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Interesting reading thank you for posting it. I do think though there are greater points of commonality than I initially thought. I may be wrong--and I admit my youth and inexperience make this likely--but I think key here is what St Thomas means by 'being'. To my understanding when Thomas uses this word to apply to God he uses it as a verb and not a noun. God is the noun that is doing the being.
"We love, because he first loved us"--1 John 4:19
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my tentative assessment is that the critics are probably right that Palamas�s formulations go far beyond the Cappadocians. It really looks to me that Gregory is reading the ontological distinction back into the Fathers. I am by no means unsympathetic with the intent of Gregory�s work, though I am less sympathetic with Lossky, Romanides and their fellow neo-Palamites who are polemically advancing the Palamite distinction to justify continued separation from the Catholic Church. Palamas is trying to assert the reality of our divinization in Christ to the Trinitarian life of God and demonstrate how it is possible for us to be incorporated into the divine life of the Holy Trinity without losing our creaturehood. But is the being/energies distinction, interpreted as a real, ontological distinction, necessary to express this soteriological concern? Irenaeus, Clement, Athanasius, Augustine, and Thomas did not think so. Hence I question the wisdom of Orthodoxy�s apparent dogmatization of this distinction. It appears to me that she has elevated a piece of philosophical speculation to a dogmatic level that cannot be justified. Palamism needs to remain in creative conversation, not only with Athanasius and the Cappadocians, but also with Augustine and Aquinas. Justify their separation from the Catholic Church? Palamism is erroneous and a piece of theological speculation? St. Gregory describes life in the Trinity. Theosis. The article only highlights how different and incompatible the Eastern and Western approaches are.
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The essence / energy distinction in the Cappadocian Fathers simply reflects their views on the nature of the ontological "gap" that exists between God and man.
Man is by definition a diastemicand kinetic being, i.e., he is a dimensional (existing in space and time) and constantly moving being, while God is adiastemic and akinetic, i.e, He is beyond dimensionality and exists in absolute stability. This ontological "gap" or difference is permanent at the level of essential being, and as a consequence, man can never know, nor come into contact with, the divine superessential (hyperousios) essence. Instead, all that man can experience of God are His enhypostatic energies, i.e., the enactments of the divine essence by the three divine hypostases, which flow out from the Trinity, and which manifest the divine being within the created world. In other words, God is known by man (both now and in eternity) only in His gracious activities (energeia).
Thus, to say that man can know or experience the divine essence (ousia) is to fail to grasp the radical otherness of God in relation to man, an essential otherness, which the Cappadocian Fathers held to be a fundamental truth of revelation. That being said, for the Cappadocian Fathers, any participation in the divine essence (ousia) by man necessarily involves his essential annihilation, and not his salvation.
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