Michael Prokurat, Alexander Golitzin, Michael D. Peterson

Источник

GRACE

GRACE. The Greek word, charis, means free gift, gratuity. Grace in Orthodox theology is thus the unmerited gift of God (q.v.). More specifically, it signifies the Father’s gift of himself through Christ in the Holy Spirit (q.v.). The distinction, important for Latin Scholasticism (q.v.), between created and uncreated grace finds no equivalent in the Christian East. The two concepts of grace clashed in the debate over the holy hesychasts, won by Gregory Palamas (qq.v.). Gregory’s clear insistence on grace as finally God himself in his uncreated energies was upheld by local councils held in Constantinople (q.v.) in 1341, 1347, and 1351. The particular, Western concern with the relationship between (or opposition of) nature and grace, seen especially in Augustine of Hippo’s (q.v.) debate with Pelagius and resulting in the former’s advocacy of predestination, continued to affect Western Christianity into the Reformation (e.g., Luther and Calvin) and beyond, but has no counterpart in the Orthodox East. The latter’s theology and anthropology (qq.v.), while insisting on the divine initiative and on theosis (q.v.) as the content of salvation, simultaneously requires room for the free response of the human being. The whole sphere of Orthodox asceticism (q.v.) bears witness to this notion of synergia, cooperation, between divine grace and created nature (q.v.). The two are never read in opposition to one another or as mutually exclusive. This insistence is at least as old as Irenaeus of Lyons (q.v.), especially his vision of created nature, summed up in the human being, as presupposing grace in order to become truly itself. In other words, whatever is without grace is, for Irenaeus and the whole patristic tradition of the East, at the same time less than “natural,” i.e., fallen.


Источник: The A to Z of the Orthodox Church / Michael Prokurat, Alexander Golitzin, Michael D. Peterson - Scarecrow Press, 2010. - 462 p. ISBN 1461664039

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