Barlaam of Calabria

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Barlaam of Calabria was a Greek-speaking monk and scholar, born around 1290 in the Greek south of Italy and active in fourteenth-century Constantinople, best remembered as the man Gregory Palamas argued down — the rationalist adversary in the Byzantine dispute now called the Hesychast controversy. The label is his opponents’; what survives of his own thought is more interesting than the role he was assigned.

He arrived in the Byzantine capital learned in Aristotle and in the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and made his reputation in the court’s intellectual life. His first polemics were aimed not at the monks but at the Latin West, against the Catholic arguments for the procession of the Holy Spirit; there he held that the highest matters of God lie past the reach of demonstration, knowable only by their effects. It was that same conviction, turned inward, that brought him into collision with the contemplative monks of Mount Athos.

The Hesychasts practised a disciplined prayer of the heart and reported that, at its height, they perceived an uncreated light — the very radiance, they held, that the disciples saw on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration. To Barlaam the claim was an error and a presumption: God in his essence is unknowable, and whatever light a praying monk might see could only be a created thing, a sensory event mistaken for the divine. He mocked the bodily techniques some monks used, the fixed posture and controlled breath, in a phrase that stuck to them as ridicule. Palamas answered with a distinction that would become Orthodox doctrine — between God’s unknowable essence and his uncreated energies, by which the divine genuinely communicates itself and can genuinely be seen.

The church sided with Palamas. A council at Constantinople in 1341 condemned Barlaam’s position, and he left the Byzantine world for good. Returning to Italy, he entered the Latin Church he had earlier attacked, was made bishop of Gerace in Calabria, and in his last years taught Greek to Petrarch — a small hinge between the Byzantine learning he carried and the Western Renaissance then beginning. He died in 1348.

His afterlife is double. In Orthodox tradition he is the type of the overreaching rationalist, the philosopher who trusted argument where he should have trusted prayer, and the controversy that bears his opponent’s name treats his defeat as the vindication of a truth. Historians read him with less verdict: a capable thinker formed by the same apophatic tradition as his rivals, who drew from the shared premise that God is beyond knowing the opposite conclusion about what contemplation could reach. The two men agreed that the essence of God lies past the mind. They divided over whether anything of God comes the rest of the way down.

→ Related: Byzantine Hesychasm · Neoplatonism