St Gregory Palamas

Biography

Born about 1296 in Constantinople to a senatorial family, Gregory renounced a court career for the Holy Mountain about 1316, and was formed in the hesychast life of prayer. When the Calabrian philosopher Barlaam attacked the monks' claim to a real experience of the divine light, Gregory answered in his Triads, and the council of June 1341 in Constantinople upheld the hesychasts and censured Barlaam, who departed for the West.

In the civil war that followed, Patriarch John XIV Kalekas favoured Gregory's remaining opponent Akindynos; Gregory was arrested in 1343 and excommunicated by a synod under the patriarch in 1344, remaining a prisoner while his teaching was proscribed. At the beginning of 1347 Kalekas was himself deposed, Gregory was absolved, and Patriarch Isidore consecrated him Archbishop of Thessalonica. The great council of Blachernae in 1351 vindicated the distinction of God's imparticipable essence and His uncreated energies, and its confession was written into the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, proclaimed each year on the Second Sunday of Great Lent, which now bears his memory. Captured at sea by the Ottomans in 1354, he spent about a year in captivity conversing on the faith, was ransomed, and reposed in Thessalonica on 14 November, in 1357 or 1359 as the reckonings differ. He was glorified in 1368 by Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos, barely a decade after his death.

The controversy

• The hesychast controversy: whether man truly partakes of God in His uncreated grace and light, or whether all that is 'God' in the saints is created. The sitting patriarch, John XIV Kalekas, sided against Gregory, imprisoned him, and had him excommunicated; the councils of 1341, 1347, and 1351 judged the doctrine the other way.

Position taken

• That God is truly partaken in His uncreated energies while His essence remains imparticipable, so that salvation is real union with the living God (theosis) and not a created gift or a moral improvement only.
• That the censure of a sitting patriarch could not amend the received faith: Gregory held his confession under excommunication and imprisonment, appealing to the Fathers, and the Church's councils, not the incumbent's verdict, proved to be her voice.