Gregory Palamas

Gregory Palamas was born in 1296 in Constantinople into a noble family of Anatolian origin that had established itself in the Byzantine capital. His father, Constantine, was a senator and a courtier of Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos and served as tutor to the emperor's grandson, the future Andronikos III. After Constantine died, Gregory was brought up under imperial patronage and received a thorough education in secular learning, including Aristotelian philosophy. Around 1316, while still a young man, he declined a career at court and withdrew to Mount Athos to take up the monastic life.

On the Holy Mountain he was tonsured and lived at Vatopedi and later at the Great Lavra, combining cenobitic discipline with periods of greater solitude and the hesychast practice of the Jesus Prayer. In the mid-1320s Turkish raids prompted him and other monks to leave Athos for Thessaloniki, where he was ordained a priest. He then spent some years as a hermit near Beroea before returning to Athos. In the 1330s Barlaam of Calabria denounced the hesychasts, arguing that their claim to see the uncreated light of God was philosophically and theologically unsound. Palamas replied in the treatises known as the Triads, articulating a distinction between God's unknowable essence and God's uncreated energies, through which the saints truly participate in the divine life and may behold the same light that shone at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor.

The dispute was taken up by synods in Constantinople in 1341, 1347, and 1351, which endorsed Palamas's teaching and condemned Barlaam, Gregory Akindynos, and Nikephoros Gregoras. Palamas's fortunes were bound up with the civil war between John VI Kantakouzenos and the Palaiologan court; he was imprisoned for a time when his patrons were out of power. In 1347 he was consecrated Archbishop of Thessaloniki, but the Zealot faction that then controlled the city kept him from his see until about 1350. In 1354, while traveling, he was captured by Ottoman forces and detained in Asia Minor for about a year until a ransom was arranged.

He died in Thessaloniki in the late 1350s, traditionally on 14 November 1359. In 1368 Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos, who had been Palamas's disciple and biographer, presided over his canonization. Palamas's relics are venerated in Thessaloniki. His defense of hesychasm and of the essence-energies distinction became a central reference for later Eastern Orthodox theology, and the Church commemorates him on 14 November and on the Second Sunday of Great Lent.