Gregory Palamas on Essence and Energy
This is an excerpt from my last paper for the Medieval Theology independent study course I did, which I will write about as a whole in a different post. Our last paper was a reading report on Gregory Palamas. We read The Triads and had to reflect on a few topics within it. I chose trying to figure out the notorious distinction Gregory (following more or less the Eastern Tradition as a whole) posited between God's "essence," and God's "energies." Enjoy!
If
the texts attributed to Palamas are indeed all the work of his hand, then it is
quite likely that no one will ever be able convincingly to explain what Palamas
meant by the distinction of essence and energies in God, since it is not clear
that Palamas himself knew what he meant.
It
perhaps goes without saying that the pragmatic and often anti-intellectualist
zeal of much of contemporary Christianity would find itself with an
unexpectedly very awkward conversation partner should they be stuck in a room
talking to Gregory Palamas. The conversation
would begin well enough. Pleasantries would
be exchanged. Maybe a few passing
remarks on how odd it was that they all had—somehow—come to be locked in a room
together. “This feels a little
artificial,” one might remark, “like its just some pretext for something
else.” A few would nod in agreement or
shrug their shoulders, and the subject would quickly be dropped, never to be
mentioned again. And at the first
allusion to the name of Christ, genial interaction would commence.
And
the conversation would probably proceed for a bit without halter, trading on
many equivocations born both from the dialogue habits of strangers, and the
difference era, geography, and culture can play with the modes of common
vocabulary (assuming we can extend the implausibility of this scenario just a
bit more and just suppose by some miracle Gregory now speaks English). So Gregory could say to the pragmatic,
anti-intellectual Christians (prefaced with a deep, drawn out sigh), “I’m
having troubles with a philosopher friend of mine. He just doesn’t understand that Christianity
is all about union with Christ.” To
which the pragmatists would nod their heads vigorously, replying,
“Exactly! That’s exactly what we’re
saying. Christianity isn’t about
theology or philosophy, its just about loving Christ and loving others.” At which point another in the room would say,
“It is just so refreshing to know our God’s essence is love.” And it is at this point in the story, with
the words know and essence still lingering in the air,
where many of the pleasantries stop as Gregory, rising from his seat, replies
(beginning with a quote from Maximus Confessor):
“God infinitely transcends these
participable virtues an infinite number of times.” In other words, He infinitely transcends . .
. goodness, holiness, and virtue . . . thus neither the uncreated goodness, nor
the eternal glory, nor the divine life, nor things akin to these are simply the superessential essence of
God, for God transcends them all as Cause. (95)
Perhaps
recomposing himself after this outburst, looking with a bit of concern at the
mental hernias spreading like plague across the room, Gregory quickly adds, “but, we say He is life, goodness and so
forth, and give Him these names, because of the revelatory energies and powers
of the Superessential.” (95) But of course at that point it is too late,
his interlocutors no doubt now lie strewn about the floor in befuddlement (some
possibly in coma), and the rest of us are now left with the seemingly hopeless
task of clarifying the elusive distinctions of essence and energies in God.
Before
we plunge into the technicalities, we musnt forget the point of this whole
exercise is to reveal the very fissure that opened up between Barlaam and
Palamas, and that to say Christianity is all about following Christ is not
really to decide the matter of what Christianity means. Whereas Barlaam, much
like our somewhat hapless pragmatists, was more akin to believing that the true
Christian life was merely about a sort of mimetic imitation of Christ, given to
us as signs, Palamas saw Christianity as participation
in Christ, and ultimately the Trinitarian life of God Himself. Thus Barlaam says “this light [of Christ on
Mount Tabor] was a sensible light, visible through the medium of the air,
appearing to the amazement of all and then at once disappearing. One calls it ‘divinity’ because it is a
symbol of divinity.” (72-73). In this
sense, the Superessential God remains utterly beyond, apart from us and without
and above participation. A sorted of created, deictic signpost substituting for
the thing itself. Yet Palamas considers this, not just linguistic nonsense, but
the very undermining of the Gospel itself:
What a novel opinion! How can one
speak of a sensible and created divinity which lasts only a day . . .Can this
[light] be the divinity which (without ever being the true divinity [as Barlaam
argues]) triumphed over that venerable flesh akin to God? . . . what do you say
to this? Is it to such a divinity that
the Lord will be united, and in which He will triumph for endless ages? And will God be all in al for us, as the
apostles and Fathers proclaim, when in the case of Christ, divinity will be
replaced by sensible light? . . . .Why in the Age to Come should we have more
symbols of this kind, more mirrors, more enigmas? Will the vision face-to-face remain still in
the realm of hope? For indeed if even in
heaven there are still to be symbols, mirrors, enigmas, then we have been
deceived in our hopes, deluded by sophistry; thinking that the promise will
make us acquire the true divinity, we do not even gain a vision of
divinity. A sensible light replaces
this, whose nature is entirely foreign to God! (73)
To
begin to pry this opinion of Barlaam apart Palamas begins to repeat a dilemma: “How
can this light be a symbol, and if it is, how can it be called divinity? For the drawing of a man is not humanity, nor
is the symbol of an angel the nature of an angel.” (73) And goes on, “every symbol derives from the
nature of the object of which it is a symbol, or belongs to an entirely
different nature. Thus when the sun is
about to rise, the dawn is a natural symbol of its light, and similarly heat is
a nature symbol of the burning power of fire.”
(75) Palamas then uses a very
interesting word: symbols of the same nature as that signified are “connatural.” The word itself is reminiscent of the vocabulary
used in Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa.
Andrew Radde-Gallwitz notes both “connatural,” and “concurrent,” are
used by the brothers, borrowed as concepts from earlier philosophy, to indicate
where “two [or more] items stand in a necessary relationship, such that if one
exists, so does the other.” And
“Simplicius [for example] says that ‘at the same time that the fire came to be,
it possessed upward movement as concurrent with its substance.’”[2] Thus while we did not have access to the
Greek of Palamas’ text, it is nonetheless telling that Palamas uses a similar
example of fire and heat alongside the term translated into English as
“connatural” (75, 79), thus suggesting the similarity to Radde-Gallwitz’ analysis.
Palamas
seems to affirm this further as he writes, “So a natural symbol always
accompanies the nature which gives them being, for the symbol is natural to
that nature.” Thus “if the light of
Thabor is a symbol, it is either a natural or a non-natural one. If the latter, then it either has its own
existence, or is a phantom without subsistence.
But if it is merely an insubstantial phantom, then Christ never really
was, is or will be such as He appeared on Thabor,” (75). And if it is not a
phantom but has independent existence, “separate from the nature of He Whom it
signifies, of Whom it is only a symbol—then let [he who argues this] show where
and of what kind this reality is, which is shown by experience to be
unnaproachable . . .” (77) The argument
appearing to be that if this supposedly created light is shown to be
unnaproachable (as Gregory shows) then it would be equal in unnaproachability
to the uncreated God. But of course this
is absurd, so their connatural continuity must be accepted.
Thus
a first step has been taken to understand a bit about the energies. They are “connatural,” with God—that is,
necessary corollaries to the superessential nature of God, and not something
created. Gregory imparts another
clue. They are “enhypostatic,” a term
that perhaps makes us feel we have taken two steps back and only one
forward. It appears that Gregory uses
the term to indicate both that the
uncreated light of God “has permanence and stability,” (78) and to signify negatively that it is not
identical to the essence, as he is so fond of repeating. This is a sort of tantalizing suggestion,
given the significance of the term hypostatic.
It appears only in hints and fragments, but the energies of God as
manifestations appear as corollaries to God’s “personal” encounter with us,
which is to say despite “energies,” being quite impersonal sounding, that they
are enhypostatic indicates they are
meant to be a tool to describe personal
activity, that is, the energies only “have permanence and stability,” in the hypostases of the Father, Son and
Spirit (i.e. enhypostatic can be glossed: the energies are hypostatic only in
participating in—en—the hypostases of
the Trinity). Gregory gives us several
clues of this. For example:
Perhaps [Barlaam] will say it is
‘through the essence’ that God is said to possess all these powers in Himself
in a unique and unifying manner. But, in
the first place, it would be necessary to call this reality ‘God’ for such is
the term we have received from the Church.
When God was conversing with Moses, He did not say ‘I am the essence,’
but ‘I am the One Who is.’ Thus it is
not the One Who is who derives from the essence, but essence which derives from
Him, for it is He who contains all being in Himself. (98)
And earlier Palamas
writes, “These, then, are the essential powers; as to the
Superessential . . . that is the
Reality which possesses these powers and gathers them into unity in itself.”
(81) The energies have a sort of
coherence brought about by God as Subject (hypostasis). John Zizioulas has a helpful comment
regarding the Cappadocians that appears to be helpful here as well:
D. Wendebourg assumes too quickly .
. .that, because the Cappadocian Fathers distinguished between the essence and
the energies of God and declared the impossibility of passing beyond them to
the divine ousia, they automatically
excluded the hypostases from direct involvement in human history. Such an assumption seems to overlook the
insistence of the Cappadocians not only on the distinction between essence and
energy, but also on that between essence and hypostasis. This allows them to keep the essence of God
beyond direct contact with the world while bringing the hypostases into such a
contact. It is at this point that I
disagree with Lossky and the Neopalamites, who tend to exhaust God’s
soteriological work with the divine energies and undermine the involvement of
the divine persons in salvation.[3]
While
Zizioulas cautions against interpreting Palamas and the Cappadocians in the
same way, I think it is nonetheless acceptable, given the evidence just
presented, to affirm at least something similar is happening in Palamas. The energies are enhypostatic manifestations
of God, and as such are a grammar meant to display our ontological and personal
participation in a personal though transcendent God, even if some of this sense
may get a little lost amongst Gregory’s lengthy focus on the energy/essence
distinction.
This
leads into the nature of that distinction itself, which will also elaborate on
the distinction between the Cappadocians and Palamas that Zizioulas was hinting
at. What sense can we make of the
distinction? While utilizing biblical
terms like energeia, the difference nonetheless at first glance
seems contrived. Yet Vladimir Lossky
helpfully gives the summary that it is a distinction born from the necessity to
hold in tension that “God. . .is at the same time totally inaccessible and
really communicable to created beings,” and “neither of these terms [can be] excluded
or minimized in any way.”[4] It is in other words, as we saw above, a
device necessary to ensure both that
we can participate in God, and that it is indeed the transcendent God in whom we participate. Yet this is not the only antinomy. Another, elaborated by Lossky:
What is the nature of the
relationship by which we are able to enter union with the Holy Trinity? If we were able at a given moment to be
united to the very essence of God and
to participate in it even in the very least degree, we should not at the moment
be what we are, we should be God by
nature. God would no longer be
Trinity but myrihypostatos or
‘myriads of hypostases’; for He would have as many hypostases as there would be
persons participating in His essence.
God is and therefore remains inaccessible in his essence. But can it be said that it is one of the
three Persons that we enter into
union? This would be the hypostatic
union proper to the Son alone, in whom God becomes man . . .[5]
While
this could be something of a false way to state the problem (as we saw with
Zizioulas’ distaste for Lossky’s “neo-Palamism,”) it nonetheless does seem to
be generally helpful to understand the thought process of Gregory. The only
option, of course, is that we participate in God via God’s energies. However this “third” option is mitigated
slightly by the fact (which Lossky either overlooks or does not consider
important) that, as we have seen, the energies are enhypostatic and are fully
expressive of, even if not identical with, the divine essence and persons.
Which
brings us to a point that we will close with.
Just what, exactly, are the energies then? Palamas is adamant that 1.) they are not
created (97 et al) 2.) They are enhypostatic.
3.) They are as we have seen “connatural,” expressions of God’s essence
4.) They “are numerous . . . but in no way diminish the notion of simplicity .
. . [nor] cause any detriment to the simple nature of God.” (78). Right away this list as it stands so far can
rule out conceptualism, which is to say the energies cannot really be likened
to be multiple only in our conception
of them. Yet how do they not violate simplicity? For energies appear in Palamas to be
something different that essence and different
from each other. Yet Palamas insists on
simplicity being upheld. Indeed in an
odd way Palamas has to count on simplicity to assure the continuity of
essence/energy in order to maintain the very purpose of the distinction: our
true participation in the truly transcendent God. What is to be made of the claim to the
integrity of simplicity then?
Palamas gives no extended argument, and indeed either does
not really see this as a problem or considers the few examples he does give to
be sufficient for his purposes.
Particularly interesting is if we go back to his discussion of
connatural signs. Heat, for example, is
a connatural sign of fire—it is its energy, so to speak. Heat is simultaneous the connatural sign of
fire, while nonetheless being conceptually distinct from it. In modern logic this is what is known as a
“modal property,” which is to say formally distinguishable concepts which
nonetheless constitute a single continuous object. Modal properties are taken from Aristotelian
theories of hylomorphism, or objects as compounds of matter and form. Consider a bronze statue of Athena. On the one hand, it would appear
that we must recognize at least two material objects in the region
occupied by the statue. For presumably the statue cannot survive the process of
being melted down and recast whereas
the lump of bronze can. On the other hand, our ordinary
counting practices lead us to recognize only one material object. Given that Palamas fairly directly links this
idea of an energy and sign connatural to nature and applies it to God, it is
safe to say that the energies are something
like modal properties of the essence.
We can quote Gregory here to see the parallel: “The capacity of fire to
burn, which has as its symbol the heat accessible to the senses, becomes its
own symbol, for it is always accompanied by this heat, yet remains a single
entity, not undergoing any duplication; but it always uses heat as its natural
symbol, whenever an object capable of receiving heat presents itself.” (79)
This leads
to two more interesting observations on just what we can make of this mind
jarring distinction. The first is
the non-duplication of the nature in the connatural sign. The fire does not undergo duplication in the
heat, its natural sign, but remains a single thing. This is the nature of a modal property. Gregory himself says as much: “Even if we
affirm that this energy is inseparable from the unique divine essence, the
Superessential is not for that reason composite; without doubt, no simple
essence would exist if it were so, for on would search in vain for a natural
essence without energy” (82) i.e. even normal non-superessential natures are
not rendered asunder by their various energies, a fortiori God is not less of a unity because of His energies. It also indicates that the properties of the energeia do not have what Frege calls
“sortal characteristics,” that is, in naming the property one has not also
named the logical conditions in which that property could be quantified or
numbered. Which is to say in naming the
criterion of identity of an energy (i.e. Palamas’ list: “inaccessible,
immaterial, uncreated, deifying, eternal . . .” – p.80) we have not thereby
also listed the conditions which would enumerate each as non-compossible with
the others. Each “de-nominates” a
quality without “de-lineating” it, so to speak.
Hypothetically,
one could imagine Palamas saying that multiple (indeed, infinite) energeia do not violate simplicity because
there is no criterion possible in which one could “turn them against
eachother,” so to speak. Each energeia
is coextensive with the essence, even if the term is not identical to the essence.
Palamas has an affinity to this way of putting it even if he does not
quite word it so: “But since God is entirely present in each of the divine
energies we name Him from each of them [i.e. each are coextensive with His
essence] although it is clear He transcends them [i.e. they are not identical
to the essence]” (96). Radde-Gallwitz notes a similar distinction in Gregory of
Nyssa where Nyssa deals with plurality and simplicity by noting that “goods are
only limited by their opposite,” i.e. none of these modal properties are
opposites of the other, therefore none limit the other and each, even if
various, are all nonetheless coextensive with the essence, even if none are
logically identical with it. To these
Radde-Gallwitz gives the name “propria,” of the essence. “Propria strictly speaking are neither
accidental nor predicated in answer to ‘what is it?’ They are inherent in natures and necessarily
so, without being definitional.”[6] He cites Porphyry’s use of the term propria in relation to humans and
laughter. Man is the animal that laughs
and each are coextensive: if man, then laughter, if laughter, then man. But laughter does not answer the question:
“what is man?”
And
so we see at least a hint of how their multiplicity does not interfere with
simplicity. But there is another
hint. Modal properties only display
their multiplicity in an exterior relation.
Heat may be a connatural sign for fire, but unless there is a body to
heat, heat will never manifest itself (Palamas says so explicitly on
p.89). He applies this analogy and
transfers it to Deification, one of the energies. “Deification is likewise everywhere ineffable
present in the essence and inseparable from it, as its natural power. But just as one cannot see fire, if there is
no matter to receive it, nor any sense organ capable of perceiving its luminous
energy, in the same way one cannot contemplate deification if there is no
matter to receive the divine manifestation.” (89) And earlier Palamas notes:
“for as St. Basil tells us, he alone knows the energies of the Spirit who has
learnt of them through experience.”
(87) To this catenae we might add: “In the first place, that essence is one,
even though the rays are many, and are
sent out in a manner appropriate to those participating in them, being
multiplied according the varying capacity
of those receiving them.” (99). Thus
while Palamas insists the energeia are uncreated, he also appears to on
occasion speak of their multiplicity as manifest only from our standpoint of
experience of them. Thus the
multiplicity of the modal properties, while always connatural qualities of the
essence, nonetheless perform specific functions only in relation to finite
creation and humans, who can only interact with one or another modal property
at a given time. Just as when I burn my
hand with fire: the unity of fire is not compromised, though I am being
affected by one particular modal aspect, namely heat.
[1] David Bentley Hart, “The Hidden and the Manifest:
Metaphysics After Nicaea,” in Orthodox
Readings of Augustine ed. Aristotle Papanikolaou and George E. Demacopoulos
(New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 212n.39.
[2] Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine
Simplicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 160.
[3] John Zizioulas, Communion
and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York:
T&T Clark, 2006), 138-139n.80.
[4] Vladimir Lossky, The
Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1976), 68.
[6] Radde-Gallwitz, Divine
Simplicity, 201.
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