St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359)

STEPHEN THOMAS

St. Gregory Palamas was born in 1296 in Constantinople into an aristocratic family, receiving a thorough education in Greek philosophy and rhetoric. His adoption of monasticism involved his whole family. Having tried this life on Mount Athos both as a solitary hermit and in a monastic community, he preferred to live with a small group of monks under the tutelage of a spiritual father. The writings of Barlaam the Calabrian led him to respond polemically, defending the hesychasts (those monks who practised inner stillness) against a philosophy so apophatic that it denied the possibility of experience of God. The whole of Palamas’s theology addresses this question: if we cannot grasp God with the intellect, is he absolutely unknowable? Palamas argued that, just as the prophets of ancient Israel partially knew Christ as a foretaste of things to come, so do the hesychasts experience the glory of the Age to come in this life; it is a partially realized eschatology (Ware et al. 1995: 418). Palamas used a distinction between essence and energies to explain how God is knowable through divine revelation and can be experienced in the life of prayer: we know the uncreated energies of God, while his essence remains unknown. But while Palamas was competent in philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, and knew about the developments in the sciences of his time, he was not interested in an intellectual synthesis: having reviewed these, Palamas exclaims: “Where can we learn anything certain and free from deceit about God, about the world as a whole, about ourselves? Is it not from the teaching of the Spirit?” (Sinkiewicz 1988: 102–3; Ware et al. 1995: 354).

This is for from the medieval interest in human science burgeoning in the West during his time. Barlaam’s teaching was universally rejected by the Orthodox Church, and he ended his days as a bishop, teaching Greek to Petrarch in Italy. A new challenge arose in Akyndinos, a former pupil of Palamas, who argued from a very static and formal view of tradition that the experiences of the hesychasts were not Orthodox. Against Akyndinos, Palamas eventually prevailed. He was appointed bishop of Thessalonica by the emperor, an appointment which saw him produce a series of pastoral sermons which encapsulate his teaching in a more popular way. He died in 1359 and was soon canonized (1368). His memory is celebrated in the liturgy on the second Sunday of Lent; no theologian is praised more highly as “a true follower and companion of thy namesake Gregory the Theologian” (Ware 1984: 318). Palamas was a theologian of “the glory of God,” the light of Mount Tabor which shone upon three chosen apostles at the transfiguration of Jesus Christ (Mt. 17.1–8; Mk. 9.2–8; Lk. 9.28–36), these expressions being the biblical ones which correspond to the patristic formulations “divine or uncreated energy” and “uncreated light.” This glory God chose to share with the human race. It is God’s deifying grace transfiguring human life. That it is a matter of experience even in this earthly existence is the main feature of Palamas’s understanding of Orthodoxy.