Gregory Palamas

The Relationships between Scientific and Theological Discourses at the Crossroads between Medieval and Early Modern Times and the Historiography of Science

“…1290-1348), a Greek monk from Southern Italy, is the key figure through which to interpret the consequences for the science of the stars of the decisions Byzantine Orthodox authorities took at the 1351 Council of Constantinople on the question of the filioque (Demetracopoulos 2011). The convention sanctioned the theological doctrine of the Byzantine scholar Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) on divine substance and energies as official for the Orthodox Church, thus widening irredeemably the divide between the Eastern and Western Churches (Kapriev 2011;Rigo 2004b). This solution to a theological controversy coincided with a socio-historical turning point that involved a well-known political dispute within Byzantine society, culminating in the hegemony of the hesychasts in formal Byzantine culture.…”