God Made Man and Man Made God: Collected Essays on the Unique View of Man, the Cosmos, Grace, and Deification That Distinguishes Eastern Orthodoxy From Western Christianity

Publication Data: Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2010
Format: softcover
Number of Pages: 140
Dimensions (l × w × h): 21.3 cm × 13.8 cm × 0.8 cm
Additional Information: two-color printing
ISBN: 978‒1‒884729‒92‒8

   
by Archbishop Chrysostomos

“This short book consists of three chapters taken from lectures that I delivered in various universities. These talks, taken together, address the differences between Orthodox and Western Christian teaching[...]. The first chapter[...]sets the stage for my contrast of the Eastern and Western theological and spiritual mind-sets by setting aside an almost ubiquitous, if wholly fallacious claim about the cosmology, anthropology, and soteriology—the view of the universe, man, and salvation—of the Greek Fathers; that is, that they draw their teachings from the philosophical traditions of the classical Greek philosophers. [...]The second chapter of this work deals with the idea of Divine Grace, or, in Orthodox terms, the Energies and work of God Himself, which I attempt to distinguish from the Western understanding of Grace, and especially from the idea of ‘created grace.’ [...]In the third chapter of the book, I treat with the fourteenth-century Hesychastic controversy and the confrontation between St. Gregory Palamas, the great Orthodox luminary and mystic, and the Latinized Greek, Barlaam the Calabrian, and his Latin theological traditions.”
—“Introduction”

CONTENTS

Introduction
   I. Classical Hellenistic Thought and the Greek Patristic Tradition
   II. Grace in the Orthodox Patristic Tradition
   III. Hesychasm and Deification by Grace Through Union With Christ
Index