Essence and Energies: Being and Naming God in St Gregory Palamas

233 Pages·2022·5.296 MB·English

by  Tikhon Pino

Essence and Energies: Being and Naming
God in St Gregory Palamas
St. Gregory Palamas (ca. 1296–1357) is among the most well-known and cel-
ebrated theologians of Late Byzantium. This book provides a comprehensive
account of the essence–energies distinction across his twenty-five treatises
and letters written over a twenty-year period.
An Athonite monk, abbot, and later Metropolitan of Thessalonica,
Gregory is remembered especially for his distinction between God’s essence
and energies, and his celebrated doctrine still generates a great deal of debate.
What does Palamas actually mean by the term energies? Are they ‘activities’
that God performs, and if so, how can they be eternal and uncreated? Indeed,
how could God be simple if he possesses energies distinct from his essence?
Going beyond the Triads and the One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, this book
explores Palamas’s answers to these long-standing questions by analyzing
all the treatises produced by Palamas between 1338 and 1357. It seeks to
understand what Palamas means when he speaks of God’s energies, how he
seeks to prove that they are distinct from the divine essence, and how he
explains that this distinction in no way violates the unity and simplicity of
the one God in Trinity.
Essence and Energies is a useful resource for upper-level undergraduates,
postgraduates, and scholars interested in Byzantine theology in the four-
teenth century.
Tikhon Pino is Assistant Director of the Pappas Patristic Institute at Holy
Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. He holds a PhD from Marquette
University, an MTS from Holy Cross, and a BA in Classics from the Catholic
University of America. He has published widely on the Greek theological
tradition, specializing in the reception of patristic thought in Late Byzantium.

Essence and Energies: Being
and Naming God in St Gregory
Palamas
Tikhon Pino
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 Tikhon Pino
The right of Tikhon Pino to be identified as author of this work has
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pino, Tikhon Alexander, author.
Title: Essence and energies : being and naming God in St. Gregory Palamas /
Tikhon Pino.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series:
Routledge research in Byzantine studies | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022016407 (print) | LCCN 2022016408 (ebook) | ISBN
9781032244792 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032244808 (paperback) | ISBN
9781003278757 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Gregory Palamas, Saint, 1296-1359. | Orthodox Eastern
Church--Doctrines--History. | God (Christianity)--Attributes. | God
(Christianity)--History of doctrines--Middle Ages, 600-1500.
Classification: LCC BX395.P3 P56 2023 (print) | LCC BX395.P3 (ebook) |
DDC 281.9--dc23/eng/20220708
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016407
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016408
ISBN: 978-1-032-24479-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-24480-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-27875-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003278757
Typeset in Times New Roman
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
For Daria, Markie, and Izzie

Contents
Preface xi
List of Abbreviations xii
Introduction 1
The Scope of the Essence–Energies Distinction 2
The Scope, Outline, and Structure of this Study 5
Notes 7
1 The Interpretation of the Essence-Energies Distinction
and the Complete Writings of St Gregory Palamas 10
Essence and Energies in Modernity 10
The Roman Catholic Critique: Early Modern Scholarship on
Palamas 11
Reading More of Palamas: Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-
Century Scholarship 13
Bulgakov, Florovsky, and the Rise of Neo-Palamism 15
Debating Essence and Energies Today 20
The Last Twenty Years 21
The Need for New Research 24
Premises and Methodology of this Study 25
The Whole Palamas: Essence and Energies across the Complete
Corpus 25
The Limits of the Triads and One Hundred and Fifty Chapters 28
The Writings against Akindynos (1341–1347) 29
After Akindynos 31
Notes 34
viii Contents
2 Understanding the Language of Essence and Energies 50
Introduction 50
Ousia 50
Οὐσία and Nature 51
The Aristotelian Dimensions of Οὐσία 52
God Beyond Names 53
Apophatic and Cataphatic Theology 55
Energeia 57
The Divine Energy Par Excellence: The Uncreated Light
and the Glory of Thabor 57
The Other Divine Energies 58
Beyond the Language of ‘Energies’ 60
Generic Equivalences of Energy 61
The Uncreated Powers of God 61
‘The Things around the Essence’ 63
Natural and Essential Properties 66
Energies as Nature Itself 67
All That the Father Has 68
Products of the Divine Nature 69
The Divine Predicates 69
The Energies and the Divine Processions 70
Conclusion 72
Notes 73
3 Activities that Begin and End? Energies as the Actuality and
Actualization of God 86
Introduction 86
Actualization ad extra: Distinguishing the Power from its
Manifestation 86
The Gifts of the Spirit: Grace and its Effects 86
Activities that Begin and End? 88
Nuancing Divine Activity: Energies and their Manifestation 89
The Language of Cessation and Rest 91
Dynamis, Energeia, and the Problem of Actualization, Motion, and
Change 94
Actualization ad intra: The Eternal Actus of God 96
Actualization as the Inner Motion of Being 96
Energeia as First Actuality: Divine Power as Actus Purus 98
Conclusion 99
Notes 100
Contents ix
4 Distinguishing Essence and Energies 106
Introduction 106
Antinomy, or the Coincidence of Opposites 108
One and Not One 110
Many Energies 111
Difference among the Energies 113
The Experience of God 115
Known and Yet Unknown 115
Seen and Unseen 116
Participated and Unparticipated 117
A Part of God 118
Nature and Will: The Necessary and the Contingent 121
Lexical Arguments: The Energies ‘of’ the Essence 123
The Appeal to Specific Energies 125
Conclusion 125
Notes 126
5 Divine Simplicity and the Unity of Essence and Energies 135
Introduction 135
A Single Divinity of the One God: Engaging the Charge of
Ditheism 138
The Language of Multiple Divinities 138
Calling the Divine Energy ‘Divinity’ 141
One Godhead in Essence and Energies 142
The True Ditheism of the Barlaamites: Rejecting the Unity
of the Uncreated 143
True and False Conceptions of Simplicity 145
That ‘Being’ Is Not Compounded by ‘Having’ 145
The False Dichotomy of Substance and Accidents 147
Energies versus Essential Differences 149
Energies, Qualities, and Pathos 152
Composition as the Combination of Multiple Substances 153
The Question of a ‘Real Distinction’ 156
Synonymity and the Language of Res 157
A Notional Distinction 159
Conclusion 161
Notes 162