Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age

Abstract ‘Palamism’ is not a neutral term. It was devised in the early twentieth century by a Roman Catholic scholar, Martin Jugie, to indicate a system of thought developed in the fourteenth century by Gregory Palamas and validated by several Orthodox Church councils that Jugie considered erroneous and therefore indicative of the fallibility of Orthodox teaching. In opposition to Jugie, Orthodox scholars, principally John Meyendorff, proposed a different interpretation of Palamism that in many ways was just as ideologically motivated. The first part of this book examines the debates generated by Meyendorff’s classic Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire Palamas and the new directions that have been taken since then by both Western and Orthodox scholars. The second part, in response to a call by Robert Sinkewicz to raise ‘the larger questions’, explores the issues raised by the controversy initiated by Barlaam of Calabria in 1340 with his denunciation of Palamas as a ‘Messalian’ heretic. These issues concern the nature of doctrinal development, the sense in which a human being can participate in God, the meaning of grace, the character of symbols, and the context of divine–human communion. Palamas developed his distinction between the divine essence and the energies precisely in order to defend the reality of such communion as deification. It is argued that he did not reify the distinction but at the same time held that it was more than merely notional. Finally, it is suggested that Palamas has a valuable contribution to make to current debates on the relationship between divine transcendence and divine immanence.