Palamas, Saint Gregory

born Nov. 11/14, 1296, Constantinople

died 1359, Thessalonica, Byzantine Empire

Eastern Orthodox priest.

From 1332 he was the chief defender of the school of mysticism known as Hesychasm, which integrated repetitive prayer with bodily postures and controlled breathing. His Apology for the Holy Hesychasts (1338) is a justification for mystical experience that involves both soul and body; his Book of Holiness (1344) is the fundamental textbook of Byzantine mysticism. He was made bishop of Thessalonica in 1347, and in 1368 he was acclaimed a saint and named Father and Doctor of the Orthodox church.

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▪ Greek theologian

born Nov. 11/14, 1296, Constantinople [now Istanbul, Tur.]

died 1359, Thessalonica, Byzantine Empire [now in Greece]; canonized 1368

      Orthodox monk, theologian, and intellectual leader of Hesychasm, an ascetical method of mystical prayer that integrates repetitive prayer formulas with bodily postures and controlled breathing. He was appointed bishop of Thessalonica in 1347. In 1368 he was acclaimed a saint and was named “Father and Doctor of the Orthodox Church (Eastern Orthodoxy).”

      Born at Constantinople of a distinguished family with ties to the imperial court, Palamas mastered the classical philosophies of antiquity at the imperial university. In 1316, however, he renounced a political career in order to become a monk at Mount Athos in northeastern Greece, the spiritual centre of Greek Orthodoxy. For 25 years he immersed himself in study and reflection on the sacred Scriptures and the writings of the Church Fathers; he was introduced to contemplative prayer by a spiritual master and in turn became a master for other initiates. Raids by the Turks about 1325 forced him to interrupt his monastic life on Mount Athos and to flee to Thessalonica and Macedonia. He was ordained a priest in 1326 and later, with 10 companions, retired to a hermitage in Macedonia.

      He returned to Mount Athos in 1331 to the community of St. Sabas and about 1335 was chosen a religious superior (hēgoumenos) of a neighbouring convent. Because of differences with the monks who considered his spiritual regimen too strict, he resigned after a short term and returned to St. Sabas.

      In 1332 Palamas entered into a theological dispute that lasted for a quarter of a century and involved polemics with a series of Greek and Latin scholastic theologians and certain rationalistic humanists. His first adversary was Barlaam the Calabrian, a Greek monk residing in Italy who visited Constantinople and other Orthodox monastic centres to engage in philosophical disputation for intellectual prestige. Expounding a mode of theological agnosticism, Barlaam denied that any rational concepts could express mystical prayer and its divine-human communication even metaphorically. Subsequently, he composed a satirical work defaming Hesychasm by referring to its adherents as “men with their souls in their navel” (Greek: omphalopsychoi). The image derived from the Hesychast meditative posture of focusing the eyes on a spot below the chest in order to heighten the mystical experience. Palamas responded to this attack by composing his “Apology for the Holy Hesychasts” (1338), also called the “Triad” because of its division into three parts.

      The “Apology” established the theological basis for mystical experience that involves not only the human spirit but the entire human person, body and soul. This doctrine attempts to articulate a prayer experience that devotees call “the deification of the entire man,” a reference to the Hesychasts' claim of an inner transformation effected by a mystical illumination uniting man with God in the depths of his spirit. Hesychast spirituality strove to bridge the gulf between human and divine existence. It held the necessity of an intermediary relationship between man's world (immanence) and God's eternity (transcendence). Hesychast prayer aspires to attain the most intense form of God-man communion in the form of a vision of the “divine light,” or “uncreated energy,” based on the model of the Synoptic accounts of Christ's Transfiguration on Mount Tabor (Mark 9:1-7). The corporeal disposition for this contemplative state involves intense concentration and a methodical invocation of the name of Jesus (the Hesychastic “Jesus prayer”). Palamas emphasized the nonmaterialistic nature of Hesychast spirituality by explaining that the experience of inner light was not available to all but only to the “pure of heart” empowered by grace to perceive it.

      After a succession of public confrontations with critical theologians and humanists, and a politically motivated excommunication in 1344, Palamas had his teaching systematized in the Hagioritic Tome (“The Book of Holiness”), which became the fundamental manifesto for Byzantine mysticism. The Hesychast controversy became part of a larger Byzantine political struggle that erupted in civil war. At its conclusion in 1347, Palamas, with support from the conservative, anti-Zealot party, was appointed bishop of Thessalonica. His administrative duties, together with continued writings against his humanist critics, occupied him for the rest of his life.

      Gregory Palamas became the acknowledged intellectual leader and apologist for the monastic school of mysticism known as Hesychasm (from the Greek work hēsychia, or “state of quiet”). This Byzantine contemplative movement's form of prayer integrated repetitive formulas with bodily postures for the purpose of experiencing a state of inner peace and mystical union. Though controversial in Palamas' time, Hesychast spirituality is now sanctioned by the Orthodox church as a legitimate form of prayer.

      In his fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, used as a vehicle to express his own spiritual experience, Palamas set a definitive standard for Orthodox theological acumen. At the provincial Council of Constantinople in 1368, nine years after his death, he was acclaimed a saint and titled “Father and Doctor of the Orthodox Church,” thus placing him among the ranks of those who determined the ideological shape of the Eastern church.

      An English translation of selected Hesychast texts is in Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart (1951), translated from Russian by E. Kadloubovsky (Eugenie Kadleigh) and G.E.H. Palmer.

The Rev. Anselm H. Amadio

Additional Reading

John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 2nd ed. (1974), is the principal biographical study in a Western language. Basil Krivoshein, The Ascetic and Theological Teaching of Gregory Palamas (1954), is the fullest exposition of Palamas' thought. Broader treatments are M.J. Le Guillou, The Spirit of Eastern Orthodoxy (1962); and A.J. Philippou (ed.), The Orthodox Ethos: Essays in Honor of the Centenary of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America (1964).

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