Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Conciliar

The Hagioritic Tome in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts

The Holy Mountain (Hagioritic Tome)

Royal Archives

2026

Copyright

The modern English translation and the cover design are © 2026 Royal Archives. All rights reserved.

The underlying source text is in the public domain.

Published by Royal Archives

First published 2026

Translated by Royal Archives

Source: Τόμος Ἁγιορειτικὸς ὑπὲρ τῶν ἱερῶς ἡσυχαζόντων

Cover: Mount Athos and the Monastery of Stavronikéta (1857) by Edward Lear (British, 1812–1888), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:hagioritic_tome:en:1

Introduction

The Authors and Compilers

These are conciliar documents, and their authority rests not on any one name but on the bodies that ratified them. Yet a single figure stands at the center of all four.

Gregory Palamas was born in Constantinople in 1296, the son of a courtier in the household of the emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos. Well educated in the capital and marked out for a promising career in imperial service, he chose instead the monastic life, withdrawing while still young to Mount Athos. There he was formed in the tradition of contemplative prayer that his opponents would later attack and that these documents were written to defend. In the course of the controversy he was raised to the see of Thessalonica, where he served as archbishop until his death on November 14, 1359. The Church numbered him among the saints in 1368, when a synod at Constantinople under Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos—who also composed his Life and liturgical service—formally proclaimed his sanctity.

The first of the four texts, the Hagioritic Tome, is the one most directly his own work. Its closing attestation names him plainly: “our brother kyr Gregory, most honored among hieromonks, has set down in writing” the teaching it contains, and the fathers of the Holy Mountain declare that they have subscribed to it because it faithfully follows the tradition of the saints. Palamas drafted it; the monastic community of Athos—the abbots of the Great Lavra, of Iviron, of Vatopedi, the elders of the sketes, and the local bishop of Hierissos who oversaw the Mountain—signed it as its guarantors. It is thus at once a personal composition and a corporate manifesto.

The three later documents are the acts of synods held in the capital, and their authority is that of the assemblies themselves. Behind them stand the patriarchs and emperors who convened and confirmed them, and their story is bound up with the turbulent politics of the age. The councils of 1341 met under Patriarch John XIV Kalekas—who, though no friend of the hesychasts, presided over Barlaam’s condemnation—with the emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos present at the first session shortly before his death. The documents of 1347 belong to the reversal of fortune that deposed Kalekas himself and installed the Palamite Isidore as patriarch, an outcome sealed by the entry of John VI Kantakouzenos into Constantinople and the support of the empress Anna Palaiologina. The great council of 1351 was summoned by Kantakouzenos, now emperor, and presided over by Patriarch Kallistos I. The compilers of these tomes are therefore the councils in their fullness: bishops, emperor, senate, abbots, and the theologians who marshaled the patristic testimonies. Palamas appears in them not as author but as the accused who becomes the vindicated—the “metropolitan of Thessalonica” whose confession the synod examines and approves.

The Occasion and Purpose

The controversy began not as a quarrel about mystical experience but as a collision of two ways of understanding the knowledge of God. Its catalyst was Barlaam, a learned monk of Calabria in southern Italy—Greek by descent and language, but schooled in the philosophical methods of the Latin West. Drawn to Constantinople in the 1330s, he came into contact with the monks who practiced the discipline of stillness, or hesychia: the tradition of inner watchfulness, guarding of the heart, and unceasing invocation of the name of Jesus, which the contemplatives of Athos and elsewhere held to lead, by grace, to a real vision of the divine light.

Barlaam found their claims intolerable. As the Synodal Tome of 1341 recounts, he approached the simpler among the monks, drew out their manner of speaking, and then charged them in writing with grave error: that in claiming to receive “divine illuminations that come to be in them mystically and ineffably,” they made the very essence of God participable, and in calling the light they beheld uncreated, they preached two Gods. To their practices of prayer—including the coordination of the invocation with the breath—he gave mocking names, and he denounced the light seen on Mount Tabor at Christ’s Transfiguration as a created, sensory phenomenon, “even worse and lower than our very intellection.” Behind the ridicule lay a theological principle: that God in his transcendence can be reached by the mind only through negation and inference, never contemplated directly, and that whatever the monks claimed to see could be no more than a creature.

The monks turned to Palamas to answer him, and the dispute widened until it could be resolved only by the judgment of the Church. That is the purpose these documents share: to determine whether the hesychast fathers had spoken in accord with the saints, and whether the distinction they drew—between the unknowable essence of God and his uncreated, self-communicating energies—was a faithful expression of the apostolic faith or a novelty to be condemned. The question was pastoral as much as speculative, for it concerned whether the God confessed by Christians can truly be encountered, or only reasoned about from a distance.

The Argument and Structure of the Four Documents

The collection may be read as a single argument unfolding across four stages, each building upon the last.

The Hagioritic Tome, composed on Athos around 1340, is the earliest and most compact. It is the monastic community’s preemptive defense, drawn up before the councils met, and it sets out the essential claims in a series of short, pointed chapters. Deifying grace, it insists, is uncreated; union with God is accomplished by that grace and not by mere imitation; the light that shone on Tabor is uncreated and eternal; and God’s eternal energies, no less than his essence, are without beginning. Each chapter warns that whoever denies these things sets himself against the saints. The Tome frames the whole matter within salvation history, likening the mysteries now made known to the contemplatives to the prophecies of the Trinity glimpsed under the old covenant and only later made plain—a bold claim that the hesychast experience belongs to the unfolding of revelation itself. It closes with the signatures of the Athonite fathers, giving the individual theologian the weight of the whole Holy Mountain.

The Synodal Tome of 1341 records the proceedings of the councils held that year in the church of Holy Wisdom, with the emperor and senate in attendance. It narrates the drama directly: Barlaam’s accusations, his evasions and refusal to face the monks, the reading of the sacred canons, and Palamas’s defense. Much of the Tome consists of a florilegium—a chain of patristic testimonies from John of Damascus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Basil, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, Andrew of Crete, and others—assembled to show that the monks’ teaching on the uncreated light of the Transfiguration was the constant voice of the fathers. It answers, point by point, Barlaam’s disparagement of the Taboric light, and it defends the monks’ prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me,” against his ridicule, adducing the witness of Diadochos of Photike, John Chrysostom, and John of the Ladder. The Tome ends with the words of the emperor, distinguishing the vision of divine glory from any claim to see the invisible nature of God.

The Synodal Tome of 1347 belongs to a later phase, after the political tide had turned. Barlaam had by now left the East; the monk Gregory Akindynos had taken up his cause, defending his positions while disowning his name; and the patriarch John Kalekas had made himself the protector of the anti-hesychast party. This document opens with a full confession of faith—a majestic recital of Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy, culminating in the affirmation that God communicates himself to angels and men not according to his imparticipable essence but according to his uncreated “grace and power and energy and splendor.” On that basis it embraces the earlier synods “against Barlaam the Calabrian, and against Akindynos,” and it includes the hierarchs’ report to the empress Anna Palaiologina and the imperial decree of John Kantakouzenos confirming the deposition of Kalekas “the Barlaamite.” Here the controversy has become inseparable from the governance of the Church itself: the vindication of the hesychasts entails the removal of the patriarch who opposed them.

The Synodal Tome of 1351 is the longest, most systematic, and most authoritative of the four—the definitive dogmatic settlement. Convened at the Blachernae palace under the emperor Kantakouzenos and the patriarch Kallistos, with a great assembly of metropolitans, bishops, officials, and people, it confronted a new generation of opponents, chief among them the philosopher Nikephoros Gregoras. After narrating the fruitless attempts to bring these men to examination, the Tome proceeds to resolve the disputed matters as a set of ordered doctrinal questions: whether there is in God a real distinction between essence and energy; whether that energy is created or uncreated; whether the distinction introduces composition into God; whether the energy may be called “Godhead”; whether God transcends his energy according to his essence; and of what all creatures partake. To each it answers from a dense weave of patristic authority—Basil, the two Gregories, Athanasius, Maximus, John of Damascus, Cyril, Chrysostom, Dionysius—and from the acts of the Sixth Ecumenical Council on the two energies of Christ. The distinction is affirmed as real yet without division, like the fire and the light that streams from it: one and inseparable, yet truly to be distinguished as cause and caused. With this the council conclusively exonerated Palamas and condemned his opponents, and its Tome became the doctrinal charter of the whole controversy.

The Theological and Spiritual Significance

At the heart of all four documents lies a single distinction: between the essence of God, which remains forever unknowable, imparticipable, and beyond all naming, and the energies of God—his uncreated operations, powers, and splendor—by which he goes forth from himself, is genuinely communicated to his creatures, and is known. Both are equally God; neither is a creature. The saints who are deified partake not of the divine essence, which would make them God by nature, but of the divine energy, by which they are made God by grace. This is the axis on which the councils turned, and it was framed as the guardian of two truths held together: the absolute transcendence of God, who is never exhausted or comprehended, and the reality of his self-gift, by which he is not merely inferred but encountered.

The councils understood this teaching to be inseparable from the life of prayer it defended. Hesychasm—the discipline of stillness, of the guarded heart and the mind returned into itself—was not, in their account, a technique for manufacturing visions but the ascetic condition in which the purified are made able to receive what God freely gives. The unceasing invocation of the Jesus Prayer, which Barlaam had mocked, is defended in the 1341 Tome as the ancient practice of “all Christians,” grounded in Peter’s confession that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” and in the apostolic command to pray without ceasing. To hallow the name of Jesus in the depth of the heart, the fathers taught, is to be made ready for the light.

The councils grounded this teaching in the logic of an earlier dogmatic settlement. Just as the Sixth Ecumenical Council had confessed two natural energies and two natural wills in the incarnate Christ, corresponding to his two natures, so—the Tome of 1351 argues at length—a nature without its energy is no nature at all, and to deny the divine energy is in effect to deny the divine essence from which it proceeds. Those who collapsed energy into essence, or dragged the energy down into the created order, were shown to fall into a subtler form of the very error the Sixth Council had condemned. The fathers were emphatic that this distinction introduces no composition or division into the simple God: the energy is not a part added to the essence but wells up from it as radiance from its source, timelessly, inseparably, and without ever being sundered from it. The whole force of the argument was to hold together what a careless mind might tear apart—the perfect simplicity of God and the reality of his manifold self-communication.

That light is the Transfiguration on Tabor, which stands at the theological center of the whole dispute. When Christ shone before his disciples, the councils confess, they beheld no created radiance and no mere symbol, but the uncreated glory of the Godhead itself, made visible to eyes that grace had opened. As the Hagioritic Tome puts it, Christ was transfigured “not by taking on what He was not, nor by being changed into what He was not, but by being made manifest to His own disciples as what He was.” The Taboric light thus became the paradigm of all authentic vision of God: uncreated, yet truly seen; the glory of the divine nature, yet communicated to the flesh. In vindicating the hesychasts’ claim to behold that light, the councils affirmed that the goal of the Christian life is theosis, deification—a real participation, by grace, in the very life of God.

Reception and Influence

Within the tradition that received them, these councils were quickly accorded an authority approaching that of the ecumenical synods. The doctrinal affirmations of the essence–energies distinction, together with anathemas against those who denied it, were incorporated into the Synodikon of Orthodoxy — the solemn proclamation of the faith read each year on the first Sunday of Great Lent, the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The Tome of 1351 itself quotes that Synodikon in the course of its argument, and the placement of the new decrees within it set the vindication of Palamas in continuity with the Church’s earlier victories over heresy. Fittingly, the Second Sunday of Great Lent was appointed for the commemoration of Gregory Palamas, so that his defense of the hesychasts is celebrated as a renewed Triumph of Orthodoxy a week after the first. His formal glorification as a saint followed in 1368, less than a decade after his death. Many within the Eastern Church have regarded the synods of 1341, 1347, and 1351 as together constituting a ninth ecumenical council, and their teaching became a permanent feature of Orthodox theology, liturgy, and spiritual life.

The controversy also marked a point of divergence between the Christian East and West that later generations would examine with care. Barlaam, condemned in the East, returned to Italy, was received into the Latin Church at Avignon, and was consecrated bishop of Gerace, where he died in 1348; he is remembered in the West also as one of the scholars who helped introduce Petrarch to the Greek language. For centuries afterward the essence–energies distinction was regarded with suspicion by many Western theologians, whose tradition, shaped by the scholastic synthesis, hesitated over a real distinction within God between his essence and his operations. Only in the twentieth century did a number of prominent Catholic theologians begin to reappraise Palamas’s teaching more sympathetically, and the underlying hope it defends—the possibility of theosis, humanity’s real participation in the divine life—has since been spoken of warmly across confessional lines. This introduction reports that history without adjudicating it: the councils are presented as the tradition that produced them received them, their decisions recorded as the historical acts they were, while the later cross-tradition discussion is noted simply as part of their reception.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents the four documents in a fresh English translation, rendered directly from the Greek. The conciliar acts survive in the great collections of Greek ecclesiastical texts—the Hagioritic Tome among the works associated with Palamas, and the three synodal tomes among the conciliar documents of the period, the Tomes of 1341 and 1347 preserved together and the definitive Tome of 1351 transmitted in full. The translation was prepared by hand for this corpus, checked throughout against a consistent glossary of the dogmatic vocabulary at issue—essence and energy, participation and deification, the uncreated and the created—so that the precise terms on which the whole controversy turned are rendered with care and uniformity across all four texts. It is a new translation, not a reprint of any earlier one.

The edition is English-only; it is not a parallel or bilingual presentation, and it does not set the English against the Greek. Each of the four documents is given as a distinct work, with the internal divisions and headings that guide the reader through the argument, from the compact chapters of the Hagioritic Tome to the ordered doctrinal questions of 1351. In keeping with the conventions of this series, citations of Scripture and of chapters are given in a clear modern style, and the documents are attributed as what they are: conciliar acts. The Hagioritic Tome is credited to the Holy Mountain, with Gregory Palamas named as its principal author; the three synodal tomes are credited to the councils that issued them, under the patriarchs and emperors who convened and confirmed them. Where a translator’s hand has supplied or conjectured a word made necessary by the state of the text, the fact is marked rather than concealed. The aim throughout has been to let these remarkable documents speak in clear contemporary English, so that a reader today may follow, in the Church’s own words, how a long and difficult controversy came to rest in a confession of the God who is at once beyond all knowing and truly made known.

Prologue: In Defense of the Hesychasts

1 THE HAGIORITIC TOME in defense of THOSE WHO PRACTICE STILLNESS (THE HESYCHASTS)

2 Against those who, out of their own inexperience and their disobedience toward the saints, set at naught the mystical energies of the Spirit—energies that are worked in those who live according to the Spirit, and are made manifest through deeds rather than demonstrated through words—better proven by deed than by argument.

3 Those teachings which have lately been spoken of in common, which are commonly known to all and openly proclaimed, were, in the law given through Moses, mysteries foreseen in the Spirit by the prophets alone. But the good things promised to the saints for the age to come are mysteries of the polity that is according to the Gospel, given and foreseen—even to these only in measure, as in the manner of a pledge (an earnest)—to those who have been counted worthy to see them through the Spirit. Yet just as, in those days, one of the Jews who heard the prophets speak of a Word and a Spirit of God, coeternal and before the ages, and did not hear it with thanksgiving, would have stopped his ears, supposing that he was hearing utterances forbidden to true religion and contrary to the confession acknowledged among the pious—namely the saying, “The Lord your God, the Lord is one”—so also now one might perhaps suffer the same thing, who hears without reverence of the mysteries of the Spirit that are known only to those purified through virtue. But just as, again, the outcome of those prophecies afterward showed those former mysteries to be in agreement with what was made plain, and we now believe in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, a Godhead in three hypostases, one nature, simple, uncompounded, uncreated, invisible, incomprehensible—so also the mysteries of the age to come, revealed in their own due seasons according to the ineffable manifestation of the one God in three perfect hypostases, shall be made manifest in agreement with all that is now made plain. Yet this too must be considered: that even if the threefold character of the Godhead was manifested to the ends of the earth only later, doing no harm whatever to the principle of the monarchy, nevertheless it was accurately known to those prophets even before the outcome of these things, and was readily received by those who in that time were persuaded by them. In the same manner, then, neither now are we ignorant of the terms of the confession—both of the things openly proclaimed and of the things mystically foreshown in the Spirit to the worthy. Some have learned by experience itself: as many as, for the sake of the Gospel life, renounced the possession of riches, the esteem of men, and the unworthy pleasures of the body; and not only so, but confirmed this renunciation also through submission to those who have attained maturity according to Christ. For, having given themselves leisure—free from all care, for themselves and for God—through stillness (hesychia), and through pure prayer having come to be above themselves, and having come to be in God through the mystical union with Him that surpasses the intellect, they were taught the things that surpass the intellect. Others have learned through their reverence for such men, or through faith and affection. So we too, hearing the great Dionysius say, in his second Letter to Gaius: “The deifying gift of God—deity, and divine-source and good-source, and the God who bestows this grace upon the worthy—we are persuaded to be beyond this deity. For God does not undergo any multiplication, nor does anyone in this way speak of two deities.” But this deifying grace of God the divine Maximus, writing concerning Melchizedek, declares to be uncreated, and ever existing from the ever-existing God; and elsewhere in many places he speaks of an unbegotten and enhypostatic Light made manifest to the worthy—by which they become worthy—but not then coming into being. This is the Light which he [that is, the great Macarius] names it: and a Light of unutterable glory, and the purity of angels, the food of the bodiless ones, and the glory of the divine nature, and the beauty of the age to come, a divine and heavenly fire, an ineffable and noetic Light, a pledge (earnest) of the Holy Spirit, the oil of gladness that sanctifies.

That Deifying Grace Is Uncreated

1 Whoever, then, ranks those who call this deifying grace of God uncreated and unbegotten and enhypostatic together with the Messalians, and styles them ditheists—if indeed there is any such person—let him know that he sets himself in opposition to the saints of God, and that, unless he repents, he casts himself out of the company of those who are being saved, and himself falls away from the one and only God who is God of the saints by nature. But whoever, believing and being persuaded and speaking in accord with the saints, and not pretexting pretexts in sins, does not reject what is plainly stated as though he did not understand it, but is ignorant of the manner of the mystery—let him not disdain to inquire and to learn from those who know. For he will discover that there is nothing inconsistent with the divine words and realities, and this in matters most necessary, without which nothing whatever could subsist, nor any mystery befitting God at all.

That Union With God Is by the Grace of the Spirit

1 Whoever declares that the perfect union with God is accomplished by imitation and relation alone, apart from the deifying grace of the Spirit—as it is among those of like character and who are loved by one another—and that the deifying grace of God is a habit of rational nature acquired through imitation alone, and not a supernatural and ineffable illumination and a divine energy, seen invisibly by those counted worthy and conceived inconceivably: let him know that he has fallen, without knowing it, into the deception of the Messalians. For by every necessity the one being deified will be God by nature, if deification comes to be by a natural power and is comprehended within the bounds of nature. Let such a one, then, not attempt to fasten his own perversion upon those who stand securely, nor to bring a blemish upon those whose faith is unblemished; but laying aside his opinion, let him learn from those who have had the experience, or from those taught by them, that the grace of the Godhead is altogether unrelated to nature, having within nature no receptive faculty of itself whatsoever; for otherwise it would no longer be grace, but the manifestation of an energy that operates according to natural power. And what comes to pass would be no marvel, if deification were according to a receptive faculty for deification; for then deification would reasonably be a work of nature, and not a gift of God, and such a one would be able to be God even by nature, and to be properly so called. For the power that belongs to each of the things that exist according to nature is nothing other than the unswerving movement of a nature toward its energy. And how does deification carry the one deified out of himself, if it is still comprehended within the bounds of nature? I cannot see. The grace of deification, therefore, is above nature, and virtue, and knowledge, and—as Saint Maximus says—all such things fall infinitely short of it. For all virtue, and our imitation of God so far as it lies in us, makes the one who possesses it fit for the divine union, but it is grace itself that brings to completion the ineffable union; for through it God wholly interpenetrates the worthy in their wholeness, and the saints in their wholeness wholly interpenetrate God in His wholeness, receiving God whole in exchange for themselves, having gained God alone as the reward that has counted the soul worthy in relation to the body.

That the Mind Dwells in the Heart or the Brain

1 Whoever maintains that those who say the intellect is established in the heart, or in the brain, are Messalians, let him know that he wrongly assails the saints. For the great Athanasius says that the rational faculty of the soul resides in the brain; while Macarius, who is in no way lacking in greatness, places the energy of the intellect in the heart. And nearly all the saints are in agreement with these. For when the divine Gregory of Nyssa says that the intellect, being incorporeal, is neither within nor outside the body, he is not contradicting those holy men; for those men say that the intellect is within the body inasmuch as it is conjoined to it. Saying this, then, in another manner, they differ not at all from him. For neither does the one who says that the Word of God once came to be within a virginal and all-blameless womb—as there conjoined, beyond all reason, to the human compound that is ours, through ineffable love for mankind—stand opposed to the one who says that the Divine, being incorporeal, is not in a place.

That the Light of Tabor Is Uncreated

1 Whoever says that the Light which shone round about the disciples on Tabor was an apparition and a symbol of such a kind as to come into being and pass away, and not properly to be, and not above all understanding but rather an energy inferior to understanding, plainly speaks against the opinions of the saints. For these, both in their hymns and in their writings, address it as ineffable, uncreated, eternal, timeless, unapproachable, boundless, infinite, illimitable, invisible to angels and to men, an archetypal and unalterable beauty, the glory of God, the glory of Christ, the glory of the Spirit, a ray of the Godhead, and the like. “For the flesh,” he says, “is glorified at the moment of its assumption, and the glory of the body becomes the glory of the Godhead. But the glory was unseen in the visible body to those who could not contain what is invisible even to angels. He is transfigured, therefore, not by taking on what He was not, nor by being changed into what He was not, but by being made manifest to His own disciples as what He was, opening their eyes and making them see, who had been blind. For while remaining the same as Himself, He now appeared to the disciples seen otherwise than He had appeared before. For He Himself is the true thing, the comeliness of glory; and though He shone as the sun, the image is faint—for it is impossible that the uncreated be imaged in creation without defect.”

That God’s Eternal Energies Are Uncreated

1 Whoever says that the essence alone of God is uncreated, but not also His eternal energies—over all of which He transcends, as that which works transcends all that is worked—let him hear Saint Maximus saying: “All things immortal, and immortality itself; and all things living, and life itself; and all things holy, and holiness itself; and all things virtuous, and virtue itself; and all things good, and goodness itself; and all things that are, and being itself, are manifestly works of God. But some have begun to be temporally (for there was a time when they were not), while others have not begun to be temporally; for there was never a time when there were not virtue, and goodness, and holiness, and immortality; and everything that is comprehended in the principle of goodness, and simply all life, and immortality, and simplicity, and immutability, and infinity, and whatever else is contemplated essentially concerning God, are works of God, and have not begun to be temporally. For the ‘was not’ is never older than virtue, nor than any other of the things mentioned; even though the things that participate in them, considered in themselves, have begun to be temporally. Virtue is without beginning, having no time older than itself, since it has God as the sole and most utterly eternal begetter of its being.” And God is infinitely and beyond all infinity exalted above all things that exist, both the participants and the participable. Let such a one, then, learn from these words that not all things that have their subsistence from God are also under time. For there are some of them that are without beginning, and this in no way harms the principle of the one nature alone without beginning, and of the Trinity in unity, and of the supernatural simplicity that belongs to it. For in the same manner the intellect too, after the faint image of that surpassing indivisibility, is in no way composite by reason of the thoughts innate to it.

That Spiritual Gifts Are Imprinted Upon the Body

1 Whoever does not accept that the spiritual dispositions imprinted upon the body arise from the gifts of the Spirit that are in the soul of those who advance according to God, and who says that the mortification, as a settled habit, of the passible faculty is dispassion—rather than its habitual energy directed toward the better, when one has wholly turned away from evils and turned toward what is good, having ⟦put off⟧ the evil habits and grown rich in the good ones—such a one, consistently with this opinion, also renounces the manner of life with the body in the incorruptible age of the things that are. For if the body will then share with the soul in the ineffable goods, surely even now it shares, so far as is possible, in the grace mystically and ineffably bestowed by God upon the purified intellect, and it too will experience the divine things, in a manner suited to itself, the passible faculty of the soul being transformed and sanctified, but not mortified as a settled habit. And through itself, being common to body and soul, it sanctifies the dispositions and energies of the body. For since, according to Saint Diadochus, when a man has been released from the good things of this life through hope of the good things to come, the intellect, vigorously moved by reason of its freedom from care, itself perceives the ineffable [conj. the ineffable things] kindness of God, and imparts to the body also, according to the measure of its own advance, a share of the kindness that is its own. And this joy, then arising in soul and body, is an unerring reminder of the incorruptible life.

2 The intellect is fitted by nature to apprehend one light, and the sense another. For sense apprehends a sensible light, one that displays sensible things as sensible; but the light of the intellect is the knowledge that lies in concepts. Sight and intellect, therefore, are not fitted to apprehend the same light, but only so long as each of them operates according to its own nature and within what is according to nature. But when they have been granted a spiritual and supernatural grace and power, then, by both sense and intellect, those counted worthy behold the things that are beyond all sense and all intellect—so that, to speak with the great Gregory the Theologian, only God knows, and those in whom such things are worked.

Attestation of the Holy Mountain

1 These things we have been taught by the Scriptures; these things we have received from our Fathers; these things we have come to know through our own small experience. These things also our brother kyr Gregory, most honored among hieromonks, has set down in writing in defense of those who practice sacred stillness; and because they accurately follow the traditions of the saints, we have subscribed to them, for the full assurance of those who read.

Signatures

1 [The signatures]

2 The first of the venerable monasteries on the Holy Mountain, the hieromonk Isaac.

3 The abbot of the venerable and sacred Lavra, Theodosius, hieromonk.

4 It bore also the signature of the abbot of the monastery of the Iberians (Iviron), in his own tongue.

5 The abbot of the venerable and imperial monastery of Vatopedi, the hieromonk Ioannikios.

6 It bore also the signature of the abbot of the monastery of the Serbs, in his own tongue.

7 I, the least hieromonk Philotheos, holding the same convictions, have subscribed.

8 The least among hieromonks, and spiritual father of the venerable monastery of Esphigmenou, Amphilochios.

9 […] of the imperial and [venerable monastery of Vatopedi, Theodosius].

10 I, Gerasimos, lowly among hieromonks, having seen and read what was written in love of the truth, and having approved it, have subscribed.

11 I, Moses, the lowly elder and least among monks, holding the same convictions, have subscribed.

12 The least among hieromonks, and spiritual father of Vatopedi, Theodosius.

13 The abbot of the sacred monastery of Koutloumousi, Theosteriktos, hieromonk.

14 I, Gerontios the sinner, Maroules, numbered among the elders of the venerable Lavra, holding the same convictions, have subscribed.

15 The least among monks, Kallistos Mouzalon.

16 I, Gregory Strabolanchadites, the least and lowly among monks, perhaps a hesychast too, understanding and holding these things, have subscribed.

17 I, Isaias, the elder from the skete of Magoula and least among hieromonks, holding the same convictions, have subscribed.

18 The least among monks, Mark the Sinaite.

19 The one in the skete of Magoula, and least among hieromonks, Kallistos.

20 It bore also the signature of the elder hesychast from the Syrians, in his own tongue.

21 The least among monks, Sophronios.

22 The least among monks, Ioasaph.

23 I, the humble bishop of Hierissos and of the Holy Mountain, James, nurtured in the Hagioritic and patristic traditions, and bearing witness that, through the chosen men who have here subscribed, the whole Holy Mountain in agreement has subscribed—I too, in agreement, and setting my seal upon it, have subscribed. And this I add along with all the rest: that whoever does not agree with the saints as we, and as our Fathers shortly before us, do, his communion we do not [accept].

24 [finis col. 1236]

Colophon

The Hagioritic Tome in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts
by The Holy Mountain (Hagioritic Tome).

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
Mount Athos and the Monastery of Stavronikéta (1857)
by Edward Lear (British, 1812–1888), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

The text is set in Palatino and Georgia.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
August 16, 2026.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Introduction
- Prologue: In Defense of the Hesychasts
- That Deifying Grace Is Uncreated

- That Union With God Is by the Grace of the Spirit

- That the Mind Dwells in the Heart or the Brain

- That the Light of Tabor Is Uncreated

- That God’s Eternal Energies Are Uncreated

- That Spiritual Gifts Are Imprinted Upon the Body

- Attestation of the Holy Mountain
- Signatures
- Colophon