The question of apophasis vs. cataphasis (that we have discussed in the last part) extends far beyond the scope of “methodic truth”, for just as deification commences in this life to be perfected in the next one, so there’s in both traditions an inner continuity between the way of spiritual ascent and the conception of its final End.

We touch here on one of the main points of contention between Eastern and Western theology, namely the beatific vision. As is known, for the Latins “final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the contemplation of the Divine Essence” (S.Th. I-II.3.8), the immediate vision of God in se, whereas the apophatic East holds to the radical unknowability of the Essence and describes the visio beatifica rather in terms of “theophany”. 

Now the Eastern assertion that the Essence will forever be unknowable must strike the Westerner as a kind of intrinsic heresy, for not only does it go against the testimony of Scripture (which vouches that we shall “see Him as He is” and “know even as we are known”) but also against the postulate of integral metaphysics according to which saying “man” means saying “knowledge of the Absolute”. God, after all, is “supremely intelligible” (I.12.1), and when we speak of any “unknowability” concerning the Essence, this deficiency is, for Aquinas, not to be searched in the Res Divina, which is Intelligibility itself, but rather in the limitation of the creaturely knowing – an inadequacy that can only be bridged by grace (III.9.2).

“The intellect naturally desires the vision of the Divine Essence” (Contra Gentiles, III.57), St. Thomas (rightly) teaches, and as his great disciple Dante should later sing: “Never can our intellect be sated unless that Truth, which no truth goes beyond, shines on it”. For all is “from Him and through Him and to Him” (Rom. 11:36) and “the ultimate purpose of creation is that God, who is the Creator of all things may at last become ‘all in all’” (Catechisms §294): “Fecesti nos ad te”.

There’s thus in the Western tradition no place for any kind of “epectasy”, understood as an ever deep conversion into God’s Infinity with no “ultimate” consummation in sight, a kind of “via sine fine”.

 

For the ultimate perfection of the rational creature is only to be found in that which is the Principle of its being; since a thing is perfect so far as it attains to its Principle (S.Th. I.12.1).

 

All must returns to its supreme Cause and Principle, for “all rivers flow into the sea” (Eccl. 1:7) and “our heart is restless until it rest in Thee”.

For Thomas, in the beatific vision “the Essence of God itself becomes the intelligible form of the intellect” (I.12.5) and thus the knowledge that the Blessed have of God is ultimately nothing other than God’s Knowledge knowing Himself by Himself, a direct participation in the Divine Word as the Corpus Christi Mysticum (and in this sense a Thomist might actually agree with the assertion that we’ll never know the Essence, for it us not “we” who know, but God in us).

 

According to the knowledge whereby things are known by those who see the Essence of God, they are seen in God Himself not by any other similitudes but by the Divine Essence alone present to the intellect; by which also God Himself is seen (I.12.9)

 

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When the West thus holds up the “facie ad faciem” of St. Paul (1. Cor. 13:12), the East replies with the Mosaic “None can see my Face and live” (Ex. 33:20). This perspective is justified in the framework of its specific theological outlook. Palamism is firstly a doctrine of spiritual realization, a “spiritual stratagem” (upâya), that places itself on the point of view of manifestation, and as long we “live” in the flesh we truly shall never see the Divine Face in all its splendor.[2] And this is also what (at least according to our estimation) the Holy Fathers meant when they stressed the unknowability of Essence^[3], namely that it is unknowable in this life (a proposition that of course every good Thomist would agree with) but not necessarily in the life to come. As St. Gregory the Theologian says:

 

What God is in nature and essence, no human ever yet has discovered or can discover. Whether it will ever be discovered is a question that whoever wishes may examine and decide. In my opinion, it will be discovered when that within us which is godlike and divine – I mean our mind and reason – has mingled with its Like, and the image has ascended to the Archetype, of which it now has the desire. And this, I think, is the whole of philosophy, that we shall know even as we are known. But for the time being, all that comes to us is a little emanation and, as it were, a small reflection of a great Light (Second Theologian Oration, §17).

 

Nevertheless if Palamism rejects such a knowledge, even in the life to come, this follows a strict internal logic. As Lossky points out: “In the tradition of the Eastern Church there is no place for a theology, and even less for a mysticism, of the Divine Essence” for it would “lead to conclusions which are inadmissible for practical piety”  (Mystical Theology, III). In the spiritual economy of the East, which is based on the deification in this life by means of the (immanent) divine Energies, all considerations of the transcendent Ousia have to be “bracketed out”. This serves also to forestall the regression back into a Platonic mysticism of the “One”, viz. into the dualizing gnosticism to which the magian soul is so liable, whereas in the West such a “theomonism” is certainly a possibility (as Meister Eckhart and others prove) and may even function as a healthy counter-balance to its devotional “bhakti”.

Nevertheless for the Westerner – ever striving for the Absolute – such practical consideration must remain incomprehensible and in the apparent denial of the visio beatifica he cannot but see an implicit negation of the whole Christian revelation as such: The Face that Moses couldn’t see is revealed to us in Christ and since the Blessed who have “by love become integrated into the Mystical Body” are made “not merely ‘Christians’ but Christ Himself” (non solum christianos factos esse, sed Christum), as St. Augustine says, denying the beatific vision comes close to saying that the Son – the eternal Gnosis of the Father – lacks knowledge of the Divine Essence (with which He is simply identical).

For the West, which is decidedly Christocentric in its whole outlook, the great vision of the world to come is that of the Mystical Body in which the Communio Sanctorum is unified in the crucible of Divine Love until it finally becomes “One Christ loving Himself” (unus Christus amans seipsum), according to a beautiful expression by St. Augustine, the Heavenly Rose that Dante saw, swirling around the Divine Face: “In forma dunque di candida rosa / mi si mostrava la milizia santa / che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa”.

The East on the hand hopes for the transfiguration of all things in the theophanic splendor of the Trinity “whose brightness surpasses all that the mind can conceive and who pours upon all the Radiance common to the Three” (St. Gregory the Theologian) – “The righteous will shine like the sun” (Matt. 13:43).

 

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Nevertheless the differences, although essential to each respective viewpoint, is not as absolute as often thought; for if we take a closer look at what Thomas actually teaches we will find it not at all that far removed from the Palamite position.

While Thomas does grant the creature a real participation in the Divine Knowledge, a true “unio rei visae cum visu”, in which “the Divine Essence itself is united to the intellect” (I.12.9), this participation can never be absolute (I.12.7) and allows for degrees in perfection (I.12.6), meaning that the creaturely vision will never identified univocally with God’s Knowing as such. The creature will never be Omniscient or Omnipotent, neither will it ever create the world or raise the dead “for this would be to comprehend His power” (I.12.8), to which no created intellect can attain. One could say that each knows the Divine Essence from a unique perspective, as one logoi in the Body of the Word, but only God knows all perspectives at once.[4]

It seems we meet here with a paradox: God is “infinitely knowable” (infinite cognoscibilis) but no creature can know infinitely (I.12.7); “he who sees God’s Essence, sees in Him that He exists infinitely, and is infinitely knowable; nevertheless, this infinite mode does not extend to enable the knower to know infinitely (I.12.7.3). In short: God is so utterly intelligible that He cannot be comprehended: “quod omnem cognitionem excedat, quod est ipsum non comprehendi” (I.12.1.3); he exceeds all knowledge, or: He “super-knowable”:

This however does not strike us as fundamentally opposed to the Palamite assertion that the blessed will “not see the Divine Essence itself, but see God by a revelation appropriate and analogous to Him” (Triads, I.3.4). What Thomas is denying vehemently is simply that God is seen “in a vision of the imagination” (in visione imaginaria) or in a “created similitude” (per similitudinem creatam), for “to say that God is seen by some similitude, is to say that the Divine Essence is not seen at all” (I.12.2) and to say that the Divine Essence is not seen amounts to saying that “beatitude would consist in something else besides God; which is opposed to faith”.

However the “theophany” that the East talks about is not in any way “created” or a mere “phantasma” of the imagination, but truly God Himself, His eternal and revelatory “Glory”. But again, Thomas uses almost the same terminology when he speaks of the lumen gloriae, the “light of glory” which strengthens the intellect to see God (I.12.2) and “establishes the intellect in a kind of deiformity” (I.12.6) so as to be able to bear the more-than-luminous splendor of the Divine Face.

 

By this light the blessed are made deiform – that is, like unto God, according to the saying: When He shall appear we shall be like to Him, and we shall see Him as He is (I.12.5).

 

It is the degree of participation in this “light by which we see Light” (Ps. 35:10) that determines the perfection of the beatific vision (for the Essence itself obvious doesn’t allow for any “degrees” whatsoever). What is seen by all is the same Divine Sun, but not all eyes are equally strengthened to behold its radiance, and thus “the intellect which has more of the light of glory will see God the more perfectly” (I.12.6).

 

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It seems as if the debate around the knowability or unknowability of the Divine Essence also stems from one of the “linguistic difficulties” [5] that we’ve mentioned at the very beginning: For the Eastern tradition, basing itself more strictly on the terminology inherited from the Greek philosophers and Fathers,  God is “beyond Being” and, since “being and intelligibility are convertible” (tò gàr auto noein estin te kai einai), it also follows that God is also “beyond intellect and reason”, as the Areopagite says; meaning: “the Essence is unknowable”.
As already Plato says: “That which completely is [i.e. the forms], is completely knowable, while that which in no way is, is altogether unknowable” (Rep. 477A) and since God (or “the One” in Platonic phraseology) is obviously beyond all forms and categories, the unknowability of the Essence is not merely a vague “apophatic” murmuring or some obscure existential mysticism but a perfectly coherent philosophical statement: “For if all knowledges are of beings and have their limit in beings, that which is beyond all being also transcends all knowledge” (Dionysius, Div. Nom. I.4).
However this is, at least in principle, not at all contradictory to what Thomas says (who likewise bases himself primarily on Dionysius in this matter), for to say that the Essence is “above knowing and unknowing” doesn’t means that is simply unintelligible (which would mean confusing privative “nothingness” with super-essential “Non-being”) but that it is “super-intelligible” or, again, that “it exceeds all knowledge and cannot be fully comprehended” (S.Th. I.12.1.3).  .

When Palamas says that the Essence will never be known in se but theophanically “revealed” in manner “appropriate and analogous” to each of saint, while Thomas asserts that the Essence is actually seen but only according to the degree of participation in the lumen gloriae, both of these caveats are, it seems to us, merely way of expressing the same paradoxical truth, namely that creature will truly be “made God” (“fit deiformis”) by grace but that it also will never “be God” in the most univocal sense, which is what all traditions express in one way or the other.

 

In the final analysis everything is reduced to a question of terminology: the unconditional affirmation of identity by Shankara – not by all Vedantists – necessarily results from the perspective of the absolute Subject. For Ibn Arabi it is not a question of ‘becoming one’ with God: the contemplative ‘becomes conscious’ that he ‘is one’ with Him; he ‘realizes’ true unity. In Christianity ‘deification’, the necessary complement of ‘incarnation’, does not imply any ‘identification’ on the same plane of reality; that man as such should literally ‘become’ God would imply that there was a common measure and a symmetrical confrontation between God and man; no doubt it was this reservation Shankara had in mind when he maintained that the delivered one (mukta) is without the creative power of Brahma. Be that as it may, there is no more reason to reject the expression ‘to become God’ than to reject Shankara’s formula of ‘identity’, for they retain all their antinomic and elliptical value (Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives, V). 

 

The Uncreated Energies and Gratia Creata

 

 

As we have said before, the objective perspective of Thomism takes its starting point essentially from the Absolute itself and thus it proclaims: “Everything that is not the Divine Essence is a creature" (I.28.2) – a true Catholic mahâvâkya, for since every creature “in se considerta est nihil” (II.109.2) it also follows that “the world is unreal, only Brahman is real” (a conclusion that was later drawn in its full force by Meister Eckhart). This is why Thomism cannot accommodate the notion of “uncreated grace” or “divine energies” (at least within the bounds of orthodoxy), for it would inevitably break with its whole internal logic (hence it is also obvious that the Eastern notion of the beatific vision as “theophany” is, in Latin theology, an impossibility, for every “apparition” that is not the Divine Essence is automatically creature and thus not God).

The most fundamental distinction, the “master signifier” of all of Christian theology – and all (exoteric) monotheism in general – is that of created/Uncreated and this distinction is by its very nature absolute and doesn’t allow for any gradation whatsoever. For the Hindu there might be degrees of mâyâ, he might even speak of “mâyâ in divinis” (and reasonably so), but for the Christian the category of created/Uncreated must always remain a strict binary.

Considered in this sense, the Palamite notion of “uncreated Energies” which are distinct from both the Ousia and the Hypostaseis and yet fully divine, yea “Divinity” itself, is a kind of “miracle” that is (at least to our knowledge) unparalleled in Christian theology (in the West a similar “miracle” was arguable achieved by Erigena’s distinction of natura increata increans and natura increata creans). For to introduce the notion of “lesser divinity” (hypheiméne theótes), or what we might call a “relative absolute”, is to implicitly go beyond the exoteric limitations of strict monotheism and to allow for exactly such a “gradation”, however rudimentary (and thus it is no surprise that Gregory’s detractors have often accused him of “ditheism”).

This “miracle” is only possible because Palamism doesn’t start from dogmatic assertions about the transcendent Godhead but from the factual experience of His immanence. Thus it can declare: “The Uncreated Light is truly divine”, and this is true for the reflection of God in manifestation is essentially not-different from God. Yet, to forestall all allegations of “pantheism”, it must also emphatically affirm that “the divine Energies are truly distinct from God as He is in Himself” and this too is (relatively) true. As Palamas rightly argues, the rays of the Sun are not different from the Sun itself but merely its outwards radiations, its “energies”; but at the same time it is also obvious that (from the standpoint of manifestation) these outwards “rays” are not strictly identifiable with the Solar disk itself, God’s innermost Essence, and thus “really distinct” from it.

Nevertheless “in the Sun all is simply: Sun” (omnia in Deo est Deus) and thus the Thomistic perspective retains (despite all its necessary limitations) its intrinsic validity. For every outward manifestation is ultimately traceable to its interior principle; again: “every effect subsists in its cause” and from the standpoint of gnosis “only the Cause is real”. Thus, in the Essence itself, in which “omnia simplex”, there obviously cannot be any “real distinction” between ousia and energeiai (as some neo-Palamites insist), and this is also what St. Gregory himself seems to affirm when he says: “The Light is one in the one Divinity, and therefore is itself the Divine Principle, more-than-God and more-than-Principle, since God is the ground of subsistence of Divinity” (Triads, I.3.23).

It is “that which surrounds the Essence” (ta peri tes ousias), its outwards irradiation, its “Glory”, the doxa tou Theou that the Apostles beheld streaming of the glorified Body of the Savior (which is also the kabôd Elohim that Ezekiel saw), reverberation, radiance, the Divine Presence on earth, the Shekinah (hence why the invocation of the Name, which mystically “contains” this Presence, is so essential to Hesychast practice: “God and His Name are one”).

Again we might employ the image of the tree and its reflection, which is at the same time “tree” and “not-tree”, depending on the point of view. Here it is Palamism that insists on continuity: “the Uncreated Light, God’s outward projection into creation, is divine”; whereas Thomism must stress radical discontinuity, for the Absolute is necessary absolute, i.e. “absolved” from all relativity whatsoever and perfectly detached in its unstained purity. 

Platonically speaking: insofar as the Nous is distinct from the One and realizes its own separate hypostasis, it is a “creature” – and this is the Thomistic point of view (“Omnis res quae non est Divina Essentia, est creatura”). However one could just as well say that the Nous is nothing other the One insofar as it radiates and “acts” ad extra – i.e. it is simply an “energy” of the One – and this is the Palamite perspective.

 

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Now Thomism, which places itself on the highest point of view (“only the Essence is real”), but which, in its effort to uphold the created/Uncreated distinction, cannot allow for any “gradation”, a “relative absolute” or a direct theophanic manifestation of Divinity on earth (or in Heaven), must necessarily declare the Tabor-light as “created”, for to affirm that this “Glory” were in any way “eternal” would essentially mean that what the Apostles saw on Mt. Tabor was nothing but the Divine Essence ipse, which is obviously absurd.

Naturally this must strike the Easterner as the “acme of impiety” (as Palamas exclaims), it is unacceptable, a denial of the “spiritual first principles” on which the whole Eastern way is founded and thus to be vehemently rejected: If the deifying energies are not divine, so he argues, real deification is impossible.

However in order to allow for the true divinity of the immanent Doxa (within the bounds of the exoteric point of view), Palamism has to go into the opposite extreme and consequently banish the Essence into the realm of utter transcendence (and this, for the Thomist, is hardly acceptable, for it means depriving creation of its Principle and final telos).

Thomism considers God primarily as He is in Himself, Deus sub ratione Deitatis, hence why Thomas can also state that “God has no real relation to the world” (relatio Deo ad creaturam non est realis) – a proposition that is of course (from the highest point of view) rigorously true, but which must nonetheless strike the Easterner – who bases his whole spirituality on God’s operations (energeiai) in this world – as nigh scandalous.

Thomism always moves from the Centre outward and in the Centre all radii are one (hence why they must remain relatively “invisible” to the Thomist perspective), whereas the “ecumenic” perspective of Palamism proceeds from the outer to the inner without ever fully penetrating into the principal point (hence why the multiplicity of energies or “radii” stays ultimately incommensurable) and this difference of movement will also become evident in the Latin and Eastern conceptions of the Trinity. Yea, we might even discern it in the very structure of the ecclesial organization, for whereas the Eastern churches exist in a lose communion of plurality, in the West all is centered towards the Chair of Peter as the fixed and immovable point where all converges.

 

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Thus we see how both perspectives compensate for their exoteric limitations: Palamism allows for direct experience of God through His Energies, a real “compenetration” of the created and Uncreated order, by making the Essence radically unparticipable (thereby necessarily denying the unio beatifica and at least risking to introduce a dualism into God). Thomism on the other hand safeguards Divine Unity but risks positing a dualism between God and the world; because it only considers the “absolutely Absolute” it must radically deny all true experiential theôria (for this would mean to see the Divine Essence itself), which it can only admit in the life to come. Even though (according to Thomistic teaching) all beings participate (qua their very being) in the Divine Essence (which for Palamas is “the height of absurdity”) it cannot accommodate for any immediate experience of the Divine – and this is undoubtedly its greatest weakness.

Thomas’ epistemology is essentially empiricist; it replaces the Platonic “intuition of ideas” with an Aristotelian “abstraction of universals”, thereby marking (at least the beginning of) a movement away from the Augustinian illuminism which had dominated Christian discourse ever since late antiquity and which was then fully abrogated by Duns Scotus only shortly after Thomas’ death (and let us also point out that it’s no coincidence that it was St. Bonaventure, as the last great champion of Augustinianism, who also, with his Itineranium, furnished the last great “anagogical” masterpiece of the middle ages and maybe of the Western tradition as such).

For Thomas God is only known indirectly in via (through His creatures and through revelation) and finally directly in the beatific vision in patria (cf. I.12). Palamas on the other hand can allow for theôria, nevertheless it must always remain imperfect in the sense that God remains essentially unknowable in eternity. Here we see how both theologies are at the same time contraries and complementary. Both have to account for the fact – testified to by experience, Scripture and Tradition – that the created can truly “become uncreated” and “partake of the Divine Nature” (2. Pet. 1:4) while yet keeping both neatly distinguished – a truly daunting task, probably best treated by mystics rather than scholastic doctores.

 

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Because the Thomistic perspective cannot accommodate an immediate participation in Divinity, it must always place some last “barrier” between creature and Creator and thus emerges the doctrine of “created grace”.

Now, let us say immediately that this doctrine is probably one of the most misunderstood in all of St. Thomas. Things aren’t quite as simple as the term “created grace” (which Thomas himself hardly uses and which seems to have been popularized mostly by anti-Thomistic polemics) would make it seem. Grace, for Aquinas, is not a “something”, a “substance” different from God that is then added to the creature, as it were, “from without”, but a true participation of the created in the Uncreated and entering-into the Blessed Life of the Trinity:

 

God is in all things by His Essence, Power, and Presence, according to His one common mode, as the Cause existing in the effects which participate in His Goodness. Above and beyond this common mode, however, there is one special mode belonging to the rational nature wherein God is said to be present as the object known is in the knower, and the beloved in the lover. And since the rational creature by its operation of knowledge and love attains to God Himself, according to this special mode God is said not only to exist in the rational creature, but also to dwell therein as in His own temple. So no other effect can be put down as the reason why the Divine Person is in the rational creature in a new mode, except sanctifying grace (I.43.3).

 

Thus sanctifying grace disposes the soul to truly “possess” the Divine Person (“ad habendam divinam Personam”) and to be given the Holy Spirit who is “Gift” itself, Donum Dei (cf. I.38). However to keep the created/Uncreated dichotomy intact he has draw a subtle – but firm – line of distinction. He does so by always distinguishing between the “thing in itself”, the efficient cause (which is necessarily uncreated since ultimately God Himself) and the effect of this cause as it manifests in the created being (which he thus likewise calls “created”). In other words: the creature truly participates in the uncreated and deifying Love “like an iron in fire”, yet the grace by which this deification is effected in the creature – the “heat” that manifests in said iron – is said to be created. This distinction (between the uncreated Res Divina and its created effect in the creature) is also why Thomas can even speak of a “created beatitude” (which on the face of it seems of course absurd): The Object of Beatitude is obviously the eternal Blessedness of the Godhead itself, but insofar as the visio beatifica manifests as an “effect” in the finite creature it is said to be “created” (cf. I-II.3.1). Likewise, grace in itself is fundamentally gratia increata, the Holy Spirit, God ipse, but the effects of grace in the creature reflect the created nature of its recipient, meaning it is “created”, not in virtue of its substance but with respect to its recipient (II-II.24.3.2). 

In sum: whereas Palamism identifies grace with the “fiery rays” emanating from the Divine Sun, Thomas can merely take its “effects” into account (enkindling charity, illumining the mind, melting the hardened heart). However, there can be no talk of Thomas calling the Paracletic Fire itself “created”, like some Palamites insinuate when they claim that Thomistic grace would “degrade the Spirit of God to a creature!” (Capita LXXI). And Thomas himself is in no way a stranger to the language of mystical “compenetration” :

 

The beloved is contained in the lover, by being impressed on his heart and thus becoming the object of his complacency. On the other hand, the lover is contained in the beloved, inasmuch as the lover penetrates, so to speak, into the beloved (I-II.28.2.1).

 

We thus end up with a doctrine that seems torn between affirming the mystical presence of the Beloved in the soul (stemming doubtless form Thomas’ own experience) and the desire to keep both parties, “lover” and “beloved”, firmly distinct from another with all the cold precision of scholastic subtlety  – “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach!, in meiner Brust!”. As one commentator resumes:

 

Thomas appears to be drawing a firm line of fine distinction, and one way of characterizing that distinction would be to say that he wishes to maintain the closest possible union between God and humanity while at the same time keeping firmly separated Uncreated and created. He does not seem to intend by caritas causata that what is infused into the human person differs somehow (essentially, for example) from the charity that is the Divine Essence – at least, he fails to draw the kind of distinction between the two that one might expect, given his predilection for distinctions. His intention seems rather to insist that the human person remains a creature, even though simultaneously a participant in divine nature … Nevertheless Aquinas is always walking a fine line between the desire to draw very firm distinctions between Creator and creature and the desire, which pulls in the opposite direction, to affirm the reality of interaction between these two ontologically distinct realms … So firm is this division that Thomas prefers that his readers infer entities such as grace and happiness change their status, from uncreated to created, rather than claim that the creature becomes a composite of created and uncreated (Williams, Ground of Union, II.2.1).

 

Nevertheless, however subtle the distinction might be, there still always remains an unbridgeable chasm between the transcended Cause and its effect in the creature and this, in turn, must be fundamentally unacceptable to the Palamite. When Thomas says that “grace is the beginning of glory in us” (II-II.24.3.2), the Easterner must insist that this Divine Glory is truly participated in a substantial, “theopathic” manner, and not merely as a “created effect”:

 

The Light [of Thabor] was not a simulacrum of Divinity, but truly the Light of the true Divinity, not only the Divinity of the Son, but that of the Father and the Spirit too … How do you dare to consider it alien to the Divinity, calling it ‘a created reality’, and ‘a symbol of Divinity’, and claiming that it is inferior to our intellection? (Triads, III.1.12).

 

A similar reaction was doubtlessly also felt by Meister Eckhart, who (while remaining a faithful disciple of “Brother Thomas” in most things) proceeded to tear down again the wall between man and God that had come to be erected in high scholasticism, thereby bringing the Thomistic metaphysics to its true “gnostic opening”.

In his Sentences, Peter Lombard had still identified the deifying grace as the pouring forth of the Holy Spirit into the hearts of the faithful as a substantial presence; yet, among his later commentators, it increasingly took on a “created” quality. For Bonaventure grace is an accidental habitus of the soul and for Thomas “divine filiation” consists of similarity (similitudo), not substantial oneness, whereby God deifies not as indwelling principle but as “causa efficiens” (cf. I-II.110.1.2).

Eckhart, who objected to this development, appears thus not as a “revolutionary” but rather as one of the last true “conservatives” and one might even say that it is Eckhart who draws from Thomism all its final “esoteric” conclusions. 

 

In the Book of Divine Consolation, he opposes Aquinas’s thesis of efficiency with the following sentence: The divine Goodness does not make the good man, but it begets him: bonus in quantum bonus non est factus. An efficient cause remains outside the effected; it produces a separation and distinction between God and the soul. And Eckhart rebuts the similitudo theory of divine filiation even more brusquely: the soul, he writes in the Book of Divine Consolation, hates likeness, similitudo, out of love for the One. And even more harshly he writes against its reduction to mere likeness: the just man as just man is of one being with iustitia, with all of its properties (Flasch, Meister Eckhart, XVIII.1).

 

Thus, even though Thomas masterfully delivers a doctrine of deification that keeps a clear distinction between God and man, it has often found to be lacking, even amidst his immediate successors.

 

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The Thomistic synthesis has proven fragile (and maybe there’s some truth to the saying that every masterpiece, by the sheer surplus of its perfection, is already the sign of degeneration) ^[6]; in an unparalleled tour de force it binds together Moses and Plato, the revelation of Jesus Christ and the categories of Aristotle, in one interiorly consistent whole that spans almost every area of human knowledge and which has served as the bedrock for Catholic theology for centuries. Yet every system, no matter how perfect, must have its weak spot and it seem (at least to us) that the notion of gratia creata (and the epistemology that goes with it) is one of them.

Once the edifice of Thomism began to crumble all the antinomies that had been so neatly woven together into one beautiful tapestry became unraveled and began to manifest in their sharp adversity, the synthetic “both/and’s” disintegrating into the many conflicting “either/or’s” that have shaped the history of modernity: mysticism vs. philosophy, faith vs. reason, nature vs. grace, etc. We see this already in the immediate reception of St. Thomas’ thought which gave rise both to the mystical gnosis of Meister Eckhart as well as to the neo-scholastic rationalism that prepared the way for the philosophers of the “Enlightenment”.

Thomism, indeed, is like a late Gothic cathedral: it puts us in awe at its craftsmanship and in it we still feel the vitality and youthful joy of the middle ages, its heroic virtue and gentle chivalry, its grandeur, might, and exaltation – and yet, if we take a closer look behind its glimmering façade, we cannot help but perceive here already a certain “seed” of corruption, a quantum of excess, a subtle naturalism of forms that foreshows all that was to come only shortly after.

However, it would be wrong – outright absurd in fact – to blame these developments simply on St. Thomas (which would be like blaming Shakespeare for the decline of blank verse!). The causes are certainly manifold and they stem undoubtedly also, at least in part, from the general imbalance that was inherent to the Western mentality from the very beginning and which only became accentuated when Roman worldliness and Germanic Innerlichkeit, Greek wisdom and Semitic revelation, came together to form that specific amalgam that is Western Christianity. All is already there in Augustine, that great Faustian man, all that is noble, great, and beautiful, but also everything tragic and excessive (never could the Eastern spirit have produced a book like the Confessions!).

Be that as it may, it seems like it took the introduction of Aristotle into the theological faculties to finally “tip” the balance of the Western soul that had been resting contently in the Augustino-Platonic consensus for a good 1000 years (and we should do well to remember that the Thomistic synthesis was originally motivated as a reaction against Averroism and other “Aristotelian heresies” that were springing up in universities all over Europe). While Aristotelianism certainly furnished some “advances” in theology (especially when it comes to ethics), it inevitably lead to a “naturalization” of the intellect, which ended up barring all possibility of a truly spiritual intelligence, a “gnosis” truly so called.

 

In situating the intelligence outside of the supernatural order and in ignoring the possibility of an sacred intellectuality, one ‘liberated’ the intelligence from below, abandoning it to the norms of reason and thereby refusing it to be, entitatively, illuminated by the Holy Spirit. The true religion stopped being the true philosophy, according to the beautiful expression of St. Augustine, and philosophical rationalism became the inevitable outcome (Borella, La Foi et L’Intelligence, XII).

 

Palamism remains unaffected by the ups and downs of the Western psyche, remaining firmly centered in the stability of the East; it is nourished not by its speculative coherence but by the prayer and tears of the Hesychasts.

 

On “Absolute Divine Simplicity”

 

 

Palamism is a doctrine of grace and sanctification, a “mystical theology”, and here its specific point of view is certainly superior to that of Thomism. Nevertheless, things become problematic when its followers have tried to turn St. Gregory’s “Defense of the Holy Hesychasts” into something it was never meant to be and to construct from it a systematic theology on par with that of St. Thomas, a “Palamism” properly speaking (which is essentially an invention of 20^th century Russian emigrées in France, whose construction of Palamism as an “existential personalism” is not totally unconnected with French existentialism and Heidegger’s critique of “onto-theology”). This becomes for example evident when certain neo-Palamites take up the doctrine of St. Gregory (which is inherently mystical and spiritual) as the basis to attack – on the level of pure metaphysics – what they call “absolute divine simplicity”.

Some Palamites even go so far as to blame everything wrong with the modern West – from Ausschwiz to the atom bomb – on the scholastic notion of God as actus purus! But this is obviously ridiculous. The (“absolute”) simplicity of God has not only been held in all the noblest religious and philosophical traditions of mankind but also constitutes a central tenet of the catholic and apostolic Faith, handed down to us by the Fathers.

 

God is a simple, uncompounded Being, without diverse members, and altogether like, and equal to Himself, since He is wholly understanding, and wholly spirit, and wholly thought, and wholly intelligence, and wholly reason, and wholly hearing, and wholly seeing, and wholly light, and the whole source of all that is good – even as the religious and pious are wont to speak concerning God (St. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. II.13.3).

 

In general the whole discourse around “absolute divine simplicity” can only strike one as absurd: either God is simple or He is not, and if He’s not “absolutely simple” – “more-than-simple” even[7] – He’s not “God” (as Summum Bonum), but some manifestation of an even more perfect Reality beyond Him. In other words: denying that the Trinitarian God is absolutely simple means implicitly introducing the Brahma saguna/nirguna (the “qualified” and the “unqualified” Godhead) dichotomy of Vedanta or that of the (qualified) Nous and the (absolutely simple) One in Platonism; and while such a distinction can certainly be valid in principle (when it is understood as signifying different degrees of the same Reality), one has to be exceedingly diligent in its application.

The Western tradition of Classical Theism has found a solid and interiorly consistent way of refusing such a differentiation, while at the same time masterfully circumventing many of the theological impasses that other exoteric monotheisms (for example the Asharites in Islam or some schools of dvaita-vedânta) inevitably run into (e.g. questions of secondary causality, divine freedom, the Euthyphro dilemma, etc.), and for this the scholastic deserve all our admiration. Yet it too is not without risks, for to dispense with all notions of “divine relativity” (or mâyâ if you want) and to consider God de jure in His absolute Sublimity alone, while at the same time de facto keeping with a fundamentally “theological” outlook that primarily knows Him as Creator, Judge, Saviour etc., comes, in practice, too often at the price of “pulling down” the Essence (which neither creates nor judges) to the ontological level (and let us also note here that the Aristotelian notion of God as “pure act” is not without certain limitations).

Here the Palamite notion of a “lesser divinity” – which is not “another God” but simply the manifestation of Divinity on a lower level, the “small reflection of a Greater Light” that the Nazianzite spoke about[8] – proves truly esoteric and well fitted to safeguard the transcendence of the Ousia that is beyond all being and acting. However when some Palamites (perhaps motivated by a confessional zeal against “Latin simplicity”) assert that the different Energies are “really distinct” and ultimately incommensurable, thereby practically hypostatizing them, this is not only “agnostic” in all senses of the word – for it utterly absolutizes the chasm between God’s outward action and His inner nature which ultimately makes even a limited knowledge of God categorically impossible – but also risks splitting God Himself apart and committing what the Muslim would call “shirk”, that is to say “association” (and in fact it has been alleged that the Palamite notion of a “creative energy” really distinct from the Essence amounts to reintroducing the Platonic demiurge through the backdoor).

 

*

 

Some even go so far as to deny that “absolute simplicity” should be anything at all besides a purely conceptual “abstraction”. But this is plain fideism. Again, the Absolute is the only thing that is self-evident and the absolute is by necessity absolutely simple (as St. Thomas likewise shows in his quarta via). [9] To deny this, ultimately forces us to say that all the greatest sages that walked the earth before the revelation of the Lord, whether they be Lao Tzu and Shankara or Aristotle and Plato, were simply wrong, not only accidentally but fundamentally so, which is to reduce all of human thinking – to reduce man as such – to an absurdity. To claim for oneself a “sacred irrationalism” in the name of “apophaticism” just shows that one doesn’t understand the least bit about it and means truly turning the “mystical theology” of Dionysius into an agnostic mystificationism.

When certain neo-Palamites claim that the ipsum esse subsistens of St. Thomas is a pure “abstraction” that has nothing to do with “the living God”, or that in the Latin view of simplicity “the heights of theology have been deserted in order to descend to the level of religious philosophy” (Lossky), there’s more Pascalian existentialism in such statements than the authentic spirit of the Fathers. When St. Paul preached to the Athenians on the Areopagus he didn’t just throw his hands up, exclaiming: “Dieu d’Abraham, Dieu d’Isaac, Dieu de Jacob – non des philosophes et des savants!”, but rather affirmed: “what you have been worshiping as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (Acts.17:23). And did not God Himself reveal to Moses “I am who I am”?, in which the Thomist naturally hears: “My ‘whatness’ (quidditas) is my ‘isness’ (esse)”, or: “My Essence is my Existence”.

Far from an “abstraction”, the simple esse of God is for St. Thomas not something that we learn about way of deduction or through a chain of intricate syllogisms (for God’s being is not contained in any genus or universal and thus not “abstractable” from anything), but rather that which makes all thinking possible in the first place; it is that by which all is known, the “lighteth every man”, and “the intelligible Sun that shines within us” (S.Th. I-II.109.1).

 

‘The concept of being’, says Cajetan, ‘is in a sense natural to the intellect as such in the same way as knowledge or awareness of first principles and so it must come before all other concepts essentially … It is the first thing we know and is involved in all our knowing, but it is not adequately understood in itself until we come to the end of the mind’s journey’ … Being is the light of knowing – its evidential light … Being shines interiorly in the mind. It is evidence itself expressed and apprehensible in what are called the first principles of reason, but synthetically anterior to that expression. Its evidence is like a transparent daylight. Although the transparency itself is not directly seen, it is the condition of our seeing those things on which the sun’s light falls (Kelley, The Metaphysical Background of Analogy).

 

Only because we have an intuitive knowledge of “being” can we know beings at all and if the intellect were not opened towards the Infinite no finite things could be reflected in its mirror. This is also the meaning of the so-called “ontological argument” as it was first formulated by St. Anselm[10], and the fact that it (like the “five ways” of Aquinas) has been so often rejected and even ridiculed by later philosophers from Kant onward just shows that this intuition is utterly lost on modern man. As Descartes (the great last scholastic) should later state it in his Third Meditation: “the mere fact that I exist and have within me an idea of the Infinite, i.e. God, provides a very clear proof that God indeed exists”. For the Infinite is the Sun of the Good (to Agathón) by whose light all things are seen. 

 

It is the Source of knowledge and truth, and yet itself surpasses them in beauty … Not only does it furnishes to visibles the power of visibility but it also provides for their generation and growth and nurture though it is not itself generation … And in like manner the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the Good their being known, but their very essence and existence is derived to them from it (Plato, Rep. 509A-B).

 

Again, saying “man” means “knowledge of the Absolute” and since every knowing is a participation in Divine Truth (the Prima Veritas), theology, the philosophical inquiry into revealed truth informed by the light of faith, is for Thomas not merely a kind of “rational exercise” but nothing less that “a certain foretaste (praelibatio quaedam) of that knowledge which will be our happiness in eternal life”! (Comp. Th. I.2).

 

*

 

Nevertheless, when Palamas objects to a reduction of the Essence to mere Existence, this too has a profound justification (which is all but lost on most neo-Palamites). In denying that God is (essentially) Being, he immediately rules out all kinds of “ontologisms” and leaves the door open to a true gnosis, a “super-existentialism”, that once more approaches the teachings of Eckhart.
For Palamas, God “contains” Being (as an intrinsic quality) but is not reducible to it, and while it would certainly attest to a shallow reading of Thomas to suppose that his doctrine of Essence/Existence amounts to such a reduction, it is nevertheless true that at least in neo-Thomism such an “ontologizing” is not wholly absent.
Once more it comes down to linguistics, viz. to the philosophical vocabulary inherited by the two traditions: for the Greek tradition since the time of Plato, “being” is understood as “ousia” or “to on” (that which is), hence why God, being not “a being” but the Principle of all being, must categorically be understood as “hyperousios”, beyond being.
Thomas usually avoids the designation of “above Being” or “Non-being” (although there are exceptions)[11], opting instead for his well-known (analogical) formula of God as ipsum esse, Existence itself. However what Palamas means by “ousia” and Thomas by “esse” is not at all convertible; a fact too seldom acknowledged by those who are quick to accuse Aquinas of his “limited point of view” or of “onto-theology”. Thomistic esse is precisely that “being of all being that is beyond being” (tò gàr einai pánton estin he hyper tò einai theótes), that St. Dionysius talks about (Hier. Cael. I.4); it is the Principle of being (ens or ousia) and thus necessarily “epekeina tes ousias” (cf. Plato, Rep. 509B), beyond all being, hence why “we cannot say that esse itself is” (Thomas, In de Ebd. II). Esse is unrestricted act, it is “verb” rather than “noun”, and as such Aquinas can even talk about “infinite Being” (esse infinitum), which, from the Greek perspective, is of course a contradictio in adjecto, for “being” (as ousia) is by definition “form” (eidos) or genus (what the scholastics call “ens commune”) and thus limited and determined by “the Divinity that is above being” (hyper tò einai theótes).
Being is a quality of God, in fact it is the primal quality, the unity of all attributes, the “form of forms”, and insofar as it is quality (ergo by definition not-infinite) it is obviously not univocally identifiable with the supra-formal Essence (and this is Palamas’ view); yet, precisely as quality of the Essence, as its “effect” or “manifestation”, it can also not be fundamentally different from it and must be contained in its Cause and Principle in a super-eminent manner[12], hence why an analogical transposition of creaturely ens to divine esse is wholly justifiable (thus St. Thomas).

 

*

 

We see that the difference ultimately comes down to cataphasis and apophasis, i.e. the analogical predication of “being” as esse infinitum by St. Thomas and the denial of being in Palamas’ Theos hyperousios. This apparent “denial” however must in no way be understood as if God was totally foreign to being (for to transcend being means to “sublate” not to negate it) and we should reject all the attempts to “chase God out of being” (Marion’s “Dieu-sans-Être”), which is only too commonly observed among post-Heideggerian theologians, as just another kind of modernism (as if a contingent phenomenon like existentialism could ever pose a serious challenge to traditional theology!). However, when neo-Palamites take this “super-ontologism” to introduce a “real” distinction into the Godhead itself, this cannot be anything but self-defeating.

This becomes most obvious when it comes to the question of the divine Attributes. Whereas for Palamites – as for Vedantic theists like Ramanuja – these Attributes (Goodness, Justice, Mercy, etc.) are their own diverse Energies really distinct from the Essence, for Thomas God’s Goodness and His Justice are only “virtual distinct” but, in divinis, fundamentally non-different from the Divine Essence. God doesn’t “posses” Goodness as something external (or “accidental”) to Him, He is the Good itself; “He is wholly Understanding, Spirit, and Thought”, as St. Irenaeus says, not as so many distinct qualities or “parts” but simpliciter: absolutely and simply so. Yet it would be wrong to say that God’s Justice is simply the same as His Mercy (like many neo-Palamites argue): while Justice and Mercy are God (viz. the Essence), Justice is not Mercy and Mercy is not Goodness:

 

The Name the Strengthener is not understood in the same way as the Name the Abaser, and so on. However, from the standpoint of the Unity, every Name evinces both the Essence and its own reality, for the One named is One. Thus the Strengthener is the Abaser in respect of the named One, whereas the Strengthener is not the Abaser in respect of its own (relative) reality, the signification being different in both of them (Ibn Arabi, Fusûs al-Hikam, VII).

 

God as He is in Himself is ineffable and unnamable; all the divine Names can merely point at some aspect of the Essence (and thus do have a real fundamentum in Re) but never exhaust its Plenitude; they are the infinite light of the Absolute refracted in the prism of our finite understanding, and even though they signify really distinct ways in which God manifests quoad nos, seen in God they are all simply: God.

 

Therefore although the names applied to God signify one thing [namely the Essence], still because they signify that under many and different aspects, they are not synonymous (S.Th. I.13.4).

 

The objection that “absolute divine simplicity” would mean that “creation, generation and procession are identical so that the Son of God and the Holy Spirit will in no way differ from creatures” or any such things (cf. Capita XCVI-CIII) is therefore baseless. And neither does the assertion that God has many attributes that are identical with the Essence, imply that “God possesses many essences” (CXVII), for the whole indefinitude of different colors stems from the one white Light, just as all the myriad rays lead back to the same unique Sun: “Omnis illuminatio ab uno Lumine; et multi sunt radii, et unum Lumen”.

 

*

 

Palamas himself leaves ambiguous how real the Essence/Energies distinction ultimately is (at least interpretations differ wildly), which we have explained thus: seen in via it is absolutely real, but in patria all is simply God (for a virtual distinction is a real distinction from the viewpoint of manifestation). And this is (at least to our limited opinion) also the way the Essence/Energy distinction was originally envisioned by the Holy Fathers, namely as a distinction between God in se and His “economic” manifestation ad extra, His “operations” (energeiai) in the world, which obviously are, in God, not in any way other than the Essence.

As St. Basil writes in his Letter CCXXXIV (which is the locus classicus for the Essence/Energies distinction in patristic literature):

 

We know the Greatness of God, His Power, His Wisdom, His Goodness, His Providence over us, and the Justness of His Judgment; but not His very Essence … and our idea of God is gathered from all the attributes which I have enumerated … We know our God from His operations (energeiai), but do not undertake to approach near to His Essence. His operations come down to us, but His Essence remains beyond our reach.

 

What Basil is saying is simply this: As long as we’re in this world we only know God through His operations, i.e. as “Good”, “Just”, “Wise” etc., and while these Names do allow us to form a limited conception of God (meaning they do point to a real fundamentum in Re), they can obviously never render the Essence fully knowable.

But this is also exactly what St. Thomas teaches when he says that “in this life we cannot see the Essence of God” and “because therefore God is not known to us in His nature, but is made known to us from His operations or effects, we name Him from these”, “yet not so that the Names which signifies Him expresses the Divine Essence in itself” (cf. S.Th. I.13.1, 8).

 

*

 

We might also quote a passage from St. John Damascene (on whom both St. Thomas and St. Gregory draw heavily for their respective doctrines) which has often been used to against the Thomistic conception of simplicity. In his Expositio de Fide Orthodoxa (IX) he writes:

 

The Divinity is simple and uncompounded. But, that which is composed of several different things is compounded. Consequently, should we say that the qualities increate, unoriginated incorporeal, immortal, eternal, good, creative, and the like are essential differences in God, then, since He is composed of so many things, He will not be simple but compounded, which is impious to the last degree. Therefore, one should not suppose that anyone of these things which are affirmed of God is indicative of what He is in Essence. Rather, they show either what He is not, or some relation to some one of those things that are contrasted with Him, or something of those things which are consequential to His nature or operation (energeia).

 

Thus, according to St. Damascene, there is plurality of distinct attributes (good, just, creative, etc.) but these attributes cannot in any way be understood as to signify an “essential difference in God”, since that would make Him composite. The divine attributes do not describes the Essence as it is itself, but are rather predicated of His outward operations, meaning that one cannot say of God in se that He is “good” or “just”, but merely that He appears so from our “relative” point of view, that is to say that they express certain relations between God and the world, but God as He is in se doesn’t relate to anything, except to Himself in the pericherosis of the Trinity (hence why the hypostatic Names – Father, Son, Holy Spirit – are irreducible even in the Essence).

Now this is again precisely what Aquinas teaches as well when he states that the attributes are only “virtual distinct” (secundum rationem tantum) but non-different in the Essence: We call God “good” and this can serve as a valid (although ultimately insufficient) “symbol” or analogy to describe some aspect of what God is, but in Himself He is neither good nor just, but “hyperagathon”, more-than-good, meaning that in God there is no “Goodness” (as distinct from His Justice) but all is simply one: and “therefore all these Names [Good, Just, Holy, Creator] are to be taken as applying in common, in the same manner, simply, indivisibly, and unitedly to the whole Godhead” (Damascene, ibid. X).

As Thomas himself comments:

 

Damascene says that these names do not signify what God is, forasmuch as by none of these names is perfectly expressed what He is; but each one signifies Him in an imperfect manner, even as creatures represent Him imperfectly (I.13.2)

 

God is “good” insofar as He acts on (or relates to) the world, i.e. according to His “operation” (“this Name [Good] contains the idea of energy”, says Damascene); but while “the Name of Good excellently manifests all the processions of God”, as the Areopagite teaches (Div. Nom. III), it is also clear that it is “in no way indicative of what He is in Essence” (ut supra).

 

The Name ‘Good’ is the principal name of God considered as (first) Cause, but does not designate God in His Absoluteness. For the Absolute precedes all causality (S.Th. I.13.11).

 

In God’s Eternity, the Creation of the world is as present as the Last Day, yet it is obvious that “Creator” and “Judge” are really distinct as pertains to their operation (without thereby being two different Gods): “The Divinity is simple and has one simple energeia”, says St. Damascene, meaning that all that God works is (essentially) one; it is actus purus (or “pure energy”).

When Damascene says that His attributes pertain to energeia instead of ousia this is merely to deny any bifurcation of the Essence into substance [13] and accidents (or qualities) which would be “impious to the last degree” (meaning that the Essence is truly  “absolved” from the operations insofar as they’re “relative”). God is not good “like a body is white or black” (De fide, X) for “God is absolute primal being, and there can be in Him nothing accidental” (S.Th. I.3.6). In other words: St. John introduces the Essence/Energies distinction precisely to affirm the absolute simplicity of God, i.e. that the Essence is not compounded of different attributes but wholly transcend them all in its Absoluteness.

We see that, again, ultimately all comes down to the difference of perspective, one of continuity and one of rupture (or “direct” and “inverse analogy”). The via eminentia of St. Thomas states: “from the goodness of creatures can we infer, by way of analogy, that God (as their cause and exemplar) is good”, or alternatively: “We can say that God is good, albeit only equivocally”[14]. Whereas the Eastern apophasis holds that “the external effects stand in no proportion to their transcendent Cause” (or: “we cannot univocally say that God is good”), hence the only way we can make unequivocal statements about God is by way of negation (“De Deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quid non sit”, St. Thomas agrees).

 

The terms ‘without beginning’, ‘ incorruptible’, ‘unbegotten’, as also ‘uncreate’, ‘incorporeal’, ‘unseen’, and so forth, explain what He is not: that is to say, they tell us that His being had no beginning, that He is not corruptible, nor created, nor corporeal, nor visible. Again, goodness and justice and piety and such like names belong to the nature, but do not explain His actual essence (De fide, IX).

 

Thus, what the West expresses in the distinctio virtualis according to which the attributes can be said to be both really distinct (in via) and identical (in patria), the East says in terms of the Essence/Energy distinction, that allows for a plurality of attributes pertaining to His immanent operations “that come down to us” without rupturing the (absolute) simplicity of His transcendent Essence which ever “remains beyond our reach”.

Nevertheless, since the Easterner doesn’t know of a theology “in God”, a “philosophy of Essence” (which transcends the “theological” point of view properly speaking, and breaches into the domain of metaphysics) the distinction must, for him (as viator), always remain – at least in practice – irreducible. This is also why the East has not developed an analogical method with the same rigor as the scholastics did, for the way of analogy presupposes a metaphysics of esse (and inversely Cajetan says that “without knowledge of analogy no one may begin to learn metaphysics”).[15]

 

Trinity East and West

 

 

Now the criticism of “absolute divine simplicity” is of course always closely tied in with the question of the Trinity, particularly as it relates to the Latin teaching concerning the procession of the Hl. Spirit “from the Father and the Son” (Filioque). 

 

Indeed, the real difference between the Latin – Augustinian – view of the Trinity, as a single Essence, with personal characters understood as ‘relations’, and the Greek scheme, inherited from the Cappadocian Fathers, which considered the single divine Essence as totally transcendent, and the Persons, or hypostaseis – each with unique and unchangeable characteristics – as revealing in themselves the Tri-personal divine life, was the real issue behind the debates on the Filioque (Meyendorff, Theology: East and West).

 

The narrative of the “personalist-existential” East vs. the “essentialist” West that Lossky, Meyendorff and other neo-Palamites have put forward is sufficiently known: “The Latins, in this view, have fallen prey to a static ontology in which abstract notions of being have obscured the mystery of actual existence. The Greeks, on the other hand, have remained fully alive to the primacy of personal existence” (Plested, Op. cit. II.1). Thus the Latin Trinitarianism is often decried as a “relativistic impersonalism” or a “semi-Sabelianism” that dissolves the Persons into the Essence and “brings about a certain rationalization of the dogma of the Trinity” (Lossky) that the East, with its aversion to concrete dogmatic formulations, cannot but find disconcerting: “Our thought stands still before the primordial mystery of the existence of the Personal God” (idem).

Now the Westerner might of course object that revelation is by definition addressed to man, and when God chose to reveal Himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, He didn’t do so to strike us dumb before the “primordial mystery of His existence” but to communicate something real about His inner-most Nature. Whereas the Easterner thinks the Latin Trinity too “rationalistic”, the Westerner might question whether the Eastern perspective really succeeds in ensuring Divine Unity (which is the foundation stone of his whole metaphysics). And contrary to the Eastern accusation of “impersonalism”, many critics of Palamas have in turn lamented that it is rather the Essence/Energy distinction, in which the Persons are relegated to a precarious position “between” the immanent Energies and the transcendent Essence, that “depersonalizes” the Godhead, even going so far as to see in it “nothing less than the complete defeat of Trinitarian theology” (cf. Wendebourg, Geist und Energie).

 

*

 

Although such formulaic propositions should of course be taken with a grain of salt they nevertheless possess a certain truth-value: The Latins generally start from the One Essence and then move outwards to the Three Persons (unitas in Trinitate), whereas the Greeks start from Persons and then ascend to the Essence (Trinitas in unitate), and we see how these perspective fundamentally align with the viewpoints of Thomism and Palamism as we have laid them out above.

Whereas the Western view considers primarily the One Essence in its Trinitarian deployment, the East (keeping with its approach of “bracketing out” the Ousia) starts from the Person of the Father as the Principle of Unity in Godhead (“a single God because a single Father”), the Source of all Divinity (pegaia Theótes) – “ho Theos” – who establishes the relations of origin (generation and procession) of the Son and the Holy Spirit.

The “theophanic” Eastern looks at the Trinity in terms of the manifestation of the Triad: the Father revealing Himself through the dyad of Spirit in the Son. The Eastern Trinity is directed “outwards”, whereas in the Latin view the hypostatic processions are considered as “relations of opposition”, i.e. inward looking; Father and Son turning towards each other in the circulation of Divine Love. It focuses on the Monad which “bifurcates” into the dyad and then “rediscovers” its principal Unity in the “communal kiss of love” (St. Bernard) in which they breathe the Holy Spirit (the virtus unitiva) in a single breath (una spiratio duorum).

We might say that the East views the Trinity from the outside (for “the Essence is unknowable”) and the West from the inside. Or, if we follow Borella and identify the Word as “Archetypical Relation” and the Spirit as “Archetypical Personhood” (cf. Amour et Charité, XIVff.), we might say that the Greek Trinity (with its focus on hypostasis) expresses the Trinity as seen from the Holy Spirit (which is fully in keeping with its “pneumatic” outlook), whereas the Latin, relational view, considers it from the viewpoint of the Son (again conforming with the Western Christocentrism).

 

*

 

To illustrate this, we could employ the (highly imperfect) image of a horizontal line stretching from left to right: In the Eastern paradigm, the principal point (the Father), by extending, begets the second Person as His image (as the “Word” carried by the “Breath” of the divine Pneuma); the Holy Spirit likewise proceeds from the Father and is eternally manifested and (economically) delegated^[16] by the Son, so that we could say with St. John Damascene: “The Son is the image of the Father and the Spirit is the image of the Son” (De fide, I.13). And this order (Father→Son→Spirit) is in fact exactly the composition of Rublev’s Icon of Trinity.

In the Latin point of view however Father and Son occupy the extreme ends with the Spirit mediating between them as their “communal love” and “reciprocal gift” (donum commune). Thus in the so-called “psychological” approach of the Trinity as developed by the Augustino-Thomistic tradition (which again bases itself on the fundamental theomorphism of the human person and the way of analogy) the Spirit is the “bond of love” (vinculum caritas) through which “the two become one” (Father→Spirit←Son).^[17]  

Alternatively, we might conceptualize the Latin Trinity in terms of a circle, in which the Father and Son mark two diametrically opposed point (either upmost and lowest or extreme left and right), the Spirit being the circular movement that flows from A to B and unifies all in the unmoving movement of the circumference. Here we see that instead of a “static ontologism”, the Latin perspective does in fact place a major emphasis on the Divine circumcessio, the “circle dance” of the Most Blessed Persons in which there is no beginning or end.

The Eastern Trinity on the other hand might best be depicted as an equilateral triangle: the Father (A) marking the uppermost point which then descends in the two sides of Son (B) and Spirit (C), as the two revealing Hypostases of the Father or the “two hands of God”, according to an expression of St. Irenaeus. We might also employ the image of the Sun from which emanate both Heat and Light: “The Word and the Spirit are two rays of the same sun inseparable in their showing forth of the Father and yet ineffably distinct, as two persons proceeding from the same Father” (Lossky). And it is obvious that, for the Easterner, to add here another relation of origin must seem artificial at best and at worst risks “deconstructing” the whole taxis (order) of the intra-divine Life all together.

 

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However, even though the Eastern conception is arguably more “dyadic” than the Western one (which is already necessitated by its stronger emphasis on the Monarchy of the Father) it would be wrong to reduce it to this, for the Son and Spirit (the lower points B-C) are not in any way separated but do indeed “connect” to form the base of our triangle. Such a direct relationship between the Son and Spirit (which is often downplayed or even outright denied by anti-Latin polemicists) is in fact affirmed by all the Holy Fathers of the East, although it was never clearly defined and of course never went so far as to predicate a “co-spiration” of the Son in the procession of the Spirit.

 

They [the Cappadocian Fathers] thus expressed, albeit imprecisely, the interrelation of the Son and the Holy Spirit in such phrases as ‘with the Son and through the Son’, ‘without mediation and by means of’, ‘through the mediation of the Son’, etc. And the most typical and general, although not the most exhaustive, expression of this trinitarian interrelation was the formula dia tou Huiou (through the Son). This formula was to receive its definitive expression in St. John of Damascus’ doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit (from the Father through the Son). Therefore, dia became a distinguishing feature of Eastern pneumatology in the fourth century; and it remains such (Fr. Bulgakov, The Comforter, II.4).

 

We touch here of course on the compatibility of the two views; many commentators (doubtlessly in the spirit of “ecumenism”) have  proposed that both Trinitarianism are not all opposed to each other at all but merely come down to semantics and would thus be easily unifiable by simply interpreting the Filioque as meaning “per Filium”. But while it is true that both views existed for long time before the great schism in mutual harmony^[18] and that early Fathers like Maximus Confessor did not see the Western Filioque as “heretical” or fundamentally opposed to Eastern orthodoxy (cf. Epist. ad Marin), we should be careful not to lose sight of the incommensurable idiosyncrasies of both perspectives. 

To reduce the Filioque simply to some contingent historical factor (i.e. to combat the Arian heresy) or to a question of semantics alone, without seeing that it is in deep continuity with the whole theological vision of the West, means to blind oneself to what is essential. Already in Augustine (whose De Trinitate precedes the official addendum to the Creed by more than a hundred years) the whole Trinitarian outlook is fundamentally based on the filioque-principle and the full dogmatization of this doctrine in the Councils of Lyons (1274) and Florence (1431-49) does not mark a “departure” or an “innovation” but merely makes explicit what the West has always held most deeply (“Cogitatio Trinitatis in unitate fructus et finis totius vitae nostrae” – St. Thomas). The Filioque is not merely a dogma but a true “gnostic symbol”, it is the key to the Latin notion of deification and the beatific vision in which we fully participate in the non-duality of Trinitarian Life “and breath the Spirit in the same spiration as Father and Son” (St. John of the Cross); it is the Face of God turned to the Christian West and as such non-negotiable (just like the East cannot simply give up the Essence/Energy distinction without giving up its unique – and God-given – “personality”).

 

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As we have said in the very beginning, the theological visions of East and West are irreconcilable on the horizontal plane, but still contemplate each other “vertically”. They can exist side-by-side, for no matter how many systems and summas we may construct: God is greater (“Allâhu akbar”). Yet every unique perspective excludes by definition, and we hope to have shown sufficiently in this “phenomenology of the Spirit” how the specificities of each viewpoint, from the economy of grace and the way of deification, to the nature of God and our sharing in it in the beatific vision, even to the outer forms of art and liturgy, are most intimately intertwined and possessed of a strict inner coherence. 

Each outlook that has come down to us from the respective tradition is “revelation”, a unique Face of God, and to level this diversity for the sake of some horizontal “ecumenism” is nothing but a sin against the Spirit. If, Deo volente, the schism is ever mended it is essential to respect this diversity. Every attempt at a kind of “syncretism” can only end in disaster.

 

The wealth of Christianity is partly in its variety. The extraordinary spiritual dynamism of Orthodox theology is a precious benefit for all Christians. But surely the organic unity of the Eastern perspective is incompatible with the organic unity of the Latin perspective, and each one has developed its own virtualities while being practically unaware of the other’s. Each one also has its own altogether inevitable limits. And it is to be feared that, in wanting to reunite them, we might add the limits of the one to the limits of the other, and both will be corrupted: Latin dogmatism will suffocate the mystical spontaneity of the East, and the relative aversion of the East to exterior formulations, its pneumatic ‘realism’ composed of immediacy and interiority, will accentuate among present-day Westerners a scorn for theology, and will sanction a confusing of the individual soul’s movement with the motions of the Holy Spirit. It is good that hatred and scorn cease between Orthodox and Catholics. It is to be hoped that the ‘primacy’ of the throne of St. Peter be recognized on all side. But it would be catastrophic for this ecumenism to lead to the destruction of that which forms the irreplaceable specificity of each one (Borella, Amour et Vérité, XV.2.3).

 

A Church that is truly “catholic” and that “breathes with both lungs” can accommodate both, for no single form can ever exhaust the Fullness of Christ. So let us pray that our separated brethren return once more into the flock of Peter.

 

Sancti Thoma et Gregori – Orate pro nobis.