08 — The Scholarly Reassessment

The §4.2 flagship of this collection. Since the 1980s a body of scholarship has revisited Meyendorff’s readings of Palamas, of Barlaam, and of the fourteenth century generally, and has contested several of the categories he made standard. This section reports that literature: the positions, their proponents, their evidence, and the answers made to them. It adjudicates nothing — and it takes equal care not to overstate the revision, because a great deal of Meyendorff’s work remains the field’s working reference.

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

What This Section Covers

The “Christological Corrective” Debate — the single most contested thesis in Meyendorff’s corpus: that Palamas applied a Christological correction to the Dionysian hierarchical scheme. Romanides in 1960–64, Golitzin in 1999–2002, and the current state of the question.
The Wider Revision and What Stands — the rest of it: Sinkewicz and Fyrigos on Barlaam, de Halleux and Schultze on the imported categories, Rigo on the “head–heart” scheme, Flogaus and Demetracopoulos on Palamas’s use of Augustine, Plested on the Palamas–Aquinas antithesis, Wendebourg on the energies and the Trinity, Russell on “Palamism,” Pino’s map — and, at the end, a careful account of what has not been overturned.

Why This Section Exists

Meyendorff is cited across this repository more than any modern authority except one. A collection about him that reported only the corpus and not the criticism would be, by the repository’s own methodology, negligent: it would give the reader a scholar’s constructions without the means of weighing them.

It would also misrepresent the field. Anyone who reads current work on the hesychast controversy — Norman Russell’s history of the modern reception, the Analogia volumes on Palamas, the Brill and Oxford literature of the last fifteen years — will find Meyendorff treated as a founding figure whose framework is under revision. A reader who came to that literature from a Meyendorff-only diet would be badly disoriented.

The Discipline Applied Here

Three rules govern both files.

Positions are named with their proponents. No anonymous “scholars now think.” Where a claim is contested, the contesting party is named, dated and cited.
Meyendorff’s position is stated in its strongest form before it is criticized. A refuted straw man serves nobody.
The revision is not overstated. The critics have gone after Meyendorff’s interpretive framework — the categories, the antitheses, the Dionysian thesis, the historiographical narrative. They have not gone after the critical edition of the Triads, the chronology of Palamas’s life, the demolition of Jugie’s “decline” thesis, or the substance of the Byzantine theology surveys. Confusing the two would be its own kind of distortion. This is stated in full at the end of The Wider Revision and What Stands.

The repository’s Palamas collection operates on the same discipline and reaches the same posture, calling Meyendorff at once “the watershed” and — with Russell — an apologetic shaper of the modern “Palamism” (The Palamite Revival; St. Gregory Palamas, “Sourcing & Methodology”). Both halves are asserted; neither is asserted alone.

A Note on the Dogmatic Line

Nothing in this section touches the Church’s dogma. The councils of 1341, 1347 and 1351 defined that the divine energies are uncreated, that God is really participated in them, and that this does not compromise the divine simplicity; that definition entered the Synodikon of Orthodoxy and is confessed (The Councils of 1341–1351; The Distinction). What is under dispute here is a set of twentieth-century scholarly interpretations of the fourteenth century — Meyendorff’s and his critics’ alike. Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, the dogma stands where it stands; per §4.2, the scholarship is reported with both sides named.

References

Golitzin, Alexander. “Dionysius Areopagites in the Works of Saint Gregory Palamas: On the Question of a ‘Christological Corrective’ and Related Matters.” Paper, Second International Conference on St. Gregory Palamas, Limassol, 6 November 1999; Greek publication, Holy Great Monastery of Vatopedi, 2000; English in St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 46.2 (2002); repr. Scrinium 3 (2007).
Romanides, John. “Notes on the Palamite Controversy and Related Topics.” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 6.2 (1960–61) and 9.2 (1963–64).
Russell, Norman. Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Pino, Tikhon Alexander. “Beyond Neo-Palamism: Interpreting the Legacy of St Gregory Palamas.” Analogia 3.1 (2017): 53–73.