So much has been said and written about him — so much that he, a lover of silence, might have thought it excessive.
He himself, though, was a fruitful writer — author of more than seventy works. He, who so loved silence, cared little for the spinning of words. And yet, how else, without words, could he defend that high silence he had climbed to, and to which he led others?
For Gregory, words became tools — shields to guard silence. Even his very name meant “watchful” — the sort of name guards often bore.
Everyone knew him as Gregory.
Saint Gregory Palamas. 15th-century icon. A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts
Is it a chance, one wonders, that the cycle of Lenten Sundays places the Triumph of Orthodoxy side by side with the Sunday of Saint Gregory Palamas?
Is it just a simple accident of history, with no deeper meaning to find? Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann wrote of the two opening Sundays that, “although both of these commemorations are very important, they are not dependent on Great Lent as such” and their link to it is “purely historical”…
The realm of Great Lent is complex, with many layers. What seems important beyond its bounds can seem random and too much within it — and the other way round as well.
The Triumph of Orthodoxy meant a victory over heresies, and more widely — over any delusion, over every false and lying thought. But in the pages of history, this triumph was short; for nothing in history ever lasts for long. Iconoclasm was overthrown; yet soon Theodora, who restored the veneration of icons, faced another, even more dreadful heresy — the Paulicians. The Paulicians denied not only the veneration of icons but the Cross, fasting, and monastic life; they believed the one who made the world was a wicked power, and that when Adam ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, it was not a fall but a good thing.
All peaceful attempts to win them back failed; Theodora decided to use force: either you, Paulicians, accept Orthodoxy — or… And about a hundred thousand Paulicians died. “Some were crucified, others put to the sword, a third were cast into the depths of the sea.” If the victory over the iconoclasts can rightly be called a triumph of Orthodoxy, then here there was no triumph, but defeat… No, not of Orthodoxy — the Church, by the voice of the venerable Theodore the Studite, clearly spoke against eradicating the heresy by force: “The Church does not take vengeance with the sword!” This was a defeat for secular power, which thought it had the right to take vengeance with the sword for its beliefs. The Paulician survivors fled to the Arabs, allied with them, and for a long time thereafter struck back at Byzantium, raiding it and looting its cities.
Yet what piles up, again and again, in the rough rush of history — failures, wrong turns, violence — takes on a quiet and deep meaning in the clear, clean waters of Great Lent. Great Lent itself is an exit from the surges of daily life, from the evils of the day, from the waves of history that rise where those daily lives and their evils meet. It is indeed like the never-ending Cherubic hymn: “let us lay aside all earthly care now…”
And so, after laying aside delusions, after returning to the childlike directness of faith (which is just what the veneration of icons shows), after forgiveness (which was, indeed, the choice not to condemn Theophilus to anathema) the next step before us is towards inner stillness and silence, hesychia.
Saint Gregory was not the first to teach of quiet and silence.
This theme already appears in the apostolic epistles. “Let your adornment be… the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet (Greek: *hesychios* – S.A.) spirit” (1 Peter 3:3–4). And again, you hear it when the Apostle Paul asks us to pray for all people, and for the rulers of this world, so that “we may lead a quiet and peaceable (Greek: hesychion – S.A.) life in all godliness and reverence” (1 Timothy 2:2).
The theme of hesychia runs through the whole fabric of Orthodox asceticism, from Arsenius the Great and John Climacus onward. But it is only with Saint Gregory that it finds its full voice as a clear teaching of the Church.
We know the outward events of Gregory's earthly days quite well.
His father was a senator. The young Gregory received his schooling at the imperial court and won fame as a master of Aristotle. A brilliant career was open to him. But Gregory, at just twenty years old, turned his back on the capital around the year 1315. He settled on Athos, took monastic vows, and toiled in various Athonite houses. Fleeing the Turkish onslaught, he left Athos for a time, then returned. For a short time he served as abbot of the Esphigmenou Monastery. For the most part, though, he lived a quiet and withdrawn life, keeping the Jesus Prayer.
There is, perhaps, a wisdom in how the Church arranges these Lenten Sundays: the first, the Triumph of Orthodoxy, bound to Constantinople; the second, dedicated to Athos.
So we go from the noise and the crowds of Constantinople to the near-empty slopes of Athos; from the colossal church of Hagia Sophia to the small, humble Athonite chapels. Although Gregory, living a long life by the standards of his age, spent time in various places, his closest bond was with Athos — “the fatherland, the abode fit for the heavenly,” as he later wrote of it. Here, with the Athonite Elders to guide him, he grew in holiness and prayer; here he passed long, long stretches of time in silence.
Athos is a rare place of quiet, where only the faraway crash of waves, the rustling of olive trees, and the calling of bells that draw the brothers to pray bring the mountain to life Here, Saint Gregory would spend whole days inside his cell, in silence and in stillness.
The word “for your last day of rest” (Sunday), as is well known, comes from the concept of not-doing.
This does not mean lazy idleness, but rather a pulling away from the noise that flares up around any worldly task, much like static electricity. A freeing from the “spirit of overwork,” the pneuma periergeias (rendered in Church Slavonic as “the spirit of despondency”), which is named in the prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian during Lent. It is to go back to the vast, spherical space of childhood, where no pressing chores or strict deadlines ruled the day. "For unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3).
And when we, grown-up and busy, give up — if only for a while — this endless “no time!” (time burns like fire; it is always being consumed; we all burn on the pyre of time) and the unceasing, never-empty “must,” we come back to childhood. To childhood with its wide reach and its almost boundless time. With its sense that Someone Great and Grown-up is near — Someone who knows all, sees all, and loves us.
But Gregory was not given much time to enjoy this stillness and this silence.
In the mid-1330s a gifted and influential opponent appeared among the Athonite hesychasts — the monk, philosopher, theologian, mathematician and astronomer Barlaam, a native of Calabria. He mocked the hesychasts’ mystical practice, of which he had only a rather vague notion…
Saint Gregory’s long-running dispute with Barlaam of Calabria kept him busy for several years.
The School of Athens. Raphael Sanzio. 1510
Iconoclasm — whose defeat is commemorated on the first Sunday of the Fast — was a heresy that had come from the East, born of the Paulicians and Gnostics, and fed by the refusal of icons in Judaism and Islam. Varlaamism, by contrast, was a heresy that came from the West; it grew out of the kind of Aristotelianism in which Barlaam, an Italian by origin, had been raised.
When the teachings of Aristotle first appeared in the West at the end of the eleventh century, they were at first seen as heresy. This is no surprise, as they arrived through Arab and Jewish thinkers, and were heavily coloured by Neoplatonism. Yet within a century and a half Aristotelian thought had put down roots in European universities; and after Thomas Aquinas skilfully reconciled it with the scholastic method, it became part of Catholic theology.
Barlaam argued even with Catholic theologians (notably over the Filioque), but he argued in their scholastic idiom. Things were different in his clash with Gregory Palamas. Gregory, too, had studied Aristotle thoroughly in his youth; but he belonged to another tradition, to a different strain of Aristotelianism. In Byzantine theology Aristotle’s teaching had long since been assimilated and reworked over the centuries; it was no novelty there, no passing intellectual fashion that might free reason from the bonds of dogma.
Barlaam was a rationalist; he proclaimed God’s unknowability and dismissed as absurd any claim that God can be known through the Jesus Prayer or by beholding the Divine Light.
In this respect Barlaam’s position fell surprisingly into step with that of the iconoclasts, who by then were mostly forgotten. No — Barlaam did not deny the veneration of icons. But the very idea that God, and the relations between the Persons of the Holy Trinity, could not be known was close to the way the iconoclasts thought.
The iconoclasts denied any possibility of knowledge of God and of communion with Him through icons, seeing in them only superstition and idolatry. On that same ground Barlaam denied the possibility of knowing God and of communion with Him through sacred silence and through the practice of the Jesus Prayer.
For the iconoclasts the gold background of icons was only gilding, empty ornament, not a sign of the uncreated Divine Light. Likewise for Barlaam the Divine Light, which certain hesychast monks were said to behold in prayer, was nothing but illusion and spiritual delusion. Barlaam rejected the whole idea of an uncreated (that is, not a material) Divine Light; he believed the light that shone on Christ’s apostles on Mount Tabor was just an ordinary, “created” thing.
Gregory too believed that God — in Himself — cannot be known. Yet He can be known through His workings, His energies — through uncreated manifestations, such as the Light of Tabor.
And to come to know these workings of God one must renounce worldly “doing”: cast off every worldly care and fix one’s attention on a single action — the action of prayer. Likewise, to hear and take in the Word of God one must lay aside one’s own words. Not only the “spirit of over-doing,” but also the “spirit of idle talk” — both present in the prayer of St Ephrem the Syrian.
Varlaam’s views were condemned as heresy. Varlaam returned to Italy and became a bishop. Gregory was still destined to weather further disputes with opponents of hesychasm… and to win out over them.
But Gregory could not sink once more into a “quiet and serene life.” The years that followed for the saint were filled with many troubling events: a dungeon, excommunication, vindication, election to the Thessalonian see, Turkish captivity, release…
Reliquary with the relics of Saint Gregory. Church of Saint Gregory in Thessaloniki
His black, thick beard grew grey, his hair thinned, his strength waned. So he would be shown on icons: “grey, curly hair, large beard, somewhat broad; a pleasant face with tearful eyes…” But he always carried the silence and the light inside him — wherever he went, whoever he spoke with, whatever he felt. The silence and the light.
“Silence, you are the best / Of all that I have heard,” as Boris Pasternak wrote.
So no, it is no accident that the theme of hesychia, of silence, appears in the second week of Great Lent. The Fast is a cleansing not only from “excess” food, but from “excess” speech, from any verbal chaff. That which clings to us from outside and, even more, that which we ourselves produce. For “for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment” (Matthew 12:36).
This cleansing is exactly what the hesychasts reached: “…those who, for the sake of the Gospel life, rejected the accumulation of wealth, human glory, and indecent pleasures of the flesh, and further solidified their renunciation by entering into obedience to those who excelled in Christ; heedlessly in silence attending to themselves and to God, in pure prayer rising above themselves and abiding in God, through the mysterious union with Him that surpasses understanding, they became partakers of mysteries that are inaccessible to the mind,” as Gregory Palamas wrote of them.
Great Lent is an opportunity to touch these mysteries. Not only for those experienced in the practice of the Jesus Prayer, not only for those living the monastic life. Not only for those by temperament inclined to solitude and brevity of speech. It is an opportunity for everyone. For anyone willing, at least in these Lenten days, to lay aside their worldly affairs and idle words. Even if only for a moment. Even if we only let go of the smallest part.
Evgeny Abdullaev (pen name — Sukhabat Aflatuni) — writer, historian, literary critic
