Gregory Palamas

Gregory Palamas was born in Constantinople in 1296 into a noble family and educated at the imperial court. Around 1316 he became a monk on Mount Athos, where he practised the hesychast prayer of stillness for many years, as well as living for a time as a hermit and in a monastery near Thessalonica.

In the 1330s the Calabrian monk and philosopher Barlaam attacked the hesychasts, ridiculing their method of prayer and denying that the light they claimed to see could be divine. Palamas answered in his Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts, developing the distinction between God’s unknowable essence and God’s uncreated energies. Councils in Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 upheld his teaching, though not without years of conflict in which he was for a time imprisoned.

In 1347 he was made archbishop of Thessalonica. Captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1354, he spent a year in captivity, where he held discussions with Muslims. He died in 1359 and was canonized in 1368; the Orthodox Church commemorates him on the second Sunday of Lent.

His teaching became part of the received doctrine of the Orthodox Church, and some of his writings were included in the Philokalia, through which they reached a wide readership. In the twentieth century theologians such as Vladimir Lossky and John Meyendorff made him central to the modern understanding of Orthodox theology, and his distinction between essence and energies remains a point of discussion between East and West.