Conciliar

The Holy Mountain (Hagioritic Tome)

1341–1351 · 14th c. · 4 works

The Palamite Councils of Constantinople are a series of three synods — held in 1341, 1347, and 1351 — together with the closely related Hagioritic Tome (a statement of the Athonite fathers, c. 1340), which collectively defined the Orthodox theology of divine essence and energies associated with Gregory Palamas (c. 1296–1359). The councils were convened in the context of the Hesychast controversy, a dispute between Palamas and the Calabrian monk Barlaam over the nature of the divine light seen by the hesychast monks at prayer and of the union with God that they described.

The Council of 1341 condemned Barlaam's teaching that the divine light witnessed by the disciples at the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor was a created phenomenon, and upheld Palamas's distinction between God's essence (ousia), which remains entirely beyond participation, and his uncreated energies (energeiai), through which the creature genuinely participates in God. The Council of 1347 extended this condemnation to Gregory Akindynos, who had continued to oppose Palamas. The Council of 1351 issued the most complete theological definition: its Synodal Tome set forth at length the doctrine that the essence–energies distinction is real and not merely conceptual, that the divine energies and grace are genuinely uncreated, and that deification (theosis) consists in real participation in these uncreated energies — anathematizing those who held otherwise.

The Hagioritic Tome, signed by the monastic communities of Mount Athos and presented to the Patriarch before the 1341 council, served as the foundational patristic brief for Palamas's position. Taken together, the Palamite Councils and the Hagioritic Tome constitute the dogmatic foundation for Orthodox teaching on prayer, deification, and the knowledge of God, and are received throughout the Orthodox world as authoritative conciliar definitions.

Sources: Encyclopædia Britannica — Hesychasm · Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent) — Hesychasm