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Balkans and Anatolia (14th – mid-15th c.)Religion

Hesychast controversy

A theological dispute that divided Byzantium from the late 1330s to 1351. The Calabrian monk Barlaam mocked the hesychast monks, whose tradition was centred on Mount Athos and who practised silent prayer and claimed to behold the uncreated light seen by the apostles at the Transfiguration; their defender Gregory Palamas answered that they beheld not God’s unknowable essence but his uncreated energies. After a series of synods in Constantinople, most of them held during the civil war, the sixth and last, in 1351, under John VI Kantakouzenos, made Palamas’ teaching the doctrine of the Orthodox Church.

Date
c. 1337 – 1351start: year known, approximate; end: year known · duration: ≈ 14 years
Place
Constantinopletoday: Istanbul, Turkey · Balkans and Anatolia
Participants
Gregory Palamas, John VI Kantakouzenos, Byzantine Empire
Threads
Balkans and Anatolia (14th – mid-15th c.)
Also known as
Palamite controversy; Hesychast disputes; Паламитские споры; Исихастская полемика

Hesychasm — from the Greek for “stillness” — was a tradition of inner, unceasing prayer which by the early 14th century combined the Jesus Prayer with a psychosomatic technique; on Mount Athos, where Gregory of Sinai had spread it, monks said that at its highest stage they beheld the light of Mount Tabor. About 1337 Barlaam of Calabria, a learned monk trained in Western scholastic theology who had come to Constantinople some seven years earlier, met hesychasts in Thessalonica, ridiculed them as “navel-gazers” and accused them of the Messalian heresy. Gregory Palamas, an Athonite monk, answered him in his Triads in defence of the hesychasts, and in 1340–1341 the superiors of Athos endorsed his teaching in the Hagioritic Tome.

A synod in Constantinople in June 1341, presided over by Emperor Andronikos III, condemned Barlaam, who soon left for Italy and joined the Latin Church. The emperor died a few days later, and the dispute became entangled with the civil war of 1341–1347 between the regency of Anna of Savoy and John Kantakouzenos. Supporters of Palamas and of Kantakouzenos are often equated, although, as Steven Runciman noted, the religious and political parties did not coincide. Palamas was arrested in 1342 and excommunicated by the synod of 1344, when his former disciple Gregory Akindynos prevailed; only Kantakouzenos’ entry into Constantinople in February 1347 brought the Palamites a lasting victory, and Palamas was made archbishop of Thessalonica.

At the council of May 1351, opened by Kantakouzenos, the historian Nikephoros Gregoras spoke for the anti-Palamites, but the council condemned them and proclaimed the distinction between God’s essence and his energies as Orthodox doctrine. Opponents were punished, and some, like Demetrios Kydones, eventually turned to the Latin Church. Palamas died in 1359 (some sources say 1357) and was canonised in 1368. Opposition to Palamas came to be identified with “Latinism” — as Martin Jugie noted, the two became equivalent in the minds of many Orthodox — and the controversy is often seen as having deepened the estrangement between the Orthodox and Latin churches.

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14th century

Sources

  1. Wikipedia (English): Hesychast controversy
  2. Wikipedia (English): Gregory Palamas
  3. Wikipedia (Russian): Исихастские споры
  4. Wikipedia (Russian): Григорий Палама
  5. Meyendorff J. A Study of Gregory Palamas. — London: Faith Press, 1964.
  6. Runciman S. The Great Church in Captivity. — Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
  7. Wikidata: Q5746591