Could Palamas become ‘the inheritance of all Christians’?

This chapter considers the treatment of Palamas in recent debates. A major obstacle to his reception is the polemical use made of him by Palamites and anti-Palamites. The methodologies adopted by modern scholars include the expository, the problematic, the antithetical, and the comparative. The problematic method has been the most fruitful, as used by Torstein Tollefsen (who presents the energeiai as the pluralization of the divine unity), Manuel Sumares (who discusses the capacity of creatures to receive divinity), Stelios Ramfos (who highlights the importance of notion of enhypostasia), and Christos Yannaras (who argues that essence and energy are both modes of existence). Recent colloquia have shown the difficulty of demonstrating compatibility between Palamas and the Western intellectual tradition, but Nikolaos Loudovikos argues ably for ‘contiguity’ between Aquinas and Palamas.