The Majesty of the Divine Mind
On the Perichoretic Nature of Knowledge
In his book Essence and Energies: Being and Naming God in St Gregory Palamas, Tikhon Pino provides a list of things Saint Gregory Palamas refers to as “divine energies.” The list includes but is not limited to being, divinity, foreknowledge, life, love, “God,” simplicity, will, and much more. This list may surprise some people familiar with “Palamite” theology. The all-too-common portrayal of the essence-energy distinction is that the essence is God “ad intra” and the energy is God “ad extra,” or, in other words, the essence is the “being” of God, and the energies are God’s manifestation beyond Himself. While this understanding is common, it is certainly incorrect. If Palamas considers “being” a divine energy, the divine essence is clearly not God’s being. And if the very name “God” is a divine energy, then clearly the essence is not “God-in-Himself.” The answer to the highly neglected but pressing question, “What are the divine energies, exactly?” will not be answered here. This post aims to inquire into the multiplicity of the divine energies–as the inner life of the Triune God–and determine how they relate to our knowledge of God and the world.
There are various branches of human knowledge and inquiry, including teleology, ontology, ethics, epistemology, politics, economics, etc. If everything in creation only exists insofar as it participates within the One God, that means everything reflects this same God in their irreducibly unique ways. And if our mind only knows anything insofar as it participates within knowledge already fully actualized in God, then the very truths we discern in regards to the deepest forms of human inquiry will reflect this same God (and will only be intelligible in light of His revelation).
There is one God and one divine life. God acts eternally ad intra and throughout creation in time, and His activity follows a discernible and consistent pattern or logic. God is a God of right order because He is an “ordered” communion of persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The pattern of God is that of “communion,” which we defined as “revealed relation” in our previous post. The Father moves towards the Son, the Son reciprocates this motion by turning towards the Father, and the Spirit reveals the relation of the Father and the Son in being the bearer of their love. Fr. Dumitru Staniloae says the Father and the Son “rejoice” over their “common possession” of the Holy Spirit.1 I continue my search for acceptable Trinitarian metaphors, and the following has been on my mind as of late: imagine two individuals staring into each other's eyes, face to face. There is a sense in which this dualistic intersubjectivity is dreamlike, monotonous, and limited. Now imagine two individuals who, together, stare outwards into the unlimited world outside them, and in looking beyond themselves, they see themselves. They are perfectly united with the object (rather, subject) of their contemplation and see themselves in it. While not a very well-structured analogy, I think it is quite illuminating. The Father knows the Son, but only “through” the Spirit and vice versa. The knowledge the Father has of His perfect Image is always-already “shared” in the other of the Image, just as the joy of the Son is always-already “shared” in the other of the Father who glorifies Him. The actuality of God is that of revealed relation, in which the “relation” between the two is fully opened in eternal generosity, thereby always-already being a relation of three.
In any case, the pattern of God is communion, that is, revealed relation (tri-unity). The pattern consists of the Father’s procession towards the Son in the Spirit and the Son’s reversion to the Father in the same Spirit. Gift-giving, self-sacrifice, the higher entering into the lower, the masculine moving towards the feminine–these are all names of the eternal “pattern”: the divine energy itself, the inner life of God.
The actuality of God, as revealed relation, is the Archetypal pattern for every pattern in creation. The Triune communion creates the communal whole (the created world) in His Image. Furthermore, creation's “reason” or “purpose” is found only in God. That is to say, while creation is not identical to God, the world's truth, intelligibility, rationality, purpose, etc., exists as an eternal divine idea. These are the “logoi” of St. Maximus the Confessor, and logoi are simply divine energies related to the creative power of God (which Palamas calls “dunamis,” which does not mean “potential” in the Scholastic sense but is itself an actuality).2 If the “purpose” or “telos” of created beings is found in God alone, then the discipline of “teleology,” in the truest sense, is an inquiry into divine providence.
Divine providence is an energy, and knowledge is the union between a mind and an object. To do true teleology is to be deified, in the precise sense that through this particular philosophical discipline, it is possible to discern the true purposes of creatures that only subsist in God's mind. Now, all philosophy is limited insofar as it is purely a function of the “mind” and does not necessarily imply any change in the heart. However, once the dogmas of the faith (all of which are contained in the two foundational doctrines, Incarnation and Tri-Unity) are assented to by rationality (which always requires a certain self-sacrifice of fallen rationality, which strives towards non-communal understandings), a theoretically infinite horizon of possible knowledge is unveiled, precisely because the “dogmas” provide a “living epistemology” (one could even risk using the term “method”) wherein the infinite God is revealed as shining forth through His creatures. The answer to ontology, teleology, ethics, epistemology, and even worldly affairs is always, in the end, found in the Triune God, who we can know in Christ. Thus, it seems to follow that since the Triune God exists within the “pattern” (of communion) described above, every truth about creatures will reflect this pattern of communion. But even more significantly, the very mode of inquiry provided to us by the foundational dogmas will disclose the mutual interiority of every form of knowledge, as all existing within the One God.
The divine energies are mutually interior, and this mutual interiority is both essential (they are energies of the one divine essence) and constitutive. In other words, the relations of the divine energies are, in a sense, perichoretic. Just as the three divine persons are distinct yet mutually interior, the divine energies are not reducible to one another, yet necessarily subsist together. God is both Lord and Love (both are divine energies according to Palamas), as both refer to different aspects of the infinite inner life of the One Triune God. God cannot be “Lord” one day and “Love” one another day. Nor can God act as Lord and not act as Love. Rather, the three divine persons each Love as the Lord and are the Lord as they Love, and they do so in their irreducibly unique hypostatic ways. A clearer way of demonstrating the perichoretic nature of the divine energies is with the energy of “being.” God is both being and providence (both are divine energies, according to Palamas). But if God “is” providence, then providence has being. Therefore, the energy of being is interior to the energy of providence. The same is true vice-versa, but this relation is less intuitive. God’s providence, that is, His eternal knowledge and power of determining the final destinies of all creatures, is something He eternally possesses as a “first actuality” (what equates to what Palamas calls dunamis, or “power”) as the Father contemplates the fullness of His power in His Image. Since “being” only exists in the revealed relation of the Triune God, and the whole God is in every energy (as Palamas emphasizes time and time again), the “being” of God only ever subsists insofar as it is equally “providence.” There is a single Trinitarian communion; it is eternal and fully actualized, so everything said of God (every divine name) implies and contains everything else.
As mentioned above, true teleology is, in essence, contemplation of the divine mind, specifically the energy of providence. The “telos” of every creature is Christ, as Christ the Logos contains the purpose and meaning of each creature, along with the creative power of their existence. He has eternally received all the “logoi” (divine ideas related to creatures) from the Father. It is, therefore, through participation (via “adoption”) in the Son's inner life that we are united with the reason or purpose of our being as it is eternally shared with the Son by the Father in the Spirit.
The “telos” of our being is participation in the Triune God. However, at the same time, the essence of our being is participation in God. As St. Maximus says, God draws us forth from nothing, and our life in time is meant to consist of a progression into higher stages of being (“well-being” and “eternal being”) which “consummate” the relation between us and God that is our being from the beginning. Thus, our being and purpose are both one and the same, or, perhaps more accurately, the fullest realization of both reveals their absolute interdependence and mutual interiority. They are one in their distinction because the identity of each implies the other.
While we exist in time, the identity of purpose and being can only seem “antinomic,” but antinomies simply result from the failure to account for incompleteness through applying eternal/eschatological standards to temporal/protological realities (and antinomies are strictly distinguished from mere contradictions, which have no standards). Eschatologically speaking, our being is nothing more or other than participation in God. But as fallen and in time, our being is incomplete. One cannot abstract oneself from the flow of time and say this “is” our being, as our being in time is our consummating movement towards God. Insofar as we stray from God, we move towards the nothingness of self-isolation. Any philosophy that does not account for sin will inevitably fall into a misunderstanding here, as they will not see that our present being is both suspended over nothingness (we are in time) and stained by it (we are fallen/sinful). We can never forget the reality of sin, a Christian dogma. Sin not only leads to false understandings of the world but also has an actual ontological impact on the state of our reality. We must always be mindful of the threefold distinction between “sin” (and all its synonyms: self-relation, pride, withdrawal, hatred, rebellion, etc.), protological reality (time, incompleteness, distance, etc.), and eschatological reality. In the person of Christ, the fullness of eschatological reality is revealed within our protological reality. Through the Incarnation, the “Beginning” and the “End” entered into our incomplete world, thereby transfiguring it through the union of divinity and humanity. With Christ, we now know the distinction between sin and the eschaton (as the eschaton is fully revealed in Him), along with the incomplete nature of our present reality and its necessary consummation in the eschaton.
So, our purpose is not separate from our being; rather, it is immanent to our very ontological composition. True teleology, then, is not separate from true ontology; both are two distinct yet mutually interior perspectives on the divine mind, only possible through the mind’s participation in the energies/logoi of God. And similarly, since we are only fully united with our purpose in the eschaton, teleology and ontology are interior to eschatology. And since our “purpose” is equal to our “good,” teleology, ontology, and eschatology are all interior to ethics. The same perichoretic structure applies to the totality of our knowledge because our knowledge is always a participation in the perichoretic God.
Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God (Vol 1).
See Tikhon Pino’s Essence and Energies: Being and Naming God in St Gregory Palamas.