The Christologies of the Hesychast Controversy

In this dissertation, an argument is made that the two main parties in the hesychast controversy–the Palamites and the anti-Palamites–had meaningfully different Christologies. While most research on the theology of the hesychast controversy has focused on the metaphysics of Gregory Palamas’s distinction between God’s essence and His energies, little work has been done on how the various approaches to this distinction play out in different theologies of Christ. This study seeks to understand whether Palamas and his disciples arrived at a Christology different from that of their opponents, as well as asking which of the two parties was more faithful to the Christology of Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, who in fourteenth-century Byzantium were seen as important norms of Christological belief. After establishing several fundamental aspects of Maximus’s and John’s Christologies that would be important to the hesychast controversy, this study proceeds to compare how various pairs of Palamites and anti-Palamites differently approach the person of Christ in their theology. The third chapter examines Gregory Palamas and Gregory Akindynos, the fourth Nikephoros Gregoras and Philotheos Kokkinos, and the sixth Prochoros Kydones and John VI Kantakouzenos. A brief detour is made in the fifth chapter to examine the exclusively anti-Palamite dispute between Isaac Argyros and Theodore Dexios. This study concludes not only that the Palamites and anti-Palamites ended up with different Christologies but also that the Palamites were more faithful to the Christologies of Maximus and John of Damascus. In particular, the Palamites articulated a more unitive Christology focused on the deification of Christ’s humanity whereas the anti-Palamites struggled to maintain the unity of Christ while also preserving a strict dichotomy between his humanity and divinity. The Palamites successfully incorporated the idea of Christ’s “theandric activity”—but the anti-Palamites never fully grasped the synergy of divinity and humanity in Christ.