The Sorbonne Thesis and A Study of Gregory Palamas

Meyendorff took his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1958 with a thesis on St. Gregory Palamas, published the following year as Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire Palamas and Englished in 1964 as A Study of Gregory Palamas. The book reconstructed Palamas’s life from the sources, set the hesychast controversy in its Byzantine context, and argued that Palamas was not a symptom of decline but a creative and faithful exponent of the patristic tradition. This file describes the thesis, its argument, and the terms it introduced.

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

The Doctorate

Meyendorff was awarded the doctorate — a doctorat ès lettres, the French higher doctorate of the faculty of letters — by the Sorbonne in 1958, for what the seminary’s own record calls “a ground-breaking doctoral thesis on the teachings of St. Gregory Palamas” (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff,” svots.edu; Canadian Orthodox History Project, “Protopresbyter John and Matushka Marie Meyendorff,” orthodoxcanada.ca). He was thirty-two.

The thesis appeared the next year as Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire Palamas, in the series Patristica Sorbonensia (volume 3), from Éditions du Seuil in Paris (Meyendorff, Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire Palamas, Patristica Sorbonensia 3, Paris: Seuil, 1959). It was translated into English by George Lawrence and published by the Faith Press in London in 1964 as A Study of Gregory Palamas, with a second edition in 1974 issued jointly by the Faith Press and St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary bibliography, svots.edu; the repository’s Palamas collection cites the 1964 Lawrence translation throughout — see St. Gregory Palamas). Alongside it in 1959 Meyendorff published a shorter popular treatment, St Grégoire Palamas et la mystique orthodoxe (Paris: Seuil, 1959; reissued 1976), and the critical edition of the Triads (see The Critical Edition of the Triads) — three books on one subject in a single year.

What the Book Does

A Study of Gregory Palamas is a work of historical theology in the strict sense: it establishes the life, then the controversy, then the doctrine, in that order, from the sources.

The life. Meyendorff reconstructed Palamas’s biography principally from the encomium and Life written by his disciple Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos, read critically — the method the repository’s Palamas collection follows in its own biographical file (Family and Athos, which cites Meyendorff’s Study page by page for the birth in 1296, the father Constantine as synkletikos, the education in the circle of Theodore Metochites, the monastic exodus of c. 1316 with the brothers Makarios and Theodosios, the years at Vatopedi, the Great Lavra and Glossia, the move to Thessaloniki after the Turkish raids of 1326, the Berroia years, and the return to the hermitage of St. Sabas c. 1331). That the standard modern chronology of Palamas’s life is Meyendorff’s is simply a fact about the field.

The controversy. Meyendorff traced the dispute with Barlaam the Calabrian from its origin in the argument over the Filioque and the demonstrability of theological propositions, through Barlaam’s attack on the psychosomatic method of prayer and his jeer that the monks were omphalopsychoi — “people whose soul is in their navel” — to the councils of 1341, 1347 and 1351 that vindicated Palamas (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 1964, on the Barlaam dispute and the councils; see The Barlaam Dispute and The Councils of 1341–1351). One of the book’s sharper observations, still routinely cited, is that Barlaam is nowhere actually named in the Triads, which engage his positions while leaving the opponent anonymous (Meyendorff, Study, p. 135, as cited at The Barlaam Dispute).

The doctrine. Meyendorff presented the essence–energies distinction not as a metaphysical curiosity but as the necessary condition of a real deification: God is wholly unknowable in essence and wholly given in His energies, so that the participation of the creature in God is genuine participation in God and not in some created intermediary (see The Distinction). He connected this to the vision of the uncreated Light of Tabor and to the whole hesychast practice, and he insisted that Palamas’s theology was continuous with the Fathers — Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, John of Damascus — rather than an innovation.

The Reframing

The book’s polemical target was the reigning Western estimate. Meyendorff’s own summary of that estimate — Palamism as “a curious and sui generis example of medieval Byzantium’s intellectual decline” — is the formulation quoted in the repository’s Palamas collection as what the Study overturned (The Palamite Revival). Against Martin Jugie’s magisterial hostile article in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (1932), which had framed Palamism as a heresy positing a real distinction in God incompatible with the divine simplicity, Meyendorff argued that Palamas was a faithful and even creative exponent of the patristic tradition — a theologian doing exactly what the Fathers had done, in the idiom his own century required (The Palamite Revival, on Jugie and on Meyendorff’s answer).

This reframing worked. Norman Russell’s history of the modern reception records that after 1959 the field had a new center of gravity, and that nearly all subsequent scholarship — Orthodox and Western alike — has defined itself in relation to the positions Jugie and then Meyendorff staked out (Russell, Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age, Oxford, 2019, esp. parts I–II).

The Contested Categories

Meyendorff did not merely defend Palamas; he explained him, and the explanation used a specific set of terms. Four of them proved consequential and have all been challenged.

“Christological corrective.” Following a suggestion of Florovsky, Meyendorff proposed that Palamas applied a Christological corrective to the Neoplatonically-tinged hierarchical scheme of Dionysius the Areopagite — that is, that Palamas displaced Dionysian mediated hierarchy in favor of the immediate availability of the incarnate Christ to the believer (The Palamite Revival, stating the thesis and attributing it to Meyendorff). This is the single most contested claim in his corpus; it is treated in full at The “Christological Corrective” Debate.
Barlaam as Western humanist and nominalist. Meyendorff read Barlaam as a proto-Renaissance humanist, formed by Western rationalism and comparable to the nominalists, against whom Palamas defended the monastic and biblical vision. Antonis Fyrigos’s later work on Barlaam’s actual education and origins has substantially undercut this portrait (Fyrigos, as reported in Pino, “Beyond Neo-Palamism,” Analogia 3.1 [2017]).
“Personalism” and “existentialism.” Meyendorff cast Palamas’s theology as personalist and existential, over against an “essentialist” opponent — the vocabulary of mid-century French thought (see St. Sergius and the Sorbonne). His own summary claim was that Palamas offered a personalist and existential theology and a spirituality which, freed from Platonic spiritualizing, integrates the whole man in the new life.
The humanist/monastic and symbolic/realist antitheses structuring the whole narrative.

These four are what later scholars mean by “the Meyendorff thesis.” It should be said plainly that they are interpretive constructions laid over the texts, not the texts; that Meyendorff advanced them as a theologian’s reading and not as the Church’s teaching; and that the councils of 1341–1351 which the Church received said nothing about personalism, existentialism, or Dionysian correctives (see The Councils of 1341–1351). The distinction between what the Church defined and what Meyendorff argued is the §4.1/§4.2 line of this collection.

The Immediate Reception

The book was a success and a scandal at once. It made Palamas academically respectable in the West and gave Orthodox theology its most-cited modern scholarly monograph; it also drew, immediately, a combative attack from another Orthodox theologian.

Fr. John Romanides reviewed it in the Greek Orthodox Theological Review in two installments — “Notes on the Palamite Controversy and Related Topics,” GOTR 6.2 (Winter 1960–61), and its sequel in GOTR 9.2 (Winter 1963–64) — objecting to Meyendorff’s whole characterization of Palamas: to his “imaginative theories” about Palamite prayer and anthropology, to the importation of categories alien to Orthodoxy (personalism, essentialism, existentialism), and above all to the “Christological corrective,” where Romanides insisted on a seamless continuity between Palamas and the Fathers and denied that Palamas needed to correct the tradition at all (The Palamite Revival, summarizing and citing the Romanides reviews; the article details are confirmed at johnsanidopoulos.com, “The Areopagite in 20th Century Orthodoxy,” 2017). The dispute set the tone of an intra-Orthodox argument that ran through the 1960s and exposed a methodological fault line: how far the Fathers may legitimately be read through modern philosophical idiom.

What Endures

Three things from the Study have proved durable independent of the contested frame.

The chronology and biography of Palamas. Meyendorff’s reconstruction remains the working account, adjusted at points but not replaced.
The demonstration that Palamas is a patristic theologian. However one judges the “corrective,” the demolition of the “decline” thesis stands, and no serious scholar now defends Jugie’s estimate as a whole.
The linkage of doctrine to practice. Meyendorff insisted that the essence–energies distinction is unintelligible apart from the hesychast experience it was formulated to defend — that the doctrine is the theology of a prayer. That connection has become common ground (see The Psychosomatic Method, which cites Meyendorff’s own introduction to the Triads on the point).

Norman Russell’s judgment is the balanced one, and is the repository’s settled framing: Meyendorff’s work was at once “the watershed” and, in its apologetic dimension, part of the construction of a twentieth-century “Palamism” that does not always correspond to Palamas’s own thought (Russell, 2019; see St. Gregory Palamas, “Sourcing & Methodology”). Both halves of that sentence are true, and this collection asserts neither without the other.

References

Meyendorff, John. Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire Palamas. Patristica Sorbonensia 3. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1959.
Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964; 2nd ed., Bedfordshire: Faith Press / Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The biography of Palamas; the Barlaam dispute; the councils; the essence–energies doctrine; the “Christological corrective”; p. 135 on Barlaam’s anonymity in the Triads.)
Meyendorff, John. St Grégoire Palamas et la mystique orthodoxe. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1959; reissued 1976. (The popular companion volume.)
St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff.” svots.edu. (The 1958 doctorate; the bibliography of the 1959 publications and the 1974 second edition.)
Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Protopresbyter John and Matushka Marie Meyendorff.” orthodoxcanada.ca. (The Sorbonne doctorate on Palamas.)
Jugie, Martin. Articles “Palamas, Grégoire” and “Palamite, Controverse,” Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, 1932. (The hostile Western account the Study answered.)
Romanides, John. “Notes on the Palamite Controversy and Related Topics.” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 6.2 (Winter 1960–61); “…and Related Topics — II,” GOTR 9.2 (Winter 1963–64). (The immediate Orthodox critique.)
Russell, Norman. Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. (The modern reception; the distinction between “Palamism” and Palamas.)
Pino, Tikhon Alexander. “Beyond Neo-Palamism: Interpreting the Legacy of St Gregory Palamas.” Analogia 3.1 (2017): 53–73. (Fyrigos on Barlaam’s education; the map of the reassessment.)
johnsanidopoulos.com. “The Areopagite in 20th Century Orthodoxy.” 2017. (Bibliographic details of the Romanides reviews and of Golitzin’s critique.)