On the second Sunday in Lent, the Orthodox Church honors St. Gregory Palamas (c. 1296-1359). To Orthodox theologians St. Gregory is a tremendously exciting and seminal thinker, whose ideas swept through the 14th Century Church like a divine fire. Before Gregory, it is not unfair to say, Orthodox thought, as exemplified by such figures as Barlaam of Calabria, was drifting toward Renaissance Roman Catholicism, just as the Byzantine Empire was drifting toward political subordination to the Western powers. Gregory decisively rejected the intrusion of humanism and rationalism into theology. His great contribution was to arrest the tendency to push the implications of God’s transcendence to their logical end point. His great opponents Barlaam, Gregory Akindynos and Demetrios Kydones, placed God so far beyond human comprehension that He became an impersonal, unknowable, Neoplatonic deity, almost the sort of God that Antony Flew, the recent defector from atheism, hypothesizes.
St. Gregory’s God, by contrast, is personal and knowable, not in His divine essence but in the “energies” with which He touches the world. To a non-specialist like me, the details of the reasoning of Gregory and his later interpreters are obscure, but the conclusion, vindicating the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Who became incarnate in Jesus Christ, against the God of the philosophers, is clear.
To the saint’s contemporaries, God’s accessibility was not a matter of abstract speculation but immediate practical import. Palamatism became a key issue in secular politics, in which Gregory himself strove to play the role of peacemaker. Contrary to what one might cynically suspect, the Palamite cause did not triumph through being on the winning political side. While it was certainly helpful that the emperor who presided over the first council to consider the controversy (the Council of St. Sophia, June 10, 1341) was Gregory’s boyhood friend Andronicus III, that prop vanished when Andronicus died less than a week later. Within a few years, the Emperor John V Palaeologos had accepted union with Rome in return for promises (never fulfilled) of a great anti-Turkish crusade. Had Palamatism not already been decisively established within the Church, it is likely that this political development would have led to its condemnation. Instead, Gregory was canonized in 1368, only nine years after his death. His role as a Father of the Church was further emphasized when he began to be commemorated during Lent, on the Sunday formerly reserved for the highly esteemed St. Polycarp of Smyrna (d. 166).
Further reading: Monachos, “Gregory Palamas – An Historical Study”, “St. Gregory Palamas – Knowledge, Prayer and Vision”, “Gregory Palamas – Historical Appendices”
Fr. George Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers”
Panayiotis Christou, “The Teaching of Gregory Palamas on Man”
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