St Gregory Palamas

Biography

Born about 1296 to a senatorial family of Constantinople, Gregory left the court for Mount Athos, where he learned the prayer of the heart from the hesychast fathers. He was drawn from the desert by the attack of Barlaam the Calabrian on the monks' claim that the light of Tabor is truly God's, and that man may partake of God Himself.

His answer became the Church's: God is unknowable in His essence and truly participable in His uncreated energies, so that the vision of the divine light is neither a created symbol nor an impossible sight of the essence, but real communion with the living God.

The Synod of Constantinople in 1341 vindicated him and condemned the teachings of Barlaam. That should have ended it. Instead Patriarch John XIV Kalekas, having embraced Barlaam's doctrine, turned on Gregory, contrived his imprisonment through political means, and moved to promote Akindynos, Gregory's opponent, ordaining him deacon.

Kalekas then issued an encyclical anathematizing Gregory and those of his mind, naming among the condemned all who had “dared, uncanonically and without judgment, to cut off my commemoration.” The Church reversed him: the synod of 1347 deposed Kalekas, and the council of 1351 confirmed Gregory's theology. He was made archbishop of Thessalonica, was captured by Turkish pirates and used his captivity to dispute with his captors, and died in 1359. He was glorified within nine years.

The controversy

• Barlaamism: that the light of Tabor was a created symbol, that God is knowable only through created intermediaries, and that the hesychasts' claim to participate in God Himself was error. Condemned by the Synod of 1341, and afterwards embraced by the reigning patriarch.

Position taken

• That God is one and simple, unknowable in essence yet truly communicated in His uncreated energies, so that deification is real participation in God and not in a creature.
• That a patriarch who has embraced a condemned heresy is not to be commemorated, though he has not yet been judged. Gregory ceased commemorating Kalekas, and the ground was precisely the one Canon 15 names: the heresy of Barlaam stood condemned by the Synod of 1341, while Kalekas himself was not judged synodically until 1347. He walled off before the verdict on the man, applying a verdict the Church had already given on the teaching.
• That the cessation is not the founding of a rival church. Gregory sought no parallel hierarchy and awaited the Church's judgment, which came, and vindicated him.