Gregory Palamas and the Hesychast Councils

Monks who followed the “life of stillness”, in Greek hesychia, repeated continually the prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” and taught that the pure in heart receive a divine illumination (Synodal Tome of 1341 §§2–3) (Synodal Tome of 1341 §47). Barlaam of Calabria, a monk from Calabria versed in secular philosophy, attacked them in writing (Synodal Tome of 1341 §§2–3). According to the tome of the council that judged him, he ridiculed their breathing exercises and charged them with claiming to share in God’s very essence; when they answered that they shared not in the essence but in the uncreated grace of the Spirit, he accused them of believing in two gods (Synodal Tome of 1341 §§2–3) (Synodal Tome of 1341 §47).

Gregory Palamas, a priest-monk whom the monks of Mount Athos call their brother, answered in the treatises known as the Triads (Hagioretic Tome closing declaration and signatures (PG 150, cols 1235–1236)). He defended beginners who control their breathing in order to gather the mind into the heart (Palamas, Triads 1.2.1 and following). He argued that the light which shone from Christ at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–2), the light of Tabor as he calls it, was no created symbol but the light of the Godhead itself (Palamas, Triads 3.1.9 and following). And he drew a distinction: God’s essence is beyond all sharing, while his energies, such as his providence, his will and the grace that deifies, are uncreated, and God is wholly present in each of them (Palamas, Triads 3.2.5 and following). The leading monks of Athos signed a declaration that this teaching agreed with the tradition of the saints (Hagioretic Tome closing declaration and signatures (PG 150, cols 1235–1236)).

In 1341 a council met in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in the presence of the emperor (Synodal Tome of 1341 §§5, 51–53), whom the later tome names as Andronikos Palaiologos (Synodal Tome of 1351 §46). It found that Barlaam had spoken “blasphemously and heretically” about the light of Tabor and about the prayer, and ruled that he must repent or be cut off from the church; Patriarch John signed the tome that August and forbade further argument (Synodal Tome of 1341 §§5, 51–53).

The argument went on. The tome of 1351 relates that Akindynos took up Barlaam’s charges and that some bishops still opposed Palamas. In that year the emperor John Kantakouzenos presided over a council in the Blachernae palace at which Palamas, by now metropolitan of Thessalonica, answered his critics (Synodal Tome of 1351 §§2–6). The council held that the Fathers distinguish God’s essence from his energy, that the energy is uncreated, that this puts no composition in God, and that creatures partake of the energy and not of the essence. It declared the light of the Transfiguration uncreated yet not the essence of God, placed Barlaam and Akindynos under anathema, and named Palamas a defender of the faith (Synodal Tome of 1351 §§18–19, 30–40, 46, 51).

The Orthodox Church receives these councils: the encyclical of the Holy and Great Council held on Crete in 2016 lists the councils of 1341, 1351 and 1368 among those “of universal authority” (Holy and Great Council, Encyclical I.3). Latin theology spoke differently. Thomas Aquinas had taught that God’s action and power are not distinct from his essence (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.25.1, reply to objection 2), and in 1336 Pope Benedict XII had defined that the blessed see the divine essence itself, face to face (Benedict XII, Benedictus Deus). In 1910 the article on hesychasm in the Catholic Encyclopedia called the distinction “fundamentally opposed” to the scholastic idea of God (Fortescue, Hesychasm (Catholic Encyclopedia, 1910)).