BARLAAM di SEMINARA. — Theologian and scientist of the 14th century, b. around 1290 at Seminara (Calabria) and d. as bishop of Gerace in 1350. Contrary to the generally held opinion until our own day, B. was not born in the Catholic Church, but in schism (cf. his testimony in one of his pamphlets against the dogma of the procession of the Holy Spirit ab utroque, the 7th in the series, in cod. Parisinus graec. 1218, fol. 506v
of the 15th century). As a young man he received a thorough education in one of the Calabrian monasteries nominally dependent upon some Catholic bishop of the Byzantine rite, but in fact faithful to the dissident patriarchate of Byzantium. Having moved to Constantinople in 1326–27 as a teacher of the sciences in the monastery of St. Saviour, he soon became its abbot. He was also appointed professor of theology and patristic exegesis at the Imperial University, thereby arousing the jealousy of Nicoforo Gregoras, who challenged him to a public scholarly disputation. Gregoras reports this, having published his Florentios to demonstrate that he had defeated the Calabrian. After a stay in Thessalonica, B. was recalled to Constantinople to negotiate the union together with the legates of Pope Giovanni XXII.
It was then that he composed his 21 pamphlets against the Latins (PG 151, 1249–53; the titles and incipits of the treatises).
Some of these pamphlets were criticized by Gregorio Palamas. Perhaps for this reason B. shortly afterward wrote against the method of prayer of the hesychasts (v.) of Mount Athos, contaminated by illuminism, and against the new theology of Palamism. The dissident Byzantine patriarch intervened at that point (1341), and B., disavowed, had to retract his position. Humiliated, B. returned to the West, where in 1339 he had been at the papal court of Avignon as legate of Andronico III, who was demanding a crusade against the Turk from the Pope. Nothing was achieved because the Pope made union with the Roman See a preliminary condition. B.’s ideas on this question are known to us from two speeches composed at that time and recently published (C. Giannelli, in Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati, III [Studi e Testi, 123], p. 52, under the title: Un progetto di B. Calabro per l'unione delle Chiese), which should not be confused with the minutes of the session held at Avignon, from which Allatius gives excerpts (PG 151, 1331–43).
At Avignon B. formed a friendship with Petrarca, who received lessons from him in Platonic philosophy. These contacts and his studies of the dogmatic discrepancies between East and West led B. to become a Catholic. It was Petrarca who urged him to take this step in 1342, again at Avignon, where B. had returned once more. Thanks to his influential friend, B. obtained a pension from the papal court and, somewhat later, the Byzantine-rite bishopric of Gerace, near his native Seminara. Consecrated at Avignon by Cardinal Bertrando del Poggetto, he was recalled to the court once again in 1346 for a mission to the Byzantine empress Anna of Savoy, then regent. The matter undoubtedly concerned religious union, but the triumph of Giovanni Cantacuzeno in 1347 caused everything to collapse. B. returned to Gerace, where he died.
Numerous works of his have survived, many of them still unpublished, and almost always brief, though dense in content. Among the lost books, his Contro i Messaliani, that is, against the Palamists, should be mentioned. Having become a Catholic, B. refuted his own earlier positions concerning the primacy of the Pope and the procession of the Holy Spirit. Three of his pamphlets (PG 151, 1255 ff.) constitute a noteworthy defense of Catholicism. Among the published works, we should also mention: 1) Two books on ethics according to the Stoics, in Latin (PG 151, 1341–64); 2) Λογιστικὴ, or Aritmetica ragionata in 6 libri (Strasbourg 1572); 3) Commentarius arithmeticus secundi libri Euclidis (published among the Opera omnia of Euclid in the Biblioth. classic. graecor. et latinor. Teubneriana, of Leipzig); 4) Seven letters on the beginnings of the hesychast controversy (ed. G. Schirò in Archivio storico per la Calabria, 1–8 [1931–38]; the edition is unfortunately defective).
date de sa mort, in Echos d'Orient, 39 (1940), pp. 100–25. On the works of B. cf. Fabricius Harlis, Bibliotheca graeca, XI, pp. 462–70. Martino Jugie