Barlaam, Palamas, and the Hesychast Councils

When Barlaam of Calabria ridiculed the praying monks of Athos as “omphalopsychoi” — men with their souls in their navels — he forced the Church to say what the Jesus Prayer’s deepest claims mean. St. Gregory Palamas’s Triads and the Constantinopolitan councils of 1341–1351 answered: the light the hesychasts see is uncreated, God is truly participable in His energies while imparticipable in His essence, and the body shares in prayer and in glory. This file narrates the controversy and its dogmatic settlement.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Barlaam’s Attack

Barlaam of Calabria (c. 1290–1348), a Greek from Byzantine Italy, arrived in Constantinople around 1330 with a reputation in philosophy and a program: the defense of Greek Christianity by way of an apophaticism so strict that God, unknowable in Himself, could be reached only through created intermediaries and inferences. His collision with the hesychasts came at the end of the 1330s, when — after encountering, by his own account, simple monks who described the psychosomatic practice of the Jesus Prayer — he attacked both the method and the claim behind it. He fastened on the breathing technique and the attention directed toward the heart and coined the sneer that stuck: the monks were omphalopsychoi, “navel-souled,” men who supposed the soul was located in the navel and could be gazed upon there (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, trans. Lawrence, Faith Press, 1964, on Barlaam’s career and pamphlets; the epithet is reported and answered in Palamas, The Triads, ed. Meyendorff, trans. Gendle, Paulist, 1983). More seriously, he denied that the light the hesychasts reported seeing — the light they identified with the light of Tabor (see Matthew 17:1–8) — could be anything uncreated: visions accessible to bodily eyes must be created phenomena, at best symbols; and a claim to unmediated experience of God was, to Barlaam, enthusiasm and Messalianism — the ancient heresy that claimed sensory vision of the divine essence (Meyendorff, Study, 1964; Ware, “The Debate about Palamism,” Eastern Churches Review 9, 1977, summarizing Barlaam’s charges).

Per this repository’s standpoint (METHODOLOGY §4.1): Barlaam’s position is reported here in its own terms — a consistent philosophical apophaticism with genuine patristic proof-texts about divine unknowability — and it is assessed as the Church assessed it: a theology that, pressed to its conclusion, leaves God unexperienceable and grace created, and which the councils of 1341–1351 examined and rejected.

Palamas’s Defense: The Triads

St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), Athonite monk, later Archbishop of Thessalonica, answered in three triads of treatises In Defense of the Holy Hesychasts (c. 1338–1341). Three lines of his defense matter directly to the Jesus Prayer.

The body prays. Against the mockery of the method, Palamas refuses to concede that the body is prayer’s enemy. The body is not evil; it is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19, which he quotes); the heart is the body’s rational center and “the seat of grace”; and to “send the mind into the heart” — enlisting posture and breath as aids for beginners — is sound incarnational anthropology, warranted by the fathers of the tradition from whom he had received it, including Nikephoros the Hesychast, whom he defends by name (Palamas, Triads I.2, trans. Gendle, 1983; Meyendorff, Study, 1964; see The Psychosomatic Method). Deification, he insists, embraces the whole man: the bodies of the saints are glorified, as Moses’s face shone and Stephen’s was as an angel’s — hence a method of prayer that involves the body is not superstition but a confession of what man is (Palamas, Triads, trans. Gendle, 1983; Exodus 34:29; Acts 6:15).

The light is uncreated. The light of Tabor, and the light the purified see in prayer, is neither the divine essence nor a creature: it is the eternal glory of God, His uncreated energy, truly seen — not by the natural power of the eye but by the Spirit’s transformation of the seer (Palamas, Triads III.1, trans. Gendle, 1983; Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, SVS Press, 1974). The Transfiguration is read as the disclosure not of a temporary created radiance but of what Christ eternally is, the disciples being changed so as to see it (Matthew 17:2; 2 Peter 1:16–18; Palamas, Triads III.1).

Essence and energies. The distinction that secures both previous claims: God is utterly imparticipable and unknowable in His essence (ousia), and truly, wholly present and participable in His energies (energeiai) — which are not creatures, nor parts of God, but God Himself in His self-giving action. This allows the tradition to say without contradiction what the Jesus Prayer presupposes: that the one who prays really encounters God (not an effect or intermediary), and that God remains inexhaustibly beyond the encounter (Palamas, Triads III; Meyendorff, Study, 1964; on the distinction’s patristic pedigree in the Cappadocians and Maximus, see Ware, “The Debate about Palamism,” 1977, and the collection St. Gregory Palamas, where the theology is treated in full).

The Councils of 1341–1351

The dispute was judged by a series of councils at Constantinople, the “hesychast councils,” whose decisions the Orthodox Church receives as dogmatically authoritative:

  • June 1341: A council in Hagia Sophia heard Barlaam’s accusations against Palamas and the monks and condemned Barlaam’s positions; he anathematized his own errors, departed for the West (where he later became a Latin bishop), and the affair passed to his successors as accusers, first Gregory Akindynos (Meyendorff, Study, 1964; a second session in August 1341 condemned Akindynos; the two sessions of 1341 are sometimes counted as two councils).
  • 1347: After a civil war in which the controversy was entangled with politics, a council reaffirmed the hesychast teaching and deposed its opponents; Palamas was consecrated Archbishop of Thessalonica the same year (Meyendorff, Study, 1964).
  • 1351: The decisive council, in the Blachernae palace, against the philosopher Nikephoros Gregoras, issued its Tomos defining the essence–energies distinction and the uncreated character of the light of Tabor as the Church’s teaching; its determinations were subsequently incorporated into the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, the anathemas and acclamations read on the first Sunday of Lent (Meyendorff, Study, 1964; the Palamite chapters of the Synodikon in the Triodion — The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, Faber, 1978).
  • 1368: A further council canonized Palamas, nine years after his death, and condemned his opponent Prochoros Kydones; Palamas received the second Sunday of Great Lent as his feast — the Sunday after the Triumph of Orthodoxy, a liturgical statement that the hesychast definition stands in continuity with the victory over iconoclasm (Meyendorff, Study, 1964; the hub article notes the same commemoration).

The judgment of these councils is not, in Orthodox reckoning, a scholastic appendix but the dogmatic charter of the whole praying tradition this collection describes: it is because God is truly participable in His energies that the invocation of the Name is communion and not psychology; it is because the body is destined for glory that the method could enlist it; and it is because essence remains beyond participation that no experience, however exalted, closes the infinite approach (Ware, The Power of the Name, SLG Press, 1974; Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, 1974).

Assessment and Afterlife

Two sober notes complete the account. First, the scope of the conciliar settlement should be stated exactly: the councils dogmatized the essence–energies distinction and the uncreated light; they did not canonize the breathing technique, which remained then and remains now an optional, guarded aid (see The Psychosomatic Method). Confusing the two — as if Orthodoxy had made posture and breath a dogma — misreads the Tomos, and the tradition’s later freedom with the technique (the Russian amendments of Section 05) proves the point. Second, the debate did not end in 1351 as an intellectual matter: Palamism was long treated with suspicion or hostility in Roman Catholic scholarship (Jugie’s articles being the classic case), was recovered sympathetically in the twentieth century by Meyendorff and others, and continues to generate discussion — including intra-Orthodox discussion about how the distinction is best articulated philosophically. Those scholarly debates are real and are treated in the Palamas collection; what is not in dispute within Orthodoxy is the conciliar teaching itself, confessed each first Sunday of Lent in the Synodikon and each second Sunday in the feast of Gregory Palamas (Ware, “The Debate about Palamism,” 1977; Meyendorff, Study, 1964; St. Gregory Palamas). The fourteenth-century victory also had a missionary consequence directly relevant to this collection: the hesychast international — Gregory of Sinai’s Paroria, the Bulgarian and Serbian disciples, the metropolitans it gave to Russia — carried the vindicated practice north, where the next act of the story unfolds (Section 05; Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, Cambridge, 1981, on the hesychast networks).

See Also

References

  • Palamas, Gregory. The Triads. Ed. John Meyendorff, trans. Nicholas Gendle. Classics of Western Spirituality. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983. (Triads I.2 on the body and the method; III.1 on the uncreated light; the defense of Nikephoros.)
  • Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964. (The standard narrative of Barlaam, the pamphlet war, and the councils of 1341, 1347, 1351, 1368.)
  • Meyendorff, John. St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. (The hesychast networks and the Slavic transmission.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. “The Debate about Palamism.” Eastern Churches Review 9 (1977). (Barlaam’s charges; the later scholarly debate.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974.
  • The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1978. (The Synodikon of Orthodoxy; the second Sunday of Lent.)
  • Scripture: Exodus 34:29; Matthew 17:1–8; Acts 6:15; 1 Corinthians 6:19; 2 Peter 1:16–18.