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

The Synodal Tome of 1347

The Council of Constantinople (1347)

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 ͵ατμζʹ ἔτους

Cover: Sunrise (c. 1890–95) by Arkhip Kuindzhi (Russian, 1841/2–1910), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:tome_1347: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.

Confession of Faith and Condemnation of the Barlaamites

1 …the fountain of the kingly Godhead contemplated in the Son and the Holy Spirit; the sole preexisting cause of the things that have come to be; not the only Creator, but the only one who is truly Father of one Son, and the sole Emitter of one Holy Spirit; ever existing, and ever being Father, and ever being alone both Father and Emitter; greater than the Son and the Spirit in this one respect, as cause, but in all else the same as they and equal in honor; of whom there is one Son, without beginning inasmuch as he is timeless, yet not without beginning inasmuch as he has the Father as his principle and root and fountain; from whom alone, before all the ages, he came forth incorporeally, without flux, impassibly, by begetting, yet was not divided, being God from God—not one thing insofar as he is God and another insofar as he is Son, ever existing, and ever being Son, and Son alone; and ever being toward God without confusion, not a cause and principle of the divinity conceived in the Trinity, as deriving from the Father as from a cause and principle, but a cause and principle of all the things that have come to be, since all things came to be through him; who, being in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but at the consummation of the ages emptied himself, taking the form that is ours, and of the Ever-Virgin Mary, by the good pleasure of the Father and the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, was conceived by the law of nature and born, at once God and man; and having truly become man he became like us in all things except sin, remaining what he was, true God, having united without confusion and without change the two natures and wills and energies, and remaining one Son in one hypostasis even after the incarnation, performing all the divine things as God and all the human things as man, and subject to the blameless human passions. Impassible and immortal he is and remains as God, yet willingly suffering in the flesh as man; and crucified and dead and buried, and on the third day risen; who, having appeared to the disciples after the resurrection, and having promised the power from on high, and having commanded them to make disciples of all the nations, and to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and to teach them to observe all that he had enjoined, was himself taken up into heaven, and sat at the right hand of the Father, making our own lump of nature equal in honor and sharing his throne, as sharing his deity, with which lump he shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and to render to each according to his works. And then, having ascended to the Father, he sent upon his holy disciples and apostles the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father; co-unoriginate with the Father and the Son, as timeless, yet not without beginning, since it too has the Father as root and fountain and cause, not as begotten but as proceeding; for it too came forth from the Father, before all the ages, without flux and impassibly, not by begetting but by procession, being undivided from the Father and the Son, as coming forth from the Father and resting in the Son, having its union without confusion and its division without separation; being God also, and from God, not one thing insofar as it is God and another insofar as it is the Paraclete;

2 a Spirit subsisting in its own right, proceeding from the Father and sent through the Son—that is, manifested—itself also a cause of all the things that have come to be, as having been brought to completion in it; the same as, and equal in honor with, the Father and the Son, apart from the unbegottenness and the begetting. And it was sent by the Son to his own disciples—that is, it was manifested. For how otherwise could that which is not separated from him be sent by him? And how otherwise could that which is present everywhere come to me? Therefore it is sent not only by the Son but also by the Father, and through the Son—it which also comes of itself, being manifested. For the sending is a common work—that is, the manifestation of the Spirit. But it is manifested not according to the essence. For no one has either seen or declared the nature of God, but rather it is manifested through the grace and the power and the energy, which is common to Father and Son and Spirit. For proper to each of these is the hypostasis of each, and whatever pertains to it; but common, no less, is the supra-essential essence alone, which is altogether nameless and unmanifested and imparticipable, as being beyond all naming and manifestation and participation; yet common too are the grace and the power and the energy and the splendor, and the kingdom and the incorruptibility, and simply all those things according to which God communicates himself and is named by grace to the holy angels and to men; falling away from his simplicity neither because of the divisible and distinct character of the hypostases, nor because of the divisible and manifold character of the powers and energies. Thus for us there is one almighty God in one Godhead. For neither could there ever be a composition out of perfect hypostases, nor could that which is powerful, when it has a power or powers, ever truly be called composite simply because of its being powerful.

3 Besides these things, we venerate relatively the holy icon of the Son of God, who was circumscribed inasmuch as he became man for our sake, referring the veneration relatively to the prototype; and the precious wood of the cross, and all the symbols of his sufferings, as being divine trophies against the common enemy of our race; and also the saving figure of the precious cross, and the divine churches and places, and the sacred vessels and the God-given oracles, on account of the God who dwells in them. Likewise we venerate also the icons of all the saints, on account of our love for them and for God, whom they truly loved and served, lifting our mind, in the act of veneration, toward the figures the icons represent. We venerate also the very reliquaries of the saints, since the sanctifying grace has not flown away from their most sacred bones; just as neither was the Godhead divided from the Lord’s body in the three-day death.

4 We know nothing that is evil according to essence; nor that there is any other principle of evil than the turning aside of rational beings, who have wrongly used the free will given them by God. We cherish all the traditions of the Church, both written and unwritten, and before all the most mystical and all-holy rite

5 and communion and synaxis, from which the other rites also receive their perfection, in which, in remembrance of him who emptied himself without being emptied, and took flesh and suffered for us, according to his divine command and his own act, the most divine things are consecrated and made divine—the bread and the cup—and that very life-originating body and blood is effected; and it bestows their ineffable partaking and communion upon those who approach in purity. But all those who do not confess and believe as the Holy Spirit foreannounced through the prophets, as the Lord ordained when he appeared to us manifested in the flesh, as the apostles preached when sent by him, as our Fathers and their successors taught—whether, as men worthy of a curse, they have themselves begun some heresy of their own, or have followed to the end those who wickedly began it—we reject and subject to anathema.

6 We receive and embrace the holy and ecumenical councils: that at Nicaea, of the three hundred and eighteen God-bearing Fathers, against the God-fighting Arius, who impiously reduced the Son of God to a creature, and cut the Godhead worshipped in Father and Son and Holy Spirit into created and uncreated; that after it, at Constantinople, of the one hundred and fifty holy Fathers, against Macedonius of Constantinople, who impiously reduced the Holy Spirit to a creature, and likewise cut the one Godhead no less into created and uncreated; that after it, at Ephesus, of the two hundred Fathers, against Nestorius patriarch of Constantinople; the one against Eutyches and Dioscorus, who wrongly dogmatized one nature in Christ; and that after it, at Constantinople, of the one hundred and sixty-five Fathers, against Theodore and Diodore, who held the same opinions as Nestorius and in their writings supported his, and against a certain Origen and Evagrius, who, though men of old, attempted to introduce certain mythical notions into the Church of God; and that after it, in the same city, of the one hundred and seventy Fathers, against Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paul, who ruled at Constantinople, who denied in Christ the two energies and two wills corresponding to the two natures; and again that at Nicaea, of the three hundred and sixty-seven Fathers, against the Iconoclasts.

7 We embrace also all the holy synods gathered, by the grace of God, at various times or places for the confirmation of piety and of the evangelical way of life; among which are also those convened in this great city, in the renowned church of the Holy Wisdom of God, against Barlaam the Calabrian, and against Akindynos, who came after him holding his views and striving by guile to defend them—men who dogmatize that the common grace of Father, Son, and Spirit, and the light of the age to come, in which the righteous shall shine as the sun, as Christ also foreshowed when he shone upon the mountain, and simply every power and energy of the tri-hypostatic Godhead, and everything that in any way differs from the divine nature, is created; and these too impiously cut the one Godhead into created and uncreated, and call those who piously confess that most divine Light, and every divine power and energy, to be uncreated—since nothing that belongs to God by nature is recent—ditheists and polytheists, just as Jews and Sabellians and Arians also call us. But we reject both these and those, as being truly atheists and polytheists, and cut them off completely from the fullness of the faithful, as the holy catholic and apostolic Church of Christ has done through the Synodal Tome and the Hagioritic Tome, believing in one Godhead, tri-hypostatic and almighty, in no way falling from its unity and simplicity on account of the powers or the hypostases. Upon all these things we await the resurrection of the dead, and the unending life of the age to come. Amen.

8 REPORT OF THE HIERARCHS to our most mighty and holy lady and mistress, the Lady Anna Palaiologina.

9 Most mighty and holy lady and mistress of ours: We the hierarchs who sit shut up in our cells—the metropolitan of Ephesus, of Cyzicus, of Alania, of Christoupolis, of Apros, of Lopadion—having received from the grace of the all-holy Spirit the yoke of the Gospel, and being bound to set ourselves against the demons, both intelligible and perceptible, who oppose the Gospel of Christ, and to remind your most pious and holy Majesty, and to stir up its love of piety to cast down every height that exalts itself against God, do now remind and report that he who is presently patriarch, having been taken captive by the terrible and irrational passion of avarice, has conducted himself like a hireling in the Church of Christ, gathering silver and gold for his sons and his daughters, contrary to the definitions of the saints and the sacred canons of the holy Church of Christ, shamelessly selling the widowed churches, selling the exarchates, and trafficking in the abbacies, advancing steadily toward the worse, dividing what is just, and judging perversely the ecclesiastical and civil cases that arise, so that in many instances there are even two contradictory written rulings from the same man;

10 alas, the audacity! Later he did this openly even in the matter of the faith. And what need is there to speak of the sacred treasures? For many of the vessels consecrated to God he fearlessly took away with audacious hand and mind, and—oh, the shame!—for his own gain both broke them up and sold them. And on top of all this, through excessive love of glory he even abandoned the Church of Christ, and made long and burdensome sojourns in the palace. And the great church of God, left unprovided for and uncared for, became a pitiable ruin. And his falsehoods, and his other deceptions and hypocrisies, which he displays each day before those who converse with him—what tongue could recount them? For his mouth does not know the truth, and in him the great dignity of the high priesthood has been rendered worthless. And we, sitting in want and distress, beseech God that he may enter into the heart of your holy Majesty, and that his deeds may be brought to light. Now therefore, as you see, our holy mistress, the wretched man, having fallen into the depth of evils, is truly contemptuous, and, adding lawlessness to lawlessness, has been forsaken by God, and has fallen even from piety itself, and has rolled down into the error of false doctrine, and has made himself liable to written anathemas, having set aside the determinations and decisions in favor of piety made by that synod, over which our thrice-blessed and holy sovereign and emperor also presided; and having proceeded against the piety of those who were then vindicated, though he had been an advocate of the truth they upheld, but now agreeing with the disciples and successors of that Barlaam’s false doctrine. And now, on the one hand, doing away entirely with the divine and creative energies of God, and saying that they do not differ at all from the essence, he dogmatizes that God is essence only—bare and bereft of the providence and justice and goodness concerning him, and of the other glories of the Godhead; and now, on the other hand, representing these creative energies of God to be created—and the very splendor of the divine nature, by which Christ flashed forth upon the mountain—on the pretext that it differs from the essence of God, and cutting the divine into created and uncreated, and overthrowing the right determination opposed to such great and grievous impieties, and ordaining as priests and hierarchs those who hold and write such blasphemies, while persecuting and disowning those who contradict them, and adding too those of like mind, while importuning the emperor—who was plainly in agreement with the monks. We therefore beseech and entreat your holy Majesty that the affairs of the Church and of piety be in no way endangered for the sake of one man, and that a man manifestly condemned. For just as the synod against Arius condemns all Arians who appear at any time whatever, so too the synod against Barlaam condemns all who defend his teachings and fight against those who contradict them. And this man—bare-headed, as the saying goes—by speaking and writing and ordaining and casting his vote, has shown his agreement with those who hold the views of Barlaam; he therefore no longer has any portion with the pious. Let him be driven away from the flock of Christ as a wolf, as a serpent, as a savage lion. But if he requires also a refutation, thinking he has some defense, let him be brought forward to judgment. We beseech, therefore, and beseech again, that the cause of Christianity be no further endangered, for many of the Christians on his account are dying without communion in the undefiled mysteries of Christ, and others do not even enter a church. And many of the priests have ceased even from celebrating the liturgy altogether. These things we report as bound to do, and as intercessors, and as servants, and for the sake of credibility we have signed below with our own signatures. In the month of September, of the fifteenth indiction.

11 It bore also signatures:

12 The humble metropolitan of Ephesus, Matthew. The humble metropolitan of Cyzicus, Athanasius. The humble metropolitan of all Alania and Soteroupolis, Laurentius. The humble metropolitan of Christoupolis, Macarius. The humble metropolitan of Apros, Chariton. The humble archbishop of Lopadion, Hierotheus.

13 The present copy, having been collated with its original and found in all respects to correspond exactly, was signed by me for security: The humble metropolitan of Philadelphia, Macarius.

Decree of the Emperor John Kantakouzenos

1 DECREE of John Kantakouzenos

2 confirming the synodal decisions against the same patriarch of Constantinople, John Kalekas the Barlaamite.

3 Most well-disposed and most faithful inhabitants of my realm, all of you of God-glorified, God-protected, and God-magnified Constantinople—clergy, monastics, all who belong to the state, and all the common people—that the things stirred up by that Barlaam against piety, and how they were refuted by the most holy among hieromonks, Lord Gregory Palamas, and how he was condemned synodically, my Majesty also being present; and how Akindynos, a little later holding his views, was himself also refuted synodically—my Majesty likewise presiding in the synod at that time—and was justly subjected to the same fitting condemnation; and how a synodal tome was set forth upon these matters, comprehensively cutting off from the catholic and apostolic Church of Christ, and from the whole fullness of the Orthodox, anyone who should again be found bringing the same charges that Barlaam spoke or wrote against the monks—that is, against Lord Gregory Palamas and those with him—of these things I think no one at all is ignorant. But a little later, when certain men, out of a wicked and power-loving disposition, had fabricated against my Majesty the things which you also know, and a grievous confusion had thereupon overtaken the empire of the Romans, Akindynos, treating such wretchedness of the times as a godsend, and deceiving and winning over many—among them also the man who had served as patriarch—raised a terrible faction against the Church, in no way inferior to that within the state, defending those false doctrines of Barlaam while disowning only his name, and that for the sake of deception, although he escaped the notice of none who listened with discernment. And since the man who had served as patriarch became the confirmer and protector of Akindynos and his party, and deemed Akindynos himself worthy of ordination, and advanced some of those who agreed with him to ecclesiastical offices; and since at the same time he spoke out boldly in support of such doctrines before the most exalted lady of the Romans, the most beloved sister of my Majesty, and again proceeded against the monks who had been vindicated in piety—she, perceiving from this that those synodal determinations and decisions in favor of piety were being annulled, and that the synodal tome upon them was being utterly set aside and overthrown by him, after often previously examining these matters together with the most holy hierarchs, then convened a synod as well; in which, after careful examination and determination, all subjected him to a common deposition, and—should he not repent and reject Akindynos and his followers—cut him off from the portion of the Orthodox. And when this God-pleasing work had been accomplished—for, as the one who said it has it, even the chastisement of vice is praiseworthy—the Lord dissolved the civil strife and bestowed peace upon the empire of the Romans. And thus my Majesty, by God’s good pleasure, having entered this great city, found him deposed, and Akindynos and those with him once more synodically disowned—a thing which not only those who assembled here at this synod did, but in which the most holy metropolitans who remained at leisure in their own cells also concurred by written vote, these adding, along with his aberration in doctrine, also his other lawless deeds committed against the Church and the empire; a thing which those outside who were with my Majesty also declared—the most holy patriarch of Jerusalem and all the rest of the most holy metropolitans—themselves likewise convening a synod, and, among other things, stripping him of all priesthood on account of his communion with Akindynos. For although they were separated in place and in body, yet, as though one Spirit were speaking in them, they all declared the same thing together, which my Majesty also, by the grace of Christ, approves and confirms, both now and before. However, after the arrival of my Majesty, although the condemnation had been sent to him in writing by the hierarchs through a tome, since I learned that he was still making excuses and objecting, on the ground that he had been condemned in absentia, and saying that he was ready to be present and to make his defense, presiding together with the most exalted emperor of the Romans, the most beloved son of my Majesty, and with the most holy hierarchs and the senate, we sent word to him to appear before the synod. But he was shown to have pleaded his absence in vain; for he did not dare to appear and to come to any discussion at all, though he was summoned to the synod three and four times. For this reason he is subjected to the same condemnations as before, my Majesty also justly concurring; and my Majesty, showing and confirming this through the present decree, enjoins upon all to approve these lawful and synodal determinations and decisions, and to turn away from those who hold the views of Akindynos, and from all who again proceed against the aforesaid most holy hieromonk Lord Gregory Palamas and the monks with him, as being deceivers and as again troubling the Church. For the sake of this, and of the peace and security that accords with piety, the present decree of my Majesty has been issued. It bore also, in red letters of the imperial and divine hand, the date: in the month of March, of the fifteenth indiction.

4 Having collated the present copy with the divine and venerable decree shown to me, and having found everything to correspond, I have signed. The humble metropolitan of Philadelphia, Macarius.

5 — [The Tome is completed; col. 774 in PG 151.] —

Colophon

The Synodal Tome of 1347
by The Council of Constantinople (1347).

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
Sunrise (c. 1890–95)
by Arkhip Kuindzhi (Russian, 1841/2–1910), 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

- Confession of Faith and Condemnation of the Barlaamites

- Decree of the Emperor John Kantakouzenos

- Colophon