02 — The Palamas Scholarship

In one year, 1959, Meyendorff published a doctoral monograph on St. Gregory Palamas, a critical edition of Palamas’s Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts with French translation, and a shorter popular study. Together they re-founded the study of Palamas in the West, moved him from the margins of Byzantine intellectual history to its center, and set the terms — including some contested ones — in which the fourteenth-century hesychast controversy has been discussed ever since.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) / Orthodox Church in America

What This Section Covers

• The Sorbonne Thesis and A Study of Gregory Palamas — the 1958 doctorate, its publication as Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire Palamas (Paris: Seuil, 1959), the English A Study of Gregory Palamas (trans. George Lawrence, London: Faith Press, 1964), and what the book argues.
• The Critical Edition of the Triads — Grégoire Palamas: Défense des saints hésychastes (Louvain, 1959; 2nd ed. 1973), the textual work behind it, and the Classics of Western Spirituality selection edited by Meyendorff and translated by Nicholas Gendle (Paulist Press, 1983) that made the Triads available in English.

Why the Section Matters

Before 1959 the standard Western account of Palamas was Martin Jugie’s article in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (1932), which presented “Palamism” as a heresy compromising the divine simplicity, and behind it a general assumption that fourteenth-century Byzantine theology was a symptom of intellectual decline (Palamite Revival, on Jugie and the pre-1959 Western reception). After 1959 that account could no longer be maintained without argument, because the texts were now edited, translated and read.

That is the durable achievement, and it is not in dispute. What is in dispute — and is treated at length in Section 08 — is the interpretive frame Meyendorff supplied along with the texts: the reading of Barlaam as a proto-Renaissance humanist and nominalist, of Palamas as a “personalist” and “existential” theologian, and above all the thesis that Palamas applied a “Christological corrective” to the hierarchical scheme of Dionysius the Areopagite. Readers should treat Sections 02 and 08 as a single unit.

The Repository’s Existing Account

This collection is the expansion of, and must agree with, the account already given in the sibling collection on Palamas, which calls the doctoral work “the watershed” and states the thesis and its critics side by side (Palamite Revival). That file’s discipline — naming positions with their proponents and issuing no verdict — governs here too.

See Also

• St. Gregory Palamas — the subject
• The Palamite Revival — the repository’s summary of the modern reception
• The Scholarly Reassessment — the other half of this story
• Byzantine Theology — where the Palamas work is generalized into a synthesis

References

• Meyendorff, John. Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire Palamas. Patristica Sorbonensia 3. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1959. Eng. A Study of Gregory Palamas, trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964; 2nd ed. 1974.
• Meyendorff, John, ed. Grégoire Palamas: Défense des saints hésychastes. Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense 30–31. Louvain, 1959; 2nd ed. 1973.
• Palamas, Gregory. The Triads. Ed. John Meyendorff, trans. Nicholas Gendle. Classics of Western Spirituality. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983.
• Russell, Norman. Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.