ENERGIES OF THE SPIRIT:  TRINITARIAN MODELS IN EASTERN ORTHODOX AND WESTERN THEOLOGY

 by Duncan Reid

     At last, a non-Orthodox who understands the bases of Orthodox belief, and is not merely attracted to our ethos!  Using the time-tested comparative method, Duncan Reid  ( an Australian and evidently Anglican) gets at the roots and paradigmatic differences between Eastern and Western Christianity.  If the reader can put up with Godself (for Himself) and Deification for Divinization and a few minor quibbles, she or he will be greatly enlightened by this volume, published under the auspices of the American Academy of Religion (no. 96).  It is a revision and translation of the author's doctoral dissertation at the German University of Tübingen under the direction of Prof. Jurgen Moltmann (who wrote the Foreword) and Prof. Luise Abramowski.  The author avows an ecumenical intent in which both East and West learn from one another.  But in a balanced presentation, he seems to lean toward the advantage of Orthodoxy.  He disavows the negative view of St. Gregory Palamãs prevailing among Scottish and other Western theologians.  

     Right at the outset, the author sums up St. Gregory Palamas's view thus:  "The energy is in fact God's uncreated grace."   In a footnote, Reid mentions the contrasts formulated by the Romanian hierarch, B. Krivochein (we are not told where the form : matter distinction stands in this scheme; or how the later philosophical distinction between essence and existence should be classified here, though the distinction between the Trinitarian processions in the divine Essence and the missions in the economy of creation parallel essence and energy):

      Since East and West think too differently for mutual understanding to occur, one might well wonder how any rapprochement between them could ever be realized, so long as either retained its current outlook.  Reid later (Ch. 2) explains the Aristotelian origins of the Western identity of essence and energy.  I will preface the following quotation from Reid with the observation that Aristotle in his Metaphysics affirms that "Since essence is admittedly regarded as substrate and as matter--and the last is dýnamis ["power, potential"]--all that is left is to speak of perceptible things' essence qua energy--[i.e. to say] what it is."  I now quote from p. 9 of his Background chapter (Ch. 1):

Reid adds that while essence is for Plato transcendable, for Aristotle, there can be nothing "beyond essence" [epékeina tês ousías].   Moreover, there are discernible in Aristotle's thinking "the roots of two different ways of combining the terms ousía, dýnamis, and enéryeia."  The last two are near synonyms that can be contrasted with the first--this the usage that prevailed in the East.  (I should obtrude that the East got its essence : energy distinction from the Greek language, as it had been influenced by Aristotle the way ordinary English has been influenced by prominent scientists.  Or there can be a contrast between an essence that has energy and an essence that merely has dýnamis--potentiality--; this, or rather its first option--"the essence (ousía) of an incorporeal thing is in its activity (enérgeia)"--underlies the Western identity principle.  It goes back to Augustine, who was strongly influenced, we are told (pp. 11-12), by the Neo-Platonic distinction between absolute and relative.  The identity of essence and energy (Reid does not point out that the Western view derived even more from the version of Aristotelianism developed by Muslims in Damaskos and, more directly and relevantly, Cordova, Spain) led directly to the Western scholastic "identification of God's essence or substance as pure actuality (actus purus)."    Augustine's outlook demanded that the mission of the Persons of the Holy Trinity parallel the processions, and vice-versa--in contrast with the distinction in John 15:26.  Reid says that the Filioque

ensured the close connection between the economic, salvation-history trinity and the theoretical, psychological explanation of the doctrine [sic; dogma would be more correct, since the "explanation" is the doctrine].  The filioque thus becomes, for the West, a theological necessity, not only as a defence against Arianism, but also to avoid any suspicion that there might be two and perhaps even mutually contradictory trinities.  The filioque clause thus serves to retain a place for the psychological trinity.  The Augustinian axiom that the outward activities of the trinity are indivisible means that the trinitarian hypostases are not to be distinguished on the basis of their economic activities.  That leads to the need to emphasize the psychological model of the trinity,

which, Reid concludes, "was to find its most complete form . . . in the work of Thomas Aquinas."   As Fr. J. Romanides might say, the Latins emphasized the mental side of what for the East is ontological.  And the Reformers, following the Scotist tradition, gave will priority over reason or intellect.
     As early as the third page, Reid has offered his basic conclusion concerning the difference between Eastern  and Western (Filioquist) Trinitarianism :  "The western position I call a principle [your reviewer would call it a framework assumption or premise], the identity principle; and the eastern position a doctrine, the doctrine of energies"--which he considers a well-established, Synod-approved teaching.   This neat distinction is very insightful; it is one that the author will adduce evidence and arguments for, even as it also forms a map to this analysis.
     Near the end of the introductory chapter, Reid outlines his intention to look at the identity principle as it appears in the thought of Karl Barth (of the Reformed persuasion) and of Karl Barth (the most famous Reformed theologian of this century), Karl Rahner (a twentieth-century papal advisor), and the twentieth-century Orthodox theologians--Georges Florovsky and Vladimir  Lossky.  (All four were contemporaries of the first half of the twentieth century, though Rahner and Florovsky lived till 1984 and 1979, respectively.)  That done, we are told, Reid will turn to questions that have arisen in recent debates about Palamism (the thinking of St. Gregory Palamas).  Finally, he plans to look at certain common concerns and interests that seem to underlie both positions.  He writes:  "The central question in all [of] this is:  What can each of the traditions learn and accept from the other without losing its own fundamental insight into the truth about God?" (p. 5).  One can well wonder whether the question admits of any non-contradictory answer.  
     Present purposes do not require detailing the eminently rewarding comparisons presented in Ch. 2.  But an example of the author's approach is his willingness to consider favorably Protopresvter Florovksy's categorizations of eternity (no beginning, no end) as the condition of uncreated Essence; æonic time (like the Latin æviternity or sempiternity, with a beginning [which seems improper for the uncreated Energies, since they are part of the Being of the eternal, uncreated God] but is timeless and has no end [Reid does not allude to the Latin parallel]) as the realm of the uncreated Energies; and temporality as the realm of created being, whether essences or energies.  A few readers may be interested in the relation of the Energetic theletikè énnoia to the lóyoi (of the Essence, for the scholastics), which the author doesn't seem to completely tie up; the entire issue strikes me as unnecessarily verging on an "analysis" of the divine Mentality!
     The third chapter profitably compares views of our four theologians--Barth, Rahner, Florovsky, and Lossky--on the Trinity (with Filioque), Creation, and Grace.  I will only venture to wonder about Lossky's views on the Salvation.  I do not question Reid's reporting (he has obviously read all of Lossky); it's rather that I find Lossky's apparent acceptance of the dichotomy of "Redemption" and "Sanctification" puzzling.  Many Western analyses strike the East as breaking organic wholes (CLICK HERE FOR MORE) into cut-and-dried independent parts whose relation to one another may be mainly sequential.  It may be like pretending that a couple of arms and legs, a head, two feet, etc. lying around in the body-parts department is equivalent to the seeing the living or functional organism under study--an organism or system in which each member's functioning or disfunction affects (helps or hurts) the other members.  As thinking people, we have got to have reasons for important choices; but we can go too far when we treat a vibrant whole as a cut-and-dried inventory listing of independent parts--especially if we fail to discern the basic element that ties the rest together--Life.  The opposite extreme, of course, is the philistinism of shunning cerebral activity.
     To sum up Ch. 3, it compares the two approaches--two recent theologians of each--of East and West.  Reid poses pointed questions concerning their views on the Trinity (with an excursus on the Filioque), Creation, and Grace; he does this with laudable scholarship and clarity--more to the advantage of the East than the West, I opine, despite his studied neutrality.  
    We come to Ch. 4.  It may be observed that Reid seems to understand Orthodox theology in a systematic or organic way better than some Orthodox writers.  However, one may judge that he runs into problems in Ch. 4, where the basic issue is the relation between teachings about the Trinity and about human Salvation in East and West--the emphases of theology proper and economy--in effect, human Salvation.  Reid comments that, "although Barth and Rahner want to discard the psychological analogy [Augustine's analogy between humans and God, with the procession of the Son being a psychological relation of reason and that of the Spirit being a relation of will (or love)], they continue to approach the inner being of God on the basis of an economic order of manifestation" (p. 68).  In short, the economy of human Salvation dominates divine Being--much as, I might add, the human-addressed pulpit dominates Worship addressed to God in Protestantism.  But Lossky can hardly have believed that "God's Essence becomes the visible object of the divine Vision" (p. 69); or, regardless of what he may have written, would he have left "very little room for human activity in relation to God," making "the human subject . . . a passive recipient" (ibid)?  Reid may be right, of course, in exclaiming in connection with Lossky's position that "It is quite astounding to think that neither Thomas Aquinas nor Karl Barth have [sic] sufficiently emphasized God's aseity!" (ibid).
     Reid is more favorable disposed toward St. Gregory Palamas than Latin and Protestant theologians generally (cf. p. 73), though not necessarily for the right reasons.  He thinks the Palamite position, as laid out by J. Kuhlmann, is "more acceptable to our personalist and existentialist rather than onotological and essentialist ways."  Yet, the East is in general more ontologically oriented than it is rationalistically oriented (like the Latin scholastic theologians, especially after Aquinas) or that it is, despite the Eastern emphasis on energies, will-oriented (like the Reformers).  One could gather from what Reid says that the Energies are related just to the will, even though will-less entities have energies--energies that in effect define them to a high degree.  Reid discusses the critique of Dorothea Wendebourg "two-pronged" critique of the Palamite position.  I will not go into this but simply point out that a problem exists in having the Spirit be the Giver-of-Life and dispenser of the energy of Grace, which Reid thinks can look like leaving the Son in a secondary place for human Salvation.  The error lies in Reid's view that the energy which the Spirit dispenses is "the common Trinitarian Energy"/"the common Energy of the Trinity" (pp. 78, 80).  I would have thought that the uncreated Energy that the Spirit, as the Giver of Life, unites believers with  is the Life of theandric Christ --though, to be sure, that Life is specifically Christ's uncreated Life that He shares with the other Persons of the all-holy Trinity:  A baptized communicating believer becomes a member of Christ who shares His Life, His uncreated Energies, and His soterial undertakings.  That the Spirit brings this about in no way logically diminishes the essential rôle of Christ in Salvation.  This is where I think Reid gets a bit lost, though I should emphasize that he seeks to defend Florovsky and Lossky even while critiquing their views.  He overemphasizes (p. 77) comments by Florovsky that the Incarnation of Christ saves human nature, whereas the Spirit energizes an individual's will to reap the advantages of that.  He also makes to much of the fact that Lossky devotes far more space in the Mystical Theology "to the Energies than to the Trinity"; one devotes more space to controverted issues, not necessarily to that which one feels to be of greater essential importance.  There is simply less that we can say about the Mystery of the Trinity than we can about the work of Jesus on earth and its consequences. 
     Reading a quotation from Kuhlmann, I became perplexed because it is at odds with what precedes and follows.  Referring to Kuhlmann's volume, I discovered that Reid had somehow transposed "personalist" and "ontological"--thus ruining the parallelism under discussion--that Palamas is more "personalist" (by which Reid seems to mean "inclusive," i.e. of both divine and created being"), whereas Aquinas is more "ontological"--a strange way of referring to the scholastic view of Christ's members' partaking of the divine "Essence" intentionally rather than entitatively (ontologically).  I can't see why St. Gregory Palamas (or Orthodoxy generally) is any less "ontological" on this point than Thomas.  In fact, whether reading the Kuhlmann original or Reid's explanation a couple of times, I agree but do not see how the "strength in Orthodox spirituality, namely that it includes an anthropology that recognizes the whole human being" is clarified by the discussion of Kuhlmann comments on St. Gregory Palamas.  I believe this passage could be re-written to make it more transparent how all of this points to a possible reconciliation of Orthodoxy and Latin theology--something that others have tried and failed to show--and which, till I find it demonstrated, can hardly believe it possible.   The gap of the illiterate Dark Ages and the disconnect of being too many centuries apart make Eastern and Western frameworks unbridgeable, so far as I can ascertain; one side or the other has to give up its framework and accept the other's.

     On p. 79, Reid stresses that in the East, "the equality of the three Hypostases was asserted [e.g. in the Creed] dogmatically as well as doxologically" (cf. "the Holy Spirit, . . . the Giver of Life, . . . with the Father and Son co-worshiped and conglorified" in the Creed); whereas in the West, the economic or soterial relevance of the Trinity has prevailed--the Father's sending the Son to become part of the created economy and the Son's economic sending the Spirit to make Grace available being elevated to and equated with the ordering of the Persons' essential relations.  Reid's point is that the Eastern emphasis on worshiping three Persons as God and the Western emphasis on appreciating their soterial activities both serve to keep the Persons distinct without destroying the unity of the Trinity.  
      The foregoing observations illustrate Reid's approach, which (except for the final chapter or two) grasp a good understanding of the Orthodox point of view (better than many Orthodox books on the shelves).  There are very few specifics than one need take exception to.  But two caveats are in order.  First, he mainly relies on Orthodox writers of the twentieth century that were just initiating the return to the traditional energetic point of view.  Florovsky is admirable, but Lossky--and Meyendorff's analysis of Palamite theology--cannot be relied on.  Reid is fully aware of theologians like Romanides and Yannaras, who came closer to the paradigm idea than the others.  Secondly, the attempts at the end of the book to bring together what Reid himself has earlier conceded to be "apparently mutually exclusive ways of thinking" (repeated in different words below on the same page, p. 122) can only raise eyebrows.  Perhaps he had an obligation to one or more of his (evidently very good) mentors not to leave them in the lurch.  Till the end, he mostly leans toward favoring the Orthodox energetic alternatives.  The books is very enlightening and can be recommended to Orthodox-inclined readers.  The writer wishes he had come across Reid and Yannaras before working out* the paradigm idea a year or two prior to receiving Reid's volume.
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     *It first dawned on the reviewer that the West embraces different paradigms (in the sense of the early Kuhn, Newton-Smith, etc.) with different axioms from those of the East while I was engaged in discussions with the most well-known Latin apologete on the Internet.  The discussions were friendly, but whenever the question involved energy or ideas stemming from energy, it became clear that we were engaged in what I was later to learn Fr. Romanides calls cross-talk.  Much more recently, I came across an article by Chr. Yannaras that makes it clear that he has realized that energy draws the crucial line of separation between East and West.   The Latin apologete's premises didn't allow my words to mean what I meant.  He was ready to list our differences, but he understood them only in his own paradigm--as being a variant on "Catholic" belief.  When one spoke of validity (for the Orthodox, a dynamis lacking authenticity/reality without Grace when not inside of the Orthodox fold) or Grace (an energy for the Orthodox), the exchanges simply bogged down in a verbal swamp.  An ex-Evangelical, that apologete  accepted Newman's idea of defending papal innovations as built-in developments of earlier ideas; it proved impossible to tell the apologete in question that cross-paradigm development is nonsense.  It dawned on me, more or less suddenly at that time more than half a decade ago, that energy (which Aquinas had an intimation of but could not distinguish from essence, for which reason his intimations were in vain) is utterly different from the static Mediæval (and Cordovan-derived)  premises of Latin and Reformation paradigms (the one based on intellectus; the other, on will and virtual reality).  So I dug back into my knowledge of intellectual history and quickly saw that after the West had been cut off from its Greek-language early Christian paradigm during the long, barbaric Dark Ages, Western scholars erected entirely new paradigms, derived from the Muslim Aristotle (as then taught in Cordova by both Muslims and Jews)--paradigms having no lineal connection with the still-continuing Apostolic and Orthodox paradigm in the East.  The content of the Bible and early Synods was still there; but it was read through the form--i.e. the lens or filter--of Cordova.  It had the old content but a new form--which is what determines what content is allowed and what it means.  From there, I had a roadmap that guided me through the jungle of East-West differences.  It has been very useful and productive.  On this website, see HERE as well as HERE and HERE and pages linked to these.  Reid's book has helped me more recently to define a few of the issues.