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Bless, Father Kimel!

The point is not that the CCC doesn't accept and express Eastern theological ideas - it does and its section on the Jesus Prayer is wonderful.

The real point is that the CCC is not therefore a good representative of traditional WESTERN thought on the subject of holiness.

Alex

Alex,

I read the CCC to say that sanctifying grace is uncreated. (sorry, I don't have the citation available). Logic tells me the only thing uncreated is God, THE CREATOR.

My understanding is that at baptism one receives the Holy Spirit. What could be more an uncreated grace but the third person of the holy Trinity?

As you can tell, I'm not a theologian. I hope I'm not babbling.

Paul

Alex,
So what, in a nutshell, does Meyendorff say that makes sense about the distinction between essence and energy? And in making this distinction, how does he avoid going "flat"?

Dear Paul and djs,

I did NOT say the CCC denies uncreated grace!

I said that the CCC is NOT a traditional reflection of western theology on Grace - it makes a deliberate effort to reach out to the Eastern Church in this regard which is a good thing.

How well it does that - that's for theologians to determine, not me.

We CANNOT know the nature of uncreated energies versus God's Divine Essence.

Just as we cannot know the distinction between the manner of the Son's proceeding from the Father versus that of the Holy Spirit's.

We do know, and the Fathers on both sides assure us, that there IS a distinction that distinguishes, therefore both Persons - quite apart from the Filioque.

The idea of created grace limits, not expands, any reflection on our life in the Holy Trinity through Christ.

But the fact remains that the West has demonstrated and is demonstrating that it can relate its theological paradigms to the East and can appreciate the East to the extent that it can assume certain Eastern positions that it believes are the same as its own.

Whether they are or not is again for theologians to determine.

Alex

Here's a short article comparing St Thomas and St Gregory on Uncreated and Created Grace [praiseofglory.com] .

I have just picked up, through ILL, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas by A. N. Williams. This looks like a very promising study, though I doubt I'll have time to really read it thoroughly before its due back to the library, given other projects. Her basic thesis is that, despite differences between the theologies of both men, a fundamental disparity does not exist between the two on deification and sanctificaiton.

Williams does address the distinction between being and energies in Palamas. She personally believes that this distinction is only nominal in Palamas, though many Palamites interpret the distinction as real and ontological. This is important, as it is certainly doubtful that the Cappadocians, who seem to be the originators of this theory, posited a real distinction between the two.

Why do contemporary Western trinitarian theorists have find this distinction a problem? Because the whole point of the doctrine of the Trinity is to assert that God truly communicates himself, in the fullness of his reality, in the Incarnation of Christ. He does not withhold himself but gives himself fully. Thus the Western claim that we can truly know God, though we can never comprehend him.

As I understand the purpose of Palamas's distinction, it is to prevent a pantheistic absorption of the believer into the Godhead in such a way as to eradicate the believer's creaturehood. If Williams is right that this distinction is only notional, then the Western concern is protected.

I think there is a limitation with the English language here. "Knowledge" usually implies an intellectual act in English. What Palamas is talking about is actually "experiencing" the energies of God, not "knowing" in the intellectual sense.

This was the whole point of his agrument with Barlaam of Calabria in the Triads, namely Barlaam held that one must first have "knowledge of things" or "knowledge" in the intellectual sense, and Palamas argued to the contrary, that some of the simplest monks and holy people were abounding with experience of the energies of the transfigured Christ and His Holy Spirit that would be in most Western views fools or simpletons in an intellectual sense.

Palamas makes a concerted distinction between essence and energies, and to somehow minimalize that distinction I think to an extent goes against the grain of Byzantine apophatic theology. "The deifying gifts of the Spirit (energies) cannot be equated with the supersessential essence of God" he writes in the Triads. This distinction is at the heart of apophatic thought.

I and many other Byzantines become somewhat nervous at the use of terms like "know" and "knowledge" because of the distortion of Scholastic ideas through the Enlightenment and into modern thought where the "knowledge" of man put him above God or eliminated the need for God.

And where I think many of us Westerners get uncomfortable with the apophaticism of the East is that it seems to come close to saying that God has not truly revealed and communicated himself in Christ Jesus. We are not talking just about an "intellectual" knowledge. We are talking about a personal and evangelical knowledge of the eternal deity given to sinful humanity through the Spirit in the sacred humanity, acts, and words of Jesus of Nazareth. "No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known" (John 1:18).

I fully agree that we cannot know what God is, but surely we must say that we are given to know who God is. Thus we read in the Orthodox-Reformed agreement on the Holy Trinity [reformiert-online.net] : The crucial evangelical concern is that God is as he has revealed himself to be, that when he gives himself to us in Christ through the Spirit, we are truly being given God as he truly is.

Let me put the question this way:

How is it that we know that God is ineffable and incomprehensible? It is because our philosophical reflections have told us that this is so, or is it because God has made himself truly known in Christ and we have thus personally encountered the ineffability and mystery of God?

Letting the liturgy itself be the catechist, the tropar from the Feast of the Transfiguration has much to say in this regard:
"Thou wast transfigured on the mountain, O Christ our God, showing to Thy disciples Thy glory as each one could endure, shine forth Thou on us who are sinners all, Thy light ever-unending through the prayers of the Theotokos. O Light-giver, glory to Thee"

As "each one could endure" is key. The essence of God is completely transcendent and ineffable, and to us as humans can only be experienced through His energies as "each can endure" and thus can not be experienced in its totality, as it is beyond knowing and as St. Gregory Palamas also says, even beyond unknowing. And at the Transfiguration the revelation of the energies of God eventually became overwhelming to the human senses and reason of those present.

The Transfiguration is iconic of all living persons on earth in this life being able in some way to experience the Taboric or Uncreated Light, the energies of God, through the person of Jesus Christ, but not the totality of God's essence, because of the ineffable, transcendent and infinite nature of God beyond our human sensual and rational limitations.

In this regard the Byzantine tradition takes a much more experiential approach rather than attempting to rationalize or reduce the realities of God to categorization or verbal description, which will always be lacking and incomplete, and eventually minimalization of God Himself by erroneus and prideful supposition that we somehow "understand" all of this.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On the issue of created and uncreated grace, I can only input that in the West, there exists both according to classical scholastic philosophy. There are, if memory serves, three types of grace, and among these a million distinctions. There are actual graces, which are merely favors God can bestow on you, from the meeting of a crucial person in your life of faith, to a cool breeze on a hot day. Then, there is sanctifying grace, which actually changes the soul from sinner to just; it is not the indwelling of the Trinity in the soul, but the grace that "cleans up" in order that the Godhead can dwell within. Then, there is the actual union with God, of which I don not remember the name, but I do recall my teachers saying that this is distinct from sanctifying grace and actual grace, both of which, in the West, are created. These might just be some hazy memories from seminary days, but this is why Latin Christians can say, "You will get great graces from praying such and such a prayer, doing such and such a thing, etc." In the East, so it was explained to me by a ROCOR monk, grace is always uncreated and always singular: Grace and not graces. In the end, I suppose it is only a matter of wording, and it just all depends on the Latin obsession to disect the invisible and undividible. (Where does actual grace end and sanctifying grace begin? And on and on.) In the book, "Ground of Union", the author writes that St. Thomas writes of created grace solely in order to defend the ontological integrity of the creature in relationship to the Creator, and not to diminish the Christian doctrine of theosis.
As for essence and energy in God, I struggled with this problem in my seminary days, but in my case the major figure that helped me out was St. Gregory of Nyssa. In the Western idea of the beatific vision, on can get the impression that our eternal beatitude (our union with the Trinity) is the result of one act: the viewing of the essence of God like the freezing of a still photograph. In St. Gregory of Nyssa's thought, our advancement toward God is an eternal ascent into the Infinite, a race to catch the ever-expanding beauty of God. There must, in the end, be some "core" of the Trinity, that God "sees", but we don't, and even Latin theology will admit this when pressed ("Totus videtur, sed non totaliter"= All is seen, but not completely) This is due to our conditions as creatures and thus finite, but God does not hide from us. He is merely superluminous, ineffable, and all-glorious. He shows us what (or rather, Who) He is, but it takes an eternity to really know Him.
At least that's how I understand things.

Arturo

Dear Diak,

Do you really think that this is what the Western Church is about in her theological expression of our Faith?

"In this regard the Byzantine tradition takes a much more experiential approach rather than attempting to rationalize or reduce the realities of God to categorization or verbal description, which will always be lacking and incomplete, and eventually minimalization of God Himself by erroneus and prideful supposition that we somehow "understand" all of this."

I have lived in the Western Tradition all of my life. I have studied Scholastic Theology, Biblical Theology, etc. as it has been and is taught in the West. I have never been taught that our approach to learning is coterminus with the truth that we're learning about. Nor have I learned that God can be captured in discussions of categories, genus, or species. Thinking in this way, in categories for example, is just that thinking for the purpose of examining and of learning.

The experiential is alive and well in the Western Church also. God is working with us also.

A difference in emphasis does not mean that we minimalize God in any way. We know that He is Who He Is and that He is essentially unknowable except as we experience Him in Christ through the working of the Spirit. We, in our historical experience, simply borrowed the propensity of early easterners like Aristotle and attempted to use things like categories to examine what God has said.

It seems to me that some in the East do not see our analytical propensity as necessarily something to run from. If I recall correctly, one of the Patriarchs of your own Church created a university school of theology for your Church in Ukraine. He stressed the usefulness of using Thomistic Theology as a framework that would help make the study of theology in the East more like a science.

Of course, my memory might be serving me poorly again.

We do not associate understanding more about the Reality under study in theology with grasping the totality of the Reality under study in theology or with minimalizing that Reality.

It not appropriate to suggest that we do, in my opinion.

But, I digress.

Thanks for hearing me out!

Steve

St. Gregory of Nyssa's "darkness of God" especially discussed in his "Life of Moses" forms a pillar of apophatic thought that becomes more developed with Palamas much later.

St. Gregory of Nyssa is really a critical foundation of the whole development of "negative language" about God which can be seen not only with Palamas but also strongly in Denys the Areopagite's "Mystical Theology" which draws heavily on the themes of darkness of God and unknowing from the "Life of Moses".

It's interesting you mention St. Gregory of Nyssa in terms of enlightenment, Arturo. With myself it was actually the reverse, it was St. Gregory Palamas for me that "closed the loop" so to speak with illumunation of certain texts and ideas of St. Gregory of Nyssa, Denys the Areopagite, etc. that I had read earlier, and re-reading them after reading St. Gregory Palamas was amazing.

Steve, it is not a matter of "right or wrong" but an essential difference in approach. I wouldn't be Catholic (in communion with Rome) if I thought the Latin approach was inherently wrong. Unfortunately in many Greek Catholic seminaries Byzantine theology was eliminated and the formation became basically entirely Scholastic, so some of us are possibly a bit touchy about this subject .

As Greek Catholics we deserve to be taught our own uniquely Byzantine theological heritage. I am not advocating the elimination of Thomistic theology at all, to the contrary it should be taught, but if we are to regain our patrimony as per the directives of the Holy Father we must also regain our theological heritage.

I think St. Thomas Aquinas' proofs for the existence of God are a good example. In an almost Euclidian manner (akin to a geometric proof) he makes the arguements. This is completely different than how St. Gregory of Nyssa or St. Gregory Palamas would approach this subject, which would be in a much more mystical and "negative" manner.

"Contemplation, then, is not simply abstraction and negation; it is a union and a divinisation which occurs mystically and ineffably by the grace of God, after the stripping away of everything from here below which imprints iteself on the mind..." (Triads of St. Gregory Palamas)

The Byzantine and Latin theologians are very much united, however on the issue of human suffering bringing one closer to God.

Because of a certain amount of supression of Byzantine theology in Greek Catholic semanaries and the forced study of Scholastic theology over the last 200 years, we have a lot of ground to cover to balance our theology back in line with our Byzantine heritage.

The Latin and Byzantine theological approaches we are discussing here, while very different, are at their very heart complimentary, not opposing. Both need each other to avoid extremes of thought in the Catholic communion.

Dear Diak,

Thanks for your quick response. Let me say first that I understand and agree with most of what you say.

From what I've learned here and from the words of the Pope, there is a need for the Eastern Churches to teach in the Byzantine tradition and embody it fully in their practices. I have no issue with that.

But that was not the point of my post.

When you said:

"In this regard the Byzantine tradition takes a much more experiential approach rather than attempting to rationalize or reduce the realities of God to categorization or verbal description, which will always be lacking and incomplete, and eventually minimalization of God Himself by erroneus and prideful supposition that we somehow "understand" all of this."

It seemed to me that you were mischaracterizing the tradition of the West. It appeared that you were suggesting that we think that we can "reduce the realities of God to categorization or verbal description."

You correctly point out that these will always be lacking and incomplete. You suggest that this will eventually lead to our "minimalization of God Himself by erroneus and prideful supposition that we somehow 'understand' all of this."

I am sure that you know that that is not what scholastic theology is about. It is simply another learning tool. We would not presume to allow our theology to suggest that we have captured God's realities in categories or verbal description.

Indeed, it seemed to me that your comments shoved and folded Western Catholic theology into categories and descriptions which are not its own.

God is Who He Is and He is Mystery and Majesty. Nowhere that I am familiar with in Western Catholic thought is the notion to be found that by studying God's realities we can minimalize God.

The goal as I understand it is to do the exact opposite. The goal is to amplify and reflect on the beauty and glory of the One whom we study. It was intended to enhance our sense of wonder, I think. Surely this was the effect in St. Thomas.

Of course all theologies will always be lacking and complete, not just those of the West. They all fall short of encompassing the Realities of God. All theological approaches the analytical, the scholastic, and it seems to me, the apophatic, among others are creations of humankind.

As I understand it is not an erroneous and prideful supposition that we can somehow "understand all of this" that leads us in the West to the use of theological concepts and frameworks to try to learn about God." It is Faith seeking greater understanding of the Reality which enraptures and draws us to study Him in His Revelation that leads us.

It is not Faith seeking to encompass the Godhead and to make Him in our Image by squeezing Him into categories that are man made. An erroneous and prideful presupposition that is! It is not ours.

Diak, I totally agree with this statement:

"The Latin and Byzantine theological approaches we are discussing here, while very different, are at their very heart complimentary, not opposing. Both need each other to avoid extremes of thought in the Catholic communion."

I guess I wondered why it was necessary to cast the Western Approach in the terms that you did in order to point out the beauty and greatness that is in the Eastern approach. That's what you appeared to be doing in the paragraph from your post that I quoted earlier in my response. Maybe I misunderstood.

I enjoy learning here. Your posts are most informative. Casting our theology in the terms of error and reducing God and His realities to categorization and verbal description gets in the way.

After all, I'm a Latin and it's said to be in our blood try to understand.

Thanks for hearing me out, again!

Steve

Steve, I certainly had no intention of putting down the Angelic Doctor nor denying the rich mystical tradition of the West with such luminaries as St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, etc. etc. And I will always hear you out, friend.

I was speaking (and overgeneralizing, admittedly)more to the eventual development of Western thought into its more pragmatic approach or one tending more towards rationalization, especially during and after the Enlightenment.

Your use of the term "systematic theology" itself shows how in the West the divorce of "theology" occurred from prayer and liturgy. In the Byzantine mind theology, spirituality, and liturgy form one organic whole.

After the Scholastics there came "schools" and "disciplines" which further separated theology into various subcategories for study. Theology and liturgy became themselves different disciplines of study. This approach would have been completely foreign to someone like St. Cyril of Jerusalem or St. John Chrysostom.

Please understand in the Christian East there was not an equivalent of the Enlightenment and its associated "triumph of human reason", nor an equivalent of the Reformation. The East kept its mystical approach while the West tended much more towards a more "rational" and pragmatice approach.

Thus the eventual effects and historical theological development of the Scholastics are seen with mixed feelings in the Byzantine mind. But again, I am not saying in an absolute sense that the Scholastics were inherently wrong or that they somehow deny a Latin mysticism, nor that the Scholastic approach has no merit. After all, St. Thomas is the Angelic Doctor...and I used to use his cosmology quite often when teaching science years ago

St. Peter Moghila, Metropolitan of Kyiv, actually used some aspects of the Scholastic approach in his seminary curriculum and when compiling his Orthodox Catechism. This was one of the most widely distributed Orthodox catechisms.

In the end, as I mentioned above, both Byzantine and Latin theologies are complimentary, not opposite. Both need each other to avoid certain theological/philosophical excesses.

Dear Friends,

This is all well and good.

How is the CCC's mention of theosis, in any way, an outline of the West's belief in it that is comparable to that of the East?

I think some of you Westerners (didn't someone have an avatar of a cowboy hat at one point?) want to "overdo" it in trying to make Theosis an integral part of Western spirituality.

And it certainly is not.

Alex