But how can it be achieved? Evidently, the contact and “coherence of the two wills” of different ontological status need some very special conditions, and it took several centuries for hesychast th practice to build a path to synergy. At the period of the so called Sinaitic hesychasm (7-10 cc.) a specific anthropological mechanism has been discovered and mastered that is the key to synergy.
This mechanism that I call the “ontological mover” is the combination of two activities, attention and prayer, the latter taking the special form of the hesychast incessant prayer. Here the attention secures the uninterrupted and incessant character of the prayer, and the prayer, due to such character, embraces all the levels of the human being and accumulates enormous energy directed entirely to personal communion with Christ. In this way a hesychast advances actually to synergy, and the access to higher steps of the Ladder is opened up.
At its higher steps hesychast practice takes a specific character with growing elements of spontaneity. New forms of prayer emerge called sometimes “automobile” (i.e. going on their own without any man’s effort) and a certain chain or hierarchy of new configurations of energies of a human person is generated in a spontaneous process that has an obvious resemblance to processes of self-organization. The most significant of these new phenomena is the radical change of man’s perceptive system: the formation or “opening-up” of some new perceptions takes place. These perceptions called often the “intellectual senses” (noera aisthesis) are completely different from all physical senses (though they have some likeness to the sight, for which reason hesychasts call the experience of them the “vision of the Light of Tabor” considering the event of Christ’s Transfiguration on the mount Tabor as the prototype of hesychast Theoria). Here the integral and fundamental reorganization of the human being begins that is generated by the Divine energy acting in man and manifesting itself explicitly and visibly due to synergy. (The parallels to synergetics that are evident here will be discussed later.) Here we concentrated on synergy in hesychasm, i.e. on the experiential aspect of the Orthodox conception of synergy. It is this aspect that is particularly important if we discuss synergy – as we do now – as the anthropological and epistemological paradigm, in the first place. However, it should be at least mentioned briefly that synergy is also closely connected with basic theological problem fields such as Christology (the problem of the two wills in Christ), the conception of theosis, and especially theology of Divine energies. As a result, one can find in Orthodox theology the full-fledged theology of synergy, the main contributions to which belong to Maximus the Confessor (580-662), Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) and Gregory Palamas (1296-1357).
th It was given the completed form in the “palamitic synthesis” of the 14 c., and in the modern “neopalamitic” theology founded by Russian émigré theologians (V.Lossky, J.Meyendorff e.a.) its studies are renewed and continued. These two lines in the Orthodox conception of synergy, experiential or ascetic, and theological or patristic, not contradict, but complement each other (it is often said that the specific nature of Orthodox tradition is the union of patristics and ascetics that have the same spiritual foundations). Taken together, they form an integral whole having two principal distinctive features: 1) the phenomenon of synergy belongs specifically to the economy of personal being, it is a phenomenon of the meeting and collaboration of two personalistic formations; 2) synergy is characterized by radical asymmetry since the energies that reach their contact are different ontologically and play completely different roles in the contact. These features should never be forgotten in all comparisons of the Orthodox synergy with similar (to some or other extent) phenomena in other contexts and fields.
2. The Domain of Anthropology
Starting with the idea of synergy as it appears in Orthodoxy and chiefly in hesychasm, synergetic anthropology proceeds to a certain much more general paradigm. The advancement to this paradigm has several stages. In the first stage we analyze the anthropological aspect of synergy in hesychast practice. In synergy human energy manages to achieve the contact and coherence with the Divine energy: evidently, it should be an event with important anthropological contents. In all usual regimes of empiric being such contact is inaccessible for a human person; in other words, the person is closed or locked for it. In synergy the person achieves this contact; in other words, he/she becomes open or unlocked for it. Thus what is achieved by a human person in synergy can be described as his/her opening-up or unlocking towards the Divine energy that belongs to another ontological horizon. This is the first conclusion: in the anthropological aspect, synergy is the ontological unlocking of a human person. In hesychast practice this unlocking makes accessible the higher steps of the Ladder, at which the person approaches in his/her energies the union with Divine being defined as “personal being-communion” in modern Orthodox theology. According to Orthodox personology, the concept of personality is identified with the Divine Hypostasis so that personal being as such is Divine being whereas an empiric man is not considered as personality. He can, however, partake in personality and convert himself into personality in the communion with God; as Russian philosopher Lev Karsavin says, “I should regard myself as personality insofar as I am one with Christ”[5] . It means that the union with God in hesychast practice is at the same time man’s conversion (though not in his essence but only in his energies) into the personal mode of being; or, in other words, the constitution of human personality. And since synergy is man’s ontological unlocking towards personal being, it can be considered as a paradigm of the human constitution that corresponds to the constitution into personality conceived as Divine Hypostasis.