Gregory Palamas

Gregory was born in 1296 at Constantinople, into a family close to the imperial court; his father was a senator and a tutor to the young emperor. Gregory was educated for the same world and was expected to enter it. At about twenty he left instead, and took his mother, two brothers, and two sisters with him into the monastic life. He went to Mount Athos, the monastic peninsula in northern Greece, and lived there for roughly twenty years, mostly in a hermitage, praying.

What the Athonite monks practised was hesychasm, stillness. They sat, controlled the breath, and repeated the Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Some of them reported that in prayer they saw light, the same uncreated light, they said, that the disciples saw on the mountain of the transfiguration.

Around 1330 a learned Greek from Calabria named Barlaam heard about this and attacked it. He mocked the method, called the monks navel-gazers, and made the theological objection: God's essence is utterly beyond creatures; no created eye can see it; whatever these men are seeing must be either a physical phenomenon or their own imagination.

Gregory came down from the mountain to answer him, and the answer is the Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts.

His distinction is the one his name is attached to. God's essence is indeed unknowable and unshareable, Barlaam was right about that. But God's energies, his activities, his going-forth toward creation, are God himself, not a created substitute, and those can be truly known and truly participated in. The light on Tabor was not a symbol and not a created glow; it was God's own uncreated glory, and the disciples' eyes were changed to see it. Deification is real. A human being can genuinely share the life of God without becoming God's essence.

He also insisted that the body belongs in prayer, that a human being is not a soul trapped in flesh but a unity, and grace reaches the whole of him.

The fight ran for two decades and was tangled up with a Byzantine civil war. Gregory was condemned and excommunicated in 1344 and spent four years imprisoned. Councils at Constantinople in 1341, 1347, and 1351 finally ruled in his favour. He was made archbishop of Thessalonica.

He was captured by Turkish pirates on a voyage in 1354 and held for about a year; the letters he wrote during that captivity, describing his debates with his Muslim captors, are unusually calm. He died on 14 November 1359. The Orthodox church keeps the second Sunday of Lent as his feast.

Sources: Gregory Palamas, The Triads (Classics of Western Spirituality); The Philokalia, vol. IV; John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas; Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware, eds., The Philokalia.