Friday, April 19, 2024

Norman Russell on the Main Characteristics of Palamite Theology

  

(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)

 

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