Program / Course 20: Spiritual Theology / Lesson 4.3
What you will learn
- Describe the controversy between Barlaam of Calabria and Gregory Palamas and its setting.
- Explain the Orthodox distinction between God’s essence and energies and its link to the Transfiguration.
- State the objections raised by Western and some Eastern critics, including concern about divine simplicity.
- Compare how Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant writers have evaluated Palamas.
The big idea
In the fourteenth century, a debate arose in the Byzantine world over whether the monks of Mount Athos could truly experience the uncreated light of God that the disciples saw at the Transfiguration. Barlaam of Calabria said that God is utterly unknowable and that such claims were mistaken. Gregory Palamas replied that God, in his essence, cannot be known by any creature, but that he gives himself in his energies, and that this is real communion with God. Church councils in Constantinople endorsed Palamas. The Orthodox regard this as an official teaching. Many Catholics and Protestants have questioned it or interpreted it differently, and the debate continues.
Key terms
- Essence (ousia)
- What God is in himself, his inner being, which Orthodox teaching holds is unknowable and incommunicable to creatures.
- Energies (energeiai)
- The uncreated activities or operations of God by which he is present and active in creation and gives himself to those who are united to him.
- Uncreated light
- The light of God’s glory, seen by the disciples at the Transfiguration, which Orthodox teaching holds is not a created effect but God’s own energy.
- Transfiguration
- The event in which Jesus’ appearance changed before Peter, James and John on a mountain (Matthew 17:1-8). Tradition places it on Mount Tabor.
- Apophatic theology
- Speaking of God by saying what he is not, in recognition that God exceeds all human concepts. Also called the negative way.
- Divine simplicity
- The doctrine, strong in Western theology, that God is not made up of parts and that his attributes are identical with his being.
- Tome
- In Byzantine usage, a formal written decree issued by a council or church authority.
Background
The controversy took place in the Byzantine Empire, in the 1330s to 1350s, a period of political weakness and civil war. Its principal figures were Barlaam of Calabria, a Greek-speaking scholar from southern Italy who had studied the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, and Gregory Palamas, a monk of Athos who became archbishop of Thessalonica. Palamas lived from about 1296 to 1359 and was canonized by the Orthodox Church in 1368. Dates and details of his life are mostly agreed, though some are uncertain.
Barlaam visited Athos, heard accounts of hesychast practice and was disturbed by claims of seeing divine light through prayer and by descriptions of bodily methods. He is reported to have mocked them as people who looked at their navels. He argued, as a student of the negative theology of Dionysius, that God is beyond all knowing and that any claimed vision must be created or imaginary. Palamas, at the request of the monks, answered him in writings called the Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts.
Several councils in Constantinople between 1341 and 1351 addressed the matter. The Orthodox Church regards the council of 1351 as confirming Palamas’s teaching. The Catholic Church has not accepted it as an ecumenical decision. Politics also played a role, as rival claimants for the imperial throne took different sides. This lesson summarizes the arguments and positions and does not decide them.
Step-by-step explanation
Step 1: Barlaam’s concern
Barlaam held that God is wholly unknowable and that no creature can have direct experience of him. Whatever the mystics saw must therefore be a created thing. He was concerned about the risk that ordinary Christians would take visions as the real presence of God, and about practices that seemed to confuse the body and the mind.
His concern was not frivolous. Every tradition has met people who confuse imagination with divine encounter, a matter the next lesson returns to.
Step 2: Palamas’s answer
Palamas agreed that God’s essence is beyond all knowing. No creature, not even an angel, can know or share it. But he said that if God were wholly unreachable, the Christian claim that believers are united with God (2 Peter 1:4, partakers of the divine nature) would be empty. He therefore distinguished between God’s essence and his energies. The energies are God himself acting and giving himself. They are uncreated. Through them believers participate in God without becoming God by nature.
He drew on earlier writers such as Basil the Great, who wrote that God’s energies come down to believers while his essence remains beyond approach, and Maximus the Confessor.
Step 3: The light of Tabor
The Gospels say that at the Transfiguration Jesus’ face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light (Matthew 17:2). Palamas taught that this was not a created sign but the uncreated light of his divinity, shining through his humanity, and that the saints can be granted to see it. He held that this vision comes as a gift of grace and not by a technique, and that it belongs to the church’s life of repentance, worship and sacrament.
He also defended the value of the body in prayer, because the incarnation shows that the body is not an enemy. He did not say that bodily methods compel God.
Step 4: Objections
Critics, both among the Byzantines and later in the West, raised several objections. The first concerns divine simplicity. If God has an essence and distinct energies, they ask, does this introduce a real division in God? Palamas and later defenders said the distinction is real but does not divide God, since the whole God is present in each energy. Critics replied that Western theology, following Augustine and Aquinas, holds that God’s attributes are one with his being.
A second objection is that it implies two kinds of God, one knowable and one not. Defenders respond that the God known in the energies is the same God. A third is that it appears to make it unclear how grace is related to God. Western teaching speaks of created grace, which Orthodox thinkers see as problematic. Another point of difference is Western teaching about the beatific vision, the vision of the divine essence promised to the blessed, which Palamas’s position seems to deny.
Step 5: Later reception
In the Orthodox world, Palamas became one of the great teachers. A feast is kept in his honor on the second Sunday of Lent. In the twentieth century, Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky and John Meyendorff presented his teaching as the center of Eastern theology. Some Orthodox scholars, in turn, have asked whether their predecessors made the distinction too sharp.
Catholic scholars have varied. Some, especially earlier ones, saw the teaching as incompatible with Western doctrine. Others, including some recent scholars, argue that the difference lies in language and approach and can be reconciled. Protestant scholars have often been less engaged, and views range from interest to concern. The question remains open in ecumenical dialogue.
- What is at stake in saying that God can or cannot be directly experienced?
- Why might a person fear that visions of light are only imagination?
- How do I think God can be both beyond all knowing and truly present?
- What does it mean to share in the divine nature, in light of 2 Peter 1:4?
- How should a Christian from another tradition judge a doctrine they find unfamiliar?
- Is the disagreement here about words, about doctrine or both?
Examples
The sun and its rays
Orthodox writers often use an image: the sun in itself cannot be approached, but its light and warmth reach the earth. The image has limits, since the energies are God himself, not an effect of God, but it shows the idea that God can be present without being grasped.
A western reply
A Catholic theologian says that when Aquinas speaks of grace as a created gift, he means that grace changes the creature, and that the blessed see God’s essence in glory because God lifts them. He asks whether the Orthodox and Catholic accounts describe the same thing in different terms. (A constructed example of a common kind of discussion.)
The monk’s question
Imagine a monk who says he met God in prayer and cannot describe it, only that he was changed. A skeptic asks how he can know it was God and not his own mind. The question is the center of the debate. (A constructed example.)
Different perspectives
Orthodox
The Orthodox Church affirms Palamas’s teaching as the faith of the church, confirmed by the councils of Constantinople, and treats the essence and energies distinction as a safeguard of both God’s transcendence and his nearness. Palamas is commemorated as a saint, and his teaching is regarded as faithful to the Fathers.
Catholic
The Catholic Church has not condemned Palamas and does not treat the councils of Constantinople as ecumenical. Many Catholic theologians have worried that the distinction compromises divine simplicity and the vision of the divine essence. Others, including some who participate in dialogue with the Orthodox, hold that the difference is one of language and that the two traditions can be reconciled.
Protestant
Protestant views vary widely. Reformed and other scholastic traditions hold to divine simplicity and may find the distinction hard to accept. Some Protestant and Anglican writers have been interested in the participation language. Many Protestants have not studied the matter closely, and few official statements exist.
Scholarly view
Historians stress the political and personal conflicts around the debate, and the fact that Barlaam and Palamas drew on a common inheritance from Dionysius and the Cappadocians. Philosophers and theologians disagree about whether the essence and energies distinction is coherent, with some defending it as a version of the Western distinction between God’s being and his acts.
Why it matters
The Palamite controversy lies at the center of a difference between Eastern and Western accounts of what it means to know God. A student who understands it can read Orthodox spirituality accurately, avoid caricatures in either direction and see why the Transfiguration, the Incarnation and grace belong together in Eastern thought.
Common misunderstandings
Misunderstanding: Orthodox Christians believe humans become God in essence.
Correction: Palamas and the tradition teach the opposite. The creature never shares the divine essence. Participation is in God’s uncreated energies, by grace.
Misunderstanding: Barlaam was a heretic who denied that God can be known at all.
Correction: He held that God is utterly beyond knowing, drawing on Dionysian negative theology, and he doubted claims of visions. Many scholars view his concerns as understandable, though the Orthodox councils rejected his position.
Misunderstanding: Western Christians have no doctrine of participation in God.
Correction: Catholic and some Protestant writers have their own teaching on union with God, grace and the beatific vision. The difference lies in how these are described.
Misunderstanding: The controversy was only about methods of breathing.
Correction: Bodily practice was a trigger, but the issues were the knowledge of God, grace and the Transfiguration.
Knowledge check
What was Barlaam’s objection to the hesychasts?
He held that God is wholly unknowable and that no creature can directly experience him, so any claimed vision of divine light must be created or imagined. He was also uneasy about bodily methods of prayer. He drew on the negative theology of Dionysius.
What is the distinction between God’s essence and energies?
Palamas taught that God’s essence is unknowable and cannot be shared by creatures, but that God gives himself in uncreated energies, by which believers participate in him. The energies are God himself acting, not created effects. The distinction is meant to preserve both transcendence and nearness.
Why do some Western theologians object?
They worry that a real distinction between essence and energies threatens divine simplicity, the teaching that God has no parts and that his attributes are one with his being. They also question whether it fits the Western teaching on created grace and on the vision of God’s essence in glory.
What was the role of the Transfiguration?
Palamas read the light shining from Christ on Tabor as the uncreated light of his divinity, shining through his humanity. He argued that the saints can be granted to see this light by grace. For him the event showed that real communion with God is possible.
Think it through
- What is the difference between knowing about God and knowing God?
- How could the essence and energies distinction be both true and misleading?
- What would it take for two traditions to decide that they mean the same thing in different words?
Independent assignment
Two readings of one doctrine
In your notebook, write 400 to 550 words. Summarize Palamas’s teaching in your own words, then write two paragraphs presenting the best case for it and the best case against it, from an Orthodox and a Catholic or Protestant point of view. End with a paragraph stating what you think is at stake. Do not share this with anyone.
Further study
- Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church Read the chapters on the divine darkness and on the divine light.
- Timothy (Kallistos) Ware, The Orthodox Church Read the section on Palamas and the hesychast controversy.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Divine Simplicity Read for the Western doctrine that the debate touches.
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Read the questions on whether God is simple and on the vision of God’s essence.
- John of Damascus, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith Read for the Eastern background on God’s nature and the Incarnation.
- Matthew 17:2 Jesus is transfigured.
- 2 Peter 1:4 Partakers of the divine nature.
- Exodus 33:20 No man can see God and live.