Palamism - Western Views - Rejection of Palamism

Rejection of Palamism

Historically, Western theologians have tended to reject Palamism, 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 twentieth century, Roman Catholic theologians generally rejected the contention that, in the case of God, the distinction between essence and energies is real rather than 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.

Western resistance to Palamism continued into first half of the twentieth century. 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".