Gregory Palamas

Lived

1296–1359

Era

Medieval

Where

Mount Athos and Thessalonica

Tradition

Eastern Orthodox

The distinction between God's essence and his energies

A monk of Mount Athos and later archbishop of Thessalonica, who defended the hesychast monks against the charge that their practice of inner prayer and their claim to perceive the divine light were delusion.

Why it matters

His answer — that God's essence is unknowable while his energies, God himself as he acts and gives himself, are genuinely encountered — was affirmed by councils at Constantinople in the 1340s and 50s and is settled Orthodox teaching. It is also one of the sharpest divergences between eastern and western theology, since the west never accepted the distinction, and it is why Orthodox accounts of salvation are framed as participation rather than as a verdict.

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.