Barlaam of Calabria (ca. 1290–1348)
JOHN A. MCGUCKIN
Barlaam of Calabria (Bernardo Massari before he entered religion) was a 14th- century Italo-Byzantine Orthodox monk and cleric. He was the main intellectual opponent of St. Gregory Palamas and an instigator of the latter’s defense of the Athonite Hesychast school. Moving from Byzantine-dominated Southern Italy, Barlaam came to Constantinople around 1330 and was part of the court of Emperor Andronikos Palaeologos, who sponsored him to become a university teacher in the capital (Aristotelian philosophy, and astronomy) and also promoted him as the higumen of the Savior Akataleptos Monastery. He was a leading theologian in the imperially sponsored attempts to broker a union with the Latin Church. In 1333–4 Barlaam was part of the mission negotiating terms of union with theologians of Pope John XXII, and in 1339 he was also sent to the royal courts of Naples and Paris, and came to Avignon on that occasion to talk with the exiled Pope Benedict XII. It was in the course of this visit that he met with, and taught some Greek to, the Renaissance poet Petrarch. Barlaam has often been elevated by subsequent Orthodox thought as a “rationalist” foil to the mystical approach of St. Gregory and the Athonite Hesychasts. He has sometimes had to play this role to excess, a parody of the “bad theologian”
who uses Aristotelian syllogisms instead of the simple teachings of the fishermen; but he certainly privileged Aristotelian method and logic in his theological discourse, although the grounds for the argument were also rooted in the city-based schools of philosophical theology resisting the insistence of the monastics (especially the Athonites) that theology was now closed to new insights and had to follow only patristic precedent, as that was mediated predominantly through the ascetical lens. He attacked the Athonites in a very sarcastic apologia that focused on their “experiential” claim to be able to see the divine light (a theme found already in the 11th-century writings of St. Symeon the New Theologian, who advances it as a powerful pneumatological claim of the type that those who do not experience the living grace of the Spirit, consciously in their own lifetimes, are not truly Christian at all). Barlaam dismissed the monastics as ill-informed “navel-gazers” (omphalopsychoi – those who think their soul is in their belly-button), and used syllogistic logic to argue that if any “light” was seen in prayer it had to be a created light, being a material phenomenon that the eyes could relate to, and thus was certainly not the “Uncreated Light” of the Godhead.
St. Gregory Palamas was asked by the Athonites to mount a series of responses to Barlaam’s attacks (conducted in a fraught political time) and Gregory did so in an extended series of works, chiefly the Triads in Defence of the Hesychasts, which laid down the intellectual basis for late Byzantine Hesychasm out of patristic cloth and personal experience in prayer. It has sometimes (but dismissively) been called Palamism in some studies. It has distinctive themes of spiritual transfiguration and the core distinction of the essence and energies of God: the divine essence being unapproachable and incomprehensible to all creatures, yet the divine energies being immanent and intimately near, and as themselves being divine, capable of allowing a mortal creature to access and experience the divine directly in this lifetime. The issue of Palamas’ conflict with Barlaam turned around symbolic themes such as those related to the exegesis of the transfiguration story of the gospel. Patristic thought (for example, St. Maximos the Confessor or John of Damascus) (see McGuckin 1987) had indicated that the light of Thabor was a mystical apprehension in which the eyes of the apostles were given a supermaterial capacity. They saw the deity and were transfigured by its deifying radiance. Barlaam demanded a primacy of logic in the statements of theology, and a sharper (if not radically separate) distinction of creaturely and uncreated natures; perhaps unaware of the extent to which sophisticated theology of the Alexandria school had already articulated deification theology from the 5th century onwards. The battle was soon set over methods of discourse. The local Council of Constantinople in 1341 (two sessions known as the “Sophia synods”) considered his works and ruled against them; after which he was forced to issue a retractation of his views, and his anti-hesychastic works were publicly burned. Barlaam left Constantinople soon afterwards, and was warmly received by the pope at Avignon (despite his having written twelve anti-Latin treatises against papal primacy and the filioque doctrine). The pope appointed him to the bishopric of Gerace in Calabria, where he lived the remainder of his life (1342–8). In 1351 another synod at the Blachernae palace in Constantinople anathematized him and his doctrine, and gave Hesychasm an official authorization as authentic Orthodox doctrine.
SEE ALSO: Deification; Hesychasm; St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Barlaam of Calabria (1857–1861) Works. In J. P. Migne (ed.) Patrologia Graeca, vol. 151, cols. 1255–82. Paris.
Jugie, M. (1932) “Barlaam de Seminara,” in Dictionnaire d’histoire et de geographie ecclesiastiques, vol. 6, cols. 817–34. Paris.
McGuckin, J. A. (1987) The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and Tradition. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Meyendorff, J. (1987) Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press.
Sinkewicz,R.E. (1982) “TheDoctrineof the Knowledge of God in the Early Writings of Barlaam the Calabrian,” Medieval Studies 44: 181–242.