Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) remains today, as he was during his lifetime, a polarizing figure. For many Eastern Orthodox, his work represents the acme of Orthodox theology prior to its gradual infiltration and corruption by western influences following the fall of Constantinople. For many Western Christians, by contrast, he was a heretic who denied divine unity and simplicity. A search of his name on YouTube will reveal that these divergent views, animated largely (although not solely) by confessional divisions, remain alive today.

The present work offers a broad survey of the modern reception of Palamas, beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing to the present. The author also offers his own engagement with the major issues, ranging from the validity of Palamas's appeals to the church fathers to the interpretation of the light of the Transfiguration (held by Palamas to be uncreated and eternal) to the nature of divine-human communion. The work is written at a high level of scholarship and exhibits the author's considerable expertise in Greek patristic and modern Orthodox theology.

Part 1, occupying the first half of the book, surveys the historical reception of Palamas's thought. Although it has no particular polemical aim, it effectively lays to rest the myth that interest in Palamas vanished following the Turkish conquest and was revived only in service to an anti-Western agenda. The grain of truth behind this idea is that, due to the lack of translations into Russian and Slavonic, his works were little known in those areas of the Orthodox world. In the Greek-speaking church they remained widely influential, although even there in-depth study was hampered by the absence of printed editions. (In fact, the first Greek press in Ottoman territory was established by patriarch Dositheus II of Jerusalem precisely in order to promote the study of Palamas.) His works were first made widely available through the inclusion of a representative selection in Migne's Patrologia Graeca (1856–1857). A further impetus for study was provided by the “name-worshipper” controversy in Russia of 1912–1917 in which the condemned monks and their supporters appealed to Palamas. As Russell observes, the intense interest in Palamas among the Russian émigrés in Paris—Sergius Bulgakov, Kiprian Kern, Vladimir Lossky, and others—was simply a continuation of discussions that had begun before the Revolution.

Part 2, “Raising the Larger Questions,” is the more ambitious and, in my opinion, less successful part of the book. The issues debated by Palamas and his opponents are so deeply embedded in biblical and patristic exegesis that they do not readily lend themselves to a purely systematic treatment. Russell certainly makes a credible effort in this direction, offering insightful comments on a number of issues and a wide range of secondary literature. However, the selection and arrangement of topics seems rather arbitrary. Virtually nothing is said about Palamas's teaching on the role of the body in prayer, even though it is surely one of his most important legacies. Even on the more philosophical issues that are the main focus, it was not clear to me how “a participatory understanding of the divine mystery” (the subject of chapter 6) and “the reality of divine-human communion” (that of chapter 7) are supposed to be different.

The choice of a systematic over a developmental approach also has the unfortunate consequence that the central concept of the divine energies never really comes into focus. Palamas formed this concept by drawing together a number of themes present in earlier authors’ works: the gifts of the Spirit and divine-human synergy in St. Paul's writings, the Cappadocian understanding of the divine attributes, the divine processions and divine logoi in the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, the natural energies and “things around God” in Maximus the Confessor's writing, and patristic exegesis pertaining to the uncreated light. It is all too common to take just one or two of these as the real core of the idea while ignoring or dismissing the others. In the present case, Russell several times refers to energeia as a “Cappadocian term” (quite ignoring its usage by St. Paul) and seems to take Basil's Epistle 234 as Palamas's most definitive source (186). Most of the other sources are mentioned insofar as they figure in Palamas's appeals to patristic authority, but there is no attempt to understand them in their own right or to see what each contributed to the final synthesis.

Finally, let me touch on an issue that goes beyond matters of presentation to a fundamental difference of aim. Russell criticizes my own work on Palamas (Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom [Cambridge University Press, 2004]), along with that of the Greek philosopher Christos Yannaras (Metaphysics as a Personal Adventure: Christos Yannaras in Conversation with Norman Russell [St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2017]), as overly confrontational. Yannaras and I have argued (in very different ways) that the Greek patristic tradition culminating in Palamas's work offers a better way of understanding the relationship between God and creatures than does the Western theological tradition exemplified by authors such as Augustine and Aquinas. Russell remarks: “Despite the rigour of their arguments it is doubtful whether they will convince most Western Christians. A non-confrontational method is more likely to be effective” (230). Obviously, however, a great deal depends on what audience one has in mind in assessing what counts as “effective.” It seems to me that those who work primarily in ecclesiastical or theological circles often forget to what extent the great medieval theological syntheses are in the broader culture today simply a dead letter. In my own philosophy department, I doubt there is anyone (apart from me) who is even aware that Thomists still exist, much less anyone who takes Thomism seriously as a philosophical option. And the same could be said of Augustinianism, Scotism, Calvinism, and so on. In such an environment, if Palamas truly is radically different from traditional Western theological views—as I believe he is—then that is very much to the better.