Catholic View On The Divine Energies

[Paddington]

First of all, sorry if anything about my question distorts what I'm trying to get an answer for.

I take it for granted that Roman Catholicism teaches Theosis just as the Eastern Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and probably anybody else from the East does. Even some Protestants do.

The explanation of Theosis that I learned from an Eastern Orthodox is that there are Divine Energies that are eternal just as God is eternal. They "emanate" from God or something like that. The process of Theosis is that we become like God through taking part of the Divine Energies. I guess anything you can say about Salvation/Theosis in general can be seen in relation to the Divine Energies.

1. If anything is wrong so far, then let me know please.

2. Is this also Catholic?

Peace,
Paddington

Edited November 12, 2007 by Paddington

[abercius24]

I'm not exactly sure what the Eastern Church teaches on this. Our friend Apotheoun would be best to answer that. Any kind of real extension of God beyond the Blessed Trinity would definitely not be Catholic, whether it be understood from an Eastern or a Western perspective. The Bible does teach of God's presence empowering the righteous and the heavenly hosts -- what we call Sanctifying Grace in the Latin Rite. I'm not sure how the Eastern Church understands this doctrine, but it may be along the lines of what you are talking about.

[Laudate_Dominum]

This guy has some sweet essays on the subject.

[url="http://www.uky.edu/~dbradsh/"]http://www.uky.edu/~dbradsh/[/url]

[Myles Domini]

[quote name='Paddington' post='1418234' date='Nov 12 2007, 09:29 PM']First of all, sorry if anything about my question distorts what I'm trying to get an answer for.

I take it for granted that Roman Catholicism teaches Theosis just as the Eastern Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and probably anybody else from the East does. Even some Protestants do.

The explanation of Theosis that I learned from an Eastern Orthodox is that there are Divine Energies that are eternal just as God is eternal. They "emanate" from God or something like that. The process of Theosis is that we become like God through taking part of the Divine Energies. I guess anything you can say about Salvation/Theosis in general can be seen in relation to the Divine Energies.

1. If anything is wrong so far, then let me know please.

2. Is this also Catholic?

Peace,
Paddington[/quote]

[url="http://web.archive.org/web/20060224204652/praiseofglory.com/aquinaspalamasgrace.htm"]AQUINAS AND PALAMAS ON CREATED AND UNCREATED GRACE[/url]

...But thanks to the Aristotelian renewal, it was St. Thomas who, without breaking with the tradition of borrowing from Hellenism, without breaking even with the Christian Platonism of Augustine, nonetheless by the orientation of his Neo-Aristotelianism brought about a decisive return to the Pauline view of man.

For Aristotle had ceased to conceive of the soul as somehow paralelling the body in a superior world, separated from the body although weighed down by it. He made the soul the proper "entelechy" of the body, that is, as it were, the directive idea intimately determining all its development.

His successors, however, had interpreted this in a purely materialistic sense, as if the soul had no distinct existence apart from the body, and it is not impossible that Aristotle himself actually thought of it in this way. His teaching on this point, therefore, had seemed irreconcilable with Christian doctrine. Nonetheless St. Thomas took it up again and, by somewhat "re-platonising" it, made it much more satisfactory from the Christian point of view than any form of Platonism or Neo-Platonism.

For, like Plato, he saw the soul as a form, and, moreover, a substantial form, endowed with its own spiritual being, in itself indestructible. But he saw it nonetheless, as did Aristotle, as the form of the body, and of one particular body, determined by its insertion into the material world. The unity of man, body and soul, is thus restored, in harmony with the biblical view--restored, that is, in a spiritual dynamism which causes the body to be unified and perfected in itself in and through the soul.

The soul, in turn, in accordance with the way in which St. Thomas thought of grace, is perfected and exceeds itself in God. In contradiction to Peter Lombard, St. Thomas did not accept the idea that grace is purely and simply the gift of the Holy Spirit, of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity as He is in Himself. It seemed to him that, in this case, man would indeed be the Temple of the Spirit, but not His living Temple, vivified by the presence of its Guest assimilating our life to His own life. The uncreated grace of the gift of the Spirit, therefore, according to Thomas, is extended in the soul itself by a created grace, that is, by a divine quality making the soul like to God, causing it to participate in His own life.

This teaching was frequently misunderstood later on to the point of being interpreted in an exactly opposite sense. The characterizing of grace as created was taken as a pretext for representing it as a second nature, a "super-nature" superimposed on our original nature. Nothing could be more contrary to the profound thought of St. Thomas.

If grace, as he conceived it, is created, it is in the soul that it is so: he says expressly that it is not a superior and distinct nature added to the soul like a mere garment, but a quality infused into it. While grace is supernatural in the basic sense that it is superior to any created nature or to any that could be created, it is in no way a "super-nature." It is as it were a new "accident" inserted into the substance of the soul, fitting it as a soul to live the very life of God, wholly divine.

No theological notion, certainly, is more mysterious than this idea of grace which is created, but in such a way as to render a creature whom it recreates, without changing or destroying it, a "participant in the divine nature," according to the phrase used in the second Epistle of St. Peter (v. 4).

How can a created reality cause us to participate in the uncreated? Yet the paradox is simply that of a reality actually inserted in us to the point of being wholly our own, without ceasing nonetheless to be in itself divine. This is the paradox of that Spirit Who is the Spirit of God, but Who makes Himself the "spirit" of the soul. It is the summit and the crown of that dynamic vision of a creation adopted by its Creator, it is the perfection of that life of relatedness, of one being's reference to another, which is the basis of the biblical universe.

And here this universe most completely transcends the highest of purely human visions of the world, even those developed among the most religious of Greek thinkers.

About a century after the Thomistic synthesis, the East saw another at once deeply traditional and strongly original, take form along its own lines. This is the synthesis of the bishop of Thessalonia known to Byzantine and Russian Christians as St. Gregory Palamas. It seems at first sight to be opposed point by point to that of St. Thomas. In reality, it was almost precisely the same spiritual preoccupations which motivated it and to which it wished to do justice. Yet its metaphysical presuppositions are different although they are not so completely contradictory to those of St. Thomas as they might appear.

For Palamas, the living God that offers us His grace remains at once absolutely transcendent and yet very really communicated to His creatures. He expresses this in a line of thought which, by way of the Greek Fathers and especially St. Gregory Nazianzen and the other Cappadocians, unquestionably goes back to a Judaism of purest biblical inspiration. As the rabbis distinguished between, without separating, God in His inaccessibility to the creature and the Face (or the Angel) of God in which He really communicates Himself, so Palamas distinguishes between the divine essence, totally incommunicable, in which neither man nor any other creature can participate either in this life or even in eternal life, and the divine "energies," in which God actually condescends to His creatures.

In contrast to the divine essence, these energies can be participated in, while they yet remain uncreated, wholly divine. They are the life of God inasmuch as He wishes to communicate it, a life inseparable from His essence and from the three Persons Who are one with that essence, but distinct from Them to the point of being capable of being participated in by created persons.

What is more, since man is inseparably body and soul, the divine energies in permeating his soul transfigure even his body of flesh: this is the light of Thabor, the light shining from the face of Christ at the Transfiguration, as it had once been reflected from the face of Moses at Sinai, and as it snatched away the prophet Elias in the fiery chariot. This light, which not only illuminates the soul but also tranfigures the body, is nonetheless called "uncreated" for the reason that it is the product, the immediate activity of the divine energies in us.

If we wish to indicate the points of contrast between St. Thomas and Palamas, we can pick them out easily. On the one hand, absolute simplicity of the divine essence, in which grace already allows us to participate and which we shall see without any intermediary in the eternity of the blessed. On the other hand, division, or at least real distinction, between the divine essence and the "energies," so that, in grace, the energies act directly within our whole being, while the essence itself, in this life and the next, remains impenetrable, inaccessible to us.

On the one hand, again, created grace, but one which assures our participation in the very essence of God. On the other, uncreated grace, but one which causes us to participate only in the energies radiating from the essence.

Although St. Gregory Palamas was as persuaded as was Thomas himself of the necessity for realistic thinking, and for a realism which should be critical and therefore nourished by Aristotle rather than by Plato - though by an Aristotle rectified by the Bible and the tradition of the Fathers - he was certainly a less rigorous philosopher. His concern was directly spiritual, and he wished to be a theologian only to defend the spirituality which seemed to him traditional, not to speculate for the sake of speculating. It is, therefore, an easy game to criticize, from a strictly philosophical point of view, the real distinction he made between the divine essence and the divine energies.

The fact remains that the same contradiction encountered here is at least latent in the Thomistic theological conception of a grace which is created even though it causes us to participate in the divine nature itself. For on the one hand as on the other, we run into the unheard-of paradox of biblical faith, the paradox that no Greek concept could include: of the transcendent God Who yet communicates Himself and Who really communicates Himself, without for all that absorbing His creature, much less being dissolved in it.

Furthermore, we must not be deceived by some of his expressions. While Gregory Palamas speaks of the divine essence as unpartakable, unknowable, this must be understood, as with the Cappadocians, in the sense of an adequate knowledge or of a participation which would make us divine persons. Conversely, the participation which St. Thomas envisages is only an analogical participation and the vision necessarily not comprehensive. Under one formulation as under the other, what is meant is a communication of the divine life which is authentic, and which becomes authentically our own, without implying any pantheistic immanence or any form of externalism.

Moreover, the notion, which at first sight seems so disturbing, of an "uncreated" light which yet can be seen even by the eyes of the body, simply synthesizes this life of the body in the soul and the life of the soul in God by grace, which is the ideal of humanity as Thomism itself conceives it. There is no doubt that, in Thomistic thought, the transfiguration of the body at the resurrection, however mysterious it remains, will be the effect of its receiving the radiation of the beatific vision as it takes possession of the soul in its entirety--a soul to which, let us remember, it is essential to be the form of a body.

In spite of the apparent conflict between Thomism and Palamism, we should, therefore, recognize in both systems, from the viewpoint of spirituality, the final triumph of the biblical idea of man over all the dangers of warping which the usage of terms or ideas borrowed from the Hellenistic idea of man might have involved.


-- Louis Bouyer, INTRODUCTION TO SPIRITUALITY, pp. 152-156

[Apotheoun]

[quote]Furthermore, we must not be deceived by some of his expressions. While Gregory Palamas speaks of the divine essence as unpartakable, unknowable, this must be understood, as with the Cappadocians, in the sense of an adequate knowledge or of a participation which would make us divine persons.[/quote]
I cannot agree with the comment quoted above. The divine essence is and always will be wholly incommunicable and unknowable, and so it cannot be known in part, nor can it be known imperfectly; instead, it cannot be known by man at all. In other words, the divine essence remains utterly beyond a man's reach, but God does condescend to come down to him in His energies (see St. Basil, [i]Letter 234[/i]), and in so doing He divinizes him, i.e., He makes him God in God.

Finally, as far as "created" grace is concerned, the Byzantine tradition rejects the idea that anything created can give man a real participation in the divine nature. Thus, one can only become God in God.


[i]The link below is to a thread that touches on this subject:[/i]

[url="http://www.phatmass.com/phorum/index.php?showtopic=81541&hl"][u]God As Unknowable[/u][/url]

Edited July 13, 2008 by Apotheoun

[abercius24]

Extending some of the theological points made above by others:

Can it not also be argued that each human being is not capable of perfectly knowing any other human being? And despite that ignorance, a relationship is built on what IS known?

And would it be correct to say "Divine Energy" is basically just another term for man's "relationship" with God? Because everything God does is Perfect and Eternal, the "relationship" He has with man must also Perfect and Eternal, yet still unknowable -- as man's relationship with anything is truly unknowable?

Edited July 16, 2008 by abercius24