Homilies and Letters

Beyond the Triads and the One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, St. Gregory Palamas left a large and varied corpus: sixty-three pastoral homilies, a body of letters to his opponents and to the monks of Athos, the Apodictic Treatises against the Latin Filioque, the controversial Antirrhetics against Akindynos, and theological dialogues such as the Theophanes. This file maps that corpus and its modern editions, complementing the homiletic material treated in section 06.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Homilies

As Archbishop of Thessaloniki — elected in 1347, and shepherding the see (with interruptions, including a period of captivity among the Turks) until his death on 14 November 1359 — Palamas preached regularly to his flock, and sixty-three of his homilies survive (Veniamin, The Homilies, Introduction; on the dates, cf. the standard biographies). The first complete English translation is that of Christopher Veniamin, Saint Gregory Palamas: The Homilies (Mount Thabor Publishing), which prints all sixty-three with extensive notes. Most are festal and pastoral, following the liturgical year; section 06 of this collection treats the homiletic corpus in its pastoral aspect. Here the concern is the theological homilies, in which the dogmatic teaching of the Triads reappears in preached form.

These sermons are important precisely because they show the controversial theology landing in the parish. The Archbishop is not arguing with Barlaam here but feeding ordinary Christians; yet the same uncreated light, the same essence-energies distinction, the same call to deification run through the festal preaching. This is one reason the Church remembers Palamas not only on 14 November but on the Second Sunday of Great Lent, the “Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas,” where his teaching is set as a kind of second Sunday of Orthodoxy — the dogmatic vindication of the hesychast vision placed at the heart of the Lenten ascent (Synodikon of Orthodoxy; liturgical calendar).

On the Transfiguration (Homilies 34 and 35)

The two Transfiguration homilies are the most important theologically. Homily 34, “On the Holy Transfiguration of Our Lord,” demonstrates that the light seen by the apostles on Tabor is uncreated; Homily 35, “Another on the Transfiguration,” demonstrates that although that light is uncreated, it is not the essence of God but his natural energy and glory (Veniamin, The Homilies, nos. 34–35). Preached to ordinary Christians, these sermons restate in accessible form the precise distinction that the hesychast controversy had forced Palamas to articulate: the Taboric light is neither a created phenomenon nor the imparticipable essence, but the uncreated energy in which the saints really participate.

On the Cross and the Marian Homilies

Palamas also preached on the Cross, drawing out its place in the economy of salvation and the mystery of God’s wisdom revealed in apparent weakness. His Marian homilies — above all Homily 37, “On the Dormition” of the Theotokos, together with homilies on the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple — are theologically rich: they present the Mother of God’s life of stillness and prayer in the Temple as a model of hesychast contemplation, and her glorification as the firstfruits of the deification offered to all (Veniamin, The Homilies, no. 37 and the Marian sermons; cf. Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas). In the homily on the Entrance, Palamas reads the young Virgin’s seclusion in the Holy of Holies as the prototype of the contemplative life: she who would bear the Word first practiced the stillness and prayer that prepare a soul to receive God — a striking move by which the Theotokos becomes the model hesychast and the controversy’s spirituality is grounded in the Gospel itself.

The Range of the Homilies

The sixty-three sermons span the whole of the Christian year and much of the Christian life: homilies on the Sundays of the Triodion and the Lenten fast, on Pascha and Pentecost, on the Nativity and Theophany, on saints’ feasts, and on practical moral themes (almsgiving, the use of wealth, the duties of citizens of Thessaloniki during civil strife). They are a primary source for Palamas as a pastor rather than a polemicist, and they confirm that for him the contemplative and dogmatic theology of the Triads was never an esoteric specialty but the inner truth of the ordinary Christian life lived toward deification (Veniamin, The Homilies; Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas).

The Letters

Palamas’s correspondence is a primary source for both his theology and the course of the controversy. Three groups stand out:

Letters to Barlaam — early in the dispute, before it reached its full doctrinal sharpness, Palamas corresponded with Barlaam of Calabria, especially over the procession of the Holy Spirit and the proper use of demonstrative (apodictic) reasoning in theology.
Letters to Akindynos — addressed to Gregory Akindynos, at first a mutual acquaintance and later Palamas’s chief opponent after Barlaam’s departure; these trace the hardening of the conflict.
The Athonite correspondence — letters to and concerning the monks of Mount Athos, bound up with the Hagioritic Tome (1341), the manifesto in which the leading Athonite fathers endorsed Palamas’s teaching.

In Christou’s critical edition the Letters to Barlaam and Akindynos are gathered in the first volume of the Syngrammata alongside the Apodictic Treatises and the Triads (Christou, ed., Grēgoriou tou Palama Syngrammata, vol. 1).

The Apodictic Treatises on the Procession of the Spirit

The two Apodictic Treatises on the Procession of the Holy Spirit (Logoi apodeiktikoi) are Palamas’s principal anti-Latin Triadology, written early (c. 1334–1335) against the Filioque. The title is pointed: against Barlaam, who held that no strictly demonstrative (apodictic) proof was possible in theology — only probable, dialectical argument — Palamas insists that the truth that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone can be demonstrated from Scripture and the Fathers (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas; Russell, Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism).

The core arguments, summarized:

The Spirit proceeds from the Father alone (ek monou tou Patros), per John 15:26 and the Creed of 381; the Father is the sole cause (aitia) within the Trinity, and to make the Son a second cause of the Spirit’s existence compromises the monarchy of the Father (see The Holy Trinity).
A careful distinction between the eternal procession of existence (ekporeusis), which is from the Father alone, and the temporal manifestation and sending of the Spirit “through the Son” (dia tou Huiou) in the economy of grace. The Latin error, on this reading, is to confuse the economic sending with the eternal origin.
If the relations of origin define the hypostases, then to derive the Spirit from both Father and Son tends to collapse the distinction between Father and Son — making them indistinguishable as cause — which is incoherent.

These arguments place Palamas in direct continuity with St. Photius the Great’s Mystagogy. For the full Orthodox treatment, cross-reference The Filioque Controversy. A modern bilingual English edition is Apodictic Treatises on the Procession of the Holy Spirit, trans. ed. by Heers and Moody, with an introduction drawn from Panagiotis Christou (Uncut Mountain Press, 2022). In that edition the anti-Filioque argumentation is concentrated in chapters 32–37 of the first treatise and chapters 19–20 of the second, where Palamas presses the relational point: since the hypostases are constituted by their relations of origin, to make the Spirit proceed from the Son as well as the Father blurs the line that distinguishes Father from Son, since both would then be “cause” in the same respect.

The Apodictic Treatises are also methodologically significant. By titling them “demonstrative” (apodeiktikoi), Palamas stakes a claim against Barlaam’s theological agnosticism: revealed truths, he holds, are not merely matters of pious probability but can be shown with the force of demonstration from the agreed premises of Scripture and the Fathers. This early conviction — that theology is a genuine science of its own, not a domain where reason must fall silent — undergirds his later confidence in the hesychast controversy, and it is one reason the Treatises, though written before the main dispute, are foundational to everything that follows (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas; Russell, Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism).

The Antirrhetics, Dialogues, and Smaller Treatises

The years 1341–1347, between councils, produced a dense series of controversial works. Chief among them are the seven Antirrhetics against Akindynos (Antirrhetikoi pros Akindynon), the exhaustive point-by-point refutation of Akindynos, which fill the third volume of Christou’s Syngrammata. Alongside these stand shorter treatises — On the Divine Energies, On Divine and Deifying Participation, and That Barlaam and Akindynos Are the Ones Who Divide the Godhead — in which Palamas turns the charge of “dividing God” back upon his accusers.

His two dialogues are the Theophanes (a dialogue named for its interlocutor, treating how the one God can be at once imparticipable in essence and truly participable in his energies and operations) and the Dialogue of an Orthodox with a Barlaamite. The participation argument of the Theophanes — that to participate in an essence as such would be to become a hypostasis of that essence, which is impossible for creatures, so that real participation must be in the energies — is one Palamas develops in parallel across the Theophanes, the Triads, and the Capita 150 (Tikhon Pino, Essence and Energies: Being and Naming God in St Gregory Palamas, 2022; Sinkewicz, Introduction to the Capita).

Finally, among the responses to the synodal proceedings is his reply to the three bishops/opponents who pressed objections against him — one of the occasional pieces by which Palamas defended the conciliar vindication of his theology in 1341 and 1347.

The Corpus Map: The Christou Edition

The standard critical edition of the Greek is Panagiotis K. Christou (ed.), Grēgoriou tou Palama Syngrammata (“The Writings of Gregory Palamas”), Thessaloniki, published in successive volumes from 1962 onward (the project completed in the 1990s). Its organization gives the shape of the corpus:

Volume 1 — the Apodictic Treatises on the procession of the Spirit; the Antepigraphai; the Letters to Barlaam and Akindynos; the Triads (Hyper tōn hierōs hēsychazontōn, “In Defence of the Holy Hesychasts”).
Volume 2 — further dogmatic and polemical treatises (including On the Divine Energies and related works).
Volume 3 — the Antirrhetics against Akindynos.
Volumes 4–5 — the remaining treatises, dialogues, and the homilies (the homilies also edited separately as Homiliai).

In the older reference scheme the works are cited from Migne, Patrologia Graeca vols. 150–151, but Christou’s edition supersedes Migne and is the text cited by modern scholarship; the Capita 150 is cited from Sinkewicz’s separate critical edition (Christou, Syngrammata; Sinkewicz, The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters; per the methodology of this collection, §2.1).

This corpus map also clarifies how the works relate chronologically and rhetorically. The Apodictic Treatises and the early letters belong to the period before the hesychast controversy proper (c. 1334–1336), when Palamas was engaging Barlaam on the procession of the Spirit and the limits of demonstration. The Triads and the Hagioritic Tome belong to the height of the controversy (c. 1338–1341). The Antirrhetics, the shorter treatises On the Divine Energies and On Divine and Deifying Participation, and the dialogues belong to the middle period of the dispute with Akindynos (1341–1347). The Capita 150 and most of the homilies belong to the aftermath of his vindication (1347 onward), when as Archbishop of Thessaloniki he could both pastor a city and synthesize his theology. Reading the corpus in this order — treatises, Triads, Antirrhetics, dialogues, Capita, homilies — is reading the unfolding of a single sustained argument from its first occasion to its calm restatement (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas; Russell, Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism).

References

Christou, Panagiotis K., ed. Grēgoriou tou Palama Syngrammata. 5 vols. Thessaloniki, 1962–1992.
Migne, J.-P., ed. Patrologia Graeca, vols. 150–151 (older reference edition of Palamas).
Palamas, Gregory. Saint Gregory Palamas: The Homilies. Trans. and ed. Christopher Veniamin. Waymart, PA: Mount Thabor Publishing, 2009.
Palamas, Gregory. Apodictic Treatises on the Procession of the Holy Spirit. Ed. and trans. Gregory Heers and Christopher Moody. Uncut Mountain Press, 2022.
Palamas, Gregory. The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters (Capita 150). Ed. and trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz. Toronto: PIMS, 1988.
Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964.
Russell, Norman. Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Pino, Tikhon Alexander. Essence and Energies: Being and Naming God in St Gregory Palamas. London: Routledge, 2022.