The following text is based on a theological discussion I had at the Phatmass Phorum back in May of 2006.  While the Interlocutor's comments remain as originally written, my responses have been revised and expanded — most recently on 5 April 2026 — to reflect my current theological views and further study.  The original 2006 discussion from which these comments were drawn can be found at the link at the bottom of the page.

No offense, but perhaps you are unfamiliar with what St. Gregory Palamas has said in his many writings on this topic.  In the Capita Physica, which is called "The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters" in the Philokalia, he says quite clearly:  "Three realities pertain to God:  essence, energy, and a triad of divine hypostaseis." [St. Gregory Palamas, The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, no. 75]  Thus, Palamas teaches, both in the Capita Physica and in the Triads, that the distinctions between essence and energy, hypostasis and energy, and essence and hypostasis are real, and not merely formal or notional.  In fact, theosis is not possible if one fails to make these real distinctions.  The denial of a real distinction without a separation in God is a common failure of Western scholars who desperately try to see the distinction between essence and energy — which was made by the Cappadocian Fathers in the 4th century, by St. Maximus in the 7th century, and by St. Gregory Palamas again in the 14th century — in Neo-Platonic or Aristotelian terms, which involves a fundamental misreading of them all.

This Palamite distinction is rooted in the Cappadocian Fathers; for if a man denies that they make a real distinction without division between essence and energy, he destroys their argument against the heretic Eunomius.  For it is well known that Eunomius believed that the divine essence was knowable — i.e., as unbegottenness — but since the divine essence is adiastemic, as St. Gregory of Nyssa (in his homilies on Ecclesiastes) and the other two Cappadocian Fathers (in their own writings) affirmed, it is clear that it is impossible for man to transcend his created existence and come into contact with that which is utterly beyond him.  This means that man cannot have any knowledge of God's essence, nor can he participate in it in any sense, because to do so would involve the annihilation of his created essence.  Thus, salvation involves an existential change in man through the divine energies, not an essential one through some kind of vision or knowledge of the divine essence, especially if one were to posit the strange notion of a "created light of glory" (i.e., some type of "created grace") that empowers man to see God's adiastemic essence along the lines of that proposed by the Scholastics during the Middle Ages.

This is also why the Byzantine tradition rejects the idea that there is an analogy of being (analogia entis) between God and man, because since God's essence is adiastemic it follows from this fact that there is a "gap" (diastema) between God's essence and man's essence, which is why St. Gregory Palamas says that "Every created nature is far removed from and completely foreign to the divine nature.  For if God is nature, other things are not nature; but if every other thing is nature, He is not a nature, just as He is not a being if all other things are beings.  And if He is a being, then all other things are not beings," for as he goes on to say, "God both is and is said to be the nature of all beings, in so far as all partake of Him and subsist by means of this participation:  not, however, by participation in His nature — far from it — but by participation in His energy." [St. Gregory Palamas, The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, no. 78]  This radical ontological distinction makes the Scholastic analogia entis untenable; for Palamas, the diastemic gap between the uncreated and the created is not bridged by a shared concept of being, but is instead overcome by the divine energies, which allow the creature to participate in God's life without collapsing the absolute transcendence of the divine essence.

Regarding the Patristic Tradition, if a man denies the presence of real distinctions in God between essence, energy, and person, it follows that he destroys the Cappadocian argument against Eunomianism, while also causing problems in connection with the doctrine of the Incarnation.  Looking first at the distinction between essence and energy, it follows that anyone who fails to make a distinction of this kind reduces the salvation of man to a virtual reality in which the human person comes into contact with God through a form of created mediation — i.e., a created grace, which is akin to the Arian heresy — rather than by a real participation in the uncreated life and glory of the Holy Trinity itself through the kenotic self-emptying of the eternal Logos.  So, the failure to distinguish between essence and energy has the effect of making a real participation in God impossible for man, not only in this life, but also in the eschaton.

Furthermore, a failure to make a real distinction between essence and person in God undermines the reality of the dogma of the Incarnation of the Son of God, as noted above, for the Logos alone assumed human nature from the Virgin Theotokos and became man.  The reason that one must make a real distinction without a separation as opposed to a mere noetic distinction in connection with this dogma is that the latter distinction causes the Incarnation of the eternal Logos to collapse into an incarnation of the divine essence and of all three of the divine persons, while the former safeguards the dogma as it is established through divine revelation, that is, as an Incarnation of the second person of the Trinity alone.  Thus, to try and hold the Eunomian doctrine of absolute divine simplicity and knowledge of the divine essence through created means leads inexorably to the heresies of Patripassianism and Sabellian modalism, which involves the complete capitulation of the Cappadocian Fathers to the false teaching of the heretic Eunomius.

If the quotation from St. Basil’s Letter 234 falls flat with you, it is because you have failed to grasp his argument against Eunomius.  St. Basil’s argument can be summarized in the following manner:  First, it addresses Eunomius' view that God’s essence is unbegottenness and that this quality can be known by the created human intellect.  In response, St. Basil argues that one need not (and in fact, one cannot) know the essence of God.  However, it does not follow from this that God is utterly transcendent, for He is immanent in His energies which "come down to us" and in which we are able to participate. [St. Basil, Letter 234, no. 1]  Next, Eunomius attacks St. Basil for supposedly making God complex.  On this second point of the Eunomian polemic, St. Basil responds by asserting that while God’s energies are various, His essence remains simple; thus, "we know our God from His energies, but do not undertake to approach near to His essence."  Finally, Eunomius’ third point concerns the nature of worship, for he holds that man must have a comprehensive knowledge of what he worships or the act is somehow invalid.  On this point he accuses St. Basil of being ignorant of the object of his worship, to which St. Basil responds that he knows that God exists and so worships Him by faith, but what God is in essence cannot be known because it is beyond the created intellect of man to comprehend.  It is at this point that St. Basil turns the tables on Eunomius by pointing out that the heretic’s understanding of divine simplicity itself is defective because it makes all of God’s energies identical to His essence, and St. Basil condemns this idea, noting that the "absurdities involved in this sophism are innumerable." [St. Basil, Letter 234, no. 1]

Now, as far as St. Thomas’s philosophical speculations about the Trinity are concerned, the East rejects them because they come too close to the teaching of Eunomius by making everything in God identical to the divine essence.  The Eastern Church condemned that Aristotelian philosophical approach centuries ago in a document called the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, which is chanted in the Divine Liturgy on the Feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy during Great Lent.

Well, there are of course a few Byzantine Christians who also misunderstand Palamas, and who fail to see the fact that his teaching is a continuation of the doctrine of the Cappadocian Fathers.  That said, the fact that Endre von Ivanka, who was not a "Byzantine Theologian" but who was instead a Roman Catholic scholar, clearly misunderstood the teaching of the Cappadocians and Palamas on the divine energies.  Ivanka was no doubt influenced by other anti-Palamite Roman Catholic scholars (e.g., Martin Jugie), and so his scholarship was a product of the time in which he lived, and it is clear that he fundamentally misunderstood both Palamas and the Cappadocians.  This has been confirmed by the work of Eric Perl who has written about Ivanka's failure to really read what Palamas said, and who thus failed to see that both Palamas and the Cappadocians had rejected Neo-Platonism.  As Dr. Perl has highlighted, Palamas explained that the divine energies do not stand midway between God and creation as some type of intermediaries; instead, the energies are God, and more precisely they are the activities of the three divine persons, which means that they are personal (enhypostatic) enactments of the divine nature, and are not, and must never be conceived as, emanations from the "One."  I would also recommend reading Dr. Mosshammer's articles on St. Gregory of Nyssa in order to better understand that Father's rejection of Neo-Platonism in his later writings, i.e., beginning with his 6th Homily on Ecclesiastes.  I talk about this change in Nyssa's views in detail in my paper entitled, "St. Gregory of Nyssa and the Ontological Gap Between Created and Uncreated Being," which is available on this website.

So the fact that Ivanka was in error on Palamas does not alter the reality that the distinction between essence and energy is real, and not merely notional.  In fact, if the distinction is not real the Cappadocian argument against Eunomius collapses.  It is only because the Cappadocian Fathers made a real distinction without a division between essence and person, and essence and energy, that they were able to defeat Eunomius and his followers.  Furthermore, the diastemic nature of creation, which is inherent to its ontological structure as St. Gregory of Nyssa proved, is why a creature cannot transcend its created existence, either in thought or in reality, because created being is by definition dimensional and kinetic.  Taking what I have said up to this point into account it becomes clear that salvation involves an existential, but not an essential, change in created beings.

Moreover, anyone who thinks that Palamas, who attacked explicitly Neo-Platonic thought in connection with theosis, has either never read Palamas or has misread him.  Western scholars and theologians commonly makes these types of misreadings, and not only of Palamas, but of Pseudo-Dionysios as well, and Dr. John Jones — who was formerly the head of the philosophy department at Marquette University — has written some excellent critiques in connection with St. Thomas' misreading of Pseudo-Dionysios, see in particular his articles entitled:  "Misreading the Divine Names as a Science:  A Scholastic Framework for Reading the Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysios," "Manifesting Beyond-being Being (Hyperousios Ousia):  The Divine Essence / Energies Distinction for Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite," and "An Absolutely Simple God? — Frameworks for Reading Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite."

Finally, it is important to note that only some of the problems between East and West have their origin in the West's use of pagan philosophy and rationalism in theology (e.g., the West's acceptance of a concept of absolute divine simplicity built upon the thought of Plotinus, and the reduction of the divine hypostaseis to an Aristotelian and Platonic dialetic of "relations of opposition," etc.), while other problems are founded upon basic theological differences in connection with how the two sides understand grace and even salvation itself.

St. Gregory Palamas is reading the Cappadocians correctly, just as St. Maximos and St. John Damascene read them correctly centuries earlier, which is why they also made a real distinction between essence and energy in God.

What I am saying is that Endre von Ivanka has misunderstood the Cappadocian Fathers, because if he really believes that the distinction between essence and energy in their trinitarian theology is only notional, he has turned the Cappadocians themselves into Eunomian heretics, while also undermining — as I indicated above — the dogma of the Incarnation.  Now that is quite an ironic reading of the Cappadocians, since they are arguing specifically against Eunomius on this very issue, but perhaps he — like you — has not fully grasped the nature of the ontological gap between the adiastemic uncreated essence of God and the diastemic created essence of man.

Essence, Energy, and Person:  Real Distinctions Without Separations

by Steven Todd Kaster

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

Copyright © 2006, 2026 - Steven Todd Kaster