The Critical Edition of the Triads

Alongside the doctoral monograph, Meyendorff published in 1959 a critical edition of Palamas’s Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts with a facing French translation — Grégoire Palamas: Défense des saints hésychastes — in the Louvain series Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense. It was the first time the central text of the hesychast controversy had been properly edited, and it is the textual foundation on which all later study of the Triads, including the English selection of 1983, rests.

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

The Text and Its Predicament

The Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts — nine treatises in three groups of three, written between about 1338 and 1341 — are Palamas’s answer to Barlaam the Calabrian and the founding document of the Palamite settlement. They defend the psychosomatic method of hesychast prayer, argue that the light of Tabor is uncreated, and set out the distinction between the unknowable divine essence and the divine energies in which God is really given (see The Triads: Structure and Argument and Defense of the Hesychasts).

Until 1959 they had never been critically edited. Palamas’s corpus as a whole was scattered across manuscripts and partially printed in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca in a state that made serious philological work difficult; the great Thessaloniki edition of the Syngrammata under the direction of Panagiotis Christou would not begin to appear until 1962 (see The Triads, on the Christou edition; note that the repository’s own files give the Christou series variously as five volumes 1962–1992 and six volumes 1962–2015, and this file makes no claim beyond the start date of 1962). A defense of Palamas that could not be checked against a reliable text was, in the terms of the Western academy, not a defense at all. Meyendorff supplied the text.

The Louvain Edition

Grégoire Palamas: Défense des saints hésychastes appeared in 1959 as volumes 30–31 of the Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, the Louvain series for critical editions in Christian antiquity and the Middle Ages. It gave the Greek text established from the manuscripts, a French translation, an introduction and notes. A revised second edition followed in 1973 (Meyendorff, ed., Grégoire Palamas: Défense des saints hésychastes, Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense 30–31, Louvain, 1959; 2nd ed. 1973; the repository’s Palamas collection cites the second edition and gives both dates at The Triads: Structure and Argument).

This is the work on which Meyendorff’s standing as a Byzantinist, as distinct from a theologian, chiefly rests. A critical edition is a different kind of claim from an interpretation: it is checkable, it either collates the manuscripts correctly or it does not, and it survives the collapse of the editor’s theories. It is worth noting the shape of the achievement precisely because the interpretive frame around it has been contested — the two are separable, and the criticism of the frame (see Section 08) has not been criticism of the edition.

The English Triads

The Triads reached the English-speaking world through a selection. Nicholas Gendle translated a substantial portion of the work from Meyendorff’s Louvain text, and the result was published in 1983 in the Paulist Press series Classics of Western Spirituality as Gregory Palamas: The Triads, edited and introduced by Meyendorff (Palamas, The Triads, ed. John Meyendorff, trans. Nicholas Gendle, Classics of Western Spirituality, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983). It has been the standard English text ever since, with the important qualification that it is a selection and not the complete nine treatises (The Triads: Structure and Argument, noting that the volume “offers a selection rather than the complete nine treatises”). Readers who need the whole must go to the Louvain edition or to Christou.

Meyendorff’s introduction to that volume is itself a source cited in its own right. It supplies, for instance, the passage from Nikephoros the Hesychast on the descent of the mind into the heart with the breath, and the explanation of Barlaam’s omphalopsychoi jeer (Meyendorff, introduction to The Triads, trans. Gendle, pp. 13–15, as cited at The Psychosomatic Method). The Classics of Western Spirituality placement was itself a statement: it put a fourteenth-century Byzantine monk in the same series as Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and Ignatius Loyola, which is to say it claimed him for the common patrimony of Christian spirituality rather than for a regional curiosity.

[Disputed: the exact description of Meyendorff's role in the 1983 CWS volume. The repository's own files describe it inconsistently — most give "edited by John Meyendorff, translated by Nicholas Gendle," while the Palamas collection's master README describes it as translated by Gendle "with an introduction by John Meyendorff." The title page credits Meyendorff as editor and author of the introduction; both descriptions capture part of the truth. The place of publication is likewise cited in the repository as both Mahwah, NJ and New York — the imprint's addresses in different printings.]

The Companion Volumes

Two further Palamas publications belong with the edition.

St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974) is a shorter and more accessible study, developed from the 1959 French popular volume, which situates Palamas within the broader hesychast and monastic tradition and is the book usually recommended to non-specialists (Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, SVS Press, 1974; cited in the repository at Pastoral Ministry).

Byzantine Hesychasm: Historical, Theological and Social Problems — Collected Studies (London: Variorum Reprints, 1974) gathers his scholarly articles on hesychasm from journals across two decades, and is where the specialist arguments — on the councils, on the manuscript tradition, on the social history of the movement — are to be found (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary bibliography, svots.edu).

A further volume, Trinitarian Theology East and West: St Thomas Aquinas – St Gregory Palamas, written with the Roman Catholic theologian Michael Fahey (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977), placed the two figures side by side in an explicitly ecumenical frame (svots.edu bibliography). That juxtaposition would itself become a subject of later scholarly scrutiny: Marcus Plested has argued that the now-familiar framing of Palamas and Aquinas “as archetypes of opposing Greek and Latin theological traditions” is a product of late modernity and “not at all reflective of either figure or their near-contemporaries” (Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, Oxford, 2012, as quoted at Critique of Scholasticism).

What the Edition Made Possible

The consequences of putting a good text into circulation are worth spelling out, because they include the criticism of Meyendorff himself.

First, the edition made the Triads teachable. Every subsequent Anglophone treatment of hesychasm — including this repository’s — depends on Gendle’s translation of Meyendorff’s text.

Second, it made Palamas arguable. Once the text was available, scholars could check the interpretation against it. Alexander Golitzin’s argument that the “Christological corrective” is not in the texts is an argument made possible by the man it refutes; Golitzin was, moreover, Meyendorff’s own student (Pino, “Beyond Neo-Palamism,” Analogia 3.1 [2017], noting Golitzin as Meyendorff’s student who came to reassess Dionysius more positively than his teacher). That is the ordinary and honorable fate of an edition: it outlives the editor’s theses and supplies the means of testing them.

Third, it changed the ecumenical conversation. With the Triads in a Catholic-published spirituality series and a joint Orthodox–Catholic volume on Palamas and Aquinas in print, the essence–energies distinction moved from a Catholic textbook heresy to a live question in Catholic–Orthodox dialogue, in which Catholic theologians such as Gérard Philips and A. N. Williams have argued that the distinction represents an admissible theological pluralism (Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas, Oxford, 1999; see The Palamite Revival).

References

Meyendorff, John, ed. Grégoire Palamas: Défense des saints hésychastes. Introduction, texte critique, traduction et notes. Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense 30–31. Louvain, 1959; 2nd ed. 1973. (The critical edition with French translation.)
Palamas, Gregory. The Triads. Ed. John Meyendorff, trans. Nicholas Gendle. Classics of Western Spirituality. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983. (The standard English selection; Meyendorff’s introduction, pp. 13–15, on Nikephoros the Hesychast and the omphalopsychoi.)
Meyendorff, John. St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Hesychasm: Historical, Theological and Social Problems — Collected Studies. London: Variorum Reprints, 1974.
Meyendorff, John, and Michael A. Fahey. Trinitarian Theology East and West: St Thomas Aquinas – St Gregory Palamas. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977.
St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff.” svots.edu. (The bibliography of the 1959, 1973, 1974, 1977 and 1983 publications.)
Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Williams, A. N. The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Pino, Tikhon Alexander. “Beyond Neo-Palamism: Interpreting the Legacy of St Gregory Palamas.” Analogia 3.1 (2017): 53–73. (Golitzin as Meyendorff’s student.)