St. Gregory Palamas

Archbishop of ThessalonikiFeast November 14

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Athonite monk and Archbishop of Thessaloniki who, against the philosophical attacks of Barlaam the Calabrian, defended the hesychast prayer of the heart and gave the Eastern Orthodox Church its mature theological grammar for what man knows of God: that God is unknowable in His essence and truly known in His uncreated energies, the same uncreated divine light the three disciples saw on Tabor.

Born: 1296 (Constantinople)
Reposed: November 14, 1359 (Thessaloniki)
See: Thessaloniki
Feast: November 14 · Second Sunday of Great Lent

Gregory was born in Constantinople in 1296, the eldest son of a senator at the court of the Emperor Andronikos II. His father reposed when Gregory was a small child, and the Emperor himself took on the upbringing of the four orphaned children, intending Gregory for a high office in the imperial administration. Gregory studied at the imperial university, where he excelled especially in Aristotelian logic; at twenty he gave a public oration on Aristotle that astonished his teachers.

He resolved to enter the monastic life. He brought his two brothers, his mother, his two sisters, and most of the household servants to the consent of his decision, and the whole household entered monasteries at the same time: Gregory and his brothers to Mount Athos, his mother and sisters to a convent in Constantinople. Gregory was twenty years old; the year was 1316.

On the Holy Mountain he was placed under the elder Nikodemos of Vatopedi and was given the prayer of Jesus and a long period of silence and watchfulness in the cell. After the death of Nikodemos he passed to the Great Lavra, then to a small hermitage near it, then, when the Turkish raids made the southern Athonite peninsula unsafe, to the monastery of St. Sabbas at Beroea on the mainland, where he spent five more years in stricter asceticism. He returned to Athos in 1331 and was ordained to the priesthood.

Holy St. Gregory Palamas, pray to God for us.

In 1335 the controversy began that would consume the rest of his life. The Calabrian philosopher and theologian Barlaam, who had come to Constantinople from southern Italy, attacked the Athonite hesychasts in writing: he ridiculed their practice of the Jesus Prayer joined to the breath, their claim that pure-hearted ascetics could behold an uncreated divine light, and their teaching that God can be truly known in something other than the bare logical concept of His existence. Gregory was asked by the Athonite community to answer Barlaam. The Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts (1338–1341), three sets of three treatises each, are the principal answer. In them Gregory worked out the distinction the Church has held ever since: God's essence is unknowable and incommunicable to any creature, but His uncreated energies, His operations, His grace, are truly God Himself, and through them the saints really partake of God, by deification, while remaining creatures.

In 1347 Gregory was consecrated Archbishop of Thessaloniki. He held the see for the last twelve years of his life, interrupted by a year of captivity among the Turks (1354–1355) when his ship was taken in the Sea of Marmara; in captivity he debated theology calmly with the Muslim scholars set over him, and was ransomed by the Christians of Bursa. He reposed at Thessaloniki on November 14, 1359, at the age of sixty-three. Nine years later, in 1368, the Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos of Constantinople (who had been one of his disciples) presided over his glorification as a saint; the second Sunday of Great Lent was set aside for the universal commemoration of his memory and his teaching, as a kind of continuation of the Sunday of Orthodoxy: that the Faith confessed against the iconoclasts in 843 is the same Faith confessed against the philosophical attack on hesychasm in 1351.

2 works

Books in print

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The TriadsBy Gregory Palamas · Paulist Press, 1983Palamas's defense of the hesychasts, distinguishing God's unknowable essence from His uncreated energies in which we truly partake. The cornerstone text of Orthodox theology of theosis.Buy on Amazon
Saint Gregory Palamas and Orthodox SpiritualityAbout John Meyendorff · St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1998Meyendorff's accessible introduction to the spiritual world from which Palamas wrote, monastic, sacramental, and rooted in the prayer of the heart.Buy on Amazon
The Mystical Theology of the Eastern ChurchAbout Vladimir Lossky · St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1976Lossky's classic exposition of Orthodox dogmatic theology read through the prism of the essence-energies distinction: apophasis, the Trinity, the economy of the Son and the Spirit, the deifying union. The book that introduced the Palamite vision to the modern West.Buy on Amazon
The Vision of GodAbout Vladimir Lossky · St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1983Lossky traces the patristic doctrine of seeing God from the Apologists through the Cappadocians and Maximus to its synthesis in Palamas, a short history of one question read across the whole Greek Fathers.Buy on Amazon
Aristotle East and WestAbout David Bradshaw · Cambridge University Press, 2007Bradshaw traces the divergent reception of Aristotle's energeia in East and West, from the Cappadocians and Dionysius through Maximus to Palamas, set against the parallel Western trajectory through Augustine and Aquinas. The rigorous philosophical case for the essence-energies distinction.Buy on Amazon
A Study of Gregory PalamasAbout John Meyendorff · St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1998The first full English study of Palamas's life and work, originally published in French in 1959 and hailed at the time as a major contribution to Western understanding of Eastern Christianity. The starting point for any serious reading of Palamite theology.Buy on Amazon
Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern AgeAbout Norman Russell · Oxford University Press, 2019Russell's recent study examines how 'Palamism' was constructed in the twentieth century by Western and Eastern theologians for polemical and apologetic purposes, then returns to Palamas himself to read his tradition, philosophy, and theology on their own terms.Buy on Amazon
Essence and Energies: Being and Naming God in St. Gregory PalamasAbout Tikhon Alexander Pino · Routledge, 2023Pino's comprehensive account of the essence-energies distinction across Palamas's twenty-five treatises and letters, written over twenty years, the standard scholarly treatment for the modal grammar of the distinction. The book to read alongside the florilegium on this profile.Buy on Amazon