The Fixing of the Orthodox Tradition
The iconoclastic controversy was the last major doctrinal dispute within the Byzantine Church. Once it was settled, the Church entered a period of doctrinal stability. Any who might have disturbed the consensus which had been reached were now outside the bounds of the Empire, and therefore also of the Church.
Imperial policy, recognising the harmful effect doctrinal controversy had on the State as well as on the Church, encouraged conservatism rather than creative thinking in the Church. The De Fide Orthodoxa of St John of Damascus (c. 675-c. 749) referred constantly to what previous theologians had said, and from then on the tradition was faithfully handed on as a fully developed whole. The worship of the Church, too, became fixed. A period of creative writing in the eighth and ninth centuries, which produced liturgical texts of great beauty and spiritual depth, was followed by the standardisation and fixation of liturgical texts and rules, so that little development took place after the tenth and eleventh centuries.Only one further doctrinal controversy of any significance occurred. Mount Athos, in northern Greece, became from the tenth century the centre of Byzantine monasticism, and it was the one remaining home of speculative theological thinking. In the fourteenth century the hesychastic movement in monastic spirituality gave rise to a dispute as to the exact nature of the light which shone forth from Christ at the Transfiguration, and which some of the monks claimed to be able to see in prayer. Gregory Palamas (c. 1296-1359) defended the monks’ teaching against the attacks of the monk Barlaam, a Greek from Calabria who had come under the influence of Western nominalism and taught the complete unknowability of God. Gregory defended the method of prayer practised by the hesychasts, and affirmed the possibility of a real union with God through his deifying grace. He distinguished between the essence of God, which is unknowable, and his energies, consubstantial with his essence, through which he communicates himself to the world. At a council in Constantinople in 1341 Palamas’ views were upheld, and Barlaam condemned. His teaching was accepted by two more councils at Constantinople in 1347 and 1351, and became an integral part of Orthodox doctrine.