[...]
This is why Palamists have always insisted that the creature's participation in God must be understood in an emphatically realist, ontological, or "entitative" sense. Such participation does not mean, and cannot mean, possessing a part of the participated reality. If it did it would not be participation at all, as understood not only by Palmas, but by Plato, Plotinus, or Proclus. Rather it necessarily means possessing the whole of the participated, although in a differentiated manner according to the receptivity of the participant. Entitative participation, therefore, does not involve any breaking-up of God into parts or postulation of intermediary beings between God and creatures. But the very wholeness and identity of God in all the participants also demands that he be not confined to them but absolutely apart from all. In short, it entails that the whole God be both essence and activity, that his essence be distinct from his creative activities.
The essence-activities distinction thus allows Palamas to say that God is "being and not being, everywhere and nowhere, many-named and unnameable, ever-moved and unmoved, and simply, all things and none of them all." There is merely an expansion of Ps.-Dionysius' succinct statement, "He is all things in all things and nothing in any". Both Ps.-Dionysius and Palamas would concur with the Almarician assertion that as universal formal cause God is "lapis in lapide," though they would at once add that in his essence he is neither this nor anything else.
This understanding of the metaphysical reasoning behind the Palamite distinction sheds new light on the debate between Palamism and Thomism. Aquinas, of course, disagrees with the Almarician doctrine on the ground that it leads to pantheism. "If the divine being were the formal being of all things, all things would necessarily be simply one. . . . If God is the being of all things, it is no more true to say 'A stone is a being' than 'A stone is God."'" Within his own system he is quite right, precisely because he is working without the essence-activities distinction. Since his essence is all there is to God, and it is absolutely undifferentiated, then if God is the being of creatures, all things are the same, and since the essence of creatures is the essence of God, they are sim-ply God. Alternatively, if we accept the diversity of creatures but hold that God is their being, then the essence of God must be differentiated according to creatures. This is an equally panthe-ist theology of the process type. In either case, the attempt to preserve ontological participation without the Palamite distinction leads to an unmitigated immanentism in which God and creation are ultimately identified.
Aquinas' solution is to deny such participation. The divine ideas are only the exemplary causes, not the formal causes, of creatures. The being and all the perfections of creatures are not God, but are rather created similitudes of the divine being and perfections? "From this, which [Dionysius] says, that 'the Divinity is the being of all things,' he shows that in all things a certain similitude of the divine being is found from God." Of course this is not what Ps.-Dionysius says at all, and Thomists are usually glad to find that Thomas does not really agree with him. Consequently they argue that there can be no real, ontological union of creatures with God, but only an "intentional participation," which apparently means no more than an agreement of will. As a result creation comes to be seen as autonomous. To be sure, it is still radically dependent on God for its origin and continuance; but it can be considered in and by itself, apart from God, because it has its own being instead of having God as its being. The outcome of this is the theory of "pure nature," creation in a state of existing but not yet having received divine grace, and the concomitant idea of an intrinsic or "natural" finality of the creature, alongside its "supernatural" end in God.
Palamism, of course, rejects all these theories. Creation has no being but God. He is indeed lapis in lapide, all things in all things. But this is not pantheism because the "all in all" is not only always accompanied by the "nothing in any" but is grounded in it and made possible by it. God can be wholly present in all things only because he is apart from all. Creation has absolutely no autonomy because the being which God imparts to it in creating is not a created similitude, but is nothing other than himself. This is the meaning of the doctrine of the divine activities as the causal powers of God, or God-for-us. Hence, as Vladimir Lossky says, "The Eastern tradition knows nothing of 'pure' nature to which grace is added as a supernatural gift. For it, there is no natural or 'normal' state, since grace is implied in the act of creation itself . . . . There is no 'natural beatitude' for the creation, which can have no other end than deification."
Eric Perl - St.Gregory Palamas and the Metaphysics of Creation