Attached Paper In-person November Annual Meeting 2026

The Anthropocene and the Life of the World: The Human Being as Functional World Soul in St. Gregory Palamas

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

The great Byzantine saint Gregory Palamas (1296-1357) explicitly rejected the Platonic idea of the World Soul. I argue, however, that certain structural features of the World Soul remain in the superstructure of Palamas's accounts of the creation and deification of the sensible world through the human soul. I thus argue that through its rational movements in cooperation with the activities of the divine Nous, Logos, and Eros the human soul becomes a functional World Soul in Palamas's thought.