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

The Synodal Tome of 1341

The Council of Constantinople (1341)

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 Συνοδικὸς τοῦ ͵ατμαʹ ἔτους

Cover: The Watzmann (1824–25) by Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:tome_1341: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.

Preamble

1 SYNODAL TOME WRITTEN CONCERNING THE GREAT COUNCILS THAT REFUTED AND CAST OUT THE IMPIETY OF BARLAAM AND AKINDYNOS;

2 In which there were present not only the Church, but also the senate and the universal judges of the Romans, the most divine emperor likewise presiding, for as long as he was among the living.

3 1. Truly praiseworthy is he who said that humility can be a spiritual philosophy, even one that is held in disrepute. For this man, feigning to be a learner, came once together with certain of the monks among us who, having chosen the life of stillness and having bidden farewell to all other things, devote themselves wholly to God. And to none of the more learned among these, but rather to the simpler ones, did he resort on purpose, altogether out of fear of being detected. After a little while, however, having withdrawn even from these, he charged them in writing with an abominable opinion, as though it were held by them. For having heard them say—holding it from the tradition of the holy Fathers—that those who through the commandments of God have purified their hearts receive divine illuminations that come to be in them mystically and ineffably, he accused them of saying that the essence of God is participable.

Barlaam’s Accusation Before the Synod

1 3. And when they answered that it was not the essence, but the uncreated and eternal and deifying grace of the Spirit that is given to them, from this very point he attempted to fasten an accusation upon them. Moreover, coming into the Church of God and bringing these matters before our Mediocrity, accusing especially the most honored among the hieromonks, Lord Gregory Palamas, he demanded that these men too be summoned to our sacred and divine synod.

Barlaam of Calabria’s War on the Fathers

1 2. But the monk Barlaam, who hailed from Calabria, having cast himself—out of sheer folly and self-willed eccentricity—into the open sea of conceit, and thinking great things of himself on account of his outward learning in philosophy, made war upon the supernatural and truly genuine philosophy, taking the field against the teaching of the Spirit, he who could not contain at all the things of the Spirit.

Barlaam Evades the Synod

1 4. When, therefore, they had been summoned, Barlaam turned to another course, evading and refusing to be wholly persuaded to present himself before the synod and to come to words with the monks he had accused and to stand against them in the matters he had written against them; making the imperial absence his pretext for evasion at that time, but in truth condemning himself, and dreading the refutation that would come of it.

The Synod Convened in Holy Wisdom

1 5. Then, a synod having been convened in the presence of the emperor who is from God, the renowned and blessed of memory, in the celebrated church of the Wisdom of God the Word, together with the senate and not a few of the most honored archimandrites and abbots, and with the notables of the commonwealth assembled, the same Barlaam was sent for, and was invited to speak and to demonstrate whatever he might have to say against the monks who live in stillness. Although these too were by now present at the synod, he—as though stricken with forgetfulness of the matter at hand, or rather attempting to confound the points of the case—betook himself to dogmatic questions and perplexities, and sought solutions of the perplexities. And insisting and contending upon this, that he would say nothing beforehand until he should obtain the answer and solution to these questions—since, having been rebuffed once and twice and with severity, he would not desist from this insistence, nor could he be persuaded to speak concerning the examination of the matters at hand, namely the written accusation made by him against the monks—

The Sacred Canons Read

1 6. our Mediocrity gave order that there be read, in the hearing of the synod, the sacred and divine canons, by which it is forbidden and in no way permitted—not only to such as he, but to all others as well—to raise any question concerning doctrines, and thereby altogether to lay upon others the necessity of giving a defense concerning these, nor, having set up for themselves a teaching dignity, to expound upon certain ecclesiastical matters. For this was given to the hierarchs of God alone, by the grace from on high. For the sixty-fourth canon of the Sixth Synod says: “A layman ought not publicly to raise discourse or to teach, thereby arrogating to himself a teaching dignity, but to yield to the order delivered by the Lord, and to open his ear to those who have received the grace of the teaching word, and to be taught divine things by them. For in the one Church God has made diverse members,” according to the voice of the Apostle; which the Theologian Gregory, interpreting, clearly sets forth the order among them, saying: “Let us reverence this order, brethren; this let us keep. Let one be an ear, another a tongue, another a hand, another something else; let one teach, another learn.” And let the one who learns do so in ready obedience, and the one who supplies in cheerfulness, and the one who ministers in eagerness. “Let us not all be a tongue, which is the readiest thing; let us not all be apostles, not all prophets; let us not all interpret.” And after some words: “Why do you make yourself a shepherd, being a sheep? Why do you become a head, being a foot? Why do you attempt to play the general, being ranked among the soldiers?” And elsewhere Wisdom enjoins: “Be not hasty in words. Do not stretch yourself out alongside the rich. Neither seek to be wiser than the mighty.” And if anyone be caught unsettling the present canon, let him be excommunicated for forty days. And again, the nineteenth canon of the synod at Chalcedon: “The presidents of the churches must, on every day, but especially on the Lord’s days, teach all the clergy and the people the words of piety, gathering out of the divine Scripture the meanings and sayings of the truth, and not transgressing the bounds already laid down, or the tradition of the God-bearing Fathers. And if a scriptural question be raised, let them not interpret it otherwise than as the luminaries and teachers of the Church have set it forth in their own writings; and let them gain esteem rather in these things than in composing discourses of their own, lest at times, being at a loss for this, they fall short of what is fitting. For through the teaching of the aforesaid Fathers the peoples, coming to knowledge of the things that are earnest and choiceworthy and of the things unprofitable and to be cast away, reform their life for the better, and are not taken captive by the passion of ignorance; but giving heed to the teaching, they spur themselves against suffering harm, and by fear of the punishments that hang over them work out their own salvation.”

Gregory Palamas Invited to Respond

1 7. After the reading, then, of these same sacred and divine canons, there were brought into the midst the reports which Barlaam had earlier drawn up against the monks; and when such reports had been read, the aforesaid hieromonk Lord Gregory Palamas was invited to make his defense concerning them, as touching him especially. He, having spoken by way of a prologue and having defended himself as was fitting, then recounted also how the matters of their dispute had come about: the same Barlaam having first written and accused them—the things stated above—and having set forth things contrary to the divine words of the Fathers, as was demonstrated; and how he too had of necessity been moved to the defense and the refutation.

Barlaam’s Writings Against the Massalians Produced

1 8. Then it was decreed that the writings of Barlaam be brought forward, which, for the deception of his hearers, he had inscribed “Against the Massalians.” In these writings he spoke also concerning the unapproachable light of the Transfiguration of our Master and Savior Jesus Christ, and concerning his chosen disciples and apostles who were deemed worthy of the vision of this light, in these very words: “The light of the Godhead that shone on Tabor was not unapproachable; nor was it in truth a light of the Godhead, nor at all more sacred or more divine than the angels, but even worse and lower than our very intellection. For all our thoughts and all things thought are more venerable than that light, inasmuch as it falls upon the sight through the air, and is subject to the sensitive faculty, and shows only sensible things to those who behold it, being material and shaped, and appearing in place and in time, and coloring the air, and now composing itself and appearing, now dissolving and passing into non-being, as being a thing of fantasy, divisible and finite. Wherefore it was seen also by those who suffer privation of the noetic energies—or rather who have not yet acquired these at all and have not yet been purified, but are imperfect, even at that very vision upon the mountain, as not yet deemed worthy of the intellection of godlike things. But we are led up from such a light to thoughts and contemplations which, by a discerning judgment, are better than that light. Therefore those who call it beyond intellect, and true and unapproachable and the like, are utterly deceived, knowing nothing higher than the visible beauties, and for this reason repugnant, and bringing most destructive doctrines into the Church.” These things, then, did Barlaam set down—manifestly heterodox and contrary to the things said by the saints concerning this divine light.

Testimony of St. John of Damascus

1 9. For the monks, affirming that they thought and spoke things in agreement with the sayings of these Fathers, brought these forward as well. The divine John of Damascus, then, says: “Today the abyss of unapproachable light; today the boundless outpouring of divine radiance is beheld upon Mount Tabor by the apostles. Now are seen the things invisible to human eyes: an earthly body radiates the divine splendor, a mortal body wells forth the glory of the Godhead. For the Word became flesh, and the flesh became Word, though neither departed from its own nature. O the wonder! Not from without did the glory accrue to the body, but from within, from the supremely divine Godhead of God the Word, united to it according to hypostasis by an ineffable principle.”

The Apostles Behold His Kingly Glory

1 10. For though men have not the strength to fix the eye unwaveringly upon him, yet in that [vision] the chosen ones among the apostles behold him shining forth in the glory of his own kingdom.

The Chief Apostles, Witnesses of His Godhead

1 11. Hence he takes to himself the chief among the apostles as witnesses of his own glory, and he reveals to them his own Godhead. And it is fitting that those who behold the divine glory be perfect—that glory which is beyond all things, the only and supremely perfect and pre-perfect.

Testimony of St. Dionysius the Areopagite

1 12. For the truly divine and God-proclaiming Dionysius says: “Thus shall the Master be seen by his own perfect servants, in the manner in which he was beheld on Mount Tabor by the apostles. He takes along John, the virgin and most pure instrument of theology, so that, having beheld the timeless glory of the Son—In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God—he might thunder it forth.”

On Stillness and Prayer

1 13. For stillness is the mother of prayer, and prayer is the manifestation of divine glory. For when we close the senses, and commune with ourselves and with God, and, freed from the outward whirl of the world, come to be within ourselves, then shall we clearly behold within ourselves the kingdom of God. For the kingdom of heaven, which is the kingdom of God, is within us, as Jesus the God declared.

Transfigured, He Shines With the Lightning of the Godhead

1 14. Before the disciples is transfigured he who is

2 ever glorified in the same way and who shines with the lightning of the Godhead.

The Glory of the Godhead Becomes the Glory of the Body

1 15. For having been begotten without beginning from the Father, he possesses the natural ray of the Godhead as without beginning, and the glory of the Godhead becomes the glory of the body.

On the Transfiguration of the Lord

1 16. But the glory, being unseen within the visible body to those who could not contain the things invisible even to angels, was reckoned invisible to the prisoners of the flesh. 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, from blind, to see. And this is that saying, “He was transfigured before them.” For remaining himself in identity, he was now seen by the disciples appearing as other than he formerly appeared; and “he shone,” it says, “as the sun”—not that he was not brighter than the sun, for it is impossible that the uncreated be imaged without deficiency in the creation, but only so far as those who beheld him were able to look upon.

None Has Seen God by Nature

1 17. For no one has ever seen God as he is by nature; and what one has seen, this he has beheld in the Spirit. This is the change of the right hand of the Most High. These are the things which eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and which have never arisen upon the heart of man. Thus in the age to come we shall be forever with God, beholding Christ flashing with the light of the Godhead. This light holds the victory over all nature; this is the life that has overcome the world. But Peter says, “It is good for us to be here.” And thereupon a cloud—not of gloom, but of light—overshadowed them; for the mystery hidden from the ages and from the generations is unveiled. A voice of the Father came forth from the cloud of the Spirit, and a glory continuous and everlasting is made manifest.

Testimony of St. Andrew of Crete

1 18. And the divinely-eloquent Andrew of Crete says: The Savior leads the disciples up the high mountain—to do what? or to teach what? To display the surpassingly resplendent glory and brightness of his own divinity.

The Deification of Our Nature

1 19. This, therefore, is what we celebrate today: the deification of our nature, its alteration into something better, its ecstasy and ascent toward what is above nature—by which there comes the victory of the better, or, to say it more properly, ineffable deification.

The Angels Marvel at This Glory

1 20. This the angels marvel at. This the archangels glorify.

The Supramundane Powers Proclaim His Love for Mankind

1 21. This the whole noetic ordered array of the supramundane powers, feasting immaterially, sets forth as the clearest and most undeceiving proof of the Word’s love for mankind toward us.

No Creature Can Contain This Brightness

1 22. There is nothing now beheld in creation that could contain the surpassing excess of this brightness. For he who is beyond essence, having taken essence into essence, lived among us through flesh—he who indeed flashed forth surpassingly upon the mountain.

Beheld as What He Ever Was

1 23. He did not then become more translucent or more exalted than himself. Far from it! Rather, he was beheld in truth as that which he also was before, by those disciples who were being perfected and initiated into the higher mysteries. For having come, so far as was attainable, outside the flesh and the world, they were there already taught the things of the state to come from what they experienced.

On Participation in the Good

1 24. For even if the good is in no way wholly incommunicable to any of all that exists, yet it is not communicated as a whole, whatever it is in itself, but only in such measure and manner as becomes containable for those who participate, so far as is attainable. And this it does through its utmost goodness, traveling out to all and pouring itself forth in illuminations of boundless gift. And the proof of what is said would be this very blessed and much-hymned experience that the apostles underwent upon the mountain: when the unapproachable and uncreated Light, transfiguring its own flesh, made it shine in a manner beyond essence by the overflow of its own welling-forth of light. O the wonder! In a most perfect ecstasy of nature they fell into a heavy sleep, and, gripped by fear, with their senses stilled, they tore away from themselves utterly all noetic motion and apprehension. Thus, in accordance with that divine and super-luminous and invisible darkness, they came to be with God, receiving the truly seeing by not seeing at all, and procuring, by suffering unknowingly, the unknowing that is by way of transcendence, and, initiated through sleep into a wakefulness loftier than every noetic vigilance, they came to be outside all things seen and thought, and even outside themselves, so that, through unknowing and unseeing, they might be instructed in the mystery that is beyond essence by way of transcendence—the mystery that has gone forth beyond all deification and abstraction—through the manifestation of the Word, and the overshadowing of the Spirit, and the voice of the Begetter borne from above out of the cloud.

Testimony of St. Gregory the Theologian

1 25. Concerning this divine light the great Gregory the Theologian says: A light was the divinity displayed upon the mountain to the disciples, almost too strong for their sight; and again, He will come as my discourse is, but such as he was seen by the disciples or displayed to them, the divinity overpowering the little flesh.

Testimony of St. Maximus the Confessor

1 26. And Saint Maximus: This, he says, is the Gospel of God—an embassy of God and an exhortation to men through the incarnate Son, who bestows as the reward of reconciliation with the Father, upon those who obey him, the unbegotten deification; and by unbegotten deification I mean the enhypostatic illumination according to species, which has no genesis, but an unfathomable manifestation in the worthy.

In the Form of God to Those Who Ascend

1 27. And again: The Lord does not appear with glory always to all who stand beside him, but to those who are beginners he comes in the form of a servant, while to those able to follow him as he ascends the high mountain of his transfiguration he appears in the form of God, in which he subsisted before the world was.

The Light of His Face and the Theology of Negation

1 28. And again the same: The light of the Lord’s face, which overpowered the energy of human nature, prefigured to the blessed apostles the manner of the mystical theology that is by negation—according to which the blessed and holy divinity is, in its essence, beyond all utterance and beyond all knowledge, and is raised infinitely beyond all infinity, leaving to those who come after it not even the barest trace of apprehension.

Participated Yet Hidden in His Essence

1 29. For he who, says the same, is not participable in his essence by the things that exist, yet wills in another manner to be participated in by those who are able, in no way departs from what is hidden in his essence; since indeed the very manner in which, willingly, he is participated remains perpetually unmanifest to all.

Testimony of St. Basil the Great

1 30. And the great Basil also says: The Holy Spirit is, in his nature, unapproachable, yet containable through goodness; filling all things by his power, yet partaken of by the worthy alone; participated not in one measure, but distributing his energy according to the proportion of faith; simple in essence, manifold in his powers.

Wholly Present to Each, After the Image of the Sun’s Ray

1 31. Wholly present to each, and wholly being everywhere, divided without passion and participated in entirety, after the image of the sun’s ray; and present to each of those receptive of it as if to him alone, it sends forth its grace sufficient and whole to all.

The Energies and Essence of God

1 32. And again: For the energies of God are manifold, but his essence is simple. And we say that we know God from his energies, but we do not promise to draw near to his essence. For his energies descend to us, but his essence remains unapproachable.

Testimony of St. Athanasius the Great

1 33. For thus also the great Athanasius says, that no one of men can anywhere see the bare essence of God. Whence it is plain that the saints did not behold the essence of God, but the glory, as is also written concerning the apostles, that Peter and those with him, having kept awake, saw his glory.

The Same Before and Now, Unchanging in His Divinity

1 34. And again the same: Christ, says he, is impassible even amid the sufferings of the flesh, having as God conquered death; and having risen on the third day and ascended into heaven, he will come in glory and not in grace, coming in his own divinity and manifestly shining forth from his holy body that is from Mary the ineffable glory, as he also showed in part upon the mountain—teaching us that both before and now he is the same, being ever unalterable and having no change whatever concerning his divinity.

Testimony of St. Dionysius the Areopagite (35)

1 35. So also the great Dionysius: When, says he, we have become incorruptible and immortal, and have attained the Christ-like and most blessed lot, we shall be forever with the Lord according to the saying—being filled, in all-pure contemplations, with his visible theophany, which shines round about us with most radiant beams, as it did the disciples in that most divine transfiguration; participating in his noetic gift of light with a passionless and immaterial intellect, and in the union that is beyond intellect, in the unknown and blessed encounters of the supra-radiant rays, in a more divine imitation of the supercelestial intellects.

Testimony of St. Basil the Great (36)

1 36. And the great Basil: It is a prize of virtue, says he, to become god and to be illumined with the purest light, having become a son of that day which is not broken by any gloom. For another sun makes this day —

2 the sun that flashes forth the true light; which, once it has shone upon us, no longer hides itself in any setting, but, having embraced all things in its illuminating power, works in the worthy a light perpetual and without succession, making those who participate in that light themselves to be other suns. “For then,” he says, “the righteous also shall shine forth as the sun.”

Testimony of St. Maximus the Confessor (37)

1 37. And the divine Maximus: The soul becomes god by participation in the divine grace, having itself ceased from all the energies of intellect and sense, and having brought to rest together with itself the natural energies of the body, which is deified together with it according to the participation in deification proportioned to it; so that God alone is manifested through both the soul and the body, their natural marks being overpowered by the surpassing greatness of the glory.

Testimony of St. Dionysius the Areopagite (38)

1 38. And the great Dionysius: We see no deification or life that is strictly conformable to the Cause that transcends all things.

On the Source of Deification

1 39. The same, being asked how he who is beyond all is above divine-source and above good-source: If, he says, you should conceive of divinity and goodness, it is the very substance of the good-working gift, and the inimitable imitation of him who is beyond God and beyond good, according to which we are deified and made good. For if this becomes a principle of being deified and made good for those who are deified and made good, he who is above every principle is also beyond what is so called divinity and goodness, as being divine-source and good-source.

Testimony of St. Gregory of Nyssa

1 40. And the divine Gregory of Nyssa: If his judgments, says he, cannot be searched out, and his ways are not traced, and the promise of good things transcends all conjecture drawn from surmise, how much more, in measure, according to what is inexpressible and unapproachable, is the divine itself above and higher than the things conceived about it?

Testimony of St. John of Damascus (41)

1 41. But also the divine John of Damascus, again in his sacred hymns: That you might show forth manifestly your ineffable second descent—how the Most High God shall be seen standing in the midst of gods—you shone ineffably upon the apostles on Tabor, together with Moses and Elias.

Transfigured, Displaying the Archetypal Beauty

1 42. And in another hymn: And having hidden a little the assumed nature of the flesh, he was transfigured before them, displaying the comeliness of the archetypal beauty. And this not in its entirety, at once assuring them and sparing them, lest along with the sight they should lose even their life, but only as they were able to contain it, bearing it with their bodily eyes.

Testimony of St. Dionysius the Areopagite (43)

1 43. And the great Dionysius again: The divine darkness, says he, is the unapproachable light in which God is said to dwell—invisible by reason of its surpassing radiance, and unapproachable by reason of the excess of its super-essential outpouring of light.

Testimony of St. John Chrysostom

1 44. Not God, says the Father Chrysostom, but the grace is poured out.

The Emperor on the Fear of the Perfect

1 45. And since he again brought forward the fear that came upon the apostles at that most divine vision—to show thereby that the apostles were imperfect even in that very vision, and that the light then seen by them was low and earth-bound—the most ⟦divine⟧ and far-famed emperor, his mind then wholly illumined by such a light, said: There is also a fear that belongs not to beginners but to the perfect, concerning which the Prophet says, “The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring unto ages of ages”; and again elsewhere, “Fear the Lord, all you his saints.” And a proof that the apostles then had not the beginner’s fear but the perfect’s, is their seeking to remain forever in that ineffable vision. For “Let us make here,” he says, “three tabernacles,” and, “It is good for us to be here.” For he who has fear in the other manner is eager to flee from that which he also fears. But Peter, the chief and topmost of the apostles, supposing that this dimensional and finite age was slipping away and that the dimensionless and unending age of the light was shining forth, said, “It is good for us to be here,” speaking in a god-inspired way from the disposition of his soul. For he assuredly saw that which human nature could in no way be able to see, unless it were blended together unto the grace of the Holy Spirit. For they were then deemed worthy of so much as human nature could contain, the Spirit cooperating with it.

The Emperor on the Invisible Nature of God

1 46. And let none of us, said again the emperor wise also in divine things, when he hears us hymning, so far as is fitting, that most divine light, suppose that we say the nature of God is visible. For even if they ran up to so great a height of contemplation, they saw a divine grace and glory, but not that very nature which supplies the grace. For we know that nature—being mindful of it from the divine oracles—to be imparticipable, ungraspable, invisible even to the supramundane and highest powers themselves, as leaving not even the barest trace of apprehension to those who come after it. Since Gregory too, most theological, having first recounted certain of the prophetic visions, immediately added next: But neither these of whom the discourse speaks, nor any other of their rank, stood in the substance and essence of the Lord, according to what is written, nor did he either see or declare the nature of God. From which sayings and words, Barlaam—laying his hand upon the holy things in an unhallowed and perilous manner—was both refuted and put to shame.

Barlaam Against the Jesus Prayer

1 47. Furthermore, this same Barlaam was found to have, in writing, distorted and accused many of the customs of stillness, and at the same time to have set himself against the prayer customary to these monks—or rather to all Christians—namely, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” For he treated of this also, in these very words:

2 I, though there are many things for which one might justly bring a charge against the expounder of such a teaching, count this not the least: that, attempting to overturn the mysteries of Christians by means of the “inbreathings,” he also slanders the Fathers, as though what he himself now teaches, these too held formerly. O thunderstruck and foul man, which of them ever called watchfulness and the guarding of the heart, and attention, by such a monstrous name as you hand down? They say that this man laid it down as law for his initiates to use perpetually a prayer that runs thus: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” And from this, then, one can perceive what manner of man was the inventor of the “inbreathings.” For the “Our Father,” which the Bogomils especially use, he does not prescribe—for he supposed he would thereby be detected; but for those to whom he prescribes to attend through life to this little prayer alone, he holds that all the other prayers are to be reckoned vain babbling. And to those, again, where all Christians in this prayer call our Lord Jesus Christ also “our God,” this man has changed the “our God” into “Son of God,” and thereby has manifestly uncovered the whole of his evil doctrine. For, in keeping with the doctrine of the Bogomils, this man too alters, in the said prayer, the “our God” into “Son of God.” Since no one could state any other cause for which he has made such a change. And these things, then, [said] the most godless Barlaam.

Refutation From Peter’s Confession

1 48. But these very things of his are altogether opposed to the most blessed confession of the foundation of the faith, the chief of the disciples, and to the Master’s beatitude pronounced upon it. For he said to him, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”; and the Lord to him, “Blessed are you, Simon bar Jonah, for flesh and blood did not reveal it to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” But also in the Symbol of the faith we say: “We believe in one God the Father almighty, and in the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages.” Do we, then, not glorify Christ as God, since we say that we believe in the Son of God? And concerning such sacred prayer the golden-tongued and divine teacher John says, writing to monastics: “Be at leisure perpetually, and abide with the Lord our God, until he have mercy upon us, and seek nothing else than only mercy from the Lord of glory. And seeking mercy, seek it in a humble and contrite heart, and cry from morning until evening, and, if possible, all the night long: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.’ I beseech you, therefore, force your intellect to this work unto death. For this work needs much forcing, because ‘narrow is the gate and straitened the way that leads to life, and they that use force enter into it.’ For ‘the kingdom of heaven belongs to the violent.’ I beseech you, therefore, do not separate your hearts from God, but remain and keep it with the remembrance of our Lord Jesus Christ always, until the name of the Lord be implanted within, in the heart, and think nothing else than that Christ be magnified in you. I beseech you, therefore, never bring to a stop or despise the rule of this prayer. But whether you eat, or drink, or travel, or do anything whatever, cry without ceasing: ‘Lord Jesus Christ,

2 Son of God, have mercy on us.’ For ‘pray without ceasing,’ says the divine apostle, ‘without wrath and disputings.’”

Testimony of St. Diadochos on the Jesus Prayer

1 49. But also the divine Diadochos: The intellect, says he, altogether demands of us, when we have stopped up all its passages by the remembrance of God, a work that fulfills its need for activity. We must, therefore, give it the “Lord Jesus Christ” as the whole business of its aim. For “no one,” it says, “calls Jesus Lord, except in the Holy Spirit.” For as many as meditate always, unceasingly, upon this holy and glorious name in the depth of the heart, these can also at some time see the light of their own intellect. For it consumes, with a perception that suffices, all the filth that floats upon the soul. For “our God,” it says, “is a consuming fire.” Whence the Lord thereafter calls the soul to a great love of his own glory. For that glorious and much-longed-for name, abiding through the remembrance of the intellect in the warmth of the heart, works in us a habit of loving his goodness with all our being. For this is the precious pearl, which a man, having sold all his substance, can find, and have unspeakable joy at the finding of it. And it would take long to recount the counsels and exhortations of the God-bearing Fathers concerning this. The monks, then, insisting that this prayer was from the beginning the delightful and divine meditation of the God-bearing minds, and at the same time wishing to string together in order whatever lies in the writings of the saints concerning it—such as is also the saying of him who by his discourses built the ladder of spiritual ascent: “Let the remembrance of Jesus be united to your breath, and then you will know the profit of stillness” —

The Emperor’s Closing Words

1 50. while the monks were eager to say such things in order, the emperor, in all things admirable—who has now also brought his life to a blessed end—taking up again the word on behalf of Christ the Lord, the word on behalf of him who anointed him, said: But be it so, and granted that some one of the evil-believers said this in the beginning. There is no charge against us from God, who use well what was ill-conceived by them. For neither, because the Persians call Abraham the God of heaven, shall we say that it is ill to say, “The God of heaven do I worship”; nor, because the Greeks call God a world-making mind, shall we for that reason not call him the maker of the world. Or, in saying this, should we justly be charged as thinking according to them? For the Greeks, saying that matter is unbegotten and coeternal with God, even though they call God the maker of the world, yet [mean it] not as the bringer-forth of what formerly in no way existed, but as the orderer of what exists, adding only order and form and harmonious arrangement to the things that are, attributing to the power of God little more than belongs to human craft; but we, believing that all things received their coming-forth into being from God out of nonexistence, know him exactly to be the maker of heaven

2 and earth and of the things between.

3 — [The Tome is brought to completion upon the council against Barlaam and Akindynos; col. 692 in PG 151.] —

Colophon

The Synodal Tome of 1341
by The Council of Constantinople (1341).

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
The Watzmann (1824–25)
by Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840), 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
- Preamble
- Barlaam’s Accusation Before the Synod
- Barlaam of Calabria’s War on the Fathers
- Barlaam Evades the Synod
- The Synod Convened in Holy Wisdom
- The Sacred Canons Read
- Gregory Palamas Invited to Respond

- Barlaam’s Writings Against the Massalians Produced

- Testimony of St. John of Damascus

- The Apostles Behold His Kingly Glory

- The Chief Apostles, Witnesses of His Godhead

- Testimony of St. Dionysius the Areopagite

- On Stillness and Prayer

- Transfigured, He Shines With the Lightning of the Godhead

- The Glory of the Godhead Becomes the Glory of the Body

- On the Transfiguration of the Lord
- None Has Seen God by Nature
- Testimony of St. Andrew of Crete
- The Deification of Our Nature
- The Angels Marvel at This Glory

- The Supramundane Powers Proclaim His Love for Mankind

- No Creature Can Contain This Brightness
- Beheld as What He Ever Was
- On Participation in the Good
- Testimony of St. Gregory the Theologian
- Testimony of St. Maximus the Confessor
- In the Form of God to Those Who Ascend

- The Light of His Face and the Theology of Negation

- Participated Yet Hidden in His Essence

- Testimony of St. Basil the Great

- Wholly Present to Each, After the Image of the Sun’s Ray

- The Energies and Essence of God

- Testimony of St. Athanasius the Great

- The Same Before and Now, Unchanging in His Divinity

- Testimony of St. Dionysius the Areopagite (35)

- Testimony of St. Basil the Great (36)

- Testimony of St. Maximus the Confessor (37)

- Testimony of St. Dionysius the Areopagite (38)

- On the Source of Deification
- Testimony of St. Gregory of Nyssa
- Testimony of St. John of Damascus (41)

- Transfigured, Displaying the Archetypal Beauty

- Testimony of St. Dionysius the Areopagite (43)

- Testimony of St. John Chrysostom
- The Emperor on the Fear of the Perfect
- The Emperor on the Invisible Nature of God
- Barlaam Against the Jesus Prayer
- Refutation From Peter’s Confession

- Testimony of St. Diadochos on the Jesus Prayer

- The Emperor’s Closing Words

- Colophon