ST Gregory Palamas Patriarch of Constantinople

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Translated Texts for Byzantinists
Volume 8
Gregory Palamas
The Hesychast Controversy
and the Debate with Islam
Documents relating to Gregory Palamas
Translated with an introduction and notes by

NORMAN RUSSELL
Gregory Palamas
Liverpool
University
Press
First published 2020
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool, L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2020 Norman Russell
The right of Norman Russell to be identified as the author of this book

has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced stored in a retrieval
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the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A British Library CIP Record is available.
ISBN 978-1-78962-153-2 cased
Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
To Richard Price
CONTENTS
Contents
Preface ix
Abbreviations xi
General Introduction 1
1 Byzantium in the Mid-Fourteenth Century 2
2 The Hesychast Controversy 10
3 The Main Characteristics of Palamite Theology 22
4 Palamas in Captivity among the Turks 24
5 A Contested Saint 29
6 The Reception of Palamas 33
7 Texts and Editions 35
I. The Life of Gregory Palamas by Philotheos Kokkinos 37
II. The Synodal Tomos of 1341 211
III. Letters from Prison in Constantinople 231
1 To John Gabras 234
2 To Philotheos 266
3 To Bessarion 285
4 To the Empress Anna Palaiologina 288
IV. The Synodal Tomos of 1347 and Related Documents 291
1 The Synodal Tomos of 1347 294
2 The Prostagma of John VI Kantakouzenos 308
3 The Anti-Palamite Tomos of 1347 311
V. The Synodal Tomos of 1351 323
viii GREGORY PALAMAS
VI. Palamas in Captivity among the Turks 377

1 Letter to his Church 385
2 The Disputation with the Chionai 401
3 Letter to an Unknown Recipient 408
VII. The Synodal Tomos of 1368 413
Glossary 449
Bibliography 453
Index of Citations from the Fathers and Other Ancient Texts 471
General Index 475
PREFACE
Preface
The richly documented Byzantine fourteenth century is of great interest to

students of intellectual and cultural history. The late Palaiologan age was a
period of intense philosophical study, searching theological debate and deep
concern to ensure the transmission of Hellenic culture. It was also a period
of far-reaching cultural and political change as large Christian populations
in north-west Anatolia and south-east Europe came under Muslim rule as
a result of the rapid expansion of the Ottoman emirate first in Bithynia
and then in Thrace and Macedonia. Yet, considering the increasing availa-
bility of critical texts, let alone the vast number of manuscripts still lying
unpublished in the great libraries of Rome, Paris, Oxford, Mount Athos and
elsewhere, comparatively few works from this period have been translated
into a modern language.
The present selection of texts, most of which have not previously been
translated into English, focuses on the life and career of Gregory Palamas,
who was born in Constantinople in 1295/6, embraced the monastic life on
Mount Athos in 1320, and was metropolitan of Thessalonike from 1347
until his death in 1357. My emphasis is less on what Palamas himself wrote,
although I have included some representative material from his letters, as
on how he was viewed by his contemporaries. Consequently, I begin with
the Life or Encomium, rich in circumstantial detail, which was written by
the patriarch Philotheos in the mid-1360s in preparation for the canoni-
zation of Palamas. This is followed by the Synodal Tomoi of 1341, 1347, and
1351, which respond to the Hesychast Controversy initiated by Barlaam of
Calabria and vindicate Palamas’ teaching on the theological implications
of the patristic notion of deification – that is, on how human beings can
come to participate in divine glory. The Anti-Palamite Tomos of 1347 is
also included to illustrate the objections put forward by Palamas’ episcopal
opponents. Palamas, however, engaged in debate not only with his fellow
Christians. During his year of captivity in Bithynia he had discussions
with Muslims on the relative merits of Christianity and Islam. These are of
great interest to us (as they were to Philotheos, who quotes them at length
x GREGORY PALAMAS
in his Life of Palamas) and are translated in full for the first time. The
final text in my selection, the Synodal Tomos of 1368, brings the Hesychast
Controversy to a close with the condemnation of Prochoros Kydones’
account of the transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor and the insertion
of Gregory Palamas into the festal calendar of the Great Church.
In the course of the work, which has occupied me for several years, I
have incurred a number of debts. The series editor, Judith Ryder, has been
especially patient and encouraging, gently prodding me when I have been
distracted by other projects and keeping my mind focused on the telos. I
am also grateful to scholars who have supplied me with texts and copies of
their articles, particularly to Theodore Avramov, Charalambos Dendrinos,
Sergio Mainoldi, Johannes Pahlitzsch, and, most of all, Antonio Rigo,
who has made so many of his publications available to me and whose
scholarship has contributed to almost every page of this book. I owe a
special debt of gratitude to Fleur Lynas, who skilfully typed a manuscript
of more than a thousand hand-written pages and amended it many times
for me. Subsequently, Liverpool University Press’s readers, Andrew Louth
and Kirsty Stewart, worked carefully through the text and made a number
of valuable comments and suggestions. I thank them warmly. Finally, I
also thank Clare Litt and her colleagues at Liverpool University Press,
especially Sarah Warren of Carnegie Publishing, for guiding the book so
efficiently through the successive stages to publication.
The volume is dedicated to a distinguished colleague and friend who
has encouraged my work over several decades and whose own translations
of the Acts of the Ecumenical Councils for the same Press have set a
benchmark for all such enterprises.
Ozenay, 71700 France
17 January 2019
ABBREVIATIONS
Abbreviations
ACO Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, ed. E. Schwartz

BF Byzantinische Forschungen
BZ Byzantinische Zeitschrift
CCSG Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca
CFHB Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae
Christou Grēgoriou tou Palama Syngrammata I–V,
ed. P. Christou et al.
CPG Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum,
ed. E. von Leutsch and F. W. Schneidewin
CSHB Corpus scriptorum historiae byzantinae (Bonn
corpus)
DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers
DTC Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, ed. A. Vacant,
E. Mangenot, and É. Amann
ECR Eastern Churches Review
EPE Ellēnes Pateres tēs Ekklēsias, ed. and trans.
P. Christou and Th. Zissis
GCS Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller
GNO Gregorii Nysseni Opera, ed. W. Jaeger et al.
GOTR Greek Orthodox Theological Review
GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
IJSCC International Journal for the Study of the
Christian Church
JÖB Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik
JTS n.s. Journal of Theological Studies, new series
Lampe A Patristic Greek Lexicon, ed. G. W. H. Lampe
LCL Loeb Classical Library
Liddell and Scott A Greek-English Lexicon, compiled by H. G. Liddell
and R. Scott and revised by H. S. Jones
NPNF Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series
OCP Orientalia Christiana Periodica
xii GREGORY PALAMAS
ODB The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium,

ed. A. Kazhdan et al.
Perrella Gregorio Palamas I–III, ed. and trans. E. Perrella
PG Patrologiae cursus completus, series graeca,
ed. J.-P. Migne
PL Patrologia cursus completus, series Latina,
ed. J.-P. Migne
PLP Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit,
ed. E. Trapp et al.
REB Revue des Études Byzantines
RSBN Rivista di studi bizantini e neoellenici
RSLR Rivista di Storia e Letteratura religiosa
SC Sources chrétiennes
SVTQ St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly
TM Travaux et Mémoires
ZRVI Zbornik radova Vizantološkog Instituta
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
General Introduction
It might seem astonishing that among the many serious problems facing
the Christian Roman Empire in the mid-fourteenth century so much time
was given to the Hesychast Controversy, a dispute which began in 1340,
when Barlaam of Calabria formally charged Gregory Palamas and the
hesychasts of Mount Athos with the heresy of Messalianism, and ended
shortly after 1351 – following four Constantinopolitan councils – when
the anathematization of the opinions of Palamas’ opponents was added
to the Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Even after the council of 1351 and the
canonization of Palamas in 1368, a strong rearguard action was sustained
by anti-Palamites until the end of the century. Yet, given the historical
context and the political interdependence of Church and imperium, the
time dedicated to settling the Hesychast Controversy is not so surprising.
For the imperium to function properly it needed a Church that was
united. Conversely, given the emperor’s role as epistemonarches, the
Church needed strong imperial leadership for the resolution of theological
disputes. The divisions on the ecclesiastical level could not be resolved
so long as the political leadership was dysfunctional. Moreover, the
threatened collapse of the Roman polity, even if it was widely believed that
the catastrophe would be averted by divine intervention, focused the mind
powerfully on eternity. Against the backdrop of the successive political
crises that afflicted the empire in the middle of the fourteenth century –
not to mention the Black Death of 1346–48 – the more important drama
for many concerned the correct interpretation of the Orthodox faith and
the salvation of their souls.
2 GREGORY PALAMAS
1. Byzantium in the Mid-Fourteenth Century
For the Christian Roman Empire, the 1340s and 1350s were decades of
intense external pressure compounded by bitter internal conflict.1 The
first of the crises that faced the imperial government in the 1340s was the
threat of an overwhelming attack on Constantinople by the Mongols. At the
end of the winter of 1340–41 the emperor Andronikos III received a letter
from his daughter, who was married to Özbeg, the khan of the Golden
Horde, warning him that an attack was planned. An embassy under Manuel
Kydones (the father of Demetrios, who was to be chief minister under John
VI Kantakouzenos and John V Palaiologos) was swiftly despatched to
Saray, Özbeg’s capital on the Volga, and was able to avert the threat through
the exercise of diplomacy.2 This was to be Andronikos’ last diplomatic
initiative. By the time Manuel Kydones arrived back in Constantinople in
the summer of 1341, the emperor was dead.
The Mongol threat was dealt with relatively easily. The threats posed
by the expansion of the Ottoman emirate in Bithynia and of the Serbian
kingdom in Macedonia and Thessaly were more intractable. In 1331 the
emir Orhan captured Nicaea, in 1337 Nikomedeia, and in 1350 Chalcedon,
the last imperial possession in Bithynia. In the same year as Orhan’s
entry into Nicaea, Stefan Dušan became king of Serbia and began his
own programme of territorial expansion at the expense of Byzantium,
proclaiming himself ‘emperor of the Serbs and Romans’ in 1345. The Turks
at the time, despite their arrival on the opposite shore of the Bosphorus and
their raids into Thrace, seemed to the Greeks the lesser enemy. That was
to change after 1354, when Orhan’s forces were able to seize Kallipolis
(Gallipoli), as a result of the damage caused to the walls by an earthquake,
and establish a permanent base of operations there.
The Ottoman and Serbian threats would have been confronted more
vigorously if the Greeks had not embarked on a ruinous civil war.3 When
Andronikos III died suddenly on 15 June 1341, five days after presiding
1 We are fortunate in possessing very full sources for the history of these decades. These
are principally the historical memoirs of John Kantakouzenos (Ioannis Cantacuzeni eximper-
atoris Historiarum Libri IV) and Nikephoros Gregoras (Nicephori Gregorae Byzantina
Historia), both published in the Bonn Corpus in 1828–32 and 1829–55, respectively, besides
a large number of patriarchal documents, monastic typika, orations, and private letters.
2 Saint-Guillain 2006/7.
3 For a narrative history of the civil war, based on the accounts of Kantakouzenos and
Gregoras, see Nicol 1972, 191–216, and in more detail, Nicol 1996, 45–83.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 3
over the first Constantinopolitan council of 1341,4 the heir-presumptive,

his son John V Palaiologos, was not quite ten years old. John’s mother, the
empress Anna, appointed the patriarch John XIV Kalekas to act as regent
with her until her son should come of age. The regency did not include
the megas domestikos John Kantakouzenos, Andronikos III’s military
commander and chief political adviser, who had presided, as the expected
regent, over a second Constantinopolitan council held shortly after the
first in early July 1341. Anna perhaps resented his power and influence.
Kantakouzenos’ exclusion, together with his absence from Constantinople
at the height of summer as military commander in order to deal with a
threat from Bulgaria, gave an opportunity to the ambitious commander of
the fleet, the megas doux Alexios Apokaukos, to acquire an ascendancy
over the empress. By the autumn Kantakouzenos had been thoroughly
marginalized, accused of wanting to supplant the Palaiologos dynasty
with his own, a political programme that was dubbed ‘Kantakouzenism’.
A campaign of vilification, masterminded by Apokaukos, polarized public
opinion and precipitated civil war. On 23 September Kantakouzenos
withdrew from Constantinople and joined his troops at Didymoteichon in
Thrace. In Constantinople his mother Theodora was arrested and confined
to prison, where she eventually died from ill-treatment. At Didymoteichon
on 26 October Kantakouzenos reluctantly acceded to the wishes of his
troops and crowned himself emperor, or rather, as he insisted, John V’s
co-emperor. The civil war initiated by this act was to end seven years
later with Kantakouzenos victorious but the empire ruined financially and
physically.
The social resentment unleashed by the war took the land-owning
aristocracy (the dynatoi) by surprise. The common people, who had
already experienced the suffering inflicted by the seven-year dynastic war
of the 1320s between Andronikos II and his grandson Andronikos III and
knew what was in store for them, lashed out against the rich. Rioting broke
out in many towns. In Thessalonike the Zealot movement seized control in
1342 and governed the city as a quasi-independent commune until 1350.5
What was more predictable than internal unrest was the intervention
4 On the role of emperors at church councils see the excellent discussion in Price 2009,
vol. 1, 36–41.
5 On the Zealots, see Malatras 2013, 359–73. Malatras warns against assuming that
the Zealots represented a movement from below. Their principal leader was a Palaiologos,
Andrew, who after the collapse of the movement went to live as a monk on Mount Athos.
4 GREGORY PALAMAS
of foreign forces. In the summer of 1342 Kantakouzenos made a pact

with Stefan Dušan: military help in return for a large slice of Macedonia.
Towards the end of the same year he called on the aid of Umur Beg, emir
of Aydın, with whom he had already formed a friendship, to come with a
large Turkish force to relieve Didymoteichon, which was under siege from
a Bulgarian army. In January 1346 he bound himself to Orhan, emir of
Bithynia, by giving him his daughter Theodora in marriage. The Turkish
help that Kantakouzenos received proved decisive. In Constantinople the
situation was becoming untenable. Apokaukos had been murdered in June
1345. Anna, desperate for funds, pawned the crown jewels to Venice and,
at the beginning of February 1347, in an attempt to remove the last obstacle
to negotiating a peace settlement, deposed the patriarch John Kalekas.
The war ended when Kantakouzenos entered the city the next day and on
8 February 1347 received Anna’s agreement to his terms.
Mount Athos did not remain untouched by the civil war. In March
1342 a delegation consisting of the protos Isaac and several senior
hegoumenoi, including Makarios of the Lavra and Lazaros of Philotheou,
went to Constantinople at Kantakouzenos’ request to mediate between
him and the imperial government.6 The initiative was a failure. Makarios
succumbed to blandishments and was rewarded with the metropoli-
tanate of Thessalonike. Isaac and the other hegoumenoi were confined to
monasteries in the capital. Only the minor members of the delegation were
allowed to return to Athos.
One result of the prolonged absence of the protos and the hegoumenoi
was a weakening of discipline on the Holy Mountain. In response to this,
a four-man commission, drawn from the central administration at Kareai,
was appointed at the end of 1343 to investigate the situation.7 As a result
of their findings, a group of hesychasts, whose leader was Joseph of Crete,
was found guilty of ‘Messalianism’, the dualist heresy of the Bogomils,
at a general assembly held in Kareai in the summer of 1344 and expelled
from the Holy Mountain.8 This episode proved damaging to the reputation
of Athonite hesychasm and was exploited by Palamas’ opponents, Gregory
Akindynos and Nikephoros Gregoras.
6 Rigo 2014, 259.

7 Rigo 1989, 166. Rigo identifies the members of the commission as Theodosios,
hegoumenos of Alypiou and dikaios of the protos, Kallistos, synekdemos of the protos,
Eugenios, ecclesiarch of Kareai, and Theophilos Plakas, observer.
8 Rigo 1989, 171–8.
The war also touched Athos more directly. Kantakouzenos’ Turkish

allies occupied the neighbouring peninsula of Sidonia, pillaging as they
went. Turkish privateers were also looking for pickings. Among their prizes
were the four men of the investigative commission, who were seized at sea
as they were doing the rounds of the monasteries and not released until
a ransom was paid.9 Greater stability came in 1345, when Stefan Dušan
took control of the Holy Mountain. According to a chrysobull issued by
him in November 1345, he acted at the request of the monks themselves,
who had stipulated that they should not be hindered from commemorating
the emperor of the Romans first and the king of Serbia second, and that
all the chrysobulls, typika, and customs of the Holy Mountain should be
respected.10 Stefan was generous in gifts of liturgical vessels and land to
the major monasteries, but he contrived to have a Slav (Antonios) appointed
as protos. At the end of the civil war Antonios was replaced by a Greek
(Theodosios of Alypiou) but until the settlement negotiated in 1368 by the
patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos between John V Palaiologos and Dušan’s
successor, Stefan Uroš V, which restored Athos to the empire, the protos
was usually a Slav. It was only in 1374, with the confirmation of Gerasimos
as protos by John V, that a permanent Greek succession was secured.11
Nevertheless, the Serbian protectorate ensured that Athos did not suffer
much from the civil war beyond the detention of the Athonite leadership in
Constantinople.
Palamas himself spent the civil war years in Constantinople.12 After the
councils of June and July 1341 he stayed on in the capital, dismayed at the
deteriorating political situation. He made no secret of his support for the
man who had shown himself at the councils to be a friend of the hesychasts,
remonstrating with the patriarch, privately and in the presence of others,
about the disastrous policy he was pursuing.13 On the outbreak of hostilities
he retired first to the monastery of St Michael at Anaplous (perhaps modern
Arnavutköy) just north of Constantinople on the European side of the
Bosphorus, and later to the environs of Herakleia (modern Marmaraeǧlisi)
9 Mamalakis 1971, 116. According to Mamalakis, the ransom demanded was 500
Venetian ducats.
10 Mamalakis 1971, 116–17.
11 Mamalakis 1971, 120.
12 For a detailed account of Palamas’ activities in these years see Meyendorff 1959,
96–112.
13 Philotheos, Life, §65 (Tsames, 499), translated below, pp. 121–2.
6 GREGORY PALAMAS
about a hundred kilometres from Constantinople on the north shore of

the Sea of Marmara. When he received news of the imminent arrival of
the delegation from Mount Athos in March 1342 he came back quickly
to Constantinople to greet his colleagues and spent several weeks in the
capital supporting their efforts to restore peace. On the failure of these
efforts he was arrested on the charge of being in communication with
Kantakouzenos. In the spring of 1343 he was incarcerated in the palace
prison as a political prisoner, and in November 1344 excommunicated by
the home synod on the grounds of disseminating a false interpretation of
the Tomos of 1341 and disobeying the Church. The patriarch issued an
encyclical justifying the excommunication,14 which Palamas answered at
length (as he was able to do because he was not being held for ecclesiastical
reasons), insisting that it was Kalekas who had falsified the Tomos and that
all true Christians were in communion with Athos.15 Palamas was released
in February 1347 on the deposition of John Kalekas. A few days later the
empress Anna sent him with Kantakouzenos’ father-in-law, Andronikos
Asen, to negotiate the terms of her surrender with Kantakouzenos.
One of Kantakouzenos’ first acts on becoming the undisputed senior
emperor on 8 February 1347 was to make preparations for a church council.
A number of ecclesiastical matters needed urgent attention. The deposition
of the patriarch John Kalekas had been accomplished by a synod hurriedly
convened by the empress Anna in the Blachernai palace on 2 February. The
correct canonical procedure needed to be followed before a new patriarch
could be elected, for only then could outstanding theological issues be
settled, anathemas be lifted, vacant episcopal sees be filled, and the new
emperor be crowned in the Great Church of Hagia Sophia. A synod was
convened at the earliest opportunity at the Blachernai palace. Kalekas
refused to appear before it and, after the canonical threefold summons,
was declared deposed. The theological issues debated by the synod
concerned the teaching of Gregory Palamas, who had been excommu-
nicated by Kalekas in 1344. Palamas was vindicated and the decisions of
the councils of 1341 condemning the teaching of Barlaam and Akindynos
were confirmed. Then on 17 May the bishops proceeded to elect a new
patriarch. On being allowed a free vote they chose not Palamas but Isidore
Boucheiras, a hesychast sympathetic to Palamas, who as bishop-elect of
14 Text in PG 150, 891–4.

15 Palamas, Refutation of the Patriarchal Letter (Christou II, 587–623; Perrella II,
1276–342).
Monembasia had been deposed and also excommunicated by Kalekas in

1344. Isidore promptly consecrated no fewer than thirty-two new bishops
to fill the vacant sees, beginning with Palamas himself, who became
metropolitan of Thessalonike. On 21 May Isidore officiated at the ceremony
of the coronation of Kantakouzenos, not in the Great Church, as tradition
demanded (it had become too dilapidated to use), but in the church of the
Virgin at Blachernai near the imperial palace. A week later, on 24 May, the
patriarch also officiated at the wedding of Kantakouzenos’ fourteen-year-
old daughter Helena to the fifteen-year-old John V Palaiologos, again at the
church at Blachernai, thereby sealing the reconciliation of the two houses
of Palaiologos and Kantakouzenos.16
The reconciliation, however, did not go much beyond the symbolic level.
At Didymoteichon, Kantakouzenos’ eldest son Matthew was resentful
because he had not been included in the succession as a co-emperor. In
Constantinople a group of bishops opposed to Palamite theology held a
rival synod that issued its own Synodal Tomos in July 1347, deposing both
Isidore and Palamas.17 At Thessalonike the Zealots refused to accept the
political settlement in Constantinople until Kantakouzenos finally entered
the city in the autumn of 1350 accompanied by John V Palaiologos.18 It was
only then that Palamas was able to take possession of his see.
Kantakouzenos returned to Constantinople in the early spring of 1351
to face fresh challenges, both ecclesiastical and secular. The patriarch
Isidore had died in the spring of 1350 and his successor, Kallistos I,
a former hegoumenos of Iveron who had been a disciple of Gregory of
Sinai (and wrote his biography), had encountered renewed opposition
from bishops and intellectuals who could not accept the orthodoxy of the
new metropolitan of Thessalonike. The councils of 1341 and 1347 were
perceived by these opponents as Kantakouzenist. A new council was
needed, which had to be non-partisan both theologically and politically if
it was to achieve its purpose of reconciling Palamites and anti-Palamites.
The council met for its first session on 28 May 1351 in the Triclinium of the
Blachernai palace. John Kantakouzenos, who presided, intended it to be a
forum in which the anti-Palamites could express themselves freely and, as
he hoped, be persuaded by the strength of Palamite arguments. There were
four sessions in May and June, with a fifth following in July. In the event,
16 On the children of Kantakouzenos see Nicol 1968, nos 24–7 and 29–30.
17 Meyendorff 1959, 134.
18 Nicol 1996, 107–10.
8 GREGORY PALAMAS
the anti-Palamites, led by the metropolitans of Ephesus and Ganos and the
philosopher Nikephoros Gregoras, were alienated by what they perceived
as the partisan management of the proceedings by Kantakouzenos. Despite
the solemn excommunications, the anti-Palamites did not consider the
matter resolved.
While he was attending to the theological questions debated by the
council Kantakouzenos was faced with a new threat. In the same month
as the opening of the council he had been forced to make an alliance with
Venice pledging support in their war against Genoa. The consequence
of this unwanted involvement in the rivalry between the two maritime
republics was humiliating for the empire. After a major naval engagement
in the Bosphorus on 13 February 1352 the Venetians withdrew, leaving
Kantakouzenos to make what terms he could with the Genoese.
In the meantime John Palaiologos, who had been left in Thessalonike
after the fall of the Zealot regime, was reconsidering the 1347 settlement
with his father-in-law. News reached Kantakouzenos in Constantinople
that John V was intriguing with Stefan Dušan. John’s mother, the empress
Anna, was despatched to Thessalonike to bring him to heel, which she did.
Thessalonike became her appanage, where she remained until her death
in 1365. John V himself, at his own request, was granted an appanage in
Thrace centred on Didymoteichon, which meant that Matthew had to be
moved to Adrianople. A consequence of the close proximity of the two
men was the outbreak in 1352 of another round of civil war when John
Palaiologos attacked Matthew in Adrianople. The rebellion was put down by
Kantakouzenos with the help of a large Turkish force commanded by Orhan’s
son, Suleiman, and John Palaiologos was exiled to the island of Tenedos. As
a result of the rebellion Kantakouzenos finally came to the decision that he
could not maintain his stance as the protector of the dynastic rights of the
Palaiologoi and decided in April 1353 on the coronation of his son Matthew
as co-emperor. The patriarch Kallistos, however, was a Palaiologos loyalist
and refused to perform the ceremony. He fled to Galata across the Golden
Horn and from there was able with the help of the Genoese to join John V on
Tenedos. A new patriarch had to be elected. From the three names submitted
to him, Kantakouzenos chose Philotheos, metropolitan of Herakleia and a
close friend and supporter of Gregory Palamas. Philotheos performed the
coronation in February 1354. At the end of the ceremony Matthew’s first act
as emperor was to add his signature to the Synodal Tomos of 1351.
The coronation of Matthew appeared to inaugurate a new era of
stability. This illusion was swiftly shattered by a devastating earthquake
on the night of 2 March 1354 that hit the Gallipoli area, destroying much
of the city itself and its fortifications. In the morning Turkish forces led by
Suleiman crossed the Hellespont and occupied what was left of Gallipoli,
delivered to them, as they believed, by divine providence. The disaster set
in motion the events that led to the abdication of John VI Kantakouzenos.
The emperor tried to buy back Gallipoli, travelling to Nikomedeia to
negotiate with Orhan in person, but the emir pleaded that he was too ill
to keep the rendezvous. Kantakouzenos next went to Tenedos to settle
his differences with John Palaiologos, but John refused to see him. On
29 November John Palaiologos quietly entered Constantinople by the small
Heptaskalon harbour on the south side of the city. When the people heard
he was back they began a series of violent demonstrations. On 9 December
John Kantakouzenos, rather than resort to force, abdicated and embraced
the monastic life as the monk Ioasaph. Two days later his wife Irene retired
obligingly to the convent of Kyra Martha in Constantinople. The patriarch
Philotheos sought sanctuary in Hagia Sophia. Kantakouzenism as a
political force was finished. Henceforth John V Palaiologos would reign
unchallenged (apart from a brief usurpation by his son, Andronikos IV)
until his death in 1391.
With the victory of John V the patriarch Kallistos returned to office.
Theologically he was a Palamite, so there was no change of ecclesiastical
policy with respect to the Hesychast Controversy. When Kallistos died in
August 1363 he was succeeded again by Philotheos, even though Philotheos
was as staunchly Kantakouzenist as Kallistos had been pro-Palaiologan.
John V had no wish to intervene in domestic theological matters, so
Philotheos was allowed a free hand in the ecclesiastical sphere.19 Without
imperial support, however, he was unable to stifle anti-Palamite dissent
until the opportunity arose in 1368 to glorify Palamas among the saints.
Yet the slowness of progress towards a canonical solution was ultimately
to the good. The controversy touched on such important theological issues
– affecting the very nature of salvation and divine–human communion –
that a solution imposed by imperial decree, especially in view of the deep
social divisions between Kantakouzenists and dynastic legitimists, would
probably not have been effective anyway. So far as the hesychast issues first
raised by Barlaam of Calabria were concerned, there was no alternative to
prolonged theological debate.
19 On John V’s constitutional role as epistemonarches see Laurent 1955; Dagron 1996,
316; Russell 2012.
10 GREGORY PALAMAS
2. The Hesychast Controversy
The practice of hesychia, or withdrawal to a life of solitude and contemplation,

goes back to the earliest years of monasticism. Its most influential teacher
was St John Climacus, who in the late sixth or early seventh century devoted
a chapter to the subject (Step 27) in his Ladder of Divine Ascent. For the
hesychast, the purpose of hesychia was to facilitate ascent to a transformative
communion with God. Climacus insists that the ascent is not an exterior one,
but an ascetic journey to the core of one’s being, where one encounters Christ
and is transformed by him: ‘A hesychast is someone who strives to confine
the incorporeal within a corporeal dwelling, which is a paradox.’20 Almost all
the elements that we find in the later hesychast tradition are already present
in Climacus: the recitation of the Jesus Prayer, the descent into the ‘heart’,
the transformative vision of divine light, and, ultimately, deification. The
inadequacy of merely external hesychia receives eloquent expression in
the late tenth–early eleventh century from St Symeon the New Theologian,
whose special contribution is the development of hesychast teaching on the
role of the Holy Spirit. One of the best models for the hesychast, according
to St Symeon, is that of the apostles after the Crucifixion: having locked
themselves in a house on the first day of the week for fear of reprisals, they
saw Jesus enter and received from him the Holy Spirit.21 A text attributed to
St Symeon, but in fact dating from the end of the thirteenth century, gives
detailed instructions on the best practices to follow in order to facilitate
reception of the Spirit.22 The emphasis in this text falls on techniques. Once
the hesychast has put himself under unquestioning obedience to a spiritual
father, he is to sit on a stool with his head bowed and his gaze focused on his
abdomen or navel. He is to control his breathing for the purpose of drawing
his intellect down into his heart. There in the heart he will encounter his inner
being flooded with light, filled with divine grace. By the end of the thirteenth
century the mystical practices that Barlaam the Calabrian was to encounter
in the 1330s were already well established on Athos.
Barlaam was born in Seminara in Calabria in about 1290.23 The Greek
sources call him an Italian, but this may mean no more than that he was
20 John Climacus, Ladder, Step 27 (PG 88, 1097B).

21 Symeon the New Theologian, Ethical Discourse XV. 74–9, citing John 20: 19–22.
22 Three Methods of Prayer, trans. Palmer et al. 1995, 67–75.
23 For a biographical sketch of Barlaam with a discussion of sources, see Fyrigos 2005,
161–9.
born and raised in Italy. His mother tongue was probably Greek, but he also
had a good knowledge of Latin. He admits himself that he was Orthodox
by birth. Where he acquired his education is not known, but he was a monk
of the Basilian monastery of St Elias at Galatro (Galotyrion) in Calabria,
where he was ordained to the priesthood. He came to the Greek East in
about 1325 and made his way via Arta to Thessalonike. He does not tell
us his motives for coming, but Palamas says that he wanted to live with
his fellow Orthodox,24 and Gregoras that he was eager to study Aristotle
in the Greek original.25 From Thessalonike he went on to Constantinople,
where he impressed John Kantakouzenos and the emperor Andronikos III
by his learning and his expertise in dialectic, especially in a debate with
Latin envoys of Pope John XXII on the procession of the Holy Spirit. Some
may have seen him as abrasive and ambitious,26 but that did not prevent
him from becoming an important member of Constantinople’s intellectual
élite. Kantakouzenos supported his work of commentary on Dionysius the
Areopagite. Andronikos III sent him in 1339 on a confidential mission to
Philip VI of France and Pope Benedict XII to ask for military aid against the
Turks. Older scholarship tended to see Barlaam as a westernizer ‘imbued
with the spirit of the Italian Renaissance’,27 but more recently it has been
established that he had been formed in a Byzantine Neoplatonic tradition
much in the manner of Theodore Metochites and Nikephoros Gregoras.28
It was on his return from his mission to Paris and Avignon that Barlaam
published his attack on the hesychasts, Against the Messalians.29 It is
the publication of this work that marks the beginning of the Hesychast
Controversy.30 Barlaam had already been in contact with Palamas by letter,
for Palamas had written to him on the occasion of the latter’s publication
24 Palamas, First Letter to Akindynos 4 (Christou I, 206, 15; Perrella III, 392).
25 Gregoras, Florentios, 18–19. Fyrigos believes the statements are complementary.
26 Meyendorff 1959, 66–7, citing Gregoras, Akindynos, and Philotheos of Selymbria.
27 Meyendorff 1959, 65–6.
28 Trizio 2011.
29 The work is no longer extant apart from some quotations in Palamas and the Synodal
Tomos of 1341.
30 For overviews of the controversy from different perspectives see Krausmüller 2006
and Russell 2017. The classic study, now somewhat dated, is Meyendorff 1959. Nadal 2006
gives a fascinating account of the controversy from the viewpoint of Akindynos. For readers
of Bulgarian there is also now Christov 2016, an excellent up-to-date analysis of the whole
controversy which also takes into account the role of the translations of Aquinas in the
second half of the fourteenth century and the Palamite Council of Tŭrnovo of 1359.
12 GREGORY PALAMAS
of his anti-Filioque work, Against the Latins, to take issue with him on
his assertion that apodictic proof was not applicable to the Trinity.31
Barlaam had maintained that neither apodictic proof nor dialectic proof, as
defined by Aristotle, was applicable to the internal relations of the Trinity
on the grounds that (a) in order to be valid apodictic proof required that
the fundamental axioms should be self-evident, which here they were not
because they were based on revelation, and (b) dialectic proof required
that there should be agreement on the initial premises, which was not the
case in the matter of the Filioque. Palamas objected to the agnosticism
which seemed to him to be implied by this argument. In the course of his
correspondence with Barlaam, however, he tacitly admits the limitations
of Aristotelian logic and falls back on the illumination of the believer by
grace. The correspondence ends with a discussion of participation in divine
light. Palamas sees this as a sharing in the light of grace, which penetrates
and transforms the whole person, both body and soul. To Barlaam, for
whom divine illumination is an intellectual infusion of knowledge from
God, Palamas’ ideas seemed far too physicalist. He decided to investigate
the matter further.32
By his own account, Barlaam’s informants about hesychast theory
and practice were Ignatios the Hesychast, to whom he addressed two
letters,33 David Dishypatos, Joseph Kalothetos, ‘the good Luke’,34 and ‘a
certain youth’ whom he tried to dissuade from accepting what were clearly
‘absurd doctrines somewhat resembling the heresy of the Euchites’.35 Apart
from the youth (who may simply be a polite fiction on Barlaam’s part in
order to avoid attributing heretical doctrines to his correspondent and his
correspondent’s friends) these were not members of the heretical fringe
of the hesychast movement. David Dishypatos, of a distinguished family
related to the Palaiologoi, was a monk of Gregory of Sinai’s monastery
at Paroria.36 He later became a strong defender of Palamas. Joseph
Kalothetos had been a monk of Esphigmenou on Mount Athos and was
31 For a detailed analysis of the arguments see Sinkewicz 1980 and 1982.
32 For a detailed analysis of the historical origins of the hesychast controversy see Rigo
1989, Part I.
33 Barlaam, Letters IV and V.
34 Barlaam, Letter V, 15 (Fyrigos, 386).
35 Barlaam, Letter V, 17 (Fyrigos, 388). ‘Euchites’ (‘people dedicated to continuous
prayer’) was another term for ‘Messalians’.
36 Barlaam’s Letters VI and VIII are addressed to Dishypatos.
later hegoumenos of a monastery in Constantinople or Thessalonike.37 He

too wrote later in defence of Palamas. Ignatios and Luke have not been
identified with certainty, but as Ignatios is referred to as a bishop38 he may
be Ignatios Glabas, metropolitan of Thessalonike from 1336 to 1342.39 In
Thessalonike Barlaam also met hesychasts who spoke to him about seeing
red and white lights and other things that appalled him.40 From these sources
Barlaam constructed a negative picture of hesychasm as a disguised form
of the dualist heresy of ‘Messalianism’, or Bogomilism.41
In the early fourteenth century Athos had experienced a strong revival
of hesychasm largely through the teaching of Gregory of Sinai.42 Gregory
was born near Klazomenai on the southern shore of the Gulf of Smyrna in
about 1275. As a youth he was seized by Turkish raiders from the emirate
of Germiyan and taken to the slave market at Laodikeia (Denizli), where he
was bought and set free by pious Christians. He then went to Cyprus, at that
time under Lusignan control. In Cyprus he was initiated into the monastic
life by an anchorite with whom he stayed for a short time, but it was only
later the he was tonsured, when he made his way to the great monastery of
St Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai, a magnet for pilgrims and monks
throughout the Byzantine period. He lived there for several years under a
strict monastic regime, employed in cooking, baking bread, and copying
manuscripts. For reasons that are unclear (his biographer, Kallistos I,
suggests it was because of jealousy aroused in his fellow monks) he left
Sinai with a disciple, Gerasimos, and, after an illuminating encounter with
a hesychast called Arsenios in Crete, arrived on Mount Athos. This would
have been between 1307 and 1310, when the leading monastic figures on the
Holy Mountain included Nikodemos of Vatopedi, later the spiritual father
of Gregory Palamas,43 and the charismatic Maximos of Kapsokalyvia.44
After touring the monasteries Gregory settled at the skete of Magoula,
near the monastery of Philotheou, where three contemplatives, Esaias,
Kornelios and Makarios, lived. Within ten years, despite complaints from
37 Barlaam’s Letter VII is addressed to Kalothetos.

38 Barlaam, Letter IV, 2 (Fyrigos, 370).
39 Fyrigos 2005, 105–6.
40 Barlaam, Letter V, 16 (Fyrigos, 386).
41 On the neo-Manichaean sect of the Bogomils, see Obolensky 1948; Rigo 1996.
42 The most complete study of the Sinaite is now Rigo 2002.
43 Mamalakis 1971, 163–4, mentions Nikodemos as one of several notable ascetics all
connected with Vatopedi.
44 On Maximos, see Ware 1988.
14 GREGORY PALAMAS
senior monks about the new teaching he had brought from Sinai, Gregory
had acquired a large group of disciples. Magoula became a renowned
centre of hesychast contemplation, with the result that Gregory was widely
regarded as the ‘common teacher’ of the monks.45 Turkish incursions in
the 1320s, however, forced Gregory to leave Athos in 1326. After several
temporary refuges, he finally settled at Paroria, in the borderland between
the empire and Bulgaria, establishing a monastery on the slopes of nearby
Mount Katakekryomene, where he died on 27 November, probably in 1346.
The monastery of Paroria was to play an important role in the transmission
of hesychasm to the Slavic world. Among Gregory’s disciples were two
ecumenical patriarchs (Isidore and Kallistos I) and a patriarch of Bulgaria
(Theodosios), besides several theologians who were to produce significant
work in support of Palamas during the hesychast controversy.46
Gregory of Sinai himself took no part in the controversy. It is not
certain whether he and Palamas ever met, even though their stays on Mount
Athos and in Thessalonike overlapped.47 Their talents were different.
Palamas was drawn by his opponents into theological polemics, for which
he evidently had a flair, whereas the Sinaite was a charismatic teacher of
the hesychast life in the tradition of St John Climacus and St Symeon the
New Theologian. In short ‘chapters’ designed for spiritual reading Gregory
of Sinai instructs his disciples on such matters as how to attain hesychia,
how to realize the energy of the Holy Spirit, what postures they should
adopt in prayer, how much time they should give to psalmody in relation
to the prayer of the heart, and how they should regulate their diet in order
to support a life of prayer.48 Central to his teaching is the practice of the
Jesus Prayer, together with detailed instructions on the accompanying
45 Rigo 2002, 52.

46 Rigo 2002, 63.
47 Balfour 1984 argues that Palamas had in fact been a pupil of the Sinaite but became
estranged from him (which accounts for why he does not mention him in any of his writings)
when, meeting with him in Thessalonike in 1326, he refused to accompany him to Sinai
(which was Gregory of Sinai’s original plan on leaving Athos). Most scholars regard
Balfour’s conclusions as too speculative, but they do account for Palamas’ strange silence
about the elder Gregory. It is scarcely conceivable that Palamas did not know the Sinaite,
even if he was not formally attached to him.
48 Five such collections of chapters were collected by St Nikodemos the Hagiorite and St
Makarios of Corinth in the Philokalia (trans. Palmer et al. 1995, 212–86). Two further texts
have been published: a homily on the Transfiguration (Balfour 1982) and chapters, based
on Dionysius the Areopagite, on the symbolism of the monastic life and the Liturgy (Rigo
2005).
physical postures appropriate to such prayer, very much in the manner

of Ps.-Symeon.49 He discusses the passions and the virtues, teaching his
disciples how to overcome the former and climb the ladder of spiritual
progress by the latter until they should arrive at perfection, which is union
with Christ.
It would have been difficult to construe heretical doctrines simply from
the teaching of Gregory of Sinai and his disciples. But Barlaam appears
also to have met monks (the ones who spoke to him about red and white
lights) who may well have been unorthodox. A nun called Irene Porine,
who ran a hostel in Thessalonike for visiting monks, was exposed as a
Bogomil as a result of the Athonite investigation of 1343–44 that resulted
in the conviction of Joseph of Crete and his circle of the heresy. Porine
was in contact through her hostel with leading hesychasts such as Isidore
Boucheiras and Gregory Palamas.50 Barlaam was not wrong to sense in
1340 that something was amiss in Athonite hesychasm. The mistake he
made was to try to pin Bogomilism on Palamas.
Gregory Palamas was born in Constantinople in 1295/6.51 His father
was a senator and adviser to Andronikos II, who saw to it that his son
received an excellent education at the school of Theodore Metochites with
a view to entering government service. The young Gregory, however, chose
the monastic life. At the age of twenty-four, accompanied by two of his
brothers, he went to Mount Athos, where he put himself under the spiritual
guidance of the hesychast Nikodemos of Vatopedi. When Nikodemos
died two years later he moved to the Great Lavra and, after a further three
years following the coenobitic regime there, took up the hesychast life
at the skete of Glossia on the north-west slope of Mount Athos. In 1326
Turkish incursions forced him, like Gregory of Sinai, to seek shelter in
Thessalonike. From there he went on to practise the hesychast life at a
hermitage near Berroia in western Macedonia, but in 1331 returned to
Mount Athos, where he settled finally at the hermitage of St Sabas, a
dependency of the Great Lavra. It was at St Sabas that he began writing
and entered into correspondence with Barlaam.
49 See the discussion in Ware 1972.

50 Gregory Akindynos, Letters 52. 69–75 (Hero, 222–4). Cf. Hero’s commentary (Hero,
402–3); Rigo 1989, 156–7.
51 For the life and work of Gregory Palamas, see now Sinkewicz 2002. Meyendorff 1959,
however, is still indispensable. For my revision of the dating, see the Introduction to the Life
of Gregory Palamas below.
16 GREGORY PALAMAS
The occasion for his making contact with Barlaam was the publication
of Barlaam’s discourses against the Latins on the procession of the Holy
Spirit. Palamas did not know Barlaam personally, so he wrote to a common
friend, Gregory Akindynos.52 Akindynos had been an early disciple
of Palamas and had been supported by him in 1332 in an unsuccessful
attempt to become a monk at the Lavra. Subsequently, when he returned to
Thessalonike, Akindynos had also got to know Barlaam. Palamas wrote to
him, knowing that his letter would be forwarded to Barlaam, to complain
that Barlaam’s denial, on Aristotelian grounds, that apodictic proof was
applicable to God made any knowledge of God impossible. Barlaam in
his response is able to show that Palamas’ premises depended on faith
and, therefore, by the rules of correct reasoning, his argument could not
be apodictic. Palamas subsequently tried a different approach. In his first
letter addressed directly to Barlaam he claims that the testimony of the
Fathers (the Church’s ‘inner wisdom’) must take precedence over the
‘outer wisdom’ that is the preserve of the pagan philosophers. This led to a
discussion of the nature of divine illumination. Barlaam held that because
truth is one, insofar as the pagan philosophers had attained to truth they too,
like the Church Fathers, had been illuminated by God. Palamas is shocked
by this. In his view the two kinds of illumination are not comparable. True
theologians arrive at a knowledge of God through participation in divine
glory. The rules of apodictic and dialectic reasoning belong to a different
level of knowledge altogether. What Barlaam is trying to do is to turn
debating techniques and intellectual analysis into ultimate truth.
The correspondence between the two men became increasingly bitter,
with Palamas accusing Barlaam of overweening pride and Barlaam
complaining that Palamas was misrepresenting him and calumniating
him.53 Palamas produced a body of treatises (the Triads) to defend the
hesychasts against the accusations that Barlaam elaborated in a series of
opuscula entitled On Discourses, On the Perfection of Man, On the Wisdom
of Creation, On Prayer, On Light, and On Knowledge.54 These culminated
in his Against the Messalians, to which Palamas responded in the third
52 On the life of Akindynos the fullest study is Nadal 2002, 189–223; see also Hero 1983,
ix–xxxiii.
53 Palamas, Second Letter to Barlaam 41 (Christou I, 284; Perrella III, 548); Barlaam,
Letter III, 97 (Fyrigos 2005, 368).
54 Fyrigos 2005, 182. All Barlaam’s anti-hesychast works were destroyed after his
condemnation in 1341. Some quotations from the opuscula survive in Palamas’ Triads.
of his Triads on the deification attainable by the hesychast life. Despite

Akindynos’ attempts to dissuade Barlaam from pursuing his campaign,55
Barlaam took it to its logical conclusion and laid a formal charge of heresy
against Palamas and the hesychast monks at the patriarchate in 1340.56
At the council held in Constantinople in June 1341 to try the case,
with the emperor Andronikos III presiding, Palamas was acquitted and
Barlaam’s arguments were rejected and condemned. Palamas had prepared
carefully for such an eventuality, having drawn up a concise statement of
the hesychast position which he had presented to the bishop of Hierissos
(the ordinary of Mount Athos), the protos and the leading hegoumenoi in the
previous summer for their formal adoption and signature.57 This document
proved decisive. In the following month a second council was held, now
with Akindynos as the defendant, for Akindynos had in the meantime also
become a sharp critic of Palamas. What he most objected to was Palamas’
distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies, which
Palamas had developed to explain how God was utterly transcendent yet at
the same time participable by those who shared by grace in divine glory.
The distinction seemed to Akindynos to introduce a new division into
the Godhead besides that of the three Persons, entailing higher and lower
divinities. At the July council Akindynos was condemned, like Barlaam,
for doctrinal error. This second council, however, never attained the author-
itative status of the June council, for in the meantime Andronikos III had
suddenly died. The new council was presided over by John Kantakouzenos.
Within a few months Kantakouzenos had gone into rebellion against the
regency. The patriarch John Kalekas then began to find Akindynos useful
as a theological support against Palamas and the hesychasts, who were now
seen as Kantakouzenist partisans. As a result, a Synodal Tomos recording
the decisions of the July council was never issued.58
Most of Palamas’ theological writings after the Triads belong to the
period of civil war, when he was either living quietly in the vicinity of
Constantinople at Anaplous or Herakleia or being held in the Blachernai
55 Akindynos, Letters 8 (in toto) and 10. 30–6 (Hero, 26–8, 36–8).
56 Synodal Tomos of 1341, lines 31–5 (Hunger et al., 212, translated below, p. 215).
57 This was the Hagioretic Tomos, or Tomos of the Holy Mountain in Defence of the Holy
Hesychasts (Eng. trans. Palmer et al., 418–25; Sinkewicz, 183–8).
58 Our knowledge of the second council comes from Kalekas’ Explanation of the Tomos
(Allatius, 830–3 = PG 150, 900B–903B), Akindynos’ Discourse Before John Kalekas 6
(Nadal, 261), and Palamas’ Letter to Philotheos 7 (Christou II, 522–3; Perrella III, 980),
translated below, and Philotheos, Life § 64 (Tsames, 497–8) also translated below.
18 GREGORY PALAMAS
prison. His main opponent was now Akindynos, who rose to a position
of great influence through the reliance that the patriarch placed on him.
Unlike Barlaam, Akindynos was not a philosopher. He was a monk from
a humble background (Greek, not Slavic, as is often claimed) who had
acquired a good education at the renowned school of Thomas Magistros in
Thessalonike.59 Deeply immersed in the Fathers of the Church, he turned
against Palamas because he believed that the man he had once admired
so strongly was manipulating the patristic tradition to support theological
innovations.60 Indeed, much of the controversy turned on the correct
exegesis of a number of key patristic texts. These were the Divine Names
of Dionysius the Areopagite, Against Eunomius and Letter 234 of Basil of
Caesarea, the Theological Orations of Gregory of Nazianzus, the Ambigua
of Maximus the Confessor, and the Homilies on the Transfiguration of St
Andrew of Crete and St John Damascene. Drawing on these and other texts,
Palamas argues that to insist on an unqualified divine simplicity removes
God from human experience. We cannot know ‘what God is’ (his essence),
but we experience him in ‘what God does’ (his energies). For Akindynos,
however, God can only be known symbolically, or by inference, from
what he has created. The debate came to focus on the exegesis of the
Transfiguration. What was it that the apostles saw? For Palamas, it was
the uncreated glory of God shining through Christ’s humanity which will
illuminate all who have attained the likeness of Christ. Yet, because this
glory was accessible to the senses, although divine it was not the same
as the divine essence. For Akindynos, the light seen by the apostles on
Mount Tabor belonged simply to Christ’s humanity and was therefore a
created grace, not some kind of lower divinity. Precisely because it was
accessible to the senses, to make it the same as God was to fall into the
error of ditheism. These arguments were rehearsed in a series of treatises
and counter-treatises throughout the six years of the civil war.
The council of 1347 was convened hurriedly by Kantakouzenos
within three weeks of his entry into Constantinople. Preoccupied as he
59 Magistros was known for taking into his school boys of talent, even if their families
had slender means. On Akindynos’ ethnic background, see Nadal 1990.
60 Akindynos gives his own account of his relationship with Palamas in a speech
delivered in the presence of the patriarch John Kalekas in the spring of 1343: Greek text with
Spanish translation in Nadal 2002, 258–314. On Akindynos’ principles of patristic exegesis,
see Nadal 1974a. Nadal has also written an important (if unapologetically partisan) study of
Akindynos as a theologian: Nadal 2006, vol. 2.
was with practical matters, he was not concerned that it should discuss
the theological issues at any length. The patriarch John Kalekas was
deposed and banished to Didymoteichon.61 Akindynos was stripped of
the priesthood and excommunicated. The new Palamite patriarch, Isidore
Boucheiras, proceeded to appoint new bishops, including Palamas himself.
But opposition was not thereby silenced. Opponents included not only
intellectuals such as Nikephoros Gregoras, who now emerged as the leader
of the anti-Palamites, but also a significant number of bishops. Ten of them
met in May and later, in July 1347, issued a Synodal Tomos of their own
deposing Isidore Boucheiras and Gregory Palamas.62 In the meantime
Gregoras, who had been invited by the empress Anna in the previous year
to adjudicate for her between Kalekas and Palamas, had been working on
his own refutation of Palamas.63
Nikephoros Gregoras had been, like Palamas, a pupil of Theodore
Metochites. But whereas Palamas had not gone very far beyond the study
of Aristotle, Gregoras had imbibed deeply from Neoplatonic sources.64 The
incomprehensibility of God is absolute for him. Even sensible things elude
our grasp of their essence. Therefore Palamas’ claim that we can participate
in the life of God through the gift of grace, a gift which is nothing less
than God himself in an active mode, is utterly unacceptable to Gregoras.
The only source of true knowledge is what Gregoras calls the ‘motionless
movement’ of the mind. The mind’s knowledge of itself is the real path to
wisdom. Sensory impressions, even the sensory impression of the light of
Tabor, produce mental images, nothing more. These images must be seen
as symbols, which are not in themselves reality but can assist the mind to
ascend to reality, which is the mind’s knowledge of itself, where God is
ultimately to be found.
The continuing opposition to Palamite theology and the Synodal
Tomos of 1347 made another council necessary. It was intended by the
emperor John Kantakouzenos that this time the opponents of Palamas, who
included two metropolitans, Matthew of Ephesus and Joseph of Ganos,
should have ample opportunity to express their objections. The opponents
61 Towards the end of the year he was brought back to Constantinople, where he died on
29 December.
62 Published by Allatius 1648, 803–10, and translated below, pp. 311–22.
63 Gregoras, Historia Byzantina XV, 7 (Bonn II, 768).
64 The most complete study of Gregoras’ thinking is Moschos 1998. For a brief summary
see Russell 2017, 502–3.
20 GREGORY PALAMAS
were not defendants in a heresy trial, as had been the case in 1341 and
1347. The council met in the Triclinium of the palace of Blachernai on 28
May 1351 with Kantakouzenos presiding.65 At this first session Palamas’
opponents were invited to make their case. Their main argument was that
a Palamite addition had been made to the confession of faith required
of new bishops, an addition that was unorthodox. Palamas in reponse
claimed that the addition was no more than an explication of the Sixth
Ecumenical Council and that by rejecting it the dissidents were aligning
themselves with Barlaam and Akindynos. In view of the many issues
that were raised, it was decided that at the second session the dissidents
should take the floor first and should speak with complete freedom. This
they did on 30 May, but when Palamas, who was attending the council
as metropolitan of Thessalonike, rose to respond, the dissidents walked
out. The second session ended with the reading of a confession of faith
that Palamas had drawn up in the course of his disputes with Barlaam
and Akindynos. At the following session, which was convened on 8 June,
the dissidents were invited to present their own confession of faith, which
they did in traditional terms, following it up with a complaint that Palamas
had taught the existence of a higher and a lower deity. This third session
ended with a decision to follow it up with another to consider the matter of
essence and energies. The fourth session was held on 9 June. The emperor
called for the Synodal Tomos of 1341 to be read. This document remained
a fundamental point of reference. It laid down the basis on which Barlaam
had been condemned and, moreover, having been signed by Andronikos
III of hallowed memory, could not be dismissed as Kantakouzenist. The
dissenters were challenged by Palamas to give their own explanation of the
light of the Transfiguration. Their lack of unity on this point, some holding
that it was the divine essence itself and others that it was an apparition or
a created image, led to the collapse of their case. A few days later a fifth
session was held without the dissidents (which the Synodal Tomos calls
‘another council’) at which the essence–energies distinction was discussed
at great length with much citing of the fathers.66 At the end of this session
65 The proceedings of the council are summarized in Meyendorff 1959, 141–51; see also
Papadakis 1969.
66 The patristic texts excerpted at the fifth session of the council (nearly a hundred
of them) occupy more than half the Tomos (§18 to §48). The fathers cited are Anastasius
of Sinai, Athanasius of Alexandria, Basil the Great, Cyril of Alexandria, Dionysius the
Areopagite, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, John Damascene,
each member was asked his opinion by Emparis, megas chartophylax and
consul of the philosophers. The unanimity of the assembled bishops and
notables having thus been ascertained, the dissidents were excommu-
nicated and the priests among them stripped of their sacerdotal functions.
It was decreed, moreover, that henceforth no one was to bring forward any
doctrinal complaint against the metropolitan of Thessalonike.
The Synodal Tomos summarizing the debates and recording the
council’s judgement was drawn up by Philotheos, at that time metropolitan
of Herakleia, and on 15 August 1351, the feast of the Dormition of the
Virgin, was signed by the emperor John Kantakouzenos and ceremo-
nially handed by him to the patriarch Kallistos in the sanctuary of Hagia
Sophia. John V Palaiologos, who at that time was still in Thessalonike,
signed the Tomos on his return in March or April 1352. One of the lesser
figures among the anti-Palamites at the council, Theodore Dexios,
addressed an appeal to John Kantakouzenos complaining that the
emperor had manipulated the proceedings in the Palamite interest.67 But
it was difficult now simply to identify Palamism with Kantakouzenism.
The patriarch Kallistos I, for example, was a Palamite but hostile to
Kantakouzenos’ dynastic aspirations, whereas Kantakouzenos’ confidant
and chief minister, Demetrios Kydones, was to show himself later to be
an implacable anti-Palamite. In 1352 anathemas against the anti-Palamites
were inserted into the Synodikon of Orthodoxy and read out on the first
Sunday of Lent. The council of 1351 thus formally adopted Palamite
theology as the official doctrine of the Orthodox Church.68
Maximus the Confessor, and Ps.-Justin Martyr. The most frequently cited are Basil the
Great and John Chrysostom, whose Homilies on John are a particularly rich source of
quotations. The texts are set out under the six headings suggested by the emperor as a
framework for discussion: namely, whether there is an essence/energies distinction, whether
the energies are uncreated, whether the simplicity of God is compromised by the essence/
energies distinction, whether the divine energies are called ‘divinities’ by the Fathers, what
is the nature of ‘participation’, and what is the nature of the light of the Transfiguration.
67 Polemis 2003, xxxi–xl.
68 The council of 1351 was followed by a Bulgarian council held in Tŭrnovo in 1359.
This council (the only source for which is Kallistos I’s Life of St Theodosios of Tŭrnovo)
has been studied recently by Ivan Christov in an important work on the dissemination of
Palamite theology in Bulgaria (Christov 2016). Christov believes that the council of 1359
was convoked because of the strength of anti-Palamite feeling in Bulgaria. The council’s
repudiation of anti-Palamism was connected with the political rejection of Latin influences
at the time and the return of Bulgaria to Constantinopolitan orthodoxy (Christov 2016,
207–8).
22 GREGORY PALAMAS
3. The Main Characteristics of Palamite Theology
Palamas developed his philosophical and theological defence of hesychasm

not in a systematic way but as a set of ad hoc responses to a series of challenges
from different critics, principally Barlaam of Calabria, Gregory Akindynos,
and Nikephoros Gregoras.69 Nevertheless, Palamas’ defence reflects a
coherent viewpoint that may be set out as the following propositions:
(a) The highest goal for human beings is to participate in God. Palamas
distinguishes between different senses of participation in God. The weakest
sense is the way in which a cause is present in its effect. All created things
participate in God by virtue of being products of divine action. This is the
passive sense of participation. But there is also a dynamic sense (drawn
from the Christianized Neoplatonism of Dionysius the Areopagite) in
which a superior reality acts on an inferior in a transformative manner
in order to effect the relationship of participation. There are thus different
degrees of participation, the highest of which is that of the saints, who are
transformed by God through leading lives that open them to participation
in divine glory.70
(b) Participation in God entails a distinction between the divine essence
and the divine energies. The very nature of participation requires two terms,
the participator and the participated. Without a continuing duality, partici-
pation becomes absorption. But what is it in which the saints participate?
It was axiomatic (as taught by Dionysius the Areopagite) that the ousia
of God (his essence, substance, or being – ‘what God is’) was beyond all
participation. But his energeiai (his energies, powers, or operations – ‘what
God does’) enable him to be known and experienced, which is another way
of saying that he can be participated in. Yet the distinction between essence
and energies is not merely epistemological. The simplicity of God is not
absolute. We already make distinctions in God with regard to the persons
or hypostases. The glory of God, as experienced at the Transfiguration, was
69 This section summarizes Russell 2019, chapters 6 and 7, where my assertions are more
fully documented.
70 Palamas’ main discussions of participation are in his Apologia 16–17 (Christou II,
108–10; Perrella I, 1008–12), his Dialogue of an Orthodox with a Barlaamite 47–9 (Christou
II, 211–13; Perrella I, 1214–18), his treatise On Divine and Divinizing Participation 9–14
(Christou II 145–9; Perrella I, 1082–92), and in his One Hundred and Fifty Chapters 86–9
(Sinkewicz, 184–8; Perrella III, 98–102). The first three works were written immediately
after the Council of 1341; the last represents his mature reflections towards the end of his
life.
accessible to the senses, and therefore, being finite, could not be the same
as the divine essence. We must therefore distinguish between the ‘essence’
of God and his ‘energies’ without making the distinction an ontological
one. ‘Essence’ and ‘energies’ are not two separate ‘things’ but two different
modes in which the whole of God is wholly present.71
(c) The essence–energies distinction does not result in polytheism.
Barlaam asked Palamas whether his essence–energies distinction did
not amount to positing a higher and a lower divinity.72 Palamas initially
thought that there was a sense in which this might be said (on the
authority of Dionysios the Areopagite), but quickly retracted and strongly
maintained to the end of his life that there was no higher or lower divinity.
The accusation of polytheism was one that he constantly fought against but
which refused to go away. At the council of 1351 he felt obliged to make a
formal declaration that he did not hold and had never held that there was
a multiplicity of deities in the Holy Trinity.73 Yet his characterization of
the energies as ‘deities’ or ‘divinities’ (theotētes), although reflecting the
usage of the Cappadocians and others who spoke of the divine attributes as
theotētes,74 kept the accusation alive down to modern times.75
(d) Grace is both uncreated and created. Grace (charis) has more than
one meaning. On the natural level it signifies physical and intellectual
beauty. On the supernatural level it is both the giving of the gift by the
Holy Spirit and the reception of the gift by the believer. Beyond that it is
also the splendour of the Trinity manifested to the deified.76 The distinction
between the gift as an act of giving and the gift as something received is
fundamental. The former (the Holy Spirit in operation) is uncreated; the
latter (as the grace received) is created. If the outpouring of grace is made
71 Palamas touches on essence and energies at many points throughout his writings. For
his final summary of the distinction see his One Hundred and Fifty Chapters 72, 85, 126 and
134 (Sinkewicz 166–8, 182–4, 228–30, 238–40; Perrella III, 82, 96–8, 140, 148–50).
72 Gregory Palamas, Third Letter to Akindynos (Meyendorff, ‘Une lettre inédite’; Perrella
III, 574–604); cf. Akindynos’ version of the letter (Nadal 1974b).
73 Synodal Tomos of 1351, §9 (Karmiris 1968, 379–80; translated below, p. 335).
74 See Lampe’s Patristic Greek Lexicon, sv, A2. Palamas himself appeals to Dionysios,
Divine Names XI, 6 and Gregory of Nyssa, On the Deity of the Son and the Holy Spirit in
Palamas’ Antirrhetics Against Akindynos II, 102 (Christou III, 177; Perrella II, 230).
75 Jugie 1932, 1764 compares Palamas’ position on divine unity to that of Gilbert de la
Porrée, whose Trinitarian theology was censured at the Council of Reims in 1148.
76 Palamas discusses the different senses of the word in his Letter to Athanasios of
Kyzikos 32 (Christou II, 442; Perrella III, 840).
24 GREGORY PALAMAS
a creature, a barrier is erected between the believer and God which makes
divine–human communion impossible.77
(e) The divine–human communion brought about by grace is
consummated in deification. Palamas declared after his vindication by
the Council of 1347 that the essence of his dispute with Barlaam lay
in their conflicting assessments of the ability of grace to deify, to raise
the believer to participation in the divine.78 This for Palamas (following
Maximus the Confessor) was the purpose of the Incarnation. The purpose
of the Christian life, by extension, was therefore communion with God
in its fullness, a communion which can begin by grace even in this life.
Grace deifies because grace is the Holy Spirit himself in action, who first
brings about the divine rebirth of baptism and then enables the believer
by the imitation of Christ to partake of God, a partaking which is nothing
less than union with God. But union cannot take place with the hypostasis
of God, or through the merging of the divine and human essences.
Hypostastic union with the Father belongs to the Son alone. Logically,
then, if essential and hypostatic union are excluded, what remains is union
with the divine energy, with grace-in-action. Those, like Akindynos, who
deny that union on this level was the purpose of the Incarnation deprive
us of salvation in terms of deification. The barrier that Akindynos raised
between humanity and God by equating the energies with the Son and the
Spirit, or by denying them altogether, was the reason for the confirmation
of his earlier condemnation by the council of 1351.79
4. Palamas in Captivity among the Turks
The year 1351 was a landmark in the Hesychast Controversy. But 1354 was
of comparable significance for both the empire and the Church on account
of four events: the seizure of Gallipoli by the Turks, the capture of Palamas
77 Note that all Palamas’ discussions of grace appeal to Joel 3: 1 (quoted in Acts 2: 17) –
naturally in the Septuagint version – which says ‘I shall pour out from my Spirit’. This was
taken as testimony that what is given by the Spirit is derived from him but is not something
less than he is.
78 Palamas, Treatise Clarifying in Brief the Opinion of Barlaam and Akindynos 4
(Christou IV, 88; Perrella II, 1432).
79 For Palamas the distinction between being and acting cannot coincide with the
distinctions between the hypostases. See his Letter to Daniel of Ainos 10 (Christou II, 384;
Perrella III, 732–4).
by soldiers of Orhan Beg, the abdication of John VI Kantakouzenos, and the

translation into Greek of Aquinas’ Summa contra Gentiles by Demetrios
Kydones. These events were not unrelated. It was the unexpected Ottoman
occupation of Gallipoli as a result of the earthquake of 2 March 1354
that resulted in the capture of Palamas and the year he subsequently
spent in Bithynia awaiting ransom. The crisis precipitated by the loss of
Gallipoli led to Kantakouzenos’ abdication on 10 December 1354 and his
embracing the monastic life. The translation of Aquinas, completed on
24 December 1354, was a by-product of Kydones’ preference for a policy of
seeking help from the West rather than complying with Ottoman demands,
a preference that was intensified by the loss of Gallipoli in 1354 (and its
temporary recovery in 1366). The year 1354 marks a turning point for
Byzantium both politically and culturally.
John Kantakouzenos saw greater advantages in co-operating with the
Turkish emirates than in trying to solicit Western help. He spoke Turkish
and enjoyed a genuine friendship with Umur Beg, the emir of Aydın, whose
military help proved decisive in the civil war of 1341–47. In 1346 he also
turned to Orhan, the emir of Bithynia, cementing a relationship with him
by giving him his daughter Theodora as one of his wives. While accepting
the reality of Turkish expansion in Asia Minor, Kantakouzenos never lost a
desire to restore the Empire to its former glory. He seems to have hoped that
this could be achieved by making Byzantium the senior member of a family
of begliks in the region. The rapid development of the Ottoman emirate
under Orhan’s successor Murad I (1360–89) was to make that impossible,
but in the mid-fourteenth century it did not seem entirely unrealistic.
It is a mistake to see the advance of the Ottomans in north-west Asia
Minor in terms of the expansion of a unitary state. Initially the House of
Osman was a Turko-Muslim tribe that moved into the frontier region of the
Seljuk lands, motivated by the gaza ethos.80 The Greek Christian towns
were conquered piecemeal, because they were not supported adequately,
if at all, from Constantinople. The success of Osman’s enterprise attracted
gazi warriors and dervishes to his territory, for immediately beyond it lay
‘the abode of war’, which promised lucrative rewards to gazi raiders. The
gaza spirit, however, did not entail fanaticism. Although he was styled
‘champion of the faith’, Osman’s son Orhan, like many frontier begs, was
accommodationist with regard to the Christian populations of the towns and
80 On the construction of the Ottoman state in this period, see Kafadar 1995, 118–50.
26 GREGORY PALAMAS
villages he subdued.81 The first substantial town he conquered was Prousa

(1326), on the northern slopes of the Bithynian Olympus, which became
the Ottoman capital of Bursa. The nomadic ethos, however, remained
important. Palamas gives us a lively picture of Orhan’s summer residence
at a village in the mountains, with its cool air and cold spring, where meals
were taken in the open, sitting on the grass. Orhan, although uneducated
himself, valued learning. He lost no time in establishing medreses in
his territory (the first at Nicaea in 1331), which laid the foundations of a
bureaucratic state. It was only under Orhan’s son, Murad I, however, that
an administrative apparatus and a standing army (the Janissaries) were
created. Murad I was also the first to be called ‘sultan’ (hünkar).
Palamas’ account of his captivity gives us a unique insight into the
conditions of Orhan’s beglik, where Christians and Turks lived ‘cheek
by jowl together’ in the towns to which Palamas was taken.82 The beg’s
accommodationist attitude left large communities of Christians, at least
in urban areas, who had their churches and were able to practise their
faith. One of these communities (at Pegai) seems to have been under
the authority of a Christian tekvur. At Nicaea, which had been the
imperial capital during the Latin occupation of Constantinople, there
were still many magnificent buildings, most of which stood empty and
deserted. The Christian quarter of Nicaea was centred on the monastery
of St Hyakinthos, which served the Christians’ liturgical needs. Palamas
found the Christians despondent but accepting of the situation under
their Muslim masters. At Lampsakos, when they discovered they had the
metropolitan of Thessalonike in their midst, one of the first things they
asked him was how God could have allowed such a catastrophe to befall
their nation. Palamas regarded the personal misfortune of his captivity
as a relatively minor punishment for his sins. He addressed the larger
question when it was put to him later from the Muslim perspective: Does
not the victory of Islam prove the superiority of the Muslim faith? These
religious encounters and their settings are of great interest and give us a
unique insight into Christian and Muslim attitudes at this time.
The first debate Palamas had with a Muslim was with Orhan’s grandson
Ismail at Orhan’s summer residence. The conversation began with a
81 On Ottoman policy in this regard, see Pahlitzsch 2015a.

82 Arnakis 1951 has been superseded by Philippidis-Braat 1979, whose important study
also gives a critical edition of the ‘captivity dossier’ with a French translation. See also
Pahlitzsch 2015a and 2015b; Fanelli 2018.
discussion of almsgiving. Then several questions were put by Ismail: ‘Why

do you not love and accept the prophet Muhammad? How is it that you
venerate the cross?’ Finally there came a stock objection to Christianity:
‘You claim that God had a wife, for you say that he begot a son.’ To these
points Palamas replied in a manner suitable for his listener. You cannot love
a teacher if you do not believe the teacher’s words; the cross is a symbol
comparable to Muslim symbols which are similarly respected; just as Christ
was born of a virgin, who had no husband, which the Muslims accept, so
the Word was born of the Father, who had no wife. Even though Ismail
was known as a harsh critic of the Christian faith, the conversation ended
amicably.
The second of Palamas’ encounters with spokesmen for Islam was
with a group of apparently Christian apostates with Judaizing tendencies
called Chionai.83 This was a formal debate arranged at the behest of the
emir when he was told by his Greek doctor Taronites that the monk he
was holding captive was a distinguished theologian. A former Christian,
Balabancık, who had become a trusted member of Orhan’s circle, was
appointed to preside, no doubt because of his competence in both Greek
and Turkish. The first point made by the Chionai was that they had
become Muslims when they found that the Ten Commandments had been
superseded by Islam. To this Palamas responded with a brief exposition
of the Trinity as the one immutable God with his Word and his Wisdom.
He then went onto the offensive, pointing out that Muslims also speak
about the word and spirit of God, and adding for the benefit of the Chionai
that in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves Moses and the prophets had
adumbrated the Trinity. Next Palamas was asked how someone born as a
man could be God, to which he responded with a brief exposition of how
human sin required redemption by divine action, which was brought about
by the Word of God becoming a human being. After a noisy discussion
in which Palamas pushed home a number of points of logic, Balabancık
intervened to pose (at Orhan’s request) what the Muslims clearly thought
was the key question: ‘Why is it that we accept Christ and love and honour
him as word and breath of God, and we hold that his mother is near to
God, whereas you do not accept our prophet, nor do you love him?’ Again
Palamas resisted the invitation to reciprocal recognition on the grounds
that if you do not believe the words of a teacher you cannot love that
83 On the difficulty of identifying the origins of the Chionai, see Philippidis-Braat 1979,
214–18; Fanelli 2018, 195–207.
28 GREGORY PALAMAS
teacher. The Christian acceptance of Christ is not equivalent to the Muslim

acceptance of Muhammad. Christ is not simply a prophet but will return
to judge the whole world. The debate ended with a discussion of the use of
icons in churches in view of the Mosaic ban on images, in which Palamas
silenced the opposition by pointing out that Moses himself had decorated
the Tabernacle with images of cherubim. The Christians use images not as
objects of worship but in order to ascend through them to God.
The third and last recorded discussion was an informal debate that
Palamas had with a danişmend from the medrese at Nicaea (Iznik) whom
he had just seen conducting a funeral. For the first time he had a Muslim
scholar as his interlocutor. His opening question was on the content of
the Muslim funerary prayers. On being told that the prayers asked for
forgiveness for the deceased, Palamas went onto the offensive. Christ
should be addressed as God because only he has the power to forgive sins.
But Christ too is a servant of God, the danişmend objected. He is more
than a servant, Palamas responded because, as even the Muslims admit,
he will judge the living and the dead. Once again the question is thrown at
him: ‘How is it that you do not accept our prophet or believe in his book,
even though this book has also come down from heaven?’ This is the first
time that the Qur’an as a holy book is mentioned. Palamas replies that
in law the acceptance of statements requires the support of testimonies.
Christ is attested by Moses and the Hebrew prophets, but Muhammad is
not attested, either by them or by the gospels. The danişmend suggests
that there were such testimonies in the gospels but the Christians have cut
them out. This is an easy claim for Palamas to refute on rational grounds.
In the course of his disquisition Palamas puts forward the argument that
Islam has triumphed by the sword, whereas Christianity has been spread
by the power of Christ’s teaching. At this point the atmosphere became
tense. Some of Palamas’ Christian hearers, fearing that he had overstepped
the mark, signalled him to stop. To break the tension Palamas said: ‘If
we agreed in what we said, we would all hold the same doctrine. But let
anyone who can do so understand the force of what has been said.’ One
of the Muslims responded with: ‘there will be a time when we shall agree
with one another’, and Palamas expressed his approval of the sentiment.
With this exchange, each side expressing its confidence that the other
would eventually be won over, the discussion came to an end.84
84 This cannot be construed as an ‘ecumenical’ exchange, as many have asserted.
Palamas’ ransom was finally paid and he was repatriated to

Constantinople in the spring of 1355. Philotheos says that it was pious
Serbs from Dalmatia who paid the ransom.85 Gregoras claims that it was
Kantakouzenos, now the monk Ioasaph, who paid it so as to have Palamas
at liberty in the new political situation under John V Palaiologos when the
Palamite version of hesychasm might again be open to challenge.86 Perhaps
the two versions are complementary. The Serbs may well have provided
the funds, but it is likely that it was Kantakouzenos who undertook the
negotiations with his son-in-law Orhan in order to obtain Palamas’ release.
5. A Contested Saint
The Constantinople to which Palamas returned in early 1355 had changed

culturally as well as politically. Demetrios Kydones, who had resigned his
office of mesazon at the time of John VI’s abdication and retired with him
to an adelphaton in the Constantinopolitan monastery of St George of the
Mangana, had two or three months previously completed his translation of
Thomas Aquinas’ Summa contra Gentiles.87 This work, which had been
sponsored by John Kantakouzenos, who also paid for multiple copies, was
a publishing sensation. ‘Now’, said Kydones, writing some years later,
‘Thomas’ book Against the Hellenes is in the hands of many, bringing on
the one hand praise to the author and on the other much benefit to those who
use it.’88 Palamas, however, is not known to have seen the book. He was
fully absorbed after his arrival in Constantinople with defending himself
against renewed attacks by Nikephoros Gregoras and also with attending to
the pastoral needs of his diocese. Within two and a half years he was dead.
Kydones’ enterprise was nevertheless to contribute significantly to the final
stages of the Palamite controversy.
Demetrios Kydones was later assisted in the translation of other Latin
works by his younger brother, Prochoros, a monk of the Great Lavra.89
85 Philotheos, Life §103. 15 (Tsames, 552). Pahlitzsch (2015b, 226) plausibly suggests that
it was Stefan Dušan himself who supplied the funds.
86 Gregoras, Historia Byzantina XXIX, 42 (Bonn III, 252).
87 Demetrios Kydones has been the subject of numerous studies. The fundamental works
are Mercati 1931; Loenertz 1970; 1971; and Tinnefeld 1981. For Kydones’ political and
cultural context, see Ryder 2010; for his anti-Palamite role, see also Russell 2003.
88 Demetrios Kydones, Apologia I, fol. 57r (Mercati 1931, 363).
89 On Prochoros Kydones, see Russell 2006 and Plested 2012, 73–84.
30 GREGORY PALAMAS
Born in about 1335, Prochoros had entered the monastic life at the age of
fifteen and was ordained to the priesthood probably in 1365. Somehow,
although he never lived in Constantinople, he became proficient in Latin.
He assisted his brother with the translation of a number of works, including
some portions of Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, as well as other works
by Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas.90 At the Lavra, partly under the
influence of the Latin works he was translating, Prochoros became strongly
opposed to Palamite theology.91 As a result he attracted the intense hostility
of other members of his community. In 1364 or 1365 the hegoumenos
Iakobos Trikanas wrote to the patriarch Philotheos (who had earlier been
a hegoumenos of the Lavra) to report the problem and to ask for a copy of
the Synodal Tomos of 1351. Prochoros was required to read and sign the
Tomos at a synaxis held at the Lavra. This he did but afterwards retracted.
He then wrote to the patriarch himself, complaining about the treatment
he was receiving from his community, and sent him a copy of some of his
own writings, one of them being no less than a refutation of the Tomos
of 1351. Prochoros later travelled to Constantinople to support his case in
person. He seems to have completely misjudged the impression his writings
would make. The patriarch’s response on glancing through his work was
immediately unfavourable.92 He decided to send a trusted theologian,
Theophanes of Nicaea, to the Lavra to investigate the matter further.93 Up
to that point, the whole affair was something which Philotheos assumed he
could deal with as a routine matter of ecclesiastical administration. Then
Prochoros, on his own initiative, took a step which changed things entirely.
He formally challenged the celebration of Palamas as a saint at the Lavra
with his own feast day.94
In 1367, probably in November, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary
of Palamas’ death, Prochoros sent a pittakion to the hegoumenos of the
Lavra denouncing the honouring of Palamas as a saint. In consequence of
the formal nature of the complaint, a general synaxis of the Holy Mountain
90 For a complete list, see Russell 2006, 80, n. 27.

91 On anti-Palamite currents on Mount Athos and Prochoros’ relationship to them, see
Rigo 2004.
92 As indicated by the quotation from his pittakion in §15 in the Synodal Tomos of 1368,
Prochoros either misinterpreted this or chose to ignore it.
93 Polemis 1996, 26–8. Polemis suggests that Theophanes’ visit to Mount Athos may
have been in May 1366.
94 For a detailed account of the Prochoros affair see Rigo 2004, 20–51; more briefly,
Russell 2006.
was convened which upheld the cult of Palamas and placed Prochoros
under anathema. When the report of the synaxis, together with an Athonite
profession of faith in Palamite terms and a copy of Prochoros’ pittakion,
were forwarded to the patriarchate, Philotheos decided that a trial was
unavoidable.95
The patriarch prepared carefully for the trial. A member of the powerful
Kydones family was not to be dealt with lightly. He appointed a theological
commission, headed by the metropolitan Theophanes of Nicaea, to
examine Prochoros’ works in detail. He also appears to have decided
that in order to quash anti-Palamism once and for all Gregory Palamas
needed to be proclaimed a saint of the Great Church. In pursuit of this
aim he began to assemble evidence for Palamas’ sanctity, commissioning
the megas oikonomos of the church of Thessalonike to collect testimonies
from people who had received healing or other benefits from him.96 When
a council was convened in April 1368 to hear Prochoros’ case, the ground
had been laid for putting Palamas beyond any further criticism.
Philotheos presided over the council and was also Prochoros’ chief
interrogator. First he invited the defendant to make his case. Prochoros
asked for his books to be produced and challenged anyone who wished to
contradict what was said in them to come forward and he would resolve
any difficulties for them. Philotheos responded that it was not for Prochoros
to teach the assembled bishops, especially if he was aligning himself with
Barlaam. Whether or not he was following Barlaam’s lead needed to be
established first. Prochoros’ books were therefore produced and read, as
he had requested. When the synod anathematized them, however, he was
clearly ‘stung by their repudiation’, so confident was he that his theses were
unassailable.97 Then, as in the previous councils, the debate came to focus
on the correct exegesis of the Transfiguration. Philotheos interrogated
Prochoros closely on the nature of the divine light. Prochoros argued that
it was both created and uncreated on account of Christ’s dual nature. This
allowed Philotheos to prove that such an opinion was incompatible with
belief in the hypostatic union of the natures. The radiance seen on Mount
Tabor was ‘the radiance and illumination of the trihypostatic deity, not of
95 For the text of the Athonite profession of faith (with an Italian translation) see Rigo
2004, 144–7.
96 Synodal Tomos of 1368, §19. There is evidence that Philotheos’ miracles dossier may
have circulated as a separate text; see Talbot and Johnson 2012, xix.
97 Synodal Tomos of 1368, §11.
32 GREGORY PALAMAS
the flesh’; it did not originate from the created flesh of Christ but shone
through it, which is why the face of Christ in the words of the gospel ‘shone
like the sun’.98 Prochoros’ interpretation was incompatible with the decree
of the Sixth Ecumenical Council on the relationship between the human
and divine natures of Christ, and it was not simply his flouting of the
injunction of the Synodal Tomos of 1351 forbidding criticism of Palamas
but more importantly this Christological error (which made his offence
worse than that of Barlaam and Akindynos) that ensured his condem-
nation. Prochoros, to his brother’s fury and dismay, was deposed from the
priesthood and excommunicated. He was not subjected to imprisonment or
exile, but lived quietly in Constantinople and died about a year later.
Antonio Rigo rightly says that the conclusion of the Prochoros
affair marks the dawn of a new age.99 From now on Philotheos became
determined to apply the stipulations of the Synodal Tome of 1351 with full
rigour. Opposition from members of the circle of Demetrios Kydones, such
as Manuel Kalekas,100 or from Gregoras’ pupil, John Kyparissiotes,101 was
no longer tolerated in Constantinople and could be mounted only from
outside the reach of the patriarch’s authority. Kalekas fled to Pera, the
Genoese quarter on the other side of the Golden Horn, where he joined
the Dominicans. Kyparissiotes wrote from the shelter of Lusignan Cyprus.
Prochoros’ quixotic initiative was the last direct attempt to change the
mind of the church leadership.
There is another sense, too, in which the Prochoros affair marks the
dawn of a new age. When Philotheos perused Prochoros’ works he was
struck by the novelty of the argumentation, with its reliance on syllogistic
reasoning.102 This was Philotheos’ first encounter with the scholastic
method that Prochoros had borrowed from Aquinas. Prochoros himself
used only the method, not the content, of Thomist philosophical theology.
But, after the council, those works of Aquinas that had been translated
by the Kydones brothers were carefully studied by both defenders and
opponents of Palamas.103 Aquinas became a valuable source of ideas for
98 Synodal Tomos of 1368, §12 and §13.

99 Rigo 2004, 51.
100 On Kalekas, see Loenertz 1950; Russell 2003, 171–2; Plested 2012, 115–18.
101 Kyparissiotes has not been the subject of recent study. For the literature, see Talbot
1991b.
103 On the Thomist contribution to Theophanes of Nicaea’s refutation of Prochoros, see
Polemis 1996, 87–109.
solutions to problems thrown up by either side. The triumph of Palamite

theology in 1368 may have led to ‘an extreme exaltation of the monks of
Mount Athos as the spokesmen for Orthodoxy’,104 but it did not imprison
Orthodoxy in a ‘theology of repetition’.105
6. The Reception of Palamas
Palamas saw his philosophical and theological defence of hesychasm triumph

in 1351, six years before he died, but, once Kantakouzenos had abdicated,
the will was lacking at the top to discipline the dissidents. In 1369, a year
after Palamas’ canonization, John V Palaiologos became a Roman Catholic
(in his private capacity) in the hope that this would help him obtain Western
military aid. Yet even if, as Gregoras claimed, he criticized hesychasm
in private, he showed no hostility to it in public. John VI Kantakouzenos
continued strongly to support Palamism from his monastic retirement,
writing two treatises against Prochoros and sponsoring the copying of
manuscripts. Several of the opponents of Palamite theology in the circle of
Demetrios Kydones joined the Latin Church and became Dominicans. In
1396 the Church’s line hardened and the patriarch Antony IV introduced a
religious test: waverers were now compelled to sign a Palamite profession of
faith.106 The fact that many anti-Palamites saw that they no longer had any
place in Orthodoxy and became Roman Catholics meant that the West, from
the outset, inherited a tradition of hostility to Palamas.107
Western hostility began to be expressed forcibly, however, only in the
seventeenth century. At the Council of Florence (1438–39), even though
the Latins were aware of the commitment of the Greeks to the essence–
energies distinction, Palamite theology did not become an issue. It became
so only after the Council of Trent (1545–63), in the competitive confes-
sional atmosphere of the Catholic Counter-Reform. The French Jesuit Denis
Petau (Dionysius Petavius) and the Catholic Greek scriptor at the Vatican
Library, Leon Allatzes (Leo Allatius), were the first to discuss Palamas
in printed works.108 For them Palamite theology was proof that the Greek
104 Rigo 2004, 50.

105 On the impact of Aquinas on Byzantine thought, see Plested 2012, Part II.
106 Russell 2003, 171.
107 I discuss the history of the reception of Palamas more fully in Russell 2019, Part I.
108 Petavius in the first volume of his De dogmatibus theologicis (Paris, 1644), and
34 GREGORY PALAMAS
Church was in error and that to be sure of salvation Orthodox Christians

needed to become Roman Catholics. Another French Jesuit, François
Richard, took the debate beyond learned circles with his publication in
vernacular Greek of his Shield of the Faith of the Roman Church (Paris,
1658), known as the Targa after its Greek title, which attacked Palamas as
a heretic. The patriarch of Jerusalem, Dositheos II, responded to the Targa
with his Tome of Love (Iasi, 1698), a collection of Palamite texts prefaced
by a long introduction giving an account of the Hesychast Controversy
from a Palamite perspective. In 1727, in the context of worsening relations
with the Roman Catholic Church, a Constantinopolitan council endorsed
Palamism once again. In 1784 the Life of Palamas by Philotheos Kokkinos
was published in Demotic Greek by St Athanasios of Paros, because, as
he says, he found that the people of Thessalonike had no knowledge of
their great saint. Several attempts by Greeks, however, to publish Palamas’
collected works, including one in the seventeenth century by Dositheos
of Jerusalem and another in the eighteenth by Nikodemos the Hagiorite,
came to nothing because of the unfavourable political circumstances of the
time.109 Throughout this period Western scholars, for whom the Hesychast
Controversy, in Gibbon’s words, ‘consummated the religious follies of the
Greeks’,110 remained, with very few exceptions, hostile to Palamas.
Gibbon was imbued with the religious scepticism of the Enlightenment.
But the Enlightenment also fostered the study of history on scientific
principles. The first scholarly monograph on Palamas was by a Russian
cleric, Igumen Modest Strelbitsky, who published his St Gregory Palamas,
Metropolitan of Thessalonike in Kiev in 1860. Valuable work was also
done in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth century by Bishop
Porfyrii Uspensky, who consulted manuscripts on Mount Athos, and the
Byzantinist Feodor Ivanovich Uspensky, who edited the journal Vizantiiskii
Vremennik during and after the First World War. In Greece, a professor at
the University of Athens, Gregorios Papamichail, produced a monograph
Allatius in his De Ecclesiae occidentalis atque orientalis perpetua consensione (‘Cologne’,

1648).
109 The three-volume manuscript which Nikodemos sent to a Greek printer in Vienna in
1797 was lost when the printer’s premises were raided by the Austrian police looking for
Greek revolutionary material.
110 Gibbon 1910, vol. 6, 265. Gibbon’s two pages on the Hesychast Controversy (265–6)
in this, the sixty-third chapter of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, are still worth
reading. Although appalled by Hesychast doctrine, he records his satisfaction that neither the
axe nor ‘the faggot were employed for the extirpation of the Barlaamite heresy’.
on Palamas in 1911, based on the study of a selection of manuscript sources,

which is still useful. The most erudite student of Palamas in the first half
of the twentieth century, however, was the French Assumptionist priest
Martin Jugie, whose articles on Palamas and the Palamite controversy in
the Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique set the benchmark for Palamas
studies for many decades.111 But Jugie, who coined the term ‘Palamism’,
was hardly non-partisan. His interest in Palamas was motivated by a
desire to show that the Orthodox Church had introduced innovations in
the past and was therefore not comparable to the Roman Catholic Church
as a vehicle of salvation. The response to Jugie was led by Russians of
the post-revolution diaspora based in Paris, chief of whom was John
Meyendorff, whose modestly entitled Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire
Palamas (Paris, 1959) has still not been superseded. Yet Meyendorff, too,
was strongly motivated by party spirit. It was only towards the end of the
twentieth century that work without a theological axe to grind began to
appear, deepening our historical understanding of Palamas and his age.
7. Texts and Editions
The publication of a critical edition of the complete works of Gregory

Palamas was due to the labours of John Meyendorff. His simultaneous
publication in 1959 of his magisterial Introduction and his critical edition
of Palamas’ Triads coincided with the celebration of the sixth centenary
of Palamas’ death. At a conference on Palamas held in Thessalonike to
mark the occasion a decision was taken to publish the whole of Palamas
on the basis of the best manuscripts and the existing critical editions.
The general editorship was entrusted to Panagiotis Christou, Professor
of Patristics at Thessalonike’s Aristotle University. The first volume,
published in 1962, contains Palamas’ apodictic treatises Against the Latins,
his correspondence with Barlaam and Akindynos, and his Triads. The
enterprise was welcomed by the scholarly world, even if some reviewers
criticized the standard of editing and the absence of any discussion of the
manuscripts. After a long gap between the third and fourth volumes the
series was finally completed with a fifth volume in 1992.112
111 Jugie 1932.

112 The five-volume Greek edition has been reprinted in an inexpensive set of three
volumes on the initiative of the Italian psychiatrist and philosopher Ettore Perrella (Perrella
36 GREGORY PALAMAS
Before the Christou edition, any serious work on Palamas had had to
rely on the manuscripts. All that had previously been published, often in
unsatisfactory editions, was reprinted in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, but
even these texts would not have been available if it had not been for the
advice of the Abbé Migne’s mentor, the great French patrologist Cardinal
Pitra. Migne himself was not inclined to reprint the works of such a
notorious heretic as Palamas; Pitra persuaded him otherwise.113 Migne’s
collection also contains the Synodal Tomoi from 1341 to 1368, the Life by
Philotheos, and much other material from the patriarchal registers and the
writings of anti-Palamites. Critical editions of many of these texts, together
with editions of important authors previously available only to those who
could consult the manuscripts, have now put us in a better position than
at any time since the fourteenth century to engage with Palamas and his
doctrines in an informed manner.
I, II and III, published in 2003, 2005 and 2006). With the exception of the homilies (only in
Italian), the Greek text of all of Palamas’ writings is given with an Italian translation on the
facing page.
113 See the monitum in PG 151, 551–2. Nadal Cañellas, who identifies the unnamed mentor
as Cardinal Jean-Baptiste Pitra (1812–89), has provided a French translation: Nadal 2006,
vol. 1, xvii.
I
THE LIFE OF GREGORY PALAMAS

BY PHILOTHEOS KOKKINOS
by Philotheos Kokkinos
Introduction
The Life of Gregory Palamas was written by Philotheos Kokkinos, as he

himself states in the Synodal Tomos of 1368.1 The terminus a quo of its
composition is supplied by a quotation from Palamas’ Against Gregoras I,2
which dates from 1355, but no doubt, even if Philotheos started collecting
materials earlier, he began the composition of the work after Palamas’ death
in November 1357. The terminus ad quem is Philotheos’ mention in the
Synodal Tomos of 1368 of the Life of Palamas written by him.3 Along with
the Life, Philotheos also refers to akolouthiai he composed. The work may
therefore be assigned to the period between November 1357 and October
1364, during the time of Philotheos’ forced retirement from the patriarchate,4
when he was living at the Akataleptos monastery in the north of the city near
the Golden Horn.5 There the anniversary of the death of Palamas had been
celebrated annually as a feast from within a year or two of Palamas’ death.
Philotheos was the author of a considerable hagiographic corpus.6
Four of his Lives were of monastic contemporaries whom he had known
1 Synodal Tomos of 1368, §19 (Rigo, lines 732–4).

2 Life of Palamas, §11, lines 15–17 (Tsames, 438).
4 He refers to Kallistos I as ‘the patriarch who was my predecessor’ at the time when
he was collecting evidence for Palamas’ miracles: Synodal Tomos of 1368, §19 (Rigo, lines
745–6).
5 The monastery church survives today as the Eski Imaret Camıı.
6 Thirteen works are listed by Vitalien Laurent (Laurent 1935, 1505–6). Laurent’s article
still gives the best overview of Philotheos Kokkinos (PLP 11917), the second hesychast
patriarch of Constantinople from 1353 to 1354/5 and from 1364 to 1376. For Philotheos’
refutation of Nikephoros Gregoras, see Russell 2009; for his relations with Mount Athos
see Rigo 2004 and 2015a, 274–5; and for his broader political activity see Christou 1985 and
Obolensky 1988, 178–84.
38 GREGORY PALAMAS
personally and whose sanctity he could vouch for.7 He had known Palamas
intimately, but in view of the controversy surrounding him did not assume
that he was thereby absolved from due diligence: ‘I took the greatest care
to obtain accurate information’, he says.8 Philotheos’ extreme care is
reflected in the way in which he records the sequence of events. He never
gives full dates but he does indicate the precise number of years elapsing
between each episode. In theory it should therefore be possible to construct
a reliable chronology of Palamas’ life by working backwards from the date
of his death. In practice it is not so easy.
Chronology
The main question concerns the year of Palamas’ death. Philotheos tells
us that Palamas died immediately after the feast of St John Chysostom
(therefore 14 November), but further than that specifies only that Palamas
lived for sixty-three years, twelve and a half of them ‘exercising a wonderful
leadership of the Church’.9 We know that Palamas was elected metropolitan
of Thessalonike in May/June 1347, so according to Philotheos this would
make the year of his death 1359 or, in the Byzantine reckoning, early in
6868 (the year anno mundi running from 1 September to 31 August). In
1903, however, Professor N. Beïs of the University of Athens, following
indications in the Byzantine brief chronicles, fixed the year as 6866, making
the date 14 November 1357.10 In the following year Beïs’ colleague, Professor
K. I. Dyovouniotis, calculating, in accordance with Philotheos, twelve and a
half years from Palamas’ episcopal ordination in 1347, argued that the year
of Palamas’ death must have been 1359.11 Beïs responded in 1906, defending
his original assertion, but Dyovouniotis’ date of 1359 held the field until
the end of the twentieth century. Since then, largely through the work of
Antonio Rigo, the consensus of scholarly opinion has swung back to 1357.
In an influential article on the circumstances of the canonization
of Palamas, Rigo subjects the evidence for dating to careful scrutiny.12
7 Germanos Maroules (d. c. 1335), Isidore Boucheiras (d. 1349), Sabas the Younger
(d. 1349), and Palamas himself. Critical editions in Tsames 1985.
9 Life, §115, lines 15–17 (Tsames, 563–4).
10 In vol. 16 of the journal Athena. For full references see Meyendorff 1959, 168, n. 70.
11 Meyendorff 1959, 168, n. 70.
12 Rigo 1993, 159–62, n. 9. See Rigo for the full documentation of his arguments.
LIFE BY PHILOTHEOS KOKKINOS 39
The day and the month (14 November) are not in dispute, but the year
is unclear. From the coordinates given by various fourteenth-century
sources, three years are possible: 6866, 6867, or 6868 (i.e. 1357, 1358,
or 1359). Three brief anonymous chronicles independently of each other
give the year 6866 (1357).13 Nikephoros Gregoras, who says that Palamas
died fifteen years after the Messalian affair on Mount Athos, implies that
the year was 6867 (1358). Philotheos gives conflicting information. He
assigns the return of Palamas to Thessalonike to the beginning of 6863
(early September 1355), telling us also that Palamas began to suffer at
this time from the illness from which he died four years later (i.e. in 6867,
or 1358). But he also says that Palamas had been a bishop for twelve and
a half years (or, in the Akolouthia, also composed by him, for thirteen
years), which would place his death in the early months of 6868 (1359).
In view of these conflicting dates the best solution is to look for evidence
from independent sources.
The line of inquiry adopted by Rigo is to attempt to ascertain when
Palamas’ successor was elected. We know from Symeon, metropolitan
of Thessalonike at the beginning of the fifteenth century, that the next
metropolitan after Palamas was Neilos Kabasilas, who died in 1362
without taking possession of his see.14 Unfortunately, the first mention of
Kabasilas as metropolitan-elect of Thessalonike is in a synodal act which
is undated.15 The act was assigned by Darrouzès to the beginning of 1361
on the assumption that Palamas had died in 1359.16 But there is evidence to
suggest that it should be dated earlier. Rigo draws attention to a reminiscence
by Makarios of Ankyra that Neilos Kabasilas, as metropolitan-elect
of Thessalonike, presented a memorandum on the occasion of a dispute
concerning the deposition of a metropolitan of Alania that sustained the
right of appeal to the emperor against a patriarchal decision. The dispute is
also reported by Gregoras and must be assigned to 1357, with the relevant
synod taking place in 1358.17
Rigo’s conclusion, namely, that Palamas must have died in 1357, has
won general acceptance, even if it is difficult to explain why Philotheos,
who is normally very careful about indications of chronology, should have
13 Schreiner, Byzantinischen Kleinchroniken, 387, 565, 625.

14 PG 155, 145A.
15 Miklosich and Müller 1860, 417; Koder et al., 2001, Nr 257, 498.
16 Darrouzès 1977, nr. 2432.
17 Details in Rigo 1993, 161.
40 GREGORY PALAMAS
made a mistake as fundamental as that of the year of Palamas’ death.18 On

the assumption that Philotheos is correct, however, in saying that Palamas
‘lived for sixty-three years with the morsel of flesh he was born with’,19 by
working back from Rigo’s date we can fix the year of Palamas’ birth as
6804, or 1295/6.20
The date of Palamas’ departure from Constantinople to embrace the
monastic life on Mount Athos is also problematic. Philotheos declares that
Theoleptos of Philadelphia had been one of Palamas’ spiritual guides.21
Sinkewicz believes that this must be rejected ‘since the chronology of
their lives does not allow for this’.22 Theoleptos’ presence is attested in
Constantinople in 1307–08 (when, as Sinkewicz observes, Palamas was
too young to have been his disciple), but Theoleptos is also known to have
participated in patriarchal synods in Constantinople in 1318 and 1319.23 If
Palamas left Constantinople not in about 1316, as Meyendorff maintains,
but at the end of 1319, when he was twenty-four years old, the chronological
problem is resolved without having to reject any of Philotheos’ statements.24
On the assumption that Palamas arrived on Mount Athos in the spring
of 1320, his withdrawal to Thessalonike on account of Turkish raids –
following Philotheos’ indications of the time elapsing between each change
of residence – would have been in 1326. This was the time when Turkish
mercenaries, employed by Andronikos II in his dynastic war with his
father Andronikos III, were plundering on their own account in Thrace
and Macedonia. Palamas’ stay in Thessalonike, however, was brief. He
was ordained there but in the same year moved with ten companions to a
monastery near Berroia, sixty kilometres to the south-west of Thessalonike.
Again, this move can be correlated with the political situation, for it was
18 Rigo promises as the end of his discussion (Rigo 1993, 162) to return to this question
but he has not yet had the opportunity to do so.
19 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §115, lines 15–16 (Tsames, 563–4).
20 Note that the Greek method of computation counts both ends of a series.
21 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §12, lines 1–8 (Tsames, 439); cf. Palamas, Triads I, 2, 12,
lines 11–17 (Meyendorff, 99).
22 Sinkewicz 2002, 132.
23 Sinkewicz himself notes this, with reference to Darrouzès 1977, nos 2082, 2083, 2085,
2086, 2087, and 2093 (Sinkewicz 1992, 16).
24 Meyendorff 1959, 50, takes Philotheos’ reference to Palamas having reached the end of
adolescence when he began to make preparations for his retirement to Mount Athos (Life of
Palamas, §14, line 1 [Tsames, 441]) to imply that he was then about twenty. Legally, however,
adulthood began at twenty-five, so there is no contradiction in accepting that Palamas left
Constantinople at the age of twenty-four.
in 1326 that the governor of Thessalonike, the panhypersebastos John

Palaiologos, entered into negotiations with Stefan Uroš III with a view to
transferring his allegiance to the Serbs. The crisis was resolved temporarily
in the following year by the death of John Palaiologos at the Serbian capital,
Skopje, but in 1331 a large-scale Serbian invasion of Macedonia forced
Palamas to leave Berroia and return to Mount Athos.
Palamas spent the period from 1331 to 1337 on Mount Athos. Philotheos
describes a vision Palamas had ‘in the third year’ of an overflowing cup of
milk turning into wine.25 Palamas related his vision to his disciple Dorotheos
Blates, taking it as divine authorization for the apostolate of teaching and
writing to which he felt himself called.26 He rapidly gained recognition as
a man of learning and spiritual discernment. One consequence of this was
his election by the protos and council to the hegumenate of Esphigmenou,
an office he held in 1335–36.27 Why his hegumenate did not last longer is
not explained by Philotheos, but the story of the healing of the ‘delusions’
of the monk Eudokimos concerning Palamas’ fitness as a mystical teacher
suggests that he encountered opposition to his spiritual teaching that
made it difficult for him to continue as hegoumenos.28 It is a telling detail
that, after his departure, according to Philotheos, the hesychasts in the
community also left.29
Palamas retired in 1336 to his hermitage of St Sabas near the Lavra. It
was here that he first wrote to Barlaam of Calabria about the latter’s denial
of the validity of apodictic proofs with regard to the internal relations of
the Trinity. In the following year he was asked by Isidore Boucheiras to
come to Thessalonike to assist him in the defence of hesychasm against
the accusations of Barlaam. It was in Thessalonike, where he continued
to practise the hesychast life ‘in a little cell in the innermost recesses of
his house’,30 that he wrote the Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts.
He was still in Thessalonike when he was summoned to Constantinople to
answer a formal charge of heresy laid against him and the hesychasts by
Barlaam.
25 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §35 (Tsames, 466–7).

26 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §36 (Tsames, 467–8). Palamas had already composed his
first work, his Life of Peter the Athonite, which Rigo 1995 dates to 1332.
27 It was at the beginning of his hegumenate that he published his two apodictic treatises
Against the Latins (second half of 1335).
28 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §38 (Tsames, 470–1).
29 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §37, lines 43–9 (Tsames, 470).
42 GREGORY PALAMAS
The situation for Palamas was dangerous. In the summer of 1340 he

had taken the precaution of going to Mount Athos to organize a common
front against the accusations Barlaam had made in Against the Messalians.
The Hagioretic Tomos he drew up and had signed by the central authorities
in Kareai was to be crucial for his defence against the charge of heresy. He
set out for Constantinople with Isidore in the winter of 1340–41. When he
arrived at the capital early in 1341, he found the current of opinion flowing
against him.31 But as a result of intensive lobbying, by the time the council
was convoked on 10 June 1341 most of the bishops residing in Constantinople
had been won over to his side. At the council itself, presided over by the
emperor Andronikos III, Palamas was easily vindicated. Instead, it was
Barlaam who was condemned and his works against the hesychasts were
ordered to be destroyed.
After the council Palamas stayed on in Constantinople. This was
because although Barlaam quickly withdrew from the scene and made
his way to Avignon (where he obtained from Pope Clement VI the see
of Gerace in Calabria), Palamas’ former disciple, Gregory Akindynos,
stepped forward to lead the opposition to him. A second council was
convoked in July to hear Akindynos’ complaints.32 But a week after the
June council Andronikos III had died suddenly, and the new council of
July was presided over by his megas domestikos, John Kantakouzenos.
The new council again supported Palamas but ‘scarcely two months’ later
the deteriorating political situation led to a renewed bout of civil strife,
with Kantakouzenos taking up armed in opposition to the regency of the
empress Anna and the patriarch John Kalekas.33 Consequently, the second
council is not mentioned in the Synodal Tomos of 1341.
Palamas spent the early years of the civil war in the vicinity of
Constantinople, first at the monastery of the Archangel Michael at
Anaplous and then at Herakleia.34 Akindynos was now in the ascendancy,
with Kalekas using him as his principal theological adviser. Being
a Palamite was now seen as tantamount to being a Kantakouzenist.
On 26 March 1342 a delegation of senior Athonite monks arrived in
Constantinople on a mission to mediate between John Kantakouzenos

32 Meyendorff 1959, 86 follows Jugie in dating this council to August. More recent
research has established that it was held in July. See Nadal 2006, ii, 204–20.
33 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §65, line 4 (Tsames, 499).
34 Palamas, Letter to Philotheos, §13 (Christou II, 530; Perrella III, 994–6).
and the regency.35 By the autumn it was clear that the mission had failed
and in May/June of the following year Palamas was arrested and confined
in the prison of the Blachernai palace on the charge that he had been in
treasonable communication with Kantakouzenos. On 4 November 1344
the patriarchal synod deposed Isidore Boucheiras as metropolitan-elect
of Monembasia and excommunicated Palamas on the grounds that by
continuing to write in defence of his theology he was contravening the
stipulation of the Synodal Tomos of 1341 prohibiting all further debate.
Palamas remained in prison until he was released just before the empress
Anna’s capitulation to John Kantakouzenos on 8 February 1347.
The council convoked in February 1347 overturned the ecclesiastical
policy of John Kalekas. Palamite theology was once again vindicated,
Kalekas was deposed, and on 17 May 1347 Isidore Boucheiras was elected
patriarch. Later in May or early June Palamas was elected metropolitan
of Thessalonike.36 As a Kantakouzenist, however, he was not welcome
in Thessalonike, which was still under Zealot control, and was unable to
take possession of his see. On being refused entry into the city, he went to
Mount Athos, where, probably at the end of November 1347, he met Stefan
Dušan, who was then staying on the Holy Mountain.37 On Stefan’s behalf
he undertook an embassy in December 1347 to Kantakouzenos, now the
emperor John VI, who was in Constantinople.38 As Rigo remarks, the events
of Palamas’ first six months as metropolitan demonstrate his close ties to
Kantakouzenos.39 It was only with the fall of the strongly anti-Kantakouzenist
Zealot regime in September 1350 that he was able to enter Thessalonike.
The challenge to Palamite theology, however, had not yet been
overcome in a convincing and conclusive manner. The council of 1347
had been arranged hurriedly as one of a series of events to consolidate
Kantakouzenos’ victory in the civil war. A number of bishops remained
unreconciled and, moreover, after the excommunication of Akindynos the
philosopher Nikephoros Gregoras had emerged as a powerful spokesman
for the opposition. At the council of 1351 John Kantakouzenos took care
that the opposition should be heard at length and that the final decision in
35 Rigo 2015a, 259.

36 On the date see Rigo 2014, 136.
37 Rigo 2014, 145.
38 Rigo 2014, 147–8. Rigo points out that Kantakouzenos was actually at Didymoteichon,
but this is not a detail of importance to Philotheos.
39 Rigo 2014, 148.
44 GREGORY PALAMAS
favour of Palamas should command as broad an assent as possible. The

council was a major event, but Philotheos passes over it rapidly, ‘content to
leave the details of what was said and enacted there’ to others.40 He is more
concerned with the trials still awaiting Palamas in Thessalonike.
Palamas returned to his see late in the year (‘it was outside the sailing
season’41) only to find his entry barred once again as a result of the deterio-
rating relationship between John V Palaiologos (then resident in Thessalonike)
and John VI Kantakouzenos. On this occasion John V was brought round
by his mother, the empress Anna, but his renewed opposition to John VI
after the coronation of Matthew Kantakouzenos as co-emperor in February
1354 led to Palamas undertaking a new political mission to Constantinople
to reconcile the two senior emperors. It was on his way to Constantinople by
sea in March 1354 that he was taken prisoner by the Turks.
The date of Palamas’ capture is fixed by the earthquake that destroyed
Gallipoli on 2 March 1354. It was ‘a few days after the earthquake’ that
Palamas embarked on a ship at Tenedos to take him to Constantinople.42
He was released in the following year after the payment of a ransom.43
The date is not specified in any of the sources, but it must have been in the
spring of 1355.44 Palamas stayed in the capital until the end of August,45
during which time he engaged in debate with Nikephoros Gregoras at the
request of John V Palaiologos. His return to Thessalonike must therefore be
dated to the end of the summer.46
Palamas remained in Thessalonike until his death. It was there that
he composed his final work, his four treatises Against Gregoras, which
Philotheos says he completed ‘in the third year’ after his departure from
Constantinople for the last time – therefore in 1357.47 His death occurred
within a few months, on 14 November of the same year.

42 Palamas, Letter to his Church, §5, line 1 (Philippidis-Braat 1979, 139).
43 Philotheos says that Palamas ‘spent a whole year in captivity’: Life of Palamas, §103,
line 1 (Tsames 1985, 552).
44 For a discussion of the date and circumstances of his release see Philippidis-Braat
1979, 207–10.
45 A synodal act dated 17 August 1355 bears Palamas’ signature; Philippidis-Braat 1979,
209, n. 4, with reference to Miklosich and Müller I, 432–3 and Darrouzès 1977, 358–9.
46 As Rigo points out, the end of summer is indicated by the first miracle recorded after
Palamas’ return, which was the breaking of a drought (Rigo 1993, 160).
The following timeline summarizes the above discussion:

1295/6. Born in Constantinople.
1301/2. Death of father, Konstantinos/Konstantios (Gregory ‘had not yet
completed his seventh year’48).
1319, autumn. Departs for Athos (‘it was already autumn’49) with his
brothers Makarios and Theodosios.
1319–20. Spends the winter on Mount Papikion.
1320, March. Arrives on Athos (‘at the beginning of spring’50) and becomes
a disciple of Nikodemos of Vatopedi.
1322. Death of Nikodemos (‘in the third year’51 of Gregory’s monastic life)
and transfer to the Lavra.
1324. Moves to the hermitage of Glossia (‘after the third year’52).
1326. Forced by Turkish raids to leave Athos (‘two years after Gregory’s
arrival’53).
1326. Arrives in Thessalonike and is ordained priest.
1327. Leaves Thessalonike and arrives at Berroia (‘he was then in his
thirtieth year’54).
1331. Forced to leave Berroia as a result of invasion by the Serbs (‘in his
fifth year living here’55).
1331. Returns to the Lavra and establishes himself at St Sabas.
1335. Elected hegoumenos of Esphigmenou.
1336. Returns to the Lavra and withdraws to St Sabas.
1336, autumn. Engages with Barlaam.

52 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §21, lines 11 (Tsames, 449).
46 GREGORY PALAMAS
1337–40. Summoned to Thessalonike by Isidore Boucheiras, where he

spends ‘three years’.56
1340/1, winter. Summoned to answer charges in Constantinople.
1341, spring. Arrives in Constantinople ‘a little while before’57 the synodal
hearing.
1341, 10 June. Successfully defends himself against Barlaam at the council
of 1341.
1341–43. Remains in the vicinity of Constantinople, retiring to the
monastery of St Michael at Anaplous and then to Herakleia.
1343, April/May. Imprisoned in the Blachernai palace.
1344, 4 November. Excommunicated by John Kalekas and the patriarchal
synod.58
1347, 2/8 February. Released from the Blachernai palace prison.
1347, February. Participates in the councils of 1347.
1347, May/June. Consecrated metropolitan of Thessalonike.59
1347, autumn. On being refused entry into Thessalonike, goes to Mount
Athos, where meets Stefan Duşan.
1347, December. Sent to Constantinople by Stefan Dušan.
1350, September. Enters Thessalonike and takes possession of his see.
1351, May. In Constantinople for the council of 1351.
1354, March. Captured by the Turks on his way from Thessalonike to
Constantinople on a mission to reconcile John V Palaiologos with
John VI Kantakouzenos.
1355, spring. Released by the Turks on payment of a ransom and arrives in
Constantinople.
56 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §52, lines 26–27 (Tsames 1985, 484–5).

57 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §57, lines 33–34 (Tsames 1985, 490).
58 For the date of this synod, held principally to depose Isidore Boucheiras as
metropolitan-elect of Monembasia, see Mercati 1931, 201–3.
59 The evidence for the dating of Palamas’ consecration is discussed by Meyendorff 1959,
131, n. 15.
1355, summer. Debates with Gregoras in the presence of John V Palaiologos,

Paul of Smyrna and other dignitaries.
1355, late summer. Returns to Thessalonike.
1357, 14 November. Dies in Thessalonike.
The Cult and Canonization of Palamas
The procedure by which Palamas was proclaimed a saint is of great interest.

Traditionally, a holy person was venerated locally after his or her death. A
cult would develop, with an annual commemoration. An akolouthia and
perhaps a Life would be written, and eventually the locally honoured saint
might be included in the calendar of the metropolis or patriarchate. Under
the Palaiologan emperors, however, a procedure developed leading to the
official acknowledgement or ‘canonization’ of a saint by the patriarchal
synod.60 This seems to owe something to contemporary developments
in the West, but there is no evidence of any direct borrowing. What the
saints canonized in this way have in common is a controversial political
element. Philotheos himself refers to the canonization of the ascetical
Athanasios I, who had been patriarch under Andronikos II and had been
deposed in September 1309 in order to put an end to the Arsenite schism.61
In describing what he regards as the correct procedure, Philotheos says
that anyone who wants to honour Palamas with a feast day may do so
(as Philotheos himself had done at the Akataleptos monastery) but for
the feast to be celebrated in the Great Church of Hagia Sophia a synodal
decision was necessary. And he adds: ‘This is the usual practice with the
saints whom God glorifies, as also happened in the case of St Athanasios
the ecumenical patriarch.’62
60 See Macrides 1981; Talbot 1991a. The Greek term for canonization is anakēryxis, or
‘proclamation’.
61 Arsenios Autoreianos (patriarch 1254–60 and 1261–65) marks the beginning of the
shift of power from the imperium to the Church. He opposed the unionist policy of Michael
VIII Palaiologos and excommunicated Michael in the early 1260s for blinding the legitimate
heir to the throne, the young John IV Laskaris. When Arsenios was deposed and exiled in
1265, his followers (who like him revered the memory of the Laskarids) refused to accept his
successors.
62 Synodal Tomos of 1368, lines 766–8 (§19) (Rigo 2004, 127). The precise date is not
known.
48 GREGORY PALAMAS
The official process for the canonization of Gregory Palamas was

initiated under Philotheos’ predecessor, Kallistos I, when the patriarch
wrote to the suffragan bishops of Thessalonike (the city being still sede
vacante) asking them to investigate the miracles attributed to their late
metropolitan.63 Philotheos, however, had already begun his own investi-
gation. In about 1360/1 he wrote to the megas oikonomos of the metropolis
of Thessalonike (whom he addresses as his brother) instructing him to write
a report for him on the miracles claimed at Palamas’ tomb.64 The report
(written in a less elevated style than the rest of the Life) is incorporated by
Philotheos into his text, but there is evidence that it also circulated indepen-
dently.65 These miracles, which give us, incidentally, a vivid picture of the
lives of a variety of people from different social classes,66 were needed as
a testimony that it was God, not the Church, who glorified the saint – a
valuable feature in the case of a contested figure such as Gregory Palamas.
Besides recounting the miracles attributed to Palamas, Philotheos
also gives indications of how his cult spread. Palamas was a saint of
more than local importance. Serbs as well as Greeks flocked to his tomb
in Thessalonike in search of healing.67 In Kastoria, an important city in
western Macedonia, icons were painted of him and a feast instituted on
the anniversary of his death. It was also in Kastoria that the first church
dedicated to St Gregory Palamas appears to have been built.68 ‘They did not
wait for great synods and common votes in order to proclaim him a saint’,
says Philotheos, ‘for these are sometimes obstructed by time, caution,
diligence and a host of human considerations, but were rightly satisfied by
the vote and proclamation from on high and by the clear and unambiguous
sight and assurance of the facts themselves.’69 Thus well before the synod
of 1368 Palamas was being celebrated liturgically as a saint not only in
63 Synodal Tomos of 1368, lines 745–9 (§19) (Rigo 2004, 126). Rigo (2004, 89) dates this
letter to about 1362. Neilos Kabasilas, although already metropolitan-elect of Thessalonike,
had not taken possession of his see.
64 Synodal Tomos of 1368, lines 739–41 (§19) (Rigo 2004, 126). The dating is suggested
by Rigo 2004, 89.
65 A volume of the miracles of the metropolitan of Thessalonike is mentioned in a
contemporary Life of Maximos of Kausokalyvia (Halkin, 60).
66 For discussions of what these reveal about social attitudes at the time see Talbot 2006
and Talbot 2010.
68 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §128, lines 3–6 (Tsames, 581); cf. Synodal Tomos of 1368,
lines 781–2 (§19) (Rigo 2004, 127). The church is no longer extant.
Kastoria but also in Thessalonike, in the capital itself (with particular

splendour at the monastery of the Akataleptos), and on Mount Athos (at
Palamas’ own monastery of the Great Lavra). Nor did the feast need to be
celebrated discreetly. According to Philotheos, the synodal proclamation of
Palamas’ sanctity was simply a formality that was needed before he could
be celebrated liturgically in the Great Church itself of Hagia Sophia.70
Documents Included in the Text
Besides incorporating the miracle reports he had received from the megas
oikonomos of Thessalonike,71 Philotheos also reproduces four other
documents. These are:
1. Chapter 11 (§ 34–§ 40) of Palamas’ Seventh Antirrhetic Against
Akindynos.72
2. Most of Palamas’ Second Letter to his Brother Makarios.73
3. A large section of Palamas’ Letter to his Church from captivity
among the Turks.74
4. The account of the emir Orhan’s Greek doctor, Taronites, of the
disputation between Palamas and the Chionai.75
The purpose of these texts is to allow Palamas to present his own testimony
at critical points in the narrative. The chapter from Against Akindynos
VII comes at the point when Palamas moves back to the Lavra after the
obscurity of his years at Berroia and is about to emerge as a public figure,
first as hegoumenos of Esphigmenou and then as the opponent of Barlaam
of Calabria. Philotheos wants to present a spiritual portrait of his subject
that will win the reader’s sympathy for him during the events to come.
He knew Palamas intimately as a friend, but ‘nobody can know someone
70 Synodal Tomos of 1368, lines 772–3 (§19) (Rigo 2004, 127).

71 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §97, lines 1–48 (Tsames, 533–5); §105–8 (Tsames, 553–6;
§114–34 (Tsames, 562–88).
74 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §99, lines 5–61 (Tsames, 536–8) and §100, lines 14–178
(Tsames, 538–43).
50 GREGORY PALAMAS
and what he has actually experienced like that person himself, not even
someone close to him, or know how to speak and write about it in the way
that he himself can.’76 This remark is typical of the acute psychological
observations we find at many points in the Life.
Palamas’ Second Letter to his Brother Makarios was written from the
prison of the Blachernai palace at the beginning of 1345.77 Makarios, the
elder of the two brothers with whom Palamas had embraced the monastic
life in 1320, was a monk of the Great Lavra. In this letter addressed to
him (but intended, no doubt, for general circulation at the Lavra) Palamas
briefly reviews his experiences since the beginning of the civil war, when
the authorities first moved against him, and expresses his conviction that
the tide was now turning in his favour. By allowing a change of voice at this
point in a terse passage from Palamas’ letter that conveys the immediacy
of the events as they unfolded, Philotheos heightens the dramatic impact of
the change of fortune that is to follow.
The remaining two documents, relating to Palamas’ captivity in the
Ottoman emirate from March 1354 to the spring of 1355, are included
by Philotheos for their intrinsic interest and lively circumstantial detail.
Philotheos had no personal experience of the Ottoman emirate, so it
was appropriate that Palamas should speak for himself. The texts that
Philotheos reproduces are the accounts of the two discussions Palamas had
with Muslims at Prousa (Bursa) and at Nicaea (Iznik) from his Letter to
his Church of July 1354,78 and the report by Taronites of the disputation of
Palamas with the Chionai that was held at Prousa at the emir’s request.79
Besides the value of the texts simply as gripping narratives, Palamas’
first-hand account of how Christians lived under Ottoman rule, and his
eloquent defence of Christian doctrine in the face of Muslim objections,
were of the greatest interest to Philotheos’ audience.

77 Dated by Meyendorff 1959, 370. In his revision of the dating of Palamas’ letters from
prison, Rigo (2015a, 272–3) accepts Meyendorff’s date.
78 Meyendorff 1959, 162–3.
79 The date of the disputation is therefore the early summer of 1354.
Text and Translations
The Life of Palamas has been translated below from the critical edition by
Demetrios Tsames. Based on a study of five manuscripts of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries,80 it was published by Tsames in 1985 in the corpus
of Philotheos’ hagiographical works.81 The first printed edition, based on
a faulty manuscript of the sixteenth century,82 had been published by the
patriarch Cyril of Jerusalem in 1857. It was this edition that was reproduced
by Migne (PG 151, 551–656) and has been superseded by Tsames.
The earliest versions of the Life in Demotic Greek are found in two
late Athonite manuscripts of Iviron and Esphigmenou.83 The first printed
edition in the vernacular is a version of Athanasios of Paros, published
in Vienna in 1784 at the expense of a pious Thessalonian, John Goutas.84
Athanasios published his translation to make Palamas better known among
the Greeks and also, he says, to defend him against his Western enemies.
In the twentieth century a Modern Greek translation was also published by
Panagiotis Christou in the Greek Fathers of the Church series.85 The work
of translation has continued in the present century. The complete text of
the Life has been translated into Italian by Ettore Perrella and Emanuele
Greselin.86 The miracles stories have been translated into English by
Alice-Mary Talbot.87 The present translation is the first in English of the
complete text.
80 Three of these are on Athos at the Great Lavra (M. Lavras 321, 1134, 1573), and two
in Paris at the Bibliothèque nationale (Parisinus gr. 421 and Parisinus Coisl. 98). Several
codices of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, not used by Tsames, are also listed by
Philippidis-Braat 1979, 120–1.
81 Tsames 1985, 427–591.
82 Hieros. S. Crucis 22.
83 These are Athous Iviron 589 and Athous Esphigmenou 107: Philippidis-Braat 1979,
121.
84 Reprinted by Ekdoseis Orthodoxos Kypseli, Thessalonike, 1981.
85 EPE 70, Thessalonike 1984,
86 Perrella I, 1353–513. I have borrowed my sub-headings in the text from Perrella.
87 Talbot and Johnson 2012, 299–437.
52 GREGORY PALAMAS
Text
Philotheos
Most Holy Patriarch of Constantinople
Discourse
On our Father among the Saints
Gregory Archbishop of Thessalonike
Prologue
1. The great Gregory has long been regarded as a subject set before the
Church of Christ for celebration and for competitions in eloquence. But
until now nobody at all has had the courage to take up the challenge. On
the contrary, all of them – speech-writers, orators and, one might say, the
whole golden generation of wise men88 – hesitating to speak and equally
drawing back because of the magnitude of the subject, have honoured the
man only in silence,89 admiring his eloquence and astonished, as it were,
at his voice. And rightly so. If it were easy to enter into his thinking and
receive his words, and this occurred naturally, all would have quickly
attempted it from the beginning, and nobody who spends his life among
speeches and muses would have flinched from doing so. Indeed, only thus
would it have been possible to succeed in an appropriate manner; only that
thinking and language could have won the prize; only that word could have
hit the target. But as that option is not available, nor does the matter permit
it, and besides, as I have said, as everyone’s powers are understandably
unequal to the task, it was necessary so far as possible that friendship in
these circumstances should prevail and should dare to measure up to the
magnitude of the task, not insisting on its own way, as blessed Paul says90
but believing all things and hoping all things, as again he himself says.91
2. Therefore, despite being myself one of the least of almost all orators and
historians of our time, since I do not concede the first place to anyone else in
88 Cf. Hesiod, Works and Days 109 (Solmsen, 53). Hesiod was a standard school text.
89 Cf. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28, 20 (Moreschini, 676).
90 1 Cor 13: 5.
91 1 Cor 13: 7.
love for him or in the list of his friends, it is also right that I should take up
the struggle before the others, speaking briefly about myself and my defeat
following what I have said, thus paying my debt so far as possible to the best
of my abilities. I think that in this way the content of my discourse will match
my hopes, either by succeeding in saying something worthy of the subject,
however inadequately, or by following the facts as a narrative. Anyone
who manages to show goodwill will also appreciate the work’s objective;
anyone, on the other hand, who fails to see any value in it will at least benefit
from one of its aims if not from both. And we shall show that we are not
so bold as to attempt a task that so exceeds our abilities out of ambition or
for the sake of displaying eloquence, but only out of friendship and what
pertains to it. Nothing I write is for the sake of praise, applause or honour
but only to preserve goodwill towards him, as I have already said. Moreover,
friendship has not corrupted my account, as one might perhaps think, and
led to exaggerations. For it is not our habit, nor was it his, to indulge in such
expressions that the account may be disputed by those who know. Indeed,
almost everyone may sit as judges on what is said here, comparing the words
with the facts and inquiring with exactitude into what really happened. For
our part, we have not indulged in exaggerating and inflating our account –
quite the contrary – but rather have contented ourselves with understatement
and restraint, and have therefore not been able to develop every aspect in a
similar fashion. Accordingly, it is reasonable to ask the well-disposed among
our audience, before the others, not to expect every detail concerning him,
nor to have everything covered in the proper order and sequence. This has
not been possible because neither the wealth of material nor its importance
has allowed it. What will be recorded will be the more essential points of
the history of this man’s remarkable life, its more urgent aspects, avoiding
equally both prolixity and excessive conciseness, so far as is possible and so
far as my capacities permit.
Youth
Origins
3. The great Gregory’s parents, like those of the great Job, were of ‘noble
stock from the East’,92 but moved to this great imperial capital, the city
of the admirable Constantine, and became here parents of children, both
92 (Job 1: 3). The ancestral home of the Palamas family is not known. Gregory’s parents
were called Konstantinos and Kale.
54 GREGORY PALAMAS
male and female.93 The admirable Gregory was the first of these in order
of birth to enter into life.94 He proved to be first not only in the words and
affairs pertaining to this world but much more so in the higher matters that
transcend the world, so that he did not fall away in the slightest from any
of the prerogatives that belong to an eldest son. As far as his native city is
concerned and the prestige it confers, it is superfluous, I think, to elaborate on
that now. It suffices to say the following, that the imperial city is universally
agreed to be superior to all others, and really is so since it exceeds them all
in every aspect, in size, beauty and position, in its combination of elements,
in the pleasantness of its breezes, in its land and sea, and in the gifts brought
to it from every quarter, by land and sea, by Hellenes, barbarians and all
races of people. But the best and most outstanding thing of all is that this
city has from the beginning been called the manifest mother and home
of the discourse and wisdom of the Hellenes, drawing to herself the once
renowned Stoa, the Peripatetics and the Academicians and uniting them
in a Christian perspective, while rejecting the godlessness and the myths,
the long passages of rubbish with their lies and absurdities, the wearisome
garrulity and deceit and dumping them ‘in their Kynosarges.’95 This city
has set that wisdom in order in accordance with truth and with faith in the
one trihypostatic, almighty and omnipotent God, and with the cross and
the simplicity of the Gospel and shown it to be a loyal slave and servant of
the true and first wisdom.
4. This, then, was the birthplace, admirable in every way, that the admirable
Gregory was allotted. And he had such parents according to the flesh as
such a person ought to have had as the cause of his coming into being or
such parents as were needed to bring such a person into this life, as will be
apparent in what follows. At the time when the second Palaeologue – I am
referring to the famous Andronikos – obtained the sceptres of the empire,
the wise Gregory’s father was a member of the senate and was numbered
among the most illustrious.96 So great was the abundance of his virtue and
93 Gregory had two brothers, Makarios and Theodosios, and two sisters, Epicharis and
Theodote. Another brother died in childhood.
94 Gregory was born in 1295/6.
95 That is to say, Constantinople has superseded Athens as a centre of true (i.e. Christian)
learning. The Kynosarges was a gymnasium outside the walls of Athens dedicated to
Herakles. According to Diogenes Laertius (Lives of the Eminent Philosophers VI, 13)
Antisthenes, a pupil of Socrates, used to teach there.
96 Andronikos II Palaiologos (1259/60–1332) became emperor in 1282.
the consent of all regarding his qualities, that the emperor chose him to be
the father and tutor of his grandson and future emperor, to train his soul
in virtue and form in him an upright character.97 As a matter of fact, he
himself, being naturally intelligent and quick-witted in all things, shrewd
and eager to occupy the first place in such matters in the eyes of all, was not
ashamed that the emperor had chosen him to be a teacher of virtue, a symbol
of goodness and an initiator and guide to everything that is best and most
beautiful. Indeed, to put it more strongly, there were times when the emperor
became angry with his household and was roused to fury and heaped threats
and abuse upon them. Whereupon they all withdrew from him, as if at a
signal, and gave way to the force of his anger, cowering, as the saying has it,
‘at the lion’s roar’.98 Gregory’s father, however, used to go up to the enraged
emperor and by his attitude and frankness of speech was able quickly to
abate his anger and pacify him. Calmly reminding him of the humility and
low condition of human nature, he would say, ‘You too doubtless share in
this nature, even if you have been appointed by God to rule over your fellow
human beings.’ And by evangelical and patristic exhortations, and indeed
by his own wise counsels, and the incantations and remedies of his thoughts
swiftly brought him to himself. The emperor, for his part, marvelling at
the man for his frankness of speech, his wisdom, and, one could perhaps
go so far as to say, his natural disposition to virtue, confessed his great
gratitude for his goodwill and his assistance. Readily holding him worthy
of the highest honours and dignities, he set him at the head of all in almost
all things – even at the head of those related to him by blood – on account
of the purity of his soul and the fact that he had his gaze fixed solely on the
good and on God. Nor was his attention centred only on words, or on some
kind of ostentation or exhibition of virtue to certain people. On the contrary,
his words were realities, the fruit at the same time of a lack of concern for
money, gain and vainglory and of an admirable love for his neighbour.
5. So great was his mental vigilance and his returning to himself and to God
through attentiveness and prayer that although he was in contact every day
with the emperor, the senate and other dignitaries, he did not ignore people
outside government circles, especially the brighter and more intelligent of
them. Sometimes when the emperor was speaking to him about current
97 Andronikos III Palaiologos (1297–1341) who succeeded his grandfather (after a civil
war) in 1328.
98 Cf. Amos 3: 8.
56 GREGORY PALAMAS
affairs, as was his custom, he saw that Palamas forgot what he was saying
to him and inquired again about the same things. The emperor did not put
up with this in others when they were speaking to him, accusing them
of stupidity and boorishness. ‘But Palamas,’ he would say, ‘forgot what I
told him not through carelessness or lack of attention but rather because
of his inward attentiveness and vigilance, his prayer and the engagement,
as it were, of his intellect with God.’ Because of this, while Palamas was
respected by all, by senior officials, judges and the powerful, he was also
the protector of men and women who had suffered injustice and every day
delivered many from their plight. Once, for example, Constantine, one
of the emperor’s sons, second in order of birth and occupying the second
position in the imperial hierarchy, had abused his power with regard to a
poor widow and appropriated from her against all justice three hundred gold
coins.99 Gregory’s father went and spoke to him, reminding him of God’s
laws, his duty to uphold justice and the laws, his special responsibility for
the protection of the poor and of widows, and similar matters. He quickly
persuaded him and told the widow that Constantine was willing to restore
what belonged to her. She for her part wanted to reward her benefactor for
his good deed and pressed him earnestly and warmly to accept half of the
money. But Gregory’s father interrupted her. ‘My dear lady,’ he said, ‘you
do not reward your benefactor rightly or in a worthy way by depriving him
of the greatest gifts for the sake of a paltry one. Now, as you yourself know
by experience, I have the influence to do such things with regard to the rich
and powerful, with God’s help of course, for what can be greater than God
for those who have intelligence? If, as you yourself say, I am overcome by
money and surrender myself to it, I shall inevitably suffer loss as a result,
since both God and the givers will despise me, and what stupidity could
be worse than that? Go then and enjoy by yourself what belongs to you by
right without anybody bothering you any more. Give all your thanks to
God and give me the gift only of your prayers.’
6. This high-minded man showed himself to be detached in a superlative

degree not only from money and property and the glory that many play
with and, as I have already said, that plays with many, but also from his
own affections, struggling though his love for Christ to overcome natural
99 The despot Constantine Palaiologos became first in the imperial hierarchy after the
death of his brother, the co-emperor Michael IX, in 1320. It was his promotion that led to the
civil war of 1321–25 between Andronikos II and his grandson Andronikos III.
needs and the powerful bonds and relations that derive from them. He
was therefore loved by both friends and family, on account of which he
himself did not cling to his children with caresses and kisses even when
they were still in the tender years of infancy, or laugh and play with them
as is natural and usual with fathers. ‘My friends, I too should enjoy these
things,’ he would say, ‘for love and nature often prompt them, but I am
wary of intimacy in case such behaviour should become a habit and make
me exceedingly wayward and mean-spirited and therefore unworthy of
God who has given children but can take some away. For it is natural that
some should predecease their own parents, as our end is uncertain and
indeterminate. So I avoid showing much intimacy and affection towards
my children, on the grounds that if a separation should occur, that is to say,
at God’s behest, I should not appear to be a person totally unprepared and
unready, a lover of children rather than of God. It is absolutely inevitable
that intense love should be followed by an equal intensity of grief, and the
danger with excessive and ungovernable grief is that ungrateful words and
deeds follow. What person who wishes to live a truly devout life would not
pray very earnestly to avert this?’ That true man of God, who was incapable
of lying, fully confirmed these words in the events themselves that were
shortly to occur. For one of his sons was afflicted by a serious illness and
was approaching his end and appointed time. Before he died, his father
beseeched God earnestly, applying both mentally and sensibly the supreme
remedy of prayer for him. When he saw that the boy’s life had come to an
end and that he was departing for the true life, however, he immediately
gave himself wholly to thanking God and singing hymns to him, showing
himself to be the opposite of the way the great David conducted himself
long ago on the occasion of his son’s death and proving, as I have already
said, his words to be deeds.100 As a result, when his friends came to console
him, he consoled them instead and gave them appropriate instruction.
Religious education
7. When I have recorded one or two further things about the great man’s
admirable parents, I shall move on to Gregory himself, leaving the rest to
those who are familiar with them. The following was also a firm habit of
Gregory’s parents, namely, every day to frequent the company of monks,
teachers and spiritual fathers not only on their own but also taking their
100 Cf. 2 Sam 18: 33.
58 GREGORY PALAMAS
children along as well, and not just those who were adolescents and already
reasonably mature, but also those who were still very young and had only
recently begun to speak and understand what was being said to them.
Their idea was that from the very beginning of their lives their children’s
souls should be directly moulded and broadened by holy discourses and
teachings. It was for that reason that one day the whole household boarded
a small boat to go to the opposite shore above Galata where the hermitage
of St Phokas lay.101 Their intention was to meet, as was their custom, the
monk and presbyter who practised the hesychastic life there, to benefit
from his teaching and to receive his spiritual counsels and prayers. As they
were going up towards the place, Gregory’s father asked his family if they
had brought anything with them suitable for the teacher’s table. When they
said that in their haste they had forgotten to take anything worthwhile with
them, he was annoyed and reproached them for their carelessness in the
matter. But he referred this too to God, as was his custom, and prayed for
his help. The prayer did not simply remain a form of words but in a very
short time the deed was accomplished in an extraordinary and supernatural
way. As the boat that carried them was making its way up the Bosphorus,
Gregory’s father put his hands in the water and in silent mental prayer
asked the Ruler of the sea with faith to send him a catch. They had not
gone very far when – O what a novel kind of fishing! With what wonderful
deeds and powers does the Ruler of all things glorify his own servants! –
suddenly tossing his hand out of the water this novel fisherman landed a
huge sea-bass in the middle of the boat and showed it to his companions,
saying, ‘Look, this is the meal planned by Christ for the father’s table.’
Astounded by that extraordinary event, they joined him in singing hymns
to God the worker of the miracle. When they came to the presbyter, full
of joy and wonder, they shared with him their truly novel catch at table
together. ‘Who has known such a hunt among people living now at any
time in the past?’102 This is perhaps an opportunity for us to speak now
with that great voice, for the miracles were similar, as indeed was the
faith of those novel hunters. The difference was that in the earlier case
they were in the wilderness ‘exposed to the icy cold and to rain’ where for
the sake of piety they had been suffering hardship for some seven years
101 On the hermitage of St Phokas, see Janin 1969, 498–9.

102 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43, 7 (Moreschini, 1036), recalling the miraculous
trapping of a deer in the mountains of Pontus by St Basil and his companions. Philotheos
expects his readers to recognize the reference and its context.
and in those circumstances had all been calling on God together with long
prayers, whereas Gregory’s father had only gone a short distance from the
imperial palace and his own house and encountering God alone had prayed
in solitude. Yet he was granted the same between the water and the boat as
the others had also been granted on the mountains and the dry land. What
he experienced was in no way inferior to the manna and the quail and the
famous ancient miracles of God.103
Death of his father

8. It was at all events in a similar spirit that when Gregory’s father was
coming to the end of this earthly life and was close to the point of passing
to the blessed life above, he was finally tonsured and inducted fully into the
monastic life of which previously, I think, in his way of life and works he
was not without experience.104 On that occasion the fair Kallone – for his
wife bore both these names, Kale (fair) in the world and Kallone (beauty)
in the monastic life105 – approached him and, because she was aware of
the emperor’s goodwill and favour towards him, asked him if he would
request the emperor to grant maintenance and protection to the children.
Her husband not only disagreed with what she said, not appearing at all like
a person overcome by fatherly feelings, but also reproached her for uttering
words unworthy of her own outlook and the virtue she had practised since
childhood. ‘For my part,’ he said, ‘it is not to these earthly kings of limited
power that I wish to leave my children but’ – looking at the icon of the
Mother of God that was set before his eyes – ‘to her who is the Mistress of
all things, the mother of the King of Heaven.’ And that truly wise man was
not disappointed in his hopes. For after their father had departed for God,
the universal queen persuaded the earthly kings to treat the children with
great generosity in an unprecedented fashion, and after they had left the
capital a little while later she appeared to be their protector, guardian and
guide and in every way their saviour in matters of both body and soul, as
my discourse will show in due course. Such were the models of life and the
stimuli that the divine Gregory received from his parents. In what follows
103 Cf. Exod 16: 11–16.

104 It was not unusual for the devout to wish to die in the monastic state. In the case of
Gregory’s father, Philotheos has shown him (§ 7) to be already living the hesychastic life
even as a paterfamilias – alone in silent noetic prayer.
105 The custom of taking a monastic name with the same initial as one’s baptismal name
gives Philotheos the opportunity to play on the two names.
60 GREGORY PALAMAS
we shall examine in what measure he wonderfully surpassed them, for now

it is time to turn to Gregory himself.
9. So then, when the good Konstantios – for that was the name the great
man’s father received when he joined the monks, exchanging Konstantinos
for it – at the end of his life, as I have said, left this world for God and the
things he had long desired, the mother was left with the children. They
were still of a very tender age – for the oldest, the good Gregory, had not
yet completed his seventh year – but she longed to be tonsured forthwith
and abandoning her family and the world to live in solitude. But she was
prevented from realizing this aim and desire for a while because, as was the
custom, she took counsel from fathers and spiritual teachers. ‘You should
not go off on your own in this way,’ they said. ‘First you should attend to
the needs of your children. It is best that you should organize your life
with them in mind and see to their upbringing and education according to
Christ’s laws.’ And in fact things worked out according to plan, that is, as
the divine Apostle says, helping those who choose the good.106
Gregory’s education
10. So the good Gregory was made to apply himself to the study of literature
and the outer learning (for it was not fitting that such a soul and nature
should not also obtain a share of the arrows and weapons deriving from
that source).107 And while still being perfected in the rudiments and first
principles of grammar, from the outset he immediately experienced the aid
of that wonderful sponsor, I mean the common Mistress of all things,108
who showed that the father’s words were not in vain, idle or useless when
towards his last breath he approached her as a suppliant and appointed her
governor in all things and guardian over his children, but indeed she was
to govern, guide and lead them well in all things and bring them ultimately
to a safe harbour. Gregory, as I have said, began his education when he
was very young. Since he found it somewhat difficult to repeat his lessons
by heart, he made it his rule not to pick up the book and begin to commit
to memory, before he had bent his knee to the ground three times in holy
106 Cf. Rom 8: 28.

107 The ‘outer learning’ was the study of Greek literature and philosophy, and was taught
at schools such as those of Theodore Metochites, Palamas’ teacher. The ‘inner learning’ was
that of Christian theology and was pursued generally in a monastic environment.
108 The Mother of God.
prayer before the venerable icon of the Mother of God. Once he had done
this, he was able to learn his lessons by heart every day easily and without
hindrance. If it so happened that he forgot and failed to say his usual prayers
or make his act of veneration, he was subsequently unable to recite what
he was supposed to have learned, and like a contestant without weapons
from that quarter and bereft of assistance was liable to blows from his
trainers and teachers. Gregory’s queen and protector, however, persuaded
the emperor’s soul to be generously and affectionately disposed towards
him and the other children.109 As a result, the emperor not only bestowed
on them every other kind of care, that is to say, provisions of all kinds
and allowances from the imperial treasury as well as money, which those
who enjoyed imperial favour generally received, but he also frequently had
them brought to the palace and granted them audience, showing them much
favour and benevolence despite, as I have said, their being very young.110
And all those who attended the emperor and frequented the palace, that is,
those who held high office as well as officials of subordinate rank, when
they saw Gregory and his brothers at the palace were extremely cordial
towards them, calling them the children of the saint, so great was their
respect for both the father and the children.
11. In a short time Gregory had achieved an excellent command of both

grammar and rhetoric, with the result that he was admired exceedingly for
his competence in delivering discourses and composing written texts by all
the teachers and leading orators of that time. He also distinguished himself
in physics and logic – in a word, in all Aristotelian studies – so much
so that the man most admired for his abundant wisdom and learning by
everyone at that time, who skilfully managed affairs between the emperor
and the common Roman people, I mean the Grand Logothete,111 once in
the presence of the emperor began a discussion with Gregory on Aristotle’s
treatment of logic, and was so struck by what he heard the youth utter
that he could not contain himself or conceal his admiration but turning
immediately to the emperor in amazement said: ‘Even Aristotle himself,
if he were present and had heard this young man, would in my opinion
109 The emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos (1282–1328).

110 Showing the imperial virtues of eumeneia and philanthrōpia.
111 Theodore Metochites (1270–1332), mesazon and logothetes tou logikou from 1305,
became Grand Logothete in 1321. On Metochites as a scholar see Wilson 1983, 256–64; De
Vries-van der Velden 1987.
62 GREGORY PALAMAS
praise him more than a little. And I would here add,’ he went on to say, ‘that
those who study philosophical treatises, especially the complex works of
Aristotle, should possess such a spirit and aptitude.’112
His inclination to the ascetic life

On account of this, the emperor, too, was proud of him, rejoicing in him as
an excellent young man and expecting great things of him when the time
came for him to take counsel from him. But Gregory himself, fixing his
gaze on the heavenly emperor and the empire and senate that are incorrupt
and ageless, dedicated himself entirely to this goal and project. He regarded
all the rest as of little importance, or rather, hardly worth care or thought
at all. ‘You are my portion, Lord, I promise to keep your words,’ he would
say with the prophet,113 and ‘Lead me in the path of your commandments,
for I delight in it’,114 and ‘Turn my eyes from looking at vanities; give me
life in your ways’,115 and similar things. Accordingly, he placed himself
instead under monks, zealous fathers and teachers of virtue, especially
the most distinguished and earnest of those who came down from the holy
mountain of Athos, who would tell him that the straight path of the gospel
would appear difficult and steep to him and the Lord’s light yoke would
appear hard and heavy so long as he lived permanently among those
whose desires were all voluntarily subject to the world and its ruler.116
While such people are alive to the things of the world, they are dead to
the things of heaven, and every day drag down those who associate with
them unless they happen to be especially alert and vigilant. Therefore they
advised that first of all the best and safest thing was to leave one’s home
and city at the same time and lightly take up one’s cross and follow Christ,
who has called one, according to his word,117 and set out straightaway for
the desert and the holy mountain. ‘For in this way,’ they said, ‘it will be
possible for you to realize your original plan and not fail in your goal. By
freeing yourself from the people and the things that hinder you, you will
join those who are best placed to help you. If such an abrupt transition and
112 These words are quoted from Palamas himself, who recalls them in Against Gregoras
I, 14 (Christou IV, 242; Perrella II, 938–40); Tsames (438, n. 34) dates this event to 1313,
when Palamas was seventeen.
113 Ps 118 (119): 57.
114 Ps 118 (119): 35.
115 Ps 118 (119): 37.
116 Cf. Matt 11: 30; Eph 6: 12.
117 Cf. Matt 10: 38, 16: 24; Mark 8: 34; Luke 9: 23, 14: 27.
change to these things seems rather difficult to you, perhaps because of

some existing obligation, before all else you must accept lowliness in all
things and bodily hardship and a frugal way of life, and in this way you
will be able to make a beginning and lay the foundations of the house of
virtue in the best way, that is, with God helping you. For those are the
roots, as it were, and causes of that admirable humility, chastity, purity
and holiness of both soul and body, the best principles and preliminaries
of all virtue.’
12. These along with other things were taught to Gregory by Theoleptos,
that truly great luminary of Philadelphia, who moved on, or moved up, from
the sacred hesychia and company of the mountain of holiness to preside
over the Church.118 Theoleptos became his father and spiritual guide to
the wonderful things taught by the fathers above. Initiated by him into
holy vigilance and noetic prayer in an excellent manner, he forged his way
wonderfully to a habitual practice of such prayer while still living in the
midst of tumults and in the world.119 But this happened later. At that time
the good Gregory, listening to the counsel of the fathers, quickly became
‘a bird cleaving the air’, ‘a fire-brand in the fire’, or ‘a throroughbred
horse running swiftly over the plain’.120 For he practised such excessive
asceticism, so to speak, in respect of poor-quality clothes, shoes and
bedding, and also with regard to every other aspect of his conduct and
118 I.e. the Church of Philadelphia in Lydia (now Alaşehir). Theoleptos (PLP 7509), a
strong anti-unionist, was appointed bishop of Philadelphia in 1283/4, shortly after the
accession of Andronikos II, who reversed the unionist policy of his father, Michael VIII. If
‘the mountain of holiness’ is the Holy Mountain of Athos, Philotheos is the only witness to
Theoleptos having been there at the time of his elevation to the episcopate.
119 Palamas himself also claims that Theoleptos had been an early mentor (Triads I, 2, 12
[Meyendorff, Défense 99; Perrella I, 356]). Sinkewicz (2002, 132) rejects this because of the
problems of chronology that it creates. Theoleptos, he says, could only have been a teacher
of Palamas in 1307–08, when Palamas was just eleven or twelve years old. But Theoleptos
is also known to have been in Constantinople for a series of synodal debates between 1317
and 1319 (Sinkewicz 1992, 16). If Palamas did not leave Constantinople until 1317 or 1318
(as proposed by Kourouses 1972, 327–8 and accepted by Hero 1994, 27, note 54), or in 1319,
as I propose, the testimonies of Philotheos and Palamas with regard to Theoleptos become
unproblematic.
120 CPG 1, 191–2. The first two of these proverbial phrases also evoke great monastic
figures of the past: Athanasius describes Antony as ‘a bird cleaving the air’ (Life of Antony
13); the anonymous author of the Life of the early 10th cent. ascetic Paul of Mount Latros
refers to him as ‘a fire-brand in the fire’ (Life of Paul the Younger 4).
64 GREGORY PALAMAS
daily routine, and, in a word, so transformed and remodelled his mode of

life and all his external habits that he was often thought to have gone out of
his mind. Yet this poor opinion of him never upset him. Indeed, he adopted
such abstinence, fasting and sleep-deprivation that he not only cut out
sweet foods, to which earlier he was very much addicted, and moreover the
sleep that comes at first light at dawn, which is so agreeable and naturally
necessary for the human constitution, and which is something else he very
much enjoyed earlier, but he set himself a very harsh and restricted diet
indeed, simply satisfying his basic needs with the smallest amount of bread
and water. He therefore already rose above the constraints of nature, with
the loving help of him who is beyond nature, and nobly, noble man that he
was, abstained from the very grave appetites and passions and overcame
even sexual desire and the rebellion this gives rise to – and he did this in
the full flush of youth and in the midst of the world and the material that
nourishes the desires, lighting, as it were, a flame under them. As a result
he seemed almost superhuman.
13. Gregory was already thinking about withdrawing from the world and
going to the famous mountain of Athos, for he desired to engage in more
intense struggles and share in a more perfect and sublime way of life. The
emperor, however, considered his departure as of no small damage to him
but in fact a crucial loss and, so to speak, a truncation of his power. He
therefore used every approach both verbally and by gifts, imperial honours
and grand promises to keep Gregory by his side and prevent him by all
possible means from withdrawing to the monastic life. But although he
offered him altogether more than this – gifts and honours belonging to an
earthly and corruptible kingdom that lead to human slavery – whatever
they were, Gregory in no way preferred them to the kingdom of heaven
and divine adoption but in his speech and thoughts maintained the greatest
wisdom and high-mindedness, for he thought that to prefer the former
would clearly show extreme ignorance and folly. The emperor grudgingly
gave in to the noble youth’s persistence, showing in words and by his tears
how deeply he felt and how unbearable he found the parting. At the same
time he was shrewdly perceptive about the future and made an accurate
prophecy. ‘He would have turned out a great man,’ he said, ‘and a much
admired one, if he had stayed here with us and remained in the world. But
as he has fallen in love with higher things, he is right to pass over to them,
and in a short time he will be admired for them and will be a great man in
the true sense.’
First steps in the monastic life

The beginning of adulthood
14. Having now reached the end of his adolescence and, as I have said,
eager to withdraw to the monastic life, Gregory did not simply seek his
own advantage but, in accordance with the divine Apostle, also that of
others.121 He therefore first urged the members of his household, the
women as well as the men, to abandon the world and take up the life of
divine philosophy.122 Indeed, he persuaded his closest relations and the
more loyal and intelligent of the servants to abandon the distractions of
the world and of material reality and entering monasteries here in the
capital to place themselves fully under the guidance of monks. Having
thus made a propitious beginning and packed up a good number of virtues
as his luggage, he departed from his home and his native city to engage
in admirable commerce in higher, supernatural matters, taking with him
only his two male siblings.123 They left the city of Constantine when it
was already autumn,124 with the intention of going to Holy Athos and the
settlement there. But while passing through Thrace they came to Papikion
(this was of old a holy mountain lying between Thrace and Macedonia,
at that time inhabited by admirable and splendid monks who meditated
on divine matters in an excellent way) and decided to spend the winter
with them.125 This, it seems, was a work of divine providence, that is,
so that the wise Gregory and the divine grace that overshadowed him
should be demonstrated to them too, and through him should lead many
to true knowledge of God in an impressive manner, as my narrative will
soon demonstrate. For by living there with his brothers and practising the
philosophical life with these monks he was seen by them to be truly a great
and wonderful man in his speech and manner, in the way he looked and
walked, in his sense of recollected attentiveness, in a word in everything
121 Cf. 1 Cor 10: 24. The end of adolescence was when adulthood began legally at the age
of twenty-five (ODB 1, 421).
122 Since at least St Basil and St Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, the ascetic life
had been called the philosophical life.
123 Makarios and Theodosios.
124 The date which best fits the sequence of events as given by Philotheos is autumn 1319,
when Palamas was twenty-four (see above, p. 40).
125 On the monasteries of Mount Papikion see Bakirtzis 1996. They fell into decline in the
thirteenth century and were abandoned in the fourteenth.
66 GREGORY PALAMAS
by which a man of God is naturally portrayed and described.126 As a result,

those who saw him could not help being amazed at seeing in an immature
and youthful body a person who was so much like a presbyter, monk and
true philosopher in word, deed and thought.
Disputes with Messalians

And the people on the neighbouring mountain, who had been infected long
ago with Marcionism or Messalianism by their forebears, became a not
ignoble trophy of Gregory’s wonderful command of language.127 When they
learned that Gregory was staying there on the mountain in the habitations
of the monks, they came to him, at first in twos and threes, to engage in
discussion with him and test him. But when they realized that ‘even en
masse’128 they were unable to score any hits on him, they withdrew and
went back to their own people. In their difficulty, they claimed that their
own skill in debate and in expounding the saving word was weak but their
teachers were expert dialecticians and formidable exponents of theology,129
126 There are echoes here of Gregory of Nazianzus’ portrayal of Basil in Oration 43, 77
(Moreschini, 1116).
127 The fundamental doctrine of the Messalian heresy, which originated in Syria in the
fourth century, was that each person is inhabited by a demon that can be expelled only by
continuous prayer, baptism being ineffective in this regard. The result of the practice of
continuous prayer was the bestowal by God of the gift of the Spirit, which enabled believers
‘to contemplate the Trinity with their bodily eyes’ (Obolensky 1948, 49). In the tenth
century Messalians from the area of Melitene were transported to Thrace by the emperor
Constantine V as part of his policy to disperse heretical communities. Members of a dualist
heresy with Manichaean connections, the Paulicians, were also transported to Thrace from
their strongholds on the Armenian border. The two heresies were not identical but shared
a hostility to ecclesiastical Christianity and its ‘material’ sacraments. Both the Messalians
and the Paulicians sent missionaries into Bulgaria, where they met with success on account
of the Bulgarians’ hostility to the Christianity of their Byzantine enemies. In the mid-tenth
century a Bulgarian priest called Bogomil (the Slavonic form of Theophilos) combined
elements from Messalian and Paulician teaching to found the heretical movement known as
Bogomilism. Byzantines writers, on the principle of the assimilation of modern heresies to
ancient ones, tended to refer to the Bogomils as Messalians. The monks of Mount Papikion
who debated with Palamas, however, seem to have been Messalians in the narrow sense. On
the complex relationship between these heretical groups in the Balkans, Obolensky 1948
is still fundamental. On the situation in the fourteenth century, see now Rigo 1996. For a
selection of relevant texts in translation, see also Hamilton and Hamilton 1998.
128 Philotheos uses an ancient adverb from Attic Greek, iktar, which the grammarians
explained as ‘close together’ or ‘thickly’.
129 Philotheos, like Palamas, uses the word ‘theology’ in the sense of discussion of God,
not in the Evagrian sense of experience of God.
precise in their dogmatic arguments: ‘If you were to debate with them face
to face,’ they said, ‘you would not stick it out very long at all.’ But Gregory
was filled with the Spirit. Resenting intensely the slanderous things they
had said about God, he did not turn down the challenge to take the road
leading to them, but bringing only one of his brothers along with him
went up eagerly to meet them. This is not the time or the place to describe
in detail all that he said when he engaged in debate with the leaders and
teachers of the heresy. Arguing against them with the help of the divine
Spirit, he effortlessly brushed away all the objections and claims they put
forward as if they were cobwebs, completely overturning their position
and demonstrating that nothing they said was sound in any way and that
the absurdities they were fabricating against the Church in their ravings
were in vain – this is not the time or the place because it calls for a deeper
inquiry. Nevertheless, it is indispensable at this point to recall one of the
topics discussed and thus, as the saying goes, indicate the whole from the
part.130
15. The leaders and teachers of this heresy of the Messalians held it as
self-evident that the only prayer suitable for Christians was that which long
ago Christ gave explicitly to his disciples when they questioned him.131
They said that all the others we string together are prayed and sung by us
in vain, because in no way do they come from Christ’s teaching or from
the divine laws. That is why they have made only this prayer lawful in their
church and have forbidden all the rest.132 This was an argument, then, in
addition to others against our Church, that they put to Gregory at that time
as one that was truly important and powerful, and they said that any other
prayer was an outright contravention of the divine laws and oracles, which
in no way may be flouted. Gregory, for his part, a champion and friend of
holy prayer, took up the argument in its defence. ‘Even if we ourselves,’ he
said, ‘fail to respect what is implied by that holy prayer of the Lord, as you
falsely claim, what about those holy disciples of Christ, who were the first
to ask about it and were taught it by Christ himself? It is not correct ever to
130 apo meros to pan, an expression often used by the commentators of ancient literary
texts to indicate the figure of speech pars pro toto, the signification of the whole by a part.
131 Cf. Luke 11: 1–4.
132 The rejection of all prayers except the Lord’s Prayer is also attested by an important
tenth-century source, the Sermon Against the Heretics by the Bulgarian priest Kosmas. See
Obolensky 1948, 134–5.
68 GREGORY PALAMAS
say, in my view, that they transgressed against what he handed down and
taught. What do you say about this?’ At once they all replied in unison:
‘The first disciples and apostles were naturally guardians and fulfillers of
Christ’s commandment. They kept it themselves and through the Gospels
handed it on to their successors in a similar fashion. But you have set aside
the tradition and introduced your own.’ The divine Gregory took up the
argument again. ‘Then how was it,’ he asked, ‘that after Christ’s ascension
into heaven and the coming and manifestation of the Paraclete to them,
when they were being persecuted in Jerusalem by the God-slaying Jews
on account of the Gospel and the preaching, they lifted up their voices in
unison to God with their friends – for that is what the divine Luke tells us
in the Acts of the Apostles133 – and did not pray in the words of the Lord’s
prayer but used other words more appropriate to the occasion and what was
needed? What they asked for in the prayer was so fully granted that God
himself immediately gave a sign of approval from on high, by causing an
earthquake in the place they were praying and confirming the prayer by
the appearance of the Holy Spirit. For “when they had prayed”, it says, “the
place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all
filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness”.134
How was it, too, that when the tax-collector, according to Christ’s word,
did not pray to God using the same prayer but prayed with other words, he
went down to his home justified more than the Pharisee?135 Anyone who
has sense should perceive and infer from Christ’s teaching that he did not
restrict prayer entirely to those words alone, but rather giving believers a
model of prayer with those words, taught them mystically that when they
pray, sing psalms, make supplications and bless him at all times, as the
divine David says, and bear his praise continually in their mouth,136 they
should everywhere keep the aim of those divine words in their mind and
never fall away from it. Examine the content of this teaching carefully.
Clearly, when he delivered the prayer to the apostles he did not say: “You
should pray in these words, and in these alone.” So what did he say? “Pray
in this way”,137 clearly with this aim and model that I am now indicating
to you, outlining a rule and norm, as it were, of how you should approach
133 Acts 4: 24–30.

134 Acts 4: 31.
135 Cf. Luke 18: 10–14.
136 Cf. Ps 34 (33): 1.
137 Matt 6: 9.
God and pray to him, which is what they themselves had just asked him.
For “teach us to pray,” it says, “as John taught his disciples”.138 Therefore
once Christ’s first disciples and first apostles had been taught these things
by Christ himself, they in turn practised the rule of prayer in an excellent
and intelligent way and taught us, their own disciples, the things they had
been taught so thoroughly. In our common and private prayer we also
do what they learned from Christ himself, referring everything we utter
when we pray or sing to the pattern of this first prayer. In this manner we
always and everywhere pray according to Christ’s word and teaching, for
he says: “Pray then this way”.’139 Then he went through what relates to
Christ’s cross, together with our salvation and re-creation that derive from
it, with those enemies of the cross. He described how the type of the cross
was active from the beginning in the fathers and the prophets and realized
mystically in them the mystery of the divine economy, even though it was
only made manifest to them later by the facts themselves. Even now it is
possible to hear that wise and theological tongue very clearly and sublimely
in what he says about those who have written on the precious cross.140
With these arguments and other similar ones he left them utterly at a loss,
having, as it were, sewn up their mouths and put a stop to their blasphemous
verbosity, and returned from that place like a brilliant victorious general
with magnificent trophies. For the leader of the heresy started from that
moment to ponder Gregory’s words, having realized straightaway that they
were true and divinely inspired. Shortly afterwards, this man, together
with many prominent figures among them and no small part of the rank
and file, went up to the city of Constantine and, assembling in the great
church of the faithful,141 renounced their ancestral heresy and became part
of our holy congregation. These events were for Gregory the preparatory
steps and preliminaries, so to speak, for his holy withdrawal and adoption
of hesychia, presaging his supreme struggles on behalf of the true faith and
his ultimate victory.142
16. When Gregory returned from Papikion, it also caused no small wonder
to the monks who lived on the mountain that he had been able to escape
138 Luke 11: 1.

139 Matt 6: 9.
140 See Palamas, Homily 11, On the Precious and Life-Giving Cross (PG 151, 124D–145C).
141 The Church of Hagia Sophia.
142 The ‘true faith’ is eusebeia, literally ‘piety’, which always signifies orthodoxy.
70 GREGORY PALAMAS
from the hands of those wild beasts and their machinations, since they
were so numerous and so dangerous, and that single-handedly he had
not only withstood the heresy’s hostility and tremendous nonsense but,
strengthened by the grace of Christ,143 had also magnificently defeated
and put to flight those who often, either by stealth or openly, got rid of
those who opposed them. Indeed, this is what they stealthily attempted
against him and his brother, showing themselves to be like ‘a wolf that
had opened its jaws in vain’,144 for God’s hand and power invisibly
defended his servants. For while they were still among those barbarians
and Gregory was arguing with them, as I have already described, once the
discussion had come to an end and they were on the point of going home,
those bloodthirsty deceivers decided to send them some food for their
sustenance and table. The fact that something deadly had been concealed
by them in the food did not escape Gregory’s notice. But although he had
been alerted to the hidden crime by the Holy Spirit, he accepted it, warning
them that none of them was to touch any of it. They followed his advice.
When one of the company, wanting to check the matter, threw the bread to
the dogs outside the door and one of them ate a piece and was immediately
seen to die. Under such circumstances, the discernment of the man also
became evident to all the others, in that he had rightly prevented any of
the people there from partaking of the meal sent by the murderers, which
was full of poison and death.
17. Having observed these things, those God-loving men held Gregory in
much greater esteem than they did before. Indeed, they were now highly
impressed by him and did everything possible by their actions and words
in every way to keep the man with them and enjoy his wisdom and virtue
permanently. But this was far from his intention and by now almost
impossible, for, as I have already said, he had long had his sights fixed on
excellent Athos and its spiritual gifts.
Arrival on Mount Athos

So then, at the beginning of spring he left the mountain with his two
brothers and went up to the Athos he desired.145 On arriving at the lavra of
143 Cf. 1 Tim 1: 12.

144 A proverb recorded by Gregory II of Cyprus and popular in the fourteenth century; cf.
Leutsch, CPG 121.
145 Spring of 1320.
Vatopedi,146 he attached himself to the noble Nikodemos, a man admirable

in both his ascetic practice and his contemplation, as almost all who live
on Athos know.147 He had lived at first on Mount Auxentios, which lies
opposite Byzantium to the east of Chrysopolis at the extreme end of the
Propontis, where in his ascetic life he had followed the path of virtue
fully to its further point.148 Later, after his arrival at Vatopedi, he engaged
in the same feats of virtue with the same zeal and ardour for very many
years until he met an admirable and blessed end through Christ in a state
of blessedness. It was therefore this man, who was living in the vicinity in
solitude,149 that the good Gregory rightly approached. He was tonsured by
him and submitted himself to perfect obedience to him.
18. What kind of man the admirable Gregory was in word and deed and
mental contemplation soon after he made his vows and placed himself
under obedience will become evident in the following. He had already
completed his second year, eagerly practising fasting, keeping vigil,
watchfulness and unceasing prayer to God day and night. And taking the
Mother of God as his guide, and at the same time his patron and intercessor,
he kept her assistance and her visage in front of his eyes at all times by
words and prayers and movements of the intellect, thus accomplishing the
path of obedience under her guidance. One day when he was living alone
in a hermitage practising attentiveness towards himself and God in a state
of stillness, a divine man of venerable appearance suddenly appeared in
front of him ‘in reality, not in a dream’.150 He was John, the chief of the
evangelists, the son of thunder,151 the pre-eminent disciple and friend of
Christ. Gazing at Gregory with a joyful expression, he said: ‘I have come
to you, as you see, in the guise of a messenger from the Mistress who
surpasses all the saints to ask you why you keep crying out day and night,
practically at all hours, “Lighten my darkness, lighten my darkness”.’
Therefore we too must report these same sacred words here without
146 Vatopedi, an important monastery ranking with Iveron next after the Great Lavra, had
been founded in the mid-tenth century.
147 On his death, Nikodemos of Vatopedi was venerated as a saint. His feast day is 11 July.
148 Mount Auxentios (now Kayışdağ), twelve kilometres south-east of Chalcedon, had
been a holy mountain with many monasteries and hermitages from the fifth century until the
end of the thirteenth, when gazi raiders made it unsafe for monks.
149 Kath’hesychian, i.e. as a hesychast.
150 Homer, Odyssey 19, 547 and 20, 90.
151 Cf. Mark 3: 17.
72 GREGORY PALAMAS
altering them.152 Gregory replied: ‘And what else, should I, a human being
beset by passion and full of sins, ask when I pray to God than for him to
have mercy on me and illuminate me to know his saving will and put it
into practice?’ But Christ’s beloved disciple said again: ‘Do not be afraid
and do not doubt. The Mistress of all exhorts you through me: “For I
myself will be your helper.”’ Gregory again asked the holy teacher: ‘And
when will the Mother of my Lord help me, in the present or in the future?’
‘Both in the past and now,’ said the Evangelist, [the teacher] of great and
sublime things, very graciously and pleasantly, ‘and even in the future.’
19. When John had conveyed these things in a supernatural manner and had
filled Gregory ineffably with that divine message and the great gifts of the
Mother of God, he disappeared. Many years later Gregory narrated these
things with much weeping to Dorotheos, his good disciple and companion,
who was full of the greatest possible zeal for the monastic life and supported
Gregory in the great struggles on behalf of right belief.153 To what he said
he added: ‘Even in my family home and at school, and indeed even at the
palace, before deciding to abandon everything and retire to the monastic
life, I had a wonderful faith and hope in the Virgin Mother of God and used
to importune her with fervent love. Accordingly, at the beginning of each
day it was my most pressing task before any physical or intellectual work to
stand before her holy icon and say with the greatest possible compunction
and contrition of heart that holy and great prayer, holy and great in both
words and content, namely, the prayer full of confession and repentance
along with supplication that takes its beginning and brilliant preface from
the wonderful Egyptian.’154
152 This sentence is included by Tsames (447) in the reported message of John the
Evangelist. Athanasios of Paros, however (1981, 57), and Perrella (I, 1372) take it, rightly I
think, to be an aside by the author.
153 Dorotheos Blates (PLP 2818), who succeeded Gregory Palamas (after Neilos and
Nicholas Kabasilas) as metropolitan of Thessalonike (1371–79). With his brother Mark he
founded the monastery of Vlatadon, today the seat of Thessalonike’s Patriarchal Institute for
Patristic Studies.
154 The ‘wonderful Egyptian’ is the fifth-century penitent, St Mary of Egypt. Her memory
is celebrated on the fifth Sunday in Lent. The ‘holy and great prayer’ is the hymn at the
beginning of Vespers on Saturday evening: ‘The pollution of past sins prevented thee from
entering the church to see the elevation of the Holy Cross’ (Lenten Triodion), trans. Mother
Mary and Kallistos Ware, 447–8).
At the Great Lavra

20. Gregory was in the third year after his withdrawal to the monastic life
when his teacher and father, Nikodemos, who had reached the fullness of
his days in both the divine and the human sense, in a truly glorious and
blessed manner departed for the Lord.155 Immediately afterwards Gregory
left that place and moved to the Great Lavra of the famous Athanasios.156
There he was welcomed as a guest by the fathers, who treated him with
their customary friendship, or rather, to tell the truth, with beyond what
was their tradition and custom, for they had all been won over in advance
by his reputation and had long held a good opinion of him. He remained
with them and shared their life for three whole years.157 During this time
he was rightly admired for his practical regime and spiritual life,158 for he
showed that the reality was much greater than the reputation and went far
beyond the words. He also took turns with them, as was their custom, in the
task of serving the common table of the brethren, and also of standing with
the choir in church and singing the divine offices with them, at the behest,
that is to say, of the Lavra’s superior. He was an object of wonder in all
things to everybody in the community and caused amazement to them all,
the old and the young, those living in community and the anchorites, the
learned and the uneducated. For he was not keen on just one of the virtues,
somewhat neglecting another. Nor did he pursue one to extremes, as if
just brushing another with his finger-tips. Nor did he honour the universal
and general virtues more highly, and disparage those that seemed more
particular. On the contrary, he strove in both deed and word to a superlative
degree to achieve both those that are universal and those that are particular
all at the same time, so that his soul should be a coming together and
combination of every good, overcoming all with wonder and making the
souls of all return to themselves.159 And what should one say about the
155 If Palamas became his disciple in 1320, this would be 1322.

156 The Great Lavra was founded by Athanasios of Athos in 963. Although called a lavra
it was from the beginning a coenobitic monastery with attached hermitages. The typikon of
Constantine IX Monomachos of 1045 assigned it precedence over all the other monasteries
of Athos in perpetuity.
157 I.e. from 1322 to 1324.
158 His politeia and philosophia.
159 The theme of the return of the soul to itself (drawing on Niketas Stethatos and others) is
prominent in Palamas’ first composition, the Life of Peter the Athonite, of 1332 (Christou V,
161–91; Perrella III, 174–230). See esp. §§ 17–20 (Christou V, 171–3; Perrella III, 192–6) and
Rigo’s commentary (Rigo 2012, 86–8).
74 GREGORY PALAMAS
graciousness of his manner and conversation, and about the modesty and
moderation evident in the wisdom of his thinking and the great power of
his words, so that for those who encountered it, it was, as it were, a good
prodding them towards compunction?
21. This excellent man, then, by the intensity of his effort gained mastery
over everything, I mean not only over the passions and appetites that are
irrational, but also over those that are natural and necessary, striving, as it
were, with the aid of the body to come to be outside the body. They say that
at that time he had overcome sleep and the need for it so completely that for
three whole months he kept vigil every night, as if he were devoid of flesh.
He took a little sleep every day at noon after eating, which in my view was
so that he should suffer no irreparable harm to his brain as a result of its
becoming unnaturally dry. But Gregory’s love for stillness and seclusion
did not allow him to remain there permanently. After the third year, as I
have said, he left the Lavra and all that went on there and eagerly set off
for his beloved solitude. In those he parted from he caused an unbearable
sadness, but in those he joined an equally intense joy.
At the skete of Glossia

22. And so, arriving at that holy place of anchorites which locally is called
Glossia,160 he found the stillness he loved. He found that which he had
long desired in the company of friends leading the same way of life and
zealous for the same things. Their leader and most distinguished figure was
the famous Gregory, whose family also originated from Byzantium.161 At
that time he had a great reputation for stillness, watchfulness and contem-
plation and was very much admired not only by them but even more so later
by those who pursued the contemplative life in his native city. There when
he came to the end of this transitory life and had worthily passed over to
the life that has no end, God bore witness to him, glorifying his bones and
his dust in a supernatural manner. It was also said that this namesake of
160 Traditionally identified with Provata, on the north-east slopes of Mount Athos between
the Lavra and Karakalou.
161 The ‘famous Gregory’ (ekeinos ho pany) is identified by most scholars (following
Meyendorff 1959, 52) with Gregory Drimys, known from the histories of Nikephoros
Gregoras (Historia Byzantina XIX, 13 [Bonn II, 919]) and John Kantakouzenos (Historiarum
Libri IV, II, 39 [Bonn I, 545]). David Balfour has argued vigorously for the identification
of Philotheos’ Gregorios ho pany with Gregory of Sinai (Balfour 1984, 117–23) but his
conclusions have been regarded as too speculative and have failed to win general acceptance.
his, who led the same way of life and associated with him at that time to
the best of his ability, cultivated philosophically, alone and in his company,
the same most beautiful and sublime matters relating to the operation of the
intellect and to the greatest and first contemplation of God as those divine
things which that wise man with the passage of time through zealous
application, long experience and the conversation of God-bearing men had
succeeded in attaining.
23. Now all that Gregory accomplished there on his own and with God’s
help through stillness is not at all easy or simple for anyone to narrate in
due order. For how is it possible when through an excessive humility he
concealed them not less than people conceal what they have done when
they have surreptitiously committed the most heinous crimes and acts of
wickedness? For in an excellent fashion he always took the greatest care to
hide from the left hand what the right hand was doing, in accordance with
Christ’s word,162 and secretly offered up the mind’s ceaseless prayer163 and
worship in spirit to him who sees in secret.164 The Gregory I have already
mentioned, my fellow ascetic and friend, told me all about him in the
hearing of all, for it could not escape his notice what kind of a man he was.
‘When the wise Gregory,’ he said, ‘was living here alone with himself and
with God, the hidden gifts and graces granted to him were many and great.
Who could make them all public in their proper order?’ But those that
were obvious and known at that time even to outsiders, and were such that
one could easily be brought by them to an appreciation and knowledge of
invisible things, were extreme humility and the sincere whole-hearted love
for God and for one’s neighbour that the divine Apostle speaks about.165
These are the first, middle and last supports, elements and perfective
principles for the whole of Christian philosophy and conduct. If Christ’s
teaching and, so to speak, preliminary lesson for his disciples was the text
‘Learn from me that I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest
for your souls’,166 then according to his own saying every commandment
and divine law is somehow recapitulated and summed up in the text
‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your
162 Cf. Matt 6: 3.

163 Cf. 1 Thess 5: 17.
164 Cf. Matt 6: 4.
165 Cf. Rom 12: 9; 2 Cor 6: 6; 1 Tim 1: 5.
166 Matt 11: 29.
76 GREGORY PALAMAS
strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself’.167 By
placing love incomparably higher than the supernatural gifts of the Spirit,
blessed Paul indicates that it is ‘a still more excellent way’,168 so that not
even martyrdom is of any value by its own nature if it is not combined with
love and allied to it. And love, he says, again with great liberty of speech,
never ends.169 What need be said, declared Gregory, about compunction
and tears, considering that he had transcended compunction and mourning
through love, in accordance with what God-bearing men have said about
these things, and constantly poured out endless streams silently from the
springs of his eyes. Such streams are said to nourish the body and bring it
into line with the soul, through divine yearning and love for God, as I have
already said. A constant flow of tears remained with him throughout his
life, as almost all of us know, a fact that while exceeding reason and wonder
is not unbelievable to those God-bearing men who have experienced it
personally and have spoken about it and even, in my opinion, to those who
only hear about it.
24. They were unable, however, to enjoy this excellent way of life and
hesychia in that place to the end of their lives as they had planned. Two
years after Gregory’s arrival the appalling Achaemenian pirates began
constant raids on the mountain.170 Almost every day they attacked and
disturbed those monks in particular who practised the hesychastic life
outside the walls. As a result sometimes of sudden incursions, forays and
acts of pillage and enslavement, sometimes of simply the anticipation and
fear of being disturbed and having their beloved stillness interrupted, these
monks were forced to leave even against their will, persuaded no doubt by
the divine law which commands the persecuted to flee and not stand up to
their persecutors.171
And so they arrived at our own Thessalonike.172 Altogether, these
friends living the same way of life were twelve in number. On discussing
the matter among themselves they came to an agreement to leave
167 Luke 10: 27.

168 1 Cor 12: 31.
169 1 Cor 13: 8.
170 Achaemenians is the classicizing word for Turks (recalling the Persian Wars).
171 Cf. Matt 10: 23. Philotheos’ ‘no doubt’ (or ‘surely’ – dēpouthen) perhaps responds
to Gregoras’ claim that Palamas was forced to leave Athos because he was accused of
Bogomilism (Gregoras, Antirrhetics I, 4; II, 5; Historia Byzantina XIV, 7). The year was 1326.
172 Philotheos was a native of Thessalonike.
Thessalonike right away, together with Athos and everything in that area,
and go to Jerusalem.173 There they would venerate the holy places and
spend the rest of their lives in stillness. Since it seemed to all of them
that they had come to a good decision and they were already beginning to
prepare for their departure, the wise Gregory sought approval and blessing
from above and prayed for divine confirmation of what they had decided.
Accordingly, while he was praying by himself in stillness and beseeching
God about all these things, he saw a vision at a point when it seemed to
him that he was nodding off during prayer. ‘It seemed to me,’ he said,
‘that in the company of brothers with whom I was planning to leave I was
standing in the forecourt of the imperial palace. The emperor himself was
present, seated on the imperial throne and holding a consistory with great
ceremony. Around him stood the guard, the senate and the officers of state,
as is the custom. One of them detached himself from the group and came
towards us in an attitude of informality. (He appeared to be dressed in the
uniform of a military governor.) He seemed to put both his arms round me
and press me to his chest, as if drawing me towards him. Then turning to
my companions, he said: “Look, as you too can see, I am keeping this man
with me, for the emperor has ordered it. If you yourselves choose to go,
you may leave and nobody will stop you.”’ Having received this message
from God just as he had requested, Gregory told his friends about it. They
all decided to stay together and in no way leave the court and environs of
the great citizen, guardian, powerful custodian and protector of the great
city of Thessalonike, by whom I mean the wonderful martyr, Demetrios.174
For they understood very well that it was he who in a strange manner had
thus carried out the divine and imperial commands and in a friendly and
sincere fashion had kept Gregory, and through him the rest of them too, for
the moment in the stillness and withdrawal that he earnestly desired, and
later in the presidency and holy leadership and guardianship of the Church,
which after a considerable time was wonderfully brought about through
God’s great wisdom and providence, the beginnings of great things having
been set down long in advance.
173 According to Balfour (1984, 127), this was proposed by Gregory of Sinai, whose
biographer Kallistos I says that he left Thessalonike with the ultimate purpose of returning
to Sinai.
174 The myrrh-flowing martyr, St Demetrios (feast day 26 October) has been since at least
the sixth century the patron and protector of Thessalonike. Philotheos wrote an encomium
of him.
78 GREGORY PALAMAS
The period of maturity

Ordination to the priesthood
25. It was also at Thessalonike that the wonderful Gregory received the
great and wonderful office of the priesthood. This was at the common
request of the company of the holy men who were there with him,
especially because they were about to board ship with the expectation
of making a long journey and meeting people entirely unknown to them.
They had long imagined doing this, as I have already said. But because
it was necessary that this man of such great and high virtue should
undertake very great and high things in a wholly appropriate manner, and
the initiator and bestower of ordination to the priesthood was a complete
stranger to them,175 Gregory approached God with the aim of enquiring
devoutly about what was being proposed. Taking in his hands the book
of the Apostle that lay before him, he raised his bodily eyes as well as
the eyes of his understanding to God and in his mind sought in faith to
come to a knowledge, so far as possible, of what was the divine will.
Then on opening the book and glancing at what lay there, he immediately
lighted on the passage with which the wise Paul, writing long ago to the
Galatians, began his letter to them, saying, ‘Paul an apostle, sent neither
by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus
Christ and God the Father’.176 By this Gregory understood that nothing
happens without God’s approval and inspiration, nor can anything human
and earthbound oppose what is spiritual and divine in any way at all.
He therefore received what was divine and sacred in a divine and sacred
manner – more so, I think, than anyone else – and made obeisance to him
who had bestowed it. Once he had physically entered on the divine office
he immediately stripped himself for even greater contests on behalf of
virtue. Thus this wise man very wisely honoured him who had honoured
him, or rather, to put it more aptly, he increased the gift within himself
even more, every day rekindling the torch and the fire of the spirit.
175 The metropolitan of Thessalonike at the time was none other than John Kalekas,
who served as (non-resident) metropolitan for twelve years (1322–34) before being elected
ecumenical patriarch. Philotheos is understandably reluctant to mention the ordaining
bishop’s name, even though he was no doubt only one of Kalekas’ suffragans.
176 Gal 1: 1.
At the skete of Berroia

26. A little while after the ordination and the divine oracle of which I
have spoken, they left Thessalonike and, coming to the neighbourhood of
Berroia, arrived at the nearby mountain and the skete of monks that at that
time had been set up there.177 There with his ten companions (the most
complete and perfect number),178 zealous participants with him in the same
life, Gregory established a study-house of divine philosophy. Truly filled
with every good thing, he began to investigate philosophically once again
the divine perfection that is above. For five days of the week he remained
totally secluded and did not receive anyone at all for any conversation. On
Saturdays and Sundays, however, he came out for the mystical sacrifice and
to meet and converse with the brethren.179
He was then thirty years old and was physically strong, having not yet
experienced even a short bout of sickness. He therefore greatly intensified
his ascetic struggles and the hardship of his way of life, mortifying his body
by fasting and long vigils and striving to make it completely subject to the
spirit. By all kinds of continence and watchfulness and by his habitual flow
of tears he refined and purified the soul’s power of sight, always raising it
up towards the divine, which is akin to it, through unceasing mental prayer
and through immediate communion and unity with God by grace. As a
result, the fruits of the Spirit, to speak like the Apostle,180 used to well up
in him, and everyone, not only those who were dwelling on that mountain,
in accordance with love for divine philosophy, and in the town, regarded
his wonderful mode of life and speech as an archetype and image of virtue.
Everything concerning him seemed to them a new wonder, remote from
this age of ours and almost superhuman. For what astonished them along
with the sublimity of his ascetic practice was his speech and the newness
and truly supernatural character of his divine wisdom, which could not be
compared with that of anyone else.
177 This was the same year as Palamas’ ordination, 1326. Palamas’ departure from
Thessalonike thus coincides with the rebellion and succession from the empire of the
governor of Thessalonike, John Palaiologos, a nephew of Andronikos II. The skete (still
extant) is that of Timios Prodromos, twenty kilometres from Berroia in the foothills of the
Pieria Mountains, where a cave is shown that by tradition was occupied by Gregory Palamas.
178 The number 10 is the Pythagorean tetractys, the sum of the first four numbers. Aristotle
reports that Pythagoras called it the perfect number (Metaphysics 986a8).
179 This is the classic hesychast regime of seclusion during the week and sharing in the
synaxis on Saturdays and Sundays.
180 Cf. Gal 5: 22.
80 GREGORY PALAMAS
27. And what need be said when even without speaking, O admirable man,
you instil wonder in the souls of those who behold you? Sometimes you
were deeply recollected, with your attention wholly turned inwards upon
yourself and upon God and your face bathed supernaturally with those
strange streams of tears. Sometimes your face was filled with a light like
the fire of a furnace in a manner surpassing nature and was transformed and
changed, especially when you were emerging from the mystical celebration
of the sacred rites or coming out of your cell and leaving your stillness.
The death of his mother

While Gregory was living there in such circumstances, his mother, who
was most beautiful in a true sense and much loved by him, left this world
and passed over to God enriched by numerous virtues. A letter soon arrived
from Byzantium written by her daughters, the virgins who were leading
the ascetic life with her, which informed him of the death of their common
mother and invited him to visit them and offer them spiritual guidance.
Allowing himself very rightly to be persuaded by the letter and his sisters’
invitation, he went up to the city of Constantine, taking both his brothers
with him. He found that his sisters had in no way let down their family,
admired their virtue and praised their struggles and their life so pure and
observant in every respect. Then, having rendered appropriate thanks to
God for everything, and having given spiritual teaching and exhortation
about the higher things to the best of his ability, he returned again to his
life of monastic withdrawal.
Return to Berroia
This, however, did not please his sisters. They said that is was absolutely
necessary either that along with his brothers he should remain there,
teaching and instructing them daily and leading them in a worthy manner
towards virtue and God, or that they themselves should emigrate with them
and seek exile and withdrawal. Gregory for his part declared that it was
impossible for him to live again in his native city. As for the alternative, he
thought it both possible and advantageous that his sisters should emigrate
with him, and so along with his brothers took them too back to Berroia.
They settled in the town and resumed there their customary way of life and
ascetical practices, while he returned to the mountain and his ascetical hut.
28. After a little while his older sister Epicharis left her body and her siblings
and everything belonging to this world and gloriously passed over to God,
crowned supernaturally in an invisible manner with virginal and ascetical

charisms,181 and showing the grace of apostolic signs even to those outside
the monastic life in no obscure fashion. Ten days earlier, while she was still
in good bodily health, she had predicted her death very clearly and for this
reason had kept her brothers with her when they had come down into town
from the mountain. She also foretold in the divine Spirit that Theodosios,
the second of the brothers, would similarly come to die within a brief space
of time, and that Gregory, together with his brother Makarios, would shortly
return to Athos and would subsequently encounter various difficulties which
would nevertheless end up to his advantage. These things did indeed turn
out as she had predicted, not one of them failing in any way to be true. For
since her earliest childhood she had virtue as a companion, so to speak, who
grew to maturity with her, along with the habit of having recourse to God
in all things, frugality, mourning and contempt for what is transitory and
subject to corruption in this world. Indeed, the wise Gregory had a fund of
marvellous stories worthy of remembrance that he had heard from his fairest
mother.182 He himself used to recount these later to the people living with
him, but because of their length my narrative must omit them. Nevertheless,
the following must be added to what has already been said.
29. Many excellent men lived on that mountain, among them one advanced
both in years and in character whose name was Job.183 Job pursued a serious
way of life. He was distinguished for his gentleness and goodness and, to
put it briefly, for every good thing. He had a hut not far from where Gregory
lived and became his disciple and intimate friend, for virtue forms a strong
bond between people because it makes them lovers of the same things.
This ascetic was once sitting with the great man, as was his custom, and
listening attentively to what he was saying, because he had heard him say
among other things that every person called by Christ, of whatever station
in life, ought to practise unceasing prayer in accordance with the Apostle’s
exhortation, ‘Pray without ceasing’ (1 Thes 5:17), which is addressed to the
181 These are the divine gifts that were bestowed on outstanding ascetics, especially the
gifts of vision and spiritual insight (the ‘reading of hearts’).
182 By the word ‘fairest’ (kallistē), Philotheos plays on the name of Palamas’ mother, Kale
– Kallone.
183 The monk Job (PLP 8931) also appears in two contemporary saints’ lives, the Life of
Athanasios I of Constantinople by Theoktistos and the Life of Germanos the Hagiorite by
Philotheos himself.
82 GREGORY PALAMAS
Church as a whole, and also with the prophet David, who even though he
was a king said: ‘I keep the Lord always before me’ (Ps 15:8). The great
Gregory, too, doubtless follows them when he says: ‘It is more important to
remember God than to breathe’,184 himself addressing the faithful as a whole
in the same way. ‘It is necessary,’ he concluded, ‘that we too, persuaded by
the examples I have given, should teach these things in the same way not
only to those who have left the world and embraced the monastic life, but
also to men, women and children, to the educated and the uneducated, to
everyone without distinction, and make every effort to introduce them to it.’
When the old man heard the wise Gregory say these things, I don’t know
what came over him. He tried to argue against such manifest and incontro-
vertible arguments, maintaining that this was only for monastics who had
withdrawn from the world, not a general teaching for the many living a
secular life. The great man added to his arguments many other similar
examples but was utterly unable to persuade the elder, so he put a stop to the
discussion as he was always anxious to avoid loquaciousness and contention.
When they had parted from each other, and had gone home and each was
praying in stillness in his own hut, as was their habit, God immediately
resolved their dispute from above. Using an angel as a minister, he taught
the ignorant monk in a compassionate way what he had not learned, at the
same time honouring Gregory supernaturally, one might say, for what he
had said. The radiant angel appeared plainly at the side of the elder as he
prayed. ‘With regard to what was being discussed a short while ago, O elder,
do not hold any other opinion whatsoever than that which the holy Gregory
expressed.’ And, having given this order, he immediately disappeared. The
elder, fully recognizing the teaching and the apparition to be angelic and
divine, eagerly went straight to the saint, revealed to him what he had seen
and heard, and begged forgiveness for his unseemly dissent and resistance.
This he received even more abundantly than he was expecting – for who can
rival Gregory in moderation and love? – and from that time he was almost
inseparable from the great man. They bound themselves to each other in an
excellent way with bonds of unbreakable harmony and friendship.
Shortly afterwards when the good Job was departing for Christ whom
he loved and was already approaching his last breath, he gave thanks to
God in the presence of all for the great graces he had received, that he had
become an intimate companion and disciple of Gregory and that he had
benefited very greatly in many ways from his teaching and friendship.
184 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 27, 4 (Moreschini, 646).
Again at the Great Lavra

30. The wise Gregory was in his fifth year living here in stillness when
the Illyrian nation invaded that region, or rather, made a series of raids
on the mountains, plains and fields, including all the villages.185 Some
of these they pillaged, enslaving the inhabitants, others they burned to
the ground. Gregory himself was forced to move again and return to
the most excellent Athos. When he arrived there, he went back to the
Great Lavra of the admirable Athanasios. He was delighted to see his
beloved fathers and brothers and they were delighted to see him. He did
not stay in the Lavra, as he had done previously, but instead established
the seat and habitation of his hesychia a short distance from it, namely, at
the hermitage of St Sabas.186 He rarely came down to the Lavra and the
crowds there, only when the community called on him from time to time,
as they did with the other presbyters, to perform his priestly functions
and celebrate the mysteries. They wished as a result to embellish and
glorify themselves, so to speak, as if demonstrating their intense zeal and
ambition regarding such matters. But Gregory usually lived in a state of
extreme stillness alone with himself and with God. He neither went out
of his hut nor did he ever go out to talk or see anyone at all. Nor could he
even bear to look at the man who took care of his most basic needs, apart,
as I have said, from Saturdays and Sundays, when he could be seen and
approached by others too.
Perfection in the active life and in contemplation

31. Virtue as a whole is divided into two aspects, the active and the contem-
plative. Those who are wise in these matters say that the active aspect is
the base and foundation, so to speak, of the contemplative.187 The active
is easier and the zealous gain complete mastery of it with great ease. The
contemplative is by nature more difficult to master, or rather, to put it more
precisely, cannot be fully acquired all at once. For it naturally raises up
the holy and purified mind of deiform men to God himself and unites it
immediately with him. It is said that those who have attained this union
185 Palamas’ fifth year at Berroia was 1331, when the Serbs (the ‘Illyrians’), having
destroyed the Bulgarian army at the battle of Velbužd (28 July 1330), began to move into
Macedonia.
186 The traditional spot above the Lavra now has a chapel dedicated to St Gregory Palamas.
Tsames (459, n. 120) is mistaken in identifying this St Sabas with the Serbian monastery of
Hilandari.
84 GREGORY PALAMAS
find it a state of suspension from every other divine contemplation, for

it is inexhaustible and infinite. Nor is there said to be anything that even
the most philosophical, the most penetrating, the most investigative mind
possesses or can possibly possess that is more sublime. ‘For this is the
ultimate object of desire.’188 In the words of the great Dionysius, even ‘the
most divine and most lofty minds move ever in a circle, united with the
illuminations of the beautiful and the good that have no beginning and
no end.’189 This, therefore, being the case, the divine Gregory was seen
to struggle to attain the active life in this way, and to do so successfully
both before his renunciation and after his withdrawal and reception of the
habit, since from the beginning of this he was almost perfect and no mean
rival of the great and zealous in these matters. As he advanced in years
and the practice of the ascetic life, what need be said about how much he
excelled those zealous for such things in every respect? With regard to
extreme poverty and detachment and, moreover, fasting, humility, every
kind of self-restraint, withdrawal, mourning, silence and all such things
he was a wonderful example both to people close to him and to strangers.
But because what he set before his eyes and made the object of his efforts
was pre-eminently contemplation, and contemplation excels and surpasses
everything else – indeed, God-bearers are accustomed to calling it the
vision of God, unmediated union, illumination, deification and so forth,
through which and with which such men make good progress towards
the highest love and the divine likeness, and indeed towards a sublime
and faultless knowledge of God through unceasing prayer, stillness of the
intellect, humility and mourning – we shall investigate, if such an investi-
gation is really possible, how this true man of God dealt with these most
divine and lofty matters.
32. Matters of high theology, however, and the way in which Gregory
approached them must be left for the time being until the appropriate place
and occasion. The other matters may perhaps be admired more easily,
even if not as fully as they deserve. But to go through each of them in
detail and bring them, as it were, before the eyes of the hearers seems to
me to be something impossible. For this reason one should rather hear
him expounding these matters in his own voice, since nobody can know
someone and what he has actually experienced like that person himself,

189 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names IV, 8, 704D (Suchla, 153).
not even someone close to him, or know how to speak and write about it in
the way that he himself can. The wise Gregory therefore speaks about the
attentive repose of the intellect and the fruits that derive from this, and also
about divine illumination, when he writes on these among many others
topics against his opponent concerning the divine light.190
When the intellect detaches itself from every sensible thing, emerges from the
cataclysm of the tumult surrounding them, and turns its gaze to the inward
man, it first observes the ugly mask placed on it as a result of the deceptive
nature of the world below and through mourning strives to wash it away.
Then, when it has stripped off this unsightly covering, with the soul no longer
distracted ignobly by various relationships, it enters with tranquillity into the
true treasure-chamber and prays to the Father in secret in accordance with the
commandment.191 And the Father grants it first of all the gift of the pacification
of thoughts, which makes it capable of receiving the charisms of the Spirit.
With the pacification of thoughts he perfects humility, which generates and
maintains every virtue – not the humility consisting of words and gestures that
are easily assumed by whoever wishes, but the humility to which the good and
divine Spirit witnesses, which the Spirit itself creates when it renews a person’s
inward being.192 Within these two, as if within the secure walled enclosure
of the garden of the intellect, grow all the various trees of true virtue. Right
in the middle stands the sacred palace of love, at the outer entrance of which
flourishes the preliminary stage of the age to come, an inexpressible joy that
can never be lost.
The mother of freedom from anxiety is poverty, poverty is the mother of
attentiveness and prayer, attentiveness and prayer are the mother of mourning
and tears and these eliminate predispositions. When the latter are expelled the
path of virtue is easily accomplished, once obstacles have been removed and
a blameless conscience acquired. These make joy and blessed laughter well
up more fully from the soul. Then indeed tears of pain are transformed into
sweetness and the words of God become ‘like sweetness in the throat and more
than honey in the mouth’.193 Petition in prayer is converted into thanksgiving,
and the study of the divine testimonies ‘is a delight of the heart’,194 when the
heart approaches them with a hope that cannot be put to shame,195 and as if
190 The following text reproduces Palamas’ Against Akindynos VII, 34–40 (chapter 11),
with some cuts (Christou III, 486– 92; Perrella II, 844–56).
191 Cf. Matt 6: 6.
192 Cf. Ps 50 (51) 6–12.
193 Ps 118 (119): 103.
194 Ps 118 (119): 24, 111.
195 Ps 22: 5.
86 GREGORY PALAMAS
standing on the threshold gains some experience of this taste and learns in
part something of the immeasurable riches of God’s goodness196 in accordance
with him who says ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good’,197 for delight belongs
to the just, joy to the upright, gladness to those who have been humbled, and
consolation to those who have mourned for him.
What follows then? Is that as far as the consolation goes, and is it just
these that are the gifts of the sacred betrothal? Does he reveal himself no more
clearly than this to those who have been bathed by blessed mourning and have
put on the wedding garments of the virtues, seeing that he is the bridegroom
of such souls? Of course not. For once every shameful passion dwelling within
has been driven out and the intellect, as my discourse already explained, has
returned to itself and to the other powers of the soul, it will cherish the soul
by the complete cultivation of the virtues and advance to what is more perfect.
Setting itself to make yet more practical ascents, and cleansing itself further
with help from God, not only does it wipe away what has been stamped on it
by evil but it also puts away everything it has acquired, even if it belongs to
the better part and the understanding. When the intellect has thus risen above
both intellectual concepts and perceptions that are not without some admixture
of the imagination, and having set aside all things out of love for God and in
a manner pleasing to God, has come to stand before him deaf and mute, as
Scripture puts it,198 then it holds back the principle of matter and shapes for
itself the highest conformation of reality in all security, inasmuch as nothing
belonging to the external world is knocking on the door because the grace that
is within it remodels it to conform to that which is superior to it and in a most
extraordinary fashion fills it with ineffable light, perfecting the inner man.
When the day dawns and the morning star rises in our hearts, as the chief of
the apostles says,199 the true human being, in accordance with the well-known
prophetic saying, goes out to his true work.200 With the light showing the
way, he ascends or is helped to ascend the everlasting mountains,201 and –
O the wonder! – is enabled by this light to behold things transcending this
world, whether separated from the matter that has accompanied him from the
beginning, or not, as the way itself knows. For the intellect does not ascend on
the wings of the imagination, or wander about as if totally blind. Nor does it do
so in reliance on the absent objects of the senses, or on the transcendent objects
of the intellect, having acquired a precise and unambiguous apprehension of
196 Cf. Eph 2: 7.

197 Ps 33 (34): 9.
198 Cf. Ps 37 (38): 14.
199 Cf. 2 Pet 1: 19.
200 Cf. Ps 103 (104): 23.
201 Cf. Ps 75 (76): 5.
them. No, it ascends in reality by the ineffable power of the Spirit, and by an
apprehension that is spiritual and ineffable it hears what may not be heard and
sees what may not be seen. Such a man becomes wholly part of the wonder he
encounters there. When he descends from there and vies with those tireless
singers of praise, he truly becomes an angel of God on earth, offering up to
him, through his own person, every kind of creature, since he himself partic-
ipates in all things and has a share now in him who transcends all things, so
that he is an excellent image of him.
Thus the divine Nilus says: ‘The state of the mind is an intelligible height
resembling the colour of heaven, to which the light of the Holy Trinity comes
in the time of prayer.’202 And St Diadochus, uniting the end with the beginning,
puts it all in a single chapter when he writes: ‘Divine grace confers on us two
gifts through the baptism of regeneration, one being infinitely superior to the
other. The first renews us in the waters of baptism and restores the brilliance
of what is according to the image, removing every wrinkle of sin. The second
requires our co-operation. When the intellect begins to taste the goodness
of the all-holy Spirit with full consciousness, we should realize that grace is
beginning to paint the divine likeness over the divine image in us […] so that
our power of perception shows us that we are being formed into the divine
likeness; but the perfecting of this likeness we shall know only by the light of
grace.’203 And again: ‘No one can acquire spiritual love unless he experiences
fully and clearly the illumination of the Holy Spirit. If the intellect does not
receive the perfection of the divine likeness through illumination, although
it may have almost every other virtue, it will still have no share in perfect
love.’204 We also hear St Isaac speaking in the same way: ‘In the time of prayer
the intellect filled with grace sees its own purity like the colour of the sky, a
purity which was called by the elders of Israel the place of God, when it was
seen by them on the mountain.’205 And again: ‘Purity of the mind is when at the
time of prayer the light of the Holy Trinity irradiates it.’206
For the divine light shines everywhere but is not visible everywhere.
Although it is one, it does not shine equally on everyone, not even on the saints,
despite their being deiform and illuminated. The light of the sun is one and its
202 Actually, Evagrius Ponticus, Reflections, Part I, Gnostic Chapters 4 (trans. Sinkewicz
2003, 211). Attributed to Nilus of Ancyra, it appears as De malignis cogitationibus 18 (PG
79, 1221B).
203 Diadochus of Photike, On Spiritual Knowledge 89 (trans. Palmer et al. 1979, 288,
modified). Palamas has shortened the text.
204 Diadochus of Photike, On Spiritual Knowledge 89 (trans. Palmer et al. 1979, 288,
modified)
205 Isaac the Syrian, Sermon 32 (ed. Spetsieris, 140).
206 Isaac the Syrian, Sermon 32 (ed. Spetsieris, 140).
88 GREGORY PALAMAS
rays are many, and not only many but also brighter or dimmer according to the
sensitivity to light of those who receive it. The light that transcends the senses
works in the same way as that which falls on a sensible image that is obscure
to the senses. At this point one should also add the will of the illuminator. An
intellect deemed worthy of that light also transmits many signs of the divine
beauty to the body that is united to it, acting as a mediator between divine
grace and the coarseness of the body and endowing it with a power to receive
what would otherwise be impossible.
Hence the godlike and incomparable habit of virtue, and the impossibility
or difficulty of being moved to do evil. Hence the spiritual principle that clearly
articulates the principles of beings and of its own nature plainly reveals the
mysteries of nature. It is through these mysteries by the principle of analogy
that the understanding of those who listen with faith is drawn upwards to
receive those things that are above nature, a reality that the Father of the Logos
possessed by immaterial contacts. Hence, too, the various other miracles of
the saints and their gifts of discernment, prevision and giving descriptions of
events that have taken place at a distance as if seen by their own eyes. And the
most important thing of all is that the attention of those most blessed men is
not focused upon these things. It is like when one looks at a ray of sunlight and
becomes aware of small floating particles in it, even though that is not why one
was looking at it. In the same way, those who enter purely into communion
with the rays of the divine, which are naturally accompanied by the revelation
of all things – not only of what is and what has already come to be, but also of
what is still to be – in proportion to their purity.207 But a prior work for them
is the return of the mind to itself and its attaining unity with itself, or rather,
even if this is an astonishing thing to say, the return of all the soul’s powers to
the mind, together with its own and the divine energy, through which they are
restored and rendered well disposed towards the prototype, that ancient and
inexpressible beauty, through the reflowering of grace.
33. It was things of this sort, concerning sacred study, stillness, divine
illumination and deification, that occupied that godlike and heavenly
intellect, that divine and truly wise tongue. With regard to these topics,
who else could ever have reflected on them or spoken about them in such
an extraordinarily divine and sublime manner, among those, I mean,
who have advanced in these exalted matters in both theory and practice
and have gained knowledge of such by blessed experience? As what he
207 Cf. St Benedict’s vision of ‘the whole world gathered beneath a single sunbeam and
brought before his eyes’ (Gregory the Great, Dialogues II, 35) cited by Palamas in Triads I,
3, 22 (Meyendorff, Défense 157; Perella I, 408–10).
says is in harmony in every detail with the writings and discourses of

the God-bearing fathers, it is in all respects incontrovertible and secure.
It was because the great man was experienced and well instructed by
action and operation in those divine and supernatural matters that when
the occasion demanded, some considerable time later, he came to speak
and write about them.208 This is self-evident to anyone of intelligence.
For such things would never occur to the human mind or be the product
of human wisdom and speech. Far from it, unless one were foolishly
to compare fireflies with the sun’s rays or the blows of blacksmiths and
wood-cutters with thunder, or rather with the last echoes of its rumbling,
as my narrative will shortly demonstrate, so that the tree should be known
by its fruit, as Christ’s saying has it,209 and the state of the root accurately
discerned from its branches.
The charism of vision

34. It was the evening of the great mystical Supper and the Lord’s passion
according to the flesh.210 The rites were being conducted in a magnificent
fashion, as was the custom at the Lavra, and Gregory was sharing in the
celebration and the hymns, standing along with others, among the leading
monks and participating with them, ornamenting, one might say, that
assembly by his presence. But as often happens, some of those standing
there, as if forgetting what was being celebrated and those great and
wonderful odes for which they had assembled, let themselves lapse into
idle chatter, and excessively and beyond measure at that, if it is permissible
to speak at all about measure in such matters. The man of God naturally
found this annoying but it did not seem to him appropriate that he should
speak to them and stop their conversation. So he detached his mind from
them and from the hymnody and returned it to himself, as was his habit,
and through himself to God. And at once a divine light enveloped him from
above and by those rays illuminated the eyes both of his soul and of his
body. As a result, he saw clearly as already present what was going to take
place a number of years later. For Makarios, who was entrusted at that time
208 That experience is the best teacher has been a commonplace since classical times:
e.g. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 177; Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 18, 26. Dionysius the
Areopagite, Divine Names II, 9, 648B (Suchla, 134). It is still a proverb today: ta pathē
mathēmata.
209 Cf. Matt 12: 33.
210 Holy Thursday, 16 April 1332.
90 GREGORY PALAMAS
with the administration of the Lavra, was standing on his right and seemed
not to be wearing the usual common monastic habit but appeared to be
serving as a bishop and be vested as one and be behaving in all respects
in an episcopal manner. This was seen by us to turn out to be true eleven
years later, that is, when after his leadership and protection of the Lavra
this Makarios ascended the episcopal throne of our Thessalonike and died
there in that office.211
Once the divine Gregory was praying for himself and his companions.
His prayer was addressed to the Virgin and Theotokos, the ordinary guide
and agent of salvation, that she might make their journey and ascent to
God free from obstacles and make the provision of what was necessary to
satisfy their bodily needs easy and free from anxiety, so that they should
not be constrained for the lack of such things to spend time seeing to
them and leave off spiritual and more necessary tasks. That was what the
prayer was about. Now the Mistress of all things, anticipating, so to speak,
the prayer itself out of the abundance of her providential care, quickly
appeared before him – he was fully awake – dressed in a sober and virginal
fashion just as she is represented by us in our carefully executed icons.
And turning to those who followed her, most of whom seemed to be distin-
guished personages, she said: ‘Henceforth you are to be the administrators
and distributors for Gregory and his companions of everything appropriate
to their needs.’ And having thus in a few words answered the holy prayer
and granted her gift, she returned to herself. ‘From that time,’ the holy
Gregory used to tell us, ‘all our physical needs were satisfied without effort,
wherever we happened to be living.’
The charisms of speaking and writing

35. Two years went by in the course of which the great Gregory experienced
these things while he was living at the hermitage I mentioned. Once in the
third year, while he was living there on his own as was his custom and
keeping his intellect focused on God through noetic stillness and prayer,
it seemed to him that somehow a shadow came over him just as he was on
the verge of sleep, and all at once he saw the following vision. It seemed
211 It was in March 1342 that Makarios was sent with the protos Isaac and other senior
Athonites to Constantinople by Kantakouzenos to negotiate a settlement of the civil war
that had started in the previous autumn. Makarios appears to have changed sides and been
rewarded by high ecclesiastical office. He was metropolitan of Thessalonike from 1342 to
1346 and was succeeded by Palamas in 1347. On this episode see Rigo 2015a.
to him that he was holding some kind of vessel in his hands full of milk
and that the milk suddenly began to well up and pour out over the edge
of the vessel. Then it changed abruptly into an excellent wine with a fine
bouquet that ran profusely over his clothing and his hands, soaking them
and filling them with its fragrance. ‘At this point,’ he said, ‘while I was
experiencing great pleasure and, you might say enjoying myself, a man full
of light appeared before me. “Why is it,” he said, “that you do not share
this divine drink welling up here so marvellously with other people too,
but instead let it run to waste? Do you not know that this is a gift from God
and that he will not allow it to gush forth and flow out like this?” When I
offered the excuse that I did not have the capacity to distribute it, and that
there was nobody around at the moment who wanted it, he said: “Even
if there is nobody around who seeks it in a worthy fashion, you should
nevertheless do what you can and not totally neglect the distribution I have
referred to but leave the demand for it to the Master. For you must know
very well the commandment relating to the talent and the condemnation of
the servant who neglected to make it productive and failed to carry out the
master’s instructions.”212 ‘Then,’ he said, ‘it seemed to me that that radiant
figure disappeared, while I shook off that shadow of sleep and remained
sitting there the whole night and most of the day too, entirely bathed in a
brilliant light.’
36. The wonderful Gregory related this later to his friend and disciple, the
holy Dorotheos,213 when he began to publish those marvellous discourses
of his on the divine doctrines, interpreting the transformation of that sacred
drink from milk to wine as alluding to a change in his discourse from
what was moral and simple to what was doctrinal and higher. What was
the consequence? Persuaded by the divine oracles, the sage opened his
intellectual as well as his physical mouth from that time, and began without
any reservation to impart to all a share of the Spirit he had attracted from
above, conveying God’s discourses to them in a perfectly plain manner.
These were discourses that would never, in my opinion, have been put
into words and written down by anybody at all, even by someone with
ten tongues and as many mouths and hands, as some people put it, if he
himself had not done so, and if those divine and wise discourses of his and
the volumes which have so fortunately been bequeathed to us in his place
212 Cf. Matt 25: 14–30.

213 Dorotheos Blates (see note 153, above).
92 GREGORY PALAMAS
and in that of his great intelligence and voice had not been produced. Those
who lived on holy Athos at that time saw and heard all these things from
close by. And those especially who with the passage of time had arrived at
a mature outlook and had become lovers of excellent stillness and the like
considered his whole manner to have something divine and supernatural
about it and were greatly struck by the treasure of grace hidden within
him. Every day they related many things about him worth mentioning and
recording in everyone’s presence, and indeed rightly held that the following
saying of the wonderful father Isaac applied to Gregory more appropriately
than to anybody else: ‘Who has seen a man resplendent with virtues yet
outwardly insignificant, luminous in his life, wise in his knowledge, and
humble in his outlook?’214 They maintained that it was obviously none
other than Gregory who was signified by that great father in his sermon
and was sought for with such diligent enquiry and perplexity because of
the rarity of such people.
37. Guided by those divine utterances and by the Spirit dwelling within
him Gregory subsequently, along with his wonderful spoken discourses,
as I have already said, began to write and construct wonderful treatises.
The first to be composed by him was on the holy father Peter, a product and
resident of our own land who took his surname from the time he spent on
holy Athos and the great and angelic way of life he led there.215 The second
after this was the discourse on the holy entry of the Mother of God into the
temple in accordance with the Law, and her Godlike life there, because it
had come to his knowledge at that time that there were some people there
who were talking nonsense and in rash and untutored language had dared
to challenge those mysteries.216 There were also many others in addition to
these that are worthy of mention and holy remembrance.
Hegoumenos of the monastery of Esphigmenou

But since he was supernaturally so resplendent in word and deed and in the
sublime gifts of the Spirit and towered above everybody else, holding them
all spellbound, it was not possible for him to sit in seclusion in a corner, or
keep the manifest torch of his reason under the bushel of silence and hide
214 Cf. Isaac the Syrian, Sermon 5 (Spetieris, 29).

215 Life of Peter the Athonite (Sinkewicz 2002, 151). Sinkewicz cites Rigo 1995, 181 for
dating the text to 1332.
216 Homily 53, dated by Sinkewicz (2002, 153) to 1333.
his virtue for very long. (This is also what that divine oracle expressly
commanded, as my narrative has already shown.) So what happened? He
was invited by a common vote, I mean by a vote of the general leader and
ruler of the Mountain together with those distinguished in age and virtue,
to take charge of a community of monks.217 Actually, he was persuaded to
undertake this by the votes of heaven rather than by human votes. Having
arrived there, he took possession of his chair and assumed responsibility
for the brothers, who numbered about two hundred.218 But now let those
come forward who experienced that apostolic leadership and guidance,
and let them relate what sort of a man he was in deed and word in what
concerned the government and care of souls. He was unassuming in his
manner, liberal in his outlook, gentle in his conversation, approachable
and humble to the zealous but severe and unyielding to the negligent and
contemptuous, forgiving to those who rightly returned from sinning, or
rather, he himself made the greatest effort in deeds and words every day
to bring about their return and repentance, and by his own example drew
them all in an appropriate manner towards virtue. They know it well who
against all hope have been delivered from the most grievous passions, and
from bonds of sin that have endured for many years, and from the variety
of demonic operations and machinations by his teachings and prayers and
have become a new model of repentance to everybody.
What need is there to speak of his frequent and varied colloquies and
teaching, of that golden and unconstrained flow of speech, of his care for
the church with its ministers and cantors and concern for its beauty, of
the liturgical ceremonies and rites of the supernatural and most sublime
mysteries, and, moreover, of the appropriate decorum with regard to the
sacred altar and of the attentiveness and recollection in those who served
as priests, which he himself inspired in the participants simply by being
seen as he celebrated the divine and mystic rites in a supernatural manner?
What need is there, in view of the fact that after that wonderful period of
leadership and the withdrawal of the man from there, the monks of that
monastery had not the slightest desire either to persevere there or to live
in its neighbourhood? Some went off to find stillness and withdrawal,
217 I.e. the protos and hegoumenoi of the leading monasteries, the governing body of
Mount Athos meeting at Kareai, offered him a hegoumenate.
218 This was the monastery of Esphigmenou, founded in the late tenth century on the
north-east coast of Athos. In the fourteenth century it was particularly rich and flourishing.
Palamas was hegoumenos in 1335–36.
94 GREGORY PALAMAS
others to put themselves under a stricter obedience and ascetic discipline,

and others to seek out the most extreme desert places, because it was not
possible for all to stay permanently in the company of their wise teacher
and guide, which is what they wanted. But in these matters I say only what
is sufficient to give a general picture.
38. It is nevertheless also necessary to mention two or three particular

episodes in which God performed miracles, again through him. At this
monastery of Esphigmenou – for that is what they call it, I do not know
why, whether because of the founder, or the site and arrangement of the
buildings, or some other reason 219 – there was a monk who was pious,
learned and zealous and was one of the ministers serving the holy church.
His name was Eudokimos.220 While this man was engaged in noetic
prayer and concentrating on keeping his intellect focused, our common
enemy tricked him in a moment of carelessness, presented him with
some apparitions and images that were illusory and false, and persuaded
him to give heed to these as if they were something holy. In short, he led
him astray from what was fitting so that before long Eudokimos would
have gone out of his senses and torn himself away from God altogether
if Gregory had not been there with that divine wisdom of his and the
medicines of the Spirit. For if the evil one had been able to block this
great remedy of the Spirit by his machinations, as he had intended, he
would have taught Eudokimos the most pernicious things, in addition
to the others, and persuaded him that, although Gregory might be great
and admirable in delivering discourses, he was totally untutored and
inexperienced in his mystical contemplation and practice of virtue, and
therefore no attention at all was to be paid to him and his discourses
or credence given to anything he might happen to say in them. But the
wise Gregory exorcised even this delusion from that soul, along with all
the other errors that had come to possess it, pitching himself against the
sophistical advocate of evil and countering his arguments in a variety of
ways, sometimes by holy teachings and fatherly laws and admonitions,
sometimes by mystical prayers and tears and in addition to these by the
common prayers and supplications of the Church for the sick of which he
was a creator and promoter, until in the end, having expelled from that
219 The origin of the name Esphigmenou is still debated. The modern consensus is that it
derives from esphagmenou, ‘slaughtered’. See ODB 2, 729.
220 PLP 6239.
place the entire demonic operation, he not only healed Eudokimos but
made him as reliable and reputable as his name suggested through the
great operation and grace of the Spirit.221
39. Once the monks lacked oil. The great man came to hear about this from
them, and, realizing the seriousness of the situation, gave instructions for
them to come to the storeroom. Then going in and standing with faith by
the oil jar, he called on God, who alone can bring all things supernaturally
out of non-being, and with his hand made the sign of the cross, straightaway
showing to the monks the famous jug of Sarepta like a new Elijah.222 For
the jar of oil there at the monastery, like the jug at Sarepta, did not run out
for the entire year, even though it was drawn off in abundance, at the great
man’s orders, by the monks who lived within the monastery as well as
those who lived outside.
When he learned that the reason for the lack of oil was that the olive
trees did not have the strength to produce fruit, he went to the olive grove
with the presbyters and the monks and on arriving there prayed over it,
made the sign of the cross over the trees, and sanctified the whole of that
place with holy litanies, supplications and sprinkling with holy water.
Then when he had expounded the Holy Scriptures, as was his custom, and
had exhorted his hearers especially to escape from fruitlessness of the
soul, seeing that this was suited rather to the axe and the fire, according,
that is, to the word of the great Baptist and Forerunner,223 he returned
to himself and to the monastery. And when the season arrived – Oh the
wonder! – the plants that for many years now had not been strong enough
to give fruit were seen to be productive beyond all expectation and full
of fruit. And that the miracle and the great power of Christ actualized by
Gregory should be more manifest, the trees that appeared to be more laden
with fruit were those that he had passed close to as he walked by, or those
near him when he gave his discourse, or under whose shade he had sat.
221 A play on the name Eudokimos: dokimos means ‘reliable, eudokimos’ reputable.
222 Cf. 1 Kings 17: 12–16.
223 Cf. Matt 3: 10, Luke 3: 9.
96 GREGORY PALAMAS
Doctrinal conflicts
Return to the Lavra
40. At this point in our discourse we must also deal to the best of our
ability with his battle against the new heresies, his great struggles on behalf
of divine grace, his long endeavours and ordeals. These, of course, are
familiar to everybody and have been circulated and discussed very widely
by both our own people and foreigners, by those living close by or afar,
all who have been touched by the power of his oral teaching and his holy
and inspired writings, except in so far as we too are able by our discourse
to retrieve the principal matters and restore them to memory. This, too,
should indeed be a work accomplished somewhat under his patronage and
with his holy assistance, I mean so that I should be able to organize the
discourse properly, that is, to set out the facts according to his own way of
thinking, and thus not fail utterly to produce something suitable, because
it seems to me more important than anything else not that I should find out
what to say but rather that I should decide what is appropriate to leave out
without thereby seeming to ruin the whole.
41. The Great Lavra had the great Gregory back again, but he quickly
removed himself from that support and monastery and departed for his
beloved stillness and hermitage, out of love for study and withdrawal.224
This was because, with God’s help, his physical condition was now better,
and the problem with his liver had diminished, so that he was not compelled
to follow cures and special diets, which isolation and withdrawal made it
impossible to procure, as he had done previously.
Barlaam the Calabrian

Barlaam the Calabrian had then recently visited Roman territory for the first
time, to his own detriment and to that of those who found him persuasive.225
Acting the philosopher and monk, and above all pretending to be orthodox
and in agreement with our own Church, he began to write doctrinal works
against his fellow Latins and to engage in rational disputes on the procession
of the Holy Spirit, professing to support the opinion of our own theologians
and to defend the definition of faith and the words of Christ. The resulting
224 The year is 1336.

225 For a biographical sketch of Barlaam of Calabria (PLP 2284) with a list of his works
and a full bibliography, see Fyrigos 2005, 161–91. Barlaam first arrived in Greece c. 1325.
sophistry directed against the Church was clearly rather ‘bait’, as someone
has said, ‘wrapped round the hook of impiety to trap the gullible’.226 But such
things could not also deceive the pillar of theology, the mystic and teacher of
the higher wisdom, I mean the divine Gregory. Far from it. Taking it in his
hands, he examined it, read it through, judged it fairly and demonstrated that
this refutation, fraudulently composed in writing, was a manifest stratagem
against the truth. For the Latins, as we all know, necessarily introduce two
principles of Godhead in their doctrine of the procession of the Spirit.227
Barlaam, in purportedly refuting this absurdity, appears to have attempted
by his own words cure evil by evil. In a certain way, although not as they do,
he too condones absurdity, rejecting the syllogistic proofs of wise theologians
against the heresies and appealing instead to the Greek philosophers, I mean
Aristotle and Plato and those who follow them, as men who are holy and
illuminated by God. Against such nonsense with regard to true piety the
noble Gregory opposed discourses that were worthy both of himself and of
the truth for the sake of which reason exists.228 By reinforcing the truth on
the one hand and manifestly refuting the lie, he thus now for the first time
drew his adversary towards him, or rather, began to unmask his concealed
stratagem and hypocrisy. These were practice bouts, as it were, for Gregory
for the very great contests and exertion he was subsequently to engage in on
behalf of the true faith.
Barlaam accuses the hesychasts

42. A little later Barlaam left Thessalonike for the imperial capital,
where he began to work mischief under the mask of dissimulation.229
For deceitfully approaching the more simple of those who sat in stillness
226 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 21, 21 (Moreschini, 526). Philotheos is referring here
to Barlaam’s treatises On the Procession of the Holy Spirit Against the Latins (Fyrigos 2005,
172–4).
227 The Latin argument that the procession of the Spirit from both the Father and the Son
(the Filioque) did not destroy the divine monarchia by making the spirit proceed from two
principles or sources because he proceeds ‘as if from a single principle’ (tamquam ab uno
principo) cut no ice at all with the Orthodox.
228 These are Palamas’ apodictic treatises Against the Latins (Sinkewicz 2002, 138).
229 Meyendorff (1959, 65) believes Barlaam arrived in Constantinople in about 1330.
Fyrigos (2005, 162) notes that even when he lived in Thessalonike Barlaam made frequent
visits to the capital. Perhaps his definitive move was connected with the rebellion of the
governor of Thessalonike, John Palaiologos, in 1325–27, which would make his transfer to
Constantinople a little earlier than 1330.
98 GREGORY PALAMAS
and practised noetic prayer and watchfulness, he pretended with feigned

humility to be a disciple and friend. When he had heard from them some
brief remarks on noetic prayer of an introductory and preliminary nature,
which they made in an untutored and simple manner, because his intention
was not to learn from them but to abuse and slander them, he tore to pieces
and dismembered the health-giving word like greedy dogs do and carried
away its parts and portions as if evilly jammed in his teeth, and then
suddenly turned on the teachers and divine science, by which I mean their
holy prayer and mystical contemplation, shamelessly calling heretics –
alas! – the very teachers of mysteries and contemplators of sacred things.
But shortly afterwards, convicted before the president of the common
Church of the faithful of some shameful and infamous matters, he left
Constantinople in deep disgrace and returned to Thessalonike.230 There he
repeated the same accusations against the monks and hesychia, particularly
against their first teachers, the God-bearing fathers. Purporting to prove
in speaking and in writing that these were the very ones responsible
for error among the monks, he contended arrogantly and with insolent
speech against the champions of their teaching. When news about this
reached the great Gregory, who was living on Athos at the time practising
hesychia at the holy Lavra, as already mentioned, he said prophetically to
the monks who were with him: ‘I learned from our blessed fathers long
ago that heresy would once more rise up against the Church of Christ in
our own generation. I see, and I wish I did not, that the prediction of those
saints is already coming to pass. And I suspect that the serpent, the author
of evil and creator of such things, could never have provided any other
instrument as suitable and ingenious with regard to evil as this one.’ What
came about in a short space of time in accordance with his prophecy may
in fact be seen more clearly by people alive today in the miserable end
of Akindynos, who succeeded to Barlaam’s madness just as in the past
Eunomius had succeeded to that of Arius and Severus the Acephalite to
that of Eutyches and Dioscorus.231
230 The nature of Barlaam’s ‘disgrace’ is not clear. Perhaps it is connected with debates on
scientific questions he had with Nikephoros Gregoras. At all events, in 1334 ‘he abandoned
almost all his scientific interests and immersed himself in theological disquisitions’ (Fyrigos
2005, 164). He may have returned to Thessalonike shortly after this.
231 The allusions are to fourth-century Arians (Arius and Eunomius) and to fifth-/sixth-
century Monophysites or Miaphysites (Eutyches, Dioscorus of Alexandria, and Severus of
Antioch).
43. Akindynos became leader of the foul heresy of these ineffectual people
or polytheists and atheists, which is how their wicked convocation acquired
its appellation and name.
Gregory is called to Thessalonike

What happened next? Because Barlaam was pressing very hard on the
monks in Thessalonike and also attacking holy hesychia orally and in
writing, he converted many laypeople to his own viewpoint as well as
many monks – naturally those who had not been brought up on hesychia
– misleading by persuasive words and sophistical arguments those who
had not been trained in these matters. But they had nobody among them
qualified to respond to these arguments adequately and to the point, so as
to put the fallen back on their feet by the healthy word of truth, and refute
the mischief and the heresy with clarity. So they met together in a common
assembly to take counsel. The holy Isidore presided over the proceedings,
moving, reconciling, counselling and zealously attending to these matters
more than anyone else, seeing that he was the chief of Gregory’s disciples
and friends and the first to put Barlaam’s mischief to the test and to have
run to earth the principles of his writings against us.232 They therefore
resolved to summon the wise Gregory with his theologian’s tongue and his
great wisdom of the spirit to leave his retreat on the Mountain and come to
them, for by nature, art and divine grace he was able better than anybody
else to accomplish such things in a worthy fashion.
44. They therefore wrote to the great man and begged him very earnestly
not to ignore their common request and embassy, which concerned matters
that were most urgent and important and to lend a hand on behalf of the true
faith, which was now in danger, and come to the defence of the Church, the
common mother of all, which was under attack.
Gregory was persuaded by the words of those who practised the same
way of life as he did and were of the same mind, judging with the wise
Solomon that there was a time for hesychia and a time for war and a time
for everything else.233 And leaving his Athonite solitude, not voluntarily
232 Isidore Boucheiras (PLP 3140), the future patriarch of Constantinople, was at this time
still a lay ascetical teacher living in Thessalonike (Meyendorff 1959, 53–4). His encomiastic
Life was written by Philotheos (ed. Tsames 1985). For a hostile assessment of his character
see the Anti-Palamite Tomos of 1347, § 9.
233 Cf. Eccl 3: 8.
100 GREGORY PALAMAS
yet at the same time voluntarily – the former because he had chosen to
live in hesychia and not be bound by practical concerns, the latter because
of the necessity of what has been described, which was so pressing and
involved such important issues – he consented very gladly to what they
desired.234 They for their part, showing him certain passages of Barlaam’s
writings against the truth, which had recently come into their hands, and
explaining more fully how things stood with him, begged him to defend
them and the common Church of Christ.
The divine Gregory felt a deep inward pain – his soul was wounded,
so to speak – because in observing the present situation he could already,
by the wisdom and grace of the Spirit, foresee clearly what was going to
happen. For that reason, abandoning his struggle and his hesychia, he was
forced to compose refutations unwilling as he was to write discourses
and hesitating to do so, despite being very able and versatile – and to use
memoranda, discourses, friends and anything that lay within his power to
recall Barlaam to peace with the monks and to harmony with the whole
Church. Barlaam, however, already wholly possessed by the devil who was
instigating him, and with his mind focusing on him, was absolutely unable
to give ear to spiritual matters. Therefore every day he added rather to the
blasphemy and the quarrel and stoked up the fire as much as he could, not
realizing that he was rousing the lion to battle.
45. But this admirable soul and true philosopher, the great Gregory, did
not easily give up hope that although Barlaam’s behaviour was such he
would not amend his ways and reform. But when he saw that the frequent
arguments and counsels put forward by his friends had no effect, he himself
made one final attempt and in front of many good people who were present
at his discourses advised him to desist from his ill-considered quarrel with
the monks and from speaking and writing about prayer and hesychia, or
rather against the monks themselves and the God-bearers who taught these
things. ‘Not only will you in no way gain any glory from this,’ he said,
‘as doubtless you mistakenly imagine in your own mind, but be assured
that all your machinations will rebound against you. For now you still have
the reputation of being a learned and great man among almost everyone
and there is nobody who does not praise you. Therefore stick to your own
field. Speak, write, investigate philosophically and teach what belongs to
234 Palamas thus returned to Thessalonike at about the same time as Barlaam. They were
both there from 1337 to 1340.
the outer learning and its disciples, which you are doubtless familiar with
and are well trained in, and you will find nobody opposing you or contra-
dicting you.235 Indeed, you will attract large numbers of the best people as
your hearers and followers and will greatly increase the reputation you now
have, for everybody will value your opinion and praise it in their speeches.
If, however, you abandon your own subjects and what you know, as I have
said, and attempt, on the contrary, to write, investigate philosophically and
teach what lies outside your field and about which you know nothing at all,
I mean hesychia and prayer and the like, and moreover do not leave off
abusing and insulting the monks, first no one of any sense will listen to what
you say when you attempt to speak about, or investigate philosophically,
matters you are ignorant of. “For do not believe a philosopher,” says my own
God-bearing philosopher, Isaac, “when he is teaching about hesychia.”236
Secondly, not only will you lose your reputation among our own people and
be entirely without honour on account of this, but I believe you will in the
end slink off in disgrace and you will regret it exceedingly but to no avail.’
46. These were the wise and inspired words addressed to him by Gregory,
which later turned out just as he said, as we all know. Barlaam, however,
remained exactly the same Barlaam, putting forward the same arguments and
worse every day and in all his speeches and writings shamelessly attacking
the Church and its holy and mystical teachings. As a result, despairing once
and for all of his return and amendment, Gregory was himself compelled
to begin writing and refute what was profane in his speeches with holy
discourses, in case this foul heresy should be transmitted from one person
to another like some fatal disease and the condition become daily more
difficult to heal and finally be rendered incurable. When this came also to
Barlaam’s attention, he was not a little alarmed and became very agitated.
In fact he went to see the great man, and said with one can imagine what
flattery and hypocrisy: ‘I for my part, knowing what a learned, great and
wonderful man you are in every respect, never cease proclaiming this to
everyone every day and singing your praises with all my heart and tongue.
But as for you, having heard I know not what and holding I know not what
opinions against me, you use all kinds of arguments against me in what
you say and write and, as the saying goes, heave on all the ropes, even
235 In other words, stick to Hellenic philosophy and literature (the ‘outer learning’) and do
not meddle with theology (the ‘inner learning’).
236 The passage in Isaac the Syrian has not been found.
102 GREGORY PALAMAS
though I have not done you the slightest harm in public. For no one has
ever reproved you, nor have I moved against you or your people in private.
How could that be so, since I have always rather bestowed praise on your
followers, as I have already said? No, it is others rather that I have targeted,
criticizing them privately in speech and in writing.’
47. This is what Barlaam said with his habitual hypocrisy and mendacity.
And how did the friend and disciple of truth respond in the presence of
many who were common friends of both to Barlaam’s words? Listen
again to the wonderful reply of that good tongue. ‘It is not in the least
expedient or good,’ he said, ‘indeed it is very harmful to everybody, to seek
to express in words what lies beyond human reason, and to put mystical
matters before the public, to expose these to the hearing and understanding
of children, to stir up the laity against the monks, and to give cause for
no small disturbance to the Church of Christ, which now more than ever
enjoys peace with regard to the confession of faith. This in my view will
bring blame upon you and will cause you to be hated by everybody. You
will, I am convinced, find it an unbearable trial, as I told you earlier, not to
mention at this point the invisible harm to the extent that it affects the soul.
You say that your abuse and your writings are directed against others, not
against me. When there is one orthodox faith and we all hold it to be our
mother, how is it possible that when one person is reviled on account of it,
the other should remain unperturbed? How unless in despising God’s glory
and promoting his own in every way, he is always careful not to speak
against any particular person even if the discourse concerns the defence of
the orthodox faith, so as not to stir up the others and his opponent against
himself? I, at any rate, know perfectly well that many find fault with me
and revile me, and others say other things against me, each according to
his own purpose or knowledge, and that you yourself, who set this matter
in motion, are intent on defaming my name, but nothing regarding such
things bothers me. For I know, and I am assured by Christ’s grace, that
my struggle and effort is for the sake of God’s truth. I prefer to be insulted
along with my poor and frugal brothers who suffer these things for the sake
of God than to enjoy a fleeting moment of human reputation and glory.237
And I consider abuse suffered with those who live according to Christ as
better than any of the treasures of the world.’238
237 Cf. Luke 6: 22.

238 Cf. Heb 11: 26. Not a quoted speech but Philotheos’ summary.
The triads in defence of the holy hesychasts

48. Nine treatises altogether were composed by the sage against the false
treatises and perverse doctrine of Barlaam or, to be more precise, in defence
of truth according to orthodox belief and of that which is nourished by it,
divided into three triads.239 However, they were not all published together at
the same time and for the same reason. Indeed, they should not be separated
in this way either by number or by order. On the contrary, all of them as a
whole defend holy hesychia and, as it were, concentrate on that goal and on
those who participate in hesychia in a good and worthy manner.
The treatises are divided, as I have said, in this way. The first three deal
with the outer learning and with how and to what extent it should be used by
those Christians, next with the guarding of the intellect and with how it is not
unprofitable for those who are eager to live the hesychast life to attempt to
keep the intellect with the body, and then with the divine light, illumination,
spiritual happiness and perfection in Christ. These were published before
Barlaam’s treatises themselves had come into his hands in their then written
form. That is to say, the great man had still only received reports of them
from those who had heard them delivered as lectures. Moreover, he heard
that terrible stories were being circulated by Barlaam’s lying and insolent
tongue against the monks and holy hesychia, as indeed the questions written
at the head of the three treatises indicate very clearly.
The three that follow these, which he had entitled the later treatises, are
more strictly the second series, because his adversary did not allow them to
remain in their proper order, but made it necessary that a further triad should
be added to these in response to the second edition of his writings against
the truth. The great man, then, wrote these three later or second triads
against those which I call Barlaam’s first treatises when he had succeeded
in getting hold of a copy for himself – this was when Barlaam was away
in Italy240 – and refuted and overturned them magnificently. Among many
other things he refuted the nonsense that the knowledge that comes from the
outer learning is a saving knowledge and he taught in a very wise and divine
manner what true saving knowledge is, what prayer in the secret recesses of
the intellect and the spiritual worship of God are, what their properties and
characteristics are, what the divine and ineffable vision of that holy light is,
239 The Triads In Defence of the Holy Hesychasts, composed in 1338–40 (Sinkewicz 2002,
138–9).
240 Barlaam was away in Naples and Avignon in 1339 on a confidential mission for
Andronikos III (Fyrigos 2005, 165).
104 GREGORY PALAMAS
and that this last is known with certainty only by those who by divine grace
have attained the fullest and most sublime experience of it.
49. When Barlaam returned from his embassy, he became aware of what the
great man had accomplished so worthily against his treatises and his heresy.
He therefore reshaped and revised most of his arguments, supposedly to get
round the objections and the logical absurdity. But it is fairer to say that he
avoided one precipice only to stumble over another and fall into another
pit – for such are always the effects of lies, never of the mean and of truth,
but rather of the precipices that lie on either side – and later changed the
title of his discourses to Against the Messalians to deceive the multitude.241
Instead this aroused that destroyer of lies, I mean the wise Gregory, again
to investigate and examine these discourses and, once he had grasped their
meaning and formulated for the second time a rational and spiritual rebuttal,
to refute them in a masterly way and finally raise up a trophy against them
in the form of the last three, published as if from scratch in response to the
second edition of these discourses of Barlaam’s, very ably refuting their
propositions and inferences and the swarm of resulting absurdities that they
contain, and again in a very sublime and divine manner teaching those able
in faith to hear and understand such things about deification and the divine
light. It was doubtless such people that Christ himself was inviting long ago
to hear about divine and sublime matters when he said: ‘Let anyone with
ears listen’,242 and ‘Let anyone accept this who can’.243 The rest, he says,
see yet do not see and hear yet neither hear nor understand according to the
prophecy: ‘You will listen but not understand’244 that expressly cries out:
‘Seeing, you will see and not perceive’.245
Gregory and mystical experience

50. But what can I say, O divine and holy man, about these holy discourses
of yours! For these discourses ought to be called holy in the proper sense.
Or rather, all discourses that treat of divine and holy matters in this way are
holy, but yours are holy not merely in themselves but should rightly be called
241 On the tracts which became Against the Messalians, see Fyrigos 2005, 149–59. Against
the Messalians in its final form belongs to 1340.
242 Matt 11: 15.
243 Matt 19: 12.
244 Matt 13: 14.
245 Matt 13: 13.
so, just as one speaks of ‘the holy of holies and the song of songs’ of the
great theologians ‘for they are more embracing and more authoritative’.246
What, then, should we say about these most holy discourses of yours? And
how could we add anything to them? Or perhaps this would be futile and
superfluous, well-nigh impossible and indeed beyond our present purpose
and occasion. Rather, we would refer those who thirst for such things to the
discourses themselves and to the spring of immortality that wells up from
them, in so far as they open the mouth of their understanding when they
drink it in from there, or again in the words of the theologian, ‘in so far as
they purify themselves when they form pictures in the imagination, in so
far as they form pictures in the imagination when they love, and in so far as
they love when, in turn, they apprehend intellectually.’247 But if some still
complain that they have difficulties with divinity and deifying grace, we
will only add the following to what we have already said.
51. Those who for different reasons and at various times have spoken
about such things and engaged in philosophical reflection on them in a
lofty manner under the inspiration of the divine Spirit are many and distin-
guished. Some have dealt with one aspect, others with another. Some have
devoted themselves to certain topics, others have covered most of them. By
common consent none of our predecessors, not even among the ancients,
has examined these matters exhaustively. Only Gregory, out of all of them
and after all of them, has been observed to have thus brought everything
together into a unity in an admirable way and to have written about them
and expounded them brilliantly and extensively with much learning and
freedom, and moreover to have united things that were known supernat-
urally through experience but in a disjointed manner and, as it were, to
have elucidated and explicated what his predecessors had set out briefly in
summary form.
Now nobody at all, unless he were completely without any share in the
Spirit, would say that some of these were not plainly discourses of the Holy
Spirit, uttered supernaturally through the mouths of human beings. Nor
would anyone say that others of these do not by nature express the mind and
spirit of Christ. In an amazing manner beyond human reason they speak to
us without intellect and tongue, astonishing our hearing and sending our
intellect into ecstasy. They transport us all of a sudden from the earth and

106 GREGORY PALAMAS
make us experience strange and unutterable things. We do not know with

any certainty what we are experiencing – or if we do know we cannot express
it – and the most amazing thing of all, we cannot free ourselves of that holy
possession and divine madness, nor can we easily tear ourselves away from
studying and contemplating those discourses. Rather, even when we put
them aside even for a brief period out of bodily necessity, enthralled by them
we return to them as quickly as possible with intense desire. And we have
the feeling that we are communing with new things again, as if from the
beginning, which we have never encountered before or come to know. And
always the same experiences keep recurring in a never-ending cycle. And
we are never satiated, our desire becoming more intense every day. And our
soul on the one hand is overjoyed and excited at the length, tenor and pace
of the discourse, and on the other suffers pain and displeasure, as it were,
that such things eventually come to an end and are not instead endless and
eternal, by which I mean are not in their quantity and measure coextensive
with the insatiable nature of our desire for them.
Of the discourses of those God-bearing teachers, some are suitable for
beginners in contemplation, others for those who are accomplished and
experienced in it. And you will not find that the same ones are appropriate
for everyone. On the contrary, they fall into different categories with regard
to expression and sense and, in a word, in every respect. The discourses,
however, of this friend and disciple and fellow-ascetic of those excellent
men are all without exception lofty and pitched at the lofty, the advanced
and the perfect, so much so that they do not leave any extreme untouched.
But at the same time they are all as a whole entirely suitable for those who
are not perfect but are beginners in contemplation, so much so that it is not
possible to improve on them.
And what further need be said, man of God, when with these discourses
you have conquered them all, all those engaged in the active life as well as
those with a share in contemplation, the educated as well as the uneducated,
the young as well as the old? You offer yourself as supernaturally suitable for
all who use you. You do not simply offer discussions of doctrine, putting your
discourses together out of things that are beyond nature and ineffable. No,
you speak in simpler moral terms, inexhaustibly pouring forth expositions
of the Scriptures from the springs of the Spirit, just as that holy manna is
said to have miraculously nourished Israel in the desert long ago248 and
248 Cf. Ex 16: 31.
becoming all things to all people249 to provide the food that is suitable for
each person and adapted to the need of each. For you yourself had the true
manna, who is Christ, welling up inexhaustibly within you in your heart, or
to put it more precisely, you still have him, for that manna was a type and
symbol of him. I have nothing further to say, and this is not a contrivance on
my part, with a view to inserting my own soul with its own experiences and
emotions concerning you and your teaching into the discourse and the text.
This concludes what I wanted to say.
Barlaam goes to Constantinople

52. The point we have reached in the development of the narrative is that the
great man had published some great and wonderful discourses, such that
he himself had never expected to produce, in defence of holy hesychia and
the truth of the orthodox faith against the man who had expressed hostility
against it. What happened? And how did this strange war come to an end?
Setting everything aside, the good Barlaam withdrew from the war against
the others and stopped speaking and writing against them as he had previously
been doing. Devoting himself henceforth entirely to battling against
Gregory, he concentrated his whole effort upon him as their best spokesman.
And because he was not in a position to attack him or fire missiles at him in
person, ‘he was repelled,’ as it is said, ‘like an arrow hitting a harder surface,
and recoiled like a snapped cable.’250 Something similar to this happened in
the case of the champion of orthodoxy. Barlaam’s machinations and wiles,
which had formerly been skilfully selected, all rebounded on him and were
no longer given any credence whatsoever by my Thessalonians. Alarmed
by the unity and harmony of their civic life,251 their opposition to him, their
enthusiasm for what was right and just, and above all their zeal for virtue
and holy things, he abandoned them and arrived once more at the city of
Constantine. In doing so he was relying on the friendship of the president of
the common church of the faithful at that time and of a considerable number
of the people in his entourage, and on the fact that there was a time when the
latter did not have good or friendly relations with those who were living in
hesychia with themselves and God alone.252 It is also said that it was these
249 Cf. 1 Cor 9: 22.

251 Thessalonike was about to be racked by the Zealot revolt of 1342–49, but Philotheos
ignores this.
252 Philotheos is referring to the patriarch John XIV Kalekas (1334–47).
108 GREGORY PALAMAS
men who first malevolently incited this empty-headed philosopher against

the monks who were engaged in the philosophical contemplation of divine
things because they envied their conspicuous reputation for frugality, and
wanted to make them, too, flatterers and vulgar sycophants.
Other activities of Gregory at Thessalonike

But I have nearly forgotten to mention among the things I was saying what
was happening in the meantime. The sage had already spent three years
in Thessalonike, during which he was earnestly engaged in speaking
and writing on subjects that have already been mentioned in defence of
truth in accordance with orthodoxy. For the most part he combined this
with his habitual mourning and seclusion and spent his time, as was his
custom, by himself with God. And because he did not have his beloved
solitude and undisturbed withdrawal away from people, he made himself
a little cell in the innermost recesses of his house and inaccessible, as
it were, to noise and disturbance and all visitors. Withdrawing from
everybody, he secured for himself there night and day, so far as he was
able, the fruits of solitude.
53. Once the great man was living there, practising hesychia and engaging
in mystical prayer, while his disciples and companions in the same kind
of ascetical life were all keeping vigil together throughout the night, in
the presence of the wonderful Isidore singing psalms and commemorating
Antony, I mean the common teacher and father, in the appropriate form.253
For it was the evening on which the common festival is held annually
in his honour,254 and this great man himself – O the wonder! – was not
absent, but was present, radiant with light, in his monastic habit, sharing
in the celebration and the work and correctly regulating both sides.255 Now
Gregory was in his own place praying in stillness, as I have said, when
suddenly a divine light came upon him and enveloped him. This was usual,
but with the great light the great Antony also appeared. Standing visibly in
front of Gregory he said: ‘The prayer of the intellect in stillness is good, for
it cleanses the soul’s eye and renders it worthy of the revelation and vision
253 St Antony of Egypt (c. 251–356), regarded as the founder of the monastic life. Feast day
17 January.
254 16 January 1340.
255 I.e. acting as ekklesiarches regulating the antiphoral singing of the two sides of the
choir.
of ineffable things. But it is necessary at the right time to be with others

and to share in prayer and psalmody and the rest with them, I mean, with
spiritual brethren who are living the same kind of life. You must therefore
now go and join those who are keeping vigil, because they have the greatest
need of your support.’ And having instructed his friend, Antony departed
to himself, while Gregory immediately obeyed the commandment.
Abandoning his hesychia and his cell, he happily joined his friends to their
great delight and celebrated the whole of that holy night and ceremony,
keeping vigil with them.
The Tomos of the Holy Mountain

54. It seemed expedient to the wise Gregory and to the fathers of holy
Athos, those living the hesychastic life on their own as well as those who
were leaders of the major monasteries, and indeed to the common superior
of the Mountain, to consult with each other about his struggles in defence
of orthodoxy and his zealous personal role in the matter. In this he was
doubtless rightly imitating the great Paul, who consulted with the apostles
who preceded him about the gospel he was preaching, ‘to make sure I was
not running,’ as he said, ‘or had not run, in vain’,256 in case, says the wise
theologian, there was something of this kind in what had been said or done
by him. He therefore went up to the Mountain, taking with him the divine
Isidore, submitted his discourses to common scrutiny, indicated his own
approach and his zeal for his hesychia and divine contemplation, explained
in detail the quibbles and blasphemies of his opponents and how he had
responded to them, and requested their common vote and decision on these
matters. The latter found him a powerful champion of orthodoxy, although
they were not previously unaware of him, and a fellow defender of their
own principles who stood resolutely for the same things and against the
same things as they did. They then went on to praise him and vote in his
favour and confirm his discourses and writings. We, too, were present on
that occasion and participated formally among the choir of presbyters. And
we concurred with them with our soul and our hand, orally and in writing,
in a word, with all the means at our disposal.257
256 Gal 2: 2.
257 Philotheos was a signatory of the Tomos, composed by Palamas and validated by the
governing body of the Holy Mountain in the spring or early summer of 1340. For an analysis
of the Tomos see Rigo 2020b.
110 GREGORY PALAMAS
The death of his sister Theodote

55. And the following, too, should be added to what has been said. Some
considerable time before this, Gregory’s remaining sister, Theodote,
happened to be struck down by a serious illness. She was already on the
verge of leaving the body and was expecting to depart for God when the
great man left for Athos, as we have already just said. His disciples and
friends approached him and asked him for instructions regarding her death
and funeral, that is to say, what kind of arrangements he would like them
to make, seeing that his departure was absolutely necessary. At the same
time they requested him to offer words of comfort to the sick woman, so
far as possible, before her death. For it was naturally very hard for her with
death approaching not to have her brother and father with her, to see him
and hear him utter the last sweetest words shortly before she would take
her last breath. But Gregory clearly foresaw the future in the divine Spirit.
‘Such words are not necessary,’ he said to them with great confidence. ‘For
God willing we shall return before her end.’ And things turned out as he
had said in a supernatural and wonderful manner.
While he was still away – it was the evening on which we are
accustomed to celebrating the holy departure from us of the Mother of
God 258 – Theodote, feeling that her inevitable end was approaching, asked
for the father to visit her and be with her. When she heard that he was away,
she was deeply upset and blamed herself as unworthy of seeing him and
talking to him for the last time. From that moment she fell utterly silent and
became calm, as if she had withdrawn into herself. And all those who were
present, anticipating the removal and burial of her body, since her soul was
shortly to depart, began to prepare for the funeral. But she herself – O the
strange marvel! – lingered on for eight days from that moment, without
nourishment, or sleep, or pain, or speech, merely breathing lightly and
showing by her eyes that she was still alive and was expecting her brother’s
arrival, as he had predicted. That was clearly the reason. For toward the
evening on the eighth day he returned from his visit and coming to the sick
woman’s bedside, spoke to her. She sensed his presence and raised her eyes
to him along with her soul, and because she could not speak showed in the
only way she could that her desire had been fulfilled. Moving her dying
hands as best she could and trying to raise them up to God in the required
act of thanksgiving, she uttered with her soul and mind ‘Glory to you, O
Lord’, and shortly afterwards nobly surrendered her soul to God. For it
258 I.e. the eve of 15 August 1340, the feast of the Dormition.
was certainly God who had so marvellously and supernaturally worked

these things, fulfilling both Gregory’s wonderful prediction about his sister
and her excellent desire to see him, and honouring both of them at the
same time. At the moment of her soul’s departure, Theodote’s face shone
wonderfully with a divine light, manifesting her holy and ineffable radiance
even to those outside. And even while they were carrying out the body and
singing the customary funeral hymns, some of those present including the
great man himself sensed such a fragrance that its intensity could not be
described. Indeed there were many other things besides these that were
recounted by many people, but because of the length of our discourse we
must omit them.
Barlaam at Constantinople
56. The great Gregory, then, devoted himself constantly in solitude to
those practices that were his custom, namely, hesychia, watchfulness and
prayer, and experiences of the divine. Barlaam, however, his opponent
in these matters, had gone to the city of Constantine, as I have already
mentioned.259 This city, in my view, cannot be praised too highly for its
size, beauty, wealth, wisdom, and so forth. In one respect alone am I unable
to praise it, and that is in its addiction to games of draughts and dice, or in
the words of the divine Theologian, to horse-races and theatres,260 to such
an extent that it makes fun of divine things and ridicules those who go to
see them, or burlesques divine things and makes a theatrical show of the
mysteries in a lamentable fashion, as if on a stage or in a play. This was the
city, then, that Barlaam arrived at with his duplicity and concealed impiety.
Putting forward his expertise in outer matters and philosophy simply as a
bait for those who gape for such things, because of the complete absence
of anyone to contradict him he conquered the city in a short space of time
and unfortunately persuaded it to share his opinions and bound it to his
own blasphemies and doctrines. Like the Jews did formerly in the case
of Christ, he introduced Beelzebub in place of the Spirit, and, calling
those in the likeness of God deceivers, he accused the saints of heresy
and wickedness and denounced some of them as blasphemers, cheats and
unorthodox believers, though he was really himself a wicked repository of
unorthodoxy and a perfect instrument of blasphemy and deceit.261
259 I.e. in October 1340.

261 Philotheos is here referring to Barlaam’s Against the Messalians.
112 GREGORY PALAMAS
57. He also whispered these things to those surrounding the man who
presided over the Church,262 like that ancient serpent in paradise.263 Those
men were corrupt from long before, as in fact I have already said. Through
them, as if through certain appropriate instruments and members, he
dragged down the head, as indeed the serpent had once dragged down
Adam through his wife. And in a short while he persuaded everybody to
renounce the rigorous observance of orthodox worship and to vote against
its most scrupulous practitioners and teachers.
Gregory at Constantinople
But with regard to this, God blocked it from above, for he allows his own
servants to experience trials in a manner profitable to them, for reasons
which he in his wisdom knows, permitting some of them and holding
others in check, so that falsehood, in my opinion, may not in the end prevail
over truth. A letter from there, from him who presided over the common
Church, arrived in Thessalonike summoning the holy Gregory and his
companions to the Church to answer charges.264 He went up at once with
his theologian’s tongue without any hesitation or delay, taking with him his
most important friends, Isidore and Mark and the good Dorotheos.265
When he arrived at the city of Constantine, one could immediately see
the darkness being driven out by the light, the prevailing night frost of
impiety being melted and dispersed by the brilliant force of the rays of
the noetic sun, and the soul-destroying wild beasts, in the words of the
God-bearing David, at the rising of this sun withdrawing to their own
dens,266 and cowering in their beloved darkness. For he found almost all
of them, as I said, except one or two of the best, either already won over,
or within a hair’s breadth of being persuaded, or already confused and in
the process of shifting from their original position. And having identified
the truth, he steadied them by the ruling principle of truth speaking within
him, and guided them by the Spirit. Once more the crooked paths became
262 I.e. to those surrounding the patriarch John Kalekas.

263 Cf. Gen 3: 1–5.
264 This formal summons from the patriarch arrived in Thessalonike in the winter of
1340–41.
265 These were Isidore Boucheiras and the Blates brothers Mark (PLP 2819) and Dorotheos.
The seriousness of the charge is indicated by Palamas’ undertaking the journey with his
companions in the middle of winter and his concern to organize further support en route.
266 Cf. Ps 103 (104): 22.
straight and the rough roads became level,267 and, to borrow the words of
the divine David again, the good spirit of God brought them all by his
guidance and his advocacy on to level ground268 where there is no stone
or stumbling-block 269 and where, again to quote holy Scripture, there is
no poisonous snake on the road, or malicious bite, or venom that procures
death.270 Among the people he won over, even before anyone else, was the
patriarch, who only a little while before had summoned him. Indeed, he also
won over the common assembly of bishops who were present at that time
with the patriarch.271 Even before they entered into fuller discussions with
the great man and began to examine the points at issue, ‘at the very outset’,
as the saying has it, of the conversation they were so impressed by what he
said and thought that they could not even express their astonishment.
Because within a short time they had let themselves float out on the
ocean of his words, they spent whole days and nights in discussion with
him, listening to his admirable arguments against Barlaam and his empty
chatter and finding equally in both his writings and his discourses the direct
teachings of God, a holy mind, or rather, the mind of Christ, as the divine
Paul says,272 a mouthpiece of theology and sacred doctrines, a standard
of orthodoxy, and everything that one might wish to say about what was
honourable and sublime. They all as a body explicitly declared him a
teacher of orthodoxy of one mind and voice with the common teachers
of the Church, speaking with the common tongue of their confession and
destroying error. And the common guardian of the common Church said
that they owed him much gratitude because by his wonderful discourses
he had delivered him and those around him from Barlaam’s error and from
deceit and falsehood.
Preparations for the Council of 1341

58. This is what the Church’s leader together with the bishops around him
said at that time, while his soul was still sound and he had not yet been
perverted by envy, which is so terribly destructive, and by impiety.273
267 Cf. Isa 40: 4; Mark 1: 3.

268 Cf. Ps 142 (143): 10.
269 Cf. Rom 9: 32–3.
270 Cf. Deut 8: 15. All these scriptural allusions serve to present Palamas as a new Moses,
or a new John the Baptist.
271 I.e. the Home Synod.
272 Cf. 1 Cor 2: 16.
273 The patriarch John XIV Kalekas.
114 GREGORY PALAMAS
And because a common council of the universal Church needed to be

held, so that God might be glorified ‘in the great congregation and the
mighty throng’,274 to use the expression of the divine David, and again in
his words, to praise in turn his own servant, ‘for those who honour me
I will honour,’ he says, ‘and those who despise me shall be treated with
contempt’,275 and, moreover, so that the very memory of error should be
banished resoundingly from our midst276 and that the legion of evil spirits
along with the herd of swine277 should be driven into the sea and into the
depths of perdition,278 that is what was done.
For the time being a date was fixed, taking as the appointed time the
return of the admirable emperor.279 It was of course absolutely necessary
that he should not be absent from the ceremony and the mystery – that is
what I myself call what was enacted with the Spirit and in the name of
the Spirit at that holy council – but should be present with his divine and
royal soul and voice, should pronounce and teach in an admirable fashion,
and should himself in his own person condemn the impiety and confirm
in the best possible way the word of piety. It was at the time of that great
and supernatural confession and teaching about God that the admirable
Andronikos departed this life in a holy manner and abandoning his earthly
existence went to God.280 This he received in exchange for his whole earthly
kingdom and far in excess of it, more than any of the emperors who had
reigned before him. But this is to anticipate. I must not neglect to mention
the following things, since they are important and occurred in the course
of the events I have been describing.
A prophetic dream
59. With his companions the divine Gregory, as I have already said, went
up from Thessalonike to the queen of cities. When he arrived in Thrace
and was in the vicinity of Odrysoi and Orestias, he made a detour,
as it were, from his planned route and asked David to meet him – my
David with the grace that dwells in him and his wonderful wisdom and
274 Ps 34 (35): 18.

275 1 Sam 2: 30.
276 Cf. Ps 9: 6.
277 Cf. Mark 5: 9.
278 Cf. Ps 67 (68): 22.
279 Andronikos III spent the winter of 1340–41 in Thessalonike.
280 Andronikos III died on 15 June 1341.
speech 281 – who had long shared the same ascetical life with him, the same
thoughts, manners and outlook, and was numbered among the first of his
friends. He wrote, then, inviting the man to join him and his struggle.
David was practising hesychia somewhere in the mountains between
Thrace and the Scythians,282 where Gregory, the wonderful hesychast,
had founded a monastery of divine philosophy after moving from Sinai,
himself giving the place and the monastery, on account of this, a name
derived from Sinai.283 But David forestalled the great man’s letter, or rather,
it was God who forestalled it, bringing him out of his solitude and his
hut, and contriving that this good fellow struggler and defender should
meet the noble struggler for true devotion sooner than expected. For it was
only on the third day after Gregory’s arrival in the city of Constantine
that David suddenly made his appearance from the mountain, bringing a
wonderful and supernatural joy to the teacher’s soul, such as one cannot
easily describe. He brought with him some who shared his life of divine
philosophy with him. For a suspicion, for which there were no grounds, that
a barbarian raid was imminent had driven them out. Thus miraculously by
divine providence, as we have just said, it was arranged from on high that
the two should be there together in the way that was necessary.
60. Now among those who came down from there with them was their
friend Dionysios, who had once been a citizen of this imperial city and
belonged to an aristocratic family.284 He was more than most people a
lover of hesychia and of the philosophical life in accordance with Christ.
Because of this he had spent his whole life away from his native city living
in remote places and mountainous areas, for the most part in the vicinity of
the good David. This man, as I have said, arrived in the city of Constantine
with the others. On the first night, before he had even met the wise Gregory
face to face (it so happened that neither had ever previously seen the other),
while he was lodging together with the others with some fellow-monks, he
straightaway had the following dream.
281 David Dishypatos (PLP 5532), who belonged to the distinguished family of the
Dishypatoi, was a hesychast member of Gregory of Sinai’s monastery at Paroria.
282 ‘Scythians’ is the classicizing term for Bulgarians.
283 Gregory of Sinai founded four lavras at Paroria in about 1330. His monks were known
as ‘Sinaites’.
284 Dionysios of Paroria (PLP 5490) was the recipient of a letter from Palamas in 1343–44
(Sinkewicz 2002, 149, n. 33).
116 GREGORY PALAMAS
‘We were on our way to the holy church of the Mother of God at
Blachernai,’ said the good Dionysios.285 ‘We were all going as a body to
venerate and we had among us the holy Gregory. Not long after we had
entered the church and had venerated in the customary manner, we were
standing before the doors of the divine sanctuary when we seemed to see
some men with radiant faces and vestments coming out in a body from
there. These men dressed Gregory in a radiant vestment and handed him
something like a staff, which he took in his hands and circumambulated the
whole church with all of us following him. It seemed as if he was driving
out of there a swarm of little homunculi that all had hideous black faces.
Then, returning to where he started, it seemed as if he began again, in case
any of them had managed to tuck themselves away in the darkness or in a
corner, and searching them out with great care he drove them out likewise
and thrust them from the holy things. They went out of that place because
they were utterly unable to meet his gaze or stand firm. As they fled, they
threatened him in their frustration, as if retaliating against him and thus
pursuing him with deeds and words, and they never stopped blaspheming
against him. But the great man,’ Dionysios said, ‘left them to their cursing
and returned with us to the spot before the sanctuary where we had been
standing earlier. Those figures dressed in radiant vestments came out once
again from there and set the great man on the throne, pronouncing the word
“axios” three times in the customary manner in a marvellous voice.’
61. Such were the things then seen, which were so obviously symbols of what
was to occur later that they had no need of a commentator or interpreter.286
For whether the black homunculi are seen as those who under demonic
influence have plotted against the Church of Christ in various ways – I mean
Barlaam and Akindynos and the accursed and wicked faction that surrounds
them – or whether that crowd of demons is seen as the primary cause of the
heresies, or even whether they were both things at the same time, Gregory
was often seen in his discourses and letters, publicly and privately, to have
driven them out of the Church in a marvellous manner and by a divine power
to have gained more than anyone else a supernatural ascendancy over them
285 The church of the Mother of God at Blachernai housed the great relic of the Virgin’s
‘honourable robe’, or maphorion, brought from Palestine in the fifth century. It was no doubt
this that the monks came to venerate.
286 In 1347 Palamas was ordained bishop in the same church of Blachernai. The rite of
episcopal ordination is represented in the vision.
and by his efforts to have given the orthodox a brilliant victory. Moreover, the
divine vision also wonderfully indicated the following, that it was twice that
he had to struggle against the same opponents in the Church’s supreme trial
– the first time before acceding to a throne and a position of leadership in the
Church, I mean when he struggled against Barlaam and the first beginnings
and writings of the heresy, the second time against Barlaam’s pernicious
successor in this heresy, I mean Akindynos, Gregory’s treacherous
friend who was his disciple and betrayer like Judas of old, together with
Akindynos’ repulsive gang, after Gregory’s ordination and accession to a
throne – and that this holy ceremony and ordination concerning Gregory
was to be conducted within that very church of the Mother of God and it was
there that the ‘axios’ would shortly be pronounced over him who was truly
worthy in the divine Spirit both perceptibly and spiritually by the spiritual
and perceptible Church gathered together as a body, which is how it turned
out wonderfully in reality in a brief space of time, that divine revelation not
failing to come true in any detail whatsoever. For even though Akindynos
met with disaster before the great man’s ordination, for various reasons and
at various times the heresy kept reviving, at one time being destroyed and
at another constantly sending up new heads through the support of certain
people, like the Hydra of the myth, until finally this Herakles of our age,
receiving a more efficacious help from the divine fire than that from the
perceptible fire the other Herakles had possessed previously, that is, as
a result of the divine Spirit that through his ordination flowed upon him
more abundantly, publicly cut them off and burned them to their roots and
foundations, so to speak, to the benefit of the whole Church, and consigned
them totally to silence and the deep and to utter destruction.
62. What happened after that wonderful vision? My own preference would
be to go through everything in detail, so far as possible, and embellish
the discourse with the valorous deeds and wonderful struggles of the
great man, and, as it were, let myself go in the narrative. But the length
of the discourse prevents me from doing so, as the text would then lose
all proportion. I would therefore refer those who want these things to his
own discourses and to the Church’s public tomes and treatises. I myself
will here present my discourse somewhat in summary form, observing the
maxim, ‘due measure is best of all’,287 as he did himself.
287 CPG 2, 80. The maxim (pan metron ariston), perhaps first uttered by the third-century
peripatetic philosopher, Alexander of Aphrodisias, is still current in Greek.
118 GREGORY PALAMAS
The Council of June 1341

The most pious emperor, for whom they were waiting, arrived with his
chief officials.288 He received a very full report on these matters from
the patriarch, although he was not entirely uninformed about them. The
council was convoked in the most great and renowned church of the
great Wisdom of God.289 Almost the whole city gathered there, as if for
a great and notorious trial. Barlaam opened the prosecution, accusing the
monks in the same terms as he had done previously. He did not follow
correct procedure, however, and abandoned his earlier role of prosecutor.
Indeed, he attempted to move on to other issues and obfuscate the case,
but he gained no advantage from this. He was quickly halted and his own
writings, which he himself on his own initiative had not long before given
to the Church’s leader, were produced against his will. In the end they
were refuted for their many kinds of heresy in an admirable manner in the
presence of all and were ridiculed and mocked by everybody. Moreover,
together with their father and creator they were rightly subjected to the
most vehement anathemas. Since Barlaam was wholly unable either to
maintain his arguments or to counter the manifestly sound refutations,
he could not escape the entirely justifiable zeal of the Church and of the
faithful who had come to that public spectacle. They were already roused
to anger against the heresy and were seeking to destroy those responsible
for the error, for such things readily push the populace to excess. Barlaam
therefore simulated a change of heart and pretended to make a confession of
truth. He thus acknowledged the heresy and falsehood of his own writings
in the presence of all and asked for an opportunity for repentance, which
he received forthwith. Then donning the helmet of Hades, as the saying
goes,290 he made himself scarce and immediately absconded to his Latin
friends, taking his impiety with him.291
The Church of Christ, on the other hand, plainly acknowledged its own
champion, that is, Gregory the great, applauding him, admiring him and
crowning him with garlands of praises of every kind. What wonderful
288 Andronikos III, who had been wintering in Thessalonike after a successful three-year
campaign in Epiros, returned to Constantinople in the spring of 1341. His ‘chief officials’
included his military commander, John Kantakouzenos.
289 I.e. the Great Church of Hagia Sophia. The date was 10 June 1341.
290 CPG 2, 80.
291 Barlaam left at the end of the month (after not only his condemnation by the Council
on 10 June but also the death of his patron, Andronikos III the following week), and made his
way via Euboia and Naples to Avignon.
thing did it not say to him? What did it not do? More than that, it said and
did everything that was best, resolving in no way to do or say anything that
was not worthy of him. Moreover, even the emperor himself and his close
relations by blood, and indeed the leading members of the government
pronounced him with great admiration a teacher of piety, a standard of
sacred doctrine, a pillar of orthodoxy, a bastion of the Church, a boast of
the Christian Empire and everything that is most honourable.
The Council of July 1341

63. But O the way evil succeeds evil, O the return and repeated licence of
falsehood! Once again Archelaus comes after Herod 292 and Caiaphas speaks
against Christ after his father-in-law Annas,293 unwittingly prophesying on
behalf of the nation and advocating the truth that he is fighting and the
words uttered by the prophets and theologians in defence of this truth. And
after them too and along with them comes the artful Akindynos, surrep-
titiously adopting Barlaam’s heresy and error.294 Akindynos regrouped
Barlaam’s scattered disciples and added a great many others to them. He
re-established the heresy, appointing himself the ephemeral leader and
teacher of unorthodoxy, and coming into conflict with orthodox piety and
its champion, just as of old Simon the Samaritan and Nicolaus the Syrian
proselyte did with the gospel of Christ and the first disciples and apostles.295
Although nobody asked him to do so, he publicly repudiated Barlaam and
with ferocious anathemas numbered him among the successors of the
ancient heresiarchs. He did this so that his error might acquire some veil
or mask, he himself being openly different in his speech and writing and
the whole war against orthodox piety. Therefore once again struggles and
contests and an occasion for war arose for this defender and master of the
word,296 who stood firm against the same errors and for the same principles
and courageously bore the brunt of the fighting for the truth concerning
orthodox piety.
64. First he met and debated with Akindynos for a while and in the
presence of many notable people refuted him resoundingly and reproached
292 Cf. Matt 2: 22.

293 Cf. John 18: 13.
294 Gregory Akindynos (PLP 495). His former friendship with Palamas is not mentioned.
295 Cf. Acts 6: 5; 8: 9–22.
296 I.e. Palamas.
120 GREGORY PALAMAS
him for his heresy, his earlier simulation of the truth and his final assent to
falsehood. The latter, because he was unable to say anything or present any
counter-arguments, simulated a confession of the truth again. By a letter and
affidavit in his own hand he purportedly certified his own discourses and
his solidarity with the saints in every respect and testified to his agreement
with the discourses and writings of the wise Gregory. This document is
still extant today and proves Akindynos’ impiety and mendacity.297
After a brief interval, however, he cast aside his hypocrisy and pretence
and began denying this confession and the letter. He went round the city
with others of his own way of thinking, causing an uproar again with
regard to what had already been decided previously and dragging the
unsettled into falsehood. For ‘an Ethiopian cannot become white’, nor can
‘a crab be taught to walk straight ahead’.298 That being the case, a council
was again convoked by the Church in no way inferior to the previous one
against Barlaam.299 And again the great champion and famous athlete of
right belief refuted error by the words of the divine Scriptures and the holy
teachings of the theologians, and for a second time brilliantly triumphed by
the truth of his teaching on right belief. The admirable emperor was also
present.300 Although at that time he had not yet assumed power or taken up
the reins of government, it was only the diadem and the title of emperor that
was not yet his, and so he occupied the place of the admirable emperor, his
brother, who had just recently, after noble struggles and achievements on
behalf of right belief, departed for God.301
At this great council the emperor censured Akindynos for sharing the
same lamentable opinions as Barlaam and being manifestly opposed to
the common values and doctrines of the Church, as indeed the emperor
his excellent brother had done previously with regard to Barlaam. And
together with the Church’s leader and the senior clergy, including, of
course, Gregory and his entourage, he confirmed the authoritativeness of
true piety. Or rather, they all as a body acclaimed him and extolled him
in speeches and in written compositions with many kinds of praises, so
297 The text of Akindynos’ affidavit is published in Meyendorff 1963, 226: reproduced in
Nadal 2006, vol. 2, 201, n. 640.
298 CPG 2, 258; 1, 426.
299 Meyendorff (1959, 86), following Jugie (1932, 1783), dates this second council to
August 1341. Nadal (2006, vol. 2, 205) has reassigned it to July 1341. It was held, like the
first in Hagia Sophia (Kalekas, On the Tomos, PG 150, 901A).
300 John VI Kantakouzenos, the emperor at the time Philotheos was writing.
301 Andronikos III, Kantakouzenos’ ‘brother’, died on 15 June 1341.
that nothing was in any way inferior to what had been enacted at the
first council. On this occasion a Tomos was rightly published against the
heresy and its leaders in defence of true piety by the common vote of the
Church.302 The Tomos included everything in a comprehensive fashion and
was ratified by the signatures of leading churchmen, beginning with him
who presided over them all and at that time occupied the patriarchal throne.
Theological dissent during the civil war. The patriarch’s hostility

towards Gregory
65. I see that my discourse is getting too long. I therefore need to abbreviate
it as much as possible, thrusting aside the relentless and dense succession
of topics, like the people one bumps into in a theatre or crowd.
Scarcely two months had gone by after this second council when the
long and difficult period of sedition, civil strife and mutual destruction
broke out among our own people.303 The common shepherd and guide of
the Church, and at the same time of the empire,304 should have calmed
down the general uproar and restrained the irrational impulses, malicious
accusations and envy of certain people, and like a messenger and disciple
of peace305 should have made every effort to bring everyone together. But
he did not do so. Instead, as if deliberately and provocatively pushing in
the opposite direction, he was, alas, observed every day to be fomenting
conflict, division and sedition.
He did not have the great Gregory as an ally in these activities. Quite the
contrary, the latter strongly recommended and advised peace and harmony
among all and urged him to conduct himself in a manner befitting his
profession and office, for this was advantageous to himself, to the empire
as a whole and to the entire nation, whereas the opposite brought about
the exact reverse. It also added, he said, the results of divine anger and
punishment from above, a matter so serious and supernatural that it easily
brings about nothing but total catastrophe. When the patriarch saw that the
great man was of this opinion and advocated this policy not just once or
twice or privately to him alone, but frequently and in the presence of many
302 The Synodal Tomos of 1341, translated below. It omits mention, however, of the second
council of July.
303 The civil war that lasted from October 1341 to February 1347.
304 John Kalekas, as well as exercising the office of patriarch, also became co-regent with
the empress Anna in the summer of 1341.
305 Cf. Isa 52: 7.
122 GREGORY PALAMAS
notables, and even in the senate when the empress was presiding, sometimes
speaking on his own, at other times with a few of those who shared his point
of view, what he should have done was to admire him for his resolution and
opportune boldness of speech and thank him for his affection and love and
for his expression of the common mind, for in this way he would have shown
himself to be the common father and protector of the nation in reality and
not to have assumed this great title in vain or simply in a nominal fashion.
Instead, he became angry and moved against his friend. He took up arms,
alas, against the mild advocate and made every effort to inflict punishment
on the man. He took no account of the honours he had earlier accorded him
in public and in private, both before the councils and after the councils,
when he counted him among the foremost of his friends. Nor did he take
any account of the fact that the present state of affairs was advantageous and
salvific for all, both for society as a whole and for individuals and indeed
for himself personally more than anybody else; because he had assumed
responsibility for the common protection of all and was duty bound to give
an account of his common administration of all to the common Lord of all.
66. Accordingly, the wise Gregory made a hurried departure because he

could see that any effort was pointless. He found a place not far from the city
where he could live in his accustomed hesychia with himself and with God,
and like the divine Jeremiah lamented the disobedience and utter destruction
of the nation.306 As for the shepherd, because his zeal, alas, was directed
against the flock, and he sought to attack the rams rather than the sheep in
order better to attain everything he wanted, what did he not think of? What
did he not plan night and day so as to bring down this distinguished ram
of Christ’s great flock along with the others, or even before all the others?
And because he had no pretext for attacking him, nor could he fabricate
even a shadow of slander against him, he straightaway moved violently
against right belief and raised up a strange and peculiarly murderous war
against the Church. He who was the foremost of priests and teachers, alas,
studied how to destroy the divine doctrines. Thus he thought to destroy their
champion and herald, that is, the wise Gregory, along with them and raise
up a trophy against his zeal and philosophy, or rather, against the Church of
Christ, which through him and by him was being attacked in such an evil
fashion. He not only dissented from Gregory in demeanour and deeds but
306 Palamas withdrew first to the monastery of St Michael at Anaplous on the European
side of the Bosphorus, and then to a hermitage in the vicinity of Herakleia.
made himself truly foreign and alien to all Christians as a whole and akin
only to the wicked demon, the source of all evil, and his brood.
The patriarch’s patronage of Akindynos

67. This new enemy of God, then, introduced into the Church the betrayer
instead of the disciple, the pseudo-apostle instead of the wise apostle,
the antichrist instead of Christ, that is to say, the apostate and enemy of
truth, by whom I mean Akindynos falsely so called,307 instead of the great
Gregory. Gently to start with and by small steps and then ‘with the head
uncovered,’308 as the saying goes, every day he exalted Akindynos and
commended him, whereas he denigrated Gregory and his holy company
even though they were not present and condemned them almost without
a hearing.309 He spent whole days and nights with the teacher of heresy
studying these matters and conferring about them and acting in concern
against right belief and its champions, as are recorded in books and archives.
Gregory is imprisoned
And to cut the matter short, after those interminable and repeated slanders
– because the people who originated them and spread them sought in
addition to the other things to condemn him for offences against the state
and treason and even sedition, attempting out of shame to conceal the true
motives for their accusations against him and instead falsely stringing
these all together at various times in different ways against the innocent
and slandering him by every available means – Gregory, the son of light
and shining herald, was finally condemned by them, alas, to darkness
and prison as if he were a criminal.310 Even in this he was not separated
from the image and imitation of the venerable Jeremiah, as I have already
said. Just as Jeremiah was once in the pit of mire because of his divine
prophecies and the truth,311 so Gregory also was sent to prison by people
of his own nation for precisely the same reasons or even greater ones. His
307 ‘Falsely so called’ because akindynos means ‘safe’ or ‘without danger’.

308 CPG 1, 392.
309 In June 1342 the Home Synod ordered the burning of all Palamas’ writings produced
after the Council of July 1341 (as being contrary to the stipulation of the Synodal Tomos
forbidding all further discussion). On 4 November 1344 the patriarchal synod went on to
excommunicate Palamas.
310 Palamas was arrested in the spring of 1343 on a charge of being in communication with
the enemy after the failure of the Athonite mission on behalf of Kantakouzenos.
311 Cf. Jer 38: 6.
124 GREGORY PALAMAS
good disciple and friend, Dorotheos, was with him there, just as he was
during other trials at other times, sharing as it were with pleasure in his
long imprisonment and other afflictions.
Successes and heresy of Akindynos

68. Once he who by ill fortune was the Church’s leader had made this
lion captive exactly as he desired, he thought disgracefully that he had
already won the contest outright, and in the complete absence of anyone
to hinder him – O earth and heaven! O divine ordinances and contests and
struggles of martyrs, confessors and holy fathers, who after Christ and his
death and blood built up the Church! – he hastened to appoint that sinner
and betrayer of the Church, I mean Akindynos, that author and dispenser
of heresies after the first one,312 a champion of the Church. You could say
that he wanted to appoint Hades an instructor, or death a nurse, or put the
frenzy of the evil one in control of fire or a wolf in charge of sheep.
Tell me, was it him you made a teacher and father of the Church? Was it
this denigrator of divinity – not to enumerate everything – this destroyer of
the glory of the Only-begotten along with the Jews destined to a miserable
end, this fighter of the Spirit greater than any of the Macedonians you
might care to mention,313 this enemy of the great Trinity as a whole, this
storehouse of heresies? Was it him you made shepherd and teacher of
the Church, him who insulted and persecuted it much more than any of
them, that he should teach it something? Was he to teach it about created
divinities, of which he alone is the father and creator? Or was he to teach it
about the Platonic Ideas, and that rotten stinking nonsense of antiquity, and
mortal life, and that which is not properly good or existent, and whatever
marvels and deceit are related in Greek mythology? These are fine things
indeed and truly suited to you and your teachers and theologians.
All the same, it is necessary to learn about these things from your empty
teachers whose bad pastor you are. I refer to the phrase ‘the created energy
of God’, which necessarily results in their establishing that his nature is
created, and to the propositions ‘nature and energy in God are in every
respect identical and without difference’, ‘God is nature alone, deprived
of all natural properties’, and ‘the natural properties of God’s nature are
312 I.e. after Barlaam.

313 The Macedonians were the followers of the fourth-century bishop of Constantinople,
Macedonius, and known as ‘Spirit-fighters’ (pneumatomachoi) on account of their opposition
to the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit.
produced subsequently and are naturally created.’ For these are both the
consequences of your impiety or atheism. Sometimes they destroy the
nature itself at the same time as destroying the natural properties. At other
times they prove the nature to be a creature on account of the properties,
because ‘the natural properties must correspond to the natures’ according
to the patristic theologians.314 It appears to be a necessary conclusion that
you are ungodly not only in perhaps one or two ways, like those ancient
teachers and formulators of heresy, but in every way simultaneously.
69. And what need be said, when you have denied even the much-hymned,
supernatural and ineffable deification of human nature, to which, as has
been said, every action of Christ and every mystery is referred.315 You claim
to have taught that you honour this deification only nominally and concep-
tually, whereas in reality you have vilified it in a most shameful and absurd
way, classifying it as something created and with an arrogant soul and
tongue setting down below that which transcends all things. And you have
felt no shame for your innovation or reverence for the supernatural character
of the revelation of this mystery, which no messenger or ambassador but the
only-begotten Son himself,316 who is in the bosom of the Father,317 expounded
in deeds and words before going up on the mountain with a chosen group
of disciples, the mountain he called kingdom of God and common glory of
himself and of the Father.318 When he went up on the mountain he indicated
and showed the dazzling light of the essential and divine majesty hidden
under the flesh, as the great Basil said,319 since he is the ‘true light, which
enlightens everyone, that has come into the world’,320 in so far as this could
be seen by ‘those bearing corporeal eyes’ – it is the theologians themselves
who say this – that they might not lose their life along with the vision.
Consequently, with regards to the future more perfect communion
with God and deification, according to which ‘the righteous will shine like
the sun in the kingdom of their father’321 and will be equal to the angels
314 Akindynos, Refutatio Parva, line 359 (Nadal, 423), purporting to quote John
Damascene.
315 Cf. Akindynos, Refutatio Magna § 34 (Nadal, 132–3).
316 Cf. Isa 63: 9.
317 Cf. John 1: 18.
318 Cf. Matt 16: 27–8; Luke 9: 26–7.
319 Actually, from one of the hymns of Mattins of the Transfiguration (6 August).
320 John 1: 9.
321 Matt 13: 43.
126 GREGORY PALAMAS
and sons of God according to the word of the same sun of glory,322 you
banish them all from it headlong, doing away with that too through the
great transfiguration of Christ, because the theologians say unanimously
that both the one and the other are one and the same thing: the natural,
inaccessible, immutable, eternal, connatural and indivisible glory and
divinity of God, the light that is unfading, that has no temporal beginning,
that is infinite, invisible and immortal, that is likewise invisible to all
human eyes, both sensible and intellectual, but can be seen now and
henceforth in the Holy Spirit only by eyes that are spiritual and godlike,
and brings down the rewards of victory on every creature, as David the
singer of the Old Testament says. ‘In your light we shall see light’,323 he
says, which I take to mean that in the Spirit we shall see the Son. The
theologians themselves interpret this in the same way, the writer and
singer of the New Testament saying in turn: ‘Now have been seen things
unseen by human eyes, a mortal body as a fountain of divinity’ and ‘Now
what was invisible has been perceived by the apostles, divinity dazzling
in the flesh on the mountain of Tabor.’324
70. Even though, so far as he could, he shamelessly and arrogantly

destroyed these things that are so very great, so intensely supernatural and
divine – ‘what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has the human heart
even conceived’:325 the very voice of theology and philosophy says this –
the shepherd and protector of the common Church – O the judgement and
all-seeing eyes of God! – went and ordained him a teacher and shepherd
of the Church, as if laying in advance the foundations of his own tyranny,
through which and with which he planned the complete destruction of
the common Church of Christ, which the latter had earlier declared to be
superior to the gates of Hades.326 He did not realize that he was instead
devising the trap for himself, digging a hole, as the great David says,327 and
preparing a pit into which he would shortly fall himself, as the sequel to my
discourse will show.
322 Cf. Luke 20: 36.

323 Ps 35 (36): 10.
324 John Damascene, Canon on the Transfiguration, first Troparion of the second Canon
of the seventh Ode (cf. English trans. Mary and Ware, 490).
325 1 Cor 2: 9.
326 Matt. 16: 18.
327 Ps 7: 16.
He, for his part, hastened boldly and with much authority to promote him
who was alien to pious faith, by whom I mean Akindynos, his own spiritual
teacher and initiate, to the priesthood.328 The Christ-loving empress, on the
other hand, found out about it and, showing her fervent zeal for religion,
which was in no way inferior to that of her late husband, the emperor,
attempted to pre-empt and frustrate the unholy deed by words, exhortations
and deeds.329 The patriarch, acting as if he were deaf and replying ‘not a
word’ to the empress, took him who formerly had been ejected through the
sacred gates and excommunicated from the Church and thrusting him by
force into the sanctuary, enrolled him in the clergy and numbered among the
servants of Christ the servant of his adversary.
The intervention of the Empress Anna

As soon as the admirable empress heard about what had been done so
wrongly and violently, she did not hesitate or delay in the least. She faced
what had to be done in a manner that was noble and worthy of her and
dismissing him who had wrongly usurped the most holy things she drove
him out through the same sacred gates with all who thought like him and
supported him. After those many insults and shameless acts they would
have suffered, in my opinion, imprisonment and beatings, especially the
one who had been so evilly ordained, if he had not immediately hidden
himself away in underground holes and caves and made himself all but
invisible to everybody.
Gregory describes the dangers he has experienced

Much clamour was raised against the heresy by the great majority of the
faithful, and almost every class and generation sought to lay hands on the
offenders. But it would be better to hear what Gregory’s wise tongue has to
say about these matters. This is how he puts it in a letter to one of his close
relations:330
71. Everybody, I think, will know from this the power of the truth advocated
by us and will marvel at it. For not only was it victorious when it was examined
in two councils before there was any rebellion, but even after the civil war had
328 Kalekas ordained Akindynos in 1344.

329 The opposition of the empress Anna to Kalekas on this issue is widely documented
(see Meyendorff 1959, 112–14); cf. the Letter to Makarios, quoted at length by Philotheos
below.
330 In fact to his brother Makarios, a monk at the Lavra.
128 GREGORY PALAMAS
started, when we seemed offensive to the emperors,331 and our detractors had
already gained the upper hand for a considerable time and were all saying and
doing whatever they wanted without restraint. We remained shut up in prison,
yet we prevailed no less than before with regard to the truth of the divine
doctrines. The whole thing was the result of the power of God, which ‘is made
perfect in weakness’,332 as he himself said to the Apostle. For it is truly made
perfect when it is shown to survive even when battled against, and although
apparently dragged down by the dangers threatening those who adhere to it, is
manifestly superior to those who would drag it down and remains undefeated
by them. And that is what happened. It was as if someone had his tongue and
hand tied and was challenged to defend himself verbally or in writing, yet
could not be defeated on these matters even in this way.
Remember that now the emperors held us to be their enemy, and all who
wanted to curry favour with them called us a rebel because we did not happen
to adapt our opinion to the times. How much more hostile then were those who
were very antagonistic towards us and bent on using every means of attacking
us? Clearly, then, we were condemned to be confined with the prisoners and
the charge was also laid against us that we had introduced doctrinal novelty,
because some kind of shame came over those who were ill-treating us about
what they were to say was the truth.
The Barlaamites were encouraged by these events, especially Barlaam’s
close disciple, successor and follower, Akindynos. They beguiled the
patriarch, who was irritated with us because we did not care to conform to the
times, and pretended to be well-disposed towards him and the rulers. They
also offered him some other things if only he would help them now that they
had the opportunity to move against us and reverse their defeat. The patriarch
did not reject what they offered him and he said that he owed them additional
thanks if he could have everybody battling against us and especially those
in the imperial palace itself, where he moved us for greater security. And
he became all things to them. He assumed all authority, as exarch, ally and
witness to what was said by them, as supposedly privy counsellor, and, as
he thought, as not subject to limitation even by virtue of his office itself. He
was guarantor as judge entrusted also with the government of the Church. He
was intermediary to the emperors, from whom he conveyed decrees which
he furnished to them together with his own letters against us to instil fear in
those he could not persuade in any other way. The measures taken against us
did not stop there, but councils, or rather sham councils were convoked, in
which threats and promises, gifts and confiscations, and whatever is either
damaging or advantageous at different times was not only uttered but was
331 I.e. to the empress Anna and the emperor John V Palaiologos.
332 2 Cor 12: 9.
also commanded by him to whom was allotted the leadership of the Church.
And the damaging decrees were directed against those who supported us,
whereas those that appeared advantageous were for those who attacked us and
calumniated us. But the evil wrought against us truly reached such a height,
that it not only towered up and was clearly manifest, but it was brought down
all the more vehemently and sent to destruction with a crash that could not fail
to be heard even by those far away.
Just when they thought that they had already won and that everything was
working out according to plan, and they were intending to apply the finishing
touch of evil – or rather, they had already applied it with the unlawful ordination
of Akindynos – the God of emperors moved the emperors to act. He aroused to
pacific zeal all the functionaries, all the high office holders next to the emperors,
then the shield-bearers and pikemen of the guard, then the palace servants, in
short, every government department and every member of the imperial court,
to leave the rest aside for the moment. And it was noticeable that the emperors,
who had been particularly irritated with us, suddenly turned their anger against
those who had attacked me, and that all the rest vied with each other and
provoked each other to strive to help us. What was even more striking was that
the civil war had not yet come to an end. Rather, it was actually coming to a
climax, and the war was the reason why they were hostile towards me.
Consider the following. If somebody comes across two men who are
fighting and asks one of them to be a judge of something said by him, would he
pay attention to any word whatsoever, and especially while the fight with his
opponent was still going on? And if the one who is asking for the judgement
from him has people disputing with him, will it not be much more difficult for
him to attain what he seeks? And if it should be suspected by him that he is
not well disposed towards him, but rather is hostile to him, and friends with
his opponent, and his disputant is in the converse position, how is it not utterly
unattainable, if not beyond even that? Nevertheless, what was not possible for
two people fighting before they ceased hostilities against each other, and all
the more so when others who did not seem to be friends fought for them on
their behalf, this God made possible among civilians and soldiers, generals
and governors, that he might demonstrate to all in every way that the power of
truth is invincible.333
72. This is what that excellent tongue set out, explaining in general terms
first the manifest madness of those adversaries ranged against him and
orthodox piety, whose exarch, champion and general was the most wicked
333 Gregory Palamas, Second Letter to Makarios 3–5 (Christou II, 540–3; Perrella III,
1014–20). Sinkewicz (2002, 150) dates the letter to the beginning of 1345. For a discussion of
the letter in its historical context, see Rigo 2015a, 272–4.
130 GREGORY PALAMAS
leader of the Church,334 and secondly the inventive and invincible skill of
God’s providence and power in response to these events, bringing about the
best results paradoxically through apparent opposites.
The conversion of a follower of Akindynos

What new Thucydides or Herodotus could narrate one after another in the
way they deserve the details of the amazing events of that time? For most
of them, I would concede the palm to this philosopher of ours above all
popular orators, sophists and rhetoricians for his philosophical discussions
on various topics at different times in his wonderful treatises and letters
to his friends. As for me, I shall record one or two of them in a summary
fashion and then return to my narrative.
73. At around this time a good and virtuous man was appointed governor
and general of the Peloponnese by the emperors.335 He was extremely well
thought of by them, and equally a friend of true piety and a defender of
orthodox teaching about God. While he was preparing for his departure
to take up that command and was still at the imperial capital, many of his
friends were with him every day. Some of them were to leave with him
and assist him on the voyage and with his official administration, each one
attending to particular duties as needed and in accordance with his office.
Others were there simply out of friendship and to keep him company.
Among them was one of the friends and companions of Akindynos who
had been taken into the general’s service. He was presentable in appearance
and of good family, but his manner was unpleasant and he did not know
how to control his tongue. The right hand of the Most High, however,
marvellously changed even him in a short time.
This man’s teacher, Akindynos, entrusted to him the most powerful of
his writings against true piety, written in iambic verses,336 which he was
334 I.e. the patriarch John XIV Kalekas.

335 Philotheos dates this episode to the time when Palamas was in prison (spring 1343
to February 1347), so the newly appointed governor cannot have been the despot of the
Morea. (The despotate of the Morea was created only in 1349, when the emperor John
VI Kantakouzenos sent his son Manuel to be the first despot.) The governor (hēgemōn)
Philotheos refers to must have been the epitropos of one of the strongholds not controlled at
the time by the Franks, perhaps Monembasia.
336 Akindynos’ Five Hundred and Nine Iambic Verses Against Gregory Palamas,
Archbishop of Thessalonike was first published by Allatius in 1652 and is reprinted in PG
150, 843–62.
sending to the Peloponnesians, just as in ancient mythology the Sphinx

was sent to the Thebans, or in antiquity the arrogant Persian expedition
was sent to the whole of Greece. And he kept these terrible things stowed
away secretly and studied them every day. He discussed them with his
companions, constantly blaspheming against true piety and Gregory its
guardian. He contradicted everybody who piously stood firm and spoke up
on their behalf, and his own master and general, I declare, before anyone
else. Indeed, he strongly defended Akindynos and his followers, thinking
that he alone was a teacher of true piety and propounding this to everybody.
But God, who is concerned for the salvation of all, by a single vision during
the night wondrously rescued all the Peloponnesians as a body, along with
this man too, from spiritual disaster and strengthened all the faithful by the
miracle. The way it happened was this.
He was lying asleep on his bed at night with those wicked writings
close to his breast when suddenly it seemed as if some members of the
imperial guard stood beside him. They immediately ordered him to get up
and follow them to prison for that was what the emperor had commanded.
The man was startled and quickly jumped out of bed, full of confusion
and anxiety. Then he regained his senses, and putting it all down to the
imagination, which often gives shape to things that do not exist, got back
into bed and went to sleep. But again the same imperial guardsmen seemed
to be present and gave him the same orders as before. And as before the
man jumped out of bed seized this time by an even greater anxiety and fear,
because only a little while previously he happened to have experienced
the imperial prison and he carried memories of the wretchedness he had
endured there as if they had been thrust underground. He struggled with
his thoughts for a considerable time and was in a state of perplexity because
of going over them continuously in his imagination.
74. But because he decided once more that this was the product of a dream
and the imagination, he got into bed again and went to sleep. And again
after a short period of sleep those men in the imperial service appeared
beside him and again they gave him the same orders as before but with
greater intensity. Although he was still asleep, it seemed to him that he was
still perplexed and sought from them the reason for the emperor’s anger.
They pointed at once to the wicked heretical writings secreted close to his
breast, at the same time clearly telling him the reason. ‘It is because you
have on you the babblings of the impious Akindynos and you are hastening
to take them to the Peloponnese to the destruction and perdition of many
132 GREGORY PALAMAS
people. And if you do not now get rid of them, throwing them far from you,
and at the same time in your soul break away from your habitual attachment
and pernicious affection for such things, you will not escape the emperor’s
anger that threatens you.’
The man felt persuaded by what was said and very willingly promised
to put it into effect. As soon as he was released from sleep he carried out
the deed in accordance with the promise, utterly convinced that the vision
was of divine origin. He immediately threw the heretical writings ‘to the
crows’ and having become strongly hostile to them instead of their friend,
he spent the rest of the night sleeping with an untroubled soul. The next day
he went as usual to the governor’s house and immediately recanting in the
presence of all and seeking forgiveness from God and everyone present for
his previous errors, he became a vigorous spokesman to everybody of the
wonders of God.
The general’s eldest son seized the writings and went off in haste to
the great man imprisoned in the palace. There he described to the people
attending Gregory, just as he had recently heard explained to him, the
deadly stratagem of the heresy and its wonderfully miraculous and extraor-
dinary confutation. At the same time he produced that wicked book of
impiety written in verse to confirm what he had been saying. The teacher
heard everything privately from his own people and had not the slightest
doubt about it. Here were these pernicious discourses, whose father and
creator, as soon as he had produced them, had assigned to darkness, deep
holes in the ground and invisibility, here they were exposed to the light of
truth and to the refutation of Gregory’s brilliant tongue. With warm tears
and with a kind of ineffable spiritual pleasure he gave thanks to God who
thus invisibly but manifestly checks the attacks of pernicious heresy and
in a wonderful way full of all wisdom dispenses the salvation of the many.
75. This was not the first time alone that God worked such a miracle. In
those years practically the whole of the land and the sea were full of such
happenings – the islands and the cities, and above all great Thessalonike,
where indeed the whole matter started. The wicked writings of the
heresy were sent out everywhere surreptitiously (for there was no room
for them here at that time as they were liable to censure and frequently
condemned 337) but were almost all bought up by the pious in a marvellous
337 I.e. in Constantinople.
way, as if they were brigands or committers of sacrilege, and before they

could accomplish their work were handed over to Gregory’s hands and
tongue. For Gregory had been appointed emperor and god there in a
wonderful fashion by him who is by nature the only God and Lord of such
things, even though he was held in prison, as we have often said, and bore
the outward form of a convict so that what was done by him should be
even more marvellous.
The contemplation of such things by the great and wonderful Sabas also
became a work of this divine dispensation and performance of miracles. I
refer to our own famous Sabas, the lamp of hesychia and discernment, the
house of humility and love, the temple of divine wisdom, the new sun in
the flesh through the supernatural radiance and energies of the divine light,
who saw what was then going on concerning Akindynos and his wicked
gang of supporters, and prayed to God, interceding with him about it. We
have already composed a discourse on him who so much exceeds anything
we have heard or can understand.338
Gregory’s years in prison

76. The wise Gregory, then, spent four whole years in prison as if in a
pit,339 taking Jeremiah inside with him, as I have said, as a fellow athlete
and fellow ascetic, and with a sickly and delicate body at that in need of
nursing almost every day and of constant medication, and certainly not
of everything to the contrary. For the fact that he remained permanently
confined without being permitted to leave his cell for such a long time
naturally only caused his health to deteriorate. But what tormented him
more was the double ruination of the people. On the one hand, they took
up arms against each other, breaking out in rebellion and internecine
wars in complete fury. On the other, they denied their ancestral and
apostolic veneration for God and the common traditions of the theologians
unrestrainedly and introduced in place of the pure word of truth the
profane babble of the heresies, like those who substitute pure gold by
base metal or wine, which naturally gladdens the heart, by a vinegary
and watery liquid that is of no benefit to those who drink it. And what is
worse than both these and more grievous is that many, if not almost all,
338 Sabas of Vatopedi, a member of the Athonite mission to Constantinople of 1342 who
was detained in the monastery of Chora, is the subject of a Life by Philotheos (Tsames,
161–325).
339 I.e. from early spring 1343 to February 1347.
134 GREGORY PALAMAS
were incited to do these things by those, alas, who were thought to be the
protectors and leaders of the Church, the very people who should have
used every means to restrain them. But he, leaving both of these to God,
sometimes beseeched him in the words of the divine David and with the
same hope: ‘Let your mercy, O Lord, be upon us, even as we have hoped in
you’,340 and at other times frequently added Chrysostom’s phrase, with the
same love and gratitude: ‘Glory to you, O Lord, for everything.’341 These
were salutations, as it were, addressed to the divine by that great and
celebrated soul throughout his life. It was above all in times of difficulty
and tribulation that he remained unbowed and unshaken in all things, as
if standing in the midst of the furnace of all these different kinds of trials,
unconsumed by fire like those blessed young men.342 He praised God in
the senses and the intellect, weaving together the hymn of his confession
in an excellent manner orally and in his writings. And indeed, like those
young men he consigned the ministers and ringleaders of the error to the
flames, consuming them there intellectually, and hence in deed and word
summoning the whole of creation as a body in a marvellous manner, to
thanksgiving and supplication.
77. Judging in his own mind whether indeed this was an opportunity
for noetic hesychia and complete dedication to God, and whether his
natural constitution was indefatigable, he gave himself night and day to
these things in a wonderful manner, and in addition studied the books
of the theologians very attentively and composed books and treatises
himself on true piety. For it was here that he composed almost all his
discourses against the sophistries, or rather, one should say, the impieties,
of Akindynos.343 The occasion that prompted them was that man and
his long rigmaroles and screeds of slanderous and blasphemous rubbish,
which my valiant friend could easily have disposed of without any effort,
even if half-asleep, as if they were simply shadows and hallucinations of
discourses and blasphemies, thanks to all the wonderful dogmatic and
theological insights contained in his own writings. The latter are worthy
340 Ps 32 (33): 22.

341 Palladius, Life of John Chrysostom 11 (PG 47, 38). This was Chrysostom’s prayer on
his deathbed.
342 Cf. Dan 3: 19–26.
343 I.e. Palamas’ seven antirrhetics Against Akindynos, dated by Sinkewicz (2002, 141–2,
no. 13) to 1343–44.
of him, all of them presenting a thorough instruction on the whole mystery

of the high theology of the Trinity and of the economy of the incarnation
of one of the Trinity. They are the mystery of true piety or a clear manifes-
tation and teaching of the supernatural mystery of piety, explaining what
is obscure and clarifying what is difficult to understand and reconciling
the excellent statements of the theologians and teachers with the Holy
Scriptures, harmonizing them and showing that all as a whole are in accord
with the great Gospel and its preaching, which is admired exceedingly by
the intelligent as scarcely ever before by anyone.
The end of the civil war

John, falsely called the head of the Church, was like a man who had gone
completely off his head.344 He seemed to have lost his wits and to have
suffered a brain seizure, or rather, to be more precise, to have been carried
away by a spirit of error and to have openly declared war on God himself.345
For he resumed the same behaviour as before. In concert with those under
him, he elected one of Akindynos’ associates and disciples, a man wearing
the habit of a monk and deacon (I shall omit his name for the time being),
president of the brilliant Church of Thessalonike, a second Barlaam or
Akindynos, I mean with regard to unorthodoxy and wicked zeal against
true piety.346 But God resolved these matters more swiftly than those that
had preceded them, or rather, he not only resolved them in a wonderful way
but turned them against John, bringing them down on his own head, as my
discourse will show forthwith.
78. When she heard about these things, the admirable empress, who was a
good guardian of orthodoxy, sent at once to John, the defender of heresy,
exhorting him to break off communion once and for all with those sharing
the opinions of Barlaam and Akindynos, who had been declared heretics
by a council along with their teachers and had been excommunicated
from Christ and the Church by formal letters, Synodal Tomoi and the most
344 This is the first time that the patriarch John XIV Kalekas is mentioned by name.
345 The mention of a seizure may be more than a rhetorical trope. See Joseph Kalothetos,
Letter 1, 9 (Tsames, 367).
346 This was Hyakinthos (PLP 29453), a monk of the monastery of the Hodegon of
Constantinople, who entered Thessalonike as its metropolitan when the Zealots took control
of the city again in 1345. See Meyendorff 1959, 116, n. 97; Hero 1983, 383. The metropolis of
Thessalonike omits Hyakinthos from its official list of metropolitans.
136 GREGORY PALAMAS
fearful anathemas.347 But he, adding impudence to unorthodoxy, or to put it

differently, with divine providence rightly pushing him into the pit which he
had just dug, sent back to the Christ-loving empress a volume full of writings
supposedly justifying his own innovative doctrines and strange behaviour.348
This act was seen as the agent that very rightly brought about his downfall
and deposition. For the volume spread calumny and the sweepings of slander
and blasphemy against the Church’s sacred Tomos and mounted a refutation
in the guise of an exegesis of the Tomos, which a little while before, while
he was still of sound mind and had not gone off his head, he had praised
and applauded as a direct definition of orthodoxy and had supported it more
firmly than anyone else with his tongue and his hand.349 And this was not all.
Contained in this volume of heresy were even the strongest and most central
arguments of these impious texts, which rejected nearly all the saints and
theologians as unorthodox on account of their holy writings.
This notorious enemy of truth was therefore caught by his own feathers
and brought on himself his just reward. The admirable empress now rekindled
her former zeal for orthodoxy. She convoked an assembly of the choir of
bishops, along with prominent members of the Church and government
officials, and stripping the champion of the heresy, together with his advisers
and the leaders of the heresy, of the priesthood, she most rightly and properly
ejected them from the Church.350 It was for this reason, I believe, that her
imperial role was preserved for her into her old age by God, who rightly
rewarded her wonderful zeal in defence of orthodoxy, her patronage of his
Church and alliance with it, and her excellent imitation of her admirable
husband, the emperor, and her courage in defence of orthodoxy.351
By this splendid confirmation of orthodoxy – for the destruction of the
heresy and of its leaders did become a confirmation of orthodoxy and a
347 Philotheos does not go into the empress Anna’s political motives, but it is true that
despite her Latin origin she remained a devout Orthodox to the end of her life. For a character
sketch see Nicol 1994, 82–95.
348 The volume contained a dossier of anti-palamite texts by different authors which was
destroyed after the Palamite council of 1347. See Rigo 2015b, 298.
349 Kalekas had in fact drawn up the Synodal Tomos of 1341 and had signed it together
with the metropolitans present at the Council.
350 This was the council hurriedly assembled on 2 February 1347 just before John
Kantakouzenos entered the city.
351 Anna was treated deferentially by Kantakouzenos. After a successful mission to
Thessalonike on Kantakouzenos’ behalf in 1351 to deflect her son from rebellion she stayed
on in that city as empress, dying in about 1365 as the nun Anastasia.
support of the Church of Christ – on the same day the general rebellion and
prosecution of civil war also came to an end, because the empire returned
most excellently to concord and harmony with itself, and its members
recognized each other and naturally returned to a state of unity.352 God
worked a wonderful miracle by which he showed everybody clearly what are
the fruits of heresy and blasphemy against God and what are the results of the
destruction of those things and of correct doctrine and piety concerning God.
Metropolitan of Thessalonike
Gregory’s release and election
79. When peace, which years before had fled and had been exiled,
returned, as I have described, after a long period of time, before anything
else the great Gregory emerged splendidly from his unjust confinement,
or rather, from his years of struggle for orthodoxy, his imprisonment and
his condemnation, wearing the crown of his confession. And to omit the
intervening events, by the common vote of the Church together with the
empire, as is the custom, and before that by divine action and assent, the
divine Isidore received the helm of the universal Church.353 Immediately
after him and through him the great Gregory received that of the wonderful
Church of great Thessalonike, having received many pressing requests and
supplications to accept this from the emperor himself and indeed from the
admirable patriarch.354
And the common body of the church received, or rather, received again,
its former distinguished defender and champion, the popular leader and
guide, as it were, with regard to the ordinances of God and the Church’s
great company. He was awarded this not as a human favour granted by
certain people, but as a prize for virtue practised since childhood, for long
struggles in defence of true piety and for the confession of orthodoxy.
And so that distinguished and great see received him who was truly
worthy of it. But no, neither did that see, which is so great and admired by
all at a time when it lacked a pastor, need to acquire some other instead
of him – and therefore it did not – nor did he, when going so splendidly
352 On 2 February 1347.

353 Isidore Boucheiras (PLP 3140) was elected patriarch shortly after the council of
8 February 1347 and was enthronized on 17 May.
354 Hyakinthos had died suddenly in the late spring of 1346 (Akindynos, Letter 60; 54–63;
Hero, 244 and 414).
138 GREGORY PALAMAS
by divine election and invitation to take up the leadership of a church,

need to choose another instead of this one – and therefore he did not. No,
both situations arose in a wonderful and opportune way and according to
a plan of salvation. And what need be said other than that the great and
omnipotent grace of the Spirit became operative exactly as was necessary
to effect such things, for the sake of which especially the great man fully
accomplished those great and noble struggles of his?355
Obstacles to occupying his see

80. Indeed, now began new contests and new bouts of wrestling and the
athlete was the archbishop of God. It was as if this sprang from a new
beginning, as if he was destined to wrestle throughout his life, and this
inheritance had been chosen by that man whose nobility exceeded that of
all others as a result of divine providence. Observe. He went down from
Byzantium towards the see and city that had been allotted to him. But,
alas, it shook off the father and turned away from him, because it was
still smelling of the corruption it had previously received and the sedition
and had not yet been healed of its malign and corrupting humour and its
bad disposition by the sweet odour of peace.356 The innovations in the
divine doctrines talked about by the unorthodox and the malign suspicion
concerning them were added by some, even though this was rather a
pretext and a cover for grave discord and the aftermath of disorder. But
God wonderfully proclaimed the great man from above to those in the
city, even though he was persecuted, and showed, through those who were
rightly wanting him, what intimacy and freedom of speech he enjoyed with
him, as our narrative will now show.
81. There was a certain devout and earnest man, enrolled from above among
the clergy of the Church of Thessalonike, who had been honoured by the
rank of presbyter and thus held the office of orphanotrophos.357 He had a
female child not yet subject to the bonds of marriage, every limb of whose
body had been weakened by a painful disease and who had lain bedridden at
355 Philotheos in this paragraph invokes divine providence to explain discreetly why
Palamas did not himself become patriarch.
356 Palamas was prevented from entering Thessalonike because the city was still in Zealot
hands.
357 The orphanotrophos was the director of an orphanage, a post of some prestige (ODB
3, 1537–8).
home for three whole years. On the occurrence of the feast day of the Mother
of God, which our custom was to celebrate on her holy birthday, that is, on
the eighth of Gorpiaios,358 the aforementioned presbyter asked his fellow
presbyters participating in the liturgy to offer a holy prayer at the great
mysteries celebrated in common to the God and Lord of the mysteries, asking
him to make known to them by some sign from him what they were to think
about the archbishop who had wrongly been driven from them, what sort of
standing and right of access he had with him. This would refute and shame,
he said, those who had willingly maltreated him and would reassure those
who through ignorance were in a state of doubt and confusion. Now while
they were praying for these things during the celebration of the mysteries,
he for his part prayed with them, letting his mind dwell on his paralysed
and bedridden daughter and asking for her to be healed in preference to any
other sign. And God, glorifying there his own servant, for whose sake they
were offering the prayer and the supplication, immediately raised the girl
from her bed and made her walk without stumbling and run round the house
with those who were in good health (O, your strange marvels, O Christ!)
in such a way as to fill onlookers with amazement and astonishment. The
priests were informed of these things while the mysteries were still being
celebrated. The news caused them to sing praises to God and marvel at it
as something beyond word and understanding, especially those who knew
how serious and long the child’s illness had been. It also made them know
rightly that his servant was both God’s admirable archbishop and equal to
the apostles, and they proclaimed this to the others unreservedly.
Again on Mount Athos

The archbishop therefore backed water and withdrew, because his presence
had been refused, as I have said, and sailed for holy Athos. Both before
and after his voyage down he was very ill physically and was only able
to disembark on the Mountain after many days. He too, I think, said to
his Thessalonike what Christ also said to Jerusalem when it repelled him
long ago: ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that
make for your peace! But now they are hidden from you and you did not
recognize the time of your visitation.’359 I shall pass over the words of ill
omen in silence.
358 Gorpiaios was the name of September in the Macedonian calendar – a neat classicizing
touch by Philotheos to honour the capital of Macedonia.
359 Cf. Luke 19: 42–4.
140 GREGORY PALAMAS
The fathers on the Mountain were delighted to welcome the man they
had long desired to see again. Sharing every day in the streams that flowed
from his tongue, like some divine nectar, they wanted very much to keep
him with them. And he wanted that too, until such time as the unrest there
and the disturbance should return naturally to concord and health.
Stefan Dušan
82. Now Stefan, the ruler of the Triballi,360 also came to Athos at that
time.361 (For the recent civil strife among the Romans had disastrous
consequences and had appointed that man emperor of no small part of
the Roman Empire.)362 He arrived, as I said, on the Holy Mountain at that
time with sovereign authority, and because he met the great archbishop
there, entered into discussion with him, as he had long desired on account
of his fame. First he tried in all kinds of ways to win the man over and
transfer him to his own jurisdiction. What did he not say? What did he not
promise so as to be able to achieve his goal? Because he did not succeed in
persuading him by these means, he adopted a second approach, proposing
with the addition of some pressure, that the great man should return to
the city of Constantine and become his ambassador to the emperors. The
proposal of an embassy was clearly a pretext for a hidden purpose, but it
did not reflect the truth of the matter. Far from it. The authority he had
acquired over Roman territory was still new and insecure. Yet he wanted
to win over the great man by that authority, as if he were a hot coal of the
Roman Empire and easily able, since he was so important, to kindle again
the flame of friendliness towards his interests, both in deeds and in words.
83. It is also worth noting the following. When this ruler of the Triballi,
as I have already said, had tried every means and made every attempt
by pursuing arguments to win over the great man to himself, he added
the following to what he had said. The Romans had driven him out
disgracefully and had not allowed him to take possession of the church that
had been allotted to him. He himself, however, that is, if he was persuaded
360 Philotheos uses here the classicizing term for the Serbs. The Triballi were a Thracian
tribe who occupied the Plain of Kosovo in the fifth century BC.
361 Stefan Uroš IV Dušan, kralj (king) of the Serbs from 8 December 1331, spent several
months at the Serbian monastery on Athos, Hilandar, in 1347–48 (ODB 3, 1951).
362 After his capture of Serres and occupation of Mount Athos in 1345 Dušan proclaimed
himself ‘emperor of the Serbs and Romans’ and was so crowned at Skopje in May 1349.
by his words and accepted his invitation, would be happy to grant him
cities, churches and lands. Then he listed in addition the large sums of
annual rents and money, which clearly he had there at his disposal. The
man of God went through many points in detail with him worthy of relating
and recording, but finally added the following: ‘We have not the slightest
need of political power, lands, rents, revenues and huge sums of money. It
is as if one were to take a sponge, which naturally can only contain a cupful
of water, and throw it into the middle of the Aegean. It would never suck
in the sea down to the depths. How could it? Even there the sponge would
only absorb the cupful that it can hold by nature. The sea’s currents and
great mass of liquid are as nothing to it, and are necessarily disregarded.
In a similar way, we too have long since learned to live on little and be
satisfied by necessities alone. This has already, as it were, become second
nature to us. And if you were to go and dip us into all the gold on earth and
under the earth, and even into the river of the legendary Pactolus,363 you
would see that we would draw from it nothing more than is sufficient for
our daily nourishment and needs. Therefore your talking about those many
great gifts and wealth is wholly superfluous so far as we are concerned.’ So
what happened next?
A new attempt to take up office

84. God’s archbishop was forced to return once more to the city of
Constantine, as I have said.364 He went to see the emperors and after a brief
interval went down again to Thessalonike, to his own Church, because of
the obligation he was under on account of his leadership of the people there
and indeed also because the emperors,365 together with the great leader of
the universal church,366 pressed him to do so, seeing that the strife there
seemed to have calmed down and to be heading towards a state of concord
and harmony.367
There were, however, other new causes of disturbance and discord,
and the archbishop was again excluded from the city and the church.
363 The River Pactolus (now Sart Çayı) in Lydia was famous in antiquity for the gold it
brought down from Mount Tmolus. It was the source of Croesus’ wealth.
364 It seems likely that Palamas went voluntarily to Constantinople at Dušan’s request to
mediate between him and Kantakouzenos; see Rigo 2014, 145–6.
365 Now John VI Kantakouzenos and John V Palaiologos.
366 The patriarch Isidore Boucheiras.
367 This was after the nobles regained control temporarily in 1349.
142 GREGORY PALAMAS
For the leaders of the recent confusion wrongly demanded certain very
great benefits from the emperors as a result of the disorder and civil
strife, when instead it would have been more appropriate if they had
been arrested and brought to trial. The decision facing the archbishop
was necessarily to choose one of the following two courses of action:
either to stay there and deprive the emperors of sacred commemoration
and prayer in the holy mysteries, and thus enjoy his throne and his office,
or to remain faithful to them and be constrained himself not to share in
either of these. He therefore chose the lesser of the two evils. Once more
the great man accepted flight with the emperors, and again for the sake
of not disregarding anything laid down in any of the laws, because he
saw that division and civil strife was again creeping in between them.368
Again a voyage and again exile and the sea escorted the archbishop
of the great city to the mother island of Hephaestus,369 consigning the
happiness of the great city to this poor and obscure island, and thus
suddenly rendering it great and distinguished.
Gregory on Lemnos
85. What, then, need be said, once the great man had disembarked on
Lemnos as a result of the vote of the universal Church about the size of
the cargo of blessings he brought with him to the island? Every day he
supplied the people with words and deeds, holy rites and teachings. And by
educating that coarse and barbarous character of theirs and softening their
barren hearts, he made them fertile and productive, to the extent that the
famous proverb was thoroughly reversed by the islanders of that time, in
that through him they experienced not ‘the Lemnian evils’ but rather ‘the
Lemnian blessings’.370
During the great man’s stay here pestilence and death struck one of the
towns. I do not mean that general pestilence that had occurred throughout
368 I follow Athanasios of Paros in taking en ekeinois to refer to the emperors and thus best
translated as ‘between them’. It was the summer of 1350. The patriarch Isidore Boucheiras
had just died (February/March 1350). His successor, Kallistos I, was a Palamite but loyal to
the Palaiologos dynasty. Kantakouzenos wanted to crown his son Matthew co-emperor but
Kallistos refused to perform the coronation. Kallistos was to resign on this issue but not until
after the Church Council of 1351.
369 The Northern Aegean island of Lemnos.
370 ‘The Lemnian evils’ (ta Lēmnia kaka): a proverb (CPG 1, 110; 1, 270; 2, 121; 2, 503–4)
which fourteenth-century philologists, including Thomas Magistros (Philotheos’ teacher)
derived from Euripides’ Hecuba, line 887.
the world a little while previously,371 but a lesser and more limited one that
followed it. The sick called on the pastor to visit them and help them – he
was living in one of the other towns of the island – and he went to them at
once, without the least postponement or hesitation. Some of his servants
did not have the courage to go with him for fear of the disease. Others
followed him out of confidence in the great man. These were affected
somewhat by the corrupting air of the place and the pestilence even before
arriving at the town late in the evening. The next day, however, they felt
better, and following the blessed man joined in prayers and supplications
with him outside the walls with the whole population. Even though the
threat was so terrible and so great, the great man checked its impetus and
advance, banished the disease and put a stop to death through prayers and
supplications addressed to God both publicly with others and privately on
his own. In this way he was glorified by God, who fulfils the desire of those
who fear him, to use the words of the divine David,372 and gives ear to their
supplication.
Entry into Thessalonike

86. But the great man’s admirable city could not bear to see this as a
permanent state of affairs. Nor could it endure allowing its own blessing to
be thus handed over to the people of Lemnos against all justice by a small
number of rebels, who were truly wicked and corrupt and unworthy of
being called its citizens. Therefore, moved by a just zeal, more than before,
for its own glory and its prerogatives, it exiled and excluded some of those
criminals and rogues, while in the case of others it brought them to their
senses and checked their evil impulses and obnoxious deeds by suitable
and appropriate remedies.373 Once these people were out of the way, as
was right and necessary, all the citizens with one will and voice issued
a warrant, as it were, for their good pastor. They immediately prepared
a galley for this purpose and the leading churchmen went up to Lemnos
and very soon brought back the great priest. These men were the cause of
much grief and lamentation for the Lemnians because they deprived them
of him. But for his own citizens his splendid advent was an occasion of
371 The Black Death of 1346–48.

372 Cf. Ps 144 (145): 19.
373 The Zealot revolt was brought to an end by the arrival together at Thessalonike of
John VI Kantakouzenos and John V Palaiologos towards the end of 1350. The Zealot leaders
were treated leniently.
144 GREGORY PALAMAS
unspeakable joy and of paeans of praise and applause that cannot easily be
described.
87. For who could describe in detail the festivity and joy of the whole
people on that occasion? What birthdays, hair-cuttings, house-warmings,
anniversaries and whatever else people celebrate can compare with that
festival to welcome the great man?374 Or rather, they are not even capable of
being recalled, as they have long since grown old and been lost to memory.
And we ourselves, what imperial victories, triumphs or ceremonial entries
can we find to equal it? None, I think, whatsoever. For his friend and
namesake would only just have been able to repeat the words ‘and the
great Athanasius was welcomed in the same way’.375 That is to say, this
great man emulated him both in the persecutions he suffered and in his
struggles, and indeed in his acclamations. Therefore the great ceremony
and festival of that day can only be compared with the mysteries of Christ
and the ceremonies and festivals held on those occasions, especially with
the crowning and most splendid mystery of them all, or, as it is called, the
‘feast of feasts for us and festival of festivals’.376 This is evident from the
event itself.
For when the great archbishop had entered the city in the customary
fashion and had put on the new full-length robe and the sacred vestment,
at the point where he was to go in procession through the middle of the
city accompanied by hymns and psalmody, all the singers, as if at an
agreed signal, began to chant the hymns belonging to the great day of
Christ’s resurrection with loud shouts and cries, even though they were
far from the date of that feast. It seemed to them that they were seeing the
disciple and imitator of Christ as another Christ before them, as one who
had returned from Hades and the tomb of persecution and exile, and that
they were celebrating that day as a glorious resurrection. ‘Let us purify
our senses,’ they said to one another, ‘and we shall see Christ flashing
forth in the unapproachable light of the resurrection’,377 and ‘Come, let us
374 Philotheos paraphrases the opening of Gregory of Nazianzus’ fortieth Oration

(Moreschini, 922). ‘Hair-cutting’ was a ceremony of the coming of age of boys when they
were entered in the register of citizens.
375 Palamas’ ‘friend and namesake’ is Gregory of Nazianzus. The quotation is from
Oration 21, 28 (Moreschini, 534).
376 Canon of Easter, Irmos of the eighth Canticle.
377 Canon of Easter, first Troparion of the first Canticle.
drink a new drink and a fountain of incorruptibility that Christ has made
flow from the tomb’,378 and again, addressing the whole of the new church
with the wise singer who draws on the divine Isaiah: ‘Shine, shine new
Jerusalem, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen
upon you.’379
And the strange thing in this affair was that nobody planned it, nobody
was the first to intone the melody, and even though an inquiry was made
afterwards no such person was ever found. As was evident at the time and
later to people of sense, this was the result of inspiration and grace from
above, the mind and tongue of all having been moved as a body sponta-
neously and invisibly to do this. Quite so.
Pacification of the Church

88. These things were done by him after his splendid entry into the church
and the city. On the third day following, he announced to the whole city
a public solemnity and procession with holy icons, psalms and prayers, as
is the custom. In a moment the whole city gathered together, every family
and people of all ages and walks of life. You might say that they longed
to see him and hear him preach and offer up prayers to God for them. He
went through the greater part of the city praying, blessing, giving thanks
for what had transpired, and interceding for what was to come. Finally he
delivered an instructive discourse addressed to everyone in general, for the
most part counselling harmony and peace.380 He made everybody hang on
his words and right from the beginning pierced their souls with respect for
himself and God so deeply that it is impossible to describe.
And what should be said about the others, those who previously had
mocked him and been extremely hostile to him and had stirred up sedition,
when through that homily he swiftly made friends of them? Or rather,
not only friends but even slaves falling prostrate there before his feet and
covering them with kisses, confessing their rash judgement of him, their
offensive behaviour and whatever they had done previously as a result
of stupidity, and begging forgiveness of that holy soul and tongue with
copious tears. Not only did he grant them forgiveness in abundance but also
added more than they had asked for. He enrolled them among his friends
378 Canon of Easter, Irmos of the third Canticle.

379 Canon of Easter, Irmos of the ninth Canticle.
380 The homily is extant: Homily 1 On Peace, with another delivered on the third day after
Palamas’ entry into Thessalonike (PG 151, 9A–17C).
146 GREGORY PALAMAS
and intimates, and never ceased performing acts of kindness for them in
words and deeds. And because it was necessary for him both to perform the
greater and higher rites and by the mystical sacrifice to purify his people,
he entered the church with his clergy and ministers, as is the custom, and
for the first time celebrated the mysteries among them.
And God glorified him from above, once again working miracles
through him. The presbyter and orphanotrophos mentioned earlier had a
son. The boy suffered from a disease or demonic activity, I am not sure
which. I suppose people would call it epilepsy, but it attacked him without
much warning and was at its most severe in accordance not with the lunar
cycle, as in the case of other people, but with the solar. When the time came
for the great man to celebrate the Liturgy, as I have already described,
one of the presbyters who was to celebrate with him, who was the child’s
father, approached the great man with great faith and asked him if he would
give communion of the life-giving sacrifice by his own hand to the sick
child. He consented, and as the time was already near, he brought the child,
carrying him in his arms. The archbishop of God gave communion to him
of the bloodless sacrifice, as he had promised, and that chronic illness with
its unseen cause immediately slipped away. The boy has now been free of
it for a long time, and ever since has himself praised God and extolled his
servant to everyone.
Recommendations to the clergy

89. After a few days had elapsed, the archbishop summoned all who had
received ordination to a conference. For because his aim was to build up
the Church from scratch, and the ordained are the foundations and columns
of the Church after the first and only foundation, or its builders and fellow
workers – I mean, with himself as the first after Christ the builder and
architect – he considered it necessary before anything else to build and
teach those things, by the architectural skill of the Spirit, and to educate
and restore, so that the future construction work should proceed according
to his plan and not appear somehow to be running in vain.381
So gathering them all together, as I have said, he set out for them
in a wonderful manner the principles of the great dignity of priesthood.
He showed how exalted it is and how it is the servant of awesome and
ineffable mysteries, and I do not mean for human beings alone but also
381 Cf. Phil 2: 16; Gal 2: 2.
for the heavenly and incorporeal beings themselves. He showed how

extremely insignificant human beings are and pointed out that nobody, as
writers have declared, is worthy of that ministry. He showed how, because
he became man through the superabundance of his love for humanity, the
only-begotten Son of God and our high priest was called supernaturally
both sacrifice and offerer of sacrifice, and transmitted to us his fellow
human beings, by words of supernatural goodness, this awesome and
bloodless rite. He showed how it was absolutely essential that those of
us who have been deemed worthy of this office should always be anxious
to walk in the footsteps of him who has ordained us to the best of our
ability, if we are not to miss the mark completely and foolishly build on
another foundation, a foundation which no one who builds such things
in a true and genuine fashion can possibly lay, as the blessed Paul tells
us: ‘No one,’ he says, ‘can lay any foundation other than the one that has
been laid, which is Jesus Christ.’382 If that is the case, and no one who
thinks and speaks correctly would choose to say otherwise, what should
we think of wanting to go in the opposite direction and wandering in an
unholy fashion rather far from the new way of life and the commandment,
and instead of being called a lamp and a light, according to Christ’s word,
being called a stumbling-block and a pit for the brethren?
By making these and similar topics the subject of his address and
discussion, the wise man persuaded most of his hearers – those who had a
regard for truth and the commandment – by the strength of his arguments.
Moreover, by his actions and his personal example he led almost all of them
to make progress and improve the quality of their lives. For he performed
every sacred ceremony and mystagogical rite like somebody who was more
than human or was manifestly a new kind of human being, carrying them
out in a supernatural fashion and astonishing everybody by his manner, his
words, his deeds and approach to any matter.
Teaching activity
90. Everybody admired his tireless zeal and willingness to speak, preach
and teach in Church, which he did despite the difficulties and opposition he
encountered both in public and in private. They admired the debates and
discussions he held both in public and in private, sometimes with many
people, sometimes with a few, and even on occasion with single individuals.
382 1 Cor 3: 11.
148 GREGORY PALAMAS
And they admired the beauty of his speech, the variety, frequency, sublimity
and transcendence of those divine contemplative doctrines and definitions
which nobody else at all, in my opinion, could frame.
And what need be said, O divine and holy person, when every word,
discourse or address whatsoever that issued from your mouth was always a
forthright education of the soul, a setting right of character, a correction of
sin, a lesson in virtue and a philosophy of every good? First he cultivated
and prepared the outer senses by the sweetness and novelty of his speech.
Then he gently poured it into the ears of the soul, letting it enter, as they
say, in the manner of oil and honey, and subduing the soul more thoroughly
than any siren. And when it has attached itself there in its own way to
each one and secretly organizes and remodels them, it accomplishes such
things in a wonderful manner as human speech and knowledge has not
the slightest knowledge of. And only the universal creator and maker,
who has fashioned our hearts on his own, the change of the right hand
of the Most High,383 accomplishes this supernaturally through those who
have succeeded in having him dwell within them and alone have made
themselves worthy of his deifying indwelling and union. These, according
to Christ’s word, are like the scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven,
‘who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old’,384 that is,
who interprets what belongs to the Old and New Testaments and brings
them together into a unity, or into what persuades us to put away the old
self and create the new,385 or, if you wish, into what drives out the foolish
nonsense of antiquity and the hoary old error of polytheism and abolishes
the ideas, destinies and foolish wisdom of the Greeks by the finished and
concise word of truth and by the new wisdom of the Spirit, through which
fishermen became wise and those despised came to be more honoured
than the rest. Indeed, the discourses of this great man brought together all
these themes and developed them both in his writing and in his addresses
and when giving counsel, as I have said, both in public and in private.
The Council of 1351

91. This being the situation, the great man made every effort by word
and deed to restore the Church, sometimes pulling up long-established
evil by the roots and clearing out the rubbish of the passions, sometimes
383 Cf. Ps 76 (77): 11.

384 Matt 13: 52.
385 Cf. Eph 4: 22–4.
cultivating hearts that had long been a waste land and sowing the seed of
the word night and day in the fertile soil. Meanwhile, because those who
were infected with the disease of Barlaam and Akindynos were once again
constantly disturbing and agitating the universal Church – even though
the notorious leaders of the heresy had long since left the scene386 – the
emperor and the patriarch decided to hold another council in this queen
of cities and again submit what was being said by them to examination.
They themselves were clamouring for this every day, not so as to learn
what was true – they could have found that out perfectly well long ago as
it had often been made plain – but only so as to seem to have something to
say against the truth and to disturb and confuse the many, as has always
been the habit with every heretic. In view of the way things seemed to be
going and the fact that the holding of a council was imminent, the person
whose presence was demanded before that of anyone else was naturally the
foremost expert technician and champion of the word. For it was against
him, as if against a brave soldier and general, that all or a major part of
the struggle was directed by the opponents, even if they attacked us no
less than him, fighting against us publicly and, as it were, honouring us by
including us in their abuse.
92. And so the triple victor went up again from Thessalonike,387 not to go
over the point four or more times, summoned to the contest by letters from
the emperor and the patriarch requesting him to attend in the strongest
possible terms.388 A great and wonderful council was held, surpassing
those which had preceded it not only on account of the many great bishops
who composed it – who, moreover, inspired each other to fight bravely, if
necessary to the last drop of blood, in defence of the Spirit and of orthodox
doctrine and of the Church as well – together with the close blood-relations
of the emperors and the state officials, that is, with the whole senate, but also
on account of the scholars and learned men belonging to a different group
of dignitaries, by whom I mean the Church’s élite members, and indeed
monks and hermits too, and those who occupy themselves philosophically
386 Akindynos died in 1348. Barlaam, who had returned to Italy where he became bishop
of Gerace, died in the same year.
387 Palamas is described as trisaristeus, a victor of three events in a single games, in his
case the contest with Barlaam, the Council of 1347, and the struggle with the Zealots.
388 The emperor mentioned is John VI Kantakouzenos (in the singular because John V
Palaiologos had stayed in Thessalonike); the patriarch is the recently elected Kallistos I.
150 GREGORY PALAMAS
with divine matters whether publicly or privately. I leave aside the common
mass of devout people who gathered to hear the speeches on matters of
faith in such numbers that even the imperial palace which was the venue
for this council, although large and impressive, was packed out both inside
and outside.389
When the emperor and the patriarch had taken their seats, as is the
custom, and we, too, had sat down after them and with them, each, that is,
according to his own dignity and rank,390 those who sided with the opinion
of the opponents were also brought in, a small and detested faction, not the
portion of Jacob or the Lord’s people and ‘allotted share of his inheritance’.391
They were Canaanites, Hittites and Amorites, not even worthy of enjoying
the status of those Gibeonites whom Joshua assigned as drawers of water
and hewers of wood for the people of God long ago, when by guile and
fine hypocrisy they had snatched themselves away from the ruin and total
destruction of their neighbours.392 Hence one of the priests distinguished for
their eloquence and the eminence of their sees, on observing them as they
entered, remarked at the time that it was clear from their faces that they
belonged to the faction and party of those who are depicted in the paintings
above us. He was referring to the wicked assemblies of the heretics which
were put to shame long ago by the holy councils of the fathers, represen-
tations of which were indeed on the walls of that sacred and imperial hall.393
93. I shall leave the details of what was said and enacted there by the
emperor and the council for five whole days in succession, I think, to those
who know what to say and write about them, and above all to the divine
definition of faith, which the holy council, together with the emperor and
the patriarch, rightly drew up and by their assent and signatures, with the
Spirit speaking in their midst, endowed with authority and gave to the
Church of the faithful as a pillar of orthodoxy, a monument of true piety
389 The council met on 28 May 1351 in the fortified imperial palace of Blachernai in the
north-west corner of the city, which had been the imperial residence since the late eleventh
century.
390 The first of these was Philotheos himself, who as metropolitan of Herakleia ranked
next after the patriarch.
391 Deut 32: 29.
392 Cf. Josh 9: 16–27.
393 The council assembled in the hall known as the Triklinos of Alexios, or the Alexiakon,
which was decorated with scenes of the seven ecumenical councils; on the Triklinos, see
Runciman 1975.
and an unshakeable tower of theology, secured carefully on every side by

scriptural proofs and theological teachings of the holy fathers and councils,
even though the remnants of the error, like the tail of a dead snake that
continues to twitch, attempt to strike back at it despite suffering intense
pain as a result of the blows they have received from it and the paralysis of
their own body.
94. Now since the wise Gregory saw that the whole of the contest, so to
speak, was focused on him and that those who were publicly fighting
against the Church were again aiming blows at him as if shooting at a
target, he too very willingly took up the battle and accepted responsi-
bility for everything to do with the war. He was encouraged in this by the
emperor and the council.394
Let those who were present and ascertained what was done and said with
their own eyes and ears describe what followed. Let them tell us how he put
to flight not once but twice those fighters against God, who were unable to
withstand the assault of the divine light in his words, with the result that not
even the emperor together with the whole council could detain them. They
promised ostensibly to come back for a new council, but to this day they
have not yet reappeared. Let them tell us how he proclaimed the health-
giving word of faith in the great congregation395 using words and written
texts and delivering extraordinary speeches in which he proved himself in
complete accord with the Church’s wise theologians and the latter in turn
with themselves and with the sayings of sacred Scripture, with the result
that it was impossible for his opponents to present any counter-arguments
to what he said, or even murmur against it.
Who could fully describe how he gave wings to the souls of those able
to hear him, how suddenly he would exalt the mind and have everyone
hanging on his wise tongue, engrossed in his lips and the flow of his words,
so that they were almost outside their own bodies with divine possession
and with love and rapture for those things? Only someone who had
experienced those things could have an accurate idea of them.
Such was the character of that contest and those words that it can only
be suggested ‘by the claws’, as the saying goes.396 And if Clement, the
394 Palamas attended the council as metropolitan of Thessalonike, ranking next after the
patriarch and the metropolitan of Herakleia.
395 Cf. Ps 39 (40): 10.
396 CPG 2, 165 and 409. The full saying is ‘(to judge) by the lion’s claws’.
152 GREGORY PALAMAS
interpreter and author of these things, was a fellow struggler with Peter,
the herald of piety, both in speech and in writing, those things too should
certainly be attributed to Peter and be considered deeds wrought by him
since he has undertaken them by words, letters and the casting of votes and
become a participant in his struggles.397 And so this last holy council was
brought to a close.
A dangerous storm
95. Because it was necessary once again for the great man to return to
Thessalonike and not be absent from his church for too long, he took to
sea with his companions.398 But they experienced such blustery weather
and high waves, such commotion of the sea (for it was outside the sailing
season both for going up and coming down) that the difficulties of the return
voyage were very much greater than those of the voyage going up, and
not only the passengers but also the sailors and the captain gave up hope,
telling each other they were all in danger of their lives and commending
themselves to God by making their confession as if they were approaching
their last breath.
But the great archbishop of God not only received their hopes and
instructed them all to turn to God together in prayer, but before anything
else, relying more than ever before wholly on his dignity and office, he
placed himself between God and his companions like a true mediator
between God and humanity. Using both the silent intercessions of the mind
and a mediator’s customary freedom of speech, he made the storm quieten
down, calmed the rough sea and against all human hope saved everyone
from shipwreck.
Gregory again barred from entry into Thessalonike

Although the sea thus miraculously grew calm for them, and the waves
subsided and sent them very gently on their way to their own people and
city, the storm of trials was by no means over. For as they were approaching
the harbour and as one would expect were looking forward with pleasure to
disembarking, the emperor barred their entry.399 He was already planning
a breach with the emperor his father-in-law, and at his own initiative had
397 See the preface of the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, PG 1, 1157–72.

398 In the late autumn of 1351.
399 The emperor John V Palaiologos.
entered into some pact and agreement, I do not know of what kind, with
Stefan, the ruler of the Triballi already mentioned.400 It was, I suppose,
as a result of these that he also refused entry to the archbishop of God,
presumably by this act providing Stefan with evidence of fidelity to him,
in case he should think that the pact with him was feigned and that he
was preparing to deceive him, which was actually close to the truth, the
emperor wisely misleading him, as experience was later clearly to reveal.
He [Gregory] therefore withdrew once again and returned of necessity
to his beloved Athos. Among his servants and friends there were some who
were upset at these events and were growing ever more faint-hearted under
the weight of the trials they were suffering. He, on the other hand, said
that quite to the contrary it was fitting that they should be glad about these
things and rejoice in them and render the greatest thanks to God, that we
too should have been deemed worthy to share in some degree in the lot of
those great teachers and bishops of his, who although regarded as saviours,
fathers and spiritual benefactors, were persecuted by those who then held
power as malefactors, scoundrels and archenemies for the whole of their
lives and in most cases were finally condemned to death. And in saying
this, he showed that his actions matched his words, for in the midst of his
trials he remained extremely noble and detached in intellect and soul and
kept his thoughts fixed far above the visible world.
Anna Palaiologina reconciles the two sides

96. But God, who with the testing also provides the way out, according to
blessed Paul, so that we may be able to endure it,401 after a short time also
resolved this trial. Within the course of three months the admirable and
Christ-loving empress arrived,402 fired by a noble and imperial purpose,
and not only abrogated the treaty, or rather the appearance and pretence
of a treaty, between her son the emperor and Stefan, but also together
with the emperor her son rightly recalled the archbishop to his church and
city.403 For the emperor himself, in a manner that was in no way inferior
but even greater, also held the great man in respect, since he was wise and
400 Stefan IV Dušan, ‘emperor of the Serbs and Romans’.

401 Cf. 1 Cor 10: 13.
402 Spring 1352.
403 For a detailed account of Anna’s successful mission to Thessalonike, based on the
narratives of Kantakouzenos (Historiarum Libri IV III, 200–8) and Gregoras (Historia
Byzantina III, 147–50), see Nicol 1996, 115–17.
154 GREGORY PALAMAS
Christ-loving and could claim a will, a nobility of character and a generosity

of spirit equal to that of any of his predecessors, even if the difficulty and
adverse circumstances of the times prevented him in his earlier life from
making use of himself and his natural advantages as he would himself have
wished.404
The archbishop therefore returned to his church once again. He
regarded it with the greatest affection and was regarded by the church in
the same way. Their love was mutual and each enriched the other, the one
benefiting from the Church’s obedience to the things of God, the other
deriving much profit from his words and deeds, as is evident from what
follows.
The miraculous healing of a nun

97. There is a large and populous women’s monastery in Thessalonike of
imperial foundation and for that reason, I think, called Basilikon.405 For
it exceeds in size all other such monasteries there as a body. Among the
nuns who conducted themselves with piety and decorum in this monastery
was one called Eleodora.406 She suffered from a distressing and noxious
fluid that flowed down painfully from the upper part of the left side of
her head. The discharge was especially troublesome to her eye and it was
there that most of the pain was concentrated. The suffering was unbearable
in itself and not comparable to any other. There was also the fear of an
even greater complication, namely that the eye should come to be dislodged
from its natural seat on account of the intensity of the pain. Every medical
procedure, whether of our own doctors or of foreign ones, proved equally
ineffective because of the gravity of the condition, but after the passage
of forty successive days the pain suddenly stopped, without any external
intervention. At once a fine membrane descended and covered the pupil.
From that very moment, I would point out, the patient lost the power of
sight, but she did not feel any further pain. I emphasize that the eye lost
its function completely, to the extent of making reading for the most part
impossible.
Around the end of the year following this episode, when the month of
Gorpiaios had already begun, the feast of the Mother of God in honour
404 Philotheos is anxious in recounting this episode to minimize the culpability of John V
Palaiologos, the reigning emperor at the time of writing.
405 On this monastery see Magdalino 1977, 277–9.
406 PLP 6007.
of her nativity was being celebrated there with splendour.407 The teacher
was also present to keep the all-night vigil with his flock. As the hymns
of vespers were coming to an end, he began his instructional discourse
and homily for those present. All, as was customary, were hanging on his
teaching and the Siren charm of his sacred eloquence. The nun with the
eye problem was among the others present, sharing in the nectar of his
words. With amazement and compunction of the soul, and with her eyes
full of tears she gave abundant thanks to God that in his love for humanity
he had caused such a man to come and be among them and that she herself
had been deemed worthy to share in such things. Moreover, being fully
aware that some of the Byzantines were saying things against him with
an unbridled tongue and were trying to disparage what he said, and that
this was utter nonsense, impudence, effrontery and impiety, she raised
her hands in supplication to God with many tears, asking that through
his prayers and freedom of access to him she might be delivered from
her suffering and have the sight of her useless eye restored to what it was
before.
She spent the whole night in this fashion and with these bright hopes.
She had no hesitation or doubt about it, she said. When the time of the
sacred rite and the mysteries was drawing near, at which the archbishop
was to serve and officiate, she too approached, just as the woman suffering
from haemorrhages approached Christ long ago,408 and so far as possible
without being observed quietly touched the great man’s priestly vestment.
Laying it on the affected part, she drew from it a power and a healing that
came from it in a marvellous way, and during that time nobody noticed her.
She slept for the rest of the night with many tears and supplications, and on
the next day – O your wonderful and miraculous works, O Lord! – when
she got up, she could see clearly. Her eye had become absolutely clean and
healthy, with the result that it did not seem that it had ever been blind and
had lost its natural function for a short time.
407 8 September 1353.

408 Cf. Matt 5: 25–34.
156 GREGORY PALAMAS
Prisoner of the Turks

Gregory’s illness
98. A year passed in the course of these events, I mean after his return
from Byzantium, and with his body overworked and subjected to severe
hardship by frequent absences, trials and unyielding labours, he fell ill with
a severe and long-lasting malady.409 Everyone despaired of his life, but God
against all hope gave it back to him, preparing the athlete once more for
new contests, new races and feats of wrestling, as our discourse is about
to reveal.
Capture by the Turks

Seeing that the great man was stronger than the death expected of him,
since God, as I have said, manifestly worked his miracle, and the illness
had for the most part subsided, although the effects of it were still with him,
he was obliged at the insistence of the admirable emperor to go up once
again to the queen of cities as his ambassador to the emperor his father-in-
law to establish a truce between the two of them. But the King of kings and
Lord of lords above,410 on the one hand rejected this truce as superfluous for
the time being, and on the other, through his being taken prisoner, sent him
in a wonderful manner as an evangelist, herald, mediator and arbitrator to
the Achaemenians who were so removed from him by reason of faith and
indeed also to those held prisoner by them.411
And he was taken away as a prisoner to Asia by the Achaemenians,
those people destined to a miserable end, like one among many. He who
had long been enriched by the freedom and sovereignty that comes from
above, and with his words had guided very many towards that freedom and
sovereignty in an excellent manner, was taken away so that there too he
might do the same work and deliver many by his own presence from mental
imprisonment and slavery.
409 The illness, an abdominal complaint, recurred later and led eventually to Palamas’
death.
410 Cf. 1 Tim 6: 15.
411 Palamas was taken prisoner in March 1354 by the Achaemenians (i.e. the Turks) when
the ship taking him to Constantinople was captured near Gallipoli.
A disputation with Ismail

99. But it would be good to hear again that excellent and holy tongue
describing what he experienced and that unprecedented captivity. This,
then, is what he says in his letter to his own church.412 He writes as follows:
When three months had gone by – after his being taken captive, which he
spent at Pegai,413 where there was evidently a Christian church, as he himself
records – when three months had gone by – he says – we were snatched
away from there by lawless hands, as it were, and in four days brought to
Prousa.414 There, members of the Christian community distinguished for
their intelligence came to see us and touched on important questions but did
so at an inopportune time, for the barbarians were all around us. But those
seekers after true piety ignored the unsuitability of the occasion because
unexpectedly they had [before them] the man who could speak to them, as
they thought, about matters they wanted to put to him.415
Two days having gone by, we left Prousa under escort and two days later
arrived at a village on a hill surrounded by distant mountains and adorned
with shady trees. This village, benefiting from breezes blowing sometimes
from one direction and sometimes from another because of the mountain
peaks surrounding it, has a spring spouting very cold water and is surrounded
by cool air even in the summer. For that reason the supreme ruler among the
barbarian princes spends the summer there.416 While I was being taken there
along with the other prisoners, one of his grandsons sent to us and invited
me to separate myself from the other prisoners.417 And he sat down with me
on the soft grass, with some of the officials standing around us. And after
we sat down fruit was set in front of me but meat in front of him. And at a
signal from him, I began to eat the fruit and he the meat. As we were eating,
he asked me whether I ever ate meat and why not. When I had replied in a
suitable fashion, someone arrived from elsewhere and explained the reason
for his absence. ‘I have only just been able to complete the distribution of
412 The full text of the Letter to his Church from which this long passage is excerpted is
translated below. Philotheos reproduces §§ 12–15.
413 On Pegai (now Karabiga), on the south coast of the Sea of Marmara, see ODB 3,
1615–16.
414 On Prousa (now Bursa), the Ottoman capital in Bithynia, see ODB 3, 1750.
415 The words ‘before them’ (hyp’opsin), omitted from Philotheos’ transcript have been
supplied from Palamas’ letter. It is not difficult to guess the matters the Christians of Prousa
wanted to put to Palamas: ‘Why has this happened to us?’
416 Palamas was taken to Orhan Beg’s summer residence at a village of Mount Olympus.
417 The grandson is named below as Ismail. It is not known which of Orhan’s sons (or
son-in-law) was his father, except that he was not Murad, who succeeded Orhan in 1362.
158 GREGORY PALAMAS
alms,’ he said, ‘appointed by the great emir on Fridays.’ There then began
quite a long discussion of almsgiving.
Ismail, for that was the name of the great emir’s grandson, said to me, ‘Is
almsgiving also a practice with you?’ When I said that almsgiving is really a
product of love for the true God, and that the more one loves God the more
truly disposed one is to give alms, he asked again whether we too accept and
love their prophet Muhammad. On my denying that we did, he asked me the
reason why. I put forward a defence on this point adequate for my listener, and
said, ‘It is not possible for anyone who does not believe the teacher’s words to
love the teacher as a teacher.’ ‘You,’ he said, ‘love Isa,’ for that is what he called
Christ, ‘even though you say he was crucified.’ I considered this and in a short
time resolved the apparent contradiction, setting out the voluntary character,
the manner and the glory of the passion and the impassibility of the Godhead.
Then he questioned me again, saying, ‘How is it that you venerate the wood
and the cross?’ Again I offered him a defence on this point, as God inspired me
to do, and added, ‘You yourself doubtless approve of those who honour your
own symbol and are extremely annoyed with those who show disrespect for
it; well, Christ’s monument and sign is the cross.’ Whereupon wishing still to
mock our religion as something disreputable, he said, ‘But you claim that God
had a wife, for you say that he begot a son.’
I for my part replied to him: ‘The Turks also say that Christ was born of
the Virgin Mary, whom we glorify as the Theotokos. Therefore if Mary, in
giving birth to Christ according to the flesh, had no husband and had no need
of a husband, when she gave birth to the word of God in the flesh, all the more
reason why God, when begetting his own Word in an incorporeal and divinely
befitting manner in keeping with the Word’s incorporeal nature, did not have a
wife and did not have need of a wife, as you wrongly suppose.’ Even confronted
with this, he did not become furious, despite being, as some who knew him
said, foremost among the Christians’ harshest and fiercest opponents.
Discussions with the danişmend

100. These things which the admirable Gregory said and heard occurred,
as already mentioned, while he was in the neighbourhood of Prousa. And
because the great providence of God that arranged whatever concerned him
in an ineffable manner also summoned the noble man to Nicaea, where at
the time the great ruler of the barbarians was also staying while undergoing
medical treatment, he went to Nicaea at the latter’s command.418 Here he
418 Nicaea (now Iznik) was captured by Orhan in 1331 after a long siege. On the city see
ODB 2, 1463–4.
took part in a debate and colloquy, again at the latter’s command, with
the Chionai, who were renegade Christians, as our discourse will shortly
describe.419
But now it is necessary to learn by his own hand and tongue what was
said and done by the great man at Nicaea, naturally through the divine
Spirit, after this debate with the impious Chionai. In the letter that has
already been quoted he goes on after a brief interval to say the following:420
When our guards as usual left us at liberty in Nicaea, we asked in what part
of the city the Christians were more numerous. On learning that it was in the
vicinity of the monastery of St Hyakinthos,421 we went there straightaway,
joining the people of that neighbourhood in accordance with their desires and
their wishes, and found lodgings there. Or rather, I found lodgings there myself
because I was on my own.
The next day I went out to see the gate which is and is called the East Gate,
since it was nearer than the others. I had only gone a little way outside the gate
– what need is there to speak of the beautiful high buildings and the fortifi-
cations? The whole city is full of them, although now they serve no purpose
– I had only gone out a little way when I saw at a level spot a cube formed of
blocks of marble as if meant for a function. I then asked those who happened
to be near if there was some particular use for the cube, which was outside the
city yet in close proximity to it as if set up ready for use. They told me what the
cube was used for. And before they had finished speaking, we heard wailing
voices coming from the city gate, and turning towards the sound we saw a
group of barbarians bearing a corpse and making straight for the cube. We
moved away, and following them discreetly, kept at a sufficient distance to see
and hear what they did and said.
When they reached the cube, they all observed a profound silence. And
several of them lifted up the coffin containing the corpse, which was wrapped
in white sheets, and set it reverently on the cube. Then as they stood round it
they had in their midst one of their tasimanai – that is what they are accustomed
to call those who are dedicated to their sanctuaries.422 Raising up his hands,
419 On the Chionai, whom Philotheos and Palamas present as a Judaizing Muslim sect of
ex-Christians, see Philippidis-Braat 1979, 214–18. On the venue, see n. 443 below.
420 In what follows Philotheos reproduces §§ 19–30 of Palamas’ Letter to his Church with
some abbreviations.
421 The monastery’s katholikon, later known as the Church of the Koimesis (or Dormition),
survived until the early twentieth century. It is illustrated on the cover of this book.
422 The first Ottoman medrese had been established in Nicaea in 1331. Tasimanes is the
Greek rendering of danişmend, a schoolman of the medrese.
160 GREGORY PALAMAS
this man made a loud invocation and the others responded in a similarly loud
voice. They did this three times. Then those who were to deliver that coffin to
the tomb took it in their hands and carried it further away, while each of the
others with the tasimanai returned home.
Then we too returned and entered on foot by the same gate. On seeing
the tasimanes sitting with some others in the shade of the gate, to enjoy the
freshness of the air at that season – for it was the month of July – and some
Christians, as I supposed, sitting on the opposite side, we too sat down.423
Seated there, I asked whether there was anyone who knew both the languages
I needed. When someone came forward, I asked him to say to the Turks on my
behalf: ‘I consider it good, the ritual performed by you there outside. For the
supplication made by you was on behalf of the dead man and addressed to God
– for to whom else could it have been addressed? I should also like to know
what was said to God there by you and what it was about.’ The tasimanes, using
the same interpreter, said: ‘We asked forgiveness from God for the dead man,
for the personal faults of his soul.’
‘Rightly so,’ I said, following up his remark. ‘But at all events it is the
judge who has the power of granting forgiveness, and according to you as well
it is Christ who will come as the judge of the whole human race. It is therefore
to him that you should address your prayers and supplications. Should you
too not invoke him as God, like we do, since we know that he is indivisible
from the Father as his innate Word? For there was no time when God was
irrational or without his innate Word.’ The tasimanes replied: ‘Even Christ is
a servant of God.’424 And I said to him again: ‘But it is necessary to consider
this, my good friend, that he judges, as you yourselves say, the living and the
dead, resurrected and standing around him while he presides over the dread
and impartial tribunal at his future coming. And Abraham, your forefather,
as you too have your Scripture – for you like to maintain the authority of the
Mosaic books – and it can be seen also to be preserved by the Jews, Abraham,
I repeat, said to God: ‘You who are judging the whole earth, shall you not give
judgement?’425 So he who is to judge the whole earth is God himself, who
according to the prophet Daniel is king of all things and for ever,426 and is not
other than the Father with regard to the godhead, just as sunshine is not other
than the sun with regard to light. The tasimanes seemed annoyed and after
being silent for a moment began speaking more expansively, for Christians
423 The East Gate, with its arch and inner gate, formed a long shaded corridor (Philippidis–
Braat 1979, 154, n. 37).
424 Qur’an 19, 30.
425 Gen 18: 25.
426 Cf. Dan 7: 14.
and Turks had gathered together in some numbers to listen. He began, then,
by saying that they loved all the prophets, including Christ, and the four books
that had come down from God, one of which was the Gospel of Christ.427 And
he concluded by throwing the question back to me. ‘But you,’ he said, ‘how is
it you do not accept our prophet or believe in his book, even though this book
has also come down from heaven?’
I said to him in turn: ‘Among both you and us it has long been the custom
confirmed by both time and law not to accept anything and acquiesce to it as
true without testimonies. Now testimonies are of two kinds. Either they derive
from the deeds and facts themselves or they are supplied by persons worthy
of credence. Thus Moses instructed the Egyptians by signs and wonders. He
divided the sea with his staff and brought it together again.428 He made bread
rain down from heaven.429 And what other examples need one give, as Moses
is also believed in by you? For God too bears witness to him as his faithful
servant but not as his son or word.430 Then at God’s command he ascended
the mountain and died and joined his ancestors.431 Now Christ, along with the
many great and extraordinary deeds he performed, is also attested by Moses
himself and the other prophets. And alone from all eternity is he said even by
you to be word of God; and alone from all eternity was he born of a virgin; and
alone from all eternity was he taken up into heaven and remains there immortal;
and alone from all eternity is he expected to return from there to judge the
living and the resurrected dead. I say about him what is also acknowledged by
you Turks. It is therefore because of these that we believe in Christ and in his
gospel. But we do not find that Muhammad is either attested by the prophets or
has worked anything miraculous and worthy of note that leads us to faith. For
this reason we do not believe in him or in the book that issues from him.’ The
tasimanes, although clearly displeased with these remarks, offered a defence,
saying: ‘There used to be references to Muhammad in the gospel and you have
excised them. But as you see, coming out of the ends of the east he has proved
victorious even as far as the west.’
I said to him: ‘Nothing has ever been excised from our gospel by any
Christian, nor has there been the least alteration. For heavy and dreadful
imprecations are laid on this act, and anyone who dares to excise or alter
anything of Christ is rather himself excised. How, then, can any Christian
have done this? And how would he still be a Christian, or be in any way
427 The others being the Pentateuch, the Psalms, and the Qur’an.
428 Cf. Ex 14: 21, 27.
429 Cf. Ex 16: 4.
430 Cf. Num 12: 7.
431 Cf. Deut 32: 48–50.
162 GREGORY PALAMAS
acceptable to Christians, if he had erased the text engraved by God and what
Christ himself had recorded or proclaimed? Besides, there is the testimony
of the many different languages into which the gospel of Christ was rapidly
translated from the beginning; it was not written in just one language alone
from the outset. How then could it have been falsified or anything altered?
How is it that among the different nations the harmony of the sense has
been maintained until now? Also, the gospel of Christ exists among many
heterodox Christians, whom we call heretics. Among them are some who
agree with you on certain points, but can find nothing to prove such a thing
in the gospel of Christ. And among those who have contradicted us from
the beginning – these too are many – nothing of the kind has been proved.
Indeed, it is possible even to find the opposite plainly stated in the gospel.
How then could it have testified to the contrary? Moreover, there is nothing
in the gospel that has not also been said beforehand by the divine prophets.
If then there was anything written in it favouring Muhammad, it would also
have been found written in the prophets. Instead, what you can find written
there and not deleted is that many false Christs and false prophets will arise
and will lead many astray. That is why it exhorts us, saying: ‘Do not be led
astray and go after them.’432
Moses and the prophets who lived long before him and after him all
returned to the earth through death and lie there awaiting the judge who
will come from heaven. If that were the case also with Christ another would
have come after him who would have ascended to heaven and imposed the
end. For heaven sets the limit to everything here below. Since Christ, as you
yourselves acknowledge, ascended into heaven, no one else is expected after
him by anyone of sound mind. For Christ not only ascended into heaven but
is also expected to come again, which is another doctrine you share with us.
Therefore it is he who has come and is coming and is expected to come again,
and we are right neither to accept nor to await anyone other than him.
He is the one who is expected to come again and judge the human race.
Why? Because he himself said that he came and manifested the light to the
world, that is, himself and his teaching, yet on account of teaching false
doctrines and living a hedonistic life, people loved the darkness rather than
the light. So that we should not experience the same, the chief of Christ’s
disciples said: ‘There will be false teachers and false prophets, who will bring
in destructive heresies and they will exploit you in their greed with deceptive
words. For many will follow their licentious ways.’433 Someone else says
again that ‘if an angel should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we
432 Cf. Luke 21: 8.

433 Cf. 2 Pet 2: 1–3.
proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!’434 And the evangelist says: ‘Every
spirit that does not confess that the Lord Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is
not from God.’435 How is it, then, that someone who says that he who maintains
that Jesus manifested in the flesh is not Lord is not from God, be a person who
transmits a book which says that he who asserts this comes from God? This is
not possible. It is not possible.
It is true that Muhammad, starting from the east, advanced as a conqueror
as far as the west, but he did this by war and the sword, by pillaging, enslaving
and slaughtering. None of this can follow from a good God. It follows rather
from the will of someone who was from the beginning a murderer.436 But
so what? Did not Alexander, starting from the west, subjugate the whole of
the east? In any case, others frequently at various times have mounted many
expeditions and conquered the whole world. But no nation entrusted their soul
to any of these as you have done to Muhammad. And what is more, even by the
use of violence combined with the inducement of things that give pleasure, this
man has not been able wholly to win over even one part of the world. Christ’s
teaching, by contrast, although excluding almost all of life’s pleasures, had
encompassed all the ends of the earth and prevails in the midst of those who
fight against it. It is not imposed by any violence, but rather triumphs on every
occasion over the violence offered against it, in such a way that this teaching is
the victory that conquers the world.437
At this point the Christians who happened to be present, on seeing that the
Turks were already being roused to anger, signalled to me to put an end to my
speech. I, for my part, to lighten the atmosphere, smiled at them and added: ‘If
we agreed in what we said, we would all hold the same doctrine. But let anyone
who can do so understand the force of what I have said.’ One of them said:
‘There will be a time when we shall agree with one another.’ And I concurred
and expressed the wish that that time would come soon. But why should I have
said this to those now living in a different manner from those then? I concurred
because I remembered the Apostle’s saying, that at the name of Jesus every
knee shall bend and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory
of God the Father.438 This will at all events happen at the second coming of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
At this point the meeting on that day broke up. What happened on the
following days the spirit is willing to write but the hand has not the strength.
But I have written this for you because you wanted me to.
434 Cf. Gal 1: 8.

435 Cf. 1 John 4: 2–3.
436 Cf. John 8: 44.
437 Cf. 1 John 5: 4.
438 Cf. Phil 2: 10–11.
164 GREGORY PALAMAS
101. These words were the fruit of his wise intelligence as I have said, and
of his tongue, which by the divine Spirit at that time proclaimed the things
of God in the midst of the atheists in a divine and lofty manner and without
the least fear, in accordance with Christ’s word, of ‘those who kill the body
but cannot kill the soul’.439
Disputation with the Chionai

To what has already been said I must add, as I have promised, the disputation
which this confessor and preacher of true piety had with the recent
apostates, the impious Chionai, so that our discourse about him should be
complete and not lacking in anything.440 I shall set out the disputation word
for word in accordance with the text which that good and God-loving man,
by whom I mean the doctor Taronites, wrote out and sent from there to the
people in Byzantium.441 It runs as follows.
The Chionai came, it is said, at the command of the Turkish sovereign to engage
in a debate with the metropolitan. They were afraid to enter into discussion
in his presence and at first negotiated with me and the metropolitan, and
especially with those who had access to the Turkish sovereign, in an attempt
not to speak at all on such matters. As they were unable to achieve this, they
entered into further negotiations with a view to not speaking in the presence
of their sovereign. In this they succeeded. And the latter appointed not a few
dignitaries including one called Palapanos.442 And they came together with
the Chionai to where the metropolitan was staying. And we all sat down
together.443
The Chionai then began to speak very volubly. The substance of their
speech was this: ‘We have heard ten words that Moses brought down written
on tablets of stone, and we know that the Turks keep them. And we abandoned
what we thought previously and came to them and we too became Turks.’
Then the dignitaries told the metropolitan to present a defence. And he
began thus: ‘It is not fitting that I should present a defence now. First, because
439 Mat 10: 28.

440 On the Chionai, see p. 159.
441 Taronites was a Greek doctor who attended on Orhan, who suffered from a liver
complaint. His account of the disputation, based on notes he took at the time, is translated
below. Philotheos reproduces the whole text.
442 Palapanos is Balabanık, originally a Christian slave (hence his command of Greek),
who as a Muslim rose to a high position among the Ottomans; see Kafadar 1995, 135. The
disputation appears to have been conducted in Greek without the need for interpreting.
443 This was at Prousa, not Nicaea, as Philotheos assumed, here and in his akolouthiai for
Palamas’ feast; see Philippidis-Braat 1979, 202.
in relation to the sublimity and majesty of the Catholic and Apostolic Church
of my Christ, who am I to present a defence, since my part in it is minimal
and almost nothing? Second, because the dignitaries, who are also sitting as
judges, adhere to the side of the opponents and it is not fitting that I should
expound on points opposed by them the justifications of true piety, which
are the divinely inspired scriptures and especially the books of the prophets.
Third, that I have been delivered up into captivity and I know from my Lord
and God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, that after he was delivered up when he was
questioned he did not reply.
Nevertheless, because the great emir commands this, and I understand
that God has given him sovereign knowledge444 – it belongs to a slave or any
ordinary person to know about one system of belief and scarcely even that,
whereas a sovereign, and one moreover who has many nationalities under his
authority, must necessarily know about every system of belief and know about
it with accuracy – for this reason I wish to say about our religion whatever the
word of God might give me to say when I open my mouth. And I shall do this
not to make a defence against the Chionai. For these, from what I have heard
earlier about them, plainly appear to be Jews rather than Turks. But the speech
I am about to make is not addressed to Jews. The mystery, then, of our faith is
as follows.
‘There is only one God, who has always existed and endures for ever,
without beginning, without end, immutable, unchangeable, indivisible, without
confusion, without limit. Every creature is corruptible and mutable. Its very
beginning is a change, for it has come from non-being into being. God himself,
then, who alone is without beginning, is not devoid of word.445 God himself,
who alone is without beginning, is not devoid of wisdom. Consequently the
Word of God is also the Wisdom of God. For the wisdom is in the word and
without the word there is no wisdom. Therefore if there was a time when the
Word or the Wisdom of God was not,446 there was a time when God was devoid
of word and wisdom – which is irreligious and impossible. Consequently, the
Word of God is also without beginning, and the Wisdom of God was never
separable from him.
‘But nor is word found without spirit, as you Turks yourselves
acknowledge.447 For in saying that Christ is the Word of God, you also say that
444 Or ‘authentic knowledge’. Palamas plays on the meaning of the word authentikos.
445 Cf. Eph 6: 19.
446 Palamas used the word alogos, which can mean ‘devoid of word’ (Logos) or ‘devoid
of reason’. Palamas means both. Because God is not devoid of reason, he is not without the
Logos.
447 Qur’an 4, 171. In Greek pneuma means both ‘spirit’ and ‘breath’.
166 GREGORY PALAMAS
he is the Spirit of God, as never separated from the Holy Spirit. Therefore God
has both a Word and a Spirit that are with him and remain with him without a
beginning and without any separation. For there was no time when God was
without spirit or without word. The one is therefore three and the three are one.
God has word and spirit. He does not have them as we do, dispersed into the
air, but in a way appropriate to him as if by analogy. For example, the sun’s
radiance is generated from the sun and the sun’s ray is sent out from it and
comes down as far as us and neither the radiance nor the ray is ever separated
from the disk, and consequently in calling them “sun” we are not saying there
is another sun other than the one sun. Similarly, when we say that the Word
of God and the Spirit of God are God, we are not saying that there is another
God apart from the one God, who is thought of as existing without beginning
and eternally with the eternal Word and Spirit. And this is what we have been
taught to believe and confess by Christ himself, the Word of God.
‘It is not only Christ who taught this but also Moses in the Decalogue,
whom you Chionai put forward. For this reason he said: “The Lord God is
one Lord”,448 mentioning the same one three times – for he says “Lord” twice
and “God” once – in order to show that the three are one and the one is three.
Moreover, Moses wanted to show from the beginning that God has both a
Word and a Spirit and that in them and with them he is one God, the creator
of every created thing. He therefore said: “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and
there was light”.449 And he said: “‘Let the earth put forth vegetation’; and it
brought forth vegetation”.450 And not to go into all the details, as David says:
“God spoke all thing and they came to be”.451 This phrase “God spoke and they
came to be” shows that God has a Word – for it is not possible to speak without
a word – and that all created things came to be through him. And so the Word
of God himself preceded every creature and is uncreated. And since the Word
of God is uncreated, how is he not God? For only God is uncreated.
‘Furthermore, Moses also teaches us about the creation of man. “God,” he
says, “breathed into his face the breath of life, and the man came into being as
a living soul.”452 In saying, then, “God breathed into him, and the man came
into being”, he showed that God has a spirit, and that this spirit is a creator.
Now the creator of souls is God alone. That is also why Job said: “The spirit of
the Lord has made me”.’453
448 Deut 6: 4.
449 Gen 1: 3.
450 Cf. Gen 1: 11–12.
451 Ps 33 (32): 9; 148: 5.
452 Gen 2: 7.
453 Job 33: 4.
The metropolitan of Thessalonike also wished to string together the

other testimonies of the prophets, and especially those through whom it is
demonstrated that God also brings about the renewal of both humanity and
the world through his Word and his Spirit, as David also says: ‘He sent out
his word and healed them from their corruptions’,454 and again elsewhere:
‘You send forth your spirit and they are created, and you renew the face of
the earth.’455 But when the metropolitan of Thessalonike had already begun
to speak along these lines, his opponents stopped him, and all those standing
around said to him at one and the same time: ‘These things that you say are
true and it is not possible that they should be otherwise.’ And the metropolitan
of Thessalonike said to them again: ‘Surely then God is three, and these three
are one God and creator.’ And again, moved to do so either by a divine power
or by being unable to contradict what he said, they agreed with him, saying:
‘That is what has been proved, that is what is true, and that is what we adhere
to ourselves.’ And the metropolitan of Thessalonike said: ‘Good. Glory to our
God who is content that things should be thus.’
They: ‘But tell us this. How is it that you call Christ God, when he is a
man and was born as a man?’ And he again: ‘God is not only all-sovereign and
almighty, but also just, as the prophet David also said: “For our God is just and
loves just deeds, and there is no injustice in him”.456 There is no work of God
that is not accompanied by justice. And just as the sun’s ray has a life-giving
power at the same time as it has light and heat, so God’s activity has along with
it divine power and justice. Now when God created man for good works and
instructed him to live in accordance with his divine commandment, because
this man, willingly giving ear to the devil, submitted to him and sinned, and
having disobeyed the divine commandment was justly condemned to death, it
did not belong to God to deliver man from him by an act of power. For thus he
would have been unjust to the devil, by taking man out of his hands by force,
when he did not receive him by force. Moreover, he would have abolished man’s
free will by liberating him by force and by an act of divine power. It did not
belong to God to abolish his own work. It was therefore necessary for a sinless
man to have come into being and to have lived without sin and thus to have
helped mankind, which had sinned voluntarily. “But no one,” says Scripture,
“is without sin, even if his life lasts but a single day.”457 And the prophet David
says: “In iniquity was I engendered; in sin did my mother conceive me.”458
454 Ps 106 (107): 20.

455 Ps 103 (104): 30.
456 Ps 10 (11): 7; Ps 91 (92): 16.
457 Cf. Job 14: 4–5.
458 Ps 50 (51): 7.
168 GREGORY PALAMAS
‘That is why the only sinless Word of God became a son of man and was
born of a virgin and a paternal voice from heaven witnessed to him. And he
was tempted by the devil and fought against and conquered his tempter. And
through deeds and words and great wonders he showed and confirmed the
faith and manner of life belonging to salvation. And thus he who lived without
guilt and without sin took on himself the sufferings of own guilt to the point
of death, so that going down into Hades he might even there save those who
have believed.’
Again the metropolitan of Thessalonike wanted to speak about the
resurrection and ascension of the Lord, and adduce the testimonies of the
prophets that demonstrate that Christ is God and testify that it was God himself
who became incarnate from the Virgin, suffered for us and was raised from the
dead, and all the rest, but the Turks raised a clamour and prevented him from
doing so, saying, ‘How do you say that God was born and that a woman’s womb
contained him?’ and other similar things. ‘No, God only spoke and Christ also
came into being.’459 He said to them: ‘God is not a large body, so that he is
unable to fit into a small space because of his size. No, being incorporeal, he
can be anywhere both beyond everything and within a single thing. Even with
the smallest thing one can think of, the whole of him can be in that too.’ Again
they rose in uproar and said that ‘God spoke and Christ came into being.’ The
metropolitan of Thessalonike responded: ‘You say Christ is the Word of God.
How then is he brought into being in his turn by another word? For in that case
it would follow that the Word of God is not coeternal with God himself. This
was demonstrated at the beginning, and admitted even by you, that God has
both word and spirit coeternal with him. That is why you say that Christ is not
only word but also spirit of God. God spoke and this stone came into being’ –
indicating a stone lying near him – ‘and the vegetation and the creeping things
themselves.460 If then it is because Christ was brought into being by the word
of God, as you say, that Christ is Word and Spirit of God, then the stone and
plants and each of the creeping things are also word of God and his spirit,
because in their case too he spoke and they came into being. Do you see how
bad it is to say that “God spoke and Christ came into being”? For the eternal
Word of God was made human and became flesh without confusion, not in
virtue of flesh being spirit and word of God.461 For it was later, as we said, that
he assumed human nature from us and for our sake, but he was always in God,
since he is his coeternal Word, through whom God also created the worlds.’462
459 Cf. Qur’an 3, 52/59.

460 Cf. Gen 1: 11, 24.
461 Cf. John 1: 14.
462 Cf. Heb 1: 2.
At this point the Chionai interrupted again, and Palapanos, who was
presiding, imposed silence and said to the metropolitan of Thessalonike: ‘The
sovereign orders you to explain why it is that we accept Christ and love and
honour him and say that he is Word and breath of God,463 and we hold that
his mother is near to God,464 whereas you do not accept our prophet, nor do
you love him.’ The metropolitan of Thessalonike said: ‘Someone who does not
believe in the words of a teacher cannot love that teacher. That is why we do
not love Muhammad. Our Lord and God Jesus Christ said to us that he would
come again to judge the whole world and commanded us not to accept anybody
else until he comes again to us. He even said to those who did not believe him:
“I have come in my Father’s name, and you did not accept me; if another comes
in his own name, him you will accept.”465 That is why Christ’s disciple writes
to us that “Even if an angel should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what
we proclaimed to you, let him be accursed”.’466
The Chionai together with the Turks again said to the metropolitan of
Thessalonike: ‘The practice of circumcision was manifestly given by God from
the beginning and Christ himself was circumcised. Why do you not practise
circumcision?’ The metropolitan of Thessalonike: ‘Because you are referring
to the old law, and what was given then to the Jews was given by God, but the
keeping of the Sabbath was also given by God, as was the Jewish Passover and
the sacrifices only to be performed by the priests, and the setting of the altar
and the curtain within the temple. As these things and others like them were
given at that time by God, why do you not adhere to them or do these things?’
Since the Chionai and the Turks had no defence to offer on this point, the
metropolitan of Thessalonike wanted again to adduce the prophets who had
plainly predicted the change in the law and in the old covenant and that the
change was brought about through Christ. And he began by saying: ‘What
you too say is old, and everything old is oriented towards the end.’ And again
they interrupted him, saying, ‘Why do you set up many likenesses in your
churches and bow down to them, even though God has written and said to
Moses: “You shall not make any likeness, whether in the form of anything that
is in heaven, or anything that is on earth and in the sea”?’467 The metropolitan
of Thessalonike said in reply: ‘Friends also bow low to each other, but they
do not thereby deify each other. That Moses truly learned this from God in
such a form and taught it to the people at that time in such a form is clear
463 Cf. Qur’an 43, 57.

464 Qur’an 66, 12.
465 John 5: 43.
466 Gal 1: 8.
467 Exod 7: 4; Deut 5: 8.
170 GREGORY PALAMAS
to everybody. But on the other hand, Moses himself at that time scarcely let
anything pass without making a likeness of it. For he made the area behind
the curtain into a likeness and symbol of the things above – and since the
cherubim are among the things above, he made images of them and set them up
there within the inner sanctuary of the temple – whereas he made the temple’s
exterior into a symbol of the things here below. If someone had asked Moses at
that time: “How is it that when God forbids images and likeness of the things
above and the things below, you have still made these things in this way?” he
would have certainly said that images and likenesses were forbidden so that
no one should worship them as gods, but ascending to God through them is
good. The Hellenes used to address praises to created things, but as gods. We
also praise these things, but we ascend through them to the glory of God.’ The
Turks, then speaking again, said: ‘And did Moses really do these things at that
time?’ Many people replied: ‘Yes, he did all these things.’
At this point the Turkish dignitaries arose, reverently bade the metropolitan
of Thessalonike farewell, and departed. But one of the Chionai hung back,
swore at the great archpriest of God obscenely, and leaping at him, punched
him on the jaw. The other Turks who saw this seized hold of him, accused him
of serious misconduct, and brought him before the emir. When they returned,
the Turks said to him what they wanted to say. What it was precisely that they
said we did not hear. We heard personally the things that we have set down,
and with God our witness what we have set down is what we saw and heard.
Gregory’s successes during his captivity

102. Such were the wrestling matches, contests, wonderful victories and
trophies against error of the great Gregory during his captivity. And thus
even there my wrestler was declared winner of the crown by the activity
and power of the Spirit dwelling within him, imitating himself, as it were,
everywhere, and in all respects and in all things proving victorious as if
being awarded the victory even by nature. And I have recounted these
matters at length in this way, and in detail, not in order to add some lustre
to his person and to his speeches, as one might suspect – for which of them
is not lofty and divine, so that each of them is able to astonish those who
engage in conversation with him as well as those who listen to him, even
if it happens to be the smallest one, and belongs to a minor occasion, not
to one where he has carefully prepared what he will say and do? – but in
order by this means to demonstrate the utter sublimity and reliability of
the man’s theology to those who do not know him, and also how all that
he says is in harmony in every respect with the doctrines of the apostles
and fathers. A further reason is because he is a herald in all respects and
to everyone everywhere of the monarchy and the one trihypostatic and

omnipotent deity, not of the polyarchy and polytheism held by those who
are really polytheists and worshippers of the ideas and the created order
and who offend against true worship and deity.468 These my discourse has
already frequently censured through him and with him. For one must not
at all events consign such things to silence and oblivion, since they are
certainly a mystery of true piety and form not the smallest part of our
sacred discourse and our faith. But we must return again to our subject.
Gregory is freed
103. This noble man spent a whole year in captivity enduring the terrible
privations of imprisonment, sometimes anointing the devout to prepare
them for patience and courage and the practice of every other virtue,
through hope for the future and especially by his own example, sometimes
censuring the impious and brilliantly triumphing in very many ways over
the mystery of error, and indeed suffering blows and various tribulations
in consequence, as my discourse has shown a short time ago. As a result
of all this he was a martyr without shedding blood and a splendid athlete
of true piety.
The political situation then altered again for the Romans, as in a throw
of dice, and a change occurred at the same time in both the empire and
the common Church. Those who were making great efforts to have him
freed found themselves excluded from government and from the exercise
of public office.469 At that time, against all expectation, he was freed from
captivity. When all their hopes had come to nothing, certain Triballi or
Dalmatians from beyond the western borders, good and virtuous men,
superior to their own race, came at God’s prompting, although they lived
far away, paid the barbarians a large sum of money and liberated the
saint.470 This was so that this too should clearly be one of God’s miracles
concerning him, for as it is said, God does and transforms everything only
according to his will.
468 I.e. the Akindynists.

469 In December 1354 John VI Kantakouzenos was forced to abdicate.
470 According to Nikephoros Gregoras it was Kantakouzenos who ransomed Palamas,
but it is very plausible that the sum demanded was supplied by the Serbs, possibly by the
emperor Stefan Dušan himself, a few months before his death in December 1355. On the
financial negotiations at the time between Kantakouzenos and Orhan over the fortress of
Tzympe, see Fanelli 2018, 159–65.
172 GREGORY PALAMAS
The last years

Again in Constantinople
104. Having returned again to the queen of cities, he published his treatise
in two books Against the Latins on the Procession of the Holy Spirit in a
wonderful way.471 This treatise was something original and extraordinary;
our Church had never seen anything like it before on the subject. Indeed,
to tell the truth, without any dissemblance or pretence, it was such as to
make all the treatises against the Latins before this one look like childish
games and mere semblances of dialectical argument. When he had
published these books so wonderfully and in a manner worthy of himself
and of the Spirit that spoke within him, and had given such followers of
Barlaam and Akindynos as were still around the final blows, as it were, in
discourses and written treatises and also in debates conducted in person
in the presence of the emperor himself and many of the officials,472 so that
he was admired no less for this by everyone, he returned again to his own
Thessalonike, which thirsted, one might say, for him and his teaching and
burned strongly with desire.
Return to Thessalonike
Because he found Thessalonike manifestly thirsting no less strongly for
the waters that come from above and pining away from thirst, he quickly
resolved for her the effects of this palpable drought, by entreating the
Creator with prayers and supplications. And those who already for a long
time now had been thirsting for it he watered abundantly with the living
word that gladdens the heart, and he healed them in his customary fashion,
making their bodies stronger along with their souls on both sides.
New miracles
105. A monk called Porphyrios, who also had the dignity of a presbyter,
lived in the monastery of the Hypomimneskon473 and served the mysteries
471 This was a new expanded edition of a work first published in 1335 (Sinkewicz 2002,
138, no. 1). The new edition was issued in response to the pro-Latin policy initiated by John
V Palaiologos and his mesazon Demetrios Kydones after the abdication of Kantakouzenos.
The Greek text that is extant represents the expanded version.
472 Palamas was invited by John V to debate the controverted doctrines of hesychasm at
the palace with Nikephoros Gregoras in 1355, not long after his return from captivity; for
details, see Meyendorff 1959, 164–6.
473 On this monastery, see Janin 1975, 413–14.
there. Being a devout and intelligent man he was well acquainted with
the saint and often went to see him and enjoyed sharing in the refreshing
streams that flowed from his tongue. Once when the Lord’s Transfiguration
was being celebrated by them, in the customary way at which Porphyrios
was therefore also obliged to keep the night vigil with the rest of the monks
and assist in his priestly role, a pain suddenly attacked him on his left side
and impeded his holy ministry as well as his keeping the vigil and standing
in the church. In fact, it even prevented his participation in the sacred rite
and his attendance in the church, and added greatly to his vigil because it
did not even allow him to lie down at all on his bed from the severity and
intensity of the pain.
That night passed, but the intensity of the pain did not subside in any
way. When the time of the mysteries drew near and called the archbishop
of God to the sacred rite, Porphyrios too, as best he could, straightaway
followed behind the superior of the monastery, who was reckoned among
the bishops under him and was usually invited to celebrate the liturgy with
him, and become a spectator and auditor of the mystical rite. He stood
somewhere near the holy altar, and when the mysteries had been celebrated
straightaway approached the saint, told him about the pain that painfully
oppressed him and begged him to heal him as rapidly as possible by his
hand and his prayer.
The latter at first put him off and courteously refused the request,
saying that he himself had not the ability to work such things and asking
Porphyrios not to entertain such assumptions about him. But when he
insisted all the more, begging him again for the holy sign by his hand
and for his prayer, the great man yielded to the sufferer’s need, and with
his eyes on Christ made the sign of the cross with his hand over the
presbyter’s side, and recited with deep emotion the words of the sacred
hymn: ‘Crucified by the nails, O Lord, you lifted the curse laid upon
us, and pierced in the side by the lance, you tore up the bond of Adam
and freed the world.’474 Then he added what was said by the chief of
the apostles to the paralytic: ‘Jesus Christ heals you’,475 and released
the sufferer from that sharp pain not gradually but immediately and
completely, so that he returned home to his monastery perfectly well and
miraculously restored to health.
474 Anastasimos canon, first Troparion of the sixth Canticle.

475 Acts 9: 34.
174 GREGORY PALAMAS
106. ‘After this some days went by,’ the same Porphyrios said, ‘and an
illness attacked my body, causing it distress for a good number of days. And
just when I saw it had passed its peak and was leaving me, I experienced
another attack very much worse than the first. For all the troublesome matter
that flowed down my throat abundantly, as if that is what it was meant to
do, made what I suffered before seem like child’s play. For it blocked the
natural passage for food so that for eight whole days I could not swallow
any water or the smallest quantity of food and was in danger of a painful
death by strangulation.
‘When every expedient had been tried to effect a cure, and all had
proved equally ineffectual, I resorted once more to my usual doctor, that
is, the great Gregory, and told him about my illness from the beginning,
adding the last life-threatening evil that had attacked my throat. After
entreating him very strongly, I persuaded him to lay his hand with a holy
prayer on the afflicted part. He did this, making the sign of the cross, and in
tears accompanied it with the divine hymn to Christ of the wise one: “You
remained without sharing in suffering, O Word of God, although experi-
encing suffering in the flesh, yet you free man from suffering.”476 When he
had gone through it to the end, he said: “Return to yourself and to your cell,
and ask healing of God alone for the sufferings of your soul as well as your
body, because only with him are all these things possible.” That completes
what the man of God said.
‘When I returned from there,’ Porphyrios went on to say, ‘not only did
I have my throat miraculously free from that sense of strangulation, but
I immediately recovered my appetite for food and went into the common
table of the brothers – it was already time for the midday meal – and – O the
wonder! – I myself straightaway ate the same food as all the others, when a
short time before I had not even been able to drink water, as I have just said.’
107. A nun who was the owner of a school for virtue, I mean the monastery
of the admirable Theodora,477 had with her a female child. The child had
been abandoned as an infant and she had brought it up in a maternal and
benevolent manner seeing to its nourishment and all the care that was
required. As a result the child had already reached adolescence and was
able to serve her mistress capably and offer her good hopes for the future.
This doubtless was why the child had been taken by her, but through the
476 Canon of Sunday of the 318 Fathers of Nicaea, first Troparion.

477 On this monastery, see Janin 1969, 374–5.
capricious behaviour of some demon she experienced the opposite in a

most shameful manner.
For the child’s natural bowel movements functioned in a manner
contrary to nature, soiling her bedding, her night clothes and the girl herself
while she slept at night on her bed. This was most shameful and caused the
mistress much distress, seeing that the girl had long since left her babyhood
behind but by no means put an end to the unpleasant and tiresome aspects
of babyhood. Consequently, she gradually lost her goodwill and affection
for the child and was already thinking of sending her away and being rid
of her.
But the Saviour comes unbidden to those who suffer, and he completely
cured the body of the one and the soul of the other, or rather, to be more
precise, he healed both of them in both respects, for they were both sick
in body and in soul. For when the great archpriest came to the monastery
as was his custom, they told him even about these things and prostrated
themselves at his feet, seeking healing with fervent faith and tears. He
looked at them with eyes full of compassion and gave them spiritual
guidance in a fatherly manner in very sweet and compassionate words.
Then he laid his hand on the girl’s head and having praised God and prayed
to him, immediately restored the sick girl to health.
108. A man called Palates, a mild man by temperament and a gold

embroiderer by trade, was decorating a newly made priestly vestment with
gold for the great man. Making this doubtless the pretext, as it were, for
his visit and the benefaction that he was to bestow, the great man arrived
uninvited at his house where he was working with his fellow artisans. Now
he had a male child, already five years old, who for fifteen whole months
had been suffering from a haemorrhage, with the result that he had almost
lost his natural appearance and form and it was only by his voice that one
could believe he was still alive.
On seeing this child in the house, the great man inquired compas-
sionately about the cause of the suffering. The father, immediately
overcome by emotion, explained his misfortune with tears and sad words,
and immediately taking up the half-dead child in his arms and placed him
in the archpriest’s hands, himself saying ‘Have mercy on my son’ like the
man in the gospels said directly to Christ.478 He had gone to almost all the
478 Matt 17: 15.
176 GREGORY PALAMAS
doctors and had followed all the treatments they had prescribed for him,
but nothing until that time had been any good, so that by now he had given
up all hope.
The great man first made the sign of the holy cross over the sick child.
Then he laid his own hand on his head and secretly whispered a prayer
to God. Immediately after the third prayer, he gave back the child to his
parents healthy and well. As a result, merely the sight of him walking and
moving and jumping like a child was enough to proclaim the miracle to all
in a marvellous way.
Pastoral work
109. These and similar things were often done by him privately for
individuals. What need be said about what he did publicly for everyone?
Indeed, at the festivals celebrated by the whole population, and the
religious services, sacred processions and cortèges most people regarded
his utterances and teaching as being the undisguised utterances of God and
words of life, and they said so. Also, when people were to meet him and
see him, they all pressed together, open mouthed, jostling each other and
competing for which of them would occupy the best place. They brought
it about that most of the sick who were thrown down at his feet returned
from there with their health restored. The opinion they gained of him
was much greater than what was seen, for they regarded him like one of
the God-bearing and apostolic men and teachers of old and vied to add
something every day to the love they felt for him and the bright faith they
had in him.
110. Such was the attitude of the good flock towards its truly excellent
and great shepherd – for I myself also have immense admiration for the
virtue of both parties – of the one the divine, sublime and truly apostolic
character of pastoral care, and of the other the obedience, docility and
ability to follow him worthily and be truly educated and admirably
trained by him in divine matters; of the one the wonderful access to God
and the power he had from him to work such things at all times, and of the
other the goodwill, faith and willingness to see, receive and experience
those things purely and without guile, neither exploiting his holy word and
dealing deceitfully with him in some matters, nor disgracefully damaging
the brilliance and clarity of all his works by lack of faith and wicked envy.
Indeed, through these things God from on high, in my opinion, brought
them together from afar and worthily made them one, giving the worthy
to the worthy and bringing about a wonderful union and harmonious

concord so that nobody sang out of tune in any way whatsoever, as my
discourse demonstrated a short time ago.
Gregory’s virtues
111. To attempt to narrate absolutely everything this great man did in detail
would not only be too long a task taking us beyond the time available
to us and the goal we have set ourselves, but would also be something
almost impossible, as our discourse has already showed. I shall therefore
compress my material as much as possible and so put some kind of limit
on my discourse, with the intention of concluding its delivery with the end
of his transitory life or even with a few minor things that occurred after
the end.
For he excelled in every form of virtue, both of speech and of action,
as I have already said, and was thus highly esteemed by all, both as a body
and individually, not only because he observed all the sacred rules and
canons, and indeed some of them so greatly that he seemed to be out of the
body although in the body and to transcend human nature, but also because
he was himself a canon for all of them and a standard for those who came
after him. He avoided both overshooting and falling short, which is often
difficult to find united in a single person, even among the ancients, and in
these final wretched times has become a great and unprecedented saint in
all kinds of ways, so much so that it is not at all easy in any way to put his
achievements on a par with those of his contemporaries and compare them.
From their very great abundance he has left it to those who come after him
to speak of them and admire them as particularly personal to him and as
appropriate marks of his truly great virtue and spiritual structure. I am
referring to the exceedingly great meekness and humility of his soul; to
his always keeping anger and wrath at a distance, dealing very patiently
with those who were angry or upset with him, and wishing, moreover,
to respond in every way with the kindest possible words and actions; to
his not easily accepting anything which may happen to be said against
somebody, which almost everyone does as a matter of course, especially
those in positions of authority, as a result of which and with which the
innocent are very often reviled and condemned, and for those who are not
vigilant love easily disappears; to his being not only forthright and superior
to any ignoble flattery with regard to the powerful, but on occasion even
harsh and rigorous towards them, just as he was correspondingly protective
of the poor, treating them with immense kindness and compassion; to his
178 GREGORY PALAMAS
endurance and resolute perseverance in the face of trials; to his utterly

unyielding and implacable resistance to every kind of human pleasure,
whether simply of the soul or of the body and soul together; and to the
utter tranquillity and serenity of his heart, its sweetness and graciousness,
which became so thoroughly a habitual state in him that becoming, as
it were, a quality that suffused his heart and belonged intrinsically to
it, it overflowed, so to speak, from his sense-organs and welled up into
the external sphere, ever manifesting in a wonderful way the treasure of
ineffable joy hidden within. This made him one in spirit and nature with
those God-bearing men who fully understood such things and knew how to
judge them, and was very much desired and loved by them. They honoured
him equally with their heads and with their souls, and with that divine
peace and joy with which the outer and visible person along with the soul is
brilliantly adorned, as I have already said. And they observed him always
practising meditation compunction and watchfulness, with the result that
there came from him that strange and supernatural flow of tears far beyond
any discussion or example.
One person used to call him a treasury and storehouse of humility and
asserted that he had never seen any monk rival his humble-mindedness,
and with such high and so many achievements of divine and human virtues
to his credit at that. There is nobody, he says, among those who are highly
regarded by us today who possess even a portion of his virtues so clearly
in a row. Another used to say that among the achievements of the saints
not one was lacking in any way in the blessed man, except that he did not
have the ability like them to work miracles. But he said that he could easily
have obtained this, too, from God if he had so wished. So even this was a
prediction uttered on his behalf through the Holy Spirit by that God-bearing
man, as the facts themselves will now show us very fully.
112. That wonderful and matchless pair of admirable fathers, the

excellent Sabas and Germanos, the venerable ornaments of holy Athos,
whose God-like lives and ascetic practice we have already issued in two
discourses,479 told us the following about the great man while he was still
alive, speaking as if with one voice. ‘We ourselves,’ they said, ‘not only
regard it as important, beneficial to the soul and helpful to salvation just to
be in the admirable Gregory’s company and to see him and converse with
479 The Lives of Sabas of Vatopedi (PLP 27991) and Germanos Maroules (PLP 17147),
edited by Tsames.
him as frequently as possible, but we consider it conducive to the greatest

benefit and sanctification if we can hold even the shoes of his feet in our
hands, and carry them around with us and frequently kiss them and hug
them.’
Those two great luminaries of discernment lauded the man praised by
us so highly and expressed such wonderful judgements about him that by
a few details they conveyed the whole. Indeed, those God-bearing men,
who are still living today in the flesh, rate what has been achieved by this
great man very highly, and proclaim it loudly almost every day, and teach
everyone orally and in writing about it, the joy of his language, the divine
pleasure given by his soul, the stimulus he gave to asceticism and practice
along with contemplation like some coal kindling a fire.
I leave aside now reporting in detail what was said about him so
admirably in the imperial city by scholars and learned men, I mean by
those bishops most distinguished in eloquence and virtue, by the leading
senators, and by those who had chosen the monastic and hesychastic life.
They called him the home of every kind of wisdom, the protector of the
common Church of Christ, the champion of true piety, the teacher of divine
doctrines, and the guide to everything that is excellent. As a result most
of them paid more attention to him than they would have to a mere human
being and said that he lacked nothing in the slightest of the attributes of
the greatest patristic theologians, but in all things shared in the same mind
and spirit and was a fellow-struggler with them. And if he had been the
contemporary of those noble ones, they said, they would have considered
him a supporter and fellow-general in their council. Not only would they
not have denied him any aspect of equality with them, but they would have
considered themselves honoured by having him among their number and
by associating with him. And now that he has departed this life and has
joined them more completely, he has been perfected gloriously in heaven
and openly amongst us here below through the excellent communion,
concord and unity existing between his truly superlative, divine and lofty
discourses and theirs, with the result that the oracles from above and that
great and marvellous revelation testify together to them, as my discourse
will go on to show. This being seen and heard somehow or other by those
partaking of heresy and by their friends, every day it stoked the fire of
this uncouth envy, conflict and battling against God, because they take
the things of this world to be God and are unable in any way to turn their
minds to anything beyond these, but because of them wilfully discard life,
soul and indeed the one true God, before heaven and the sun. For this is the
180 GREGORY PALAMAS
war against the truth of religion and its theologians most shamefully and
absurdly declared by them.
113. There are some of our people who knew the famous Atouemis,480 who
later they say passed to a better life. Now they relate that although he still
adhered to the party of those who were warring against the Church, he
openly declared that ‘if I were to set myself the task of learning all the
doctrines of our Church and practising this holy philosophy to the utmost,
I would not choose any other teacher out of all of them in preference to
this one’, referring of course to the great Gregory. ‘For never,’ he said,
‘has another mind, apart from his, contemplated these divine and sublime
realities so divinely and sublimely, nor has any tongue, apart from his,
expounded them and articulated them so clearly and shown them to be as
it were alive and speaking.’
Thus even his enemies testified to the truth, so that in this way too
he might acquire credibility from what people said, and the light of truth
shine in the darkness.481 And that is how it was. For because the great
grace of the Spirit, which dwells in the souls of the worthy and turns their
natural powers into some kind of underlying matter, that is, when they
have first been purified as much as possible by action and contemplation,
encourages all those souls and prepares them, changing them and drawing
them towards its own deiform habits, it extends itself and penetrates them
and increases exceedingly, especially in those whose souls have somehow
naturally and appropriately attached themselves to it. On that account it
indicates and proclaims those who have come to possess it, one because
of his almsgiving, another because of his extreme non-possessiveness,
another because of the severity of fasting, another because of his extreme
simplicity and guilelessness, another because of his love, and making
another known for his humility, even if they did not all share in the whole
range of blessings, as I have already said. So it was appropriate that the
grace of the indwelling Spirit should be received by the spiritual faculties
of this blessed man too and in every way show him to be a new and deiform
man, more so than anybody else. Therefore since the indwelling grace of
the Spirit had suitably laid hold of the spiritual faculties of this blessed man
480 The humanist Theodore Atouemis had been a student of Nikephoros Gregoras.
Akindynos praises him in a letter of 1345 (Letter 49. 53–8; Hero 1983, 208, 390). At the time
of the Council of 1351 he was still an opponent of Palamas.
481 Cf. John 1: 5.
in a worthy manner, and having shown him in every way a deiform and
new man more so than anyone else, had adapted itself to his intellect, or
rather, to put it more precisely, having found his whole mind indisputably
superior to that of any of his contemporaries, had united itself wholly as
mind to it in an appropriate way and had cleaved to it, having made it a
deiform mirror and image of itself in a wonderful way, and enabling him to
learn his spiritual and intellectual discourses – which we have been taught,
receiving them by the faculties of hearing and the intellect – in a divine
and sublime manner by imitation of the angels, experiencing them without
being taught like the holy prophets and theologians, and thus communi-
cating to us below in a supernatural manner and through his agency
producing within us those things ‘that no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived’,482 as a result of which those who have
understanding rightly call him a theologian, a golden speaker, a wonder of
the whole world and a supernatural and new man.
Having on the one hand become such a man, and on the other received
the votes of those who knew him best, it was necessary that he should have
thus been proclaimed and have had witness borne to him frequently by
many great signs, through the vote from above, beyond which there is no
further vote, or higher appeal or other court and have experienced at all
events a fitting end of this life appropriate for such a man. Therefore he
attained and brilliantly confirmed, as very few people do, each of the two
in reciprocal fashion, I mean a blessed end on account of an admirable and
ascetic regime, and furthermore what belongs to that blessed and divine
life with God on account of the circumstances of a wonderful end.
Last writings
114. So then, it was the third year after the great man’s last departure from
Byzantium,483 during which time he published a book consisting of four
treatises against that so-called philosopher and monk, Nikephoros,484
who ‘spoke out of the earth and the belly’,485 that latest, arrogant abuser
of the Godhead and of its theologians, both old and new. This book was
admirably written and in a manner worthy of himself and his treatises on
divinity by the great man at the request of the present ruler of the universal
482 1 Cor 2: 9.
483 The year 1357 (Palamas having left Constantinople in 1355).
484 The four treatises against Nikephoros Gregoras (Sinkiewicz 2002, 145, no. 20).
485 Isa 8: 19 LXX.
182 GREGORY PALAMAS
church,486 and so he accomplished this last, so to speak, sacred contest like

the consummation of his own struggles.
Final illness and death

Already by the arrival of the fourth year he encountered a serious illness of
the internal organs, which after a short time carried him off from this life.
But he was superior even to this, through his bowing to God’s will and his
intense affection for his flock. For he loved it in a worthy manner and was
wonderfully loved by it in return, as I have already said. He did not give
up performing his divine and lofty duties, as was his custom, teaching,
serving the sacred rites of the divine mysteries, taking part in processions
and celebrations, and in every way training and sanctifying his people.
But because it was necessary for him, too, as a human being to yield
eventually to nature, in case some divine nature should appear to be
pretending to be human, he succumbed with difficulty to illness. Being
confined to bed and realizing that he was to depart, he made use again
of his wonderful tongue. He discussed temptations and endurance with
those who were present in an admirably philosophical manner, showing in
many ways, from the divine Scriptures, rational arguments and compelling
proofs, the profit to be derived from them. He added discourses on life,
death and the soul,487 and thus predicted his departure in the presence of
all, having been initiated from above and initiating others in turn, so that
he even announced the precise day to his friends many days in advance,
saying it would be immediately after the holy feast and falling asleep of
Chrysostom, who clearly had just summoned the great man to himself as
one who shared his mode of life and was a dear friend and companion.488
This divine prediction that I have already mentioned was revealed to him
in his sleep.
115. So then, the archpriest of God lay sick, already breathing his last,
pressing on towards heaven and the heavenly things, and attending to or
thinking about nothing at all apart from the path that led there. Except that
with his tongue he was constantly whispering, and thus indicating to those
486 I.e. the Patriarch Kallistos I, whose second term of office was 1355–63. It was during
this time between his two patriarchates that Philotheos found the leisure to compose his
encomium.
487 Palamas, Homily 32 (PG 151, 401A–412C).
488 The day of Palamas’ death is therefore 14 November.
who were with him what place he was setting out for on this last journey.
For as those present, as I have said, strained to hear that good tongue
whispering its last words, they could hear nothing else coming from him
repeatedly but this wonderful and truly divine phrase consisting of these
very words: ‘the heavenly things to the heavenly’ and frequently repeated
in quick succession at that, as if revolving like the turning of a wheel, until
the divine and heavenly grace dwelling within his heavenly soul separated
it from the dust that had been assumed489 and from its natural union with
it – his soul having long since wonderfully detached itself from those
things in its disposition and action – and by the heavenly angels conveyed
it worthily to heaven and the heavenly things. In all he lived for sixty-three
years with the morsel of flesh he was born with, for twelve and a half of
them exercising a wonderful leadership of the church that accompanied
him in his struggle.490
116. Moreover, this grace of the Spirit that accomplishes all things indicated
these things in an exceptional manner, even to those outside, by a strange
light that filled the room containing his corpse at the very time of the
departure of his soul. The light illuminated his face and changed it in an
extraordinary way by the radiance enveloping it, although it had wasted
away even before death and for the most part was almost corpse-like, so
that it did not fall short in any way of that radiant and godlike vision of the
great Stephen, I mean when he was preaching about God in the midst of the
Council of the Jews. ‘Looking intently at him,’ it says, ‘they saw that his
face was the face of an angel.’491 For both these were the work of the same
Spirit and the same energy, even though those who are in darkness with
regard to light and ignorant with regard to wisdom are refuted by both the
former and the latter yet still continue to raise new objections, imagining
that the former never even took place and that the latter are pernicious and
unworthy of the Spirit and thus rejecting both of them.
But the splendour that appeared in that room, manifestly when the soul
was departing from the body, was witnessed by two leading members of
489 Unlike Talbot and Greselin, I take katalēphthentos to be the middle past participle of
katalambanein, not kataleipein. Both are possible but katalambanein seems to fit the sense
better.
490 The year is disputed. By Philotheos’ reckoning it appears to be 1359. For persuasive
arguments that it was in fact 1357 see Rigo 1993, 159–62 (summarized above, pp. 38–9).
491 Acts 9: 15.
184 GREGORY PALAMAS
the Church, both of them adorned with the rank of the priesthood, and with
every kind of virtue (one of whom indeed also belonged to the honourable
list of monks), who later also informed the others about the wonders they
had seen. People of all kinds and of almost all ages were witnesses of the
supernatural radiance around his face, as also, in a word, were as many
as the carrying out and burial of that sacred corpse attracted at that time
– mind you, it attracted the whole city in a body, so that the whole of that
sacred room, both inside and outside, was crowded with the throngs of
people. Indeed, this splendour remained completely inseparable from him,
for the grace of the Spirit that dwelt with him remained wholly in his bones
and dust without intermission, just as it did in his holy soul, and rendered
his holy tomb a house of light, a wonderful source and spring of holy graces
and a public doctor’s surgery free of any charge.
These my narrative will now reveal in part, as I have promised, for it is
not the aim of the present account to go through them all one after another
– how could it? For this reason it will set them out concisely, so far as
possible, and without prolixity or rhetorical amplification, avoiding at the
same time both length and satiety.
Posthumous miracles492
117. A monk among those ordained to the priesthood who was practising
the ascetic life in one of the monasteries of Thessalonike became
seriously ill. His illness took the form of a pain in the head so severe that
it threatened to bring him swiftly to his death. Although he escaped death
for the time being, apparently through medical treatment, the pain in his
head was by no means cured but returned at intervals, at first once every
month, then, as time went on, twice a month or three times or often even
more frequently, bringing the man to a state of extreme distress. Seven
years went by in this way and the illness progressively deteriorated. It
made the sufferer, on account of his strange and unusual cries, seem to his
companions to be raving and oblivious to his surroundings. Once again
he was threatened with imminent death, all medical knowledge and drugs
proving useless.
492 In the Synodal Tomos of 1368 Philotheos says not only that had he made inquiries
privately through the oikonomos of the metropolis of Thessalonike but that the patriarch
Kallistos had also instructed the bishops and clergy formally to investigate the reports of
Palamas’ miracles (Synodal Tomos of 1368, § 19).
What was the consequence? The monk despaired of the present life and
fixing his mind only on the life to come, looked to his departure already
hanging over him. For the rest, he uttered words of repentance and turned to
God with sighing and groaning. He called to mind his soul and its salvation
and accusing himself of past negligence in his life and of his faults blamed
himself that on his deathbed he had no one to share his pain with him and
labour with him for such healing of his soul as was still possible.
Then calling the great man to mind in those circumstances, and his
holiness and great pastoral care and solicitude (for he was among those
who had known him well) and recollecting that he had not been present
on the last day when the blessed man departed for God, he said: ‘Surely if
I had heard his dying words and shared at that time in his holy prayers, I
would now prefer these to any amulet or defensive weapons.’ On uttering
these words and consequently bewailing himself because of them, the
presbyter finally fell asleep, and his sleep immediately brought him the
following vision. ‘It seemed to me,’ he said, ‘that I was standing within the
sanctuary of the church of the wonderful Demetrios,493 and saw the great
bishop standing by the divine altar celebrating the liturgy in his usual way.
And I fell down before him and fervently begged him to grant me his holy
blessing. At first he seemed not to pay any attention at all to the request but
kept his mind fixed on the mysteries and the holy altar. After a little while
he also turned towards me and laid his right hand on my forehead, precisely
where all the pain at that time seemed to be concentrated, and made the
sign of the cross on me with his fingers. Straightaway oil seemed to flow
from them in a strange manner and anoint my face.’494
This is what happened when he was asleep and had that holy vision.
He got up at once, suddenly and beyond all hope freed from death and
suffering and those distressing pains so that not even any trace of them
remained, and acknowledged his great gratitude to God and his servant.
118. Another of the inhabitants of the city, not of the common people but
indeed from a noble and distinguished family, who lived with his wife
and children and managed his household, suffered from chronic pain. The
name the doctors give to it is colic. This condition grew worse with time
493 On St Demetrios, the great patron of Thessalonike, whose basilica dates from the fifth
century, see ODB 1, 604–5 and 605–6.
494 Since the origins of his cult, St Demetrios was reputed to be myroblytos – exuding
perfumed oil from his relics.
186 GREGORY PALAMAS
and no longer responded in the slightest to medical treatment or drugs, as

it had done previously. On the contrary, he was entirely dominated by the
severity of the pain, with his natural orifices completely blocked and no
means of evacuation being afforded for the refuse of the abdomen, so that
the best doctors present at that time said that some harmful matter had
become compacted and solid and thus had turned into stone, blocking the
route for natural evacuation.
By this time it was the sixth day, with the man terribly agitated by the
pain in his bowels and by the evening despairing of life itself. His nearest
relations and other close family and friends were sitting with him expressing
sympathy, as was usual in such circumstances. As they were talking, their
conversation turned to Gregory and the great miracles worked by him
and to the fact that many people who approached his tomb suffering from
serious illnesses and chronic medical conditions were frequently seen to
recover. The sick man suddenly became aware of what was being said and
with tears and piteous words begged the saint to show compassion. ‘Man of
God,’ he said, ‘seeing that you are a most precise imitator of Christ, even
if I am not now present myself like the others at your tomb, because both
the illness and the hour prevent me, you have the ability to pay me a visit
and heal me and deliver me from excruciating pain and imminent death.’
While he was uttering these and similar words he fell asleep, and at
once the great Gregory appeared to him in the form of a presbyter and
monk related to him – he too actually bore the same name of Gregory –
who was accompanied by an attendant, a monk and deacon he once knew.
These, as I say, happened to be familiar to the sick man. So Gregory asked
him in a friendly manner, ‘What is the trouble? What is the cause of this
clamour and of so much confusion and anguish?’ ‘Can’t you see,’ he replied,
‘that I am in the grip of excruciating pain, and will soon be taken from this
life by it, and, alas, will leave my dearest ones bereft of any protection
whatsoever?’ ‘My good man,’ said Gregory, ‘do not fear such things for the
time being, for everything in a little while will turn out well in accordance
with your prayer, once you have laid this on the painful parts.’
Upon these words he seemed to draw out from the fold of his garment
a portion of the sacred vestment formerly refurbished for him, as I have
mentioned,495 which was decorated with nine golden crosses, and laid it
on the affected part. The deacon who attended him himself seemed to
495 See § 108.
hold a cross made of wax and applied it to the back parts of the patient, to
the bone above the fundament which doctors call the os sacrum.496 And
having performed these things in a wonderful way by the Holy Spirit, he
vanished from the sick man’s sight. The latter, quickly awaking from sleep,
felt a stabbing pain in his abdomen and the noxious matter was miracu-
lously evacuated, so that everyone present was amazed at the sight. The
symptoms immediately subsided and the sufferer was not only delivered
once and for all from the death that was expected and from chronic pain but
going sound and vigorous to the great man’s tomb himself proclaimed the
supernatural nature of the miracle to all in a clear voice and made offerings
in thanksgiving to God and his servant.
119. The leader of the sacred songs and chants of the Church of Thessalonike
and leader and head of the choir of singers – customarily called the
domestikos – was distinguished in such matters by time, experience,
nature and skill and by everything appertaining to them. He was called
teacher of the living and was accorded seniority in all things. Now this
man was afflicted by an illness which had arisen from some distressing and
pungent matter, and had been confined to bed, lying motionless on a small
couch for almost a whole year. Through the counteractant cold diet, and
of course other forms of treatment by doctors, the matter on the one hand
had been reduced but on the other had undergone some slight mutation, so
that its unconsumed and undigested residue fled for refuge, as it were, to
the extremities of the body and thereafter both the hands and the feet of the
choir leader were gravely weakened.
Many days passed since that episode and the noxious matter came
to be expelled even from those areas. But although the other parts and
members of the body were completely freed from the conditions, some
portion of that noxious matter remained lodged in the first three fingers
of the right hand – I mean the thumb and the two fingers next to it – and
rendered them useless and lifeless for any activity whatsoever. A good deal
of time went by without any amelioration at all of the condition. On the
contrary, the fingers remained rigid, incapable of bending or flexing and
unable to make any natural movement. What appeared alarming to him,
and indeed quite appalling, was to see his hand lifeless beyond all hope.
For by now all medical skill and procedure had given up hope of a cure.
496 In Greek to hieron osteon, the correct medical term, mentioned several times in the
Corpus Hippocraticum, for the bone at the base of the spine.
188 GREGORY PALAMAS
But what upset him as much, if not even more, was that he could no longer
practise his profession as before, nor could he write down or publish the
melodies on account of the paralysis of his right hand. Therefore disdaining
all human skill and assistance, all surgery and treatment by drugs, the sick
man had recourse directly to the divine tribunal and sought his true help
there, putting forward Christ’s own servants as powerful ambassadors and
intercessors with him.
Night fell after that supplication and suddenly, in the place of all and
before all, the great Gregory appeared to him in his asleep, bringing him
the good news in a marvellous way that he would shortly be the recipient
of divine visitation and healing. For it seemed to the sufferer that he was in
the Great Church of the Wisdom of God and somewhere on the right hand
side encountered the great archbishop, in fact in the place where the tomb
is situated.497 And the latter placed his hand on his head in a fatherly and
affectionate manner and addressed him in the sweetest and most desirable
words, saying, ‘Go, leader of the singers. From now on everything will
go well with you.’ As dawn was already breaking, the latter got up and
went running to the church. He arrived at the great man’s tomb and fell
down before it, bathing it copiously with tears of repentance and suppli-
cation, only now proclaiming the sin and former rashness of his tongue
against him – for as he himself said he had sinned against him in this way
– and again asking for forgiveness and for the healing of his affliction while
constantly rubbing his right hand on the stone of the tomb. And having
made this supplication and spoken for a considerable time, he went home
again and returned to his normal state. How wonderful and transcendent is
your grace, O Christ, with regard to Gregory! And his hand recovered its
natural activity, and the fingers that were previously dead and motionless
were seen suddenly to be alive and moving and performing all their natural
functions in an appropriate way. For as soon as he entered the house he was
seen to pick up his pen and write in a healthy and unfaltering manner and
move his hand to the chants in the rhythmical way he used to do formerly.
And he proclaimed God his saviour together with his great servant in a
clear voice.
497 The tomb was in church of Hagia Sophia, formerly the cathedral of Thessalonike, until
the church was turned into a mosque in 1584. The relics were then housed in the monastery of
Vlatadon before being transferred to a church dedicated to St Gregory Palamas, which thus
became the metropolis. A fire destroyed the original church in 1917 but the tomb survived
the fire and is now resplendent in the rebuilt edifice.
120. A man who was a weaver of imperial purple cloth was unable for a long
time, because of some obscure reason, to perform the natural evacuation of
the residue of his bowels. The resulting lack of appetite for food and drink
for days on end brought the sufferer to a state in which he was already
depriving himself of what was necessary for life. Indeed he went to one
of the imperial doctors to seek healing from him and from his expertise.
The latter hand prepared a medicine for him for the evacuation of the
bowels and handed it to him. The sick man took it from him but treated it
with much greater caution that the doctor had advised. For the doctor had
told him to drink all of it. But when he got home he drank not the whole
quantity but only half of it, saying that he would test it in this way before
going any further. So he took half the quantity, which began to take effect
immediately, and was thus seen to be excessive and uncontrollable, so
much so that after a little while it affected the patient’s flesh and developed
into dysentery.
When the doctor who had prepared the medicine, either through
ignorance or negligence, learned of the extent of the harm done, he
attempted to check the evacuation by antidotes to the drugs he had used.
But the condition did not respond, appearing stronger than any treatment
he devised, and finally threatened the patient with death. At this point the
latter despaired of any help from that quarter and resorted in prayer to God
and his great servant. ‘I know, O man of God,’ he said, ‘that both during
your lifetime and after your departure you were able in Christ to perform
very many and very great wonders. Be therefore a helper to me, too, at this
hour and through your intercession snatch me away from these dangers that
hang over me and from bitter death.’
After these words and his prayer, the sick man fell asleep, and in
his sleep he saw the monk who once served the archbishop saying the
following to him: ‘Go to the archbishop’s house, my good man, and place
his sacred stole on your kidneys and you will not fail to attain your goal.’
It then seemed to the patient, while he was still fast asleep, that he went
to the archbishop’s house and asked for that holy strip of cloth, as he had
been instructed. And because he did not obtain what he sought, he returned
again to the monk who had instructed him, who still seemed to be waiting
there, and told him about his failure. The latter took him by the hand and
led him not to the archbishop’s house but instead to his tomb, and taking
there the sacred stole in his hands, laid it on the sick man’s kidneys. Right
after this, the monk vanished and immediately the sick man woke up and
as a result of what he had seen in his dream judged the archbishop’s house
190 GREGORY PALAMAS
to be his tomb and perhaps the stone slab lying on it to be represented by

the sacred stole. Still being in the grip of the disease he went to the holy
sarcophagus and having rubbed his kidneys on the stone, quickly returned
home from there, having overcome both death and disease.
121. This great physician of souls and bodies also healed a doctor. The
latter had been lying in bed for such a long time struggling with a variety
of illnesses, that he had sores in his flesh as a result of his long confinement
and the sores had developed an abundance of maggots. It was not only he
who was ill but also his wife and beloved children. And the doctor’s house
was not a centre of medical healing as it should have been, but rather a
hospice for the sick. But the common doctor, by whom I mean the divine
Gregory, appeared to them most philanthropically of his own accord. And
how did he appear? While their daughter was asleep it seemed to her that
she saw the great man at the house. And it seemed that she prostrated
herself before him and begged him for her father’s healing. The great man
received her supplication graciously and ordered the basin to be brought to
him in which it was his custom each year to perform the holy washing of
feet.498 This was brought full of holy water by one of the sacred deacons,
and the archbishop ordered the deacon to cleanse the sick man’s arms and
legs thoroughly with the water. The deacon carried out his instructions
more quickly than words can describe, and as soon as he was washed the
sick man returned to his natural condition and state of good health.
When the child saw these things done in such a wonderful way, she
thought to make a similar request for her mother and beg the teacher for
her health, too. But she seemed to hear a voice on his part saying that for
the time being she should be satisfied with the present circumstances, but
after a little while she could expect that those things would come about in
a similar way. What happened next? On waking up the girl told her parents
what she had seen. Her father as soon as he heard this gave instructions
that he should be taken to a bathhouse and on bathing rid himself of the pus
and maggots. Then he left the bathhouse and went to the great man’s holy
tomb. After two days had elapsed he suddenly felt a stabbing pain in the
abdomen and sensed the need to defecate the excrement which for many
days previously had been prevented from being voided naturally. And on
going home, he experienced such a violent evacuation of his bowels that
498 At the ceremonies of Holy Thursday in the week before Easter.
even his professional colleagues, when they saw it, again gave up hope
for his survival. It was their opinion that within a short time he would
lose his natural power of life through the wasting effect of the illness and
the weakness resulting from it, and also with the addition of this great
and frequent evacuation. But he, for his part, with the noxious matter thus
miraculously voided through the saint’s washbasin and the novel bathing
of his arms and legs, at once proved superior to the disease. Not only did he
not lose the strength that he then had but he gained much greater strength
than he possessed formerly, with the result that against all expectation he
could easily mount his horse and go round the city as he used to, practising
his profession and healing many people. But his wife was not among these.
Rather, he had given up hope for her, finding her illness to be much stronger
than his expertise. The common doctor and father, however, did not fail to
keep his promise. On the contrary, after him he also healed her, giving
precedence to the head in accordance with its dignity, and saving the entire
body as a whole ‘so that the man of God may be complete’ as the saying has
it,499 on this occasion too.
122. A woman of a noble and highly respected family contracted a long and
serious illness, in which a flow of some painful discharge running down
her right arm rendered the whole limb withered and useless. Or rather,
not only was the arm useless and inactive (for even this would have been
extremely serious) but it was an unprofitable burden500 to the sick woman
for it did not hang downwards of its own accord but stuck out sideways,
somewhat at a right angle, unbending and incapable of any movement or
change of position. It was an ugly sight, at odds with the rest of her body.
So the doctors prescribed the hotter and more drastic drugs to revive
and heal her rigid arm, but she had no confidence at all in them. Instead,
she frequently rubbed her afflicted arm with unguents and relics of the
saints and with the holy oils that came from them, looking for help and
healing from these. But whereas she heard every day about the frequent
miracles of the wonderful Gregory, at first she was not inclined to believe
the reports. Not only did she formerly not have a fitting opinion of him,
but had even used her tongue abusively against him, as do these vain,
capricious and fickle women, whom indeed our city of Constantine nurtures
in especially large numbers among the so-called nobility. They immerse
499 2 Tim 3: 17.

500 Homer, Iliad 18, 104.
192 GREGORY PALAMAS
themselves in empty chatter, in divisions, schisms and licentious talk, and

aspire to attracting a faction round themselves and acquiring notoriety and
a shameful reputation.501 While some do so manifestly for this reason –
for what other reason could there be? – this woman perhaps did so out of
feminine simplicity and ignorance, if indeed we should concede that in
such cases these things may be accepted and pardoned, when there are so
many and such distinguished teachers available.
At first then, as I have said, because of her lack of faith she did not
deign in the least to turn her mind to the stories told about the great man.
But because the working of his miracles circulating throughout the city
frequently resounded in her ears, and the affliction in her right arm distracted
her night and day of its own accord, and not the slightest relief was apparent
from any quarter, she too was driven unwillingly by necessity to join the
others in seeking help from the great man, testing him rather than placing
her confidence in his powers. For she said that it was inevitable that either
he could not bring about such things, or if he could he would not wish to do
so for people of her disposition, which even though right would have been
contrary to the saving word. But the disciple of Christ, who ‘makes the sun
rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the
unrighteous’502 in this case was himself merciful like Christ.
And so, when the woman approached him and entreated him, with the
doubt of those thoughts as I have described and rubbed her arm on the
stone covering on the tomb, first he healed her hitherto dead and motionless
fingers, so that she could move them and bring them together to make the
sign of the cross with them, and while she was still present in the sacred
church building make the customary veneration of the holy icons. Then
three days after she returned home he suddenly healed her whole arm during
501 The reason for this hostile aside on the female nobility of Constantinople is obscure.
Perhaps, as Alice-Mary Talbot suggests (Johnson and Talbot 2012, 435, n. 34), the allusion
is to the circle of Irene-Eulogia Choumnaina. Irene-Eulogia, the hegoumenissa of the
monastery of Christ Philanthropos, which she founded in 1312, had been an implacable
anti-Palamite – Akindynos had been the spiritual father of the community in the 1340s.
Gregoras reports that after she died (in about 1355) ‘the saintly reputation of Irene-Eulogia
among the people of Constantinople was such that pilgrims flocked to her tomb to bask in the
odour of her sanctity and to seek her intercession to perform miracles for them’ (Nicol 1994,
70, citing Gregoras Historia Byzantina XXIX, 21–4 [Bonn III, 23–40]). The development
of such a shrine in Constantinople during the second patriarchate of Kallistos I cannot have
been welcomed by the Palamites.
502 Matt 5: 45.
the night, and from that time the woman’s arm was healthy and functioned
properly – O the miracles of God! She was healed at the same time of both
the grave illness of her soul and of her wretched unbelief which is much
worse than bodily afflictions and sang praises to God and proclaimed his
servant in a clear voice. Indeed those who are still unbelieving in the same
way should henceforth listen to her and be convinced.
123. A widow, an elderly and poor woman, had a noxious flux that ran down
her left arm from high on the shoulder and rendered the arm useless. Now
this was a double affliction for the woman and for that reason unbearable.
For at first, as if starting from small beginnings, it did not prevent her
from working as usual with her distaff and the pain it caused still seemed
tolerable. As time went on, however, she lost the use of her hands completely
and with this her means of earning a living. The pain, too, became severe
and unbearable. A great many medical remedies were applied to staunch
the flux, and even finally the cauterization of the shoulder, as supposedly
the cause and seat of the condition, but this did nothing for her other than
add to her suffering and make the pain in her arm worse.
After the poor woman had been tormented thus for a long time, in her
dire straits she summoned her female neighbours with loud piercing cries.
These took compassion on the suffering woman, and as they had no other
way of helping her told her to hurry and go to the great man’s tomb along with
the others and seek healing from him alone. The suffering woman followed
that good advice, and went to the holy tomb and offered up fervent prayers
and supplications. As night was falling she went home again. And while
the mattress and the floor held her captive in the same way as usual with
the anticipated pains, the great physician of the sick began her treatment in
a somewhat refined manner. He did not take away her pain there and then,
although this would have been possible, but drew it out rather gently, little by
little, as if rather to give the sick woman a clearer perception, and banished
it for the time being from her shoulder and upper arm, while allowing it
still to linger in her elbow and forearm. But not understanding any of this
in the slightest, and feeling a more violent attack of the illness than usual
because it was concentrated in a smaller area, the woman began to berate
the physician and abuse him verbally, just as those who are physically
undergoing treatment or a surgical operation are not at first aware of being
cured, as if he were utterly responsible for the worsening of her pain. But
her women friends and neighbours gathered together again and advised her
to go once more and seek the rest of the cure.
194 GREGORY PALAMAS
So she went and again and prostrated herself painfully before the
wonder-working tomb of the great man making the same complaints
against him as before and murmuring against him under her breath. But he
in his compassion immediately supplied what remained and bestowed the
complete cure on the woman there and then, not while she was asleep or
through words, as was generally the case with the others, but while she was
awake and manifestly in the context of the circumstances themselves. For
quite a while he seemed to be drawing out the pain and that chronic illness
from the tips of her fingers like a fine thread. On arriving home from there
not only free from pain and suffering but with her hand operating naturally
and fit for any kind of work, the woman ever after glorified God and his
servant with a grateful tongue.
124. There were also two nuns, one advanced in age and already an old
woman, the other in the prime of life, who suffered from cataracts in the
eyes and from an impairment of hearing. When they both went to the great
man’s tomb, each seeking release from her affliction, he graciously healed
the deafness of the younger and the blindness of the older woman, so that
the one received the former use and operation of her eyes, and the other the
full natural power of her hearing. And together they sang praises to their
benefactor and doctor, for having regained so sharply and so clearly the
re-creation, as it were, and resuscitation of these first and most necessary
organs that had, so to speak, become dead.
125. Nor did the great man refrain from being a benefactor to our Thracians,
but compassionately numbered these too among his own family and
compatriots, in a wonderful imitation of the guardian and saviour of the
truly great city of Thessalonike, I mean Demetrios, great among martyrs
and wonder-workers.
For there was a man, a native of the city of Orestias, which Hadrian
later restored and gave it his own name, who was honoured for his grey
hair, intelligence and gravity and had already become one of the citizens
of Thessalonike.503 Through his piety and his love and zeal for what was
best, he was a friend of the great man, even before he took possession of
his church, simply from hearing about his good deeds. Inspired by zeal for
the truth he taught that was being maligned, he constantly rebuked those
503 The Thracian city of Adrianople (now Edirne). It was captured by the Ottomans
probably in 1362 (Ostrogorsky 1968, 536).
rebels in public in defence of these things, upbraiding them also for having
rejected their archbishop. As a result he frequently stirred up that swarm
with these things and provoked their leader to devise and plan terrible
things against him, which would have been brought to their conclusion if
God had not put an end to their tyranny and revolt from on high.504
When the archbishop entered the city and the church received its
bridegroom,505 he was introduced to him by people close to him and
became his friend, though even before seeing him he had been no less a
friend to him and his truth, as I have already said. And having tasted the
sweetest waters of his teaching, he was utterly captured by love and indeed
being bound to him by affection became in his soul inseparable from him.
When the great man heard among other things of the man’s magnificent
zeal against the rebels and his resistance to them on behalf of the truth, he
praised him fittingly and added at the end the following blessing. ‘Only
God can fitly reward your remarkable zeal for the truth and the good, my
friend, and the great resistance of your soul. For whatever recompense I
could give would be small and disproportionate, since it would belong to
human nature and capacity.’ And these words at that time were not far
removed from some divine inspiration and prediction, as the rest of the
narrative will reveal.
After the passage of some considerable time, this good friend fell ill
with the following. Some growths, four in all, appeared bunched together
on his left hand. They were very large in size, of a hard and resistant nature,
and rough and thorny at the extremities of the protuberances, with the
result that they did not allow him to close his palm naturally and form
a fist, leaving his hand incapable of gripping because of the irregularity,
roughness and thorniness of the growths, as I have said. Moreover, this
deformation shamed him and threw the whole body out of balance. He
spent eight years in this condition without any hope of a cure at all.
But having himself witnessed and heard about the miracles performed
every day at the great man’s tomb, he too went to the sepulchre with the
others and after prostrating himself stood there. He laid his afflicted hand
on the tomb and rubbed the stone, it seeming to him that through his icon
504 The Zealot revolt (1342–50). Their leader was Andrew Palaiologos, who fled to the
Serbs in 1349.
505 A bishop had been regarded as the ‘bridegroom’ of his see since at least the fifth
century: cf. the letter of the Egyptian bishops to the emperor Leo I quoted by Evagrius
Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History II, 8. 106 (SC 542, 106).
196 GREGORY PALAMAS
he was looking at Saint Gregory, as if he were still alive. And in a somewhat

friendly and courteous manner with much geniality he whispered the
following prayer: ‘Now that you enjoy a clearer and purer access to God,
O true friend of Christ that you are, you easily have the power to grant the
requests of petitioners, since you are their advocate and intercede directly
for them. It is therefore the opportune time for you to use this freedom of
access to God and influence with him on my behalf and that of my afflicted
hand and to cause him to be merciful and a saviour to me too. Be mindful
at this time of your own words and the promise you once made to our
unworthy self when you were still alive and in the flesh, saying, “God will
fitly reward your zeal and your resistance for the sake of the truth and the
good.”’506
As the man was praying thus in a somewhat courteous manner, as I
have said, and with a smile on his lips like someone superior to desire and
faith, one of the people sitting there in hope of a cure – a monk by class
and a foreigner in his speech and ways but a very good man and of an
excellent character – cast his eye upon him.507 Suspecting his demeanour
and his manner of praying as supposedly not what it should be and not
made earnestly and with compunction, he began by asking the man what
it was he suffered from. The latter held out his hand and showed him the
affliction. ‘If you are so seriously ill,’ the monk said to him again, ‘and are
suffering such deformity, why do you not bring your supplication to the
saint with tears and lamentations instead of approaching him in such a
nonchalant and affected manner as if you were jesting?’ The other replied,
‘Father, this gentleman – pointing to the saint – knows with what thoughts,
attitude and disposition I am seeking help and healing from him.’
‘After addressing these words to him,’ the man said, ‘I returned home
and when night fell I went to sleep, remembering the great man as usual
and making supplication to him in my mind. When night was approaching
first light and it was the time that usually summoned me to church and
the holy hymns, I got out of bed and asked the maidservant for water
with which I had washed my face hitherto with my right hand, for the
other had long since been useless for this purpose, as my narrative has
already mentioned. When in the course of washing I touched my left hand
506 ‘Social networking’ applied even to the saints. Here the petitioner calls in a favour
from his friend, Palamas.
507 Philotheos (or his source) emphasizes that the monk’s protest is the result of ignorance
of Byzantine culture, not of malice.
as usual, I found that that affliction – O your extraordinary miracles, O

Christ! – had completely gone from the hand so that not even a trace of
it remained and the palm could move without hindrance and be clenched
naturally into a fist. When I realized this, I asked the maidservant to bring
a light quickly and called my wife, and showing her and the other members
of the household the miracle, we praised God and his great servant in
amazement.
What happened then? The man went off once again to the saint’s tomb
and gave thanks for this great act of benevolence with the same demeanour
as before and in the same courteous manner. The monk already mentioned
observed him again and again rebuked him in the same way, accusing him,
as he thought, of flippancy and lack of respect. But the latter immediately
opened his healed hand and silently proclaimed the miracle. When the
monk saw the hand he applauded in amazement, and in a piercing voice
set about glorifying God and praising his servant. Then turning also to
the saint’s icon, he said, ‘Man of God, I have been watching by your
holy tomb until now with doubts in my mind, and perhaps that is why I
have failed, it seems, in my request and not obtained healing. I was even
already thinking of returning to my own people. But now I shall not leave
you and your gifts of grace – no, by your struggles for virtue and these
great miracles! – but I shall certainly remain here and stay near you until
I too attain the same results through you and of course your mediation
with God.’
And he did not fail to attain his goal, having thus judged and petitioned
in the right way, but even succeeded rather quickly and obtaining healing
as he desired, returned quickly to his own people. This is evident from
what followed. ‘From that time,’ said the first man, the one whose hand
had been healed, ‘I went every day to the great man’s tomb, to venerate it
and render the thanks that was due, but that monk was nowhere to be seen.
Clearly, he had received healing and returned to his friends. For how could
it be,’ he said, ‘that he went off without obtaining what he sought, and so
quickly, when the day before he had sworn so emphatically that in no way
would he leave before his prayer had been answered and he had received
what he sought?’
126. But is the admirable Gregory so wonderfully a physician, saviour

and protector of his own Thessalonike with its indigenous inhabitants, the
population of the surrounding countryside, and indeed newcomers too,
when necessity demands, yet with regard to people beyond its borders is
198 GREGORY PALAMAS
careless and negligent because they are strangers and live far away? Of
course not. On the contrary, knowing that the Church of Christ is one
throughout the world, he championed the whole of it equally while he was
still alive, and courageously dedicated his life to it in clear imitation of
Christ, with the result that there too he is regarded as having become a
saviour, deliverer and physician in the same way to those who call on him.
Thessalians and Illyrians and people who come from those parts and
have brought with them wonderful accounts of the miracles of the great
man are reliable witnesses to this claim. Needless to say, they also paint
icons of him there and often celebrate his feast day with great faith and
obvious spiritual affection, and are eager to erect churches as if for one of
the apostles and fathers and proclaim the great man with great awe a herald
of orthodox faith, a champion of the church and teacher and guardian of its
true doctrines. Everyone there proceeds in a manner that mirrors that of his
own homeland and rightly imitates those foreign and humble Samaritans508
and the believing Caananite woman509 and all in the same list as these
who surpassed great Jerusalem and the pride, vain conceit and envy of the
scribes and Pharisees in that city through their faith in Christ. And I fear, I
fear very much, that those words of the Lord may be uttered in a terrifying
way to this city, too, in the last days: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which kills
the prophets and stones those who are sent to you’,510 and ‘Many will come
from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, while
the sons of the kingdom will be cast out.’511 It is doubtless for these reasons
that this imitator of Christ appears vividly to those who believe so strongly
and fulfils their requests, as we have already said. With regard to these, we
too should record one or two in detail.
127. A woman of noble and pious family, Zoe by name,512 developed a

piercing pain in her abdomen, which indeed pressed on it so sharply and
caused her such intense distress that rivulets of blood flowed down from
there every day. The woman suffered very severely in this way for five years
without any drug at all or any medical expertise being able to alleviate
the condition. The doctors did the most they could for her every day but
508 Cf. John 4: 39.

509 Cf. Matt 15: 22–8.
510 Cf. Matt 23: 37.
511 Cf. Matt 8: 11.
512 PLP 6444.
achieved absolutely nothing, with the result that they declared it impossible
for the patient to go on living. Her flesh was wasting away so steadily that
she would not have survived even as long as she did if her body did not
happen to be so strong and vigorous and she had not possessed a very good
appetite. But although with her strong constitution she put up a powerful
fight against the illness, she was gradually defeated, worn down by its long
duration, and as a result became bedridden and almost immobile for two
whole years on top of the preceding five.
But with the fame of the great Gregory’s miracles becoming daily
conspicuous – I refer to those performed among these people as well as the
extraordinary things accomplished in great Thessalonike – the sick woman
also came to hear of what was being said and had recourse in faith to the
divine power that was active in him. Summoning the presbyters of the
Church, in accordance with the divine Scripture,513 she first asked them to
celebrate publicly the holy prayer of the oil and when this was finished to
offer up prayer and supplication on her behalf to the divine Gregory. When
this had been done by the presbyters in their customary way, although she
herself was unable to stand and sing with those who were praying and
singing the divine hymns on her behalf because she was bedridden and
immobile, from where she was lying she prayed fervently to the saint and
asked with faith for his grace and help.
And – O your wonderful works and miracles, O Christ! – the woman
whose flesh had already been wasting for so long and who had become
paralysed and almost immobile suddenly rose up from her bed, not after
a day, not after a short interval of time, but at once while they were still
praying and singing, strong and healthy in her body and bearing scarcely
a trace in her person of that chronic affliction and unhealthy condition. As
a result, those who saw it and heard of it were astonished and considered
the miracle supernatural and not at all inferior to the one performed by
Christ himself concerning the paralytic previously raised in a supernatural
manner, whether one thinks of the one at Capernaum514 or the one at the
pool by the Sheep Gate,515 with the only difference that there he performed
the miracle in his own person, whereas here he raised the sick woman from
her bed and chronic affliction in a similarly sudden way but through his
disciple and friend, Gregory.
513 Jas 5: 14.

514 Cf. Matt 8: 5–13.
515 Cf. John 5: 2–9.
200 GREGORY PALAMAS
128. In consequence, on becoming aware of this, the more devout and

eminent of the people of that place,516 and especially those belonging to the
clergy, set up a holy icon to Gregory, as I have already said, and observed
a splendid feast throughout the city on the day of his death, and eagerly
embarked on the erection of a church to him as a brilliant disciple of
Christ.517 They did not wait for great synods and common votes in order to
proclaim him a saint, for these are sometimes obstructed by time, caution,
diligence and a host of human considerations, but were rightly satisfied by
the vote and proclamation from on high and by the clear and unambiguous
sight and assurance of the facts themselves.
129. A mild-mannered, grey-haired monk of this same city called Ephraim,518

who a little while before had come into the church of Thessalonike,519 stood
there in public and told the following story about himself. ‘Two years ago I
went to Thessaly on some matter and on my return from there this is what
happened. A small thorn pierced my right foot on the road and for some
days caused me pain. Then, I don’t know how all the pain transferred itself
to my left foot and became unbearable. Within a short time it prevented me,
among other things, from eating and sleeping. Quite a few days went by
in this state and the foot became inflamed and swelled up like a wineskin.
Then the swelling became perforated with more than forty holes, the scars
of which may be seen as a testimony to my story, and pus flowed out from
every side as if from some spring in the foot. A year and a half went by
without the inflammation getting any better and all medical treatment
proved useless as did all drugs. I despaired of myself for this reason and
often renounced my utterly painful life.
‘What happened after this? I too heard from local people and indeed
also from travellers coming from Thessalonike about the very many and
exceptional miracles of the admirable Gregory. I believed what I heard
unequivocally and proclaimed him a pillar of the Church, a teacher of
right belief and holiness, and an abode of virtue, and moreover a worker
516 One of the principal manuscripts used by Tsames (M. Lavra 1134) identifies ‘that
place’ as Kastoria: Tsames 1985, 580 n. On the western Macedonian city of Kastoria, see
ODB 2, 1110–11.
517 This church in Kastoria appears to be the first to have been dedicated to St Gregory
Palamas.
518 PLP 5403. Ephraim was also from Kastoria.
519 I.e. the Church of Hagia Sophia.
of divine signs and wonders filled with apostolic vigour and grace. Then I
prayed fervently for myself and my affliction to the best of my ability, even
though I was bedridden, and begged in my prayers with fervent tears for
the healing of my foot so that I might recover my health, and being able
to walk without hindrance might make my way to his Thessalonike, and
having venerated his holy tomb might become a herald here of the great
wonders which Christ has worked in me through his protection.
‘After I had prayed in these and similar words with much compunction,
as it was already night and time for bed, I too was just going off to sleep
with this prayer. And lo and behold, a monk wearing the usual marks of
a bishop, I mean a cross on his head and a holy stole, seemed to enter my
cell. He greeted me, and sitting down beside me asked me how I was.
I showed him the swelling of my foot and the sores and also told him
about the pain they caused and the long time I had been suffering. He
immediately took my foot in both hands and, as it were, reducing the
swelling and squeezing out the pus, said, “There is no need to worry now.
You no longer have anything at all to cause you distress.” And when he
had said and done these things in a compassionate way, he departed. And
immediately after the vision I fell into a sweet and gentle sleep such as I
had never had before.
‘When dawn was breaking and the morning office of prayer and
psalmody was being sung by the monks, I too went off to the church,
supporting myself on a stick. They were suddenly struck with amazement
at seeing me, for no one had expected me. And when I was questioned by
the monks, I recounted the miracle and the cause of the extraordinary cure,
and made those who heard me even more astonished and amazed.
‘Eight days went by after this, and fully restored now to my original
healthy state, I went to the church where the icon of the admirable Gregory
is reverently kept. After venerating it, prostrating myself and rendering
the thanks that was due, I returned to the monastery and my own people.
But when it was necessary to fulfil my vow to the new physician and its
stipulations, I said to myself, “The season is already turning to winter and
therefore conditions of travel are unfavourable and difficult, especially for an
old man like me. I must therefore give up the idea of going to Thessalonike,
the weather not permitting it, as I have said. And it is permissible to fulfil
my promise to the great man in a different way and thus not break its
stipulations. What I shall do is call together the presbyters of the Church,
and of course my fellow monks, and organize a public feast day in honour
of the great man, celebrating a festival in the right way. I shall thus honour
202 GREGORY PALAMAS
my debt to God and also at the same time repay the honour and thanks due
to his servant.”’
So after turning these things over in his mind and speaking to his
companions, Ephraim immediately began to plan for the feast, and ordered
the servants to make exceedingly lavish and magnificent preparations. But
this did not find favour with him who was the cause of this celebration.
He did not want the miracle to be confined to those people alone and not
spread more widely. On the contrary, he wanted its grace to travel rather
and be proclaimed to those also who lived at a distance, so that through
these people too, just as through all the others, God might be glorified
everywhere. And the way it happened was as follows.
That day had not yet come to an end when the monk was seized by
intense shivering and a violent fever. And in addition, the swelling of his
foot returned and the pains, as if starting all over again, were no less severe
than before. The sufferer at once understood the cause of this blow and
admitted that he had sinned with regard to the great man because through
negligence he had failed to keep his agreement with him. With much
supplication he again sought forgiveness and declared he would speedily
fulfil what he had promised. Upon this, his strength returned in an extraor-
dinary fashion and the danger receded on the same day.
After a short time Ephraim had recovered so fully with regard to his
foot and his body as a whole that he was able to go to the great man’s city
using his own feet and venerate the holy tomb and embrace it most gladly.
And so, as I have already said, he proclaimed the great man’s great miracles
in the church like a person inspired.
130. If I were to omit from my narrative the great man’s novel miracles
concerning Tzimiskes of Berroia, how would I not harm not only the
narrative but also the common body of the Church? In the same degree
that he was previously an opponent of the Church, he became a friend and
disciple, I mean through these miracles, and was favourably and sincerely
disposed towards it at the end of his life when he departed to God.520 Let me
therefore give a summary of these miracles, setting them before the eyes,
as it were, of believers and non-believers alike, and especially the latter.
This man, then, although well-born and intelligent seemed to have
resolved on one particular thing concerning this matter wrongly and
520 On Andronikos Tzimiskes, who had been a pupil of Akindynos and is mentioned in
Akindynos’ Letters 27 and 28, see also Hero 1983, 352.
unworthily. For formerly in his native city of Berroia he had been a pupil of
Akindynos, who was destined to a miserable end. Having first been taught
by him some elementary matters pertaining to the preliminary stages of
grammar, he later drained the whole wicked and filthy cup of his heresies
and became another Akindynos in his outright impiety.
Now although he had frequently heard many great things about divine
energy and grace both in Thessalonike from the admirable Gregory when
he was still alive, and in the city of Constantine from us and the fathers
and teachers here, he had long since become insensible to those sacred
words and always ready to foster resistance, strife and falsehood against
the truth. As a result he had composed and written treatises supposedly
against the true faith, not realizing to put it in the words of the Apostle,
that like his own mentor he himself understood ‘neither what he was
saying nor the things about which he was making assertions’.521 But the
right hand of God was in the end to bring about a change of heart in
him through these great miracles of Gregory and at the same time as
benefiting him corporeally also healed his soul in a wonderful manner.
This is what happened.
131. The man had a male child. The child contracted some fatal illness.
He was lying on his bed with everyone expecting him to die and was
already breathing his last. His father, as if absorbed by grief, withdrew so
as somehow to avoid the very sight of the child and having to see him be
separated from his soul. He was sitting by himself with his right arm on
his knees and his head resting on his right hand, in the customary posture
of those who mourn, and murmuring to himself said, ‘If Gregory is really
a worker of miracles, as they say, and is able to grant such things, let him
show this to us too and save my son who is threatened by disease and
death.’
While he was mulling over these things in the intensity of his grief and
testing rather than praying, sleep rapidly came over him as a result of his
great anguish. And the sleep represented the divine Gregory to him – O the
amazing miracle! – dressed in his sacred vestments and saying compas-
sionately to him who had hitherto neither prayed nor believed the following
words: ‘We have come, as you see, because you have called us.’ The other,
waking with a start from that brief sleep and going to the child who was
521 1 Tim 1: 7.
204 GREGORY PALAMAS
already in danger, found that amazingly by the divine power of the one who
had appeared to him, the child had overcome not only the death that was
imminent but also his serious illness.
This astonishing event on the one hand reconciled the man to the
Church, since he embraced the correct understanding of orthodoxy and
became a friend instead of an enemy to orthodoxy, and to Gregory its great
champion, and on the other armed him against its enemies and revealed
him at once a distinguished opponent of the wicked error of Barlaam
and Akindynos. For this reason he also consigned to the flames all his
books and treatises against orthodoxy and what is more against its chief
defenders, confessed a sound belief without any reservations, and some
time later, when released from these earthly bonds, departed for God in a
good manner still in this belief.
132. Not long after the man’s death the child already mentioned was again
attacked by a serious illness and lay in bed, again, as before, expected to
die. And when every human hope had been exhausted and there was no
help from any quarter, his mother resorted again through prayer to the
accustomed doctor and fervently sought divine assistance from him. And he
came immediately without hesitation or delay, and appearing to the woman
in her sleep said, ‘Be of good courage, woman, for your child will not die.’
And the word immediately became a deed. The illness quickly departed
along with the imminent death and the sick child was restored to health.
133. Let me follow this by adding a third miracle by the great man that took
place in the family of this same Tzimiskes, that we might gain a still better
understanding of how the imitator of Christ richly rewarded former enemies
who had become his friends. The sister of Tzimiskes’ wife fell ill and the
illness looked very much as if it would prove fatal. The sick woman’s sister,
despairing of all human aid, saw that she had to resort to divine assistance
alone. Going out of the house at the dead of night on her own just as she
was, driven by sisterly love and the urgency of the illness, she crossed the
capital city as if drunk, so that she seemed to those who met her on the
way like a madwoman out of her mind. But she was going to that holy
monastery of monks which has always been called Chora [dwelling place],522
522 On the Chora monastery, an old monastery in the north-west of Constantinople

restored by Theodore Metochites (where Nikephoros Gregoras retired as a monk), see ODB
1, 428–30.
either because it is the dwelling place of the living, by which I mean Christ,
or because it is the dwelling place of him who cannot be contained, by
which I mean she who is both Virgin and Mother of God. After entreating
Christ repeatedly and praying for her sister with copious tears she went
home again.
When death was gradually approaching and was undoubtedly about to
come upon the woman, the sister again invoked Gregory and with him and
through him the great power of Christ. He immediately appeared following
behind Christ and stood by the woman, who had already fallen asleep. ‘We
have come to you,’ he said, ‘as you see, because you have just called us.
What you should know,’ he said, ‘is that for the present your sister will not
die.’ When the woman asked, ‘Who is it that you are following?’ the holy
Gregory replied at once, ‘He is Christ, the common Lord of all, who dwells
in that monastery of Chora.’ Having been instructed in these things in her
sleep, the woman woke up full of wonder, and when she saw those mystical
and divine words become a reality, she glorified Christ with her sister and
proclaimed his great servant.
Epilogue
The vision of the heavenly synod
134. I shall recall one further miracle of this great man and thus conclude
the narrative by placing, as it were, a final golden flourish on the miracles
already recounted. I shall leave the majority to our wise scholars who have
already expounded them and woven them into a narrative account in a
wonderful way, and above all to the brother who wrote about these things
in a sublime way with an abundance of deliberation and wisdom,523 from
whom we too learned what we have previously narrated and to the best of
our ability incorporated into our narrative, that we may not seem to annoy
anyone by leaving it somewhat incomplete. This is what happened.
One of the monks of the wonderful Lavra of the celebrated Athanasios,
which we have already often mentioned,524 a man who had chosen a
completely solitary and eremitical life, and hardly ever saw or spoke to
anyone at all apart from one or two people, used to entreat God fervently
night and day to reveal to him how things stood with regard to the divine
523 According to the Synodal Tomos of 1368, § 19, this was the megas oikonomos of the
Church of Thessalonike.
524 The Great Lavra of Mount Athos.
206 GREGORY PALAMAS
Gregory, that is to say, what his final state was and with whom he now
kept company there among those who have been pleasing to God. One
night, after having prayed much in this fashion, he had the following
vision.
It seemed to him that he was in the great city of Constantine and was
standing in the wonderful church of the great Wisdom of God 525 – even
though he had never been there in his life nor ever seen it with his own
eyes. And he saw a council of holy fathers sitting in the church. There
was Athanasius the Great, and also Basil and Gregory and John of the
golden tongue, and Gregory of Nyssa and Cyril the wise and with them and
behind them the rest of the throng of holy theologians.526 While these were
debating, the man who was looking on was straining to pay attention to
what they were saying, but he could learn nothing further about what was
being debated by them or what the topic was. But when they seemed to be
coming to the end of their discussion and it was necessary to bring it to a
conclusion, as was usual, by some kind of pronouncement, then the monk
heard of all those sitting there saying unanimously: ‘It is impossible for us
who are present to ratify our decrees and vote on them unless Gregory, the
presiding bishop of Thessalonike, is also present at the council and casts
his vote.’
One of the servants was immediately sent to summon him to that holy
council. He went off to find him but returned after a short while saying that
it was impossible at present for anyone to approach him and speak to him
because he was standing by the imperial throne in private audience with
the emperor. The fathers told him to go off again and wait until the end of
the conversation with the emperor and thus intercept Gregory and give
him their message. He went off again at once and, waiting according to his
instructions, seized the right moment to approach Gregory, inform him of
everything and say, ‘It is impossible for the decrees of the council to be
ratified unless you yourself are present.’
When he learned this, Gregory went to the council. When they saw him
approaching, they all rose and having received him warmly, one might say,
into their midst, led him to the chief, holy and equally honoured triad of
theologians and seated him with them.527 They thus held the vote they had
been deliberating and ratified the decrees, or rather they confirmed by his
525 The Great Church of Hagia Sophia.

526 I.e. the great fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries.
527 I.e. the three hierarchs: Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom.
words what had previously been voted on and proclaimed, to his glory and
that of the universal Church of Christ.
For the words addressed to Gregory by all the theologians as a body were
those things taught by them with a certain holy thanksgiving and ineffable
joy and delight, on various occasions and at various times, all of which
he himself had finally condensed into one by divine power and grace and
had combined and elaborated in a correct manner. And having attributed
the authority to them through himself in the divine Spirit, he refuted the
new heresies in an excellent fashion by their writings and made his own
treatises a logical conclusion and explication of their own holy writings.
‘When all of them together and each of the theologians individually,’ he
said, ‘appeared to have said these things with the greatest good humour to
Gregory and at sufficient length, they rose with him from their seats and
dissolved that holy assembly.’528
The testimony of the miracles

135. Such in fact were the great and supernatural miracles of the great and
wonderful Gregory after his departure to God and truly blessed death. They
are miracles worthy of him, of his great and angelic way of life, and of his
wonderful struggles and labours on behalf of orthodox belief, and indeed
of the frequent persecutions he endured and of his excellent confession
of faith. Although they are only a few of the many which are, which are
to be, and which have already been, they are sufficient to indicate the
whole from the part. Or rather, I think that these miracles, so wonderfully
and frequently enacted in a supernatural manner through divine grace,
were more for the sake of the principle of a sound faith, fought against in
the past by very evil and many-headed heresies and now contested more
viciously than ever, but supported by him and frequently proclaimed to
people near and far, by sea and by land, through the divine Spirit dwelling
within him, so that his voice goes out apostolically ‘through all the earth’
and his ‘words to the end of the world’.529 Even though this offshoot of
theirs, and the rearguard and retinue of this wicked system of error still
persist in their ancient error and nocturnal skirmishing, and, like a blind
man, ‘grope along a wall,’ as the blessed Isaiah puts it,530 they are unable
to fix their gaze on the great light of these miracles and on the sun of truth.
528 The council is presented here as the heavenly counterpart of the Council of 1368.
529 Ps 18 (19): 5 (4).
530 Isa 59: 10.
208 GREGORY PALAMAS
In my view, one may rightly appropriate that brief saying of the Lord and
say to them: ‘Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.’531
Such are the efforts that the new opponents of the true faith have made
to surpass even the infidelity of the Jews. For it was them that Christ was
reproaching when he declared in the past that they would not be able
to believe in his word without signs, saying, ‘Unless you see signs and
wonders you will not believe.’532 And even though they have seen Christ
working signs and acts of power and gifts of healing miraculously in the
present day through this great man, they do not believe. ‘For he has blinded
their eyes,’ says Scripture, ‘and hardened their hearts, and having eyes they
do not truly see and having ears they do not see.’533
But now is not the time to discuss these people – I have already dealt
with them adequately in discourses and treatises.534 Perhaps one day they
too will be persuaded by these great and frequent acts of power and works,
if not by words. If that does not happen, they will be persuaded when they
see this great man resurrected and glorified by Christ in the company of
the angels and divinized men, caught up from the earth into the air and
exalted with them in the clouds, to put it in the words of blessed Paul, to
meet the Lord in the air535 supernaturally like a sun with them through
communion with the sun of righteousness, and deification by him, I mean
according to the word of the great sun. ‘For then the righteous will shine,’
says Scripture, ‘like the sun in the kingdom of their Father’,536 ‘and so will
be with the Lord for ever’.537 If we can imagine this here and now, I say that
even they will be spectators at that time of divine and supernatural things.
They will certainly witness these, in my view, because they will then have
knowledge of what now they do not wish to believe, because I clearly hear
divine Scripture saying with regard to those who crucified Christ, ‘They
will look on the one whom they have pierced.’538
531 John 4: 48.

532 John 4: 48.
533 Cf. John 12: 40; Isa 6: 10.
534 Philotheos is referring principally to his fifteen Antirrhetic Treatises Against Gregoras
(Kaimakes 1983).
535 Cf. 1 Thes 4: 17.
536 Matt 13: 43.
537 1 Thes 4: 17.
538 John 19: 37.
Final invocation
136. O you, thrice-blessed and truly holy and much-beloved head, the
power of hesychia, the glory of monastics, the common ornament of
theologians, fathers and teachers, the fellow worker of the apostles, the
unbloodied emulator in word and deed of confessors and martyrs and the
wearer of their crown, the athlete, leader and champion of true belief, the
sublime exegete and teacher of the divine doctrines, the clearest-sighted
destroyer of the atheistic and polytheistic error of every kind of heresy,
the universal Church of Christ’s protector, guardian, deliverer and saviour
after the first and only Saviour – I call upon you, as the Church’s mouth,
tongue, soul and mind (I do not mean like in the person called ‘mind’
by the Hellenes, the famous philosopher Anaxagoras,539 but mind that is
most holy, most sublime, and deiform and downright divine) and as the
Church’s head next to Christ, the supernatural and universal head of all
things, as the home of every kind of rational principle, as the channel
of amazing graces, as the supreme instructor of virtue, as the standard
of theology and canon of doctrine, as the exceptional generosity of God
towards human beings, as a universal ornament of human nature, and as
everything divine and noble and venerable. For even though you have
departed for Christ you still watch over your flock and the Church in
general, only now with greater clarity from above, and you heal all kinds
of diseases and put them right by your words, you drive out heresies and
you eradicate every kind of passion. For you will never forget that sacred
knowledge of yours and your great striving and exertion on our behalf.
By this you have been nourished and have grown in stature with us in a
heavenly manner, and having been perfected supernaturally you will by
this be glorified along with us.
May you graciously accept this discourse of ours, which has been
driven by an abundance of love for you and has been undertaken by us
despite its exceeding our ability. And you will indeed accept it, I am sure,
approving of the friendship and the effort, and of the fact that here we
have not been moved to speak or write in an inappropriate or extravagant
manner, even though perhaps we have done so elsewhere, as you yourself
have said. And may you put an end to the storm of the passions and trials
we are enduring that has raged for so long and reached such a terrible pitch
539 The Presocratic philosopher Anaxagoras of Klazomenai (as reported by Simplicius,

On Physics 164, 24 and 156, 13) taught that ‘mind’ (nous) was the fundamental principle of
the universe.
210 GREGORY PALAMAS
that every day it throws up great waves and squalls. Or save us from our
present predicament with welcome hopes of the next world and the blessed
rest and repose we expect in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory and
power with the unoriginate Father and the life-giving Spirit, now and for
ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen
II
THE SYNODAL TOMOS OF 1341
of 1341
Introduction
The Synodal Tomos of 1341 is a brief recapitulation of the one-day council

held on 10 June 1324 in the presence of the emperor Andronikos III to
hear the case of Gregory Palamas, accused by Barlaam of Calabria of
the heresy of Messalianism.1 Barlaam had made his accusation in a work
called Against the Messalians (which was subsequently ordered to be
destroyed and has not survived) and had followed it up by laying formal
charges against Palamas at the patriarchate in 1340. The patriarch John
XIV Kalekas thereupon summoned Palamas to Constantinople to make
his defence.2 Palamas, who was then living in Thessalonike, set out at
once accompanied by a group of supporters including Isidore Boucheiras
(the future patriarch Isidore) and the Blates brothers Mark and Dorotheos.
He had already taken the precaution of having his position on hesychasm
endorsed by the central authority of Mount Athos, where the protos and
his council of senior monks (including the hieromonk Kallistos of the
skete of Magoula, the future patriarch Kallistos I, and the hieromonk
Philotheos of the Lavra, Kallistos’ successor as patriarch) together with
the bishop of Hierissos, the ordinary of the Holy Mountain, had signed
a statement prepared by Palamas which was subsequently known as the
Tomos of the Holy Mountain, or the Hagioretic Tomos.3 When Palamas
1 The council and its political and theological context has been analysed from Palamas’
viewpoint by Meyendorff 1959, 76–94 (Eng. trans. 49–62). For a detailed analysis from a
hostile viewpoint see also Nadal 2006, vol. 2, 177–98.
2 The summons was issued by a peremptory synodical letter addressed to the ecclesi-
astical authorities in Thessalonike. Akindynos, who was then still a friend of Palamas,
persuaded the patriarch to write again personally to him in a less hostile tone. See Akindynos,
Discourse Before John Kalekas, §3, lines 68–86 (Nadal 2002, 259–60); cf. Akindynos,
Letter 11 (Hero, 54–6).
3 In their accounts of these events both Philotheos (Life of Palamas, §54 and §57) and
Akindynos (Discourse Before John Kalekas, §2, lines 54–6) indicate that the Athonite
212 GREGORY PALAMAS
reached Adrianople he sent for David Dishypatos, a monk of Paroria and

strong supporter of Palamas, only to find he was already on his way to join
him. Thus strengthened by powerful monastic backing, Palamas arrived in
Constantinople in the spring of 1341.
Preparations for the council began to be made once it was known
when the emperor Andronikos III and his megas domestikos John
Kantakouzenos, who had been wintering in Thessalonike after a successful
military campaign in Epiros, would be returning to Constantinople.4 On
their arrival in the early part of May, the date of the council was set for
Sunday 10 June.5 It was an important public occasion, held in the Great
Church of Hagia Sophia under the presidency of the emperor and the
patriarch and attended by the senate, the general judges, the bishops then
resident in the capital (about thirty-six), and a large audience of ecclesi-
astics and laypeople.6 After the council was opened Barlaam was invited
to make his case. He wanted to discuss the dogmatic matters at issue, but
the Church canons reserving dogmatic pronouncements to bishops were
invoked to prevent him from doing so. His charges against Palamas were
read out instead and Palamas was invited to present his defence. Then
passages from Barlaam’s writings were examined relating to two topics:
first the nature of the light seen by the apostles at the transfiguration of
Christ on Mount Tabor, and second the nature of hesychastic prayer. In
both cases Barlaam’s statements were followed by the reading of numerous
passages from the fathers that appeared to contradict him, at the end of
each of which the emperor pronounced his own judgement. The outcome
appeared to Barlaam to be predetermined. After taking counsel from his
patron, Kantakouzenos, he decided to confess that he was in error and seek
clemency.7 The day’s proceedings closed with the apparent reconciliation
of Barlaam and Palamas and a concluding discourse pronounced by the
emperor.8
council had taken place in the summer of 1340 before the summons from Kalekas was
received in Thessalonike.
4 Philotheos, Life of Gregory Palamas, §58, lines 13–14 (Tsames, 491).
5 The precise date is given by one of the Byzantine Brief Chronicles. For details see
Nadal 2006, vol. 2, 183, n. 582.
6 The number of bishops is given by Kantakouzenos in a letter written much later. See
Darrouzès 1959, 15.
7 Recounted by Kantakouzenos in his memoirs: Historiarum Libri IV, II, 40 (Bonn I,
558–9).
8 Gregoras, Historia Byzantina XI, 11 (Bonn I, 558–9).
THE SYNODAL TOMOS OF 1341 213
Barlaam was condemned because his statements were deemed to be

incompatible with the teaching of the fathers. Nothing was said in the final
judgement about Palamas’ own teaching. This was a point picked up by
Palamas’ opponents. Later Palamas insisted more than once that if one
party in a dispute is condemned, his opponent is implicitly vindicated.
The matter might have been clarified at a subsequent council, but five days
after the synod of 10 June 1341 the emperor died suddenly. The subsequent
council that was convened in July 1341 focused on the complaints of the
hesychasts against Akindynos.9 It was held under the presidency of the
megas domestikos John Kantakouzenos and the patriarch John Kalekas,
again in the Great Church of Hagia Sophia, but appears to have ended
inconclusively.10 As Nadal points out, Akindynos was always opposed by
the hesychasts after the council as a ‘Barlaamite’ (thus associating him
with the undisputed condemnation of Barlaam), rather than as someone
who had been condemned in his own right.11
Text
The Synodal Tomos (translated below) that was issued in July 1341 ignores
the second council.12 With civil war already looming, it was not in Kalekas’
interest to promote a council presided over by Kantakouzenos that in
any case had not produced any worthwhile result. The strategy adopted
by Kalekas to bring the matter to a close is simply to forbid any further
theological discussion. Hence the threat of punishment declared at the end
of the Tomos for anyone who continues to discuss the dogmatic issues raised
at the council, or any other dogmatic issues for that matter. Events were to
prove Kalekas’ confidence in his disciplinary authority quite mistaken.
The text was first published by Dositheos of Jerusalem in his Tomos
Agapes (Iasi, 1698). Dositheos’ edition was reproduced by Migne in PG
151, 679–92. There is a better text in Karmiris (vol. 1, 354–66), but this
has now been superseded by the critical edition by Hunger, based on that
9 For the month of the council, which Jugie, followed by Meyendorff, believed to have
been held in August, see Loenertz 1964, 61.
10 For a reconstruction of the debates at the council and an analysis of the events
surrounding it see Nadal 2006, 198–220.
11 Nadal 2006, vol. 2, 217.
12 The Tomos is discussed in detail by Nadal 2006, vol. 2, 220–32.
214 GREGORY PALAMAS
of a contemporary volume of the patriarchal register found in Vienna

(Cod. Vind. hist. gr. 47): Hunger et al., 1995, 205–56, Nr 132. This is the
text translated below. I have numbered the paragraphs in accordance with
Hunger, who divides them differently from Karmiris.
Text
1. Anyone who says that humility is the knowledge of truth is truly worthy
of praise. For humility is the understanding of our own limits, and it is
through this that we enjoy peace towards God and our neighbour.13 It is
also through this that we gain rest for ourselves both in this world and
in the age to come in accordance with that divine and instructive saying
of the Lord: ‘Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and
you will find rest for your souls.’14 This persuades the person who has
acquired it to attend to himself and place his confidence in God, turning
away from every evil by the fear of the Lord, according to the saying of
the wise Solomon,15 to conduct himself piously and discreetly with regard
to what is above him, not removing the ancient landmarks16 and deviating
to either side – I refer to exaggerations and deficiencies – but following
the royal and central highway that leads unerringly and safely to heaven
and to God.
2. But the monk Barlaam who set out from Calabria and pitched himself
into the sea of arrogance entirely out of foolishness and reliance on his
own opinions, on account of holding the science of outer philosophy in
high esteem has proceeded against the philosophy that is supernatural and
true, mobilizing against the teaching of the Spirit the material-minded and
censured philosophy that can in no way accommodate what belongs to
the Spirit.17 A little while ago, pretending to be willing to learn, this man
insidiously approached some of our monks who had chosen the hesychastic
life and having bidden everything else farewell were cleaving to God.
13 The first two sentences closely paraphrase Maximus the Confessor, Epistle 13 (PG 91,
512A).
14 Matt 11: 29.
15 Cf. Prov 3: 7.
16 A common reference to Proverbs 22: 28. Cf. John Damascene, On the Orthodox
Faith 1 (I, 1), lines 27–8 (Kotter, vol. 2, 8).
17 The ‘outer wisdom’ is that of ancient Greek philosophy in contrast to the ‘inner
wisdom’ of the Christian tradition.
Among these monks he did not approach any of the more learned but
instead deliberately sought out the more simple, obviously anxious not to
be detected. After a short time he turned against even these and in writing
criticized the opinions they were supposed to be advocating as loathsome.
For he had heard them saying that the tradition of the holy fathers held
that those whose hearts had been purified through God’s commandments
received divine illuminations that were mystically and ineffably
engendered within them, and he had accused them of maintaining that the
essence itself of God was participable. When they defended themselves
by saying that they meant not the essence but the uncreated, eternal and
deifying grace of the Spirit, he attempted to smear them with the charge
of ditheism.18 Not only that, but he also presented himself at God’s church
and reported the matter to our humility,19 accusing especially the most
honourable hieromonk kyr Gregory Palamas and seeking to have him as
well as them summoned to appear before our holy and divine synod.20
3. When these had been summoned, Barlaam adopted a different tack.
Wanting to withdraw the charge and altogether unwilling now to appear
before the synod and enter into debate with the monks he had accused and
be confronted by them with regard to what he had written against them, he
made the emperor’s absence at that time a pretext for withdrawal, though
in reality he despaired of himself and feared eventual condemnation.21
Subsequently a synod was convoked – and in the presence of the emperor
of glorious and blessed memory – in the celebrated Church of the Wisdom
of God’s Word with the attendance also of the senate and with not a few
of the most honourable archimandrites and abbots and members of the
citizen body assembled there.22 The said Barlaam was also summoned
and directed to speak and set out his arguments if he had anything to say
against monks practising the hesychastic life, who were themselves already
present at the synod. Barlaam, for his part, as if suffering from loss of
memory about what had previously been alleged, tried very hard to confuse
the issue. He proceeded to deal with dogmatic questions and problems
18 For Barlaam’s account of this episode see Fyrigos 2005, 99–112.

19 John XIV Kalekas. This is still the conventional self-reference for an ecumenical
patriarch.
20 I.e. the permanent home synod of the patriarchate of Constantinople.
21 The emperor Andronikos III was wintering in Thessalonike after a successful
campaign in Epiros. See Nicol 1972, 185–7.
22 The Great Church of Hagia Sophia.
216 GREGORY PALAMAS
and sought solutions to disputed points. On this matter he objected and

maintained strongly that he could say nothing before first giving an answer
and solution to these questions. Whereas he was halted once and then a
second time with great severity but did not give way to this objection, nor
could he be prevailed upon to address the examination of the evidence
submitted, namely, the accusation made by him in writing against the
monks, our humility authorized the reading in the synod’s hearing of the
holy and divine canons by which it is forbidden and in no circumstances
permissible, not only to people like him but also to all others, to instigate
discussion on matters of dogma and consequently to impose on the rest
the absolute necessity of defending these matters. It is also forbidden to
them to arrogate to themselves any authority to teach and expound ecclesi-
astical topics; for this authority has been bestowed on God’s bishops alone
by grace from on high.
4. For Canon 64 of the Sixth Ecumenical Council says the following:23
‘It is not fitting for a layman to instigate discussion or teach publicly, thus
claiming for himself authority to teach. On the contrary, he should defer
to the order imparted by the Lord, open his ear to those who have received
the grace to teach, and be taught by them about divine things. For in the
one Church God has made different members, according to the word of
the Apostle, which Gregory the Theologian interprets, when evidently
setting forth the order in these matters he says: “This is the order we revere,
brethren, this is the order we preserve. Let this person be an ear, that one
a tongue, that one a hand, and that one something else. Let one teach and
another learn, and let the one who learns do so in ready obedience, the
one who provides do so in cheerfulness, and the one who renders service
do so in eagerness. Let us not all be a tongue – that is the easiest – nor
all apostles, nor all prophets. Nor let us all be interpreters.”24 And a little
further on: “Why do you make yourself a shepherd when you are a sheep?
Why become a head when you are a foot? Why do you try to become a
general when you are a private soldier?”25 And in another place wisdom is
commanded: “Do not be quick with words; do not compete with a rich man
when you are poor, nor seek to be wiser than a wise man.”26 If anyone is
caught undermining the present canon, let him be excluded for forty days.’
23 Canon 64 of the Council in Trullo, held in Constantinople in 692.

25 Ibid., 32, 13.
26 Ibid., 32, 13, drawing on the Book of Proverbs.
5. And again the nineteenth canon of Chalcedon says:27 ‘Those who

preside over the churches must expound to all the clergy and people every
day, and especially on Sundays, the texts of piety, selecting from holy
scripture the thoughts and words of truth and not going beyond the limits
already laid down or the tradition of the God-bearing fathers. Moreover, if
a debate should arise on a scriptural text, let them not interpret it otherwise
than the luminaries and teachers of the Church have done in their own
writings, and let them be satisfied with these rather than compose their own
discourses, when sometimes in encountering a difficulty they might fall
away from what is fitting. For through the teaching of the aforesaid fathers
the people will gain knowledge of what is excellent and to be chosen and
also of what is unsuitable and to be rejected; they will reform their lives for
the better and not succumb to the passion of ignorance, but by paying heed
to the teaching will encourage themselves not to suffer evil, and by fear of
the punishments attached to it will work out salvation for themselves.’28
6. After the reading of these holy and divine canons, the charges which
Barlaam had recently made against the monks were produced and laid before
the synod. When these charges had been read, the arraigned hieromonk,
kyr Gregory Palamas, was directed to make his defence against them, since
it was him they principally concerned. He made an introductory speech and
defended himself in a manner which he appropriately set out in detail later.
He explained how the dispute between them arose before the said Barlaam
had written the above-mentioned work against the monks and had set out
his arguments, as has been demonstrated, against the divine discourses of
the fathers, and before he himself had been moved of necessity to mount a
defence and refutation.
7. Then it was determined that Barlaam’s writings should be produced,
which to deceive his hearers he had entitled Against the Messalians.29
In these writings he discusses the unapproachable light of the transfigu-
ration of our Master and Saviour Jesus Christ, and his leading disciples
and apostles who were deemed worthy of the vision of this light, in the
following words:
8. ‘The light which shone on Tabor was not unapproachable, nor was
it in truth the light of divinity, nor was it altogether more sacred or more
27 Actually, Canon 19 of the same Council in Trullo.

28 Cf. Phil 2: 12.
29 Against the Messalians is no longer extant, having been ordered by the synod to be
burnt. Some passages are quoted below.
218 GREGORY PALAMAS
divine than that of angels, but it was inferior to and lower than our intellect
itself. For all our thoughts and concepts are more worthy of respect than that
light, seeing that it encounters our vision by passing through the air, comes
under a sensory faculty, and shows only sensible objects to the beholder.
This is because it is material, has a form, occurs in space and time, and
colours the air. One moment it constitutes itself and is visible and another
moment it dissolves and departs into non-being, by virtue of its being
formed in the imagination, and its being divisible and finite. That is also
why it was visible to those suffering a privation of intellectual activities,
or rather by those who had not yet even begin to acquire them and were
still impure and imperfect even in respect of that vision on the mountain,
since they were not yet deemed worthy of the intellectual apprehension
of deiform beings. “For we ascend from such light to mental represen-
tations and objects of contemplation which are incomparably superior to
that light.”30 Therefore those who say that the latter is beyond the mind
and true and unapproachable and similar things are entirely deluded. They
know nothing higher than phenomenal goods and are therefore impious
and introduce very destructive doctrines into the Church.’
9. This is what Barlaam writes which is clearly heterodox and contrary
to what has been said by the saints about this divine light. The monks
affirmed that what they think and speak is in accordance with what has
been said by these and presented the following:
10. Now, then, the divine John of Damascus says: ‘Today the abyss
of unapproachable light, today the unbounded effusion of divine radiance
shines out on the apostles on Mount Tabor; now things that may not be seen
were beheld by human eyes: an earthly body shines with a brilliant radiance,
a mortal body flows with the glory of divinity. For the Word became flesh
and the flesh became Word, although neither abandoned its own nature. O
the wonder! The glory was not added to the body from outside, but come
from within, from the supremely divine divinity of the Word of God united
hypostatically with it in an ineffable manner. For on that mountain the
angels were unable to contemplate his glory with a steady gaze, yet on this
mountain the leading apostles saw him shining with the glory of his own
majesty. Here he accepts the chief apostles as witnesses to his own glory
and divinity, and reveals his own divinity to them. It is fitting that those
who have beheld the divine glory, the glory that transcends all things, the
glory that alone in both supremely perfect and beyond perfection, should
30 Cf. Proclus, Theologia Platonica II, 4 (Saffrey and Westerink, vol. 2, 33).
themselves be perfect. For the truly divine Dionysius, who speaks of God,
says: “The way the Master will be seen by those who are his perfect servants
is the way he was seen by the apostles on Mount Tabor.”31 He takes John as
the virgin and most pure instrument of theology, because having beheld the
timeless glory of the Son, he thundered: “In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”32 For the mother of
prayer is hesychia, and prayer is the manifestation of divine glory. For when
we shut off the senses and hold converse with ourselves and with God, and
having been freed from the external distraction of the world come to be
within ourselves, we shall see then the Kingdom of God within us. For the
Kingdom of heaven, which is the Kingdom of God ‘is within us’, as Jesus
who is God proclaimed.33 He who was always glorified in like manner was
transfigured in the presence of the disciples and shone with the dazzling light
of the Godhead. For having been begotten by the Father without beginning
he possessed the natural ray of the Godhead that is without beginning, and
the glory of the Godhead also became the glory of the body. But the glory
that existed in the visible body was not apparent to those who were incapable
of seeing what was invisible even to the angels, since they were fettered to
the body, and was invisible. So he was transfigured not because he received
something that had not previously existed, nor because he was changed into
what he had not been formerly, but he was manifested to his own disciples
as that which he was, opening their eyes and enabling them to see when
they had been blind. This is the meaning of “He was transfigured before
them”.34 For although he remained in the same identity by which he was
visible previously, he was now seen in a different manner by the disciples.
“And he shone,” it says, “like the sun”;35 not because he was not brighter
than the sun – for it is impossible for the uncreated to be portrayed within
creation in an exact manner – but in so far as the spectators were able to
behold. For indeed “no one has ever seen God”,36 as he is in his nature,
and what anyone has seen is what he has contemplated in the spirit.37 What
“the change of the right hand of the Most High”38 means is this: “What
31 Cf. Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names I, 4, 592C (Suchla, 114).

32 John 1: 1.
33 Luke 17: 21.
34 Matt 17: 2.
35 Matt 17: 2.
36 John 1: 18.
37 Cf. 1 Cor 2: 11.
38 Ps 76 (77): 11.
220 GREGORY PALAMAS
no eye has seen, nor ear heard nor the human heart has ever conceived.”39
“And so,” in the age to come, “we will be with the Lord for ever,”40 and will
see Christ radiant with the light of the Godhead. This light proves victorious
over the whole of nature; it is the life “that has conquered the world”.41 But
Peter said, “it is good for us to be here”,42 and then a cloud, not of darkness
but of light, overshadowed them; for “the mystery that has been hidden
throughout the ages and generations”43 has been revealed, and the voice of
the Father came out of the cloud of the Spirit, and a glory that is enduring
and eternal was shown.’44
11. The divinely inspired Andrew of Crete said, ‘The Saviour leads his
disciples up on to the high mountain. What is he doing or what is he teaching?
He is showing them the dazzling glory and brilliance of his own Godhead. It
is this then that we celebrate today, the deification of our nature, its change
for the better, its ek-stasis and ascent to that which transcends nature, its
complete victory, or, to put it more precisely, its ineffable deification.45 The
angels marvel at it, the archangels glorify it, the entire intelligible order of
supramundane beings rejoices in it immaterially, taking it as a clearly manifest
and incontrovertible indication of the Word’s loving kindness towards us.
It is not possible for any conceivable thing in creation to accommodate the
superabundance of this radiance. For he who is beyond being truly entered
into being and, invested with being in a manner beyond being, dwelt
among us through flesh. Indeed, when he shone on the mountain with such
exceeding brilliance, he did not on that occasion become more radiant or
more exalted than he was – perish the thought! – but what he was before
is what was seen in reality by those disciples who were more perfect and
had been initiated into the higher things. For having gone outside the flesh
and the world so far as that is attainable in this life, they were instructed
39 1 Cor 2: 9.
40 1 Thes 4: 17.
41 1 John 5: 4.
42 Matt 17: 4.
43 Col 1: 26.
44 John Damascene, Homily on the Transfiguration: a compilation of passages from §§ 2
to 18 (precise references in Hunger et al. 1995, 222–6). For a fine English translation of the
entire homily, see Daley 2013, 205–31.
45 Ek-stasis is a term originating with Dionysius the Areopagite to indicate the
transcending of oneself, literally the departure from oneself, in order to enter into a relation
with God, who by a reciprocal movement of divine ek-stasis, or divine procession, reaches
out to unite himself with the believer.
here and now in the things that belong to our future state, which they
tasted experientially. For if the good in general terms is imparticipable by
nothing at all, not the whole of it, whatever it is, but to the degree and in
the manner in which it is accessible to the participants, it becomes capable
of being discerned – and this through extreme goodness – by proceeding
towards all things by its infinitely abundant radiance and being poured
forth on to them. Proof of what has been said would be that blessed and
much celebrated experience that the apostles had on the mountain when the
unapproachable and timeless light, having transfigured its own flesh by the
superabundance of its own radiance, shone forth in a manner transcending
being. O the wonder! By a most perfect ek-stasis of nature they fall into a
deep sleep and gripped by fear shut down their senses, entirely detaching
from themselves every intellectual movement and understanding. Thus, in
that divine and supremely radiant and invisible darkness they were united
to God, entering into true seeing through total non-seeing, being provided
with supreme unknowing through undergoing experience that is beyond
discursive reason, and being initiated in their sleep into a wakefulness
higher than that of any mental effort. They became beyond all visible and
intelligible things, even beyond themselves, so that transcending in the
highest possible way the supra-essentiality of all affirmation and negation,
they were instructed mystically through unknowing and unseeing by the
utterance of the Word and the overshadowing of the Spirit and the voice of
the Father coming through the cloud from on high.’46
12. On this divine light the great Gregory the Theologian says: ‘The
divinity was light that was shown on the mountain to the disciples but
a little stronger than their power of sight.’ And again: ‘He came, in my
opinion, in the way he was seen by, or shown to, the disciples, with his
divinity overcoming his mere flesh.’47
13. The holy Maximus says: ‘The gospel of God is this, an entreaty and
exhortation addressed by God to humankind through the Son who became
incarnate and bestowed uncreated theosis on those who believe in him as
the reward of reconciliation with the Father.’48 ‘And by uncreated theosis I
46 Andrew of Crete, Homily on the Transfiguration (PG 97, 932–57): a compilation of

passages from cols 933, 945, 948, 949. For a fine English translation of the entire homily, see
Daley 2013, 181–201.
47 Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 101, 29 (Gallay and Jourjon, 48).
48 Maximus the Confessor, Questions to Thalassius 61 (Laga and Steel II, p. 101, lines
292–7).
222 GREGORY PALAMAS
mean that specific real radiance which has no origin, but is manifested in
the worthy in a manner beyond understanding.’49 ‘The Lord,’ he says, ‘does
not always appear in glory to those who stand before him. To beginners he
appears in the form of a servant, but to those who are able to follow him as
he climbs the high mountain of his transfiguration he appears in the form
of God, the form in which he existed before the world came into being.’50
And again the same author says: ‘The light of the Lord’s countenance that
overpowered the operation of the human sense faculty signified for the
blessed apostles the mode of apophatic mystical theology. According to
this theology the blessed and holy Godhead is in its essence beyond ineffa-
bility and unknowability and infinitely transcends all infinity, not leaving
any trace of apprehension, even the slightest, in those who come after
it.’51 ‘For he whose essence is not participable by beings,’ says the same
author, ‘wills that those capable of doing so should participate in him in
another mode, yet does not in any way emerge from the hiddenness of his
essence, so that even that mode by which he wills to be participated in
remains permanently unrevealed to anybody.’52 And again: ‘The operations
(energies) of God are manifold, the essence is simple. Although we say
that we know God by his operations (energies), we do not undertake to
approach him in his essence; for his operations (energies) descend to us, but
his essence remains inaccessible.’53
14. In the same way the great Athanasius also says: ‘Nobody can in any
way see the naked essence of God; it is therefore manifest that the saints
saw not the essence of God but his glory, as has also been written about the
apostles, that “when Peter and his companions were keeping awake they
saw his glory”.’54 And immediately the same author says, ‘Dispassionate
amidst the passions of the flesh, Christ as God conquered death, rose on
the third day and ascended into heaven by natural glory and not by grace,
and he will come visibly in his own divinity, radiating ineffable glory
from his body that he received from Mary, just as he manifested in part
on the mountain, teaching us that he is the same both before and now,
49 Scholia on the Questions to Thalassius 61, schol. 14 (Laga and Steel II, p. 111).
50 Maximus the Confessor, Two Centuries on Theology and the Economy II, 13 (PG 90,
1129C–1132A).
51 Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 10, 31d. (PG 91, 1168A).
52 Maximus the Confessor, Five Centuries of Various Texts I, 7 (PG 90, 1180C).
53 Basil of Caesarea, Ep. 234, 1 (Deferrari, vol. 3, 372).
54 Cf. Luke 9: 34.
being ever without change and suffering no alteration with regard to the
divinity.’55
15. And the great Dionysius says the following: ‘When we have
become incorruptible and immortal and have arrived at our most blessed
fulfilment after Christ’s likeness, we shall, as Scripture says, “be with
the Lord for ever”,56 wholly filled with his visible theophany in all-holy
contemplations, a theophany that envelopes us in the most manifest
shimmering as it did the disciples at that most divine transfiguration, for
we shall participate mentally without passion or materiality in his noetic
radiance and in a union surpassing the mind through the unknown and
blessed applications of transcendentally bright rays in a more divine
imitation of the supra-celestial intellects.’57
16. And the great Basil says: ‘The prize of virtue is to become a god and
to shine with the purest light, having become a son on that day which is not
cut short by darkness. For another sun makes this day, a sun that radiates
the true light, who once he has shone upon us no longer conceals himself
by setting, but perpetually and uninterruptedly enveloping all things by his
illuminative power, implants that light in the worthy and makes those who
participate in the light other suns. For then, says Scripture, “the righteous
too will shine like the sun”.’58
17. And the divine Maximus: ‘The soul becomes a god by partici-
pation in divine grace, ceasing from all activities (energies) of mind and
sense and simultaneously suspending the natural activities (energies) of
the body, being deified along with it by the participation in theosis that
corresponds to it, so that only God is then manifested through the soul and
the body, since the natural properties of these have been overpowered by
the abundance of glory.’59
18. And the great Dionysius: ‘We do not see any theosis or life which
bears a precise likeness to the transcendent cause of all things.’ And when
the same was asked, ‘How is it that he who transcends all things is beyond
the source of divinity and beyond the source of goodness?’ he replied,
‘If by divinity and goodness you mean the reality itself of the gift that
55 Passage not found.

56 1 Thes 4: 17.
57 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names I, 4, 592C (Suchla, 114–15).
58 Matt 13: 43. The quotation from ‘Basil’ conflates passages from several sources.
59 Maximus the Confessor, Two Centuries on Theology and the Economy II, 88 (PG 90,
1168AB).
224 GREGORY PALAMAS
produces goodness and the inimitable imitation of that which is beyond

God and beyond goodness by which we are deified and rendered good. For
if this becomes the beginning of deification and of becoming good for those
who are deified and rendered good, he who is beyond all beginning, also
transcends so-called divinity and goodness as the source of divinity and
the source of goodness.’60
19. And the divine Gregory of Nyssa says: ‘If even his judgements
cannot be investigated and his ways cannot be traced, and the promise of
good things transcends anything we can imagine by guesswork, by what
measure rather is this ineffable and unapproachable divine thing higher and
more sublime than anything we can conceive about it.’61
20. And also the divine John Damascene in one of his sacred hymns:
‘That you might show visibly your second ineffable descent, just as God
Most High was seen standing in the midst of gods, when he shone ineffably
on the apostles on Tabor together with Moses and Elijah.’62 And in another
hymn: ‘And hiding for a short time the acquisition of the flesh, he was
transfigured before them manifesting the archetypal beauty and dignity,
and doing so not completely, assuring them fully yet at the same time
sparing them, for fear that with the vision they should also lose their lives,
but as much as they were able, bearing bodily eyes, to accommodate.’63
21. And the great Dionysius again says: ‘The divine darkness is the
inaccessible light in which God is said to dwell, which is both truly
invisible because of its supreme brightness and also inaccessible because
of the superabundant outpouring of light.’64
22. ‘It is not God,’ says the father of the golden mouth, ‘but grace that
is poured out.’65
23. Seeing that the plaintiff (Barlaam) raised in turn the problem of
the fear that was experienced by the apostles in the presence of that most
divine vision, claiming that it showed that the apostles were not adequate
for it and that this light that was seen by them under such circumstances
60 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names II, 7, 645AB (Suchla, 131), and Ep. 2, 1069A
(Ritter, 158).
61 Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius III, 1, 108 (GNO II, 40).
62 John Damascene, Canon on the Transfiguration (= Canon 2 of Matins of the
Transfiguration, Ode 9, troparion 2) (PG 96, 849D).
63 Anonymous, Idiomel 3 from the lite of Vespers of the Transfiguration.
64 Dionysius the Areopagite, Ep. 5, 1073A (Ritter, 162).
65 Ps.-John Chrysostom (actually, Severian of Gabala), On the Holy Spirit 11 (PG 52,
826).
was commonplace, the most divine emperor of glorious memory,66 with

his understanding evidently illuminated on that occasion by the same
light, said: ‘There is also a fear that belongs not to beginners but to the
perfect. The prophet speaks about this when he says: “The fear of the Lord
is pure, enduring for ever”;67 and again elsewhere, “Fear the Lord all you
his holy ones.”68 Evidence that the apostles on that occasion had the fear
not of beginners but of the perfect lies in the fact that they sought to remain
permanently in that ineffable vision. “Let us make three dwellings here,”
says Scripture, and “it is good for us to be here.”69 For someone who has
the other kind of fear is eager to escape from that which he fears. But Peter,
the supreme summit of the apostles, thinking that this episodic and finite
age could be drawn out, and that that uninterrupted and endless nature
of the light could be manifested, said “it is good for us to be here” in an
inspired manner out of the disposition of his soul. For he saw fully what
human nature is unable to see fully if it is not mingled with the grace of the
Holy Spirit. For they at that time were deemed worthy of as much as human
nature can accommodate when it is helped by the Spirit.’
24. ‘Nobody among us,’ the emperor, wise in divine matters, went on
to say, ‘when he hears how much we rightly praise that most divine light
understands us to say that the nature of God is visible. For if they ascended
to such a height, they beheld divine grace and glory, but not the nature itself
that furnished the grace. For we know, instructed as we are by the divine
utterances, that the former (the divine nature) is imparticipable, inappre-
hensible and invisible even to the supramundane and supreme powers
themselves, since “it has left not the slightest trace of comprehension to
those who come after it”.70 Thus Gregory, the greatest of the theologians,
after first listing the visions of the prophets, immediately afterwards adds:
“Neither these whom I have discussed, nor anybody else like them, has
stood in the substance and essence of the Lord, according to scripture, nor
has he either seen or expounded God’s nature.”’71
25. On the basis of these passages and citations Barlaam, who had
attacked holy matters in a pernicious and unholy way, was censured and
66 Andronikos III died suddenly five days after the council (on 15 June 1341).
67 Ps 18 (19): 10.
68 Ps 33 (34): 10.
69 Mark 9: 5 = Luke 9: 33.
70 Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 10, 31d (PG 91, 1168A).
226 GREGORY PALAMAS
put to shame. Furthermore, our good Barlaam was found to have misrep-
resented and condemned in writing many of the practices of hesychasm.
Together with the prayer the hesychasts are accustomed to use, he attacked
rather the prayer of all Christians, the ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have
mercy on me.’ For he discussed this prayer in his own words as follows:
26. ‘Among the many things which one could rightly lay as a charge
against the instigator of such teaching,72 I myself think that not least
among them is this, that in attempting to overturn the Christian sacraments
through inbreathings, he also slanders the fathers, as supposedly holding
before him the same opinions as he now teaches himself. O perverse and
polluted man, which of them ever called such monstrosity as you teach
“vigilance”, “guarding of the heart” and “attentiveness”? But they say that
it was prescribed for initiates to pray unceasingly in the following words:
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” From this one can
therefore see who it was who was the inventor of inbreathing. For he does
not prescribe the Our Father, which the Bogomils make pre-eminent use
of. For he thought that thus it would become obvious. With these words,
instead he proposes sticking simply to this short prayer throughout one’s
life and leaves all other prayers to be considered a heaping up of empty
phrases. With these words again, when in this prayer all Christians invoke
“Our Lord Jesus Christ and our God,” he has changed “our God” into “Son
of God,” and by these words has very clearly revealed his own unorthodox
belief to us. Whether he changed “our God” to “Son of God” in the said
prayer to accord with the doctrine of the Bogomils or for some other reason,
no one can say.’73
27. That is what the most perverse Barlaam has written, which assuredly
contradicts the most blessed voice of the foundation of faith, Peter, the chief
of the apostles and the Master’s pronouncement of blessedness upon it. For
Peter said to him: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and the
Lord replied: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for flesh and blood
has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”74 Moreover, in the
symbol of faith we say: “We believe in one God, Father almighty, and in
the Son of God, the only begotten, who was begotten of the Father before
72 I.e. the late thirteenth-century Athonite, Nikephoros the Hesychast (PLP 20325), on
whom see Rigo 1991.
73 This long citation (§ 26) purports to be from Barlaam’s lost Against the Messalians, on
which see Fyrigos 2005, 113–59.
74 Matt 16: 16–17.
all the ages.”75 Therefore do we not glorify Christ as God when we say we
believe in the Son of God?
28. On the topic of this sacred prayer the golden-mouthed and divine
teacher John wrote to the monks, saying: ‘Be still always and wait on the
Lord our God until he has pity on us, and do not seek anything else other
than mercy alone from the Lord of glory. And in seeking mercy, seek with
a humble and merciful heart and cry out from morning to evening, and
if possible throughout the night too, the phrase “Lord Jesus Christ, Son
of God, have mercy on us.” I therefore entreat you, force your minds to
perform this work until death, for much force is needed for this work,
because “the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life”76 and
those who force themselves enter through it, for the kingdom of heaven
belongs to the violent.77 I therefore beg you, do not separate your hearts
from God but cleave to him and guard your heart with the remembrance
of our Lord Jesus Christ always, until the name of the Lord is implanted
within it, and do not think of anything else than Christ’s being magnified
within you. I therefore beg you, never abandon this rule of prayer or hold
it in contempt, but whether you are eating, or drinking, or on a journey, or
whatever you are doing, cry out without ceasing: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son
of God, have mercy upon us.” For “pray without ceasing,” says the divine
Apostle, “without anger or argument.”’78
29. And the divine Diadochus says: ‘When we have blocked all its outlets
by means of the remembrance of God, the intellect requires of us impera-
tively some task which will satisfy its need for activity. For the complete
fulfilment of its purpose we should give it the prayer “Lord Jesus”. “No
one,” it is written, “says ‘Lord Jesus’ except in the Holy Spirit.”79 Those
who always mediate unceasingly upon this holy and glorious name in the
depths of their heart can sometimes see the light of their own intellect. For it
is able perceptibly to burn up all the filth that covers the surface of the soul;
for it is written: “Our God is a consuming fire.”80 Then the Lord awakens
in the soul a great love for his glory. For when the intellect with fervour
75 From the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.

76 Matt 7: 14.
77 Cf. Matt 11: 12.
78 1 Thes 5: 17 and 1 Timothy 2: 18. The passage is from Ps.-John Chrysostom, Letter to
the Monks, 2–5 (Nikolopoulos, 481).
79 1 Cor 12: 3.
80 Deut 4: 24.
228 GREGORY PALAMAS
of heart maintains persistently its remembrance of that glorious and much

longed for name, it implants in us a constant love for its goodness. For this
is the pearl of great price which one can acquire by selling all that one has,
and so experience the inexpressible joy of making it one’s own.’81
30. It would take too long to cite the precepts and exhortations of the
God-bearing fathers concerning this theme or having some bearing upon
it. And so with the monks asserting that the delightful and divine practice
of the Spirit-moved intelligence of the God-bearing fathers has from the
beginning been this prayer, and at the same time wishing immediately
afterwards to string together everything on this topic that lies in the
writings of the saints – such as the saying in the ladder of spiritual ascent
constructed out of words. ‘Let the remembrance of Jesus,’ it says, ‘be glued
to your breath, and then you will enter upon the benefit of stillness’82 – with
the monks most eager to say such things one after another, the emperor,
admirable in every respect, who has just recently come to the blessed end
of his life, addressed the assembly again as the anointed of the Lord on
behalf of the anointed Christ. ‘Let it be,’ he said, ‘and let it be granted
that whatever people who hold false beliefs say is the first principle is in
no way on that account properly to be considered a charge against them
even though they understand it wrongly. For because the Persians speak
of a god of heaven we do not say that Abraham wrongly says “I worship
the God of heaven.”83 Nor because the Hellenes call God a world-creating
intellect do we deny that he is the creator of the world. Or in saying this are
we rightly accused of thinking as they do? For the Hellenes say that matter
is without beginning and co-eternal with God. They call God creator of
the world, not as one who brings forth what previously had not yet in any
way being, but as the organizer of being, who adds to what exists only
order, form and harmonious position, a little like the production of art in
the human sphere, not attributing anything more than that to the power of
God. We, however, believing that all things have received their progression
from non-being into being from God, know him as the “maker of heaven
and earth” and of what lies in between. In the same way, when we call
our Lord Jesus Christ “Son of God”, we praise him and call upon him as
“true God from true God”, both confessing the divinity of the Son and
witnessing to the cause of the Son’s divinity. It is said that both Messalians
81 Diadochus of Photike, On Spiritual Knowledge 59 (Des Places, 119).

82 John Climacus, Step 27 (PG 88, 1112C 10–11).
83 Gen 24: 3 (LXX).
and Bogomils use the prayer taught by the Lord to his holy disciples and
apostles. Why, then, should we abstain from this ourselves for that reason
and utterly betray it to those who have wrongly stolen what belongs to us
and gag our voices because of those who simulate in words the piety of the
truly devout? Perish the utterly shameful thought! No, because “we have an
advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the atoning
sacrifice for our sins”,84 let us call on his name with hope and as a result of
such an invocation win salvation in accordance with the prophet’s saying
“and it shall be that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord should
be saved”.85 And since indeed “there is no other name under heaven given
among mortals by which we must be saved”, and “no one can say ‘Jesus is
Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit”,86 and “at the name of Jesus Christ every
knee shall bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth”, blessed is
he who through constant meditation on this much-hymned name has God
dwelling within him “for ever”, for it is written that “those who love your
name will rejoice and you will pitch your tent among them and they will
exult in you.”87 And how is it that he who strives day and night to hold this
divine and supremely glorified name in his heart would not become full
of the Holy Spirit, when the Lord says in the gospels that “he will give the
Holy Spirit to those who ask him day and night.”’88
31. In consequence, Barlaam was proved to have committed blasphemy
and doctrinal error in what he was saying about the divine light of Tabor
and in what he had written against the monks concerning the holy prayer
practised and frequently uttered by them. The monks, for their part, were
declared innocent of the charge he had brought against them, as men who
loved the commentaries and traditions of the holy fathers concerning these
matters and were faithful to them, as they themselves clearly confessed
and affirmed. Then by the common vote of the synod, seeing that Barlaam,
as already stated, had impugned holy things wrongly and erroneously, he
was convicted and at that point went on to seek pardon in addition. We
therefore declare that if he truly demonstrates repentance and corrects
himself and is in no way detected speaking and writing about such things,
then may he prosper. But if he does not, let him be excommunicated and
84 1 John 2: 1–2.
85 Joel 3: 5 (quoted in Acts 2: 21).
86 1 Cor 12: 3.
87 Ps 5: 12.
88 Luke 11: 13 (without ‘day and night’).
230 GREGORY PALAMAS
cut off from the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ and orthodox
community of Christians. Moreover, if anybody else is found in the future
accusing the monks of anything drawn from what has been blasphemously
and erroneously uttered or written by Barlaam against the monks, or
rather against the Church itself, or is found attacking them at all in similar
terms, let him be subject to the same judgement that has been given by our
humility and be himself excommunicated from the same holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church of Christ and orthodox community of Christians. We
declare solemnly, with spiritual severity and under threat of punishment,
that from now on and henceforth no one is to discuss these matters or other
dogmatic issues, either in writing, that is to say, or not in writing, because
from this arise no small scandals for the Church of God, and confusion and
disturbance, a tossing motion and a rolling swell come upon the souls of
hearers, and especially of the more simple. It was assuredly for this reason
that the divine canons discussed above were enacted by the God-bearing
and holy fathers. So that no one in the future will fall into similar errors,
we have exercised foresight and drawing up the present document for
security have appended our own signatures in the month of July of the
ninth Indiction.89
89 July 1341. The list of signatories has not been transmitted.
III
LETTERS FROM PRISON IN CONSTANTINOPLE
Letters from Prison in Constantinople
Introduction
The four letters translated below belong to the period of the civil war when
Palamas was first living under house arrest and was then (from April/May
1343 to February 1347) detained in the prison of the Blachernai palace.
They are the following:
1. Letter to John Gabras (26 December 1342–11 February 1343).1
2. Letter to Philotheos (November/December 1344).2
3. Letter to Bessarion (1345, probably the second half).3
4. Letter to the Empress Anna Palaiologina (end of 1345–beginning of
1346).4
John Gabras belonged to an impoverished noble family some of whose
members had posts in the imperial civil service.5 Palamas wrote to him
after a disciple of Akindynos had brought him a copy of Akindynos’
refutation of his Dialogue of an Orthodox with a Barlaamite. Gabras was
a friend of both Palamas and Akindynos but at this time sympathized
more with Akindynos’ theology. He was the recipient of at least two letters
from Akindynos.6 A letter also survives from Akindynos to the disciple
who brought Palamas the copy of his refutation.7 Palamas’ lively letter to
Gabras illustrates the social networking that was an integral element of
1 Sinkewicz 2002, 147, W27.

2 Sinkewicz 2002, 149–50, W37.
3 Sinkewicz 2002, 149, W34. The Letter to Bessarion, formerly thought to belong to
1343–44, has been redated by Antonio Rigo; see Rigo 2015a, 261–3.
4 Sinkewicz 2002, 150, W39.
5 PLP 3355.
6 Letters 3 and 32 (Hero, 10 and 116–20).
7 Letter 30 (Hero, 104–12); see also Hero’s commentary, 356–8.
232 GREGORY PALAMAS
the Hesychast Controversy. In the letter Palamas does his best to convince
Gabras (through reporting his conversation with his visitor) that it is he,
not Akindynos, who is faithful to the teaching of the Fathers. In defending
his essence–energies distinction Palamas denies that he is introducing
divisions into the Godhead or implying the existence of inferior and
superior deities. Yet the distinction is necessary, he argues, if human
beings are really to participate in the divine glory of the Transfiguration.
Sinkewicz notes that Gabras was the author of an anti-Palamite treatise
refuted by Joseph Kalothetos (d. after 1355), but that subsequently he was
apparently won over to the Palamite side and became a monk.8
The Letter to John Gabras was written before Palamas’ arrest on a
political charge, when he was staying at one of his monastic retreats in
the neighbourhood of Constantinople, perhaps at Anaplous.9 The letters
addressed to Philotheos and Bessarion belong to a group sent by Palamas
to his supporters on Athos from his prison in the Blachernai palace.10
They show how Palamas kept his Athonite brethren abreast of ecclesi-
astical events in Constantinople. On 4 November 1344 Palamas had been
excommunicated by the patriarchal synod on the grounds that by continuing
to publish writings on the Hesychast Controversy (which he was able to
do because he was being held on a political, not an ecclesiastical, charge)
he was contravening the prohibition of the discussion of dogmatic issues
laid down in the last clause of the Synodal Tomos of 1341.11 Immediately
after his excommunication he wrote to the Athonite elders (the heads of
monasteries on Athos) and to Philotheos (at that time hegoumenos of the
Lavra12) to defend himself against the ‘manifest calumny’ to which he was
8 Sinkewicz 2002, 147.

9 Palamas gives information about his movements at this time in his Letter to the
Athonite Elders, § 4 (Sinkewicz 2002, 149, W36; now dated by Rigo to November/December
1344 [Rigo 2015a, 270–1]) and in his Letter to Philotheos, §§ 13–21.
10 This group of letters has been the subject of an important study by Antonio Rigo
(Rigo 2015a). The letters in chronological order are: (1) First Letter to his Brother Makarios
(October 1344); (2) Letter to the Athonite Elders (November/December 1344); (3) Letter
to Philotheos (November/December 1344); (4) Second Letter to his Brother Makarios
(beginning of 1345); (5) Letter to Bessarion (second half [?] of 1345). Letters (3) and (5) are
translated below. Most of letter (4) is translated above, in Philotheos’ Life of Palamas, § 71.
11 Mercati 1931, 195. The encyclical announcing the excommunication (published by
Allatius 1648, 817–20 and reprinted by Migne, PG 150, 891–4) was refuted by Palamas at the
beginning of 1345 in his Refutation of the Patriarchal Letter (Sinkewicz 2002, 142–3, W13).
12 Philotheos was hegoumenos of the Lavra from after spring 1342 to before June 1345
(Rigo 2015a, 262).
LETTERS FROM PRISON IN CONSTANTINOPLE 233
being subjected in Constantinople, maintaining that his teaching was in

complete conformity with the Hagioretic Tomos of 1340 and the Synodal
Tomos of 1341. Kalekas had apparently not yet sent official notice of the
excommunication to Athos.13 So Palamas was able to get his version of
events to the Athonites in advance.14 The letter to Bessarion is addressed
by Palamas to a senior monk at the Lavra to assure the brethren of his
own community that the Hesychast Controversy is not, as some may have
thought, about ‘peering inquisitively into matters that are susceptible of
different interpretations’ but concerns the nature of ‘piety’ (the orthodox
Christian faith) itself.15 It contains separate greetings to his close personal
friends and disciples, the Blates brothers.
The Letter to the empress Anna Palaiologina was written some months
later when the political situation was beginning to turn in Palamas’ favour.16
The empress was clearly beginning to explore ways of distancing herself
from the patriarch John Kalekas. At her invitation Palamas wrote briefly to
outline the main points of the Hesychast Controversy, which in his opinion
centred on the nature of the light of the Transfiguration. Palamas’ letter
was followed in September 1346 by a report to the empress signed by six
metropolitans and an archbishop denouncing the patriarch for sustaining
the condemned doctrines of Barlaam.17 The empress was finally persuaded
to summon a synod (comprising about ten bishops and the protos of Mount
Athos) to depose Kalekas on 2 February 1347.18
Text
The letters are translated below from the critical edition published by
Christou and reprinted by Perrella:
1. Letter to John Gabras: Christou II, 325–62 (Perrella III, 624–90).
2. Letter to Philotheos: Christou II, 517–38 (Perrella III, 970–1010).
13 Meyendorff 1959, 115.

14 It is noteworthy, as Rigo has pointed out (Rigo 2015a, 282–3), that it was the Lavra
rather than the central authority on Athos that exercised itself on behalf of Palamas.
15 Bessarion (PLP 2706) is known only from this letter.
16 For a detailed discussion of the events of 1345–6, see Rigo 2015b.
17 Critical text with Italian translation in Rigo 2015b, 334–9.
18 See Dennis 1960, who discusses the text of the Tomos issued by this synod.
234 GREGORY PALAMAS
3. Letter to Bessarion: Christou II, 501–4 (Perrella III, 944–50).

4. Letter to the Empress Anna Palaiologina: Christou II, 545–7
(Perrella III, 1022–6).
Translations of these letters are available in Modern Greek (Christou) and
Italian (Perrella). This is their first translation into English.
Text
1. TO JOHN GABRAS
Gregory Palamas to the most wise, most learned, and most dear to me in
the Lord, John Gabras.
1. Solomon says somewhere in Proverbs: ‘Give instruction to the wise

man, and he will become wiser still’.19 We, therefore, persuaded by him
who has commanded and exhorted and who, according to Scripture, was
wiser than all who had preceded him, offer a nudge on behalf of piety to
your wisdom through this letter, not furnished very much with beauty
through art and Attic graces – for it has been produced for the most part
using rather inelegant words – but embellished well enough with the light
of truth, which I have acquired to the best of my ability and which makes
the sincerity of a healthy intellect flash forth from within, and indicates
sufficiently, I believe, the accuracy of the presentation of the matter under
discussion from every aspect. For I have given much thought to this. If the
exhortation of a wise man is effective and profitable for those who submit
to it, it is now up to you to exhibit the start of what is expected.
2. Yesterday, then, towards the late morning, I took in my hands one
of the volumes of holy writings and came out from the inner part of the
cell to a space more open to the light so as to read it. The gatekeeper
of the monastery came to find me and told me that somebody I knew
wanted to see me and was waiting in the forecourt of the gate. He told me
his name. I understood from his name who he was, one of Akindynos’
company, who had first, I believe, before Akindynos, frequented the
notorious Barlaam.
19 Prov 9: 9.
Nevertheless, I told him to admit the man standing at the gate, and I put
down the book I had in my hand. When he met me, believe me, even before
he sat down there fell from his mouth the arguments of the wicked opposition
which these people have perniciously transferred from Pyrrho’s scepticism
to divine matters.20 For my part, while I listened to him I began to smile, and
frequently invited him to sit down. So then he sat down. And there came
into my mind the words of Basil the Great: ‘How then can I be an innovator,
when I speak in harmony with those who are distinguished for the power of
their intellect and spirit?’21 And he adds: ‘Everywhere is full of our calumi-
nators, or rather, these things are sad and painful for the hearts of those who
seek peace.’ When I recalled this instead of smiling I began to frown. And
as the one sitting by me did not put a stop to his fallacious reasoning, but
drew absurd conclusions hostile to me, I was obliged to respond to him. And
this great exponent of demonstrative proofs, as he had thought earlier, when
I replied to his propositions and demolished them without any difficulty, was
incapable of drawing any conclusion.
In the end he refused to speak. ‘There was a time,’ he said, ‘when
you thought you had defeated Akindynos in this way, by confounding the
arguments. But listen to what has been written by him in rhetorical style in
reply to what you have entitled Dialogue of an Orthodox with a Barlaamite.22
3. Having said this, he took it into his hands out of the fold of his
garment, and went through it by himself, picking out the best arguments,
which he had marked with wax.
I said to him: ‘Well then, Akindynos has clearly demonstrated what he
has often denied, that he is a Barlaamite. For he responds as if our Dialogue
written against the Barlaamites were directed against him. And he thinks
to write in a rhetorical style about God as if this is appropriate and most
proper. Nevertheless, read what you wish, perhaps now you will see the
point of the proverb, “you are pulling along a horse on the plain.”’23 For
I was full of confidence, seeing that I had already studied such writings,
since three days previously someone who had purposely pretended in a
clever fashion to share their point of view had brought them all to me. You
20 Pyrrho, the founder of the sceptical school of philosophy at the beginning of the third
century BC, held that no positive knowledge was possible.
21 Cf. Basil, On the Holy Spirit XIII, 29 (PG 32, 208CD).
22 Sinkewicz 2002, W8, dated autumn 1341.
23 ‘Proverbial of challenging a person to do that in which they excell’ (Liddell and Scott,
s.v. pedion with reference to Plato, Theaetetus 183d).
236 GREGORY PALAMAS
know, then, where in the Dialogue it is shown from the words of the fathers
that the essence of God transcends every power and divine energy, differing
from them in its ineffability and inaccessibility. Having no argument to
offer against this manifest demonstration, Akindynos resorts to loathsome
sophistry, which my visitor proceeded to read. This is how it went:
‘Rather, it belongs to me to ask questions and to you to reply. Tell me,
then. Do you say that these lower powers and deities are creators of beings,
or do you say that they are gods and uncreated divinities and coeternal
with the great God who transcends all things, without, however, being the
creators of everything? If the first is the case, you speak against our divine
fathers and the rules of piety, from which we have learned that there is only
one creator of the universe, the supreme God. If the second is the case,
listen to the divine voice which says that the gods of the Greeks, despite
having heard, are perishing: “Let the gods who did not make heaven and
earth perish.”24 And so let your gods, who are infinitely an infinite number
of times inferior to him who transcends all things hear this and perish,
whether you call them creators or not creators of the universe. With regard
to one of them, you boldly cry out: “for how does God not deify me?” saying
that the grace that deifies you is without substance, without hypostasis,
activated and an infinite number of times infinitely inferior to the Trinity
which has created everything. And taking what our divine fathers say
about our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ and the all-holy Spirit to
those who impiously thought them to be creatures, you apply it ignorantly
to the energy which is without substance and without hypostasis, activated
and an infinite number of times infinitely inferior to the trihypostatic God
who transcends all things, and in such impious a fashion that one of two
conclusions necessarily follows: either such energies share in the status of
the Son and the Spirit and are hypostases and persons, so that the Trinity
is no longer a triad, but a myriad consisting of persons and hypostases,
or else the Son and the Spirit share in the status of these energies, so that
the Son of God the Father and our God and the Holy Spirit are without
substance and without hypostasis, and thus alien to the divine essence and
inferior, like things acted upon in relation to the actor, or things without
substance in relation to substance, or what is divisible in relation to the
indivisible, and, in a nutshell, infinitely an infinite number of times. What
could anyone conceive of that is more impious than this?’25
24 Jer 10: 11.

25 Gregory Akindynos, Refutatio Magna III, 40; French trans. Nadal 2006, vol. 1, 242–3.
4. I sat listening and at the same time considering within myself the
absurdity of the author’s babbling and the pitiable character of the impiety
mixed in with it, which also applied to the man who had read them, rather
than the arguments against which Akindynos had nothing to say.
‘It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that Akindynos jests with things which are
not to be jested with and shadow-boxes, but does so against his own head
and soul and against those of you who pay attention to his words. For who
among us says that there are many creators? Who thinks that there are
greater and lesser gods? Who has cut off the divine powers and energies
from the divine essence and then considered them makers, or not makers,
of beings? Who, apart from Akindynos and those who think like him, has
alienated the powers of God, the visionary power, the deifying power,
the brilliance that was demonstrated on the mountain, and what closely
resembles them, on the grounds that they do not belong to the essence and
has stupidly classed them with created entities? He has therefore composed
these nonsensical refutations either in vain, or against nobody, or against
himself. Whereas everywhere in his discourses there is much mention by
him of “higher” and “lower”, here he has not only set it out at the beginning,
in the middle and at the end, for the purpose of slandering us, but has also
added “infinitely an infinite number of times”.26 Where has he found this
in my own writings? I know that I have not said this anywhere in my own
writings.’
My interlocutor said, ‘It may be found in the Dialogue itself and in the
Hagioretic Tomos.’27
‘Bring me that Tomos,’ I said to my servant, who happened to be
passing, ‘which is lying near my pillow.’
‘Well now, Akindynos imputes impiety to the mountain which takes its
name from holiness, making himself polluted, as it seems.’28
Then taking the Tomos into my hands and opening it, I found the place and
showed it to him where it is not Palamas but the divine Maximus who writes
this. For three chapters from the first of his theological centuries are quoted
in testimony of the uncreated nature of the divine energies. And two of these
26 This phrase (from Maximus the Confessor) is repeated by Akindynos on many

occasions throughout his writings.
27 The Hagioretic Tomos, issued by the protos and council of the Holy Mountain in the
summer of 1340, was in fact drawn up by Palamas (Sinkewicz 2002, W4). There is an Eng.
trans. in Sinkewicz 2002, 183–8.
28 Akindynos had himself spent some time on the Holy Mountain.
238 GREGORY PALAMAS
testify on either side to the uncreated nature of all the participations.29 ‘The
things which participate in these,’ he says, ‘that is, angels and human beings,
and the life and immortality that are in them by nature, began to be in time.’
‘The things which are participated,’ he says, ‘such as goodness, being, life,
immortality and, in short, all that is contemplated essentially around God, did
not begin in time, even though the things that participate in them themselves
have their origin in time.’30 He said that participables did not come into being,
and added ‘in time’, because they are not unoriginate in terms of causality,
since they have God as their principle of origin with regard to essence, just
as Maximus says at the end of the first chapter: ‘All goodness is without
beginning because there is no time prior to it, since it has God eternally as
the unique author of its being.’31 Here he called even eternity time, precisely
because he is also speaking theologically about the Son: ‘If you take the origin
to be in time,’ it says, ‘he is still unoriginate, for he is the maker of time, not
subject to time.’32 But Akindynos, who calls all things creatures whether they
are participables or participators, should learn that nothing belongs to the
created order which does not have its being by participation, and he should
listen to the one who says: ‘Only God is only participated; creation only
participates in being, but does not transmit being.’33 If then Akindynos says
that these participables, that is, the being and life that are participated, do not
have being by participation, they are not exterior to God; for it is only he who
does not have being by participation. Therefore he manifestly makes God a
creature by classifying him among the created beings, for he does not take
account of the fact that the principles of the art of anything are in the artist.34
And if he says that participables also have their being by participation, these
will inevitably belong to the class of participants, not to that of participables.
It would then be necessary to seek some other things that are participable, and
if these in turn have their being by participation, again to seek further things,
and so on ad infinitum, until we come to the uncreated energies of the divine
29 Maximus the Confessor, Two Centuries on Theology and the Economy I, 48–50 (PG
90, 1100–1).
30 Maximus the Confessor, Two Centuries on Theology and the Economy I, 48 (PG 90,
1101B).
31 Maximus the Confessor, Two Centuries on Theology and the Economy I, 48, 1101A.
Eng. trans. Palmer et al. 1981, 124 (modified).
32 Cf. Thalassius, Century IV, 100 (PG 91, 1469C).
33 Passage not identified.
34 Cf. Arethas, scholion 227 on Aristotle’s Categories, used by Basil, On the Holy Spirit
XXVI, 61.
nature, that is to say, to the nature which is participated by everything which

has begun to be, but which does not participate in anything but sustains beings
and exercises providential care over them, by which beings that participate in
them are watched over and sustained and share in the life by which all things
live which have begun to live, on the levels of sense, mind and reason.
5. Now, participation in being itself in no way participates in anything,
just as the great Dionysius says,35 but the other participables insofar as they
exist as participables and the principles of beings, do not participate in the
least in anything – for providence does not participate in providence, nor does
life participate in life – but insofar as they have being are said to participate in
being-in-itself, as without this they cannot even be participants, just as there
is no foreknowledge without knowledge. Which is why the divine Maximus
in these Chapters also says about all these in common: ‘For non-being is
never prior to virtue, nor to any of the other things we have mentioned.’36
And again: ‘All virtue is without beginning, because it has no time prior
to it, since it has God eternally as the unique author of its being.’37 And a
little above, perfectly shutting the still open mouth of Akindynos, who with
these arguments reduces the divine to a creature, says: ‘These things around
God are contemplated essentially.’38 And in the fiftieth chapter he declares
openly: ‘There was no time when such things did not exist.’39 What is partic-
ipable and not a participant is so far from being a creature that even the great
theologian Gregory refers to this in his hymn to the divine Spirit, saying that
the Holy Spirit is participable, not a participant,40 and the great Athanasius
presents him as uncreated when he writes: ‘Again from this one can see that
the Holy Spirit is participable and not participating – one should not shrink
from saying the same things – “For it is impossible,” it says, “that those who
have once been enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift and become
participants in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the beautiful word of God.”41
35 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names I, 5–6, 593C–596C (Suchla, 116–19).

1101A).
1101A).
1100D).
1101B).
41 Heb 6: 4–5.
240 GREGORY PALAMAS
And if angels and the other creatures are participants of the same Spirit – for
it is for this reason that they were also able to fall from that in which they
participated, the Spirit being always the same and participable, but creatures
being participants in him – the Holy Spirit cannot be an angel or, in short, a
creature. The Holy Spirit is participable with respect to his energies, but not
with respect to his essence.’42 Again the same Maximus declares: ‘The divine
is imparticipable with respect to essence. Accordingly, even what is partic-
ipable, in which both angels and human beings participate, is uncreated but
is not the divine essence.’43 Therefore two of the three chapters of the divine
Maximus say that the participated divine energies are without beginning,
while the one in between the two says that God ‘infinitely an infinite number
of times’ transcends all participants and participables, at all events with
respect to essence.44 If anyone objects to ‘infinitely an infinite number of
times,’ let him make measurements and let us know how transcendent the
participables are with respect to the participants and the divine essence is
with respect to the participables.
6. In fact, when I demonstrated these things to my interlocutor sitting
beside me, I said: ‘Could it be that Akindynos openly raves against the
saints and continues to put forward Palamas as some kind of mask to
conceal his blasphemy against them? And yet given that the Dialogue
against the Barlaamites is in circulation, we also find written in it: “since all
that are participants, not being participations, have a beginning in time.”45
Participations have never begun to be, according to the divine Maximus,
even if in his view God transcends them all infinitely an infinite number
of times. How then is Palamas guilty of the charges, when Maximus spoke
in this way? Or rather, how is not Palamas above any false accusation,
covering his accusers with manifest ignominy, when he agrees with the
divine Maximus and when he cites his theological discussions?’
‘And how,’ he said, ‘did Saint Maximus come to write in the way that
he did?’
‘We have been taught,’ I said, ‘to follow the saints and not call them to
account and subject them to copious examination. Nevertheless, we know
42 Athanasius of Alexandria, To Serapion I, 27 (PG 26, 593AC).

43 Maximus the Confessor, Various Texts I, 7 (PG 90, 1180C).
1101A).
45 Gregory Palamas, Dialogue of an Orthodox with a Barlaamite 24 (Christou II, 186,
Perrella I, 1166), quoting Maximus the Confessor, Two Centuries on Theology and the
Economy I, 49 (PG 90, 1101A).
that with respect to essence the divine is higher than anything that partic-
ipates, in whatever way it has been described or conceived. For that height
is untouched by any mental conception, as it is removed in its essence from
everything, and therefore is beyond any expression and participation. We
do not, however, on this account reckon as created all that is conceived in
a manner befitting God as around the essence, for we hear him who says:
“Everything that is conceived of as around God was from before the creation
of the world, but we say that these have been named after the one who names
them has come into being.”46 And we are also taught by the great Athanasius,
who after stating that the Saviour did not say “all that the Father has is
mine” with reference to created things, said, listing what was common to
the Father, Son and Spirit: “It is to be good, just, infinite and immortal, and
all that is around the essence, as he himself teaches in other places, which
is contemplated, discussed theologically and celebrated in hymns, each of
which, as he again himself says, is not essence but is around the essence.”47
7. ‘But you class with creation everything that differs in any way from
God’s essence and everything that does not mount up to that height, on
account of the essence being imparticipable, inexpressible and in every
respect beyond intellectual comprehension, and you recklessly drag
down its transcendence. For the great Maximus taught about God that he
transcended even this, placing him beyond everything said of him in that
he is without name and beyond name,48 seeing that the great Dionysius,
too, says that God transcends every affirmation and negation, and that the
transcendence of essence is an affirmation, even if it has the force of a
supreme negation.49 But the theologians say that the divine transcends even
this. It seems that it is not resentment against Palamas that moves you but
resentment against the majesty itself of the Creator. For Palamas has not
said anything other than that with respect to essence God is superior to
everything that in any way may be spoken, or participated or conceived
intellectually, exalting in gratitude him who has raised him up from the
tumult below, and what is greater as a reason for piety, has said that he does
not compose and demonstrate the divine hymn out of his own resources,
even though he is driven by necessity to contradict those who maintain
46 Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius II, 1, 167 (GNO I).

47 Ps.-Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Annunciation of the Mother of God 3 (PG 28,
920C).
48 Maximus the Confessor, Various Texts I, 7 (PG 90, 1180C).
49 Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology 3, 1033C (Ritter, 147).
242 GREGORY PALAMAS
that everything that is not the divine essence is created and everything
that is uncreated is the essence of God, but exalts the God of the fathers
through the words of the fathers and refutes in a powerful manner those
who construct theological arguments that are contrary to the fathers. For
why do they cause a disturbance again, seizing an opportunity that is
very convenient for them? If Akindynos entertains the hope that the civil
war prevailing at the present time will never come to an end, and that the
books which affirm the patristic traditions will lie in some corner for all
time, and that he can dance in triumph over the truth without restraint, in
a manner appropriate to the present situation, not ceasing to write such
rubbish without taking any account of the justice that comes from on high,
he should know that if the situation causing the revolt comes to an end, he
will bring on himself much opprobrium.50 I do not need to say that even
now he incurs the opprobrium of the right-minded.
8. ‘Against whom does he direct the reproach concerning “inferior”
and “superior”? It has become absolutely clear that he does so against the
holy fathers, because in his folly he himself reduces the things that are
contemplated essentially around God, that is to say, that are contemplated
naturally around him, to the level of creation, which is the same as saying
that he clearly detaches the things around the divine essence which are the
subject of theological discussion and praise from that essence and on his
own initiative, and against the fathers, introduces the expression “inferior”,
not because he discovered that it had been used earlier by us, but because
it followed from the theological discussions of the saints, as Barlaam had
done before him.51 The dilemma and the double-edged sword which he
extended towards us, in accordance with which whether we say that the
powers of God are creative or whether we say that they are not creative, we
are uttering an impiety, for by saying that the divine powers are creative,
we make created things the works of another and not of the one God, but
by saying that the divine powers and energies are not creative we are again
speaking impiously because we are calling something uncreated, and
considering it such theologically, which has not created heaven and earth.
50 A rare reference by Palamas to contemporary political events, namely the civil war of
1341–47.
51 The accusation that Palamas taught the existence of higher and lower divinities was
first made by Barlaam in his Against the Messalians. See Palamas’ Third Letter to Akindynos,
§ 6. Cf. Nadal 1974b, who argues that Palamas redacted the original version of the letter to
distance himself from a view he later rejected.
And therefore this two-edged sword is not only brandished against us but
also against Gregory surnamed on account of his theology and Damascene
the divinely wise theologian and all the other saints.
9. ‘The theologian of Damascus says in the eighth chapter of his
dogmatics: “Generation in God is without beginning and eternal, being the
work of nature and producing out of his own essence, that the begetter may
not undergo change, and that he may not be a first god and a later god and
receive any addition. Creation, being a work of the will, is not coeternal
with God, because it does not happen that what is brought into being out of
non-being is coeternal with what is without beginning and everlasting.”52
And Gregory the great theologian, against those who say that the Son is
the Son of the will but not of the Father, if the Father willed to beget him,
says: “One who wills is different from the act of will, one who begets is
different from the act of begetting, and one who speaks is different from
the act of speaking, unless we have drunk too much. On the one hand there
is the mover and on the other the movement. Therefore what is willed does
not belong to the act of will, nor does what is begotten belong to the act of
begetting, nor does what is heard belong to the act of speaking, but they
belong to one who wills, the one who begets, and the one who speaks.”53
The fact therefore that the divine will differs from the divine nature and that
it is uncreated is also briefly presented by the Damascene theologian. For
he says that, appropriately to his two natures, Christ has duplicate natural
properties relative to the two natures, two natural wills, divine and human,
and two natural energies, divine and human.54 For how will the properties
of the nature not differ from the nature of which they are the properties
and to which they are appropriately attributed? And how is the natural
will and energy of God and freedom of choice not uncreated? For again,
to quote the same author, “the divine will of Christ is without beginning
and accomplishes everything, since it has the power of following suit.”55
What follows? Whereas the great Gregory the Theologian says, “one who
wills is different from the act of will” even in the case of God,56 and the
things produced by the will of God are not from the faculty of will but
from the one himself who wills – for he has given an account that is valid
52 John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 8 (I, 8) (Kotter, vol. 2, 21).

54 John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 57–8 (III, 13–14) (Kotter, vol. 2, 136–7).
55 John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 62 (III, 18) (Kotter, vol. 2, 160).
244 GREGORY PALAMAS
in all cases – Akindynos will say to him, with the shamelessness dear to
his disposition, “Listen to the divine voice which says that the gods of the
Greeks, despite having heard, are perishing: ‘Let the gods which have not
made heaven and earth perish.’57 May therefore your gods, whom you deny
are works and created products, also listen to this and perish.”’
10. ‘But he who is surnamed the Theologian did not also call the will of
God “deity”,’ said my interlocutor.
‘But you,’ I said to him in turn, ‘do not accuse us simply of saying
that there are many deities, but of saying that there is something else in
some way different from the essence of God. You also have the practice of
honouring what you say is alongside the essence of God by the appellation
“deity”, but you call all these “created deities”. So when the most theological
Gregory said that the will is different from God who wills, the will being
uncreated inasmuch as it naturally attached to God, does he too fall under
the same accusation that is directed by you against us? And indeed since he
says that this uncreated will is not the creator of the things willed, that is to
say, of the things created – for he said that the thing willed does not belong
to the divine will – he rightly becomes subject along with us to Akindynos’
abusive tongue and hand. For we too say that almighty God who is adored
in three hypostases has a creative power and energy which is uncreated,
one, and is possessed naturally in common by the three, but is not the nature
of the three, as “the one who wills is different from the act of willing”,
so the one who acts is different from the activity, for “the one belongs to
the mover and the other to the movement”.58 And the one who acts and
wills is the hypostasis, but the willing and the acting are the movement
of the nature, as the Damascene states under divine inspiration when he
says, “The actor (energōn) is one thing, the power of action (energētikon)
is another, the activity (energeia) is another, and the product of the activity
(energēma) is another. The product is the result of the activity. The activity
is the effective and essential movement of the nature. The power of action
is the nature from which the activity (energeia) proceeds. The actor is the
one who exercises the activity, that is, the hypostasis.”59
11. ‘Now we also say that God, who is worshipped by us in three
hypostases, has a creative energy, and following the great Gregory we say
that the works of creation belong to him who is omnipotent and acts, but not
57 Gregory Akindynos, Refutatio Magna III, 40, quoting Jer 10: 11.
to this creative power and energy. It is thus that he is for us the one creator
of the universe. Let Akindynos, together with the many gods invented by
him, both creators and non-creators, share in the biblical curse pronounced
by him. And may it be that not only he should perish but also his perverse
conduct, the terrible malignity that dwells within him, and his pernicious
opinions. We do not call the creative power and energy “deity”, just as the
theologian does not call the willing power “deity” either. So, then, either he
shares in the reproach with us, by saying that the one who wills and the act
of will are different, and, moreover, that the products of the will belong to
the one who wills, not to the act of willing – just as we say that the one who
acts and the activity (energeia) are different, and, moreover, that the things
that are made belong to the one who acts, not to the activity – or else, he too
will share under an impartial judge, in the reproach made by Akindynos,
or together with him we too will be utterly above Akindynos’ slanders, in
that we venerate one creator of all things. But whereas, on the one hand, the
creative power is not called a “deity” by the fathers, on the other, the power
of the vision of God does have this appellation. For we ourselves in the same
Dialogue have cited Gregory of Nyssa, who speaks under divine inspiration
and writes: “The divine nature remains unutterable and inexpressible,
transcending every meaning that can be voiced. Therefore the term ‘deity’
represents not the nature but the power of the vision of the Spirit.”60 And
the great Basil says, “Even if the name ‘deity’ should indicate nature, the
community of essence forces us to conclude that this appellation is properly
applied to the Holy Spirit also, but I do not know how those who construct
arguments about everything take the term ‘deity’ to indicate the nature.
Therefore the appellation bears an indication of a kind of power, either of
oversight or of energy. The divine nature, however, in all the names devised
for it remains as it is, incomprehensible, as our discourse has it.”61
12. ‘These authors, then, in these passages call “deity” the power of
vision and the authority to be active and to exercise oversight, but elsewhere
in their discourses they also apply it to other powers of God. The great
Dionysius does so to the essence of God and the providential power that
proceeds from the imparticipable God, deification itself, by which beings
that participate in it both are and are called “divine”.62 Nobody, unless
quite out of their mind, has placed the supervisory authority of God, which
60 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit (PG 46, 573D–576A).
61 Ps.-Basil of Caesarea, Letter 189, To Eustathius, 7–8 (Deferrari, vol. 3, 66–8).
62 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names XI, 6, 953 (Suchla, 222).
246 GREGORY PALAMAS
is to say his providence and contemplatory power of knowing all things

before they come into being, in the category of created things. But even
the deifying power is manifestly a participation, since it is participated by
the deified, is uncreated. For Maximus, distinguished in divine matters,
taught just above that every participation is without beginning; and that
the essence of God transcends these participations by virtue of its ineffa-
bility and imparticibility, has been shown here by the great Basil and the
divine Gregory of Nyssa.63 And he has demonstrated further that even if
the contemplatory power of God is uncreated, it is not the Son of God or
the Holy Spirit; for each of these two is ineffable, and not simply ineffable
but is the same way as the Father. Besides the great Basil and the divine
Gregory of Nyssa, both the great Dionysius and the theological Maximus
say that God transcends in his essence even the uncreated participations
insofar as they are participated, by which it becomes perfectly clear that
these differ in many ways from the divine essence. And the creative
energy is not different from these, I mean from the contemplatory and
deifying energies, and that beings are not from them but from him who
activates everything, is here perfectly clear to all intelligent people: the
latter point, from the exhortation of the great Gregory, who says that
each thing that is activated belongs to the activator, not to the activity,
just as what is uttered belongs to the speaker not to the utterance;64 the
first point from the fact that God contemplates beings even before their
coming into existence, not that he creates them even before they come into
existence, but that there are those he deifies who have come into existence
but not at the same time as their coming into existence. What then? Will
Akindynos with a shameless face also repeat to all of these that very
clever remark, “Listen to the divine voice, which the gods of the Greeks
heard and perished: ‘Let the gods who did not make heaven and earth
perish’,”65 and “let those therefore called by you uncreated deities hear this
and perish as inferior to him who transcends all things, whether they are
creators or whether they are not creators”,66 the wretched man placing the
63 Cf. Maximus the Confessor, Various Texts I, 7 (PG 90, 1180C); Ps.-Basil of Caesarea,
Letter 189, To Eustathius 7–8 (Deferrari, vol. 3, 66–8); Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius
12 (PG 45, 1105C–1108B).
65 Gregory Akindynos, Refutatio Magna III, 40, quoting Jer 10: 11; French trans. Nadal
2006, vol. 1, 242.
66 Gregory Akindynos, Refutatio Magna III, 40, quoting Jer 10: 11; French trans. Nadal
2006, vol. 1, 242.
divine powers of God in the same class as the false gods and cursing these
with them?
13. ‘Whereas the power or energy of each of these is God himself –
he is power, according to the great Dionysius, as in himself excelling and
superexcelling all power and as infinitely powerful,67 and at the same time
if the movement is disconnected from what is moved it is impossible to
comprehend in itself what remains, but when the one who acts is called
to mind the activity is also without doubt tacitly signified with the actor,
and one who mentions the activity includes in this word the actor whose
activity it is – Akindynos (one shudders to hear it!) has not only reduced
God to a creature, but has classed him with the false gods, that is to say,
with the demons, for the gods of the gentiles are demons,68 and has cursed
him (what audacity!) with these. This is the point at which Akindynos’
writings directed against us have arrived. They set before us such a precise
standard of piety that if anyone at all ever had the desire to outdo his
followers in what is most disgraceful, I do not think they would get the
better of him. So much does he exceed the wickedness of the wicked by
bearing the ignominious reputation of victory over them.
14. ‘But we, for our part, having nobly leaped over the first of the two
parts of his widely spread snare, or rather, having brought down, destroyed
and crushed the head of the intellectual serpent which through him utters
blasphemy against heaven69 – for a sole Creator has been declared by us,
the trihypostatic Lord, the uncreated energy not being at all detrimental to
the unity, for the things made are attributed to the one who acts, not to the
activity70 – let us now shatter the second part. For even if we say that the
things made are of the divine energy or power, the Creator is for us still
one. But Akindynos will wail with his dilemmas and sophisms. For you
have already heard the one who said that begetting is the work of the divine
nature, but creation is the work of the divine will.71 Both are therefore
uncreated, but the one is the will of the nature, and the other, as you hear,
is another work. Let him too be a ditheist in your view, as Palamas is, for
he too has shown us the distinction between divine nature and energy, that
is to say, the will. But because, he says, that creation is also a work of the
67 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names VIII, 2, 899D (Suchla, 201).

68 I Corinthians 10: 19–22.
69 Ps 73 (72): 8.
248 GREGORY PALAMAS
divine will, but not of the divine nature, does it follow from this that there
is not one creator or that it is not the same God who is by nature over all
things? Is the divine John Damascene also subject to Akindynos’ drunken
insults? Away with such madness!
15. ‘But a second witness is also available who expresses himself theolog-
ically in the same manner. For the blessed Cyril in his Thesaurus writes as
follows about the above begetting: “If too begetting is the same as making,
the begetter is the one who makes what is begotten, and the maker is the
begetter of what is made. But making belongs to the energy, while begetting
belongs to the nature. Nature and energy are not the same.”72 Let him too
be a ditheist in your view as Palamas is, for he too has openly declared that
nature and energy are not the same. And now with regard to this there is our
own discourse. The latter said that to create belongs to the energy, not to the
nature, just as above it said that Christ heals by authority, demonstrating
that the healings were not the work of prayer, as in the case of the saints, but
the results of his own essential energy.73 Surely it is not that this discourse
too speaks of many creators, or sets aside him who is the one creator by
nature because it does not say that the uncreated energy is identical with
the uncreated nature? For how can that not be uncreated when the creation
of the things that have been made belongs to it and the results which are the
miracles also belong to it, seeing that the property of making belongs to this
but not to the nature? Palamas’ written defence of piety is in agreement with
these and those like them, who are so eminent in the power of their mind and
spirit, and it is rightly ranked with their theology and praised with it by those
who are endowed with intelligence and who are not disabled, with regard to
the rational part of their soul, by envy, the source of all evil.
16. ‘If Akindynos, the accuser of those who are praised, says that
created things are not works of the divine energy, because he thinks that
there is no difference between the divine nature and the divine energy, it is
evident that they are not works of the divine nature either. For in his view
uncreated nature and energy do not differ from each other. Consequently,
the God he calls great and superior to all things is not himself the maker
of the universe. And let him who has introduced such a God justly hear
the biblical curse cited by him against himself: “Let the gods who did
not make heaven and earth perish.”74 And if he does not wish to perish
72 Cyril of Alexandria, Thesaurus 18 (PG 75, 312C).

73 Passage not identified.
74 Jer 10: 11.
with them through being with them, let him acknowledge the difference –
which we have been taught by the saints, as was manifestly shown above
– between the uncreated and divine energy and nature, which are never in
the least way at all separable from each other. Moreover, let him not call
one of them Father and the other Son, that he might not fall into further
and worse impieties. For incomprehensibility, ineffability and imparticipa-
bility belong equally to them, and their power of willing and doing is one.
Therefore the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are one energy, one power,
one nature, but this does not mean that the divine power and energy and
the divine nature do not differ. Almost all the theologians say that things
which have one power and energy also have the same essence. And just as
the uncreated energy characterizes an uncreated essence, it is shown by
these that essence, power and energy are not absolutely the same. For what
is inferred is always different from the premises and what characterizes
differs from what is characterized. If Akindynos continues to maintain
that creatures are works of uncreated energy, which in his view has no
difference at all with regard to uncreated nature, he makes these works
of the nature, for according to him, there is no difference at all between
nature and energy. But according to the divine Cyril, to engender belongs
to the nature,75 and according to the Damascene theologian engendering
is a work of the divine nature.76 Therefore Akindynos either considers
created things which are engendered and the God who has engendered
them of the same substance, and thus again introduces a God who is the
creator of nothing, or he holds that even the Son and the Holy Spirit are
creatures, in virtue of their being from the Father’s nature, which is to say
that in his view they are engendered by his will, along with everything
else. So either let him know that he has classed himself with those who
bring down heaven to earth and number the creator with creation, or let
him hear again the biblical curse cited by him rightly directed against
himself: “Let the gods who did not make heaven and earth perish.”77 And
if he does not wish to perish with them and be classed with those who
make creation rise up against the creator, let him confess the difference
between the uncreated and divine energy and the nature, and not differ in
vain from Palamas, who expresses himself in harmony with the saints in
all things.

76 John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 8 (I, 8) (Kotter, vol. 2, 21–2).
77 Jer 10: 11.
250 GREGORY PALAMAS
17. ‘Now even if he too is able to say, although not in our manner,
that the divine power and energy differ from the divine nature, he brings
us a divine nature deprived of will and makes himself worse than the
Monotheletes.78 For the will of the divine nature is an energy and power,
which, if it differs in no way from the nature, we cannot say belongs to
the nature or is from the nature. For how can the same thing be said to
belong to itself or to be from itself? Who has even said that the divine
nature belongs to the divine nature, or that the nature also has a nature?
That is how illogical it is to say that essence and energy are totally without
difference. And how, moreover, will the light that shone round the apostles
on Tabor not also be created, as Barlaam says, if no uncreated property
differs in any way from the divine essence? For the one was seen, and in
the age to come will be seen, by the worthy; and by it the just will shine
like the sun79 and they will become co-eternal through having contem-
plated it, having been made radiant by it, and having shone resplendently
with it. “No one has stood in the substance and essence of God, according
to what is written, and seen or proclaimed the nature of God.”80 And it is
given by measure, apportioned indivisibly by the salvific righteousness of
him who gives to each according to merit, that which John Chrysostom
taught belongs to the divine energy but not to the divine essence, even if
the Baptist revealed to us that this is the Spirit himself.81 This energy, then,
is apportioned indivisibly but the divine essence is absolutely indivisible.
And that light is the splendour of the divine nature, while the divine
nature is that of which it is the splendour. And in accordance with this the
melodious prophet sings, “Let the splendour of our God rest upon us.”82 For
the saints do not just look at the splendour of God but they also experience
it blissfully.83 And the splendour of them and of their God is one, just as
Maximus, distinguished in divine matters, says that there is one energy of
God and of the saints.84 But that there is one nature of God and of the saints
nobody has hitherto had the audacity to say.’
78 The Monothelete doctrine (Christ has two natures but one will) was imposed by
imperial decree in the seventh century in an attempt to reconcile the monophysites to the
imperial Church. It was successfully resisted by Maximus the Confessor.
79 Matt 13: 43.
80 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28, 19 (Moreschini, 676), quoting Jer 23: 18.
81 Ps.-John Chrysostom (Severian of Gabala), On the Holy Spirit (PG 52, 826).
82 Ps 90 (89), 17.
84 Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 7 (PG 91, 1076C).
18. I was eager to develop further my discourse on the most divine

light, but the man who had brought me those rhetorical compositions of
Akindynos interrupted me, saying: ‘But does it not seem to you that the
holy Damascene says what is contrary to the great Gregory surnamed the
Theologian? For whereas the latter says that what has been willed does not
belong to the will, the Damascene father said that what has been created
belongs to the will. Surely these created things are the same as what has
been willed.’
‘It is not possible,’ I replied to him in turn, ‘that in any of these matters
the saints make contradictory assertions, or at any rate disagree, even if you,
through ignorance, introduce the idea that the God-bearers in many ways
disagree not only with each other but even with themselves. For when you
hear them calling the divine nature and the splendour of the divine nature
“deity”, and not only this but also the authority and power of foresight of him
who knows all things before they come into being, which is clearly uncreated
– how could it be otherwise? – and has the divine nature, in virtue of its being
in every respect inexpressible, imparticipable and incomprehensible, as
transcendent to itself, you bring an argument against them that they oppose
each other because there is one deity. And just as we have learned to think
there is one God, so we have been taught to confess one deity, for indeed they
do not affirm just one of the two but both of them together. Consequently, you
accuse us too of saying that there are two uncreated divinities, not knowing
either what you are saying or what it is you are confidently maintaining.
For indeed, just as we have learned to think of one God in three Persons,
who is not only absolutely and unconditionally transcendent, but is also
all-sovereign, all-providential, wise, just, good and, in a word, almighty, so
too we have been taught to confess one deity not only in the one transcendent
reality of the three adored Persons, but also in the one uncreated authority,
one uncreated providence, and all the others. Thus for us God is one because
there is one deity, and so we confess that there is one deity of Father, Son and
Spirit, not daring lawlessly as you do to split the supremely united almighty
monad into uncreated essence and certain created powers that according to
the theologians are always from it and in it.’
19. ‘And how is it that you too do not manifestly separate from God what
you call the uncreated powers and energies?’ said Akindynos’ companion.
‘For you say both that these are around God and that God transcends them.’
I replied in defence to him, ‘The fact that the discourse is naturally
somewhat susceptible to such an interpretation does not entail a division.
For when we speak of a man’s head or heart, we are not speaking of a man
252 GREGORY PALAMAS
apart from his head and his heart. Nor, when we say that the mind is the
best part of the inner man, are we speaking of a man apart from a mind.
Nor when we say that opinion and intellect are around the mind are we
speaking of a mind without them. Nor if one speaks of the hypostases as
around the essence is one saying that essence is separate from hypostasis
or that a hypostasis is without essence. And so not only do we not speak at
all of a created and an uncreated deity of God, but neither do we speak of
many uncreated deities. But when you wickedly and godlessly introduce
a novelty by making an unnatural division and strange circumcision with
regard to the one deity, on the one hand by saying that the uncreated
energy is not different from the uncreated essence – for thus God would
be only essence deprived of all energy – and on the other by making an
unnatural division through saying that every power is created which is not
essence, without so much as mentioning the power of the will, of which
the fathers spoke at length and for which they also suffered much.
20. ‘So because you have spoken in this way and do not bring
together the deity of the three hypostases and divide it in accordance
with the suggestions of the fathers, we have ourselves arrived at the need
to demonstrate, so far as possible, not only its divinely most befitting
simplicity, but also the no less pious distinction between its energies.
Indeed, if someone were to say that there is one uncreated power, the one
which subsists without being engendered, anyone who thinks correctly,
not being able to bear the impious utterance conveyed by this, would
say “perish the impiety!” For the divine power which subsists by being
engendered is also likewise uncreated, on the one hand, by virtue of the
principle of causality, being secondary on account of coming from it, and
on the other, by virtue of the principle of uncreatedness, being indivisible
from it and of equal status with it, just as also in the case of the Holy Spirit
who exists by procession, and so one uncreated power is adored in the
Father, the Son and the Spirit. So too, when you say that there is only one
uncreated deity, the nature of God which is ever both unrevealed to anyone
and incomprehensible by anyone, we cannot bear to agree with you, for
we say that not only the divine nature but also the splendour of the divine
nature is uncreated, not that the splendour subsists independently but that
from that source it appears in, and is manifested divinely to, those who are
worthy of divine communion. “For to this,” it says, “the moderate light of
truth in this world leads me, to see and experience the splendour of God.”85
Celebrating and praising this, the divine musician Metrophanes says, “O

most monarchical Holy Triad, who projects a natural coeternal glory, an
unutterable and single light of three suns, grant that those who hymn you
with an orthodox faith may see your glory.”86
21. ‘Therefore this glory and splendour, which was also seen by
Peter and his companions in their experience on Tabor, in accordance on
the one hand with the principle of origin and the fact of being partic-
ipated and seen – even if only by the worthy and by them in an ineffable
manner – is inferior in relation to the source from which it comes, but
in accordance on the other hand with the principle of the uncreated, and
of the immaterial and incorporeal, and the fact that it is united with it
eternally, as the splendour and illuminatory power of the nature which
is the source of light, is inseparable from it and thus is one known as
uncreated deity in its divine essence, and in its deifying power and grace.
In this manner, even if many spirits are mentioned by the fathers and
many energies of the Spirit, the Spirit in us is one, even if Akindynos
goes on in the same Dialogue to accuse us slanderously of supposing that
there is a multitude of uncreated spirits, since he maintains, so as not to be
subject to this censure, that the powers and energies and graces befitting
God are created. And he does so when the great Basil manifestly says that
the Holy Spirit possesses all these things eternally, having nothing which
he acquires as an addition, but on the one hand he subsists as a hypostasis
springing from God, and on the other what springs from him are his
energies,87 one of which in Egypt 88 transformed the dust into animals and
during the Saviour’s sojourn on earth performed a great many miracles,
which he himself called “the finger of God”.89 Again Akindynos says this
about the divine kingdom, supposedly refuting those who do not venerate
one divine kingdom, in the place where he cites what was said by the
venerable Maximus on the saying of Zorobabel, who said that women
are stronger and truth prevails over all,90 thinking to knock these things
together himself with a view to proving that the kingdom of God indicated
on the mountain is created.91
86 Metrophanes, Ode 4, 106–13 (ed. Valentini).

87 Ps.-Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius V (PG 29, 732D).
88 Cf. Exod 8: 12–13.
89 Luke 11: 20; cf. ps.-Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius V (PG 29, 733).
90 Maximus the Confessor, Questions to Thalassius 54, 141–2 (Laga and Steel, vol. 1,
451).
91 Esdras 4: 13–14.
254 GREGORY PALAMAS
22. ‘How can I demonstrate these things to you, and the folly and
nonsense that pervade these expressions of his, in few words? For this man
seems to suffer what belongs to such things rather than do them, being
totally ignorant of divine matters and absolutely without instruction. Where
can he have learned these things? From his parents? But no one is able to say
what their name was, except that they were brigands and robbers somewhere
on the western borders, or they were victims of brigandage on the part of
their neighbours, or rather, victims in return.92 Raised originally in these
customs, he is now deemed worthy to be the guide of monks and nuns. But
did he learn a better way and a more accurate account of doctrines from the
teachers whom he frequented upon his arrival from there? But one of these,
whose servant he was, alas attached a noose to himself and departed this
life by the evil of suicide. Another revolted openly against piety and then,
a fugitive on account of shame, preferred to live the rest of his life with
the impious. But perhaps from the companions whom he considered most
dear? But these too studied with the same teachers as he did, and received
an education not only concerning the divine sayings but also concerning
their perversion. Akindynos, then, motivated by complete ignorance mixed
with malice opposes them, as when according to the same Dialogue he
places life-in-itself, goodness-in-itself and the like among created things,
because they participate in the common denomination of beings, being
totally without cognizance that if they are also called beings, they are also
superior to beings, just as the great Dionysius himself says.93 Anyone who
for this reason classes self-participation with creatures would easily also
place the Holy Spirit among beings, since the great Basil says that the Spirit
participates in the names befitting God,94 but that Akindynos opposes them,
stirred up by malice alone, is also clear from the fact that he is not able to
attack without first diverting the discourse to another,95 just as, among many
other examples, is also the case once again in this Dialogue.
23. ‘And if indeed one uncreated power and deity is participated by some
and another by others – for the great Dionysius also says that different things
participate in different divine powers,96 for some simply as beings participate
92 Nadal (1990) regards this, rightly, as a slander, but he ignores the rhetorical convention
of psogos (denigration).
93 Dionysius the Areopagite, Letter 2, to Gaius, 1068A–1069A (Ritter, 158).
94 Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit IX, 22 (PG 32, 108C).
95 I.e. to Palamas himself because he cannot openly attack the fathers.
96 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names XI, 6, 956A (Suchla, 222–3).
in the power that endows with being, others as living beings participate in
the life-giving power, and others participate in the mode appropriate to
themselves – who would not say, apart from him, who denies even this,
that one thing participates in one deity and another thing in another? But
he says, “If the different uncreated powers and deities of God are partic-
ipated by different creatures, one governs some creatures and another
governs others.”97 Once again, who has heard that the powers of God govern
creatures? For to govern does not belong to those things which by nature
have the capacity to rule and have inherited from the beginning the adminis-
tration of those that have been entrusted to them. The providential powers
of almighty God have never not been such. But Akindynos has arranged his
argument in such a way as if we were saying that the powers of almighty
God were separated from each other and from God, and as if for the same
reason the providential powers were not providential from the beginning,
but something else was prior, and then the authority of exercising providence
over creatures was acquired by concession.
24. ‘Do you see once again how great the calumny is? But “if the
different uncreated powers and deities of God are participated by different
creatures,” he says, “one governs some creatures and another governs
others, and among human beings not all enjoy a single deity, but some
participate in some deities and others in others, and some are governed
by some and some by others.”98 Oh dear, oh dear! In his view, it seems, all
human beings, even the ungodly and the impious, enjoy deity since they
exist in a state of participation in it and enjoyment of it, something we
have been taught belongs only to the saints. “For the Lord,” he says, “will
bring every human being into contact with the deity provided one does not
introduce anything unworthy of union with the divine. But if one is truly a
temple of God, containing no idol or image of wickedness in oneself, one
will be accepted by the Mediator into participation in the divinity.”99 We
know that even the wicked and the lawless are participants in the creative
power by virtue of being products of it, just as irrational animals are, and
inanimate beings, and the demons themselves, but never to this day have
we heard that even the lawless have been led by the creative power from
non-being to enjoying and participating in deity. For one who says this
says that even the originator of evil himself is either not a creature of God
97 Gregory Akindynos, Refutatio Magna III, 39; French trans. Nadal 2006, vol. 1, 241.
99 Gregory of Nyssa, On Perfection (PG 46, 277C).
256 GREGORY PALAMAS
or else will enjoy God and come to participate in deity. The content of the
chain of accusations that he has put together against me, as saying that
some human beings are governed by some deities and others by others,
show him to be of the opinion that one deity governs all, which all, he says,
enjoy, and is thus in reality himself caught falling into the calumny which
he directs against us. For he denies that the one deity, which he himself says
takes precedence, exercised power over all things from the beginning. For
he says that this rules but that the one that governs has sovereignty as an
acquisition. Moreover, as if it were we who were uttering the absurdity into
which he has fallen himself, he asserts as a conclusion an utterance full of
admirable elegance. “If some human beings are governed by some deities
and powers and others by others,” he says, “how is it that God did not set
the boundaries between the nations according to the number of his deities
and uncreated powers, but did so according to the number of his angels?”100
In fact it is reasonable that these should be set by God in accordance with
the number of those by which they are governed and administered.
25. ‘We ourselves might say, throwing the question back to the author of
this incoherent gossip, debating with him after the fashion of his own wisdom,
and bringing back the purveyor of such things to the great enterprise of his
own thinking: Given that you say that one deity governs all things, how is
it that God did not fix a single boundary between the nations in accordance
with this one deity, but set the boundaries according to the number of his
angels? And the deity which you say is one, how does it govern? I leave aside
for now the argument that to govern does not belong to those who are leaders
and superiors by nature; but the one deity, which you yourself present as
deprived of all power, supposedly so that it should not be composite and
you be exposed to the charge of ditheism, how does it govern without the
power of providence? For to govern belongs to providence. But you will say
that providence exists on its own? But this would not make providence in
this way a nature. And indeed neither is to encounter providence through
it only a nature for those who are administered by it. Therefore if in this
way providence is not a nature, it is called providence by those who are
administered by it, because it has through it a power of providence, since
the deity of God in itself, whatever that is, is without relation, detached
from all things, and nameless because it transcends all names. Tell me, how
then did God not fix boundaries between the nations in accordance with
100 Gregory Akindynos, Refutatio Magna III, 39; French trans. Nadal 2006, vol. 1, 241–2;
cf. Deut 32: 8 (LXX).
each of these, but in accordance with the number of his angels? I speak thus
myself too, in keeping with your rusticity, for you have not been able to
understand even this, that if the boundaries between the nations were fixed
in accordance with the number of God’s angels, what space in the inhabited
world would have been able to hold such a multitude? I will not go into the
ten thousand times ten thousand attending God that were seen by Daniel.101
But given that thousands of thousands serve him, are we to conclude that
in accordance with these numbers there are also thousands of thousands of
boundaries between the nations? Moreover, when the Most High divided the
nations, when he dispersed the sons of Adam and fixed boundaries between
the nations according to number, did this not happen, according to the story,
in the time of the sons and grandsons of Noah and their famous building
of the tower, when, indeed, those divided were not more than seventy?102
For that precise reason the boundaries between the nations were not fixed
according to the number of angels, but God set angels according to specific
number of the nations, that is to say, he set angels or an angel for the defence
and safeguarding of each nation. But Akindynos says, “But if the nations
were constituted according to the number of God’s angels and not of his
powers, there is neither a number nor a multitude of the latter.”103 Does
God therefore not possess a power of acting, or of providential care, or of
deification, or of universal sovereignty? How then as the great Dionysius
says, “If we were to call the transcendent hiddenness ‘God’, or ‘life’, or
‘essence’, or ‘light’, or ‘reason’, we do not intend anything else than the
powers proceeding from him that bestow deification, or being, or life, or
wisdom,”104 which elsewhere in the Divine Names he places beyond beings?
For it is “by participating in these in a manner appropriate to them that
beings are, and are said to be, beings and living beings and divine beings”.105
Indeed, the great Basil also says, “The Holy Spirit is simple in essence but
complex in powers.”106 But Akindynos says, “Nor is it possible to say that
there are many uncreated powers of God, but the creator and governor of
all things is one.”107 Who, O new theologians, has granted the governance
101 Dan 7: 10.

102 Cf. Gen 11: 1–8.
103 Gregory Akindynos, Refutatio Magna III, 39; French trans. Nadal 2006, vol. 1, 241–2.
104 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names II, 7, 645A (Suchla, 131).
105 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names XI, 6, 956A (Suchla, 222–3).
106 Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit IX, 22 (PG 32, 108C).
258 GREGORY PALAMAS
to him? For if he is creator and lord, he is not a governor, or if a governor,

he is not a creator and lord. For how can this be? And how is he absolutely
one if, as Akindynos claims, he has not a single power? For according to the
theologians, that which has not a single power neither is, nor is something,
nor is susceptible in any way whatsoever of either affirmation or negation.
Surely it is not consistent with his own doctrine for Akindynos to say that
the creator of all things is nobody. Moreover, on what grounds does he give
God the name of creator? Will he say that it is on account of his creating?
Well then, if to create is his nature, and is not an attribute of his nature, and
in addition to this there is a power of willing, the products of creation will
be coeternal with God. But if when he willed, he created, it follows that God
has both these as attributes of his nature, and also that when he did not yet
wish to create he still had the power to will and the power to create at such
time as he wished. So did he not have the power? And is there any difference
between having the capability and having the power? Such ideas belong
truly to a disturbed mind.
26. ‘Now to say that when the boundaries of the nations were fixed
according to the number of the angels of God, there is absolutely no number
with regard to God, is also to abolish the threeness of the hypostases.
Sabellius, too, would have been happy to ask how, if the number of the
hypostases was really multiple, the boundaries between the nations were
not fixed according to their number rather than the number of the angels.108
It was for this reason that he too thought up the idea that there is no number
of the divine persons. But when the great Dionysius,109 and Basil the
Great,110 and his brother who thought like a brother,111 and the whole choir
of theologians called the divine nature “deity”, or rather, when they said that
this was an appropriate term for the providence of God and his authority
and providential power and similar things, did they therefore not know that
he is the creator of all things? Or that he is one but trihypostatic in that he
possesses three hypostases and omnipotent in that he has many various
powers, or rather all of them? Or alternatively, if one should say that he is
called omnipotent because he is capable of doing anything, but not because
he possesses powers, then he does not possess three hypostases either, but
108 Very little is known of Sabellius except that he lived in the third century and was a
Monarchian, holding (in later terminology) that God was a single hypostasis.
109 Dionysius the Areopagite, Letter 2 to Gaius, 1068A–1069 (Ritter, 158).
110 Ps.-Basil of Caesarea, Letter 189, To Eustathius 7, 8 (Deferrari, vol. 3, 66).
111 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Beatitudes III (PG 44, 1225).
in such a person’s view will be trihypostatic because he is constituted in a

threefold manner.’
27. At this point the man who had conveyed Akindynos’ idle chatter
in the first place interrupted the discourse, because he saw that I had a
precise knowledge not only of what he had brought with him but also of
the other things Akindynos had produced against the truth, and began to
say in amazement: ‘How have you come to know this? Where, in short, did
you find all this?’ For the wretched man thought that we had been living
in ignorance of these writings and would continue to do so, since they are
kept under lock and key, or rather, in darkness and invisibility, so that apart
from one or two of his most trusted friends none of the others should know
where on earth they might lie. Hence ‘I cannot understand where you found
these and how they came into your hands.’
‘I know,’ I said to him, ‘that Akindynos avoids our sight and conceals
the works written so furiously against us, and that is because he has
acquired a certain license in the present civil war and profited from the
depravity of the times. So I know that even now he avoids our sight. For we
know that the sacrilegious too hide themselves from the sight of the priests,
from whom they make every effort to conceal those things they have stolen
and their unholy enterprises against the sacred vessels. But God does not
allow what has been secreted not to be brought to light so as to be mocked
by the servants of truth.
28. ‘Well now, since you have interrupted the progress of the discourse
towards the other topics discussed by Akindynos, let us return to the
beginning read by you, which you yourself described as a piece of rhetoric,
and examine what had previously been passed over in order to see whether
this too was frivolous talk rather than rhetoric. Accordingly, he says against
us, to present it here in as concise a manner as possible: “How can you say
that the non-self-subsistent and non-hypostatic grace and energy of God
deifies? And you say this about such grace in an ignorant and impious
fashion when the fathers said with regard to the Son and the Spirit, ‘How
is it not God who deifies?’ One of two things follows: either such energies
share in the status of the Son and the Spirit and thus are all hypostases, or
the Son and the Spirit share in the status of the energies, with the result
that they too are non-self-subsistent, non-hypostatic and alien to the divine
essence, with all the consequences.”112
260 GREGORY PALAMAS
‘Against this we would say: ‘Surely you yourself see that you have just
testified against yourself. For if, as the case stands, you have declared that
it is a property of the Son and the Holy Spirit to deify and you admit that
the saints say, ‘How is it not God who deifies?’ when indeed you hear the
great Dionysius saying, “If you consider deity the matter of the deifying
gift by which we are deified and this is the principle of being deified, he
who is beyond every principle transcends what is thus called deity”,113 yet
you declare that the matter of the deifying gift and the deifying deity – that
is, the grace of the Spirit, since it is the principle of the deified – are created,
you are clearly reducing the Son and the Holy Spirit to the level of creatures.
For since you say that to deify is a property that belongs exclusively to the
Son and the Spirit alone and that which makes into a god and deifies and
makes divine is a creature – for to deify and to make into a god and to
make divine do not differ at all – how is God, the Son himself and the Holy
Spirit who makes divine and deifies, not also a creature in your view? So
if you do not repent of the impiety, you will join Arius, Eunomius and
Macedonius and you will be in the list of the excommunicated for ever.114
We ourselves say that it does not belong only to the Son and the Spirit to
deify, but we know that the Father is no less deifying. For it is with him
that Christ comes to the worthy in accordance with the promise and unites
himself with them,115 not of course without the Holy Spirit. There are three
elements which may be contemplated in what is united: essence, energy
and hypostasis. It is necessary that entities that have been united from
different things should be united with one or with two of these but not with
all three of them, if they are not to experience a state of confusion with each
other, but united with him through one of the two are to possess their own
appropriate salvation and reciprocity with each other in a fitting manner.
It has never come into the mind of anyone whatsoever that God should be
united to a human being according to essence, so that the essence of God
and the essence of humanity should be one. And to be united according to
the divine hypostasis so that there should be one hypostasis of what has
been united without confusion belongs only to what was assumed by the
113 Dionysius the Areopagite, Letter 2 to Gaius, 1068A–1069 (Ritter, 158).

114 Fourth-century heretics. Arius, an Alexandrian presbyter, denied the consubstan-
tiality of the Son with the Father. Eunomius, bishop of Kyzikos, was a radical Arian who
taught the existence of a single supreme substance, or ousia. Macedonius, archbishop of
Constantinople, denied the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit.
115 Cf. John 14: 23.
Lord, which, non-receptive of any stain, became wholly enriched by the

divine grace and energy. For the Father ‘gives the Spirit without measure’,
which is the same as saying that the Son, as a human being, receives without
measure, the Baptist says.116
29. ‘And his most distinguished interpreter after him says that the
Baptist here refers not to the essence of the divine Spirit but to his energy:
for it is this that is shared out.117 Moreover, since each of the deified is deified
through being united with God, but not with the divine essence or with the
divine hypostasis, it necessarily follows that they are deified by the divine
grace and energy, as Gregory surnamed the Theologian also understood.
“Christ,” he says, “is called such because of the deity, for this anointing of the
humanity does not sanctify by energy, as in the case of other christs, but by
the presence of the whole of the one anointing.”118 And the divinely inspired
Maximus says, “by God’s command both Moses and David were moved to
action and all who became receptive of the divine energy through setting
aside their human and carnal properties”,119 whom the same author elsewhere
calls “living images of Christ and identical with him rather by grace than by
assimilation”.120 And again, “The image ascends its archetype, in the degree
that it receives the divine energy and delights more in the ecstasy from those
things which are its own and are perceived to be such through the complete
victory of the grace of the Spirit over it, so that there will be one energy, and
one alone, that of God and of those worthy of God.”121 Do you see that when
God is united to each of the deified in accordance with this grace and energy,
he deifies what has been united to him, having shown his own energy and
their energy to be one? Therefore since the Father, the Son and the Holy
Spirit possess such a power and energy, they are “God” and “deifyer” and
are said to be such. And he who spoke of each of these as “deifying” so in
accordance with this deifying energy; the divine is nameless. And he who
spoke of this energy as deifying, since it is the power and energy of the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, thus also called God deifying through
this energy and not any other. For it is not possible for anyone who disjoins
the one who is in action and exercises power from the activity and power to
116 John 3: 34.

117 John Chrysostom, On John 30, 2 (PG 59, 174).
119 Maximus the Confessor, Disputation with Pyrrhus (PG 91, 297A).
120 Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 21, 15 (PG 91, 1253A).
121 Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 10 (PG 91, 1076C).
262 GREGORY PALAMAS
comprehend in itself what remains.122 Therefore since the great Dionysius in

celebrating this energy as the principle of divinity, the principle of goodness,
deifying deity and principle of those being deified, has also shown it through
these sublime names to be uncreated and without beginning,123 how can the
principle of deified angels and human beings be a creature, seeing that it is
participated by all the supramundane ministering powers, and affords them
their abiding in God, and being deity and the principle of deity, exists as
the deification of all, but not as itself participating in deification? How can
there be a deification of deification? Therefore in celebrating this as deifying
but not deified, and as an inimitable imitation, thus guarding against the
understanding of the many, lest anyone should think that this is the essence
of God, and responding to Gaius, who asked how God is beyond God, he
says that God is not beyond God in the sense of transcending those who are
gods by adoption,124 for then he would not have been beyond God before the
creation, but in the sense of also transcending the deifying energy and the
thearchic deity, seeing that he is by essence beyond beginning and impartic-
ipable, proving that he is not like two gods and thearchies, one in essence
and the other not in essence, one enhypostatic and the other anhypostatic,
one superior and the other inferior, as according to the nonsense of Barlaam
and Akindynos, but dividing the indivisible conceptually and recognizing
their difference for us, but not distancing them and separating them from
each other.
30. ‘So too the great Basil, in his writings to Amphilochius, after
discussing love, joy, peace, kindness, wisdom, understanding and what is
similar to them, then says, the Holy Spirit possesses all these things eternally,
but “what springs from God is enhypostatic, whereas what springs from the
Spirit is his energies”,125 not proposing that the eternal energies of the Spirit
are anhypostatic by reason of being non-existent. For how could these be
enumerated unless they are contemplated in their own hypostasis? Indeed,
we also distinguish the hypostasis from the essence, and we demonstrate
the difference between the two when we discuss it with people, but it is not
possible to see a hypostasis without an essence. If then reason divides them,
and observes each separately and thinks about each separately and describes
122 For a brief account of Palamas’ doctrine of the energies, see the General Introduction,
§ 3 (b).
123 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names I, 1, 588AB (Suchla, 108–9).
124 Dionysius the Areopagite, Letter 2 to Gaius, 1068A–1069A (Ritter, 158).
125 Ps.-Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius V (PG 29, 772C).
them in their particularity against those who say like Nestorius that there
are two hypostases in Christ because there are two natures, or like Sabellius
that there is one hypostasis of the Holy Trinity because there is one essence,
has it created two gods or one composite god made out of non-essential and
essential elements? Away with such truly deranged conjecture and irrational
reasoning! And when Akindynos attributes to us – although we show that
there is a difference between the divine essence and energy and all the
things that by making a pious distinction are contemplated with regard to
the one God – that the properties can be substituted for each other so that
the energies can in themselves be hypostatic and the essence be without
substance, and the Son and the Holy Spirit be anhypostatic, yet Akindynos
himself does not see that in reality it is he who is subject to this because
he denies the difference and the distinction that follows it between the
divine energies and the divine essence, how is he not evidently devoid of
intelligence? There are even places in the books published by me against his
impiety where it is clearly demonstrated that Akindynos falls into fifty of
the greatest wicked heresies through maintaining that there is no difference
between essence and divine energy.’126
31. At this point in the discourse my interlocutor exclaimed, ‘Enough of
this! For as one can now see, you seem not so much to refute Akindynos’
writings and demolish his arguments against you, as to blow them away
like dust or toss them into the wind like the so-called chaff of empty husks.
So that suffices on these matters. Restraining you by force, for I do not
think that it is easy for you to tear yourself away from close engagement
in the struggle with those who oppose you, explain what I first asked you
about, how it is that the theologian Gregory and the father Damascene do
not contradict each other when the one says that what is willed belongs to
the will and other that what is willed does not belong to the will.’
32. I in turn said to him, ‘you should know that you must not concentrate
too much on the letter of theology, for the letter kills those who do not look
beyond it.127 Therefore always throw open the outer doors of the divinely
inspired word and cast your mind’s eye inside, and you will understand the
purpose and meaning of the inspired writers. For there is nothing in them
that is crooked or twisted but all is straight to those who think about it and
upright to those who find a way of knowing. Indeed the most theological of
126 Cf. Gregory Palamas, Refutations of Akindynos I, vii, 15–46 (Christou III, 50–69;
Perrella II, 24–62).
127 Cf. 2 Cor 3: 6.
264 GREGORY PALAMAS
the Gregories says against those who maintain that the Son is not Son of the
Father but of the begetting, and furthermore that what has come into being
belongs to the will and generally to any energy and to the movement, that
what has been willed does not belong to the will, nor does what has been
accomplished belong to any movement, but to the one who moves and the
one who wills.128 For it is the will that presents what is willed as belonging to
him who wills. And alongside what is willed by the latter’s will would also be
what is accomplished by the movement, because this belongs to that initial
cause. If you, however, erroneously take that which indicates the relation
with the one who wills, that is to say, the will of what has been willed, as
that which divides what subsists and rather as the cause of what has been
willed, give your attention please, he says, to the one who wills himself, and
attribute what is willed to him. For movement and will are a kind of bond
between them, showing that what is willed does belong to the will and to
the one who wills. That is what on the one hand the great Theologian says.
On the other, the Damascene, a reliable teacher indeed of divine matters,
addressing those who say that the Son is from the Father in the same way as
creatures are, and maintain that the Father stands in a similar relationship
to both the Son and to creatures, demonstrates the difference between these
bonds, as it were, of which we have already spoken, saying: “On the one
hand the creative energy of God, that is, the use, and through its results the
manifestation, of God’s creative power, the act of creation itself is subject
to willing and non-willing. On the other hand, generation, that is, the act of
generating is governed by nature but is not subject to will. Therefore it is a
work of nature alone, but not also of will; it is without beginning and eternal,
conceived of simultaneously and in absolute continuity with the originating
and theogonic deity of the Father.”129 For creation, that is the act of creating,
as also the result itself, is work of will; for when God willed, he manifested
his creative power through the results. Therefore the act of creating and
the creature are not coeternal with God. But the act of begetting and the
product of begetting are by nature coeternal. So the theological luminary of
Damascus certainly does not deny that what is willed belongs to the one who
wills – exactly as denied by those against whom the Theologian protested,
when he argued that what is willed belongs to the one who wills – but he
too argues that the things willed are produced through the will of him who
128 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29, 6 (Moreschini, 698–700).

129 A loose paraphrase of part of John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 8 (I, 8) (cf.
Kotter, vol. 2, 21–2).
willed out of his goodness, and that the Son is the Son of the Father and
coeternal with him through the begetting. Do you see how the conclusion
drawn from both of them is the same? We for our part, then, even if it is
necessary for us to labour over the argument, will not, so far as lies within
our power, permit anyone at all to think – but we would not even accept
it if someone else said it – that our fathers express theological opinions in
contradiction to themselves and each other. If you yourselves also sought
after this, you would long ago have come to an agreement in faith with the
saints and with us. But with regard to what has recently been said by me, how
many ditheisms does Akindynos think to devise? For many differences have
now been revealed and in accordance with them the uncreated elements are
many: eternal nature, eternal begetting, the one a work, the other a divine
nature of which the divine begetting is a work. Again, there is a divine will
and this is different from the divine nature – for the work of each is different
– and also from the begetting; for one is said to be a work of the nature, the
other a work of the will, which in no way comes close to the begetting.’
33. At that, my interlocutor rose to his feet smiling very gently, and
bringing the discussion to a close, no longer with the same boldness, returned
to the occupations dear to him. I, for my part, have sent this to your sagacity,
and if I am not shooting beyond what is appropriate, have also added in
the place of a target for you the other products of Akindynos’ pernicious
thinking, and ask you simply to direct the arrows of your discourse at them.
For to use the power of words in defence of piety is especially incumbent
on those like you who have been concerned all their lives with literature.
If indeed for you the word is life, even before life you received from your
forebears the practice of piety, since you have acquired the habit of occupying
yourselves with divine thoughts like a truly supramundane inheritance
which has descended upon you as something pure and undefiled, so that it is
possible to apply to you in many ways, not only in a single way, the apostolic
saying: ‘you are from God in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom God,
and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.’130 May you keep well
and with your other friends abstain from the abundant swine-producing
food set forth by Akindynos’ Circe.131 Prayer for you will be effectual if you
receive from Hermes the undefiled lotus,132 and most of all if you keep in
mind the discourses that clearly agree with piety.
130 1 Cor 1: 30–1.

131 Cf. Odyssey X, 210 ff.
132 Cf. Odyssey IX, 82 ff.
266 GREGORY PALAMAS
2. TO PHILOTHEOS
Gregory Palamas to the most holy hieromonk and to me most beloved in
the Lord brother, father and master, the truly named Philotheos.133
1. To whom much has been given much will be required, according to the
Lord’s saying;134 and to your holiness much has been given, adorned as you
are pre-eminently by intelligence, by a liberal education and by goodness
of character, and in addition to this, by the supernatural monastic way of
life, and by residence on the supernatural, that is to say, holy mountain with
such superlative understanding and with such diligence and exactitude that
by the grace of Christ you have been judged by the most distinguished of
those who dwell on the mountain of holiness to be most worthy to rule
those who live in accordance with God.135 Moreover, I believe that you
have understood better than anyone the damage inflicted on piety by the
Barlaamite error through reading our writings and, more importantly,
through meditating with unparalleled sacred knowledge on the holy
Scriptures. It is therefore right that the truth of piety itself, and we too who
have lately put ourselves in danger on its behalf, should appeal to your
pre-eminently perfect understanding more than to that of anyone else to
fight against this error because it does not seem that we are absent from the
Holy Mountain with regard to what concerns this need when you yourself
are present.
2. You should now know, most God-beloved and God-loving father,
that he who by every contrivance now stands at the head of the Barlaamite
error136 has used the fact that our holy fathers have written in our defence as
a pretext for preparing a kind of baited hook capable of catching those who
are not extremely wary and has cast it, like a fishing line, this way and that,
as we have heard. And this is a plausible lie leading to the destruction of
those who are persuaded, through which the serpent who is the originator
of evil also drew us at the beginning, alas, from life towards death. In
these circumstances, since this bait has been prepared against the truth, we
133 Truly named, because ‘Philotheos’ means ‘lover of God’. For an analysis of the letter,
see Rigo 2015a, 271–2.
134 Luke 12: 48.
135 Philotheos was clearly at this time still hegoumenos of the Lavra; cf. Rigo 2015a,
262–3.
136 The patriarch John Kalekas.
have deemed it necessary to make what pertains to them manifest to your

sagacity. I for my part am experiencing something of this kind but, believe
me, most holy father, I find it extremely distasteful – one might say I have
very little natural talent for it – to describe in detail the uttering or refuting
of calumnies and indeed have an entirely different character from those
who contradict the truth of divine dogma. But what is it I am experiencing?
It is necessary with regard to what has now taken place coolly to explain
what has happened.
3. Once some elderly calumniators rose up against Susanna the daughter
of Hilkiah.137 According to what is written about them they had grown old
in evil days and in their impurity and licentious mode of behaviour made
false allegations against her chastity. And God raised up against them the
holy spirit of a young lad, Daniel by name. Now younger calumniators have
risen up against me, younger not only in years but also in impiety, or rather,
absence of piety – for they have introduced atheism and polytheism into
the Church and in this novelty of theirs shamelessly make false allegations
against me – and God has raised up against them the holy spirit of aged
saints, perfected in virtue and grey hair, that just as then, through what
was opposite, that is, through the youthfulness of Daniel, the opposite evil
of the malicious old men was confuted, so too through the opposite, the
venerable age of the most holy old men, who are full of days and of divine
spirit, the impiety of the young men who attack us is confuted. Indeed,
the person who has just sent a refutation of what was earlier written by
the holy elders in our defence, has met here secretly with these younger
men, and has permitted them both to shape the action and to construct the
letter.138 I think that you will be able accordingly to resolve with all zeal
whatever objections are raised by anyone on the spot. For if someone says,
‘Surely there is also some elderly man among those who write against the
hieromonk Gregory’, you yourself may readily reply to him, ‘you may see
many young men agreeing at that time with the elderly men who spoke
137 Daniel 13 (LXX).

138 Palamas was writing from the Blachernai prison shortly after his excommunication
on 4 November 1344. The author of the refutation of ‘what was earlier written by the
holy elders in our defence’ is the patriarch John Kalekas. The ‘younger men’ were led by
Gregory Akindynos. The ‘letter’ was the notice to Athos of Palamas’ excommunication
(text in Hunger et al., Nr 145, 326–38; for an analysis, see Rigo 2015a, 266–7). Palamas is
writing to Philotheos to pre-empt the patriarch’s letter, the issuing of which, on the advice
of Akindynos, had been delayed. For a less allusive account of these events, see Palamas’
Second Letter to his Brother Makarios (excerpted by Philotheos in his Life of Palamas, § 71).
268 GREGORY PALAMAS
against Susanna; for the assembly believed them,’ it says, ‘and condemned
Susanna to death.’ In the assembly there were no doubt young men, but just
as then the elders were leaders of the deception of the young, in the same
way now, even if some elder agrees with them, it is the young who are
leaders of the false accusation.
4. I think that you yourself will again think fit to say to the fathers
who have exerted themselves on our behalf, and are grey-haired because
they truly both persevere in virtue and advance in age in accordance
with Christ: ‘This action of yours should also be completed, most divine
fathers – for indeed nothing of yours is incomplete – and it would have
been much better not to have started something of this kind, or not to
have started it without finishing it, as if somehow inciting those who
are treating that brother of ours abusively without holding them in
check. Above all, it is the end that for the most part naturally crowns the
beginnings, and it is from the end that anyone may ascertain whether the
beginnings are good, and it is from the end that it becomes clear whether
anyone who initiates anything is moved by a good spirit or not. For
indeed, no gift of the divine Spirit is incomplete; “For every perfect gift
is from above,”139 according to the theologian brother of God. Therefore
you who have recently been moved by the love dwelling within you, that
is to say, by the love of God, to testify in favour of brother Gregory and
have confidentially affirmed in writing that apart from the other matters
you have precise knowledge of the man’s piety and are ready to put your
heads at risk for the sake of the truth known by you and to which you
testify, seeing that you have now received copies of documents testifying
against him who has received this support from you and clearly proving
your discourse to be a lie and your opinion to be a fraud. Therefore,
with regard to piety, consider now that you have been entrusted by God
with a judgement similar to that of the famous Daniel – given that you
are obliged to imitate him as closely as possible – and must become like
him anew not only by having the authority to say “We are all without
any part in the condemnation of brother Gregory,” but also by a decisive
refutation of the dissenters and by a vote corresponding to this refutation
and conforming to the fact of the matter. Consider that he who at the
outset was moved to inscribe letters of love, is the one who now urges
you to unite with love for him an outspokenness with regard to the truth
139 James 1: 17.
concerning him and, so far as you are able, to raise up a clearly visible
trophy against the lie and manifest an exact piety established on our
mountain that cannot be hidden, as the gospel saying has it.’140
5. If it were to become evident, father, that in reality I was seeking
to establish my own glory, and not that which has been revealed and
proclaimed and transmitted to us from above by the Holy Spirit through
the prophets and by Christ through his apostles and the fathers who
succeeded them, if it were I who initiated the recent disputes on this topic,
and were not resisting those who under the guise of opposing me were
raising questions that are not to be raised, if before or after the synods
held on these questions and the Tomoi issued by them I had held strange
opinions, if subsequently it were I myself who had taken the initiative
and were not opposing those who were again raising questions, for the
sake of supporting what had earlier been decided, if I were running away
from synods and not rather myself suffering without due legal process
and appealing for synods, if I were really raising a clamour and not rather
seeking to calm it, so far as I am able, and were not desiring, once peace
had been disturbed, to establish the truth once again, I myself would
condemn myself to the heaviest penalties. But what need is there now to
list these and similar things? What I myself would wish, or rather what
I would pray from you, is that those of the holy elders who are moved to
defend us should come here and like the famous Daniel should separate
those who speak against me and question them apart on the meaning of
what is said by each of them.141 If this can indeed be done, and those who
speak and write against me are not shown to disagree with each other
in a manner similar to that of those who behaved maliciously towards
Susanna, I would prefer, without any other examination that the judges
should vote against me. But what is more important than this is that those
who rage against us would scarcely be able to agree among themselves
even if they had made a pact to do so.
6. Thus every word uttered by them against me is a clear and most
manifest calumny. It is therefore for you to judge, most God-beloved
father. Would it not be something most just if you were to say to those who
combat what was said by us with regard to Barlaam that this is actually a
manifest calumny, to assert that what was said by Palamas in refutation
of Barlaam’s erroneous opinion is his own private opinion? What is said
140 Cf. Matt 5: 14.

141 By ‘the holy elders’ (gerontes) Palamas means the heads of the principal monasteries.
270 GREGORY PALAMAS
against us is actually against all those who think in an orthodox manner

with us. And why do we speak about us ourselves and those who in our
time ‘rightly explain the word of truth’?142 Indeed, the censure expressed
by this affirmation refers to the saints themselves from all eternity. If what
the latter have said against their opponents is not of the gospel and of
Christ who speaks in it and of the Spirit who revealed in the beginning,
but is simply of those who lived later, tell me how was it that the Lord
said: ‘Do not call anyone a teacher on earth; for you have one teacher,
who is Christ’?143 No doubt it was because all who came after him said
what belonged to him, in that with regard to the sense they agreed with his
teachings. For it is thus that there is one teacher, because there is one sense
in accordance with piety, even if the words differ through the great mass
of what has been written or the external appearance of the expression;
‘For piety for us does not consist in words but in realities.’144 How, then,
are Palamas’ writings not acceptable when they are in harmony with the
ancient theologians and with the God of the theologians and composed,
moreover, against Barlaam and Akindynos, who have raged against the
divinely inspired Scriptures, and have insanely reduced God’s divine
grace to the level of a creature, and have divided the one deity into created
and uncreated, and call Palamas a ditheist because he proclaims the one
deity to be uncreated in every respect, just as Eunomius called the great
Basil a tritheist for having proclaimed the one God uncreated in all three
hypostases? Say [the following]: ‘So you do not accept the writings of
Palamas? How then do you not manifestly reject our own? Is there not a
Hagioretic Tomos undersigned by the hand of the most venerable protos
and by our own hands?145 If Palamas is in accord in every respect with this
Tomos and speaks in its defence, as indeed he does – for I myself, father,
would sentence myself to the ultimate penalty if it would appear that I
uttered anything that was outside its intention and that of the saints – since,
then, Palamas affirms what is in the Tomos, it would be necessary for the
fathers to say again that he manifestly affirms what we hold with regard to
142 2 Tim 2: 15.

143 Matt 23: 10.
145 The protos was the head of the Athonite communities, who was elected for life in this
period by the general assembly of monks at the monastic capital of Karyes. Assisted by a
council of hegoumenoi, he administered the affairs of the Holy Mountain and represented it
to the authorities in Constantinople. The Hagioretic Tomos (drawn up by Palamas) had been
signed by the protos and his council in August 1340.
those who oppose it, and whoever attacks his writings manifestly attacks
ours and attempts to hide the fact that he is writing against us, craftily
substituting the name of Palamas, and, to put it simply, all the abuse and
insulting treatment on these matters which is directed against him refers
to us. And why do we say “we ourselves”? Because the abuse extends to
the saints themselves and to the God of the saints, whose utterances we
have recorded in the Tomos together with what follows from their pious
and unpolluted thinking.
7. ‘We did well, then, to write to the megas doux himself about
this man,146 in whose defence and for the sake of unassailable piety the
discourse “Fear at least the judgement itself of God” was composed, even
if we appropriately uttered these discourses when there had not been a
single synod on such matters. But now that two great synods have been
held which have discussed them freely, at the first of which Barlaam of
Calabria was declared impious,147 and at the second Akindynos of Prilep,148
and the hieromonk Gregory was not only declared most pious by the grace
of Christ, but also truly a defender of piety, just as attested by all who
were present there from every part – and indeed there are with us now
those who were present there at that time – how and on what grounds is
Palamas now declared impious and therefore deserving imprisonment? But
you are saying, or rather you have written, that what Palamas said was
not validated, but that only what Barlaam said was censured and rejected.
What an absurd argument! How can one propose such an irrational reason?
Such arguments are truly the products of Akindynos’ deranged mind, for
it is absolutely clear that nobody else apart from him could have proposed
and uttered such things. For what is more ridiculous than to say that when
two people argue against each other before a synod sitting in judgement,
and one of them is declared impious, the other who has prevailed over him
is not declared pious, in accordance with that which delivered the winning
vote? How is a contradiction not oppositional, or how is it not impossible
that they can be both true or both false at the same time? For in the case of
a contradiction, if one of the two is impious, the other is necessarily pious.
And it would have been necessary to say these things if a Synodal Tomos
146 The megas doux was Alexios Apokaukos, who, with the regents, the empress Anna,
and the patriarch John Kalekas, made a triumvirate of the regency. Although opposed to
Kantakouzenos, Apokaukos was not anti-Palamite.
147 The synod of June 1341.
148 The synod of July 1341.
272 GREGORY PALAMAS
had not been issued as a result of those synods which announce the clear
decisions to those who come after.149 But after there having been held
not only that synod dealing with Barlaam, but also the one dealing with
Akindynos, a Tomos was drawn up and signed by the patriarch and the
other bishops by which Barlaam was condemned as holding erroneous and
blasphemous opinions and wrongly interpreting the writings of the saints,
and Palamas was acquitted with all who shared his opinions as interpreting
them piously and rightly and as keeping within the exegetical teaching and
traditions of the saints – wherefore they were proved to be innocent of the
charge Barlaam had laid against them, as is explicitly stated there150 – who
is able to say, if he wishes to be pious, that the writings of the hieromonk
Palamas, Gregory, who loves the patristic commentaries and traditions and
remains firmly within them, do not have validity? And how was Palamas
proved to be innocent of the charge laid by Barlaam, who accused him
by name, as the Tomos itself testifies, unless he had been examined and
exonerated? But was it not Barlaam who brought the charge? And how was
he able to accuse Palamas? But when he reported him to the authorities, he
did not find himself held in esteem. And how was Palamas summoned from
afar as the accused? But when he came and presented himself at the synod
convoked especially for this purpose, Barlaam, condemning himself – and
the Tomos confirms this too151 – was not persuaded to stand up against him
and engage in debate with him.
8. ‘Yes, but he came immediately when the synod met, said what he
had said and what he had written at that time against Palamas and had his
arguments heard together with the accusation he had previously drawn
up. They were read aloud to all, as the Tomos again testifies. For it says:
“the charges which Barlaam had recently made against the monks were
produced and laid before the synod”, in which the principal accusation,
as mentioned above, was levelled against the most honourable hieromonk
kyr Gregory Palamas.152 What then did Palamas do? Did he not make
his defence against this charge laid against him and his companion? Or
did he make his defence but did not do so convincingly or adequately
enough to acquit himself of the charges and demonstrate that those who
agreed with him were beyond all reproach? And how were the monks
149 The Synodal Tomos of 1341, translated above.

150 Synodal Tomos of 1341, § 31 (Hunger et al., Nr 132, lines 467–70).
proved to be not guilty of the charge, as the Tomos itself witnesses? For
it adds: “When these charges had been read, the arraigned hieromonk,
kyr Gregory Palamas, was directed to make his defence against them,
since it was him they principally concerned. He made an introductory
speech and defended himself in a manner which he appropriately set out in
detail later. He explained how the dispute between them arose before the
said Barlaam had written the above-mentioned work against the monks
and had set out his arguments, as has been demonstrated, against the
divine discourses of the fathers, and before he himself had been moved
of necessity to mount a defence and refutation.”153 Where are those who
blamed Palamas for initiating the controversy? Let them listen to the
Tomos, which shows that Barlaam was the first to accuse and to write.
Where are those who follow Barlaam’s doctrines as reliable and profess to
approve of the Tomos? Let them look at what is written in the Tomos about
him, where it is demonstrated that Barlaam expounded what was contrary
to the discourses of the fathers. And it is for this reason that Palamas was
moved by necessity to set out his objection. Where are those who say that
Palamas’ writings have not been ratified and consider them novelties? Let
them learn from the testimony of the same Tomos that he was moved out
of necessity to respond to the impiety set out by Barlaam and make an
appropriate defence, and, as mentioned above, it was demonstrated he was
faithful to Scripture and the traditions of our holy fathers.154 It is therefore
evident that anyone who dares to invalidate his writings also invalidates
the writings of the saints.
9. ‘Why was the Tomos drawn up and given in order to procure justice
if it did not justify him and acquit him of the charges raised by Barlaam?
But he says that the Tomos is only about the divine light and sacred prayer
and about nothing else.155 It was necessary to say this to those who do
not have ears and eyes; for there is nothing said by Barlaam which is not
included implicitly in the Synodal Tomos. Indeed, after Palamas had made
an appropriate defence against the accusations made in writing by Barlaam
against him and the other monks, as the Tomos says, the discussion on
the divine light was set out more clearly.156 In addition to this, who with

155 He (i.e. Kalekas) says this in his Letter to the Monks of Athos (Hunger et al., Nr 145);
see Rigo 2015a, 26–71.
274 GREGORY PALAMAS
any sense does not know that even without examining the other things
written in the Tomos, the discussion on the light includes them all and
that all who are fully informed about the matter know that the objection
made by Palamas against Barlaam relates only to the light and to sacred
prayer? For what Barlaam says in reproach are many uncreated beings,
thinking he can infer ditheism from this, he has drawn unintelligently
from what is said about this light by the holy fathers, whereas Palamas
has handled them correctly. Therefore the whole of Palamas’ discussion is
concerned with the divine light, because this was the target of Barlaam’s
blasphemy, whereas the other things are to be classed as mere chatter,
along with the perversity of the opponents, who divert the discussion to
matters the relevance of which is difficult to understand that they might
be able consequently to deceive the many and lead them astray, with their
calumnies and lies unnoticed. But since “the deity that was manifested
on the mountain to the disciples was light”, according to Gregory the
Theologian,157 how was the synod’s vote about the light and not about
deity? When this divine light was also declared uncreated synodically,
even though it is not nature, as the Synodal Tomos teaches – “For if those
who climbed Tabor with Jesus ascended to such a height,” it says, “they
beheld divine grace and glory, but not the nature itself that furnished the
grace”158 – this divine light therefore being shown to be uncreated, it is
necessarily also proved at the same time that if this is also called deity,
even if as a dim radiance of deity, even if according to the theologians the
divine nature transcends it, as cause, as provider, as beyond any naming
and participation whatsoever, nothing prevents these from being one deity.
Rather, it proves those who say that this light is created to be polytheists,
atheists and worshippers of creatures.
10. ‘Since indeed it is not only Barlaam who has had the audacity
to say that this light – the splendour of the divine nature by which God
communes with the worthy – is created, but Akindynos also says that it
is created, as he was convicted of saying at the synod held earlier on his
account and as is clearly proved by his own writings and by the discourses
which even now still issue from his mouth – even though there are places
where he avoids the expression and slips in the doctrine in different words
– and, moreover, by his disciples or fellow initiates, who say this with even
greater frankness, and, in addition to this, also by the accusation even now

still being made against Palamas. For it is for this reason that he accuses
him of saying that there are two uncreated deities, inasmuch as he proved
in his refutations of Barlaam both that the divine nature is uncreated and
that the splendour of the divine nature is also called “deity” by those who
saw and experienced the splendour of God, according to the Gregory who
takes his surname from theology.159 Since, then, Akindynos too is proved
in many ways to say that the light seen ineffably by the apostles on Tabor
was created, how is it that he has been granted the right to speak in public?
How is it that he who has proclaimed God uncreated in every respect – and
it is for this reason that that light is uncreated and carries the appellation
“deity”, because it is not separated from the fullness of the deity, for apart
from God nothing is uncreated – how then is it that he who has struggled
in defence of the uncreated deity and has spoken publicly about it, and was
publicly exonerated at a great synod, is now imprisoned without judgement
as a result of calumny, whereas he who makes God a creature – for the
splendour of the divine nature is not outside the divine nature, even if it is
not the nature – this man, who moreover had manifestly been the disciple
of him who had earlier been publicly condemned for an equal impiety, and
who after him was refuted,160 like him, at a great synod, you now regard
worthy of being accorded complete licence and applaud with the greatest
enthusiasm even his prattling writings full of many great impieties? How
can you accept what he says against the hieromonk Gregory Palamas?
But what is most astonishing of all is that the Synodal Tomos which was
written after the synod on Akindynos161 pronounces the most terrible
excommunication and outlaws and cuts off from the whole Christian body,
that is to say, anathematizes, anyone who once again has the audacity,
whoever it may be, to accuse Palamas and those who agree with him or
in general to attack him on the same grounds as Barlaam did.162 It was
not another but Akindynos himself, on incurring such a sentence after
judgement, who accused the same Palamas again on the same grounds as
before, and had you accept him and with him make the same accusations
against Palamas and without any investigation whatsoever consign him to
many years of prison, in order that with him appearing to all to have been
confined as supposedly convicted, his false accusers should seem to be

160 Reading exelēlegmenon (with Perrella) in place of exelēlegmenou (Christou).
161 I.e. after the synod of July 1341.
276 GREGORY PALAMAS
expressing the truth, and at the same time be able to persuade and mislead
the majority since he was not present and could not offer a defence. And
moreover this was before the civil war, and before your enmity against
Palamas, for what reason we do not know – for even you yourself do not
have the courage to say anything that is clear – and Akindynos scarcely
dares to whine openly, but is overcome with shame and avoids people who
are well informed about those synods.
11. ‘And besides, the fact that you have imprisoned him because his
false accusers have been rather stronger is also made evident by you
yourselves. For you say that you have imprisoned the man because he
talks, but you have allowed those who have chosen to calumniate him
to express themselves freely, both in speech and in writing, as if the
accuser is allowed to speak to anyone in any way but the defendant is not
allowed to speak to anyone in any way. But it is said that a disturbance
arose inopportunely, and it is for this reason that we imprisoned him.
And how is it that you did not imprison the one who uttered impieties
and was the cause of the disturbance, but the one who had nothing to do
with either aspect of the cause? For indeed the Synodal Tomos, having
presented Barlaam as the instigator who had first composed writings and
against the divine sayings too, rightly produced against him the canons
which prevent the raising of doctrinal questions. In demonstrating this,
the Tomos itself says: “our humility authorized the reading in the synod’s
hearing of the holy and divine canons by which it is forbidden and in no
circumstances permissible, not only to people like him but also to all
others, to instigate discussion on matters of dogma and consequently to
impose on the rest the absolute necessity of defending these matters.”163
But now, having received from that source the same canons, you use
them against him who has placed himself under the obligation to make
a defence, since he has been moved by necessity to produce a refutation
and mount an appropriate defence, in love for and fidelity to the commen-
taries and traditions of the divine fathers, as is attested by the Tomos
itself, which again in its conclusion, after imposing terrible excommuni-
cations on those who have the audacity to accuse Palamas once again on
the same grounds as Barlaam did and cutting them off from association
with Christians, decrees with spiritual penalties that no one in future is to
instigate doctrinal discussions on these or other dogmas.164 But you have

164 Synodal Tomos of 1341, § 31 (Hunger et al., Nr 132, lines 483–90.
accepted those who now once again have instigated such discussions, or
rather you have not silenced them even after those excommunications; on
the contrary, when they again put forward the same arguments against
the same man in an impious and shameless manner, and he again opposed
them, obliged by the same piety and again necessity, or if not by the same
piety at least of his own accord, you disparage him and imprison him and
shut him up under guard, on the pretext that he was causing a disturbance
and wanted to teach, and that was the case when he was so far from
seeking any status as a teacher and so completely innocent of what was
being alleged by Akindynos against him, that even after the synod on
Akindynos, although publicly strongly encouraged by you who had voted
on all this, or rather, strongly pressed by you, in no way chose to accept
anything of the sort.
12. ‘For what could the defence have in common with such teaching
or wishing to cause a disturbance have in common with submitting to the
necessity not to remain silent, and when one is accused on the grounds
of piety at that? And who does not know, even apart from the synodical
decision recorded in the Tomos, that it is the accuser – and, moreover, after
the judgement and recorded vote – who is the cause of the disturbance even
if the accused in turn defends himself, and that it is the accuser who is the
principal cause of the defence? And how is it that the fact that Akindynos
is accusing is opportune and not disturbing – and, moreover, when he
is not only speaking but also writing – whereas the fact that Palamas is
defending himself, whether verbally or in writing, is disturbing and
inopportune? And how is it that before the synodical judgement Palamas
was guiltless in opposing his accusers, whereas after the vote exonerating
Palamas was awarded to him by synodical judgement he is guilty because
he again defends himself against those who although condemned are not
ashamed to accuse him anew? For indeed the Synodal Tomos laid a penalty
on those who again instigated such doctrinal discussions, but not on those
who necessarily defended themselves against those who again took the
initiative and accused them. For to restrain the defendant by force, and in a
matter of piety at that, how is this not the height of injustice? Furthermore,
as is obvious to all from your own writings and from the facts themselves,
Palamas has now avoided even defending himself verbally, since the time is
not opportune, nor it is without disorderly disturbance. For you have taken
him by force to the uninhabited region of Herakleia and imprisoned him
there. But even before he arrived in the region of Herakleia, escaping the
disturbances he spent his time outside the city in deserted places around
278 GREGORY PALAMAS
it, so that even you say that when you summoned him to a synod you were
utterly unable to find him.’
13. For I learn, most reverend father, that this too has been written to
you against me, that when I was summoned to appear before the synod I
fled to Herakleia. But know that this too is a brazen lie, and hear the truth
of the matter, for it is necessary that I should explain to you what happened
at this synod, resuming the discussion a little earlier and summarizing
as far as possible. Once the civil confusion had been set in motion, as it
should not have been, we were unable to find favour with the patriarch
and the other authorities. Nevertheless, keeping our distance from them in
peace, we settled in the monastery on the opposite side which is honoured
by the name of the heavenly commanders.165 But soon after, the patriarch,
as it appears, still nursing within him resentment against us, granted
freedom of speech to Akindynos who had previously been condemned by
the synod and to other disciples of Barlaam, and allowed them to cause
as much disturbance as possible against us. At times we reported this to
the patriarch, thinking it was done without his knowledge, asking him to
quieten this disturbance if not for the sake of justice and piety at least on
account of the civil war then prevailing, but we seemed to be singing in
vain. Indeed, sometimes very bitter verbal arrows were fired at those who
conveyed the reports.
14. When a little time had gone by, about half of the fast days before the
Lord’s passion, the patriarch sent a certain distinguished man to me – who
at the appropriate time will testify to the truth of what I am now saying –
and having sent him communicated the following to me: ‘Previously, you
used to come to pay your respects to the emperors and see me, but now,
after the revolt that has taken place, you have sown the suspicion in the
heart of the most sovereign lady that you incline towards the opposite side,
because you have shown yourself vexed in these latter days. Come to me
and let us go together to her and speaking frankly, show yourself to be in
agreement with us on what has recently taken place. And if you do this,
everything for you will be well from us, and nothing untoward will happen
to you or to your people.’ And he recounted things which I do not now need
to mention, and then added the following, that ‘since Akindynos too has
again begin to rave and cause a disturbance as before, simply because you
have turned up here, we shall punish him still more severely and silence
165 The monastery of the Archangel Michael, on the opposite side of the Golden Horn
(antiperan) at Anaplous. On this monastery see Janin 1969, vol. 3, 346–50.
his raving.’ And I replied, using the same messenger, as follows: ‘I thank
my lord for his concern for me. With the start of the civil war I have been
truly grieved, most divine lord, for the nation and for those who have been
appointed by God to rule our nation. Therefore being here away from home
I was obliged to say publicly what seemed to me expedient, but at the same
time, reasoning with myself that maybe I was not aiming intelligently at
what was potentially useful, I suggested it privately and as cautiously as
possible. When we were also summoned, and you deigned to share with
us what had been accomplished, I was moved myself by my conscience
to speak more clearly about the situation as it appeared to me, and what
else did I say but that which contributed to peace? And that is what I said
to my lord when we were alone. But you became angry – I do not know
why – and expressed those things against me as a result of which, if caught
in the act, I would at that time have suffered the most dire consequences if
the megas doux had not appeared and explained our purpose, that it is well
intended and Christian. Since then, however, we have as a result of this
been regarded as suspect by her imperial majesty. It is within your power,
if you so wish, easily to dissolve this suspicion.
15. ‘Given that Akindynos has often already had the audacity to deal
with matters that have been forbidden, and that this cannot have escaped
the attention of your supreme holiness, what is the complaint against me
if on becoming acquainted with this I was obliged to do nothing more
than make this known to your holiness? This is therefore what I am now
reporting to your holiness. Thanks to the authority given to your divinity
by the Spirit, you know better than anyone those great synods held on this
matter, and the Tomos issued by them, and the most terrible excommuni-
cations recorded in the Tomos against those who still dare to accuse us and
the monks who agree with us. It belongs to you, then, to put a stop to this
loathsome renewed audacity of Akindynos. If this man does not hold his
foul rebellion in check, we will remain firm in our own steadfastness and to
the best of our ability and in every way instruct those who wish to hear us
about the truth concerning us and piety. If there are some who in ignorance
of the truth are dragged down to falsehood and impiety, that is your concern
as the common shepherd, or rather, as the chief shepherd. And now forgive
me, my divine lord, if out of respect for the days, I am unwilling to come to
your divinity, but when the sacred fast is over I shall be happy to do so.’ But
do you yourself see, most God-beloved father, how the patriarch himself
testifies that it is Akindynos, not us, who raises anew questions which the
Tomos forbade to be raised? And with him now stirring matters near and
280 GREGORY PALAMAS
afar by hand, by tongue, and in all manner of ways, the patriarch almost
everywhere testifies against us and supports him.
16. But when Palm Sunday arrived,166 I learnt that together with our
most reverend fathers the most holy protos too was to arrive here and was
already on the voyage, so I too entered the city. When he disembarked, I
conducted him first to my cells in the city, and we spent two days there
together without my accompanying him to the imperial palace. During the
week of the saving Passion, and the week that followed, there were occasions
on which I myself went to the patriarchate and the imperial palace. One
day I was sitting alone with her majesty discussing what should be done,
when after a little while the patriarch arrived with his retinue. All of us
then sat down together in the presence of the empress and the patriarch
and continued the conversation. The most important of the officials then
began to propose things which, if I may put it thus, were not suitable in
my hearing. So when they started saying these things, I attempted to stop
them. But they said to me: ‘Since you are living in retirement at a distance
from events here, you are uninformed about what is going on, but for us it
is necessary that you too should know these things.’ And they added the
following, continuing what they were attempting on that occasion to say. I
for my part, believe me father, said to myself the words of Susanna: ‘I am
constrained on all sides. For if I say what seems to me to be necessary, I
shall be offensive to those who are present, who are so very important. But
if I am completely silent I shall not escape God’s judgement. It is preferable
to be thought burdensome by some than to sin against God and the people
who bear the name Christ.’167 Therefore not bearing to go against my inner
judgement, I began to address them in the following words: ‘With regard
to what you have said, my inner conscience threatens me with the future
most dread tribunal and strongly affirms that I would be condemned before
the eternal sovereign, if I did not now say in your presence what seems to
me advantageous, right and true. But the reasoning that fights against my
conscience threatens to condemn me and prove me liable in your presence
to terrible and extreme punishments, unless I set my conscience aside and
remain silent, counting as nothing the fear of what comes from above.
But “it is necessary to obey God rather than human beings.”’168 Next,
166 24 March 1342; on the mission of the delegation from Mount Athos, see Meyendorff
1959, 100. The protos was Isaac of Anapausos (PLP 8261).
167 Cf. Dan 13: 22–3.
168 Acts 5: 29.
mixing thus the saving medicine of truth with honey, so far as possible,
that is to say, with soothing words, I poured it into the ears of those who
expressed those things with their own mouths. And a long discussion
took place among all those who were present there, who included the very
powerful. But mildness was not maintained by the powerful right to the
end. Nevertheless, again by using honeyed words so far as possible and
praying in the end for the best outcome from Christ, we were released.
17. After this, even though we were not present, the patriarch showed
himself every day, so to speak, exceedingly angry with us in many ways,
inspecting everything, making many rounds and pulling every string, as
the saying goes, to find some occasion against us and hand us over to
dire ill-treatment. But trusting in God, to whom we seek to belong to
the best of our ability, whether we suffer or do not suffer, we lived in the
midst of what was devised against us at every turn until the Sunday of
the Holy Fathers.169 Immediately after this Sunday we were again sent
to that monastery on the opposite shore. Since in the springtime there
is much commotion at that place, because those who sail up towards the
Black Sea for the sake of commerce make their preparations there for the
most part, whereas higher up from that monastery, or rather everywhere
in an arc around it there are places very suitable for tolerable tranquillity
– indeed, the column of perseverance, the column of Daniel,170 is situated
there together with the hermitages of many other older saints – and there
are areas of woodland thick with dense, shady trees and deliberately
kept inaccessible to the general public by their owners, where we too
have gone and spent some time for the sake of a little tranquillity. We
learnt that in the week after our departure an ecclesiastic arrived at the
monastery honoured by the name of the heavenly commanders-in-chief
and after searching for us with the greatest diligence and not finding
us retraced his steps. When I myself learnt this I went down to the city,
and on meeting our own fathers asked them if it had become known to
them what the reason was for such a diligent search for me on the part of
the patriarchal authority. They said to me: ‘It was truly a work of God’s
providence that yesterday you were not found by the man sent to summon
you to the so-called synod to which those bishops who usually sat with
the patriarch were invited and no other bishop at all, and from among the
169 The Sunday after Pentecost.

170 Daniel, who occupied his column from 460 until his death in 497, was the most famous
slylite after St Symeon Stylites himself.
282 GREGORY PALAMAS
notables only the relations of the empress Choumnaina were present there,
and of these only the younger ones followed by an appropriate swarm of
servants.171 And among these was Akindynos, he too with his own swarm
of Barlaam’s disciples and not a few monks, some of them holding stout
cudgels under their mantles. Their entire concern was that without anyone
noticing it they should summon you alone, pretending gentleness, and
once you had supposedly been condemned synodically to hand you over
to mockery and floggings.’ And when they had explained these things to
me, believe me, father, I for my part said: ‘Let us then go to the patriarch,
now that the height of the storm has passed.’ But persuaded by those who
thought that this should not be attempted, I abandoned the road leading
to the patriarch, and staying now with one friend and now with another,
spent a great many days in the city.
18. One day, when I was in the company of the most venerable protos
of the Holy Mountain, two ecclesiastics arrived and addressed us and sat
down beside us. Then they said to me alone in his hearing: ‘Our sovereign
lady and our lord the emperor have commanded that your holiness should
come to the palace.’ I replied to them: ‘What you have said seems unlikely
to us. You are servants of the Church, yet you say you are bearers of an
imperial command. How is that? Was there not an official of either low or
high rank to carry out what was ordered by our lords and emperors?’ To
which they replied: ‘Today when the patriarch came out of Hagia Sophia
and took the road leading to the palace, we were given this command by
him to find you and give you this message, and this is what we have done
and said. So come, let us go together.’ And I replied: ‘This seems much
more unlikely than what you said earlier. Could the emperors have visited
the greatest of churches this morning?’ They said in turn: ‘There was
some occasion for the visit there today by the emperors. But come, let
us go together.’ And I again: ‘it seems that I am sought for some matter
concerning the Church. But now – for it was already mid-day and it was
no longer the right time for a synod – it would be pointless for me to go
with you. So I am now sending a message by you to my lord the patriarch
that I shall come in accordance with his command tomorrow morning.’
When they heard this, they took it badly.
171 The empress Choumnaina was Irene-Eulogia Choumnaina Palaiologina, who,

widowed at the age of sixteen upon the death of her husband, the Despot John Palaiologos
(hence her title ‘empress’) founded the monastery of Christ Philanthropos, of which she
became abbess. The spiritual father of her community was Akindynos.
19. The protos then summoned the most honourable hieromonk kyr
Lazaros, the hegoumenos of the monastery of Philotheou, and sent him
to the patriarch with the following message: ‘If Palamas is summoned for
some other reason he will come willingly, but if it is on account of the
questions raised by Barlaam and Akindynos, this is a matter that concerns
not Palamas personally, but all Christians in general, especially the monks,
and most of all, those of this Holy Mountain. Set a day, then, on which
a synod will be held to examine this question, and please be so good as
to let us know beforehand so that once we have prepared ourselves, we
can all come together and the truth will be elucidated.’ They then went
away, and after a little the hegoumenos of Philotheou returned, saying that
the patriarch had replied as follows: ‘It has not even entered our mind to
convoke a synod for the examination of such matters, but I am investi-
gating the treatises on this matter.’ When the protos heard about this from
me, he took the opportunity to say once more to the patriarch: ‘Even if you
had not been making an investigation, I would have contacted you, had I
not seen how angry you were against them.’
20. I, for my part, was again eager to go to him, but the most beloved
of fathers stopped me again, saying, ‘Hold back still, until we have gone
to him without you and found out what he says.’ And so, leaving me
behind, they went to the patriarch and said to him: ‘Your great holiness
having previously read Barlaam’s treatises and subsequently also Palamas’
antirrhetic treatises against him, you have praised him in the presence
of not a few of our most eminent people and have expressed admiration
for Palamas’ writings in the company of all who heard them read aloud
testifying to their utter reliability. As a result, you know and have condemned
the impiety of Barlaam’s writings and thanks to this you have confessed
the greatest gratitude to Palamas. Subsequently, when a great synod was
convened, or rather, when great synods were convened,172 the same thing
happened again in the presence of all. The issue being not simply a dispute
between two men but the antirrhetic treatises they wrote against each other
on the subject of piety, the synod first pronounced the treatises of Barlaam
impious and then those of Akindynos, who after Barlaam had vindicated
him, and justified, proclaimed and corroborated those of Palamas, that is to
say, our own treatises and those of the Church of God, as the Tomos says.
For what reason was the Tomos issued in Palamas’ favour as a justification
172 These were the synods of June and July 1341.
284 GREGORY PALAMAS
if not to justify what had been written by him?’ When the patriarch heard
this he intervened and interrupted the discourse, and turning in a different
direction began to say, fuming with anger: ‘Palamas has now been found
out. For one of his monks was arrested on his way to Kantakouzenos
carrying four letters from Palamas, two addressed to the Asan family and
two addressed to Kantakouzenos himself and to one of his people.’173 When
they heard this, ready in imitation of Christ to lay down their lives for
their friends, they said: ‘We lay down our lives right now for that man, if
this is really true. The matter is a calumny, my lord, an obvious calumny.
He has never done anything of the kind. In fact the proof is close at hand.
Let Palamas’ man, the one who was arrested on these charges, be brought
before us without delay. But the patriarch turned away from them in anger
and fixed his gaze on others. And coming back to us, they recounted these
things, and advised me, saying: ‘Get out of here at once, if you do not wish
to be condemned to death.’
21. For this reason, father, I abandoned even the places in the vicinity
of the city and went to Herakleia, but not because I was running away
from any synod, as they write. For above you heard them saying that the
synod they speak of had not even entered their minds. But in reality, all this
discussion of dogma is a pretext, devised to conceal their hatred for those
who long for peace. You may also gather that this is how things stand from
the letters sent by me to the fathers,174 in which I also recount what was
done to me at Herakleia and why and with what stratagem. I escaped from
there. The remainder of the narrative of events has been cut short by the
messengers, who are in a hurry to leave. But you by your prayers to God
may cut short definitively any similar events to follow.
173 The Hellenized Asan (or Asen) family, related by descent to the royal family of
Bulgaria and by marriage to Kantakouzenos, were supporters of Kantakouzenos during the
civil war.
174 The Letter to the Most Venerable Elders on the Holy Mountain (Sinkewicz 2002, W36,
dated autumn 1344).
3. TO BESSARION
Gregory Palamas to the most honourable among the monks and most
ascetical, kyr Bessarion.175
1. Kyr Bessarion, blessed by God and loved by me with all my heart, the
way things are in the present age is just as the Apostle predicted, your
holiness has written and we ourselves see. Moreover, the devil, seeing
the moment propitious for him, has attempted to destroy even the very
foundations of piety, and in such a clever manner that perhaps he would
have brought his malicious enterprise to a successful conclusion, without
even those expecting it being aware of the disaster, if God had not wished
through me, the least of people, to detect him and disperse his wickedness.
What, then, were we supposed to do when we became aware that he was
creeping in and attempting to shake the foundations of piety? Withdraw to
the hesychastic life and remain silent, taking into account the inclination
of the many nowadays towards the worse, and the reproaches that would
be incurred from them, and the attacks from opponents, or stand up to
fight for piety, and defend it with words and run risks for it, looking to
the God of piety and to approbation from him, or rather, to the necessary
obligation that we have towards him? The second, of course. For this is the
more profitable for everyone. For when the foundation of piety is in good
condition, it is not only possible for some people to build on it the works of
virtue, but even for those who live more negligently there always remains
the hope of repentance. But if that foundation is demolished, then every
good is pulled down with it.
2. For this reason, with God helping us and strengthening us in many
ways, we have stepped forward in defence of piety, which has been treated
so scornfully and have put the scorner to shame, or rather have completely
destroyed him, cutting off his head. This was Barlaam, who received his
strength from every quarter. For indeed he seemed powerful both in the
Church and in the state, and received much support both from the emperor
and from those in authority. Nevertheless, he was in all respects refuted,
as an opponent of piety, and out of shame took flight, because he did not
wish to repent. The beginning and head having thus been cut off, to which
the serpent, the author of evil, had attached his coils when he mounted his
175 For an analysis of the letter, see Rigo 2015a, 278–80.
286 GREGORY PALAMAS
attack on piety, what wonder is it that still in his death-throes he should

raise up the dust of temptations against us with his tail? Read the old
stories, and you will find that all who struggled on behalf of piety when
it was opposed, after the victory at those great councils subsequently had
to bear themselves the penalties of the condemned. If therefore those who
were in themselves most worthy of being venerated by all even when they
were still alive experienced this, how much more will we ourselves, who
through the uselessness of our lives are worthy of beatings and needful of
correction? And how would it not be a sign that our race on behalf of the
faith was dissimilar from the struggles of the fathers on behalf of piety,
if we were exempt from the subsequent correction which they themselves
shared? And how would not someone who defames us say that we have
acted for the sake of glory, if we had not borne the same dishonour as they
endured? For this reason do not be surprised, dear brother, ‘at the fiery
ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something
strange were happening to you’,176 but accept it, because we still bear the
trace of communion with those who shared in the passion of Christ, ‘who
suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his
steps’.177 Do not seek freedom, but pray for endurance, nor judge that it is
good when people of their own accord with the help of God quench the
fire of the evil one, but stand clear of it and free yourself from the heat and
smoke before it is fully put out, and do not be too annoyed with those who
do not completely approve of you or even blame you. Bear in mind what
the saying symbolizes, how the foundation stone and head of the corner is
a stumbling-block,178 and how the aroma of Christ is for some a fragrance
from life to life, and for others from death to death.179
3. It seems to me that some regard this present controversy as a peering
inquisitively into matters that are susceptible of different interpretations,
as seeming to inquire into what, as regards hesychasm, is inaccessible
to the mind. Later, once they have come to know that I have submitted
myself to these reproaches and afflictions for the sake of steadying the
piety, common to all, which has been shaken, without regarding my soul
as of value to myself, they will undoubtedly thank me and accept what I
say. Even if not all do so at the present time, they will do so in the day
176 1 Pet 4: 12.

177 1 Pet 2: 21.
178 Cf. 1 Pet 2: 7.
179 Cf. 2 Cor 2: 15–16.
of the Lord, when all things will be revealed, and these things above all.
Know, too, that apart from a few, the others have not yet understood the
issue that has been raised concerning right belief. The controversy was not
started by us but rather has aroused us held is fast as an opponent – look
at the great harm which would come from this supposition if it progresses.
For it overturns the whole mystery of the faith, and does not refrain from
damaging the way of life of people orientated towards God, being a
recapitulation of the heresies which have arisen from the beginning to the
detriment of every good and a kind of epilogue to them, and now invented
in these last days of the last age by the originator and perfecter of error in
order to oppose everything good and true from start to finish. Thus he has
concealed his entry, so as to be undetectable by the majority and therefore
difficult to shake off.
4. I make a reverence to the most holy former hegoumenos kyr
Philotheos,180 writing to him that the fathers say ‘from humility comes
discernment’.181 You yourself have shown the marks of humility in what
you have written to us, through which you have also wisely reminded us of
what we ourselves lack, but you have not shown the marks of discernment.
For I am still waiting for you to give your assistance to those who earlier
had suffered for the sake of divine truth and now suffer for the common
race.182 You have even attempted to alienate those who have worked with
us and suffer with us and draw them to yourself. So correct yourself as
regards this, dearest father, and add to the prayers for me. A reverence to
the most honourable hieromonk kyr Makarios,183 my brother not only in
the spirit; and tell him not to be sorry if a little while ago he was impeded.
A visit to us was not yet opportune. A reverence to my brothers in Christ
in all things, kyr Mark Blates and kyr Moses;184 and say to kyr Mark,
‘Do not make the circumstances an excuse for staying on the mountain
with Moses, or rather – what is more extraordinary – for guiding him,
but prepare yourself to give me indications of your permanent residence
on the Holy Mountain. For I hope you see even Moses who is with you,
180 The reference to Philotheos as prohegoumenos dates the letter to 1345; see Rigo 2015a,
263.
181 John Climacus, Ladder Step 4 (PG 88, 717B).
182 Cf. 1 Pet 2: 9.
183 Palamas’ Second Letter to his Brother Makarios (also written in 1345 but a few months
earlier) is quoted at length by Philotheos in the Life of Palamas, § 71.
184 On Mark (PLP 2818) and Moses (PLP 19926) see Rigo (2015a, 279), and his comments
on the PLP notices.
288 GREGORY PALAMAS
if nothing else, at least contrite in the depths of his heart, not because
he cannot stand people who insult him, but because he bears rationally
the gibes that naturally will be directed at him in this very numerous
community. At any rate, put up with a prisoner who freely speaks his
mind.’185 A reverence to all my fathers and brothers in God. Be well, and
may you be always disposed in your heart by the grace of Christ to ascend
towards the better. And for your part, be at peace with all, especially with
yourself, on which account do not cease to pray also for me.
4. TO THE EMPRESS ANNA PALAIOLOGINA

Gregory Palamas to the most powerful and most pious sovereign lady,
Palaiologina.186
1. Nothing is so supremely necessary, nothing is so supremely profitable

and at the same time fitting for those who by the grace of God rule over the
people who bear the name of Christian than to use the power that comes
from God’s sovereignty of behalf of God’s eternal kingdom, which again is
madly being reduced to the level of the created by our present opponents.
And since that great emperor of ours,187 so admirable in every respect,
certainly understood this, he proved by his deeds that he had received his
reign from God, seeing that he had assumed a divine zeal for his kingdom
and had completely reduced those who chose to humble its eminence. This
too, our holy sovereign lady, your most excellent reign clearly makes present
through what you are already accomplishing. And may it be that you bring
the action to its conclusion, and as he is no longer with us, completely
destroy those who again oppose piety, so that, as in all the other virtues,
you may be equal to him in your zeal for God.
2. And because among the virtues your most royal wisdom is mingled
with a zeal moved by God, you have done well to seek to learn concisely
and in as clear a manner as possible what is thought and said by us and
185 Palamas’ reference to himself as a prisoner (desmios) points to a date for the letter after
his formal condemnation and imprisonment in the Blachernai Palace in November 1344.
186 Written in response to the initiative taken by the empress Anna in 1346 to inform
herself about the key issues of the Hesychast Controversy as the civil war began to go
against her.
187 Andronikos III, Anna’s late husband, who died five days after the synod of 10 June
1341.
our opponents about the divine light, the matter is as follows. The saints
sometimes call the essence of God ‘deity’, and sometimes they call ‘deity’
the light by which our Lord became ineffably radiant on Mount Tabor
and dazzled the disciples who went up with him. Since we therefore hold
that this radiance is uncreated, along with the essence that is beyond any
manifestation, yet was revealed to the worthy, Akindynos, like Barlaam,
accuses us of advocating two uncreated deities, a higher and a lower, and
says, as Barlaam did earlier, that the only uncreated divinity is the essence
of God and that the divine radiance is created. Since he says that the divine
radiance was created he necessarily says that it is lower. Therefore he too
says that there are two divinities, a higher and a lower. It is thus evident
that he accuses us of speaking of a higher and a lower deity in order to
deceive his hearers. But the real reason why he accuses us is this: because
we advocate that the divine and ineffable light, which he says is created, is
uncreated, just as the God-bearing fathers and Christ himself, who shone
with this light and called it the kingdom of God, have taught us. For the
kingdom of God is not servile and created; for only this kingdom is never
conquered but is invincible and beyond all time and epoch.
3. Therefore in this way, like the great Athanasius,188 we venerate
God in one deity, not uncreated only in his essence, but also in what
is contemplated and considered theologically around the essence, the
power, the will, the goodness, the light, the life and suchlike, the essence
and the radiance and in short every divine power and energy of the three
Persons being one and the same. But Akindynos illegitimately splits the
one God into created and uncreated elements and cuts the deity of the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit into two deities alien to each other
and in reality higher and lower, calling the essence of God ‘higher’, as in
his view the only uncreated deity, and that light ‘lower’, as created deity.
As a result he also makes the essence of God created; for if the radiance
is created, the essence is not uncreated. The brevity of the present letter
does not allow us to discuss the host of other pernicious heresies into
which he falls in consequence. Just as Sabellius, by saying that the Son
does not differ from the Father, made it a doctrine that the Father does
not have a Son, so Akindynos, when he says that that divine radiance and
energy does not differ in any way from the essence of God, says that that
the essence of God possesses no energy. Anyone who says this, apart
188 Ps.-Athanasius of Alexandria, Sermon on the Annunciation of the Mother God 2 (PG
28, 917C–920A).
290 GREGORY PALAMAS
from being a Messalian, also demolishes God completely and shows

himself to be an atheist. For according to the theologians, that which
posses no energy has no existence at all.
4. That is why that divine and venerable mouth of my thrice-blessed
and holy lord and emperor says in the Synodal Tomos: ‘Since if the Lord’s
initiates who went up Mount Tabor together ascended to such a height of
contemplation, they beheld divine grace and glory, but not the nature itself
that furnished the grace.’189 And indeed, initiated by the divine sayings, we
know that that nature is imparticipable, incomprehensible, and invisible
even by the highest supernatural powers themselves. And now those who
have shown contempt for God, and for the saints of God, and for that
emperor of ours from God, and for the synod’s investigation and decree,
and for the terrible censures and anathemas pronounced by it, publicly
denounce us who think in this way in a pious manner, together with those
who share our opinions, and defend and support Akindynos and those who
impiously think like him and hold the contrary opinions, zealously trying
by every means to have them as colleagues and fellow celebrants.190
189 Cf. Synodal Tomos of 1341, § 24; Hunger et al., lines 337–9.
190 Kalekas had appointed strong antipalamites to Thessalonike (Hyakinthos) and
Monembasia (Iakobos), and, having ordained Akindynos, apparently wanted to make him a
bishop once circumstances permitted it.
IV

AND RELATED DOCUMENTS
of 1347
Introduction
At the beginning of February 1347 the six-year civil war between

Andronikos III’s megas domestikos, John Kantakouzenos, and the regency
exercised in Constantinople on behalf of the young John V by his mother,
the empress Anna Palaiologina, and the patriarch John XIV Kalekas came
to an end. The position of the regency began to weaken after the murder
of the megas doux Alexios Apokaukos by his own political prisoners on
11/12 July 1345. In the course of 1346 Kalekas came under increasing
pressure. In January two dogmatic treatises written by Philotheos against
Akindynos on the topic of the light of Tabor were sent to the empress
from Mount Athos.1 Anna then appears to have begun her own investi-
gation of the issues raised by the controversy. She herself requested reports
from Kalekas, Palamas and David Dishypatos.2 These were followed in
September 1346 by a report signed by six metropolitans and an archbishop,
who denounced the patriarch in the strongest terms for putting Christianity
itself in danger.3 This report was all the more damaging to Kalekas because
the signatories were not partisans of Palamas. Finally, in January 1347
Anna decided to convoke a council, which, meeting in the Blachernai
palace on 2 February only hours before Kantakouzenos’ entry into the city,
deposed the patriarch.
One of the first things Kantakouzenos did after the capitulation of the
empress on 8 February was to convoke a council to ratify the deposition
1 Laurent 1935, 1504; Meyendorff 1959, 117.

2 Meyendorff 1959, 117, 374–5; Rigo 2015b. For Kalekas see Philotheos, Life of Palamas,
§ 78 and the Synodal Tomos of 1347, §13. Palamas’ text is his On the Refutation of the Tomos
(Sinkewicz 2002, 143, W15), Christou II, 649–70 (= Perrella II, 1386–1426). Dishypatos’ text
has been edited by Candal 1949.
3 Critical edition with Italian translation in Rigo 2015b, 334–9.
292 GREGORY PALAMAS
of the patriarch and begin the process of electing his successor.4 The new
council, which met in the Blachernai palace, consisted of only eleven
bishops, since Kalekas refused to attend and the Kantakouzenist bishops,
led by Lazaros, patriarch of Jerusalem, who had already condemned
Kalekas at a council held in Adrianople in May 1346, had not yet arrived.
Nevertheless, the number of bishops available was deemed sufficient for the
matter in hand, and, following Kalekas’ refusal to appear after the canonical
three summonses, he was deposed, excommunicated and stripped of the
priesthood.5 In March Kantakouzenos published a decree (prostagma)
confirming this decision. A few weeks later, when the bishops had arrived
from Adrianople, a further council was held in the Great Church of Hagia
Sophia in the presence of the two emperors, John VI Kantakouzenos
and John V Palaiologos, and the empress Anna. On the occasion of this
council several of the previous signatories signed again and the patriarch
Lazaros and a further seven bishops also added their signatures.6 On a later
occasion, presumably after 17 May, when Isidore was elected patriarch, a
third set of signatures was appended that includes that of Gregory Palamas,
the new metropolitan of Thessalonike.7
The Palamites were triumphant. The deposed patriarch, John
Kalekas, was exiled to Didymoteichon and died shortly after returning
to Constantinople, on 29 December. Akindynos also died in exile not
long afterwards. Not all the bishops, however, were happy with what
they saw as the victory of a heretical monastic faction. After meeting
in a series of councils in Constantinople during the early summer, some
ten bishops, claiming the support of a further twenty bishops outside
the capital, issued their own Synodal Tomos in July 1347 declaring the
deposition of Isidore Boucheiras and Gregory Palamas.8 They were led
by Matthew, metropolitan of Ephesus, whose antipathy towards the
patriarch Isidore seems to have been as great as it had been towards
4 Meyendorff 1959, 129–30.

5 The resulting Synodal Tomos was issued between 25 and 28 February, 1347; Rigo
2013, 748.
6 For the full list of names, see Rigo 2013, 749.
7 For the full list of names, see Rigo 2013, 749.
8 According to Gregoras (Historia Byzantina XV, 10 [Bonn II, 786]), the dissident
bishops met first in the church of the Holy Apostles and subsequently in the monastery
of St Stephen the Protomartyr. Their Tomos is particularly interesting for the accusations
they make against the Palamites concerning alienation of children from parents, hostility to
icons, and a non-ascetical fondness of hot baths.
John Kalekas.9 Isidore retaliated in August 1347 with a Tomos Against

Matthew.10 Two of Matthew’s associates, Neophytos of Philippi and Joseph
of Ganos, were deposed, but Matthew himself was only suspended. He
seems to have made his peace with the patriarchate in 1350 after Isidore’s
death.11
Texts and Editions
The three texts translated below from the rich dossier of documents for the
years 1346–47 are the following:
1. The Synodal Tomos of 1347, from the critical edition of Herbert
Hunger (with a German translation by Ewald Kislinger): Hunger
et al., 346–82, Nr. 147.
2. The Prostagma of John Kantakouzenos, from the critical edition of
Antonio Rigo (with an Italian translation by Rigo): Rigo 2013, 757–9.
3. The Anti-Palamite Tomos of 1347, from the critical edition of Antonio
Rigo: Rigo 2020a.
The Synodal Tomos of 1347 was first published by Miklosich and Müller in
1860 in an edition with several lacunae, and was reproduced by Migne in PG
152, 1273–84. The first critical edition was produced by John Meyendorff
in 1963, on the basis of six manuscripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries (Meyendorff 1963, 211–26). Hunger’s critical edition is based
on Meyendorf with the addition of a further manuscript of the patriarchal
register, Vindobonensis hist. gr. 47.
The Prostagma of John Kantakouzenos was first published in 1698 by
the patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem in his Tomos Agapēs, pages 8–10,
and was reprinted by Migne in PG 151, 769–72. Rigo’s critical edition is
based on three fourteenth-century manuscripts, two from Athos (Athous
9 Matthew (PLP 3309) had been the senior signatory of the letter of the seven bishops
who had written to the empress Anna in September 1346. He was a revered figure, one of
the few bishops who with great difficulty had entered Turkish territory (between June 1339
and February 1340) to take possession of his see. On Matthew in Ephesus see Vryonis 1971,
343–8 and, on his activities in Constantinople, Rigo 2015b, 308–12.
10 The Tomos Against Matthew was published by Uspenskij 1892, 728–37.
11 Rigo 2015b, 311.
294 GREGORY PALAMAS
Dionysiou 147 [3861] and Athous Vatopediou 262) and one from Vienna
(Wien österreichische Nationalbibliothek jur. gr. 7).
The Anti-Palamite Tomos of 1347 was first published by the scriptor
of the Vatican Library, Leo Allatius, in his De ecclesiae occidentalis
atque orientalis perpetua consensione (‘Cologne’, 1648, 803–10), and was
reprinted by Migne in PG 150, 877D–885A. Rigo’s edition is based on
the manuscript used by Allatius (Vat. Barb. gr. 291) with the addition of
evidence from indirect witness.12
The translations below are the first in English. I have added my own
numbering of the paragraphs.
Text
The Synodal Tomos of 1347

Synodal Tomos confirming the previous Tomos13 on the examination and
condemnation of the doctrines of Barlaam and Akindynos and again
together with Akindynos refuting and deposing the patriarch,14 who
subsequently adopted the same views as Akindynos and became his patron.
1. Truly no one is such an architect of any deceit as the adversary,15 the

furnisher and patron of every kind of impiety. For of old he alienated the
human race from God and persuaded it to accept and worship a multitude
of gods on the grounds that one God could not save such a complex
heavenly and earthly animal as man. His deceptive arguments were refuted
when Christ appeared alone of all as almighty and all-sovereign God, who
came down from heaven to dwell on earth, then from earth descended into
Hades, and having returned thence to heaven with the human nature he had
assumed, made everything – whatever he willed – in everyone.16 Therefore
the leader of deceit adopted a different approach and pretended to reject the
error of polytheism. He made a show of helping to drive everyone towards
a single God by the utterances of each false belief, but in fact cut them off
12 See Bucossi, Gazzini and Rigo (forthcoming).

13 The Tomos of the Constantinopolitan council of June 1341.
14 John XIV Kalekas, patriarch of Constantinople 1334–47.
15 Satan.
16 Cf. 1 Cor 12: 6.
from the one God. For by the sophistical arguments of the heretics he tried
to persuade them that God was not trihypostatic and almighty. What was
he trying to achieve by this? Polytheism together with atheism. For if the
Son of the Father is not true God – which is the main feature of the Arian
madness – how is the Father true God? How is he truly uncreated who
has begotten a creature? How can God be one if he consists of created and
uncreated, which are utterly distinct from each other? On the other hand,
how can there be Father or Son if each is the same, which in turn was the
madness of Sabellius? For each will end up in non-being as a result of
the other. Therefore the patron of error has been refuted on these points
too, the holy fathers proclaiming one God in three uncreated persons who
differ hypostatically, and wisely ward off in this manner both confusion
and juxtaposition.
2. But although he was thus refuted on these points, the ingenious but
unsuccessful contriver of error was unable to stay inactive to the end, nor
could he bear to refrain from pushing those persuaded by him towards
atheism and polytheism, but craftily repudiating one part of that earlier
error, that he might be able to avoid detection by the many, and accepting
another part, that he might thereby lure them no less easily to perdition, he
again prompted those in thrall to error to say that God was clearly one and
to worship him as three hypostases, not indeed because the nature, will,
power, energy, kingdom, wisdom, goodness, infinity, simplicity and all the
glorious distinctions, so to speak, of the Godhead are a unity of three, but
because all these together are one, a single essence, and are all created by
that essence. ‘For if the divine will and power and energy,’ they say, ‘are
uncreated, nothing would be different from the uncreated essence, and if
they were different in any way whatever from that essence, there would be
one uncreated Godhead, the transcendent essence of God as the cause of
these, and those that are different from the essence in any way whatever
are to be numbered with God’s creatures.’17 These, therefore, and the glory
of the divine nature – the light of the age to come, the prelude to which the
disciples saw with their own eyes on Tabor – they sometimes call the divine
essence, sick as they are with the undisguised doctrines of the Messalians,
and sometimes drag down to the level of the created as not being the divine
essence but its energy and radiance. What do they maintain by this and
inspire their supporters to think? Atheism and polytheism, diametrically
17 Cf. Gregory Palamas, Antirrhetics Against Akindynos VI, xiii, 46 (Christou III, 422,
13–17; Perrella II, 722–4).
296 GREGORY PALAMAS
opposed evils and both equally deplorable, the one because it divides the
one Godhead into created and uncreated, and introducing the other, atheism,
not only by that argument – for if the power, energy, will and radiance of
the essence are created, how is the essence itself uncreated? – but also by
destroying the difference between the divine essence and the divine energy.
For thus each is inevitably forced by the other to proceed towards non-being,
and both reciprocally, with the result that neither is uncreated godhead.
3. The leader and patron of this novel version of Arianism and
Sabellianism, of this atheistic and polytheistic contraction and division of
the godhead, was Barlaam the Calabrian. On the pretext of advocating the
unity of the godhead he led many astray, and inveighing against those who
worship God as truly one in a single and undeniably uncreated godhead,
both verbally and in writing, for thinking that along with the essence that
is beyond any manifestation, the divine radiance that appears to the worthy
is also uncreated, he accused them impiously of maintaining that there are
two divinities, a higher one and a lower one, declaring himself that the
divine and deifying energy, grace and radiance is created and is in reality
inferior in virtue of being created and seen by those who have been divinely
filled with grace. It was on these points above all that he was brought down,
as is treated in the Tomos of the most honourable hieromonk, kyr Gregory
Palamas, who verbally and in writing has refuted this impiety of his.18
4. He was therefore summoned from afar, an assembly of the best
people was held and the whole city came of its own accord to hear the
proceedings.19 Accordingly, with the late emperor of blessed memory
and the patriarch presiding,20 and the hierarchs, officials, general judges,
senate and leading members of the clergy sitting by them, and with all
the others standing round, Barlaam, being present, was refuted by the said
hieromonk, kyr Gregory Palamas, who was also present, and was shown
to have thought, spoken and written things contrary to the holy words of
the fathers and the common faith of Christians, in the charges which he
brought against Palamas and the monks who supported him, as the sacred
Tomos issued on this matter sets out word for word.21 Barlaam at all events,
having been condemned by synodical process, declared his repentance on
18 This appears to refer to the Hagioretic Tomos. No other work of Palamas is styled a
Tomos.
19 The Council of June 1341, held in Hagia Sophia and lasting one day.
20 Andronikos III Palaiologos (emperor 1328–41) and the patriarch John XIV Kalekas.
21 Cf. Tomos of 1341, § 30.
these matters and the next day boarded a ship and secretly fled, slipping
away under the cap of Hades, as the saying goes. Not long afterwards
the emperor, who more than anyone else spoke freely at the synod and
confirmed the true faith, departed this life.22
5. Later the disciples of Barlaam’s heresy and especially Akindynos,
who with him and under him concocted that wicked falsehood, again began
to cause a disturbance. They deceived the majority again because they
claimed not to be pursuing Barlaam’s error and without anyone applying
pressure on them put him under numerous anathemas. When Palamas in
turn learned of this, he repeatedly refuted Akindynos in the presence of
no small an audience, with the result that having nothing to say against
him, Akindynos testified to Palamas by a document in his own hand that
everything he said and wrote was in every respect in complete agreement
with the saints. This document is available to those who wish to see
it.23 After a brief interval he set aside this autograph text and signature
and again went about causing disturbance. And again a holy synod was
convoked, which was in no way inferior to the previous one.24 Because
of the absence of the late emperor of happy memory – on account of his
departure from us – his place was taken by one who distinguished himself
at the synod, nobly and wonderfully refuting Akindynos’ audacious errors,
and when the emperor was still alive, to put it in Scriptural terms used to
lead Israel in and out and magnanimously administer the Roman Empire,
and who by God’s grace is now invested with the imperial dignity for the
well-being of the Romans and reigns as co-emperor with the son of our late
thrice-blessed and holy lord and emperor.25 So then, at this synod too a very
clear proclamation was made of the indubitable orthodoxy of Palamas and
those who shared his teaching, and Akindynos who spoke against them
was utterly condemned as unorthodox and clearly shown to be of the same
mind as Barlaam. He was therefore convicted not only by this second synod
but also by the first. For the holy synod that convicted Arius also condemns
along with him all who were later found to share his thinking. Similarly,
22 Andronikos III died at Constantinople on 15 June 1341, five days after the council.
23 The text, which is found in the margin of some manuscripts, has been published by
Meyendorff 1963, 226.
24 See Meyendorff 1959, 86–8 (whose dating of August 1341 has now been revised).
25 The president of the second council was the megas domestikos John Kantakouzenos,
who by the time the Tomos of 1347 was drawn up was co-emperor with Andronikos’ son,
John V Palaiologos.
298 GREGORY PALAMAS
the sentence passed on Barlaam also condemns those who both now and in
the future hold any of Barlaam’s opinions whatsoever.
6. After the synodical condemnation of the manifest Barlaamite,
Akindynos, the Synodal Tomos was drawn up and signed. Although in
summary form, it nevertheless dealt with everything, proclaiming the
orthodoxy of Palamas and of the monks to be indubitable and in fact the
common faith of Christians, and delivering from error those who had been
duped by Barlaam and Akindynos. This was followed by terrifying curses
and fearful, no, more than fearful, imprecations excommunicating Barlaam
from the holy Church, should he not repent, expelling him from the body
of Christ, and setting him apart from the entire Christian community. This
was also directed against all who had dared or would in the future dare to
impeach the orthodoxy of Palamas and the monks who agreed with him, in
the way Barlaam had done.
7. After the drawing up and signing of this holy Tomos in defence of
the common Christian faith, which the then patriarch proceeded to sign
by his own hand at the head of all the others, not quite two months went
by before, alas, faction and confusion, the worse of all evils, overtook the
Roman state.26 This was caused by the malign, wicked and ambitious will
of certain members of the senate who conspired and fabricated serious
accusations against him who by the common consent of all Romans and
above all by the imperial will, was entrusted both before and after the
emperor’s demise with the care and protection of the Roman Empire, as
well as with the guardianship of the emperor’s children, seeing that he was
clearly shown on a great many matters to be his most genuine and faithful
friend who shared the same outlook as he did.27 The prime mover of this
nation-wide mischief and disturbance who also in his own interests misled
and manipulated the will of the God-crowned empress was the patriarch,
to whom above all is due the instigation of these things.28
26 The anti-Kantakouzenist coup d’etat of October 1341, by which the patriarch John
Kalekas and the empress Anna Palaiologina, supported and advised by the megas doux
Alexios Apokaukos, became regents for the nine-year-old son of Andronikos III, John V
Palaiologos.
27 By ‘certain members of the senate’ Alexios Apokaukos is indicated without being
named. The ‘most genuine and faithful friend’ of the late emperor Andronikos III is, of
course, John Kantakouzenos.
28 In the light of events immediately preceding the council – in late January 1347
the empress Anna Palaiologina had called a council to depose Kalekos – care is taken to
exonerate the empress from all blame.
8. The holy Palamas was rightly upset by this. Unable to bear such
highly fraudulent accusations against someone outstanding in all respects,
and that the same time wisely foreseeing the general catastrophe that
would result from this for the Roman people, he judged it unbefitting,
so far as it concerned him and to the best of his ability, not to try to
stop these fearful things by speaking out freely.29 Not once or twice but
many times, in private and in the presence of many, alone and with other
devout persons, he discussed the likely outcomes, sometimes on behalf
of the one most dishonestly calumniated, sometimes on behalf of the
Christian people. When he saw that the patriarch had turned against
him and regarded him with much hostility, and at the same time that
there was nothing further he could accomplish, he left the city and went
to live in the surrounding area.30 The patriarch for his part, having no
other measures he could take against him, was seen to be in friendly
conversation with Akindynos. Although Akindynos was not less hostile
than formerly to the faith of Palamas and the other monks, or rather
to the common Christian faith, the patriarch allowed him no ordinary
freedom of speech. Subsequently, he was seen to spend his days and
nights in his company, advocating his cause, sharing a common mind
with him in everything, and with him and through him violently running
down, both verbally and in writing, those who a little while earlier had
been vindicated. Not long afterwards he became an open persecutor of
Palamas and the monks who were with him, and a manifest supporter and
patron of Akindynos and his disciples. Our most pious lady and mistress,
the Lady Anna Palaiologina, and we ourselves, were unaware that on
the pretext of what has already been stated above he was surreptitiously
running down Palamas.
9. What account could adequately represent the abuse mischievously
concocted against him and the monks who supported him over many
years, both here and in distant cities, and especially in Thessalonike, where
earlier these impious opinions of theirs had already arisen? He did these
29 As Meyendorff observes, Palamas’ ‘family connections, his spiritual authority and his
recent victory over Barlaam gave him easy access to the high functionaries of the empire’
(1959, 96).
30 Palamas himself tells us that he went to live first at the monastery of St Michael
at Anaplous on the Bosphorus just north of Constantinople, and then in the environs of
Herakleia, on the north shore of the Sea of Marmara (Letter to Philotheos, §§ 13 and 21
[Christou II, 530, 538; Perrella III, 996, 1008–10]).
300 GREGORY PALAMAS
things against them, however, as we have said, without their being aware,
until thinking that he already had the consent of all parties, he attempted to
make Akindynos, Barlaam’s initiate, successor and follower, a priest and
subsequently a bishop of the Church. Just at the point when he was ready
to enrol the unholy one, as regards to worship, among the holy deacons,
the aforementioned most pious empress became aware of this lawless
ordination of Akindynos even before it was carried out and sending word to
him exhorted the hierarch to desist from this unholy act and endeavoured,
as was reasonable, to recall him from his flouting of the divine canons. For
by bringing Akindynos, who was outside the bounds of orthodoxy, within
the altar of the church, he promoted him by force and inserted the profane
one among the holy deacons in violation of the law. The clamour raised
by the orthodox quickly became an uproar. The empress thereupon used
her authority in a profitable and correct manner and excluded Akindynos,
who had attained to the priesthood, from the holy Church, heaping on him
and his supporters many different kinds of ignominy. She then sentenced
him, as one who was shameless and alien and had taken steps against the
priesthood rather than towards it, to beatings, fetters and prison,31 although
by then he was in hiding, as he is now, lurking in underground cellars and
caves. She, for her part, thinking that in consequence the impetuosity of
the patriarch who had treated orthodoxy so despotically had been reined in
and transformed, decided to bear with him patiently and did not at that time
subject him to any further censure.
10. But instead he became worse and compiled a document, or rather
documents, against Palamas and the monks, or rather against orthodoxy
and the Church itself, with the aim of annulling the Synodal Tomos and the
synodal determinations and decisions enacted on behalf of the orthodox
faith.32 As for his speeches, moreover, against orthodoxy that he delivered
to all and sundry and the actions that he took against it in the capital and
in more distant towns, what description can do them justice? As already
mentioned, we were unaware of most of these, as was the God-crowned
empress. When the church in Thessalonike needed a presiding bishop, he
31 The long passage from ‘the aforementioned most pious empress’ to ‘beatings, fetters
and prison’ is reproduced (as first noted by Meyendorff 1963, 226) from Palamas, Refutation
of the Patriarchal Letter 8–9 (Christou II, 572–3; Perrella II, 1286–8), which suggests, as
Meyendorff points out, that Palamas had had a hand in the redaction of the Synodal Tomos.
32 This was the dossier that Kalekas compiled for the empress Anna. For its contents see
Meyendorff 1959, 114–15 (Eng. trans. 76–7).
impiously made another Akindynos bishop-elect.33 On hearing of this, the

God-crowned empress, like a true defender of orthodoxy, again rebuked
the patriarch and exhorted him to have absolutely nothing to do with
such people as they had been proved synodically to be unorthodox. But
he showed her his own book which supposedly vindicated him. In this
book are his own writings against orthodoxy and his affection for them is
abundantly clear.34
11. But while he was doing these things here, those who were staying
with our mighty and holy sovereign and emperor Kantakouzenos outside
the megalopolis, the most holy patriarch of Jerusalem and those of the most
holy metropolitans and bishops of his own church who happened to be
with him, met together and held a holy synod.35 They drew up a Tomos
deposing him who had had the audacity to do such things, subjecting
him to complete deposition, not only because of his other actions which
were unlawful and harmful to the common good, but also because of his
association with Akindynos and his followers and his approval of them.
Moreover, those holy metropolitans resting in their own cells in this
megalopolis, the metropolitans of Ephesus, Kyzikos, Alania, Christoupolis,
Apros and Lopadion, wrote to our aforementioned mighty and holy lady
and mistress, making it manifest that he was condemned and had no part
with the orthodox.36 They did so not only because of his lawless and illegal
actions against the common good, but also because he had set aside the
synodical judgements and decisions, and on the one hand had proceeded
against the orthodoxy of those at that time exonerated as proponents of
orthodox truth,37 while on the other he had sided with the disciples and
33 This was Hyakinthos of Cyprus, a monk of the Hodegon monastery in Constantinople

who was metropolitan of Thessalonike from late spring 1345. His sudden death in early May
1346 robbed the Akindynists of an able leader.
34 On this book see Philotheos, Life of Palamas, § 78.
35 This was a synod held in Adrianople under Patriarch Lazaros of Jerusalem after he had
crowned John Kantakouzenos emperor there on 21 May 1346.
36 These metropolitans, Matthew of Ephesus, Athanasios of Kyzikos, Laurentios of Alania
and Soterioupolis, Makarios of Christoupolis, Chariton of Apros, and Hierotheos of Lopadion,
all resident in Constantinople, had initially supported Kalekas. Athanasios, Laurentios, and
Chariton were original signatories of the Tomos of 1347. Makarios and Hierotheos signed
subsequently with Lazaros of Jerusalem. Matthew (Gabalas), who courageously went to take
possession of his see of Ephesus under Turkish occupation, was eventually deposed as an
anti-Palamite. On these metropolitans and their letter to Anna, see Rigo 2015b.
37 In November 1344 Kalekas took measures against Isidore, bishop-elect of Monembasia,
and Palamas, deposing the former on disciplinary charges and excommunicating the latter
302 GREGORY PALAMAS
successors of the false opinion of the notorious Barlaam and in a bare-faced

manner had written and spoken in support of them, ordained and appointed
them, and shown himself as manifestly of the same mind as those who held
Barlaam’s opinions.38
12. After the God-crowned and most mighty empress had received
this and similar letters from these holy bishops, she often summoned
us to meetings with the senate and numerous persons of high standing
and examined with us matters concerning the divine doctrines.39 And
when she understood that the Tomos containing the synodal decisions in
defence of orthodoxy had been overturned by the incumbent patriarch
in writing and orally, she no longer held back, but filled with godly zeal
sought the indictment of those who had set aside the Tomos and the confir-
mation of the same and its orthodoxy. She therefore summoned us to the
God-protected palace, since we made up a complete synod, and also invited
the most reverend protos of the Holy Mountain together with the elders
who accompanied him and many of the distinguished and pious monks
who were in this megalopolis.40 Presiding with her beloved son, our mighty
and holy sovereign and emperor, kyr John Palaiologos, and with the whole
senate also present along with leading members of the clergy, not a few
archimandrites and abbots, and also distinguished citizens, she directed
first that the Synodal Tomos should be read aloud in the hearing of all,41
and then brought forward the aforementioned book of the patriarch’s which
he himself had sent to our mighty lady and mistress, through bishops and
again through ecclesiastical persons, as if it were orthodox.42
13. In this book, hypocritically and under the pretext of expounding
the Tomos, he composed a misrepresentation of it, its complete annulment
on the grounds that he was promulgating a false interpretation of the Tomos of 1341 and had
ceased to commemorate the patriarch in the Liturgy.
38 Between 1344 and 1346 Kalekas ordained Akindynos to the priesthood and appointed
several anti-Palamites to the episcopate.
39 The ‘us’ introduced here refers to the bishops summoned by the empress to the palace
first for discussions and then to depose the patriarch John Kalekas, as mentioned also in the
Prostagma of John VI Kantakouzenos.
40 The synod summoned by the empress to depose Kalekas met on 2 February 1347. Its
members were opponents of Kantakouzenos in the civil war.
41 The Synodal Tomos of 1341.
42 Kalekas’ ‘book’ (a dossier of anti-palamite texts, also mentioned in Philotheos’ Life
of Palamas, § 78) has been lost, surviving only in fragments quoted below. See Rigo 2015b,
298.
and dismissal, saying on the one hand that the main points of its argument
had been taken from writings of the past, and on the other refuting them in
an utterly shameless way. He also in these writings manifestly blasphemes
the eternal and divine energies of God, calling them a crowd of deities and
saying that those who maintain that they are uncreated are polytheists. He
says that they are to be honoured by the appellation of divinity, just as one
would also impiously call the seven spirits, that is, the seven energies of
the Spirit, a crowd of spirits. Moreover, he even proceeded openly against
those who had been vindicated with regard to orthodoxy and had been
proclaimed and testified to as such by that sacred Tomos, that is, Palamas
and the monks who supported him, saying – O the shameless falsehood!
– that Barlaam had been condemned without a hearing. And outdoing
everyone in taking legal action and laying charges, what the latter had also
brought against the monks he too accused them of, quite unabashed by the
final judgement of the Tomos, which manifestly cuts off from the body of
the orthodox anyone who once again makes an accusation against them and
brings an action based on anything said or written by Barlaam. Rather he,
alas, thus places himself and those who have put their trust in him precisely
under the excommunications and anathemas of the synod.
14. In this book of his other writings were also found and laid before
the synod which had been written by authors who shared his opinions and
were keen supporters of heresy. These he had appointed spiritual fathers,
guardians of souls and teachers of the people evidently because they agreed
with him. In these writings he publicly denounces practically the whole
of orthodoxy and all the saints going back to the earliest times under the
pretext of writing against Palamas and his supporters, and anathematizes
and excommunicates them, writing expressly as follows:
15. ‘To those who dare to say that the glory of Christ’s divinity is other
than the essence of God, anathema.’ And again: ‘To those who dare to
say that uncreated light is other than the essence of God, anathema.’ And
again: ‘To those who say that the divine grace on the other is different
from the essence of God, anathema.’ And again: ‘To those who say that
uncreated divinity is accessible to bodily eyes, anathema.’ And again:
‘Those who dare to say that through the Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus
Christ uncreated light is visible by bodily eyes are foolish and blind.’
16. So who is it who holds these things dear and clasps them to himself
as orthodox, and is not only in communion with those who write such
things but concelebrates with them and appoints them spiritual fathers and
teachers, and is the only one who denounces Palamas and excommunicates
304 GREGORY PALAMAS
him, or rather denounces and excommunicates the saints from of old,

and those who came together at the holy synods, and indeed the Synodal
and the Hagioretic Tomoi, and those emperors who are manifestly of the
same opinion with regard to orthodoxy as Palamas, and in short all the
orthodox?
17. In this book of his are also writings of Akindynos in which he not
only says that the divine and ineffable light seen by the apostles on Tabor
is created, but is inferior to the angels, as Barlaam also used to say. This
he made plain and through them wrote, supposedly on his own behalf, to
our aforementioned lady and mistress, indicating that once this theophany
has become visible it is less worthy than any incorporeal essence, even
than human souls themselves. He who had been allotted the leadership
of the church, alas, had in his personal possession not only such writings
and teachings but also Akindynos’ impieties in autograph copies of his
works.43 Yet he ordained him deacon and excommunicated and banished
those who did not accept him as a good exponent of these doctrines. What
are these, that from a few of them the impious and inconsistent nature of
the doctrines of Akindynos and of the patriarch who agrees with him may
be demonstrated?
18. ‘We are unable,’ he says, ‘to think of the natural energy of God
as other than his essence and nature, or of light which is uncreated and
co-eternal with God, or of glory, or of grace, or of radiance, as in any way at
all different from this divine essence.’ And again: ‘Nothing that is of itself
accessible to the vision of bodily eyes is by any means uncreated, even
if it were Moses, even if it were Paul, who ascended to the third heaven,
even if it were an angel who attained to divine contemplation.’ And again:
‘How can created nature see a divine energy with bodily eyes, even if one
were equal to the angels, or even if one were an angel?’ And again: ‘The
dazzling light that shone on Tabor is said to be represented as uncreated and
eternal divinity by the Theologian and by St John Damascene.44 If anyone
on that account calls it supraessential God and different from the divine
essence, I do not take him to be expressing a valid theological opinion. For
the light is said to be uncreated, everlasting and pre-eternal, not something
43 Passages from these works are quoted below that are not found in Akindynos’ extant
writings. No doubt they were burnt after the synod.
44 Akindynos reports in his Letter 62 (Hero 1988, 252–6) that he discussed passages
from Gregory of Nazianzus (Oration 40, 6) and John Damascene (principally from the
Dialectica) with an acquaintance who advocated neutrality in the dispute.
different from the essence of God. Therefore neither do I say that it is.’ But
in uttering these words he says in an unorthodox, or rather impious and
atheistic, fashion that the same light is both essence of God and a creature.
Listen to what he says next: ‘I censure both the uncreated and the created
of the divinizing wisdom and grace; for us here in this world contradiction
is not to be bowed down to so that if one falls under anathema, the other is
no better.’
19. In these autograph works of his ‘the things that are contemplated
in essence around God’, ‘holiness, life, immortality’, immutability and all
that is like them, which St Maximus in his theological writing describes as
‘there was no time when they were not’, as without beginning and eternal,45
these Akindynos stoutly maintains to be creatures, and likewise the seven
spirits in Isaiah, about which Gregory the Theologian says, ‘Isaiah liked to
call the energies of the Spirit spirits’, he holds to be created.46 And what St
John Damascene wrote in praise of the most divine light in the Saviour’s
Transfiguration he said he wrote as an encomiast, not as a true theologian.47
Therefore it is ‘safer for us’, he says, ‘to acknowledge that we are ignorant
of these things and not accept them, so that we should not as a result fall
into ditheism, forced to advocate the existence of two gods and divinities’,
clearly like Barlaam calling ditheism the assertion that not only God’s
essence which is absolutely invisible to all but also the divine radiance
and grace and energy which is manifested to the saints and bestowed upon
them is uncreated divinity.
20. Whereas on account of these writings and doctrines of the
Barlaamite Akindynos and of those like him that are so unorthodox and
so alien, which that said patriarch has been convicted of holding and of
acquiescing in and in many different ways, in deeds and words and in
writings, of being eager to advocate and support, we, by the grace of Christ
the defenders of orthodoxy, having made an accurate investigation and
examination of what relates to these things, and having voting together
with us the God-crowned empress, who has proved to be divinely inspired
and full of intelligent zeal for orthodoxy, along with her most beloved
son, our mighty and holy master and emperor, kyr John Palaiologos, and
furthermore the entire senate with the leading figures of the state and also
45 Cf. Maximus the Confessor, Two Centuries on Theology and the Economy 1, 48
(PG 90, 1100D).
47 John of Damascus, Homily on the Transfiguration (Kotter, vol. 5, 436–59).
306 GREGORY PALAMAS
the others assembled with them, all the senior clerics and the most reverent
archimandrites and abbots and monks and not a few learned men, do strip
of all priestly rank and function him who, as should not have happened,
was anointed patriarch, and sentence him to permanent deposition. And
if he does not repent and genuinely renounce these wicked, impious and
alien doctrines, and those who hold them, through a libellus of his own in
accordance with the ecclesial tradition that has prevailed in these matters
from early times, we also subject him to anathema, as the previous Tomos
also directs, cutting off completely from the whole Christian and orthodox
body not only Barlaam, but also, if anyone else is found again accusing the
monks of anything drawn from what has been said by him against them, or
is found attacking them at all in similar terms; for he has brought down on
himself the very sentence of the Tomos.
21. We declare invalid and utterly unacceptable to all any writings
whatsoever composed by him or any other person against Palamas and his
supporters, and to be cast out as being full of malice and impiety directed
against the holy theologians or rather against piety and the Church itself.
22. With regard to Akindynos, seeing that he has thus raved against
orthodoxy, despite having earlier, as already mentioned, been condemned
synodically, and seeing also that he has seized on the civil war as a piece
of good fortune and has shamelessly profited from the most grievous
confusion and distress of the times and the outrages suffered by the
Christian people, and following after Barlaam, on the pretext of proceeding
in his manner against Palamas, has proceeded against the saints from of old
and has caused severe disturbance to the Church of Christ, we subject him
to the same terrifying judgements and strip him of all priestly function,
and furthermore declare him excommunicated and cut off from the holy
Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ, unless he should repent, and from
the orthodox body of Christians.
23. With regard to those who have been carried away by them and led
astray but are not the leaders of the heresy, if they remain unrepentant
we subject them to the same penalties. But if they genuinely repent and
anathematize this erroneous belief and those who persist in it, we restore
them most gladly not only to communion with the orthodox but also to
the priesthood, not degrading them in any way, in accordance with the
judgement and sentence passed on such people by the holy and ecumenical
seventh council, which decrees: ‘We do not by any means admit to the
priesthood the founders and leaders and advocates of unorthodoxy, even if
they repent, but those who have been forced, or carried away, or led astray,
and are truly and genuinely repentant, we restore to the priesthood, each
to his own rank.’48
24. Furthermore, if anyone else at all should ever be detected thinking
or saying or writing the same things against the said most honourable
hieromonk, kyr Gregory Palamas, and the monks who are with him, or
rather against the holy theologians and the Church itself, we decree the
same penalties against him and subject him to the same sentence, whether
he belongs to the clergy or to the laity.
25. This frequently mentioned most honourable hieromonk, kyr
Gregory Palamas and the monks who agree with him – who in their writing
and thinking, or rather, as already said, in their fighting by every means in
defence of the divine Scriptures, and our common religion and tradition,
have scrutinized and comprehended with precision nothing that is not
congruous with the divine Scriptures – we hold to be not only superior to
all their opponents, or rather, to those who contend against the Church of
God, as the earlier Synodal Tomos puts it, but we also declare to be the most
reliable defenders of the Church and of orthodoxy and its champions and
helpers. For thus will the Tomos issued in relation to those synods possess
reliability and certainty, just as it now indeed does.
26. Thus these matters that have been examined synodically by us,
together with the sovereignty that comes from God, and have been judged
and confirmed will possess complete reliability and certainty, being wholly
concordant with the truth and with all the divine fathers and with the
preceding holy and divine synods held for this purpose and with the Synodal
Tomos relating to them, and also with the aforementioned judgements and
verdicts of the most holy bishops formerly resident in this queen of cities
and of those outside who made similar declarations in writing. And this
authorized and canonical judgement will be preserved unaltered for all
eternity by the grace of Christ, drawn up and recently undersigned in the
month of February of indiction 15.
The original contained the following signatures of the most holy
bishops:49
48 On this ‘decree’ of the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787, cf. the disputation between
Patriarch Tarasios of Constantinople and certain monks on the Letter of Athanasius of
Alexandria to Rufinianus in Mansi, vol. 12, 1027–31.
49 The bishops signed (in February 1347) in order of precedence. The metropolitan of
Kyzikos had been exarch of the Hellespont since the end of the seventh century, when
Justinian II temporarily transferred the autocephaly of the Church of Cyprus to that city
308 GREGORY PALAMAS
The humble metropolitan of Kyzikos, hypertimos and exarch of all the

Hellespont, Athanasios.
The humble metropolitan of Philadelphia and hypertimos, Makarios.
The humble metropolitan of all Alania and Soterioupolis and
hypertimos, Laurentios.
The humble metropolitan of Didymoteichon and hypertimos, Theoleptos.
The humble metropolitan of Methymna and hypertimos, Malachias.
The humble metropolitan of Apros, Chariton and locum tenens of
Euchaita.
The humble metropolitan of Madyta and hypertimos, Isaac.
The humble metropolitan of Rhosion and hypertimos, Theodoulos.
The humble metropolitan of Varna and hypertimos, Methodios.
The humble metropolitan of Selymbria and hypertimos, Esaias.
The humble metropolitan of Pompeioupolis and hypertimos,
Gregory.50
The Prostagma of John VI Kantakouzenos

All residents of Constantinople, glorified, protected and celebrated by
God, residents most well-disposed and most faithful to my majesty, clerics,
monastics, members of the administration and the common people as a
whole!
I think that no one at all is ignorant of the attack launched by the
notorious Barlaam against piety and how it was refuted by the most holy
(cf. Englezakis 1995). It was Athanasios of Kyzikos (PLP 384, one of the signatories
of The Report of the bishops to the empress Anna of 1346) who consecrated Isidore
Boucheiras (the former bishop-elect of Monembasia) the successor to Kalekas as patriarch
of Constantinople.
50 Meyendorff’s edition of the Tomos appends two further sets of signatures that were
added after the conclusion of the council. The first set is headed by Patriarch Lazaros of
Jerusalem, who had crowned Kantakouzenos emperor at Adrianople. The second set,
consisting of the new pro-Palamite bishops consecrated in the wake of the council, is headed
by Philotheos of Herakleia, who was to succeed Isidore as patriarch. Palamas’ own signature
as metropolitan of Thessalonike and exarch of all Thessaly appears immediately after that of
Philotheos; cf. the Synodal Tomos of 1351, § 4 (below, p. 330).
hieromonk kyr Gregory Palamas, and how he was condemned synodically,

in the presence also of my majesty,51 or that Akindynos, having a little
later adopted Barlaam’s opinions, was also himself refuted synodically,
with my majesty, too, presiding at that synod, and was justly subjected to
the same condemnation,52 and that a Synodal Tomos was issued on these
matters that comprehensively cuts off from the Catholic and Apostolic
Church of Christ, and from the whole body of the orthodox, anyone who
again makes the same accusations as any of those uttered or written by
Barlaam against the monks, that is to say, against kyr Gregory Palamas
and his companions.53 But after a little, certain people came under the
influence of a malicious and ambitious spirit hostile to my majesty54 – as
you, too, know – and when, as a result, a difficult period of confusion
befell the Roman empire, Akindynos, treating this depravity of the times
as a piece of good fortune, and deceiving many and winning them over
to his side, among them the then patriarch, raised up a terrible rebellion
against the Church in no way inferior to the civil war, vindicating those
erroneous opinions of Barlaam and merely disowning his name in order
to deceive, even if this did not escape the attention of anyone who listened
to him intelligently. Once the then patriarch had become the sponsor and
patron of Akindynos and his followers, he deemed Akindynos worthy of
ordination and raised some who thought like him to positions of ecclesi-
astical leadership, and at the same time spoke freely to the sovereign
lady of the Romans, the most beloved sister of my majesty, about these
doctrines and proceeded anew against the monks whose piety had been
vindicated. Having understood from this that those synodical decisions
and decrees on behalf of piety were being treated as invalid, and that the
Synodal Tomos concerning them had been set aside and dismissed, she
first examined these matters many times with the most holy bishops,55
and then convoked a council at which, after an accurate investigation and
assessment had been made, they all by common consent sentenced him to
deposition unless he should repent and excommunicate Akindynos and
his followers and exclude them from the body of the orthodox.56 When this
51 Council of June 1341.

52 Council of July 1341.
53 Synodal Tomos of 1341, § 31.
54 The megas doux Alexios Apokaukos.
55 See the account in Rigo 2015b.
56 The council of 2 February 1347.
310 GREGORY PALAMAS
task, pleasing to God, had been accomplished, for ‘even the punishment of
sin’, it has been said, ‘is worthy of praise’,57 the Lord brought the civil war
to an end and awarded peace to the empire of the Romans. And thus when
my majesty entered this great city, by God’s good pleasure, I found, on
the one hand, him deposed and, on the other, Akindynos and his followers
again synodically excommunicated, which was not only effected there and
then by those who had assembled at this council, but was also supported
in writing by the votes of those most holy metropolitans who were
occupying their time in their cells, the latter adding to the deviations in
doctrine other unlawful acts of his perpetrated against the Church and the
empire. The same was done by those who were with my majesty outside
the capital, the most holy patriarch of Jerusalem and all the remaining
most holy metropolitans, who coming together in a council declared in
addition to the other things that on account of his being in communion
with Akindynos they also stripped him of all priestly dignity.58 For even
if they were separated in place and body, they all declared the same thing
because one Spirit was speaking and acting within them, which is what
my majesty by the grace of Christ also loves and supports both now and
previously. Nevertheless, after the arrival of my majesty, and moreover
when the judgement of the bishops had been sent to him by a Tomos in
writing, I learned that he was still excusing himself and protesting, saying
that he had been condemned in his absence and was ready to present
himself and make his defence. Presiding with the most high emperor of
the Romans and most beloved son of my majesty, and together with the
most holy bishops and the senate, we summoned him to appear before the
synod. But he made an unconvincing excuse for his absence. For he lacked
the confidence to present himself and enter into any debate whatsoever,
even though he was invited to attend the synod three and four times. For
that reason he was subjected to the same condemnation as previously,
with the just concurrence of my majesty, which is also manifested and
confirmed by the present rescript, and it is decreed that these lawful and
synodical judgements and decisions are to be accepted by all, and that
those who think like Akindynos and all those who again proceed against
the said most holy hieromonk kyr Gregory Palamas and the monks who
are with him are to be rejected as deceivers and disturbers again of the

58 Kantakouzenos wishes to emphasize that due canonical procedure has been followed
to confirm the deposition of Kalekas brought about on 2 February.
Church. It is for this reason and for the sake of religious peace and security
that the present rescript of my majesty has been issued.
Signed in red letters by the imperial and divine hand in the month of March,
Indiction 15.59
The Anti-Palamite Tomos of 1347

1. Listen, you tribes of the earth and languages, all you who inhabit the
world,60 all you, that is, who worship the one God and one divinity glorified
in three persons. Listen, you who have been anointed with the holy blood
of the precious lamb, of him who destroyed the polytheistic error of the
Greek religion so that what is worshipped by those who have believed in
our Lord Christ may be one God and one divinity. Listen to what storm,
what buffeting, what darkness has overtaken the Church of the Romans,61
much worse than the Egyptian darkness.62 For the devil was not satisfied
with the utter destruction of our nation, which being a murderer, he had
procured through the rebellion and uprising of his own instruments.63 Nor
did he simply consider the betrayal of so many districts and cities sufficient,
together with the massacre, enslavement and plundering of Christians of
every class and age, but if he did not shake the Church of Christ with iron
crowbars so as to send everything over the edge into the abyss, this terrible
sophist considered himself an enemy with power for a short time over the
doctrines and holy laws and decrees of the fathers.
2. So what does he do? A little while ago, as everybody knows, he
raised up certain men who falsified the monastic teachings and rose up
in revolt against each other, or to put it differently, sowed some tares, as
it were, among the true doctrines of orthodoxy and inflicted outrages on
the good seed of faith. These men thought and said things which although
inconsistent with themselves and very contradictory were nonetheless
consistent with the wicked demon who had incited them. For some of these
people had the audacity either to consider the essence and the energy of
God as identical, or, if it is necessary to think of the energy as something
different, to consider it as not coeternal or indeed co-unoriginate with
59 March 1347.
60 Cf. Ps 48 (49): 1.
61 I.e. the Orthodox Church of the Eastern Roman Empire.
62 Cf. Exod 10: 21–3.
63 I.e. the Kantakouzenist rebellion of 1341.
312 GREGORY PALAMAS
the unoriginate and eternal God, but created and in fact corruptible like
common created objects, such as the radiance of the Godhead manifested
on Tabor,64 or the light that shone around the shepherds,65 or some other of
the many theophanies. That is what one group thought.66 The others, as if
in equal measure diametrically opposed to erroneous teaching, or rather,
surpassing the former in vying for supremacy – O intemperate in soul and
hand and tongue! – write speeches, wretched men that they are, not crying
out from heaven, but from the earth like the ventriloquists, as Isaiah says,67
spouting alien and spurious doctrines, which our fathers neither sang, that
we might expound the content of Scripture, nor in any way transmitted
to us.68 Nor will they deign to obey the great Paul, who exhorted us to
avoid profane novelties,69 nor the wise Solomon, who told us not to deal in
superfluous subtleties or go beyond what is necessary.70 For these brazen
fellows subdivide the one suprasubstantial divinity, that is to say, the one
God divided indivisibly into a Trinity, by a new distinction and without
embarrassment or shame wrongly teach that there are many divinities and
many gods.71 For they say that the natural and substantial energies of God
also participate in no lesser a fashion in these divine and wonderful names.
And they have not been taught this or been instructed in it by holy Scripture,
where angels as well as human beings are called gods and lords;72 lordship
and divinity subsist in them by a sharing of names, God honouring his own
works by grace, but there is not a multiplicity of gods. For this reason there
are no lords or infinite divinities, as they claim, commensurate with the
energies, but one God, one Lord, one Divinity, as the divine Apostle says,73
rejecting plurality lest we fall away into paganism.
3. Starting thus from unsound premises, they immediately, by faulty
logic, deduce comparative excesses and deficiencies and superiorities and
64 Cf. Matt 17: 2; Luke 9: 29.

65 Cf. Luke 2: 8.
66 These are the Barlaamites (presumably including Akindynos, although the latter is not
mentioned by name).
67 Cf. Isa 19: 3 LXX.
68 These are the Palamites.
69 1 Tim 6: 20 (following the MS tradition that reads kainophōnias for kenophōnias).
70 Eccles 6: 17 LXX.
71 The standard Akindynist charge; cf. above, p. 236.
72 Human beings (or angels) are called gods in Ps 81 (82): 6, a key text for the Palamites.
On this see Russell 2011.
73 1 Cor 8: 6.
inferiorities among these recent divinities in relation to the divinity that

transcends any analogy, relation or comparison, as if divine words were
shouted down from on high and it were not possible from the beginning of
all ages to the end of time to think differently from the way they do. Yet
what is more absurd, where the prophetic words say ‘God said’, ‘the Lord
spoke’ and ‘the Almighty commands’, they attribute speech and words in
general to God, who transcends words. Indeed in this way these people
create new persons and set these natural energies of God, although they
have no substance in themselves, opposite the essence and profess that they
speak and converse like living beings with those who have been initiated
into them. Moreover, they even assimilate those who participate in them to
uncreated nature. And indeed they say that such divinities confer benefits
and do good, and in their peculiar manner want the transcendent Godhead
to have little or no part in them.
4. These things and more than these they speak about openly and
write treatises about, but there are other things that they discuss more
discreetly with those, both male and female, who come to their meetings,
at any reckoning a mixed bunch of insignificant men and women. Quite
a few of those who have accepted responsibility for the spiritual care of
souls testify to this, having investigated those who have been duped and
having then reported it to us. The first group, those who were followers
of Barlaam, who belonged to the Italians and believed as they do, came
together with them in the ecclesiastical court and suffered a defeat, as was
right. The second group, those who were victorious up to a point because
their examination had been deferred, temporarily kept out of sight the
travail that was to break out with their own blasphemies, and in case they
should be thought to share the polytheism of the Greeks, for the time being
blocked their mouths with stones. And what happened next? Because they
thought that the opposing party had been put down, and they had obtained
synodical letters as symbols of victory, they were immediately elated by
their success, and first in private and then in full public view displayed
self-appointed teachers in the city and sowed their new errors like evil
seeds in the souls of wretched human beings. And they did this despite
having been bound by the Church henceforth not to discuss doctrine, or to
teach, and to know that otherwise they too would fall under censure and
excommunication.74
74 This statement is correct. See the concluding declaration of the Synodal Tomos of
1341.
314 GREGORY PALAMAS
5. Progressing next to even greater wickedness – O the shamelessness!

– they even lay hands on the marriages of men with young wives and
children so as to make way, without restraint, for their strange and alien
teachings. They add to this audacity the senseless and unconsidered
tonsure of young boys from the best families among our people. And they
perform these things as if they are the leading pastors of the city, and it
is permissible for them to do whatever they want by authority. But the
then patriarch,75 seeing that they were first doing these things behind the
scenes, and then bringing them out into the open, admonished them and
advised them to show restraint, saying that these things were outrageous,
contrary to canonical order, and productive of confusion and conflict in the
Church publicly and privately for everybody. He did this repeatedly but did
not see any amendment at all in their behaviour, nor would they give up
their habitual bigotry, and certainly had no intention of returning to their
allotted monasteries where they had been tonsured but refused to remain.
He therefore tried to drive them out of the city as vagrants and rebels and
innovators of alien doctrines and works. But sensing what was going to
happen to them, they sought refuge in the Great Church of Hagia Sophia,
where they were in danger of being stoned if the sanctity of the place had
not forbidden such an act.76 For a time they remained shut in there. When
they came out, however, some of them, those who were the leaders of the
innovation, were sent to prison; the others were dispersed elsewhere.77
Next a confession of faith was requested both from ecclesiastics and from
officials, but they avoided professing orthodoxy in the same degree as the
others shunned unorthodoxy. They were urged to do this frequently and
repeatedly, but as they did not change their opinion in the least they were
summoned to appear in court and answer the charges. But they did not
obey this, nor did they dare at all to speak openly.
75 John XIV Kalekas, deposed on 2 February 1347, just before the entry into
Constantinople of John Kantakouzenos, by a synod convoked by the Empress Anna, and
condemned a week later on 8 February by a further synod held in the sacred palace presided
over jointly by the empress and Kantakouzenos.
76 Hagia Sophia had the right of granting sanctuary, confirmed by an imperial prostagma
in March 1343. This was the time that Palamas and sixteen of his companions sought asylum
there. See Meyendorff (1959), 104 (Eng. trans. 69), with references to Palamas, Letter to the
Athonite Elders, 7 (Christou II, 514–15; Perrella III, 966) and Miklosich and Müller, vol. 1,
232–3 (= Hunger et al. 308–10, Nr 141). See now also Rigo 2018a.
77 Palamas, as a political prisoner, was confined in the palace but was not prevented from
writing and publishing theological works.
6. That which therefore needed to be done by the Church in this matter

with spiritual authority was precisely what was done. First of all, they
attempted to persuade Isidore, the metropolitan-elect of the most holy
metropolis of Monembasia,78 to renounce the doctrines of Palamas and his
faction. For it was said that he too was one of those who shared his opinions,
although he had gained the votes of the bishops without their being aware
of this. But when they found him stubborn and unyielding, they drove him
out of the bema when he was already at the point of concelebrating with the
patriarch. They then summoned him for trial. When he openly confessed
that he would not renounce their teaching, and moreover would rather give
up his soul with the Church than fall out of harmony with Palamas, if anyone
should force him, he deprived himself of both the episcopate and the Church
of which he had been proclaimed bishop. He was therefore also subjected
to synodical deposition, with the result that shortly afterwards another was
ordained for the Church that had been allotted to him.79
7. Palamas, the originator and patron of the blasphemies, was likewise
himself also condemned together with his associates (for neither did he
give in to pressure, nor in any way whatever did he relinquish his absurd
nonsense), and was excommunicated from God’s Church and deprived of
the priesthood, as is recorded in the synodal acts concerning him, signed
by the then patriarch of Theoupolis-Antioch, and by each of the bishops
not only those now present here but also those who have returned to their
sees.80 It was thus that their suspension and degradation was brought about,
even though they gave no heed to the penalty but continued to exercise the
priesthood, defiantly offering the mystical sacrifice in secret.
8. Following this there was peace in God’s Church and this side of
things quietened down. But then a violent storm blew up coming from
78 Monembasia, ‘the Gibraltar of Greece’, just off the southern coast of the Peloponnese,
was an important naval base that had been raised to metropolitan status by Michael VIII
in the previous century. Isidore Boucheiras, a noted hesychast, was the current patriarch,
having been appointed just two months previously on 17 May 1347 after the deposition
of John Kalekas. Isidore had at once consecrated thirty-two new pro-Palamite bishops,
including Gregory Palamas himself.
79 On Isidore’s deposition (on 4 November 1344), see Mercati 1931, 201–3; Meyendorff
1959, 110–12. Isidore’s replacement was Iakobos Koukounares (Hero 1983, 397–8).
80 Palamas was excommunicated by the same synod that deposed Isidore. The patriarch
of Antioch (Theoupolis) was Ignatios II (pat. 1342–86), an Armenian convert to Orthodoxy
who had come to Constantinople to establish his credentials. He published his own
anti-Palamite Tomos in 1344 (Mercati 1931, 199–200).
316 GREGORY PALAMAS
spirits inspired by Satan, which overturned everything and made the sea
much rougher. Those who had been declared such blasphemers; those who
were such enemies of the truth, it put at the very helm [of the Church].
Those who had uttered unutterable things it appointed to priestly functions,
those who were apostates it made guardians of dogma, and those who
lived by their own notions it set up as directors of souls.81 This is how the
situation arose.
9. When John Kantakouzenos, who has now laid hold of the imperial
office of the Romans, recently captured the greatest of cities and seized fuller
control of the empire, he needed to install a patriarch on the great throne of
the priests because the incumbent at that time had been removed.82 Because
of this, an innovative event occurred far from the Church’s customs and
established laws which the divine apostles and shepherds of the churches
had previously laid down like some fixed landmarks. For summoned to elect
a patriarch, we were compelled by the secular authority to elect not the man
whom divine grace with the fraternal concord [of the synod] should choose
but the man we were directed to choose.83 Almost all of us were opposed
to that and resisted this uncanonical and unconsidered command, with the
exception of a few flatterers who were drawn along in a servile fashion. But
he clung to his opinion as if it were dogma, now proposing one candidate
for patriarchal office and now another. And what need be said further about
this divisive state of affairs? It ended with the patriarchal dignity being
conferred on the excommunicated and deposed Palamas and Isidore. And
time was spent on such things, with him pushing the matter by the exercise
of authority, and with us once more strongly resisting as best we could and
asserting that Church regulations and the strict observance of laws were
being flouted. But the will of flesh and blood prevailed, and such are the
judgements of God that from the many deprived and ejected bishops the
one who becomes patriarch – O the laws and tribunals of God! – is Isidore,
a man who had been deposed by the unanimous votes of the patriarchs and
bishops, and who had not been judged to be in the least worthy takes his
81 The indignation expressed here is heightened by the word-play that defies reproduction
in English: the arrhētourgoi become hierourgoi, the apostatai become prostatai, and the
autonomoi become oikonomoi.
82 John Kantakouzenos entered the capital on the night of 2/3 February 1347. The
patriarch John Kalekas had been hastily deposed earlier that day (on 2 February) by a synod
convened by the empress Anna.
83 On the manoeuvring to find a successor to Kalekas, see Meyendorff 1959, 130–2 (Eng.
trans. 87).
seat on the great throne. Those who have accurate knowledge of him, both
in the past and now, say that he is fatuous in the presence of others, empty-
headed and unsophisticated in his thinking, that he does not know how to
conduct himself in company, or how to distinguish what is better from what
is worse as befits those in high office, that he has as much grasp of affairs
as ants that crawl on the ground, and that he is a public amusement to those
who wish to make fun of him. And what is worse than this, he has not
learned the laws of obedience, nor has he been brought up in a coenobium,
but he has associated indiscriminately with the public in cities and towns,
preferring to teach and educate children. There, it is said, he has alienated
wives from their husbands and children, one in Thessalonike and another
in Byzantium, namely, in the first instance the daughter of Kydones, and
in the second the daughter of Tzyrakes.84 Let whatever unspeakable and
absurd doctrines he is said to have taught them in clandestine colloquies
be left to those who have examined them spiritually, lest we fill the air
with blasphemies. For what useful teaching could be given by a man who
completely ignored the times of fasting, of abstinence from food and drink
when this was prescribed, and treated all days as the same as those do who
live in the barbarian manner, we cannot put it in words as effectively as
those who satirize his antics express in a different way.
10. But on this rotten foundation another evil was erected, and iniquity
was added to iniquity, as the divine David puts it.85 The most pernicious
originator of the evil was Palamas – Palamas, just to mention his name calls
for the purification of the soul and the mind. This most odious person was
consecrated bishop of the presiding city of the Thessalians, even though
previously he had been deposed. Besides being deposed, he then even
yesterday committed the crime of sacrilege at the Peribleptos Monastery,86
84 The ‘daughter of Kydones’ may have been a daughter of the Thessalonian aristocrat
Manuel Kydones and a sister of Demetrios, who was about to embark on a brilliant career as
mesazon to a succession of emperors from John VI to Manuel II. The Tzyrakes family was
not as distinguished but was also of political importance. A Tzyrakes was a member of the
household of the empress Anna who conspired with the opposition to the regency to open the
gates of Constantinople to Kantakouzenos.
85 Ps 68 (69): 27.
86 The Peribleptos Monastery, in the Psamathia district of Constantinople, was an
imperial foundation that was restored by Michael VIII Palaiologos when he recovered the
city from the Latins in 1261 and continued to be patronized by the imperial family. It was
noted for its important collection of relics, including the hand of John the Baptist and the
head of Gregory of Nazianzus.
318 GREGORY PALAMAS
which like a thief he stripped of its icons and smashed up the monastery’s
oil vessels so as to acquire silver like Judas. Nor was the thrice-wretched
man ashamed on the day of the saving passion of Great Week in Lent to
pamper his body with baths and food and drink in violation of the canons,
making himself a stumbling-block and source of scandal to the conscience
of the monks, and perhaps also to the conscience of those who heard him,
particularly those who were present and saw him in the Holy Monastery of
the Resurrection of Christ our God.87 For there he made use of the asphyx-
iating, rather than cleansing, hot baths.
11. These men, then, who were set down on Christ’s Church like
foundations of lawlessness, or were proposed to Christ’s Church as the
more ignoble leaders of an ignoble gang, advanced those who had long
shared their opinions, or who now professed to share them, to the holy
thrones of the Churches, men whose origins or what regime they had
pursued during their lives were unknown to the majority.88 And so the
Church of God was filled with dishonour and infamy. That is how things
are with them. As for us, once we had broken off communion with them,
we settled down quietly by ourselves, leaving the wrong entirely to God
and hoping to gain from him judgement on what had happened. But those
who had wronged us in this way did not like to remain quiet themselves.
On the contrary, they found it intolerable if they did not attempt to drag
us too down into the same pit as themselves and force us into communion
with them. Therefore, sometimes they plead with us, promising us great
things; at other times they adopt a different line, acting like persecutors and
tyrants. And they place us in secure confinement so that we cannot be seen
or visited, which is what bandits do to those who fall into their hands, and
they put as much pressure on us as they can. Now they threaten to carry out
additional acts of inhumanity; next they write malicious books against us,
accusing us of the crime of not being in communion with them – nothing
87 The Monastery of the Resurrection (Anastasis) in Constantinople had been rebuilt

in the time of Michael Palaiologos by the Grand Logothete, George Akropolites. George’s
son Constantine, who also became Grand Logothete, paid for further reconstruction around
1320, becoming the new ktētōr. He was a noted hagiographer. See Janin 1969, 20–1.
88 As a result of the synod of February 1347 and the subsequent appointment of Isidore
as patriarch (on 17 May), thirty-two new bishops were appointed (Meyendorff 1959, 131,
with reference to Philotheos, Life of Isidore 118). The new bishops were required to make a
Palamite confession of faith at their consecration (Meyendorff 1959, 132, with reference to
Miklosich and Müller, vol. 1, 291, and the Tomos of 1351, § 5), hence the phrase: ‘or who now
professed to share them’.
more than that. In addition to this they take away our churches and our
means of livelihood, so that a violent death should overtake us. But we for
our part, having, for some time endured their insanity and not seeing that
their disposition towards us has become more reasonable, do what we need
to do in view of their having begun this evil course of action. We have
drawn up a petition, partly requesting and partly advising that a synod be
convened, if not of all the bishops at least of those who are at hand, that
what has been wrongly taught and implemented might be examined and
that in this way the divided factions of the Church might be united. To this
petition we have also appended sacred and divine canons drawn from what
each of them severally has implemented, by which we are prevented from
being in communion with them. We also solemnly affirm the following,
that unless matters receive the appropriate remedy with the giving of a
precise judgement, we shall never be in communion with them, but in
accordance with the recorded canons of the sacred apostles and of the holy
and ecumenical councils we subject them to the same penalties, deposing
and anathematizing like them. And that is what we ourselves have done.
But they, for their part, once they had strayed from the correct path, have
relied solely on the secular authority and power. They spit upon God’s laws
and justice. With sword in hand they rise up against us every day, intent on
anything that can insult us and dishonour us more deeply. For the wretched
men do not know either the quality or the kind of spirit that constitutes us,
nor above all do they consider the scales of justice, how these apportion
rewards commensurate with each action.
12. We have therefore resolved to make our denunciation of their
irrational deeds and words more clear and to register in the present document
some of the acts perpetrated by them. Whereas the bishops having met
together, those present in this imperial capital being about ten in number,
and those outside it [participating] by formal statements and letters being
more than twenty and having also received the rescripts of deposition of the
aforementioned patriarchs, and more importantly than these the apostolic
and patristic canons – namely, on uncanonical ordination, the thirtieth of
the Apostles,89 the fourth of the First Council of Nicaea,90 and again the
89 Canon 30 of the Apostolic Canons declares: ‘If any bishop obtain possession of a
church by the aid of the temporal powers, let him be deposed and excommunicated, and all
who communicate with him’ (trans. Percival, NPNF 14, 595).
90 Canon 4 of Nicaea I (325) requires that if possible, ‘a bishop should be appointed by all
the bishops in the province’ (trans. Percival, NPNF 14, 11).
320 GREGORY PALAMAS
third of the Second Council of Nicaea;91 on those who have been deposed
by the Church and then brazenly undertake liturgical functions, the fourth
of Antioch,92 and again the sixth of the same council,93 the twenty-eighth
of the holy apostles,94 and again the tenth;95 furthermore on not separating
fathers from their own children on account of asceticism, the fifteenth
of Gangra;96 on the innovators of new doctrines and those who profane
the holy vessels and other things dedicated to God, the final decree of the
Second Council of Nicaea;97 and in addition to these what the divine fathers
say should be imposed as penalties on those who impiously fail to observe
the prescribed fasts – clothing ourselves in these sacred judgements as if
in a powerful suit of armour, we declare with the Holy Spirit and with
the sacred apostles and holy synods inspired by the Spirit the following:
Isidore, whose family name is Boucheiras, having ascended the patriarchal
throne unworthily, having not respected the synodically enacted sentence
of deposition imposed upon him for unorthodoxy, and having not
acknowledged the aforementioned crimes into which he has fallen, but
instead, armed with secular authority, having laid hands on the patriarchal
office, and subsequently by suspensions, penalties and persecutions having
forced the clergy, monastics and even bishops to be in communion with
him, and having carried out depositions, in some cases without due process
and in others after carefully planning them, and so having become a
stumbling-block to all Christians, for which reason bishops, priests, monks
91 Canon 3 of Nicaea II (787) annuls elections made by princes and requires that any
bishop who has obtained jurisdiction by making use of the secular authorities ‘shall be
deposed, and also excommunicated, together with all who remain in communion with him’
(trans. Percival, NPNF 14, 557).
92 Canon 4 of Antioch (341) prevents any bishop who has been synodically deposed from
being restored by another synod if he has presumed to exercise his ministry once deposed
(cf. Percival, NPNF 14, 110).
93 Canon 6 of Antioch (341) requires anyone excommunicated by his bishop to remain so
unless he is restored to communion by the episcopal synod (cf Percival, NPNF 14, 111).
94 Canon 28 of the Apostolic Canons excommunicates any justly deposed bishop,
presbyter, or deacon who continues in his office (cf. Percival, NPNF 14, 595).
95 Canon 10 of the Apostolic Canons excommunicates anyone who prays, even in private,
with an excommunicated person (cf. Percival, NPNF 14, 594).
96 Canon 15 of Gangra (325–81) lays down that anyone who neglects his children under
the pretence of asceticism shall be anathema (cf. Percival, NPNF 14, 98).
97 The Decree of Nicaea II (787) prescribes the deposition of those dare ‘to spurn the
traditions of the Church and to invent some novelty’, specifying the rejection of icons or
relics and the turning of sacred vessels to common use (trans. Percival, NPNF 14, 550).
and laypeople have broken off communion with him in the mysteries of
God and their sanctification, we depose with all our heart and spirit and
strip of the patriarchal authority which he has assumed unworthily through
the secular power.
13. Along with him we also depose Palamas, the originator of heresy,
who has composed many treatises in which he has formulated the unsound
and empty conceptions of his own mind and shaken the Church of God
to its foundations, inventing gods and divinities both visible and invisible
with his superior and inferior divinities, and counting for nothing the
holy symbol of the faith of Christians sealed by the holy fathers at Nicaea
that commands us to believe in one God and one divinity, and the other
ecumenical councils, and expounding a new theology, he and his supporters
who hold the same opinions as he does, and in addition proceeding against
the holy icons and sacred vessels and other matters of Christian good
order, such as daring to celebrate the Liturgy after sentence of deposition.
This pernicious man, Palamas,98 and anyone else belonging to his wicked
faction who without our being currently aware of it has clandestinely
acceded to the episcopate, we not only strip of the priesthood and subject
to permanent deposition, but also judge to be worthy of fire and sword as
‘degenerate children’ and ‘a perverse and crooked generation’,99 and similar
requitals paid back to God. And we issue these decrees in accordance
with the laws and the canons against those sacrilegious bishops, unworthy
as they are of the cure of souls and episcopal office, which decrees will
remain immutable, having authority, as already stated, through canonical
and episcopal decisions given both now and in the past, and are not to be
violated by pious Christians. With regard to what remains to be done, we
shall take these useful measures, mindful of the future, that such wolves
might not stealthily slip in among the sheep of Christ and destroy the
simpler souls. Furthermore, we exhort all who believe in Christ our Lord,
and confess one God and one divinity, to use every means to avoid evil
contact with them, and with the teachings that they disseminate unlawfully
to the destruction of souls, teachings that do not differ in any way from a
pestilential disease.100 And we urge them to resort to churchmen with the
98 Literally: ‘this Palamnaios or Palamas’, the word-play being difficult to reproduce in

English.
99 Deut 32: 5.
100 No light comparison; in the summer of 1347 the Black Death carried off many
thousands in Constantinople. For the year see Nicol 1968, 129.
322 GREGORY PALAMAS
ability to nourish them, men who have been watered, as it were, from the
spring of the all-holy Spirit, and who pour forth streams of teaching whose
fruits in the present life are peace, joy and exultation, and in the life to come
are the enjoyment of eternal light, the first-born’s inheritance of the Church
above, the attainment of the kingdom of heaven. These are the rewards of
those who struggle until death to maintain the patristic traditions. These
are the inheritance of those who have not chosen to move the landmarks
of the fathers.101 The present Tomos was drawn up in the month of July in
indiction 15.102
101 Cf. Deut 19: 14; 27: 17; Prov 23: 10.
102 July 1347. The signatories have not been transmitted.
V
of 1351
Introduction
The solemn pronouncements and decrees of 1347 failed to bring the

desired peace to the Church after the conflict of the civil war. There were
those who felt that the alliance of the Palamites with Kantakouzenos
(although by no means all Palamites were Kantakouzenists) had resulted in
a Palamite takeover of the organs of ecclesiastical government. Certainly,
it could not be denied that Kalekas’ successor, Isidore Boucheiras, and
the thirty-three new bishops he ordained, had inaugurated an ecclesi-
astical regime as Palamite as the previous one had been Akindynist.
Despite depositions and excommunications, dissent was not stifled. Able
spokesmen came forward, led by the philosopher Nikephoros Gregoras,
to occupy the ground vacated by Kalekas and Akindynos. By 1351 it
had become clear that unity could not be imposed by imperial fiat, as
had been attempted in 1347. The patriarch Isidore had died in February/
March 1350. His successor Kallistos I, although not a Kantakouzenist,
was nevertheless a Palamite. It was therefore manifest to the dissenters
that the same monastic faction remained in control of the Church. Even
though Matthew of Ephesus had been reconciled, they maintained their
opposition. Therefore a council was convoked by the emperor John VI
Kantakouzenos with the intention that the issues dividing the parties
should be debated at length so that the anti-Palamites should be won over
by the strength of the Palamite arguments.
The council assembled on 28 May 1351 at the Blachernai palace in the
Triclinium of Alexios Komnenos, frescoed with representations of the great
ecumenical councils. It was a more numerous assembly than the previous
councils, presided over by the patriarch Kallistos and the emperor John
Kantakouzenos – the emperor John Palaiologos was absent in Thessalonike
– and attended by twenty-five metropolitans and seven bishops, besides
several members of the imperial family, the senate, and other dignitaries
324 GREGORY PALAMAS
of the patriarchal and imperial courts.1 The opposition was present in

strength. Led by the metropolitans of Ephesus and Ganos (who had signed
the Anti-Palamite Tomos of 1347), it included the philosopher Nikephoros
Gregoras and two other lay intellectuals, Theodore Dexios and Theodore
Atouemis.2 At the first session the opponents of Palamite theology were
invited to present their case. They did so and Palamas responded to them,
claiming that his opponents were restating the erroneous opinions of Barlaam
and Akindynos and that his own teaching was simply an explication of the
Christological doctrine of the Sixth Ecumenical Council. The day ended
with the decision that at the next meeting the dissidents should again speak
first and Palamas should reply to them.
At the second session, which met two days later, relations between
the two sides broke down. When Palamas began to speak the dissidents
walked out, leaving Palamas to address the bishops and dignitaries in
their absence. The dissidents were again present, however, at the third and
fourth sessions (on 8 and 9 June) and finally came to the central point of
their objection to Palamas: namely, that he divided the Godhead, teaching
a multiplicity of deities. Palamas responded that one must go behind the
terms (essence and energies) to examine the realities they signified. Even
if the terms were unfamiliar, he maintained, they were necessary in order
to express the doctrine of the Church. A series of passages was then read
from the acts of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, to which the dissidents
replied with quotations from Maximus the Confessor and Theodore
Graptos. These were countered in turn by passages from Basil the Great
and Gregory of Nyssa. Next, according to the Tomos, the emperor John VI
Kantakouzenos invited the dissidents to recant without success, the
patriarch Kallistos made an appropriately pro-Palamite speech, and the
matter was put to the vote. The result by then was a foregone conclusion.
The metropolitans Matthew of Ephesus and Joseph of Ganos were deposed
and stripped of the priesthood. The others were excommunicated, apart
from a few who recanted and sought pardon.
A final session was held in July after the usual interval to allow an
opportunity for repentance. It took the form of a kind of seminar on
1 For a detailed account of the council, see Meyendorff 1959, 141–51.

2 Besides the official record of the council (the Synodal Tomos of 1351), we also have
accounts from Kantakouzenos, Historiarum Libri IV (Bonn III, 166–72), Gregoras, Historia
Byzantina XVIII–XX (Bonn II, 869–1031), Arsenios of Tyre, Tome against the Palamites
(ed. Polemis) and Theodore Dexios, Appeal against John Kantakouzenos (ed. Polemis).
Palamite theology. The emperor proposed six topics for discussion,3 and a
large number of patristic texts were adduced to prove that Palamas’ teaching
on these questions was in complete accord with orthodox tradition. The
Tomos, apparently drawn up by Philotheos Kokkinos, the then metropolitan
of Herakleia,4 was signed by the emperor John VI Kantakouzenos in the
customary red ink, and then by the patriarch Kallistos and the metropolitans
and the officials of the Great Church in their order of precedence. John
V Palaiologos added his signature when he returned from Thessalonike,
probably in February or March 1352.5 Kantakouzenos’ eldest son Matthew
also signed in February 1354, after he had been crowned co-emperor by
Philotheos Kokkinos (Kallistos I having resigned the patriarchate rather
than impair the dynastic rights of the Palaiologues).6
In theory that should have been the end of the controversy. Palamas’
opponents had been given complete freedom to speak their minds. The
theological issues raised by the Palamite distinction between the divine
essence and the divine energies had been examined systematically and at
length. A large number of patristic authorities had been cited in support
of the distinction. And finally the emperors, the patriarch, and a large
body of metropolitans and officials had willingly signed the Tomos. Yet
it was not the end of the controversy. As might be expected, the Tomos
reports Palamas’ arguments more fully than those of his opponents.7 The
council of 1351 was intended from the beginning to reaffirm the councils
of 1341 and 1347. The anti-Palamites felt that, notwithstanding claims to
the contrary, the council’s proceedings had been manipulated in order to
reach a predetermined end. Indeed, it was on these grounds that Theodore
Dexios addressed an appeal to John Kantakouzenos shortly after the
council, asking for a retrial.8 So far as the anti-Palamites were concerned,
their objections had not been answered.
The wider reception given to the council of 1351, however, ensured
that within a decade (despite the continued opposition of Nikephoros

4 Meyendorff 1959, 148, n. 106.
5 Meyendorff 1959, 149, citing Loenertz 1954, 116.
6 Meyendorff 1959, 150, citing Lemerle 1951.
7 For a fuller account of the anti-Palamite arguments presented at the council, see the
Tomos of Arsenios of Tyre, who attended the council as the representative of the patriarch of
Antioch. Text and discussion in Polemis 1993.
8 Text and English summary in Polemis 2003, lxxxii–cxiv, 1–187. For the dating see
Polemis 2003, xxx–xxxi.
326 GREGORY PALAMAS
Gregoras) it came to be regarded as authoritative. Shortly after 1351

the anathemas against Barlaam and Akindynos were inserted into the
Synodikon of Orthodoxy.9 In 1359 the Council of Tŭrnovo, under the
influence of Theodosios of Tŭrnovo, who had been a disciple of the
patriarch Kallistos at Paroria, confirmed the Bulgarian Church’s condem-
nation of Barlaam and Akindynos.10 A disciple of Theodosios and trusted
confidant of the patriarch Philotheos, the monk Kiprian, who became
metropolitan of Kiev in 1375, later inserted the anathemas against
Barlaam and Akindynos into the Russian version of the Synodikon
of Orthodoxy.11 The council of 1351 thus came to be embedded in the
Slavonic as well as in the Greek tradition.
Text and Editions
Owing to the very large number of surviving manuscripts, there has not
yet been a critical edition of the Synodal Tomos of 1351. The Tomos was
first printed in Paris in 1672 by the great Dominican scholar François
Combéfis in his collection of patristic texts, the Bibliothecae graecorum
partum auctarium novissimum, pars altera. It was this text (with inept
emendations by Mansi) that was reprinted by Migne, along with Combéfis’
learned but hostile notes, in PG 151, 717–64. The Tomos was next published
by Dositheos of Jerusalem, but from an inferior manuscript, in his Tomos
Agapēs in Iasi in 1698. A much better manuscript was used by Porfyrii
Uspensky in his Istoriia Afona III, 2, published in Saint Petersburg in
1892. The most recent edition of the Tomos is that of John Karmiris in
his Dogmatica et symbolica monumenta orthodoxae catholicae ecclesiae,
published in 1968.12 Karmiris uses a manuscript of the National Library of
Greece (codex 2092), which he has compared with the printed editions.13
It is this text that is translated below with Karmiris’ paragraph numbers.
Karmiris, however, gives only the first six of the signatories. I have
supplemented the list from Combéfis’ text, PG 151, 761–3.14
9 For the original form of the text see Rigo 2018b (cf. Karmiris, 410–14).
10 Meyendorff 1959, 151; Christov 2016, 207–8.
11 Obolensky 1988, 198.
12 Karmiris 1968, 374–407.
13 Karmiris 1968, 352. The Tomos was not entered in the patriarchal register.
14 On the signatories, see Honigmann 1954.
The Tomos is followed in the majority of manuscripts by the horismos

of Matthew Kantakouzenos (PG 151, 764; critical text Lemerle 1951, 59).
The horismos has been translated from Lemerle.
Text
1. We do not think that anyone is ignorant either of the rage of the Church’s
common enemy,15 or of the Saviour’s decisive help, through which the
Church not only prevails against the arrows of the countless evils that
afflict her, but is even manifested more resplendently. The proof of the
former’s rage on the one hand is the blood of God and his voluntary passion
and cross, and of God’s assistance on the other is the precise witness of
the Church’s persecutors, some of whom have been transformed into
evangelists, whereas others have been proclaimed a monument to God’s
power not because they have succeeded but because they have failed. Even
so, it was not possible for the common enemy to remain quiescent. On
the contrary, as if condemning himself, like someone who has not thought
things through in a fitting manner, he engaged in a war with the Church
not through a small nation, as in the past in the case of the Jews, but
bitterly arming the whole Roman world against her. His commanders were
Diocletian, Maximian and Decius, and anyone like them who perished
as miserably as the degree in which they knew how to wage war.16 For
the memory of these men has perished with a noise,17 whereas the voice
of God’s Church has gone out through all the earth.18 The most incontro-
vertible witness to this power is the bodies of the martyrs, which drive
out all demons. Thus the power of God is shown to be transcendent even
in disastrous circumstances. But the evil one did not gain understanding
through experience, and being an infant in the bargain set about attacking
the Church from a different angle. He despaired totally of fighting openly,
15 I.e. Satan; cf. the preambles to the two Tomoi of 1347.

16 The reference is to the persecution of the emperor Decius in 250–1, and the Great
Persecution under Diocletian and his co-emperor Maximian which lasted from 303 to
312. The Decian persecution was cut short by the emperor’s death in the battle of Abrittus
against the Goths in 251, the first death of a Roman emperor at the hands of a foreign enemy.
Maximian committed suicide in 310 under pressure from Constantine. Diocletian died in
retirement, a deeply disappointed man, in 312.
17 Cf. Ps 9: 6.
18 Cf. Ps 18 (19): 4.
328 GREGORY PALAMAS
being averse to public humiliation. So insinuating himself into the circles

of Sabellius and Arius and their devotees,19 he advised them to do away
with polytheism and persuaded those dimwits, on the pretext of honouring
God’s oneness, to disparage the true God. But he was perceived to have
advised this too against him, the Church of God receiving as the spoils of
this war the Trinity’s equality of honour.
2. This evil one has also involved himself with many other circles
against the Church. Now retreating and now advancing, he attacks the
truth sometimes with doctrines containing nothing sound and sometimes
with pleasures, which he is accustomed to enjoy and the end of which is
separation from God. Most recently he has found favour with Barlaam.20
This man, a monk of Calabrian origin, steeped in Hellenic learning
and relying wholly upon it, proceeded against the truth and those who
adhere to it in a holy manner, and accused them of ditheism for saying
that not only is the trihypostatic and wholly imparticipable essence of
God uncreated, but also the grace of the Spirit that is eternal and deifying
and participable by the worthy. When a divine synod was convoked on
these matters, he was refuted and condemned by the holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church of Christ on the basis of the theological writings of the
holy fathers, which supported the truth of the teaching of the current most
holy metropolitan of Thessalonike, Palamas, and of the monks.21 But after
a little while, Akindynos became an advocate of Barlaam’s erroneous
opinion. By no means brought to his senses by the condemnation of his
teacher, or improving in any way, he attempted to accuse them again of
the same things, dishonestly denying that he was a disciple of the teacher
and vehemently heaping curses upon him, and maintaining that he had
never thought or expressed the same things as Barlaam so that it would be
possible in consequence for him to utter the same things. He declared this
to them, giving a glimpse of the hidden Barlaam, and thinking, saying and
committing to writing the same erroneous opinion as his.22
19 Sabellius taught a modalist form of Trinitarian monarchism in the early third century;
Arius, who died in 336, was condemned by the Council of Nicaea (325) for denying that the
Son was eternal like the Father.
20 Recent scholarship has established that Barlaam was indeed steeped in Hellenic
(especially Neoplatonic) learning; see Trizio 2011. He was not a Westernizer as Meyendorff
(1959, 66) had thought.
21 Namely, the synod of 1341.
22 The Synodal Tomos of June 1341 imposes penalties on those who hold the same
opinions as Barlaam (§ 31). Akindynos had been condemned at the following council in July,
3. Thus a second synod was convoked, presided over by our present

mighty and holy emperor, the Lord John Kantakouzenos,23 and the same
opinions, utterances and accusations against the monks as those of Barlaam
were condemned, on which account they incurred the same condemnation
as Barlaam’s, a Synodal Tomos having been issued against the blasphemies
of the notorious Barlaam, by which he was excommunicated from the whole
Christian body, as this same Synodal Tomos explains in detail, also on
account of many other things, because he attempted to prove that the light
of the Lord’s transfiguration, which was seen by the blessed disciples and
apostles who ascended the mountain with him, was created, circumscribed,
and contained nothing beyond the kind of light accessible to the senses. Not
only was this Barlaam excommunicated by the Tomos, but if anyone after
him contends against the monks and God’s Church, he renders himself
liable to the same penalties. For the Tomos says specifically: ‘Moreover, if
anybody else is found in the future accusing the monks of anything drawn
from what has been blasphemously and erroneously uttered or written
by Barlaam against the monks, or rather against the Church itself, or is
found attacking them at all in similar terms, let him be subject to the same
judgement that has been given by our humility and be himself excommu-
nicated from the same holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ and
orthodox community of Christians.’24
4. But when the wicked serpent, the originator of evil, who is at
work among the sons of disobedience, as Scripture says,25 saw that, in
attacking orthodoxy and those who firmly adhere to it by using men who
did not occupy any office, he was hardly able by such means to attain his
purpose, he entered into the man who at that time fulfilled the function
but no Synodal Tomos was issued in respect of that council, so he was always careful to
distance himself from Barlaam so as not to incur the same penalties. In fact Akindynos’
opinions were not the same as those of Barlaam, but the Palamites needed to argue that they
were because until 1347 the Synodal Tomos of June 1341 provided the legal grounds for
censuring him. A confidant of the patriarch John XIV Kalekas and spiritual father of the
princess Irene-Eulogia Choumnaina-Palaiologina, he enjoyed considerable prestige in
Constantinople until his condemnation by the synod of 1347, shortly after which he died.
23 Namely, the synod of July 1341, presided over by Kantakouzenos, at the time megas
domestikos, because in the interval the emperor Andronikos III had suddenly died. The
‘same utterances and opinions’ were those of Akindynos, but in his case a separate Tomos
was not issued.
24 From the peroration of the Synodal Tomos of 1341. See above, p. 230.
25 Eph 2: 2.
330 GREGORY PALAMAS
of patriarch, John,26 a vessel receptive to his evil designs. John shared the
opinions of Akindynos and had implemented, written and planned much
against orthodoxy and those who adhered to it, or rather, against himself
(for it was he who imposed the condemnation in writing on the notorious
excommunicated Barlaam), and no sooner had he seized on the civil war
as a piece of good fortune than he too deservedly found recompense for
his pains and evil designs. For he was condemned and deposed. And
once he had been excommunicated by synodal resolution, a sacred Tomos
was issued by the synod which proved both his adherence to the heresy of
Akindynos and his rage without any reason against the orthodox. Indeed
this Tomos, bearing the signatures of at least thirty hierarchs, which the
most holy patriarch of Jerusalem later also confirmed by signing, not
only expels Akindynos and the patriarch from the Catholic Church and
cuts them off completely from the Christian body, but ‘furthermore, if
anyone else at all should ever be detected thinking or saying or writing
the same things against the said [most honourable] hieromonk, kyr
Gregory Palamas, and the monks who are with him, or rather against
the holy theologians and the Church itself, we decree the same penalties
against him and subject him to the same sentence, whether he belongs
to the clergy or to the laity. This frequently mentioned most honourable
hieromonk, kyr Gregory Palamas and the monks who agree with him
– who in their writing and thinking, or rather, as already said, in their
fighting by every means in defence of the divine Scriptures, and our
common religion and tradition, have scrutinized and comprehended with
precision nothing that is not congruous with the divine Scriptures – we
hold to be not only superior to all their opponents, or rather, to those who
contend against the Church of God, as the earlier Synodal Tomos puts it,
but we also declare to be the most reliable defenders of the Church and of
orthodoxy and its champions and helpers. For thus will the Tomos issued
in relation to those synods possess reliability and certainty, just as it now
indeed does.’27
5. But he who always rejoices in our misfortunes, neither knows how
simply to keep quiet, nor is he short of instruments when he goes round
seeking them.28 But possessing certain people besides who have sat at the
feet of Barlaam and the notorious Akindynos, and have recently become
26 John XIV Kalekas, patriarch 1336–47.

27 From the peroration of the Synodal Tomos of 1347. See above, p. 307.
28 Cf. 1 Peter 5: 8.
infected with their teaching, through them he has gained control of those
who bear the names of Ephesus, Ganos, Gregoras and Dexios.29 These
men formed a party and attracted other people of no significance, but
they never had any sound ideas. They raised up a clamour against the
Church of God, and made serious efforts to lead the multitude astray and
lamentably cut them off from the Church, thinking by this to gain glory
for themselves. It consequently became necessary for a great synod to
be convened, since our most serene sovereign had pity on the souls that
were perishing. Therefore the following most holy metropolitans and
hypertimoi30 were summoned by his mighty and holy divine majesty31 and
by the most holy and ecumenical patriarch, the Lord Kallistos:32 those of
Herakleia, Thessalonike, Kyzikos, Philadelphia, Chalcedon, Melenikos,
Amaseia, Pontoherakleia, Pegai, Berroia, Trebizond, Traianoupolis,
Selymbria, Apros, Amastris, Ainos, Sougdaia, Brysis, Madyta, Bizye,
Garella, Medeia, Tenedos, Kallioupolis and Hexamilion.33 The following
metropolitans were present through recording their opinion: those of
Adrianople, Christoupolis and Didymoteichon.34 Also present were the
most reverend bishops of Panion, Charioupolis, Pamphylos, Athyras,
Kampania, Sinaos and Eleutheroupolis.35 The synod was presided over
by our most serene, mighty and holy master and emperor, the Lord John
Kantakouzenos in the Triclinium, known informally as the Alexiakon,
29 Viz., Matthew (Gabalas) metropolitan of Ephesus (1329–51); Joseph, metropolitan of

Ganos in Eastern Thrace; the polymath Nikephoros Gregoras (1290/1 to between 1358 and
1361); and the monk Theodore Dexios.
30 Hypertimos, ‘exceedingly honourable’, was a title enjoyed since the eleventh century
by metropolitans.
31 John VI Kantakouzenos (1347–54).
32 Kallistos I, patriarch 1350–3 and 1355–63.
33 The metropolitans (here called archiereis) are listed in order of precedence. Herakleia
leads the list because before the founding of Constantinople in 324 the bishop of Byzantium
was suffragan to its metropolitan. Although they were lost one after another in the later
fourteenth century, most of the cities mentioned were at this time still under Byzantine
control. On the south shore of the Sea of Marmara Kyzikos, the metropolis of the Hellespont,
had been taken by the Turks in about 1335. Pegai, then under a Christian tekvur, was to fall
in 1363. But Philadelphia, deep in Asia Minor, held out until 1390.
34 The delicate political situation in Thrace presumably prevented the participation of
these metropolitans in person. Christoupolis (modern Kavala) belonged to Stefan Uroš IV
Dušan and was not retaken until 1357–58. Matthew Kantakouzenos and John Palaiologos
were on the point of open hostilities in their Thracian appanages, Matthew seizing
Adrianople and John Didymoteichon later in 1351.
35 These were small towns in Macedonia and Thrace.
332 GREGORY PALAMAS
of the sacred palace of Blachernai.36 Seated alongside his sacred majesty

was also the most holy ecumenical patriarch, the Lord Kallistos. And also
seated with him was the brother of his sacred majesty, the all-fortunate
sebastokrator kyros Manuel Asan.37 And seated with him as well was
the beloved brother of his sacred majesty, the Lord Michael Asan, and
moreover the beloved nephew of his sacred majesty, the panhypersebastos
the Lord Andronikos Asan.38 Seated with the bishops and senior Church
officials were the senate together with hegoumenoi and archimandrites
selected from among those living in this happy city. Moreover, there were
also present a considerable number of hieromonks, priests and monks.
Nor were senior state officials absent. And standing round the sides were
as many laypeople as wanted to follow the proceedings. Also summoned
were those who had caused disturbances and divisions in the Church,
and they were asked for what reason, when the emperor was living in an
orthodox fashion, did they venture to do such things against orthodoxy.
They, for their part, alleged as the cause that an addition had been made to
the confession of faith required of bishops on their ordination. And they
held the metropolitan of Thessalonike responsible for this, because, they
claimed, they had been scandalized by him on account of some of the
things he had written in his refutations of Barlaam and Akindynos.
6. The metropolitan of Thessalonike said: ‘So then, you yourselves
share their opinions.’ But just as Akindynos had become a denier of the
one who had taught him Barlaam’s error, so they too, in imitation of
Akindynos, denied having been taught by either of them. The metropolitan
of Thessalonike said in reply: ‘Truly, the majority of those who chose to
oppose us manifestly used the erroneous belief of Barlaam and Akindynos
36 The Blachernai palace in the north-west corner of the city had been founded in about
500 and fortified by the Komnenian emperors, who made it their main residence. After 1347
it became the residence of John Kantakouzenos. The first session of the synod was held there
on 28 May 1351.
37 The title sebastokrator, created at the end of the eleventh century by Alexios I
Komnenos (1081–1118), was conferred on members of the imperial family (see Nicol 1968,
265). Manuel Asan is described as John’s full brother (autadelphos) but he was in fact his
brother-in-law. The powerful Asan (or Asen) family supplied the Bulgarian royal dynasty.
John’s wife, Irene Asanina, was a granddaughter of the Bulgarian tsar, John Asen III, who
had married Irene Palaiologina, a daughter of Michael VIII Palaiologos, in 1277 or 1278.
38 These were senior members of the Greek branch of the Asen family. Michael, also a
grandson of John Asen and Irene Palaiologina, was a cousin of Irene Asanina. Andronikos,
whose title panhypersebastos had also been created by Alexios Komnenos, was one of
Irene’s nephews, the son of her brother Manuel, who had married Anna Komnene Doukaina.
as a screen and have remained unrepentant to this day. You who come after
them have clearly aligned yourselves with them, as if looking to them for
a model of dogmatic precision. In addition to this, the holy synod, which
previously you say expressed revulsion at the addition – which should not
properly be called an addition because it is an explication of the holy Sixth
Ecumenical Council39 – is nothing other than the excommunication of
Barlaam and Akindynos. Those who find fault with it are clearly to some
extent of the same mind and take the part of Barlaam and Akindynos.’ But
they again denied that they were aligned with them. And so they began to
explain what it was that scandalized them in exactly the same words as
Barlaam and Akindynos had previously used against the metropolitan of
Thessalonike and the monks. As it became evident from this that they were
suffering incurably from the same illness, it seemed to the most divine and
holy emperor, with the agreement of the most holy ecumenical patriarch
and the entire sacred synod, that if the debate on the doctrines in dispute
were thoroughly investigated from beginning to end, the truth would
by this means be determined. This was approved by the metropolitan
of Thessalonike, but his opponents were altogether against it. Yet when
they were invited to make a clear statement of their own opinion on the
doctrines in dispute, they flatly refused, making what had been said before
a pretext of scandal. As many issues had been raised at this first session, it
was adjourned on account of this hostility; and it was confirmed in writing
that at the second session those who dissented from the Church would
begin where they wished and would say whatever they wished, and then
after them the metropolitan of Thessalonike, beginning where he wished,
would express everything according to his own judgement.
7. When the second session was convened,40 the opponents also attended,
and being first to speak they said all that they wished to say against the
metropolitan of Thessalonike. But when the metropolitan of Thessalonike
began to reply to the speech that they had made, they fell silent and got up
to go. And although they were strongly urged to stay, they could not be
39 Palamas claims his doctrine is not an addition (prosthēkē), and therefore innovatory,
but an explication or unfolding (anaptyxis) of what was implicit in the Sixth Ecumenical
Council held in Constantinople in 680–81 to settle the Monothelete question. The Council
declared that Christ had two wills (both a divine and a human will) and two corresponding
energeiai, or operations. Palamas’s position was that he was drawing out what was implied
by this definition.
40 Two days later, on 30 May 1351.
334 GREGORY PALAMAS
made to do so. Giving promises that they would return to another meeting,
they left, without anyone driving them away, before the appointed time.
The metropolitan of Thessalonike, on the urging of our divine emperor and
the holy Church of God, spoke freely and at length on the doctrinal issues
to be debated by the Church, and everybody praised him and agreed with
him. Then he added the following, saying that a disputation in defence of
orthodoxy is one thing and a confession of faith is another, and that in the
case of a disputation it is not necessary for the disputant to be scrupulously
precise about his use of words, as Basil the Great has said, but in the case of
a confession of faith precision is observed in all matters and is obligatory,41
‘and it is for this reason that in my antirrhetic treatises against Barlaam and
Akindynos I drew up a confession of the faith which I have received from
the saints, so that those who come across my writings might learn from the
confession what the purpose of the disputation is’. Our sovereign and holy
lord and emperor asked for this confession and when it was brought to him
he commanded that it should be read.42 When this had been done, each
person was asked to state what opinion he had of it. And there was nobody
who did not give a laudatory opinion of it, and at the same time express
his admiration of the metropolitan of Thessalonike, and say that he wished
himself to depart this life with the doctrines of that confession and appear
with it before the Judge of the living and the dead on the day of common
confession. And with that the second session came to a close.
8. The next session was then convened.43 The opponents replied and
asked for their own confession to be read. This was done, and at the end of
it was the following statement: ‘With regard to Barlaam and Akindynos,
we hold the same opinion about them as the holy Church of God does.’ In
the midst of the many speeches that ensued, the opponents began to set
out their charge against the metropolitan of Thessalonike, which was this:
that in certain of his writings he frequently mentions two deities or more
and that these deities are superior and inferior. And on their repeating this
statement frequently and making a commotion about it and indeed making
these words the substance of their charge, the most pious emperor directed
us to attain clarity on this point: ‘In the matter under discussion is it the
41 Basil of Caesarea, Letter 210, 5 (Deferrari, vol. 2, 208).

42 This confession of faith is printed out at the end of the Synodal Tomos in Migne (PG
151, 763–8) and in Karmiris 1968, 407–10. For an English translation, see Papadakis 1969,
333–42.
43 A week later, on 8 June 1351.
words themselves that are objected to, or is it the realities indicated by the
words, or is it both? For if indeed the war is against the realities, why do you
battle against the shadow of the reality, and busy yourself with the words?
For what indeed should be investigated are the bare realities themselves,
and the truth about them should be sought in the theologians. If you find
you are in agreement on the realities, why do you quibble about a word?
Certainly, we have not come together here for the sake of words. Nor do we
fight among ourselves, as the Theologian says, about names, for we do not
risk any danger concerning words so long as the mind seems to be healthy.’44
9. Upon this, the metropolitan of Thessalonike said, ‘May I say
something briefly on the lexical issue. For the truth and orthodoxy reside,
so far as we are concerned, not in words but in realities, as Gregory the
Theologian says. It is about doctrines and realities that we are contending.
And if anyone agrees with us about the realities, we will not quibble about
the words. With regard to the charge brought by my opponents that is what
I say. That there are two or many deities in the holy Trinity, so that the
Father is one deity, the Son another, and the Spirit another, I have not held,
nor do I hold, nor indeed by the grace of Christ will I hold. Moreover, I
place any who do hold this under anathema. I do not acknowledge any
other deity apart from the trihypostatic deity, nor have I proclaimed any
divine or angelic essence or hypostasis, according to the great Dionysius,
apart from the divine energy and certain processions proceeding by nature
and from all eternity from the deity in the name of God, with the intention
to speak in harmony with the saints. And I would not even have said this
unless I had been forced to do so by my opponent and as a rejoinder in
my struggle against him, who says that the only uncreated divinity is the
essence of God, and assigns every divine power and energy differing from
the essence to the created order. Above all, I would say this, that I have not
inferred from these premises that there are many deities, as they falsely
allege, which is evident from my own writings and, among others, from my
confession. At all events, it is my contention that what has been alleged by
my opponents is not something that I have professed, for I acknowledge one
deity, and that one as trihypostatic, omnipotent and active. Besides, neither
then was it my intention to be concerned with words but the whole struggle
was about realities, nor now do I quibble about names and syllables. On
the contrary, when realities are proclaimed in an orthodox fashion, I am
44 Cf. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 39, 11 (Moreschini, 908–10).
336 GREGORY PALAMAS
ready, by the grace of Christ, to hold and accept everything that the divine
synod determines about the words.’ Upon which, the most pious and most
serene emperor and the divine synod, expressing their approbation of the
metropolitan of Thessalonike for his orthodox mind in all respects in the
speech he had given on divine matters, and praising him especially for
his conciliatory attitude, decreed that it could not be said or even thought
with certainty that there were two or many or generally any number of
deities. Nor was this stated explicitly by the theologians. Nevertheless,
they prescribed that the difference between the divine essence and the
divine energy, or the divine energies may indeed be thought and uttered,
for this doctrine had been proclaimed explicitly by the Church, as will be
demonstrated below. The metropolitan of Thessalonike willingly and very
gladly accepted this. And so the third session was concluded.
10. When the fourth session was held,45 the dissidents began again to
complain of certain words contained in the writings of the metropolitan
of Thessalonike, neglecting the realities. When an investigation of the
realities was undertaken by the most divine emperor and the synod and
proofs of the contested points were sought from the Church’s theologians,
the Synodal Tomos drawn up against Barlaam was produced.46 On its
being read at the divine command of our most serene emperor, it proved
that Barlaam’s erroneous doctrine was shared in every respect by the
dissenters. For they were not ashamed to oppose to the end what was
written there about other things and especially about the most divine light
of the Lord’s Transfiguration. Indeed, when the dissenters from the Church
were asked by the metropolitan of Thessalonike what opinion they held on
the most divine light, the metropolitan, in what he said and in what he read
out from his own writings in the hearing of all, showed himself in every
respect to be firmly in accord with the mind of the theologians, whereas
the others, in what they said and in what they were found to have written,
were convicted of dividing the one deity of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Spirit into two, into what is created and what is uncreated, on the
one hand by saying that the essence of God is uncreated deity deprived of
all divine power and energy, and on the other by rejecting and denying any
power and energy in God – in a word, his omnipotence – and reducing God
to a creature, and saying that he is two deities, in reality both uncreated
and created, both superior and inferior, inasmuch as they sometimes said
45 On the following day, 9 June 1351.

that the light of deity that shone on Tabor was the essence of God, and
sometimes that it was an apparition, a veil, an image, and a creature, with
the result that in their view the same thing is both a creature and the essence
of God. Autograph writings by them were produced by the metropolitan of
Thessalonike in which they accused him of saying that the most divine
light and radiance was uncreated but not the essence of God. Moreover, in
accusing the metropolitan of Thessalonike of saying that there are many
deities, because he maintains that all the powers and energies common to
the three hypostases are uncreated, they have shown themselves not to be
conducting a war against the words but to be of the opinion that there is no
difference between the divine essence and the divine energies, nor is the
divine and omnipotent energy uncreated.
11. With regard to the theologians of the Church who were produced,
many passages were read from Basil the Great, among them the following:
‘For if Eunomius regards absolutely nothing in God as conceptual, so
that he should not seem to glorify God with human appellations, he will
confess all that is attributed to God as uniformly essence. How is it then not
ridiculous for him to say that the power of creation is essence, the power of
providence is again essence, and similarly the power of foreknowledge?’47
And from the theologian Damascene, in which he teaches about the two
energies that are in our Lord Jesus Christ, saying:
You should know that energy/operation (energeia) is one thing, the power
of operation (energētikon) is another, the product of operation (energēma)
is another, and the one who operates (ho energōn) is another. For energy/
operation is the active and essential movement of the nature; the power of
operation is the nature from which the energy/operation proceeds; the product
of operation is the result of the energy/operation; the one who operates is the
one who uses the energy/operation, namely the hypostasis.48
And the divine Maximus, in the chapter entitled ‘from the conversation
with the secretary’, says:
At all events, it is necessary to say that in Christ there are wills and energies
– it is absolutely necessary. For nothing that is exists without a natural energy.
For the holy fathers clearly say that no nature whatsoever can be or can be
known without its essential energy.49
47 Basil the Great, Against Eunomius I, 8 (PG 29, 528B).

49 Maximus the Confessor, Relatio motionis (Record of the trial) 8 (PG 90, 1210).
338 GREGORY PALAMAS
12. Since in what they were saying they were not only continuing to
fight against the saints individually, but were actually seeking to abolish
and overthrow the Sixth Holy and Ecumenical Council itself, in which
indeed there was no other aim than the full setting out of the two natural
wills and two natural energies that are in our Lord and God Jesus Christ, it
was necessary for this reason to have the acts of this council produced and
read, and for orthodoxy to be proclaimed from them. So they were brought
into the assembly. As soon as they were laid before us, the dissidents cried
out: ‘Do not read the acts of the council but only the definition.’ With the
divine synod brought to a halt, which is what this cry sought to achieve,
and was the reason why they rejected and would not accept the acts, they
would not in any way whatsoever retreat from this strange attitude and
perverse opinion, and would by no means allow the reading of the acts.
Whereupon, at the divine command of our most serene emperor, a passage
was read from the text customarily read from the ambo on the Sunday of
Orthodoxy, which word for word runs as follows: ‘To those who reject the
statements of the holy fathers, uttered in support of the correct doctrines
of the Church of God, the statements of Athanasius, Cyril, Ambrose,
Amphilochius, who spoke of God, Leo the most holy bishop of the elder
Rome, and so forth, along with the acts of the ecumenical councils, that
is, of the fourth and the sixth, and do not embrace them, anathema.’50
Then was also read the passage from the acts, which word for word runs
as follows:
For what person, even if slow-witted, does not see what is evident to all, that it
is impossible and against the natural order for a nature to be able to exist and
not have a nature’s energy? Even the heretics have not attempted to say this,
those who have devised every human cunning and perverse inquiry against the
correctness of faith, and have invented associations agreeable with their base
ideas. How then is it that what was never said by the holy fathers, nor what
the profane heretics dared to invent has been able to be rashly proposed at the
present time, so that of the two natures of Christ, that is, of the divine and the
human, the properties of which are recognized as unmixed in Christ, there is
one operation (energeia)? Who in his right mind can demonstrate, when they
say that there is one operation (energeia) whether this operation (energeia) is
50 From the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, a text first drawn up in the late ninth century to
mark the Triumph of Orthodoxy (the defeat of the Iconoclasts) and read from the ambo on
the first Sunday of Lent. Under the emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118) contemporary
heretics began to be added to the list of those anathematized.
to be considered temporal or eternal, divine or human, uncreated or created,

or whether it is the same as that of the Father or different from him? It follows
that if it is one and the same there is one common operation (energeia) of the
divinity and the humanity of Christ, which is an absurd thing to say. Therefore
when the Son of God, who is himself God and man was operative (energēsas)
in his human nature on earth, the Father was naturally likewise operative
(enērgēsen) with him. For what the Father does is what the Son likewise does.
Because – which is what the truth encompasses – insofar as Christ performed
certain actions (enērgēsen) in a human fashion, these are attributed only to
his person as Son; whatever things are not the same as these, those are also
attributed also to the Father. For Christ was clearly operative (enērgēsen) in
one way and in another, so that with regard to the divinity, what the Father
does is also what the Son likewise does; and with regard to the humanity,
those things that are properties of the human nature, he himself was operative
(enērgēsen) as a man, because he was truly both God and man. Consequently,
it is rightly believed that this very man, being one, possesses natural energies,
(energeias), that is, the divine and the human, the uncreated and the created,
as true and perfect God and as true and perfect man, being himself one, the
mediator between God and man, the Lord Jesus Christ.51
Then another passage was produced from the same acts, which runs word
for word as follows:
With regard to each nature we acknowledge a distinct energy (energeian),
that is to say, the essential, natural and appropriate [energy] that proceeds
indivisibly from each essence and nature in accordance with its innate natural
and essential quality and together with the undivided and unconfused energy
(energeian) that is established in the other essence. For it is this that also creates
the difference between the energies (energeiōn) in the case of Christ, precisely
as the being of natures creates the difference between natures.52
13. Moreover, the Definition that they requested should be read runs
word for word as follows:
The present holy and ecumenical council, having faithfully received and with
upturned hands embraced the report which the most holy and most blessed
pope of the elder Rome, Agatho, made to our most pious emperor … .
51 Concilia Oecumenica (ACO) Epist. et Theol. Concilium universale Constantino

politanum tertium (680–681). Concilii actiones I–XVIII, Document 4, p. 102.
52 Concilia Oecumenica (ACO) Epist. et Theol. Concilium universale Constantino
politanum tertium (680–681), Concilii actiones I–XVIII, Document 11, p. 444.
340 GREGORY PALAMAS
And after a little:

Following the five holy and ecumenical councils and defining in harmony with
the holy and approved fathers, [this council] confesses our Lord Jesus Christ,
our true God, one of the holy and consubstantial and life-giving Trinity, perfect
in divinity and equally perfect in humanity, like us in all things except sin; who
before the ages was begotten of the Father according to the divinity, and the
same in these last days born for us and for our salvation of the Holy Spirit and
Mary the virgin, who is properly and in truth Theotokos, according to the
humanity; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, acknowledged
in two natures without confusion, without change, without separation, and
without division, in no way abolishing the difference between the natures
by the union, but rather preserving the particularity of each nature, and
coming together in one person and one hypostasis, not separated or divided
into two persons, but one and the same only-begotten Son, God the Word,
Lord Jesus Christ, as previously the prophets had prophesied about him, and
Jesus the Christ himself had taught us, and the Symbol of the holy fathers had
transmitted to us. And likewise we proclaim two natural volitions, or wills, in
him, and two natural energies (energeiai), existing without division, without
change, without separation, and without confusion; and the two natural wills
are not in opposition – God forbid – as the impious heretics have said, but his
human will follows, and does not do so reluctantly or with resistance but rather
as subject to his divine and omnipotent will.53
14. When these were read, the leaders of the heresy seemed like
the deaf and dumb. They all started shouting together contending that
there was no difference between the divine and uncreated essence and
its divine and uncreated energy and citing passages, of which one was
from the holy confessor Maximus and the other from the holy confessor
Theodore Graptos,54 distorting and misinterpreting these in the interest
of their own impiety. For how could the divine Maximus have intended
53 Concilia Oecumenica (ACO) Epist. et. Theol. Concilium universale Constantino

politanum tertium (680–681). Concilii actiones I–XVIII, Document 18, p. 774.
54 Theodore Graptos, together with his brother Theophanes, suffered on behalf of
the images in the time of the emperor Theophilos (829–42). His sobriquet refers to his
being branded on the forehead with iambic verses outlining the charges on which he was
condemned. Maximus the Confessor, the leading opponent of the then officially promulgated
Monothelete Christology, was arrested in Rome, where he had helped Pope Martin I organize
the anti-Monothelete council of 649, and after his trial in Constantinople in 655 was exiled
first to Bizye in Thrace and then to Lazica in the Caucasus, where in 662 he died of the
injuries inflicted on him.
to fight against the energy of God, when for the sake of the two energies
in Christ, that is, the divine and the human, he was driven along so many
roads, had his tongue that spoke of God cut out, had his hand amputated,
and finally, condemned to exile for life, bravely embraced a martyr’s
death? When they persisted in opposing the metropolitan of Thessalonike
and attacking him for calling the divine energy a divinity, passages from
the saints were read, from the great Basil in which he writes to the doctor
Eustathius:
I do not know how those who fabricate everything cite the term ‘divinity’ as
if it was an indication of nature, like people who had not heard from Scripture
that an appointed nature is not possible. Moses was appointed a god of the
Egyptians, when the divine voice said to him, ‘I have given you as a god to
Pharaoh’.55 Therefore the term bears an indication of some authority which is
either supervisory or active (energetikē). But the divine nature in all the names
devised for it, remains beyond our comprehension – which is what it is – as our
discourse claims.56
15. The bishop of Nyssa in his On the Divinity of the Son and the Spirit
says:
The Pneumatomachi say that divinity is indicative of nature … .57 But we
say that the divine nature either does not have an indicative name or does
not have one for us; but if something is said either by human custom, or by
the divine Scripture, there is something that is denoted about it. The divine
nature itself remains unutterable and inexpressible, because it transcends any
meaning that can be expressed in words. Let them also take as the accuser of
their senseless blasphemy the serpent who shows that the name divinity has
the sense of visible energy … . For in counselling them to touch what was
forbidden, this is promised, that your eyes will be opened and you will be as
gods. Do you see that the energy of vision also bears witness to the sound of
the word ‘divinity’? For it is not possible for anything to be seen unless the eyes
have been opened. Therefore it is not nature but the power of vision that the
term ‘divinity’ represents.58
55 Exod 7: 1.
56 Ps.-Basil, Letter 189 (Deferrari, vol. 3, 66). ‘Divinity’ and ‘deity’ both translate theotēs.
57 The Pneumatomachi were fourth-century heretics, led by Eustathius of Sebaste,
who denied the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit. They were fiercely opposed by the
Cappadocian Fathers, Basil the Great, and the two Gregories of Nazianzus and Nyssa, and
were condemned at the Second Ecumenical Council, the Council of Constantinople of 381.
58 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Divinity of the Son and the Spirit (PG 46, 573).
342 GREGORY PALAMAS
And again the same author writes to Ablabius: ‘God,’ he says, denotes one
who acts (energounta), deity denotes activity (energeian), not at all the
activity of the three, but rather each of them in activity.’59
16. Thus censured through all these texts, they were invited by the
Church to repent, with our most serene emperor first and foremost in
pleading with them in words full of encouragement and grace not to recoil
from the good medicine of repentance. But they did not accept this, and said
outrightly, ‘I do not desire to know your ways.’60 For they held fast to what
they had thought from the beginning. For that reason at the divine command
of our most mighty emperor and of the most holy and ecumenical patriarch,
the Tomos was read that had proceeded some time previously to depose
the metropolitans of Ephesus and Ganos and others, as suffering from the
disease of Barlaam and Akindynos.61 The provisions of the Tomos had not
yet been put into effect in order to allow time for their return and repentance,
and to induce this by every means and contrivance in all readiness and zeal.62
When it had been read, the most honourable great chartophylax and consul
of the philosophers began, according to the ecclesiastical custom, to ask each
one what his opinion was on the dogmatic chapters that had been discussed
and examined in succession.63 And all of them with one voice and moved
by the one Spirit openly confessed along with the unity also a distinction
and difference befitting God between the divine essence and energy, and
following the theologians agreed that the divine energy is uncreated, just as
indeed the essence is. Moreover, having heard that this divine energy was
called ‘deity by the same theologians, they gladly accepted it.
59 Cf. Gregory of Nyssa, To Ablabius, that there are not Three Gods (PG 45, 124D–125A).
The annotation seems to be a paraphrase of this passage, which is presented as a citation in
Palamas, Against Akindynos I, 10, and is then repeated as such by the Synodal Tomos and
later Palamite authors.
60 Job 21: 14.
61 The Tomos of August 1347 against Matthew of Ephesus.
62 The presence of the metropolitans Matthew of Ephesus and Joseph of Ganos at the
council of 1351, although deposed by the Tomos of August 1347, is thus explained.
63 The chartophylax, nominally the archivist and chief notary of the Great Church, was the
most important patriarchal official after the patriarch himself. He represented the patriarch
in his absence, deputizing for him at meetings of the synod. The qualifier ‘great’ (megas)
was added to the title under Andronikos I Komnenos (1183–85). The old office of ‘consul of
the philosophers’ had been revived at about the same time by Manuel I Komnenos (1143–80)
specifically to control theological speculation among the clergy. The megas chartophylax
and consul of the philosophers at the synod of 1351 signed the Tomos as Emparis (Gregoras
names him Amparis in Historia Byzantina XXI, 3).
17. In addition to this, the most holy ecumenical patriarch was himself
asked to express his own opinion. In his speech he first expounded the
difference between the divine essence and energy, and elucidated in an
excellent manner and in detail, and the modes of the difference mentioned
by the saints, and moreover demonstrated the united and inseparable nature
of the energy with regard to the divine essence, by which he established that
the divine energy and deity were also said to be uncreated by the saints.
He then adopted a wholly exhortatory attitude towards the dissidents,
entreating them, admonishing them, rebuking them, calling them by every
means to repentance and urging them in a manner full of divine love with
the utmost eagerness and zeal to come into harmony with the saints and
the holy synod. But when he saw that they remained utterly incorrigible,
and held absolutely fast to their earlier blasphemy, and completely rejected
repentance, he resumed the zeal that was worthy of him and of his virtue
since childhood, and worthy of the throne. He stripped the metropolitans of
Ephesus and Ganos of their episcopal rank and of all priesthood, and did so
with the consenting vote of the holy synod. The others who accompanied
them, both the leaders of the heresy and those who had followed them in
their error, suffered the same condemnation with them and were dismissed,
some of them seeking pardon and through repentance receiving it. And
upon that, this session came to an end.
18. A few days went by after that, our most serene and holy emperor
having thus commanded, and wisely in consequence leaving the door of
repentance open to the dissenters. But as they continued to be obdurate, it
seemed right that another synod should again be convoked, so that through
examination, the truth of orthodox teaching on the matters under discussion
might be made more manifest from the theological teaching of the saints.64
When this took place, those with heterodox opinions not being willing to
reply, but absolutely declining to do so, the most pious emperor ordered, in
view of the many dogmatic topics that had been proposed for discussion,
that the first should be whether there is a fitting distinction in God between
essence and energy; then, a distinction having been demonstrated, whether
this energy is created or uncreated; third, if this divinely befitting energy is
to be uncreated, how does one avoid thereby considering God composite,
which is what the heterodox dare to allege to the Church; fourth, whether
the word ‘deity’ not only applies to the essence but is also attributed to the
64 This fifth session seems to have been held in July 1351 (Meyendorff 1959, 147).
344 GREGORY PALAMAS
divine energy by the theologians, for the Church’s enemies pour over the
Church the ugliness of ditheism; fifth, whether the theologians say that
the essence transcends the energy in any degree, because this too is made
a reproach by the opponents; and finally, given that God is participable,
whether participation is in the essence or the energy. The topics having
been set out so succinctly, there is no need for a general discussion of them,
for thus the apprehension of the matter under discussion would not become
precise, nor would it be in accordance with our proposition, but treating
each one separately, let us pass to the next, with the venerable theologians
as our reliable guides.
19. And first, if you will, let us discuss the first point. Is it theologically
fitting to make a distinction between essence and energy, which is denied
by the dissidents, who believe that many absurdities including polytheism
are implied by this, or are they in every respect identical and undiffer-
entiated? The most mighty emperor having commanded this, the divine
synod gave heed to his words and said, ‘we know of no other path, most
pious emperor, that leads more easily to the truth than this which you have
just indicated to us. And when what the theologians think about these
matters was read in the hearing of all, it was proved that those who do not
maintain with the union also the distinction between the divine essence
and energy are atheists and involve themselves in many other absurdities.
For according to the great Dionysius, ‘That which possesses neither power
nor energy neither is, nor is something, nor is it in any way its affirmation
or subtraction.’65 That which possesses necessarily differs in some respect
from what it possesses. Therefore if there is no difference between the
divine essence and energy, it is not possible for the essence of God to
possess energy. That which does not possess energy is inactive, and that
which is inactive is also non-existent.
20. When the God-bearing Damascene writes, ‘the work of the
divine nature is pre-eternal begetting, and the work of the divine will is
creation’,66 and the holy Cyril writes, ‘it belongs to the divine energy to
make, and to the divine nature to beget, and nature and energy are not
65 Cf. Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names VIII, 5, 893A (Suchla, 203).
66 This quotation does not correspond to the precise wording of John Damascene, but
seems to be taken from Palamas, Against Akindynos V, xi, 40, where it is attributed to
Damascene as a quotation from Athanasius (cf. John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 81
[IV, 8] [Kotter, vol. 2, 180]). Palamites writing after the synod (including Palamas himself)
reproduce it without qualification as a saying of John Damascene.
identical’,67 those who say that there is no difference between the divine
essence and the divine energy, because according to the latter it belongs
to the divine nature to beget, and in their view the energy does not differ
from the nature, they make begetting a property of the energy, and thus
created things will be eternally begotten, as if they were from the divine
nature. Again, as it belongs to the energy to make, and in their view the
nature does not differ from the energy, it will belong to the nature to make.
And thus, in their view, what is from the nature will be created. And
again, as the same author writes in the second of the dialogues addressed
to Hermias, ‘In addition to all this we say that fire that burns and water
that has the property of cooling are made by God’s energy’,68 those who
say that essence and energy are without difference are obliged to say that
fire and water are from God’s essence. And thus the present heresy is
worse than the error of the Greeks, for the latter thought that only the
rational soul was from the essence of God, whereas the former include
these material and sensible bodies.
21. Moreover, when our Lord and God says in the Gospel according
to John, ‘I and the Father are one’,69 the divine Chrysostom in the sixtieth
homily of his exegesis of this gospel, where he comments on this text, says:
‘This is said here about the power.’70 For the whole discourse is on this.
‘If the power is the same, it is clearly evident that the essence is also the
same.’ And after a little: ‘It is not possible to learn of one through the other,
neither essence nor power.’ And again in the same gospel where the apostle
Philip says, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied’,71 this divine
Chrysostom says in the same homily, ‘Let us look at what Philip seeks to see.
Is it the wisdom of the Father? Is it his goodness? No, it is what God is, the
essence itself.’72 And again the same author, commenting on the apostolic
saying in the Epistle to the Romans, on the text: ‘To set the mind on the flesh
is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace’,73 said: ‘To set the
mind on the flesh he says is evil, and to set the mind on the Spirit is the grace
that is given, and the energy that is mixed with a will for the good; in no

68 Cyril of Alexandria, Dialogues on the Trinity II, 441e (de Durand, vol. 1, 296).
69 John 10: 30.
70 John Chrysostom, Homilies on John 60 (PG 59, 338).
71 John 14: 8.
73 Romans 8: 6.
346 GREGORY PALAMAS
way is he also speaking here about hypostasis and essence.’74 And again the
same Chrysostom in the discourse in which he comments on the text: ‘Put
your hand under my thigh and swear’,75 says the following in these words:
‘The lamp was truly the Lord’s flesh, which manifested the illuminations
of the Holy Spirit by a sevenfold grace. “For a rod shall come forth,” says
Isaiah “out the root of Jesse, and a flower shall come up out of it, and a spirit
of God will rest upon him.”76 What kind of spirit? The spirit that is manifold
in energies and mighty in nature. “A spirit of God will rest upon him” (here
he interprets the essence and calls what is brought upon him, the energies
of the Spirit), “a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and
strength, a spirit of knowledge and piety, a spirit of the fear of God.”77 The
seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, which were made to rest upon the Lord’s body,
these he represents by the type of the seven-branched lamp.’78 And again the
same divine Chrysostom, in his discourse on the Holy Spirit says: ‘One does
not receive all the gifts, so that one should not think that grace is a nature.’79
22. Moreover, whereas the holy martyr and philosopher Justin writes,
‘therefore God has essence for the sake of existence and will for the sake
of production’,80 he who rejects the difference between essence and will
also rejects the existence and the production of God. Are not those who
openly reject the difference people who are also shown both to deny God
and to accept a principle of spontaneous creation? For according to the
divine John of Damascus, ‘there is energy and there is will’, as he explains
in the thirty-sixth chapter on energy of his Dogmatic Chapters.81 For
speaking first about other things, and indeed about human and divine
will, he immediately goes on at the beginning of the next chapter to say
expressly: ‘One should know that all the powers which have previously
been mentioned, the cognitive, the vital, the natural and the creative, are
called energies; for energy is the natural power and movement of each
essence, which only non-being lacks.’82
74 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 13 (PG 60, 516).

75 Gen 24: 2.
76 Isa 11: 1–2.
77 Isa 11: 3.
78 The source of this quotation is not known. Philotheos, however, reuses it in his
Antirrhetics Against Gregoras II, line 211.
79 Source unknown.
80 Ps.-Justin, Questions of Christians to the Gentiles (Otto, 177 c7).
81 John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 36 (II, 22) (Kotter, vol. 2, 87–92).
82 John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 37 (II, 23) (Kotter, vol. 2, 93).
23. Since these things were therefore elucidated so very plainly, and the
difference with particular clarity, and it was not possible to demonstrate
it in any other way, ‘not in plausible words of human wisdom’, according
to the divine Paul, ‘but in what is taught by the Holy Spirit’,83 doubtless
through the divinely inspired theological writings of the fathers, it was
necessary by whatever means, said the holy synod, since they had tried to
take a contrary position on the matter, now at least, if not earlier, piously
to expel the disease of contentiousness from their minds, and desire very
eagerly to obey our common leaders and teachers of piety, and let forth
voices well nigh clearer than any trumpet on the difference between the
divine essence and energy. And there was nothing further at all any way
more important than that they should resist them and attempt to inquire
closely into what the energy is and in what its difference consists and how
it comes into being.
24. For it seems that they have not heard the father, Chrysostom, in
his exegesis of the divine Gospel according to John, where he teaches that
the divine energy is inexplicable and incomprehensible and transcends the
laws of nature. ‘For if you do not know how to explain even the path of
the wind, of which you receive a sensible perception through hearing and
touch, how is it that you investigate the energy that comes from the divine
Spirit, when you do not have knowledge of the wind, even though you hear
its sound? The phrase, “blows where it wills”84 is said as a demonstration of
the authority of the Paraclete. For if no one possesses it but it is said to blow
where it wills, how much more will the laws of nature not be able to contain
the energy of the Spirit, nor the terms of corporeal begetting, nor anything
else of a similar kind.’85 Nor yet when the great Basil refutes Eunomius and
teaches, ‘so if we think we can measure all things by our intellect, and what
cannot be grasped by our thoughts is not in the least intelligible, the reward
of faith disappears, as does that of hope.’86 And how should we be worthy
of the beatitudes, which are reserved for those who have faith in what is not
visible, when we are only persuaded by what is clear to the intellect? How
did the gentiles become foolish and their senseless mind was darkened?
Was it not because, following what was apparent to the intellect, they were
not persuaded by the proclamation of the Spirit? Who were the lost ones
83 I Cor 2: 4, 13.
84 John 3: 8.
85 John Chrysostom, Homilies on John 26, 2 (PG 59, 155).
86 Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius II, 24 (PG 29, 628A).
348 GREGORY PALAMAS
whom Isaiah bewailed, with ‘Woe on those wise by their own account and
knowing in their own eyes’,87 if not such as these?
25. They should have listened to these words of the holy theologians
and have at once gladly obeyed, and paid attention to them with the
greatest pleasure and have succumbed without undue pressure to their
divine voices that indicate the difference, welcoming it and accepting it in
reverent silence, and attributing the ‘how’ or the ‘nowhere’ or the ‘not’ to
the refutation of the difference, if they expected to see themselves counted
among those held in any way whatsoever to be pious. And they arrived at
such a pitch of insolence and shamelessness, or rather of madness, that they
even raved against the holy and ecumenical councils themselves, and all,
so to speak, of the holy theologians, and had the audacity to call them to
account and to say – alas! – that they were boiling off the Hellenic doctrines
that were still mixed in with them, indicting most of them for ignorance,
despite the fact that they form a whole synod, and that some of them were
forced by necessity to embrace this theology, even though they willingly
chose a martyr’s death in defence of it, and that others wrote these things
in a eulogistic spirit rather than teaching the truth – O how can one endure
describing their blasphemies in detail? Well now, we ourselves, for the sake
of not accepting the claim, as one of the Christ-loving fathers rejected by
them supposedly said, that sometimes what is said about divine dogma by
the saints, is not strictly dependent on truth and theological precision, let
us ourselves, confident in what is attributed to God by them, attempt to
expound briefly the mode of the union and distinction of the divine essence
and energy, not endeavouring to invent it from our own thoughts in order
to advocate something piously taught by them in the past, but trying to
set forth whatever rule was observed everywhere, to confirm the Church’s
doctrines through the Church’s teachers, and in no way by our own volition
to add or subtract anything from the doctrines taught by them. In our
treatment of this here, since we have heard the saints expressly declare that
the divine energy is from the divine essence, we do not consider this to
be the same as the way the universe is from God, in the way that this too,
along with many other absurdities, seems to the dissenters. For the one is
said to be from God also with regard to created things; the other, which is
from the essence of God, is not said to be so with regard to anything that
has been made. Indeed, this is absolutely denied by the saints.
87 Isa 5: 21.
26. And the great Basil says, ‘What has been made is not from the
essence of the maker’,88 and the divine Damascene says, ‘creation, even
if it came about after these things is nevertheless not from the essence
of God’;89 and again, ‘creation and making, by which the created and the
made are external and not from the essence of the creator, are totally unlike
them.’90 Indeed not, but neither have we interpreted this to be from outside
the divine essence, as those nonsensically say who not so much out of
impiety as out of ignorance claim the contrary, for no one could be so out
of his mind. On the contrary, knowing that according to the theologians
this movement of God belongs to his essence and nature, we say that it
proceeds and flows forth from the divine essence as from an eternal spring,
and it does this without ever being perceived to do so, but always remains
undivided from it, coexisting from eternity with the divine essence, and
being inseparably united with it. Nor can it ever be divided by any eternal
or temporal or local interval from the divine essence, but timelessly and
pre-eternally proceeds from it and continuously coexists with it. For the
great Athanasius says, ‘when all things are effected by God through Christ
in the Holy Spirit, we see that the energy of the Father and of the Son and
of the Holy Spirit is indivisible.’91 And the divine Anastasius among the
saints, whom the holy and ecumenical synod commemorated under the
title ‘the great’, says in his second discourse about the uncircumscribed:
‘We know that the heretics refrain from saying such things about God.
They say that God is in all things by energy, but is nowhere by essence,
designating as energy the final product of the energy. I for my part would
say that God’s energy is inseparable from his essence.’92 And after a little:
‘Where the energy is deemed to be, the essence is also contemplated with
it, from which is proceeds; for each is uncircumscribed and for this reason
is inseparable from the other; for the energy proclaims the hidden essence,
and is contemplated as co-present with the energy, not able to be without
it.’ And again: ‘The energy relates to the universe, and the essence is
inseparable from it.’
88 Ps.-Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius IV, 1 (PG 29, 673B).

91 Ps.-Athanasius of Alexandria, Against the Sabellians 12 (PG 28, 117A).
92 This and the next two quotations appear to be in fact from Theodore of Rhaithu (7th
cent.). The same series is cited by the patriarch John IX Bekkos in Book I of his To Theodore
Bishop of Sougdaia, where he names his source as Theodore of Rhaithu’s second discourse,
On the Uncircumscribable.
350 GREGORY PALAMAS
27. Now just as we proclaim that the divine and eternal union is not
only with the inseparable but also with many others and indeed with the
sharing in common of the uncreated and uncircumscribed according to
the theology of the saints, so too we recognize that we should honour the
distinction and difference, again according to the theologians, as also being
appropriate to God, not thereby reducing them to complete severance and
division, nor conceiving of this difference and natural differentiation as
something strange, or separating them from each other by an interval –
God forbid! – but we have been taught by the saints to accept as such those
things that are by nature causes and the products of causes, distinguishing
those things which are naturally united and indivisible in the mind alone in
a manner befitting God. For the great Athanasius says in his fifth discourse
against the Arians, ‘What is from something is one thing and that which
it is from is another. There are thus two. If there were not two, but both
were said to be the same, the effect, the begetter and the begotten would
be the same thing, which is the absurdity that has been demonstrated in
Sabellius.’93 Consequently, since it is believed by all the theologians that
the energy, too, is from the essence, it is clearly proved that they are one
thing and then another and that they are two and are therefore distinct from
each other, in accordance with ‘that from which it derives’ and ‘that which
is from something’, that is to say the cause and the effect, as this great father
teaches in his theological writings.94 And a little further on he says: ‘Take
as a human example fire and the glow that comes from it; they are two and
are seen to be two, but the glow that comes from the fire is one with it and
indivisible from it.’95 Therefore just as in the case of the fire and the light
that comes from it, the one being the nature and cause, the other the natural
effect, they are said to be one on account of their indivisibility, and on the
other hand different on account of being cause and effect, so too in the case
of the divine nature and the energy that comes from it, both the oneness
and the difference are to be accepted by us, the one in accordance with that
which is united and undivided, and the other in accordance with the cause
and the effect from that cause. For neither does the oneness dissolve the
difference, nor does the difference in any way overturn the oneness; but
93 Ps.-Athanasius of Alexandria, Against the Arians IV, 3 (PG 26, 471A).

94 Cf. Ps.-Athanasius of Alexandria, Dialogues on the Trinity, PG 28, 1157. On the
distinction between ‘that from which it derives’ (to ex ou) and ‘that which is from something’
(to ek tinos) see Aristotle, Metaphysics V, 24, 1023a26–1023b12.
95 Ps.-Athanasius of Alexandria, Against the Arians IV, 10 (PG 26, 478CD).
each of the two according to the saints is correctly contemplated, nor may
either of the two be set below the other.
28. Saint Gregory of Nyssa likewise, knowing very well that the
difference between these causes and effects is an expression of truth, and
in no way injures their natural non-differentiation, writes to Ablabius as
follows: ‘Since we acknowledge that the nature is undifferentiated, and
we do not deny the difference with respect to cause and effect, we take the
distinction between the one and the other to lie in this alone, in believing
that the one is the cause and the other the effect.’96 And his brother, the
truly great Basil, appears in general to allow such a great difference to
these causes and effects that he even teaches with regard to it an order
by natural sequence, and speaks so explicitly about the prior and the
posterior aspects of cause and effect, and thinks that not to acknowledge
these things but to attempt to deny them is absurd and irrational. And
he said that either Eunomius was not aware of this difference, or he
deliberately concealed it, writing: ‘Either Eunomius was not aware of this,
or he deliberately concealed it, that there is some kind of order, which is
not constituted as a result of our own affirmation but occurs by the natural
sequence of things itself, like fire in relation to the light that comes from
it. In such cases, we say that the cause is before and what comes from
it is after, not because we separate these things from each other by an
interval but because we think of the cause as preceding the effect in our
minds.’97 How then is it reasonable to deny the other, since there is a first
and a second, not according to our own supposition, but from the sequence
which is in them by nature? It is therefore within the power of all who
can reason in any way whatsoever to discern from these things how truth
and piety were of equal concern to the saint. For by the phrase, ‘which
is not constituted as a result of our affirmation but occurs by the natural
sequence of things itself’, they showed that the difference in this order of
effects and causes exists by unavoidable, great and natural necessity and
by manifest truth, and never allows the case to be otherwise, but is always
necessarily contemplated in them. By the fact that there is no interval, but
we are obliged to separate them mentally, and that the difference between
prior and posterior is contemplated only in the mind, it appears beyond
doubt that the need for union is very strongly and piously confirmed, and
96 Gregory of Nyssa, To Ablabius, that there are not Three Gods (PG 45, 133) (GNO III,
55).
97 Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius I, 20 (PG 29, 557AB).
352 GREGORY PALAMAS
that no injury is inflicted on this union as a result of the distinction, but

the union is asserted theologically to be unconfused and the difference is
taught in every way to be indivisible. Accordingly, again attempting to
refute this difference of Eunomius in every possible way, this great man
said, ‘How is it that you do not admit of any difference whatsoever, not
even the difference that exists in causes with respect to their products?’98
Thus the opinion that there is no difference at all between causes and
effects is clearly an indication of the madness of Arius and Eunomius. For
the latter endeavored by every means to overturn the homoousion,99 since
they had heard the Lord saying in the gospels that the Father was greater
than himself, and assuredly intending this difference to be understood, at
once impiously had the audacity to adduce the difference by nature, and
absolutely denied the difference with respect to cause and effect, since
they did not know that it was in no way able to introduce any natural
change or division but always thus kept the union of the nature intact.
Against them, these three, bravely assuming the struggle on behalf of the
Trinity, and taking up the great and supernatural mystery of the Trinity,
drove this away as far as possible from our Church.
29. Accordingly, those who now set aside this difference have been
rightly convicted of sharing in their erroneous opinion, whereas those
who willingly confess that they love and embrace the piety of these saints,
or rather, who continue to belong to the party of Christ, like them make
distinctions in the divine while uniting them and unite them while making
distinctions. Indeed one could say that the form (eidos) of the distinction
between the divine essence and energy is unique, primary and proper to
it. They differ from each other by the divine energy being participated
and indivisibly apportioned and in some way named and conceived,
even if dimly, from its results, whereas the essence is imparticipable,
non-apportionable and nameless, as evidently completely transcending any
name or concept.
98 Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius I, 23 (PG 29, 564B).

99 The homoousion is the principle of consubstantiality between the Father and the
Son (which in the fourth-century debates was also extended to include the Holy Spirit).
Eunomius had denied the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son on the grounds that the
fundamental characteristic of the Father’s nature was ‘unbegottenness’, which eo ipso could
not be shared by the Son. Eunomius’ radical Arianism was vigorously opposed by Basil the
Great and his brother, Gregory of Nyssa. In 383, two years after the victory of the Nicene
faith at the Council of Constantinople, Eunomius was banished by the emperor Theodosius
I. He died in exile around 394.
30. After this, we sought to demonstrate from the saints whether this
energy, which is inseparable from the divine nature although differing from
it, is uncreated, which is what those who contradicted the Church were
unwilling to accept. And this was proved to be clearly proclaimed by the
saints, as summed up by the holy and ecumenical Sixth Council, as has been
demonstrated more than adequately by the statements which were set out
in detail above. The following was also demonstrated, that those who do
not accept that the energy which is natural and inseparable from the divine
essence is uncreated although different from it, as has been said, also make
the essence itself of God a creature. For according to the holy Maximus,
‘the nature of each is characterized by the energy’,100 an uncreated energy
indicating an uncreated nature, and a created energy a created nature.
Again, according to the divine John the Damascene, ‘the created energy
also manifests a created nature, and the uncreated energy characterizes an
uncreated essence.’101 Therefore those who say that the divine energy is
created, necessarily also represent the divine nature as created, in view of
the fact that the divine nature is characterized by the energy.
31. Moreover, they are also Monotheletes, worse and more absurd than
they ever were, because they think that there exist pre-eternal created
entities.102 For since we confess that there are two natures in our Lord
Jesus Christ, the one uncreated, the other created, those who deny that
he has a divine nature and will and uncreated energy hold the opinion
that there is one will and one energy in Christ, which the Sixth Council
condemned and anathematized. As a result, these too have manifestly
been proved to be Monotheletes, and much worse than them, insofar
as the latter said that there was one will and one energy in Christ, but
uncreated, whereas they say that there is one will and one energy but
created, manifestly not accepting the uncreated one. The great Basil,
however, when writing to Amphilochius said: ‘Such names of the Spirit
are marvelous and great, but they do not have anything that transcends the
glory, and as for the energies, what are they? They are ineffable in their
magnitude, and innumerable in their multitude; for how can we conceive
100 Maximus the Confessor, Disputation with Pyrrhus (PG 91, 341A).
102 Monotheletism (the teaching that Christ had two natures but one energy and one will)
was promoted by the emperor Herakleios in his Ekthesis of 638 in an attempt to reconcile the
Miaphysites with the Chalcedonians, but was condemned, as the Tomos says, by the Sixth
Ecumenical Council held in Constantinople in 680–81.
354 GREGORY PALAMAS
of what lies beyond eternity?’103 What were these energies of his before
his mental creation? Those who say that the divine energies are created
manifestly think that they are creatures beyond eternity. This too has been
proved, that the common and natural divine energies of the trihypostatic
nature are uncreated, not by two or three witnesses but by the whole of
divine Scripture.
32. After this we searched in the saints to see whether anyone had
conceived of a synthesis in God on account of the difference between
the divine essence and energy. For this too is asserted by the opponents.
Accordingly, it was proved that it was proclaimed by all the saints that it
is not possible to think of any synthesis in God on account of this. For the
divine Maximus in his Disputation with Pyrrhus proves most clearly that no
synthesis arises from the energy: ‘Do you see,’ he says to Pyrrhus, ‘that as
a result you are in error, from utterly failing to realize that syntheses belong
to beings that are hypostatic, not to what is contemplated in something else,
and this is the common opinion of all, both of the pagan philosophers and
of the inspired theologians of the Church. If you say there is a synthesis of
wills, you are also forced to admit that there is a synthesis of the other natural
attributes.’104 Gregory of Nyssa too, in the sixth chapter of his Commentary
on the Hexaemeron, says in his own words the following: ‘Therefore if in the
case of human being, despite the organs constructed by nature for the sake
of perception happening to be different from each other, the mind acts and
moves by means of all them and uses each of them in an appropriate manner
according to the end in view, the human being itself is one, not changing
its nature with the differences of the energies, how could one suspect in the
case of God that because of his various powers his essence is multiple?’105
33. Moreover, this too was proved at the same time, namely that
those who, in accordance with the dissidents, do not accept the difference
between the divine essence and the energy, and in a word everything that
is contemplated naturally around the divine essence, it is those rather who
make God complex, for the great Basil says clearly: ‘If we go and attribute
all the divine names to the essence, we not only make God composite
but we prove him to be composed of dissimilar parts, by signifying one
thing and then another by each of the names.’106 And the great Gregory
103 Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit XIX, 48–9 (PG 32, 156).
104 Maximus the Confessor, Disputation with Pyrrhus (PG 91, 296B).
105 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Creation of Man 6 (PG 44, 140B).
106 Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius II, 29 (PG 29, 640C).
the Theologian writes: ‘Or else, the immortal, the guileless, and the
changeless are the essence of God; but if that were the case, there would
be many essences of God and not one, or the divine would be composed
from them; for these would not exist without being composite, even though
they were essences.’107 And again the divine Cyril: ‘For ingenerateness, or
incorruptibility, or immortality or invisibility are not essences; if each of
these signified an essence, God would be composed of as many essences
as there would appear to be natural attributes in him. For there are many,
which belong to him alone, and to nothing else whatsoever.’108 And the
divine Chrysostom: ‘Scripture calls the grace of the Spirit sometimes fire,
sometimes water, showing that these names refer not to essence but to
energy; for the Spirit is not composed of different essences, being invisible
and uniform.’109 And the bishop of Nyssa says to Eunomius: ‘Who apart
from you says that God has two natures? For you say that every concept of
a name is naturally bound up with the essence of the Father, and nothing
is attributed from outside him, but each of the names around the divine is
grafted on to the essence of God.’110
34. After this inquiry was made as to whether the divine and uncreated
energy is called ‘deity’ by the saints. For those who are currently dissenters
do not accept this at all. And this too was shown to have been proclaimed
by the holy theologians. For example, the great Basil in his books Against
Eunomius says: ‘and this name of deity signifies the power either of oversight
or of providence, which he appropriately exercised over humanity.’111 And
again in his letter to Eustathius the doctor: ‘Therefore the identity of the
energy in the case of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit indicates
clearly the indistinguishability of the nature. Accordingly, even if the name
“deity” should indicate nature, the community of essence forces us to
conclude that this appellation is properly applied to the Holy Spirit also.’112
And after a little: ‘Therefore the appellation bears an indication of a kind of
power, either of oversight or of energy. The divine nature, however, in all the
names devised for it remains as it is, incomprehensible, as our discourse has
107 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29, 10 (Moreschini, 704–6).

108 From the Doctrina Patrum, which attributes the passage erroneously to Cyril of
Alexandria’s Thesaurus, Book II, chapter 31.
110 Not found.
111 Actually Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius III, 10, 10 (GNO II).
112 Ps.-Basil of Caesarea, Letter 189 (Deferrari, vol. 3, 66). This letter is now attributed to
Gregory of Nyssa.
356 GREGORY PALAMAS
it. For having learned that it is a benefactor and judge, good and just, and as
many other such things as there are, we were taught about the differences
between the energies, but we were in no way better able to understand the
nature of the one acting through the apprehension of the energies. For when
one gives a definition of each of these names and of the natures of which
they are the names, one will not give the same definition for both. But for
those whose definition is different, the nature too is different. Therefore
the essence is one thing, of which no disclosing definition has yet been
discovered, and the significance of the names around it, which are named
because of some energy or value, is another.’113 And again this great Basil in
the same letter: ‘Therefore either “deity” is the name of an energy, as there
is one energy of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and so we say that the divinity
is one, or else, according to the opinion of many, the name of “deity” is
indicative of nature, because not the slightest change is found in the nature,
not inappropriately we define the Holy Trinity as of one divinity.’114
35. And Saint Anastasius says: ‘It is clear that the appellation “God” is
energetic, for it does not present the essence of God itself, for it is impossible
to know the latter.’115 And again the same author: ‘The name “God” does
not signify the essence of deity, for this is incomprehensible and nameless,
but from his energy, which is subject to contemplation, he is called “God”
(Theos), as the holy Dionysius says, either from theein, which means “to
run through” or from aithein, which means “to be aflame.”’116 The great
Dionysius himself says: ‘If we should name the transcendent hiddenness
“God”, or “life”, or “essence”, or “light”, or “word”, we intend nothing
other than the powers proceeding from it that confer on us deity, or essence,
or life, or wisdom. We think of this in accordance with the release of all the
spiritual energies, not perceiving any deification, or life, or essence which
resembles the transcendental cause of all things that is utterly supreme.’117
And again, the same says: ‘Deity is the providence exercised over all
things.’118 That providence is an energy is also recognized by others, and
among them the great Athanasius especially writes the following: ‘The
Father and the Son do not operate according to one providence in one case
113 Ps.-Basil of Caesarea, Letter 189 (Deferrari, vol. 3, 68).

114 Ps.-Basil of Caesarea, Letter 189 (Deferrari, vol. 3, 68).
115 Anastasius of Sinai, Hodegos II (PG 89, 53).
116 Anastasius of Sinai, Hodegos II (PG 89, 68).
117 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names II, 7, 645 AB (Suchla, 130–1).
118 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names XII, 2, 969C (Suchla, 224–5).
and a different one in the other, but in accordance with one and the same
essential energy of the Godhead.’119 The great Dionysius, again, in his
Second Letter to Gaius says: ‘divinity is the name of the deifying gift, and
is the inimitable imitation of that which is more than divine and more than
good, by which we are deified and rendered good.’120
36. Moreover, since indeed those who oppose the archbishop of
Thessalonike say that this gift of the Spirit and energy, that is to say,
deification, by which the saints are deified, and is called deity by the saints,
is a created divinity, supposedly proving this from the fact that God is said
by the great Dionysius to be the cause of its subsistence, and it is called
by him an imitation and a relation of those who participate, the sacred
synod declared that they were speaking impiously. But when this too was
inquired into by the divine synod, as to whether any of the saints had said
that deification was created, and whether the relation and the imitation
and the ‘causing to subsist’ ‘are also said to be in the uncreated category,
passages from the saints were adduced which showed that these things
were never said to be categorized among created things. For the great Basil
says in his Antirrhetics, ‘He who generated drops of dew did not cause the
drops and the Son to subsist in the same way.’121 And in the first homily of
the Hexaemeron he says: ‘that it should be proved that the world is a work
of art, offered to all for their contemplation, that through it the wisdom of
its maker might be recognized, the wise Moses did not use any other word
for it but said, “In the beginning he made”, not “he produced” or “gave
subsistence to”, but “he made”, because of many who imagined that the
world existed with God from eternity and did not admit that it was brought
into being by him.’122 It was also proved from this that being active and
being acted upon may be said not only with regard to creatures but also
with regard to what is eternal and uncreated; and yet when the dissidents
hear that grace is activated, they immediately assume that it is created.
The great theologian Gregory said: ‘Let it also be an energy, if that seems
fit. But you will not refute us in this way either, for this is that operating
energetically if it should be the homoousion.’123
119 Ps.-Athanasius of Alexandria, Sermon on the Annunciation of the Theotokos 5 (PG 28,
924B). This text is now attributed to the seventh or eighth centuries.
120 Dionysius the Areopagite, Letter 2, 1068A (Ritter, 158).
121 Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius II, 23 (PG 29, 624A).
122 Basil of Caesarea, Homilies on the Hexaemeron I, 7, 3 (Naldini, 24).
358 GREGORY PALAMAS
37. And the divine Gregory of Nyssa says: ‘We cannot call three gods
those who jointly and indistinguishably from each other exercise their
divine and supervisory energy over us and the whole of creation.’124 On
the imitation, the metropolitan of Thessalonike said that just as the great
Dionysius added the inimitable to the imitable, so that the deifying gift
should not rather be an imitation than a non-imitation,125 so Gregory the
Theologian wrote in his Second Oration on the Son that the Son is also an
imitation of the Father: ‘The Son is an image of the Father because he is
consubstantial with him, and because his is from the latter, not the Father
from him. For this is the nature of an image, to be an imitation of the
archetype, and is said to be such for that reason.’126 Therefore the imitation
is no impediment to deification being uncreated. It is also the relationship
of God’s providence to the things over which he exercises providence, and
of his foresight to the things over which he exercises foresight, and of the
limitations in God from eternity to what has been predetermined. But in
each case the fact of being a relation is no impediment to being uncreated,
just as the deifying gift of the Spirit, deification itself, is created because
it is a relation with respect to what has been deified. That it is uncreated is
also clearly and briefly indicated by the divine Maximus, when he writes:
‘Divine grace, even if it gives pleasure to those who participate, is not
an apprehension. For it remains, despite not being apprehended by those
who enjoy participation in it, because it possesses infinity by nature as
uncreated.’127 And again: ‘This is the gospel of God, the advocacy of God
to humankind through the incarnate Son, and the reward given to those
who are persuaded by him is uncreated deification.’128
38. After showing that the divine energy was also called ‘deity’, we
sought to demonstrate from the theologians whether God as essence
transcended this divine energy and the things contemplated essentially
around him. And this too was shown to have been proclaimed by all the
saints. It was also demonstrated together with this that those who did
not accept it were in reality polytheists, for they posit many principles
because they do not refer the things that are contemplated essentially
124 Gregory of Nyssa, To Alabius, that there are not Three Gods (PG 45, 128).
125 Dionysius the Areopagite, Letter 2, 1069A (Ritter, 158).
127 Maximus the Confessor, Questions to Thalassius 61, scholion 15 (Laga and Steel II,
111).
128 Maximus the Confessor, Questions to Thalassius 61, 292–6 (Laga and Steel II, 101).
around God to one cause and one principle. For the great Basil says in his
Antirrhetics: ‘There is some kind of order which is not constituted as a
result of our own affirmation but occurs by the natural sequence of things
itself, like fire in relation to the light that comes from it. In such cases we
say that the cause is before and what comes from it is after, not because
we separate these things from each other by an interval but because we
think of the cause as preceding the effect in our minds.’129 How then is it
reasonable to deny the order, considering that there is a first and a second,
not by our own affirmation but because of the natural sequence that exists
in them? He also writes in his treatise addressed to Amphilochius: ‘And
the energies of the Spirit, what are they? They are ineffable as to their
magnitude and innumerable as to their number. How shall we form a
conception of what transcends the ages? What were his energies before
the spiritual creation? How many were his graces from him concerning
creation? What is the power with regard to the ages still to come? For he
existed, and pre-existed, and coexisted with the Son and the Father before
the ages. Consequently, if you conceive of anything beyond the ages, even
that is inferior to the Spirit, for you will find that the pre-eternal energies
of the Spirit are inferior to the Spirit.’130 In his discourse on the deity
of the Son and the Spirit the divine Gregory of Nyssa says: ‘The divine
nature remains inexpressible and unutterable, since it transcends all that
can be conveyed by speech.’131 Therefore the term ‘deity’ represents not
the Spirit’s nature but his power of seeing. The great Athanasius in the
second of his discourses against the Arians, where the heretics say that
the Son is from the will but not from the nature of the Father, says: ‘if
they attribute to God willing about what does not exist, why do they not
acknowledge the transcendence of the will of God?’132 And in the third
discourse against the same: ‘The heretics have seen the object of the will,
but what is greater and transcendent they have not seen. For just as what
is contrary to the intention lies opposite to the will, so what is willed in
accordance with nature transcends and precedes the will.’133 And writing
against Macedonius the same author says: ‘You should know that to be
God is secondary to the nature, and so with us too, if we become imitators
129 Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius I, 20 (PG 29, 557 AB).

130 Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit XIX, 48–9 (PG 32, 156D–157A).
131 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit (PG 46, 573D–576A).
132 Athanasius of Alexandria, Against the Arians II, 1 (PG 26, 149C).
133 Athanasius of Alexandria, Against the Arians III, 62 (PG 26, 453B).
360 GREGORY PALAMAS
of God, according to Paul, we become gods, but we cannot become of the

same nature.’134 And the divine Maximus says, ‘God infinitely transcends
an infinite number of times all beings, both those that participate and
those that are participated.’135
39. The great Dionysius too in the twelfth chapter of the Divine Names
says: ‘In the degree that holy, or divine, or lordly, or royal beings, and the
essential participations of these participants, surpass non-beings, in such
a degree does he who is above all beings, and is the unparticipated cause
of all participants and participations, transcend all beings.’136 And in the
Second Letter to Gaius he says: ‘How is it that he who surpasses everything
is even beyond the source of deity and beyond the source of goodness?
If you conceive of deity and goodness as the use of the gift that confers
goodness and deity, and the inimitable imitation of that which transcends
deity and goodness, by which we are deified and made good, and if this
becomes the principle of being deified and being made good for those who
are deified and made good, then he who is beyond every cause and beyond
what is thus called deity and goodness is beyond them as the source of deity
and the source of goodness.’137 And again the same author says: ‘We must
turn now to the truly existing theological name of “essence” that belongs to
the truly real, but we should note this much, that the object of the discussion
is not to clarify the supra-essential essence, which transcends essence, for
this is ineffable and unknown and utterly inexpressible, and transcends the
union itself, but it is to hymn the essence-making procession to all beings
of the thearchic source of essence.’138 The divine Maximus also says in his
scholia, ‘Procession here refers to the divine energy, which has produced
every essence.’139 And the divine Chrysostom in the first homily of his
On the Incomprehensibility of God says: ‘The prophets not only appear
not to know what God is with regard to essence, but are at a loss about the
extent of its wisdom. For indeed the essence is not from the wisdom, but
the wisdom from the essence. When it is not possible to apprehend even
the wisdom with precision, how mad it would be to think one can subject
134 Ps.-Athanasius of Alexandria, Dialogues against the Macedonians I, 14 (PG 28,

1313A).
1101A).
136 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names XII, 4, 972B (Suchla, 225).
137 Dionysius the Areopagite, Letter 2, 1068A–1069A (Ritter, 158).
138 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names V, I, 816B (Suchla, 180).
139 Not found.
the essence itself to one’s own thinking.’140 And the same author says in his
Homilies on John: ‘God does not bestow the Spirit by measure. But all of us
have received the energy of the Spirit by measure, for it is the energy that
is shared out. God possesses the whole of the energy immeasurably, how
much more the essence.’141
40. After this an inquiry was made by us, since indeed the opponents
of the Church say that all things participate in the essence of God, on
account of there being no difference between the divine essence and
the divine energy, and there being, in their view, nothing in God but the
essence alone. But we have been taught by the holy Scriptures that God
has essence and power and energy, and that the power and energy differ
exceedingly from the divine essence. The divine synod said that we know
that the divine essence and the divine and natural energy are inseparable,
for there could never be an energy apart from its essence. Of course, with
regard to what was created by God from the beginning, it said, who does
not know, unless he is in error in accordance with those who contradict
the Church, that every created thing is attributed to the energy not to the
essence of the creator? For a house is not attributed to the essence of the
builder, nor a ship to the essence of the shipwright, but to his skill and
energy, as the theologian of Nyssa puts it.142 Because even the saints,
who have been deified by union with God, participate not in the divine
essence, but in his divine energy, as Gregory, great in theology, writing
on our Lord Jesus Christ, represents it: ‘Christ (Christos) is called such
because of the divinity; this anointing (chrisis) of the humanity is not
by energy, the anointing not sanctifying him by chrism as in the case of
others, but by the presence of the whole of the chrismator.’143 And the great
Basil says: ‘The Holy Spirit is to fill all things by his power; but he is to
be participated only by the worthy, not participated by a single measure,
but distributing the energy in proportion to faith.’144 And elsewhere again:
‘Just as reflections of faces do not appear in all kinds of matter, but those
which have been made smooth and translucent, so too the energy of the
Spirit is not apparent in all souls but in those which have no perversity or
140 John Chysostom, Homilies on the Incomprehensible Nature of God I, 4, 192 (PG 48,
705).
142 Not found. Cf. Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius II, 32 (PG 29, 648A).
144 Not found.
362 GREGORY PALAMAS
crookedness.’145 And the holy Maximus says, ‘Everything that God is the
person deified by grace will be, except for identity of essence.’146 And the
great Dionysius says, ‘The divine intellects move by a circular motion,
united to the unoriginated and unending illuminations of the beautiful
and the good.’147 By referring to these in the plural, he showed that they
were not the essence of God, for that is never referred to in the plural, but
by calling them illuminations and describing them as unoriginated and
endless, he showed them to be divine and uncreated energies. And our
Lord and God in his holy Gospel according to John says: ‘He who believes
in me, as Scripture has said, from his belly shall flow rivers of living water.
Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive.
For as yet there was no Holy Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.’148
Commenting on this, the divine Chrysostom says: ‘Rivers shall flow from
his belly, indicating the abundance and bountifulness of grace; wherefore
it says elsewhere “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life”,149 which
means that it will have much grace. Indeed, in another place “eternal life”
is called “living water”.150 It is called “living” because it is always active.
For whenever the grace of the Spirit comes and is established, it gushes
forth more than any spring without any intermittence, or being emptied, or
stopping. Signifying at the same time the ceaselessness of the supply and
the abundance of the energy, it called it “spring” and “river”, not one river
but untold rivers. And there it presents the flood through its springing up.’151
And the same author after a little: ‘There has not yet been a prophet among
them, nor has grace contemplated their holy things. Therefore the Holy
Spirit on the one hand drew back somewhat, and on the other was about to
pour himself out in abundance, and the beginning of this distribution was
made after the cross, not only abundantly but with even greater gifts. For
the gift was more wonderful, as when it says: “You do not know of what
Spirit you are.”152 And again: “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery,
but you have received a spirit of adoption.”153 And even the ancients had
145 Basil of Caesarea, Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah, Prooimion 3 (PG 30, 120).
146 Cf. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua to John 41, 5 (PG 91, 1308B).
147 Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names IV, 8, 704D (Suchla, 153).
148 John 7: 38–9.
149 John 4: 14.
150 John 4: 7.
152 Luke 9: 55 (variant reading).
153 Rom 8: 15.
spirit, but they did not furnish it to others. Yet the apostles filled thousands
with it. Since, then, they were to receive this grace, and it had not yet been
given to them, it therefore says: “there was as yet no Holy Spirit”,154 that is,
no Holy Spirit that had been given, “because Jesus was not yet glorified”,155
calling the cross glory. For seeing that we were enemies and sinners and
had failed to obtain God’s gift and were hated by God, and that the grace
of reconciliation was proof of this, for the gift is not given to enemies, nor
to those who are hated, but to friends and those who have been pleasing,
it was necessary first for a sacrifice to be offered on our behalf, and the
hostility to be abolished in the flesh, and for us to become friends of God,
and then receive the gift. If this happened in the time of the promise to
Abraham, how much more so in the time of grace.’156
41. And again the same author says in the thirty-sixth homily of the
same treatise: ‘So too in our case, it was not simply the water that was
operative, but when it receives the grace of the Spirit, it is then that it
remits all the sins.’157 And after a little: ‘Even though the whole world
should come, the grace is not exhausted, nor is the energy used up, but
remains the same as it was before. Just as the sun’s rays give light every
day and are not used up, nor does their light diminish as a result of the
abundance of the supply, so much more does the energy of the Spirit not
diminish on account of those who enjoy it.’158 And again the same author
says in the fifth homily of the same treatise, commenting on ‘all things
come into being through him’:159 ‘When John was speaking of creation,
he introduced the phrase about providence saying “in him was life”.160
Indeed, so that no one should disbelieve how so many and such great
things should have come into being through him, he added that in him
was life. Therefore just as in the case of a spring coming up from the
productive depths, however much you take away, you do not diminish
the spring, so too in the case of the energy of the Only-begotten, however
much you believe is supplied by it and done by it, it does not become at
all less.’161 And again, where the gospel says, ‘From his fullness we have
154 John 7: 39 (variant reading).

155 John 7: 39.
159 John 1: 3.
160 John 1: 4.
364 GREGORY PALAMAS
all received’,162 the same divine Chrysostom, commenting on this in his

fourteenth homily, says:
And what can the phrase ‘from his fullness we have all received’ possibly
mean? It is this that for the moment my discourse must discuss. It says that
he does not possess the gift by participation, but is the very source and
very root of what is good, absolute life, absolute light, and absolute truth.
He does not retain within himself the wealth of good things, but making it
also overflow to all others, and after the overflowing remaining full and in
no respect diminished as a result of supplying others, but ever welling up
and imparting to all a share of these good things, he remains in the same
perfection. What I possess is by participation, for I have received it from
another, and is a small portion of the whole and, as it were, a paltry drop
compared with the ineffable depths and infinite ocean. Or rather, not even
this example can adequately represent what we are attempting to say. For if
you take a drop from the ocean, the ocean itself is diminished, even though
the diminution is not perceptible. But of that spring, it is not possible to say
this. On the contrary, however much one draws out of it, it remains not in the
least diminished. Therefore we really need to go to another example, this one
still weak and not able to represent what we are seeking, but guiding us better
than the first one towards the meaning now set before us. Let us suppose that
there is a source of fire, and from this source thousand of lamps are lit, and
then twice as many, and three times as many, and many times more. Does
not the fire remain at the same degree of fullness even after imparting its
energy to so many others? It is plain to all that this is so. Now if in the case
of bodies that are divisible, and are diminished by subtraction, something of
such a kind is found, which after supplying to others what is from itself is
in no way impaired, how much the more will this occur in the case of that
power which is incorporeal and uncompounded. If in the example given that
which is participated is an essence and a body, and is both divided and not
divided, how much rather, when the discussion concerns an energy, and an
energy that comes from an incorporeal essence, is it unlikely that it will
experience nothing of the kind. That is why John said: ‘Of his fullness we
have all received’ … . And all of us, the twelve, the three hundred, the five
hundred, the three thousand, the five thousand, the many myriads of Jews,
the whole fullness of the faithful of those who were, and now are, and later
will be, we have all received from his fullness. What have we received?
‘Grace upon grace,’163 it says.164
162 John 1: 16.

163 John 1: 16.
164 John Chrysostom, Homilies on John 14 (PG 59, 91–2).
42. And the great Basil in his exegesis of the forty-eighth psalm
says: ‘God made man from the earth and his ministers a flame of fire.
But the capacity to know and understand their maker and creator is
a power that exists within human beings. For “he breathed upon his
face”165 means that he put into humanity a portion of his own grace, so
that like may know like.’166 And again, in his treatise to Amphilochius
On the Holy Spirit the same author says: ‘When the Lord was renewing
humankind and restored again what it had received from the inbreathing
of God but lost, and breathed on the faces of the disciples, what does
he say? “Receive the Holy Spirit.”’167 And the divine Damascene in his
work of theological chapters on foreknowledge and predetermination
says: ‘This human person the Creator created as made, transmitting to
him a share of his own divine grace, having made him by this means to
be in communion with him.’168 And again the great Basil in his treatise
to Amphilochius says: ‘Who can be so inattentive to the good things
prepared by God for the worthy as not to know that the crown of the just
is the grace of the Spirit, which then is supplied more abundantly and
more perfectly.’169
43. Moreover, the holy Cyril in the third of his Dialogues with
Hermias, where Hermias asks him about the divine indwelling within
us and participation, saying: ‘However, how pleased I should be to learn
from you how the fullness of the Father and the Son is to be conceived
and how it is realized as one rather than as varied’, the holy Cyril says
in reply: ‘Indeed, there is nothing complicated about this or difficult to
explain in any way whatsoever. For how otherwise can this be than by the
Holy Spirit, who fills us with divine graces through himself and makes
us sharers of the ineffable divine nature?’170 And again in the Thesaurus
the same author says: ‘If indeed the Holy Spirit is in reality a creature, in
accordance with the madness of the heterodox, how does he possess the
energy of God in its wholeness? For there is nobody, I think who would
declare that this is so orthodox, as to have the audacity to say that it is only
through some instruments brought into being externally that the divine
165 Gen 2: 7.
166 Basil of Caesarea, Homilies on the Psalms 48, 7 (PG 29, 449B).
167 Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit XVI, 39, citing John 20: 22.
168 John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 44 (II, 30) (Kotter, vol. 2, 104).
169 Not found.
170 Cyril of Alexandria, Dialogues on the Trinity III, 468d (Durand, vol. 3, 30).
366 GREGORY PALAMAS
essence ministers to itself with respect to energy, which naturally passes

over from it to those with the capacity to receive it.’171
44. And the great Athanasius says in his letter to Serapion: ‘Everything
that the Father has the Son has; therefore what is given from the Son in
the Spirit is a gift of the Father. And when the Spirit is in us, the Word
too, who gave the Spirit, is in us, and the Father is in the Word. That is
the meaning of “we will come I and the Father, and make our home with
him”, as Scripture says.172 For where the light is, there too is the radiance,
and where the radiance is there too is its energy and resplendent grace.
And this is what Paul teaches, when he wrote again to the Corinthians in
his second letter to them, saying, “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and
the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all”.173
For the grace and gift is given in Trinity by the Father through the Son in
the Holy Spirit. For just as the grace given is from the Father through the
Son, so there can be no communion with the gift in us, except in the Holy
Spirit. For by participating in him, we have the love of the Father and
the grace of the Son and the communion of the Spirit himself. Therefore
from these the energy of the Trinity is shown to be one.’174
45. The holy Anastasius too in his treatise on the Holy Spirit says:
‘What is said by the divine Paul about the Spirit is in harmony with this.
For he called those who believed temples of God, since they had the
grace of the Spirit dwelling within them: “Do you not know that you are
God’s temple and that God’s spirit dwells in you?”175 And again: “Do you
not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which
you have from God?”176 These words openly teach that the All-holy Spirit
is of the divine nature. If believers are called God’s temple, because they
have received the grace of the Spirit, it follows that the Holy Spirit is
from God. For it was on account of having his grace dwelling within
them that they were called God’s temple.’177 And the divine Chrysostom
in the fourth of his exegetical homilies on Acts, where he comments on
171 Cyril of Alexandria, Thesaurus 33 (PG 75, 573B).

172 John 14: 23.
173 2 Cor 13: 13.
174 Athanasius of Alexandria, Letters to Serapion I, 30 (PG 26, 600B).
175 1 Cor 3: 6.
176 1 Cor 6: 19.
177 Not found.
‘And divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them’,178 he says: ‘the

word “divided” is aptly used, for the tongues were from a single source,
that you might learn that it is an energy sent from the Paraclete.’179 And
again, the same author says in the same text: ‘And they were all filled;
they did not simply receive the grace of the Spirit but were filled by
it.’180 Moreover, when the Messalians say that those of them who are the
purified come to participate in the essence of God, and adduce the text, ‘I
and the Father will come and make our home with him’,181 very stupidly
distorting this text to make it fit their own impiety, the synod held against
these Messalians repudiated their wicked doctrine, saying, ‘a coming of
the Paraclete does take place, and God does dwell in the worthy, but not
as the deity possesses nature.’182
46. After this an enquiry was made to prove from the saints that the
light of the Lord’s Transfiguration is uncreated, and that this is not the
essence of God. And almost all said that this was proved at the fourth
session, at which the Church’s opponents were present, who at one point
said that the light was created, and an apparition, veil and mental image,
manifestly blaspheming, and at another point, also impiously, that it was
uncreated and God’s essence. For at that session Gregory, surnamed the
Theologian, was adduced, where he writes: ‘Nobody is in the hypostasis
and essence of the Lord, as it is written, and has seen or confessed the
nature of God.’183 And the divine Maximus, writing in the seventh chapter
of the third of his theological centuries, says: ‘He who is not partic-
ipable by beings essentially but wills that those who are capable should
participate in another manner, never in any way emerges from his essential
hiddenness.’184 And the divine Chrysostom, writing about the same feast,
says: ‘The Saviour was transfigured on the mountain, and in some small
way as master showed his disciples the glory of his invisible divine
kingdom. But those with a tongue that cannot be silenced and is always
on the hunt come out at once with “But if his divine glory is invisible,
how did he show this to the apostles? For if it was able to be seen, it was
178 Acts 2: 3.
179 John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles 4 (PG 60, 44).
180 John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles 4 (PG 60, 43).
181 John 14: 23.
182 Cf. Philotheos, Against Gregoras, Oration 6, lines 550–2, 630–4 (Kaimakes, 185–6).
183 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration, 28, 19 (Moreschini, 676).
184 Maximus the Confessor, Various Texts I, 7 (PG 90, 1180).
368 GREGORY PALAMAS
not invisible; and if it was invisible it was not able to be seen.” Therefore
listen carefully. The Master Christ here showed to his disciples the glory
of his invisible kingdom and did not show it. That is to say, he gave a
brief glimpse of his divinity but not completely, on the one hand giving
assurance, on the other withholding it. In giving assurance he showed
them the divine glory of his invisible kingdom, not as much as it was,
but as much as people with bodily eyes had the capacity to see. And in
withholding it, but not in a grudging way, he did not show them the entire
divine glory of his invisible kingdom, lest by the vision they should lose
their lives.’185 Moreover, all the saints call this ‘illumination’, ‘brightness’,
‘grace’, ‘deification’, ‘deity manifested in a brief glimpse more strongly’,
‘light inaccessible’, ‘natural unoriginated ray of the Son’, ‘javelin of deity’,
‘lightning of deity’, and so on. Also produced at that session was the first
Synodal Tomos on this subject, which reverently and firmly demonstrated
it to be uncreated but not essence through many testimonies from divine
Scripture and from the utterances and pious decrees in harmony with
the saints of our thrice-blessed and ever-memorable emperor the Lord
Andronikos Palaiologos.186 Then seeing that those who were opposed to
the sacred and divine Tomos and disputed it were also opposed to the most
holy metropolitan of Thessalonike, we excommunicated them, as at one
moment saying that the light of the Lord’s Transfiguration was created,
and at another moment very foolishly positing that it is God’s essence,
and as not satisfied with having the essence and power and energy of God
as uncreated, but mindlessly dragging down all the powers and energies
common to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit to the creaturely
level, and calling polytheists those who acknowledge God as uncreated,
not only with regard to essence but also with regard to hypostases and with
regard to the divine powers and energies common to the three hypostases.
47. After all this Akindynos’ book was produced and was read out, in
which it was manifest that it taught old and new heresies, and maintained
that no uncreated energy could be advocated that was common to the
trihypostatic deity, apart from the Son alone and the Holy Spirit.187 But the
holy synod, correctly and devoutly recognizing this impiety to be that of the
ancient heretics Marcellus, Photinus and Sophronius, immediately mobilized
185 Ps.-John Chrysostom, Homily on the Transfiguration (Savile, vol. 7, 339–40).

187 Which book is not specified: perhaps his Antirrhetics Against Palamas or his
Refutations of the Dialogue between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite (Refutatio Magna).
the divine Chrysostom against this false opinion, sending forth, as it were,
a thunderbolt from the heavens to burn up the dry sticks of Akindynos’
nonsense. In his exegesis of the Letter to the Philippians, Chrysostom says:
Marcellus, Photinus, and Sophronius said that the Word was an energy, and
that this energy dwelt in the offspring of the seed of David not as an enhypo-
static essence. Arius, for his part, confesses him, but in speech alone, saying
that he is a creature and much inferior to the Father. Others say that he does not
have a soul. Did you see the troops standing? Look at their corpses now, how
he hits them, knocking them all down, at once, all in a body with a single blow.
How then does he strike them down? ‘Let the same mind be in you,’ it says,
‘as was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard
equality with God as something to be exploited.’188 Hence, Paul of Samosata
fell along with Marcellus and Sabellius. For ‘he was in the form of God’, it
says. How then, O polluted one, do you say that he had began with Mary, and
before that he was not? How do you say that he was an energy? For ‘though he
was in the form of God’, it says, ‘he took the form of a slave.’189 Is the form of
a slave the energy of a slave or the nature of a slave? It is, of course, the nature
of a slave. It follows that the form of God too is the nature of God. Therefore
it is not an energy.190
48. Moreover, the divine Gregory of Nyssa says in his treatise addressed
to Ablabius that God means one who is active, and deity means energy.191
And there is nothing of the three that is energy, but rather each of them is in
activity. On the basis of the foregoing, the divine synod says that it has been
clearly demonstrated that he who says that the only Son and the Holy Spirit
are uncreated energies of God, and does not hold that there is a common
energy of the three hypostases which Akindynos rejects – has the effrontery
to introduce into the Church of God the heresy of Marcellus, Photinus and
Sophronius, which was killed off and abolished long ago. If the Son and
the Holy Spirit are called by some of the saints ‘power’ or ‘energy’, it is
because each as a perfect hypostasis has both energy and power. And this
is a common name, according to the divine Dionysius, for the whole of the
Godhead, which is beyond fullness, by which in accordance with what is
signified the Father too is called power. For us aptly the debate is not about
this energy and power, but about the deity common to the three hypostases,
188 Phil 2: 5–6.

189 Phil 2: 7.
190 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Philippians 6 (PG 62, 219).
191 Cf. Gregory of Nyssa, To Ablabius, that there are not Three Gods (PG 45, 124 ff).
370 GREGORY PALAMAS
which is not a hypostasis, but a nature, and belongs supernaturally to each

of the divine hypostases, according to the tradition of the theologians. We
acknowledge one God in three hypostases, in accordance with the great
Athanasius, who has one essence, power and energy, and whatever else
around the essence is considered divine and praised in hymns. And so
that we might give form to our debate and gather together our theological
discussion or make it fuller, let us hear in succession that the titles the
uncreated, the incorporeal, the atemporal, the unoriginate, the eternal, the
endless, the infinite, the unknowable, the formless, the inexplicable, the
unsearchable, God of gods, Lord of lords, King of kings, the all-sovereign,
the maker, the creator, light, holiness, life, goodness, power, almightiness,
and all the other titles relating to excellence and causality, are not each said
to be an essence but are said to be around the essence. These are said to be
a gathering together and a filling out of deity in accordance with Scripture,
and are also contemplated and acknowledged with regard to each of the
three holy hypostases. ‘All that the Father has are mine, and I have been
glorified in them.’192 In a different sense the Son is called the power of the
Father, or even the Holy Spirit, and for other reasons, as the theologians
have handed down to us, especially as the whole of the Father’s power is
vested in the Son, as the great Basil specifically writes in his conflict with
Eunomius. How, then, is it right to deny the natural and common power of
the trihypostatic Godhead, through which both the Son and the Holy Spirit
are hymned by the theologians as the power of the Father?
49. After this, by decree of our mighty and holy lord and emperor, each
of the bishops and senators and senior ecclesiastical officials was asked by
the megas chartophylax and consul of the philosophers his opinion on what
had been said and on all the matters examined now at the divine and holy
synod. And all of them one by one declared that they had no doubt about the
matter and said that they felt very grateful to the most holy metropolitan of
Thessalonike, as to one who had spoken and written in agreement with all
the saints, and had made such an effort to advocate the truth in accordance
with piety, and had suffered so many insults and calumnies and such abuse
for the sake of refuting the notorious Barlaam and Akindynos and those
who thereafter have until now declared themselves to be in agreement with
them, and have endeavoured to shift the Church of Christ from its traditional
faith and piety towards God. After everybody else, our truly most noble
192 John 17: 10.
and wise in matters of divinity, most serene, most mighty and holy emperor
and basileus, the Lord John Kantakouzenos, everyone having risen from
their seats, both the most illustrious senators and the most holy bishops,
as is the custom on such occasions, declared that injustice is a great evil
even for earthly creatures that creep on the ground, so much so that it can
render a whole nation useless and drag it down, whereas its opposite, justice,
according to Scripture, raises up a nation. Now if injustice is such a great
evil for those below, how much greater is it when uttered with respect to the
divine heights by those who hold erroneous opinions, and the truth itself
about God is injured by those who deny it, while those who are devoted to it
and proclaim it, and moreover advocate it strongly, are abused, calumniated
and slandered by those who with their distorted judgement are endeavouring
to deceive the masses? At all events, I discern such a degree of concord
with the saints in what has been said by the most holy metropolitan of
Thessalonike, and what has now been read from his writings in support
of piety, and such a high regard for what the saints have said in their own
writings on behalf of the divine doctrines just now set before us, that nobody
who wants to live in a right-minded manner would wish to seek any more
than this. There is such zeal within me, through the grace of Christ within
me, for the teachings of the blessed disciples and apostles of Christ and of
the holy and ecumenical councils and the holy fathers, that I am ready, so
long as I have still one cupful of blood, willingly to shed this too for them.
And I am grateful to the one God of all, our Master and Lord Jesus Christ,
that he has granted us great mercy and has been pleased to allow the truth
of piety to be manifested and strengthened today, and has not permitted
anything of this to be distorted and shaken by those who have attempted by
many arguments, tricks and devices to misrepresent it and bring it down.
That concluded the speech of the most divine emperor.
50. Whereas the emperor’s divine and august command had also been
sent to the Holy Mountain, that those living there in wisdom and virtue
should come to the council convoked in this blessed great city, and they
themselves because of the length of the journey and inclemency of the
weather were not able to come, they sent two hieromonks distinguished
in virtue and speech who reported to our mighty and holy autocrat and
emperor, declaring that they had sent their own judgement to the synod in
writing. The hieromonks who had been sent then stood up and delivered a
speech to the synod as the common opinion of the entire Holy Mountain,
which the most holy metropolitan of Herakleia, the Lord Philotheos, had
drawn up there when was still living with them. They also now produced
372 GREGORY PALAMAS
the written judgement of all which had now been sent from there, which
was read in the hearing of all and continued to agree with, and join in
attesting to, the most holy metropolitan of Thessalonike in everything
relating to the truth of right belief. That concluded everything concerning
the Holy Mountain.
51. We, the entire divine and holy synod gathered by the grace
of Christ in the Triclinium called the Alexiakon of the sacred place of
Blachernai, and now fighting in defence of right belief, and having made a
precise and fitting consideration and examination of the matters set before
us, and having confirmed the previous Synodal Tomoi on these issues as
most orthodox, or rather following on from them, do justly subject the
notorious Barlaam and Akindynos, as men who treated vital matters of
right belief recklessly and in no way repented while they were still alive,
to excommunication from Christ. Those who have now been found to be,
and have been synodically convicted of being, of like mind with them,
and simply as many as belong to their company, we hold to be expelled
from the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ, unless they repent,
and we subject them to excommunication from Christ, and hold all who
knowingly communicate with them as out of communion, and we strip
them from any priestly functions that they have. Those who have been
carried away by them and led astray, and are not among the leaders of
the heresy, if they remain unrepentant we do likewise depose them, but
if they genuinely anathematize this erroneous belief and those who still
persist in holding it, not only do we admit them to communion with the
orthodox but we also most gladly accept them into the priesthood, in no
way degrading them, in accordance with the resolution and decision on
such matters of the holy Seventh Ecumenical Council, which decreed ‘that
those who are instigators and leaders and justifies of the impiety, even
if they have repented completely, we do not admit, but those who have
acted under pressure, or have been carried away and led astray, and have
truly and genuinely repented we admit to the priesthood each according
to his grade.’193 Moreover, if anyone else at all is ever detected thinking,
speaking or writing against the most holy metropolitan of Thessalonike,
or rather against the holy theologians of this Church, we decree the same
penalties against him and subject him to the same condemnation, whether
he belongs to the ordained clergy or to the laity. Having upon examination
193 The decree of the Second Council of Nicaea of 787.
found this frequently mentioned most holy metropolitan of Thessalonike

in no way out of harmony with the divine utterances in his writing and
thinking, but rather a defender, as is fitting, of the divine utterances and
of our common piety and tradition, we declare him not only superior to
absolutely all his opponents, or rather those who quarrel with the Church
of Christ, as the previous Synodal Tomoi which we possess also relate,
but also a most reliable defender, champion and helper of the Church and
of right belief. For that is what the Tomoi issued by those synods will
maintain, just as indeed they do maintain, to be secure and certain.
52. These things having turned out in this way, plainly not without the
co-operation and grace of the Holy Spirit, there was then still a readiness
to remove any grounds for bringing an accusation, to prevent the Church’s
enemies from making a complaint about anything in the writings of the
most holy metropolitan of Thessalonike, in case anything should have been
overlooked and left unexamined, even though all his writings had been
included among the works scrutinized at the time by the holy synod.194
Accordingly, when our most mighty and holy sovereign and emperor had
located these writings, written down severally by their own hand, and
had given them to us, we found each of them the book of the most holy
metropolitan of Thessalonike and examined it, meeting in the Great Church
and spending whole days together, not once, but twice and three times and
more often. And we find the most holy metropolitan of Thessalonike in
conformity in these matters with the holy theologians and an advocate by
the grace of Christ of truth in accordance with orthodoxy. But we find that
his opponents through what they have attempted in writing to distort and
condemn, have fallen into many serious heresies. For they persevere in
manifestly contradicting what has been said expressly by the theologians,
and have dared to reckon the deification of the human nature assumed by
the Lord as created, and have impiously declared – O the audacity! – with
regard to the essence of God, on account of its being said by the saints to
be inaccessible and imparticipable, that those who think of it in this way
consider it corruptible – and they say that even though God said to Moses:
‘no one shall see my face and live’.195 Moreover, the seven spirits which,
194 Despite what was resolved at the council, it is evident that the need was felt to check
contested passages excerpted from Palamas’ writings against reliable copies of the integral
texts. For this purpose a select committee was appointed which met together a number of
times in Hagia Sophia.
195 Exod 33: 20.
374 GREGORY PALAMAS
according to the prophecy, rested upon the flower from the stock of Jesse,196
that is, upon our Lord Jesus Christ, and represented the energies of the divine
Spirit, according to the holy theologians, which the holy Zachariah hymned
as the seven eyes of Christ that look upon the whole earth,197 and which the
divine Maximus taught belonged naturally to the Son of God, they ranged
with what was created.198 It is not easy to find anything beyond this that
leads to worse impiety. Therefore the condemnation has been confirmed
upon them, by these things too, unless perhaps they repent, and what has
been recently examined and determined by us with the sovereignty that is
from God will be reliable and certain in every respect, being absolutely
in harmony with the truth and with all the divine fathers and the previous
holy and divine synods held on this account and the Synodal Tomoi issued
by them. And this perpetually valid and canonical decree, newly drawn up
and signed, will be kept inviolable for all eternity by the omnipotent energy
and grace of our great God and Saviour, for whom and through whom, our
present struggle has been brought to a conclusion.
The original was signed in red letters by both the most divine emperors:
John in Christ God faithful emperor and autocrat of the Romans
Kantakouzenos. John in Christ God faithful emperor and autocrat of the
Romans Palaiologos. And by the reverend and patriarchal hand:
Kallistos by the grace of God archbishop of Constantinople New Rome
and ecumenical patriarch.
The humble metropolitan of Herakleia, president of the hypertimoi and
exarch of all Thrace and Macedonia, Philotheos.
The humble metropolitan of Thessalonike, hypertimos and exarch of all
Thessaly, Gregory.
The humble metropolitan of Kyzikos, and exarch of all the Hellespont,
Arsenios.
The metropolitan of Philadelphia, hypertimos and exarch of all Lydia
and universal judge of the Romans, Makarios.
The humble metropolitan of Chalcedon, hypertimos and exarch of all
Bithynia, Iakobos.
The metropolitan of Melenikos, hypertimos and universal judge of the
Romans, Metrophanes.
196 Cf. Isa 11: 1.

197 Zach 4: 10.
198 Maximus the Confessor, Questions to Thalassius 54, 294–335 (Laga and Steel I,
459–63).
The humble metropolitan of Amaseia and hypertimos.

The humble metropolitan of Pontoherakleia and hypertimos, Methodios.
The humble metropolitan of Pegai and Parion hypertimos, Georgios.
The humble metropolitan of Berroia, hypertimos and locum tenens of
Tyana, Dionysios.
The humble metropolitan of Trebizond and hypertimos, Niphon.
The humble metropolitan of Traianoupolis, hypertimos and exarch of
all Rhodope, Germanos.
The humble metropolitan of Selymbria, hypertimos and locum tenens
of Kotyaion, Esaias.
The humble metropolitan of Apros, hypertimos and locum tenens of
Euchaita, Gabriel.
The humble metropolitan of Amastris and hypertimos, Kallinikos.
The humble metropolitan of Sougdaia and hypertimos, Eusebios.
The humble metropolitan of Ainos and hypertimos, Daniel.
The humble metropolitan of Brysis and hypertimos, Theodoretos.
The humble metropolitan of Madyta and hypertimos, Iakobos.
The humble metropolitan of Bizye and hypertimos, Neophytos.
The humble metropolitan of Kallioupolis, Joseph.
The humble metropolitan of Hexamilion.
The humble metropolitan of Sozopolis, Theodosios.
Also present by proxy were the bishops of Adrianople, Stavroupolis
and Didymoteichon.
Also attending the synod were the suffragans of Herakleia, the bishops
of Panion, Karioupolis, Pamphylos, and Athyras, and the suffragans of
Thessalonike, the bishops of Kampania, Synada, and Eleutheroupolis.
The following two were missing and were added later.
The humble metropolitan of Didymoteichon and hypertimos, Theoleptos.
I, the metropolitan of Lititzitze, confirmed and signed.
The megas chartophylax of the most holy Great Church of Christ and
consul of the philosophers, Emparis.
The megas skeuophylax, Euthymios Apokaukos.
The sakellarios of the most holy Great Church of God and archdeacon,
Michael Kabasilas.
The referendarios of the most holy Great Church of God, Manuel
Silvestros.
The master of petitions of the most holy Great Church of Christ, deacon
Theodore Perdikes.
The skeuophylax of the holy palace clergy, deacon George Perdikes.
376 GREGORY PALAMAS
The master of the sacred establishment of the most holy Great Church
of God, deacon Michael Maniakes.
The archon of the monasteries, deacon Choneiates.
There was another signature, likewise on the original, after that of our
most divine emperor with the following horismos.199
The Horismos of Matthew Kantakouzenos

My majesty, about to sign the present Tomos, which has been brought
into being by my mighty and holy sovereign and emperor, the father of
my majesty, and by the divine and holy synod in confirmation of the holy,
Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ for the refutation of the most
godless heresy of Barlaam and Akindynos, ordains and prescribes that
this Tomos is to be cherished by the Church without alteration or change,
without subjecting it to any kind of examination and scrutiny whatsoever,
as if it were written by God through the saints who speak in it, my majesty
accepting and embracing the things that the present Tomos approves, and
consigning to anathema all that the Tomos itself has consigned to anathema.
And with regard to those who are hostile to this divine and sacred Tomos,
my majesty ordains that it shall be opposed in words and deeds to them
and shall drive them from the Church as common enemies, but that it shall
deem those who remain faithful to it worthy of great approbation and favour.
These things my majesty ordains in virtue of being established by God
through his grace as defender and vindicator of his Church,200 and so that the
present horismos of my majesty should remain immutable for all eternity, it
is signed by me, and I have laid it on the holy altar by my own hands, bearing
it as a sacred offering, in the presence of my mighty and holy sovereign and
emperor, the father of my majesty, and my all-holy master, the ecumenical
patriarch Lord Philotheos, and the divine and holy synod around him. In the
month of February, indiction 7.201 Matthew in Christ God faithful emperor
and autocrat of the Romans Asanes Kantakouzenos.202
199 The horismos of Matthew Kantakouzenos was added in February 1354, after Kallistos
I, who had refused to crown him, was deposed and replaced by the more compliant
Philotheos.
200 Matthew describes himself as dēfensor and ekdikētēs. These juridical terms define the
emperor’s role as epistemonarches of the Church.
201 February 1354.
202 The horismos is followed in the manuscripts by Palamas’ confession of faith. For an
English translation of the latter see Papadakis 1969.
VI
PALAMAS IN CAPTIVITY AMONG THE TURKS
Palamas in Captivity Among the Turks
Introduction
Palamas was taken prisoner by the Turks in March 1354 and held captive
in Bithynia until a ransom was paid for his release in the spring of 1355.
The ‘captivity dossier’ that resulted from this episode (the record, by the
emir of Bithynia’s Greek doctor, Taronites, of a debate between Palamas
and a group of converts to Islam, and two letters from Palamas himself
giving a vivid account of his experiences) is valuable evidence not only of
the condition of Christians in the newly conquered Ottoman territories but
also of the culture and organization of the Ottoman emirate in a period for
which there are very few contemporary documentary sources.1
For most of the twentieth century it was thought that the Ottomans,
living as they did on the frontiers of the ‘abode of Islam’, were fired by a
gaza spirit (a Holy War ideology) that led them to expand their territory
along the littoral of the Sea of Marmara, and then across the Dardanelles
into Thrace, in the name of Islam. This thesis, which is associated with the
name of Paul Wittek, has been challenged by the Turkish historian Cemal
Kafadar. Kafadar has shown convincingly that the early Ottomans were
opportunist in their conquests and accommodationist in the assimilation of
the peoples over whom they acquired control.2 Palamas’ ‘captivity dossier’
supports this viewpoint.
Palamas’ account of his experiences in Bithynia gives us a convincing
picture of the Ottoman emirate in the mid-fourteenth century. The towns
still have substantial Christian populations. Naturally, the Christians
1 The ‘captivity dossier’ is discussed fully by Philippidis-Braat 1979. Arnakis (1951)

has been superseded by Philipppidis-Braat, but is still worth consulting. See now also the
exhaustive Fanelli 2018, a doctoral dissertation of the University of Padua accessible online,
esp. Part II, ‘Il Dossier dalla prigionia presso i Turchi di Gregorio Palamas’, 109–230.
2 Kafadar 1995, xi–xii, and passim. See also, more recently, Pahlitzsch 2013, 2015a, and
2015b.
378 GREGORY PALAMAS
are nervous about antagonising their Muslim conquerors but they are
nevertheless able to lead a normal life. Christian communities are
mentioned at Lampsakos, Pegai, Prousa and Nicaea. In the case of Pegai
they are not under direct Turkish rule but are governed by a Christian
tekvur. The emir Orhan had two Greek wives, one a daughter of a
Christian tekvur, who converted to Islam and took the name Nilüfer, the
other Theodora, a daughter of John VI Kantakouzenos, who remained
faithful to her Christian religion.3 Orhan also had a trusted Greek
doctor, Taronites, who was able to arrange for Palamas’ transfer to more
comfortable quarters in Nicaea.4 The Turks were accommodating, and
even if the Christians asked Palamas anxiously why God had allowed
the Turkish conquest to happen, they adapted to the new circumstances.
One striking detail is the absence of bishops. The higher ecclesiastics, as
Tom Papademetriou has shown, were in a difficult position.5 Either they
remained loyal to the patriarchate in Constantinople, in which case they
had to flee or be treated as enemy agents, or else they made their own
arrangements with their Muslim rulers, which brought them into conflict
with the patriarchate.6 In the towns through which Palamas passed the
bishops had obviously fled.7
Within a few days of the earthquake of 2 March 1354 that destroyed the
fortifications of Kallipolis,8 Ottoman forces under the emir’s son, Suleiman,
had seized the town.9 Unaware of the fall of Kallipolis, the ship that was
taking Palamas to Constantinople to mediate between John V Palaiologos
3 Kafadar (1995, 71) notes that Muslim sources are completely silent about this marriage.
4 On the Taronitai, a noble family of Armenian origin, see Kazhdan 1991b; Fanelli
2018, 208–30. On Orhan’s doctor, see also Vucetic 2013. Vucetic notes that in one of the
manuscripts Taronites is given a Christian name, Konstantinos.
5 Papademetriou 2009.
6 For the case of Matthew, elected metropolitan of Ephesus in 1329, who made his own
arrangements at Ephesus with Umur Beg’s brother Khidir in 1339–40, see Vryonis 1971,
343–8.
7 We have two very interesting letters from the patriarch John Kalekas from 1338 and
1340 (Hunger et al., Nr 116 and Nr 126, with German translations), which indicate that even
though the Christians were without a bishop they lived under the direction of a kritēs (judge).
Kalekas encourages the Christians to remain loyal to their faith, or if they have converted to
Islam and then repented of their action but were unable to accept martyrdom as apostates, to
live inconspicuously as Christians. See further, Pahlitzsch 2015a, 158–60.
8 On Kallipolis (Gelibolu), see ODB 2, 1094–5.
9 Vividly described by Kantakouzenos (Historiarum Libri IV [Bonn III, 278–9]), who
gives the name of the commander.
PALAMAS IN CAPTIVITY AMONG THE TURKS 379
and John VI Kantakouzenos, who were on the verge of yet another round
of civil war, sailed straight into the theatre of operations as the Turks were
moving troops across the straits, and was captured. As a prisoner, Palamas
at first endured severe privations, but once his captors became aware of his
status the conditions under which he was held rapidly improved. When he
was moved to Nicaea he was able to live in a Christian monastery with his
own servant.
Each side was curious about the beliefs of the other. One of the emir
Orhan’s grandsons engaged Palamas in a discussion near Prousa on the
differences between Christianity and Islam. The emir himself, on being
informed that Palamas was a learned theologian, arranged a disputation
between him and a group of Muslims called Chionai.10 In Nicaea,
Palamas took the opportunity of a chance meeting to discuss theology
with a schoolman from the recently established medrese there. Anna
Philippidis-Braat believes, probably correctly, that the harsher details of
Palamas’ theological encounters with Muslims, as recorded in the Letter
to his Church and the Disputation with the Chionai, were added at a later
date.11
The ‘Captivity Dossier’
The three documents translated below are known as the Letter to his
Church, the Disputation with the Chionai, and the Letter to an Unknown
Recipient. Each of these documents presents a number of problems. The
Letter to his Church is the official version of Palamas’ period of captivity.
It is not a straightforward text, however, but appears to be a compilation
from four different sources. The Disputation with the Chionai, based on
notes taken at Palamas’ disputation with members of a Judaizing sect of
Muslim converts by Orhan Beg’s Greek doctor, Taronites, appears to have
been redacted at a later date, perhaps by Palamas himself. The Letter to
10 On the obscure character of the Chionai, see Philippidis-Braat 1979, 214–18. The
Chionai are usually considered to be converts from Judaism to Islam, but their nervousness
in the presence of Palamas (assuming that this reflects the historical reality) is better
explained if the Chionai were originally Judaizing Christians.
11 Philippidis-Braat argues that § 8 of the Letter to his Church and §§ 9, 15, and 16
of the Disputation with the Chionai were added at a later stage in the course of redaction
(Philippidis-Braat 1979, 112, 115).
380 GREGORY PALAMAS
an Unknown Recipient repeats much of the Letter to his Church, but is

almost certainly the original version. Philippidis-Braat rightly describes
these documents as a ‘dossier’. Her careful textual analysis leads her to the
following conclusions:
1. The Letter to his Church consists of three discrete documents with
two later interpolations:12
(a) A day-by-day chronicle of captivity: §§ 1–17. This vividly narrated
section forms a literary unity, with § 17 providing a conclusion. The
‘violent diatribe against Islam’ (§ 8) was inserted when the text was
later redacted.
(b) An account of a discussion in Nicaea with a Muslim scholar:
§§ 18–30. This account relates the events of a single day. For
§§ 18–25 and §§ 28–30 Palamas has used a text already in existence.
This material corresponds to §§ 2–12 of the Letter to an Unknown
Recipient. The passage §§ 26–7 of the Letter to his Church is an
interpolation that breaks the discussion with theological reflections
on the second coming of Christ as universal judge. This indicates
that the Letter to an Unknown Recipient is the original document.
(c) The peroration, §§ 31–5, is written in a different, homiletic style.
It was composed by Palamas at a time around the end of his captivity
when he was putting together the Letter to his Church.
2. The Letter to an Unknown Recipient relates the events of the next
day after Palamas’ arrival in Nicaea in July 1355, when he engaged in
discussion with a Muslim schoolman whom he had seen conducting
a funeral. The text, which survives in a single copy, is earlier than
the Letter to his Church.13 On the basis of Palamas’ mention of the
discussion as occurring in July, using the imperfect tense of the
verb ‘to be’, Philippidis-Braat deduces that the text was written very
12 Philippidis-Braat 1979, 112. The two versions are carefully compared by Fanelli 2018,
119–24.
13 Upsaliensis Bibl. Univ. 28 (ff. 99–100ᵛ). For a description of the manuscript, see
Philippidis-Braat 1979, 117–18. The text’s first editor, Max Treu, identified the recipient as
David Dishypatos on the basis of a marginal note. The title ‘Letter to an Unknown Recipient’
(‘Lettre de captivité à un anonyme’) was given to it by John Meyendorff, who rejects Treu’s
argument for the identification of the ‘David’ of § 1 with Dishypatos (Meyendorff 1959,
377–8).
shortly after the events it describes: that is to say, in late July or early
August 1355.14
3. The Disputation with the Chionai exists in a longer and a shorter
version.15 Philippidis-Braat demonstrates that the longer version
(translated below) is a redaction of the original record for publication
in a more literary form.16 The additions to the original (shorter)
version concern the circumstances of the disputation and the
psychological reactions of the interlocutors.
From the above, we may conclude that when Palamas sat down to write his
Letter to his Church (or rather, to prepare his final redaction of it) he had to
hand three documents:
1. His day-by-day account of his experiences in the first days of his
captivity.
2. Taronites’ report of his disputation with the Chionai.17
3. His letter to a close friend relating his discussion with the Muslim
schoolman.
Palamas knitted these texts together, adding as a peroration a sermonette
exhorting his Thessalonian flock to persevere in the path of salvation. He is
likely to have sent the letter from Constantinople in August 1355.18
14 Philippidis-Braat 1979, 113.

15 Philippidis-Braat 1979, 116–18. The shorter form (without the attribution to Taronites)
is found uniquely in the same manuscript as the Letter to an Unknown Recipient, namely
Upsaliensis Bibl. Univ. 28.
16 Philippidis-Braat 1979, 114–16.
17 At the end of § 17 Palamas indicates that a version of Taronites’ report was
already circulating. Philippidis-Braat thinks that this must have been the shorter version
(Philippidis-Braat 1979, 115).
18 Epistolography was a literary genre carefully cultivated in the Palaiologan era.
Collections of their personal letters were edited not only by Palamas but also by Gregory
Akindynos, Demetrios Kydones, Nikephoros Gregoras, and others. The letter supplemented
the antirrhetic discourse. It was more intimate and more useful for cementing social networks.
Palamas’ Letter to his Church, however, was of a different kind – a pastoral letter, or parainesis
– and was therefore not included in his collected epistolography. For a discussion of the role of
epistolography in Thessalonike at this time see Tinnefeld 2003, esp. 158–60.
382 GREGORY PALAMAS
The Debate with Islam
In the course of his discussions with Ismail and the danišmend, and his
formal disputation with the Chionai, Palamas defends the Christian faith
principally against the following objections:
1. Lack of reciprocity. We accept the prophet Jesus; why do you not
accept the prophet Muhammad? This is the argument which Palamas
encountered most frequently. It was put to him by Ismail, by Orhan
Beg (through Balabancık), and by the anonymous danişmend. In
each case Palamas tailored his response to his interlocutor. To Ismail,
Orhan’s grandson, he said simply (mounting ‘a defence on this point
adequate for my listener’) that we cannot believe a teacher’s words
if we do not love the teacher.19 He makes the same statement to
Balabancık, adding that Christ predicted that unbelievers will accept
someone who comes not in the Father’s name but in his own name,
and concluding with the Apostle Paul’s declaration that anyone who
proclaims a gospel contrary to that of Christ is to be considered
accursed.20 To the danişmend Palamas develops an appropriately
juridical point, arguing that testimonies are needed for facts to be
established: Moses and the prophets testify to Christ, but there is no
testimony to Muhammad.21
2. Shirk (‘association’, the acceptance of other divinities alongside
the one God). How is it that you call Christ God when he was born
as a man? Does not this mean that you claim that God had a wife?
This objection was made by Ismail and by the Chionai.22 Palamas
responds to Ismail by an argument a fortiori: if Jesus was born of
a virgin, which Muslims accept, then God can beget his own word
in an incorporeal manner that befits divinity. For the benefit of
the Chionai, who are clearly more fully informed about Christian
theology, Palamas develops a discourse on the oneness of God who is
19 Letter to his Church, § 14.

20 Disputation with the Chionai, § 13. The fact that no response is recorded to the
provocative quotation from Paul suggests that it may have been added later.
21 Letter to his Church, § 24; Letter to an Unknown Recipient, § 8. The schoolman’s
objection that the Christians have excised references to Muhammad from the gospels is
easily countered by Palamas.
22 Letter to his Church, §§ 14–15, Disputation with the Chionai, §§ 5–11.
operative through his Word and his Spirit without this compromising
his unity. The Word of God, he explains, became a human being
through being born into the world by a human mother in order to free
humanity from sin without abolishing human freedom by bringing
about salvation as the result of an act of divine power. When the
Chionai objected that all God had to do was speak and Christ would
have come into being, Palamas retorted that if that were the case
Christ would have been like any created thing. The debate was
curtailed by the presiding official (Palapanos/Balabancık), who
simply changed the subject.
3. Idolatry. Why do you worship the cross (asks Ismail) and images
(ask the Chionai)? To Ismail Palamas responds that the cross is a
symbol which Christians honour just as Muslims honour their own
symbols.23 With regard to the Chionai, who appeal specifically to
the Mosaic ban on graven images, Palamas has at his disposal a long
tradition of argumentation against the Iconoclasts on which he can
draw. First, the Mosaic ban is not absolute because Moses himself
commanded the likenesses of cherubim and other creatures to be
made for the decoration of the Tabernacle. Secondly, people often
bow low to others to show them respect without deifying them.
Thirdly, the veneration offered to an image ascends to the prototype;
it is not directed to the image itself.24 The veneration of images is
therefore not idolatry.
4. Tahrif (the falsification of Scriptural texts). On the basis of some
references in the Qur’an to Jews and Christians hiding the truth and
also a hadith which says that the peoples of the Book have altered
their texts,25 the danişmend whom Palamas questions at Nicaea’s
East Gate accuses the Christians of excising from the Gospels
references to the coming of Muhammad. Palamas offers a defence
on rational grounds: (a) the heavy sanctions against tampering with
the Scriptural texts make it unlikely that Christians would have done
so; (b) in view of the large number of very early translations into
languages other than Greek, if the text had been altered at some
stage this would have left some evidence, but there is none.
23 Letter to his Church, § 14.

24 Disputation with the Chionai, § 15.
25 For references see Reynolds 2015, 184.
384 GREGORY PALAMAS
Besides defending the Christian faith against these charges, Palamas also
goes on the offensive, more discreetly, certainly, than in contemporary
anti-Muslim polemics, which accuse Muhammad of being an impostor,
but nonetheless firmly. His principal cause of complaint is that Islam has
been spread by the sword.26 This is a remark he made to the danişmend
in Nicaea. He did not develop it at the time because it aroused the Turks
to anger and the Christians in the audience signalled him to stop.27 It
was, however, a major issue. So far as the Muslims were concerned, their
military superiority was a sign of the superiority of their religion. For the
Christians, the defeat of Roman arms meant that God had abandoned them.
After his release Palamas developed the theme further for the benefit of his
Christian readers, arguing that the Muslim victories were a punishment
for the Christians’ sins, and in any case the truth of Christianity from the
beginning was not tied to worldly power.28
Indirectly, Palamas corroborates the thesis that although Orhan
extended his beglik by the sword, Christians were not forcibly converted
to Islam. They became Muslims on the one hand because God seemed
to be on the side of the Prophet and on the other because their inferior
status as Christians could be rectified by their ‘becoming Turks’. Palamas’
support for the Christian communities he moved among therefore took
the form of explaining why God had allowed the collapse of Roman rule
to happen – his sermons were, in effect, exercises in theodicy. He was
aware that a major Muslim strategy for encouraging conversions was to
minimize the difference between Christianity and Islam. Evidently, he did
not personally come across any of the dervishes who were already well
established in Bithynia, or else he would have seen how a syncretistic
Muslim mystical tradition made it even easier for Christians to feel that
they were taking only a small step in becoming Muslims. It was therefore
strongly in the Christian interest to maximize the difference between
Christianity and Islam. That is why occasional passages of anti-Muslim
polemics appear in the texts. Palamas’ ‘violent anti-Islamic diatribe’,
as Philippidis-Braat calls it, was intended for Christian consumption to
dissuade Christians from conversion to Islam. This kind of diatribe had
little to do with his relations with Muslims on the personal level, and there
26 Letter to his Church, § 28; Letter to an Unknown Recipient, § 10.

27 He developed it later in § 8 of his Letter to his Church, when the text was redacted after
his release from captivity.
28 Letter to his Church, § 3 and § 8.
can therefore be no doubt that it was added later when the texts were
redacted for publication.
Editions and Translations
The first of these texts to appear in print was the Letter to an Unknown
Recipient, edited by Max Treu from the Upsala manuscript in which it is
uniquely preserved (Upsaliensis Bibl. Univ. 28) and published in the Deltion
tēs historikēs kai ethnologikēs hetaireias 3 (1890), 229–34 under the title
(in Greek): ‘Letter of Gregory Palamas to the monk David Dishypatos’.
Next came the Disputation with the Chionai, transcribed (imperfectly) by
A. I. Sakkelion from a single late manuscript (Atheniensis Bibl. Nat. 1379).
Finally, the Letter to his Church was published by K. I. Dyovouniotis
in Neos Hellēnomnēmōn 16 (1922), 7–21, again on the basis of a single
manuscript (Athous Pantel. 215). The excellent critical edition of all three
texts published by Anna Philippidis-Braat in Travaux et mémoires 7 (1979),
109–222, is the edition on which the translation below is based.
Philipppidis-Braat accompanied her edition with a French translation
of all three texts. An English translation of the Letter to his Church has
been published by D. J. Sahas.29 The other texts are translated into English
for the first time.
Text
LETTER TO HIS CHURCH
Of the same, a letter from Asia which,

when he was a prisoner, he sent to his Church
1. The humble metropolitan of Thessalonike to all the children and brothers
of my humility, beloved in the Spirit, to the bishops, most beloved of God
and to the high officials of the Church, and through them, above all, to
those who wish to hear news of us, may eternal mercy from God and grace
and peace abound in you.
29 Sahas 1980.
386 GREGORY PALAMAS
2. That the judgements of God are a great abyss, that is to say,

his providence for us, because the height or depth of his wisdom is
unsearchable, we have been taught by David, the revealer of God.30 But
there are some, who through mental debility, so to speak, are seized
with vertigo with regard to these, lose their balance and fall badly, or
impiously deny providence, or irrationally condemn the life of those who
are suffering misfortune, or sometimes even wretchedly think that virtue
and faith themselves are vain and senseless. When someone has the right
mental attitude, however, the more he gazes into this abyss and eminence
and comes to ponder it, the more he tells of his wonder at the invisible and
the visible.
3. What I have understood of divine providence, having been taken
prisoner and carried off to Asia, and what I see of Christians and Turks
living cheek by jowl together and going about together, leading and being
led, I will relate to your charity. For it seems to me that through this
dispensation the things of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is God over all, are
manifested even to these, the most barbarous of all the barbarians, so that
they should be without a defence at his most dread tribunal to come, which
is already near. Through this dispensation, as can be seen from what has
happened, we too have been delivered into their hands, at the same time
as a minor punishment for our many sins against God, like those who are
now tried by being delivered to a fire which is nevertheless extinguished,
whereas those who inflict the abuse, if they do not repent of their unbelief
and ferocity, are destined for that fire which is unquenchable.
4. And if my zeal for writing has not almost completely deserted my
soul through long neglect, I could never have found a subject more worthy
than what has happened to me recently, a subject that suits me in the highest
degree and in no lesser way provides sufficient material for a narrative.
For it would have been possible for me to explain in detail both the actions
of our own people who rule over us – for until Tenedos I sailed on the
imperial trireme,31 and from there on, as I penetrated as far as Bithynia and
Mesothynia,32 nothing escaped me concerning what those of Constantinople
30 Cf. Ps 35 (36): 6–7.

31 The island of Tenedos was John V Palaiologos’ base in his struggle with John VI
Kantakouzenos from 1352 until his successful entry into Constantinople on 29 November
1354. Evidently Palamas was going to Constantinople on the initiative of John Palaiologos.
32 Bithynia was the Roman province on the south coast of the Sea of Marmara. Mesothynia
was the name given to the peninsula of Nikomedeia.
were doing on land and on sea – and what was visited on our nation from
above (I do not know whether one should call them chastisements or
forsakings), especially the earthquake of that year,33 which not only made
buildings and chattels but also bodies and souls, as the poet says, for dogs
and all manner of carrion birds,34 both rational and non-rational. But in order
not to cause disappointment by omitting all of this, I shall recount some of
my experiences briefly for those of you who wish to know them.
5. A few days after that earthquake, we embarked on a ship of eight
hundred medimnoi35 sailing from Tenedos – would that we had not! – and
chancing on a favourable wind, but an imprudent, or rather, stupid captain,
inimical to the safety of the ship, we made straight for Kallipolis.36 But the
wind turned and struck against our prow. We did not give way, but preferred
to resist rather than be carried where the wind took us, and it was night with
a storm blowing at that. Having been exposed to great danger by the foolhar-
diness and enterprise of the good captain, we finally managed to come to an
agreement and backed water, and giving in to the force of the gale – it was a
violent north wind – we were carried back on our course towards Kallipolis.
But since that earthquake had also put that city under the Achaemenians,
whom we now call Turks, and it was not possible to enter its harbour, we
heaved to close to the neighbouring shore, dropping all anchors.
6. When day dawned, since the north wind had not eased at all and we
could all see the Turks moving about in organized bands on land and sea, as
if joining the opposite continents by the number and speed of their rowers
and eager to cross over from the continent lying towards the rising sun and
fall upon the Romans dwelling opposite them – since this lay before our
eyes, we all begged the captain to return to Tenedos, so that we should not
in fact wretchedly become an additional prize for the Turks in their foray.
And as he would not be persuaded, we all offered him gifts and promised
him rich rewards, we who in such circumstances had unfortunately used
that captain and had entrusted ourselves ill-advisedly to this shipwrecker.
We argued with him that the danger was imminent and inevitable if the
force of the wind abated, since we were lying there rocking at anchor.
33 The earthquake of 2 March 1354 which devastated the north coast of the Sea of
Marmara.
34 The ‘poet’, of course, is Homer. The allusion is to Iliad I, line 4.
35 At Tenedos Palamas transferred to a merchantman. A ship of 800 medimnoi would
have had a cargo capacity of around one and a half tons.
36 The modern Gelibolu, on the Thracian side of the Hellespont.
388 GREGORY PALAMAS
But he remained adamant and adopted a blustering attitude against the

expected enemy. When the north wind dropped the barbarians, armed
to the teeth, attacked our ship in long boats rather than short ones. And
once the engagement was over – why dwell on it? – we were pitiably taken
prisoner and we were not a small number.
7. We were then all taken as a body first to Lampsakos.37 And there I
and my fellow prisoners immediately experienced together what belongs
to slavery: being stripped naked, being deprived of necessities, and being
subjected to all kinds of external ill-treatment of the body. In my case
there was not only the problem with my inner organs, the interior wasting
away of the flesh, and the slight paralysis of the limbs, but the great fuss
made over me, supposedly on my behalf, by the Romans living there
came to the ears of the barbarians, for they praised, and not in moderate
terms, my education and virtue, and expatiated on my struggles on behalf
of the Church, which, as they themselves said, surpassed all those being
now conducted. They were not wrong, in my opinion, or rather I only
know that most of it was correct, but it was not of the least advantage
to me. For as a result, the leader of the barbarians conceived the hope of
attaining thousands of nomismata from me, and it was the cause of those
attached to the doctrines of the barbarians becoming furious with me, so
that some of them made their way there and entered into discussion with
me and for the most part, as they had no strong argument to make, put
forward our captivity as a sign of the insecure basis of the Christian faith.
8. For this impious, and God-hated, and utterly abominable nation
boast that they have prevailed over the Romans on account of their love
of God. They ignore that this world lies under the power of the Evil one
and that the greater part of it is largely in the possession of the wicked, the
slaves of the infernal powers, and those who drive out their neighbours
by force of arms. That is why for the whole time up to Constantine, who
reigned truly in the love of God, idolators ruled almost the whole world,
and for a long time afterwards others who differed not at all or only a
little from their predecessors. It therefore seems to me that those too who
boast of their evil will suffer the same as the Greeks, whom the Apostle
said were given up to a debased mind, because although they knew God,
they did not honour him as God or worship him. Thus since they too know
Christ – for they say that he is the logos and spirit of God, and also that
37 An ancient city (modern Lapseki) on the Asiatic side of the Hellespont, opposite
Kallipolis.
he was born from a virgin, and acted and taught in a divine manner, and
was taken up into heaven, and remains immortal, and will come to judge
the entire universe – since therefore they know Christ in this fashion, they
have not glorified him as Christ, that is, as the Word who is God-Man, but
have exchanged the truth for a lie, and have believed in, worshipped, and
followed a mere man who was mortal and was buried, this Muhammed,
rather than the God-Man Logos who is everlasting and eternal, and who,
even though he tasted death in the flesh, it was in order to abolish death and
become the author of eternal and unfading life, which the passion, death
and resurrection of a mere man could never have been able to provide. That
is also why all the resurrected who have lived our mortal life have died
again, whereas Christ, having risen from the dead, is no longer dominated
by death, but rather it is the future eternal life that is foreshown. For since
those of whom I speak knew Christ but did not honour him or worship
him as Christ, God gave them up to a debased mind and to passions and
degrading acts, with the result that they live in a manner that is shameful,
inhuman, and hated by God, and like Esau, who from childhood was
hated by God and rejected by his father’s blessing,38 live by the bow, the
sword, and debauchery, revelling in acts of enslavement, murder, pillage,
abduction, licentiousness, adultery and unnatural lust. And not only do
they do such things, but – what madness! – they think they are pleasing
God by them. This is what I myself think about them, now that I have
come to a more accurate knowledge of their ways.39
9. You should know well that a large crowd of people, men, women,
and children, gathered round me there, some of them desiring to tell me
about their personal lives and receive healing for their spiritual ills, others
wanting a solution to a religious problem, but most of them asking why our
nation had suffered such a catastrophic abandonment by God, while others
also sympathetically lamented the disaster that had befallen me. After
spending seven days there, and on the seventh day enduring afflictions
imposed by the barbarians for the sake of increasing our ransom, on the
eighth day we were made to set out for Pegai. And if I wanted to list the
sufferings endured on this road neither the ink currently available to me nor
the paper would suffice.
38 Cf. Gen 27: 30–40.

39 § 8 (which Philippidis-Braat calls ‘the violent diatribe against Islam’) has all the
appearance of a later reflection inserted into the narrative.
390 GREGORY PALAMAS
10. It took three days for them to bring us to Pegai.40 First, although we
endured great hardship from the march and from what happened to us on it,
we were left to spend all day in the open, even though it was bitterly cold.
Then, taking me aside with the monks, they again used threats, which even
to hear of was unbearable, to force up the price of the ransom. As they were
unsuccessful – my entire property, as many may be found who know it, was
what was necessary for subsistence – as they did not succeed in what they
desired, they did not go on to carry out their threats, but sent us to a church
of Christ, which still exists there through his power and openly sings his
praises, which we saw as a welcome harbour after those many different
storms. For around it are people living as monks or as seculars, thoroughly
pleasant harbours for those who put in there as a result of captivity, and
with whom we too found no small consolation.
11. So then, together with all those with me, I received hospitality
from a man distinguished more than all the others for his generosity and
kindness, the hetaireiarches Maurozoumes,41 who brought us under his
roof and clothed us since we were naked, fed us since we were hungry and
gave us to drink since we were thirsty, or rather, he took care of us for a
little under three months and, moreover, delivered us from the company of
the barbarians and begged us (and provided the means for us) to teach in
the customary way in the church and give spiritual comfort to the native
Christians and to those who had been brought there in captivity.
12. When three months had gone by as I have just said, where there was
evidently a Christian church, we were snatched away from there by lawless
hands, as it were, and in four days brought to Prousa.42 There, members
of the Christian community distinguished for their intelligence came to
see us and touched on important questions but did so at an inopportune
time, for the barbarians were all around us. But those seekers after true
piety ignored the unsuitability of the occasion because unexpectedly they
had before them the man who could speak to them, as they thought, about
matters they wanted to put to him.
40 Pegai (modern Biga) is sixty kilometres to the south-east of Lapseki. Its bishop,
Georgios, who had clearly fled to Constantinople, was one of the signatories of the Tomos of
1351.
41 The Maurozoumes or Maurozomes (‘black broth’) family was a noble family with a
distinguished record of imperial service since the eleventh century. On their marital ties with
Turkish rulers see Kazhdan 1991a.
42 Prousa (modern Bursa), on the northern foothills of the Bithynian Olympus, is 145
kilometres from Pegai. It had been conquered in 1326 by Orhan Beg, who made it his capital.
13. Two days having gone by, we left Prousa under escort and two
days later arrived at a village on a hill surrounded by distant mountains
and adorned with shady trees.43 This village, benefiting from breezes
blowing sometimes from one direction and sometimes from another
because of the mountain peaks surrounding it, has a spring spouting very
cold water and is surrounded by cool air even in the summer. For that
reason the supreme ruler among the barbarian princes spends the summer
there. While I was being taken there along with the other prisoners, one
of his grandsons sent to us and invited me to separate myself from the
other prisoners. And he sat down with me on the soft grass, with some
of the officials standing around us. And after we sat down fruit was set
in front of me but meat in front of him. And at a signal from him, I
began to eat the fruit and he the meat. As we were eating, he asked me
whether I ever ate meat and why not. When I had replied in a suitable
fashion, someone arrived from elsewhere and explained the reason for
his absence. ‘I have only just been able to complete the distribution of
alms,’ he said, ‘appointed by the great emir on Fridays.’ There then began
quite a long discussion of almsgiving.
14. Ismail, for that was the name of the great emir’s grandson,44 said to
me, ‘Is almsgiving also a practice with you?’ When I said that almsgiving
is really a product of love for the true God, and that the more one loves
God the more truly disposed one is to give alms, he asked again whether
we too accept and love their prophet Muhammad. On my denying that
we did, he asked me the reason why. I put forward a defence on this point
adequate for my listener, and said, ‘It is not possible for anyone who does
not believe the teacher’s words to love the teacher as a teacher.’ ‘You,’
he said, ‘love Isa,’ for that is what he called Christ, ‘even though you
say he was crucified.’ I considered this and in a short time resolved the
apparent contradiction, setting out the voluntary character, the manner
and the glory of the passion and the impassibility of the Godhead. Then
he questioned me again, saying, ‘How is it that you venerate the wood
and the cross?’ Again I offered him a defence on this point, as God
inspired me to do, and added, ‘You yourself doubtless approve of those
who honour your own symbol and are extremely annoyed with those who
show disrespect for it; well, Christ’s monument and sign is the cross.’
43 The name of the village is not known.

44 The name of Ismail’s father is not known. For Ismail to be of sufficiently mature age he
must have been the grandson of one of Orhan’s senior wives (i.e. not Theodora).
392 GREGORY PALAMAS
Whereupon wishing still to mock our religion as something disreputable,

he said, ‘But you claim that God had a wife, for you say that he begot a
son.’
15. I for my part replied to him: ‘The Turks also say that Christ was
born of the Virgin Mary, whom we glorify as the Theotokos. Therefore
if Mary, in giving birth to Christ according to the flesh, had no husband
and had no need of a husband, when she gave birth to the word of God in
the flesh, all the more reason why God, when begetting his own Word in
an incorporeal and divinely befitting manner in keeping with the Word’s
incorporeal nature, did not have a wife and did not have need of a wife,
as you wrongly suppose.’ Even confronted with this, he did not become
furious, despite being, as some who knew him said, foremost among the
Christians’ harshest and fiercest opponents.
16. On these words, a violent downpour began. He got up and ran off,
but I was led back to the captives, and with them endured the rain in the
open. When the rain stopped and the day was nearly over, our guards
brought us all in a group in the late afternoon into the presence of the
ruler. At his command we were taken to the neighbouring locality which
had long been inhabited by Christian Romans, in which there was also
a residence for the imperial ambassadors. We saw them every day and
received from them provisions and moral support in a not inconsiderable
degree, and despite the harshness and cold of the place, and the lack of
what was needed for my medical condition, it was not in their nature that
their good will should be defeated.45
17. Since the emir was suffering from a liver complaint, the good
Taronites was summoned and also came there.46 Most God-loving as well
as most God-beloved among doctors, he did everything he could for me,
since he saw what would be profitable for me both spiritually and physically,
and made it his concern to persuade the emir to let me stay in Nicaea. The
emir asked him about me, saying: ‘Who is this monk and what sort of man
is he?’ Taronites made a reply and the emir said again: ‘I too have wise
and learned men, who will debate with him.’ And immediately he sent a
summons to the Chionai, people who have studied nothing, and have been
taught by Satan nothing other than blasphemy and impudence with regard to
45 These ambassadors were presumably the envoys sent by John Kantakouzenos to

negotiate the return of the fortress of Tzympe in Thrace, which had been seized by Orhan’s
son Suleiman in 1352 (Nicol 1996, 126–7).
46 On Taronites, see above, p. 164.
our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God.47 Nevertheless when they came, what
was said and done was put down in writing by Taronites, who was present
as an eyewitness and auditor, and as he has published his record it is possible
for those who wish to do so to go through it and learn about it.48
18. You should also know that I am now living in Nicaea,49 where I
have found a certain degree of leisure which has enabled me to recount the
details of my captivity to your charity, leaving aside the experiences of our
brothers in Christ, who are fellow captives with me for his sake. And so
that you may form a reasonable idea of the way things are here, when we
are moved from one city to another or to a different town, it is only then
that the barbarians set guards over us. The questions they put to us, and
the replies we give them, and the agreement with these that they express,
and in short all the conversation on the road, if one had the leisure to write
it down, would be very agreeable to Christian ears. But once the guards
have brought us to the appointed town or city when each has retired to his
own place we are free to stay where we choose and go where we want and
meet with anyone we wish. And I think that this has not come about in the
absence of some higher providence.
19. When our guards as usual left us at liberty in Nicaea, we asked in
what part of the city the Christians were more numerous. On learning that
it was in the vicinity of the monastery of St Hyakinthos, we went there
straightaway, joining the people of that neighbourhood in accordance
with their desires and wishes, and within the enclosure of this monastery
we found a beautifully decorated church and a pleasant well set among
different kinds of shady trees with rich foliage, which with the coolness
of the air and the shade offered adequate refreshment and tranquillity.50
There we found accommodation, or rather, I found accommodation, for I
was alone. With regard to the most God-beloved chartophylax, who had
been brought before the great emir beforehand, I do not yet know precisely
where he was lodged. The hieromonks Joseph and my own Gerasimos were
47 On the Chionai, see Philippidis-Braat 1979, 214–18.

48 Translated below, pp. 401–8. Palamas is probably referring to the shorter version,
which circulated independently.
49 Nicaea (modern Iznik) had capitulated to Orhan in 1331 after a siege lasting two years.
On the city and its Christian community in the second half of the fourteenth century see
Pahlitzsch 2015a, 157–64.
50 The monastery church, later known as the church of the Koimesis (Dormition),
survived until the early twentieth century, when it was destroyed during the Greco-Turkish
war of 1920–22. It is illustrated on the cover of this book.
394 GREGORY PALAMAS
then already in Constantinople. Konstas Kalamares at that time was still

alone at Prousa, where he was dwelling with a certain God-loving person
who had ransomed him. This person had not produced the whole ransom
until, by the help of God, or rather by his working a miracle, I ransomed
him completely and he was free. I did not take him with me at that time,
for I did not know where I would end up. But now having sent for him by
letter, I the captive have a freedman as a companion and servant. Here is a
situation to be added to the novelties recounted: the captive grants liberty
to his fellow captive and has a freedman under his authority, when he is not
yet master of himself.
20. The next day I went out to see the gate which is and is called the
East Gate, since it was nearer than the others.51 I had only gone a little way
outside the gate – what need is there to speak of the beautiful high buildings
and the fortifications? The whole city is full of them, although now they
serve no purpose52 – I had only gone out a little way when I saw at a level
spot a cube formed of blocks of marble as if meant for a function. I then
asked those who happened to be near if there was some particular use for
the cube, which was outside the city yet in close proximity to it as if set up
ready for use. They told me what the cube was used for. And before they had
finished speaking, we heard wailing voices coming from the city gate, and
turning towards the sound we saw a column of barbarians bearing a corpse
and making straight for the cube. We moved away, and following them
discreetly, kept at a sufficient distance to see and hear what they did and said.
21. When they reached the cube, they all observed a profound silence.
And several of them lifted up the coffin containing the corpse, which was
wrapped in white sheets, and set it reverently on the cube. Then as they
stood round it they had in their midst one of their tasimanai – that is what
they are accustomed to call those who are dedicated to their sanctuaries.53
Raising up his hands, this man made a loud invocation and the others
responded in a similarly loud voice. They did this three times. Then those
who were to deliver that coffin to the tomb took it in their hands and carried
it further away, while each of the others with the tasimanai returned home.
51 The gate still stands. It incorporates a Roman triumphal arch, hence the shaded area
mentioned in § 22.
52 The impressive buildings dated from the time when Nicaea was the capital of the
empire in exile (1204–61). For the condition of the city in the mid-fourteenth century see
Pahlitzsch 2015a, 158.
53 Tasimanēs is evidently the Greek rendering of danişmend.
22. Then we too returned and entered on foot by the same gate. On
seeing the tasimanes sitting with some others in the shade of the gate to
enjoy the freshness of the air at that season – for it was the month of July
– and some Christians, as I supposed, sitting on the opposite side, we too
sat down. Seated there, I asked whether there was anyone who knew both
the languages I needed. When someone came forward, I asked him to say
to the Turks on my behalf: ‘I consider it good, the ritual performed by
you there outside. For the supplication made by you was on behalf of the
dead man and addressed to God – for to whom else could it have been
addressed? I should also like to know what was said to God there by you
and what it was about.’ The tasimanes, using the same interpreter, said:
‘We asked forgiveness from God for the dead man, for the personal faults
of his soul.’
23. ‘Rightly so,’ I said, following up his remark. ‘But at all events it is
the judge who has the power of granting forgiveness, and according to you
as well it is Christ who will come as the judge of the whole human race. It
is therefore to him that you should address your prayers and supplications.
Should you too not invoke him as God, like we do, since we know that
he is indivisible from the Father as his innate Word? For there was no
time when God was irrational or without his innate Word.’ The tasimanes
replied: ‘Even Christ is a servant of God.’54 And I said to him in turn: ‘But
it is necessary to consider this, my good friend, that he judges, as you
yourselves say, the living and the dead, resurrected and standing around
him while he presides over the dread and impartial tribunal at his future
coming. And Abraham, your forefather, as you too have your Scripture
– for you like to maintain the authority of the Mosaic books – and it can
be seen also to be preserved by the Jews, Abraham, I repeat, said to God:
“You who are judging the whole earth, shall you not give judgement?”55
So he who is to judge the whole earth is God himself, who according to the
prophet Daniel is king of all things and for ever, and is not other than the
Father with regard to the Godhead, just as sunshine is not other than the
sun with regard to light. The tasimanes seemed annoyed and after being
silent for a moment began speaking more expansively, for Christians and
Turks had gathered together in some numbers to listen. He began, then,
by saying that they loved all the prophets, including Christ, and the four
books that had come down from God, one of which was the Gospel of
54 Qur’an 19, 30.

55 Gen 18: 25.
396 GREGORY PALAMAS
Christ.56 And he concluded by throwing the question back to me. ‘But

you,’ he said, ‘how is it that you do not accept our prophet or believe in his
book, even though this book has also come down from heaven?’
24. I said to him in turn: ‘Among both you and us it has long been the
custom confirmed by both time and law not to accept anything and acquiesce
to it as true without testimonies. Now testimonies are of two kinds. Either
they derive from the deeds and facts themselves or they are supplied by
persons worthy of credence. Thus Moses instructed the Egyptians by signs
and wonders. He divided the sea with his staff and brought it together again.
He made bread rain down from heaven. And what other examples need
one give, as Moses is also believed in by you? For God too bears witness
to him as his faithful servant but not as his son or word.57 Then at God’s
command he ascended the mountain and died and joined his ancestors.58
Now Christ, along with the many great and extraordinary deeds he
performed, is also attested by Moses himself and the other prophets. And
alone from all eternity is he said even by you to be the Word of God; and
alone from all eternity was he born of a virgin; and alone from all eternity
was he taken up into heaven and remains there immortal; and alone from
all eternity is he expected to return from there to judge the living and the
resurrected dead. I say about him what is also acknowledged by you Turks.
It is therefore because of these that we believe in Christ and in his gospel.
But we do not find that Muhammad is either attested by the prophets or has
worked anything miraculous and worthy of note that leads us to faith. For
this reason we do not believe in him or in the book that issues from him.’
The tasimanes, although clearly displeased with these remarks, offered a
defence, saying: ‘There used to be references to Muhammad in the gospel
and you have excised them. But as you see, coming out of the ends of the east
he has proved victorious even as far as the west.’
25. I said to him: ‘Nothing has ever been excised from our gospel
by any Christian, nor has there been the least alteration. For heavy and
dreadful imprecations are laid on this act, and anyone who dares to excise
or alter anything of Christ is rather himself excised. How, then, can any
Christian have done this? And how would he still be a Christian, or be in
any way acceptable to Christians, if he had erased the text engraved by
56 The ‘four books’, those of David, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, i.e. the Psalms, the
Pentateuch, the Gospels, and the Qur’an.
57 Cf. Num 12; 17.
58 Cf. Deut 32; 48–50.
God and what Christ himself had recorded or proclaimed? Besides, there
is the testimony of the many different languages into which the gospel
of Christ was rapidly translated from the beginning; it was not written
in just one language alone from the outset. How then could it have been
falsified or anything altered? How is it that among the different nations the
harmony of the sense has been maintained until now? Also, the gospel of
Christ exists among many heterodox Christians, whom we call heretics.
Among them are some who agree with you on certain points, but can
find nothing to prove such a thing in the gospel of Christ. And among
those who have contradicted us from the beginning – these too are many
– nothing of the kind has been proved. Indeed, it is possible even to find
the opposite plainly stated in the gospel. How, then, could it have testified
to the contrary? Moreover, there is nothing in the gospel that has not also
been said beforehand by the divine prophets. If then there was anything
written in it favouring Muhammad, it would also have been found written
in the prophets. Instead, what you can find written there and not deleted
is that many false Christs and false prophets will arise and will lead many
astray. That is why it exhorts us, saying: ‘Do not be led astray and go after
them.’59
26. Moses and the prophets who lived long before him and after him
all returned to the earth through death and lie there awaiting the judge who
will come from heaven. If that were the case also with Christ another would
have come after him who would have ascended to heaven and imposed
the end. For heaven sets the limit to everything here below. Since Christ,
as you yourselves acknowledge, ascended into heaven, no one else is
expected after him by anyone of sound mind. For Christ not only ascended
into heaven but is also expected to come again, which is another doctrine
you share with us. Therefore it is he who has come and is coming and is
expected to come again, and we are right neither to accept nor to await
anyone other than him.
27. He is the one who is expected to come again and judge the human
race. Why? Because he himself said that he came and manifested the
light to the world, that is, himself and his teaching, yet on account of
teaching false doctrines and living a hedonistic life, people loved the
darkness rather than the light. So that we should not experience the same,
the chief of Christ’s disciples said: ‘There will be false teachers and false
59 Cf. Luke 21: 8.
398 GREGORY PALAMAS
prophets, who will bring in destructive heresies and they will exploit you
in their greed with deceptive words. For many will follow their licentious
ways.’60 Someone else says again that ‘if an angel should proclaim to you a
gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!’61
And the evangelist says: ‘Every spirit that does not confess that the Lord
Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not from God.’62 How is it, then, that
someone who says that he who maintains that Jesus manifested in the
flesh is not Lord is not from God, be a person who transmits a book which
says that he who asserts this comes from God? This is not possible. It is
not possible.
28. It is true that Muhammad, starting from the east, advanced as a
conqueror as far as the west, but he did this by war and the sword, by
pillaging, enslaving and slaughtering. None of this can follow from a
good God. It follows rather from the will of someone who was from the
beginning a murderer.63 But so what? Did not Alexander, starting from
the west, subjugate the whole of the east? In any case, others frequently at
various times have mounted many expeditions and conquered the whole
world. But no nation entrusted their soul to any of these as you have done
to Muhammad. And what is more, even by the use of violence combined
with the inducement of things that give pleasure, this man has not been
able wholly to win over even one part of the world. Christ’s teaching, by
contrast, although excluding almost all of life’s pleasures, had encompassed
all the ends of the earth and prevails in the midst of those who fight against
it. It is not imposed by any violence, but rather triumphs on every occasion
over the violence offered against it, in such a way that this teaching is the
victory that conquers the world.’64
29. At this point the Christians who happened to be present, on seeing
that the Turks were already being roused to anger, signalled to me to put
an end to my speech. I, for my part, to lighten the atmosphere, smiled
at them and added: ‘If we agreed in what we said, we would all hold the
same doctrine. But let anyone who can do so understand the force of what
I have said.’ One of them said: ‘There will be a time when we shall agree
with one another.’ And I concurred and expressed the wish that that time
60 Cf. 2 Pet 2: 1–3.

61 Cf. Gal 1: 8.
62 Cf. 1 John 4: 2–3.
63 Cf. John 8: 44.
64 Cf. 1 John 5: 4.
would come soon.65 But why should I have said this to those now living
in a different manner from those then? I concurred because I remembered
the Apostle’s saying, that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bend and
every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the
Father.66 This at all events will happen at the second coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ.
30. At this point the meeting on that day broke up. What happened
on the following days the spirit is willing to write but the hand has not
the strength. But I have written this for you because you wanted me to;
for children long to know what their father is doing, and even more than
others, those who are conscious of their spiritual adoption.
31. While I was with you, ‘labouring in preaching’ in private and in
public,67 I taught the way leading to salvation, not keeping anything back,
even if it seemed hard to some. In the same way, now that I am absent and
enduring trials, I write to all of you, as briefly as possible, without keeping
anything back, that our wealth is Christ the living and true God, to whom
not only God the Father and the prophets sent by God bear witness, but also
the deeds and facts themselves. He therefore rightly demands that our faith
in him should be living and true, to which God and the teachers sent by
God bear witness, and the deeds and facts themselves. And this is what will
be if we live in accordance with the commandments of the Gospel. Thus,
according to the Apostle, the evangelical spirit of grace ‘bears witness with
our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of
God and joint heirs with Christ’.68
32. This is the living faith. ‘For faith without works is dead,’ says
another of the heralds of the faith.69 And what is dead is not acceptable to
the living God, for God is ‘God not of the dead but of the living’.70 Someone
then, whose faith is dead through not accomplishing good works is himself
dead, since he does not live in God and have his being in God, who alone is
the provider of true and undefeated life. He is dead until, like the returned
prodigal, he becomes cognizant of the privation he has suffered through
65 These remarks have nothing to do with modern notions of tolerance or ecumenism, as

is sometimes maintained. Each side foresees the conversion of the other.
66 Phil 2: 11.
67 Cf. 1 Tim 5: 17.
68 Rom 8: 16–17.
69 James 2: 17.
70 Matt 22: 32.
400 GREGORY PALAMAS
distancing himself from the works of life, he returns to God through the
works of repentance and hears from him, as the returned prodigal did, ‘this
son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’71 For
thus he will also have true faith. Faith to which the works of salvation do
not bear witness is not so much faith as unbelief and not so much profession
as denial. And this is what is presented by him who says about such things:
‘They profess to know God, but they deny him by their actions. They are
detestable, unfit for any good work.’72 And another of the fellow apostles
says: ‘Show me your faith by your works.’73 And who is faithful? Let him
show his works by his good life. What good is it if someone says he has
faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? By no means. You
believe that Christ is God with the Father and the Spirit. You do well. But
even the demons believe and shudder, saying: ‘We know who you are, the
Son of God most high.’74 They are demons, however, and enemies of God,
through their opposition to God by their works.
33. Take care that you do not come to experience anything similar
to these perverse believers – I do not mean with regard to pious belief
(theosebeia) but with regard to manner of life (politeia), which these people
base on their doctrines. Be on your guard lest like them, who say that he
who was born of a virgin, that is, the God-man, is the word of God and his
breath and anointed one, and then absurdly shun him and reject him as not
being God, you too are found to say that the virtues and the gospel precepts
are right and good, yet afterwards reject them through what you do, as if
they did not exist, and show that the truly good is not good for you and the
truly desirable is to be shunned.
34. Tell me, how can an infidel believe you when you say that you believe
in him who was a virgin and was born of a virgin father but in eternity and
before all time, and subsequently was born in time from a virgin mother
even if in a supernatural manner, yet you practise neither virginity nor
chastity but lust incorrigibly after the wives of others and give yourself
up to debauchery? How can a drunkard and glutton represent himself as
an adopted son through the Spirit to him who fasted for as many as forty
days in the desert and throughout his life made abstinence a law? How can
anyone who loves injustice stand before him who commanded us to judge
71 Luke 15: 24.

72 Titus 1: 16.
73 James 2: 18.
74 Cf. Mark 1: 24.
and act justly? How can the unmerciful face him who said ‘Be merciful as
your Father in heaven is merciful’?75 How can anyone who loves wealth
come into the presence of him who castigated those who enrich themselves?
How can anyone who shows no compassion for those who fall, no patience,
gentleness, forbearance, or humility, stand before him who demonstrated
these by his deeds and exhorted us to practise them by his words? ‘Learn
from me,’ it says, ‘for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find
rest for your souls.’76 And ‘If you do not each of you forgive the trespasses
of your brothers from your hearts, neither will your heavenly Father forgive
your trespasses?’77 And even when suspended on the cross, he gave us an
example, saying to his Father: ‘Do not attribute this sin to the crucifiers.’78
35. But someone will perhaps say: ‘He was God, and by the very fact
transcended evil.’ I have much to say on this point but circumstances do
not allow it. In any case, what we require from you is not divine virtue but
human virtue. Make a beginning and God will provide the accomplishment.
Turn away from evil and come to the land of virtue. Lay hold of the work
of repentance and by persevering you will receive from God not only the
accomplishment of human virtue but you will also acquire in a supernatural
manner the divine virtues themselves through the indwelling of the Holy
Spirit. For it is thus that a human being is deified. For he who cleaves to
God through the practice of virtue becomes one spirit with God through
the grace of the Holy Spirit. May this grace be with you always, now and
for ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
THE DISPUTATION WITH THE CHIONAI
Of the same, a disputation with the atheist Chionai,

written by the physician Taronites, who was present and an auditor
1. The Chionai came, it is said, at the command of the Turkish sovereign
to engage in a debate with the metropolitan.79 They were afraid to enter
into discussion in his presence and at first negotiated with me and the
metropolitan, and especially with those who had access to the Turkish
75 Luke 6: 36.
76 Matt 11: 29.
77 Matt 6: 15.
78 Cf. Luke 23: 34.
79 On the Chionai, see above, p. 379.
402 GREGORY PALAMAS
sovereign, in an attempt not to speak at all on such matters. As they were

unable to achieve this, they entered into further negotiations with a view to
not speaking in the presence of their sovereign. In this they succeeded. And
the latter appointed not a few dignitaries including one called Palapanos.80
And they came together with the Chionai to where the metropolitan was
staying. And we all sat down together.
2. The Chionai then began to speak very volubly. The substance of
their speech was this: ‘We have heard ten words that Moses brought down
written on tablets of stone, and we know that the Turks keep them. And
we abandoned what we thought previously and came to them and we too
became Turks.’
3. Then the dignitaries told the metropolitan to present a defence.
And he began thus: ‘It is not fitting that I should present a defence now.
First, because in relation to the sublimity and majesty of the Catholic and
Apostolic Church of my Christ, who am I to present a defence, since my part
in it is minimal and almost nothing? Second, because the dignitaries, who
are also sitting as judges, adhere to the side of the opponents and it is not
fitting that I should expound on points opposed by them the justifications
of true piety, which are the divinely inspired scriptures and especially the
books of the prophets. Third, that I have been delivered up into captivity
and I know from my Lord and God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, that after he
was delivered up when he was questioned he did not reply.
4. ‘Nevertheless, because the great emir commands this, and I
understand that God has given him sovereign knowledge – it belongs to
a slave or any ordinary person to know about one system of belief and
scarcely even that, whereas a sovereign, and one moreover who has many
nationalities under his authority, must necessarily know about every
system of belief and know about it with accuracy – for this reason I wish
to say about our religion whatever the Word of God might give me to say
when I open my mouth.81 And I shall do this not to make a defence against
the Chionai. For these, from what I have heard earlier about them, plainly
appear to be Jews rather than Turks. But the speech I am about to make is
not addressed to Jews.82 The mystery, then, of our faith is as follows.
80 Evidently Balabancık, a former Christian slave who became one of Orhan’s trusted
lieutenants; see Kafadar 1995, 135.
81 Cf. Eph 6: 19.
82 Nevertheless, most of the texts cited in support of the argument are from the Jewish
Scripture.
5. ‘There is only one God, who has always existed and endures for ever,
without beginning, without end, immutable, unchangeable, indivisible,
without confusion, without limit. Every creature is corruptible and mutable.
Its very beginning is a change, for it has come from non-being into being.
God himself, then, who alone is without beginning, is not devoid of word.
God himself, who alone is without beginning, is not devoid of wisdom.
Consequently the Word of God is also the Wisdom of God. For the wisdom
is in the word and without the word there is no wisdom. Therefore if there
was a time when the Word or the Wisdom of God was not, there was a
time when God was devoid of word and wisdom – which is irreligious and
impossible. Consequently, the Word of God is also without beginning, and
the Wisdom of God was never separable from him.
6. ‘But nor is word found without spirit, as you Turks yourselves
acknowledge.83 For in saying that Christ is the Word of God, you also
say that he is the Spirit of God, as never separated from the Holy Spirit.
Therefore God has both a Word and a Spirit that are with him and remain
with him without a beginning and without any separation. For there was
no time when God was without spirit or without word. The one is therefore
three and the three are one. God has word and spirit. He does not have
them as we do, dispersed into the air, but in a way appropriate to him as if
by analogy. For example, the sun’s radiance is generated from the sun and
the sun’s ray is sent out from it and comes down as far as us and neither
the radiance nor the ray is ever separated from the disk, and consequently
in calling them “sun” we are not saying there is another sun other than the
one sun. Similarly, when we say that the Word of God and the Spirit of God
are God, we are not saying that there is another God apart from the one
God, who is thought of as existing without beginning and eternally with
the eternal Word and Spirit. And this is what we have been taught to believe
and confess by Christ himself, the Word of God.
7. ‘It is not only Christ who taught this but also Moses in the Decalogue,
whom you Chionai put forward. For this reason he said: “The Lord God
is one Lord”,84 mentioning the same one three times – for he says “Lord”
twice and “God” once – in order to show that the three are one and the
one is three. Moreover, Moses wanted to show from the beginning that
God has both a Word and a Spirit and that in them and with them he is one
God, the creator of every created thing. He therefore said: “God said, ‘Let
83 Qur’an 4, 171.
84 Deut 6: 4.
404 GREGORY PALAMAS
there be light’; and there was light”.85 And he said: ‘Let the earth put forth
vegetation’; and it brought forth vegetation”.86 And not to go into all the
details, as David says: “God spoke everything and they came to be”.87 This
phrase “God spoke and they came to be” shows that God has a Word – for it
is not possible to speak without a word – and that all created things came to
be through him. And so the Word of God himself preceded every creature
and is uncreated. And since the Word of God is uncreated, how is he not
God? For only God is uncreated.
8. ‘Furthermore, Moses also teaches us about the creation of man.
“God,” he says, “breathed into his face the breath of life, and the man came
into being as a living soul”.88 In saying, then, “God breathed into him, and
the man came into being”, he showed that God has a spirit, and that this
spirit is a creator. Now the creator of souls is God alone. That is also why
Job said: “The spirit of the Lord has made me”.’89
9. The metropolitan of Thessalonike also wished to string together the
other testimonies of the prophets, and especially those through whom it is
demonstrated that God also brings about the renewal of both humanity and
the world through his Word and his Spirit, as David also says: ‘He sent out
his word and healed them from their corruptions’,90 and again elsewhere:
‘You send forth your spirit and they are created, and you renew the face
of the earth’.91 But when the metropolitan of Thessalonike had already
begun to speak along these lines, his opponents stopped him, and all those
standing around said to him at one and the same time: ‘These things that
you say are true and it is not possible that they should be otherwise.’ And
the metropolitan of Thessalonike said to them again: ‘Surely then God is
three, and these three are one God and creator.’ And again, moved to do
so either by a divine power or by being unable to contradict what he said,
they agreed with him, saying: ‘That is what has been proved, that is what
is true, and that is what we adhere to ourselves.’ And the metropolitan of
Thessalonike said: ‘Good. Glory to our God who is content that things
should be thus.’
85 Gen 1: 3.
86 Gen 1: 11–12.
87 Ps 33 (32): 9 148; 5.
88 Gen 2: 7.
89 Job 33: 4.
90 Ps 106 (107): 20.
91 Ps 103 (104): 30.
10. They: ‘But tell us this. How is it that you call Christ God, when
he is a man and was born as a man?’ And he again: ‘God is not only
all-sovereign and almighty, but also just, as the prophet David also said:
“For our God is just and loves just deeds, and there is no injustice in him.”92
There is no work of God that is not accompanied by justice. And just as the
sun’s ray has a life-giving power at the same time as it has light and heat,
so God’s activity has along with it divine power and justice. Now when
God created man for good works and instructed him to live in accordance
with his divine commandment, because this man, willingly giving ear to
the devil, submitted to him and sinned, and having disobeyed the divine
commandment was justly condemned to death, it did not belong to God
to deliver man from him by an act of power. For thus he would have been
unjust to the devil, by taking man out of his hands by force, when he did
not receive him by force. Moreover, he would have abolished man’s free
will by liberating him by force and by an act of divine power. It did not
belong to God to abolish his own work. It was therefore necessary for a
sinless man to have come into being and to have lived without sin and thus
to have helped mankind, which had sinned voluntarily. “But no one,” says
Scripture, “is without sin, even if his life lasts but a single day.”93 And the
prophet David says: “In iniquity was I engendered; in sin did my mother
conceive me.”94
11. ‘That is why the only sinless Word of God became a son of man and
was born of a virgin and a paternal voice from heaven witnessed to him.
And he was tempted by the devil and fought against and conquered his
tempter. And through deeds and words and great wonders he showed and
confirmed the faith and manner of life belonging to salvation. And thus he
who lived without guilt and without sin took on himself the sufferings of
own guilt to the point of death, so that going down into Hades he might
even there save those who have believed.’
12. Again the metropolitan of Thessalonike wanted to speak about the
resurrection and ascension of the Lord, and adduce the testimonies of the
prophets that demonstrate that Christ is God and testify that it was God
himself who became incarnate from the Virgin, suffered for us and was
raised from the dead, and all the rest, but the Turks raised a clamour and
prevented him from doing so, saying, ‘How do you say that God was born
92 Ps 10 (11): 7; 91 (92): 16.

93 Cf. Job 14: 4–5.
94 Ps 50 (51): 7.
406 GREGORY PALAMAS
and that a woman’s womb contained him?’ and other similar things. ‘No,
God only spoke and Christ also came into being.’95 He said to them: ‘God is
not a large body, so that he is unable to fit into a small space because of his
size. No, being incorporeal, he can be anywhere both beyond everything
and within a single thing. Even with the smallest thing one can think of,
the whole of him can be in that too.’ Again they rose in uproar and said that
‘God spoke and Christ came into being.’ The metropolitan of Thessalonike
responded: ‘You say Christ is the Word of God. How then is he brought
into being in his turn by another word? For in that case it would follow that
the Word of God is not coeternal with God himself. This was demonstrated
at the beginning, and admitted even by you, that God has both word and
spirit coeternal with him. That is why you say that Christ is not only
word but also spirit of God. God spoke and this stone came into being’ –
indicating a stone lying near him – ‘and the vegetation and the creeping
things themselves.96 If then it is because Christ was brought into being by
the Word of God, as you say, that Christ is Word and Spirit of God, then the
stone and plants and each of the creeping things are also word of God and
his spirit, because in their case too he spoke and they came into being. Do
you see how bad it is to say that “God spoke and Christ came into being”?
For the eternal Word of God was made human and became flesh without
confusion, not in virtue of flesh being spirit and word of God.97 For it was
later, as we said, that he assumed human nature from us and for our sake,
but he was always in God, since he is his coeternal Word, through whom
God also created the worlds.’98
13. At this point the Chionai interrupted again, and Palapanos, who was
presiding, imposed silence and said to the metropolitan of Thessalonike:
‘The sovereign orders you to explain why it is that we accept Christ and
love and honour him and say that he is word and breath of God,99 and
we hold that his mother is near to God,100 whereas you do not accept our
prophet, nor do you love him.’ The metropolitan of Thessalonike said:
‘Someone who does not believe in the words of a teacher cannot love that
teacher. That is why we do not love Muhammad. Our Lord and God Jesus
95 Cf. Qur’an 3, 52/59.

96 Cf. Gen 1; 11, 24.
97 Cf. John 1; 14.
98 Cf. Heb 1; 2.
99 Qur’an 43, 57.
100 Qur’an 66, 12.
Christ said to us that he would come again to judge the whole world and
commanded us not to accept anybody else until he comes again to us. He
even said to those who did not believe him: “I have come in my Father’s
name, and you did not accept me; if another comes in his own name, him
you will accept.”101 That is why Christ’s disciple writes to us that “Even if
an angel should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed
to you, let him be accursed.”’102
14. The Chionai together with the Turks again said to the metropolitan
of Thessalonike: ‘The practice of circumcision was manifestly given by
God from the beginning and Christ himself was circumcised. Why do you
not practise circumcision?’ The metropolitan of Thessalonike: ‘Because
you are referring to the old Law, and what was given then to the Jews was
given by God, but the keeping of the Sabbath was also given by God, as
was the Jewish Passover and the sacrifices only to be performed by the
priests, and the setting of the altar and the curtain within the temple. As
these things and others like them were given at that time by God, why do
you not adhere to them or do these things?’
15. Since the Chionai and the Turks had no defence to offer on this
point, the metropolitan of Thessalonike wanted again to adduce the
prophets who had plainly predicted the change in the Law and in the old
covenant and that the change was brought about through Christ. And he
began by saying: ‘What you yourselves also say is old, and everything old
is oriented towards an end.’ And again they interrupted him, saying, ‘Why
do you set up many likenesses in your churches and bow down to them,
even though God has written and said to Moses: “You shall not make any
likeness, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven, or anything
that is on earth and in the sea”’?103 The metropolitan of Thessalonike said
in reply: ‘Friends also bow low to each other, but they do not thereby deify
each other. That Moses truly learned this from God in such a form and
taught it to the people at that time in such a form is clear to everybody.
But on the other hand, Moses himself at that time scarcely let anything
pass without making a likeness of it. For he made the area behind the
curtain into a likeness and symbol of the things above – and since the
cherubim are among the things above, he made images of them and set
them up there within the inner sanctuary of the temple – whereas he made
101 John 5: 43.

102 Gal 1: 8.
103 Exod 7: 4; Deut 5: 8.
408 GREGORY PALAMAS
the temple’s exterior into a symbol of the things here below. If someone
had asked Moses at that time: “How is it that when God forbids images
and likeness of the things above and the things below, you have still made
these things in this way?” he would have certainly said that images and
likenesses were forbidden so that no one should worship them as gods,
but ascending to God through them is good. The Hellenes used to address
praises to created things, but as gods. We also praise these things, but we
ascend through them to the glory of God.’ The Turks, then speaking again,
said: ‘And did Moses really do these things at that time?’ Many people
replied: ‘Yes, he did all these things.’
16. At this point the Turkish dignitaries arose, reverently bade the
metropolitan of Thessalonike farewell, and departed. But one of the Chionai
hung back, swore at the great archpriest of God obscenely, and leaping at
him, punched him on the jaw. The other Turks who saw this seized hold of
him, accused him of serious misconduct, and brought him before the emir.
When they returned, the Turks said to him what they wanted to say. What it
was precisely that they said we did not hear. We heard personally the things
that we have set down, and with God our witness what we have set down is
what we saw and heard.
LETTER TO AN UNKNOWN RECIPIENT
From the Metropolitan of Thessalonike when he was in captivity
1. It is not only your disposition towards me but also the excellent disposition
of your soul that I know very well, from the time I saw you when you
were living with that blessed David and were attached to his soul with
indestructible bonds of love. But since I am unable to write, and you would
love to receive my letters and learn how I am faring from them, I now send
to your Christ-loving person the news you desire in a hand by which, as you
see, I am thriving, and to the best of my powers.
2. When we are moved from one city to another, it is only then that
the barbarians set guards over us. The questions they put to us, and the
replies we give them, and the agreement with these that they express, and
in short all the conversation on the road, if one had the leisure to write
it down, would be very agreeable to Christian ears. But once the guards
have brought us to the appointed town or city, when each has retired to his
own place we are free to stay where we choose and go where we want and
meet with anyone we wish. And I think that this has not come about in the
absence of some higher providence.104
3. When our guards as usual left us at liberty in Nicaea, at the monastery
of Hyakinthos we found a holy church and a pleasant well set among
different kinds of shady trees with rich foliage which with the coolness of
the air and the shade offered adequate refreshment and tranquillity. There
we found accommodation. Straightaway that vessel of the love of God,
Taronites, came to find us before all the others, of his own accord without
being summoned. For he wanted to see those who wanted to see him. And
in the paths, as Scripture says, he appeared to us graciously. Indeed while
he was there we filled ourselves with his presence.105
4. When he departed, he left us a friend whom he knew himself, a
man named after light, with whom on the next day I went out to see the
gate which is and is called the East Gate, since it was nearer than the
others. I had only gone a little way outside the gate – what need is there
to speak of the beautiful high buildings and the fortifications? The whole
city is full of them, although now they serve no purpose – I had only gone
a little way when I saw at a level spot a cube formed of blocks of marble
as if meant for a function. I then asked those who happened to be near
if there was some particular use for the cube, which was outside the city
yet in close proximity to it as if set up ready for use. They told me what
the cube was used for. And before they had finished speaking, we heard
wailing voices coming from the city gate, and turning towards the sound
we saw a column of barbarians bearing a corpse and making straight
for the cube. We moved away, and following them discreetly, kept at a
sufficient distance to see and hear what they did and said.
5. When they reached the cube, they all observed a profound silence.
And several of them lifted up the coffin containing the corpse, which
was wrapped in white sheets, and set it reverently on the cube. As they
stood round it they had in their midst one of their tasimanai – that is what
they are accustomed to call those who are dedicated to their sanctuaries.
Raising up his hands, this man made a loud invocation and the others
responded in a similarly loud voice. They did this three times. Then
those who were to deliver that coffin to the tomb took it in their hands
104 §§ 3–12 have been reused with some modifications in §§ 19–30 of Palamas’ Letter to
his Church.
105 Taronites’ visit is omitted from the version of the letter redacted for the people of
Thessalonike. On the high social status of doctors, see Malatras 2013, 73.
410 GREGORY PALAMAS
and carried it further away, while each of the others with the tasimanai
returned home.
6. Then we too returned and entered on foot by the same gate. On
seeing the tasimanes sitting with some others in the shade of the gate to
enjoy the freshness of the air at that season – for it was the month of July
– and some Christians, as I supposed sitting on the opposite side, we too
sat down. Seated there, I asked whether there was anyone who knew both
the languages I needed. When someone came forward, I asked him to say
to the Turks on my behalf: ‘I consider it good, the ritual performed by you
there outside. For the supplication made by you was on behalf of the dead
man and addressed to God – for to whom else could it have been addressed?
I should like to know what was said to God by you.’ The tasimanes, using
the same interpreter, said: ‘We asked forgiveness from God for the dead
man, for the personal faults of his soul.’
7. ‘Rightly so,’ I said, following up his remark. ‘But at all events it
is the judge who has the power of granting forgiveness, and according to
you as well it is Christ who will come as the judge of the whole human
race. It is therefore to him that you should address your supplications and
prayers. Should you too not invoke him as God, like we do, since we know
that he is indivisible from the Father as his innate Word?’ The tasimanes
replied: ‘Even Christ is a servant of God.’106 And I said to him again: ‘But
it is necessary to consider this, my good friend, that he judges, as you
yourselves say, the living and the dead, resurrected at his future coming.
And Abraham, your forefather, as you too have your Scripture – for you
like to maintain the authority of the Mosaic books – and it can be seen also
to be preserved by the Jews, Abraham, I repeat, said to God: “You who are
judging the whole earth, shall you not give judgement?”107 So he who is to
judge the whole earth is God himself who, according to the prophet Daniel,
is king of all things and for ever.’ The tasimanes, as it seemed, was annoyed
and after being silent for a moment began speaking more expansively, for
Christians and Turks had gathered together in some numbers to listen. He
began, then, by saying that they loved all the prophets, including Christ,
and the four books that had come down from God, amongst which was
also the Gospel of Christ.108 And he concluded by throwing the question
back to me. ‘But you,’ he said, ‘how is it that you do not accept our prophet
106 Qur’an 19, 30.

107 Gen 18: 25.
108 On the four books, see note 56, above.
or believe in his book, even though this book has also come down from
heaven?’
8. I said to him in turn: ‘Among both you and us it has long been the
custom confirmed by both time and law, to accept nothing as true without
testimonies. Now testimonies are of two kinds. Either they derive from
the deeds and facts themselves or they are supplied by persons worthy of
credence. Thus Moses instructed the Egyptians by signs and wonders. He
divided the sea with his staff and brought it together again. He made bread
rain down from heaven. And what other examples need one give, as Moses
is also believed in by you? For God too bears witness to him as his faithful
servant but not as his son or word.109 Then at God’s command he ascended
the mountain and died and joined his ancestors.110 Now Christ, along with
the many great and extraordinary deeds he performed, is also attested
by Moses himself and the other prophets. And alone from all eternity is
he said even by you to be the Word of God; and alone from all eternity
was he born of a virgin; and alone from all eternity was he taken up into
heaven and remains there immortal, as is also acknowledged by you. It is
therefore because of these that we believe in Christ and in his gospel. But
we do not find that Muhammad is either attested by the prophets or has
worked anything miraculous and worthy of note that leads us to faith. For
this reason we do not believe in him or the book that issues from him.’
The tasimanes, although clearly displeased with these remarks, offered a
defence, saying: ‘There used to be references to Muhammad in the gospel
and you have excised them. But as you see, coming out of the ends of the
east he has proved victorious even as far as the west.’
9. I said to him: ‘Nothing has ever been excised from our gospel by any
Christian, nor has there been the least alteration. For heavy and dreadful
imprecations are laid on this act, and anyone who dares to excise or alter
anything of Christ is rather himself excised. How, then, can any Christian
have done this? Besides, there is the testimony of the many different
languages into which the gospel of Christ was rapidly translated from the
beginning; it was not written in just one language alone at the outset. It also
exists among many heterodox Christians, whom we call heretics. Among
them are some who agree with you on certain points, but can find nothing
to prove such a thing in the gospel. And among those who have contra-
dicted us from the beginning – these too are many – nothing of the kind
109 Cf. Num 12; 17.

110 Cf. Deut 32; 48–50.
412 GREGORY PALAMAS
is found anywhere. But it is possible to see the opposite plainly stated in

the gospel of Christ. How, then, could it have testified to the contrary?
Moreover, no one at all can find anything in the gospel of truth which has
not been witnessed earlier by the divine prophets. Therefore if there was
anything which you say about Muhammad written in the gospel, it would
also have existed beforehand as a text in the prophets.
10. He started from the east and advanced as a conqueror as far as the
west, but he did this by war and the sword, by pillaging, enslaving and
slaughtering. Nothing of this can follow from a God who is truly good. Did
not Alexander, starting from the west, subjugate the whole of the east? In
any case, many others at various times by war and the exercise of power
have conquered the whole world. But no nation entrusted their soul to any
of these as you have done to Muhammad.’
11. At this point the Christians who happened to be present, on seeing
that the Turks were already being roused to anger, signalled to me to put
an end to my speech. I for my part, to relieve them, smiled at the tasimanes
and added: ‘If we agreed in what we said, we would all hold the same
doctrine. But let anyone who can do so understand the force of what I have
said.’ One of them said: ‘There will be a time when we shall agree with
each other.’ And I concurred. But why should I have said this to those now
living? I concurred because I remembered the Apostle’s saying: ‘At the
name of Jesus every knee shall bow’ and so on.111 This at all events will
happen at the second coming of Christ.
12. At this point the meeting on that day broke up. What happened on
the following days the spirit is willing to write but the hand has not the
strength. But I have written this for you because you wanted me to, that I
might not upset you by not producing anything.
111 Phil 2: 10.
VII
of 1368
Introduction
The publication of the Synodal Tomos of 1368 marks the end of the
Hesychast Controversy in the Byzantine Church. Prochoros Kydones,1 a
hieromonk of the Great Lavra, came into conflict with his brethren and
the hegoumenos of the Lavra, Iakobos Trikanas,2 over Palamas’ teaching
on the divine essence and energies. When Prochoros protested formally
against the commemoration of Palamas at the Lavra as a saint, his case
came before the patriarchal synod. After an examination of his theological
opinions, he was deposed from the priesthood and excommunicated.
The trial, under the presidency of the patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos,3
concluded not only with the condemnation of Prochoros but also with the
synodal proclamation of Gregory Palamas as a saint. Thereafter, Palamas
could be attacked only from outside the Orthodox Church. Composed by
Philotheos shortly after the council, the Tomos was signed by the partici-
pating bishops and officials in April 1368. Besides its intrinsic theological
interest, the Tomos is also important from a historical point of view on
three counts: the insights it gives into the problems affecting the Lavra
in the 1360s, the evidence it provides of the early influence of Thomas
Aquinas in Byzantium, and the information it gives on the developing
process of the canonization of saints.4
1 PLP 13883.
2 PLP 29309.
3 PLP 11917, patriarch from August 1353 to November 1354 and from October 1364 to
1376.
4 For a detailed analysis of the historical context of the Tomos see Rigo 2004, 1–51.
414 GREGORY PALAMAS
Problems at the Lavra
The mid-fourteenth century was a period of conflict and controversy on

Mount Athos. In 1344 there had been the internal investigation conducted
by the protos and council of the Holy Mountain, which had resulted in the
condemnation and expulsion of a group of monks exposed as Bogomils.5
No fewer than five of the monks expelled were connected with the Lavra.
The malaise continued for another two decades. In September 1350
a Constantinopolitan synod heard the case of the hieromonk Niphon
Skorpios,6 a former protos of the Holy Mountain, who had already been
through two processes on Mount Athos on a charge of Bogomilism. Niphon
was acquitted in Constantinople, but the accusation of heresy still clung
to him.7 In 1354–55, shortly after his return to the patriarchal throne after
the death of Kallistos I, one of the first cases Philotheos had to deal with
was that of Moses Phakrases, a monk of the Lavra who had been denied
ordination on the grounds of unorthodoxy without any due process.8 When
Prochoros Kydones appealed to Philotheos with the complaint that he was
being treated unjustly at the Lavra, Philotheos assumed at first he could deal
with the matter on the administrative level, as he had done with Phakrases.
The theological issues that the Prochoros affair threw up, however, made it
necessary eventually to bring the case before the patriarchal synod.9
Aquinas in Byzantium
Prochoros Kydones encountered hostility at the Lavra because of his

opposition to the theology of Gregory Palamas. He was an unusual monk,
not only because he was well connected politically – his brother, Demetrios
Kydones, was the mesazon of John V Palaiologos – but also because he
was an accomplished Latinist. For some years he had been assisting his
brother with the translation of Latin philosophical and theological texts,
including the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. He had also written
5 This episode is examined in detail in Rigo 1989.

6 PLP 20683 (incomplete).
7 On the Niphon affair, see Hinterberger 2004.
8 On the Moses Phakrases affair, see Rigo 2004, 16–18.
9 On Prochoros Kydones (PLP 13883), see Rigo 2004, 20–51; cf. Mercati 1931, 1–61;
Tinnefeld 1981, 237–44; Russell 2006; Plested 2012, 73–84.
an anti-Palamite work on his own account, On Essence and Energy, the

first theological work in Greek to make use of Aquinas, which at his trial
was subjected to especially hostile treatment by Philotheos.10 But although
Prochoros was condemned, his Thomism was not, and indeed subsequently
both Palamites and anti-Palamites drew on Thomas’s insights to refine their
arguments. The decision of 1368 may have put an end to open challenges to
Palamite theology, but it did not stifle theological thought.11
The Canonization of Saints
The Synodal Tomos of 1368 is also important for the light it sheds
on the way Palamas came to be included in the calendar of saints – or,
more precisely, in the calendar of the Great Church. The thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries saw tensions arising from time to time between the
Church and the imperial government as emperors, desperate for Western
aid against the Turks, sought ways of acceding to the papal demand for the
prior union of the Churches. The beginning of a ‘canonization process’
may be discerned in the cases of the anti-unionist saints, Meletios the
Confessor (d. 1286) and the patriarch Athanasios I (d. 1315).12 Because
of the politically controversial character of their lives, care was taken to
document their miracles as proof of sanctity. In the case of the theologically
controversial Gregory Palamas, the documentation of miracles becomes
a formal process. Philotheos mentions that his predecessor, Patriarch
Kallistos I, had sent a formal request to the local synod of Thessalonike
(then still sede vacante) to investigate and validate the miracles attributed
to Palamas.13 Philotheos himself instituted his own investigation through
the megas oikonomos of the Church of Thessalonike. As a result of the
testimonies thus collected, and also in view of popular cult of Palamas in
Constantinople, Thessalonike, Kastoria, and other places, Philotheos has
no hesitation in proclaiming Palamas ‘a saint, and a doctor of the Church,
10 For the text of On Essence and Energy see PG 151, 1192–1242 (Books I and II) and
Candal 1954 (Book VI); for a discussion see Plested 2012, 78–80.
11 For the way in which both Palamites and anti-Palamites used Aquinas in the wake of
the condemnation of Prochoros, see Polemis 1996, 87–112; Plested 2012, 89–120.
12 Macrides 1981, 83–4. The precedent of Athanasios I is appealed to by Philotheos,
Synodal Tomos of 1368, § 19 (Rigo 2004, line 767).
13 Synodal Tomos of 1368, § 19 (Rigo 2004, lines 745–9).
416 GREGORY PALAMAS
and one of the greatest teachers and God-bearing Fathers, which the Divine
Synod has accepted and approved’.14
Documents Quoted in the Tomos
Besides many passages quoted from the fathers and from the Tomoi of
1341 and 1351, the Tomos of 1368 also includes portions of the following
documents:
1. Prochoros’ Refutation of the Synodal Tomos of 1351 (six quotations).15
2. Prochoros’ On Essence and Energy, Books II and VI (substantial
passages).16
3. A letter of Prochoros to the patriarch Philotheos (excerpts).17
4. A formal letter (pittakion) that Prochoros sent to Iakobos Trikanas
denouncing the celebration of the feast of St Gregory Palamas at the
Great Lavra (excerpts).18
5. An Athonite profession of faith drawn up at the Lavra in opposition
to Prochoros (more than half the text).19
A further sixteen documents, mainly letters, reports, and summonses, are
mentioned in the text without being quoted.20
Text
The Synodal Tomos of 1368 was first published by the patriarch Dositheos
of Jerusalem in his Tomos Agapēs (Iasi, 1698) and was reprinted by Migne
14 Synodal Tomos of 1368, § 19 (Rigo 2004, lines 782–5).

15 Synodal Tomos of 1368, §§ 5–7 (Rigo 2004, lines 170–2, 173–91, 204–14, 216–18,
220–7, 231–6). Only fragments of this work survive in an autograph manuscript, Vat. gr. 609.
16 For a full list of references, see Rigo 2004, 81–4.
17 Synodal Tomos of 1368, § 3 (Rigo 2004, lines 125–9 and 132–4).
18 Synodal Tomos of 1368, § 15 (Rigo 2004, lines 603–5, 607–22, 631–49).
19 Synodal Tomos of 1368, § 15 (Rigo [2004], lines 659–80). The Athonite Profession of
Faith is edited by Rigo in Rigo (2004), 135–47 with an introduction and Italian translation.
The Synodal Tomos reproduces §§ 4–7 of this profession of faith.
20 For the complete list, see Rigo 2004, 89–92.
in PG 151, 693–716. Today the text survives in its entirety in a single

manuscript, Athos Vatoped. 262, dating from around 1370.21 Nothing is
known about the manuscript Dositheos used except that it was different
from Athos Vatoped. 262 and appears to be no longer extant. A critical
edition of the Tomos was published by Antonio Rigo in 2004 with an
important historical introduction.22 The translation below, based on Rigo,
is the first in a modern language. Rigo numbers the lines of his text, but for
convenience I have numbered his paragraphs.
Text
Synodal Tomos of 1368

1. Nothing is worse than arrogance and conceit. It was this – the all-powerful
darkness within it – that made a captive of him who had been the light-
bearer, who had been honoured by God with glory and brilliance and was
called a second brilliance and light.23 It was this that later cast many into
the pit of perdition, not only before the advent and incarnation of the Word
of God, but also after it in much greater numbers. Taking the one first
deceived by it as its fellow worker and servant in the matter, because he
saw humanity returning to the ancient honour and deification from which
he fell, arrogance and conceit used him as an adviser and easily drew
wretched people to itself. Arius and Eunomius testify to this argument,24
as do those who followed them, as they ought not to have done, together
with Macedonius, Nestorius and all the others who, cladding themselves
in pride, proceeded against the Church.25 The holy councils held by the
21 Like the Tomos of 1351 it was not entered in the patriarchal register.
22 Rigo 2004. The text established by Rigo is based on a comparison of Athos Vatoped
262 with Dositheos’ edition and an extract of the Tomos found in Hieros. Sanctae Crucis 22.
23 Lucifer; cf. Isa 14: 12.
24 Arius the opponent of Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 336), was condemned by the
Council of Nicaea (325) for maintaining that Christ does not share in the Father’s eternity.
Eunomius (d. 394), the principal opponent of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, was
exiled by the emperor Theodosius I for teaching a subordinationist Christology more radical
than that of Arius.
25 Macedonius (d. c. 362), bishop of Constantinople under the emperors Constans I and
Constantius II, denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, but was not condemned in his lifetime.
Nestorius (d. after 451), patriarch of Constantinople from 428 to 431, was deposed by the
418 GREGORY PALAMAS
divine fathers against them strengthened her by the help of the Holy Spirit.
It was this arrogance and conceit that when the Church was living in peace
burst in successively in each generation and caused her much disturbance.
It was this that not long ago also invaded Barlaam and Akindynos, and
it is impossible to say how much trouble it caused, even if it was easily
utterly repelled by God using his holy Church as his helper. And now it
is this that has most recently raged against the Church like a wild beast,
and again using its first disciple, Satan, the originator of evil, as its fellow
worker and servant because, being in itself of the same immaterial nature
as he, it was not able itself to attack, it used as its instrument their disciple,
the monk Prochoros Kydones, and openly attacked the Church. Seeing
that they had gained nothing from this apart from separation from God
and the Church and the condemnation of anathema, and in order that he
should glory rather more, and rise above the teachers, Prochoros assumed
the leadership of them all as a body, to the point of uttering impiety, and
proved them all to be insignificant as regards impiety in comparison with
himself. For it is as if, considering their rejection to be a crown of victory,
he reckoned that separation from God would win over many of them, so
that he might be able to glory over them in these matters.
2. This man was living at the holy and great Lavra on the Holy Mountain
of Athos, where he had practised the monastic life since childhood.26
And he must have been instructed there in sacred learning, since he was
deemed worthy there of the rank of priesthood, and also in other studies,
including of course what is relevant to a correct and sound faith and piety,
for this was the practice of that holy community in this matter. But he,
imitating Judas even in this respect, moved against all the teachers as a
body, or rather against God himself, and fell into thousands of opinions
and strange heresies. When the war of the notorious Barlaam the Calabrian
and Akindynos broke out against the Church, it found a worthy solution,
by which the genuine children of the Church, having opted for the peace
and harmony of the blameless Christian faith, offered up pure thanks-
giving to him who had delivered the Church from such fierce malefactors,
just as, conversely, those who were manically attached to the vanity of
Hellenic studies, and were completely carried away by their erroneous
opinions, were split asunder. Among these, the said Prochoros was the
Council of Ephesus (431) for rejecting the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures
in Christ as taught by Cyril of Alexandria.
26 Prochoros was about fifteen when he became a monk (Russell 2006, 77).
first and the greatest, the degree of his coming later in time being matched
by the degree in which he was shown to surpass the leaders of the evil in
impiety, for to their absurdities he added others that were much worse and
much more absurd. So then, on account of these new doctrines of his, and
his spurious, strange and impious thinking, and the warm attachment he
showed to those expelled by the Church, he became suspect to the monks
of the venerable Lavra and could not lead the hesychastic life there. As a
result, since the monks frequently heard him commending the teachings
of Barlaam and Akindynos and disputing the correct teachings of the
Church, and were deeply disturbed by this, they summoned him to appear
before them and sought from him a confession of faith, that they might
have the freedom to praise the one trihypostatic and omnipotent God with
one voice without condemnation. He, for his part, fearing the deposition
to which heretics are liable, made a verbal pretence of piety in public and
asserted that he held the teachings of the Church, but in his heart he was
far from the straight path. In their presence he dissembled, when they were
gathered in assembly and demanded an account of what he had been saying
in his sermons, in which he frequently appeared to them to be under the
sway of his personal opinion, dismissing our own teaching and embracing
instead the ideas of Barlaam and Akindynos and those of his own. To
them, again, he seemed to contradict each one of these, only taking care
not to announce his own opinion, bare-headed and in complete frankness,
to the synod on account of what had been laid in testimony, for he had no
intention of contradicting any of his own teachings or those of our own. He
therefore created in many much confusion and split that holy community
of monks in two, so that many of those who strove for piety and virtue not
only within the sacred Lavra but in the whole of the Holy Mountain, were
already on the point of breaking ecclesial communion with the Lavriots
on account of their being in communion with him, as we were informed
by written reports brought to our humility,27 which quoted the text in the
holy Synodal Tomos, where it says that we are not in communion with
those who are knowingly in communion with them.28 When that blessed
protector and superior of this holy community, kyr Iakobos,29 a man who
27 Then (as now) ‘our humility’ (hē metriotēs hēmōn) was the conventional way for the
patriarch to refer to himself.
28 The Synodal Tomos of 1351, § 51 (Karmiris, 404–5).
29 Iakobos Trikanas, hegoumenos of the Lavra 1351–c. 1353 and 1361–68. On Trikanas
(PLP 29309) see Rigo 2004, 1–51, esp. 6–21.
420 GREGORY PALAMAS
holds the chief rank among all of them for the power of his intellect and
spirit, and is equally learned in divine and human wisdom, and exerts
himself to the utmost for the infallible and correct doctrines of the Church,
saw this disturbance among the monks, he did not, in his care both for the
peace of all and for the return and repentance of the opponent, neglect to
counsel him and exhort him to renounce the most evil and impious error
which he harboured in his soul and embrace the Church’s truth and also be
in communion himself with those who strive after it in a holy manner. But
he, having the devil alone speaking to him internally, paid little attention
to those who conversed with him and instructed him externally. Hence
despairing of him, that blessed man wrote a report to our humility about
this matter, informing us about everything. Or rather, before he himself
wrote, all the hesychasts met together and wrote a report to our humility
through the most reverend hieromonk kyr Joseph,30 revealing the matter
to us. Then, after a short time, the hegoumenos and the priests of the
monastery drew up a report on the matter in a document signed by all with
the hegoumenos signing first of all, and sent this document by the hand of
the most honourable hieromonk kyr Malachias31 and the most honourable
monk kyr Job.32
3. Whereas the chapters against Barlaam and Akindynos composed
synodically and inserted in the holy Synodikon which is read annually
on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, in which, on the one hand, Barlaam and
Akindynos are anathematized together with all who think like them and
seek to justify them, and on the other, those who put them down with all
their strength are extolled together with all who in word and deed and to
the best of their ability maintain and commend the Church’s teachings,
a request was made that this should be sent to the holy Lavra by our
humility, so that what was read there should be recorded exactly as in the
Synodikon, and should be read likewise on the same occasion.33 As the
monks saw this text as some kind relief, and as a support and correction
for the doubters, they obliged Prochoros to read the text in the synaxis
and confirm it with his own signature. He appeared to be unwilling and
disdainful, fearing the strength of the majority, but at the same time,
being possessed of the instability which from the beginning those who
30 PLP 9003.
31 PLP 9003.
32 PLP 8938.
33 On the Lavra’s Synodikon of Orthodoxy, see Rigo 2017.
cause scandal have been found to have, he signed what he did not believe,
and immediately afterwards contradicted what he had signed, stepping
sideways just like a crab, making the reversals of Euripus,34 and changing
form like a chameleon. But he who had laid hold of the wise in their
cunning was himself caught by his own feathers.35 For he was found to
have the writings of these heretics and deviants in his cell, which when
they fell into the hands of the priests and monks stirred up an intense
war against him. Filled as a result with rage and zeal, they separated him
from communion with them. They also sent these writings to our humility
together with their reports, calling on us and entreating us not to overlook
the fact that the truth was in danger. As Prochoros was not unaware of
this, since he was a member of the same community, he too wrote to us
and submitted a report maintaining that everything that had happened to
him was an injustice and a calumny. He was so far indeed from producing
false doctrines that he did not engage in theology at all, because he
preferred to be regarded by the many as uncultivated and a rustic rather
than speculate about God even for the briefest moment. The reason, he
said, was that wishing to make the great mystery of theology inaccessible
to human beings, God had surrounded this sensible heaven with a barrier,
as it were, which shopkeepers, cooks and people from the stage, these new
dogmaticians who have recently appeared, have made fun of – calling
our own people by these names, as the truth has revealed.36 On this
account he chose to keep his counsel and remain silent, out of the greatest
reverence for theology. And he added this: Since I am sending herewith
my own writings, our own mind will be apparent from these themselves,
and the way in which I conceive of the true faith, and he added that he
submitted these to the judgement and examination of our humility, that
what we approve may be accepted and what we reject may be rejected and
jettisoned, saying these things deceitfully and hypocritically.
4. Shortly afterwards, unable to bear the insulting treatment of such a
great number of monks and the reproach of separation from communion
34 The straits of Euripus, separating Euboea from the Greek mainland, were notorious for
their changing currents.
35 A saying from antiquity referring to the shooting of an eagle by an arrow feathered
from his own plumes (Aeschylus, frag. 139); cf. Life of Palamas, § 78.
36 It may be noted that as a youth Philotheos himself had supported his studies at the
school of Thomas Magistros by serving as Magistros’ cook. Prochoros’ comment evidently
touched a nerve; Philotheos returns to it more than once.
422 GREGORY PALAMAS
with them, he betook himself to our humility and again said the same things
as he had written earlier. Asked by us for the writings which he mentioned
in his report, he brought them to us and put them into our hands. We had
thus received them, but had not yet managed to find the time to peruse them
as we wished, when again the same Prochoros presented himself. With me
was the most holy metropolitan of Ephesus, hypertimos and exarch or all
Asia, a beloved brother of our humility in the Holy Spirit and a colleague
in the sacred ministry.37 On being asked how he stood with regard to the
Church’s doctrines and what he felt about the disaster that befell Barlaam
and Akindynos and the rejection and anathematization of their erroneous
teaching and their writings, what opinion he had about the holy Synodal
Tomos, and what his attitude was towards the common Church of Christ,
he confessed that he felt doubt in his soul and uncertainty on these matters,
but said that he did not wish to trust in himself but rather to follow the
Church of Christ and be in agreement with it, to follow, that is to say, or
be instructed about, as he said, what in his uncertainty he had written for
himself, or else accept the teaching of the Church in faith alone and in
obedience with simplicity, just as our humility and the Church of Christ
would decide, as he himself said.
5. Our humility said to him that for the time being he had to accept
the Tomos and the sound and reliable opinion in it concerning the divine
Scriptures and the holy fathers without prevarication.38 For they are rather
the exegesis and interpretation of our holy faith and the solution of every
doubt, not that they contain any doubt or anything requiring interpretation
and exegesis. After his clear confession of faith and his agreement and
union with the Church without any reservation, then if there was anything
sought by him, we are prepared, again from the divine apostles and from
the holy fathers themselves, in the manner of a teacher and a father to
resolve for him, as for a son and disciple of the Church, every doubt. This,
then, is what I said to him, not yet having read his writings. When I perused
some parts of them, I became aware at once from the title that they were
full of every kind of impiety. For this was the title A Refutation of the
Misinterpretations of the Passages of Scripture Contained in the Tomos
against Ephesus and Gregoras, and the introduction to the treatise went
rather as follows:
37 This was Theodoretos (PLP 7333), metropolitan of Ephesus from 1365 to 1372.
38 I.e. the Synodal Tomos of 1351.
6. ‘Because our struggle, as Paul says, is not against blood and flesh,39
but against every obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God,40 one
must reject the expectation of refuting the misinterpretations of the holy
Scriptures in the Tomos against Ephesus and Gregoras,41 both of the author
and of those who composed the decrees. For having treated most of them
as close and intimate friends in their lifetime, we would be acting fairly
also to show them respect after their death, and keep their memory without
offending it, and above all not slander people but prefer to speak about
God. One should endeavour to bring out what seems in this document to
agree with the ancient canon of doctrines and bring it back to the truth.
This is what should be done with regard to the work both of the deceased
and of those still alive. For the latter will be made by God in his greater
gentleness to cause less harm; the former, purified of opinions that are not
true, and having lived in the faith of the apostles and fathers, will receive
their appropriate reward. These things, then, stirred me to write, especially
zeal for God. For if the lie was struck down by human thoughts, the evil
would somehow be bearable, since the thoughts of mortals are wretched
and their concepts are fallible, but who could bear that God himself should
rise up as a slanderer against himself and trade in his own sayings which
are purer than gold, even if no profit were to accrue to us from refuting
this?’42
7. Such, then, was his title and introduction. What followed surpassed
in impiety the most evil writings of Barlaam and Akindynos by a large
margin, and he who respected ‘the barrier of heaven’, as he claimed earlier
when he called certain people shopkeepers and cooks, plunged into the
depths of theology and did not shrink from exceeding every kind of impiety.
For he who accused us of misrepresenting the divine sayings did not realize
that through trying to expound them in a syllogistic fashion he was choosing
to wage a war not against us but against the saints themselves. For when he
cited passages from the God-bearing fathers, he did not proceed to expound
them in our own manner, but in a reckless way against the mind of the
saints, manifestly opposing himself to them. For whereas our God-bearing
father John Damascene says explicitly: ‘One should know that energy is
one thing, that which has the power of energy is another, that which is the
39 Eph 6: 12.
40 2 Cor 10: 5.
42 Prochoros Kydones, Refutation of the Synodal Tomos of 1351, prooimion.
424 GREGORY PALAMAS
product of energy is another, and that which is the energy is another’,43 he

says: ‘With regard to beings, truth and the discerning of concrete realities
are two different things, not simply on account of their being two different
things, but on account of the two different things being the same reality. For
if something is two different things in the mind, this does not mean that it
is two different things in reality, just as if a man and what is knowable are
two different things in the mind, when the same being is both a man and
knowable, it is not thereby two different things in reality. Therefore, of
course, in the case of God too, if energy and that which has the power of
energy and that which is in energy are different things in the mind, that
does not mean that they are different things in reality. For God does not
proceed from being in potentiality to being in energy, so that that which has
the power of energy and that which is energy are two different things in
reality. For he would be changing and proceeding from the imperfect to the
perfect.’44 And again in another chapter he wanted to prove that God does
not have a natural and essential energy, but is only essence, and among
many other things also says: ‘Just as if the essence of the Spirit was not
sufficient for everything, but needed some lesser energies for the genesis of
beings’. And elsewhere, making human beings utterly unable to participate
in God, he says the following: ‘Therefore neither do the passages cited by
them prove that communion with the Spirit is by this, nor that we participate
in something uncreated, nor that essence and energy are two different
things. From this a whole swarm of blasphemies follows, and the chopping
up of the deity into an infinite number of unequal pieces, and its composition
from thousands of unequal pieces, some of them participable and others
imparticipable. And of these things of which God is constituted, some are
said to be beings and others transcendent beings, some accessible to the
mind and others inaccessible, and such things as even nursemaids would
blush to say to little children.’ In his explanation of the text of the divine
Chrysostom, where the latter, commenting on the gospel passage which
says: ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied’,45 says: ‘Let us
look at what Philip seeks to see. Is it the wisdom of the Father? Is it his
goodness? No, it is what God is, the essence itself’, he says: ‘First I say this,
that the knowledge of the wisdom of God is the knowledge itself of the
44 This and the following four passages cited from Prochoros’ Refutation of the Tomos of
1351 are listed by Rigo as fragments C.3 to C.6 (Rigo 2004, 80–1).
45 John 14: 18.
essence. Therefore he who knows his wisdom knows his essence, given
that the wisdom of God is the comprehension of his essence. And I say that
neither is the knowledge of the good a different knowledge from knowledge
of the essence of God. For the good by which God is good is not some
acquired habit in himself but is his essence.’46 And among the next chapter
headings are these:47 ‘That the intellectual energy of God in his essence.
That the intellectual power of God is his essence. That the wisdom of God
is his essence. That the truth of God is his essence. That the will of God is
his essence.’ And he proves these statements not from the divine scriptures,
nor by citing passages from the saints, but by using his own arguments and
proofs, purporting them to be Aristotelian syllogisms. When he makes his
theological speculations, or rather his war against God, on the most divine
light that radiated from Christ on the mountain, he sets down the following
title: ‘That the light on Tabor was created’, and then adduces very many
excellent testimonies from the saints in which they teach that this was
uncreated deity, and the natural and unapproachable glory of the trihypo-
static deity, and ingenerate deification, and boundless light, and
uncircumscribed effusion of divine radiance, and light both immanent and
transcendent, and suchlike. And having himself also established that that
light is uncreated, through what has been stated above, he then proceeds
against all the saints as a body and manifestly contradicts them, going on
to say explicitly: ‘But the opposite is the case.’ And he demonstrates this
through many of Aristotle’s syllogisms, and utters and infers many other
blasphemous and impious things, opposing the Tomos of the divine synod
on every issue, or rather opposing the theologians themselves, with whom
he contends. For he says: ‘If indeed that light was a symbol of the truth
which is beyond mind and speech, it is neither the first truth nor beyond
mind and speech but only beyond sensory perception. But what is not
beyond mind and speech is neither truth nor uncreated. Therefore that light
too is created. If truth were beyond mind and speech, how would we know
what it is? As light, but what quality of light? Like whiteness. And where?
As on Tabor. And when? Before the Passion, that is, six days before it. For
46 In this citation (Rigo 2004, 81, fragment C.6) Prochoros comments on a passage from
John Chrysostom, Homilies on John 74 (PG 59, 401), cited by the Synodal Tomos of 1351,
§ 21.
47 The following are chapter headings from Prochoros Kydones, On Essence and Energy,
Book II; cf. PG 151, 1191–1242, where the work is wrongly attributed to Gregory Akindynos.
These are listed by Rigo as fragments C.7 to C.12 (Rigo 2004, 81–2).
426 GREGORY PALAMAS
the truth which is beyond mind and speech we only believe to exist, since
we are by no means so bold as to observe, nor do we have the capacity to
conceive of, the what, and the how, and the quality, and the where, and the
when, since we refrain from impiety.48 Consequently, those who say that
they see and conceive of that which is truth in God and add what it is, and
its quality, and when, attempt to prove impious matters.’ And again:
‘Nothing prevents the Lord from becoming brighter than himself at that
time, and showing what he also was earlier, unless of course that light is
something in God’s essence and uncreated. For it was also shown by the
other theophanies what he was earlier. In no way can phenomena be
something in the essence of God for the proof of God.’ Moreover, he who
accuses us of polytheism, and slanders the Church of Christ together with
his teachers Barlaam and Akindynos, proves himself to maintain many
deities and many gods. For he says the following: ‘Some, seeing the
aforesaid to be absurd, thought that the light on Tabor was the essence of
God, in that they supposed that if there is some kind of light in the essence
of God it would be absurd for it to be different from the essence. They did
not understand that there are certain things which are called sensible and
intelligible lights by analogy, among which it is perhaps possible that the
light of Tabor may be. No doubt they were deceived by its being called
deity or theophany, and did not think that it was created deity.’ And after a
little: ‘For since those things that are secondary in holiness, kingship,
divinity and lordship, through participation in those that are primary,
multiply the simplicity of their distribution as a result of their own
differences, it is evident that they do not participate in the kingdom of God
in itself and in his lordship, divinity and holiness, but become holy by a
different holiness, kingly by a different kingship, and gods and lords by a
different divinity and lordship.’49 And a little further on: ‘It is therefore not
at all absurd that although we say there is one uncreated being that is holy,
king, God, and Lord, so we say that there are many created holinesses,
deities, kingships and lordships, even if in itself there is only one uncreated
kingdom, holiness, lordship and deity of the supraessential deity.’ And
elsewhere again he says: ‘Since the end, goal and outcome of all hierarchy
is the deification of the deified, and deification is the attaining of likeness
to God so far as possible, the principles proximate to our deification are
48 These are Aristotle’s categories of predication. Cf. Topics I, 9, 103b20–104a1.

49 Prochoros is commenting here on Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names XII, 4,
972B (Suchla, 225–6).
created, such as the directors of the hierarchy, the skills and the energies
and powers by which they direct the hierarchy. It is evident that our
deifications, as the products of created things, are created and inferior with
regard to those of the deifiers. And on account of this, just as there are
many created gods, so too there are deities and deifications which are
inferior and superior, universal and partial, and each in proportion to its
own particularity. Therefore there are so many created gods, deities and
deifications transcending us in whose nature, or power, or energy, or
experience or knowledge, we cannot participate that it would be irrational
to say that we participate in the uncreated God, or in deification, or deity or
some energy or power of his.’ And let us refrain from quoting further and
adding the rest, being full of every kind of impiety, and exceeding in
impiety by a wide margin the evil works of Barlaam and Akindynos. For
perhaps only the devil, his guide and teacher in these matters, suggested
these things to him.
8. From many, almost innumerable, examples these texts have been
cited to make plain the defendant’s heresy and impiety.50 That these are
impious and products of the originator of evil, I think that nobody at all of
our court is unaware, through what he has uttered with his own hand. If
there are any who wish to have texts of the holy fathers for the refutation of
these things, we refer them to the sacred Tomos of the synod, which contains
many passages of the God-bearing fathers, and is supported by them from
beginning to end.51 But we shall add to what has been cited further of his
works of impiety, in which he insults the leaders of the Church of Christ.
For he says explicitly the following:
9. ‘With regard to those who condemn me for the use of syllogisms as
some kind of defilement of theology, I think that this is defensible, since
every truth is either a syllogism, or a principle of syllogistic reasoning, and
for me and for them too it is necessary, even if we are unwilling, to use
syllogisms if we wish to speak the truth. Why, therefore, when we have the
knowledge and the rules, are we able to refute those who reason falsely,
and for our own part drive ourselves like a charioteer towards the truth by
this method, which contributes to forming a judgement and to providing
an accessible method for attaining it? For if we had faith as a result of
revelation, like the rulers of this religion, or were able to determine it by
discovering it, or we did not demand to examine the arguments, what
50 The texts cited above are listed by Rigo as fragments C.14 to C.19 (Rigo 2004, 82).
51 The Synodal Tomos of 1351 cites nearly 100 passages from the fathers.
428 GREGORY PALAMAS
is conceded by all as being worthy of belief by us, or by confirming the

argument by the excellence of our life or by proof from miracles, the use
of syllogisms would not have thus been introduced, the principle that has
been given to us for the discovery of truth having been shown to be in
harmony with revelation, and a technique that grants a means of countering
the abuse of those who cause trouble to the faith, and produces in the pious
a training and occupation that is not unwelcome. Since the Jewish curse
has fallen upon us too, and our eyes have been darkened so that we cannot
see, and we have been ordained as blind watchmen and as deaf heralds, nor
does the Lord give a word to preachers of the gospel with much power, and
the multitudes of the taught regard us with such hostility that they will not
allow themselves to be persuaded by any argument at all, what need is there
to cast away from our hands the only instrument left for the discovery of
truth?’52 And after a little: ‘For my part, I praise the technique and judge
it to be necessary, if indeed in the present God-forsaken age it is the only
succour and light left to us.’ And again elsewhere: ‘Now people of devilish
origin, as the angels themselves might say, and sordid, like dung-beetles
and ants in their holes, or frogs croaking in the marshes,53 boast of a wisdom
greater than that of the angels, rejecting all spiritual order and arrogantly
assuming that they have been initiated into certain things directly by God
and have become teachers of these to the angels.’54
10. He also very impiously says explicitly that the principle of deity and
the principle of goodness, and the other things that are referred to in this
way are created.55 And concerning our Lord and God, the Saviour Jesus
Christ, he says the following: ‘If it is true what was said about the Lord by
Paul, namely, that “for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin”,56
and that “He came in the likeness of sin and to deal with sin.”57 Sin is called
darkness because of its privation of any goodness whatsoever. Manifestly
Christ came in the likeness of darkness and to deal with true darkness, in
52 This long passage from Prochoros Kydones, Refutation of the Synodal Tomos of 1351,
is listed by Rigo as fragment C.20 (Rigo 2004, 82–3).
53 Allusion to Plato, Phaedo 109b2.
54 Prochoros Kydones, Refutation of the Synodal Tomos of 1351, fragments C.21 and C.22
(Rigo 2004, 83).
55 Fragment C.23 (Rigo 2004, 83). Cf. Prochoros Kydones, On Essence and Energy
II, 9 and On the Light of Tabor, Vat. gr. 678, f. 40rv. The expressions ‘principle of deity’
(thearchia) and principle of goodness (agatharchia) are Dionysian.
56 2 Cor 5: 21.
57 Cf. Rom 8: 3.
order to drive it out of humanity. And for this reason not only is the body
of Christ without any sin whatsoever, but is different in comparison with
our own bodies. For just as it was united to his life and yet was mortal,
since the divine Word humbled himself and lowered himself, and was
united hypostatically to dispassion, but was nevertheless passible, so too
although it was united hypostatically to light before the resurrection. For if
he had assumed a radiance at his very engendering, as he showed it at the
Transfiguration, just as I have heard some people say disparagingly, and
showed it only to those he wished, casting a shadow on the vision of the
others, he would first have introduced a suspicion whether appearing to be
radiant was not some kind of fantasy and therefore also the fact itself of
appearing, and secondly what need was there for the second engendering,
the greater and more perfect one, I mean the one coming from the
resurrection, in accordance with which he is called the first-born from the
dead, unless what is sown perishable is raised imperishable, what is sown
as a physical body is raised as a spiritual body?58 For if the author of our life
was perfected through suffering, it is evident that Christ assumed a body
that was capable of perfection, not already perfect. Hence John’s saying,
“The light shines in the darkness”,59 which is interpreted by Gregory as “in
this life and in the flesh”60 lest it should be said about the Lord’s body, and
life, that it manifested the divinity through the mortal, the passible and the
humble. What is remarkable about the Lord’s body being called “darkness”
by Scripture on account of the humble state in which it appeared, where the
divine Scripture says that he clothed himself in the rulers and authorities?61
For if he stripped himself of them on the cross, he first put them on. Hence
we cannot say to the detriment of Christianity that the body of Christ was
transparent and airy, or that he received it radiant from his holy mother in
the way that he showed it and it will be as a result of the resurrection, nor
is this light essentially inherent in the deity.’62
11. When our humility saw these things, and others much worse and
more absurd than these, and judged them to be full of every impiety and to
58 1 Cor 15: 42, 44.

59 John 1: 5.
61 Cf. Col 2: 15.
62 Fragment C.24 from Prochoros Kydones, On Essence and Energy (Rigo 2004, 83).
Cf. Demetrios Kydones, Apologia in Defence of Prochoros, lines 284–451 (Mercati 1931,
306–10).
430 GREGORY PALAMAS
be the spawn of the devil, we summoned him again. The most reverend
metropolitan of Ephesus and hypertimos, who was again with me,63
addressed him as follows: ‘I have read some portions of your writings, and
I have found them full of every kind of impiety. For they refute the rule of
faith, I mean of the sacred Tomos of the synod,64 which our Church accepts,
along with the holy symbol, as in conformity with the divine Scriptures
and with the synodal and patristic statements, and regards as an explication
of the divine symbol of the faith, and they clearly say that the light of the
trihypostatic deity that shone on the mountain in the face of our Lord Jesus
Christ was something created, and absolutely reject the utterances of the
holy fathers and teachers, which teach that this is uncreated deity, and his
natural glory and radiance, and eternal and unoriginated grace. That is why
I said that they are full of every impiety and alien to the orthodox Church
of Christ.’ But Prochoros dissembled verbally, and again submitted in
appearance to the holy Church of Christ, and saying this treacherously and
unscrupulously, not with a sincere heart, maintained falsely that he was
totally unaware that the God-bearing fathers and teachers of the Church
said explicitly that that light was uncreated. In response to this he again
heard it said by me that either he knew this and deliberately pretended not
to know it, or if he happened not to know it, as he says, he was wilfully
ignorant, inasmuch as if he wished to, he could have manifestly discovered
it quickly everywhere in the writings of the saints. It is not possible that it
belongs to an upright person, and one who wishes to learn what is true, on
the one hand to overlook and indeed disregard the sayings of the saints in
which they clearly say this, and on the other to cite others that perhaps are
capable of a different exegesis. But if he wished instead to satisfy us in
everything, he too should have signed the sacred Tomos, as we did, and
refute the things that had been wrongly written by him, not just orally but
also in writing, since a spoken word is retracted orally but written words
are retracted in writing. On his replying ‘I cannot write other things to
refute what I have written because what was in my mind is what I put in
writing and it is impossible for me to go over it and write the opposite. The
things I say are what the Church says, and I do not retract these in words.’
And he said this in a false and deceitful manner, not truthfully, as later
became evident. Our humility said to him that the retraction and refutation
of what he had written earlier by another short piece of writing in which he
63 Theodoretos of Ephesus.
used the words of the God-bearing fathers and doctors of the Church was
necessary and indispensable. Nor was he to return immediately to the Holy
Mountain, but was to spend the winter here. This was because I commanded
him also to read the sacred books, since they could provide him with much
benefit, and especially the Acts of the holy and ecumenical Sixth Council,65
the Disputation with Pyrrhus of the divine Maximus,66 and the dogmatic
book of the God-bearing father John Damascene.67 My entire aim was that
having read these, and having been initiated into the sacred doctrines of
our sound faith, he would then gladly accept our words, and shed every
doubt from his own soul, and go on to retract his own impious writings by
means of others that were contrary to them. He for his part seemed to us to
accept these things well and as we ourselves wished and at once assigned
everything that he willed to us and to our discernment and judgement, but
to all those outside he seemed to think and say the opposite. ‘Why has the
patriarch given me these books to read,’ he kept saying, ‘as if I did not
already know them? I have studied them well and with great care and I
know what they contain. He does not examine my writings and resolve the
problems raised by them, but tells me to read the books of the saints.’ And
he would say many other things similar to these and more, which, when I
heard about it from many, led me to consider the ignorant one a hypocrite.
In the meantime, this being how matters stood, he wrote a pittakion to the
most holy hegoumenos of the sacred Lavra,68 which when it was read there,
shocked them all, hesychasts, priests, monks, the lot. And called to an
assembly with the most reverend bishop of Hierissos and the Holy
Mountain,69 they anathematized him as impious and incorrigible. They
sent the most pious hieromonk kyr Joseph to our humility with written
reports of the said most reverend bishop, the most holy hegoumenos, the
hesychasts and the priests, requesting and beseeching through the
aforementioned reports that this anathematization should be validated by
us, and that he should be excommunicated and deposed and in general not
accepted. They did not do what they did of their own accord, but rather
because they were following the Catholic Church of Christ and the Tomos
of the holy synod that directs that these things should be suffered if anyone
65 The anti-monothete council held in Constantinople in 680–81.

66 Maximus the Confessor, Disputation with Pyrrhus (PG 91, 288–353).
67 John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith (Kotter, vol. 2, 7–239).
68 On the pittakion, see Rigo 2004, 80.
69 The bishop of Hierissos was the ordinary of Mount Athos.
432 GREGORY PALAMAS
is found to think, speak and write the same things as Barlaam and
Akindynos. They also forwarded the pittakion which had been written and
sent by him to the most holy hegoumenos as proof of his impiety. When our
humility saw all these documents, we thought it necessary to show them to
our holy and great synod. Seeing that so much time had gone by since he
had come here, our humility was not aware of what was going on concerning
him, because we had heard him say that he accepted what the Church of
Christ accepted, and that he would retract his writings, as he himself said.
Therefore on that account these things were not communicated to our holy
and great synod until now, since we were expecting his genuine repentance.
But when we received the letters from the Holy Mountain, it became
necessary to inform the synod too about all these matters. And indeed
when the most holy bishops and hypertimoi of Caesarea, Ephesus, and
Kyzikos were convoked,70 by the decision of our humility, together with the
bishops of Chalcedon, Bizye and Brysis, and also the most reverend bishops
who happened to be in the queen of cities, namely the bishop of Boreia
Potamia of Ephesus, the bishop of Panion of Herakleia, and the bishop of
Peristasis, together with the presence of certain archimandrites and abbots
from this queen of cities, including the most honourable archimandrite of
the venerable monastery of Stoudios, the hieromonk kyr Makarios, and
others, and also a number of distinguished monks, Prochoros too was
summoned by our humility, in order to repeat before the holy and great
synod what, as it seemed, he had often said privately to me myself, namely,
that following the Church of Christ, he accepted what she thought and
retracted his own writings. He therefore attended and our humility received
him kindly and gently and exhorted him to say what he wished. He began
his account by first claiming that the Lavriots, as he said, felt ill-will
towards him. Then we went on to show that what he had said to me privately
was all lies, hypocrisy and guile. For he should rather have said this now
before the holy synod, and on the one hand anathematize his own impious
and lawless writings, and on the other approach the Church of Christ and
seek pardon, and accept what she accepts and thinks and teaches. But he
did quite the opposite, asking for his own works to be brought before the
synod and read, calling what the Church teaches ‘new doctrines’, and
saying that ‘I accept these works written by me; let anyone who wishes to
contradict them come forward, and I will resolve the difficulties in them.’
70 These were the patriarchate’s most senior metropolitans, who signed the Synodal
Tomos after the patriarch.
At the behest, therefore, of our humility, these works were produced and
some parts of them were read, which have been set out above severally, and
other such passages. When these were read, he showed himself strongly in
favour of them and demanded solutions to the difficulties raised by them in
accordance with his teacher Barlaam, who, on saying similar things at the
synod convoked at that time against him, was rejected completely by it, the
canons of the sacred councils having been read, by which it is forbidden
and in no circumstances permissible to people like himself and all others to
instigate any discussion at all on matters of dogma and to impose on others
the necessity of defending them, for this is granted by God to the bishops
alone.71 Since Prochoros also said the same things as Barlaam, he was told
by our humility that so long as he was thus disposed towards the correct
doctrines of the Church and manifestly contradicted them, he would hear
no defence of them or solution from us. For how could we propose a solution
if the sacred teachers of the Church are not accepted by him but are rejected
in the degree that he rejects them? When he asks for pardon and anathe-
matizes his own works and his most evil and impious opinion, and refutes
these in another work, and becomes in all things obedient to the Church
like a pupil, then, if he encounters some difficult question, we are readily
disposed to propose the solution without difficulty from the divine
Scriptures and our God-bearing fathers and teachers. Although he heard
these things he did not accept them, but strongly resisted seeking a solution,
and demanded that his writings should be read. When they were therefore
read, it was clearly apparent that they were full of all kinds of impiety, they
were successively anathematized by the holy synod, but he defended them
strongly, stung by their repudiation.
12. Then, fighting against the most divine light of the Transfiguration,
and wishing to prove that it was created, he says, among other things, that
it was like the light that shone in the face of Moses.72 ‘And that light,’ he
says, ‘and radiance was said by Paul, to be set aside and brought to an
end.’73 When he was asked by our humility to say what he thought, he said:
‘It came into existence and appeared in Moses’ face, then it ceased and
was dissolved and passed into non-existence, and now there is nothing.
The light that shone in Christ’s face was of a similar kind. It was not like
71 Synodal Tomos of 1341, Hunger et al., 214, lines 48–61; § 3 in the translation above.
72 Cf. Exod 34: 30.
73 2 Cor 3: 7.
434 GREGORY PALAMAS
some radiance inherent in God’s essence, but was as if ascribed to the deity
through the divine soul.’
13. To this our humility replied that if the divine Paul said that this was
set aside, he did not say that it was dissolved and passed into non-existence.
For being divine grace and radiance, and the natural energy of the trihypo-
static and almighty deity, it shone in Moses so that the sons of Israel could
not gaze at him in the absence of a veil – so strongly did it illuminate
his face. It remains and exists in perpetuity, and although it ceased in the
face in which it was manifested, it does not itself come to an end. For it
ceases in the sense that it is not manifest there, but not so that it dissolves
into non-existence. Christ did not possess that ineffable glory and most
divine light from outside himself. For the divine John Damascene says:
‘Today the abyss of inaccessible light, today the boundless outpouring of
divine radiance shines on the Apostles on Mount Tabor … . Now things
that cannot be gazed on have appeared to human eyes: an earthly body
radiating the brilliance of divine splendour, a mortal body pouring forth
the glory of the Godhead. “For the Word became flesh”,74 and the flesh
became Word, even if neither of them departed from its own proper nature.
O wonder, exceeding all understanding! Glory did not come upon this body
from outside itself, but from within, from the supradivine deity of God
the Word united to him hypostatically by an ineffable word.’75 And again:
‘But Moses was glorified externally, the glory being bestowed on him
from without; while the Lord Jesus did not possess the radiance of glory
as something acquired, but as coming from the brilliance of the divine
glory that was naturally his own.’76 And the divine Chrysostom says the
following in his homilies on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘We
again, reflecting the Lord’s glory with unveiled faces, are transformed into
the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord Spirit.’77 And after
a little: ‘But what is “reflecting the glory of the Lord, we are transformed
into the same image”?78 This was shown more clearly when the spiritual
gifts of the miracles were operative, only it is not difficult even now to see
74 John 1: 14.
75 John Damascene, Homily on the Transfiguration 2 (Kotter, vol. 5, 437–8); trans. Daley
2013, 206–7.
76 John Damascene, Homily on the Transfiguration 10 (Kotter, vol. 5, 437–8); trans.
Daley 2013, 219.
77 John Chrysostom, Homilies on 2 Corinthians 7, 4 (PG 61, 448).
78 2 Cor 3: 18.
it if one has eyes of faith. For as soon as we are baptized, the soul, purified
by the Spirit, shines even more brightly than the sun. And not only do we
behold the glory of God, but we receive from it a certain splendour. For
just as when pure silver is turned towards the sun’s rays, it too sends out
rays, not from its own nature alone but also from the brilliance of the sun,
so too does the soul, when it has been purified and has become brighter
than silver, receive a ray from the glory of the Spirit and send it back again.
That is also why it says “reflecting the same image”, we are transformed
by reason of the glory of the Spirit to our own glory which is engendered
in us, and that is such glory as is appropriate from the Lord the Spirit.’79
And again from the same homily: ‘Do you want to see this shining even
through the body? “Gazing intently at Stephen’s face”, it says, ‘they saw
that it was like the face of an angel”,80 but this was nothing in comparison
with the brilliance flashing from within. For what Moses had on his face,
that is what these carried around on their souls, or rather, even much
more.’81 When his own writings were read, he was found to say that the
light of the Transfiguration is not that which the just are to enjoy, but this
is what the wicked will also see. And he cites Augustine, supposedly as a
witness, misinterpreting his text which says: ‘Whereas both the good and
the wicked will see the judge of the living and the dead, it is beyond any
doubt that the wicked will not see him otherwise than in the form in which
he is the son of man, but nevertheless in his glory in accordance with which
he judges, not in his humility in accordance with which he was judged.’82
And when he was asked how he understood ‘in his glory’, he said the glory
of the only-begotten Son of God, which with the Father and the Spirit he
possesses as naturally created, and which appeared in the face of Christ
on the mountain, by which the wicked will see him. But our humility said
that that is not what the text means. What the divine Augustine says is
that the wicked will not see the Lord in his humility in the way he was
condemned, subjected to insult, mockery, dishonour and contempt, but in
his glory and honour, that is, as the judge of all. For this is what Augustine
himself adds, saying, ‘In his glory in accordance with which he judges, not
in his humility in accordance with which he was judged.’ Thus glory is not

80 Acts 6: 15.
82 Augustine, On the Trinity I, xiii, 28, which had been translated at the end of the
thirteenth century by Maximos Planoudes (Papathomopoulos et al., 103).
436 GREGORY PALAMAS
the one which is common to the trihypostatic Godhead, and which at that
time shone in the face of Christ, but another form of his glory, that is to say,
the glory in which he will come as a judge to judge the living and the dead.
‘For the Father judges no one’, it says, ‘but has given all judgement to the
Son, so that all may honour the Son just as they honour the Father.’83 But
Prochoros was a shield against these things, blocking his ears so as not to
hear a voice singing out the divine utterances.
14. With regard, then, to these and to the other texts that were read, he
denies in them that there is any difference at all between divine essence and
divine energy, but says that there are many created divinities, slandering
even the holy Dionysius as purportedly saying this.84 From all these, then,
or rather simply from the titles of his writings it was assuredly necessary
to excommunicate him and to place him under anathema as alien to the
Church of Christ. But our humility and the holy and great synod gathered
around us, showing the Church’s customary benevolence, and expecting
his return, both granted him the opportunity to present a defence and
permitted him to say such things at the synod.
15. At the instigation of our humility the reports on him by the
Hagiorites were also read together with his pittakion to the most holy
hegoumenos, which contained countless absurdities written in his own
hand. For he said: ‘I have succeeded in being received by the emperors
and the patriarch who believed that what has been done to me is the
result of injustice, slander and envy’,85 referring in this manner to what
he rightly suffered there at the hands of the Lavriots. Concerning the
things he said, he heard from me that these were utterly perverse, and
he himself purportedly submitted them to the Church. Then after a little:
‘And with regard to the Tomos and the accusations of the Lavriots, we
easily exonerated ourselves in the following way. When the patriarch
earnestly entreated us to say whether we had attacked anything in
Palamas’ writings, I gave him two treatises and he has had these for two
months now and has not yet challenged anything. In addition, he shows
us the greatest respect and love, and admires our wisdom, and shows our
writings to learned men in the Church, seeking a common consensus on
Palamas’ doctrines. As a result they anathematize and excommunicate
all those who provoke me to write, since through them the Church is
83 John 5: 22–3.
84 Cf. Prochoros Kydones, On Essence and Energy VI, 10–11 (Candal 1954, 270–2).
85 Prochoros Kydones, Letter to Iakobos Trikanas (Rigo 2004, 80, fragment B.1).
brought into extreme danger. And they ask me to resolve the controversy
and deliver the Church from painful distress. So that I would not give in,
they made me a common loan of hyperpera.86 They gave me for the time
being forty hyperpera so that I should be able to last through the winter
here, the emperor Kantakouzenos and the patriarch having given consid-
erable thought to this, so that I should be able to mount a defence without
being under economic pressure, for it was until then that they requested
me to remain in attendance.’87 That is what he said in his own words,
completely contrary to what he was saying to me, and moreover falsely
and without any substance. We therefore hesitated to add more, but from
what was manifestly false and self-contradictory it was also necessary
to know the rest. Below he goes on to say: ‘You speak and accuse me in
trite terms, and I believe that the patriarch is possibly much greater than
your holiness, and I contradict him now also in writing, and again he does
not confound me in the way that you present yourself. Rather, indeed, he
gave me his writings, as he said, in order that they might be burned.’88
And after a little: ‘You have accused me and in the meantime until today
I am uncondemned, but you are accused of indescribable heresies, for the
confession which you demanded from my brother I brought here,89 and it
was found by the synod to contain only four heresies: one, that it said that
human beings become gods in reality and truth, just as Christ was human
being in reality and truth.90 The second heresy it contained was that it
said that the prophets saw God in reality and in truth, not typologically
and symbolically.91 For if God was seen by human beings as a leopard,
and a lion, and a lamb, and a pearl, and as seated, and as the ancient of
days, and these were not types and symbols, but God was these things in
reality and truth, what would be more wretched than the Christian faith?
The third heresy is that you said that the light on Tabor was not created
and uncreated, mortal and immortal, transient and eternal.92 For you are
86 The hyperperon was a gold coin that ceased to be minted in the mid-fourteenth century,
becoming thereafter an accounting standard. Prochoros seems to have received the physical
coins.
89 This is the Profession of Faith of the Athonite Monks, critical ed. Italian translation in
Rigo 2004, 144–7.
90 Cf. the Profession of Faith of the Athonite Monks 4 (Rigo 2004, 144).
438 GREGORY PALAMAS
ignorant, it seems, of the duality of Christ’s nature and the unity of his
hypostasis. At the fourth, when you said that the energy of God was seen
as light, everyone laughed. Because they did not even know what you were
saying, but the matter was boorish and unintelligent. It is on account of
these things, my lord, not on my account that your holiness and the whole
monastery are treated despitefully as heretics and that you have fallen
yourselves into the pit you dug for me.’93 All these things that he alleged
against the divine synod falsely. For neither did he ever see it convoked,
nor did he ever hear such things said by it, unless perhaps he calls those
who share his own mind and opinions a synod. For they may occasionally
have said these things, those who always take pleasure in such matters
and utter the same things. But we consider those living on the Holy
Mountain as orthodox, as defenders of correct doctrines and as opponents
of heretics, and what he says that confession contains, not as it expounds,
that is what he set forth, but extracted them misleadingly from it. For
it was read to the holy synod and found to be orthodox and containing
nothing meriting censure. What he denounces in this runs verbatim as
follows: ‘I love and accept those who hold that this participation in God
takes place really and in truth in the Spirit, through which human beings
are called prophets, sons of God and gods, just as God really and in truth
became a man. But those who say that God is understood and imagined
as if in a figure, only relatively and by imitation and analogy through the
wisdom that it contemplates in creatures I anathematize. Moreover, I love
and accept those who say that the human heart is purified through the
keeping of the commandments, and that in this way God comes to dwell
in it by his energy and is seen by the worthy as light, which light is called
kingdom of heaven and divine illumination. But those who ridicule them
and make fun of them as enthusiasts, navel-gazers and worshippers of a
new light I anathematize. Moreover, I hold that the visions in the Spirit
which occurred from time to time in the saints such as Isaiah, Habbakuk
and the divine Paul on the road, were really and in truth a hypostatic
radiance. But those who say that they were products of the imagination
I anathematize. Moreover, I believe and hold that the light of Christ’s
transfiguration on Tabor is uncreated and eternal, deity without beginning
or end, natural ray, essential and divine energy, radiance and brightness
and lovable beauty of the deity of God the Word. But those who say that it
is both created and uncreated, both visible and invisible, both mortal and
immortal, and again a sensible symbol, an apparition and hallucination
more feeble than mental concepts I anathematize.’94
16. When Prochoros was asked concerning the divine light how one
and the same thing can be both created and uncreated, he said: ‘Because
Christ is uncreated and created. For just as he is twofold, that is, God and
man, and on the one hand is uncreated as God and on the other created as
man, so too that light which shone from the created and uncreated Christ
must itself be created and uncreated.’95
17. ‘But Christ,’ our humility said, ‘is composite from divinity and
humanity, and since for this reason both sets of characteristics are preserved,
he is created and uncreated; but that light is a single reality and belongs to
Christ’s divinity, or rather is the radiance and illumination of the trihypo-
static deity, and not of the flesh. Nor does the flesh possess light in its
own right. So how can the light be both uncreated and created?’ To this he
replied: ‘But I understand the light to be Christ himself, the only-begotten
Son of God along with out humanity which he assumed, and that is why I
call him both uncreated and created.’ Our humility said: ‘So, then, in your
writings which were read out a little earlier, where you tried to maintain
that the light was only created, you were referring to Christ himself, the
only-begotten Son of God who became man for our sake. You were saying
that in your view he was only created, not created and uncreated. Why, then,
should we exclude only Arius when you blasphemously agree with him, or
rather, when what you say is far worse and more absurd? You cannot deny
that you said this. Your writings clearly demonstrate it.’ He said nothing
in reply to this, nor did he wish to hear the words of the divine father John
Damascene, who says explicitly: ‘He who is always glorified in this way,
and who radiates with the brilliance of the Godhead, was transfigured in
the presence of his disciples. Begotten without beginning from the Father,
he possesses without beginning the natural splendour of the Godhead, and
the glory of the Godhead also becomes the glory of the body.’96 And again:
‘“And his face,” it says, “shone like the sun.”97 Not that it was less brilliant,
for it is impossible to form an image of uncreated being within creation, but
94 Cf. the Profession of Faith of the Athonite Monks 4 (Rigo 2004, 144–6).
95 Cf. Prochoros Kydones, On Essence and Energy VI (Candal 1954, 284).
96 John Damascene, Homily on the Transfiguration 12 (Kotter, vol. 5, 449–50); trans.
Daley 2013, 220.
97 Matt 17: 22.
440 GREGORY PALAMAS
because this was how much the onlookers were capable of seeing.’98 Nor
did he wish to hear the great Athanasius saying: ‘No human being can see
the bare essence of God in any way whatsoever. Accordingly, it is evident
that the saints saw not the essence of God but his glory, just as it is also
written about the apostles, that when Peter and his companions woke up,
they saw his glory.’99
18. Among other things, in his pittakion to the most holy hegoumenos
he also said this about the metropolitan of Thessalonike that is, the holy
Gregory, that our humility did not write to the Holy Mountain for his feast
to be celebrated, nor is such a feast celebrated here, wherefore I did not
permit him to be judged synodically either with those sent from there, the
most honourable hieromonk kyr Malachias and the most honourable monk
kyr Job, since I was preserving the honour of the holy Lavra that it should
not incur dishonour through acting in a uncanonical manner.100 In view of
this, our humility has judged it necessary to say something about it.
19. I said, then, that I hold that saintly and God-bearing man, I mean the
holy Gregory, to be a saint, both from the wonderful manner of life that he
led, a life equal to that of the angels, and the great struggles he undertook
against the passions and the demons, as I knew myself from intimate
personal knowledge of him, and also from the struggles he undertook
nobly on behalf of the holy Church of Christ, defending it and supporting
it in his writings, speeches and debates, and in any way he was able – this
man I hold to be a saint, in no way inferior to the God-bearing fathers,
those great doctors of the Church. And my encomia on him, carefully
worked out in canons and hymns, bear witness to this, as does his Life in
the category of encomia written by me. I took the greatest care to obtain
accurate information, and I love and honour him as a saint as a result of
his miracles, which he worked here after his departure to God, proving his
tomb to be a fount of healing. Wishing personally to gather information
about these, not because I had any doubts about them, for I know that his
life is worthy of doing such things, but for the sake of those who doubted
them or disbelieved them, I instructed my brother, the megas oikonomos
of that Church, to review and investigate some of his miracles and write
98 John Damascene, Homily on the Transfiguration 13 (Kotter, vol. 5, 451); trans. Daley
2013, 222.
99 Ps.-Athanasius, Questions to the Duke Antiochus 28 (PG 28, 613D–616A).
100 A passage from Prochoros Kydones, Letter to Iakobos Trikanas, paraphrased by
Philotheos (Rigo 2004, 80).
to me about them. He was reluctant to do this before personally seeing

those who had been healed and had experienced miracles, and taking
down a testimony from them that what was being said was true. It was thus
that he wrote to me and sent me these, having accepted the witnesses as
trustworthy. Moreover, when the patriarch who was my predecessor heard
of these, he wrote to the bishops of the Church of Thessalonike, and to the
ecclesiastics, that they should meet together and investigate the generally
accepted and evident miracles, write them down and sign them and send
them to him.101 They did as he asked, meeting together with the knowledge
and by the decree of that blessed and holy lady the mother of my sovereign
and holy emperor,102 and summoning those who had been healed, carefully
took down from them their testimony that what was said about them was
true. When they had recorded these things and signed them, they sent
them to my predecessor, as the letter recently issued by me also witnesses.
For this reason I too, when I was living privately at the monastery of the
Akataleptos,103 celebrated a splendid and great feast in honour of this saint,
having with me the singers of the Great Church and many of the clergy.
And now that I have returned to this lofty throne,104 since the Lavriots
wrote and consulted me about him, I wrote in reply that anyone who wished
may celebrate him privately. And now I say this, that anyone who wants
to celebrate a feast in his honour may do so without hindrance, privately
as I said. We did not do this in the Great Church, and not at all in the
churches anywhere else, because we had not yet communicated this to the
Holy Synod, nor had we given a public decision and judgement that the
feast should be celebrated. This is the usual practice with the saints whom
God glorifies, as also happened in the case of St Athanasios the ecumenical
patriarch.105 For since God had glorified him through the miracles, and he
101 The patriarch Kallistos I wrote to the episcopal synod of Thessalonike, the metropolis
being sede vacante.
102 The empress Anna Palaiologina, who was then living in Thessalonike, which had been
granted to her as an appanage.
103 Philotheos is referring to the ten years from 1354 to 1364 between his two patriar-
chates. The Akataleptos monastery was in the north-east of the city near the Golden Horn.
Its church still survives as the Eski Imaret Camii.
104 Philotheos’ second patriarchate began on 8 October 1364.
105 Athanasios I (patriarch 1289–93 and 1303–39), ‘canonized’ (i.e. inserted into the
calendar of the Great Church) some time between 1315 and 1368. See Macrides 1981, 82–7.
Philotheos confirms that the synodal proclamation of sanctity was the final step before a
saint could be included in the festal calendar of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia.
442 GREGORY PALAMAS
had not yet been proclaimed by the Church, the monks of his monastery
had been celebrating his feast magnificently and had been bringing his
icon into the Great Church on the Sunday of Orthodoxy and carrying it
in the other processions through the whole city for many years. Once the
holy synod had pronounced on this, the feast was also celebrated in the
Great Church. This has also happened in the same way in the case of many
other holy men and women whose precious relics lie in many of the holy
monasteries of this queen of cities, and whose feasts are celebrated by those
who wish to do so, even though the Church has not yet declared this. This,
then, is what has now taken place in the case of the holy Gregory. For how
can we not consider him a saint and God-bearing when God has glorified
him thus through miracles, so that many celebrate his feast splendidly in
other cities, and especially in Thessalonike, and some churches have been
erected in his name in Kastoria, and elsewhere many feasts have been
celebrated by the whole population in his honour? I therefore consider
him a saint, and a doctor of the Church, and one of the great teachers and
God-bearing fathers, which the divine synod has accepted and approved.
20. The matter having advanced thus far, and Prochoros having strongly
insisted on defending his own writings, and strongly and obstinately
justifying them, the holy synod considered it necessary to declare what
opinion it had of him. And when each of the most holy metropolitans and
most reverend bishops was questioned, all said that whereas his written
works and he himself when present appeared to hold many impious and
unlawful opinions, and thought them, declared them and committed them
to writing, and not only followed the most evil opinions and Barlaam and
Akindynos, but others too, and was the father and inventor of many heresies,
unless he genuinely repented, anathematized his own works, and wrote
others in defence of our holy faith, we do not accept him as a priest, since he
is a defender and inventor of many absurd heresies, but simply as a Christian.
And if he remains unrepentant and incorrigible, we also consider him
deposed from any priestly activity and excommunicate him, in accordance
with the judgement and decision on these matters of the Synodal Tomos.
For he seems to be much more seriously and absurdly ill than Barlaam and
Akindynos, so much so that he even brought his own works voluntarily
and gave them to the Church, not so that they would be rejected by it or
accepted, for that is what he said falsely and dishonestly, but he presented
them thus shamelessly against the Church, and for this reason must incur the
highest penalty. With regard to all this, our humility, being bound to apply
the authority of the holy synod’s decision, is itself of the same opinion as that
which was then said against him, and says: I was still desiring his return and
amendment, when I asked him now he responded to the declaration of the
holy synod. He requested a day’s grace, so that after reflection he could give
his response on the following day. He said this as a pretext, so as to escape
from the synod. Until then he had not declared his own mind, but when he
left, he addressed the synod more freely about our correct faith and his own
most pernicious works. When he says in regard to them that we do not have
the faith by revelation, the divine synod said: ‘We have not discovered the
faith for ourselves, but we possess it by learning it from our divine fathers
and teachers, who possess it by revelation, and through it we hope to find
salvation. With regard to Aristotelian syllogisms, of which he thinks highly,
and, which he calls “light”, we value them neither as a principle nor as a
means of approach. At the earlier holy and ecumenical council, I mean the
sixth, the divine fathers constituting that assembly immediately rejected
them as soon as they were set forth, saying that there is nothing in common
between them and the evangelical and apostolic sayings.’
21. The then divine and holy synod then having been dissolved because
on the next day Prochoros did not come as he had promised, after the
third day notice was served on him by our humility through the most
honourable patriarchal notaries of our most holy Great Church of God,
kyr George Matzoukatos and kyr Demetrios Gemistos.106 Not only did he
not wish to respond, but he continued to be opposed in the same way as
at the synod where he insisted on what he had written and expressed the
same thoughts, saying: ‘Whatever the patriarch and the synod wish to do
against me, let them do it.’ After this the holy synod was convened again
for another ecclesiastical task, and the matter under discussion having also
been raised, what had been written perniciously against the defenders of
the Church was read, in which the shameless one calls them tradesmen and
cooks, though it is he who trades in the divine sayings. Thereupon the holy
synod pronounced the sentence of deposition on him again, as it had done
earlier, and excommunicated him, requesting that the anathema should be
proclaimed publicly from the pulpit. In the meantime, however, it held this
in abeyance for the present, so that if he did not repent later only then
would it come into force. And our humility expressed its consent to the
judgement and sentence against him as irrevocable and irremediable, and
itself anathematized him many times. But again with the anticipation of
106 Demetrios Gemistos (PLP 3631), a well-known patriarchal notary, was possibly the
father of the philosopher George Gemistos Plethon; cf. Woodhouse 1986, 17.
444 GREGORY PALAMAS
his repentance it served notice on him through the most honourable megas
skeuophylax of our most holy Great Church and dikaiophylax, the deacon
kyr George Perdikes,107 the most reverend bishop of Boreia Potamia,108 and
the most honourable hieromonk kyr Gregory, but these he repelled as he
had done previously. Therefore, on this account, our humility, together with
the holy and great synod of most holy metropolitans and most reverend
bishops around us, holds the frequently aforementioned Prochorus, as no
less guilty than Barlaam and Akindynos, but thinking the same thoughts
and writing the same things, or rather thinking and writing much worse,
more absurd and more impious things than they, dismissed and deposed
in perpetuity from all priestly functions, and puts him under anathema in
accordance with the decree of the sacred Synodal Tomos, which thus lays
down explicitly: ‘Moreover, if anyone else at all is ever detected thinking,
speaking or writing against the most holy metropolitan of Thessalonike,
or rather against the holy theologians of the Church, we decree the same
penalties against him and subject him to the same condemnation, whether
he belongs to the ordained clergy or to the laity.’109 In accordance, then,
with this decree, seeing that we find him thus disposed, we consider him
deposed and we place him too under anathema, and all who think like him
and hold the same opinions as him and his followers, whether they follow
him in the things he blasphemes or defend him and his writings, and we
consider excommunicated all who knowingly are in communion with him.
If, however, he genuinely repents, as already said, and refutes his most
pernicious writings in another work and anathematizes them, even if we do
not accept him as a priest, since he has been the originator and inventor of
new and strange heresies, we nevertheless will treat him as a Christian of
our own communion, in accordance with the decree in this sacred Tomos.
22. We hold this sacred Synodal Tomos, which this man supposedly
attempted to refute, or rather brought down upon his own head, to be a
pillar of orthodoxy, and an irreproachable canon of the sound doctrines of
our holy faith, and an explication and exegesis of the sacred gospels and of
the divine symbol of the faith, and we pray that we shall depart this life in
the company of the doctrines contained in it. As for those who dwell on the
Holy Mountain of Athos, not only do we hold them superior to all who are
107 PLP 22438.

108 Theophylact (PLP 7666), a suffragan of Ephesus. In the following year he became
metropolitan of Tenedos.
109 The Synodal Tomos of 1351, § 51.
opposed to them, or rather those who dispute sophistically with them, but
we declare them the most reliable defenders and champions of the Church
and of piety, and pursuers of heretics and hold what has been written to
us by them to be sound and orthodox in every respect. In addition to this,
our humility acting with synodical authority instructs everybody that no
one should ever be detected vindicating him in any way at all, or sending
him letters wherever he happens to be living, or being received by him. If
anyone at all, of whatever list of class or rank he happens to be, whether
that of the ordained and the monastic, or that of the laity, thinks, speaks and
writes the same things as he does against the Hagiorites, or rather against
the Church itself, and expresses the same blasphemies and opinions, or
vindicates him in any way, and feels sorry about his condemnation, not out
of compassion but because he shares his pernicious and impious opinions,
we impose the same penalties on him and place him under the same
sentence and anathema. Indeed, we hold this frequently aforementioned
Prochoros, seeing that such is his disposition and such are his blasphemies
that he goes so far as to dare to say that the flesh which God the Word
assumed was in no way whatsoever without sin, nor was it perfect from its
very assumption but a means to perfection, to be excommunicated once
and for all from the entire Church of the faithful as the begetter of new and
strange heresies which no heretic since the incarnate presence of Christ
has had the audacity to utter. Therefore and on account of these things
the sentence imposed on him, unless by some chance he should repent,
has been confirmed and what has recently been determined by us with
synodical authority will be deemed secure and certain in every respect. The
present Tomos, being wholly in concord with the Synodal Tomoi preceding
it, will also be deemed secure and certain. And this same decision, lawful
in every respect and in accordance with the canons, having been recently
written and signed, will be kept unalterable for all eternity by the energy
and grace of the Almighty, who can accomplish all things, our great God
and Saviour, in the year six thousand eight hundred and seventy six, in the
month of April of the current sixth indiction.110
23. The text also bore the signature in the patriarchal and divine hand of
Philotheos, by the grace of God archbishop of Constantinople New Rome
and ecumenical patriarch.111
110 April 1368.

111 For a discussion of the signatories of the Tomos, see Rigo 2004, 72–7.
446 GREGORY PALAMAS
+ The humble metropolitan of Caesarea of Cappadocia, panhypertimos

and exarch of all Anatolia, Methodios.
+ The humble metropolitan of Ephesus, hypertimos and exarch of all
Asia, Theodoretos.
+ The humble metropolitan of Kyzikos hypertimos and exarch of all the
Hellespont, Arsenios.
+ The humble metropolitan of Chalcedon, hypertimos and exarch of all
Bithynia, Iakobos.
+The humble metropolitan of Bizye, and locum tenens of Stavroupolis,
Neophytos.
+ The humble metropolitan of Brysis, Theodoretos.
+ The humble bishop of Boreia Potamia, Theophylact.
+ The humble bishop of Panion, Ignatios.
+ The humble bishop of Peristasis, Dionysios.
+ The humble metropolitan of Caesarea of Cappadocia, hypertimos of
the hypertimoi and exarch of all Anatolia, Theodoulos.
+ The humble metropolitan of Tyana and hypertimos, Matthew.
Even though we were present in this queen of cities but on account of some
circumstance or impediment were unable to join the all-holy lord and
ecumenical patriarch, our beloved brother and colleague in the Holy Spirit,
and the holy and great synod gathered around him when the matters set out
herein were discussed synodically, when later we saw the present Tomos
drawn up and signed by them, we too read it carefully and seeing that it
was in agreement and harmony with the sound doctrines of the Church of
Christ, and with the holy and sacred Synodal Tomos drawn up previously
against the heresies of Barlaam and Akindynos, which we too had signed
earlier, we too accept this Tomos in everything it says, and we hold it to
be in harmony with the correct doctrines of the Church and the earlier
Synodal Tomos, and the monk Prochoros Kydones excommunicated as a
heretic by it we hold to be dismissed and deposed for life, unless he repents,
and we place him under anathema. Wherefore we subscribe to the present
Tomos for the sake of assurance.
+ Niphon by the grace of God pope and patriarch of Alexandria, the
Pentapolis, Libya, Ethiopia and ecumenical judge.
+ Lazaros by the grace of God patriarch of Jerusalem, Aelia Sion, all
Palestine, Syria, Arabia, Transjordan and Cana of Galilee.
+ The humble metropolitan of Herakleia, Joseph.

+ Not being present myself at the holy synod but absent, but having come
and gone through the present synodal act, and accepted it and embraced it,
I subscribe: the humble bishop of Peritheorion, Dorotheos.
+ And I too, not being present at the holy synod but absent, and having come
later and gone through the present synodal act, drawn up against the monk
Prochoros Kydones, having accepted and embraced it, have subscribed: the
humble metropolitan of Selymbria and hypertimos, Philotheos.
+ The humble metropolitan of Gotthia and hypertimos, Metrophanes.
+ The megas sakellarios and teacher of teachers and archdeacon, Theodore
Meliteniotes.
+ The megas skeuophylax and dikaiophylax, deacon George Perdikes.
+ The megas ekklesiarches and dikaiophylax, presbyter John Phylax.
+ The protekdikos of the most holy Great Church of God, presbyter
Theodosios Matzoukatos.
+ The epi ton kriseon, presbyter Michael Teichmenos.
+ The patriarchal notary George Matzoukatos.
+ The patriarchal notary Demetrios Gemistos.
+ The patriarchal notary John Holobolos.
GLOSSARY
Glossary
Adelphaton A purchased right to live in a monastery without becoming a monk.

Akolouthia The office for a feast.
Apodictic proof In logic, an argument from axioms that are self-evident. If the
axioms are simply commonly accepted, the argument is dialectic, not apodictic.
Beg An alternative term for an emir.
Beglik The territory of a beg.
Bogomilism A Balkan heresy named after the tenth-century Bulgarian priest
Bogomil (= Theophilos), dualist in its attribution of the material world to the
work of Satan and docetic in its Christology.
Chionai A Muslim sect, apparently of former Christians, with Judaizing tendencies.
Chrysobull A document bearing the emperor’s gold bulla.
Consistory A plenary meeting (strictly, the hall in which the meeting was
convened) of the senate and other advisors of the emperor. One of its principal
functions was the promulgation of laws.
Danişmend A schoolman. The medrese-trained schoolmen formed the ulema, the
educated elite who administered the law and filled posts in what was to become
the state bureaucracy.
Despot A title, created in the twelfth century, for members of the imperial family and
ranking immediately after the emperor. In the fourteenth century it indicated
the holder of an imperial appanage, principally that of the Peloponnese.
Dikaiophylax A cleric with judicial duties conferred by imperial appointment.
Dikaios An agent of the protos on Mount Athos.
Ekklesiarches A monastic official who prepared the church for services, supervised
the singing, and maintained discipline in the church.
Epi ton kriseon An official in the civil administration charged with the review of
cases judged outside the capital. From the signatory of the epi ton kriseon at
the end of the Synodal Tomos of 1368, it appears that there was a parallel office
in the patriarchal chancery.
450 GREGORY PALAMAS
Epistemonarches The disciplinary officer in a monastery, but also applied to the

emperor in his role as disciplinary supervisor of the Church.
Exarch An honorary title given to metropolitans, which originally meant a
primate.
Filioque The term referring (a) to the (anti-Arian) doctrine that emerged in the
Carolingian empire that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son
(Filioque), and (b) to the unilateral addition of the word Filioque to the Creed
by the Roman Church at the beginning of the eleventh century.
Gaza Sporadic raiding of the ‘abode of the infidel’ in order to expand ‘the abode of
Islam’ (to be distinguished from the more defensive jihad, and not obligatory
like jihad).
Gazi A holy warrior who engages in gaza.
Hadith An authoritative collection of sayings of the prophet Muhammad.
Hegoumenos The head of a coenobitic monastery or skete.
Hesychast A monk living as a solitary or as a member of skete who practises
hesychia (q.v.). Many hesychasts were attached to a coenobium, where they
attended the Liturgy on Saturdays and Sundays.
Hesychia Literally ‘tranquillity’, the stilling of external disturbance, generally
through the practice of monastic solitude, in order to facilitate the ascent of
the mind to God.
Hetaireiarches A middle-ranking military title, which in the fourteenth century
implied control over non-imperial subjects.
Hieromonk A monk ordained as a priest.
Horismos An imperial decree (literally ‘definition’) synonymous with prostagma.
Hyperperon See nomisma.
Hypertimos Literally ‘most honourable’, an honorific title applied to metropolitans.
Jesus Prayer The prayer, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me
a sinner’, based on Matthew 9: 27 and Luke 18: 38, the constant repetition
of which, since at least the seventh century, was at the core of the practice of
hesychasm.
Kyr An abbreviated form of kyris or kyrios (lord) used as a title of respect, but
rarely for the emperor or the higher aristocracy.
Medimnos Another term for the modios as a measurement for grain. There were
different kinds of modioi, the sea modios being equivalent to 17.084 litres.
Medrese A collegial establishment for the teaching of jurisprudence and the
training of scholars in the application of Islamic law.
GLOSSARY 451
Megas chartophylax The chartophylax was head of the patriarchal chancery and
principal assistant to the patriarch. The prefix megas was added at the end of
the twelfth century.
Megas domestikos The emperor’s supreme military commander.
Megas doux Since the end of the eleventh century, the commander of the imperial
fleet, ranking next after the megas domestikos.
Megas oikonomos The oikonomos (q.v.) of a major see.
Megas skeuophylax The keeper of the sacred vessels at the Great Church of Hagia
Sophia.
Mesazon The emperor’s trusted chief minister. Philotheos describes the mesazon
as one who ‘managed affairs between the emperor and the common Roman
people’ (Encomium, §11).
Messalianism The pietistic heresy of the Messalians (or Euchites), who taught that
salvation depended on the expulsion by constant prayer of the demon dwelling
within each person’s soul. Although condemned at the Council of Ephesus in
431, it survived into much later times. The term was also sometimes applied
by Byzantine writers to the more strictly dualist heresy of the Paulicians and
Bogomils.
Noetic prayer The form of prayer defined by the hesychasts as ‘the union of the
mind with the heart’ which led ultimately to the vision of divine glory.
Nomisma The standard gold coin (more fully nomisma hyperperon, ‘coin of highly
refined gold’), which by the mid-fourteenth century was no longer an actual
currency but a money of account.
Oikonomos The official which the Council of Chalcedon (451) decreed should be
appointed to supervise the financial administration of each diocese.
Panhypersebastos A title dating from the end of the eleventh century indicating
high rank in the imperial hierarchy. John Kantakouzenos as megas domestikos
was also panhypersebastos.
Pittakion A short formal document normally issued as a letter from the patriarchal
or imperial chanceries.
Prostagma A brief imperial directive.
Protekdikos The title of an official of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia whose
especial competence concerned cases of asylum claimed there.
Protos The head of all the monasteries on Mount Athos elected by a general
synaxis (q.v.).
Referendarios A notary (a ‘referendary’) who bore messages from the patriarch
to the emperor.
452 GREGORY PALAMAS
Sakellarios In the fourteenth century a patriarchal official entrusted with the

supervision of monasteries in Constantinople.
Sebastokrator A title created under the Komnenoi which was conferred on
members of the imperial family.
Skete A small monastery, typically consisting of a few kellia and hesychasteria
(simple detached cells, loosely grouped around a central church).
Skeuophylax The keeper of the sacred vessels in an important church.
Synaxis An assembly, liturgical or otherwise, usually of monks. On Mount Athos
the general assemblies (katholikai synaxeis) consisted of senior monks drawn
from a representative number of monasteries.
Synekdemos Literally ‘fellow traveller’, the principal assistant of the Protos.
Synodal Tomos A document summarizing the proceedings of a synod or council
and the judgement reached by it, to which the participants have added their
signatures.
Synodikon of Orthodoxy A liturgical document, read out on the Sunday of
Orthodoxy (the first Sunday of Lent), anathematizing ancient and contem-
porary heretics.
Tasimanes The Hellenized form of the Turkish danişmend, a schoolman of the
medrese (q.v.).
Tekvur The Turkish term for a local Christian lord in a frontier area owing
allegiance to the beg.
Typikon The foundation charter of monastery that laid down the rule of life and
liturgical practices of the community.
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Russell, Norman (2003), ‘Palamism and the Circle of Demetrios Cydones’, in
Charalambos Dendrinos et al., eds, Porphyrogenita. Essays on the History and
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(Aldershot: Ashgate), 153–74.
Russell, Norman (2006), ‘Prochoros Cydones and the Fourteenth-century
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eds, Byzantine Orthodoxies. Papers from the Thirty-sixth Spring Symposium
of Byzantine Studies, University of Durham, 23–25 March 2002 (Aldershot:
Ashgate Variorum), 75–91.
Russell, Norman (2009), ‘The Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos and His Defence of
Hesychasm’, in Eugenia Russell, ed., Spirituality in Late Byzantium: Essays
Presenting New Research by International Scholars (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 21–31.
Russell, Norman (2011), ‘The “Gods” of Psalm 81 (82) in the Hesychast Debates’,
in A. Andreopoulos, A. Casiday, and C. Harrison, eds, Meditations of the
Heart: The Psalms in Early Christian Thought and Practice. Essays in Honour
of Andrew Louth (Turnhout: Brepols), 243–56.
Russell, Norman (2012), ‘One Faith, one Church, One Emperor: The Byzantine
Approach to Ecumenicity and its legacy’, IJSCC 12/2, 122–30.
Russell, Norman (2015), ‘The Christological Context of Palamas’ Approach
to Participation in God’, in Constantinos Athanasopoulos, ed., Triune God
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 190–8.
Russell, Norman (2017), ‘The Hesychast Controversy’, in Anthony Kaldellis and
Niketas Siniossoglou, eds, The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 494–508.
Russell, Norman (2019), Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the
Modern Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Ryder, Judith R. (2010), The Career and Writings of Demetrius Kydones: A Study
of Fourteenth-century Byzantine Politics, Religion and Society (Leiden: Brill).
Sahas, Daniel J. (1980), ‘Captivity and Dialogue: Gregory Palamas (1296–1360)
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Saint-Guillain, Guillaume (2006/7), ‘Manouèl Kydônès (vers 1300–1341),
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Sinkewicz, Robert E. (1980), ‘A New Interpretation for the First Episode in the
Controversy between Barlaam the Calabrian and Gregory Palamas’, JTS
n.s. 31/2, 489–500.
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470 GREGORY PALAMAS
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INDEX OF CITATIONS FROM THE FATHERS
AND OTHER ANCIENT TEXTS
INDEX OF CITATIONS
Aeschylus Questions to the Duke Antiochus

Agamemnon 177 89 28 440
Anastasius of Sinai Sermon on the Annunciation of the
Hodegos II 356 Mother of God
unidentified passage 366 § 2 289
Ps.-Anastasius of Sinai (Theodore of § 3 241
Rhaithu) § 5 357
On the Uncircumscribable II 349 Augustine
Andrew of Crete On the Trinity I, xiii, 28 435
Homily on the Transfiguration
220–1 Basil of Caesarea
Aristotle Against Eunomius I–III
Categories 238 I, 8 337
Metaphysics V, 24 350 I, 20 351, 359
Topics I, 9 426 I, 23 352
Athanasius of Alexandria II, 23 357
Discourses against the Arians II, 24 347
II, 1 359 II, 29 354
III, 62 359 II, 32 361
Letter to Rufinianus 307n48 Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah,
Letters to Serapion I–IV Prooimion 3 362
I, 27 240 Homilies on the Hexaemeron I, 7,
I, 30 366 3 357
unidentified passage 222–3 Homilies on the Psalms, Psalm 48,
Ps.-Athanasius of Alexandria 7 365
Against the Arians Letters, Ep. 234, 1 222
IV, 3 350 On the Holy Spirit
IV, 10 350 IX, 22 254, 257
Against the Sabellians 12 349 XIII, 29 235
Dialogues against the Macedonians XVI, 39 365
I, 14 360 XIX, 48–9 354, 359
Dialogues on the Trinity II, 27 350 XXVI, 61 238
472 GREGORY PALAMAS
Ps.-Basil of Caesarea Doctrina Patrum de Incarnatione

Against Eunomius IV–V Verbi 355
IV 349
V 253, 262 Evagrius Ponticus
Letter 189, To Eustathius (Gregory Reflections 87
of Nyssa) 245, 246, 258, 341,
355, 356 Gregory the Great
Ps.-Clement Dialogues II, 35 88n207
Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, Gregory of Nazianzus
Prooimion 152 Letters 221
Cyril of Alexandria Orations
Dialogues on the Trinity 4, 113 83
II, 441e 345 18, 26 89
III, 468d 365 21, 1 84
Thesaurus de Sancta et 21, 21 97
Consubstantiali Trinitate 21, 28 144
§ 18 248, 249, 345 27, 4 82
§ 33 366 28, 19 225, 250, 367
28, 20 52
Diadochus of Photike 29, 6 243, 244, 246, 247, 264
On Spiritual Knowledge 29, 10 355
§ 59 227–8 29, 16 357
§ 89 87 30, 20 358
Dionysius the Areopagite 30, 21 261, 361
Divine Names 32, 12 216
I, 1 262 38, 11 252
I, 4 219, 223 39, 2 429
I, 5–6 239 39, 11 335
II, 7 224, 257, 356 40, 3 105
II, 9 89 40, 5 105
IV, 8 84, 362 40, 6 304n44
V, 1 360 41, 3 305
VIII, 2 247 41, 9 239
VIII, 5 344 42, 22 111
XI, 6 245, 254, 257 43, 7 58
XII, 2 356 43, 47 107
XII, 4 360, 426 Gregory of Nyssa
Letters Against Eunomius
Ep. 2 224, 254, 258, 260, 262, II, 1, 167 241
357, 358, 360 III, 1, 108 224
Ep. 5 224 III, 10, 10 355
Mystical Theology § 3 241 On the Beatitudes III 258
INDEX OF CITATIONS 473
On the Creation of Man § 6 354 Ps.-John Chrysostom

On the Divinity of the Son and Homily on the Transfiguration 368
the Holy Spirit 245, 359 Letter to the Monks §§ 2–5 227
On Perfection 255 On the Holy Spirit § 11 224
To Ablabius, that there are not John Climacus
Three Gods 342, 351, 358, Ladder of Divine Ascent
369 Step 4 287
unidentified passage 355 Step 27 10, 228
John Damascene
Hesiod Canon on the Transfiguration 126,
Works and Days 52 224
Homer Homily on the Transfiguration,
Iliad 18, 104, 191, 387 305
Odyssey 71, 265 §§ 2–18 218–20
§ 2 434
Isaac the Syrian § 10 434
Sermons § 12 439
5 92 § 13 440
32 87 On the Orthodox Faith
unidentified passage 101 § 1 214
§ 8 243, 247, 249, 264, 349
John Chrysostom § 36 346
Homilies on the Acts of the § 37 346
Apostles 4 367 § 44 365
Homilies on 2 Corinthians 7 434, § 59 337, 353, 424
435 § 69 244
Homilies on the Incomprehens- Ps.-Justin
ible Nature of God I, 4, 192 Questions of Christians to the
361 Gentiles 346
Homilies on John
5 363 Maximus the Confessor
14 364–5 Ambigua to John
26 347 7 250
30 261, 361 10 222, 225, 261
32 355 21 261
36 363 41 362
51 362, 363 Disputation with Pyrrhus 431
60 345 296B 354
74 345, 425 297A 261
Homilies on Philippians 6 369 341A 353
Homilies on Romans 13 346 Five Centuries of Various Texts I,
unidentified passage 346 7 222, 240, 241, 246, 367
474 GREGORY PALAMAS
Letters, Ep. 13 214 Palladius of Helenopolis

Questions to Thalassius Life of John Chrysostom § 11 134
54 253, 374 Plato
61 221, 222, 358 Phaedo 109b2 428
Relatio motionis (Record of the Proclus Diadochus
Trial) § 8 337 Theologia Platonica II, 4 218
Two Centuries on Theology and the
Economy Symeon the New Theologian
I, 48–50 238 Ethical Discourses XV 10
I, 48 238, 239, 305 Ps.-Symeon the New Theologian
I, 49 240, 360 Three Methods of Prayer 10
I, 50 239
II, 13 222 Thalassius the Libyan
II, 88 223 Centuries IV, 100 238
unidentified passage 360
GENERAL INDEX
GENERAL INDEX
Abraham 160, 228, 410 Akropolites, George 318n87

Adrianople (Edirne) 8, 194, 212, 292 Alexander of Aphrodisias 117n287
council of (May 1346) 301 Alexander the Great 163, 398
Agatho, pope 339 Alexiakon 20, 150, 323, 331–2, 372
Akataleptos monastery Alexios I Komnenos, emperor 332n37,
(Constantinople) 37, 47, 49, 441 338n50
Akindynos, Gregory Allatius, Leo 33, 294
originally a friend of Palamas 16, almsgiving 158, 391
211 Ambrose of Milan 338
becomes a critic of Palamas 17, 18, Amphilochius of Iconium 338
22, 98–9, 117 Anaplous (Arnavutköy?) 5–6, 17
at the council of July 1341 119–21 Anastasius of Sinai 20n65
rises to influence under Kalekas 18, Anaxagoras, philosopher 209
42, 118, 119–21, 123–5, 126–7, Andronikos I Komnenos, emperor
128, 129, 278, 282, 300 342n63
spiritual director in Constantinople Andronikos II Palaiologos, emperor 3,
192n501, 254 40, 54–6, 61–2, 64
teaching contested by Palamas 20, Andronikos III Palaiologos, emperor
235–65 2–3, 11, 17, 20, 40, 42, 55, 56n99,
disciples of 203, 231, 234–5, 254 103n340, 114, 118, 211, 212, 213,
synodical reviews of his career and 225, 228–9, 288, 290, 296
theology 297–300, 304–5, 328, Anna Palaiologina, empress 3, 6, 8, 19,
330–1 42, 43, 44, 127, 135–6, 153, 280,
condemnation and excommuni- 288, 290, 298n28, 299, 301, 302,
cation of 19, 292, 306, 309–10, 305, 309
328n22 Annas 119
Discourse Before John Kalekas Anti-Palamite synod (May 1347) 19,
211 292
Iambic Verses Against Gregory Anti-Palamite Tomos (July 1347) 7, 19,
Palamas 130–2 292, 311–22, 324
Refutatio Magna 125, 235–6, 246, Antonios, protos of Athos 5
255, 256, 257, 259, 368 Antony IV, patriarch of Constantinople
Refutatio Parva 125 33
Akropolites, Constantine 318n87 Antony of Egypt 63n120, 108–9
476 GREGORY PALAMAS
Apokaukos, Alexios 3, 4, 271, 279, 291, Auxentios, Mount (Bithynia) 71

298nn26–7 Avignon 11, 42, 103n240, 118n291
Apokaukos, Euthymios 375
Aquinas, Thomas 25, 29, 30, 32–3, 413, Balabancık see Palapanos
414–15 Balfour, D. 14n46, 74n161, 77n173
Archelaus 119 Barlaam of Calabria
Arethas, archbishop of Caesarea career 10–13, 96–7, 149
238n34 investigates hesychasm 12–13, 15
Aristotle 11, 12, 61–2, 79n178, 97, corresponds with Palamas 16–17
425–6, 443 attacks the hesychasts 97–102, 211,
Arius, heresiarch 98, 260, 295, 296, 214–15
328, 352, 417 lays charges in Constantinople 17,
Arnakis, G. 26n81 41, 107–8, 111–12
Arsenios Autoreianos, patriarch of at council of June 1341 118–19,
Constantinople 47n61 215–16
Arsenios, hesychast 13 synodically condemned 213,
Arsenios, metropolitan of Kyzikos 331, 229–30, 306, 309, 328, 329
374, 432, 446 subsequently vilified 270, 272–4,
Arsenios, metropolitan of Tyre 325n7 276, 296–7, 418
Arsenite schism 47 on the Jesus Prayer 226
Arta 11 on the Transfiguration 217–18,
Asan (Asen) family 284, 332nn37–8 224–5
Asan, Andronikos 332 Against the Latins 12, 97n226
Asan, Manuel 332 Against the Messalians 11, 16–17,
Asan, Michael 332 104, 111n261, 211, 217–18
Asanina, Irene see Irene Asenina On Discourses 16
Kantakouzene On Knowledge 16
ascent, spiritual 86–7 On Light 16
Asen, Andronikos Palaiologos 6 On the Perfection of Man 16
Athanasios I, patriarch of On Prayer 16
Constantinople 47, 415, 441 On the Wisdom of Creation 16
Athanasios of Athos 73n156 Basil of Caesarea 18, 20n65, 206, 270,
Athanasios, metropolitan of Kyzikos 324, 370
301, 308 Basilikon monastery (Thessalonike)
Athanasios of Paros 34, 51, 72n152, 154
142n368 Beïs, N. 38
Athanasius of Alexandria 20n65, 206, Benedict XII, pope 11
338, 370 Benedict of Nursia 88
Athos, Mount 4, 13–15, 40–2, 62, 109, Berroia (Macedonia) 15, 40
140–1, 153, 211, 232, 371–2, 414 Bessarion, monk of the Great Lavra
Atouemes, Theodore 180, 324 (Athos) 232, 233, 285
Augustine of Hippo 435 Bithynia 2, 386
GENERAL INDEX 477
Blachernai palace (Constantinople) Chrysopolis (Üsküdar) 71

6, 7, 17–18, 20, 50, 150, 232, circumcision 169, 407
267n138, 291, 332 Clement VI, pope 42
Black Death 1, 142–3, 321 Clement of Rome (ps.-) 151–2
Blates, Dorotheos 41, 72, 91, 112, 124, Combéfis, F. 326
211 compunction, virtue of 76
Blates, Mark 72n153, 112, 211, 287–8 Constantine V, emperor 66n127
Boethius 30 Constantine IX Monomachos, emperor
Bogomil, Bulgarian priest 66 73n156
Bogomils see Messalianism Constantinople 11, 54, 111, 191–2, 415
Bulgaria 21n67, 66n127 contemplation 83–8, 106
councils
Caiaphas 119 local Constantinopolitan
Candal, M. 415n10 1341 (June) 3, 17, 42, 113–14,
canonization, process of 47–9, 415–16, 118–19, 212–13, 271, 296
440–2 1341 (July) 17, 42, 119–21, 213, 271,
canons, invocation of 216–17, 276, 297
319–20 1347 (2 February) 136, 302, 309
Chalcedon (Kadiköy) 2 1347 (February) 18–19, 24, 43, 136
Chariton, metropolitan of Apros 301, 1351 (May–June) 20, 24, 43, 148–52
308 1368 (April) 31–2
Chionai 27–8, 49, 159, 164, 169, 170, Ecumenical
379, 381, 382, 383, 402–8 First (325) 319
Choniates, deacon 376 Second (381) 341n57
Chora, monastery of (Constantinople) Sixth (680–1) 20, 32, 216–17, 324,
133n338, 204–5 333, 338–40, 353, 431, 443
Choumnaina, Irene-Eulogia 192n501, Seventh (787) 306–7, 320, 372
282, 328n22 cross of Christ 69, 158, 383, 392
Christ, Christology Cyprus 13
in debate with anti-Palamites 107, Cyril of Alexandria 20n65, 206, 338
158, 160, 161, 162, 165, 167–8, Cyril, patriarch of Jerusalem 51
169, 340
in anti-Muslim polemics addressed Daniel, metropolitan of Ainos 331, 375
to Christians 384–5, 388–9, Daniel, prophet 160, 257, 267, 268,
399–400 269, 410
in debate with Muslims 26, 27–8, Daniel, stylite 281
391–3, 403–6 danişmend (schoolman) of Iznik 28,
Christ Philanthropos, monastery of 159–63, 394–9, 409–12
(Constantinople) 192n501 darkness, divine 224
Christou, P. 35, 51, 233–4 Darrouzès, J. 39
Christoupolis 331n34 David, monk 408
Christov, I. 11n29, 21n67 David, prophet 166, 167, 386
478 GREGORY PALAMAS
Decius, emperor 327 energy, divine 338–9, 340–2, 349,

deification 17, 24, 84, 88, 125–6, 220, 355–6, 369–70
221–2, 223–4, 259–63, 357–8, see also essence and energy
401, 417 Ephraim, monk 200
deities, higher and lower see divinities, Epiros 212
higher and lower epistolography, Palaiologan 382n18
deity, meaning of 244–6 Esaias, Athonite monk 13
Demetrios, St 77, 185, 194 Esaias, metropolitan of Selymbria
demons 116 308, 331, 375
dervishes 25, 384 Esphigmenou, monastery of (Athos)
Dexios, Theodore 21, 324, 325, 331 12, 41, 51, 93–5
Didymoteichon 3, 4, 7, 8, 19, 292 essence and energy 20, 21n65, 22–3,
Diocletian, emperor 327 124–5, 203, 232, 236, 237, 239,
Dionysios, bishop of Peristasis 432, 244–6, 248–50, 251–2, 259, 260,
446 263, 295–6, 304, 311–12, 324,
Dionysios, metropolitan of Berroia 337, 343, 344–5, 350, 358–61
331, 375 Euboia 118n291
Dionysios of Paroria 115–16 Euchites see Messalianism
Dionysius the Areopagite 11, 18, Eudokimos, monk of Esphigmenou 41,
20n65, 22, 23, 84, 335 94–5
Dioscorus of Alexandria 98 Eugenios, ecclesiarch of Kareai 4n7
Dishypatos, David 12, 114–15, 212, Eunomius, radical Arian 260, 270,
291, 380n13 351–2, 417
divinities, higher and lower 17, 20, Eusebios, metropolitan of Sougdaia
21n65, 23, 232, 236, 237, 242, 331, 375
246, 275, 289, 312–13, 324, 335, Eutyches, heresiarch 98
336–7, 343–4, 427 exegesis, principles of 251, 263, 265,
doctors (physicians) 164, 189, 190–1, 423–4, 425, 428
193, 198–9
see also Taronites, Konstantinos Fanelli, M. 171n470, 377n1, 378n4,
doctrine, explication of 333n39 380n12
Dorotheos, bishop of Perithorion 447 Filioque, doctrine of 12, 97n227
Dositheos II, patriarch of Jerusalem Florence, Council of (1438–9) 33
34, 213, 293, 326, 416–17 Fyrigos, A. 10n22, 11n24, 96n225,
dreams see visions 97n229, 98n230
Drimys, Gregory 74n161
dynatoi 3 Gabalas, Matthew see Matthew,
Dyobouniotis, K. I. 38 metropolitan of Ephesus
Gabras, John 231–2, 265
Eleodora, nun 154–5 Gabriel, metropolitan of Apros 331,
Elijah, prophet 224 375
Emparis, megas chartophylax 21, 375 Galata 8
GENERAL INDEX 479
Gallipoli see Kallipolis Hagia Sophia, Church of

gaza, gazi 25, 377 (Thessalonike) 188, 200
Gemistos, Demetrios 443, 447 Hagia Sophia, Great Church of
Genoa 8 (Constantinople) 6, 7, 9, 21, 47,
Georgios, metropolitan of Pegai 331, 49, 118, 206, 212, 213, 215, 314
375 Hagioretic Tomos 42, 109, 211, 233,
Gerace (Calabria) 42 237–8, 270–1, 296, 304
Gerasimos, disciple of Gregory of Herakleia (Marmaeǧlisi) 5, 17, 42,
Sinai 13 122n306, 232, 277–8, 284, 331n33
Gerasimos, hieromonk 393–4 Herakleios, emperor 353n102
Gerasimos, protos of Mount Athos 5 Hero, A. C. 202n520
Germanos, metropolitan of Herod 119
Traianoupolis 331, 375 hesychasm 10, 12–14, 17, 29, 71, 226
Gibbon, E. 34 Hesychast Controversy 1, 15–21,
Gilbert de la Porrée 23n74 97–104, 107–9, 111–14, 118–21,
Glabas, Ignatios see Ignatios the 286–7
Hesychast hesychia 10, 69, 76, 79, 83, 88, 98,
Glossia, skete of (Athos) 15, 45, 74 99–101, 103, 107, 108–9, 115
Golden Horde 2 Hierissos, bishop of 17
Gospels 161–2, 396, 410 Hierotheos, metropolitan of Lopadion
Goutas, John 51 301
grace, divine 12, 23–4, 203, 215 Holobos, John 447
Graptos, Theodore 324, 340 Holy Mountain see Athos, Mount
Graptos, Theophanes 340n54 Holy Spirit see Spirit, Holy
Great Lavra (Athos) 15, 16, 30, 49, 50, Holy Trinity see Trinity, Holy
51n80, 73, 83, 205, 233, 413–14, Hodegon, monastery of
418, 419 (Constantinople) 135n346,
Gregoras, Nikephoros 2n1, 4, 8, 11, 19, 301n33
22, 29, 33, 39, 43, 44, 98n230, homoousion, the 352, 357
172n472, 181, 323, 324, 325–6, humility 214
331, 382n18 Hunger, H. 213–14, 293
Gregory II of Cyprus, patriarch of Hyakinthos, metropolitan of
Constantinople 70n144 Thessalonike 135n346, 290n190,
Gregory, hieromonk 444 301
Gregory, metropolitan of hyperperon 437
Pompeioupolis 308 Hypomimneskon, monastery of
Gregory of Nazianzus 18, 20n65, 206, (Thessalonike) 172
251, 263, 274, 335
Gregory of Nyssa 20n65, 206, 324 Iakobos, metropolitan of Chalcedon
Gregory of Sinai 7, 12, 13–15, 74n161, 331, 374, 432, 446
77n173, 115 Iakobos, metropolitan of Monembasia
Greselin, E. 51, 183n489 290n190, 315n79
480 GREGORY PALAMAS
icons John VI Kantakouzenos, emperor 2n1,

accusation of Palamite hostility to 4, 11, 212
317–18 friendship with Turkish emirs 25
veneration of 28, 169–70, 195–6, victor of civil war 43, 291–2
197, 198, 200, 201, 383, 407–8 crowned emperor 301
idolatry 383, 407–8 as emperor 6–9, 44, 142n368, 316
Ignatios, bishop of Panion 432, 446 abdication of 25, 171
Ignatios the Hesychast 12, 13 as monk Ioasaph 29, 33
Ignatios II, patriarch of Antioch 315 as a historian 2n1
Incarnation of Christ 24 and council of July 1341 17, 42, 120,
inner learning see learning, inner and 212, 297
outer and council of February 1347 18–19
Irene Asenina Kantakouzene, empress and prostagma of March 1347 292,
9, 332n37 293, 308–11
Isaac of Anapausos, protos of Mount and council of May 1351 20, 21,
Athos 4, 280, 282–3, 302 43–4, 323, 324–5, 331–2, 370–1,
Isaac, metropolitan of Madyta 308 374
Isaac the Syrian 87, 101 John IX Bekkos, patriarch of
Isaiah, prophet 145, 207, 305, 312 Constantinople 349n92
Isidore Boucheiras, patriarch of John XIV Kalekas, patriarch of
Constantinople 6–7, 14, 15, 19, Constantinople
41, 42, 43, 99, 108, 109, 112, 137, early career of 78n175
141, 142n368, 211, 292–3, 315, supports Christians under Muslim
316–17, 320–1, 323 rule 378n7
Islam summons Palamas to answer
motives for conversion to 384 charges 112
obections of to Christianity 382–3, participates in councils of 1341
388 113–14, 211–13, 298
Ismail, grandson of Orhan 26–7, 158, assumes regency with Anna 42,
379, 382, 383, 391–2 298
Iviron, monastery of (Mount Athos) becomes hostile to Palamas 121–2,
51 232–3, 266–7, 278–84, 299
turns to Akindynos 17, 127, 128–9,
Jeremiah, prophet 122, 123, 133 290n190, 300–1
Jesus Prayer 14–15, 226–9 fall from power and deposition of 4,
Job, hieromonk 420 6, 19, 43, 135–6, 291–2, 302–3,
Job, monk 81–2 305–6, 309–10, 314
John Asen III, Bulgarian tsar 332n37 death of 292
John IV Laskaris, emperor 47n61 On the Tomos of 1341 120n299,
John V Palaiologos, emperor 3, 5, 302–4
7, 8, 9, 21, 29, 33, 44, 152–4, John XXII, pope 11
172nn471–2, 302, 305, 325, 374 John Chrysostom 20n65, 250
GENERAL INDEX 481
John Climacus 10, 14 Katakekryomene, Mount (Bulgaria)

John Damascene 18, 20n65, 251, 263, 14
304, 431 Kazhdan, A. 378n4, 390n41
John the Evangelist 71–2, 163 Kiprian, metropolitan of Kiev 326
Joseph of Crete 4, 15 Klazomenai (Urla) 13
Joseph, hieromonk 393–4, 420, 431 knowledge, nature of 19
Joseph, metropolitan of Ganos 7, 19, see also learning, inner and outer
293, 324, 331, 343 Kornelios, Athonite monk 13
Joseph, metropolitan of Herakleia 447 Krausmüller, D. 11n29
Joseph, metropolitan of Kallioupolis Kydones, daughter of 317
331, 375 Kydones, Demetrios 2, 21, 25, 29,
Joshua 150 172n471, 317n84, 382n18, 414,
Jugie, M. 23n74, 35, 213n9 429n62
Kydones, Manuel 2, 317n84
Kabasilas, Michael 375 Kydones, Prochoros 29–32, 413,
Kabasilas, Neilos 39, 48n63 414–15, 418–46
Kafadar, C. 25n79, 377, 378n3, 402n80 Letter to Iakobos Trikanas 416, 431,
Kalamares, Konstas 394 436, 437
Kalekas, Manuel 32 Letter to Philotheos Kokkinos 416,
Kallinikos, metropolitan of Amastris 421
331, 375 On Essence and Energy 416, 425,
Kallipolis (Gallipoli, Gelibolu) 2, 9, 428, 429
24–5, 378, 387 Refutation of the Tomos of 1351 416,
Kallistos I, patriarch of 422–3, 424–5, 427–8
Constantinople 7, 8, 9, 13, 21, Kynosarges (Athens) 54
37n4, 48, 77n173, 142n368, Kyparissiotes, John 32
182n486, 184n492, 211, 323, Kyra Martha, monastery of
325, 331, 343, 374, 415 (Constantinople) 9
Kallistos, synekdemos of the protos of Kyzikos 331n33
Mount Athos 4n7
Kalotheotos, Joseph 12–13, 232 Lampsakos (Lapseki) 26, 378, 388
Kantakouzene, Helena 7 Laodikeia (Denizli) 13
Kantakouzene, Theodora, empress 3 Laurent, V. 9n18, 37n6, 291n1
Kantakouzene, Theodora, wife of Laurentios, metropolitan of Alania
Orhan 4, 25, 378, 391n44 and Soterioupolis 301
Kantakouzenos, Manuel 130n335 Lavra see Great Lavra (Athos)
Kantakouzenos, Matthew 7, 8, 44, Lazaros, hegoumenos of Philotheou
142n368, 325, 331n34, 376 4, 283
Kareai 4, 42 Lazaros, patriarch of Jerusalem 292,
Karmiris, I. 213, 214, 326 301, 308n50, 310, 330, 446
Kastoria (Macedonia) 48–9, 200n516, learning, inner and outer 16, 60, 100–1,
415, 442 103, 214
482 GREGORY PALAMAS
Lemerle, P. 327 Maroules, Germanos 178–9

Lemnos (Aegean) 142–3 Martin I, pope 340n54
Leo the Great, pope 338 Mary of Egypt 72
light, divine 80, 86, 87–8, 103–4, 108, Mary, Mother of God 60–1, 90, 158,
111, 183–4, 273–4, 439–40 392
see also Transfiguration, exegesis of Matthew, metropolitan of Ephesus 7,
Loenertz, R. 29n86, 32n99 19, 292–3, 301, 323, 324, 331,
logic, rules of 12, 16 343, 378n6
Luke, hesychast 12, 13 Matthew, metropolitan of Tyana 446
Matzoukatos, George 443, 447
Macedonians (pneumatomachi) 124, Matzoukatos, Theodosios 447
341 Maurozoumes, haiteriarches 390
Macedonius, patriarch of Maximian, emperor 327
Constantinople 260, 417 Maximos of Kapsokalyvia 13
Macrides, R. 415n12, 441n105 Maximus the Confessor 18, 21n65, 24,
Magdalino, P. 154n405 237–8, 324, 340–1, 431
Magistros, Thomas 18, 142n370, medical practice see doctors
421n36 medrese 26, 28, 159n422
Magoula, skete of (Mount Athos) Meletios the Confessor 415
13–14, 211 Meliteniotes, Theodore 447
Makarios, Athonite monk 13 Mercati, G. 29n86, 232n11, 315n79,
Makarios, hegoumenos of the Lavra 4, 414n9
89–90 Mesothynia 386
Makarios, hegoumenos of the Messalianism 1, 4, 15, 66–70, 211, 226,
Stoudion 432 228–9, 414
Makarios, metropolitan of Ankyra Methodios, metropolitan of Caesarea
39 of Cappadocia 432, 446
Makarios, metropolitan of Methodios, metropolitan of
Christoupolis 301 Pontoherakleia 331, 375
Makarios, metropolitan of Corinth Methodios, metropolitan of Varna
14n47 308
Makarios, metropolitan of Metochites, Theodore 11, 15, 19, 61
Philadelphia 308, 331, 374 Metrophanes, hymnographer 253
Malachias, hieromonk 420 Metrophanes, metropolitan of Gotthia
Malachias, metropolitan of Methymna 447
308 Metrophanes, metropolitan of
Malatras, C. 3n5, 409n105 Melenikos 331, 374
Mamalakis, I. 5nn9–11, 13n42 Meyendorff, J. 5n12, 11n29, 15n50, 35,
Maniakes, Manuel, deacon 376 40n24, 42n32, 50n77, 97n229,
Mansi, G. D. 326 120n299, 172n472, 211n1, 213n9,
Manuel I Komnenos, emperor 342n63 293, 308n50, 315n79, 328n20,
Marcellus, heretic 368 380n13
GENERAL INDEX 483
Michael VIII Palaiologos, emperor Nilüfer, wife of Orhan 378

47n61, 317n86, 318n87 Nilus of Ancyra 87
Michael IX Palaiologos, emperor Niphon, metropolitan of Trebizond
56n99 331, 375
Migne, J.-P. 36, 51, 213, 293, 294, 326, Niphon, patriarch of Alexandria 446
416–17
Miklosich, F. 293 Obolensky, D. 13n40, 37n6, 66n127,
Monembasia (Peloponnese) 130n335, 67n132
315n78 Olympus, Mount (Bithynia) 26,
Mongols 2 157n416
Monotheletes 250, 353 Orhan, emir of Bithynia 2, 4, 9,
Morea, Despotate of 130n335 25–6, 27, 29, 378, 382, 391n42,
Moschos, D. 19n63 393n49
Moses 28, 161, 162, 164, 166, 169–70, Osman, emir of Bithynia 25
224, 382, 396, 397, 403–4, 433, Ottomans 25–6, 377–8
434, 435 outer learning see learning, inner and
Moses, monk of the Great Lavra outer
(Athos) 287 Özbeg, khan of the Golden Horde 2
Muhammad 27, 28, 158, 161, 162, 163,
169, 382, 384, 398, 406–7, 411, Pactolus, river (Lydia) 141
412 Pahlitzsch, J. 26n80, 377n2, 378n7,
Müller, J. 293 393n49, 394n52
Murad I, sultan 25, 26 Palaiologina, Irene 332n37
Palaiologos, Andrew 3n5
Nadal Cañellas, J. 11n29, 16n51, Palaiologos, Constantine 56
18nn58, 59, 36n112, 120n299, Palaiologos, John, panhypersebastos
211n1, 213 41–2, 79n177, 97n229
Naples 103n240, 118n291 Palamaina, Epicharis 54n93, 80–1
Neophytos, metropolitan of Bizye 331, Palamaina, Kale 53n92, 59–60, 80, 81
375, 432, 446 Palamaina, Theodote 54n93, 80,
Neophytos, metropolitan of Philippi 110–11
293 Palamas, Gregory
Nestorius, heretic 263 birth 15, 45, 54
Nicaea (Iznik) 2, 26, 28, 50, 158–9, education 15, 60–2
378, 379, 392–5, 409–10 disputations of with Messalians
Nicol, D. 2n3, 153n403, 392n45 66–70
Nicolaus the Syrian 119 embraces monastic life on Mount
Nikephoros the Hesychast 293 Athos 40, 45, 70–2
Nikodemos the Hagiorite 14n47, 34 joins the Great Lavra 73–4
Nikodemos of Vatopedi 13, 15, 45, 71, withdraws from Athos and goes to
73 Berroia 40, 45, 76–9
Nikomedeia (Izmit) 2, 9 returns to the Lavra 45, 49, 83
484 GREGORY PALAMAS
Palamas, Gregory continued Against Gregoras 37, 44, 61–2,

elected hegoumenos of 181–2
Esphigmenou 41, 45, 49, 93 Against the Latins 41n27, 97n228,
returns to the Lavra 96 172
defendant at council of 1341 42, 46, Antirrhetics Against Akindynos
328 23n73, 49, 295n17
in Constantinople during the civil Apologia 22n69
war 42, 46 Dialogue of an Orthodox with a
imprisoned and excommunicated Barlaamite 22n69, 231, 235–6,
43, 46, 127, 133–4, 232–3 237, 240
vindicated by council of 1347 307, Homily 1, On Peace 145
329–30 Letter to Athanasios of Kyzikos
becomes metropolitan of 23n75
Thessalonike 19, 46, 137–8, Letter to the Athonite Elders
144–6, 308n50 232nn9, 10, 284
hostility to 266–84, 317–18, 321 Letter to Bessarion 231–3
participates in council of 1351 Letter to his Church 49, 50, 157–8,
149–152, 324, 331, 374, 332–7, 159–63, 380
372–3, 374 Letter to the Empress Anna
pastoral activity of 146–8, 176–7 Palaiologina 231, 233–4,
virtues of 177–81 288–90
ascetic practices of 74, 180 Letter to John Gabras 231–2,
miracles of (while alive) 95, 138–9, 234–65
146, 152, 154–5, 172–6 Letter to Philotheos 42n34, 266–84,
captured by the Turks 44, 46, 156, 299n30
377–9, 387–8 Letter to an Unknown Recipient
disputations of with Muslims 380–1
158–70, 391–2, 395–8, 401–8, Letter II to his Brother Makarios
410–12 49, 50, 127–9
ransomed 171 Letter III to Akindynos 23n71
year and manner of death 38–40, Life of Peter the Athonite 41n26,
46, 182–4 73n159, 92
tomb of 188, 190, 192, 193–4, 195, On Divine and Divinizing
197, 202 Participation 22n69
posthumous miracles of 184–205 One Hundred and Fifty Chapters
canonization of 31, 47–9, 413, 22n69, 23n70
440–2 Refutation of the Patriarchal Letter
feast of 201–2 300n31
and devotion to the Mother of God Triads in Defence of the Holy
60–1, 71–2, 90 Hesychasts 16–17, 41, 103–4,
and Gregory of Sinai 14 105–7
and Irene Porine 15 see also visions
GENERAL INDEX 485
Palamas, Konstantinos 15, 53n92, Philotheos Kokkinos, patriarch of

54–60 Constantinople 5, 8, 9, 21, 29,
Palamas, Makarios 50, 54n93, 65, 70, 30–2, 37–8, 39–40, 44, 47–8,
81, 127n330, 287 49–50, 109, 130n335, 232, 266,
Palamas, Theodosios 54n93, 65, 70, 291
81 education of 421n36
Palapanos (Balabancık) 27, 164, 169, as hegoumenos of the Lavra 109,
382, 383, 402, 406 232, 287, 371
Palates, gold embroiderer 175 as signatory of the Hagioretic
Papademetriou, T. 378 Tomos 211
Papamichail, G. 34 as metropolitan of Herakleia 21,
Papikion, Mount (Thrace) 45, 65, 308n50, 325, 331
66n127 at the council of 1351 331, 374
Paris 11 elected patriarch 8
Paroria, monastery of (Bulgaria) 12, seeks sanctuary in Hagia Sophia 9
14, 115, 212 as a hagiographer 29, 49–50, 178,
participation 22, 238–41, 245–6, 184n492, 440–1
255–6 political activity of 5
Paul, apostle 109, 113, 128, 147, 153, and the canonization of Palamas 31,
162–3, 312, 382, 433, 434 47–8, 413, 415–16
Paul of Mount Latros 63n120 and the Prochoros affair 30–2, 413
Paulicians 66n127 Antirrhetic Treatises Against
Pegai (Karabiga) 26, 157, 331n33, 378, Gregoras 208
389–90 Life of Germanos Maroules 178n479
Peloponnese 130 Life of Gregory Palamas 37–8,
Perdikes, George 375, 444, 447 49–51, 52–210, 440–1
Perdikes, Theodore 375 Life of Sabas of Vatopedi 133,
Peribleptos Monastery 178n479
(Constantinople) 317 Synodal Tomos of 1368 413, 416–47
Perrella, E. 35n111, 51, 73n152, Philotheou, monastery of (Athos) 13
233–4 Photinus, heretic 368
Petavius, Dionysius 33 Phylax, John 447
Peter, apostle 152, 162, 173, 225, 226 Pitra, J.-B. 36
Peter the Athonite 92 Plakas, Theophilos 4n7
Phakrases, Moses 414 Planoudes, Maximos 435n82
Philadelphia 63n118, 331n33 Plato/Platonism 97, 124
Philip VI, king of France 11 Plested, M. 29n88, 33n104, 414n9,
Philippidis-Braat, A. 26n81, 27n82, 415n10
44n44, 51n80, 159n419, 379, Plethon, George Gemistos 443n106
380–1, 385 Polemis, I. 30n92, 32n102, 325nn7–8,
Philotheos, metropolitan of Selymbria 415n11
11n25, 447 Porine, Irene 15
486 GREGORY PALAMAS
Porphyrios, hieromonk 172–4 St Sabas, hermitage of (Athos) 15, 41,

prayer 67–9, 75, 81–2 83
see also Jesus Prayer Sakellion, A. I. 385
Price, R. 3n4 Saray (Mongol capital) 2
Profession of Faith of the Athonite Seminara (Calabria) 10
Monks (1367) 438–9 Serres (Macedonia) 140n362
Prousa (Bursa) 26, 50, 157, 158, 378, Severus of Antioch 98
379, 390 shirk (‘association’) 382–3
Provata (Mount Athos) 74n160 Sidonia, peninsula of (Macedonia) 5
psogos (rhetorical strategy) 254n92 Silvestros, Manuel 375
Pyrrho, philosopher 235 Simon the Samaritan 119
Sinkewicz, R. 12n30, 15n50, 40n23,
Qur’an 28, 160, 161, 165, 168, 169, 63n119, 92n215, 129n333
395–6, 403, 406, 410–11 Skopje (Serbia) 41, 140n362
Skorpios, Niphon 414
Resurrection, monastery of the Solomon 234, 312
(Constantinople) 318 Sophronius, heretic 368
Rheims, Council of (1148) 23n74 Spirit, Holy 165–6, 239–40
Richard, François 34 Stefan Uroš III, king of Serbia 41
Rigo, A. 4n7, 12n31, 14n47, 30nn90, Stefan Uroš IV Dušan, king of Serbia
93, 31n94, 37n6, 38–40, 43, 2, 4, 5, 43, 46, 140–1, 153,
44n46, 50n77, 73n159, 90n211, 171n470
109n257, 129n333, 230n3, Stefan Uroš V, king of Serbia 5
232n10, 233n14, 293–4, 413n4, Stephen, protomartyr 183, 435
414nn8–9, 416n20, 417, 419n29, Strelbitsky, M. 34
431n68, 445n111 Suleiman, son of Orhan 8, 9, 378,
Ryder, J. 29n86 392n45
Susanna, daughter of Hilkiah 267–8,
Sabas of Vatopedi 133, 178–9 269, 280
Sabellius, heresiarch 258, 263, 289, Symeon, metropolitan of Thessalonike
295, 328, 350 39
Sahas, D. J. 385 Symeon the New Theologian 10, 14
St Catherine, monastery of (Sinai) 13 Symeon the New Theologian (ps.-)
St Elias, monastery of (Galatro) 11 15
St George of the Mangana, monastery Synodal Tomoi
of (Constantinople) 29 (1341) 6, 20, 42, 43, 136, 211–30,
St Hyakinthos, monastery of (Nicaea) 233, 271–9, 280–1, 289, 298,
26, 159, 164n443, 393, 409 302, 303–4, 309, 336, 431–2
St Michael, monastery of (Anaplous) 5, (1347) 19, 294–308, 330
42, 122n306, 281 (1351) 21, 30, 32, 329–76, 417n21,
St Phokas, hermitage of (Thracian side 419, 422, 427, 430, 444
of the Bosphorus) 58 (1368) 37, 416–47
GENERAL INDEX 487
Synodikon of Orthodoxy 1, 21, 326, Theoleptos, metropolitan of

338, 420 Philadelphia 40, 63
synods see councils, local theology 66n129
Constantinopolitan Theophanes, metropolitan of Nicaea
30, 31
Tabor, Mount see Transfiguration, Theophilos, emperor 340n54
exegesis of Theophylact, bishop of Boreia Potamia
tahrif (‘falsificaton’) 28, 383, 396–7, 432, 444, 446
411–12 theosis see deification
Talbot, A.-M. 32n99, 48n66, 51, Thessalonike 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 13, 15,
183n489, 192n501 16, 18, 21, 31, 40–1, 46, 48, 49,
Tarasios, patriarch of Constantinople 138–9, 141–2, 143–5, 212, 415
307n48 Thomas Aquinas see Aquinas, Thomas
Taronitai family 378n4 Timios Prodromos, skete of (Berroia)
Taronites, Konstantinos 27, 49, 50, 164, 79n177
377, 378, 379, 393, 409 Tinnefeld, F. 29n86, 381n18
tasimanes see danişmend (schoolman) Tomos of the Holy Mountain see
of Iznik Hagioretic Tomos
tears, gift of 76, 79, 80, 178 Transcendence, divine 241
Teichmenos, Michael 447 Transfiguration, exegesis of 18, 20,
tekvur 26 31–2, 125–6, 217–22, 224–5, 229,
Tenedos (Aegean island) 8, 9, 44, 386, 253, 274, 289, 290, 295, 304, 425,
387 430, 433–6
Theodora, monastery of (Thessalonike) Trent, Council of (1545–63) 33
174 Treu, M. 300n13, 385
Theodoretos, metropolitan of Brysis Triclinium (Triklinos) of Alexios
331, 375, 432, 446 Komnenos see Alexiakon
Theodoretos, metropolitan of Ephesus Trikanas, Iakobos 30, 413, 419–20
422, 430, 432, 446 Trinity, Holy 166, 167, 168, 171, 236,
Theodosios, hegoumenos of Alypiou 249, 251, 295
4n7, 5 Trizio, M. 328n20
Theodosios, metropolitan of Sozopolis Tsames, D. 51, 72n152, 83n186
375 Tŭrnovo, Council of (June 1359)
Theodosios, patriarch of Bulgaria 14, 21n67, 326
21n67, 326 Tzimiskes, Andronikos 202–4
Theodosius I, emperor 352n99, 417n24 Tzimiskes’ sister-in-law 204–5
Theodoulos, metropolitan of Caesarea Tzympe, fortress (Thrace) 171n470,
of Cappadocia 446 392n45
Theodoulos, metropolitan of Rhosion Tzyrakes, daughter of 317
308
Theoleptos, metropolitan of Umur, emir of Aydın 4
Didymoteichon 308, 375 union, hypostatic 24, 260–1
488 GREGORY PALAMAS
Uspensky, F. I. 34 Vlatadon, monastery of (Thessalonike)

Uspensky, P. 34, 326 72n153, 188n497
Vucetic, M. 378n4
Vatopedi, monastery of (Athos) 71
Velbužd, battle of (1330) 83n185 Wittek, P. 377
Venice 4, 8
Virgin, Church of the (Blachernai) 7, Zealot revolt 3, 7, 8, 43, 135n346,
116 138n356, 149n387, 194–5
visions 71–2, 77, 82, 89–91, 108–9, Zoe, Thessalonian noblewoman
115–16, 131–2, 185, 186–7, 188, 198–9
189, 190, 201, 203, 204, 205,
206–7

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Translated Texts for Byzantinists

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Liverpool University Press gratefully acknowledges the generous continued

Documents relating to Gregory Palamas

Translated with an introduction and notes by

Copyright © 2020 Norman Russell

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VI. Palamas in Captivity among the Turks 377

The richly documented Byzantine fourteenth century is of great interest to

ACO Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, ed. E. Schwartz

ODB The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium,

1. Byzantium in the Mid-Fourteenth Century

over the first Constantinopolitan council of 1341,4 the heir-presumptive,

of foreign forces. In the summer of 1342 Kantakouzenos made a pact

6 Rigo 2014, 259.

The war also touched Athos more directly. Kantakouzenos’ Turkish

about a hundred kilometres from Constantinople on the north shore of

14 Text in PG 150, 891–4.

Monembasia had been deposed and also excommunicated by Kalekas in

2. The Hesychast Controversy

The practice of hesychia, or withdrawal to a life of solitude and contemplation,

20 John Climacus, Ladder, Step 27 (PG 88, 1097B).

later hegoumenos of a monastery in Constantinople or Thessalonike.37 He

37 Barlaam’s Letter VII is addressed to Kalothetos.

45 Rigo 2002, 52.

physical postures appropriate to such prayer, very much in the manner

49 See the discussion in Ware 1972.

of his Triads on the deification attainable by the hesychast life. Despite

3. The Main Characteristics of Palamite Theology

Palamas developed his philosophical and theological defence of hesychasm

4. Palamas in Captivity among the Turks

by soldiers of Orhan Beg, the abdication of John VI Kantakouzenos, and the

villages he subdued.81 The first substantial town he conquered was Prousa

81 On Ottoman policy in this regard, see Pahlitzsch 2015a.

discussion of almsgiving. Then several questions were put by Ismail: ‘Why

teacher. The Christian acceptance of Christ is not equivalent to the Muslim

84 This cannot be construed as an ‘ecumenical’ exchange, as many have asserted.

Palamas’ ransom was finally paid and he was repatriated to

The Constantinople to which Palamas returned in early 1355 had changed

90 For a complete list, see Russell 2006, 80, n. 27.

98 Synodal Tomos of 1368, §12 and §13.

solutions to problems thrown up by either side. The triumph of Palamite

6. The Reception of Palamas

Palamas saw his philosophical and theological defence of hesychasm triumph

104 Rigo 2004, 50.

Church was in error and that to be sure of salvation Orthodox Christians

Allatius in his De Ecclesiae occidentalis atque orientalis perpetua consensione (‘Cologne’,

on Palamas in 1911, based on the study of a selection of manuscript sources,

7. Texts and Editions

The publication of a critical edition of the complete works of Gregory

111 Jugie 1932.

THE LIFE OF GREGORY PALAMAS

The Life of Gregory Palamas was written by Philotheos Kokkinos, as he

1 Synodal Tomos of 1368, §19 (Rigo, lines 732–4).

13 Schreiner, Byzantinischen Kleinchroniken, 387, 565, 625.

made a mistake as fundamental as that of the year of Palamas’ death.18 On

in 1326 that the governor of Thessalonike, the panhypersebastos John

25 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §35 (Tsames, 466–7).

The situation for Palamas was dangerous. In the summer of 1340 he

31 Philotheos, Life of Palamas, §57, lines 22–5 (Tsames, 489).