Jean (Mr) asked:

Is there a connection between The Cloud of Inconnaissance,the writings of Jan Van Ryusbroeck and
those of Gregory Palamas? Are their ideas similar? Are they theologians, philosophers or mystics?

Sometimes, I ask myself whether their respective messages were or were not warnings announcing
the coming of Renaissance, Reformation and today's anthropocentrism.

============

The anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing(2nd half of 14th century), Van Ruysbroeck
(1293-1381) and Palamas (1296-1359) came from very different climes: England, Flanders and
Mount Athos respectively speaking. Palamas, as you probably know, was the head of a large wealthy
and influential household in Constantinople which included a retinue of servants. When he decided to
renounce the values of worldliness and take the monastic garb, his mother, his brothers and sisters
and all their servants were forced to do likewise. They went into monasteries around Constantinople,
while Palamas went to Mount Athos.

I tend not to like 'connecting' theological ideas which belong to very different climes and places,
because then you have a merely abstract connection, which is against the spirit of those very ideas
that ostensibly connect. However, the question still arises, how do you explain the similarities? The
explanation is a shared tradition. All three writers pre-suppose a Christian platonist metaphysic come
down through Fathers of the Church. You might like to read some of Pre Garrigou-Lagrange to get a
sense of this common structure. His Perfection Chrtienne et contemplationand particularly, The
Three Ways of the Spirit (1938 tr. 1950) are worth reading in this regard. Theologians, philosophers
or mystics? I would argue that thinking out of that Christian neo-Platonist metaphysic makes you all
three because i) it is theological ii) it is also philosophical iii) all mysticism rests on some concept of
this structure. That is why modern mysticism is an oxymoron. I doubt the spiritual writers you refer to
had a prophetic sense of things to come. Rather, out of their profound understanding of the self as a
relation between itself and a creator comes a knowledge, which projected is a fore-knowledge, of
what happens when this understanding can no longer be upheld. They would not have conceived the
Renaissance as a renewal, but as a falling back into heathen and pagan ways of thinking. The
Reformation would have been unthinkable, even as it was for so many at the time.

Matthew Del Nevo

www.sicetnon.com