Justified True Belief

(●) The Byzantine monk who argued that a Christian really meets God, and does not merely receive reliable news about him. + Suppose a friend tells you about someone you have never met. She describes him accurately, and everything she says is true. You now know a great deal about that man. You still have not met him. Gregory Palamas spent the last twenty years of his life defending the claim that Christian faith is the second thing and not only the first: that God is genuinely encountered, not merely described, and that the saints who said so were telling the truth about their own experience. He made that case in the most unpromising century the Eastern empire had. Constantinople in his lifetime was a shrinking capital with a shrinking treasury, fighting a civil war while the Ottoman Turks crossed into Europe, and the theological argument he became famous for ran straight through the middle of the fighting. He was excommunicated for it, imprisoned for about four years, vindicated by one council and then another, made an archbishop, captured by the Ottomans at sea, and canonized nine years after his death. The signature fact about him is what the Orthodox Church did with the argument afterward. The conclusions of the council that settled it in 1351 were written into the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, the confession read aloud in church at the start of Lent every year, and the second Sunday of Great Lent is still kept as his feast. Very few theologians in any tradition have had a Sunday named for the thing they proved.

(●) 1296 AD: Born into the emperor’s household, and orphaned young enough that the emperor paid for his schooling. + Gregory was born in Constantinople in 1296, the eldest son of a courtier named Constantine Palamas who served in the household of the emperor Andronikos II. His father died around 1303, when the boy was about seven, and the emperor took responsibility for his education. That was not charity so much as investment: a bright orphan of a good family was a future civil servant, and the palace expected him back. He was trained in the imperial school, where the staple subject was Aristotle’s logic, the discipline of taking an argument apart to see whether the conclusion really follows from the premises. His fourteenth-century biographer Philotheos Kokkinos tells a story about how it went. At about seventeen Gregory delivered a discourse on Aristotle before the emperor and his court, and Theodore Metochites, the emperor’s chief minister and the most widely read man in the empire, said that even Aristotle himself would have praised the boy. Whether or not the compliment is remembered word for word, it is worth holding on to. The man who would spend his life arguing that God is not reached by reasoning had been, at seventeen, the best reasoner in a room full of ministers.

(●) c. 1316 AD: At about twenty he walked out of the palace for Mount Athos, and his family went with him. + Mount Athos is a mountainous peninsula in northern Greece, given over to monasteries since the tenth century and governed by the monks themselves. Around 1316 Gregory left the career the court had planned for him and went there, and he did not go alone: his two brothers went with him, and his widowed mother and his sisters gave away what the family had and entered convents. The household simply dissolved. He served his apprenticeship the way a young monk did, moving as his teachers died or his hunger for quiet grew. First the great monastery of Vatopedi, under an elder named Nikodemos; then the Great Lavra, the oldest house on the mountain; then a skete called Glossia. A skete is a scattering of a few huts under one senior monk, quieter than any monastery and a good deal poorer. What he was learning there has a name, and it is the word the whole rest of his life turns on. Hesychia is Greek for stillness or quiet, and a hesychast is a monk who practices it: sitting alone, breathing slowly, repeating the Jesus Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner," until the words stop being something he says and become something he is. The point of it was never calm for its own sake. The point was that a purified heart sees God.

(●) 1326 AD: Turkish raids drove him off the mountain, and he was ordained a priest at Thessalonica. + Athos was not the sealed refuge it looks like on a map. Turkish raiding parties worked the coast through the 1320s, and around 1325 Gregory and his companions left for Thessalonica, the empire’s second city. He was ordained a priest there in 1326, at about thirty. Then he did something that tells you what he wanted. Instead of taking a parish, he went to a mountain near Beroea, a town about forty miles west, and kept a rule he held to for roughly five years: five days a week entirely alone, and then out on Saturday and Sunday for the liturgy and for whoever wanted to talk to him. Five days of silence, two days of people, week after week, for five years. It is the pattern of a man who thought solitude and the church were two halves of one thing rather than alternatives. Serbian raids reached Beroea around 1331 and sent him back to Athos, to a hermitage dedicated to Saint Sabas near the Great Lavra. He was made abbot of the monastery of Esphigmenou for a short spell in the 1330s and gave it up, by most accounts because the brothers found his rule too severe. Then he went back to his hut, and the argument that would define him found him there.

(●) c. 1337 AD: A Calabrian scholar called the praying monks deluded, and Gregory answered with nine treatises. + Barlaam of Calabria was a Greek from southern Italy, formidably learned, who had arrived in Constantinople around 1330 and made a name lecturing on logic and astronomy. He and Gregory first crossed each other over the filioque, the Latin phrase added to the Creed in the West saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father "and the Son." Barlaam’s tactic was to argue that God is so far beyond us that neither side can prove anything about the inner life of the Trinity, so the Latins should stop insisting. It was a peace offer of a sort, and Gregory thought the price of it too high. An argument that nobody can make is also an argument that nobody can answer, and he wanted the Greek case to stand as a case. He said so in his Apodictic Treatises of 1335, whose title claims exactly what Barlaam denied: that the question can be argued by demonstration rather than set aside as unknowable. Then Barlaam turned on the monks. He had gone looking for hesychasts in Thessalonica, found some unsophisticated ones, and came away appalled at the bodily side of their practice: the bowed head, the chin toward the chest, the eyes turned down, the prayer timed to the breath. He nicknamed them omphalopsychoi, "navel-souls," people who think their soul lives in their stomach, and he pressed a serious charge underneath the mockery. If the saints claim to see a divine light with their eyes, then either they are seeing something created, in which case it is not God, or they claim to see God’s own being, which Scripture flatly denies (Exodus 33:20; John 1:18). Either way, said Barlaam, these men are fooling themselves. Gregory answered between about 1338 and 1341 with the Triads: nine treatises arranged in three sets of three, the work that carries everything he is remembered for. In 1340 the leading monks of Athos signed a short statement backing him, the Hagioritic Tome, which he had a hand in drafting. The quarrel was no longer between two men.

(●) 1341 AD: A council in Hagia Sophia cleared him, and within three years a civil war had him excommunicated and confined. + On 10 June 1341 a council met in Hagia Sophia with the emperor Andronikos III presiding, condemned Barlaam’s positions, and accepted Gregory’s. Barlaam submitted, then left for Italy, entered the Roman church, was made bishop of Gerace in Calabria, and at Avignon taught Greek to the poet Petrarch. It is one of the odder footnotes in the history of the Renaissance that the man who lost to Palamas helped teach the West to read Greek again. Five days after the council the emperor died, and everything came loose at once. The empire fell into civil war between John Kantakouzenos, the late emperor’s chief minister, and the regency governing in the name of the child John V, which in practice meant the boy’s mother Anna of Savoy and the patriarch John XIV Kalekas. Gregory was no soldier and held no command. What he had was a reputation as Kantakouzenos’ friend, and in a fight like that one it was enough, because a theological question in the middle of a civil war does not stay a theological question. Both sides made use of it, though the line never ran perfectly straight, and there were men in each camp whose theology did not match their party’s. Kalekas excommunicated him and had him held, first under guard in monasteries and then in the palace prison, for roughly four years from 1343. He kept writing. The short Confession of Faith that he would later read aloud to a council was drafted in confinement. The hardest part of it was not the prison. Gregory Akindynos had been his student and his friend, the man who spent years trying to keep him and Barlaam talking to each other, and after 1341 Akindynos concluded that Gregory had gone too far and became the chief voice against him. Most of the several hundred pages Gregory wrote in these years are addressed to a friend who had changed sides.

(●) 1347 AD: He came out of prison an archbishop, and four years later a council made his answer the church’s own. + In February 1347 the whole case turned over in a matter of days. Anna had fallen out with her own patriarch, and on 2 February a synod she convened deposed John XIV Kalekas, the man who had excommunicated Gregory. Kantakouzenos entered Constantinople that same night, and Gregory walked out of confinement. Within months he was consecrated Archbishop of Thessalonica. He then could not get into his own city. Thessalonica had been run since 1342 by the Zealots, a popular faction that had thrown out the aristocracy and had no intention of accepting a bishop installed by the winning side of a war they had fought against. So Gregory waited, kept out of his own cathedral by the people he had been sent to serve, and it was three years before he entered Thessalonica in 1350. A bishop locked out of his diocese is not the career the palace had imagined for the boy who outargued Aristotle. The doctrine was settled in his lifetime, which is rare. The Council of Blachernae sat in Constantinople through May and June of 1351, heard his Confession, and affirmed the distinction he had been defending: that God’s essence is beyond every creature, and that God’s uncreated energies, his own activity going out from him, are genuinely God and genuinely given. Its chapters were added to the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, the roll of confessions and condemnations read in church on the first Sunday of Lent, which is why an argument between two fourteenth-century Greeks is still recited annually by congregations who have never heard of either man.

(●) 1354 AD: The Ottomans took him at sea and held him a year, and he spent it arguing about God with Muslims. + In March 1354 Gregory sailed for Constantinople on an errand of reconciliation between the two imperial factions. His ship put in near Gallipoli, on the European shore of the Dardanelles, which the Ottomans had just occupied after an earthquake broke its walls. He was taken prisoner and held for about a year, moved from town to town across Asia Minor, sometimes in chains, sometimes beaten, and sometimes treated with courtesy by men who wanted to hear him talk. He used the year the way he had used the prison. He debated a grandson of the emir Orhan at Bursa, and a group called the Chiones, and he wrote a long pastoral letter back to his church in Thessalonica describing the captured Christian towns he passed through, the Turks he met, and the arguments he had made for the Trinity and the incarnation. It is one of the most level-headed Christian accounts of Islam written by anyone who had been a prisoner of it. He was ransomed in 1355 and went home. He served Thessalonica for four more years and died there on 14 November 1359, at about sixty-three. A tradition preserved by his biographer reports his last words as "To the heights! To the heights!" In 1368 a synod under the patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos, who had been a friend on Athos, declared him a saint, wrote his Life, and composed the service sung for him on the second Sunday of Great Lent.

What He Taught

(T1) God’s inmost being stays out of reach, and yet what reaches us is God himself. + Stand outside on a clear morning and let the sun warm your face. You are genuinely touched by the sun. Not by a photograph of the sun, not by a rumour about it, but by the thing itself, reaching across ninety-three million miles and landing on your skin. And you have not gone anywhere near the sun, and you never will, and if you did there would be nothing of you left. Both halves of that are true at once, and neither cancels the other. The sun and its light are Gregory’s own image, and they carry his central distinction. God’s essence is what God is in himself, his own being, and Scripture says plainly that no creature has any access to it: he "dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see" (1 Timothy 6:16). God’s energies are a harder word for an ordinary thing. The Greek energeia means activity or operation, what something is actually doing: the heat and light of a fire are its energies, and they are the fire, not a substitute for it sent out in its place. So God’s energies are God at work and God giving himself, his life, his glory, his grace, his power to make holy. They are not created gifts God hands over from a distance. They are uncreated, which is to say they are God. The mistake worth heading off is thinking of the essence as the real God and the energies as a sort of lobby he keeps for visitors. Gregory insists on the opposite: God is wholly present in every one of his energies, not parcelled out among them. Neither is the distinction a wall through the middle of God. It is the difference between God as he is in himself, which is inexhaustible, and God as he freely gives himself, which is the same God arriving. A fire is not divided into itself and its warmth. Why it mattered so much to him is easy to lose. If everything a Christian actually receives is created, then grace is a package and not a Person, prayer ends at the mailbox, and the saints who said they had met God were mistaken about the best thing that ever happened to them. Gregory would not have that. What comes to us is God.

(Q) "Essence and energy are thus not totally identical in God, even though He is entirely manifest in every energy, His essence being indivisible." + Source: Gregory Palamas, Triads III.ii.9 (Nicholas Gendle translation, Paulist Press, 1983). Gregory wrote both halves of that in one breath on purpose, and the sentence falls apart if either half is dropped. There has to be a real difference, or God cannot be both beyond us and given to us. There cannot be a division, because God is entirely present in each energy rather than distributed in portions among them (T1).

(T2) The light the three disciples saw on the mountain was God’s own glory, not a created sign of it. + All three of the first Gospels tell the same strange story. Jesus takes Peter, James and John up a mountain, and "he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light" (Matthew 17:2). Luke tells the same episode (Luke 9:28–36), and Christian tradition has long placed the scene on Mount Tabor in Galilee, which is why Gregory writes about it as the Taboric light. Barlaam took the light to be a created thing: a brilliant flash God produced for the occasion, a symbol of divinity the way a wedding ring is a symbol of a marriage, real but not the thing itself, and gone by evening. Gregory thought that reading emptied the event. If the light was manufactured for the day and disposed of afterwards, then what the apostles saw was a special effect, and their own account of it as the glory of the Son will not bear the weight they put on it. His answer is that the light was uncreated: the Son’s own divinity, always his and never beginning, made visible through the flesh he had taken. What changed on the mountain was not God but the disciples. Their eyes were given, for a few minutes, a capacity they did not have when they climbed up, and Gregory notes the telling detail that the people living around the mountain saw nothing at all. A light brighter than the sun that the neighbours do not notice is not an ordinary light. That is why the Transfiguration mattered to him more than any other scene in the Gospels. It is the one place where the New Testament shows a human being seeing the glory of God with his eyes and living, and it is the down payment on what Paul promises every Christian: "beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

(Q) "Indeed, when it was shining on Thabor more brilliantly than the sun, the people of the area did not even see it!" + Source: Gregory Palamas, Triads III.i.22 (Gendle translation). Gendle spells the mountain Thabor, following the Greek. Gregory is answering the claim that the light was an ordinary light travelling through ordinary air (T2). His evidence is the silence of the countryside: a brightness that outshines the sun and is seen only by three men on a hilltop is not the sort of thing air carries.

(T3) The body is not the soul’s jailer, and it prays along with the soul. + Barlaam’s sharpest weapon was ridicule of a posture. The monks sat with the head bowed and the chin toward the breast, drew the breath slowly, and said the Jesus Prayer with it. To a man trained in Greek philosophy this looked like superstition: the mind ought to be climbing away from the body toward pure thought, and here were monks trying to pray with their lungs. Gregory’s reply began where Paul begins, with a fact about Christians that he thought his opponent had not taken seriously: "your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God" (1 Corinthians 6:19). If God has made the body his dwelling, it is strange to treat it as the one part of a person that must be escaped. When Paul calls the body a body of death (Romans 7:24), Gregory points out what Paul actually attacks in the line just before it: not flesh as such, but the law of sin that dwells in his members (Romans 7:23). The enemy is disorder, not matter. Behind the posture is a claim about what human beings are. A person is not a soul with a body attached, the way a driver has a car; a person is soul and body together, and God saves the whole thing. Gregory held that grace reaches the body too, and that this is why the saints could be visibly changed, why Moses came down the mountain with his face shining, and why the promise at the end is a resurrection and not a release. Christians who have never heard of hesychasm do the same thing every week without arguing about it: they kneel, they stand for the Gospel, they take bread into their hands. The body is already praying. Gregory’s contribution was to say so out loud when a very clever man said it was ridiculous.

(Q) "As for us, we think the mind becomes evil through dwelling on fleshly thoughts, but that there is nothing bad in the body, since the body is not evil in itself." + Source: Gregory Palamas, Triads I.ii.1 (Gendle translation). The sentence before this one names the people Gregory is separating himself from: the heretics who held that the body is an evil thing made by the devil, a view with a long life in the medieval Balkans. His point is that a Christian who despises the body has borrowed an argument from the wrong side (T3).

(T4) Sharing in God’s own life is a gift given, and no training and no cleverness can earn it. + The Greek fathers had a word for where salvation ends up: theosis, usually rendered deification or divinization. It sounds alarming in English and it is worth saying carefully what it never meant. It does not mean a human being turns into God, or gets absorbed, or stops being a creature. It means what Peter says in one startling line: that through God’s promises "you may become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). The Christian is taken into the life of God without ever ceasing to be himself, the way iron in a fire glows with the fire’s heat and is still iron. Gregory’s distinction is what lets him say that at full strength without confusion. We share in God’s energies, in his life and glory given out, and never in his essence, which stays his alone. So the promise can be as large as Scripture makes it without anybody becoming a second God. The part of this that a modern reader is most likely to miss is how firmly he shut the door on earning it. Barlaam’s world was a world of accomplishment, where knowledge is the ladder and the educated climb higher. Gregory answered that deification transcends every natural relationship and that there is no faculty in human nature capable of receiving it, which is a blunt way of saying that nothing in us is equipment for this. Prayer and obedience prepare a person; they do not produce the thing prepared for. Union is given, or it does not happen. And what is given is not a benefit. It is the giver. Gregory’s way of putting it is that the saints gain no reward for their long climb except God himself, which is either a disappointment or the whole point, depending on what a person was climbing for.

(Q) "all the saints in their entire being dwell in God, receiving God in His wholeness, and gaining no other reward for their ascent to Him than God Himself." + Source: Gregory Palamas, Triads III.i.27 (Gendle translation). The quotation begins in the middle of Gregory’s sentence, which is why it opens on a small letter. He has just insisted that the union itself is effected by grace, not by the virtues that prepare for it (T4). The clause quoted here is the reason the distinction mattered to him in the first place: if what the saints receive were anything less than God, the ascent would have ended somewhere short of him.

(Q) "For God is not only beyond knowledge, but also beyond unknowing." + Source: Gregory Palamas, Triads I.iii.4 (Gendle translation). Theologians call the method of describing God by denial the apophatic way: God is not a body, not finite, not changeable, and so on down the list, until the mind runs out of things to strip away. Gregory kept the method and refused to let it become the last word. God is past what we can say and past what we can unsay, and the vision the saints report is not the mind arriving at a blank but a person meeting someone. That sentence is the seam where the argument of his life joins the argument the church has had about him ever since.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The Eastern church wrote his answer into its confession and has kept it there ever since. + Most theologians wait centuries to find out whether they were right. Gregory found out in his own lifetime, and the Orthodox tradition has treated the question as closed from that day. The Council of Blachernae in 1351 affirmed the essence and energies distinction, its chapters went into the Synodikon of Orthodoxy the following Lent, and in 1368 the synod under Philotheos Kokkinos canonized him and gave him the second Sunday of Great Lent, one week after the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the feast that keeps the memory of the church’s long fight over icons and its end. The placement says what the East thought it was doing. The defence of the icons and the defence of hesychast prayer were one defence made twice: that the invisible God really is met in visible, material, creaturely things, in wood and paint and in a praying body. The teaching then travelled by the ordinary route of monasteries rather than universities. In 1782 Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth published the Philokalia, an anthology of Greek writers on prayer that includes Gregory’s chapters, and the Slavonic and Russian versions of it carried hesychast practice into the monasteries of eastern Europe. The nineteenth-century Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim, in which a peasant walks across Russia learning to say the Jesus Prayer without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17), is that inheritance in story form. The twentieth century made him an international figure. Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, published in French in 1944, and John Meyendorff’s study of 1959 put Gregory at the centre of Orthodox self-description, and Kallistos Ware carried him into English. For a great many Christians outside the East, the essence and energies distinction is now the first thing they learn that Orthodoxy holds and the West does not.

(†) The Latin West argued with him for six centuries before it began reading him. + The West met Gregory through his opponents, which is a bad way to meet anyone. Barlaam moved to Italy and took his account of the quarrel with him. Demetrios Kydones, a Byzantine statesman, translated Thomas Aquinas into Greek in these same decades and became convinced the Latins had the better of it, and a circle of Greek Thomists formed against Palamas and eventually joined the Roman church. For centuries afterwards the standard Western handling of the dispute was brief and dismissive. It hardened into a verdict in the early twentieth century, when the French scholar Martin Jugie treated Palamism as a late Byzantine deformation, a heresy dressed as tradition. Lossky and Meyendorff answered, and the argument became one of the live ecumenical questions of the century. Then something quieter happened: Western scholars started reading the texts. Catholic theologians including Yves Congar and André de Halleux argued that the East and the West had been answering the same question, how a creature can genuinely share the life of God, in two vocabularies, and that neither answer was the nonsense the other had taken it for. The West’s own way of protecting the same ground is the Latin doctrine of created grace, which is a plainer idea than it sounds: the gift God works in a person, the settled new capacity that makes a creature able to love God and one day to see him, is itself something God makes in the creature rather than a portion of God’s own uncreated life. Aquinas develops that at length, and the modern comparisons have been more interested in how the two accounts line up than in scoring the old points. Protestants arrived last and by a side door. Renewed attention to union with Christ, and the recovery of deification language in Luther and in the fathers Calvin quoted, sent a good many Protestant theologians to Gregory’s texts in the last fifty years, usually with real interest in what he was protecting and real hesitation about the distinction he used to protect it.

(†) The unfinished dispute is whether distinguishing God’s essence from his energies guards his transcendence or divides him. + This is a disagreement between Christians about a formulation, not about the gospel, and it is worth stating both sides at their strongest rather than choosing for the reader. - The objection. Classical theology holds that God is simple, meaning he has no parts and is not assembled out of anything: his goodness, his knowledge and his power are not three components of him but the one God named three ways. If the energies are uncreated and really distinct from the essence, the objection runs, then there is something uncreated in God that is not his essence, and God has been divided into a hidden part and a shared part. Barlaam and Akindynos pressed exactly this, and Western theology has repeated it since. - The reply. Gregory answers that he is not counting pieces. God is entirely present in each energy rather than parcelled among them, so nothing has been cut in half, and the distinction is between God as he is in himself and the same God as he gives himself. He also points out that Scripture and the fathers already talk this way, since God’s foreknowledge and his providence and his will are not his essence and are nonetheless eternal and uncreated. - What both sides are protecting. The West is guarding the claim that God is not a composite being, and the East is guarding the claim that what we receive in grace is God and not merely a creature made by God. Each side thinks the other’s formula endangers what it is guarding, and each side denies that it endangers the other’s. The argument is old, it is genuine, and it is not settled. It is also, on both sides, an argument between people confessing one God who gives himself to his creatures in Jesus Christ.

(†) His own record carries one hard entry: he fought a theological argument as though it were a war. + The Triads are not a temperate book. Gregory does not merely answer Barlaam’s claim that the mind should leave the body behind in prayer; he calls it the greatest of the Hellenic errors, the root and source of all heresies, an invention of demons, and a doctrine that engenders folly and is itself the product of madness. That is four escalating charges in one sentence, aimed at a disputed question about the method of prayer, and it is his own voice in his own most important work. He also fought to win in the institutional sense. He pressed for condemnations, not merely refutations, and the chapters that came out of the councils he shaped placed Barlaam and Akindynos by name among the anathematized, the roll of those a council has declared cut off from the church for teaching outside the faith, read aloud in church at the start of Lent. Akindynos had been his student and had spent years trying to keep the peace between him and Barlaam; he died in exile around 1348, and his writings were condemned after his death. Whatever one makes of the theology, a friend who tried to mediate and ended in that list is a hard fact in the ledger. Two things are worth setting beside it, neither of them a cancellation. The first is that the weapons were pointed both ways and he lived under them too: he was excommunicated in his turn, confined for roughly four years, and slandered about as thoroughly as he slandered. The second is that his contempt was not indiscriminate, whatever the heat of his rhetoric suggests. In the same work he grants without qualification that philosophy, so far as it is natural, is a gift of God, and that the fault lies with those who put the gift to an unnatural use. He could make the distinction. He did not always trouble to.