Apophatic or negative theology is not scepticism; it is the discipline of refusing to let any concept stand in for God. Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus and later Meister Eckhart all press it hard, and Eckhart pressed it hard enough to be condemned in 1329. The Eastern settlement came from the hesychast controversy: Barlaam of Calabria argued that if God is unknowable then monks claiming to see divine light were deluded, and Gregory Palamas answered with the distinction between the divine essence, which no creature can approach, and the divine energies, which are uncreated, are truly God, and are what deification consists of. Councils at Constantinople in the 1340s and 1351 backed Palamas, and the distinction is now a marker of Orthodox identity. The Latin West, working from Aquinas, denied the real distinction and reasoned instead by analogy — statements about God are neither literal nor equivocal but proportional. It is one of the deepest divides on the tree, and almost nobody in the pews on either side could state it.