Ancient Faith Ministries

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

Who is God? (Part 4 of 8):

God is Essence and
Energies
March 28, 2016 · Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas, March 27,

2016
Hebrews 1:10-2:3; Mark 2:1-12
Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

In the Name of the Father and of the Son

and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.

T oday, on the Sunday of St. Gregory

Palamas, which is the second Sunday
of Great Lent, we again ask our question in
this fourth installment in our eight-part
series: “Who is God?”

Today our answer to that question will focus

on something that St. Gregory talked about
quite a bit. This theology today will be a bit
“meatier” (and I hope you’ll forgive that
expression during Lent!). But it’s worth
sinking our teeth into. So what is our
answer today? Who is God? Today, the
answer is: “God is Essence and Energies.”

That God is Essence and Energies is

something that occupied St. Gregory
Palamas in the fourteenth century. At stake
was the Orthodox Christian practice of
hesychasm, which is the cultivation of
spiritual stillness through contemplation in
order to experience mystical union with
God. Some hesychasts, including St.
Gregory himself, were actually seeing the
divine, uncreated light of God Himself—that
is, they were seeing God, Who was
manifesting Himself as light.

God manifest as light was nothing new in

the fourteenth century. We recall how God’s
glory shone from the human body of Jesus
Christ at the Transfiguration and also how
Moses’ conversations with God on Mount
Sinai left his face shining with that same
glory. And this has happened many times in
history with other saints, too, such as the
much-beloved St. Seraphim of Sarov in
eighteenth century Russia and even saints
of our own time, as well.

So what’s going on here? Why is it

important for us to affirm that God is
Essence and Energies? What does that
mean?

We cannot go into all the details here, but

we can cover the basics. We should ask first
what these two words—essence and
energies—mean when they refer to God.
Let’s first talk about essence.

God’s essence is Who He is in Himself. The

word essence comes from the Latin esse
which means “to be.” In Greek, the word is
ousia. So we can also say that it means
“being.” God’s essence is God in His very
nature. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are
all of this one essence, something that we
affirm in the Creed, when we say especially
that the Son of God is “of one essence” with
the Father.

It is hard for us to say exactly what all that

means. Why? Because God’s essence is
beyond us. We cannot comprehend it. There
is actually not even very much we can say
about it. God’s essence remains a mystery to
us, inaccessible and so wholly other that we
really only have a name for it but not much
else.

The Scripture witnesses to this with

passages such as John 1:18, which says, “No
one has seen God at any time.” God’s
essence is beyond us. We cannot look at it.
We can see the incarnate Lord Jesus, as we
said last week, but we cannot see the divine
essence. If I asked you to point to God in
Himself, the essence of the Father, Son and
Holy Spirit, where would you point? If I
asked what God is, what would you say?
There really is nothing to say.

Yet at the same time—and this is key—we

also have passages such as 1 John 4:12,
which says, “No one has seen God at any
time, but if we love one another, God abides
in us, and His love has been perfected in us”
(emphasis added). This is where it gets
tricky. No one has seen God, yet God
“abides” in us if we love one another.

It gets trickier, though, because even while

we have these passages saying that no one
has ever seen God, we also have this from
the mouth of Christ Himself: “Blessed are
the pure in heart, for they shall see God”
(Matt. 5:8, emphasis added). So what’s
going on here? Can we see God or not? The
Scriptures seem to be saying two different
things—we cannot see God, and yet we can
see God. Which is it?

This is why we also say that God is Energies.

So what is God’s energies?

The word energy—in Greek, energeia—

literally means “working in.” That is, God’s
energies are His working in this created
world, His activity, His operation. God’s
energies are His presence among us and in
us. The Energies are what we actually can
see God doing. His energies are sometimes
identified with His glory, His grace, the
uncreated light.

The Energies are also God’s actions of doing

things like healing, miracles, forgiveness of
sins, the power in the sacraments, and so
forth. The Energies are where we really
meet God, where we have actual, direct
contact with Him. We can say (and this is
Scriptural language) that God is energizing
in us. Sometimes, that term is translated as
“working” or “at work,” but “energizing”
may be better.

Now, it’s important to stress here that both

God’s Essence and Energies are uncreated.
That is, they are distinct ways of referring to
God Himself. God is His Essence, and God
is His Energies. And both Essence and
Energies are common to the Father, Son
and Holy Spirit. When it comes to the three
divine Persons, there is one Essence and
one Energy of God.

While it’s St. Gregory Palamas who is

especially known for stressing the
Essence/Energies distinction, it was
nothing new. Some thousand years before
St. Gregory, St. Basil the Great made this
exact same distinction. He wrote this: “The
energies are various, and the essence
simple, but we say that we know our God
from His energies, but do not undertake to
approach near to His essence. His energies
come down to us, but His essence remains
beyond our reach” (Letter 234).

Other Fathers of the early Church say

similar things, such as Gregory of Nyssa
(Homily on the Beatitudes VI), Cyril of
Alexandria (Thesaurus 18) and Maximus
the Confessor (Ad Thalassium 22). These
are all pretty heavy hitters when it comes to
historic Orthodox theology.

So we can say many things about the

energies of God, but really very little about
His essence. Why? Because the essence is
beyond us—as Basil says, we “do not
undertake to approach near to His essence.”
Yet “His energies come down to us.” So God
is both transcendent—that is, He is beyond
us—and immanent—that is, He is available
to us and even within us.

So why is this important? What does it have

to do with our Christian life?

On the one hand, we have to maintain the

unknowability of the essence of God. He
wouldn’t be much of a God if we could say
that we know His very essence. How can the
mind of man ever dare to say such a thing?

Yet if we leave it there, if we affirm only that

God is transcendent, where does that leave
us? We remain apart from God. But
separation from God is not the experience
of the Church. Rather, Christians
experience the very touch of God. We
experience God in His divine energies,
working in our world and even within us.
We bathe in the energies of God, we
participate in the energies of God, being
made like God—this is called theosis or
deification—which is possible through our
adoption as sons and daughters of the Most
High because of our incorporation into
Christ.

So when we say that God is both Essence

and Energies, we are in fact describing in
summary why it is that the Christian life
works at all. The God Who is beyond us and
totally unlike us in His essence is
nevertheless close to us and available to us
in His energies.

Today, we ask: “Who is God?” And today,

we answer: “God is Essence and Energies.”

To the God Who is both beyond us and also

within us be all glory, honor and worship, to
the Father and to the Son and to the Holy
Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
Amen.

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About Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

The Very Rev. Archpriest Andrew Stephen
Damick is Chief Content Officer of Ancient
Faith Ministries, former pastor (2009-2020)
of St. Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church of
Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and author of The
Lord of Spirits, Arise, O God, Orthodoxy
and Heterodoxy, Bearing God and An
Introduction to God. He is co-host of the
following podcasts: The Lord of Spirits (with
Fr. Stephen De Young), The Areopagus (with
Michael Landsman), and Amon Sûl (with
Richard Rohlin). He is also host of
Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, Orthodox
Engagement, and Roads from Emmaus.
With Richard Rohlin he is collaborating on
the major documentary series The Wolf and
the Cross. You can follow him on YouTube,
Facebook, Telegram and Instagram.

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 essence-energies distinction  gregory palamas

 sermons  who is god?

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3 comments:

Ilya says:
March 29, 2016 at 1:02
pm

It’s very interesting to hear about

Orthodox Faith which I study as Russian,
and read about it and God in English,
especially because I’m English teacher. You
did good job showing us in simple words
about St Gragory Palamas and his
teachings about God.

Emil says:
July 8, 2019 at 3:31 pm

I was seriously contemplating converting

from Protestantism to Orthodoxy until this
information was revealed to me. The idea
of a man becoming a god is foreign to the
scriptures, to Judaism and is in fact the
false doctrine and promise of the evil one in
the garden. It is further disturbing that the
hesychasts see God as a being of light. The
Bible teaches us that Jesus is alone the
visible image of the invisible God. Indeed,
the evil one has the ability to disguise
himself as an angel of light.

I would love to be wrong about this, so

please correct me if I am.

Fr. Andrew
Stephen Damick
says:
July 21, 2019 at
1:31 pm

God be with you! I think you may

have some misunderstandings
here.

Man becoming god: This is

nothing other than becoming
“sons of God” (Rom. 8:14, 9:26;
Gal. 3:26, 4:6; and “partakers of
the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
The language of “gods” for those
to whom the Word of God came is
used even by Jesus (John 10:34-
35). This is the adoption as the
sons of God that all those who are
in Christ are given. I also highly
recommend reading the following
posts (in order):

[Link]
olecounsel/2018/08/29/gods-
divine-council/
[Link]
olecounsel/2018/09/04/humans-
in-the-divine-council/
[Link]
olecounsel/2018/09/12/the-
saints-in-glory/

The problem with what happened

in the garden is not that man was
not destined to become god but
rather than it was something that
man could grasp on his own
without cooperation with God.
Remember that the doctrine of
theosis is not taught in the
absence of the passage from
Genesis you mention. That part
isn’t cut out of Orthodox Bibles.
Rather, it is simply understood in
the light of the rest of the
Scripture and not isolated based
on a reduced understanding of
what it means to be saved.

The Divine Light: The hesychasts

do not call God “a being of light,”
as though He were composed of
light. Rather, God has manifested
Himself as light on a number of
occasions, such as at the
Transfiguration, when the glory of
God shone out from Jesus, or
when He shone forth from the
face of Moses after the prophet’s
encounter with God on Sinai —
these are not created effects but
rather God Himself becoming
apparent. (Otherwise, Jesus
shining with a created light rather
than the uncreated light of God is
just showing Himself not as God
but as just a special created
being.) The idea that Jesus alone
is the only way God has ever been
visible is simply not true to the
Scriptures. God appears many
times, for instance, in the Old
Testament, long before the birth
of Jesus, though it is the same Son
of God Who is appearing, though
in various forms, such as a pillar of
fire, a cloud, a burning bush, the
Angel of the Lord, etc.

Comments are closed.

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