Salonica Terminus. Fred A. Reed

a historian, “is an immediate intercourse with God, in which there exist no thoughts, ideas, images of the present or recollection of the past. This is the highest contemplation—the contemplation of God one and alone, the perfect ecstasy of mind and withdrawal from matter.”⁴⁰

      But in the second quarter of the century the practice abruptly redefined itself, combining the pursuit of punctiliously subtle doctrinal affairs with the adoption of meditative techniques reminiscent of those employed by Oriental mystics or Islamic Sufis, and probably influenced by them. It was only natural that Salonica, a mere day’s journey from the powerful monastic enclave of Mount Athos, would early on feel the impact of the newly revived quietist doctrine, which centered on the obscure but contentious question of the Procession of the Holy Spirit and sought to obtain for its followers a momentary vision of the uncreated light which Christ’s disciples are said to have beheld on Mount Tabor.⁴¹

      Barlaam the Calabrian would have none of it, and launched an energetic polemical exchange with the chief of the quietists, Gregory Palamas, a native of Constantinople who began his monastic progress on Mount Athos in the early years of the century. Palamas was a rarity: an articulate mystic whose irreproachably saintly behavior and life of personal privation attracted followers as much as did his beliefs. But in Barlaam he met his match. The Calabrian was a master theologian, with supreme oratorical gifts and a biting tongue. He heaped ridicule on the Hesychastes, attacking them in public meetings as parasites. They, he thundered, to the delight of Salonica’s pugnaciously free-thinking citizens, were heretics who were attempting to obtain knowledge of God through mystical techniques which contradicted the Greek heritage of rational examination and logical discourse. No, fired back Palamas, reason is powerless to grasp the verity of God. Only by purification of the heart through ascetic contemplation can the believer attain to divine light, source of all truth.⁴²