Gregory Palamas

The quarrel began over a practice. Monks on Mount Athos sat in stillness, controlled the breath, fixed the gaze, and repeated a short prayer continuously, and some of them reported seeing a light which they said was uncreated, the same light the disciples saw on the mountain at the Transfiguration. Barlaam, a learned Calabrian Greek, found the physical technique absurd and the claim impossible: God is unknowable in his essence, and a created being cannot see anything uncreated, so what the monks saw was either imagination or something made.

Palamas, himself a monk of Athos, answered in a series of treatises defending the holy hesychasts. His argument concedes the premise and denies the conclusion. God's essence is indeed wholly unknowable and always will be. But God is not only his essence: he acts, and his actions, the energies, are God himself in operation rather than created effects. The light on Tabor is one of them. So the monks are seeing God, truly, without seeing the essence, and the unknowability the philosophers insist on is preserved exactly.

The dispute ran for two decades and was entangled with a civil war in which the two sides had political patrons. Councils at Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 upheld Palamas, Barlaam left for Italy and the Latin church, and Palamas was made archbishop of Thessalonica and canonised within a decade of his death.

The distinction Palamas drew is now dogma in the Orthodox churches and is the single point at which Eastern and Western theology diverge most sharply on the doctrine of God.

Stated carefully, the claim is that in God there is the essence, which no creature will ever know or participate in, and there are the energies, the divine life in act, which are uncreated, are fully God, and in which a human being genuinely participates. Theosis, the deification of the human person that Eastern theology treats as the point of the whole Christian enterprise, is participation in the energies. Without the distinction, on this view, either God is unreachable and the promise is empty, or the creature absorbs the divine essence, which is incoherent.

The standard Western objection is that this introduces a real distinction into God and so compromises divine simplicity, which the scholastic tradition regards as fundamental: whatever is in God is God, without composition of any kind. Thomist theology handles the same problem differently, through the doctrine that God is known by created grace and the beatific vision. Latin theologians condemned Palamism roundly for centuries; twentieth century Catholic scholarship has been considerably more sympathetic, and some of it argues the two accounts are addressing different questions.

The atlas records the position, the objection, and the fact that the disagreement is live rather than settled.