Divine Energies

In an appendix to Fullness Received and Returned (390), Seng-Kong Tan summarizes Paul Negrut’s arguments against the notion of divine energies developed by Gregory of Palamas.

First, “while the energies are enhypostatic and only express but are not identical to the divine persons, it follows that ‘the latter is forced to occupy a kind of intermediate level between the essence and energies.’” The effect is to put distance between “theologia and oikonomia.”

Second, “by asserting that the ousia is totally impenetrable and incommunicable, Palamas has reified the divine essence altogether beyond the divine persons, departing from the Cappadocians, who identified the personal existence of Father, Son, and Spirit as the ousia.” Negrut says that this puts a question mark over Palamas’s loyalty to the Cappadocian legacy.