RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Hesshusen Hesychasts
jetween the Greek and Roman churches. After his return to Greece Barlaam attacked the Hesychasts and declared their teaching heretical, since such a "ight could only be the essence of God. To the .rgument of Palamas that the light was not the absolute essence, but a divine agency and grace in ts communicability, Barlaam replied with a charge of teaching a twofold divinity, approachable and unapproachable, thus approximating dualism. The matter was brought by Barlaam before the Patriarch Johannes, and a synod was convened at Constantinople in 1341 under the presidency of the emperor and the patriarch. The Calabrian was defeated and returned to Italy, where he rejoined the Roman Church, and in 1342 was made bishop of Gerace in Calabria. He now wrote as violently against the Greek Church as he had formerly against the Latin. He died in 1348. A second synod confirmed the decision of the first, especially as Barlaam was suspected in Greece of being an adherent of Rome. Notwithstanding all this, the number of those who agreed with him increased, and in a third synod his party were able, through the influence of the Empress Anna, to depose the patriarch, although their success was checked by the victory of John Cantacuzenos over Anna. A fourth synod was held in 1351, and the final decision was completely in favor of the monks. The Hesychasts were accordingly approved, while Barlaam was excommunicated ;md his partizan, the archbishop of Ephesus, was deposed.
The object of the Hesychasts was a revival of the mysticism which had prevailed in Greek theology
from ancient times. Since Clement of
The Alexandria, it had been an axiom that
Hesychast illumination might be gained by purifi-
Doctrine. cation, and the pseudo-Dionysius, who
sought some other means of approach to God than the ordinary method of knowledge and meditation, postulated a hidden light into which one who was deemed worthy to see God might enter. Similar concepts recur under different terminology in Maximus, but the chief theologian to raise the theory of the divine light to a cardinal doctrine in the Greek system was Symeon Neotheologus (q.v.), who flourished about the year 1000. He regarded the vision of God and the consequent union with the divine as the chief end of the Christian, and for the attainment of this object required a systematic education which was to be perfected by baptism, asceticism, penance, and the sacraments. This teaching formed the basis of the Hesychasts of Mount Athos, although they devised an artificial mode of obtaining these visions. The light was regarded as superterrestrial and divine, but was not identified with God, and a distinction was accordingly drawn between essence and activity. The latter was divided into an indefinite number of individual energies of wisdom, power, counsel, illumination, and life. These form the " divinities " which emanate from God and are inseparably connected with him. To them belongs the Tabor-light, which is superterrestrial, visible, eternal, and uncreated, yet deifies that through which it passes and raises it to the region of the uncreated. Against this the followers of Barlaam, represented especially by V.— 17
Nicephoras Gregoras, argued that the uncreated light must be either a substance or a quality. In the former case, a fourth hypostasis is assumed, and in the latter a quality, which is impossible without a subject. In either case, two Gods would be presupposed: one superior, and the other inferior and capable of being attained to by physical vision. On the other hand, the most necessary attributes of God are unity and goodness; but the former excludes all combination, and the latter is unthinkable, except in a union of essence and activity.
The problem presented to the synod was twofold: the distinction between essence and activity, and the Hesychastic interpretation of The their uncreated energies as " divin-
Points of ities," which became the principle of a Controversy, mysterious deification. On the basis of the latter question the Hesychasts could scarcely have been sustained, but the synod gave prominence to the purely speculative problem without regard to the peculiar point of view from which it was deduced. The Greek Fathers had always recognized the acme of the divine transcendency as the absolute, to which no name might be given and which no eye, either of mind or body, might behold. On the other hand, they admitted life and activity proceeding from the absolute, and these qualities could not fail unless the finite was to be separated from all vital association with God. For so fluctuating a differentiation, which formed, moreover, a ready basis for mysticism, it was not difficult to find proofs both from analogy and from the earlier theologians; and the synod accordingly rendered its decision regardless of the philosophical error contained in the mystical deductions of the Hesychasts. The justice of their claims to the discovery of the Tabor-light, the retainable portion of their Gnosticizing description of the energies, and the reconciliation of the contradiction of an uncreated visibility were unexplained; nor was the relation of essence and activity clearly defined. Nevertheless, the Greek Church remained content with this unsatisfactory result, partly because it squared with the tendency of its theology. In its turn, the Roman Catholic Church upheld Barlaam, and even made the controversy one of the points of difference between itself and the Greek Church. The struggle for Hesychasm was in defense of the essentially Greek dogma that the spirit of God still operates creatively in the Church as it did in tin Apostolic Age, and it was likewise a battle against Occidental scholasticism, which was then rejected forever by the Greek Church.
From this point of view it becomes clear why the doctrine of the sight of the divine light has been retained in Greek theology, and why it gained new power with the revival in that body in the nineteenth century. The chief representative of the Hesychasts in that period was Nikodemus Hagiorites (q-v.), a monk of Athos, in his " Manual of Symbolistics " (Venice [?], 1801), who was followed by such dogmaticians as Eugenios Bulgaris in his "Theology " (ed. Leontopulos, Venice, 1872) and Athanasios Parios (q.v.) in his " Epitome " (Leipsic, 1806), while a work on the " spiritual prayer," which leads to the vision of light, was
Hesychius Hewit