Orthodox Hesychasm and Monastic Development In Light of St. Gregory Palamas Against Barlaam

An Analysis of Orthodox Piety in Contrast to Western Piety

The disputation over hesychasm in the 14th century through the battle between St. Gregory Palamas and Barlaam of Calabria marks an instance of the most significant direct conflict between western piety versus eastern piety in Christendom. According to Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, hesychasm can be characterized in five senses:¹

1. "solitary life", a sense, equivalent to "eremitical life"

2. "the practice of inner prayer, aiming at union with God on a level beyond images, concepts and language", a sense in which the term is found in Evagrius Ponticus (345–399), Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 662), and Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022).

3. "The quest for such union through the Jesus Prayer²", the earliest reference to which is in Diadochos of Photiki (c. 450)

4. "a particular psychosomatic technique in combination with the Jesus Prayer", use of which technique can be traced back at least to the 13th century

5. The doctrine of the divine energies that existed in the Orthodox Church, present and explicated within St. Gregory Palamas’ theology.

All of these points are interconnected with each other, you cannot have one without the other. St. Gregory’s main thesis in defense of hesychasm is that we can truly achieve communion with God Himself via hesychasm due to the fact that although God is utterly incomprehensible in His essence, His energies reach to us and makes Him known to us. This theological principle of St. Gregory Palamas is present in several biblical passages, such as being “partakers of the divine nature”,³ seeing God’s powers and attributes in creation,⁴ not being able to see the face of God, but rather His back as His glory passes by.⁵

Barlaam in contrast considers such ideas repugnant, for him, the idea of knowing God through prayer implies knowledge of His essence, which would imply that God is composite. This is why for the barlaamites, God’s energy if it really is distinct from His essence, must be created for the only thing that is uncreated is the divine essence. This also means that God’s will, the triune persons, energy are all identical not only with the divine essence but consequently with one another.⁶

Many commentators have noted the rationalism of Barlaam, and St. Gregory Palamas certainly noted this as well since his triads starts with “Philosophy doesn’t save”. But this doesn’t mean that Barlaam had the monopoly on rationality, rather his rationality not only contradicted the faith, but it was also inferior. In contrast, St. Gregory’s response against Barlaam and his followers was to combine biblical theology, patristic witness, and greek philosophy to devastate his arguments from all fronts. This attitude of St. Gregory Palamas has a theme in St. Paul’s writings concerning the relationship between the body of the soul with St. Paul arguing the superiority of the spiritual life over the bodily life,⁷ but here it takes another turn since Barlaam’s philosophy is bodily whereas St. Gregory’s patristic philosophy is spiritual, because it has controlled “worldly philosophy” and gave life to it via faith. This showcases the radical difference between Barlaam’s approach against St. Gregory Palamas’: Barlaam’s worldview is based on the presuppositions of natural theology, that man can reason to revelation separated from faith. St. Gregory Palamas on the other hand bases his approach on supernatural revelation, that is that reason can only be actualized through faith, that is that faith gives grounding to reason, therefore reason without faith is dead, just like how faith without works is dead.⁸

Barlaam after being anathematized in the Hesychast synods, which are dogmatic in Orthodox Christianity and celebrated on the Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas, became a Roman Catholic bishop. It is not a surprise that he became a Roman Catholic as a result of this affair since the position he was defending fundamentally was the theology of the Roman Catholic Church, specifically outlined at the Council of Rheims in 1148 and Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 which dogmatized the idea that God’s attributes are not distinct with each other, neither with the essence, but in fact are identical with the essence. One can read Denzinger or Ludwig Ott’s “Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma” to see this even clearer. Barlaam’s apostasy to Roman Catholicism is significant for the reason that it shows that the conflict between St. Gregory Palamas and Barlaam was not merely a conflict between two Orthodox Christians, but rather a conflict between an Orthodox Christian and a crypto-Roman Catholic.

Once one becomes cognizant of the differences in piety, two things become clear: The paths that both civilizations take are different because of their theological presuppositions, and without addressing these presuppositions, one cannot achieve the piety of the other. This is why the project of uniatism is ultimately not only a failure, but also the greatest proof of the falsehood of Roman Catholicism since unity in Roman Catholicism became not a feature of union based on the sameness of faith, but rather based on faith in the Pope, for instance, the Chaldean Catholics and the Syro Malabar Catholics can commemorate Nestorians such as Theodore of Mopsuestia and even Nestorius himself, calling them “Mar”, which is equivalent to Saint in Syriac. This understanding of eucharistic union is fundamentally external, which makes one think of the prosopic union of Nestorius, which was condemned by the third and fifth ecumenical councils, for the basis of Christ’s union with His humanity is not hypostatic according to Nestorius but an external union based on God’s will, which is why Christ although is two prosopa, or persons, has one will in this scheme. Orthodox communion and spirituality, in turn, is based on an internal union, this communion is a communion in the same confessional faith rather than a communion based on “we have to be united to x figure to be truly united”. This scheme resembles Christ’s hypostatic union more accurately, for the Church is the body of Christ and we are united to Him through His person or hypostasis.

The difference between the piety can be most definitely illustrated with the monastics, what I am going to assert is not going to be the idea that Roman Catholicism lacks proper asceticism since it still in some sense has a share in the first 1000 years of the Orthodox Church even today, but rather that share has diminished greatly over time due to spiritual innovations such as that of Francis of Assisi in contrast to St. Seraphim of Sarov. If you listen to Roman Catholic clergy, their “spiritual message” does not go beyond “be nice to people”, and that the spiritual life is mechanical and based on rules such as “do XYZ prayers 15 times and you will be saved, or wear this brown scapular and if you keep it on you you will be saved from hellfire. Such Talmudic ideas in my view clearly stem from the identification of God’s essence with His will, since in this scheme God instead of being active in creation becomes a kind of a mechanical thought thinking itself being in which communion with Him becomes possible only through following a set of rules, instead of being a Divinely free being who we can commune with. I am not saying all Roman Catholic homilists are like this, but rather this is the norm in the world of Roman Catholicism.

The Text on the scapular says “Whosoever dies wearing this Scapular shall not suffer eternal fire”.

This is another reason why Roman Catholic piety even among its monastics is being corrupted, and why many of them in awe observe Orthodox monasticism in contrast. Even when I was irreligious, I was shocked to see videos of nuns going to baseball or football matches with their fellow nuns. Although in hindsight a lot of those videos and photos were probably of fake nuns, this phenomenon still occurs too often.

Nothing says spiritual contemplation like supporting a sportsball team

I am not trying to disparage these people or say they are evil for supporting a sports team, what I am rather saying is that engaging with the world in such a manner contradicts the spiritual life of monasticism, which aims to withdraw oneself from the world into “his closet and shut the door”⁹ not to pick and choose which part of the world we can go in and which part of the world we can throw ourselves out. My argument isn’t dependent on one or two examples, if that was all there was then I wouldn’t have an argument, I don’t have a problem with an individual monastic engaging in the world in the manner of a normal person provided that it doesn’t cross boundaries, but when it becomes some sort of a trend, I start to get a little cautious.

This is one of the many reasons why even traditionalist Roman Catholics once they get bored of political heroism become interested in Orthodox spirituality instead and are fascinated by it. However many of them have this illusion that one can have Orthodox spirituality while being a Roman Catholic, but that is no different than pick your religion style Protestantism that Roman Catholics love to criticize so much, but some of them ignore this and instead act as if Orthodox Christianity is “their” religion that they’ve just forgotten about for a Millenium. As I’ve written in this article, Orthodox spirituality is the way it is due to hesychasm, something that has only been recently appropriated in Roman Catholicism, which is a change from the previous policy of deriding hesychasm and the theology behind it.

Orthodox monastic spirituality on the other hand goes to what people consider extreme, and what I consider its logical conclusion of hesychasm, they truly become alone with themselves and God and spend their entire life for God, whether that is in the form of obedience from their abbot, solitary lifestyle where one truly becomes one and one with God, or an inner calling is dependent on the situation they reside in. Even amongst those in the world, we are told to visit monasteries often, in many instances they are treated as some kind of a spiritual center for that region or even for that country! One thinks of Mt. Athos as the spiritual center of Orthodoxy, since it contains many monasteries, including Russian monasteries, and going to those monasteries no matter what your nationality is, is significantly beneficial and is an authentic Christian experience based on those who live like angels, emulating Saints such as St. John the Baptist.

We thus see the engagement of Orthodox monasteries with the world through the lens of St. Paul’s understanding of the body and the soul by observing that the monastery manifests the spiritual life whereas the worldly life manifests the bodily life, and we are to allow the spiritual life to take control over our bodily life to make it spiritual, not by making it lose what it is by nature but by elevating it to its proper status as a body that is now spiritual. This approach is impossible in Roman Catholicism because of natural theology which separates reason from faith, making it impossible for faith to interpenetrate the world, and rather treat them as separate, I am again, in the annoyance of some readers, going to invoke the contrast between Nestorius’ prosopic union in which the union between God and man is merely external as opposed to the hypostatic union of these two natures, where Christ becomes the one mediator between God and man.¹⁰ This becomes most clear in the Roman Catholic manner of treating miracles and prophecies, one merely needs to think of Fatima and Charbel Makhlouf, even though Fatima has spiritual messages, it is primarily treated as a political message, and many people’s faith is based on Fatima alone, to the point where doubting Fatima (which is technically possible in the Roman Catholic system) makes one anathema amongst even the traditionalist Catholic communities. The obsession with miracles should remind us of Christ’s analysis of the spiritual state of those who obsess over miracles “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign”¹¹ or Christ affirming the superiority of those who believe without seeing in contrast to St. Thomas’ doubt “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”¹² Charbel is another example of how a miracle-working saint can go wrong, assuming that his relics work miracles (which still calls into question whether they work from God or from demons), it is interesting to see that the miracle becomes more about Charbel and less about Christ, since Muslims also consider the miracles to be legitimate, yet still doubt Christ. Is this Charbel’s fault? I don’t know, but I do know that the overall theology of God’s inability to interact with creation without using created mediums and basing the faith and union in communion on external things such as Papal Supremacy instead of establishing a communion based on union in faith has at the very least greatly contributed to these viewpoints.

Even though the Orthodox Christian worldview is absolutely correct in this regard, this does not mean that you won’t see a spiritual barlaamite in an Orthodox Church, since someone like Seraphim Aldea who is constantly concerned about the world and makes videos and arguments that are fundamentally indistinguishable from that of CNN’s argumentation also has a considerable following, but his following is not Orthodox Christians but rather anyone but Orthodox Christians, you consistently see people identifying themselves as non-Orthodox in his videos, because the content he produces itself is not Orthodox which is why many of them do not convert to Orthodoxy, rather they listen to him because they want a religious figure to legitimize their liberal views. Abbott Tryphon, Fr. Spyridon Bailey, and Fr. Josiah Trenham in contrast are at least in today’s online world are authentic representatives of Orthodox spiritual tradition that originates not even from St. Gregory Palamas, not the Apostles, not even since Christ’s incarnation, a spiritual tradition whose origin is from the time of Adam’s creation.

1. Kallistos Ware 1995, Act out of Stillness: The Influence of Fourteenth-Century Hesychasm on Byzantine and Slav Civilization ed. Daniel J. Sahas (Toronto: The Hellenic Canadian Association of Constantinople and the Thessalonikean Society of Metro Toronto), pp. 4-7. Cf. Payne, Daniel Paul, "3" (PDF), The Revival of Political Hesychasm in Greek Orthodox Thought: A Study of the Hesychast Basis of the Thought of John S. Romanides and Christos Yannaras, Baylor, archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-09-26. pp.130-131

2. "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”

3. 2 Peter 1:4 Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

4. Romans 1:20 the invisible things of God—his eternal power and godhead—are clearly perceived from the creation of the world, being understood in the things that are made

5. Exodus 33:19-23 And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy. And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live. And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.

6. How then he manages to make sense with God’s triunity with the distinction of persons without causing a separation of God into three essences a la tritheism is still up to question. The monophysite John Ascoutzanges preached tritheism on the basis of the identification of person and nature: If person is identical to nature or the divine essence, then being three persons, the Trinity therefore also must be three natures. See Johannes Zachuber, The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics: Patristic Philosophy from the Cappadocian Fathers to John of Damascus

7. See Galatians 5:16-17 This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.

8. James 2:17. Also see Galatians 5:6 For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which is energized by love. The Greek reading of Galatians 5:6 showcases that faith becomes activated and substantial through love, which directly contradicts sola fide.

9. Matthew 6:6 “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”

10. 1 Timothy 2:5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus

11. See Matthew 16:4, Matthew 12:39; Mark 8:12; Luke 11:29

12. John 20:29