Hesychasts

HESYCHASTS: A community of Greek quiet istic and mystic monks, especially on Mount Athos in the fourteenth century. Since the

First elevation of the Palaeologi to the im

Appearance. perial throne, the Church had been

Barlaani. in a state of continuous unrest, the policy of the government inclining al ternately to union with the Roman Catholic Church and to hostility to the Latin faith; while the first half of the fourteenth century was a period of civil war. This was the time at which the Hesychasts originated, first on Mount Athos, under the leader ship of Gregorius Palamas (q.v.), later archbishop of

Thessalonica. They spoke of an eternal, uncreated, and yet communicable divine light, which had shone on Mount Tabor, the Mount of Transfiguration, and had passed to them. They were soon assailed, however, by the monk Barlaam, a native of Calabria, of Greek descent, but educated in the Roman Catholic Church, and originally a member of a Roman Catholic Basilian order. He had gone to Greece at the beginning of the reign of Androni cus, joined the Greek Church, and won prominence by polemics against the Roman Church and as an agent of Andronicus to Benedict XII. at Avignon, ostensibly to procure the support of western Europe against the Turks, but really to labor for a union

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between the Greek and Roman churches. After his return to Greece Barlaam attacked the Hesychaats and declared their teaching heretical, since such a light could only be the essence of God. To the argument of Palamas that the light was not the absolute essence, but a divine agency and grace in its 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 Constan tinople 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 Gemce 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 accord ingly approved, while Barlaam wasexcommunicated and 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, as ceticism, penance, and the sacraments. This teach ing 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 em anate 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

Nicephoraa Gregoras, argued that the uncreated light must be either a substance or a quality. In the former case, a fourth hypoatasis 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 Hesychaatic 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 Hesychasta 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 tran scendency 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 accorlingly rendered its decision regardless of the philosophical error contained in the mystical deductions of the Hesychasts. The justice of their claims to the dis covery of the Tabor-light, the retainable portion of their Gnosticizing description of the energies, and the reconciliation of the contradiction of an un created 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 o: God still operates creatively in the Church as it did in the 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 Symboliatics " (Venice [P],1801), who was followed by such dogmaticians as Eugenios Bulgaria in his "Theology" (ed. Leontopuloa, Venice, 1872) and Athanasios Parios (q.v.) in his "Epitome" (Leipsic, 1808), while a work on the "spiritual prayer," which leads to the vision of fight, was

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published at Athens in 1854 under the title of "Spiritual Synopsis" by Sophronios, an archimandrate of a monastery on Athos.

(Philipp Meyer.)

Bibliography: Sources are in John Cantaeusenos, Hist. Byzantina, in MPG, cliii (gives the case for the Hesychasts); Nicephoras Gregoras, Hist. Byzantina, MPG, eAviii (given the Barlaam side); review of the sources in Krumbacher, Geschichte. For history and discussion consult: Illgen, in ZHT, viii (1838), 48 sqq.; W. Gass, Geschichte der Athos-Kl�ster, Gieseen, 1865; J. H. Krause, Die Byzantiner den Mittelalters, pp. 312 (on Barlaam), 327 (on the Hesychasts), Halle, 1869; Stein, Studien Uber As Hbaydhaaten des- 14. Jahrhunderts, Vienna, 1874; J. Hergenröther, Handbuch der allgemeinen Kirchengeschichte, 1860 sqq., Freiburg, 1885; K. Holl, D' nthuaiaa;nue and Buasgewalt bei den prierhischen MSnchtum, Leipsic, 1808; A. H. Hore, Biphteen Centuries of the Orthodox Greek Church, pp. 457-4U, New York, 1899; KL, i. 2012-2016 (Barlaam), v. 1960-8 (the Hesychasts).