Saint Gregory Palamas
Saint Gregory Palamas (1296-1359/60) was a son of a noble family. His father was Constantine, courtier of the Byzantine emperor, and his mother the pious Kalloni. He was brought up at the court of Andronicus II and received an adequate education. He was a pupil of Theodoros Metochites, a great Logothete, a university professor and a distinguished intellectual man. He was clever and took from an early age the path to wisdom.
There is a characteristic story about an event that took place in the palace when he was only 15 years old. He gave a lecture on Aristotle. His professor, full of enthusiasm, said to him "Aristotle himself would praise you if he was here!" Saint Gregory was a great student of ancient philosophy.
However, he was an even greater student of the christian faith. His heart was captivated by the desire to devote himself to monastic life. Before he transferred to Mount Athos he helped all his relatives and even his servants to settle down in their lives. He even persuaded the emperor to allow him to become a monk. His professor said prophetically "this one was going to become a great man if he stayed with us in the world. However, he chooses a higher spiritual life out of love for God. Therefore, he will be good at that too!". Gregory, with such a charisma, did not take long to be distinguished in the monastic state of Mount Athos. He followed the hesychastic tradition, which sets as a goal the theosis of a man through the purity of his life and the illumination of the mind through the grace of the Holy Spirit. It constitutes a life of uninterrupted prayer.
Saint Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessaloniki and a brilliant man of orthodoxy, “the illuminator and preacher of grace" (see the Apolitikion of Saint Gregory on the second Sunday of the Nasts), was known for his struggles during the 14th century. He fought for the movement of hesychasm, an ascetic and mystical tradition which is considered to be the greatest expression of the Orthodox spirituality, against the movement of scholasticism, which is founded on the Western thought and theology.
Saint Gregory Palamas managed to expound, develop, explain, clarify and summarize the Orthodox faith and tradition of all the last 13 centuries!
In the conflict between Saint Gregory Palamas and the representatives of scholasticism (Varlaam Kalavros and Gregory Akindynos), the contradiction was not created between the personalities of those men and their academic ideas. It was a matter of two worlds in relation to the great essence of Christian life, faith and dogma. It concerned the possibility of man to get to know God and to become a Saint by divine grace. Barlaam argued that no human could know God empirically, much less become united with Him. All we can do is "study" the Scriptures and approach Him intellectually. God was considered to be "enclosed in his own nature" and could not be united with men. The "hesychastics", the monks who said that man can, regardless of his education, meet God if he has a pure heart and if he prays unceasingly by saying "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me", were considered to be heretics. To oppose those thesis of Barlaam, Palamas settled in Thessaloniki and began to write speeches "in favor of the holy hesychasts", those who lived in silence and prayer. The differentiation concerned mainly the possibility of man to participate or not to the divine substance of God and share his divine energy. Saint Gregory made a distinction between the God that is immutable in His essence but immanent in His immaterial actions. The Church has endorsed his interpretation in the Synode that was held in Constantinople in 1351 AD.
The theological work of Saint Gregory Palamas is valuable because he provided all those spiritual resources that were necessary to save the Greek nation and the Orthodox faith in the following years of the slavery. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the occupation by the Ottomans, the orthodox christian world would have to struggle in order to keep the faith alive. The holy garden of Our Lady and Mother of God, the peninsula of Mount Athos, where Saint Gregory settled before becoming Archbishop of Thessaloniki, became the center of this tradition.
Having started his spiritual journey at the age of 20, he first practiced on Mount Papikio and then in various locations on Athos. Initially he was at Vatopedi. Afterwards, he went to the commune of the Great Lavra, where he was made a chanter by the abbot. Three years later he became a hermit in Glosia. In 1326 he was ordained as a priest in Thessaloniki by John Kalekas.
During his stay in the city, he became a member of a spiritual circle that aimed at cultivating mental prayer in the world. Later on, he left with ten other priests for the city of Veroia, where he remained in strict confinement for five years. Due to the death of his mother, he returned temporarily to Constantinople and in 1331 he settled permanently on Mount Athos. There he lived in the hermitage of Saint Savas and subsequently became abbot of the Esfigmenou Monastery. Following the entreaties of the Emperor and Patriarch Isidore, he was consecrated Archbishop of Thessaloniki in 1347, at the age of 50. From March 1354 to the spring of 1355, Gregory Palamas spent a year in Asia Minor as a prisoner of the Ottomans. After his release and until his death from a serious illness on the 14th of November 1359, at the age of 63, he remained in Thessaloniki, where he devoted himself to his pastoral duties. After his burial he began to be honored as a saint because of his holy life, his actions and the miracles that he performed and that remained in the consciousness of the faithful. The Patriarchate requested an accurate report from Thessaloniki. On the basis of this report, Patriarch Philotheos composed a praise and a sequence. By the decision of the synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (1368) the elder Gregory Palamas was officially proclaimed as a Saint of the Eastern Orthodox Church. His memory is celebrated on November 14th and on every second Sunday of the Lent, right after the Sunday of Orthodoxy, as a "second" consolidation of the orthodox dogma against the heresy of Barlaam and scholasticism.
