The Late Medieval Era · c. 1300-1400 · Athos, Thessalonica
Hesychasm & the Palamite Synthesis
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About This Movement
On Mount Athos monks had long practised hesychia, stillness. Sitting alone, controlling the breath, and repeating the Jesus Prayer until it continued of itself — and some of them reported seeing an uncreated light. When the Calabrian scholar Barlaam ridiculed the practice, Gregory Palamas, an Athonite monk who later became archbishop of Thessalonica, answered him in the Triads. God is unknowable in his essence and yet genuinely given in his energies, so what the praying monk meets is God himself and not some created substitute. The argument ran for two decades and was settled by councils at Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351, which vindicated Palamas and made the hesychast position the standard of Orthodox theology. Beside it stands a very different voice. Nicholas Cabasilas, a layman of Thessalonica, who wrote The Life in Christ to show that the same life in God was given through the sacraments to people who would never enter a monastery.
Sources
- Gregory Palamas, The Triads (ed. Meyendorff, trans. Gendle, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1983) (primary) — In Defense of the Holy Hesychasts (1338-41) - the synthesis's cornerstone in the movement's leading voice.
- The synodal tomoi of 1341, 1347, 1351 (and 1368), in Norman Russell, Gregory Palamas: The Hesychast Controversy and the Debate with Islam (Translated Texts for Byzantinists, Liverpool, 2020) (primary) — The conciliar documents that made hesychasm the Orthodox norm, most translated into English for the first time here. These are the winning side's records - the anti-Palamite side (Barlaam, Akindynos, Gregoras) is largely untranslated and reaches us mainly through its condemnations.
- The hesychast method texts: Nikephoros the Monk On Watchfulness, ps.-Symeon's method, Gregory of Sinai - as carried in the Philokalia (vol. 4, trans. Palmer, Sherrard & Ware) (primary) — The Philokalia is a 1782 compilation - a later, retrospective anthology of these 14th-century texts, not a contemporary one.
- Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ (trans. deCatanzaro, SVS Press, 1974) (primary) — Sacramental life for people outside the monastery, by a lay theologian of hesychast Thessalonica. His Commentary on the Divine Liturgy is a companion work.
- John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas (1959; Eng. 1964), with Norman Russell, Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age (OUP, 2019) (secondary) — Classic frame plus current corrective on how 'Palamism' was retrospectively systematized.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 5, ch. 4 'The rise of hesychasm' (Krausmuller) (reference) — This era is the chapter's home ground - a direct fit.