Barlaam of Calabria vs. Gregory Palamas

The Hesychast Controversy, the Essence–Energies Distinction, and Late Byzantine Theology

Abstract

The fourteenth-century conflict commonly summarized as “Barlaam vs. Palamas” was not merely a dispute about mystical technique or monastic piety.
It crystallized deeper disagreements about (1) the epistemic conditions of theology, (2) the metaphysical grammar appropriate to speaking of God,
and (3) the relation between philosophical demonstration and ecclesial experience. The resolution through a sequence of Constantinopolitan synods
culminating in 1351 secured, for Eastern Orthodoxy, a doctrinal articulation of divine unknowability in essence alongside a robust affirmation of real
divine self-communication in uncreated “energies.” This article reconstructs the dispute’s genealogy, the central claims of both parties, the conciliar
outcomes, and the controversy’s continuing significance.

1. Historical setting and protagonists

1.1 Late Byzantine context

The Palamite controversy unfolded amid the Palaiologan intellectual renaissance, when engagement with Aristotle, late antique Neoplatonism, and
Latin scholastic argumentation intensified. It also coincided with severe political instability, including the crisis and civil conflict that followed
the death of Andronikos III (1341). Theological alignments did not simply mirror political factions, but patronage networks and ecclesiastical
appointments made doctrinal positions politically consequential.

1.2 Barlaam of Calabria

Barlaam (often styled “the Calabrian”) arrived in Constantinople from Greek-speaking southern Italy and quickly became known as a learned monk and
polemicist. In the hesychast dispute he criticized Athonite prayer practices and, above all, rejected the claim that the “Taboric light” of the
Transfiguration is uncreated. After condemnation in 1341 he departed for the West and later entered ecclesiastical service in communion with Rome.

1.3 Gregory Palamas

Gregory Palamas, an Athonite monk and later Archbishop of Thessalonica, became the major defender of hesychasm. His theological intervention is
concentrated especially in the Triads for the Defense of Those Who Practice Sacred Quietude, composed in response to Barlaam’s critiques and in
the context of escalating synodal scrutiny.

2. Hesychasm as the proximate occasion

“Hesychasm” designates a tradition of contemplative prayer (Greek ἡσυχία, “stillness”) associated particularly with Mount Athos,
including disciplined attention, bodily posture, and the Jesus Prayer. Barlaam’s critique targeted not only descriptions of technique (which he
caricatured as physiological reductionism), but the theological interpretation of hesychast experience: the claim that saints can, by grace, participate
in a genuine vision of divine light. The dispute is best understood not as “mysticism vs. rationality,” but as a contest over what counts as legitimate
theological knowledge and how apophaticism (negative theology) should be construed.

3. Barlaam’s theological and epistemic program

3.1 Apophaticism as strict constraint on divine participation

Barlaam affirmed the classical apophatic thesis that God is incomprehensible and that the divine essence exceeds created intellect. He argued,
however, that this implies severe limits on any claim of immediate cognition of God. The language of “vision of uncreated light,” in his view,
risks spiritual delusion or doctrinal error (often framed in Byzantine polemics as a drift toward Messalianism), because it seems to convert the
unknowable God into an object of experience.

3.2 Created grace and the status of the Taboric light

Barlaam held that the light of the Transfiguration must be created, or at least not identical with uncreated divinity, because identifying it as
uncreated appears to force an unacceptable choice: either the divine essence becomes visible to the senses (impossible), or divine life is fragmented
into multiple divine realities. Barlaam thus pressed the horn of transcendence: God is beyond direct participatory cognition.

3.3 Theological method

Barlaam’s posture is not simply “rationalism.” Rather, it is an insistence that theology protect transcendence by refusing any account that implies
real participation in uncreated divinity. Consequently, mystical claims should be interpreted as created effects in the soul, symbolic disclosures,
or pious metaphors, not as direct communion with God’s own life.

4. Palamas’s counterproposal

4.1 The argument of the Triads

Palamas’s response does not abandon apophaticism but differentiates it. God is unknowable in essence, yet truly communicable in divine operations.
Christian salvation is not merely ethical imitation or conceptual assent; it is deification (θέωσις), a real participation in God
by grace. Palamas argued that Barlaam’s program, if consistently applied, undermines the sacramental and experiential realism of patristic spirituality.

4.2 Essence and energies: what the distinction is (and is not)

The core Palamite claim is the “essence–energies distinction”:

• Divine essence (οὐσία): God as God is in Himself, absolutely transcendent, beyond creaturely comprehension and
  beyond participation.
• Divine energies (ἐνέργειαι): God’s real self-manifestations and operations, uncreated and truly divine, yet
  not identical with the essence.

This is not a division of God into parts, nor the assertion of “two gods.” It is an attempt to preserve simultaneously (1) apophatic transcendence
(the essence remains beyond knowing) and (2) real communion (the saints truly participate in God, not merely in created symbols of God).

4.3 The uncreated light

On this basis the “light of Tabor” can be affirmed as uncreated: not the divine essence rendered visible, but the divine energy manifested. The vision
of light is therefore a genuine encounter with God as God gives Himself, while the incomprehensibility of essence remains intact.

4.4 Deification as epistemology

Palamas’s position is also epistemic: knowledge of God is not primarily a result of discursive inference but of transformed participation grounded in
divine initiative. Hence theology is inseparable from sanctification; the truth at stake is not only propositional but participatory.

5. Synods of Constantinople and doctrinal settlement

5.1 The synodal sequence (1341–1351)

The dispute passed through multiple hearings in Constantinople. A major synod in 1341 condemned Barlaam; he recanted and returned to Calabria.
Later synods addressed subsequent anti-Palamite figures and further clarified the doctrinal status of Palamas’s teaching. The synod of 1351,
associated with Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, decisively endorsed the essence–energies distinction as normative in the Orthodox tradition.

5.2 The “Synodical Tome” and reception

The settlement is linked to formal doctrinal statements often referenced as a synodical tome, and it entered the authoritative conciliar memory of
Eastern Orthodoxy. While modern classifications of these synods in relation to “ecumenical” status vary, Orthodox reception has treated the Palamite
settlement as possessing exceptionally high authority.

6. Philosophical anatomy of the disagreement

6.1 Divine simplicity and real distinction

One way to state the issue is this: Barlaam defended simplicity by refusing uncreated participability, whereas Palamas defended simplicity while
distinguishing essence and energy. The philosophical question is whether “simplicity” requires excluding any real distinction in God, or whether
certain distinctions (notably between essence and operation) can be affirmed without composition. Palamas contended that denying uncreated energies
makes salvation a relation to created intermediaries only, thereby weakening the grammar of deification as real communion.

6.2 Religious experience and discernment

Barlaam stressed epistemic humility and the dangers of delusion. Palamas replied that the tradition includes criteria for discernment: purification,
ascetic discipline, and ecclesial testing of claims within continuity of patristic teaching. The debate thus anticipates modern disputes about whether
religious experience can be cognitively significant without collapsing into subjectivism.

6.3 Apophaticism: negation vs. participation

Both parties appealed to Dionysian apophaticism. The difference is interpretive. Barlaam tended toward apophaticism as epistemic closure: God cannot
be directly participated or known. Palamas tended toward apophaticism as a guardrail: the essence remains beyond precisely so that God’s gracious
self-communication can be affirmed without contradiction.

7. Latin–Greek trajectories and ecumenical afterlives

Later polemics sometimes portrayed Barlaam as a “Latin rationalist” and Palamas as an “anti-Western mystic,” but the historical picture is more
complex. Barlaam earlier wrote anti-Latin polemics, and Palamas’s position is not anti-intellectual; it is an attempt to articulate an integrated
account of transcendence and communion. In modern theology the essence–energies distinction has been read variously as a genuine divergence from
Thomistic simplicity, as a complementary idiom, or as a difference of emphasis rather than contradiction. The interpretive range itself indicates that
the controversy remains a live site where metaphysics, spirituality, and theological method intersect.

8. Conclusion

The Barlaam–Palamas controversy concerns whether salvation entails real participation in uncreated divine life or only relation to created effects and
symbols. Palamas’s synthesis aims to hold together three claims: (1) God’s essence is absolutely transcendent; (2) God truly gives Himself in uncreated
energies; and (3) the contemplative life, disciplined by ecclesial tradition, can be a locus of theological knowledge. The dispute is therefore not an
antiquarian quarrel about technique but a paradigmatic case of how a tradition negotiates transcendence and presence, conceptual rigor and sanctity,
apophatic restraint and communion.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Palamas, Gregory. The Triads. Ed. John Meyendorff; trans. Nicholas Gendle. New York: Paulist Press, 1983.
• Synodical Tome of Constantinople (1351). Consult critical editions and standard translations in modern collections on the Palamite councils.

Secondary sources

• Cambridge University Press. Relevant chapters on the Hesychast controversy in The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium.
• Encyclopedic overview: “Hesychast controversy,” including chronology of the synods and principal figures.
• Reference overview of the Palamite councils (1341–1368), often presented under the heading “Fifth Council of Constantinople.”
• Kolbaba, Tia M. “Barlaam the Calabrian: Three Treatises on Papal Primacy.” Revue des études byzantines 53 (1995).