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Jonathan L. Zecher, Activity and Participation in Late Antiquity and Early Christian Thought. By Torstein Theodor Tollefsen., The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 64, Issue 1, April 2013, Pages 283–287, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flt010
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The so-called ‘Palamite Controversy’—one of the most significant, but also the most cerebral, theological divisions between Christians East and West—began in the fourteenth century, when Gregory Palamas took up the defence of Athonite monks practising a particular form of prayer and meditation known as ‘Hesychasm’. In order to defend against the criticisms of Barlaam of Calabria the monks’ claims to experience the ‘uncreated light of God’ while admitting (with Barlaam) that God is essentially unknowable and, therefore, essentially beyond the human sensory or intellectual grasp, Gregory deployed a now-famous distinction between God’s ‘essence’ (ousia) and ‘activities’ or, as they are commonly called in the East, ‘energies’ (energeiai). Palamas’s vindication in Constantinople in 1354 helped insure the place of Palamite theology and Hesychast spirituality in the East, but the ‘essence–energies’ distinction of Palamas has come under attack from time to time as an innovative (that is, non-traditional) and even heretical theological stance which collapses crucial ontological distinctions between God and humans in favour of a hubristic idea of deification. On the other side, Eastern Orthodox theologians such as John Meyendorff have undertaken to defend Palamas’s theology and to recast it as rooted in patristic tradition. In order to do so, they have generally mined earlier patristic material—the Cappadocian Fathers, Cyril of Alexandria, Pseudo-Dionysius, and, especially, Maximus the Confessor—for use of the ousia–energeia terminology. The shortcomings of such defences should be apparent, but so far no one has undertaken the rather more Herculean task of sorting through what those Fathers might have meant by using such terms.
