GREGORIUS, an eminent Greek ecclesiastic, was born about the beginning of the fourteenth century, and was brought up at the court of Constantinoople. After imbibing for ten years the peculiar doctrines of the monks of Mount Athos, he shut himself up in a solitary cell near Berriac to practise these doctrines, and for the next ten years starved his body and mystified his brain by sitting in a dark corner, with his chin on his breast, and his eye fixed on his navel, in expectation of seeing a celestial light settle on that part of his frame. When Baarlam denounced these exercises, and ridiculed their observers with the nickname of Omphalopogchi ("navel-souls"), the zealous fanatic came forward as the champion of his sect. The controversy was referred to the ecclesiastical court of Constantinople, and Palamas retired from the post he had taken. At the councils which were severally held in 1341 and 1351, he pled the cause of his party, and so identified himself with the tenets he advocated that his fellow-sectarians were thenceforth called Palamites. The battle was now gained, and he retired to the see of Thessalonica. The time of his death is unknown. The published works of Palamas are Prosopopeia, or two judicial pleas of the body and soul against each other, published, with a Latin version by Combets, in his Auctarium Norissimum, folio, Paris, 1672; and a refutation of the statements of John Vecus, printed in the Opuscula Aurea of Petrus Arcadius, 4to, Rome, 1630.