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

The Synodal Tome of 1351

The Council of Constantinople (1351)

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 ͵ατναʹ ἔτους

Cover: Evening Bells (1892) by Isaac Levitan (Russian, 1860–1900), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:tome_1351: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 and Proceedings of the Synod

1 SYNODAL TOME. Set forth by the divine and sacred synod convened against those who hold the views of Barlaam and Akindynos, in the reign of our pious and Orthodox emperors Kantakouzenos and Palaiologos.

2 We suppose that no one is ignorant of the madness of the common enemy against the Church, nor of the favor from the Savior, by reason of which—though countless terrors flood in upon her—she not only prevails over the darts but is even shown forth resplendent. The proof of his madness is the blood of God, the voluntary Passion, and the Cross; the proof of the alliance from God is the exact testimony of those who guard the Church—some transformed into evangelists, others proclaimed a trophy of the power of God, not by the things through which they were raised up, but by the things through which they fell. So it was; and the common enemy could not keep still. Rather, as though condemning himself for not having taken counsel fittingly, he commits the war against the Church not to a small nation, as of old to the Jews, but bitterly arms the whole world against her. His generals were Diocletian and Maximinus and Decius, and any like them—men who perished as shamefully as they had resolved to make war. For of those men the memory has perished with a clamor; but the sound of God’s Church has gone out into all the earth, and the most unerring testimony of her power is the corpses of the martyrs, driving out every demon. Thus the power of God, surpassing nature, is displayed even through calamities. But the evil one did not learn even by suffering—and that, though he is but an infant in understanding—rather, turning to another course, he assails the Church. For of waging war openly he utterly despaired, loath to face manifest disgrace; and so, slipping in among the party of Sabellius and Arius and those who belong to them, planning, forsooth, to do away with polytheism, he persuades the senseless, under pretext of honor to the One, by no means to acknowledge the true God. But this too he was seen to have devised against himself. This is the spoil of that war for the Church of God: the equality of honor of the Trinity.

3 But this evil one, casting many other coils

4 about the Church—now withdrawing, now assailing, at one time by doctrines having nothing sound, at another by the pleasures in which he is wont to take delight, whose end is separation from God—last of all, slipping into Barlaam, takes the field against the truth. This man, being a monk and hailing from Calabria, and having become deeply versed in the learning of the Greeks, and having attached himself wholly to it, advances against the truth and against those who sacredly hold to it; and, having accused them of ditheism—though they said only that the subsistent and to-all imparticipable essence of God is uncreated, and that the eternal and deifying grace of the Spirit, participated by the worthy, is likewise uncreated—when a divine synod had been convened over these matters, he was refuted and renounced by the holy catholic and apostolic Church of Christ, through the writings theologically composed by the holy Fathers who presided over the word of truth, namely the now most sacred metropolitan of Thessalonica, Palamas, and the monks. A little later, Akindynos, becoming an heir of that man’s evil opinion, in no way chastened by his teacher’s condemnation, nor having become any better, undertook once again to accuse the same men on the same charges; making himself, with guile, the ringleader in his teacher’s place, laying the most dreadful charges upon him, and insisting that he never thought or said the same things as Barlaam, so that thereby it might be permitted him to speak—yet by the very things he said pointing to the hidden Barlaam, both thinking and saying and writing the same evil opinion as he. For this reason, when a second synod also had been convened, over which our now mighty and holy emperor, the lord John Kantakouzenos, presided, he was refuted as both thinking and saying the same things as Barlaam, and as accusing the monks; for which he also drew upon himself the condemnation of Barlaam. And a synodal Tome having been issued against the blasphemies of that Barlaam, by which from the whole Christian fullness

5 he was cut off—as this very synodal Tome sets forth—for many other reasons, and because he attempted to show that the light of the Lord’s Transfiguration, which appeared to the blessed disciples and apostles who went up with him, is created and circumscribed, having nothing more than the lights perceived by the senses. And not only was this Barlaam renounced by the synodal Tome, but whoever, following him, wars against the monks and the Church of God renders himself liable to the same penalties; for it says expressly: “But if any other should again appear accusing the monks of any of the things uttered or written blasphemously and heterodoxly by Barlaam against the monks—rather, against the Church herself—or in general assailing them in such matters, he, being subjected by our Moderation to the same condemnation, shall himself also be renounced and cut off from the holy catholic and apostolic Church of Christ and from the Orthodox fullness of Christians.”

6 But when the wicked and primordially-evil dragon, who works in the sons of disobedience, as it is written, saw that, having assailed piety and those who securely hold to it—employing men not reckoned among those of dignity—he was by these means least able to attain his purpose, he slips into John, then numbered among the patriarchs, a vessel openly capacious of his malice. He, having come to be of one mind with Akindynos, and having both written and done and counseled much against piety and those who maintain it—rather, against piety itself—(for this was the man who in writing brought the condemnation upon that renounced Barlaam)—and at the same time seizing upon the civil war as a windfall, this man too found recompenses worthy of his zeal and his evil counsels. For, being refuted, he is deposed; and when he too had been renounced by synodal judgment, a sacred Tome is set forth by the synod, at once demonstrating that he cleaves to the heterodoxy of Akindynos, and at the same time his utterly unreasoning madness against the Orthodox. And this Tome, having its confirmation by the signatures of thirty hierarchs—to whom later, by his signature, the most holy patriarch of Jerusalem also gave his concurrence—does not cast out Akindynos and him who had been patriarch alone

7 from the catholic Church, nor cut them off from the fullness of Christians as with an axe; but it also says: “And if anyone else of all should ever be detected either thinking or saying or writing the same things against the hieromonk lord Gregory Palamas and the monks with him—rather, against the sacred theologians and the Church herself—we vote the same things against him too, and subject him to the same condemnation, whether he be one of the consecrated clergy or of the laity. And this same, oft-mentioned, most honored hieromonk, the lord Gregory Palamas, and the monks who accord with him, who write and think nothing discordant with the divine oracles—having accurately ascertained this by examination, and rather finding them contending in every way, as was fitting, on behalf of the divine oracles and our common piety and tradition—we declare to be not only altogether superior to the cavils raised against them (rather, against the Church of God), as the former synodal Tome also declared, but also the most secure champions and foremost contenders and helpers of the Church.” For thus also does the Tome issued at those synods set forth, just as it stands, sure and firm.

8 But he who ever rejoices in our evils did not even so resolve to keep quiet; for, not being at a loss for instruments, he went about seeking them. Having still some who, besides Barlaam and Akindynos, had resorted to those men and were sick in the extreme with their views, he makes subject to himself, through them, both the man who had been styled bishop of Ephesus and the one of Gannos, and Gregoras and Dexios; who, having formed a faction and having taken to themselves other paltry men who had never thought anything sound, raise an uproar against the Church of God, making it their zeal to lead the many astray and pitiably to cut them off from the Church, supposing that thereby they procure glory for themselves. It became necessary, therefore, on account of these things, that a great synod be convened, our most serene emperor having taken pity on the perishing souls. Wherefore, summoned by his God-strengthened and holy majesty and by the most holy and ecumenical patriarch, the lord Kallistos, the most sacred and most honored hierarchs—those of Herakleia, of Thessalonica, of Kyzikos, of Philadelphia, of Chalcedon, of Melenikon, of Amaseia, of

9 Pontoherakleia, of Pegai, of Berroia, of Trebizond, of Traianoupolis, of Selybria, of Eupron, of Amastris, of Ainos, of Sougdaia, of Brysis, of Madyta, of Bizye, of Garella, of Medeia, of Tenedos, of Kallioupolis, of Exantidion—with those of Adrianople, of Christoupolis, and of Didymoteichon also present through their declared opinions; with the most God-beloved bishops of Panion, of Karioupolis, of Pamphylon, of Adyra, of Kampania, of Sinaos, and of Eleutheroupolis also present; with our most serene and most mighty and holy emperor and king, the lord John Kantakouzenos, presiding, in the hall somewhat thus designated the Alexiakon of the sacred Blachernae; with the most holy and ecumenical patriarch, the lord Kallistos, sitting in session together with his holy majesty; and further, with the beloved own brother of his holy majesty, the lord Asanes; and further, with the beloved own brother of his holy majesty, the most fortunate sebastokrator, the lord Manuel Asanes; and indeed also with the beloved nephew of his holy majesty, the panhypersebastos, the lord Andronikos Asanes; with members of the senate seated alongside, together with the hierarchs and the ecclesiastical officials, and with the abbots and archimandrites of this prosperous city gathered together, and further not a few hieromonks and priests and monks, with some of the officials of the Church also not absent; and with the people, too, standing round about, as many as in these matters are fond of listening—there were summoned also the disturbers, these who rend the Church asunder, and they were asked for what reason, while the emperor lives piously, such things are dared by them against piety. And they alleged a certain addition that had been made in the ordination of the hierarchs being ordained. And they brought into accusation also the

10 [metropolitan] of Thessalonica, since they said they were scandalized at him in certain of the things written by him in refutation against Barlaam and Akindynos. And the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica said, “Then you, after all, hold their views.” But they, in imitation of Akindynos—as he became a denier of Barlaam, who had led him into the error—so these men became deniers of both. And the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica, rejoining, says: “And indeed the greater part of those who have chosen to contradict us, openly standing forth for the heterodoxy of Barlaam and Akindynos, have continued unrepentant even to this point; and you, who are ranged with the rest of them, are surely manifest to all, looking to those men as a pattern precisely in respect of doctrines.”

11 Upon this the divine synod said: “The addition with which you say you are displeased—which would not even justly be called an addition, since it is an unfolding of the sixth ecumenical council—is nothing other than the renunciation of Barlaam and Akindynos; and those who find fault with it are wholly manifest, to all who in any way understand, as maintaining the cause of Barlaam and Akindynos.” But they again denied that they followed those men’s views. Yet when they began to speak—in the very phrases at which they were scandalized—they brought forward the same accusations which Barlaam and Akindynos had previously set forth against the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica and the monks. And when from these things also it had become manifest that they were incurably sick with those men’s views, it seemed good to the most divine and holy emperor—the most holy and ecumenical patriarch and all the sacred synod concurring—that, the inquiry concerning the doctrines set forth being tested from beginning to end, the truth in these matters might be discerned. And though the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica commended this also, they utterly refused. But even when required to set forth openly their own opinion concerning the matters at issue, they were in no way willing, making the aforesaid things a pretext of scandals.

12 Many words having been stirred up at this first assembly, the matters of this objection were in part resolved; and it was ratified in writing that, at the second assembly, these men who are at variance with the Church should begin first, from wherever they might wish, and then, after them, the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica, beginning from wherever he might wish, should say all that he had in mind.

13 And a second assembly being gathered, those men too attend; and, beginning, they said against the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica whatever they wished. But when the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica began to answer, point by point, the things put forward by them, they confounded the discourse and rushed to flight; and though much constrained, they would not consent to remain. And having given pledges to be present at another assembly, again they flee, with none pursuing, before the appointed time.

14 But the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica, urged on by our God-given emperor and by the holy Church of God, discoursed openly and at greater length to all concerning the doctrines set before the Church for inquiry; and all both praised and assented. And when he added this also, saying that “The contention on behalf of piety is one thing, and the confession of the faith another; and in contention it is not necessary that the one contending be precise about the words, as the great Basil also says; but in confession exactness is observed and sought throughout—and on this account I composed the powerful refutatory discourses against Barlaam and Akindynos, together with the confession of the faith which I received from the saints, that those who encounter our writings might learn from the confession the aim of the contention”—our most mighty

15 and holy emperor and king sought such a confession; and when it had been produced, he commanded that it be read. This being done, each was asked to say how he stood in judgment toward it. And all said, “We agree with it.” And questions being raised upon it, the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica said the things he said, and added that of necessity, and for defense, and for the refutation of those blaspheming against him, he had come to this. And a request being laid upon them, which they ought to have fulfilled—namely, to state openly their own opinion concerning the matters for which we had assembled—they fabricated a pretext, and when they ought to have done this, they refused.

16 Whereupon the divine synod also said that not

17 for the sake of words have we assembled here; nor indeed, concerning names, according to the Theologian, shall we wrangle, knowing no danger in the words, so long as the meaning seems to be sound.

18 Upon this the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica said: “For words I have little concern; for truth and piety reside not in expressions but in realities, according to Gregory the Theologian. It is concerning doctrines and realities that I make my struggle. And if anyone agree in the realities, I do not dispute about the words. But against the accusation of those who speak against me I say this: Two Godheads, or many and diverse, in the Holy Trinity—so that one is of the Father, another of the Son, another of the Spirit—I have neither held, nor do I hold, nor indeed shall I ever hold, by the grace of Christ; rather, those who so hold I subject to the anathema. Nor do I assert any other Godhead apart from the tri-hypostatic Godhead; nor a divine or angelic essence, nor a hypostasis, according to the great Dionysius; but divine energies and certain comings-forth, belonging by nature and from eternity to God, I addressed by the name of ‘Godhead,’ supposing that I spoke in concord with the saints. Yet I would not have said even these things, had I not been brought to necessity by the one contradicting me, and contending by way of counter-position against him, who said that the essence of God alone is uncreated Godhead, while every divine power and energy that differs from the essence he dragged down into a creature. Moreover, I said this too, not gathering from it many Godheads, as they falsely charge; and it is clear from my writings, both the others and the confession. For in all of them this is so brought forward by me as being said by the contradictors, but not approved by me; for I know one Godhead, the same tri-hypostatic, and almighty and energizing. Yet neither then was my aim about the words, but the whole struggle was about the realities; nor now do I dispute about names and syllables, but, the realities having been piously proclaimed, by the grace of Christ, I am ready for all that the divine synod may decide concerning […]”

19 And a fourth assembly also taking place, those at variance began once again to find fault with certain expressions occurring in the writings of the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica, abandoning the realities. But as the most divine emperor and the synod proceeded with the examination of the realities, and as the theologians of the Church sought the demonstrations of the matters put forward, the synodal Tome issued against Barlaam was brought forward. When it had been read, by the divine command of our most serene emperor, it demonstrated those at variance to be partakers in every respect of the heterodoxy of Barlaam. For they could not refrain from contradicting to the very end the things written there, concerning other matters and especially concerning the most divine light of the Lord’s Transfiguration. Moreover, when both the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica and those at variance with the Church were asked how they stood in opinion concerning the most divine light, the one, through what he said and what he read aloud in the hearing of all from his own writings, was throughout manifestly shown to depend securely upon the mind of the theologians; but the others, through both what they said and the writings in which they were caught, were refuted as cutting the one Godhead of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit into created and uncreated—by calling the essence of God alone uncreated Godhead, deprived of all divine power and energy, while setting aside and denying every power and energy of God, and, in a word, his omnipotence, and dragging God down into creatures, and calling him two Godheads, an uncreated and a created, one truly transcendent and one inferior; since the light of the Godhead that shone on Tabor they at one time called the essence of God, and at another a phantasm and a veil and an image and a creature—so that, according to them, the same thing is both a creature and the essence of God. And there were brought forward by the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica their own autograph documents, in which they accused him of saying that that most divine light and illumination is uncreated, but not the essence of God. But also through the very things by which they accused the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica—as saying that there are many Godheads, inasmuch as he maintains all the divine and common powers and energies of the three hypostases to be uncreated—they became manifest that their war was not about the expressions; rather, they hold neither that there is a distinction between the divine essence and the divine energy, nor indeed that the divine and omnipotent energy is uncreated. Upon these matters, the theologians of the Church being brought forward, there was read from the great Basil, among many other things, also this: “For if Eunomius contemplates nothing at all in God by way of conception, lest he seem to dignify God with human appellations, he will alike confess all the things attributed to God to be essence. How then is it not laughable to say that the creative is essence; again, that the providential is essence, the foreknowing likewise, and, in a word, to posit every energy as essence?”

20 And from the theologian Damascene, in the place where he teaches concerning the two energies in our Lord Jesus Christ, saying: “It is to be known that energy is one thing, and the energetic faculty another, and the effect another, and the agent another. Energy, then, is the active and essential motion of nature; the energetic faculty is the nature from which the energy comes forth; the effect is the result of the energy; and the agent is the one who employs the energy, that is, the hypostasis.”

21 And the divine Maximus, in the chapter entitled “From the disputation held in the secretarium”: “It is altogether necessary,” he says, “that in the case of Christ energies too be spoken of, and by every necessity; for none of the things that exist subsists apart from natural energy. For the holy Fathers plainly say that no nature whatsoever either exists or is known apart from its essential energy.”

22 And since by what they said they continued not only to fight against the saints one by one, but already attempted even to overthrow and dissolve the holy and ecumenical sixth council itself—whose aim was none other than this, that the whole purpose was directed to the two natural wills and the two natural energies in our Lord and God Jesus Christ—and since on this account it was necessary that the Acts of such a council be brought forward and read, and from these the pious doctrine be proclaimed, some portions were set forth in the midst; but they, immediately upon their being set forth, cried out: “Read not the Acts of the council, but the definition alone.” And when the divine synod was perplexed as to what such an outcry could mean, and on what account they reject and do not accept the Acts, they even thus did not in the least desist from the same meddlesome malice and perverse opinion, by no means admitting the reading of the Acts. Upon this, by the divine command of our most serene emperor, there was read a passage from the Synodikon customarily read on the ambo on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, which runs verbatim thus: “To those who reject the utterances of the holy Fathers spoken for the establishment of the right doctrines of the Church of God—of Athanasius, Cyril, Ambrose, Amphilochius, of the God-proclaiming Leo, the most holy archbishop of elder Rome, and the rest—and further who do not embrace the Acts of the ecumenical councils, I mean the fourth and the sixth: anathema.” Upon this there was also read a passage of the Acts running verbatim thus: “Who, however dull and slow to understand, will not perceive what is manifest to all: that it is impossible and contrary to the order of nature that a nature can exist and not have the energy of nature—a thing which not even by the heretics was ever approved to be said, those who devised all human malignities and crooked inquiries against the rightness of the faith, and gatherings suited to their basenesses? How

23 then can that which was neither ever said by the holy Fathers nor dared to be found even among the profane heretics, be at the present believed—namely, that of the two natures of Christ, the divine that is and the human, whose properties are known to be undiminished in Christ, they have one energy? Who, ever thinking rightly, will be able to demonstrate it? When, if it is one, they shall say: It will be called either temporal or eternal, divine or human, uncreated or created; the same which is also the Father’s, or other than the Father’s. If, then, it is one and the same, it is also one energy common to the divinity and the humanity of Christ—which is monstrous to say. Therefore, since the Son of God, the same, is both God and man, having worked human things on earth, in like manner the Father also worked naturally. For the things which the Father does, these also the Son likewise does. Since—as the truth holds—in so far as Christ worked certain human things, it is referred to his person alone as Son. Which things are not the same as the Father’s. For Christ worked in one respect, clearly, and in another: that according to the divinity, the things the Father does, these the Son likewise does; and according to the humanity, the things proper to man, this same one works as man, since he is truly both God and man. Whence also it is truly believed that this same one, being one, has natural energies—the divine, that is, and the human; the uncreated and the created—as true and perfect God, and true and perfect man, one and the same, mediator of God and men, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

24 And again from the same Acts another passage was brought forward, running verbatim thus: “Of each nature we know each energy—I mean the essential and natural and corresponding energy—coming forth indivisibly from each essence and nature, according to the natural and essential quality innate in it, and drawing along with it the at once undivided and unconfused energy of the other essence. For this it is that makes the difference of the energies in Christ, just as it also makes the natures to be natures of the natures.”

25 But also the definition sought by them, when read, ran verbatim thus: “The present and ecumenical council, faithfully receiving and with open hands embracing the report made by the most holy and most blessed pope of elder Rome, Agatho, to our most pious emperor.” And after some words: “Following the holy and ecumenical five councils, and the holy and chosen Fathers, and defining in concord, confesses our Lord Jesus Christ, our true God, the one of the holy and consubstantial and life-originating Trinity, perfect in divinity and the same perfect in humanity, in all things like us

26 without sin; before the ages begotten of the Father according to the divinity, and in the last of the days the same, for us and for our salvation, of the Holy Spirit and Mary the Virgin, who is properly and truly Theotokos, according to the humanity; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, made known in two natures, without confusion, without change, without separation, without division, the difference of the natures being nowhere abolished on account of the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring into one person and one hypostasis; not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, Only-begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, just as of old the prophets taught concerning him, and Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the Symbol of our holy Fathers has taught; and two natural wills, that is, volitions, in him, and two natural energies, without division, without change, without parting, without confusion, according to the teaching of the saints, we likewise proclaim; and two natural wills not contrary—God forbid, as the impious heretics said—but his human will following, and not opposing or contending, but rather even subjected to his divine and all-powerful will.”

27 When these things had been read, the leaders of the heresy seemed like deaf men, crying out and maintaining that the divine and uncreated essence and its divine and uncreated energy are one and altogether undifferentiated; bringing forward also citations, of which one was of the divine and confessor Maximus, and the other of Theodore the Graptos, the confessor among the saints, distorting and misinterpreting these toward their own impiety. For how could the divine Maximus be about to war against the energy of God—he who, on behalf of the two energies in Christ, the divine namely and the human, was driven over so many courses of exile, had that God-voiced tongue of his cut out, had his hand cut off, and

28 —cast into exile—nobly accepted a martyr’s death? And as they still contradicted, and brought it against the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica for calling the divine energy “Godhead,” there were read passages of the saints—of the great Basil, in what he writes to Eustathius the physician: “I know not how those who fabricate everything carry the appellation of ‘Godhead’ over to the indication of nature, as though they had not heard from Scripture that nature does not come to be by ordination. But Moses was ordained a god to the Egyptians, the One who gave the oracle saying thus to him: ‘I have given you as a god to Pharaoh.’ Therefore the appellation carries the indication of some authority, whether of oversight or of operation. But the divine nature, in all the names conceived of it, remains, as to what it is, unsignified, as our discourse holds.”

29 And of Nyssa, in the work On the Godhead of the Son and the Spirit, saying: “The Pneumatomachoi say that ‘Godhead’ is significative of nature. But we say that the divine nature either has no significative name, or has none for us; yet if anything is said, whether from human custom or from divine Scripture, it is one of the things signified concerning it. The divine nature itself remains unutterable and unpronounceable, surpassing all signification by voice. Let them take the serpent as accuser of their senseless signification, who shows that the name of ‘Godhead’ has the signification of the seeing energy. For, counseling them to touch the forbidden things, he promises this: ‘Your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods.’ Do you see that he attests the seeing energy to the word ‘godhead’? For it is not possible to see unless the eyes are opened. Therefore the appellation of ‘godhead’ presents not nature, but the power of seeing.” And again the same, writing to Ablabius: “‘God,’” he says, “signifies one who works; but ‘godhead’ signifies energy. And none of the three is energy, but rather each of them is one who works.”

30 Having thus been refuted through all these things, they were summoned by the Church to repentance, our most serene emperor having beforehand much exhorted them not to leap away from the good medicine of repentance, with words possessing much that was winning and gracious. But they did not accept it, saying outright: “I do not wish to know your ways.” For they persisted in what they had wrongly resolved from the beginning. On this account, by the divine command of our most mighty emperor and of the most holy and ecumenical patriarch, there was read a Tome that had been issued some time before for the deposition of the [bishop] of Ephesus, of the one of Gannos, and of others, as having been sick with the views of Barlaam and Akindynos—yet not carried into effect, on account of awaiting their conversion and repentance, and recalling this by every means and device, with all eagerness and zeal. And when it had been read, the most honorable grand chartophylax and consul of the philosophers began, according to the ecclesiastical custom, to ask each one what opinion he held concerning the doctrinal chapters severally spoken and examined. And all, with one mouth, as moved by one Spirit, together with the united assembly, openly confessed the divine and God-befitting distinction and difference of the divine essence and energy, following the theologians, and were content to affirm the divine energy too to be uncreated, and not the essence alone. And hearing this same divine energy named “Godhead” also by the same theologians, they gladly received it.

31 Upon this, the most holy and ecumenical patriarch also being asked to bring forth his own opinion, having first expounded a discourse concerning the distinction between the divine essence and the divine energy, and the modes of the distinction spoken of by the saints, having well and severally clarified all, and further having demonstrated the united and inseparable relation of this energy to the divine essence—in the course of which he also declared that “uncreated energy” and “Godhead” are said by the saints—then became wholly absorbed in exhortation toward those at variance, calling upon them, admonishing, reprov-

32 -ing them, and thereby wisely opening a door of repentance to those at variance. But as they were still incurably disposed, it seemed just that yet another synod again be convened, so that through examination the truth of piety concerning the matters put forward might become more manifest from the things theologized by the saints. And when it had taken place, the heterodox being unwilling to attend, but refusing this once for all, the most pious emperor gave command, many doctrinal chapters having been put forward for inquiry: first, whether there is in God a God-befitting distinction of essence and energy; then, the distinction having appeared, whether this energy is created or uncreated; third, if this God-befitting energy should be demonstrated uncreated, how one might escape supposing God to be composite on this account, which the heterodox dare to allege against the Church of God; fourth, whether the appellation of “Godhead” is hymned by the theologians not of the essence alone but also of the divine energy—for from this too the enemies of the Church pour out against her the absurdity of ditheism; fifth, whether the theologians say that in some respect the essence transcends the energy, since this too is reckoned a reproach by the adversaries. And further, God being participated, whether the participation is according to the essence or according to the energy. So many questions being now set before us, we ought not to make our discourse about all together; for thus the apprehension of what is sought would be in no way exact, nor according to our purpose; but let us treat of each separately, employing therein the unerring and venerable theologians.

33 And first, if it seems good, let us speak concerning the first: Is there a God-befitting distinction in God of essence and energy—which is denied by those at variance, who suppose that from it many other absurdities and polytheism are gathered—or is it altogether the same and undifferentiated?

34 The most mighty emperor having so commanded, the divine synod, attending to the matters spoken, said: “We know no other way, most divine emperor, that leads readily to the truth than this which you have just now pointed out to us.” And the theologians, as to how they stand in opinion concerning these matters, being read in the hearing of all, it was demonstrated that those who do not, together with the union, also revere the distinctness of the divine essence and energy are godless and wrap themselves in many other absurdities. For according to the great Dionysius: “That which has no power or energy whatsoever neither exists nor is anything; nor is there at all any positing or removing of it. But that which has, in respect of what it has differs altogether.” If, then, there is no difference between the divine essence and energy, it is impossible for the essence of God to have energy. But that which has no energy is inoperative, and the inoperative is also non-existent.

35 And the God-bearing Damascene writing: “The work of the divine nature is the eternal begetting;

36 while the work of the divine will is creation.” And of Saint Cyril: “To make belongs to energy; but to beget belongs to nature. Now nature and energy are not the same.” Those who say that the divine essence and the divine energy are undifferentiated: since, according to him, to beget belongs to the essence, and there is, according to them, no difference of energy from the nature, to beget will belong, according to them, also to the energy; and thus the things made will be eternal offspring, as being from the divine nature. And since again to make belongs to the energy, and the nature is undifferentiated from the energy, to make will belong, according to them, to the nature. And thus, according to them, the things from the nature will be things made.

37 And again, the same one writing in the second of his dialogues to Hermias: “Besides all these things, we say that the kind that fire burns, and indeed the kind that water cools, has been made by the energy of God.” Those who say that essence and energy are the same and undifferentiated will be compelled to say that fire and water are from the essence of God; and thus the present heterodoxy stands worse than the error of the Greeks, since they supposed only the rational soul to be from the essence of God, whereas these suppose even these material and sensible bodies to be such.

38 But also, when our Lord and God had said in the Gospel according to John, “I and the Father are one,” the divine Chrysostom, in the sixtieth homily of his interpretation of that Gospel, clarifying this saying, says that it is here spoken according to the power. For his whole discourse was concerning this. And if the power is the same, it is plain that the essence is also. And after a little: “For it is not possible to learn either essence or power, the one through the other.” And again, in the same Gospel, when the apostle Philip had said, “Lord, show us the Father, and it suffices us,” this divine Chrysostom, in the same homily: “Let us see,” he says, “what Philip seeks to see; is it the wisdom of the Father, is it the goodness? No, but what God himself ever is—the essence itself.” And again the same, expounding the apostolic saying of the Epistle to the Romans, which says, “For the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of the spirit is life and peace,” said: “By ‘mind of the flesh’ he means vice; and by ‘mind of the spirit’ the grace that is given, and the energy that is tempered with good purpose”—nowhere here discoursing about hypostasis and essence.

39 A true lampstand was the lordly flesh, which displayed the illuminations of the Holy Spirit in sevenfold grace. “For there shall come forth,” says Isaiah, “a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall come up from it, and the Spirit of God shall rest upon him.” What kind? The Spirit manifold in energies, and great in nature: “The Spirit of God shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and piety, the spirit of the fear of God.” The seven graces of the Holy Spirit, which rested upon the lordly body, he figures in the seven lamps. And again the same divine Chrysostom, in the discourse on the Holy Spirit: “Not all the gifts,” he says, “does one receive, lest one suppose the grace to be a nature.”

40 But also the holy martyr and philosopher Justin, writing: “Inasmuch as God has essence for existing, but will for making, he who casts away the difference of essence and will casts away also the existence of God and the making.” Are not those who set aside the difference manifestly shown to deny God also, and to glorify the spontaneous? For according to the divine John of Damascus: “Will too is an energy,” as he clarifies in the thirty-sixth of the dogmatic chapters, the one on energy. For having spoken first concerning other matters, and indeed concerning human and divine will, he adds at once, at the beginning of the following chapter, verbatim thus: “It must be known that all the aforesaid faculties, both the cognitive and the vital, and the natural and the artificial, are called energies. For energy is the natural power and motion of each essence, of which only the non-existent are deprived.”

41 These things, therefore, having been so clearly clarified, and the distinction most plainly, and as it could not be otherwise, demonstrated—not in persuasive words of human wisdom, according to the divine Paul, but in things taught of the Holy Spirit, namely the God-inspired theologies of the Fathers—it behooved those who in any way attempted to differ about this, the divine synod said, now at least, if not before, to have piously driven the disease of contentiousness from their own understanding, and to have been right willing to be persuaded by our common guides and teachers of piety, who send forth voices about the distinction of the divine essence and the divine energy well-nigh clearer than any trumpet; and to attempt nothing further by way of resisting them, nor to try to meddle beyond, asking what the ener-

42 gy is, and of what kind the difference, and how it could come to be.

43 For they have not, it seems, heard the Father Chrysostom, in the places where he expounds the divine Gospel according to John, teaching that the divine energy is uninterpretable and inconceivable and above the laws of nature. “For if you busy yourself,” he says, “with the energy of this wind from the divine Spirit, not understanding even the wind, though you hear its voice? And the saying, ‘It blows where it wills,’ is spoken to establish the authority of the Paraclete. For if no one masters this, but it is borne wherever it wills, much more will the laws of nature be unable to master the energy of the Spirit, nor the bounds of bodily generation, nor anything of the kind.” Nor, again, the great Basil contradicting Eunomius and theologizing: “If we are to measure all things by understanding, and to suppose that what is uncomprehended by reasonings does not exist at all, then the reward of faith will be gone, and the reward of hope will be gone. How should we still be worthy of the crowns set before us for our faith, if we are persuaded only by the things apparent to reasoning? Whence were the nations made vain, their senseless heart darkened? Was it not because, following the things apparent to reasoning, they disobeyed the preaching of the Spirit? And whom does Isaiah lament? Are they not the wise in their own eyes, and prudent before themselves?” These things they ought to have heard from the saints theologizing, and at once gladly to have obeyed, having attended to them most pleasantly, and without examination to have fallen beneath their divine voices that signify the distinction, with pious silence cherishing and receiving it; while as for the “how”—either nowhere, or not in a sense abolishing the distinction—adding nothing, if indeed they deemed it worthy to reckon themselves among any who in any way seem to be pious. But since they came to such a pitch of insolence and shamelessness—rather, of derangement—as to rage even against the holy and ecumenical councils, and against well-nigh all the sacred theologians, and to dare to bring even these to account, saying of some, alas! that they still reek of Greek and congenital doctrines, and charging others with the greatest ignorance, and that too though they were a whole council, while some, they said, were under compulsion led out into this theology, though they had eagerly chosen a martyr’s death on its behalf,

44 and others wrote these things flattering and not telling the truth (how could one bear to recount their blasphemies in part?)—come now, let us, because the hearing of the lovers of Christ does not endure—as one of the Fathers set at naught by them once said—that whatever has been said by the saints concerning a divine doctrine not exceedingly hang upon truthfulness and theological exactness, having taken courage in the God whom they too profess, attempt to set forth briefly some few things concerning the mode of the union and distinction of the divine essence and energy; not undertaking to find out reasonings from ourselves, in support of the things piously theologized of old by them; but, keeping that law which we have everywhere been zealous to observe—to confirm the things of the Church through the teachers of the Church, and nowhere to add or take away from ourselves anything of what has been laid down in doctrine by them—employing this rule here also, and having heard the saints crying expressly that the divine energy is from the divine essence, we suppose this not to be as all things are from God, as it seems to those at variance, along with many other absurdities. For the “from God” is said even of the creatures; but the “from the essence of God” has never been said of any of the things made. Indeed, this very thing is utterly forbidden by the saints.

45 For both the great Basil says: “That which is made is not from the essence of the one making”; and the divine Damascene: “The creation, even if it came to be afterward, is yet not from the essence of God.” And again: “Creation and making, in that the thing created and made comes to be from without, and not from the essence of the one creating and making, are altogether unlike.” Nevertheless, neither have we supposed the energy to be from the divine essence as though outside the divine essence—since to drivel thus came upon the opposite party not so much impiously as ignorantly; may no one so depart from his senses—but, knowing it to be, according to the theologians, an essential and natural motion of God, we say that it comes forth and wells up from the divine essence as from an ever-flowing fountain, and is never contemplated apart from it; but remains ever indivisible from it, co-exists from eternity with the divine essence, and is inseparably united to it, never able to be separated from the divine essence by any age or temporal or figurative interval; but timelessly and before the ages it comes forth from it, and is undividedly together with it. For the great Athanasius says: “When all things are wrought by God through Christ in the Holy Spirit,

46 I shall call inseparable the energy of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” And the divine Anastasius, among the saints—whom the holy and ecumenical council also, making mention of him, called “the Great”—in his second discourse On the Uncircumscribed: “Let us see,” he says, “what things the heretics endure to say concerning God. ‘By energy,’ they say, ‘God is in all things, but by essence nowhere,’ calling ‘energy’ the effect that comes forth from the energy. But I, for my part, would say that the energy of God is inseparable from his nature.” And after some words: “Wherever one may name the energy, there is contemplated together with it also the essence from which it comes forth. For each is uncircumscribed, and on this account they are altogether inseparable from one another. For the energy proclaims the hidden essence; and it is contemplated as present together with the energy, being unable to exist apart from it.” And again: “The energy is about the whole; and inseparable from it stands the essence.”

47 But indeed, just as we proclaim the union to be divine and eternal not by the inseparability alone, but also by many other things, and indeed by the commonness of the uncreated and uncircumscribed, according to the theology of the saints, so also we have resolved to glorify the distinction, after them, as again God-befitting and venerable; not dragging them down thereby into utter rending and division, nor conceiving this distinction as some intestine and natural estrangement, nor separating them from one another by an interval—far from it—but such as we have been initiated by the saints to admit in the case of natural causes and things caused, distinguishing in a God-befitting manner, by reason alone, things naturally united and indivisible. For the great Athanasius, in his fifth discourse Against the Arians: “Other,” he says, “is that which is from something, and other that from which it is. According to this, then, they are two. But if there be not two, but it be said of the same thing, the same will be cause and caused, begetting and begotten—which has been shown to be absurd in the case of Sabellius.”

48 “And let there be,” he says, “a human example: the fire, and the radiance from it; two in being and in being seen, but one in that its radiance is from it and indivisible. Just, then, as in the case of fire and the light from it—the one being nature and cause, the other natural and caused—he spoke of the one because of the inseparability, and again of the difference because of the cause and the caused; so also in the case of the divine nature and the energy from it, the one and the difference are to be taken by us: the one according to the united and indivisible, the difference according to the cause and that which is from the cause itself. For neither does the one drive out the difference, nor again does the difference at all overthrow the one; but each, piously contemplated according to the saints, will be unable to subsist in any way apart from the other.”

49 But also Gregory of Nyssa, knowing full well that the distinction among these causes and things caused holds to the truth, and in no way does violence to the difference according to nature, writing to Ablabius, said: “Confessing the unchangeableness of the nature, we do not deny the distinction according to cause and caused, in which alone we apprehend the one to be distinguished from the other—in believing the one to be cause, the other to be from the cause.” And his brother, the truly great Basil, plainly appears to grant so great a distinction between these causes and things caused as even to lay down on it an order arising from natural sequence, and to speak of the prior and the second in the case of cause and caused; so expressly that he reckons it among the absurd and irrational to refuse to confess, but to attempt to deny these things; and he said that Eunomius either did not perceive this distinction, or, perceiving it, concealed it, writing: “But this either Eunomius does not perceive, or willingly concealed: that there is a kind of order, not arising from the contemplation that is with us, but coinciding with the very sequence according to nature, as the light from it is to the fire. For in these we speak first of the cause, and second of that from it; not separating them from one another by an interval, but in our reasoning conceiving the cause prior to the caused.”

50 How then is it reasonable to deny the order, in those things in which there is a first and a second, not according to our positing, but from the sequence inherent in them according to nature?

51 It is possible, therefore, for all who can in any way reason to perceive accurately from these things how the holy man cared in equal measure for both truth and piety. For by saying that it does not arise from the contemplation that is with us, but coincides with the very sequence according to nature, he showed, out of inescapable and great and natural necessity and resplendent truth, that the distinction in this order of the things caused and the causes really exists, and can never be otherwise, but is always of necessity contemplated in them; while by adding that it is by reasoning, not by an interval, that we separate them, and that the distinction in the prior and the second is to be contemplated by the mind alone, he plainly appears to have piously safeguarded the reality of the union, and to introduce no harm into it from this distinction, but to theologize the union itself as unconfused, and to teach the distinction as altogether indivisible.

52 Again, then, when Eunomius attempted to do away with this distinction, the great one says: “How do you leave no distinction, not even that which inheres in the causes with respect to the things from them?” Thus, to hold the opinion that there is no distinction between causes and things caused is the manifest offspring of the madness of Arius and Eunomius. For those men, zealous by every means to do away with the consubstantiality, having heard in the Gospels the Lord say that the Father is greater than himself, thereupon at once dared impiously to introduce the distinction according to nature; while the distinction according to cause and caused—knowing it to be able to introduce nowhere any natural estrangement or division, but rather to preserve ever indissoluble the union of the nature—they utterly denied. Against these the three—Basil, Gregory the Theologian, and Gregory of Nyssa—having nobly taken up the struggle on behalf of the Trinity, since this impiety was theirs and did away with the great and supernatural mystery of the Trinity, drive it as far as possible from our Church.

53 Therefore, fittingly, those who now reject this distinction have come to share with one another in the heterodoxy of those men; while those who confess that they cherish and embrace it eagerly continue to be of the piety and theology of these saints—rather, of the portion of Christ—distinguishing the divine things in a united manner, according to them, and uniting them in a distinguished manner. This, then, is one and the first, and one might properly call it the first kind of distinction between the divine essence and the energy.

54 They differ from one another also in this: that the divine energy is participated and divided indivisibly,

55 and is named and conceived, and somehow, even if dimly, known from its effects; whereas the essence is imparticipable and indivisible and nameless, being, that is, above every name and altogether inconceivable.

That the Divine Energy Is Uncreated

1 After this we sought to have it demonstrated from the saints whether this energy—which is inseparable, yet differs from the divine nature—is uncreated, a point which those who contradict the Church were least of all willing to accept. And this too was demonstrated to be clearly proclaimed by the saints, of whom the chief is the holy and ecumenical sixth council, as has been most sufficiently shown above through its particular sayings set forth one by one.

2 It was likewise demonstrated together with this that those who do not accept as uncreated the energy that is inseparable from and natural to the divine essence, yet differs from it (as has been said), make a creature even of the very essence of God. For according to Saint Maximus: “From its energy the nature of each thing is characterized, the uncreated energy revealing an uncreated nature, and the created energy a created one”; and further, according to the divine John of Damascus, who declares: “A created energy will manifest a created nature also; but an uncreated energy characterizes an uncreated essence.” Those, therefore, who call created the divine energy, from which the divine nature is characterized, of necessity present the divine nature also as created.

3 Moreover, they are even Monothelites, worse and more absurd than those of old; and they hold there to be created things before the ages. For since we confess two natures in our Lord Jesus Christ, the one uncreated and the other created, those who deny that the divine nature has also an uncreated will and energy hold there to be one will and one energy in Christ—the very thing which the sixth council repudiated and anathematized. And hence they too are shown forth as Monothelites, yet far worse than those, inasmuch as those of old indeed spoke of one will and one energy in Christ, but an uncreated one, doing away of course with the created; whereas these speak of one will and one energy, but a created one, manifestly not accepting the uncreated.

4 But the great Basil also, writing to Amphilochius: “The names of the Spirit are of this kind—supernatural and great—yet they have no excess as regards his glory; but what are his energies? Unutterable by reason of their magnitude, innumerable by reason of their multitude. For how shall we conceive of the things beyond the ages? What were his energies before the noetic creation?” Those who say the divine energies are created manifestly hold that there are created things beyond the ages. And this too was shown, that the common and natural divine energies of the tri-hypostatic nature are uncreated;

5 for the great Athanasius says: “When all things are wrought by God through Christ in the Holy Spirit, I shall call inseparable the energy of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” And the divine Anastasius among the saints—whom the holy and ecumenical council also, making mention of him, called “the Great”—in his second discourse On the Uncircumscribed: “Let us see,” he says, “what things the heretics endure to say concerning God. ‘By energy,’ they say, ‘God is in all things, but by essence nowhere,’ calling ‘energy’ the effect that comes forth from the energy. But I, for my part, would say that the energy of God is inseparable from his nature.” And after some words: “Wherever one may name the energy, there is contemplated together with it also the essence from which it comes forth. For each is uncircumscribed, and on this account they are altogether inseparable from one another. For the energy proclaims the hidden essence; and it is contemplated as present together with the energy, being unable to exist apart from it.” And again: “The energy is about the whole; and inseparable from it stands the essence.” But indeed, just as we proclaim the union to be divine and eternal not by the inseparability alone, but also by many other things, and indeed by the commonness of the uncreated and uncircumscribed, according to the theology of the saints, so also we have resolved to glorify the distinction, after them, as again God-befitting and venerable; not dragging them down thereby into utter rending and division, nor conceiving this distinction as some intestine and natural estrangement, nor separating them from one another by an interval—far from it—but such as we have been initiated by the saints to admit in the case of natural causes and things caused, distinguishing in a God-befitting manner, by reason alone, things naturally united and indivisible. For the great Athanasius, in his fifth discourse Against the Arians: “Other,” he says, “is that which is from something, and other that from which it is. According to this, then, they are two. But if there be not two, but it be said of the same thing, the same will be cause and caused, begetting and begotten—which has been shown to be absurd in the case of Sabellius.” Therefore that the energy too is from the essence, and is two, and thence differs from it, he has plainly declared, according to the “from which” and “from something,” that is, the cause and the caused, as this great one teaches, theologizing the divine things. And after some words: “And let there be,” he says, “a human example: the fire, and the radiance from it; two in being and in being seen, but one in that its radiance is from it and indivisible. Just, then, as in the case of fire and the light from it—the one being nature and cause, the other natural and caused—he spoke of the one because of the inseparability, and again of the difference because of the cause and the caused; so also in the case of the divine nature and the energy from it, the one and the difference are to be taken by us: the one according to the united and indivisible, the difference according to the cause and that which is from the cause itself. For neither does the one drive out the difference, nor again does the difference at all overthrow the one; but each, piously contemplated according to the saints, will be unable to subsist in any way apart from the other.” But also Gregory of Nyssa, knowing full well that the distinction among these causes and things caused holds to the truth, and in no way does violence to the difference according to nature, writing to Ablabius, said: “Confessing the unchangeableness of the nature, we do not deny the distinction according to cause and caused, in which alone we apprehend the one to be distinguished from the other—in believing the one to be cause, the other to be from the cause.” And his brother, the truly great Basil, plainly appears to grant so great a distinction between these causes and things caused as even to lay down on it an order arising from natural sequence, and to speak of the prior and the second in the case of cause and caused; so expressly that he reckons it among the absurd and irrational to refuse to confess, but to attempt to deny these things; and he said that Eunomius either did not perceive this distinction, or, perceiving it, concealed it, writing: “But this either Eunomius does not perceive, or willingly concealed: that there is a kind of order, not arising from the contemplation that is with us, but coinciding with the very sequence according to nature, as the light from it is to the fire. For in these we speak first of the cause, and second of that from it; not separating them from one another by an interval, but in our reasoning conceiving the cause prior to the caused.”

6 How then is it reasonable to deny the order, in those things in which there is a first and a second, not according to our positing, but from the sequence inherent in them according to nature? It is possible, therefore, for all who can in any way reason to perceive accurately from these things how the holy man cared in equal measure for both truth and piety. For by saying that it does not arise from the contemplation that is with us, but coincides with the very sequence according to nature, he showed, out of inescapable and great and natural necessity and resplendent truth, that the distinction in this order of the things caused and the causes really exists, and can never be otherwise, but is always of necessity contemplated in them; while by adding that it is by reasoning, not by an interval, that we separate them, and that the distinction in the prior and the second is to be contemplated by the mind alone, he plainly appears to have piously safeguarded the reality of the union, and to introduce no harm into it from this distinction, but to theologize the union itself as unconfused, and to teach the distinction as altogether indivisible. Again, then, when Eunomius attempted to do away with this distinction, the great one says: “How do you leave no distinction, not even that which inheres in the causes with respect to the things from them?” Thus, to hold the opinion that there is no distinction between causes and things caused is the manifest offspring of the madness of Arius and Eunomius. For those men, zealous by every means to do away with the consubstantiality, having heard in the Gospels the Lord say that the Father is greater than himself, thereupon at once dared impiously to introduce the distinction according to nature; while the distinction according to cause and caused—knowing it to be able to introduce nowhere any natural estrangement or division, but rather to preserve ever indissoluble the union of the nature—they utterly denied. Against these the three, having nobly taken up the struggle on behalf of the Trinity, since this impiety was theirs and did away with the great and supernatural mystery of the Trinity, drive it as far as possible from our Church. Therefore, fittingly, those who now reject this distinction have come to share with one another in the heterodoxy of those men; while those who confess that they cherish and embrace it eagerly continue to be of the piety and theology of these saints—rather, of the portion of Christ—distinguishing the divine things in a united manner, according to them, and uniting them in a distinguished manner. This, then, is one and the first, and one might properly call it the first kind of distinction between the divine essence and the energy. And they differ from one another also in this: that the divine energy is participated and divided indivisibly, and is named and conceived, and somehow, even if dimly, known from its effects; whereas the essence is imparticipable and indivisible and nameless, being, that is, above every name and altogether inconceivable.

Confirmed by the Whole of Scripture

1 After this we sought to have it demonstrated from the saints whether this energy—which is inseparable, yet differs from the divine nature—is uncreated, a point which those who contradict the Church were least of all willing to accept. And this too was demonstrated to be clearly proclaimed by the saints, of whom the chief is the holy and ecumenical sixth council, as has been most sufficiently shown above through its particular sayings set forth one by one. It was likewise demonstrated together with this that those who do not accept as uncreated the energy that is inseparable from and natural to the divine essence, yet differs from it (as has been said), make a creature even of the very essence of God. For according to Saint Maximus: “From its energy the nature of each thing is characterized, the uncreated energy revealing an uncreated nature, and the created energy a created one”; and further, according to the divine John of Damascus, who declares: “A created energy will manifest a created nature also; but an uncreated energy characterizes an uncreated essence.” Those, therefore, who call created the divine energy, from which the divine nature is characterized, of necessity present the divine nature also as created. Moreover, they are even Monothelites, worse and more absurd than those of old; and they hold there to be created things before the ages. For since we confess two natures in our Lord Jesus Christ, the one uncreated and the other created, those who deny that the divine nature has also an uncreated will and energy hold there to be one will and one energy in Christ—the very thing which the sixth council repudiated and anathematized. And hence they too are shown forth as Monothelites, yet far worse than those, inasmuch as those of old indeed spoke of one will and one energy in Christ, but an uncreated one, doing away of course with the created; whereas these speak of one will and one energy, but a created one, manifestly not accepting the uncreated. But the great Basil also, writing to Amphilochius: “The names of the Spirit are of this kind—supernatural and great—yet they have no excess as regards his glory; but what are his energies? Unutterable by reason of their magnitude, innumerable by reason of their multitude. For how shall we conceive of the things beyond the ages? What were his energies before the noetic creation?” Those who say the divine energies are created manifestly hold that there are created things beyond the ages. And this too was shown, that the common and natural divine energies of the tri-hypostatic nature are uncreated;

2 and this not by two or three testimonies, but through the whole of the God-inspired Scripture.

That the Essence–Energy Distinction Introduces No Composition in God

1 After this we sought from the saints whether, on account of the difference of the divine essence and energy, one might conceive any composition in God; for this too the contradictors maintain. It was demonstrated, then, proclaimed by all the saints, that there is no composition to be thought in God on this account. For the divine Maximus, in the places where he disputes with Pyrrhus, most plainly shows that no composition arises from the energy: “You see,” he says to Pyrrhus, “that from this you are deceived, from being wholly ignorant that compositions are of things existing in a hypostasis, and not of things contemplated in another; and this is the common mind of all, both of the philosophers without and of the God-wise mystagogues of the Church. But if you speak of a composition of the wills, you will be driven to speak of a composition of the other natural things also.” But also Gregory of Nyssa, in the sixth chapter of the supplement to the Hexaemeron, goes through it verbatim thus: “If, then, in man, even though the organs furnished by nature for sensation happen to be diverse, the intellect, acting and moving through all of them, and using each suitably for the matter at hand, is one and the same, not changing the nature along with the differences of the energies—how could anyone, in the case of God, suspect the things of his essence to be manifold by reason of the varied powers?” But this too was demonstrated together: that those who, with the contradictors, do not accept the difference of the divine energy, and in general of all the things contemplated naturally about the nature and essence, make God composite—or rather more so—though the great Basil plainly says: “If we shall refer all the divine names to the essence and lay them there, we shall demonstrate God to be not only composite, but also compounded of dissimilar parts, because one thing and another is signified by each of the names”; and the great Gregory the Theologian writes: “Or is the immortal and the blameless and the unchangeable the essence of God? But if so, there are many essences of God, and not one; or the Divine is composite of these. For these are not without composition, if they are essences”; and further the divine Cyril: “For the unbegotten is not essence, nor the incorruptible, nor the immortal, nor the invisible. For if each of these signifies essence, God is compounded of so many essences, as many as appear naturally to belong to him. For there are many things that belong to him alone, and to none of all others”; and the divine Chrysostom: “The grace of the Spirit Scripture calls now fire, now water, showing that these are not names of essence, but of energy; for the Spirit is not composed of different essences, being invisible and uniform”; and Nyssa, speaking to Eunomius: “Who calls God two-natured but you, who graft every notion of a name onto the essence of the Father, and say that nothing belongs to him from without, but engraft each of the divine names upon the essence of God?”

That the Divine Energy Is Called ‘Godhead’ by the Saints

1 After this it was inquired whether the divine and uncreated energy is addressed as “Godhead” by the saints. For neither did the present contradictors accept this. And this too appeared to be proclaimed by the theologians. For straightway the great Basil, in the books Against Eunomius: “And the very name of Godhead,” he says, “whether it signifies the overseeing or the providential authority, fittingly belonged to the human.” And again the same, in the letter to Eustathius the physician: “Therefore,” he says, “the identity of energy in the case of Father and Son and Holy Spirit shows the unchangeableness of the nature. So that, whatever the name of Godhead may signify, the commonness of the essence concurs in applying this appellation also to the Holy Spirit. But I know not how those who fabricate everything carry the appellation of Godhead over to the indication of nature.” And after some words: “Therefore the appellation conveys the indication of some authority, whether of oversight or of operation. But the divine nature, in all the names conceived of it, remains, as to what it is, unsignified, as our discourse holds. For having learned of a benefactor and a judge, the good and the just, and whatever else of the kind, we were taught differences of energies; but the nature of the one energizing we are no more able to recognize through the comprehension of the energies. For when one renders the account of each of the names, and of the very nature about which the names are, he will not render the same account of both. And of those whose account is different, the nature also is diverse. Therefore essence is one thing—whose declaring account has not yet been found—and the signification of the names about it is another, named from some energy or dignity.”

2 named. And again the same great Basil, in the same letter: “Whether Godhead is a name of energy, then—so that, as there is one energy of Father and Son and Holy Spirit, so we say there is also one Godhead; or whether, according to the opinions of the many, the name of Godhead is indicative of nature, since we find no variation in the nature, we not unreasonably define the Holy Trinity to be of one Godhead.” And Saint Anastasius says: “The appellation ‘God’ is plainly active in meaning; for it does not present the very essence of God—for it is impossible to know this—but presents and shows to us his contemplative energy.” And again the same: “The name ‘God’ does not signify the essence of the Godhead—for this is incomprehensible and nameless—but he is called ‘God’ from his contemplative energy, as Saint Dionysius says, either from theein, that is, to run through, or from aithein, which is to set ablaze.” And the same great Dionysius: “If we name the supersubstantial hiddenness ‘God’ or ‘life’ or ‘essence’ or ‘light’ or ‘word,’ we conceive nothing other than the powers brought forth from it to us, deifying or essence-making or life-giving or wisdom-giving. And we apply ourselves to it by the laying-aside of all the noetic energies, seeing no deification or life or essence which is exactly like the Cause that is exalted above all things in every transcendence.” And again the same says: “Godhead is the providence that contemplates all things.” And that providence is an energy is known both from other sources, and especially from what the great Athanasius writes, saying: “Not according to one providence and another do the Father and the Son work, but according to one and the same essential energy of the Godhead.” But also the great Dionysius again, in the second letter to Gaius, says that Godhead is the thing of the deifying gift, and the inimitable imitation of the supra-divine and supra-good, according to which we are deified and made good.

Against Calling the Deifying Energy a Created Godhead

1 Upon these things, since those who contradict the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica say that this gift of the Spirit and energy—namely the deification, according to which the saints are deified, addressed as “Godhead” by the saints—is a created godhead, constructing this from the fact that the great Dionysius called God its “subsistor,” and called it an “imitation,” and a “relation of those who partake,” the sacred synod declared that they speak impiously. Nevertheless, this too being inquired by the divine synod—whether any of the saints said that deification is uncreated, and whether “relation” and “imitation” and “gave subsistence” are said also of uncreated things—there were brought forward sayings of the saints not always shown to be said of created things. For the great Basil, in the Antirrhetics, says: “He who begot the drop of dew did not give subsistence to the drops and to the Son in like manner.” And in the first book of the Hexaemeron: “That it might be shown,” he says, “that the world is an artful construction, set forth for all unto contemplation, so that through it the wisdom of its Maker might be known, the wise Moses used no other word concerning it, but said, ‘In the beginning he made’—not ‘he energized,’ nor ‘he gave subsistence,’ but ‘he made’; inasmuch as many of those who imagined the world to co-exist from eternity with God conceded that it was not begotten by him.” And it was demonstrated together from this that both “to energize” and “to be energized” can be said not only of created things, but also of eternal and uncreated things; since the contentious, hearing grace “energized,” suppose it forthwith to be created. For the great Gregory in theology says: “Let it be also energies, if this seems good; not even thus

2 shall you overthrow us; rather, this very thing would be the consubstantial that has energized.” And the divine Gregory of Nyssa: “We cannot name three Gods,” he says, “those who energize the divine and overseeing energy conjointly and indistinguishably from one another, upon us and upon all creation.” And concerning the “imitation” the [metropolitan] of Thessalonica said that the great Dionysius added to the “imitation” the “inimitable”; so that the deifying gift is no more an imitation than an inimitability. Gregory the Theologian also says that the Son is an imitation of the Father, writing in the second of the discourses On the Son: “Image of the Father as consubstantial, and because this one is from that, and not that Father from this. For this is the nature of an image, to be an imitation of the archetype, and of that whereof it is called.” So that the “imitation” does not hinder the deification from being uncreated. And the providence of God toward the things provided for is a “relation”; and his foreknowledge toward the things foreknown; and the predeterminations from eternity in God, toward the things predetermined. But to each of these the being a “relation” is no hindrance to its being uncreated. So that neither is the deifying gift of the Spirit—deification itself—created, because it is a relation toward the deified. For that it is uncreated, the divine Maximus will also clearly and concisely present, writing: “The divine grace, even if it gives enjoyment to those who partake by grace, yet gives no comprehension. For it remains, even by the participation of those who enjoy it, incomprehensible, since by nature it has infinity, as being unbegotten.” And again: “This is the Gospel of God, an embassy of God to men, and of the Son made flesh, granting as a reward to those who obey him unbegotten deification.”

That God Transcends His Energy According to Essence

1 But after the divine energy too had appeared to be named “Godhead,” we sought to have it demonstrated from the theologians whether God transcends, according to essence, this divine energy and the things contemplated essentially about it; and this too appeared to be proclaimed by all the saints. And it was demonstrated together that those who do not accept this are polytheists, speaking of many principles, as not referring to one cause and one principle the things contemplated essentially about God. For the great Basil, in the Antirrhetics, says: “There is a kind of order, not constituted from our positing, but coinciding with the very sequence according to nature, as to the fire is the light that is from it. For in such things we speak first of the cause, and second of that from it; not separating them from one another by an interval, but in our reasoning conceiving the cause prior to the caused. How then is it reasonable to deny the order, in those things in which there is a first and a second, not according to our positing, but from the sequence inherent in them according to nature?” But also, in the [letter] to Amphilochius, he writes: “And what are the energies of the Spirit? Unutterable by reason of their magnitude, innumerable by reason of their multitude. For how shall we conceive of the things beyond the ages? What were his energies before the noetic creation? And how many are the graces from him about creation? What is his power toward the ages to come? For he was, and pre-existed, and co-existed with the Son and the Father before the ages. So that even if you conceive of something beyond the ages, this too is below the Spirit”—declaring the pre-eternal energies of the Spirit to be below the Spirit. And in the discourse On the Godhead of the Son and the Spirit, the divine Gregory of Nyssa says: “The divine nature remains unutterable and unpronounceable, surpassing all signification by voice. Therefore the appellation of Godhead presents not nature, but the contemplative power of the Spirit.” And the great Athanasius, in the second discourse Against the Arians, when the heretics said that the Son is of the will, but not of the nature of the Father: “If,” he says, “they grant to God the willing concerning the things that are not, why do they not recognize that in God which transcends the will?” And in the third against the same: “The heretics have seen the opposite of the will; but the greater and transcendent they have not seen. For as to the will is opposed that which is against purpose, so there transcends and precedes the willing that which is according to nature.” And writing against Macedonius, the same: “Know,” he says, “that to be God is second; for even we, if we become imitators of God, according to Paul, become gods; but of the very same nature we cannot become.” And the divine Maximus: “Beyond all beings, both those that participate and those that are participated, God is infinitely transcendent.” But also the divine Dionysius, in the twelfth chapter On the Divine Names, says: “In the degree that beings transcend non-beings—holy, or divine, or lordly, or royal—and the self-participations transcend the things that participate in them, in that degree is the one who is above all beings exalted above all beings; and above all that participate and all participations is the imparticipable Cause.” And in the second letter to Gaius: “How,” he says, “is the one who is beyond all things both above the divine-principle and above the good-principle? If you conceive Godhead and goodness as the very thing of the good-making and god-making gift, according to which we are deified and made good—for if this becomes the principle of being deified and made good to those who are deified and made good, then he who is above every principle is beyond the principle even of the so-called Godhead and goodness,”

2 as of divine-principle and good-principle, is beyond. And again the same: “We must now pass to the truly existing theological essence-naming of the truly Existent. But this much we will recall: that the aim of the discourse is not to declare the supersubstantial essence as supersubstantial—for this is unutterable and unknowable and altogether unmanifest, and surpassing the union itself—but to hymn the essence-making procession of the divine-principial essence-principle into all beings.” And the divine Maximus, in the Scholia, says that “procession” here is the divine energy, which brought forth every essence. And the divine Chrysostom, in the first discourse On the Incomprehensible, says: “The prophets appear not only ignorant of what the essence of God is, but at a loss also concerning his wisdom, how great it is. And yet the essence is not from the wisdom, but the wisdom from the essence. And when they cannot comprehend even this with exactness, of how great madness would it be to suppose that one can subject the essence itself to one’s own reasonings?” And in the Gospel according to John, the same again says: “Not by measure does God give the Spirit. For we all received the energy of the Spirit by measure”—for here he calls the energy “Spirit,” for this is what is shared—“but this one has it without measure, and whole, the entire energy. And if his energy is unmeasured, much more his essence.”

That Creatures Partake of God’s Energy, Not His Essence

1 After this it was inquired by us, since those who drive out the Church say that all things partake of the essence of God, as though the divine essence and the divine energy were undifferentiated, and there is nothing else of God, according to them, except essence alone—whereas we were taught from the holy Scriptures that God has both essence and power and energy, differing from the divine essence; rather, both powers and energies; for thus he will be not only tri-hypostatic, but also almighty—it was inquired, then, of what all things partake: of the divine essence, or of the divine energy of God. The divine synod said: “We know the divine essence and the divine natural energy to be inseparable; for energy could never be apart from its own essence. But concerning the things created from the beginning by God,” it said, “who does not know—unless he be deranged after the manner of the contradictors—that every created thing partakes of the energy of the one who created it, but not of the essence? For neither does the house partake of the essence of the builder, nor the ship of the essence of the shipwright, but of the art and the energy, according to the Theologian of Nyssa. And that the saints too, deified by the union with God, partake not of the divine essence, but of his divine energy, the great Gregory in theology presents, writing concerning our Lord Jesus Christ: ‘That he is called Christ on account of the divinity; for this is the anointing of the humanity, sanctifying not by energy, as in the case of the other anointed ones, but by the presence of the whole Anointer.’ And the great Basil: ‘The Holy Spirit fills all things by power; but it is participable only by the worthy, participated not in one measure, but dividing its energy according to the analogy of faith.’ And again elsewhere: ‘Just as the reflections of faces do not occur in all materials, but in those that have acquired a certain smoothness and transparency, so the energy of the Spirit is not in all souls, but in those that have nothing crooked or tortuous.’ And Saint Maximus: ‘All things that God is, he too who has been deified by grace will be, apart from identity according to essence.’ And the great Dionysius: ‘Cyclically the divine intellects are moved, being united to the beginningless and endless illuminations of the beautiful and good.’ Having brought them forth in the plural, then, he showed them not to be the essence of God—for that is never brought forth in the plural—and having called them ‘illuminations,’ and having named them ‘beginningless’ and ‘endless,’ he showed them to be divine and uncreated energies. And our Lord and God, in the holy Gospel according to John: ‘He who believes in me,’ he says, ‘as the Scripture said, rivers of living water shall flow from his belly.’”

2 This he said concerning the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive. For the Holy Spirit was not yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified. Expounding this, the divine Chrysostom: “Rivers,” he says, “shall flow from his belly, hinting at the lavish and ungrudging character of the grace; which elsewhere he calls ‘a fountain of living water springing up unto life eternal’—that is, it shall have much impulse. Elsewhere, then, he calls it ‘life eternal,’ but here ‘living water.’ And he calls ‘living’ that which ever energizes. For the grace of the Spirit, when it comes into the understanding and is established, wells up more than any fountain, and does not cease, nor is emptied, nor stands still. Showing at once both the unfailing character of the supply and the unspeakable character of the energy, he called it a fountain and a river—not one river, but unspeakable ones; and there too he presented the flood by the ‘springing up.’” And after some words the same: “No longer was there a prophet among them, nor did grace oversee their holy things; since, then, the Holy Spirit had been sent, and was about henceforth to be poured out lavishly—and the beginning of this distribution came after the Cross—and not only of lavishness but also of greater gifts; for the gift was more wondrous, as when he says, ‘You know not of what spirit you are.’”

3 And again: “For you have not received a spirit of bondage, but you have received a Spirit of adoption.” For the ancients too had the Spirit, but did not impart it to others; whereas the apostles filled myriads. And since they were about to receive this grace, but it had not yet been given, on this account he says, “The Holy Spirit was not yet”—that is, given—since Jesus was not yet glorified, calling the Cross the glory of the Lord. For since we were enemies and sinners, and lacking the gift of God, and hateful to God, while the grace was a proof of reconciliation—and a gift is given not to enemies, nor to the hated, but to friends and to those who have pleased—it was necessary that first the sacrifice on our behalf be offered, and the enmity in the flesh be destroyed, and we become friends of God, and then receive the gift. For if this was so in the case of the promise to Abraham, much more in the case of grace. And again the same, in the thirty-sixth homily of the same work: “And in our case too,” he says,

4 “the water does not simply work, but when it has received the grace of the Spirit, then it looses all sins.” And after a little: “But even if the whole world come, the grace is not used up, nor is the energy spent, but remains alike, and such as it was before. And just as those rays of the sun illumine each day, and are not spent, nor does their light become less by the abundant supply; so, and much more, the energy of the Spirit is in no way lessened by those who enjoy it.” And again the same, in the fifth homily of the same work, expounding “All things came to be through him,” says: “Having spoken of the creation, John adds also that concerning Providence, saying, ‘In him was life.’ For lest anyone disbelieve how the so great and so many things came to be through him, he added that in him was life. Just, then, as in the case of a fountain that has depths, however much you draw, you in no way lessen the fountain; so also in the case of the energy of the Only-begotten, however many things you believe to have been brought forth and made through it, it has become no less.” And again, when the Gospel had said, “Of his fullness we all received”—for to this we must for now lead the discourse—“He does not have the gift,” he says, “as a thing participated, but is himself the very fountain and very root of good things; self-life and self-truth; not holding in himself the wealth of good things, but overflowing it also upon all others; and after overflowing, remaining full, and in no way lessened by the supply to others, but ever welling forth, and imparting these good things to all, remaining at the same perfection. But what I bear is participated; for I received it from another, and a little of the whole, and as it were a paltry drop toward an unspeakable abyss and a boundless sea. Rather, not even this example can present what we attempt to say. For if you take a drop from the sea, by this very thing you have lessened the sea, even if the lessening be imperceptible; but in the case of that fountain it is impossible to say this; rather, however much one draws, it remains in no way lessened. Wherefore one must especially pass to another example—itself also weak, and unable to present what we seek, yet leading us by the hand from the former

5 toward the conception now set before us. Let us suppose there to be a fountain of fire, and then from that fountain ten thousand lamps to be kindled, and twice and thrice as many, and many times over. Does not the fire remain at the same fullness even after imparting its energy to so many? It is plain to everyone. But if even in the case of bodies—divisible, lessened by subtraction—something of this kind was found, which, even after furnishing to others the things from itself, is in no way harmed, much more will this come to pass in the case of that incorporeal and undefiled power. For if, where the thing shared is essence and body, it is both divided and not divided, much more, when the discourse is about energy, and energy from an incorporeal essence, will there be nothing of such suffering. On this account John also said, ‘Of his fullness we all received.’ We all received. We the twelve, the three hundred, the five hundred, the three thousand, the five thousand, the many myriads of the Jews, the whole fullness of the faithful both then and now and to be hereafter—of his fullness we received. And what did we receive? ‘Grace for grace,’ he says.” And the great Basil, expounding the forty-eighth psalm, says: “Man God made from the earth, and his ministers a flame of fire; yet nevertheless the power of conceiving and understanding their own Creator and Maker exists also in men. ‘For he breathed into his face’—that is, he deposited a certain portion of his own grace in man, that by the like he might recognize the like.” And again the same, in the [books] to Amphilochius on the Holy Spirit: “Renewing man, the Lord, and giving back again the grace which he lost from his inbreathing, having breathed into the face of the disciples, what does he say? ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” And the divine Damascene, in the [chapter] on foreknowledge and predestination of his theological chapters: “This man,” he says, “the Creator fashioned male, imparting to him of his own divine grace, and through this making him in communion with himself.” And again the great Basil, in the [books] to Amphilochius: “Who,” he says,

6 “is so deaf to the good things prepared by God for the worthy as to be ignorant that the crown of the just is the grace of the Spirit, furnished more lavishly and more perfectly?”

7 But also Saint Cyril, in the third of the [books] to Hermias, when this Hermias asked him concerning the divine indwelling and participation in us, and said, “Yet most gladly would I inquire of you how the fulfilling of both the Father and the Son might be conceived and accomplished in us, being one and not diverse,” Saint Cyril, answering, says: “And indeed,” he says, “there is in this nothing at all hard or contentious. For how otherwise than through the Holy Spirit, who fills us with divine gifts through himself, and shows us to be partakers of the unutterable nature?” And again the same in the Thesauri: “But if the Holy Spirit were truly a thing made, according to the madness of the heterodox, how would it have the whole energy of God? For no one, I think, will reach such a pitch of right thinking as to dare so much as to say that the divine essence labors naturally, through certain organs brought from without into being, toward certain ones fit to receive.” And the great Athanasius, in the letter to Serapion: “All things,” he says, “of the Father are the Son’s; wherefore the things given by the Son in the Spirit are gifts of the Father; and the Spirit being in us, the Word too, who gives this, is in us, and in the Word is the Father; and thus is the saying, ‘I and the Father will come, and will make our abode with him,’ as has been said. For where the light is, there too is the radiance; and where the radiance is, there too is its energy and self-formed grace. And teaching this again, Paul wrote once more to the Corinthians in the second letter, saying, ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.’ For the grace and gift given is given in Trinity, from the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. For as the grace given is from the Father through the Son, so there could be no communion of the giving in us except in the Holy Spirit. For by partaking of him,

8 we have the love of the Father, and the grace of the Son, and the communion of the Spirit itself. From these, then, the energy of the Trinity is shown to be one.”

9 But also Saint Anastasius, in his discourse on the Spirit: “There agree,” he says, “also the things said by the divine Paul concerning the Spirit. For the believers, having become temples of God, have rightfully obtained the grace of the Spirit: ‘Know you not that you are a temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwells in us?’ And again: ‘Know you not that your bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God?’ These things teach outright that the all-holy Spirit is of the divine nature. For if the believers are styled a temple of God, since they received the grace of the Spirit, then the Holy Spirit is from God. For having received his indwelling grace, they were named temples of God.” And the divine Chrysostom, in the fourth of the expository [homilies] on the Acts, unfolding “And there appeared to them divided tongues as of fire”: “Well,” he says, “did he say ‘divided’; for they were from one root; that you may learn that it is an energy sent from the Paraclete.” And again the same, in the same place: “And they were all filled,” he says; “they did not simply receive the grace of the Spirit, but were filled.”

10 But also, when the Massalians said that those who among them have been purified are constituted in participation of the essence of God, and brought forward that Gospel saying, “I and the Father will come, and will make our abode with him,” and very senselessly distorted this too toward their own impiety, the synod that convened against these very Massalians, rebuffing their evil opinion, declared: “There comes about a certain visitation of the Paraclete,” it says, “and God dwells in the worthy; yet not as the Godhead is by nature.”

That the Light of the Transfiguration Is Uncreated

1 After this it was sought to be shown from the saints that the light of the Lord’s Transfiguration is uncreated, and that this is not the essence of God. And nearly all said that this had been demonstrated at the fourth assembly, in which the contradictors of the Church, being present, at one time blasphemously said this to be created, and a phantasm and a veil and an image; and at another impiously said it to be uncreated and the essence of God. For there was brought forward at that assembly the one surnamed for theology, Gregory, writing: “No one has stood in the substance and essence of the Lord, according to what is written, and has either known or declared the nature of God.” And the

2 divine Maximus, writing in the seventh chapter of the third Century of theological [chapters]: “He who is participable to beings not according to essence, but willing to be participated in another mode by those who are able, in no way departs from the hiddenness that is according to essence.” And the divine Golden-mouthed, on the same feast, clearly somehow, as Master, showed to his own disciples the glory of his unseen divine kingdom. But at once those who carry about an unrestrained and predatory tongue will say: “Yes; if his divine glory is unseen, how did he show it to the apostles? For if visible, not unseen; and if unseen, not visible.” Wherefore hear with understanding. Here the Master Christ both showed to his own disciples the glory of his unseen kingdom, and did not show it; that is, he opened the divinity a little, and not perfectly: assuring on the one hand, sparing on the other; assuring, since he showed them the divine glory of the unseen kingdom, not as great as it was, but as much as those bearing bodily eyes were able to see; sparing, and not begrudging, in that he did not show them the whole divine glory of his unseen kingdom, lest along with the sight they lose their life as well. But also all the saints, calling it a shining and a brightness and grace, and a deification and a divinity shown forth somewhat more firmly even than sight, and unapproachable light, and a natural ray of the Son, a beginningless dart of divinity, a lightning-flash of divinity, and the like. And there was brought forward at that assembly also the first synodal Tome upon these matters, which piously and surely demonstrated this to be uncreated and not essence, through many testimonies from the divine Scripture, and through the sayings of our thrice-blessed and ever-memorable emperor, the lord Andronikos Palaiologos, in concord with the saints, and through God-revering decrees; against which sacred and divine Tome, seeing those then set in opposition and contradicting—the very ones set in opposition also to the most sacred [metropolitan] of Thessalonica—we cast these out, as positing the light of the Lord’s Transfiguration now created, now very senselessly the essence of God; and as not consenting that God has both essence and uncreated power and energy, but senselessly dragging down all the common powers and energies of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit into a creature, and reckoning as polytheists those who confess God uncreated, not according to essence alone, but also according to the hypostases, and according to the common divine powers and energies of the three hypostases. Upon all these things the book of Akindynos, brought into the

3 midst, was read; in which he appeared dogmatizing also other heterodoxies, both old and new; and he maintained that he reveres no uncreated energy common to the tri-hypostatic Godhead, but only the Son and the Holy Spirit. But the divine synod, recognizing rightly and in a God-loving manner that this impiety was that of Marcellus and Photinus and Sophronius, the old heretics, at once sent forth the divine Chrysostom against this evil opinion, as though hurling him from heaven like a thunderbolt to burn up the brushwood-like trifling of Akindynos; who, indeed, expounding the Epistle to the Philippians: “Marcellus,” he says, “and Photinus and Sophronius say that the Word is an energy; and that this energy dwelt in the one from the seed of David, not an essence or an enhypostatic [reality]. Arius confesses a Son, but in word only; and says that he is a creature, and much less than the Father. Others say that he has no soul. You have seen the chariots standing; behold now also their falls, how he overthrows them all together, and with one blow all at once. How then does he overthrow them? ‘For let this mind be in you,’ he says, ‘which was also in Christ Jesus; who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.’ Hence Paul of Samosata also fell, and Marcellus and Sabellius. ‘For being in the form of God,’ he says. ‘How then do you say, You wretch, that he began from Mary, and before this was not? And how do you say that he was an energy?’ ‘For being in the form of God, he took the form of a servant,’ he says. Is the form of the servant an energy of a servant, or a nature of a servant? Altogether a nature of a servant, surely; therefore the form of God too is a nature of God; therefore not an energy.” But also the divine Gregory of Nyssa, in the discourse to Ablabius: “God,” he says, “signifies one who works; but Godhead, an energy. And none of the three is energy; but rather each of them is one who works.” From these, then, the divine synod: “It has been demonstrated,” it says, “that he who says only the Son and the Holy Spirit to be uncreated energies of God, as not glorifying a common natural energy of the three hypostases—which Akindynos sets aside—dares to introduce into the Church of God the heresy of Marcellus and Photinus and Sophronius, long dead and abolished. But if also by some of the saints the Son or the Holy Spirit has been called a power or energy, yet it is [power or energy] of the Father; and thus each is as a perfect hypostasis, having both energy and power; and this is a common name, according to the divine Dionysius, of the wholly perfect and superabundant Godhead, in which signification the Father too is called a power. But our discourse is not about this energy and power, but about the common [energy] of the tri-hypostatic Godhead, which is not a hypostasis, but belongs by nature and supernaturally to each of the divine-principial hypostases, according to the tradition of the theologians. For we theologize one God in three hypostases, according to the great Athanasius, having one

4 essence and power and energy; and light, the holy, the life, the good, the strong, the almighty, and whatever others, both by transcendence and by causality—not each said to be essence, but about the essence; which are also called the aggregate and fullness of the Godhead, according to Scripture, contemplated and theologized equally in each of the three holy hypostases. For ‘all things that the Father has are mine; and I have been glorified in them.’ Besides, the Son is called a power of the Father, or also the Holy Spirit, both for other reasons which the theologians have handed down, and especially as the whole Fatherly power resides in the Son, as the great Basil expressly writes this, wrestling with Eunomius. How then is it just to do away with the natural and common power of the tri-hypostatic Godhead, on account of which both the Son and the Holy Spirit are hymned as power of the Father by the theologians?” Upon these things, by the decree of our mighty and holy emperor and king, each of the hierarchs and of the senatorial and ecclesiastical officials was asked by the grand chartophylax and consul of the philosophers what opinion he held concerning all the things now spoken and examined in the divine and sacred synod. And one by one all declared that they held concerning these things without doubt, and said that they owed much thanks to the most sacred metropolitan of Thessalonica, as having spoken and written in concord with all the saints, and having labored so greatly for the advocacy of the truth according to piety, and having borne so many insults and slanders and other injuries for the sake of refuting that Barlaam, and Akindynos, and those who after them, down to now, have appeared in concord with them, and have been zealous to remove the Church of Christ from the faith and piety toward God handed down from the Fathers. And after all, last of all, declared also our truly most magnanimous and in divine things wise, most serene, most mighty and holy emperor and king—all rising from their seats, both the most illustrious senators and the most sacred hierarchs, as is the law in such cases—the lord John Kantakouzenos, determining: “That injustice is a great evil even in these earthly and grovelling matters, such as can ruin and drag down a whole nation; since its opposite also, justice, according to what is written, exalts a nation. But if in things below injustice is so great an evil, how much more, when toward the things above

5 of those who think wrongly, the very truth that is in God is wronged by those who set it aside, and those who cherish and proclaim it, and further who advocate it according to their power, are injured and slandered and traduced by those who in perverse opinion undertake to lead the multitudes astray? I, then, see so great a concord with the saints in the things said by the most sacred metropolitan of Thessalonica, and in his writings now read for the advocacy of piety; and I see the saints having taken such pains in their own writings on behalf of the divine doctrines just now set forth, that none of those willing to live with right judgment could wish to seek more than this. And on behalf of the things theologized by the blessed disciples and apostles of Christ, and by the holy and ecumenical councils, and by the holy Fathers, so great is the eagerness in me, through the grace of Christ in me, that I am ready, if even one cup of blood were in me, to pour it out eagerly on their behalf. And I render thanks also to the God over all, our Master and Lord Jesus Christ, that he has done great mercy with us, having been well-pleased that the truth of piety should this day be manifested and established, and not having permitted it to be turned aside in anything, nor shaken by those who with many devices and guiles and contrivances have undertaken to pervert and shake it for fourteen years now.” These things, then, said also the most divine emperor. And since there had been issued by him a divine and venerable command to the Holy Mountain, that those distinguished in wisdom, understanding, and virtue should come to the synod convened in this prosperous great city; but they, both because of the length of the way and the difficulty of the season, were not able to come, they send two of the consecrated monks, honored for virtue and discourse, and a report to our mighty and holy emperor and king declaring that they had sent also their own opinion in writing to the synod. The hieromonks who had been sent, then, rose and rendered to the synod discourses, as common to the whole Holy Mountain, which the most sacred metropolitan of Herakleia, the lord Philotheos, while still remaining there with them, had composed. And they brought the written opinion of all, now sent from there, which, being read in the hearing of all, was found in concord and in joint testimony with the most sacred metropolitan of Thessalonica throughout, according to the truth of piety. These things, then, said also the whole Holy Mountain.

6 But we, the whole divine and sacred synod gathered, by the grace of Christ, in the hall thus styled the Alexiakon of the sacred Blachernae, now also contending for piety, and having made accurate and fitting examination and inquiry concerning the matters set forth, and ratifying as most pious the first synodal Tomes upon these things, rather also following them, do justly subject to the anathema from Christ that Barlaam and that Akindynos, as men who outraged the very vital points of piety, and in no way repented while yet remaining in this life; and those who have now appeared and been synodically convicted as of one mind with them, and simply as many as are of their faction, we hold to be both renounced and rejected from the catholic and apostolic Church of Christ, unless they repent, and we subject them to the anathema from Christ; and those who knowingly commune with them we hold to be excommunicate; and those who hold any priestly office we strip of all priestly ministry. But those who have been snatched up and dragged along by these men, and are not among the ringleaders of the heresy, if they remain unrepentant, we subject to the like; but if they repent genuinely, and anathematize both this evil opinion and those who have persisted in it to the end, we receive them not only into communion according to […] the holy and ecumenical seventh council determining: “That the ringleaders and chiefs and champions of the impiety we do not receive into the priesthood at all, even though they repent; but those who were compelled, or snatched up and dragged along, repenting truly and genuinely, we receive into the priesthood, each according to his own rank.” But also if anyone else of all should ever be detected either thinking or saying or writing the same things against the most sacred [metropolitan] of Thessalonica—rather, against the sacred theologians and the Church […]—whether he be one of the consecrated or of the laity. But this same oft-mentioned most sacred metropolitan, who writes and thinks nothing discordant with the divine oracles—having ascertained this by examination, and rather finding him contending, as was fitting, on behalf of the divine oracles and our common piety—we hold to be not only altogether superior to the cavils against him (rather, against the Church of Christ), as the former synodal Tomes also set forth, but we declare him also a most secure champion and foremost contender and helper

7 of piety. For thus also the Tomes issued at those synods will have, just as indeed they have, what is sure and firm. And these things having so come to pass, not without the cooperation and grace of the good Spirit, it remained still, in our eagerness to remove every ground of accusation from those willing to make accusation, that not even the things which the enemies of the Church laid to charge in the writings of the most sacred [metropolitan] of Thessalonica should be passed over unexamined—even if from the things examined in the divine synod at that time these too were all comprehended. When, therefore, our most mighty and holy emperor and king had found these things written out point by point by their own hand, and had given them to us, we read and examined each of them in the book of the most sacred [metropolitan] of Thessalonica, having come together in the Great Church and spent the day together not once, but twice and thrice and many times; and we found the most sacred metropolitan of Thessalonica in concord, in these matters too, with the sacred theologians, and an advocate, by the grace of Christ, of the truth according to piety; while they, both from the things by which they undertook in writing to distort and to accuse, were found falling into many and great heresies. For they continued openly contradicting the things expressly said by the theologians, and dared to declare the deification of the lordly assumed nature to be created; and to reckon those who think thus concerning the essence of God—because it is said by the saints to be unapproachable and imparticipable—to hold it corruptible (O impious audacity!): and this, though God said to Moses, “No one shall see my face, and live.” But also the things that rest, according to the prophecy, upon the flower from the root of Jesse—that is, upon our Lord Jesus Christ—the seven spirits, that is, the energies of the divine Spirit according to the sacred theologians, which the sacred Zechariah hymned as the seven eyes of Christ looking upon all the earth, and which the divine Maximus theologized to belong naturally to the Son of God, these they ranged among the creatures; and the

8 things more than these, and no less tending to impiety, it is not easy even to number. Wherefore also from these the condemnation upon them, unless indeed they repent, was ratified; and the things synodically examined and discerned by us just now together with the God-given imperial power, in concord with all the divine Fathers, and with the sacred and divine councils that preceded for the sake of this, and with the synodal Tomes upon them—this lawful and canonical decree throughout, written and subscribed just now, shall be kept unmoved unto the whole age, by the all-powerful energy and grace of the almighty great God and our Savior, in which and through which the present struggle has been accomplished for us. The original bore signatures: by the hand of the most divine emperors, both—“IN CHRIST GOD FAITHFUL KING AND EMPEROR OF THE ROMANS, JOHN KANTAKOUZENOS”; and the other emperor and autocrator; and by the venerable and patriarchal hand—“Kallistos, by the mercy of God archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, and ecumenical patriarch.” The humble metropolitan of Herakleia, president of the most-honored and exarch of all Thrace and Macedonia, Philotheos. The humble metropolitan of Thessalonica, most-honored and exarch of all Thessaly, Gregory. The humble metropolitan of Kyzikos and exarch of all the Hellespont, Arsenios. The metropolitan of Philadelphia, most-honored and exarch of all Lydia and universal judge of the Romans, Makarios. The humble metropolitan of Chalcedon, most-honored and exarch of all Bithynia, Jacob. The metropolitan of Melenikon, most-honored and universal judge of the Romans, Metrophanes. The humble metropolitan of Amaseia, most-honored. The humble metropolitan of Pontoherakleia, most-honored, Methodios. The humble metropolitan of Pegai, most-honored, Georgios. The humble metropolitan of Berroia, most-honored and holding the place of Tyana, Dionysios. The humble metropolitan of Trebizond, most-honored, Niphon. The humble metropolitan of Traianoupolis, most-honored and exarch of all Rhodope, Germanos. The humble metropolitan of Selybria, most-honored and holding the place of Kotyaion, Isaias. The humble metropolitan of Eupron, most-honored and holding the place of Euchaita, Gabriel. The humble metropolitan of Exantidion, most-honored, Kallinikos. The humble metropolitan of Sougdaia, most-honored, Eusebios. The humble metropolitan of Ainos, most-honored, Daniel. The humble metropolitan of Bizye, most-honored, Theodoretos. The humble metropolitan of Madyta, most-honored, Jacob.

Colophon

The Synodal Tome of 1351
by The Council of Constantinople (1351).

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
Evening Bells (1892)
by Isaac Levitan (Russian, 1860–1900), 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 and Proceedings of the Synod
- That the Divine Energy Is Uncreated
- Confirmed by the Whole of Scripture

- That the Essence–Energy Distinction Introduces No Composition in God

- That the Divine Energy Is Called ‘Godhead’ by the Saints

- Against Calling the Deifying Energy a Created Godhead

- That God Transcends His Energy According to Essence

- That Creatures Partake of God’s Energy, Not His Essence

- That the Light of the Transfiguration Is Uncreated

- Colophon