BARLAAM OF CALABRIA

BARLAAM OF CALABRIA (ca. 1290–1348). Barlaam was an Italo-Greek from Calabria, the instep of the Italian boot, and became something of a theological celebrity and an important church figure-he had been a tonsured monk-on his arrival in Constantinople (q.v.) in 1330. Welcomed at first and accorded both honors and serious ecclesiastico-political responsibilities, his criticism of the monks of Mt. Athos (q.v.) later in the same decade, especially of their claims to the vision of the “uncreated light” of Mt. Tabor (site of the Transfiguration), sparked the last great theological debate in Byzantine Church history, the Hesychast (q.v.) Controversy. Barlaam’s opponent in the fray was Gregory Palamas (q.v.), at the time a monk on Athos and later Archbishop of Thessalonica. Since Gregory proved the winner in the exchange, no further honors awaited Barlaam, at least not in Byzantium (q.v.). Gregory’s Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts was his greatest work. Its central thesis, the distinction in God between essence and energies, was recognized as Orthodox doctrine in the local councils of 1341, 1347, and 1351. Barlaam had left the city, the Empire, and the Orthodox Church by the time the first council had met. He ended his life back in Italy, a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church (q.v.), vainly endeavoring to teach Petrarch Greek.