While at the monastery, I read David Bradshaw’s Aristotle East and West, published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press. I took notes, because early on I realized it would be an important book. But by the end I was amazed. Finally, here is a scholarly, just argument how the West in its root concepts diverged from Orthodoxy, especially via Augustine and Aquinas. It is not just the papacy and the filioque that separate us, but our basic vision of God.

Maybe Lossky is too tough for me, but his polemic in Mystical Theology seemed rarely to amount to more than carping that the West is too precise. But our holy Fathers treasured precision in theology. Why else did they endure exile, mutilation, and death for such abstruse details of Christology? Even worse are John Romanides and George Gabriel, who misrepresent both traditions. They malign the West and cripple the East. But Bradshaw’s book convinces me. Finally I have found someone to dim my admiration for the Angelic Doctor.

The title is unfortunate, because the book is not really about Aristotle. It traces the word ἐνέργεια from Aristotle, who coined the term, through pagan philosophy up to Plotinus, and from St. Paul through eastern and western Christianity. It culminates in a comparison between Palamas and Aquinas. Bradshaw concludes that the ἐνέργειαι of Palamas have a long pedigree, and Palamas is synthesizing various strands of thought from St. Paul, the Cappadocians, St. Dionysius the Argeopagite, St. Maximus Confessor, and St. Simeon the New Theologian. He shows how Augustine and Aquinas diverge from the Greek tradition by their notion of divine simplicity. The argument is tight and learned, and the style is easy to read. He concludes by evaluating the positions of Aquinas and Palamas, no longer as a historian but as a philosopher. He finds Aquinas inconsistent, but Palamas he defends as coherent.

In the last few pages, he turns from careful argument to broad conjecture, and he wonders if the West’s problems of rationalism, naturalism, and dualism do not stem from Augustine and Aquinas, with their purely intellectual view of salvation. Perhaps the endless religious controversies of the West are due to the incoherence of divine simplicity, with different factions emphasizing different contradictory points. Perhaps the God that Nietzsche pronounced dead is not the authentic God of Christianity but an idol, and we can find a vision of the true God in the East.

Despite the astounding conclusion, this book is fair and carefully reasoned, with the gentleness of broad scholarship. Bradshaw treats difficult philosophers with ease and familiarity. Often he reveals the heart of their logic with childlike simplicity. The first chapters alone are valuable for their contributions to scholarly interpretation of Aristotle. More important, when he criticizes the West, he reads his subjects with accuracy and due nuance. He puts his opponents in the best light, and he presents the current scholarly defenses for any problems he finds. I want to offer a summary of his argument.

ἐνέργεια in Aristotle

Plato and Aristotle both distinguish between having a thing and knowing how to use it. Plato uses the terms κτῆσις (possession) and χρῆσις (use). The latter he also calls ἕξις (possession, state, or habit). Aristotle uses ἕξις to mean possession, along with τὸ ἔχειν (having). For the use of a thing, he coins the word ἐνέργεια. Plato applies this distinction to many things, including physical possessions. Having a lyre is not the same as knowing how to play it. In Aristotle, the distinction is limited to faculties of the soul like knowledge or sight. In this use, ἐνέργεια indicates exercise of a faculty (2–3).

The difference between possession and use is one of potentiality and actuality. Aristotle’s word for potentiality is δύναμις. For actuality he uses ἐντελέχεια or ἐνέργεια. He discusses three levels of reality, or levels at which a subject may have some predicate. The lowest is first potentiality. This is potential due to what a thing is, its φύσις (nature). The next stage is to develop the natural faculty so you can actually use it. For example, all men are potentially knowers by virtue of their being men, but only educated men know how to know, because they alone can reason when they choose. This middle stage is called both second potentiality and first actuality. The last stage, second actuality, is simply the active use of the developed faculty, for example the act of knowing. To use Plato’s example, these stages would be owning a lyre, knowing how to play, and actually playing right now. The transition from first to second potentiality requires an external agent; you cannot do it yourself. In the case of reasoning or playing a lyre, you must find a teacher. But the transition from first to second actuality is self-caused. Since you already possess a true potentiality, you can reason or play whenever you like. This is where ἐνέργεια gets its sense of actuality (3–7).

Bradshaw identifies five types of actuality in Aristotle. The first (the third in his ordering) is first actuality, a thing’s potential to act. This is an actuality because though potential, it is an “actual potential.” The second and third types of actuality are versions of second actuality, actual acting. They depend on Aristotle’s distinction between ἐνέργεια and κίνησις (motion). This distinction is confusing, because Aristotle uses ἐνέργεια in two ways. On the one hand, it is a synonym for ἐντελέχεια, meaning actuality broadly speaking (13–15). On the other hand, he contrasts it with κίνησις as merely one type of actuality. In this latter sense, ἐνέργεια is not actuality but activity.

The distinction between ἐνέργεια and κίνησις is based on whether a thing’s ἔργον (work) is also its τέλος (end). Some acts, like housebuilding, have a τέλος separate from the ἔργον. The ἔργον is building, and the τέλος is the house. Other examples are becoming healthy and learning. But in other acts, the ἔργον is the τέλος. An example is seeing. The work of seeing immediately fulfills the end, which is seeing. Another example is thinking. Bradshaw gives this table:

	κίνησις	ἐνέργεια
1.	Has a termination.	Has no termination.
2.	Is not an end, but is for the sake of an end.	Is an end or has end within it.
3.	Complete when it achieves what it aims at, e.g., during whole time or at final moment.	Complete at any moment because it does not lack anything which coming into being later will complete its form.
4.	Must cease before perfect tense can apply.	Present and perfect tense apply simultaneously.
5.	Has parts which are different in kind from one another and from the whole; the “whence” and the “whither” give them their form.	Homogeneous.
6.	Occurs quickly or slowly.	Does not occur quickly or slowly.
7.	In time.	In “the now.”

Items 1, 3, and 4 are all similar. The ἔργον must finish before the τέλος occurs. 4 refers to a grammatical test. You must cease building the house before you can say you have built it, but you can say you have thought as soon as you begin to think (7–12).

Items 5 and 6 are also related. A homogeneous act cannot be fast or slow, because there are no parts by which to measure its speed. But a composite act can be quick or slow, because the parts allow measurement relative to one another. Item 7 depends on item 5. It is not a question of whether an act happens in time or not; they all do. It is a question of whether the nature of the act implies time. Thus, housebuilding, by its composite nature, requires the concept of time. But pleasure does not. Though we happen to experience it in time, this is accidental, not part of the nature of pleasure. Thus, ἐνέργεια-as-activity possesses two key aspects: “its intrinsic atemporality and its teleological self-closure” (10–12).

Despite this distinction, κίνησις is still actual. Aristotle considers where the actuality resides. Since in κίνησις the τέλος is outside the ἔργον, we can distinguish a subject and an object: the mover and the moved. There is the builder and the house. We can call this type of actuality “transitive motion.” Note that transitive motion requires two potentialities: the mover’s moving and the moved’s being moved. Yet there is one actuality that combines both potentialities. The moving and the being moved are the same thing seen from two different perspectives. Since it is one actuality, Aristotle asks where it is. He locates it in the thing moved (15–16).

In contrast, ἐνέργεια has no external object. The act is therefore within the subject. The act of seeing is in the seer. We can call this “immanent activity.” This is our third type of actuality (15).

The fourth type of actuality is substantial form. Form is the οὐσία (substance) of a matter–form composite. Matter is potentiality; form is actuality. This is because matter can receive any form and be any substance, but form determines what a thing is (17–18).

The last type of actuality is the matter–form composite itself. This type has no corresponding δύναμις, unlike the other actualities. First actuality has first potentiality; transitive motion and immanent motion have second potentiality; form has matter. But the matter–form composite has no δύναμις, unless it is also matter. Perhaps this is why Aristotle prefers not to call the composite an actuality, but to say that it exists in actuality (ἐνεργέιᾳ or ἐντελεχείᾳ) (18).

Actuality is prior to potency in four ways: in definition (λόγῳ), in time, in substance, and in value. It is prior in definition because a potency is always a potency for an actuality. Thus, the potency cannot be defined without reference to the actuality, but the actuality stands on its own. By prior in time, Aristotle means that the form of anything that comes to be in some sense exists already in its cause, and the cause is actual (19–20).

By “prior in substance,” Aristotle means two things. First, a thing is prior when it displays a more advanced stage of development. To animals, locomotion is prior in substance to growth, precisely because it comes later. Likewise, man is prior to boy and human being to seed. Thus actuality is prior to potency, because what is actual is more developed that what is merely potential (20–21).

Actuality is also prior in substance to potency “in a stricter sense” (κυριωτέρως). This is the priority of a thing that can exist without another, but not vice versa. In eternal things, actuality can exist without potency. Indeed, it must so exist. What is eternal must contain no potency. This is because anything that has a potency to be has a corresponding potency not to be. So as long as an eternal thing with potency is actual, it has potential not to be. But according to the “principle of plenitude,” an eternally-existing potency must eventually become actual. That means the thing would cease to be, and hence not be eternal. Thus, all eternal things are purely actual, with no potency. Given this argument, an eternal thing can still have potencies not in respect to existence, but regarding existence it must be purely actual. This is how Aristotle views the planets: they have no potency regarding existence, yet they do have potency regarding motion (19–22).

Finally, actuality is prior to potency in value. Every potency involves the opposites of being and not being, and if one is good, the other is bad. But a good actuality has merely good and no evil. This argument is apparently limited in scope to potencies with a clear good–bad opposition. From this, Aristotle argues (no entirely soundly) that eternal things can have no evil. Actual things are good; eternal things are supremely good (22–23).

The Prime Mover

In the Prime Mover, Aristotle unites the two uses of ἐνέργεια. On the one hand, he has contrasted ἐνέργεια-as-activity with κίνησις, arguing that it has its end in itself and does not require time. On the other hand, he has contrasted ἐνέργεια-as-actuality with δύναμις and shown it to be prior in several respects, especially prior in substance. The Prime Mover is both supremely active and supremely actual (24–25).

Unlike the planets, the Prime Mover is pure actuality, with no potency whatsoever. On the one hand, the Prime Mover is ἀκίνητος (unmoved), so it can have no potency for being acted upon. On the other hand, it acts always, so it can have no potency to act, lest it cease acting. Thus, the Prime Mover is pure actuality because it is unmoved and it acts continuously. But if it acts continuously, then it is not only pure actuality, but also pure activity. (25–26, 28).

Just as Aristotle regards actuality to be better than potency, so he regards the Prime Mover to be supremely good. It has all the positive qualities laid out by Pythagoras: being, unity, rest, intelligibility, beauty. It is intelligible because it is substance, and all substance is intelligible. It is beautiful because its other attributes are good, and what is good is desirable, and beauty is the object of desire. Thus, in the Prime Mover converge reality, intelligibility, and beauty (27).

Not only is the Prime Mover desirable, but it is good to be the Prime Mover. Its activity is pleasure (ἡδονὴ ἡ ἐνέργεια τούτου). This is because the Prime Mover thinks, and to Aristotle, “the act of contemplation is most pleasant and best.” Bradshaw offers a conjecture as to why this is. Thinking is not transitive motion, but immanent activity. It is the most immanent of immanent activities, for it requires no external objects whatsoever (as does seeing). Therefore if the Prime Mover’s activity is thinking, it will be most actual. Only after asserting that the Prime Mover lives and thinks does Aristotle call it God (27–28).

Bradshaw raises two questions: First, how can moving the heavens avoid potency? Second, what does moving the heavens have to do with thinking (28–29)?

One theory is that the Prime Mover moves the heavens solely as final cause, “as an object of love” (ὡς ἐρώμενον). In Physics VIII, Aristotle calls the Prime Mover the efficient cause of the heavens, but in Metaphysics XII he calls it only the final cause. The theory is that Aristotle revised his view, abandoning efficient causality. The planets move because perpetual circular motion is their closest possible imitation of the Prime Mover’s contemplation. This is because “any one point as much as any other is alike starting-point, middle-point, and finishing-point” (29–30).

Bradshaw rejects this argument. First, Metaphysics XII.6 and XII.10 use language as though the Prime Mover were the efficient cause, such as that it must be “productive and causative of motion” (ποιητικὸν καὶ κινητικόν). Second, the idea that circular motion imitates endless contemplation is not in Aristotle, but supplied by the theory to fill what would be an explanatory gap in Aristotle’s text. Third, since Aristotle regards the heavens as capable of intellectually apprehending the Prime Mover, why must their imitation take physical form; why cannot they just think what the Prime Mover thinks? Fourth, an argument in Metaphysics XII.7 that the Prime Mover cannot have magnitude requires that it be an efficient cause. Fifth, if the planets move merely by desiring the Prime Mover, the Prime Mover need not exist; the planets could merely wish it exists or be mistaken in thinking it exists. Thus he concludes that an interpretation must be found in which the Prime Mover is efficient as well as final cause (30–32).

Bradshaw’s alternative interpretation is based on Aristotle’s statement, “intellect thinks itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought” (αὑτὸν δὲ νοεῖ ὁ νοῦς κατὰ μετάληψιν τοῦ νοητοῦ). This does not mean that the Prime Mover thinks “in a kind of narcissistic self-contemplation,” because when Aristotle writes about the soul, he again says that intellect thinks itself. But there he means merely that when it possesses the object, it becomes identical to it by virtue of sharing its form (32–37).

There is a difficulty in this account. If the divine mind thinks many forms, how it is yet simple? Aristotle rejects its thinking the forms in succession, because then it would not be impassible. But if it thinks them all at once, is it not composite? Aristotle does not address this question, but Bradshaw gives an explanation which, based on some other passages, Aristotle might have used. Although the thought forms are many, the divine intellect thinks them as a unity. Similarly, Aristotle says that a line, though divisible, is indivisible when thought as a whole (37–38).

If the Prime Mover thinks the forms, it would help explain why it is supreme intelligibility, beauty, and reality. Forms are what the intellect apprehends, so if the Prime Mover by thinking the forms is the forms, then it must be supremely intelligible. Moreover, we have seen that the forms are desirable. Natural objects seek to fulfill their own forms, and matter desires form. Finally, form is substance, the actual in contrast to matter’s potential (38).

The Prime Mover moves not only the first heaven, but all things. It is the principle of order for all other forms, as a general orders an army or a master his household. Though the parts have individual forms and pursue their own ends, they also fulfill the greater form. In this reading, the Prime Mover is not just final cause, but formal cause as well (39).

As formal cause, it is also efficient cause. Aristotle gives other examples of this, such as a doctor imparting health. The doctor gives health to the patient because he knows what health is; he holds it in his intellect. Thus, health causes health; the form is the efficient cause. Aristotle alludes to this when, in Metaphysics XII.10, he says the Prime Mover’s intellect moves things not for the sake of anything other than itself, “for the medical art is in a sense health.” We can say the Prime Mover moves things for its own sake because it contains them all within itself (39–41).

This reading also explains how the Prime Mover can be an efficient cause while yet remaining self-sufficient. Normally, the efficient cause is actualized in the moved thing, as when a teacher teaches or a doctor heals. But this is true only of proximate causes, not ultimate causes like the healing art in the doctor’s soul. Since the Prime Mover embraces all forms in a single whole, it can be the efficient cause without acting outside itself (41–42).

The Prime Mover is thus transcendent and immanent. It is transcendent as existing eternally and in full actuality. It is immanent as being the final, formal, and efficient cause of natural change. This is why in Physics II.7 Aristotle writes that form as a cause of motion is “unmoved,” “the first of all things,” and “not natural” (οὐ φυσική). Immanent forms are also transcendent as being in the Prime Mover. This reading also explains why Aristotle in Metaphysics IV.1 Aristotle writes that metaphysics, the study of immovable substance, is the “first philosophy,” the study of being as being. It is not because the substance is immovable, but because the immovable substance is the Prime Mover, which contains all forms in itself (42–43).

Thus the self-thinking of the Prime Mover is also the movement of the heavens. The Prime Mover by thinking makes the forms to be and makes them what they are. Yet as thinking itself, it has no end other than itself. The divine intellect is loved by the first heaven in a metaphorical sense, the same way all inanimate objects love their nature. But it also loves itself, not as metaphor but with awareness of its own worth. Thus we find here both senses of ἐνέργεια. The Prime Mover’s activity is not κίνησις, because it does not act outside itself. Nor is its actuality mixed with δύναμις, because as eternal cause of substance it is supreme substance. Thus Aristotle regards ἐνέργεια as divine (43–44).

Between Aristotle and Plotinus

After Aristotle, the term ἐνέργεια appears infrequently among philosophers, with no additions to its theory. This may be because the technical works of Aristotle were lost until the middle of the first century B.C., because they were given to Aristotle’s student and colleague Theophrastus. Like Aristotle, he posited an unmoved mover that eternally acts. But when he discusses the Prime Mover, he neglects its self-thinking and mentions only that it moves the heavens as the object of desire. His highest example of unmoved moving is the heavens’ endless rotation. This is apparently because he cannot see how an immaterial subject can be an efficient cause (45–51).

The term is also rare in non-philosophical writing. In the Histories of Polybius (c. 150 B.C.), it means activity. It also indicates force or vividness (51–53). From there its meaning passed into “energy.” It also tends to indicate a vigor or energy that is characteristic of someone or something, as “τὴν ἐνέργειαν τὴν Ἀλεξάνδρου” (the energy of Alexander) (53–55).

ἐνέργεια as divine operation first appears in Alexandrian Judaism. The Letter to Philocrates (c. 130 B.C.) mentions it. Eusebius preserves a fragment of Aristobulus that calls God’s descent upon Mount Sinai a manifestation of “τὴν ἐνέργειαν τοῦ θεοῦ.” 2 Maccabees (c. 124 B.C.) describes how two angels throw a man from his horse: “διὰ τὴν θείαν ἐνέργειν ἄφωνος ἔρριπτο” (55–56). The pagan gods have ἐνέργεια in Diodorus Siculus (c. 60–30 B.C.) (54–55).

Philo of Alexandria (c. 30 B.C. – 45 A.D.) uses the term frequently in the sense of activity or characteristic operation. Like Aristotle and Theophrastus, he regards God as perpetually active. His activity is restful, however, “with absolute ease, without toil and without suffering.” This is the meaning of his Sabbath rest. The perpetual activity of God is not self-thinking or rotation, but creation. He creates by eternally thinking the Ideas which give form to matter. Philo interprets the divine name (ἐγὼ εἰμι ὁ ὤν) as revealing God’s difference from creatures. He alone exists; creatures only exist “in semblance.” Indeed, He alone acts, for “it belongs to God to act (ποιεῖν). . . . It belongs to creatures to suffer.” We cannot know the divine οὐσία, nor even His Powers (δυνάμεις), but we can know their ἐνέργειαι (activities) (59–64).

In the first century B.C., ἐνέργεια appears in scientific literature, for example as the healing power of plants (56–57). Galen, writing in the end of the second century A.D., gives it a theoretical basis. He defines it as κίνησις δραστική (active motion). His purpose is to distinguish it from passive motion, being moved. Unlike in Aristotle, in Galen the mover and moved do not share one ἐνέργεια, but the moving is an ἐνέργεια while the being moved is a πάθος. No longer is κίνησις a type of ἐνέργεια, but ἐνέργεια is a type of κίνησις. According to Galen, by knowing a thing’s ἐνέργειαι, we can postulate its δυνάμεις (faculties), even though we lack direct knowledge of them. Regarding the soul’s δυνάμεις, we can know the ἐνέργειαι but not the οὐσίαι. This is the same triad we saw in Philo (57–59).

The Middle Platonists Numenius and Alcinous also regard God as restful yet active. Numenius describes the First, Second, and Third Gods. The First God is simple and undivided. It is the First Intellect and contains all the Ideas. Its rest is a κίνησις σύμφυτος (innate motion) whereby it orders the world. The innate motion of Numenius is apparently the ἐνέργεια ἀκινησίας of Aristotle. Bradshaw remarks that since the Neoplatonists did not read Philo, this is apparently how they received the idea (if not the term) of ἐνέργεια (64–66).

Alcinous gives a similar theology, but he uses the term ἐνέργεια. His God acts yet remains motionless. His activity is Idea (αὕτη ἡ ἐνέργεια αὐτοῦ ἰδέα ὑπάρχει). As He is beautiful, so are His thoughts beautiful, because He eternally thinks Himself. Because the First Intellect is beautiful, the World Soul thinks its thoughts after it and so orders the world (66–67).

Alexander of Aphrodisias, active at the end of the second century, was read in the school of Plotinus. He unites the two senses of ἐνέργεια, activity and actuality, in his discussion of the intellect. According to Aristotle, the intellect has no form of its own, since it receives the forms of what it thinks. But then how can it possess the capacity to think? Aristotle posits two intellects in the soul, one that becomes all things, and one that makes all things. The latter is “separable, impassible, unmixed, since it is in its essential nature activity (τῇ οὐσίᾳ ὤν ἐνέργεια).” This latter intellect is active because it “makes all things”; it is actual because it is already what the other intellect is only potentially (68–69).

Alexander calls the first intellect the “material intellect.” As we mature, it becomes an intellect “in a developed state (ὁ κατὰ ἕξιν νοῦς).” He identifies the two phases with Aristotle’s distinction between first and second potentiality. The intellect becomes developed as it receives forms by the act of a “productive (ποιητικός) intellect.” This is the intellect that Aristotle said “makes all things.” The productive intellect is not only the cause of developing the material intellect, but also of the intelligibility of all that is. This intellect he identifies with the Prime Mover. He ascribes to it ἐνέργεια, both as activity and as actuality (69–72).

Plotinus and the Theory of Two Acts

Plotinus explains in Enneads V.4[7] how the Intellect comes to be from the One. He begins with the principle that perfection requires production. In the natural world, mature organisms reproduce, and other things impart their nature as fire heats and drugs affect the drugged. This idea has roots in Aristotle, but it is Plato who applies it to God, stating in the Timaeus that He is good and free from all envy (φθόνος). This God is the First Good (74–75).

This follows Middle Platonism, but Plotinus diverges when he denies that the first Good is νοῦς, the divine Mind. His reasons are Aristotelian. First, νοῦς is identical with thinking. Second, νοῦς is defined by the intelligible object. Hence, it must be preceded by its object. But then it cannot be first. What is first, the object the divine Mind thinks, is the One. It engenders the Intellect as an object engenders thought: without changing (75).

To explain how the One gives rise to other things without changing, Plotinus appeals to ἐνέργεια:

In each and every thing there is an activity which belongs to substance (ἐνέργεια τῆς οὐσίας) and one which goes out from substance (ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας); and that which belongs to substance is the active actuality which is each particular thing (ἡ μὲν τῆς οὐσίας αὐτό ἐστιν ἐνέργεια ἕκαστον), and the other activity derives from the first one, and must in everything be a consequence of it, different from the thing itself.

The internal ἐνέργεια is Aristotle’s form, but in Plotinus it is not merely actuality, but activity as well. To Aristotle, only the Prime Mover fused activity and actuality, but to Plotinus all actualities are active. Since a thing’s activity in some way imparts itself, all things are intrinsically productive (75–78).

Plotinus concludes by calling the One “beyond being (ἐπέκεινα οὐσίας).” But that undermines his assertion that it, like all other beings, has two acts (78).

In Enneads V.1[10], Plotinus states that the One must produce without moving at all, “without any inclination or act of will.” Its generation is like the sun’s, which, giving light, remains unchanged. It generates the Intellect, and the Intellect generates Soul. Soul is an εἴδωλον (ghost, image) of Intellect. One, Intellect, and Soul are separate ὑπόστασες. The lower depend on the higher. If they come from the external act of the higher, they subsist in their return to it. They “look to” the higher, and therein they have their reality (ὑπόστασιν). This return to the higher is the thing’s ἐνέργειαι (78–81).

The One and Intellect, in producing, remain unmoved. But unlike the One and Intellect, Soul also looks down. It desires its inferior, body, and thus in producing it is moved. Soul generates nature, and from nature it also generates matter, absolute indefiniteness (ἀοριστία παντελής). Soul gives form to matter. Nature and matter are not separate ὑπόστασες, but have their being in Soul. Nonetheless, nature has a return; it contemplates Intellect as mediated by Soul. All things that look up also contemplate the One, because the Intellect “contains” or “expresses” the One (81–84).

The problem with the two-act model is that if all ἐνέργεια is directed to the One, does the One have ἐνέργεια? If yes, it would seem to have the duality of an action and its object. Plotinus struggles with this question. In V.6[24], he asserts that the One has an internal act, but no external act—but this removes the origin of the Intellect. In VI.7[38], he calls the Intellect the ἐνέργεια of the One, but he denies that the One has an internal act. But then the two-act model does not apply, so the generation of the Intellect is only asserted, not explained by any principle (85–86).

He again raises the issue in VI.8[39], where he considers two possibilities: either there is ἐνέργεια in the One and we may “locate” (θησόμεθα) him in ἐνέργεια, or there is no ἐνέργεια in the One, but things exist by being active around him (περὶ αὐτὸν ἐνεργοῦντα). Gradually he inclines to the view that the One is “self-directed activity” (ἡ ἐνέργεια ἡ πρὸς αὑτόν). The problem is that this contradicts his criticisms of Aristotle for giving the Prime Mover a duality of its thinking and what it thinks (86–87).

Plotinus never gives an adequate explanation, but Bradshaw tries to construct one based on other passages. According to Plotinus, Intellect thinks in two ways: by contemplating things in itself, and by contemplating the One. This latter is a rapt, ecstatic experience like being drunk or in love, where it forgets the duality of knower and known. Bradshaw writes that perhaps the One has a similar experience in its self-contemplation, except that whereas the Intellect is merely unaware of the duality, in the One the duality really disappears (88–89).

Nonetheless, Plotinus returns to his view that the One has no internal act. This appears in V.3[49] and I.7[54]. In the latter passage, he again asserts the One is “beyond being (ἐπέκεινα οὐσίας), beyond even activity (ἐπέκεινα καὶ ἐνεργείας).” Hoping to reconcile these passages with the two-act view of VI.8, Bradshaw suggests that they are merely different emphases. He cites Plotinus’s description in V.3 that the Intellect is light. Just as the sun is light, so the One is Intellect, but in a superior mode of being. The claim that the One is ἐπέκεινα οὐσίας means only that it has no form or limit; it is supreme οὐσία. Likewise, ἐπέκεινα ἐνεργείας means that the One has ἐνέργεια transcending the πρώτη ἐνέργεια. I don’t really find any of that very intelligible, but then I’ve never liked Plotinus (89–90).

At least two ideas in Plotinus have their source in Aristotle. First is the relation between internal and external act. The external act of a higher thing is equivalent to the internal act of a lower thing. Intellect’s external act is also Soul’s internal act. This sounds like Aristotle’s idea of one ἐνέργεια shared by mover and moved. Also, within a single body, the difference between internal and external act may relate to Aristotle’s distinction between between first and second actuality, because the external act is a manifestation of what it itself is (91–92).

Thus Plotinus’s model, like Aristotle’s Prime Mover, unites activity and actuality. The internal act gives the thing its form, and it is also the activity of the thing’s contemplating the One. But if the One is the τέλος of the internal act of all things, can we say it is their cause? If so, is it their cause per se, as when a man causes his car to hit a tree, or per accidens, as a grandfather is the cause of his grandson? Bradshaw is cautious about applying the per se–per accidens distinction to Plotinus, since it is not his own, but he concludes that the One can only be the cause per accidens. The external act of the One is only Intellect, not all things (92–94).

The second Aristotelian influence comes via Alexander of Aphrodisias. To Plotinus, a thing’s external act comes to be a separate being, but how can an ἐνέργεια take on its own substance? Bradshaw suggests as a precedent Alexander’s teaching on light. Aristotle had taught that light is the “actuality of the transparent as transparent (ἐνέργεια τοῦ διαφανοῦς ἧ διαφενές).” When a potentially transparent medium like water or air becomes actually transparent, we call the actuality light. It is not a substance; it does not propagate through time; it is merely the actual transparency as opposed to the potential. But in Alexander, light starts to take on its own substance. He calls it colored. The transparency of the medium receives its actuality from light. He calls it “the most visible of all objects.” This, then is a precedent for Plotinus’s otherwise novel idea that an ἐνέργεια can become a ὑπόστασις (94–96).

The Plotinian Heritage in the West

The transmission of Neoplatonism to the West came primarily through Porphyry. In this way, ἐνέργεια was changed into the medieval and Thomistic esse, or act of being.

In discussing the soul, Porphyry writes that its ἐνέργειαι reveal its οὐσία. Eusebius quotes this fragment in his Preparatio Evangelica, so it was well-known in Christian circles. This is reminiscent of how in Plotinus the internal act, here identified with οὐσία, overflows into the external act. Reasoning in the other direction, he argues that everything that is composite has composite acts, but everything that is simple has simple acts. If God acts through a mediator, His actions will be composite, but if He acts “in His nature,” His action will be simple. The action “in His nature” is creation. God’s distinctive nature is to exist, so His action is to grant existence. The existence of a thing is prior to and distinct from its nature (98–100).

Some Neoplatonists after Plotinus would separate the Intellect into the Intelligible Triad. They reasoned that an intellect requires being and life, so these must likewise come from the One. At first, Being, Life, and Intellect were merely different attributes of the second ὑπόστασις. But later they came to be each a separate ὑπόστασις . Even then, they were not entirely distinct, for each ὑπόστασις contained the other two as cause or effect, forming an ennead. This view is most fully articulated in Proclus (100).

Also important is the Neoplatonist commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, perhaps written by Porphyry. Here One and Intellect are not so distinct. The One is pure act (τὸ ἐνεργεῖν καθαρόν) and being before being (τὸ εἶναι τὸ πρὸ τοῦ ὄντος). Choosing the infinitive to name the One reinforces the idea that it is pure act. But the One is also the One-Many (ἕν πολλά); being is double (διττὸν τὸ εἶναι). The commentator, like Plotinus, relates the One-Many to the Intellect, but unlike Plotinus, he says the One-Many arises because it participates in the One that is the “idea of being.” He also describes the triad of Being, Life, and Thought. The Intellect issues from the One and is thereby Life. It returns to itself and is thereby Thought. The One is Being. This triad might remind Christians of the Trinity. It contains three coequal ὑπόστασες that are jointly the One itself (100–108).

Marius Victorinus describes the Trinity in these terms. He wrote in Latin, and Augustine read at least some of his translations of Plotinus and Porphyry. The ἐνέργεια that is τὸ εἶναι becomes esse, which he identifies with the Father. τὸ ὄν he identifies with the Son. The Son is potentially present in the Father, who is actuality, and comes forth as the Logos. The Logos is not static but active, the activity of the Father. Esse, likewise is active; it is τὸ ἐνεργεῖν καθαρόν. Thus, both Father and Son are esse and operari (or agere), but whereas the Father is principally esse and is agere in only a hidden inward way, the Son is principally agere and is esse in only a derivative way. They are the inner and outer acts of Plotinus. The Father contemplates Himself, and thus the Holy Spirit is His intellegere. Because there is intellegere, there must first be vivere; this is the Son. Here we see the Being–Life–Intellect triad (108–114).

Not many western Christians read Victorinus, but Boethius did, and he retained the distinction between esse and ὄν. He contrasts esse with id quod est (that which is). Esse is being itself; it comes to be an id quod est when it receives a form. The id quod est is not a hypostatis different from esse; it is being taken as distributed among existing things. To composite things, particular being is different from their esse, but to simple things (of which there is apparently only one), esse and id quod est are a unity. Existing things have existence by virtue of their id quod est; they have essence by virtue of something else, apparently their essential form (forma essendi). Aquinas, almost alone among western readers of Boethius, understand that the distinction between esse and id quod est was between existence and essence (114–117).

Boethius also taught that for God, “esse and agere are the same. . . . But for us esse and agere are not the same, for we are not simple.” Although the simplicity of God was already well-established in Christian theology, Boethius was apparently the first to explain it as the identity of being and activity. Again, Aquinas would retain this teaching, saying that God is identical to His act (117).

Gods, Demons, and Theurgy

St. Paul uses ἐνέργεια to describe the working of God. It is how God can “subdue all things to Himself” (Philippians 3:21) and raise Christ from the dead (Ephesians 1:19). He also uses the word to describe how God works in the human soul. He is “striving according to His [Christ’s] working, which worketh in me mightily (ἀγωνιζόμενος κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν αὐτοῦ τὴν ἐνεργουμένην ἐν ἐμοὶ ἐν δυνάμει)” (Colossians 1:29). The working is both Paul’s and Christ’s. The word of God “worketh (ἐνεργεῖται) in you that believe” (1 Thessalonians 2:13). This is similar to how God works in the Church, where Christ increases the body according to the working ἐνέργειαν of each part (Ephesians 4:16) (120–121).

This working is a cooperation. Whereas before Paul’s conversion he continued to “kick against the pricks” (Acts 9:5), now that he is in Christ, he acts as a synergy of God and man. This paradox appears clearly when he writes, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you (ὁ ἐνεργῶν ἐν ὑμῖν) both to will and to do (ἐνεργεῖν) of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13). He uses the word synergy to describe this cooperation: “we are laborers together (συνεργοῦντες) with God” (1 Corinithians 3:19); “we, then, as workers together (συνεργοῦντες) with Him” (2 Corinithians 6:1); “Timothy, our brother and co-worker with God (συνεργὸν τοῦ θεοῦ)” (1 Thessalonians 3:2). This is how Paul understands the unity behind the variety of gifts of the Spirit: “There are diversities of operation (ἐνεργημάτων), but it is the same God which worketh (ὁ ἐνεργῶν) all in all” (1 Corinthians 12:6). Thus Paul teaches a personal union with God that is complete yet free. This idea would become prominent in terms of participation in the divine ἐνέργειαι (121–123).

For the next two centuries, Christian authors of the East continued to use Paul’s language, but they tended to limit it to miraculous works like prophecy and speaking in tongues. They also discuss the possibility of indwelling demonic ἐνέργειαι. This uses appear in the Shepherd of Hermas, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and Origen. Clement of Alexandria stresses that demonic power only acts in people who welcome it (123–125).

Early eastern Christians such as Athenagoras and Clement spoke hesitantly of the Son as the divine ἐνέργεια of the Father, but this usage was eventually rejected. Athanasius uses the term thus, even adding that the Holy Spirit is the ἐνέργεια of the Son, but he speaks casually and does not give the term any special importance. Marcellus of Ancyra calls the Son the ἐνέργεια δραστική (active energy) of the Father, but this was later condemned at the Council of Constantinople. The Orthodox also rejected Eunomius’s claim that the Son comes to be by the ἐνέργεια of the Father, because this seemed to make ἐνέργεια an intermediary between Father and Son (125–127).

Pagan magic treats the ἐνέργειαι of gods and daimons as a power to be harnessed, but it is not a prominent term. It plays a more important role in the Hermetica, Egyptian religious writings from the third or fourth century A.D. They describe God as unknowable, while “around” (περί) the divine οὐσία there is a “fixed activity” (στατικὴν ἐνέργειαν). They also identify God with His action: “God’s ἐνέργεια is will, and His οὐσία is to will all things to be.” Sometimes the text seems pantheist, as when it says God “is what He makes.” It calls gods, daimons, and humans ἐνέργειαι actualized or “performed” (ἐνεργοῦνται) by God. The ἐνέργειαι are like rays from God (127–135).

Iamblichus is to eastern Neoplatonism what Porphyry is to western. He defends the practice of theurgy, religious rites by which humans share the ἐνέργεια of the gods. But unlike the magicians, he is not interested in special powers so much as divine fellowship. Furthermore, the rites are not invented by men, but instituted by the gods to draw men to themselves. In one of these rites, the theurgist summons “blessed spectacles” (μακάρια θεάματα), luminous apparitions of a god. Iamblichus also discusses ἐνέργεια in terms of possession by the gods (135–142).

Proclus, a fifth century Neoplatonist, followed Iamblichus in his high opinion of theurgy. Although Proclus posited Nature, Soul, Intellect, and One, he wrote that in each “order” there was a unity-of-plurality: of souls in Soul, intellects in Intellect, even ones in the One. These last were called henads. As the One is the Good, so each henad is “a particular excellence” (τὶς ἀγαθότης). The One itself is active, making things good and drawing them to itself. Each henad is an agent acting to perfect things in its own excellence. Each henad has its own “irradiations” (ἐλλάμψεις) where are intellects, each intellect has its own souls, and so on. At each lower level, there are more members than in the level above, because there are also intellects that come only from Intellect, etc. Souls with no intellectual illumination are human beings. Human souls, therefore, enjoy only “intermittent” intellection (142–145).

The cause of an effect is a synergy of all the members of the hierarchy between the effect and the One. The higher up the hierarchy, the greater share the being has in the cause. Thus, in any effect, the One has more causality than any other being. This is because whatever exists in an effect must exist in a different mode in its cause, so the One comprehends all causes. Proclus describes this cooperation in terms of ἐνέργεια. Unlike Plotinus, Proclus makes the One not final cause of all but efficient cause. Nonetheless, he does not use the two-act model, and he denies ἐνέργεια to the One (145–147).

Beings at the bottom of the hierarchy ascend back to the One. Here Proclus echoes Plotinus in describing two states of Intellect, one proper to itself and one “drunk with nectar,” a direct, non-intellective apprehension of the One. Proclus calls these both activities (ἐνέργειαι). The ascent is accomplished by “folding up” the intelligibles and silencing the soul. Sometimes he calls the ascent an ἐνέργεια, but elsewhere he says the ascender has no need of knowledge or ἐνέργεια, but ascends by πίστις (faith). Unlike intellectual activity, faith is one in form (ἑνοειδῆ) and at rest. It is trust in the trustworthy (148–152).

The Formation of the Eastern Tradition

During the Middle Ages, the works of Iamblichus and Proclus remained untranslated in the West, as did, with a few minor exceptions, the works of Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Clement, Origen, and Athanasius. ἐνέργεια tended to be translated as opus or operatio; ἐνεργεῖν as operari. This lost the sense of force or active power. Also gone was the fusion of action with actuality. Later, when Aristotle was translated, ἐνέργεια become one of three different terms, depending on the context: operatio, actus, or actualitas. Thus, the West had little notion of participation in the divine ἐνέργεια. This was not so in the East, where ἐνέργεια played a key role in describing God’s activity, particularly in opposition to the divine οὐσία. The East also carried on Paul’s sense of participation, with the added idea of divinization. These two strands—Trinitarian metaphysics and Pauline religion—came to be more and more intertwined, especially with Dionysius the Areopagite (153–154, 179).

The Trinitarian Controversy

ἐνέργεια appears twice after 360 A.D., in relation to the Trinitarian controversies of late Arianism. First, when Athanasius in Letters to Serapion upheld the divinity of the Holy Spirit, he reasoned that since the persons of the Trinity share one activity (ἐνέργεια), they must likewise share one οὐσία. This argument from one activity to one essence is also in Philo, Galen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus. The shared ἐνέργεια has a certain structure. God the Father does all things “through the Word in the Spirit” (155–156).

Eunomius also used ἐνέργεια. Unlike Arius, he relied heavily on philosophy, and he claimed that the Son is not even like the Father (ἀνόμοιος) and that the essence of God could be known. Eunomius, like Athanasius, reasoned from ἐνέργεια to οὐσία. He considered ἀγέννητος (unbegotten) to be the most proper term for God. He argued that since begetting is also an ἐνέργεια, and since the Father alone begets, the Father and Son must differ in οὐσία (156).

Eunomius also argued for a separation between ἐνέργεια and οὐσία. While οὐσία is eternal, ἐνέργεια is not. Otherwise, he complained, the effects of God’s work are God Himself, and you have pantheism. Eunomius identified this union of ἐνέργεια and οὐσία with paganism, perhaps the two acts of Plotinus or the Hermetic teaching that God, to be God, must act. But since the ἐνέργεια is not eternal, God’s begetting is not eternal, and the Son is not God (156–157).

The two arguments of Eunomius represent two fundamental questions of the Christian distinction between ἐνέργεια and οὐσία. First, does ἐνέργεια refer to God’s acts internal to the Trinity, or only to His external acts? Second, if the ἐνέργεια is also God, is God still free? If the ἐνέργειαι are eternal, are they not necessary (157–158)?

The Cappadocians addressed these questions. Basil replied to Eunomius in Contra Eunomium (c. 365) and On the Holy Spirit (375). Eunomius defended himself in Apologia Apologiae (c. 379). Gregory of Nyssa replied in his own Contra Eunomium (written in two installments, 380 and 383). His Trinitarian thought also appears in On the Holy Spirit against the Macedonians, On the Holy Trinity to Eustathius, and On Not Three Gods to Ablabius (late 370s and early 380s). Gregory the Theologian contributed in his Orations 27 to 31, the five “Theological Orations” (380) (158).

The Cappadocians reject Eunomius’s claim that ἀγέννητος is the most proper term for designating God. They distinguish between what a thing (τί ἐστί) and how it is (ὅπως ἐστί). ἀγέννητος does not describe who the Father is, but how He is. Each person of the Trinity has His own way of being (τρόπος ὑπάρξεως) or personal characteristic (ἰδιότης). The Father is unbegotten; The Son is begotten of the Father; the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. These characteristics do not describe the essence, but rather the person’s relation to his cause. Thus, ἀγέννητος names neither an ἐνέργεια nor an οὐσία, but rather a ὑπόστασις (158–159).

The Cappadocians criticize Eunomius for giving the ἐνέργεια its own name (Father), as though it were some independent being. Gregory of Nyssa poses a dilemma: either the ἐνέργεια is substantial, in which case the Son is not second but third, or it is not, in which case the Son owes His existence to something insubstantial. Thus, Gregory concludes that the ἐνέργεια is not internal to the Trinity. It will require more time to find an answer to Eunomius’s second question (159).

The Divine Names

A long tradition qualified how the divine names apply to God. In the Bible, God is the Unnamed; in philosophy, He is the ground of being and hence beyond being. Philo taught that God has no proper name (κύριον ὄνομα), and a similar teaching appears in the Hermetica. He ascribed the names to the divine Powers. Clement of Alexandria taught that God is unknowable. He is indivisible, hence without dimensions (ἀδιάστατον) or limit (μὴ ἔχον πέρας), and therefore “without form or name.” Justin Martyr wrote that God’s names derive from his works. Theophilus of Antioch said the same. Even Origen, who is less apophatic, held that the divine names describe divine activities like providence or judgment (161–163).

Gregory of Nyssa follows this tradition, but he ascribes the divine names not to God’s works or power, but to His ἐνέργειαι. They are not merely derived from the ἐνέργειαι; they name the ἐνέργειαι themselves. Thus, Gregory synthesizes the traditional teaching on the divine names with the Athanasian doctrine that a shared ἐνέργεια indicates a shared οὐσία (163–164).

οὐσία and ἐνέργεια

But if we name the ἐνέργειαι, what are they? They seem to be more than merely activities or operations, though some Thomists so read them in order to reconcile the Cappadocians with Thomistic divine simplicity. (For example, see Jean-Philippe Houdret, “Palamas et les Cappadociens,” Istina 19 (1974), 260–271.) According to Thomas, “everything which is not the divine essence is a creature.” Therefore, there can be no ἐνέργειαι that are distinct from God’s οὐσία yet uncreated (164–165).

But if Gregory held that the names name the ἐνέργειαι themselves, the answer must be that the ἐνέργειαι are God. Only if the ἐνέργειαι are God does his argument for unity of action to unity of essence hold. He knew that Origen and others had taught that Father, Son, and Spirit share one act, even though the Son and Spirit are not God. Only if the ἐνέργειαι are more than activities does the argument work. In addition, he identifies God with the Good and Beautiful, even though God has no name and terms like “good” and “wise” refer to His ἐνέργειαι rather than His οὐσία. The explanation must be that God is both His οὐσία and ἐνέργεια. (165–166).

Gregory the Theologian speaks in similar terms. He writes that God’s greatness, justice, goodness, wisdom, etc. do not name his οὐσία, because then the οὐσία would not be simple. Rather, they name His ἐνέργειαι. The οὐσία is simple, but the ἐνέργειαι are various. He cannot know God’s οὐσία, but we can know His ἐνέργειαι (166).

Gregory of Nyssa also speaks of the “things around the divine nature” (τὰ περὶ τὴν θείαν φύσιν). Again, these are God’s goodness, justice, wisdom, power, etc. Gregory the Theologian uses similar language, writing that our mind knows God, “not from the things directly concerning Him, but from the things around Him (οὐκ ἐκ τῶν κατ᾽ αὐτόν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐκ τῶν περὶ αὐτόν).” The ἐνέργειαι are not a substitute for God, but they are God Himself (166–167).

Gregory the Theologian also writes in terms of Moses’ vision of the divine glory. We cannot see God’s face, “the first and unmingled nature, known to itself,” but only his back parts, “that nature which at last even reaches to us.” These back parts are God’s glory and majesty. Gregory of Nyssa describes God as the divine light from the burning bush, for “truth is God and truth is light.” The burning bush is “that light which has reached down even to the human nature” (167–169).

Many prior authors had simply identified the divine οὐσία with the ἐνέργεια. To Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Numenius, Alcinous, and Plotinus, the ἐνέργεια somehow constitute the divine οὐσία, as when the ἐνέργεια is self-contemplation. The Cappadocians retain the teaching that God is intrinsically active and hence in some sense identified with His ἐνέργεια, but they do not identify His ἐνέργεια with self-knowing. Rather, it is activity directed outward, and hence not equivalent to God’s οὐσία. The ἐνέργειαι manifest the divine οὐσία, but they do not constitute it (170).

The Cappadocians also break with the philosophical tradition of emanationism. They refuse to call creation the necessary by-product of God’s internal activity. Basil denies that God created without deliberate choice (ἀπροαίρετος) or “as the flame is the cause of the brightness.” Gregory of Nyssa attributes creation to God’s will (θέλησις or βούλησις). Although he writes that God necessarily wills the good, he does not claim that there is always a single good. Both Gregories write that it was fitting (ἔδει) for God to create, but this need not imply necessity. Thus, at least some of God’s ἐνέργειαι could have been otherwise (170–171).

This is where the second question of Eunomius cuts. If the divine ἐνέργειαι are God, how can they also be willed by God? If we say they could have been different, do we not say that God could have been different? How are they both willed and uncreated? If everything is purely God’s will, we have not emanationism but voluntarism. We must have a principle by which we can distinguish what in God’s act is free and what is a necessary manifestation of who He is. The Cappadocians do not give us this principle (171–172).

Participation Revisited

The Cappadocians also apply their teaching on ἐνέργεια to the Christian life. Early Christians only spoke of ἐνέργεια in terms of miraculous works, but the Cappadocians also apply it to habits. Basil uses Aristotle’s distinction of first and second actuality. The Spirit is present when He acts, but He is also present when inactive, in proportion to the recipient’s faith. This is a real presence. He is “in essence simple, in powers various, wholly present in each and being wholly present eveywhere.” Given such intimate union, the human soul must first be purified of the passions; the image of God must be restored. Gregory of Nyssa describes divine participation in a similar way. By attaining purity, freedom from passion, and separation from evil, we share in the virtues of the Godhead, which is to be united to God 172–176).

Gregory also writes that we know God by observing His effects in nature. Is our knowledge from virtue the same as our knowledge from nature? If the virtue does not require our cooperation, then yes, the two are the same; it is knowledge based on observation. But if we only attain virtue by cooperation with the divine ἐνέργειαι, then that knowledge is of a different sort. It is the knowledge of human ἐνέργεια sharing divine ἐνέργεια. Gregory teaches the latter alternative, arguing that the will is free to choose either evil or good. He enjoined his audience, “Let us become clean of heart, so that we may be blessed when the divine image is formed in us through purity of life.” To Gregory, we participate in God through synergy; we know His ἐνέργεια by making it our own. This is possible because human nature is in the image of God. The spiritual life recovers the obscured divine image (176–177).

Dionysius: Procession

The next developments of ἐνέργεια come with Dionysius the Areopagite, believed to by a Syrian writer of the late fifth or early sixth century. He writes in The Divine Names that the names refer to “the beneficent processions of God (τὰς ἀγαθουργοὺς τῆς θεαρχίας προόδους).” Each name indicates two things: the characteristic imparted by God and its correlative within God. The πρόοδοι both are God and manifest God, like the “back parts” of Gregory the Theologian. Dionysius uses πρόοδος and ἐνέργεια interchangeably, but he seems to prefer πρόοδος. To the Neoplatonists, this term was part of a three-stage theory of emanation. Any effect remains in its cause (μονή), proceeds from it (πρόοδος), and returns to it (ἐπιστροφή) (179–182).

Dionysius: Return

Dionysius describes the stage of return in The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. A hierarchy is “a sacred order and knowledge and activity (ἐνέργεια).” Although of a fixed order, its purpose is to raise its members up to God, who acts to purify, illumine, and perfect creatures. This activity is where Dionysius prefers to use the term ἐνέργειαι. Each hierarchy is three triads. Sometimes each member of a triad is assigned one of the operations of purification, illumination, or perfection. In the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the lowest triad consists of catechumens (those being purified), laity (those being illumine), and monks (those being perfected). The middle triad is deacons (who purify), priests (who illumine), and bishops (who perfect). The highest triad is baptism (which purifies and illumines), communion (which perfects), and annointing with oil (which also perfects). In the celestial hierarchy, the lowest triad is principalities, archangels, and angels; the middle triad, authorities, powers, and dominions; the highest triad, seraphim, cherubim, and thrones. In this hierarchy, each level communicates to the level below a proper understanding of God, and the lowest level communicates this understanding to man (182–185).

Dionysius speaks frequently of synergy. He shares with Proclus the idea that each member of the hierarchy contributes to the effects of its subordinates. Unlike Proclus, his hierarchy does not describe how things come into being, but how things are purified, illumined, and perfected. This action is not automatic, but requires voluntary participation (185–186).

The Flowering of the Eastern Tradition

The Movement Beyond Concepts

St. Maximus (580–662) adopts the Cappadocian distinction between οὐσία and τὰ περὶ θεόν. The things around God are goodness, life, immortality, simplicity, immutability, infinity, even reality itself (αὐτὴ ἡ ὀντότης). God draws us to Himself by the part we can comprehend, and He moves our wonder by the part we cannot. Sometimes Maximus calls the things around God His works (ἔργα) and God their creator (δημιουγός). But they are not ordinary creatures, because they have no beginning in time, and by participating in them, ordinary creatures are what they are. God transcends the participating and even the participated. Yet by the τὰ περὶ θεόν, God makes Himself known, which is why we can say that they are God (188–190).

The τὰ περὶ θεόν in Maximus, then, play the same role as the ἐνέργειαι in the Cappadocians and the πρόοδοι in Dionysius. The different terminology is because Dionysius and Maximus follow Proclus in speaking of participation, whereas the Cappadocians use the language of the Bible. This change of terminology also supports Maximus’s treatment of perfections like infinity, simplicity, eternity, immutability, and reality, which are difficult to consider acts. The Cappadocians never called these things ἐνέργειαι, although they did occasionally call them τὰ περὶ θεόν (190–191).

Maximus also follows Dionysius in describing the ascent to God as a negation of concepts. Bradshaw correctly separates the negation of concepts from “the darkness where God dwells,” for the one leads to the other. But he regards even the negations as non-conceptual, against the reading of Staniloae (Orthodox Spirituality 238–244) and Romanides (”Notes on the Palamite Controversy and Related Topics, Part II,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 9 (1963), 246). The negations are conceptual—for else what would they negate?—but the divine darkness is not (191–192).

Like Dionysius, Maximus excludes concepts from the divine union. Since God is not an object of thought, the soul is not united to Him by intellectual activity. Nonetheless, he gives more emphasis to the experience and “perception” of God. This perception is of the τὰ περὶ θεόν, not God’s οὐσία. They fulfill our highest happiness, which is God. On the “eighth day,” the blessed will “share by deification in His ἐνέργεια.” Then there will be a single ἐνέργεια of God and creatures (192–195).

The Exchange of Identities

Transcending concepts and participating in the divine ἐνέργεια begin in this life through the practice of unceasing prayer. Here Maximus follows the tradition of Evagrius (345–399), a protégé of the Cappadocians and the first theoretician of monasticism. Evagrius taught that dwelling with God requires a mind purified of thoughts and passions. This is done by praying with intense concentration. Another tradition, which Bradshaw contrasts with the Evagrian, emphasizes praying without ceasing. In practice, perhaps these two traditions are not actually in conflict (195–196).

Whereas the pagan philosophers taught that man knows God by his νοῦς, the Church Fathers taught that man knows God by his heart. This is the teaching of St. Macarius. According to him, grace enters the body through the heart (196–197).

Maximus teaches, on the one hand, the doctrine of unceasing prayer, and, on the other hand, the Evagrian shedding of thoughts. But the obstacle to prayer is not conceptual thought per se, but “passionate clinging to material things.” Acquiring this dispassion requires bodily exertion. It requires ascetic labor and setting aside concepts, but more than anything else, it requires works of mercy. If God is the hungry, the naked, the sick, it is because in His compassion He is with them. But then how much more is God the one who from compassion works mercy? He shares in the divine ἀγάπη (197–201).

The Logos and the Logoi

In Maximus, ἀγάπη is just one way, albeit the highest, in which creation participates in God. The body and soul can be separated only notionally (ἐπινοίᾳ). Asceticism does not reject the body, but makes it “familiar to God as a fellow servant.” The body has five senses and the soul five corresponding activites: sight and intellect, hearing and discursive reason, smell and spirit (θύμος), taste and desire, touch and the vivifying faculty. The four cardinal virtues comes from properly combining each pair. For example, self-control comes from interweaving desire and taste. When the virtues are combined, they form wisdom and meekness. When these are combined, they form charity. By acquiring these virtues, the senses are “rendered rational” (λογισθείσας). Thereby the body is deified along with the soul (201–202).

Maximus describes another way in which body and soul together ascend to God. Our soul has intellect, reason, and sense. By intellect it perceives God directly. By reason it understands the rational formative principles of things (λόγους μορφωτικούς). By sense it receives the λόγοι as hidden within the sensations. “The whole intelligible world seems mystically imprinted on the whole sensible world in symbolic forms (συμβολικοῖς εἴδεσι). . . . The sensible is in the intelligible in rational principles (λόγοις), and the intelligible in the sensible in types (τύποις)” (202–203)

The λόγοι are the causes of things. By them, all creation participates in the Word. In God “all the λόγοι of beings both are and subsist as one in an incomprehensible simplicity.” “The one Logos is many λόγοι, and the many are one.” In a way reminiscent of Plotinus, the λόγοι proceed from the Logos into multiplicity, and they return into unity (203–204).

Sensation is thus the beginning of the ascent to God. To perceive the λόγοι, our senses must be transformed by ascetic struggle and freedom from the passions, setting aside “the Egyptian-like way of thinking that belongs to the flesh.” When Christ was transfigured, it was not Him who changed, but His disciples, their passions miraculously removed for a time. Christ’s face represents the direct vision of God, but His shining garments represent seeing Christ in creation—that is, seeing the λόγοι (202–203).

The λόγοι are not merely Platonic forms, but God’s purposes for things. They do not emanate from Him by nature, but He produces them by will. Maximus here follows Dionysius, who wrote, “Theology calls them predeterminations (προορισμούς) and divine and good acts of will (θελήματα).” By the λόγοι, God knows creatures not merely intellectually, but “as His own acts of will.” By acting in accordance with their λόγοι, rational creatures are deified (205–206).

The λόγοι of Maximus are not exactly the same as the ἐνέργειαι of the Cappadocians. What they called ἐνέργειαι he splits into three: the λόγοι, which relate to creation, the τὰ περὶ θεόν, which are God’s eternal attributes, and the ἐνέργειαι, which are God’s participable activities. Maximus’s language shows that God is present in creatures not only as their creator and sustainer, but also as their meaning and purpose. To “hear” them is to hear the discourse uttered by God (206–207).

The Uncreated Light

St. John of Damascus (c. 674–749) distinguishes five types of names for God. The most proper is the name given to Moses, ὁ ὤν, He who is. “The first name, then, is expressive of His existence but not of what He is (τοῦ εἶναι καὶ οὐ τοῦ τί εἶναι)” (De Fide Orthodoxa 1.9). This text is corrupt in Migne, which drops the οὐ. Chase and the NPNF follow Migne; in Chase the text reads, “The former name, then, is expressive of His existence and His essence.” But the correct text appears in a later critical edition, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, 5 vols. Ed. P. Bonifatius Kotter (Berlin, 1969–1988). Burgundio, a twelve-century Italian jurist, also translates the text without the οὐ, as “primum quidem ipsius esse demonstrativum est.” This was the translation available to Aquinas, so it most likely contributed to his misreading of St. John (207–208).

St. John goes on to enumerate the other ways we name God:

(2) The second is expressive of His ἐνέργεια. (3) But the terms “without beginning,” “incorruptible,” “unoriginate” or “uncreated,” “incorporeal,” “invisible,” and the like all show what He is not, in other words, that He did not begin to be, is not corruptible, is not created, is not a body, and is not visible. (4) The terms “good,” “holy,” “just,” and the like follow upon His nature and do not indicate the essence itself. (5) The terms “lord,” “king,” and the like indicate a relationship with things contrasted to Him.

Here John separates the names of God’s ἐνέργεια (2) from those that “follow on His nature” (4), in a way similar to Maximus’s distinction between ἐνέργεια and τὰ περὶ θεόν. But elsewhere John follows the broader Cappadocian usage of ἐνέργεια. Like his predecessors, he treats God’s ἐνέργεια as yet God Himself. When he paraphrases the Dionysian teaching of procession and return, he uses the term ἐνέργεια rather than πρόοδος, emphasizing God’s perpetual activity and recasting the Dionysius philosophical concepts within the language of the Cappadocians (208–210).

In the same paraphrase, he also calls God’s ἐνέργεια an “irradiation” (ἔλλαμψις). Thus he strengthens the association between ἐνέργεια and the divine light. It is a suitable metaphor, because light is everywhere active. Moreover, it is the presence of its source outside the source. In choosing it, John was following a long biblical and patristic tradition, from the Old Testament glory of the Lord, through John the Theologian’s “true light which lighteth every man,” to the divine light of Evagrius, Macarius, John Climacus, and Isaac the Syrian. This light is not physical or perceived by the senses, but the eternal, uncreated glory of God (209–212).

But the author who will most fully describe the experience divine light is St. Simeon the New Theologian (949–1022). Although creatures may partake of the light, God remains transcendent. He is both the light and beyond the light. Like his predecessors, Simeon associates the light with the divine ἐνέργεια (212–213).

Eternal Manifestation

But if this light is uncreated and prior to all creatures, to whom did it shine before creation? If no one, it seems improper to say that it was before all, at least as light. The Fathers did not ask this question, apparently on account of their belief, following pagan philosophy, that God cannot be without ἐνέργεια. But the question is more acute to Christians than to pagans, because whereas pagans regarded the ἐνέργεια as directed inward in self-thinking thought, Christians regard it as directed outward in creation. In a way, this is the same question that Eunomius posed: how can God’s activity be directed outward yet not depend on creatures? Perhaps an answer can be found from the Fathers’ teaching on the Trinity (214).

Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father alone or the Father and the Son? If from the Father alone, we cannot say how the Son and Spirit differ. They have the same essence. Having the same origin suggests they have the same τρόπος ὑπάρξεως. Although one is generated and one proceeds, is there any reality to this verbal difference? On the other hand, if the Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son, He seems to have a subordinate status, being the only person of the Godhead not responsible for the existence of another. It also violates the “monarchy in the Father,” a teaching found in many eastern Fathers that the Father is the sole source of divinity (πηγὴ θεότητος) (214–215).

In the Cappadocians, the Spirit does not proceed from the Son, but the Son makes Him known. Gregory of Nyssa writes that since the Son only mediates the Spirit, He is not deprived of His natural relation to the Father (On Not Three Gods, NPNF 5.336). A letter attributed to Basil but probably by Gregory states that the Spirit has His substance (ὑφεστάναι) from the Father, but He is known (γνωρίζεσθαι) through and with the Son (Basil, Epistle 38.4, NPNF 8.138). But the Cappadocians also reverse the relationship. Basil writes that we know the Son through the Spirit (On the Holy Spirit 47, NPNF 8.29). Gregory of Nyssa uses similar language (On the Holy Spirit NPNF 5.324). Gregory likes their relationship to a king covered with oil (Ibid., NPNF 5.321). To know one is to know the other (215–216).

This mutual self-manifestation is not merely a temporal relation, but an eternal one. According to Gregory of Nyssa, the Son and Spirit are together as Word and Breath (Great Catechism 2, NPNF 5.477). The Spirit is the vehicle of the Word; the Word is the content of the Spirit. The Spirit “glorifies” the Son and the Son “makes known” the Spirit. John of Damascus follows this description and adds that the Spirit, proceeding from the Father, comes to rest (ἀναπαυομένην) in the Word and declares Him (On the Orthodox Faith 1.7, NPNF 9.5). Thus, the Spirit does not proceed from the Son but to Him. The Son, conversely, manifests the Spirit, as a sunbeam manifests the sun’s radiance (Ibid. 1.8, NPNF 9.11) (216–218).

The final formulation of eastern thought is that of Gregory of Cyprus, patriarch of Constantinople from 1283 to 1289. Gregory presided over the Council of Blachernae in 1285, where the Byzantine Church gave its final response to the filioque. He describes the Council’s decisions in his Tome, where he writes that the Spirit may be say to exist (ὑπάρχει) from the Son insofar as He eternally shines forth from the Son, but the Spirit does not therefore have His existence (ἔχειν τὴν ὕπαρξιν) from the Son. To explain this dark distinction, he invoked the ray metaphor of John of Damascus (218–219).

In a sense, the Spirit can be called the ἐνέργεια of the Son, although Gregory is careful to add that ἐνέργεια does not constitute the hypostatis of the Spirit. The Son sends the Spirit, both temporally and eternally. We receive the gifts and ἐνέργεια of the Spirit. The temporal act is a consequence of the eternal act. Thus God is eternally active without reference to creatures. The life of the Trinity is movement: the Spirit proceeds from the Father to rest upon the Son, and in so doing both glorifies the Son, manifesting His energy, and is Himself made known through the Son (219–220, 242).

Palamas and Aquinas

To understand Palamas and Aquinas, we must first understand Augustine. Aquinas followed Augustine’s notion of divine simplicity, and Palamas argued against this Augustinian teaching as proposed by Barlaam (221–222).

The Innovations of Augustine

Augustine’s break with the Manichees came when he conceived of God as immutable, eternal, and infinite. The Platonists taught him that God can exist as an immaterial substance, not extended through space. Because He is without division spatially or temporally, He is absolute Being. To Augustine, esse is not an act, but static, a state of full and unqualified wholeness. He is simple. Each of His perfections is identical to the others and to Himself. Being simple, He is ipsum esse (being itself), and all other things have their being by relation to Him (222–225).

God is also prima species (first Form), because He is the formal cause of all perfections. He credits this discovery to the Platonists. He calls the Logos “the Form of all things that are.” The forms of all things exist in the divine mind as a unity, as in the Plotinian Intellect. Since God is the first Form, and since form is the principle of intelligibility, God is intelligible. We can know (intellegere) Him, though we cannot comprehend (comprehendere) Him—that is, know Him all at once. This knowledge requires purification from sensory images (225–226).

When we know God, we know His essence. Not only is He intelligible, but there is nothing in Him but His essence. Because of divine simplicity, everything outside God’s essence is a creature. Whereas the East interpreted the Old Testament theophanies to be appearances of the Logos, Augustine interpreted them to be angels or, occasionally, appearances of the divine essence itself. To see the divine essence is our highest aim. It it not participation, but purely intellectual contemplation (226–229).

Barlaam and the Hesychasts

Barlaam was an Orthodox monk from Calabria. From 1335 to 1337 he wrote against the filioque. In 1337 he was offended to learn how hesychasts united prayer to physical practices like breathing, and he began to write against them. He rejected the practice of drawing the mind into the heart, because Evagrius and Dionysius had taught that the mind must transcend the senses and the body. He rejected monks’ claim to see the uncreated light, because only the divine essence is uncreated. Either the monks were worshiping a creature, or they were claiming presumptuously to see the divine essence. The most probable source for Barlaam’s ideas is Augustine’s De Trinitate, which Barlaam had read in the Greek translation of Maximus Planudes (229–234).

The Palamite Synthesis

St. Gregory Palamas replied to Barlaam’s attack, first in his work In Defense of the Holy Hesychasts, also known as the Triads (1338–1341). After Barlaam was condemned in 1341, Palamas had to defend his essence–energies distinction against Gregory Akindynos. From 1341 to 1347, Palamas wrote several works about this distinction, such as Dialogue between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite, On Union and Division, On the Divine Energies, and his final and most systematic work, One Hundred and Fifty Chapters. Again he was vindicated by a council in Constantinople in 1347, when his opponents regrouped under Nicephoras Gregoras. A third council upheld his views in 1351 (234–235).

According to Palamas, the light seen by the hesychasts is the uncreated glory of God. It is beheld by the intellect (νοῦς) through bodily eyes, not as an intelligible object, but by transforming the intellect into light. Palamas calls it a “natural” symbol, something that accompanies and depends upon what it symbolizes, as dawn accompanies the rising sun and heat fire. Thus, the symbolized “becomes” its natural symbol. Through knowing the symbol, we know the symbolized. Both this light and the τὰ περὶ θεόν Palamas calls ἐνέργεια. He draws together several previously separated threads: the uncreated light, the τὰ περὶ θεόν, the Cappadocian teaching on the divine names, and the Pauline and Cappadocian understanding of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. All are God’s manifestation through His ἐνέργεια (236–238).

Against Barlaam’s claim that only God’s essence is eternal, Palamas writes that no essence can be without its powers or “natural energies.” Thus the ἐνέργεια is likewise without beginning. The same is true of the τὰ περὶ θεόν: God’s infinity, immortality, life, holiness, etc. None of these is God’s essence (238).

Though uncreated, some ἐνέργειαι will even have an end, such as God’s foreknowledge, and some have a beginning, such as God’s creating. The beginning and end are not of the creative power itself, but of its action (πράξις) and the ἐνέργεια relating to things. In this case, Palamas seems to use ἐνέργεια not to mean energy so much as activity. He occasionally distinguishes between δύναμις and ἐνέργεια, stating that ἐνέργεια, strictly speaking, is the use (χρῆσις) of the δύναμις. But usually he treats the two terms as equivalent (238–239).

Palamas also associates the divine λόγοι with God’s ἐνέργεια. If Barlaam is right to say that between God’s essence and creatures there is no reality (ὀντότης), then, Palamas reasons, creatures must exist by participating in God’s essence. But this is pantheism. Therefore there must be something between creatures and the divine essence; this is the λόγοι. Whereas Plato regarded them as self-subsistent beings, Palamas calls them divine predeterminations (προορισμούς), foreknowings (προγνώσεις), and acts of will (θελήματα). They are ἐνέργειαι related to God’s creative act. He who sees the divine light sees within it all the λόγοι of things (239–240).

Palamas defends himself against the accusation that he has compromised the divine simplicity. The divine essence is to its ἐνέργειαι as a sun is to its rays or the mind to its items of knowledge. Through the rays we know the sun, and though the intellect is not participable, it is participable in what it knows (κατ᾽ ἐπιστήμην). As the rays and knowledge have not existence apart from the sun and mind, so the ἐνέργειαι have no existence apart from the essence. They are not ὑπόστασες, but “enhypostatic” (240–241).

Indeed, to possess many powers is a sign not of composition but simplicity, as the soul is simple but has many faculties. The true sign of composition is passivity. “It is not acting and energy (τὸ ἐνεργεῖν καὶ ἡ ἐνέργεια), but being acted upon and passivity, which constitute composition.” But God only acts and is not acted upon (241).

Palamas also leaves unmentioned any connection between ἐνέργεια and the internal relations of the Trinity. He calls the gifts of the Spirit ἐνέργειαι, and he affirms that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son. But he does not say the Spirit manifests the energy of the Son, nor connect the Spirit’s procession with the divine ἐνέργεια. The ἐνέργειαι are “of God” or “of the divine nature.” Perhaps this lacuna is understandable, given that the connection is Bradshaw’s own idea (242).

Aquinas: God and Esse

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) gave the West a synthesis of several ideas: Aristotle’s Prime Mover, Augustine’s divine simplicity, and the Neoplatonism of Boethius and Dionysius. He uses Aristotle to conclude that God is pure act (actus purus) (Summa Contra Gentiles 1.16), and from there infers, following Augustine, that God is without composition (1.18) and identical to His essence (1.21). But unlike Augustine, Aquinas also considers angels identical to their essences. This is because they, like God, have form but not matter. But God is simple in another sense: His essence is identical with His esse, or act of existence (1.22). As Augustine said, He is ipsum esse. Aquinas surpasses Augustine in regarding God not as static but as act (242–244).

God is not the esse commune (common essence) shared by all created things, for that would be pantheism (1.26.9). His esse surpasses that of creatures, for nothing can be added to it; it is esse itself. But Dionysius calls God the esse of all things, having in mind God’s processions. To understand this, Aquinas says that God’s esse is not ours exactly, but like ours. It is not like ours by sharing species or genus, but by analogy, because God is our efficient cause (243–245).

This leads Aquinas to misread Dionysius in his account of the divine names. Because “the effect pre-exists virtually in the efficient cause,” the names of God must in some way be like Him. They are defective in their “mode of signification,” but not in their meaning. Apophatic theology, then, is not the negation of concepts, but the negation of their “mode of signification.” It is not a means of ascent toward God, but a means of clarifying the limitations of theological language. Since Dionysius and John of Damascus teach that the divine names name the processions or operations of God, Aquinas takes them to mean that from God’s effects we name Him as cause (245–246).

Aquinas also follows Augustine in identifying the divine perfections with God’s essence. God’s esse is His understanding and His willing. These are just different names for the same thing. They all have their end in God, but in knowing and willing Himself, He also knows and wills creation. God’s knowledge of created things is a knowledge of how they are like and unlike Himself (246–247).

God’s will is free. This is evident, because He has creates some things and not others. But if He could have created something and did not, there seems to be potency in God. Aquinas argues that this need not be an imperfection, but he doesn’t really refute the charge of potency itself, which contradicts his God of pure act (247).

Apart from “pure act,” there remains the problem that according to Augustine and Aquinas, God’s will is not an ἐνέργεια but identical to His essence. Since God could have willed otherwise, could He have been otherwise? Can His essence depend upon creation? This is the problem of combining divine simplicity with God’s free will (247).

Aquinas tries to reconcile divine simplicity with divine freedom. He distinguishes operations that remain in God, such as understanding, willing, and loving, from operations that extend from Him, such as creating, preserving, and governing. This is the distinction between immanent and transitive act. Acts of the later type promise room for divine freedom. The problem is that given divine simplicity, this distinction cannot be real but must be purely notional (247–248).

Aquinas discusses free choice in God’s choosing what to create. There are many things that God could have created but did not (2.23.3). Yet Aquinas often reasons a priori about what God must create; for instance, God must have created angels “that the order of things be complete” (2.30.6). But if it is possible to reason so about God, how could He have done otherwise (248–250)?

Aquinas: Participation and Beatitude

In Book II of Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas says that creatures have their being by participating in God’s esse. Since God is not esse commune, what does this participation mean? Aquinas does not say, but Bradshaw offers a suggestion. Aquinas calls the esse of creature an activity, and he writes that God acts continuously to sustain creatures by His esse. So perhaps Aquinas would view participation as God’s activity in creatures. But Aquinas could not really accept this. Since God’s activity is His essence, for creatures to participate in His activity would be to participate in His essence (250–252).

Rational creatures participate in God in another way: by grace. Grace is “a gratuitous strength superadded to natural strength,” allowing us to do and will what surpasses our nature. Even our readiness to receive grace is given by God. The closest Aquinas comes to synergy is his “cooperating grace.” But this is limited to exterior acts; the interior act of the will toward God is caused by God alone. Since the external act simply follows from the internal, it is hard to see how man’s will play any role at all. This grace seems to be merely an efficient cause. As uncreated and as efficient cause, it is something extrinsic to God (252–253).

The basis of Aquinas’s teaching is divine simplicity. Since God is simple, God wills everything in a single act. But then there can be no cause for His willing as He does; He alone is the cause. God’s will “is productive of good and not caused by good.” God alone bestows grace because nothing in man can move Him (253–254).

The highest form of grace is the beatific vision. Like Augustine, Aquinas holds that God is intelligible. God is pure act, and as Aristotle said, what is actual is intelligible. Understanding God is our highest end because, on the one hand, as rational creatures our highest act is understanding, and, on the other hand, the highest object of understanding is God. But since created form can represent the divine essence, it must itself serve as an intelligible species present in the intellect. This disposition of the intellect is a created reality (254).

Aquinas differs from the East in teaching that God is intelligible. To Dionysius, God is beyond knowing because He is beyond being. Aquinas answers that this limitation is due not to the relation between Creator and created, but only to our current ways of knowing. Here he contradicts Gregory of Nyssa, but he follows a judgment of the University of Paris in 1241, which condemned the proposition that “the divine essence will be seen in itself neither by man nor by angel.” Aquinas attributes this view to Eriugena, not knowing that he here followed Gregory and Maximus (255–256).

A second difference is that in Aquinas, the beatific vision is purely intellectual. He writes that the body is not necessary for man’s happiness. It increases the happiness of contemplation in “extent,” because the soul’s enjoyment “overflows” into the body, but it does not increase our happiness in intensity. Even Augustine had taught that the soul’s enjoyment remains incomplete without the body. But Aquinas views man in Aristotle’s terms, as a rational creature. This contrasts with the eastern teaching that body and soul are divinized together insofar as they share in God’s activities (256).

Third, Aquinas does not teach perpetual progress. The beatific vision is rest, an end, free of all desire. It is “unmoving stability.” In contrast, Maximus teaches that the blessed enjoy an “ever-moving stability,” and Palamas teaches an infinite progress into the uncreated light. This is possible because God’s ἐνέργεια is infinite yet participable (256–257).

Aquinas: Objections and Replies

Karl Rahner addresses the criticism that God’s grace is extrinsic in his essay “Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace,” Theological Investigations (London, 1961), vol. 1, 319–346. Rahner suggests that all grace operates in a way similar to the grace of the beatific vision. As God in the beatific vision indwells the intellect, so He indwells man in other forms of grace. But it is unclear how this can be. We cannot participate in God’s essence, and essence is all God is. The beatific vision makes sense, because God is present as an intelligible species. But not all grace indwells us as an intelligible species (257–259).

Another objection to Aquinas is the incompatibility of divine simplicity and divine free choice. Apparently Spinoza made this argument in his Ethics I, Prop. 33, n. 2. Bradshaw addresses four defenses: two from Aquinas, one from a modern thinker. In De Potentia 3.15, Aquinas addresses several objections which all basically argue that since God’s will and nature are the same, what He does by will He does by nature. Aquinas writes that will and nature differ conceptually. We ascribe His acts not to nature but to will. Bradshaw complains that this distinction is purely notional, so it cannot solve the problem (259–260).

Another possible solution may be found in the Summa Theologiae 1.19.3. Aquinas writes that while God wills creatures contingently, we may say His will is “conditionally necessary.” This is because when He wills, He cannot unwill. Thus, a given choice, though not necessary in itself, can be called necessary in that God has willed it. The problem with such a view is that it threatens divine simplicity. It seems to give God two sorts of characteristics: those that are His in all possible worlds, as His willing His own goodness, and those that need not be, such as His willing to create (260–261).

Aquinas does not apply this idea to divine simplicity, so he gives no defense on this account. But we can look for a defense to Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Absolute Simplicity,” Faith and Philosophy 2 (1985), 353–381. They argue that the distinction is “logical” and not “metaphysical,” so simplicity is preserved. Perhaps by “metaphysical” they mean what Thomas would have called “real”: that given two things, one can exist without the other. In that case, the distinction is indeed real, because the point was that some choices need not be. God’s single act need not be simple (261).

A final argument comes from John F. X. Knasas, “Contra Spinoza: Aquinas on God’s Free Will,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76 (2002), 417–429. Knasas argues with Plato that acts are defined by their objects. But since God will creatures only in willing Himself, the object of His will is Himself whether He wills creatures or not. In that case, the act is the same and there is no conflict with divine simplicity. But this leaves God no reason to create. Aquinas, on the other hand, teaches that God creates to communicate His divine goodness. Creation is not pure voluntarism. Moreover, Aquinas teaches that God’s goodness is the principal object of His will, but not the only object. To do otherwise would separate divine goodness from the decision to create (262).

Another argument, which Bradshaw does not make, relates divine simplicity to predestination. If God’s will is identical to His knowledge, then foreknowledge implies predestination. What God knows, He wills. But this is predestination at its strongest. God knows evil, so He wills evil.

Epilogue

Bradshaw asks whether Palamas is subject to any criticisms the way Aquinas is. The first criticism is that his essence–energies distinction is a novelty unsupported by the tradition. This argument goes back to E. von Ivánka, “Palamismus und Vätertradition,” 1054–1954: L’Église et les eglises (Chevetogne, 1955), 29–46, and “Hellenisches im Hesychasmus: Das Antinomische der Energienlehre,” Epektasis: mélanges patristiques offerts au Cardinal Jean Danielou (Beauchesne, 1972), 491–500. Many articles advocated this view in Istina, vol. 19, no. 3 (1974). For replies, see André de Halleux, “Palamisme et Scolastique,” Revue théologique de Louvain 4 (1973), 409–442, and “Palamisme et Tradition,” Irénikon 48 (1975), 479–493; Georges Barrois, “Palamism Revisited” and Christos Yannaras, “The Distinction between Essence and Energies and Its Importance for Theology,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 19 (1975), 211–231, 232–245; Kallistos Ware, “God Hidden and Revealed: The Apophatic Way and the Essence–Energies Distinction,” Eastern Churches Review 7 (1975), 125–136. Bradshaw writes that he hopes his book “will put this view to rest” (268).

Another criticism comes from Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” Eastern Churches Review 9 (1977), 27–44. Although Bradshaw only addresses Williams’s argument, he also cites, with “more strictly theological objections,” Duncan Reid, Energies of the Spirit: Trinitarian Models in Eastern Orthodox and Western Theology (Atlanta, 1977) and A.N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deificiation in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford, 1999). Williams has two objections. First, by his “Neoplatonism,” Palamas privileges God’s οὐσία over the ὑπόστασες. This is because the ἐνέργειαι are lower than the οὐσία, and Palamas wrote that the ἐνέργεια is distinct from the οὐσία “in the same way as is ὑπόστασις.” Second, Williams complains that since the ἐνέργειαι in Palamas communicate divine perfections to the world, they seem to result in pantheism (268–270).

Williams’s first claim is based on his assertion that to Palamas, the essence–energies distinction is the same as the unparticipated–participated distinction of Proclus. Even Nicephoras Gregoras made this claim. But Palamas does not rely on this distinction except to help explicate his own. The ἐνέργειαι are not the henads of Proclus, not least of all because they are acts. Nor is the οὐσία Proclus’s One, but God considered as He is in Himself, apart from His manifestations. Williams is wrong to call the ἐνέργειαι lower than the οὐσία. Moreover, when Palamas writes that the ἐνέργεια is distinct from the οὐσία “in the same way as is ὑπόστασις,” this merely indicates that there are two distinctions, not that they are equivalent (270).

Williams’s second argument is praised by a defender of Palamas, Eric Perl, in “St. Gregory Palamas and the Metaphysics of Creation,” Dionysius 14 (1990) 105–130. Perl agrees with Williams that for God to exercise a decision to create or to possess unrealized potencies would be “gross.” Perl argues that God’s ἐνέργειαι differ one from another solely by their relation to creatures. Yet they are uncreated and without beginning. Only their effects begin; in themselves, they are prior to creatures temporally and ontologically. The ἐνέργειαι, then, are God’s single, eternal act of creation, differentiated and made temporal only in creatures (271).

Bradshaw finds Perl’s reading tendentious. Perl seems to equate ἐνέργειαι and λόγοι, but in Palamas there are many kinds of ἐνέργειαι. Also, Palamas speaks unapologetically of ἐνέργειαι beginning and ending. Bradshaw denies that this makes God “gross.” First, as Aquinas himself argued, an unrealized potency is not itself an imperfection (Bradshaw 247). Second, the unrealized potencies are present in God’s ἐνέργειαι, not His οὐσία. This means that He can do otherwise without being otherwise (271–272).

Bradshaw considers the variety of ἐνέργειαι in Palamas and concludes that some, such as infinity, immortality, etc. could not be otherwise and exist eternally, while others, such as the gifts of the Spirit and the λόγοι, could be otherwise and exist temporally. What relates all the ἐνέργειαι is that they are all acts of self-manifestation, as the Spirit, in proceeding from the Father and resting on the Son, manifests the energy of the Son and is manifested through the Son (273–274).

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