At every Divine Liturgy the priest commemorates his bishop, and the bishops, according to the order of each Church, commemorate their metropolitan or patriarch. By this commemoration the celebrant shows that he stands in the same faith and in the same communion as the hierarch he names. When a priest or a bishop ceases to commemorate his hierarch, he breaks communion with him, and the canons of the Church state clearly when such an act is a fault and when it is a confession of faith.
In our own days, in several local Churches, some clergy have ceased to commemorate their hierarchs, judging that these have departed from the right faith, and some of the faithful have followed them. Many rest their decision on the example of Saint Gregory Palamas. In the fourteenth century, while he was still a hieromonk, that is, a monk ordained to the priesthood, he broke communion with Patriarch John XIV Kalekas of Constantinople. The patriarch himself accused him and those of like mind of having broken off his commemoration “uncanonically and without judgment”. The fact is true, and the documents of the time bear witness to it.
In this article
The Light of Tabor and the Synods of 1341
Saint Gregory lived his ascetic life on the Holy Mountain of Athos, among the hesychasts. This was the name given to the monks who sought stillness of heart, called hesychia in Greek, and who prayed without ceasing with the prayer of the mind, calling upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Around the year 1337, a learned monk from Calabria named Barlaam began to mock these ascetics. He taught that the light seen by the Apostles on Mount Tabor, at the Transfiguration of the Lord, was a created light that appeared and then passed away. Saint Gregory answered him according to the teaching of the Holy Fathers. He showed that the light of Tabor is the eternal glory of God, and that God, Who remains inaccessible in His essence, truly gives Himself to man through His uncreated energies. Through these energies man truly partakes of the life of God and is deified by grace, while remaining a creature. The dispute therefore concerned the very union of man with God.
Saint Gregory set down this teaching in profound writings, among them the three Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts, written between 1338 and 1340, and the One Hundred and Fifty Chapters. He did not write as a scholar examining things from a distance. He spoke from the experience of prayer and grace that he had lived for years on the Holy Mountain, and he always set it beside the teaching of the Fathers. Of God he confessed that He remains wholly inaccessible in His essence, yet makes Himself known to the purified man through His grace and His uncreated energies, in a knowledge that surpasses the human mind.
On 10 June 1341 a synod gathered in the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, presided over by Emperor Andronikos III, and Patriarch John also took part in it. The synod condemned the teaching of Barlaam, and he left Constantinople for good. The decision was confirmed by a tomos, that is, a solemn synodal act. The patriarch signed it, after first refusing to do so, as he himself would later write. In the summer of the same year a second synod pronounced against Gregory Akindynos, a former disciple of Saint Gregory, who was taking up Barlaam’s arguments in another form. The decision concerning Akindynos, however, was not entered in the tomos, and later each party interpreted it in its own way.
The Patriarch against Saint Gregory
A few days after the June synod, Emperor Andronikos died. His death opened a struggle for power. On one side stood the widowed Empress Anna of Savoy, Patriarch John and the counsellor Alexios Apokaukos, who governed in the name of the heir, still a minor. On the other side stood John Kantakouzenos, the closest collaborator of the late emperor. The civil war that followed lasted until 1347. The dispute over the light of Tabor became entangled with the political struggle without being identical with it, and Saint Gregory was regarded as close to Kantakouzenos.
The patriarch then turned against him. In 1342, synods convened by the patriarch condemned the writings of Saint Gregory, and he was arrested and kept under guard in several monasteries of Constantinople. From the spring of 1343 until February 1347 he was held in the prison of the imperial palace. On 4 November 1344 a synod convened by the patriarch excommunicated him, that is, declared him cut off from the communion of the Church, together with his disciple Isidore. After this, the patriarch ordained Gregory Akindynos himself.
The Breaking of Communion
At that same time Saint Gregory and those of like mind ceased to commemorate the patriarch, and hierarchs who sided with them removed his name from the diptychs, that is, from the lists of names commemorated at the Liturgy.
The clearest testimony comes from the patriarch himself. In a short act of excommunication preserved under his signature, he anathematized, that is, declared separated from the Church, Saint Gregory, those of like mind with him, “all their dogmas”, and all who “dared to break off my commemoration uncanonically and without judgment”. In the same text the patriarch also gave the reason: they had ceased to commemorate him because he did not accept their teaching.
In the summer of 1347, after the patriarch’s deposition, a tomos of Saint Gregory’s adversaries reproached him and those of like mind for having counted the penalty as nothing and for continuing to celebrate the Divine Liturgy in secret.
The documents cited here do not establish the exact date when the rupture began. We know, however, that Saint Gregory regarded the excommunication of 1344 as void and continued to celebrate. The first synod to declare the patriarch deposed met in 1346 at Adrianople, in Kantakouzenos’s camp. At that time Saint Gregory was not a bishop. Those who invoke his example today are right about these facts.
What Canon 15 Says
Such a breaking of communion is addressed by Canon 15 of the First-Second Council, held in Constantinople in 861 under Saint Photios the Great. The first part of the canon prescribes deposition, that is, removal from the priesthood, for the cleric who separates from his patriarch and no longer commemorates him “before a synodal hearing and his complete condemnation”. The canon explains that this penalty concerns those who depart from their presidents “on the pretext of certain charges”. It then adds:
“For those who separate themselves from communion with their president on account of some heresy condemned by the holy Synods or Fathers, that is, when he preaches the heresy publicly and teaches it bareheaded in the Church, such persons are not only not subject to canonical penalty for walling themselves off from communion with the so-called bishop before synodal examination, but will also be deemed worthy of the honour befitting the Orthodox. For they have condemned not bishops but false bishops and false teachers, and they have not cut apart the unity of the Church by schism, but have striven to deliver the Church from schisms and divisions.”
The canon thus sets two conditions. The heresy must already have been condemned by synods or by the Holy Fathers, and the bishop must be preaching it publicly. The phrase “Synods or Fathers” is broad, because a new teaching may take up, in other words, an error that the Fathers have already rejected. This correspondence, however, must be shown from the hierarch’s concrete teaching, set beside the faith confessed by the Church; a mere resemblance is not enough. The words “before synodal examination” concern the person of the bishop. The judgment on the teaching must have been given beforehand.
In the case of Patriarch John, both conditions could be shown. The teaching of Barlaam had been condemned in 1341 by a synod in which the patriarch himself had taken part and whose tomos he had signed. Saint Gregory’s opponents contested his teaching on the distinction between the essence of God and His uncreated energies, and accused him of introducing several divinities. The patriarch openly went over to their side. He condemned Saint Gregory’s writings, sent the empress writings against him and ordained Akindynos. In his act of excommunication he anathematized, besides persons, Saint Gregory’s teaching itself, which he called “impious dogmas”.
The truth, however, was not as easy to discern as it seems from a distance. The patriarch did not openly repudiate the tomos of 1341. In his excommunication he wrote that he himself had set the words of the Saints in the tomos and that he remained bound to their teaching, while Saint Gregory and his followers had supposedly distorted it. Each side spoke in the name of the same synodal act. Saint Gregory judged by the teaching of the Fathers, and the throne of the one speaking did not weigh more for him than the truth. In his reply to Patriarch Ignatius of Antioch, who had taken Patriarch John’s side, he wrote: “Those who are of the Church of Christ are of the truth; and those who are not of the truth are not of the Church of Christ either.”
The Judgment of the Church
At the beginning of February 1347 a synod gathered by Empress Anna in the imperial palace deposed Patriarch John for having opposed Saint Gregory’s teaching together with Akindynos, and condemned Akindynos once more. Immediately afterwards John Kantakouzenos entered Constantinople. Saint Gregory came out of prison and, in the same year, was consecrated Archbishop of Thessalonica.
In August 1347 the synodal tomos by which Matthew of Ephesus was deposed invoked Canon 15 itself, together with Canon 3 of the Council of Ephesus, to defend the new Patriarch Isidore against the sentence that Patriarch John had passed on him. The link between this crisis and Canon 15 was thus made by the synod of the time itself.
In May 1351 a great synod held in the palace of Blachernae confessed Saint Gregory’s teaching as the faith of the Church and condemned Barlaam and Akindynos. In 1368, a few years after his repose, a synod presided over by Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos numbered him among the saints. The Church celebrates him on 14 November and on the Second Sunday of Great Lent.
The one whom the patriarch had anathematized was numbered among the saints, and the synods of the time recognized that the opposition to Patriarch John had been grounded in the faith.
The Measure of His Example
The example of Saint Gregory is true, and it carries its own measure within itself.
First, he broke communion for the sake of the faith. In the autumn of 1346 the hierarchs of his party accused the patriarch before the empress of greed, of favouring his relatives and of selling ordinations. Canon 15, however, condemns separation made “on the pretext of certain charges”, and the patriarch himself admitted that his commemoration had been broken off because he did not accept Saint Gregory’s teaching. A hierarch’s faults of conduct, however grave, do not fall under this example.
Second, Saint Gregory relied on a judgment already given. Barlaam’s error had been condemned by a synod before the patriarch went over to the side of those who were reviving it. Invoking his example does not, by itself, prove that a walling-off today is justified. Whoever invokes it must show what exactly his hierarch teaches, where he preaches it openly, and which teaching of the synods or the Fathers it contradicts.
The Risks for Those Who Follow His Example
The first risk concerns the judgment of the Church. Saint Gregory’s teaching was confirmed by the synod of 1347 and by the great synod of 1351 and received into the confession and the services of the Church, and his holiness was proclaimed in 1368. Whoever ceases today to commemorate his hierarch does not gain, by this act, the certainty that he is right. His grounds remain subject to the Church’s examination, and a future synod may confirm or reject them. If, after a canonical judgment founded on the apostolic and patristic faith, it is shown that the separation was made without the ground required by the canon and has broken the unity of the Church, the cleric is answerable for schism, and the first part of Canon 15 prescribes deposition for it.
Even in Saint Gregory’s time, vindication did not come of itself. There were synods that condemned him and synods that upheld him. In July 1347 Metropolitan Matthew of Ephesus and other opponents of his drew up a tomos against the February decision, and the synod of 1351 decisively confirmed Saint Gregory’s teaching, although opposition to it continued. An assembly of bishops does not decide the truth merely by having assembled: its decision must remain faithful to the apostolic teaching and be received by the Church. Saint Gregory waited years for this judgment. Whoever walls himself off today may not see it in his whole lifetime.
The second risk comes from within a man. The Church did not number Gregory among the saints simply because he ceased to commemorate the patriarch. When he entered the struggle with Barlaam, he had more than twenty years of monastic life behind him. Near Veroia, for five years, he spent five days a week in his cell, in stillness and prayer, coming out only on Saturday and Sunday for the Liturgy and for conversation with the brethren. His confession grew out of this life. Without prayer and repentance, the confession of one who breaks communion can become mixed with pride, with judging one’s neighbour and with bitterness, even when his words about the faith are right. Then it easily becomes a struggle between factions.
For Saint Gregory, breaking communion brought no worldly triumph. He paid for it with years of prison and with a patriarch’s anathema, not knowing whether he would live to see the day when the Church would vindicate him. From prison he continued to write for the truth, and after his release he shepherded a city that for a long time would not receive him. The Church honours him today as a confessor of the uncreated light. To those who fear for the faith in the present times he leaves a whole example. His zeal for the truth grew out of a life of prayer, and his humility was seen in the way he confessed: with faith, with patience in suffering, and resting on the teaching of the Fathers.
Sources
- Patriarch John XIV Kalekas, act of excommunication against Gregory Palamas and those of like mind: PG 150, 863–864 (cf. P. Chrestou, Γρηγορίου τοῦ Παλαμᾶ Συγγράμματα, vol. 2, Thessaloniki 1966, p. 37). The dating is debated: early 1347 according to the Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya; 1345–1346 according to A. Rigo.
- Tomos of Gregory Palamas’s adversaries (July 1347): PG 150, 877–891; critical edition in A. Rigo, 1347. Isidoro patriarca di Costantinopoli e il breve sogno dell’inizio di una nuova epoca, Vienna, 2020.
- Synodal tomos of August 1347 deposing Matthew of Ephesus (invoking Canon 15): A. Rigo, 1347. Isidoro patriarca…, pp. 150–154; discussion at pp. 80–81.
- Patriarch John XIV Kalekas, explanation of the tomos of 1341: PG 150, 900–903.
- Synodal tomos of 1341: PG 151, 679–692.
- Tomos of the synod of February 1347: PG 152, 1273–1284.
- Saint Gregory Palamas, Refutation of the Letter of Ignatius of Antioch, § 3, in P. Chrestou, Συγγράμματα, vol. 2, p. 627; EPE, Γρηγορίου τοῦ Παλαμᾶ Ἅπαντα τὰ ἔργα, vol. 3, Thessaloniki 1983, p. 608.
- Canon 15 of the First-Second Council of Constantinople (861), translated here from the Greek.
References to the PG are taken from the editions and studies cited, without direct comparison with the Migne text.
Studies consulted: Православная энциклопедия, article “Григорий Палама”; M. Jugie, “Palamite (controverse)”, 1932 (English translation online).
