sen 960-7601.5.6, © 1986 Fswns dnyneponinowdos ‘uhdous MAPOYEIA eve uo Biuanunelo APOY3IA AQHINA: Tsao 98, 10680 TWh, 3645147, 914831 WEIPAIAS:“Aqiow Korovtv005, 18591 4223389 BOAOE: K. Kagan, 38221 Ty 26206 RYMPOR: “Avis Zn 228, Aces, Ty Mone JOHN DEMETRACOPOULOS IS GREGORY PALAMAS AN EXISTENTIALIST? THE RESTORATION OF THE TRUE MEANING OF HIS COMMENT ON EXODUS 3,14: “Eye elu 6 dv" TAPOYEIA, ATHENS 1996“ab.vev 690s, Ze 5" egopetto, 18.8 exe uvott Introduction ‘Theologians and Christian historians of thought, expounding the octrine of a beloved Christian thinker of theirs, are often eager to present him as a person whose message has important connotations of a diachronic nature. Their eagerness has sometimes fruitful. The renewal of the value of “religious mystici ‘example, during at least the first half of our century instigated (consciously or otherwise) many important historians such as J DDANEELOU, H-U. VON BALTHASAR and! W. VOLKER fo ingute exhaustively into the mystical character ofthe thought of such Christian thinkers {as Origen or more intensely Gregory of Nyssa, Despite the generally positive nature of such research, the school of thought of these historians (as 1 have recently argued at length) was one-sided and led notonly fo an obstinate neglect — in spite ofthe explicit textual, ‘evidence which was unavoidably subjected to hard censorship or astonishing distortion — of a major feature of Gregory of Nyssa’s thought; namely that Gregory isnot only a mystical but also a ra- tionalist theologian who strongly believed that the basic Christian dogmas can be proved sola ratione. Another example is K BARTH'S Interpretation of the famous ratio Anselm (Proslogion 2-4) and ‘Anselm's thought in genera, As it has convincingly been shown®, although saris interpretation contains some useful insights, it tums, in fact, Anselm into a precocious fideist of Bathian type Evidently, the above mentioned eases are examples of ana- honistic bias, ie. the projection of contemporary values into the ‘mental framework of past thinkers, This paper deals with a similar