Energies and Essence

Jenson has a neat summary and response to the Palamite distinction between energies and essence. Gregory, he notes, aimed to defend “Byzantine monastic teaching that the sanctified truly participate in God; that grace is not a mere matter of God’s effects upon us or our knowledge of and obedience to him, but is rather his ontological self-sharing with us.” Jenson thinks this is just fine.

But, “Palamas thought he should also reserve some final reality of God from creaturely participation,” and therefore introduced the distinction of energies and essence. Palamas could find the distinction in the Cappadocians, but there “these distinctions are flexible” and nowhere do the Cappadocians think of God’s ousia as anything but the divine life itself. Palamas uses Nyssa’s distinction to “differentiate God as he can be participated in from God as he remains immune to this.” As a result, “the ousia is not the deity of the identities and their mutual energies but has become ‘God himself,’ the chief reference of discourse about ‘the one God.’” For Gregory, “this entity is immune even to the life of the creature who is hypostatically one with the Son; also the events told by the gospel narrative do not tough it.”

The “disaster,” as Jenson calls is, is the notion that ” God himself is a static essence.” And the irony is that “Orthodoxy is here driven to a bluntly modalist doctrine: God himself is above the biblical narrative, which applies only to his activities.”