Hesychasm - Western Christianity's View of Hesychasm - Roman Catholic Views

Roman Catholic Views

See also: Essence-Energies distinction and Catholic–Eastern Orthodox theological differences

While Constantinople experienced a succession of councils alternately approving and condemning doctrine concerning hesychasm considered as identified with Palamism (the last of the five senses in which, according to Kallistos Ware, the term is used), the Western Church held no council in which to make a pronouncement on the issue, and the word "hesychasm" does not appear in the Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum (Handbook of Creeds and Definitions), the collection of Roman Catholic teachings originally compiled by Heinrich Joseph Dominicus Denzinger.

Despite the fact that Palamism has never been officially condemned by the Catholic Church, Western theologians have tended to reject it, often equating it with quietism. This identification may have been motivated in part by the fact that "quietism" is the literal translation of "hesychasm". However, according to Gordon Wakefield, "To translate 'hesychasm' as 'quietism', while perhaps etymologically defensible, is historically and theologically misleading." Wakefield asserts that "the distinctive tenets of the seventeenth century Western Quietists is not characteristic of Greek hesychasm." Similarly, Kallistos Ware argues that it is important not to translate "hesychasm" as "quietism".

From Palamas's time until the 20th century, Roman Catholic theologians generally rejected the contention that, in the case of God, the distinction between essence and energies is real rather than, albeit with a foundation in reality, notional (in the mind). In their view, affirming an ontological essence-energies distinction in God contradicted the teaching of the First Council of Nicaea on divine unity. According to Adrian Fortescue, the Scholastic theory that God is pure actuality prevented Palamism from having much influence in the West. According to Fortescue, it was from Western Scholasticism that hesychasm's philosophical opponents in the East borrowed their weapons.

In the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1909, Simon Vailhé accused Palamas's teachings that humans could achieve a corporal perception of the Divinity and his distinction between God's essence and his energies as "monstrous errors" and "perilous theological theories". He further characterized the Eastern canonization of Palamas's teachings as a "resurrection of polytheism". Fortescue, also writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia, claimed that "the real distinction between God's essence and operation remains one more principle, though it is rarely insisted on now, in which the Orthodox differ from Catholics".

The later 20th century saw a remarkable change in the attitude of Roman Catholic theologians to Palamas, a "rehabilitation" of him that has led to increasing parts of the Western Church considering him a saint, even if uncanonized. John Meyendorff describes the twentieth-century rehabilitation of Palamas in the Western Church as a "remarkable event in the history of scholarship." Andreas Andreopoulos cites the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia article by Fortescue as an example of how Barlaam's distrustful and hostile attitude regarding hesychasm survived until recently in the West, adding that now "the Western world has started to rediscover what amounts to a lost tradition. Hesychasm, which was never anything close to a scholar's pursuit, is now studied by Western theologians who are astounded by the profound thought and spirituality of late Byzantium."

Some Western scholars maintain that there is no conflict between Palamas's teaching and Roman Catholic thought. Some Western theologians have incorporated the essence-energies distinction into their own thinking. For example, G. Philips asserts that the essence-energies distinction as presented by Palamas is "a typical example of a perfectly admissible theological pluralism" that is compatible with the Roman Catholic magisterium.

Jeffrey D. Finch claims that "the future of East-West rapprochement appears to be overcoming the modern polemics of neo-scholasticism and neo-Palamism".

According to Kallistos Ware, some Western theologians, both Roman Catholic and Anglican, see the theology of Palamas as introducing an inadmissible division within God; however, others have incorporated his theology into their own thinking, maintaining, as Jeffrey D. Finch reports, that there is no conflict between his teaching and Roman Catholic thought.

Pope John Paul II repeatedly emphasized his respect for Eastern theology as an enrichment for the whole Church, declaring that, even after the painful division between the Christian East and the See of Rome, that theology has opened up profound thought-provoking prospectives of interest to the entire Church. He spoke in particular of the hesychast controversy. The term "hesychasm", he said, refers to a practice of prayer marked by deep tranquillity of the spirit intent on contemplating God unceasingly by invoking the name of Jesus. While from a Catholic viewpoint there have been tensions concerning some developments of the practice, the Pope said, there is no denying the goodness of the intention that inspired its defence, which was to stress that man is offered the concrete possibility of uniting himself in his inner heart with God in that profound union of grace known as theosis, divinization.