Kallistos Ware:

"...the basic Cappadocian principle that, in their operations *ad extra*. the three persons of the Godhead always act together. As Gregory Palamas states in his Confession of Faith submitted to the 1351 Council and formally endorsed by it:

[God] is not revealed in his essence (*ousia*), for no one has ever seen or described God's nature (*physis*); but he is revealed in the grace (*charis*), power (*dynamis*) and energy (*energeia*) which is common to Father, Son and Spirit. Distinctive to each of the three is the person (*hypostasis*) of each, and whatever belongs to the person. Shared in common by all three are not only the transcendent essence -- which is altogether nameless, unmanifested and imparticipable, since it is beyond all names, manifestation and participation -- but also the divine grace, power, energy, radiance, kingdom and incorruption whereby God enters through grace into communion and union with the holy angels and the saints.

"It will be noted that in this passage St Gregory treats the term *energeia* as equivalent to certain words found in the New Testament. The energy of God is his power, grace or kingdom. Thus the terms *energeia* and *dynamis* are not to be contrasted, as in the Aristotelian usage, but should be equated, as indeed they seem to be in several scriptural texts (Ep 3:7; Ph 3:21; Col 1:29). The identification of *energeia* with *charis* is of particular importance, and shows that the Orthodox teaching on the divine energies embodies a theology of grace. In thus equating grace with the uncreated energy of God, St Gregory and the 14th-century Councils seem to exclude the notion of `created grace' that is found in Western Scholastic theology. Careful investigation would be needed in order to establish whether the discrepancy here is merely verbal or involves a matter of doctrinal significance" (Kallistos Ware, _God Hidden and Revealed: The Apophatic Way and the Essence-Energies Distinction_, Eastern Churches Review 7(2):125-136(1975) (pp.130-131).

Christos Yannaras:

Christos Yannaras describes the development of the "man-centred `Humanism' of the Scholastics" ("derived in the medieval West fundamentally from Law") which objectivized "the truth concerning the world": When theology, as a method of demonstration, objectivizes and externalizes knowledge - when it treats truth as an object external to the understanding and excludes truth as an event within a personal *relationship* - then it also excludes the possibility of a personal vision of the world. It excludes the possibility of a personal relationship with the inner principle (*logos*) of existent things - a relationship, that is to say, with the revelation of the personal Energy of God in the creation. (The rejection by Western theologians of the distinction between the Essence and the Energies of God is a typical consequence of the rationalizing of theology, and completes the process whereby truth is no longer understood as a personal relationship.)...The world loses its human dimension, and our interpretation of the world ceases to reveal the personal Energy of God. A line of demarcation is drawn separating created *essence* from the uncreated *Essence*, the empirically knowable from the empirically unknowable, reality that can be perceived and measured from mental supposition; and so, on the fundamental level, God is separated from the world" (Christos Yannaras, _Scholasticism and Technology_, Eastern Churches Review 6:162-169(1974) (pp.162-163, 165-166).

Vladimir Lossky:

"Western theology...establishes...distinctions foreign to eastern theology: such as that between the light of glory and the light of grace--both created; and between other elements of the `supernatural order' such as the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the infused virtues, and habitual and actual grace. Eastern tradition knows no such supernatural order between God and the created world, adding, as it were, to the latter a new creation. It recognizes no distinction, or rather division, save that between the created and the uncreated. For eastern tradition the created supernatural has no existence. That which western theology calls by the name of the *supernatural* signifies for the East the *uncreated*--the divine energies ineffably distinct from the essence of God. The difference consists in the fact that the western conception of grace implies the idea of causality, grace being represented as an effect of the divine Cause, exactly as in the act of creation; while for eastern theology there is a natural procession, the energies, shining forth eternally from the divine essence...Here we are faced with a mode of divine being to which we accede in receiving grace; which, moreover, in the created and perishable world, is the presence of the uncreated and eternal light, the real omnipresence of God in all things, which is something more than His causal presence--`the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not' (John i, 5)" (Vladimir Lossky, _The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church_, Cambridge and London: James Clarke & Co., Ltd, 1957 and reprints [French 1944], pp.88-89).

June, 1996

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Index