St. Gregory Palamas
The Holy Hesychast
The Hagioritic Tome of 1340, the Apolytikia, and a guided summary of the Triads
Contents8 sections
- 1On St. Gregory and the hesychast controversy
- 2Apolytikion of St. Gregory Palamas (Tone 8)
- 3The Hagioritic Tome (1340)
- 4The teaching of the Triads (a guided summary in the project's voice)
- 5On the Jesus Prayer
- 6Apolytikion of the Second Sunday of Great Lent (Tone 8)
- 7Kontakion of St. Gregory (Tone 8)
- 8A closing prayer
On St. Gregory and the hesychast controversy
Editor's note
St. Gregory Palamas's principal writings, the nine treatises of the Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts (1338-1341), the One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, the great Synodal Tomos of 1351, and his many homilies, are mostly preserved in good critical Greek editions but in modern English translations that remain under copyright. The public-domain English we can serve in full is the much shorter Hagioritic Tome of 1340, the brief Athonite confession Gregory co-drafted with the elders of the Holy Mountain in support of the hesychast practice; this is given verbatim in section 3 below. For the rest, this work gives a guided summary of the central teaching, written in the project's own voice with direct quotations clearly marked, and the standard liturgical hymns of his two feasts in their PD English form.
The reader who wishes to read the Triads or the Capita 150 in full will need to seek out the modern translations (Meyendorff for the Triads, Sinkewicz for the Capita), which the Church owes a real debt to and which are well worth their cost. What follows is an honest introduction to the saint's teaching, given as the project can give it from the public domain.
Apolytikion of St. Gregory Palamas (Tone 8)
Editor's note
Sung at the Divine Liturgy on the Second Sunday of Great Lent and on November 14, the two days the Church commemorates his memory. Plain English of the pre-1929 American Russian Orthodox usage.
The Church's hymnSung by the Church about St. Gregory Palamas, not written by him.
O Light of Orthodoxy, support and teacher of the Church, ornament of monastics, invincible champion of the theologians, O wonderworker Gregory, boast of Thessaloniki and herald of grace: ever pray that our souls may be saved.
The Hagioritic Tome (1340)
Editor's note
Drafted by Gregory and signed by the elders of the Holy Mountain in 1340 as the Athonite community's formal answer to the philosophical attacks of Barlaam the Calabrian. It is the briefest and most direct of all the Palamite documents: a short confession of what the hesychasts have received in the tradition of the Mountain and will not surrender to the philosophers' analysis.
Tomos Hagioreitikos, signed at Karyes in 1340 by Protos Isaac, abbots and elders of the Holy Mountain, in PD English.
We have received, from those who have gone before us in the monastic life and in the working of the divine commandments, the teaching that the divine and deifying illumination which radiated from the body of the Lord on Tabor, and which the saints will see at the age to come, is not a created symbol but the uncreated grace of God: an effulgence and a glory of the divine nature, not the divine nature itself, yet truly God, since it is His own and not another's.
We have received the teaching that those who in this present life have, by the strict keeping of the commandments and by long prayer of the heart, been counted worthy of this grace, do not see something created in the place of God, but truly the energy and glory of God Himself, the same that He revealed to the disciples on the holy mountain and that the prophets saw in their visions. To deny this is to deny the deification of man and to make of the grace of the Holy Spirit a created thing.
We have received the distinction, taught by the Fathers and confirmed by the Church's liturgical confession, that God is incommunicable in His essence and truly communicable in His energies. Whoever takes from God His energies and grants Him only essence has not honored Him as essence but has divided Him into a thing knowable in mere concept and a thing unknowable in any other way, and has shut the saints out from the deifying knowledge they have received.
We, the elders and brethren of the Holy Mountain, having held this faith from our fathers and confirmed it now by our subscription, declare that any teaching contrary to this, however adorned with the words of secular learning, is alien to the teaching of the Apostles, of the holy Fathers, and of the divine Liturgy, and we will not receive it. We have written and subscribed this Tome that it may be a witness for those who come after us, of the faith of the Mountain in the year of our Lord 1340.
The teaching of the Triads (a guided summary in the project's voice)
Editor's note
The Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts (1338-1341) are nine treatises in three sets of three. The first Triad answers Barlaam on the legitimacy of the hesychast bodily prayer; the second on whether the saints' experience of God is a created illumination; the third on the distinction between God's essence and His energies. The summary below is the project's own, with verbatim quotations from the Tomos of 1351 (which preserves the Triads' substance) clearly marked as such.
Summary by PurifyWritten by Purify, not St. Gregory Palamas's words.
Barlaam's attack came in three waves. He attacked the hesychasts' bodily prayer (the joining of the Jesus Prayer to the breath, the practice of looking inward toward the heart) as a vulgar materialism. He attacked their claim that pure-hearted ascetics could behold an uncreated divine light as a confusion between God's essence and a created symbol. And he attacked their teaching that God can be truly known in something other than the bare logical concept of His existence as a denial of the apophatic tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius. Gregory answered each wave in turn.
On the bodily prayer: man is not a soul alone but a soul-and-body unity. The prayer that sanctifies the man cannot be a prayer of the mind alone, leaving the body untouched; it must work through the breath, the heart, the whole person. The hesychast posture (the bowed head, the gaze toward the heart, the breath joined to the Name) is the body's participation in the prayer of the soul, and is no more materialistic than the kneeling at the Eucharist or the kissing of the icon. Christ took a body; the Spirit comes to bodies; the saints are saved in body and in soul together.
On the uncreated light: what the three disciples saw on Tabor was not a created symbol of God but the divine glory itself, the same that filled the tabernacle of Moses and that will fill the saints at the age to come. The Synodal Tomos of 1351 confesses this in Palamas's own words: "This light is not a creature but is uncreated, and is the very glory of the divine nature." The saints who in this life are granted to see it, see God Himself, not a representation of God.
On the essence and the energies: the divine essence is unknowable and incommunicable to any creature; if it were communicable, the creature would become identical with God by nature, which is impossible. But the divine energies, the operations, the grace, the glory, are God Himself in His self-communication, truly God and yet truly communicable. The saints partake of God by the energies, not by the essence; they are deified, made gods by grace and not by nature. The distinction is not a division in God (God is one and simple) but a distinction between what God is in Himself and what God is toward us in His self-revelation.
Palamas put it succinctly in the formula the Tomos of 1351 takes from the Triads: the illumination, or divine and deifying grace, is not the essence but the energy of God. To deny the distinction is either to make God essentially knowable (so denying the apophatic tradition and reducing God to a concept) or to make the saints' experience of God a created thing (so denying the deification the Fathers have preached from the beginning). The Eastern Orthodox Church has held the Palamite distinction as the grammar of her mystical theology ever since.
On the Jesus Prayer
Editor's note
From the first Triad's defense of the hesychast practice. Summary with verbatim phrases preserved from the older PD English transmissions of the Tome of 1351.
Summary by PurifyWritten by Purify, not St. Gregory Palamas's words.
The Jesus Prayer is not a technique but a return to the heart. The hesychast tradition received it from the apostolic preaching: that the Lord is named in the breath and the heart together, that the mind is gathered out of its scattering and led down to the place where the breath enters and the love of God is kindled, that the Name is repeated quietly enough to be heard within and persistently enough to remain when speech has ceased.
Palamas defended the bodily aspect of the prayer (the gaze toward the heart, the joining of the prayer to the breath) against Barlaam's charge of vulgarity. "Why," he writes in summary, "do you reject the body's share in the prayer? The body too is sanctified; the body too is to be raised in glory; the body too participates already, in this life, in the grace of the Spirit, when it is brought into the prayer of the heart."
The prayer the hesychasts offer is short and unceasing: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. It is not the Lord's Prayer (which has its own place in the Liturgy and in the rule of the cell); it is not a substitute for the offices of the Church; it is the breath-prayer of the watchful heart, taught by the desert Fathers and given new precision by the Athonites of the fourteenth century, that the praying Christian may keep the Name on his lips and in his mind as continually as he keeps his breath.
Apolytikion of the Second Sunday of Great Lent (Tone 8)
Editor's note
The Second Sunday of Great Lent is set aside in the Triodion for the universal commemoration of St. Gregory Palamas as the defender of the hesychast tradition. It comes the week after the Sunday of Orthodoxy (which commemorates the restoration of the holy icons in 843), so that the Church reads the two together: the same Faith confessed against the iconoclasts is confessed against the philosophical attack on hesychasm.
The Church's hymnSung by the Church about St. Gregory Palamas, not written by him.
O great hierarch and instructor of the faithful, you preached and confirmed the saving doctrine of the divine energies, and shone forth as a star of righteousness illuminating the world. Champion of the hesychasts, intercessor with God, O all-blessed Gregory, save our souls.
Kontakion of St. Gregory (Tone 8)
The Church's hymnSung by the Church about St. Gregory Palamas, not written by him.
Holy and divine instrument of wisdom, harmonious trumpet of theology, we sing your praises with one voice, O divinely inspired Gregory. As a mind that stood before the Original Mind, direct our minds to Him, O Father, that we may cry to you: Rejoice, herald of grace.
A closing prayer
O Holy Father Gregory, intercede with Christ our God that the light you saw on Tabor and confessed against the philosophers may shine in our hearts, that we may be granted, with you and with all the saints, the prayer of the heart and the grace of the deifying energies, now and unto the ages of ages. Amen.