The Palamite Settlement

The essence–energies distinction is not a theological opinion the Orthodox Church happens to favour; it is dogma, defined by the Constantinopolitan councils of 1341, 1347, and 1351, inscribed in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, and commemorated liturgically on the Second Sunday of Great Lent. This file sets out what the councils settled and what weight the Church assigns to their settlement — deferring the narrative of the controversy itself to the collection on St. Gregory Palamas.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What Is Deferred and Why

The hesychast controversy is a long and politically entangled story: Barlaam’s arrival and departure, the Akindynos phase, the Byzantine civil war of 1341–1347, Palamas’ arrest and excommunication under Patriarch John XIV Calecas, the reversal of 1347, the Gregoras phase, the Blachernae council of 1351, and the aftermath down to 1368. That narrative is told, with its dates and its disputed day-datings, at St. Gregory Palamas: The Councils, 1341–1351 and The Barlaam Dispute. Readers who want the blow-by-blow should go there; this file does not duplicate it.

What belongs here is narrower and, for the doctrine of theosis, more important: what the councils defined, and with what authority.

The Three Councils

1341. The first council met in Hagia Sophia on 10 June 1341 under Emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos. Palamas and Barlaam confronted one another over the knowledge of God and the light of Tabor; the council found against Barlaam, who recanted and shortly afterward left Byzantium for Italy and the Latin Church. A second session in August 1341 condemned Gregory Akindynos, who had taken up the anti-hesychast cause (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, London, 1964, 45–47; see St. Gregory Palamas: The Councils, 1341–1351).

1347. After the political reversal of the civil war, a synod of February 1347 deposed Patriarch John XIV Calecas, condemned Akindynos, and fully vindicated Palamas, who was shortly elected Archbishop of Thessaloniki (Meyendorff 1964, 52–55).

1351. The decisive dogmatic council met at the imperial palace of Blachernae in 1351, convened by Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos with Patriarch Kallistos I. It affirmed the distinction between the unknowable divine essence and the truly divine, uncreated, participable energies and the uncreated character of the light of Tabor, and anathematized Barlaam, Akindynos, and their followers. Its conclusions were drawn up as the Synodal Tome of 1351, compiled from the records by Philotheos Kokkinos (Meyendorff 1964, 55, 90–94).

What the Tome of 1351 Defines

The Tome is a text readers can check, and Norman Russell’s translation has made it accessible in English (Russell, trans., Gregory Palamas: The Hesychast Controversy and the Debate with Islam, Liverpool, 2020). Its definitions bear directly on deification in several principal points.

That there is in God a real distinction between the essence and the energy, and that the energy of God is uncreated, not created. This is the proposition on which everything in the doctrine of theosis depends: what the deified receive is God, not a created gift (see How Participation Is Possible).

That this distinction in no way impairs the divine simplicity or introduces composition into God. The Tome says that the distinction “does not in any way impair the divine simplicity,” for “there is no compositeness in God” (Synodal Tome of 1351; trans. Russell 2020). The objection that Palamism divides God is thus not merely rebutted by later apologists; it is answered in the conciliar text itself.

That the divine energy may be experienced by the saints as light — a light beheld even through bodily eyes yet in itself immaterial, intelligible, and uncreated: the same light manifested to the apostles at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, seen by the saints in prayer, and destined to shine from the righteous at the resurrection (Synodal Tome of 1351; trans. Russell 2020).

The last of these is worth pausing on, because it settles three things at once for the doctrine of deification. It ties the mystical experience of the saints to a Gospel event, so that the vision of light is not a private phenomenon but a participation in the Transfiguration. It ties it to the resurrection, so that deification is eschatological and not merely experiential. And it says bodily eyes, so that deification is psychosomatic and not the flight of an intellect (see Sonship, Glory, and the Transfiguration; The Liturgical Witness and the Uncreated Light).

The Synodikon and the Second Sunday of Lent

The lasting inscription of the settlement was liturgical. The chapters drawn from the Palamite councils — anathemas against Barlaam and Akindynos, acclamations of the Orthodox teaching on the uncreated energies — were added to the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, the text proclaimed each year on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the First Sunday of Great Lent; the hesychast material entered it around 1352, and after Palamas’ canonization by Philotheos Kokkinos in 1368 an acclamation of Palamas himself was added (Meyendorff 1964, 93, 100; see St. Gregory Palamas: The Councils, 1341–1351; The Synodikon of Orthodoxy).

The placement is itself an argument. By inscribing the essence–energies distinction in the very service that celebrates the triumph of the icons and the Ecumenical Councils, the Church declared hesychast theology not a peripheral opinion but part of the rule of faith. The Synodikon anathematizes those who call the light of Tabor either a creature or the divine essence — the two horns of Barlaam’s dilemma, both refused (see St. Gregory Palamas: The Essence-Energies Distinction).

The commemoration of St. Gregory Palamas on the Second Sunday of Great Lent — effectively a second Sunday of Orthodoxy — makes the same point in the calendar (see The Church Calendar; Great Lent).

The Question of Rank

Whether the Palamite councils are to be numbered among the Ecumenical Councils is a genuinely open question in Orthodox reception, and this collection states it as such rather than resolving it by assertion (METHODOLOGY §4.2 applies: this is an intra-Orthodox dispute the Church has not settled).

The council of 1351 was a great patriarchal synod of the Church of Constantinople, and its Tome is universally received as binding dogma. [Disputed: a current of modern Orthodox theology — Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos), Fr. John Romanides, Fr. George Metallinos — argues that the councils under Palamas (especially 1351, sometimes with 1341 and 1368) possess ecumenical authority and should be numbered among the Ecumenical Councils; the more traditional reckoning closes the list at seven and treats 1351 as a local-but-universally-received synod of the highest doctrinal weight (Russell, Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age, Oxford, 2019, on the modern reception). The Encyclical of the 2016 Holy and Great Council of Crete lists “the Great Councils convened at the time of St. Gregory Palamas (1341, 1351, 1368)” among councils of catholic authority without numbering them (Holy and Great Council of Crete, Encyclical, §3, 2016).]

The distinction that matters is between rank and authority. The number is unsettled; the binding force is not. Nothing in the doctrine of theosis depends on the resolution of the numbering question (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils: The Question of an Eighth Council and Beyond).

Why the Settlement Matters for Theosis

Three things changed for the doctrine of deification when the councils spoke.

It ceased to be arguable within the Church. Before 1341 a theologian might, without formal fault, have held that the grace of deification was a created effect. After 1351 he could not. The Orthodox account of salvation is therefore committed, at the level of dogma, to uncreated grace (see The Western Trajectory, where the difference this makes is stated).

The monastic experience was ratified as ecclesial. The claims of the hesychasts were not confined to a spiritual literature; the Church examined them and confessed them. This is the ground on which later testimony — St. Seraphim’s, St. Silouan’s, St. Sophrony’s — is received (see The Saints as Evidence and a Sober Assessment).

The doctrine acquired guardrails with conciliar force. The Synodikon’s anathema falls on both the man who calls the Taboric light a creature and the man who calls it the divine essence. The doctrine of theosis is thus fenced on both sides by the same act — which is precisely what a dogma is for.

An Honest Note on the Modern Discussion

The distinction remains contested outside the Orthodox Church, and the discussion within scholarship has grown more nuanced in both directions: some hold the essence–energies distinction to be a church-dividing dogmatic difference, others a difference of theological idiom resting on a shared faith in real union with God. That literature — A. N. Williams’ rapprochement thesis, Dorothea Wendebourg’s critique, and the Orthodox replies — is presented, attributed, and left unadjudicated at St. Gregory Palamas: The Essence-Energies Distinction, and this collection does not depart from that staging. What is not open, from within the Church, is whether the Tome of 1351 binds. It does.

See Also

References

  • Holy and Great Council of Crete. Encyclical, §3. Crete, 2016.
  • Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964.
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
  • Russell, Norman, trans. Gregory Palamas: The Hesychast Controversy and the Debate with Islam. Documents Relating to Gregory Palamas. Translated Texts for Byzantinists 8. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. (Includes the Synodal Tome of 1351.)
  • Russell, Norman. Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
  • Williams, A. N. The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Wendebourg, Dorothea. Geist oder Energie. Munich: Kaiser, 1980.