Gregory Palamas

About Gregory Palamas

Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) was a Byzantine monk, theologian, and Archbishop of Thessalonica whose defense of the hesychast monks of Mount Athos against the Calabrian philosopher-monk Barlaam produced the essence–energies distinction, the single most consequential theological development in Byzantine Christianity after the great Trinitarian and Christological councils of the first eight centuries. His teaching, vindicated at three Constantinopolitan councils (1341, 1347, 1351), became the doctrinal frame that continues to distinguish Eastern Orthodox theology from Roman Catholic and Protestant theologies of grace and divine knowledge. Palamas is the reason hesychasm is a named theological position rather than simply a monastic practice, and the reason the Orthodox liturgical calendar dedicates the Second Sunday of Great Lent — immediately after the Sunday of Orthodoxy — to Saint Gregory Palamas.

He was born in Constantinople in 1296 into a senatorial family with strong ties to the imperial court. His father, Constantine Palamas, served as a senator under Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos and reportedly practiced hesychast prayer himself, dying while Gregory was still a child. Andronikos II personally oversaw the orphan's education at the imperial court, where he was trained in the classical Greek curriculum of the Palaiologan Renaissance — Aristotelian logic, rhetoric, grammar, the quadrivium. The young Gregory showed enough aptitude that a distinguished civil career was expected of him; the emperor is said to have urged him toward public service (both details derive from Philotheos Kokkinos’s 14th-century Vita and are standard in the hagiographic tradition). Around 1316, at roughly twenty years of age, he broke with this expectation, persuaded his mother and siblings to enter monastic life with him, and departed for Mount Athos. He entered first at the monastery of Vatopedi under the spiritual direction of Nikodemos of Vatopedi, then moved to the Great Lavra, the oldest and largest Athonite house. Turkish raids on the Holy Mountain in 1325 forced him to Thessalonica and then to Beroea, where he lived as a solitary hesychast for about five years, observing a severe rule of prayer and fasting. Around 1331 he returned to Athos and settled at the Skete of Saint Sabas near the Great Lavra, dedicating himself to continuous prayer of the heart and to the spiritual guidance of other monks pursuing the same path. In 1335 he was briefly made abbot of the monastery of Esphigmenou before returning to eremitic life.

The crisis that defined his life opened around 1335. Barlaam of Calabria, a philosophically trained Greek monk from southern Italy, had arrived in Constantinople some years earlier and had been engaged in theological debates with Latins over the procession of the Holy Spirit. He learned of the hesychast method of prayer — its somatic discipline of posture and breath, its claim that practitioners could behold the uncreated divine light — from Athonite monks in Thessalonica. He attacked it as material confusion, as crude anthropomorphism, and as a violation of the pure apophatic theology he read in Pseudo-Dionysius, coining the mocking name omphalopsychoi (navel-soulers) for the monks. Palamas responded first with private letters, then with the Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts, nine treatises grouped in three triads and composed roughly between 1338 and 1341. Drawing on Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, Basil the Great, the two other Cappadocians, and Symeon the New Theologian, he argued that the uncreated light seen by the apostles Peter, James, and John at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, and seen again by the saints in contemplative prayer, is the real divine glory — the uncreated energeia of God — and that participation in this energy is the meaning of theosis.

The Council of Constantinople in June 1341 vindicated hesychast theology and condemned Barlaam, who returned to Italy, converted to Roman Catholicism, became Bishop of Gerace, and would later teach some Greek to Petrarch in Avignon. The Byzantine civil war between John V Palaiologos and John VI Kantakouzenos, which broke out later that same year, then swept Palamas into political trouble: Patriarch John XIV Kalekas, aligned against Kantakouzenos, confined him from spring 1343, formally excommunicated him by the home synod in November 1344, and kept him imprisoned until after Kalekas’s own deposition in February 1347 — a captivity during which he continued to write his anti-Akindynos treatises. A second council in 1347, convened after Kantakouzenos's victory, reversed the excommunication and deposed Kalekas. Palamas was consecrated Archbishop of Thessalonica that same year, though the Zealot revolt in the city, a populist anti-aristocratic movement hostile to Kantakouzenos, prevented him from taking possession of his see until 1350. The Blachernae Council of 1351, with its six doctrinal chapters (the Tomos of 1351), remains the definitive conciliar statement of Palamite theology and bound it into the Synodikon of Orthodoxy. In 1354, while sailing from Thessalonica to Constantinople, he was captured by Ottoman Turks and held in Anatolia for about a year, during which he recorded theological dialogues with Muslim interlocutors at the court of the Ottoman sultan Orhan. He died in Thessalonica on 14 November 1359 after a long illness, preaching on the text "For me, to live is Christ" only days before. The Ecumenical Patriarchate canonized him in 1368 under Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos — only nine years after his death, an exceptionally rapid elevation that reflected both the strength of his theological vindication and the immediate recognition of his sanctity. Philotheos composed the liturgical office for his feast, and the second Sunday of Great Lent was dedicated to him across the Byzantine world, effectively making him a second doctor of Orthodoxy paired with the vindication of the icons on the first Sunday.

Contributions

Palamas's foremost contribution is the essence–energies distinction, the doctrinal formulation that allowed Byzantine theology to hold apophatic transcendence and cataphatic experience in a single frame. God in His essence (ousia) is utterly unknowable, incommunicable, beyond every name and category; God in His energies (energeiai) is truly known and really communicated, the self-giving outflow through which the uncreated God meets the creature. Essence and energies are really distinct but not separate, distinguished without division, and both are fully God — not parts of God, not a lower grade of divinity, not a created mediator standing between God and creation. The distinction is a real distinction within the simple Godhead, not a division of it. Palamas took this not as a novel speculation but as the precise formulation of what the Cappadocian Fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor had already taught in less systematic language; the Tomos of 1351 argued at length that the distinction was apostolic and patristic, not an innovation.

The second contribution follows directly: the doctrine of theosis (deification) as participation in the uncreated energies, not in the essence. This preserves both the absolute otherness of God and the realness of union. The creature becomes god by grace — theos kata charin, in the patristic formula Palamas retrieves — by participation, without the essence-gap ever collapsing. A Palamite theosis is not metaphorical moral imitation and not pantheistic absorption; it is ontological participation in divine life, made possible because the energies are genuinely God extending Himself to what is not God. Every finite creature can truly share in the divine life; no finite creature can ever become God by essence. The structure is neither dualist nor monist but a third option: infinite distinction at the level of essence, genuine communion at the level of energies.

The third contribution is the theology of uncreated grace. Against Barlaam and against the scholastic Latin tendency to treat grace as a created habit or quality infused into the soul, Palamas taught that grace is God's own uncreated self-communication. The light the hesychasts see in prayer is the same uncreated light the apostles Peter, James, and John saw on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration (Matt 17; Mark 9; Luke 9); the grace that sanctifies is God Himself as energeia, not a created gift standing between God and the soul. This claim has enormous downstream consequences. It means the sacraments are not conduits of a created substance called grace but are the Church's bodily meeting-place with uncreated divine life. It means sanctification and deification are not two different things but a single movement. It means the visible glory of the saints in iconography — the gold halo, the transfigured light — is not an artistic convention but a theological statement about what sanctity is.

The fourth contribution is the theological defense of the hesychast somatic method. Barlaam mocked the monks as omphalopsychoi — navel-soulers — for their seated posture, controlled breathing, and inward gaze directed at the heart region while continuously repeating the Jesus Prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me). Palamas answered that the body is not a prison to be escaped but is sanctified with the soul: the whole human person, body and spirit, participates in the energies and is deified. The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, created by God and destined for resurrection; the contemplative life therefore properly engages it. This affirmation of embodiment is a distinctively Eastern counterweight to the more disembodied mystical theologies that would develop in parts of the Latin West, and it grounds a Christian contemplative anthropology in which posture, breath, and attention are integral to prayer rather than concessions to human weakness.

Finally, Palamas gave the Orthodox tradition a mature apophatic–cataphatic synthesis. The Dionysian negative theology — God is beyond every concept, every name, every affirmation and every negation — is fully preserved at the level of essence. The cataphatic affirmations — God is light, God is love, God is good, God is being — are fully grounded at the level of energies. The essence–energies distinction is precisely how negative and positive theology are held together without either being compromised. Neither register is subordinated to the other; neither is a concession. This is the architecture that the 18th-century Philokalia and the 20th-century Orthodox theologians (Lossky, Meyendorff, Staniloae, Yannaras) would inherit, refine, and extend into a distinctive modern Orthodox voice in ecumenical theology.

Works

The Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts (Hyper ton Hiera Hesychazonton) is the foundational work — nine treatises grouped in three triads, composed between roughly 1338 and 1341 in direct polemic with Barlaam of Calabria. The Triads articulate the full case for hesychast experience, the uncreated light of Tabor, the essence–energies distinction, and the somatic method of prayer. The critical Greek edition was established by John Meyendorff (Défense des saints hésychastes, Louvain, 1959; revised 1973). Nicholas Gendle's English selection in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (Paulist Press, 1983) is the standard partial translation, covering the essential doctrinal passages; a full English translation of all nine treatises remains a scholarly desideratum.

The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters (Kephalaia 150), composed in the final years of his life, is Palamas's compact systematic presentation — the closest he comes to a theological summa, moving concisely through natural philosophy, Trinitarian theology, creation, anthropology, and deification. Robert E. Sinkewicz produced the critical Greek edition with facing English translation (The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 1988), which remains the definitive scholarly access point.

Against Akindynos (Antirrhetikoi pros Akindynon) is a six-book refutation of Gregory Akindynos's sustained anti-Palamite attack, composed during and after the 1340s conflict — portions written during Palamas's imprisonment from 1343 to 1347. It is less widely read than the Triads but is theologically crucial for the precise articulation of essence, energies, hypostasis, and the relation between them; it is where Palamas most carefully answers the charge that his distinction compromises divine simplicity.

The Tomos Hagioreitikos (Hagiorite Tome) of 1340 is a short public manifesto signed by the leading monks of Mount Athos, with Palamas as its chief author. It is the first formal collective hesychast declaration and functioned as a rallying document during the controversy; it appears at the end of volume four of the English Philokalia.

Sixty-three homilies survive from his years as Archbishop of Thessalonica (1347–1359), preserving his pastoral voice on the liturgical feasts (especially the Transfiguration), the Theotokos, Christian ethics, and the social and political crises of the city. Christopher Veniamin's complete two-volume English translation (The Homilies, St Tikhon's Seminary Press, 2002–2004; Mount Thabor Publishing, expanded single-volume edition 2009 and 2014) is the current standard.

The Dialogue with the Chiones and related captivity letters, recording his theological exchanges with Muslim interlocutors at the Ottoman court of Orhan during his 1354–1355 captivity in Anatolia, form a small but historically valuable corpus on early Byzantine Christian–Muslim encounter. Anna Philippidis-Braat established the critical text, and Daniel J. Sahas has produced the main English-language scholarly treatment.

Controversies

The Barlaam controversy, which ran from roughly 1335 to 1341, was the defining conflict of Palamas's life. Barlaam of Calabria was no cartoon rationalist; he was a serious philosophically trained monk who taught some Greek to Petrarch and who framed his critique in impeccably apophatic terms. His case was that God's essence is unknowable (Pseudo-Dionysius), that any experiential claim to see the divine is therefore confused, that the hesychasts' somatic practices and claim to perceive a material light amounted to crude anthropomorphism, and that theology proper is philosophical reasoning about what can be said of God. Palamas answered by distinguishing essence from energies: what is unknowable is the essence; what is truly seen and participated in is the uncreated energies, which are no less God for being communicable.

The Akindynos phase of the controversy extended from 1341 through the later 1340s. Gregory Akindynos had initially attempted a mediating position but gradually became Palamas's most sustained theological opponent, arguing that the essence–energies distinction compromised divine simplicity and introduced a form of polytheism by positing multiple uncreated realities in God. Akindynos was condemned at the councils of 1347 and 1351.

The Gregoras phase followed. Nikephoros Gregoras, court historian and polymath, attacked Palamism on philosophical and historiographical grounds, arguing that it was an innovation foreign to the earlier Fathers. Gregoras was condemned in 1351, though he continued writing against Palamas until his death.

Prochoros Kydones opened a late phase. His brother Demetrios Kydones had translated Thomas Aquinas's Summa contra Gentiles and significant portions of the Summa Theologiae into Greek, giving Byzantine intellectuals their first serious access to Latin scholasticism. Prochoros used this new Thomistic material against Palamism, arguing from Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity that the essence–energies distinction could not stand. He was condemned in 1368.

Palamas's own position during the Byzantine civil war was politically precarious. Patriarch John XIV Kalekas, aligned against John VI Kantakouzenos, confined Palamas from spring 1343, formally excommunicated him by the home synod in November 1344, and kept him imprisoned until after Kalekas’s own deposition in February 1347. The 1347 council reversed the excommunication and deposed Kalekas; the 1351 Blachernae Council gave Palamite theology its definitive conciliar seal with six doctrinal chapters known as the Tomos of 1351.

The most persistent live controversy concerns Catholic–Orthodox ecumenical reception. Rome has never formally condemned Palamism, and no ecumenical council recognized by Rome has ruled against it; its status has always been ambiguous within Catholic theology. A number of 20th- and 21st-century Catholic theologians — including some in the ressourcement generation and scholars such as Jean-Claude Larchet — have argued that the essence–energies distinction, properly understood, is compatible with Aquinas's own teaching on divine simplicity. Others, especially in the Neo-Thomist tradition, continue to regard it as irreconcilable. The question remains one of the most substantive seams in contemporary Catholic–Orthodox dialogue.

Notable Quotes

The hesychast, Palamas argues, is illumined by divine power and turns both inward to self-knowledge and upward to contemplation of what lies beyond — reaching the heights of knowledge without straying from the truth. — paraphrase of a central argument of the Triads.

Palamas repeatedly articulates the apophatic register in the pattern: God is not nature, for He is above all nature; not a being, for He is above all beings; nor anything of what is, for He is above all that is. — paraphrased Dionysian-Palamite thesis from the One Hundred and Fifty Chapters.

Because the creature can participate in God, yet the super-essential essence of God is completely above participation, something must stand between the essence that cannot be participated in and those who participate — these are the uncreated energies. — paraphrase of the formal argument for the energies, developed across Triads III.

The light of the Lord’s Transfiguration, Palamas teaches, did not come into being and did not cease to exist; it is uncircumscribed and imperceptible to the senses, even though the apostles contemplated it with bodily eyes. — reflects the argument of Triads III on the uncreated Taboric light.

“The divinization of the saints is according to the uncreated energy of God, not according to His essence.” — paraphrased Palamite thesis, central to the Tomos of 1351.

Legacy

Palamas's immediate legacy was institutional. The 1351 Blachernae Council bound the Byzantine church to the essence–energies distinction as doctrine, and its six chapters (the Tomos of 1351) were incorporated into the Synodikon of Orthodoxy read each year on the first Sunday of Great Lent. The second Sunday of Great Lent was formally dedicated to Saint Gregory Palamas, effectively making him a second doctor of Orthodoxy alongside the vindication of icons celebrated on the first. His canonization in 1368 by Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos, only nine years after his death, reflected both the strength of his theological vindication and the immediate recognition of his sanctity; Philotheos composed the liturgical office used for his feast.

The deeper legacy runs through the hesychast tradition he theologized. The lineage from Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) through Nicephorus the Hesychast (13th century) through Gregory of Sinai (c. 1265–1346) — the near-contemporary and formalizer of the Jesus Prayer method on Athos, not to be confused with Gregory of Nyssa nine centuries earlier — into Palamas gave the Christian East a continuous, theologically articulated mysticism of uncreated light and prayer of the heart. After Palamas, this lineage continued through the 14th–17th centuries in the Athonite monasteries, was carried into Russia by Nil Sorsky (1433–1508) and the non-possessor movement, and flowered in the 18th-century renaissance associated with Paisius Velichkovsky (1722–1794). Paisius's translation and transmission of the hesychast corpus into Slavonic made possible the Philokalia, compiled by Nikodimos the Hagiorite and Makarios of Corinth on Mount Athos and first published in Greek in Venice in 1782 — an anthology that places Palamas among its culminating voices and that remains the single most important collection of Orthodox spiritual writing.

The 19th-century Russian revival of hesychasm, associated with the Optina elders, Theophan the Recluse (1815–1894), and Ignatius Brianchaninov (1807–1867), spread the Jesus Prayer into lay Russian piety; the anonymous 19th-century Way of a Pilgrim narrativized this revival for a popular audience and became, in 20th-century English translation, an unexpected contemplative classic read well beyond Orthodoxy. The 20th-century Paris School of Orthodox theology in emigration — Vladimir Lossky (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 1944), John Meyendorff (A Study of Gregory Palamas, French original 1959), Dumitru Staniloae in Romania, Christos Yannaras in Greece, later Kallistos Ware, John Zizioulas, and others — made Palamite theology the operating grammar of modern Orthodox theology in the West. Lossky argued that the essence–energies distinction is the hinge on which Eastern theology's refusal to reduce God to an object of thought turns; Meyendorff produced the critical edition of the Triads and the historical reconstruction that established Palamas as a serious theological figure for scholarship beyond Orthodoxy.

Palamite theology now functions as the principal point of contrast and dialogue between Eastern Orthodox and Latin (Catholic and Protestant) theologies of grace. For Protestants, who generally inherit a forensic account of grace as imputed righteousness, Palamism offers a model of real participation without works-righteousness; the Finnish school of Luther interpretation (Tuomo Mannermaa and his students) has argued that Luther's own theology of union with Christ has more in common with Palamite theosis than the Lutheran scholastic tradition acknowledged. For Catholics working with scholastic categories, it presents a challenge to the identification of grace with a created quality and an alternative grammar for thinking about divine simplicity. The conversation is live in ecumenical theology and shows no signs of closing.

In the broader contemplative field, Palamas is increasingly read by practitioners of other traditions seeking a rigorous Christian language for the experience of non-dual awareness while preserving the Creator–creature distinction. The Philokalia's arrival in English (Faber and Faber, four volumes, 1979–1995, translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware) made this body of teaching directly available to English-language readers for the first time; the 21st century has seen steady expansion of scholarship (Norman Russell, David Bradshaw, Aristotle Papanikolaou, A. N. Williams) and practice-oriented writing keyed to the hesychast corpus. Palamas is now read as a central figure in the global history of contemplation, not only as an Orthodox saint.

Significance

For a cross-tradition seeker, Palamas matters because he gives Christianity a precise grammar for something nearly every major contemplative tradition claims: direct experiential access to ultimate reality while preserving ultimate reality's absolute otherness. The essence–energies distinction solves a problem that Vedanta, Sufism, Kabbalah, and Mahayana Buddhism each solve in their own idiom — how to hold transcendence and participation together without collapsing one into the other. Where Shankara's Advaita Vedanta resolves it by affirming non-duality at the level of Brahman and treating the distinction of worshipper and worshipped as conventional, and where ibn Arabi resolves it through wahdat al-wujud, Palamas holds the Creator–creature line as absolute at the level of essence while affirming genuine ontological participation at the level of energies. It is a different solution, philosophically and theologically. For readers who want a Christian contemplative theology that neither flattens into pantheism nor retreats into pure transcendence, it is the sharpest one the tradition produced.

His account of the hesychast method matters for anyone interested in embodied contemplative practice. Palamas defends the body against the Calabrian and later against all idealizing mysticism: the whole human person, body and soul, is the subject of deification. The seated posture, the controlled breath, the inward attention, the continuous name of Jesus in the heart — these are not concessions to human weakness but integral to the transformation. Readers coming from Zen shikantaza, from Tibetan deity yoga, or from the somatic disciplines of Hatha Yoga recognize in hesychasm a Christian articulation of the same insight: consciousness is embodied, and contemplative transformation is bodily. The hesychast tradition refuses the Platonic and Cartesian splits between mind and body that haunt much Western contemplative thought.

His account of theosis matters because it offers a model of spiritual transformation that is neither moralistic self-improvement nor dissolution of the self. To be deified is to become, by participation in the uncreated energies, what God is by nature — while never becoming God by essence. The person is preserved, enhanced, transfigured; the creaturely identity is glorified, not erased. This has obvious resonance with the Vedantic moksha that preserves the jiva's capacity to commune with Ishvara, with the Sufi fana and baqa sequence (annihilation and abiding), and with Mahayana teachings on buddha-nature, while differing from each on the deepest metaphysical register. For a reader trying to think across traditions, Palamas offers a way to hold these parallels without forcing an artificial identity.

His account of uncreated grace matters in its own right. Much of modern Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, has inherited a picture of grace as something given, a created gift from God to the soul. Palamas teaches that grace is God's own uncreated self-communication, God Himself as energeia reaching the creature. This changes what the sacraments are, what sanctification is, what salvation looks like. It turns the spiritual life from a reception of divine favors into a participation in divine life itself, with the body as a co-participant.

Finally, Palamas matters as a case study in how a contemplative tradition defends its own experience against philosophical critique. Barlaam's attack was the sophisticated attack: the tradition's claims to experience cannot be verified, the practices look crude, the theology strains logic. Palamas did not abandon philosophy for fideism; he answered on philosophy's own ground, producing a distinction that is both theologically and logically defensible. For any tradition facing the analogous charge — that mystical experience is illusion, that contemplative method is superstition — the Palamite response is a model of how serious theological defense is conducted.

Connections

Palamas stands at the confluence of four streams that converge in the 14th-century Byzantine synthesis. The first is the Cappadocian–Dionysian apophatic current: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius gave him the vocabulary of essence, hypostasis, and the unknowability of God. The second is the Maximian Christological current: Maximus the Confessor's teaching on the logoi of beings, on natural and gnomic will, and on created participation in divine life supplied the metaphysical architecture. The third is the experiential mystical current running from Symeon the New Theologian through Nicephorus the Hesychast through Gregory of Sinai: Symeon's claim that every baptized Christian can see the divine light consciously is the experiential precedent Palamas defends; Nicephorus's attributed Method of Holy Prayer and Attention supplied the somatic technique; Gregory of Sinai formalized the Jesus Prayer method on Mount Athos in the generation immediately before Palamas. The fourth is the patristic theology of uncreated glory running through Irenaeus, Athanasius, and the seventh-century image theology that vindicated the visible glory of Christ.

The Western connection — and divergence — with Thomistic theology is the most studied cross-link. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and Palamas never met, but the Byzantine reception of Aquinas through Demetrios Kydones's Greek translation of the Summa contra Gentiles in the 1350s meant that late Palamite controversy directly engaged Latin scholasticism. The contrast is sharp: Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity identifies God's essence with God's attributes and treats grace as a created quality infused into the soul; Palamas treats the energies as really distinct from the essence and grace as uncreated. Contemporary ecumenical dialogue continues to probe whether the distinction is a genuine contradiction or a translation problem between two idioms.

In Sufism, the distinction between dhat (the essence of Allah, utterly unknowable) and sifat (the divine names and attributes, truly encountered) has a close structural resemblance to the Palamite ousia–energeiai distinction. The 12th-century Persian illuminationist philosopher Suhrawardi, founder of the ishraqi school, developed a metaphysics of light in which divine illumination grounds all knowing — a tradition extended by Mulla Sadra in the 17th century. Both traditions theologize luminous experience at the heart of contemplative practice, and both preserve the absolute transcendence of the source of light.

In Jewish Kabbalah, the distinction between Ein Sof (the utterly unknowable infinite) and the ten Sefirot (the divine attributes through which Ein Sof manifests and is encountered) has the same structural function as the ousia–energeiai distinction, though developed independently in a Hebrew metaphysical idiom in roughly the same period (the Zohar, c. 1280s). The question of whether the Sefirot are the essence of God or something ontologically distinct runs through Kabbalistic debates as the question of the energies runs through Palamite debates.

In Vedantic and Buddhist contexts, the closest parallel is Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita (qualified non-dualism), which holds that Brahman and the world stand in a relation of inseparable distinction analogous to body and soul — different from Palamas's frame but occupying an analogous theological position between pure non-dualism and pure dualism. Mahayana Buddhism's distinction between dharmakaya (the unmanifest body of reality) and sambhogakaya (the enjoyment body through which buddhas are encountered) is another structural parallel, again worked out in a very different metaphysical register.

Further Reading