Introduction

The following Triadological and Christological problems arise from the failure to make the necessary distinctions between essence (ousia), energy (energeia), and person (hypostasis) in God:

Triadology

(1) The failure to make a distinction between essence and person in the Trinity leads to Sabellian modalism, because if the divine persons are identified with the divine essence, it follows that one necessarily confounds the persons of the Trinity. In other words, if the person (hypostasis) of the Father is the divine essence (ousia), it follows that the divine essence is the hypostatic characteristic of paternity. Now since the Son also possesses the divine essence, which – because of a failure to distinguish between essence and person – is identical with the hypostatic property of paternity, it becomes clear that the Son also possesses paternity; and, as a consequence, that He is the Father. The same holds with each of the three divine persons (hypostaseis), because if the divine essence (ousia) and Sonship are identical, it follows that the Father, and the Spirit as well, who both possess the divine essence, are also the Son. The same can be said about the Father and the Son being the Spirit if one fails to distinguish between essence and person. From what has been said it is clear that the failure to make a real distinction between essence and person in God leads to a complete collapse of the Holy Trinity into an undifferentiated monad.

(2) The failure to make a distinction between essence (ousia) and energy (energeia) in Triadology – depending upon the particular case – leads to Arianism or Eunomianism, because there is no distinction between the generation of the Son, which is proper to the Father as the source of divinity (pegaia theotes), and the creation of the world, which is an act of the divine will and energy. Arius held that the divine energy (and in particular the divine will) is identical with the divine essence, and in doing this, he concluded that the Son is a product of the Father's will, and as such the Logos (Son) is a creature and cannot be very God of very God. Now, in order to avoid this error, St. Athanasios made a distinction between the divine energy (energeia) and power (dynamis) – including the divine will – and the divine essence (ousia) or nature (physis). That being said, in St. Athanasios' theology the Son is generated by the Father, and generation (and procession as well) is a hypostatic act proper to the Father as person, which cannot be reduced to an act of the divine will; and as a consequence of this, the Son is "one in essence" (homoousios) with the Father, i.e., the Son is not a creature, but is instead true God of true God. 

          The Cappadocian Fathers – building upon the theology of St. Athanasios – made this same distinction in order to refute the heresy of Eunomius, who taught that the Son was a product of the divine energy (energeia) of the Father, and because He was "willed" by the Father into existence, the Son was a created being. Responding to this heresy, the Cappadocians – like St. Athanasios before them – taught that the Son was generated by the Father, and not created through an act of the divine will and energy (energeia); and so, for the Cappadocians, the Son is fully divine and "one in essence" (homoousios) with the Father. These same doctrinal distinctions were applied by the Cappadocian Fathers to the Holy Spirit, who derives His hypostatic origin from the person of the Father, and not through the divine will and energy (energeia), but by an act proper to the Father as the eternal cause (aitia) of the Godhead. Thus, the Spirit is not a creature, but is fully divine and uncreated.

          The distinction between essence (ousia) and energy (energeia) also helped the Cappadocian Fathers to avoid the heresy of pantheism, because the world is a product of the divine will and energy (energeia), and not of the divine essence (or nature), which means that it is created, i.e., it comes into being out of nothing through an act of the will of God. Now, to fail to make this distinction leads to difficulties in distinguishing the hypostatic origin of the Son and the Spirit from the divine act of creating the world.

(3) The failure to make a distinction between person (hypostasis) and the personalized (enhypostatic) natural energies causes confusion in connection with the gifts of the Spirit given through the sacraments. It needs to be noted that one person (hypostasis) cannot participate in the existential reality of another person (hypostasis), because to be a hypostasis involves – of its very nature – being a distinct subsistence. Thus, salvation involves man's participation in the personalized (enhypostatic) energies of the Trinity, and not in the divine essence (ousia) itself (which would involve the heresy of pantheism) nor in the hypostasis of any one of the three divine persons.

(4) Only the Son and Spirit can be "one in essence" (homoousios) with the Father, and to hold any other position on this matter by its very nature involves the heresy of pantheism. Man, even after he has been deified by grace, remains "distinct in essence" (heteroousios) from the Trinity, and nothing can change that, because – as St. Gregory of Nyssa pointed out – there is an essential gap (diastema) between the uncreated and the created, and so salvation does not involve a change in man's essence (ousia) or person (hypostasis); instead, it involves a real participation in the uncreated divine energies. The divine energies unidirectionally transgress the adiastemic boundary between created and uncreated reality, giving man a real participation in God's uncreated life and glory, but not in the divine essence (ousia) itself, which always remains transcendent. As St. Basil said in reference to man's ability to know and participate in the divine, "The operations (energeiai) are various, and the essence (ousia) simple, but we say that we know our God from His operations (energeiai), but do not undertake to approach near to His essence (ousia). His operations (energeiai) come down to us, but His essence (ousia) remains beyond our reach" [St. Basil's Letter 234, in Philip Schaff (Editor), The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, (Peabody:  Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), Series 2, volume 8, page 274].

Christology

(5) The failure to make a distinction between essence (ousia) and subsistence (hypostasis) in Christology can – depending upon the case – lead to Nestorianism or Monophysitism and Monothelitism.

          Now, if one posits the idea that person and essence are identical, it follows that because Christ has both a human nature and a divine nature He would also be two persons (hypostaseis), and this of course is the heresy of Nestorius. In opposition to this idea the Church at Chalcedon taught that Christ is one divine person (hypostasis) in two natures (physeis), and – as a result of this teaching – it follows that essence and person cannot be identical.

          Moreover, as I pointed out above, one person (hypostasis) cannot participate in the being of another person (hypostasis), because that would involve the destruction of one or both of the persons (hypostaseis), or the "creation" of some kind of hybrid person (hypostasis). But in the decree of the Council of Chalcedon the holy Fathers taught that the one divine and uncreated person of the eternal Logos assumed from the Holy Theotokos a full and complete human nature and became man, but without becoming a human person (hypostasis) at the same time, because this would involve falling into the heresy of Nestorius. That being said, if essence (ousia) and person (hypostasis) are really identical, it follows that the union of the two natures in Christ would be reduced to a mere union of grace no different from that which is received by a follower of Christ in baptism, and – as I noted above – this is simply another form of the Nestorian heresy.

          Additionally, the failure to make a distinction between essence (ousia) and person (hypostasis) can also lead to the heresy of Monophysitism, because if one identifies essence and person it follows that the union of the two natures in Christ cannot occur in the hypostasis of the eternal Logos, but must somehow occur in the essence (or nature) of the Logos and the human nature assumed by Him. This of course would involve a blending of the two natures, which involves the bizarre notion of some type of "composite" nature (monophysis) that is both divine and human at that same time. Thus the failure to distinguish between person and essence involves the absorption of Christ's human nature (physis) by His divine nature (physis); and as a consequence, Christ is not fully human, because His humanity would be a mere phantasm or appearance absorbed into His divine nature, while He would also not be fully divine, because He would have a mixed human and divine nature, and that would mean that His divine nature – as altered by this substantial mixing – would be different from the divine nature of the Father and the Holy Spirit. Thus, this Christological error leads also to a Triadological error, because it makes the Son of God less than, and essentially different from, the Father and the Holy Spirit.

(6) The failure to make a distinction between essence (ousia) and subsistence (hypostasis) in Christ has the additional difficulty of making human nature itself somehow "essentially" corrupt after the ancestral sin of Adam. Sin – by definition – is a personalized (enhypostatic) characteristic, and not a natural or essential property, but if one fails to distinguish between essence and person it follows that sin must be held to be natural to man, i.e., it must be held to be a part of his nature, rather than being a defect present within his personalized (enhypostatic) mode of willing. This distinction highlights the fact that essence (ousia) and energy (energeia) are also distinct, because the will – as a capacity – is an essential energy of a nature, while the "mode of willing" is proper only to a person (hypostasis), i.e., the "mode of willing" is a personalized (enhypostatic) enactment of that natural capacity. Moreover, a nature (or essence) never wills anything, only a person (hypostasis) can will to do something or not to do something.

          Now in Christ there are – as the Sixth Ecumenical Council taught – two natural (or essential) wills and energies corresponding to His two natures, but of course if energy is identical with hypostasis it follows that the human nature assumed by Christ in the incarnation would become sinful, because sin would be a property of the hybrid human nature / hypostasis composite. But as St. Maximos pointed out, sin is found only in the "mode of willing," i.e., in the enhypostatic activity of man, while it is not to be found in the will as a capacity of nature, and this means that Christ, in assuming human nature, does not assume sin itself (which as I noted earlier is found only within the personalized "mode of willing"), and so, Christ – as the Chalcedonian decree (quoting scripture) says – is like us in all things except sin.

This section (i.e., on Christology) can be summarized in the following manner:

[A] If essence (ousia) and subsistence (hypostasis) are identical, it follows that – if one accepts the reality of the two natures in Christ – the incarnation would involve not only the assumption of human nature, but also the assumption of a human person (hypostasis), i.e., something akin to possession, and this is simply a form of the Nestorian heresy.

[B] If essence (ousia) and person (hypostasis) are identical, it can also lead – ironically enough – to the heresy of Monophysitism, because if one emphasizes the reality of the unity of Christ's hypostasis, without distinguishing between essence and person, it follows that Christ's human nature, since it has no connatural human hypostasis, would be absorbed into His divine nature, and as I already noted above, that is simply the heresy of Eutyches, which is called Monophysitism.

[C] If energy (energeia) and person (hypostasis) are really identical, it follows that Christ must have only one will, because He is only one person (hypostasis), and this is simply the heresy of Monothelitism, i.e., the heresy of positing only one will and natural energy in Christ after the incarnation.

Knowledge of God

(7) In Orthodox doctrine the Medieval Scholastic philosophical notion that the persons (hypostaseis) of the Trinity are "relations of opposition" within the divine essence is rejected, and it is rejected because – according to the Fathers of the East – it is not possible to know anything about the divine essence; and second, because this reduces the persons to oppositional relations, but they are in fact more than that. The three divine persons are not distinguished by the notion of relations; rather, they are distinct because of their "modes of origin" (tropoi hyparxeos). In addition to this problem, another problem arises with the Scholastic theory because it reduces the persons (hypostaseis) to "mental concepts" that are distinct only in the human mind, for as St. Thomas asserted in his Summa Theologica:

          . . . relation as referred to the essence does not 

          differ therefrom really, but only in our way of 

          thinking [St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, Prima

          Pars, Q. 39, A. 1].

So an Orthodox Christian would be required to reject this approach because of the reasons I mentioned above, i.e., (1) because it reduces the persons (hypostaseis) to "relations of opposition," and (2) because it reduces the persons (hypostaseis) to mere epistemic concepts, since they only differ "in our way of thinking." Moreover, the Eastern Fathers assert the very thing that St. Thomas seems to deny, because they say that the persons (hypostaseis) "really" differ from each other and from the divine essence (ousia), but without involving opposition or separation (n.b., opposition and separation are qualities of the diastema). Thus, the Orthodox reject the dialectical approach of medieval philosophical theology.

          Now it is important to note that the East rejects not only this part of Thomas' philosophical concept of the Trinity, but also what he says about the Trinity just before the quotation I gave above, and here is what he said:

          . . . some have thought that in God essence and 

          person differ, forasmuch as they held the relations

          to be 'adjacent'; considering only in the relations 

          the idea of 'reference to another,' and not the 

          relations as realities. But as it was shown above

          in creatures relations are accidental, whereas in 

          God they are the divine essence itself. Thence it 

          follows that in God essence is not really distinct 

          from person; and yet that the persons are really 

          distinguished from each other [St. Thomas, Summa

          Theologica, Prima Pars, Q. 39, A. 1].

First, it must be noted that the Eastern Fathers accept the very idea that Thomas rejects, i.e., they hold that ". . . in God essence and person differ"; and so, the Eastern patristic tradition and the Scholastic tradition really do teach something substantially antithetical to each other about the doctrine of the Trinity. Second, the hypostatic distinctions in God are not "oppositional relations"; instead, they are true "modes of origin" (tropoi hyparxeos) independent of human thought. In fact God in His essence is beyond any category of human thought or predication. Also, it is important to point out that there can be no "opposition" in God, and so the terms "oppositional relation" and "mode of origin" (tropos hyparxeos) do not mean the same thing, and cannot be used interchangeably. That being said, the Eastern Fathers teach that God the Father is the sole "cause" (aitia) within the Godhead, while the Son is generated by the Father, and the Spirit is processed from the Father, and both "generation" and "procession" are hypostatic properties of the Father, which cannot be shared by the other two persons (hypostaseis) without falling into the heresy of Sabellian modalism. Therefore, it is true to say that God the Father is the sole source, principle, origin, and font of divinity, and that the Son and the Spirit derive their origin from Him, not through some sort of "oppositional relations," but through distinct and subsisting hypostatic "modes of origin" (tropoi hyparxeos). Moreover, from an Orthodox perspective, the Scholastics are reducing the Trinity to a form of philosophical speculation, where man moves through rational categories in order to try and "prove" that God is a triad of divine persons; while the Eastern Fathers hold instead that it is not possible to "prove" the doctrine of the Trinity, because it is in fact a datum of divine revelation that must simply be accepted by the gift of faith, which transcends human reason. 

(8) A further point must now be made, because the human mind – according to the Cappadocians – is a diastemic reality, it follows that it cannot come to know anything about, nor participate in, the adiastemic divine essence, for as St. Gregory of Nyssa explained:

          The whole created order is unable to get out of 

          itself through a comprehensive vision, but remains

          continually enclosed within itself, and whatever it 

          beholds, it is looking at itself. And even if it 

          somehow thinks it is looking at something beyond 

          itself, that which it sees outside itself has no being. 

          One may struggle to surpass or transcend diastemic 

          conception by the understanding of the created 

          universe, but he does not transcend. For in every 

          object it conceptually discovers, it always 

          comprehends the diastema inherent in the being

          of the apprehended object, for diastema is nothing

          other than creation itself [St. Gregory of Nyssa, 

          Homilies on Ecclesiastes, 7:412].

What St. Gregory is emphasizing here is the ontological gap that exists between uncreated and created essence, and this gap is permanent, which means that man can never participate in the divine essence, because the divine essence is utterly transcendent and incommunicable. Moreover, because of the diastemic nature of creation the Eastern Fathers reject the idea that there is an analogy of being between the uncreated and the created, because as Fr. Florovsky said, "Creation 'comes into being, made up from outside.' And there is no similarity between that which bursts forth from nothing and the Creator Who verily is, Who brings creatures out of nothing" [Fr. Florovsky, Creation and Redemption, (Nordland Publishing Company:  Belmont, Massachusetts, 1976), page 48]. Thus, the East rejects as impossible the very thing that St. Thomas tries to do in the quotation I gave above, i.e., to compare "relations" in creatures, and "relations" in God, and then come to a conclusion about the what relations are in the divine essence. This kind of comparison is contrary to the teaching of the ancient Fathers, and that is clear if one remembers that the divine essence is beyond intellectual comprehension; and so, through his intellectual concepts, St. Thomas is trying to do the very thing that St. Gregory of Nyssa condemned and said was impossible, i.e., he tries to intellectually transcend the diastema. Sadly, St. Thomas thought he had "learned" something about the essence of God, but of course the Church Fathers hold that that is impossible. As strange as it is to say, St. Thomas appears to have fallen into the very same trap that Eunomius fell into centuries earlier, because he also mistakenly believed that he had learned something about the divine essence by comparing it to creatures, but as St. Gregory of Nyssa said, ". . . in every object it [i.e., the human mind] conceptually discovers, it always comprehends the diastema inherent in the being of the apprehended object," and so, all that St. Thomas did was to fool himself into thinking that he had transcended the created order. Moreover, to believe that the epinoetic conceptions that man forms about God rise up and transgress the adiastemic boundary is the height of hubris and borders on a form of idolatry.

(9) Ultimately, the problem with the Scholastic position – as I have noted above – is that it reduces the Trinity to a philosophical speculation based upon logical reasoning, but God ad intra is beyond man's rational reflection; in fact, God is beyond being, and He is beyond essence (i.e., He is hyperousios), and so the medieval Scholastic philosophers, by reducing the persons of the Trinity to relations within the unknowable divine essence, have made two mistakes: first, they have made the unknowable and utterly transcendent divine essence knowable; and second, they have reversed the order of knowledge in connection with the triad of divine persons, because they have taken what they view as a logical conclusion arising from the distinct "modes of origin" (tropoi hyparxeos), and have made those "oppositional relations" the foundation of their philosophical theory of the Trinity. But again, it is important to remember that there can be no opposition or separation within the Trinity, because God is adiastemic. 

          This Scholastic philosophical approach is in contrast to the Orthodox teaching, which confines itself when speaking about the Trinity to what has been divinely revealed, i.e., that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit differ in their "modes of origin" (tropoi hyparxeos); for the Father is the unbegotten principle (arche) and cause (aitia) of the other two persons, causing the Son by begetting (gennesin) and causing the Holy Spirit by proceeding (ekporeusin). Anything beyond these revealed categories would be viewed as problematic by the Eastern Fathers, because it would involve an attempt to delve into divine mysteries that cannot be known, for as St. Gregory of Nazianzen wrote: 

          What then is this “procession”? You tell me what is

          the unbegottenness of the Father, and I will explain

          to you the natural history of the Son’s generation 

          and the Spirit’s procession. Then both of us will be 

          raving mad for prying into the mystery of God. And 

          who are we to do these things? – we who cannot 

          even see what lies at our feet, or number the sand

          of the sea, or the drops of rain, or the days of 

          eternity, much less enter into the depths of God 

          and provide an account of that nature which is so 

          unspeakable and so utterly above our reason [St. 

          Gregory of Nazianzen, Oration 31, no. 8, translation

          by Dr. Stephen Reynolds].

This respect for the divine inaccessibility is why the Eastern patristic tradition never tried to move beyond the three revealed "modes of origin" (tropoi hyparxeos) in connection with the persons of the Trinity in order to adopt the four philosophical categories of "oppositional relations" invented by the medieval Scholastics. To be frank, I believe that the Eastern Fathers would have found the whole approach of the Latin Schoolmen to be very strange to say the least, since they held that God in His essence is unknowable and consequently beyond dialectical categories of opposition. 

The Importance of Making Divine Distinctions in Orthodox Theology

by Steven Todd Kaster

Original Version:  12 May 2006 (from a thread at the Phatmass Phorum)

This essay was revised and expanded on 30 July 2021, and a preface was added to it on 31 December 2021. The original essay was supposed to include a section on Soteriology, but I never completed that part of the paper because the public forum thread was closed and the discussion was continued privately. At some point in the future I may try to complete that missing piece of the essay.

Copyright © 2006-2025 Steven Todd Kaster