A Teacher
Gregory Palamas
The essence/energies distinction, the uncreated light of Tabor, and inner prayer of the heart
The transmission
Gregory Palamas (c.1296-1359) was a Byzantine monk of Mount Athos, later Archbishop of Thessalonica, and the definitive theologian of hesychasm - the Eastern Orthodox tradition of stillness (hesychia) and unceasing inner prayer.
Born into a noble Constantinopolitan family, he abandoned a promising court career for the monastic life, and became the great defender of the Athonite monks who claimed that, through disciplined prayer of the heart, they could behold the very light of God with their whole being.
His distinctive place in the Atlas is as the mystic who supplied the metaphysics for contemplative experience. When the philosopher Barlaam of Calabria mocked the hesychasts as deluded ‘navel-gazers’ and argued God is wholly unknowable, Palamas answered with the essence/energies distinction: God’s essence remains forever inaccessible, yet His uncreated energies - the same light that shone on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration - genuinely communicate His life to the purified soul.
Across six synods in Constantinople his position was vindicated, and in 1351 it became Orthodox dogma. Where other contemplatives in this Atlas describe the ascent to God, Palamas is the one who insists the summit is real, uncreated, and shared by the body as well as the mind - deification (theosis) as the true end of the human person.
What they gave
The essence/energies distinction: Argued that God’s essence is utterly transcendent and unknowable, while His uncreated energies truly communicate Himself - preserving both divine mystery and real communion.
- The uncreated light of Tabor: Defended the hesychasts’ vision of divine light as the same uncreated glory seen at the Transfiguration, not a created symbol or mere psychological state.
- Hesychia and the Jesus Prayer: Systematized the prayer of stillness - the mind gathered into the heart in ceaseless invocation - as a legitimate and transformative path to God.
- Theosis (deification): Framed salvation as participation in the divine energies, the whole person, body included, being glorified and made ‘god by grace.’
In their words
For God is not only beyond knowledge, but also beyond unknowing.
This light is not the essence of God, for that is inaccessible and incommunicable; it is not an angel, for it bears the marks of the Master.
When the saints contemplate this divine light within themselves, seeing it by the divinising communion of the Spirit, through the mysterious visitation of perfecting illuminations, then they behold the garment of their deification.
The spiritual joy which comes from the mind into the body is in no way corrupted by the communion with the body, but transforms the body and makes it spiritual.
The line they stand in
Palamas drew his theology from the deep well of the Greek Fathers: the apophatic vision of Pseudo-Dionysius, the cosmic Christology of Maximus the Confessor (the author he quotes most), the ascetic psychology of Evagrius Ponticus and the Cappadocians, and the luminous mystical witness of Symeon the New Theologian, whose claim to experience the divine light directly he defended and grounded.
His synthesis was ratified as Orthodox dogma in 1351 and passed into the Philokalia, shaping all later Eastern spirituality; in the twentieth century it was recovered and re-expounded for the modern world by theologians such as Vladimir Lossky.
Their Practices 1
Essential Works
- The Triads (In Defence of the Holy Hesychasts)1338
- The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters (Capita 150)1350
- The Hagioritic Tome1341