(a) The highest goal for human beings is to participate in God.
Palamas distinguishes between different senses of participation in God. The
weakest sense is the way in which a cause is present in its effect. All created
things participate in God by virtue of being products of divine action. This is
the passive sense of participation. But there is also a dynamic sense (drawn
from the Christianized Nepolatonism of Dionysius the Areopagite) in which a
superior reality acts on an inferior in a transformative manner in order to
effect the relationship of participation. There are thus different degrees of
participation, the highest of which is that of the saints, who are transformed
by God through leading lives that open them to participation in divine glory.
(b) Participation in God entails a distinction between the divine
essence and the divine energies. The very nature of participation requires
two terms, the participator and the participated. Without a continuing duality,
participation becomes absorption. But what is in which the saints participate?
It was axiomatic (as taught by Dionysius the Areopagite) that the ousia of
God (his essence, substance, or being—‘what God is’) was beyond all
participation. But his energeiai (his energies, powers, or operations—‘what
God does’) enable him to be known and experienced, which is another way of
saying that he can be participated in. Yet the distinction between the essence
and energies is not merely epistemological. The simplicity of God is not
absolute. We already make distinctions in God with regard to the persons or
hypostases. The glory of God, as experienced at the Transfiguration, was
accessible to the sense, and therefore, being finite, could not be the same as
the divine essence. We must therefore distinguish between the ‘essence’ of God
and his ‘energies’ without making the distinction and ontological one.
‘Essence’ and ‘energies’ are not two separate ‘things’ but two different modes
in which the whole of God is wholly present.
(c) The essence-energies distinction does not result in polytheism.
Barlaam asked Palamas whether his essence-energies distinction did not amount
to positing a higher and a lower divinity. Palamas initially thought that there
was a sense in which this might be said (on the authority of Dionysius the
Areopagite), but quickly retraced and strongly maintained to the end of his
life that there was no higher or lower divinity. The accusation of polytheism
was one that he constantly fought against but which refused to go away. At the
council of 1351 he felt obliged to make a formal declaration that he did not
hold and had never held that there was a multiplicity of deities in the Holy
Trinity. Yet his characterization of the energies as ‘deities’ or ‘divinities’
(theotētes), although reflecting the usage of the Cappadocians and
others who spoke of the divine attributes as theotētes kept the
accusation alive down to modern times.
(d) Grace is both uncreated and created. Grace (charis)
has more than one meaning. On the natural level it signifies physical and
intellectual beauty. On the supernatural level it is both the giving of the
gift by the Holy Spirit and the reception of the gift by the believer. Beyond
that it is also the splendour of the Trinty manifested to the deified. The
distinction between the gift as an act of giving and the gift as something
received is fundamental. The former (the Holy Spirit in operation) is
uncreated; the latter (as the grace received) is created. If the outpouring of
grace is made a creature, a barrier is erected between the believer and God
which makes divine-human communion impossible.
(e) The divine-human communion brought about by grace is consummated
in deification. Palamas declared after his vindication by the Council of
1347 that the essence of his dispute with Barlaam lay in the conflicting
assessments of the ability of grace to deify, to raise the believer to
participation in the divine. This for Palamas (following Maximum the Confessor)
was the purpose of the Incarnation. The purpose of the Christian life, by
extension, was therefore communion with God in its fullness, a communion which
can begin by grace even in this life. Grace deifies because grace is the Holy
Spirit himself in action, who first brings about the divine rebirth of baptism
and then enables the believer by the imitation of Christ to partake of God, a
partaking which is nothing less than union with God. But union cannot take
place with the hypostasis of God, or through the merging of the divine and
human essences. Hypostatic union of the human with the divine belongs to the
Son alone. Logically, then, if essential and hypostatic union are excluded,
what remains is union with the divine energy, with grace-in-action. Those, like
Akindynos, who deny that union on this level was the purpose of the Incarnation
deprive us of salvation in terms of deification. The barrier that Akindynos
raised between humanity and God by equating the energies with the Son and the
Spirit, or by denying them altogether, was the reason for the confirmation of
his earlier condemnation by the council of 1351. (Norman Russell, “General
Introduction,” in Gregory Palamas: The Hesychast Controversy and the Debate
with Islam Documents Relating to Gregory Palamas [Translated Texts for
Byzantinists 8; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022], 22-24)