Hypostasis, Essence, and Energy.

The distinction — a real distinction — between divine “essence” and divine “energy” is made unavoidable in the context of the doctrine of “deification,” which implies a “participation” of created man in the uncreated life of God whose essence remains transcendent and totally unparticipable. All these aspects of the doctrine of God will, in fact, be faced simultaneously during the controversies between Gregory Palamas and his adversaries in the fourteenth century. His conclusion necessarily is that “three elements belong to God: essence, energy, and the triad of the divine hypostases.”²⁹

This triple distinction is rendered inescapable as soon as one rejects the Augustinian option of Trinitarianism in favour of the Cappadocian. For, indeed, if the Persons are only relations internal to the essence, the revelation of God, if any, is a revelation either of the “essence” or of “analogous” created symbols; the “energies,” then, are either the “essence” of God or created signs, and there is no real distinction in God. But if, on the contrary, the Persons are distinct from the essence, which is common to them but transcendent and inaccessible to man, and if in Christ man meets God “face to face,” so there is a real “participation” in divine existence, this participated divine existence can only be a free gift from God, which safeguards the inaccessible character of the essence and the transcendence of God. This God-giving-Himself is the divine “energy;” a living and personal God is indeed an acting God.

We have seen that the doctrine of the “energies” in the Byzantine tradition is central both to the understanding of creation and to Christology. Refusing to reduce the being of God to the philosophical concept of simple “essence,” Byzantine thought affirms the full and distinct reality of the Triune hypostatic life of God ad intra as well as His “multiplication” as creator ad extra. These two “multiplicities” do not however coincide. The terminology which the doctrine of energies received, in its relation to the three hypostases, was stabilized in the Palamite synthesis of the fourteenth century:

The proper appellations of the divine hypostases are common to the energies; whereas appellations common to the hypostases are particular to each of the divine energies. Thus, life is a common appellation of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, but foreknowledge is not called life, nor is simplicity, nor unchangeableness, nor any other energy. Thus, each of the realities which we have enumerated belongs at the same time to the Father, the Son, and the Spirit; but they only belong to one energy and not to all; each reality, in fact, has only one signification. Inversely, Father is the proper appellation of one sole hypostasis, but it is manifest in all the energies... And the same is true of the appellations Son and Spirit... Thus, since God in His wholeness is wholly incarnate, He has unchangeably united to the whole of me ... the divine nature and all its power and energy in one of the divine hypostases. Thus, also, through each of His energies one shares in the whole of God ... the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit...³⁰

The triple distinction — essence, hypostasis, energy — is not a division of God’s being; it reflects the mysterious life of the “One-who-is” — transcendent, tri-personal, and present to His creation.

The Palamite formulations of the fourteenth century were preceded by theological developments which dealt with the same triple distinction. In 1156 and 1157, two local councils held in Constantinople debated the problem whether the sacrifice of Christ; in both its historical and its Eucharistic dimensions, was offered to the Father alone or to the Holy Trinity. Soterichos, a theologian, was condemned because he held that the acts of offering and of receiving constituted the hypostatic characteristics of the Son and the Father respectively — an opinion the councils considered to be a confusion between the “immanent” and the “economic” Trinity — or between the hypostatic characteristics and “energies.” And, indeed, the Byzantine liturgies of Basil and of John Chrysostom include at the offertory a prayer addressed to Christ: “For it is you who offer and are offered, who receive and are yourself received.” The mystery of the hypostatic life as it is revealed in the Incarnation and in the act of redemption is also expressed in a Byzantine Easter troparion (repeated by the priest during the offertory at the Eucharist): “O Christ indescribable! You filled all things: bodily in the grave, in Hades with your soul as God, in Paradise with the thief; you also sat on the divine throne with the Father and the Spirit.”

Therefore, even if the Father alone is the addressee of the Eucharistic prayer, the act of “receiving” the sacrifice is a Trinitarian act as are all the divine acts ad extra?³¹ The mystery of the Incarnation however consists in the fact that the divine hypostasis of the Logos assumed also the role of offering bringing humanity with itself to the throne of the Father. The Eucharistic sacrifice is precisely this offering accomplished in the body of Christ where human nature is penetrated with divine energy assumed as it is by the hypostasis of the Logos.

The hypostatic, personal existence implies an “openness,” which makes it possible for the incarnate Logos to “offer” and to “receive,” to be man and God, and to remain, with the Father and the Spirit, the “actor” of the “energies” characterizing divine nature.

The Living God.

“God, when He was speaking with Moses, did not say: ‘I am the essence’ but: ‘I am who am’ [Ex 3:14]. It is therefore not He-who-is who comes from the essence, but it is the essence which comes from He-who-is, for He-who-is embraces in Himself all being.”³² When Palamas in the passage just quoted explicitly refers to the Biblical doctrine of the living God or when he refuses to identify the being of God with the philosophical notion of essence — “The essence is necessarily being, but being is not necessarily essence,”⁸⁹ — he expresses the very content of his quarrel with Barlaam and Akindynos but also maintains the theologia of the Cappadocian Fathers.

We have already noted that the conflict within Byzantine society which set the monks against the “humanists” involved an understanding of man’s destiny based on the Bible as opposed to one based on Platonic spiritualism. A similar problem developed on the level of “theology” proper, i.e., the doctrine of God. The issue was complicated by the fact that Latin Scholasticism provided the Byzantine anti-Palamites with a truly “Greek” interpretation of the divine being, and they readily turned into Latinophrones. For, indeed, the real significance of the Filioque quarrel consisted in the fact that the two sides held to a different approach to God.

Notes

1. Oratio 45, 4; PG 36:628C.

2. Oratio 40, 41; PG 36:417BC.

3. Both quotations from Georges Florovsky, Vostochnye Ottsy (Paris: VMCA Press, 1931), p. 23.

4. The treatise is addressed To Ablabius, ed. F. Mueller (Leiden, 1958), pp. 37-57.

5. Theodore de Regnon, Etudes de theologie positive sur la Sainte Trinite (Paris, 1892), I, 433. See also G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1952), pp. 233-241, and J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (London: Black, 1958), pp. 253-279.

6. De RЈgnon, Etudes, I, 365.

7. Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel, s.j. (London: Burns & Gates, 1969), pp. 110-111.

8. Lossky, Mystical Theology, p. 47.

9. Oratio 39, 11; PG 36:345CD.

10. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio, 31, 9; PG 36:144A.

11. Gregory of Nazianzus, Poem. Dogm. 20,3; PG 37:414A.

12. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio 31, 41; PG 36:149λ.

13. Basil, Ep. 38, 4; PG 32:329CD.

14. Basil, Contra Sab., 3; PG 31:605A.

15. Oratio 42, 15; PG 36:476B.

16. Pseudo-Dionysius, De div. nom. 2, 7; PG 3:645B.

17. De fide orthodoxa 1, 8; PG 94:324B; trans. F. H. Chase, fathers of the Church’ 37 (New York, 1958), p. 184.

18. Gregory oЈ Nazianzus, Oratio 40, 41; PG 36:417B.

19. Adv. Graecos; PG 45:180.

20. Pentef(pstarion (Athens: Phos, 1960), p. 218.

21. K. Rahner, Op. cit., p. 68.

22. Capita theol. et oecon. II, 1; PG 90:1125A.

23. Op. cit., p. 64.

24. Sec G. L. Prestige, Op. cit. pp. 257-260.

25. Op. cit., p. 260.

26. The term was first used in Christology (see Prestige, God in Patristic Thought,. pp. 291-299); it began to be applied to the hypostatic relations by pseudo-Cyril and by John of Damascus.

27. St. Augustine’s De Trinitate had been translated into Greek by Maximus Planudes in the thirteenth century, and could have been known by Palamas.

28. Cap. phys. 36; PG 151:1144D-1145A.

29. Cap. phys. 75; PG 151:11738.

30. Against Akindynos, V, 27; edd. Kontogiannes and Phanourgakes, pp. 373-374.

31. On the councils of 1156 and 1157, see J. Mcyendorrf, Christ, pp. 152-154.

32. Gregory Palamas, Triads III, 2, 12; ed J. Meyendorff, in Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 31 (Louvain, 1959); Palamas is paraphrasing Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio 45, 3; PG 36:625c.

33. Against Af(indynos III, 10; edd. Kontogiannes and Phanourgakes, p. 184.

34. “The procession of the Holy Spirit in the Orthodox Triadology” in Eastern Churches Quarterly. Supplemental issue Concerning the Holy Spirit (1948), p. 46. See also the debate on the Filioque between Orthodox (Bishop Cassian, MeyendorrT, Verhov-skoy, and others) and Roman Catholic (Camelot, Bouyer, Henry, Dubarle, Dondainc, and others) theologians published in Russic et Chretiente (1950), No. 3-4.

35. Cf. J. MeycndorfT, Christ, p. 166.

36. K. Rahner, Op. cit., p. 111.

Sacramental Theology:

The Cycle of Life.

In his book on The Life in Christ — a commentary on baptism, confirmation, and communion — Nicholas Cabasilas writes, “It is possible for the saints in this present world not only to be disposed and prepared for [eternal] life [in Christ] but also even now to live and act according to it.”¹ The Kingdom of God, an anticipation of the eschatological fulfilment, is already accessible in the Body of Christ: this possibility of “being in Christ,” of “participating” in divine life — the “natural” state of humanity, — is for the Byzantines essentially manifested in the sacraments, or mysteria, of the Church. These sacraments are understood less as isolated acts through which a “particular” grace is bestowed upon individuals by properly appointed ministers acting with the proper intention and more as the aspects of a unique mystery of the Church in which God shares divine life with humanity redeeming man from sin and death and bestowing upon him the glory of immortality.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 645