Palamas, and the Argument Over the Uncreated Light

The essence-energies distinction was forged in a fourteenth-century controversy. Monks of Mount Athos practised hesychasm, a discipline of stillness and the repeated Jesus Prayer, and some claimed to perceive the uncreated light, the same light, they said, that the apostles saw at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. The Calabrian scholar Barlaam attacked the claim as crude: God is beyond the senses, and any light seen must be a created effect, not God himself.

Gregory Palamas answered by distinguishing God's inaccessible essence from his uncreated energies, in which God is truly present and truly seen. A series of councils at Constantinople between 1341 and 1351 vindicated Palamas, and the Palamite distinction became settled Orthodox teaching. The Christian West took a different route, generally speaking of created grace and framing the final goal as the beatific vision of the divine essence, and some Western theologians have regarded the Palamite energies as an illegitimate division within God. The atlas notes the divergence: deification language is not absent in the West, but the essence-energies framework and the centrality of theosis to the whole of salvation are distinctively Eastern.