Norman Russel

Palamism is a modern term coined in the early twentieth century by the Assumptionist Martin Jugie. Jugie’s aim was to demonstrate that the Orthodox Church was guilty of ‘innovation’ by its endorsement of Palamas’ essence–energies distinction in the Godhead and could therefore not accuse the Roman Catholic Church of being alone in introducing new doctrines. John Meyendorff set out to answer Jugie by proving Palamas’ continuity with the patristic tradition, but against Jugie’s neo-scholastic construction of Palamism set up an existentialist and personalist construction of his own. Modern Western scholars have tended to follow Jugie rather than Meyendorff. Since the 1960s, however, the publication of Palamas’ entire corpus of writings has led to a series of studies that have deepened our comprehension of Palamas’ thinking. ‘Palamism’ today is moving beyond its original ideological construction, and although still controversial has the potential to enrich the understanding of both Orthodox and Western theologians as to how human beings are able to participate in God.

Why is Gregory Palamas such a figure of contention? More than six hundred fifty years after his death he is often attacked or defended with a fervour which no other ancient or mediaeval theologian (with the possible exception of St Augustine) can evoke. The passion aroused even today in both his defenders and his adversaries suggests that we need to look for the reasons not so much in the voluminous texts of Palamas himself as in the structures of our own thought worlds.

‘Palamism’ is a modern term. It seems first to have been used by Martin Jugie in the early twentieth century to characterize an Orthodox—he calls it a ‘GraecoRussian’—doctrine which he wanted to brand as quasi-heretical. There is, of course, a sense in which Palamas’ theological justification of Athonite hesychasm, with the special terminology he developed centred principally on the essence–energies distinction, may legitimately be distinguished from the teaching of contemporary hesychasts such as Gregory of Sinai, who makes no mention of essence and energies. But Palamas’ fourteenth-century adversaries referred simply to his ‘innovations’ or his ‘heresy’. The term ‘Palamism’ has a ring to it suggesting a system of thought, a counterpart perhaps to ‘Thomism’, which is precisely why Jugie adopted it. From the start it had a polemical colouring