International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Milan Đordević
Faculty of Theology “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Skopje, Macedonia; 
[e-mail]
Deideologizing Palamas: A Hesychast Defense of Rationality
The following study has the objective to question the widely spread labeling of the thought and 
the person of saint Gregory Palamas as “anti-intellectual”. Such a label is nowadays accepted and dis-
tributed not only by the critics of Palamas, but also from many defenders of the “orthodox palamite 
conception of knowledge”. While trying to emphasize the importance of the mystical theological ex-
perience, they underestimate Palamas’ especially high valuation of the human rational ability to ar-
ticulate and express the truths of the Christian faith. On the other hand, the contemporary critics of 
Palamas ground their argument mainly on the defense of the Hesychast prayer practice in Palamas’ 
“Triads”. In this polemical work Palamas accuses his opponent Barlaam of Calabria for uncritical ap-
plication of the secular knowledge in the sphere of the discursive Theology (emphatically quoting in 
this context saint Basil the Great and his argumentation against the pagan Philosophy). Can the strong 
antisecular rhetoric of the “Triads” be thus understood in the sense of a “polemical hyperbole” and 
not as definitive epistemological position? We may raise one further question: Was Palamas actually 
the defender of rationality in this controversy, who fought the anti-intellectual obscurantism through 
overstating it, thus confronting not only the ideological anti-hesychasm, but also the ideological an-
ti-intellectualism of his time? In order to answer this question we should focus on the non-polemical 
works of Palamas (Capita 150 and Homiliae), considering not only the contemporary developments 
in the field of the thought of Palamas, but also the contemporary ideological criticism.
José Maksimczuk
KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; 
[e-mail]
Early Reception of the 
Florilegium Coislinianum
: 
Its Relationship with the Brief Anthology of MSS Par. Gr. 852 and Vatop. 36
In his essential work on spiritual florilegia (1962), M. Richard pointed out that parts of the 
alphabetical anthology known as the 
Florilegium Coislinianum
(
FC
) are transmitted in a group of 
four manuscripts: 
Parisinus gr.
852 (s. X-XI), 
Athous
, 
Vatopediou
36 (s. XI), 
Venetus Marcianus gr.
507 (s. XII) and 
Parisinus gr.
1555 A (s. XIV). In fact, those codices form an anthology of its own, 

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460
which I call the 
Anthologia Parisina
(
Anth.Par.
) A link between the 
Anth.Par.
and the 
FC
is indeed 
undeniable as they share a large number of excerpts with identical 
incipit
and 
desinit
.
The main goal of my presentation will be to document the actual link between both compilations. 
In the first part of my paper, I will survey the internal relations between the four witnesses of the 
Anth. Par.
and show that two 
recensiones
of this short anthology have come down to us. The second