Palamas and the Critique of Scholasticism

The popular image of “Palamas versus Aquinas” — East against West, mysticism against rationalism — is largely a construction of the twentieth century, not a description of the fourteenth. St. Gregory Palamas engaged Barlaam of Calabria’s epistemology, not Thomism; the real Byzantine encounter with Aquinas came after him, through the Kydones brothers; and the sharp Lossky-Romanides opposition has been substantially softened by recent scholarship (Plested; Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou). This file distinguishes what Palamas actually engaged from what was later read back into him, and names the genuine differences that remain once the polemic is removed.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

This topic is handled with the care that the methodology requires for disputed and polemically charged questions (METHODOLOGY §4): naming positions and their proponents rather than asserting a single verdict.

What Palamas Actually Engaged: Barlaam’s Epistemology, Not Aquinas

The hesychast controversy was not, in the first instance, a debate with Latin scholasticism. Palamas’s adversary was Barlaam of Calabria (c. 1290–1348), a Greek-speaking philosopher-monk from Italy, and the dispute turned on epistemology — on what can be known of God and how.

Barlaam held a strongly apophatic-skeptical position: because God is unknowable, theological claims cannot be demonstrated (proven apodictically) but only argued probably and dialectically; and the “light” the hesychasts claimed to see must be either a created symbol or a delusion. Palamas’s reply, in the Apodictic Treatises and the Triads, was that the truths of revelation can be demonstrated, and that the saints really participate in the uncreated energies of God (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas; Russell, Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism, 2019). The quarrel was over the limits of natural reason and the reality of mystical experience — not over Thomas Aquinas, whom the controversy did not concern.

It is therefore historically inaccurate to read Palamas’s polemic as a verdict on Latin scholasticism in general or on Aquinas in particular. As Marcus Plested puts it, 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, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, Oxford, 2012 — attributed to Plested).

The Real Encounter: The Byzantine Thomists

The genuine Byzantine reception of Aquinas came after the main Palamite controversy, through the Kydones brothers. Demetrios Kydones (c. 1324–1397/98), statesman and theologian, learned Latin and translated Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles and Summa Theologiae into Greek; his brother Prochoros Kydones (c. 1333–c. 1370), a monk of the Great Lavra on Athos, translated further works of Aquinas and of Augustine and Boethius, and deployed Thomist and Aristotelian argument against the Palamite distinction (Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas; “Demetrios Kydones” and “Prochoros Kydones,” with the Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy).

This is the actual fourteenth-century meeting of Palamism and Thomism — and notably, it happened on Byzantine soil and on Byzantine terms. Prochoros, accused of using Thomist tools to attack the hesychast teaching, was condemned by the synod of 1368 (the same synod, convened by Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos, that canonized Palamas). Yet the encounter was not simply hostile: Demetrios Kydones remained an admired figure and a high imperial official, Aquinas was read with respect by Byzantine theologians of every party, and even staunch anti-Latin Palamites such as Gennadios Scholarios — the first Patriarch under Ottoman rule — drew freely on Thomist logic. Plested documents a long Orthodox tradition of reading Aquinas appreciatively, complicating any clean East-West binary (Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas).

The lesson is twofold. First, the chronology refutes the popular antithesis: Palamas had completed his major work before Aquinas was even available in Greek, so his theology cannot have been framed as a refutation of Thomism. Second, the Byzantine reception shows that Orthodox theologians did not regard Aquinas as simply “the enemy”; they sorted his arguments, accepted his logic where it served, and rejected specific conclusions (on the Filioque, on created grace, on the simplicity objection to the energies) where these conflicted with the conciliar faith. The fault line ran through particular doctrines, not down a civilizational divide.

The Modern Construction of the Opposition

The picture of Palamas and Aquinas as polar opposites is largely the work of twentieth-century Orthodox theologians, above all in the “neo-patristic” generation:

Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958) framed the Filioque and the Western refusal of the essence-energies distinction as not a verbal difference but a fundamentally different — and impersonalist — theological vision, making Palamism the marker of an Orthodox identity defined over against Latin scholasticism (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, chs. 3–4 — attributed to Lossky).
John Romanides (1927–2001) sharpened this into a strong historical narrative opposing the empirical, therapeutic theology of the Greek Fathers and hesychasts to a speculative, Augustinian-scholastic West, treating “Franco-Latin” scholasticism as a deviation (Romanides, Romanity, Romania, Roumeli and related works — attributed to Romanides).

In this framing — enormously influential in the later twentieth century — “Palamas vs. Thomism” became shorthand for “Orthodoxy vs. the West.” Its power was as much identity-forming as historical.

Norman Russell’s Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age (2019) gives the most detailed account of how this happened. He shows that “Palamism” as a coherent system, and as a banner of Orthodox distinctiveness, was substantially constructed in the twentieth century — through the recovery and publication of the texts (the Christou edition of the 1960s–1980s gave scholars, for the first time, ready access to the full corpus), and through their enlistment by the neo-patristic theologians in a program of returning to the Fathers and resisting what they saw as a Westernized “pseudomorphosis” of Orthodox thought. Russell does not deny that Palamas taught the essence-energies distinction; his point is that the fourteenth-century theologian and the modern “-ism” built in his name must be carefully distinguished, lest the polemical needs of the twentieth century be projected back onto the fourteenth (Russell, 2019 — attributed to Russell).

The Revisionist Softening

A wave of more recent scholarship has questioned the neo-patristic opposition as overdrawn:

George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Readings of Augustine (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), gathered essays showing that Augustine was received and honored as a Father in the East long before the modern anti-Augustinianism, and that the wholesale opposition of “Augustinian West” to “patristic East” does not survive the historical record (attributed to Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou).
Marcus Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas (Oxford, 2012), traced the appreciative Orthodox reception of Aquinas “from the Byzantine to the modern era,” arguing that the Palamas-Aquinas antithesis is a modern invention and that the two thinkers, on several points, are closer than the polemic allows (attributed to Plested).
Norman Russell, Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age (Oxford, 2019), documents precisely how twentieth-century “Palamism” was constructed — how Palamas was retrieved, edited (the Christou edition), and enlisted for modern theological programs — distinguishing the fourteenth-century theologian from the modern “ism” built in his name (Russell, 2019).

This revisionist current does not deny real disagreement; it removes the polemical overlay so that the disagreement can be seen clearly.

What Genuine Differences Remain

When the modern construction is set aside, substantive differences do remain — and they should be neither inflated into total opposition nor dissolved into mere semantics:

Where transcendence is guarded. Palamism locates the unknowability of God in the imparticipable essence, leaving grace to be uncreated energy; the Thomist tradition locates it such that any immediate gift to the creature is created, and the vision of the essence is reserved for the lumen gloriae of the beatific vision. This is a real difference about the structure of union with God (see Apophaticism and Grace).
Divine simplicity. The Thomist account of God as actus purus and absolutely simple is in tension with a real distinction between essence and energies; Palamites reply that the distinction introduces no composition (no “fourth thing”), but the two accounts of simplicity genuinely differ (Plested; Russell).
The Filioque and the monarchy of the Father. This remains a real dogmatic difference, independent of the scholasticism question (see The Filioque Controversy). It is worth noting that the Filioque dispute long predates both Palamas and the scholastics — it was already the heart of Photius’s quarrel with Rome in the ninth century — which is itself evidence that the deepest Orthodox-Catholic differences do not reduce to a clash of theological methods (mystical vs. rationalist) but concern specific doctrinal content.
The role and limits of natural reason. Even here the difference is one of emphasis rather than absolute opposition: Palamas’s Apodictic Treatises claim that revealed truths can be demonstrated, which is hardly an anti-rationalist position, while Aquinas carefully bounds what reason can establish about God apart from revelation. Both grant reason real but limited competence in theology; they draw the boundary in different places and for different reasons (Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas; Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas).

It is worth adding a note of balance about the revisionists themselves. 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. A Thomist committed to absolute divine simplicity and a Palamite committed to a real essence-energies distinction do disagree, and honestly. What the revisionist scholarship corrects is the move from “they disagree on this” to “they represent two incompatible total visions of God, reason, and salvation.” The first is true and clarifying; the second is the overreach.

The honest conclusion is the one the revisionists urge: the fourteenth-century Palamas engaged a particular Calabrian’s epistemology, not the Summa; the genuine Orthodox-Catholic differences over grace, simplicity, and the Filioque are real and worth stating precisely; and the cartoon of “mystical East versus rationalist West” obscures more than it reveals (Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas; Russell, Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism). For the Orthodox reader the gain is a sturdier confidence: the essence-energies theology can be held and defended on its own conciliar and patristic grounds, without needing the caricature of a rationalist West to define itself against.

References

Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Readings of Augustine. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008.
Russell, Norman. Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957.
Romanides, John S. Romanity, Romania, Roumeli and Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine.
Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964.
“Demetrios Kydones” and “Prochoros Kydones,” in Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, ed. H. Lagerlund. Springer, 2011.