The Wider Revision and What Stands

Beyond the Dionysian question, a body of scholarship since the 1980s has revisited Meyendorff’s account of Barlaam, his imported philosophical categories, his East–West narrative, and his construction of “Palamism” as such. This file names the critics and their arguments — Sinkewicz, Fyrigos, de Halleux, Schultze, Rigo, Flogaus, Demetracopoulos, Plested, Wendebourg, Russell, Pino — and then, with equal care, sets out what has not been overturned.

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

1. Barlaam Was Not What Meyendorff Said

Meyendorff’s Barlaam is a proto-Renaissance humanist: a Calabrian formed by the Latin West, carrying its rationalism into Byzantium, comparable to the nominalists of the schools, and standing for a “symbolic” theology of mediated and indirect knowledge of God against Palamas’s realism.

Robert E. Sinkewicz made the first sustained textual challenge. His study of Barlaam’s own early works — “The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God in the Early Writings of Barlaam the Calabrian,” Mediaeval Studies 44 (1982): 181–242 — reconstructed Barlaam’s epistemology from the texts rather than from Palamas’s polemical characterizations of it, and set the question of what Barlaam actually held on a philological basis for the first time. Sinkewicz’s later work — his critical edition and translation of Palamas’s One Hundred and Fifty Chapters (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988) — did the same for Palamas’s own systematic statement (see The One Hundred Fifty Chapters).

Antonis Fyrigos, the leading modern editor of Barlaam, disproved the claims about Barlaam’s Western Renaissance education and Italian Catholic formation on which Meyendorff’s portrait rested (Fyrigos, as reported in Pino, “Beyond Neo-Palamism,” Analogia 3.1 [2017]).

The consequence is significant, because the Barlaam portrait was not decoration. If Barlaam was not a Western humanist importing Latin rationalism, then the hesychast controversy was not, at bottom, a clash of civilizations — and Meyendorff’s whole plot loses its antagonist.

2. The Categories Were Imported

Bernhard Schultze, writing in 1951 — before Meyendorff’s thesis was published — had already identified the nominalism/essentialism divide as an inheritance from Russian Slavophile intellectual traditions rather than a product of historical analysis (Schultze, 1951, as reported in Pino, “Beyond Neo-Palamism,” Analogia 3.1 [2017]).

André de Halleux, in 1974, demonstrated that parallels to nominalism can be found within Palamite theology itself, not merely in its opponents, and criticized Meyendorff’s “grand dialectic” as the imposition of a Slavophile ideological scheme on a Byzantine dispute (de Halleux, 1974, as reported in Pino, “Beyond Neo-Palamism,” Analogia 3.1 [2017]).

Antonio Rigo showed that Meyendorff’s interpretation relied on Irénée Hausherr’s oversimplified opposition of a “head” spirituality to a “heart” spirituality, a scheme subsequent scholarship has taken apart (Rigo, as reported in Pino, “Beyond Neo-Palamism,” Analogia 3.1 [2017]).

John Demetracopoulos has worked extensively on the philosophical structures of Palamas’s thought and on the fourteenth-century philosophical scene, including the edition of Nicholas Kavasilas’s De rationis valore, and has contested Meyendorff’s reading of Palamas as a personalist and existentialist, arguing that it rests on questionable construals of the key texts (Demetracopoulos, as reported in Pino, “Beyond Neo-Palamism,” Analogia 3.1 [2017]). [Sourcing note: this collection has not been able to verify at source the strongly-worded formulations attributed to Demetracopoulos in secondary summaries of this criticism, and therefore paraphrases rather than quotes. Readers wanting the argument in his own words should consult his published studies directly.]

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, defending Palamas against the charge of Neoplatonism, nonetheless acknowledged that Meyendorff’s emphasis on existentialism reflected post-war French intellectual concerns (as reported in Pino, “Beyond Neo-Palamism,” Analogia 3.1 [2017]) — a notably temperate formulation from a friendly quarter.

The cumulative force of this strand is not that Meyendorff was careless but that he was of his time: a scholar working in Paris in the 1950s reached for the vocabulary Paris had, and the vocabulary carried assumptions.

3. Palamas Read Augustine

The most concrete blow to the East–West antithesis came from manuscript work.

Reinhard Flogaus demonstrated that Palamas made direct use of St. Augustine’s De Trinitate in Maximus Planoudes’ Greek translation. In “Palamas and Barlaam Revisited: A Reassessment of East and West in the Hesychast Controversy of Fourteenth-Century Byzantium,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 42.1 (1998): 1–32 — and in the earlier German article “Der heimliche Blick nach Westen: Zur Rezeption von Augustins De trinitate durch Gregorios Palamas,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 46 (1996): 275–297 — Flogaus identified passages in Palamas’s One Hundred and Fifty Chapters (notably chapters 36–40 and 122–135) that reflect Planoudes’ translation word for word, and argued that Palamas appreciated much of what he read in the latter part of De Trinitate and incorporated it into Greek theological literature.

John Demetracopoulos independently established the same dependence in Augustine and Gregory Palamas (Athens, 1997).

The finding does not make Palamas an Augustinian; both scholars are careful about how far it reaches. What it does is falsify the picture of a fourteenth-century Byzantine theologian sealed off from and defining himself against the Latin tradition. That picture was a load-bearing part of the neo-patristic narrative.

4. The Palamas–Aquinas Antithesis Is Modern

Marcus Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), argues that the now-familiar juxtaposition of Palamas and Aquinas “as archetypes of opposing Greek and Latin theological traditions” is itself a product of late modernity, “not at all reflective of either figure or their near-contemporaries” (Plested, quoted at Critique of Scholasticism). He also argues that Palamas is not fundamentally anti-rational, and proposes a spectrum within Palamite thought in which Nicholas Kavasilas functions as an internal moderating voice (Plested, 2012; cf. Pino, “Beyond Neo-Palamism,” 2017; see St. Nicholas Cabasilas).

The repository’s own file makes the necessary qualification, and it is worth repeating: “To say that the Palamas–Aquinas antithesis is a modern construction is not to say that Palamism and Thomism are secretly the same, nor that the neo-patristic theologians invented their differences out of nothing. Plested and Russell are making a historical and historiographical point — that the framing of the two as civilizational opposites is modern — not a theological claim that the disagreements dissolve” (Critique of Scholasticism).

Note that Meyendorff himself co-authored a volume placing the two side by side — Trinitarian Theology East and West: St Thomas Aquinas – St Gregory Palamas, with Michael Fahey (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977) — which is both an instance of the framing Plested criticizes and evidence that Meyendorff wanted the comparison conducted rather than assumed.

5. The Theological Objection: Wendebourg

A different kind of criticism, aimed at Palamism rather than at Meyendorff, nonetheless bears on the synthesis he built. Dorothea Wendebourg, Geist oder Energie: Zur Frage der innergöttlichen Verankerung des christlichen Lebens in der byzantinischen Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, 1980), argued that Palamism represented a “defeat of Trinitarian theology,” displacing the divine persons by the energies as the locus of God’s relation to the world (The Distinction, reporting Wendebourg’s thesis). If the objection has force, it tells against any theology — Meyendorff’s included — that makes the essence–energies distinction the organizing key to Orthodox thought. It is contested and is reported here as one position among several.

6. “Palamism” as a Modern Construction: Russell

The synthesizing critique is Norman Russell‘s Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Russell distinguishes “Palamism” — an ideological construct shaped by Jugie’s polemic and Meyendorff’s apologetic, which does not always match Palamas’s actual aims — from the historical theology of Palamas himself, and argues that, freed of the overlay, Palamas’s account of participation can fruitfully enrich the theology of divine–human communion (Russell, 2019, esp. parts I–II; reviewed by Tikhon Alexander Pino, iota-web.org, 2020; see The Palamite Revival).

Russell’s further historical thesis is that Jugie’s hostile article was formative in a paradoxical way: nearly all subsequent scholarship, Western and Orthodox alike, defined itself in relation to the positions Jugie laid out, so that the Orthodox “Palamism” of the twentieth century took shape partly as a reply to a Catholic polemic (The Palamite Revival).

The repository has adopted this as its governing frame, naming Meyendorff explicitly: “Norman Russell has argued that the twentieth-century ‘Palamism’ — shaped polemically by Martin Jugie and apologetically by John Meyendorff — does not always correspond to Palamas’s own thought” (St. Gregory Palamas, “Sourcing & Methodology”). This collection is consistent with that.

7. The Map: Pino

Tikhon Alexander Pino‘s “Beyond Neo-Palamism: Interpreting the Legacy of St Gregory Palamas,” Analogia 3.1 (2017): 53–73, is the single most useful survey of the reassessment, and much of the above is drawn from it. Its argument is that Meyendorff’s organizing dichotomies — humanist/monastic, nominalist/realist, symbolic/real, essentialist/existentialist — represent anachronistic impositions reflecting twentieth-century European theological anxieties rather than fourteenth-century Byzantine disputes, and that the field should move beyond them toward analysis of the newly-published Palamite and anti-Palamite texts across the period 1339–1445.

Readers should note that Pino writes as an advocate of the reassessment, not as a neutral referee, and that his article is a programmatic essay. It is cited here for its map of the literature and for the positions it attributes, which are checkable against the works named.

What Stands

Now the other half, and it matters as much.

The critical edition of the Triads stands. No part of the reassessment touches it. Golitzin argues against Meyendorff from Meyendorff’s own text (see The Critical Edition of the Triads).

The biography and chronology of Palamas stand. The repository’s own life of Palamas is built on the Study, cited page by page, and the reassessment has adjusted rather than replaced it (Family and Athos).

The demolition of the “decline” thesis stands. No serious scholar now defends Jugie’s estimate of Palamism as a symptom of Byzantine intellectual decay. That was Meyendorff’s principal target and he hit it.

The Byzantine theology surveys stand as surveys. Byzantine Theology and Christ in Eastern Christian Thought remain standard references on the councils, on neo-Chalcedonianism, on the iconoclast Christology, on the Synodikon and on the sacramental theology, and are cited as anchor sources across this repository. The criticism of the frame has not been criticism of the exposition.

The historical work on Byzantium and Russia stands. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia and Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions are used by historians and have not been the object of this reassessment at all (see Section 05).

Meyendorff was among the more careful of the neo-patristic generation. The repository’s own comparative judgment is worth quoting: “Lossky was dogmatic and measured; Meyendorff was a careful historian; even Romanides, the most polemical, did not build the complete dialectical machine” (The Neo-Palamite Lineage). It is Meyendorff’s misfortune that his reputation for care makes his interpretive constructions more consequential when they are wrong — but the care was real.

How to Read Him Now

Three practical rules follow.

Use the editions and the narratives; check the categories. Where Meyendorff establishes a text, a date, or a sequence of events, he is a first-rate authority. Where he explains why — in terms of personalism, essentialism, humanism, or civilizational contrast — read the explanation as a mid-century interpretation and consult the recent literature.
Distinguish Meyendorff from the councils. The Church defined that the energies are uncreated and really participated. It did not define a “Christological corrective,” a personalist anthropology, or an account of Barlaam’s education.
Do not swing to the opposite error. The reassessment has not shown that Palamas was a crypto-Thomist, that the East–West differences are illusory, or that the hesychast controversy did not matter. It has shown that a particular twentieth-century way of telling the story has to be rebuilt. That is what happens to good scholarship after sixty years.

References

Sinkewicz, Robert E. “The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God in the Early Writings of Barlaam the Calabrian.” Mediaeval Studies 44 (1982): 181–242.
Sinkewicz, Robert E., ed. and trans. Saint Gregory Palamas: The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988.
Flogaus, Reinhard. “Palamas and Barlaam Revisited: A Reassessment of East and West in the Hesychast Controversy of Fourteenth-Century Byzantium.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 42.1 (1998): 1–32; and “Der heimliche Blick nach Westen: Zur Rezeption von Augustins De trinitate durch Gregorios Palamas.” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 46 (1996): 275–297.
Demetracopoulos, John A. Augustine and Gregory Palamas. Athens, 1997. (The independent demonstration of Palamas’s use of Planoudes’ translation of De Trinitate.)
Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Wendebourg, Dorothea. Geist oder Energie: Zur Frage der innergöttlichen Verankerung des christlichen Lebens in der byzantinischen Theologie. Munich: Kaiser, 1980.
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. (The survey; and the reports of Schultze 1951, de Halleux 1974, Fyrigos, Rigo, Demetracopoulos, Congourdeau and Ware used above.)
Pino, Tikhon Alexander. Review of Russell, Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age. iota-web.org, 2020.
Meyendorff, John, and Michael A. Fahey. Trinitarian Theology East and West: St Thomas Aquinas – St Gregory Palamas. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977.