Maximus Confessor: precursor of Thomas Aquinas or of Gregory Palamas?

I. The Ontological Aspect: The Objects of Free Choice in the Eschaton and Their Properties

A. In contradistinction to Plotinus and Origen, there is no ontological identity and mutual equivalence of the categories of Essence, Will, and Energy. Rather, St. Maximus distinguishes three categories. These are Person, Energy, and Essence. These categories are not mere conventions of speech for St. Maximus, but rather correspond to distinct metaphysical realities. They are not therefore each names for the same, absolutely simple "Something." Thus, while God is simple, this simplicity is not to be understood along the lines of the definitional model of simplicity, where the term functions as a great metaphysical "equals" (=) sign. There is in God a real plurality, different kinds of eternity and infinity. In particular, the One Logos is many logoi, and these logoi are in fact divine energies, each eternal, each infinite, each fully and equally good and divine, each distinct from any other, and yet each in no way divided or separated from each other. Logically speaking, this is an extension of the principle of Cyrillic Chalcedonianism, where the christological terms of the Chalcedonian definition may be used in confessions of triadology, and vice-versa. Thus, while the adjectives "unconfused" and "unseparated" were originally used of the relations between deity and humanity in Christ, they may also be used to describe the relationship of the logoi, or divine energies, both to each other and to the One Logos.[3] With such distinctions between the essence of God and its energies, as well as the distinctions between the energies themselves, there is a resulting plurality of real, yet not opposed, Goods in God. God is consequently left free to create or not to create, for the Neoplatonic and Origenist Problematics and the identification of Essence and Activity, of diversity and opposition, that they embody are completely avoided.

B. This consideration leads inevitably to the crucial interpretive problem involved in any study of St. Maximus. Is the Confessor to be seen as the precursor of Thomas Aquinas, or of Gregory Palamas? It is therefore necessary to say something at this point about this subject, taking Fr. Juan Miguel Guarrigues' article "L'energie divin et la grace chez Maximo le Confesseur" in Istina 19 (1974) as the point of departure for our remarks, for the current study bears some relationship to the conclusions that Fr. Garrigues there presents.

In the main, this article must be seen less as an attack on Palamism and more as a subtle attempt to portray the Confessor as an incipient Thomist. In the opening remarks of the article, Fr. Garrigues endeavors to place the Palamite interpretation of the decisions of the Sixth Ecumenical Council in a bad light by somewhat confusing terminological acrobatics regarding the words "has" and "is":

The Sixth Ecumenical Council has quite thoroughly confessed that the divine nature and the human nature have the energies which are their own properties. But it is nowhere insinuated that the energy which the divine nature has might be really or formally distinct from the essence which it is. [4]

Thus far, Fr. Garrigues' remarks are true and logical enough. It is, however, when he presses his case on "having" and "being" that he runs into trouble, for too much is proved by such an approach:

If, on the contrary, the energy is the energy proper to its essential form, whatever is said of the energy formally characterizes the essence of which it is the energy.... The divine essence does not have an energy, it is energetic, that is to say, that it actualizes all the virtualities of its being.5

This is because "Maximus views the energy as a power of essential existence" [6] Consequently

the essence is not able to have any other proper attributes or energies other than those which it is. For the energy ontologically presupposes the essence in which it inheres.[7]

But even though the argument thus far has been reasonable enough, it is precisely at this point that it begins to break down:

In God the essence does not support the trinity of persons. They have the divine essence. Because they enhypostatize the essence, they are God, but, as persons, they are not implied that the divine essence as it implies its own natural energy.... In effect, only a person of the Trinity is able to have in addition to His own divine being and operation, a human being and operation. The essence is operative, the persons have the operations. [8] 

The argument seems powerful, but, unfortunately, it simply does not fit St. Maximus, who evidently does not observe such rigid rules concerning "having" and "being," for he can write "the One Logos is many logoi, and the many logoi are one (πολλοί λόγοι ὁ εἷς λόγος ἐστί, καί εἷς οἱ πολλοί)." [9] These logoi are also energies, [10] which Fr. Garrigues would view more in the sense of attributes, or alternative names of God; God has what He is and is what He has. But one could, on Fr. Garrigues' approach, maintain that the One logos is no different than the Wisdom, Justice, and Omnipotence which it has. Since St. Maximus quite clearly uses the verb "is" to describe the relationship between the Logos and its logoi, Fr. Garrigues' argument leads to one of two conclusions:, either the logoi are many enhypostasizations of the One Logos, or the One Logos is itself, by an attribute, being composed of many other attributes. Are the logoi persons? Or is the Logos an attribute?

Fr. Garrigues' next argument is crafted with much more care. The whole thrust, and thereby the whole problem, of Palamism is, according to Fr. Garrigues, not in the affirmation that the divine energies are confessed to be uncreated, but that they are in fact said to be in a real manner ontologically distinct from the divine essence, and he even calls in Patriarch Nikephoros I of Constantinople (806-815) as support for the opposing view:

in presenting itself in the line of the council of 680, the Palamite council of 1351... had reason to wish to say that the fathers of the 6th Ecumenical Council have affirmed that the uncreated divine essence implies an uncreated energy in Christ. It is wrong, however, to claim from the Palamite council that it thought that the 6th Council wished to confess a real or formal distinction between the divine essence and its energies, whereas its whole argument against the theandric energy of Monenergism rests on the contrary postulate.... Nikephoros of Constantinople repeats the argument of St. Maximus and the 6th Council which declared that the energy is inherent to the nature: `There is neither essence without energy nor energy without essence' (PG 100:304D). Then, making explicit the postulate which subtends christological dyoenergism, he recalls that, in God, the energy is only able to be distinguished from the essence by reason of its created effects....' It is orthodox to regard the divine energy as eternal, or, to speak more correctly, to regard the energy of God Himself (αυτενέργεια) on account of the impossibility of distinguishing the energy from the essence, for they fall under the same essential principle on account of the property of the simple and incorruptible nature from which they proceed....[11]

This leads Fr. Garrigues to the suggestion that Palamas himself desired less to confess a real distinction between essence and energies and more to preserve one of the most fundamental tenets of the Christian faith, that man may participate in God's divine life.[12] Nevertheless, this real distinction between God's essence and His energies is, Fr. Garrigues maintains, a "sort of eternal emanation of grace logically anterior and independent" of Christ's acts as Creator and Redeemer, [13] for such a distinction is "a reduction of the idea of participation to entitative participation," a distinctly "neoplatonic conception" which "ignores two other modes of participation: participation in the causality of the act of being and intentional participation proper to spiritual beings."[14] Thus we arrive at the real center and root of Fr. Garrigues' difficulties with Palamism: its alleged Neoplatonism.

Palamas' mistake is, according to Fr. Garrigues, that he has no conception of God's essence as "pure aseity." That is to say,

In the manner of the Neoplatonic One, the divine essence is not situated originally in the simplicity of Being in Its pure act, but in that which is Beyond-Being, separated and radically imparticipable. [15]

Consequently, in order to safeguard the doctrine of a real communion between God and the World, Palamas "has to posit a real distinction between the divine essence and its uncreated acts in which creatures participate."[16] And here, very suggestively, Fr. Garrigues brings in the name of Eunomios: 

The god of Eunomios is the infinitely unique monad, radically separate in his essence, and does not admit of any participation in his being... [17] 

The Son cannot, therefore, along Eunomios' model, be fully God by essence, but only by participation in God's energies. 

And viola! For the first time, with the determination of the essence as pure aseity, the distinction between imparticipatable essence and participatable energies is posited.[18] 

According to Fr. Garrigues, then, Palamas, being unable to see God's essence in terms of a "pure aseity" where simple being exists in its pure act, not only "having" that pure act but "being" it as well, [19] must go on to posit some formal distinction between essence and energies. And this, "notwithstanding all precautions, necessarily implies distinction and composition in God." [20] And this in turn leads to the hub of Fr. Garrigues' concern over Palamism, for this distinction "ruins the simplicity of His essence."[21] 

These points are crucial, for, as Chapter Two of this essay has demonstrated, while Plotinus certainly wished to affirm the One's absolute transcendence, his somewhat "definitional" model of simplicity led to precisely that identification of being and activity that Fr. Garrigues would have us embrace, and this identification led in turn to the Origenist Problematic, whose solution was to affirm the precise distinction he would have us deny. 

The implications of this particular aspect of St. Maximus' doctrine of free choice are immense, for the Confessor's doctrine is simply not conceivable, possible, or compatible, with the doctrine of simplicity that Fr. Garrigues is advocating. Lars Thunberg is even more to the point: 

The logos is, as we have underlined, Himself and many logoi, but then the logoi may be said to be the one and only Logos, although what we know of them and their variety does not exhaust what is contained in the Logos. There is no complete identity. As differentiated, the logoi never cease to be different from one another.... The logoi are thus not identical with the essence of God, nor with the empirical forms of existence of the things of the created world.[22]

C. In contradistinction to Plotinus, where the category of things "around God" or "around the One" serves to distinguish the second and third hypostases from the One, where the latter is stable and immutable and the former move "around" it, and in contradiction to Origen where this preposition denotes a category of preexistent souls which are "around" God, in Maximus it serves to signify those energies which are in and "around" a nature. Here "around" serves to designate the fact that the energies "around" an essence are of an infinite "extension" and therefore do not exhaustively define the contents of their essence, and thus are not metaphysically identical with that essence.[23] 

D. In a lengthy footnote (note 49) at the bottom of page 95 of his classic study of St. Maximus, Polycarp Sherwood had this to say about this category of things "around" God: 

I would not only ask, have we here a distinction so developed that it might serve as a later ground for the doctrine of uncreated energies? [24]

The answer to this question in the light of the current study must be an unequivocal "yes." In this regard, the manner of translating περι is of some importance and is indicative of a translator's biases. Sherwood himself should perhaps have been a little more literal in his translation of περι, for he hesitates to give it its full force in English as "around" and prefers the more enervated "about." 

Such a class or category of things is, as we have seen, evident already in Plotinus, and persists into St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who can speak of "things around Him" (τὰ περι αυτόν) from which we may infer "the things proper to Him" (τὰ κατ' αύτόν).[25] Not surprisingly, Fr. Garrigues unhesitatingly translates περι αυτόν not as "around," a translation that he suggests is "trifling,"[26] but as "concerning the subject of God." This seems unjustified, for if the fathers are often alleged to be, at least in terminology if not in intent and content, Neoplatonists, then it would seem more reasonable to give the preposition περι the full sense that it has in Neoplatonism as "around." 

From the book "Free choice in Saint Maximus the Confessor" by Joseph P. Farrell (pages 178-185)

Notes

3. St. Maximus, TheoPol 1, PG91:20B: Ambigua 7. PG91: 1069B. cf. 1077C-1081C; Ambigua 22. PG 91:1257AB: Gnostic Centuries. PG 90:1101B. 11019, 1096D: Alain Riou, Le Monde et L'Eglise. p. 59: Lars Thunberg. Man and the Cosmos, pp.138-139, 140-193.

4. Garrigues, "L'énergie", p. 272, author's emphasis.

5. Ibid., author's emphasis.

6. Ibid., p. 273, citing TheoPol 16, PG91:205B and I Ambig 2. PG 91:1037C.

7. Ibid., author's emphasis, citing TheoPol 1, PG 91:33B, p. 273.

8. Ibid. The underlined portions are the author's emphasis, the italicized portions my own.

9. Ambigua 7, PG91:1081C.

10. Ambigua 22, PG 91:1257AB, cf. Riou, Le Monde, pp. 59-60.

11. Garrigues, "L'energie", p. 273, Fr. Garrigues'  emphasis.

12. Ibid., pp. 274-275.

13. Ibid., p. 275.

14. Ibid., pp. 275-276, Fr. Garrigues' emphasis.

15. Ibid., p. 275.

16. Ibid. 

17. Ibid., p. 277. 

18. Ibid. 

19. Ibid., p. 275. 

20. Ibid., p.279. 

21. Ibid., p.280, emphasis mine. 

22. Thunberg, Man and the Cosmos, p. 139, emphasis mine.

23. TheoPol 16, PG 91:209A, TheoPol 17, PG 91:212D; TheoPol 23, PG 91:261AB;Ambigua 15,PG91:1220D. 

24. Polycarp Sherwood, The Earlier Ambigua of St. Maximus the Confessor and His Refutation of Origenisin, p. 95, note 49. 

25. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Fourth Theological Oration (Oration 30): 17, PG 31:125BC: 

26. Garrigues,"L'energie",p. 281.