Acta Sanctorum: St. Gregory Palamas (Nov 14)
November 14, 2025
November 14
St. Gregory Palamas
Life (1296-1359)
St Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), a monk of Mount Athos, was a practitioner of the method of prayer called hesychasm (hesychia means ‘silence’). This method of prayer is centered in the continuous repetition of the name of Jesus, usually in the form of the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” And a rigorous bodily discipline—emphasizing certain sitting postures and breathing techniques—is employed in order to help unite the mind and heart in God. Through the use of this method of prayer, the hesychast monks claimed to experience genuine communion with God, including sometimes a vision of the Uncreated Light of Divinity such as that seen by Moses on Mount Sinai, and by the Apostles Peter, James, and John at the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor. In 1330 Barlaam the Calabrian, an Italo-Greek monk raised in an Orthodox family in southern Italy but educated in the Scholastic spirit prevailing in Western Europe at that time, came to Constantinople and accepted a chair in philosophy at the University of Constantinople. Barlaam, along with a number of other Byzantine humanists who were highly influenced by Western philosophical and theological ideas, ridiculed the practice of hesychastic prayer. They denied the possibility for human beings to be in direct, genuine communion with God. In 1337 Gregory Palamas confronted Barlaam’s position and began his defense of hesychasm and the various contemplative practices of the Athonite monks. He confirmed the Orthodox doctrine that man can truly know God and can enter into living communion and relationship with Him through Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Church. He explained that the Essence (or Super-Essence) of God is utterly unknowable and incomprehensible, while at the same time, the actions, operations, or Energies of God, which are also uncreated and fully divine (such as the Divine Light), are communicated to people by divine grace and are open to human knowledge and experience. This is what is meant when Christians are said to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1.4). Saint Gregory Palamas also served the Church as Archbishop of Thessalonica from 1350 until his death in 1359.
Source: https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/church-history/fourteenth-century/saint-gregory-palamas
Scripture (Phil 2:9-11)
God highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Writings
(Year C). The Spirit of the supreme Word is a kind of ineffable yet intense longing or eros experienced by the Begetter for the Word born ineffably from Him, a longing experienced also by the beloved Word and Son of the Father for His Begetter. But the Word possesses this love by virtue of the fact that it comes from the Father in the very act through which He comes from the Father, and it resides co-naturally in Him. […]
Our intellect, because created in God’s image, possesses likewise the image of this sublime Eros or intense longing – an image expressed in the love experienced by the intellect for the spiritual knowledge that originates from it and continually abides in it. This love is of the intellect and in the intellect and issues forth from it together with its innermost intelligence or Word. […] This intense longing is – and is called – the Holy Spirit and the other Comforter (cf John 14:16), since He accompanies the Word.
Thus we know Him to be perfect in a perfect and individual hypostasis, in no way inferior to the Father’s essence, but indistinguishably identical with the Son and the Father, although not according to hypostasis; for His distinction as hypostasis is manifest in the fact that He proceeds from God in a divinely fitting manner. […] The most sublime Goodness is a holy, awe-inspiring and venerable Trinity flowing forth out of Itself into Itself without change and divinely established in Itself before the ages. The Trinity is without limits and is limited only by Itself; It limits all things, transcends all and permits no beings to be outside Itself. […]
After our forefather’s transgression in paradise through the tree, we suffered the death of our soul – which is the separation of the soul from God – prior to our bodily death; yet although we cast away our divine likeness, we did not lose our divine image. Thus when the soul renounces its attachment to inferior things and cleaves through love to God and submits itself to Him through acts and modes of virtue, it is illuminated and made beautiful by God and is raised to a higher level, obeying His counsels and exhortations; and by these means it regains the truly eternal life. Through this life it makes the body conjoined to it immortal, so that in due time the body attains the promised resurrection and participates in eternal glory. But if the soul does not repudiate its attachment and submission to inferior things whereby it shamefully dishonours God’s image, it alienates itself from God and is estranged from the true and truly blessed life of God; for as it has first abandoned God, it is justly abandoned by Him. (Cf. The Philokalia)
Musical Selection (John Michael Talbot)
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God
Have mercy on me, a sinful one
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God
Have mercy on me, a sinful one
Maker of the bread from the wheat of my life
Savior of my soul, anointed Christ
Eternally begotten son
Yet born to this world through Mary.
Forgiveness and love, when I stumble and fall
Compassion and mercy, have mercy, oh God
As far as the east is from the west, so far are our sins
In the mind of God through Jesus.
Compassion and mercy, have mercy, oh God
As far as the east is from the west, so far are our sins
In the mind of God through Jesus.
Collect
O God, who by your Holy Spirit give to some the word of wisdom, To others the word of knowledge, and to others the word of faith: We praise you for the gifts of grace manifested in your servant Gregory, and we pray that your Church may never be destitute of such gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, God, for ever and ever. Amen.