Free Sailing from Byzantium by Colin Wells Page A

brilliant statesman, able general, aristocratic magnate, devout Hesychast, accomplished man of letters— Cantacuzenos was immune to the obscurantism that so often attached itself to Hesychast beliefs, as his earlier patronage of Barlaam shows. A book lover, Cantacuzenos opened himselfwide to theological speculation, even searched it out. When forced from office less than a decade later, he would become a monk and devote himself to literature in the classical mode, writing a history of his times in the style of Thucydides. The Hesychasts’ suspicions notwithstanding, imitation of classical Greek authors was always the height of literary aspiration for educated Byzantines, and Cydones, too, would win great fame for his mastery of it.
    Cydones began his employment as the emperor's chief secretary in charge of appointments, and rapidly made himself indispensable as both secretary and friend. Brilliant and prolific (his surviving letters, some 450 of them, take up three volumes of Greek and are a major historical source for late-fourteenth-century Byzantium), Cydones would walk in Barlaam's anti-Hesychast footsteps. In contrast with Barlaam's heavy tread, Cydones’ humanist slippers rustled softly through the corridors of power, even in the palace of a confirmed Hesychast such as Cantacuzenos. In a fifty-odd-year political career, Demetrius Cydones stayed light on his feet and nimble in dodging blows from the shadows.
    Not all would be so lucky, and there were many others in the humanist camp who shared fates similar to Barlaam's. The Hesychasts had another friend of Barlaam's excommunicated, the erudite Simon Atumano, who made his way west and converted to Catholicism in time to succeed his friend as bishop of Gerace; also like Barlaam, he briefly but unsuccessfully tutored some Italians in ancient Greek. The theologian Gregory Akindynos, a friend of both Barlaam and Palamas, began by trying to mediate between them but was soon persuaded on purely theological grounds to support Barlaam.
    Akindynos was more typical of the early anti-Hesychasts than Barlaam and Atumano, in that his wide classical learning did not instill in him any affinity for the Latins. Condemnedwith Barlaam in 1341 and excommunicated by another church council in 1347, Akindynos went into exile in the East and died soon afterward. Leadership of the anti-Hesychast group then fell to the polymath and historian Nicephoras Gregoras, also no friend of the Latins, who was condemned by a church council in 1351 and placed under house arrest in Constantinople.
    It was at this point—with the civil war over, Cantacuzenos still in power, and Palamas’ orthodoxy confirmed by several church councils—that Palamas can be considered to have won the controversy. From now on Hesychasts dominated the official structure of the Byzantine Orthodox Church. When Palamas died in 1358, he was widely mourned and quickly canonized; when Gregoras died sometime around 1360, his corpse was dragged through the city's streets to be jeered at by the devout populace.
    Byzantium had now made its choice. After long centuries, it had rejected the Outside Wisdom. Palamas’ victory had turned Barlaam away from Byzantium and toward the West, where his humanism was welcomed, not condemned. The pattern would repeat itself in coming decades, as Byzantine humanists found themselves less and less in sympathy with the direction Byzantium had chosen.
    Only after Hesychasm's victory was secure and it rose to control the church did humanistic opposition to it become more firmly associated with Western sympathies. Demetrius Cydones illustrates this, for his anti-Hesychasm—already clear in his letters to Barlaam in the 1340s—preceded his interest in the West, which arose after the church council that endorsed Hesychasm in 1351.
    His “Defense of His Own Faith,” written later, after his conversion to Catholicism, tells the story. In conducting the emperor's affairs, Cydones found himself encountering