Figure · 1296

Gregory Palamas

Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), monk of Mount Athos and Archbishop of Thessalonica. He defended the hesychast monks’ prayer practice and taught the distinction between God’s essence and energies, which councils at Constantinople upheld between 1341 and 1351.

History

Life

Gregory was born in Constantinople around 1296. His father, Constantine, served at the court of Emperor Andronikos II and died while Gregory was young. The boy got the standard higher education of the capital, including Aristotle’s logic. Around 1316 he left that career for Mount Athos. There he became a novice at Vatopedi and later moved to the Great Lavra. He learned hesychasm, the monastic tradition of stillness (hesychia) and unbroken repetition of the Jesus Prayer, sometimes with controlled breathing and a fixed bodily posture.

Turkish raids drove him and his companions to Thessalonica, where he was ordained priest in 1326. He then lived as a hermit near Veria, went back to Athos, and briefly served as abbot of Esphigmenou until 1335 (biography, secondary). Until his forties he was a monk known to monks. A quarrel with a visiting scholar made him the leading theologian of his church.

Causes

Barlaam of Calabria, a Greek from southern Italy and a skilled philosopher, arrived in Constantinople around 1330. In debates with papal envoys over the Filioque in the mid-1330s he argued that neither side could prove its doctrine of the Spirit’s procession, because God is beyond rational demonstration. Palamas answered in his treatises on the procession of the Holy Spirit (c. 1336) that theology does yield certain knowledge, because it rests on God’s self-revelation, and he defended Procession from the Father Alone.

The dispute then moved to prayer. Barlaam met hesychast monks in Thessalonica and was scandalised by their claims to see a divine light and by their breathing methods. He mocked them as omphalopsychoi, “people with their souls in their navels,” and charged them with Messalian heresy. If God cannot be known by reason, he argued, he certainly cannot be seen with bodily eyes; the light the monks saw was created, at best a symbol.

Palamas replied with the Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts (c. 1338–1341). The Athonite monks backed him with the Hagioretic Tome, written in early 1341 by Philotheos Kokkinos under Palamas’s guidance (overview, secondary).

Councils and civil war

A synod at Constantinople in June 1341 condemned Barlaam, who left for Italy and later became a Latin bishop. A second synod in August 1341 condemned Gregory Akindynos, who had taken up Barlaam’s objections in a more careful form (overview, secondary).

Then politics took over. Emperor Andronikos III died in June 1341, and civil war broke out between the regency for the boy John V (led by Patriarch John XIV Kalekas) and the general John Kantakouzenos. Palamas was seen as a Kantakouzenos man. He was arrested in 1342 and held until 1347, and a synod in November 1344 excommunicated him. When Kantakouzenos entered Constantinople in 1347, synods in February deposed the patriarch and reversed the verdict.

Palamas was consecrated Archbishop of Thessalonica in 1347, but the city’s anti-aristocratic Zealot regime kept him out until 1350. A final council at Blachernae in 1351 answered the last major opponent, the historian Nikephoros Gregoras, and its Tomos made the essence–energies distinction official teaching of the Byzantine church.

Last years and influence

In 1354 Turks captured his ship on the way to Constantinople. He spent about a year as a prisoner, partly at the Ottoman court, where he debated Muslims, before being ransomed. He died in Thessalonica on 14 November 1359. Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos, his friend and biographer, presided over the 1368 synod that canonised him. The Eastern Orthodox church keeps his feast on 14 November and again on the Second Sunday of Lent, a placement that treats his victory as a sequel to the Triumph of Orthodoxy over iconoclasm.

His influence ran through the Slavic monasteries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, into the Philokalia (1782), which collected his writings with other hesychast texts, and into the Russian revival of the Jesus Prayer. In the twentieth century the émigré “neo-patristic” theologians Vladimir Lossky and John Meyendorff made him central to their account of what makes Orthodoxy distinct from the West. Meyendorff’s A Study of Gregory Palamas (1959; English 1964) began serious modern scholarship on him.

Key ideas and contributors

God is unknowable in essence and truly known in his energies. Scripture says no one can see God and live (Exodus 33:20; 1 Timothy 6:16) and yet promises that believers become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Palamas reconciled the two with a distinction he found in the Cappadocian Fathers and Maximus the Confessor. God’s essence (ousia) is forever beyond every creature. His energies (energeiai), such as his life, wisdom, power and grace, are God himself acting outward. They are uncreated and fully divine, yet distinct from the essence. He set this out systematically in The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters (c. 1349–1350; critical edition and translation by Robert Sinkewicz, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988).

Grace is uncreated. Because the energies are God, the grace that saves is not a created effect or quality placed in the soul. It is God’s own life shared with the creature. This is the metaphysical ground of Theosis: humans are deified by participation in the energies, never by absorption into the essence, so they become God by grace while remaining creatures.

The light of Tabor. The light that shone from Christ at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–8) was not a created phenomenon that came and went. It was the uncreated glory of God, and the saints can see the same light in this life. The disciples did not see it with ordinary eyes; their senses were transformed by the Spirit to perceive it.

The body prays too. Against Barlaam’s view that the body only distracts the mind, Palamas argued from the Incarnation that the whole person, body included, is meant to be deified. Bodily methods of prayer are aids to gathering the mind into the heart, the centre of the person. They are not magic, and they are not required.

Experience over syllogism. Palamas ranked the knowledge of the saints, gained by prayer and purification, above philosophical demonstration. He did not despise secular learning, but he denied it could save or bring the knowledge of God that matters.

His main works: the Triads (English selection in the Classics of Western Spirituality series, ed. John Meyendorff, trans. Nicholas Gendle, Paulist Press, 1983); the One Hundred and Fifty Chapters; sixty-three Homilies, preached mostly in Thessalonica; and several texts in volume 4 of the English Philokalia (trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware, 1995). The Greek texts are in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, volumes 150–151. Allies included Philotheos Kokkinos, Patriarch Isidore Boucheir and the Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, who after his abdication wrote against the anti-Palamites as the monk Joasaph.

Key controversies

Does the distinction divide God? This was the charge from the start. Akindynos and Gregoras argued that an uncreated divinity distinct from God’s essence means either two Gods, a higher and a lower, or a God composed of parts, which contradicts divine simplicity. Palamas answered that the energies are not a second deity or a part of God but God’s own presence, and that the Cappadocians had already distinguished what God is from what he does without dividing him. The question remains the centre of debate with Classical Theism as the Latin West developed it.

Is the distinction real? In the Thomist tradition, God’s attributes are really identical with his essence; distinctions among them exist only in our minds. Western Catholic theology after the Great Schism therefore judged Palamism harshly. Siméon Vailhé, writing on the “Greek Church” in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1909), called Palamas’s teaching “monstrous errors” and the outcome “a resurrection of polytheism” (New Advent); Adrian Fortescue’s article on “Hesychasm” (1910) was similarly hostile. Martin Jugie’s long article on Palamas in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (1932) gave the case its scholarly form. Rowan Williams’s essay “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism” (Eastern Churches Review, 1977) was a more sympathetic but still critical Anglican reading.

Is grace created? Behind the metaphysics lies a dispute about salvation. Western theology after Augustine and the scholastics speaks of created grace, a habit God infuses into the soul. Orthodox writers such as Lossky argued that this keeps God and the creature apart and makes real union impossible: “if we deny the real distinction between essence and energy, we cannot fix any clear borderline” between God’s procession and creation (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 1944; quoted in secondary summary). Catholics reply that created grace is the effect in us of God’s uncreated self-gift, not a substitute for it.

Can God be seen with the eyes? Barlaam’s objection was that the claim to see God’s light confuses mystical experience with sense perception and opens the door to delusion. Western readers long dismissed the hesychast methods as navel-gazing. Palamas’s defenders answer that the vision is given by grace, transforms the senses, and is tested by humility and the judgement of the church, not by the seer’s say-so.

Was the victory theological or political? The councils tracked the fortunes of the civil war almost exactly: Palamas was condemned when the regency ruled and vindicated when Kantakouzenos won. Critics have used this to question the authority of the 1347 and 1351 synods. Defenders note that the 1341 condemnation of Barlaam came before the war and that the teaching outlasted the dynasty.

Rehabilitation. Since the mid-twentieth century the debate has softened. The Second Vatican Council said Eastern and Western theological expressions “are to be considered often as mutually complementary rather than conflicting” (Unitatis Redintegratio 17, Vatican). Some Catholic scholars have compared the distinction to the Scotist “formal distinction,” and A. N. Williams’s The Ground of Union (1999) argued that Aquinas and Palamas are closer on deification than their followers assumed. On the other side, David Bradshaw’s Aristotle East and West (Cambridge, 2004) defended the Palamite reading of energeia as the older and more faithful tradition, and some Orthodox writers continue to treat the Western doctrine of simplicity as a root error.

What remains unresolved

Both sides agree that God is simple, that he truly gives himself, and that he is never comprehended. They disagree on how to say all three at once. For Palamists, a God whose attributes are only distinguished in our minds cannot be shared; for Thomists, a God with really distinct uncreated energies cannot be simple. Whether that is a contradiction or two vocabularies for the same mystery is still argued in ecumenical dialogue.