Gregorian Reforms as rupture: The rising tide of papalism (Aristides Papadakis)

The rising tide of papalism

In addition to the demand for libertas and spiritual renewal, however, a determined effort had been made by the papacy to see that its claims to a universal jurisdiction throughout Christendom were everywhere acknowledged. The reformers in fact resolved to reorganize the Church along monarchical lines. From the outset it was agreed that this was to be accomplished by the systematic promotion of the pope's ancient primacy and authority everywhere. The vigorous interventionist policy initiated by Leo IX was almost certainly inspired by such sentiments. In brief, from the beginning the pioneers of the reformation were convinced that an independently powerful papacy exercising direct jurisdictional control over Christendom was an indispensable preliminary condition to renewal. The idea that the reform was to be founded on the restoration of papal authority was soon standard sentiment. Any concession or compromise on the pope's alleged constitutional status in the Church universal was conceived as a threat to the movement as a whole: Roman primatial centralism could alone guarantee ecclesial unity and renewal. Evidently, the papal reform movement was never exclusively limited or restricted to spiritual or moral renewal.

Without doubt the reign of Gregory VII is the best vantage point from which to examine this important feature of the Gregorian platform. It is of course true that Gregory's ideology owed a great deal to some of his predecessors. Many of his views were already forged during his years as a subordinate papal bureaucrat and archdeacon. His understanding of lay investiture (to say it once more) was often a faithful reflection of Humbert's own theories, while one of his more controversial texts, the Dictatus papae, contains sentiments and beliefs already present in the papal curia of Leo IX. On the whole, the conclusion that Gregory was more a resolute man of action than a man of incisive ideas is certain. It was not his deep learning but actions that were to leave the world "breathless. "64 At the same time, nevertheless, his tenure as pontiff was also the high point of the rising Roman tide of the eleventh century, when the theme of papal primacy was to achieve a degree of practical and theoretical development unknown to the first reform pioneers. The principles and foundations of Roman reform ecclesiology are best observed in his reign. 65 The mystical identification with St Peter occasionally cultivated by the popes of the early Middle Ages first acquired its more extreme and indeed bizarre interpretation under Hildebrand/Gregory. The Petrusmystik dominates his reign.

The Dictatus papae, a collection of twenty-seven short statements dealing with the Roman primacy, is without doubt one of the most synoptic manifestos in existence on the subject. To be sure, some of its notions, in terms of origin, pre-date the eleventh century. For instance, number nineteen (see below) is actually directly traceable to the sixth century Symmachian forgeries. Still the arbitrary terms in which the fullness of Roman universal power is described. is unparalleled. The fact that the original text was inserted in the official register of Gregory's correspondence does not of course tell us much about its purpose or origin. Such matters are hidden in obscurity. On the other hand, the suggestion that the list was intended as an index or a list of sorts-a table of contents or chapter headings-for a lost collection of canon law on the primacy has much in its favor. As it happens, except for five of its capitula dealing with Rome's relationship to the temporal power, the list is concerned exclusively with the divine origin and practical consequences of the pope's primatial rights and prerogatives.

1. That the Roman Church was founded by God alone.

2. That the Roman pontiff alone is rightly to be called universal.

3. That he alone can depose or reinstate bishops.

4. That his legate, even if of lower grade, takes precedence, in a council, of all bishops and may render a sentence of deposition against them.

7. That for him alone it is lawful to enact new laws according to the needs of the time, to assemble together new congregations, to make an abbey or a canonry; and, on the other hand, to divide a rich bishopric and unite the poor ones.

8. That he alone may use the imperial insignia.

9. That the pope is the only one whose feet are to be kissed by all princes.

11. That his title is unique in the world.

12. That he may depose emperors.

16. That no synod may be called a general one without his order.

17. That no chapter or book may be regarded as canonical without his authority.

19. That he himself may be judged by no one.

21. That to this see the more important cases of every Church should be submitted.

22. That the Roman Church has never erred, nor ever, by the witness of Scripture, shall err to all eternity.

23. That the Roman pontiff, if canonically ordained, is undoubtedly sanctified by the merits of St Peter.

26. That he should not be considered as Catholic who is not in conformity with the Roman Church.

Considering the shadowy status of the papacy before 1046, the forceful and outspoken character of these claims is remarkable. Despite its brevity, the document is actually a comprehensive summary statement of the reorganized Church under papal sovereignty as conceived by the Gregorian reformers of the eleventh century. The pope is throughout represented as an absolute monarch, as the supreme authority over bishops, councils, clergy, and all temporal rulers. Simultaneously, papal authority is everywhere deemed preeminent, especially in administration and legislation, as Rome's arbitrary right to review petitions, authorize canon law, convene ecumenical councils, and deliver judgments (from which there is no appeal) illustrate.

Invariably, in order to explain the unaccountability and supremacy of the pope, the Dictatus implicitly insists on the old proof from apostolicity. This argument was rooted in the familiar Petrine texts of Matthew 16: 18-19, Luke 22:32, and John 21:15-17 and, especially, in the peculiar "Roman" exegesis with which the reforming popes chose to invest them.68 Specifically, the promise and commission of Christ to the apostle Peter (enshrined in these texts) was thought to refer to the Roman see alone. The sweeping powers they imply were apparently bestowed by Christ exclusively on the Roman Church. The sole heir of the promises given to Peter by the Savior was indeed the Roman pontiff. This papalist reading is obviously behind the claim of the Dictatus that the see of St Peter is divinely-instituted or as "alone founded by God". In obvious contrast to all other sees and patriarchates, it is actually incapable of error and infallible. Remarkably, St Peter's trustees are even promised personally the gift of salvation. All canonically ordained papal incumbents, by virtue of their Petrine or apostolic authority, at any rate, are deemed "sanctified." The apostolicity argument was ultimately also the basis for the self-identification with St Peter found often among the reformers. Gregory VII was even willing to argue that Peter's Roman representative was the literal incarnation of the apostle. As he was to note in one of his letters, eius vicarius ... qui nunc in carne vivit.

Suffice it to say, Roman papal claims reached their pinnacle with such arguments. Reformers were actually being redundant in transforming obedience to the pope into virtual dogma, or in declaring conciliar legislation invalid, just because it contradicted papal decrees.70 Arguably, their twelfth century successors were conscious of the repetition, as their search for new formulas and titles seems to suggest. It was then for the first time in fact that the label "Vicar of Christ" (normally used of the emperor) was moved center stage as a replacement of sorts for the pope's inherited personal sanctity and mystical identification with Jesus' disciple.71 By the end of the century, Innocent III was even ready to discard the old formula "Vicar of St Peter" altogether for the more comprehensive "Vicar of Christ." As he was to emphasize, "we are the successor of the prince of the apostles, but we are not his vicar nor the vicar of any man or apostle, but the vicar of Jesus Christ himself."72 Parenthetically, in connection with this terminological evolution, it is interesting to note that the word ecclesia was also to undergo a transformation of sorts at the same period. By then the word had come to be identified almost exclusively with "churchman" or ecclesiastical government; it was quite common in fact to speak of ecclesiastical hierarchy or authority as the Church-to the exclusion of the laity. In other words, the meaning of the biblical term ecclesia, embracing as it has always done the entire body of the faithful, was obscured or forgotten. "Language like this is a sign of a very profound revolution in the way men thought about the Church. What is uppermost in their minds when they think of the Church is a juridical entity. One speaks of the 'body of the Church' as one does of any corporation. Looked at in terms of a juridical organization, the Church is seen essentially as a hierarchical, governmental structure."73 It goes without saying that the clerical separatism enshrined in this definition of ecclesia is linked not only to a rising papalism but to a rising clericalism. Everywhere in the West by the twelfth century, in contrast with the more accessible monogamous clergy of Eastern Christendom, sacerdotal celibacy had become an enduring reality.

In all essential respects, the metamorphosis of the papacy into a highly centralized monarchy was to result in the transformation of the western episcopate as well. The excessive centralization of Latin Christendom under papal authority was indeed to leave very little room for an independent hierarchy. Papal intrusion in diocesan affairs (already evident under Leo IX) was to become commonplace by the end of the century. It is by no means a surprise that the subordination of the episcopate to Rome is also a principal subtext of the Dictatus papae. Actually virtually half of its chapters deal with the proper relationship between pope and bishop; this is always described in terms of dependence. Throughout the document, at any rate, the ancient apostolic office of bishop is presented as an auxiliary adjunct agency of the papacy. 74 Direct, even unlimited, supervision of every diocese by Rome is viewed as the norm. Virtually all traditional episcopal and metropolitan primatial rights are set aside in order to make room for papatus, the new rank or order superior to episcopatus. In the end, in fact, St Peter's successor on the papal throne assumes not only the functions and powers of the episcopacy within each diocese, but the responsibilities of the provincial synod as well. The power to translate, reinstate, and depose a bishop is, in fact, characterized as a papal prerogative (whereas of course until then it had belonged to the local synod). Inevitably, all papal legates are dignified with similar powers. As duly authorized papal agents, their right of intervention is virtually identical to that of the pope; they are given precedence over all local authority. Although they may themselves be actually in inferior orders, if neccessary, they are empowered to depose and even excommunicate bishops.

Predictably, the pope's superior status vis-a-vis the episcopate was before long defined in even greater detail by western canonists. By the twelfth century Rome's interventionist-supervisory powers on the local diocesan level were routinely portrayed as expressions of the papal plenitudo potestatis. 75 St Peter's representative was apparently alone called to this fullness of jurisdictional power, whereas the bishop's authority was more confined within definite limits. As St Bernard was to insist, the plenitudo potestatis (a phrase first used in the fifth century by pope Leo I) was a unique papal privilege. "Therefore he who resists this power, resists the ordinance of God ... [The apostolic see] can degrade some [bishops] and exalt others, as its judgment dictates ... It can summon the most eminent churchmen from the ends of the earth and compel them to her presence not once or twice, but as often as it seems fit. Moreover it is quick to avenge every act of disobedience if anyone tries to resist. "76 Given the pronounced emphasis placed on the Roman primacy by the reformers of the eleventh century, it is not surprising to find that canonists were explicitly called upon to support it. How canon law became an instrument of papal absolutism will be described in a subsequent page. It will suffice at this point only to note that by the late eleventh century-thanks to Gregorian initiative-numerous new canonical manuals were available to the knowledgeable ecclesiastic. The fact that many of them began with a chapter entitled de primatu romanae ecclesiae was by no means unusual or uncommon. It had become by then almost standard practice.

Since the powers of the papal monarchy were deemed comprehensive in every way, they were obviously meant to include Orthodox Eastern Christendom. Actually the new papalism had as its goal the transformation of the pope's legitimate primacy of honor and authority within the ancient system of patriarchates into "a real power of jurisdiction, universal in scope and absolute in nature." The intention, quite simply, was to elevate Rome over and above all the other patriarchates, to make the papal throne into something more than one apostolic throne among others. It has indeed often been stressed that the aim was to reduce authority in Christendom to one. No longer would the constitutional center of the Church be based on a multiplicity of individual sees, on conciliarity and collegiality, but on Rome alone--the caput et cardo of papal decrees and pronouncements. It is worth adding that this vision of the pope's constitutional standing in the Church was also known to the author of the familiar forgery, the Donation of Constantine. "And we ordain and decree that he [the Roman pontiff] shall have rule as well over the four principal sees, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Jerusalem, as also over the Churches of God in all the world. And the pontiff who for the time being shall preside over the most holy Roman Church shall be the highest and chief of all priests in the whole world, and according to his decision shall all matters be settled. " In its negotiations with Constantinople in 1054, Rome was to appeal inter alia to this forged donation as a prized "authority" for its claims.

Any synopsis of Rome's superior status in the Church universal (as conceived by the Gregorians) must also necessarily emphasize its relationship to the temporal power. Again, Pope Gregory's pontificate has a direct bearing on the matter. As it happens, the Dictatus contains numerous sentences on the subject. The most famous assertion undeniably concerns the pope's right to depose emperors. As we have seen, this tenet (that kingship is a removable office) was actually put into practice in 1076 during Lent, when Gregory, in addition to absolving the German aristocracy from their oaths, stripped Henry IV of his right to rule and then excommunicated and deposed him. Gregory justified his actions in a letter to Hermann of Metz by arguing that the spiritual power was essentially superior to the secular power, since it presumably alone performed a higher function in society. To support his thesis, the pope was actually even willing to suggest that Ambrose of Milan and Pope Gelasius of the early Middle Ages had said as much. But Gregory probably also relied on the Advesus simoniacos, in which Humbert of Silva Candida had argued against the sacred nature of kingship by maintaining that "just as the soul excels the body and commands it, so too the priestly dignity excels the royal."79 Whatever the case, in their attempt to transform the Roman primacy into a genuine monarchy over the Church, the reformers of the eleventh century (and in particular, Gregory VII) eventually also laid claim to a jurisdictional authority superior to the secular power. Increasingly, emancipation of the Church and its clergy from the feudal net of the lay ruler--enshrined in the cry libertas ecclesiae to mean primarily clerical domination over the laity. In time, indeed, this reaction to imperial tutelage was to result in the "imperialization of the Church" itself, to borrow the label made famous by E. Kantorowicz.80 By the twelfth century, as a recent specialist argues, the vocabulary of western canonical collections used to describe papal authority, "became virtually indistinguishable from that of imperial authority. "81 That the papal claims to the imperial purple were frequently also inspired by Constantine's forged donation goes without saying. In this connection, it bears repeating that the imperial formula "Vicar of Christ" became a papal monopoly under Innocent III.

In the last analysis, needless to say, pope Gregory's theories and logic were seriously flawed and equivocal. And of course both his actions and arguments lacked historical precedent. Even his contemporaries were surprised at his radical reinterpretation of the historical facts as described in the sources. Neither Gelasius nor Ambrose had of course actually ever made the claims that Gregory repeatedly made on their behalf. In particular, they never implied by their actions or writings that a pope had the right to depose kings and emperors, or absolve subjects from their oaths, merely because priestly responsibility was supposedly greater. 82 And of course no pope had ever actually deposed an emperor. Even Theodosius was never deposed by St Ambrose. Ironically, historical precedent exists only for the opposite process (as the depositions of 1046 by Henry III illustrate). On the other hand, it seems certain that Gregory and the reformers in general were unmoved by such counter-arguments, however scrupulously argued. It was apparently much easier to regard their assertions and actions as a simple practical exercise of the papacy's Petrine power of binding and loosing-the so-called potestas ligandi et solvendi entrusted to St Peter and all his successors. 83 For their part, extending this power directly to the secular sphere was altogether legitimate.

To summarize, the western concept of papal primacy over the Church in toto orbe had achieved an astonishing degree of theoretical practical development by 1100. The Dictatus papae was entered into Gregory's Register perhaps a mere twenty years after the death of Pope Leo IX. In terms "of ecclesiological doctrines in general and of the notion of authority in particular,"84 the new juridical understanding of primacy as supremacy was, arguably; the most decisive chapter in the entire history of the Roman patriarchate. Sadly, the fact that it was also a threat to Church unity and Christian tradition was not appreciated by the Gregorian reformers. It is at any rate safe to assume that the ancient practice of conciliarity, in which the Church was conceived as koinonia regulated by episcopal collegiality or a synodal structure, was for them no longer important. For the high papalist, at any rate, the historical Church had always been ruled by the inspired judgment of the Roman pontiff and not by bishops or councils.85 Scripture itself was on this point all too clear: as a result of his Petrine powers, the pope had direct authority to dispense and to modify both Christian tradition and institutions. As Peter's successor he could act unencumbered without the consent or approval of his brother bishops and the Church's councils.

Remarkably, any suggestion that these claims were at best exaggerated was hidden from the reformers. Most of them were in actual fact content to accept the promotion of the Roman primacy as an authentic restoration of the past. The new legal authority in the Church advanced with such breath-taking speed did not, for their part, constitute a serious breach in Christian historical continuity and tradition. As a modern apologist explains, "tel sera precisement le but de la reforme gregorienne qui apparaitra du meme coup non pas comme une revolution, mais oomme une restauration des usages anciens. La tradition sauvera l'Eglise."86 Although this scholarly interpretation is unambiguously sincere, it is also strictly speaking unconvincing. Ecclesiologically, at any rate, the rapid transformation of the Western Church in the eleventh century was a revolutionary development. Fundamentally, the term reform is "a serious understatement, reflecting in part the desire of the papal party itself-and of later Roman Catholic historians-to play down the magnitude of the discontinuity between what had gone before and what came latter. " 87 To an unusual degree, to put it otherwise, the idea that the Gregorians were rigorous traditionalists is a serious oversimplification. Its historical basis is slight. It is quite possible to argue, for instance, chat the high papalist exegesis of Matthew 16: 18 was ancient. On the other hand, it was by no means ever universal. St Augustine himself preferred a non-papalist reading. The "rock" for him was not Peter but Christ. Actually, it has even been suggested by one of the most learned scholars of the period that the Dictatus was itself composed because Rome could not justify its actions in the traditional law books. "The Dictatus papae can be understood simply as proof that it was impossible to defend Gregory VII's legal demands by means of received law: the canonists could not follow the pope and his 'guiding principles' with a compilation of papal rights. "88 

It is worth repeating again that the men responsible for this fundamental "discontinuity" were initially almost all members of the German episcopate. The aggressive self-confidence which inspired them, as we have seen, was rooted in the northern monastic reform movement. They were the heirs to Carolingian theology and civilization. As "ultramontane" churchmen, they were often at the same time uninformed of the papacy's ancient Mediterranean orientation. This inexperience automatically meant ignorance of Eastern Christendom. To cite the late Francis Dvornik, such regrettable innocence explains their determination "to extend everywhere the direct right of intervention of the papacy-even in the East where the Churches had enjoyed a good deal of autonomy in running their internal affairs according to their own custom. In wishing to extend celibacy of the clergy which they were enforcing in the West, they forgot the practice of the East that priests were married. They also forgot that there were no churches under lay ownership in the East and that no reform was necessary in this matter. In preaching obedience to Rome and in enforcing observance of Roman customs they took no account whatever of the fact that the East had different customs and different rites." Typically, their predecessors in the eighth century, despite the opposition of both Rome and Constantinople, had adopted a similar attitude towards the medieval Christian East. Like their Carolingian forerunners, certainly, the Gregorians were for the most part unaffected by ancient ecclesiology or by the Greek patristic tradition. In geopolitical terms, when they thought of the Church, they thought of Rome-centered Latin, Western, Christendom. As the Dictatus papae (c.26) neatly emphasized, whoever disagreed with the Roman Church was not to be regarded as a catholic--quod catholicus non habeatur, qui non concordat Romanae ecclesiae. Obedience to Rome, in the last analysis, was the ultimate test of orthodoxy.

Strictly speaking, a detailed summary of the schism of 1054 lies outside the chronological limits of this survey. Still, failure to mention it in the context of the papal reform movement would be indefensible. A true appreciation of the schism, broadly considered, has actually always been dependent on a precise knowledge of the Gregorian reform. It is surely not pure accident that this "extraordinary powerful movement from which, without exaggeration, may be dated the definite formation of Latin Christianity, was [also] the very moment of the final separation between the Eastern and Western Churches. Indeed, as has been argued, reform ideology was meant to be comprehensive and, as such, Eastern Christendom was seldom omitted from papal designs. The tension that this was to generate in the Byzantine world will be discussed in its proper context. It is sufficient here only to note that Rome was denounce with cool certainty by Constantinople for assuming a monarchy which did not belong to its office (to cite the sober assessment of one Byzantine theologian). The Orthodox were by no means found "asleep at the switch" once the papal claims became known. In point of fact the reform intensified the already existing East-West rivalry and this in the end brought permanent schism. As for the more precise coup de theatre of 1054, the blame has at times been place much too squarely upon Humbert's shoulders. Granted he was an important architect of the reform movement, and as one of its bolder players was certainly familiar with arm-twisting. Besides, the papal letters he had brought with him to the Byzantine capital were partly his own compositions. Still, in a very real sense, placing all responsibility for what occurred on his radicalism or combativeness is a mistake, precisely because his posture cannot be isolated. The unconditional obedience he demanded of Orthodox Christendom would have been insisted on by the papacy as well. Then again, it is unthinkable that his actions or letters would have been disowned by any of the reformers. (They were not in fact rejected until 1965.) To put it otherwise, the history of the Roman primacy and the ecclesiology his posture implied was Gregorian, not Humbertian.91 If his intransigence and hostility were the result of his own temperament, the universal episcopacy and expansionist ecclesiology he tried to advance were not. 

Although a great deal is known individually about the so-called schism of 1054 and the Dictatus of Gregory VII, the fact that the two are occasionally linked together is not common knowledge. Presumably many of the prepositions of the Dictatus were also written with the Eastern Church in mind. The argument has actually been made that the Dictatus papae was a draft of the preliminary conditions for union, which Rome wished to impose on Constantinople after 1054. Apparently some twenty years later, when the text was composed, the papal embassy to Constantinople was still a live issue for its author. Thus, it has been suggested that the emphasis on the pope's title "universal" was a reference to the Byzantine formula "ecumenical patriarch" used by the see of Constantinople since the sixth century. That the reformers disliked the Orthodox usage is well known. Humbert even saw it as a usurpation of a papal title and was accordingly scandalized; not surprising, he also (mistakenly) thought that it had been created in the eleventh century by patriarch Michael Cerularius. Predictably, it has also been proposed that the assertions regarding Rome's right to convoke ecumenical councils and confirm their decisions (tasks traditionally undertaken by the Byzantine emperor) were aimed primarily at Byzantium. Then, too, the text's redefinition of Church-state relations (the papal right to depose emperors and wear the imperial insignia, inter alia) may have had as its target both the German and Byzantine sovereigns.92 Admittedly the evidence for associating Humbert's embassy with the later Dictatus is not always convincing or conclusive. Western circumstances it would seem were the text's main concern. On the other hand, the suggestion that there is a connection and that the text may be a list of conditions for union is intriguing.

From the book 'The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy' by Aristides Papadakis

Scholastic "Analogia Entis" (Christos Yannaras)

Analogia entis 

The most important application of the relationship of analogy, with regard to historical consequences, was that which was undertaken in the field of ontology. This was the analogical relation between beings and Being, or beings and essence, known in the Middle Ages as "analogia entis." 

The origins of this lie again in Aristotle. He began with the statement: "There are many ways in which a thing may be said to 'be,' but they are related to one central point, one definite kind of thing, and are not homonymous." To define being we use the verb "is" (esti), which affirms onticity, or participation in Being — and we use it to define being "in many ways": as quality, quantity, place, time, relation. We say the horse is white, the horse is two meters tall, the horse is here, etc. It is evident that in defining the horse "in many ways" we always use the verb "is" analogically in relation to a principle: the horse is white in analogous relation to whiteness as such; the tree is tall in analogous relation to tallness as such. Consequently, the knowledge we have of the onticity of a specific horse or of a specific tree is analogous. It relies on the analogy of its attributes — the analogy of quality, quantity, place, time and relation ("analogia attributionis," as the Scholastics were to call it). 

But even if we use the verb "is" to define "in many ways," the onticity of the subject on the basis of the analogy of its attributes, the primary determination of the onticity of being is still always made with reference "to one thing," that is, with reference to what the specific subject "is." We say primarily that this is a horse and this is a tree. We define the specific subject by reference to the one horse and the one tree, that is, to the essence of horse and the essence of tree: "While 'being' has all these senses, obviously that which is primarily is the 'what,' which indicates the essence of the thing" — "the essence of each thing is one." And the reference of the specific subject to the "first one," that is, to the essence, is also analogous. Every specific subject participates "according to the same logos" in the common essence. It has the same logos as the essence — "for it is in virtue of the logos of the essence that the others are said to be ... for all will be found to contain the logos of the essence."

It is evident that determining the subject not only on the basis of the analogy of attributes but also with reference to the logos of its essence exhausts analogous relation as a possibility of defining or knowing being. Aristotle uses the concept of analogy to safeguard the unity of the subject. He does not extend analogy to mean a relation of ontological identity, the participation of beings in Being as such. The relation of beings to Being is for Aristotle a relation of cause and effect — a relation of transition from potential being (dynamei on) to actual being (energeiai on), a relation of moved and mover ("whence comes movement," — not a relation of analogical participation in Being. The regressive sequence of effect and cause, moved and mover, refers the Being-as-such of nature to a principle which transcends nature, to the "first unmoved mover," "which moves without being moved, being eternal, essence and actuality?" 

The Scholastics were the first to use the analogical relation of beings and Being to define Being in itself, or God, the "first mover," the transcendent First Cause of Being. Every being participates in Being. It is an "ens per participationem," whereas God, the "first and ultimate" being, the "eternal and best," does not participate in Being but constitutes Being in itself, "ens per essentiam," self-existence, in analogy to which whatever is, is.

The relation of beings to the Being-as-such of nature, and the relation of the Being-as-such of nature to God, the Cause of Being, can, in the scholastic view, lead to the analogical knowledge of God, since relation itself is analogous, with only one unknown term, namely, God. The Being-as-such of nature occupies the position of the "third of the comparison" between beings and God. The Scholastics used as their model the mathematical analogy a:b=c:d (2 : 3 = 4 : 6), in which when one term is unknown it can be defined by the productive combination of the remaining three. If the unknown term is 4 we have the relation a:b=c:x (2 : 3 = 4 : x, 2.x = 3.4, x = 3.4/2 = 6).

Thus the relation between beings and Being, and between Being and God, may be expressed according to the Scholastics with the precision of mathematical analogy: beings: Being = Being : x, where x represents the Cause of Being, namely, God. In this case, the analogical participation of beings in Being is the key for understanding the analogical participation of the Being of beings in its divine Cause, and God, the Cause of Being, is defined analogously in relation to Being, the cause of beings. 

We have seen that the participation of beings in Being was defined by Aristotle as the subject's analogical reference to its essence, and as the analogy of the attributes of the subject to the attributes of Being-as-such.

In the former case, the subject "is spoken of" (is known) according to the logos of its essence. The participation of the subject in Being is defined as an analogical participation in its essence. On the basis of this definition of the relation between subject and essence, we can say by analogy that in God this relation is a relation of identity: the subject that participates in the essence is the essence itself. The Being of God is God himself, and the essence of God is his very existence. 

In the latter case, the subject "is spoken of" (is known) "in many ways," on the basis of the analogy of its attributes to the attributes of Being-as-such (quality, quantity, place, time and relation). The analogical participation of the subject in the attributes of Being-as-such necessarily exhausts the knowledge of Being within the limits of experience in the world — since the experience of quality and quantity, of place, time and measurable relation always refers to the sensory reality of the world. It is nevertheless possible for us to recognize in beings that are partial and incomplete certain attributes which transcend the Aristotelian categories of being. These attributes can, through an intellectual ascent to the absolute ("regressus in infinitum"), disclose the perfections of Being. That is to say, they can make known to us by analogy the transcendent attributes of God. Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great summarized these attributes, which can be the foundation of a transcendent analogy, in the predicates: "unum, verum, bonum, res, aliquid" (one, true, good, thing, something). Being in itself is real, a reality ("res"). By transcending the partial and incomplete, it is always one ("unum"). In contrast with the other beings, it is something ("aliquid"). With regard to the knowledge we have of it, it is true ("verum"). And with regard to its willed intentionality, it is good ("bonum"). The Scholastics called these five predicates of being "transcendentals" ("transcendentalia"). Their reference to God constitutes not an experiential analogy, but a transcendent analogy, an intellectual extension ("extensio") of these predicates beyond the limits of experience in the world, in the space of the transcendent absolute. Thus we can come to know the attributes of God's essence, namely, unity, goodness, truth, supreme onticity and supreme otherness, with the aid of the intellect ("per lumen intellectus"), through the analogical elevation of the perfections of beings to the absolute and transcendent perfection of God, which is the Cause of every perfection. 

Scholastic analogy as theological epistemology 

We can draw two basic conclusions from this brief account of scholastic teaching on analogy as an epistemological path and method. 

1. The knowledge of God by analogy, as established by the Scholastics, is confined to an intellectual approach to the essence of God, which is a transcendent but nevertheless ontic essence — a transcendent object ("objectum") of the intellect. Scholastic analogy ignores the personal existence of God, the Triad of the divine persons, the mode of existence of the divine essence, which is personal. They thus introduce into the field of Christian theology not only the "poverty" of Judaic monotheism, but a conception of God which is incomparably inferior. For the personal God of biblical revelation and ecclesiastical experience they substitute the impersonal conception of a transcendent "object," a logically necessary absolute cause and origin of beings.

This transcendent "object" is accessible only through the subject's ability to rationalize. It is understood solely in the context of the antithesis between the absolute and the relative, the infinite and the finite. God is separated from the world by the sharpest possible contrast between the transcendent and the immanent, the empirically existent and the empirically non-existent, sensible reality and intellectual conception. 

Consequently, the analogy of the Scholastics established an ontology of exclusively ontic categories. It left the existential problem untouched, the problem of the mode of exis-tence of God, humanity and the world. It accepted existence a priori as logically determined. Matter remained ontologically unexplained, and the origin or principle of what exists was transferred to the necessity of the things that determined essence, not to the freedom of the person, not to triadic love as the self-determination of the mode of existence. 

2. Scholastic analogy ignored the personal mode of existence, not only as an ontological reality but also as a means of cognition. It ignored the cognitive power of personal relation, the disclosure — the unmediated knowledge — of the person through the energies of the essence, which are always personal. It ignored the immediacy and universality of the knowledge, beyond any conceptual signification that accompanies erotic "astonishment," the unexpected revelatory cognition of personal uniqueness and dissimilarity that arises in the relationship of love. 

Thus for the Scholastics even the knowledge of God was not a universal (rather than just intellectual) cognitive experience of the revelatory disclosure of the person of God within the limits of a dynamic interpersonal relationship between God and humanity. For them it was not the eros of God for humanity and humanity for God that reveals unutterably and discloses indefinably the uniqueness and dissimilarity of the mystery of personal existence. But it was the human intellect ("la raison seule") which objectifies God's existence as the logical necessity of an impersonal principle and cause of the world. 

Consequently, the Scholastics established an epistemology that exhausted the possibility of cognition in the conventional categories of objective syllogisms and restricted the truth to the coincidence of the concept with the object of thought, or opened up the way to a mysticism of essence, a contemplation of an impersonal absolute, which precisely because it is impersonal permits no solution other than pantheism or agnosticism.

The theological presuppositions of technocracy (Christos Yannaras)

What interests us here is to note, even if briefly, the cultural expression of a different cosmology, equally theological but at the opposite pole to the Byzantine, which completely negated Byzantine culture as a mode of life and approach to using the world. This was the cosmology that arose from Western theology and was embodied historically in the technological culture of the West.

 The development of a different cosmology in the West appears to be founded on the Byzantine teaching of the human person as a microcosm.[86] This teaching was transferred to the West in the ninth century through John Scotus Eriugena's Latin translations of Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nyssa. [87] But it only became widely disseminated in the first decades of the twelfth century, that is, with the renaissance of learning that accompanied the appearance of scholasticism in the West (the rediscovery of classical antiquity, the entry of Aristotelian epistemology into the field of theology, the rationalistic organization of human knowledge, and the utilitarian objectivizing of truth).[88] It is the century of the "awakening" of Western theologians to the potentiality of logic and of their appreciation of the first rationalistic conclusions of scientific observation and the systematic organization of knowledge.

Early scholastic thought set the doctrine of man-microcosm and world-macroanthropos in the context of the cognitive possibilities of the analogous syllogism, that is to say, it interpreted the microcosm-macrocosm relationship with the help of a rationalistic comparative epistemology. [89] The world was treated as an object along the lines of the human microcosm as mental concept, sensory observation and measurable size. Its objective truth was defined, measured and subjected by the human intellect and its material embodiment to human tools.[90]

Thus the doctrine of man as microcosm was developed in the West as a basis for the construction of an anthropocentric world-view, a humanism,[91] which saw in the human microcosm and its "interior life" the possibility of an intellectual and mechanical influence on the macrocosm.[92] Within the context of the mental concept, the sensory observation and the measurable relations, knowledge of the world becomes autonomous, is a knowledge with its own structure and organization, which is no longer expressed by the "semantic" terminology of aesthetic theory and personal relationship, but by an objectively articulated scientific method, which can predict events in nature and account for them causally. [93]

The objectivizing of the truth of the world and its subjection to the understanding of the individual, and also more generally the introduction of intellectualism into Western theology, is not an isolated symptom in the general development of Western Christianity. In the first place, one should note that in the context of historical phenomenology, the rationalistic structuring and systematization of knowledge in the medieval West is drawn primarily from jurisprudence, and is first introduced into theology, and then from there into cos-mology and the natural sciences [94] — without in consequence there failing to be a reverse influence: on theology from the natural sciences. [95] But the historical causes which provoked the generation of theological rationalism are much deeper, and should rather be sought in the need for the objective imposition of the authority of the Roman Church on the peoples of the West — a need which appears to have its roots not only in purely historical and sociological [96] conditions but also in the underlying monarchianism of Roman theology, from as early as the time of Sabellius [97] and Augustine. [98]

The objective strengthening of truth, which a clear and unambiguous authority lent to its institutional bearer, the Church, led Western theologians to separate faith from theology [99] and to organize the latter as an independent science [100]. This organization of theology as a science demands an apodictic methodology which objectifies the truth under examination and subjects it to the thinking and principles ("regulae, axiomata, principia") of the human intellect. [101]An apodictic theological methodology took shape largely in the second half of the twelfth century, when the logica nova, the second part of the Aristotelian Organon,[102] appeared in the West. This became the basis of a theory of knowledge and a technique of probability. [103]

The next step was the transfer of Aristotelian methodology from systematic theory to experiential reality, that is, to cosmology and physics — and it seems to be the naturalist doctor-philosophers of Toledo who led the way.[104] Science thus opened up a path for the systematic organization of knowledge in all fields of rational enquiry, that is, for the restriction of knowledge to the bounds of mental conception and intellectual expression, leading finally to the subjection of truth to the human intellect, and consequently to the subjection of the world to human will and human desire.[105]

When theology, as an apodictic methodology, objectified knowledge, when it took truth to be an object of the intellect and excluded truth as a fact of personal relation, it also excluded the possibility of a personal approach to the world. It ruled out a personal relation with the logos of things, with the disclosure of God's personal energy in creation. (The rejection of the distinction between the essence and the energies of God by Western theologians in the fourteenth century was the formal consequence of an intellectualist theology and completed the exclusion of truth as personal relation.) And when knowledge of the world is not realized as personal relation, when it does not aim at the reception and study of the logos of things, the only motive that can stimulate human interest in knowledge of the world is its usefulness.

And the criterion of usefulness implies the subjection of the world to humanity's will and desire. Thus the knowledge of nature began to serve technology alone. The criterion of usefulness transformed the world into an impersonal object. It forced nature to subject it to human need and desire.[106] The world lost its personal dimension. The world's logos ceased to be the disclosure of God's personal energy. God was radically set apart from the world by the boundary that separates created ontic essence from uncreated ontic essence, the experientially known from the experientially unknown, sensible and measurable reality from intellectual hypothesis (suppositio). The field was left clear for humanity's endeavor to secure sovereignty over as much of the realm of truth as was accessible to it through its intellectual and technical abilities, to interpret and subject the reality of the world to its individual mental capacity.

The theological presuppositions of technocracy 

This subjection of the world to man's intellectual and technical capacity (what we call today our technological culture) finds its first expression as early as the Middle Ages in Gothic architecture. The builders of Gothic edifices were not interested in the logos of the material of the construction. They did not seek to coordinate and harmonize this logos to bring out its expressive possibilities. On the contrary, they subjected the material to given forms, and gave the stones a deliberate a priori shape with the intention of realizing the ideological objective that was envisaged by the construction. [107]

Erwin Panofsky, in his very interesting study, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism,[108] has drawn attention to the attempt of both scholastic thought and Gothic architecture [109] to explore the truth intellectually and to the fact that both arose at the same time: [110] "It is a. connection ... more concrete than a mere `parallelism' and yet more general than those individual 'influences' which are inevitably exerted on painters, sculptors or architects by erudite advisors: it is a real relationship of cause and effect." [111] Gothic architecture, following soon after scholasticism, is the first technological application of scholastic thought. It sets out in visible form the scholastic attempt to subject truth to the individual intellect, drawing on the new logical structures introduced by scholastic theology. In the thirteenth century, for the first time a truth is arranged and discussed systematically, under a num-ber of sub-divisions. A complete work is divided into books, the books into chapters, the chapters into paragraphs, and the paragraphs into articles. Each assertion is established by the systematic refutation of objections, and phrase by phrase, the reader is gradually brought to a full intellectual clarification of a given truth. [112] It is "a veritable orgy of logic," as Panofsky says of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae.[113]

In an analogous manner the technique of Gothic architecture is based on a structure of small cut stones of uniform shape. The stones form columns, and the columns are sub-divided into ribbed composite piers, with the same number of ribs as those in the vaulting above them.[114] The arrangement of the columns and the division of the ribs create a rigid skeleton which neutralizes the weight of the material by balancing the thrusts of the walls. Here again, thesis is reinforced by the systematic refutation of antithesis, "the supports counter the weights placed on them," and the weight of the material is neutralized by balances arranged on rational principles.

 This technique conceals "a profoundly analytic spirit, relentlessly dominating the construction. This spirit considers the forces, analyzes them in terms of static diagrams and petrifies them in space" [115] forming a unity which is not organic but mechanical, a monolithic framework. "Our sense of stability is satisfied but we are perplexed, because the parts are connected no longer organically but only mechanically: they look like a human frame stripped of flesh."[116] We see here technology, i.e., human will and logic, taming matter. The structure manifests the intellectual conception and will of the craftsman rather than the potentialities of the material — the moral obedience of matter to spirit, not the "glory" of matter, the revelation of God's energies in the logos of material things. 

Gothic architecture is historically the first striking example of the cultural and, more specifically, the technological extensions of the anthropocentric cosmology of European theologians in the Middle Ages. On this cosmology was founded the whole structure of Western technological culture. However strange it may seem, the principle which refers the genesis of technocracy to theology is not an arbitrary one.[117] The development of technology in the West is not simply a phenomenon of steady scientific progress. At the same time it is also the specific embodiment of a particular attitude towards the world, which recapitulates all the phases of Western man's evolution: the subjection of truth to the intellect, the denial of the distinction between God's essence and energies, and consequently the sharp divide between the transcendent and the immanent, the transformation of the personal relation with the world into an attempt to dominate nature and historical reality. The development of Western technology expresses a particular ethos, that is, the principles of a specific cosmology (since, as we have seen above, humanity's relation with the world is the fundamental moral problem), [118] both as a phenomenon of the organic detachment of humanity from the whole rhythm of the world's life, and as a phenomenon of history's being caught up in a nexus of threatening impersonal powers, which make it impossible for the uniqueness of personal human existence to be presupposed — such as the appearance of the capitalist system and its socialist counterparts, which alienate human life within the context of an impersonal economy trapped in the rationalistic balancing of production and consumption. 

This is not the place for an extended discussion of all the historical consequences of Western cosmology and the problems surrounding each of them. Perhaps the most important stage in the historical evolution of the new relationship of humanity with the world initiated by the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages is the problem of the pollution of the environment, which in our time has become an increasing threat. The poisoned atmosphere of industrial zones, lands turned to desert wastes, waters made toxic, and the assertions of statisticians that in twenty-five years or less large areas of the globe will be rendered uninhabitable — all these reveal in a direct way some fault in humanity's relation with the world. They demonstrate the failure of humanity in its effort to subject the reality of nature to its individual needs. This subjection has been achieved by the power of the human mind materialized in the machine, but proves today to be the tormenting of nature and its corruption, which is unavoidably also a tormenting of human kind and the threat of death. For human life and human truth cannot be separated from the life and truth of the world which surrounds us. The relationship is a given and is inescapable. Any falsification, any violation of this relationship is destructive of the existential roots of human kind. 

Within the context of today's technological culture, the culture not of relation or use but of consumption of the world, which is imposed on the multitude with systematic tech-niques of persuasion and the total subjection of human life to the ideal of an impersonal and individualistic comfortable life - within the context of this culture the Orthodox theological view of the world does not represent simply a truer or better theory of nature, but embodies the converse ethos and mode of existence, the potentiality for a culture at the opposite pole to consumerism. Orthodox cosmology is a moral struggle which aims at bringing out, by the practice of asceticism, the personal dimensions of the cosmos and humanity's personal uniqueness. Within the context of Western culture this could become a radical program of social, political and cultural change. With the proviso that such a "program" cannot be objectivized in terms of an impersonal strategy. The possibility always remains of personal revelation, that is, of repentance, as also the content of the Church's preaching and the practice of Orthodox worship. In opposition to the messianic utopia of consumer "happiness," which alienates humanity, turning people into impersonal units, and which is organized in accordance with the needs of the mechanistic structures of the social system, the Church sets the personal uniqueness of the human person, as attained in the fact of an ascetic, that is, a personal, relationship with the world. 

From the book Person and Eros by Christos Yannaras

87 See M. A. Schmidt, "Johannes Scotus Eriugena," in Die Religion in Geschichte and Gegemvart, vol. 3, cols. 820-21; Chenu, La theologie au XIIe siècle, 40, 50; also Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, 202. 

88 "It is in this context of renaissance — where inspiration takes precedence over imitation, where also the resources of antiquity nourished new spiritual initiatives — that there developed the literary, aesthetic and doctrinal theme of the relations of humanity with nature: the human being is a 'microcosm" (Chenu, La theologie au XIIe siècle, 37). See also Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, 327-28; Chenu, La theologie comme science au XIlle slick, 101: "Between the two great crossroads of the Carolingian renaissance and that of the Quattrocento, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries mark a stage characterized by the recovery of the capital of Antiquity." 

89 "the first attempts at a microcosm-macrocosm parallelism were of a rational, we might even say of an early scientific, type" (Chenu, La theologie au Xlle siecle, 41). See also Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, 327: "... reasoning by analogy, which consisted of explaining a being or fact by its correspondence with other beings or other facts. A method this time legitimate and which all science makes use of .... The description of the human person as a universe in miniature, that is to say, as a microcosm analogous to a macrocosm, is a classic example of this kind of reasoning." 

90 "Confronted by the universe, the human person not only accepts the exterior world, but changes it, and seeks with its tools to compose a human world .... The thinking of the men of the twelfth century ... perceived all that art, in forcing nature, could reveal about humanity" (Chenu, La theologie comme science au XIIIe siecle, 49). 

91. See ibid., 40. 

92 "The 'interior life' calls in the microcosm, in the very name of its nature, for the intellectual and mechanical domination over the macrocosm" (ibid., 42). 

93 See ibid., 314: "There is an autonomous knowledge of this world and of the human person, valuable in its own order, actually helpful for speculation and action, which is transferable to theological science."And on p. 48: "The order is no longer simply the schema of an aesthetic imagination or a religious conviction; it is proved, sustained by a method." 

94 See ibid., 16: "In its earliest state, theology is normally a commentary, and throughout the course of its development it evolves in constant reference to structures related to the teaching of law. In the Middle Ages above all, canonists and theologians work in constant collaboration in analogous and interchangeable forms." Further research would be useful on the historical development of the legal-juridical spirit of the Roman Church even from the time of Tertullian and Augustine (who were both very well versed in legal matters). The same legal-mindedness calls for the objectivizing of particular cases, and the monarchical understanding of objective authority. 

95 See ibid., 315: "In the organic construction of its wisdom, theology takes account of objects which furnish it with rational disciplines, sciences of the universe and its laws, sciences of humanity and its faculties." And on p. 51: "It is the same Alan of Lille (d. 1203), this master of nature, who is also the theoretician of the 'rules of theology,' that is to say, of the method by which, as in every mental discipline, the knowledge of faith is organized and built up, thanks to internal principles which give it the appearance and value of science." 

96 The Roman Church is the only Western Medieval institution which preserves an unbroken cultural tradition and can meet the need for unity of the various nations living together in Western Europe. The exploitation of the need for such an institution had already arrived at a complete religious organization of the Western communities by the tenth and eleventh centuries. For the religious structures of the Western Medieval communities and their expression in the religious art of the eleventh century, see the extremely interesting study of Georges Duby, Adolescence de la chretrenté occidentale (Geneva: Skin, 1967). See also Robert Fossier, Histoire sociale de  l'Occident medieval (Paris: Colin, 1970), esp. 43-44, 54-56; Jean Chelini, Histoire religieuse de I 'Occident medieval (Paris: Cohn, 1968; and J. Le Goff, La civilisation de l'Occident medieval (Paris: coll. "Les grandes civilisations," 1964). 

97 "The West made the unity of God (one God) a clear and firm basis (for the dogma of the Trinity) and tried to conceive of the mystery of his threeness. A fundamental formula was 'one substance, one hypostasis.' From such a formula there was a danger of arriving at one person (Monarchians, the monarchianizing bishops of Rome Victor, Zephyrinus and Callixtus). The formula favored monarchianism and assisted in the battle against Arianism" (Basil Stephanidis, Ekklesiastike Istoria, 169). The monarchian spirit of the West was revealed very clearly by the rejection of the distinction between Essence and Energies and by the relevant works which tried to support this rejection, mainly in the fourteenth century. The pro-Latin opponents of St. Gregory Palamas defined the hypostasis as a referential essence which "differs from the simple essence because the one is referential, the other detached .... The detached differs from the referential only conceptually" (John Kyparissiotes, How the Hypostatics in the Trinity Differ from the Essence, ed. E. Candal, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 25. [1959]: 132, 140, 142). St. Grego-ry Palamas judged from the beginning that the denial of the uncreated Energies of the Trinity conceals a hidden denial of the hypostases and their identification with the essence (see On the Divine Energies 27 [ed. P. Chrestou, 2:115]). And Matthew Blastares accuses the antipalamites of wanting "to contract the divine nature into one hypostasis," introducing into Christianity the Jewish "poverty," that is, Jewish monotheism (see On the Divine Grace or On the Divine Light, Cod. Monac. 508, fol. 150, cited by Amphilochios Rantovits, To mysterion tes Agias Triados kata ton agion Gregorion Palaman [Thessalonica, 1973], 25, 27). 

98 See Stephanidis, Ekklesiastike Istoria, 198-99n: "In the West the (monarchianizing) phraseology of Western Theology has through the influence of Augustine endured to the present day." See also F. Loofs, Dogmengeschichte (1906), 363ff. Also Chenu's conclusion (La theologie comme science au XIIIe siecle, 95): "Augustine's theology ... is a fine piece of intellectualism" in conjunction with Stephanidis' observation (Ekklesiastike Istoria, 166): "The solution the Monarchians gave was based on rational argumentation, such that given the premises those were the ideas they would arrive at." See also N. Nissiotis, Prolegomena eis ten theologiken Gnosiologian (Athens, 1965), 178-79. 

99 "Theology is decidedly distinct from faith (and Scripture) in the leading scholarly circles" (Chenu, La theologie comme science au XIIIe siecle, 26; see also 55, 79, 83). 

100 See ibid., 26-27: "The 'scientific' regime which now established itself ... was the right of reason to install itself at the heart of the deposit and light of faith, and work there according to its own laws." See also 85-86: "Faith admits of ... a capacity for rational elaboration, exposition and proof, according to the philosophical sense of the word argumentum .... Even the definition of faith opens itself from now on, as if on a smooth horizon, to a rational expansion of a scientific nature." 

101 See ibid., 42: "... to accept the objectivizing of the knowledge of faith in theology ..."; and 20: "Gilbert de la Porrée (1076-1154) vigorously enunciated the principle of the transfer to theology of the formal procedures (regulae, axiomata, principia) customary in every rational discipline." See also 51: "Like every intellectual discipline, the knowledge of faith was organized and built up thanks to internal principles which gave it the appearance and value of science." 

102 The first part comprised the Categories, the De interpretation and the Prior analytics, the second part the Posterior analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistical refutations. In some editions of the Organon the treatises On generation and corruption and On the universe were added. 

103 See Chenu, La theologie comme science au XIIIe siecle, 20. 

104 Ibid. 

105 "Man's encounter with nature was only accomplished in such a way that man seized this nature and put it to work for him .... To set up Nature in fact put paid to a certain Christian conception of the universe" (ibid., 44, 50). 

106 "In this mechanical universe, man ... depersonalized his action, be-came sensitive to the objective density and the articulation of things under the domination of natural laws ... Human science embraced the knowledge of this mastery of nature" (ibid., 48).

107 Byzantine and post-Byzantine architecture expresses a radically opposite attitude to the material of construction. A comparison of Gothic to Byzantine buildings gives us perhaps the clearest illustration of two diametrically opposed cosmological views which lead to two diametrically opposed technical approaches. See Christos Yannaras, E eleutheria tou ethous (Athens: Ekdoseis Athena, 1970), ch. 13, "To ethos tes leitourgikes technes," 183ff.: "Every piece of Byzantine architecture is a personal exploration of the potentialities of the physical material .... In Byzantine architecture we not only find a personal use of the material of construction, but also a personal dialogue with the material, the personal encounter of humanity with the logos of God's love and wisdom, which is revealed in the material creation. This dialogue, which is embodied in Byzantine architecture, conveys the measure of the truth of the entire natural world as communion and Ecclesia .... The material creation is 'shaped' as person, the Person of the Logos ...." [Cf. the ET of this work by Elizabeth Briere, The Freedom of Morality (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1984; based on the Greek of the 2nd ed., 1979), ch. 12, "The Ethos of Liturgical Art."] See also Olivier Clement, Dialogues avec le Patriarche Athenagoras (Paris: Fayard, 1969), 278-83; P. A. Michaelis, Aisthetike theorese tes byzantines technes, 2nd ed. (Athens, 1972; ET of 1946 ed., An Aesthetic Approach to Byzantine Art [London, 1955]), esp. 85-98; Christos Yannaras, "Teologia apofatica e architettura bizantina," in Simposio Cristiano (Milan: Ediz. dell' Istituto di Studi teologici Ortodossi, 1971), 104-12; and Marinos Kalligas, E aisthetike tou chorou tes Ellenikes Ekklesias sto Mesaiona (Athens, 1946). 

108 Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe: Archabbey Press, 1951).

109 Ibid., 27ff. 

110 "... this astonishingly synchronous development ..." (ibid., 20). See also the diagrams later in the book. 

111 Ibid. 

112 the construction of a knowledge within faith. From this, theology is established as a science" (Chenu, La theologie comme science au XIIIe siècle, 70). 

113 Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, 34. 

114 See Michaelis, Aisthitike theorese, 89-90. 

115 Ibid., 90. 

116 Ibid. See also Worringer, Formprobleme der Gotik (Munich, 1910), 73 (cited by Michaelis).

117 "Theology is the first great technical science (technique) of the Christian world .... The men who built the cathedrals [also] constructed the summae" (Chenu, Introduction a l'etude de Saint Thomas d'Aquin [Paris: Vrin, 1974], 53, 58). 

116 "For according to whether we use things rightly or wrongly we become either good or bad" (Maximus the Confessor, First Century on Love 92 [Palmer-Sherrard-Ware]). 

Apophaticism of essence, Actus Purus, Essence-Energies Distinction (Christos Yannaras)

The ontological meaning which Greek patristic literature of the. Byzantine period gave to the term prosôpon ("person") became the occasion of an ontology radically different from that which the Western theological and philosophical tradition represents in the course of its historical development. The West was trapped in a polarized view of Being as either analogically absolute and ontic or else mystical. This came about as the inevitable consequence of the priority Westerners gave, even in the first Christian centuries, to the intellectual definition of essence over the historical and existential experience of personhood — in contrast to the Greek East, which always relied for its starting-point on the priority of person over essence. [26] 

The priority of the need to define essence within the context of the ontological question requires the objective definition of the existence of beings and an intellectualist (analogical-ontic) and etiological explanation of Being. The Scholastics established the threefold way ("via triplex') in the West of the analogical cognition of Being: the way of negation ("via negationis"), the way of eminence ("via eminentiae"), and the way of causality ("via causalitatis").[27] 

In contradictory but historical conjunction with its cataphatic-analogical determination of Being, the West was also preoccupied with the apophaticism of Being, with the impossibility of the human intellect to exhaust the truth of Being by means of definitions. Apophaticism in the West arose from the need to protect the mystery of the divine essence. That is to say, it is always an apophaticism of essence. It is characteristic that the two thinkers who did most to shape the positive-analogical approach to the knowledge of God, Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), at the same time proclaim the apophatic nature of this knowledge, the essential unknowability of God, the inaccessibility of Being. [28] And we find following this line on the apophaticism of essence not only the leading Scholastics but also the great mystics of the Middle Ages — Peter Abelard (d. 1142), Albert the Great (d. 1280) and John Duns Scotus (d. 1308), as well as Meister Eckhart (d. 1327) and Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464). 

But it is impossible for the apophaticism of essence to confront the ontological problem as an existential problem, as a question about the mode by which whatever is is, about the "mode of existence." [29] The absolutizing of the existential fact by the Scholastics, with regard to God, who is defined as "pure act" ("actus purus" [in Greek katharê energeia tou hyparchein]), interprets the mode in which the essence is and this mode is to exist ("essentia est id cuius actus est esse").[30] But it does not touch upon the mode of existing (tropos tou hyparchein), and consequently it continues to limit the ontological problem to the field of abstract definitions. 

By contrast, Eastern theology had always rejected any polarization between the analogical-ontological and the mystical determinations of Being. The ontology of the Easterners was primarily existential because its basis and starting-point is the apophaticism of the person, not the apophaticism of essence. 

In the tradition of the Eastern Church there is no place for a theology, and even less for a mysticism, of the divine essence .... If one speaks of God it is always, for the Eastern Church, in the concrete: "the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob; the God of Jesus Christ." It is always the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. When, on the contrary, the common nature assumes the first place in our conception of trinitarian dogma the religious reality of God in Trinity is inevitably obscured in some measure and gives place to a certain philosophy of essence .... Indeed, in the doctrinal conditions peculiar to the West all properly theocentric speculation runs the risk of considering the nature before the persons and becoming a mysticism of "the divine abyss," as in the Gottheit of Meister Eckhart; of becoming an impersonal apophaticism of the divine nothingness prior to the Trinity. Thus by a paradoxical circuit we return through Christianity to the mysticism of the neo-platonists.[31] 

The distinction between the apophaticism of the person and the apophaticism of the essence cannot be fully accounted for as a theoretical difference. It represents and constitutes two diametrically opposed spiritual attitudes, two modes of life, in short, two different cultures. On the one side, life is based on truth as relation and as existential experience; truth is actualized as life's social dynamics and life is justified as the identification of being true with being in communion. On the other side, truth is identified with intellectual definitions; it is objectivized and subordinated to usefulness. And truth as usefulness objectivizes life itself; it comes to be translated into technological hype, into the tormenting and alienation of humanity. 

But the historical and cultural consequences arising from the differences between East and West in the realm of ontology must remain the subject for another book. [32] Here I simply draw attention to the brilliant formulation by Martin Heidegger (perhaps the last "essence mystic" in the West) of the quandary created by the priority of the apophaticism of essence. [33] Heidegger's approach showed clearly how the apophaticism of essence defines and respects the limits of thought, and consequently the limits of metaphysics or of the ineffable, but leaves the problem of ontic individuality on the borders of a possible nihilism, reveals Nothingness as an eventuality as equally possible as Being, and transposes the ontological question to the dilemma between being and Nothingness: "warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?" [34] With Heidegger the apophaticism of essence proves to be as much a possibility of ontological and theological nihilism as an ontic-intellectual definition of essence. 

[...]

God as Actus Purus 

And for the principle of movement to be only active, since a transition frorn in potentiality to in act is inadmissible for the first mover, which no one has set in motion, its essence must be energy alone: "there must be such a principle whose very essence is actuality [energeia]." [80] And since movement is the transition from potentiality (dynamei) to actuality (energeia), and this transition is inadmissable for the first mover, the first mover, as pure actuality, is itself unmoved. [81]

At the same time, since the first mover can only be in actuality, and in no circumstances in potentiality, and since a being that is in potentiality is matter, it is evident that the first mover is immaterial and incorporeal. And since movement is neither begotten nor corrupts, but always is, at least as a temporal transition from prior to posterior ("for it was always"), and without temporal change nature does not exist, it follows that movement is eternal, just as time is eternal and the first mover is eternal actuality (energeia).[82]

The Aristotelian interpretation of energeia was transferred intact by Thomas Aquinas into the realm of Christian theology. [83] But the logical ascent to the first mover, which according to our reasoning must be, as regards its essence, eternal energy, pure and immaterial, entirely ignores the personal mode of existence of the Deity as he reveals himself as a fact in the historical experience of the Church. The question of energy interests Aquinas in the objective context of a rational-apodictic procedure which exhausts the mystery of the divine existence in the logically obligatory concept of productive and motive cause of creation. That is why there is no reference in the Summa Theologiae to the personal God of existential relation: there God is the object [84] of rational inquiry, an abstract intellectual certainty, an ontic essence absolutely in actuality, an impersonal and existentially inaccessible motive cause.

[...]

The consequences of accepting or rejecting the distinction between essence and energies

If knowledge of the personal God by human beings is possible, it must be as real as the experiential reality of the recapitulation of the natural energies in the personal otherness of the human body. Transferring the knowledge of God from the realm of immediate personal disclosure, through the natural energies, to the level of an intellectual and rationalistic approach, the restriction of the possibilities of the knowledge of God to the particular abilities of the human mind,[109] unavoidably exhausts the truth of God in abstract intellectual forms and etiological deductions, [110] that is to say, it destroys the very reality of divine personal existence.[111]

It is evident that the problem of the knowledge not only of God but also of humanity and the world — knowledge as immediate personal relation and existential experience, or as an abstract intellectual approach — is judged by the acceptance or rejection of the essence-energies distinction. The acceptance or rejection of this distinction represents two radically different concepts of reality, two incompatible "ontologies." This does not simply mean two different theoretical views or interpretations. It means two diametrically opposed attitudes to life, with specific spiritual, historical and cultural consequences.

The acceptance of the distinction means the recognition of truth as a personal relation, and of knowledge as participation in truth, not simply as the understanding of concepts arising from abstract thought. It therefore means the priority of the reality of the person and of interpersonal relationship over any intellectual definition. Within the unrestricted terms of this priority, God is known and participated through his uncreated energies, which are beyond the reach of the intellect, while in his essence he remains unknown and unparticipated. That is to say, God is known only as personal disclosure, as a triadic communion of persons, as an ecstatic self-offering of erotic goodness. And the world is the consequence of God's personal energies, a "product" revelatory of the Person of the Word, who witnesses to the Father by means of the grace of the Spirit - the "essentialized" invitation of God to relation and communion, an invitation which is personal and yet also "essentialized" in a manner differentiated according to essence. [112]

 By contrast, the rejection of the distinction between essence and energies means the exclusion of universal-personal experience and the priority of the individual intellect as the path to knowledge. It means that truth is exhausted in the coincidence of meaning with concept, in the understanding of nature and person as determinations arising from intellectual abstraction: persons have the character of the relations of essences; relations do not characterize persons, but are identified with persons, with a view to supporting the logical necessity of the simplicity of essence. Finally, God becomes accessible only as essence, that is, only as an object of rational inquiry, as the necessary "first mover" who is himself "unmoved," that is, as "pure act," and whose existence must be identified with the self-actualization of his essence. And the world is the "effect" of the "first mover," just as God's grace is the "effect" of the divine essence ("supernatural" but created). The only relation of the world to God is the intellectual connection of cause and effect, a "connection" which detaches God organically from the world - the world is made autonomous and is subordinated to intellectual objectification and to a utilitarian intentionality. [113]

The problem of the essence-energies distinction set the seal on the differentiation of the Latin West from the Greek East. The West denied the distinction, wishing to safeguard the simplicity of the divine essence, since rational thought cannot tolerate the conflict between existential identity and otherness, a distinction not entailing division or separation.[114] In the West's understanding, God is defined only by his essence. What is not essence does not belong to God; it is a creation of God. Consequently, the energies of God are either identified with the essence as "pure act," or any external manifestation of them is necessarily of a different essence, that is, a created effect of the divine cause.[115]

But this means that theosis, the participation of human beings in the divine life, [116] is ultimately impossible, since the grace that deifies the saints, even if "supernatural," according to the arbitrary definition given to it by Western theologians from as early as the ninth century, [117] remains without any real explanation. And it was precisely the defense of the fact of the theosis of human beings, the participation of the hesychasts in the sensory experience of the mode of the divine life (in the uncreated light of God's glory), that led the Orthodox Church in the synods of the fourteenth century (1341, 1347, 1351 and 1368) to define the essence-energies distinction as the formal difference distinguishing the Orthodox East from the Latin West and to see summarized under the heading of the knowledge of God the heretical deviations of the Roman Church.[118]

In the following centuries the Eastern theologians were vindicated historically by the tragic dimensions of the impasse in which metaphysics found itself in the West. The transference of the knowledge of God from the realm of direct personal disclosure, through the natural energies, to that of an intellectual and rationalist approach had as an inevitable consequence the driving of a wedge between the transcendent and the immanent, the "exiling" of God to the realm of the experientially inaccessible, the separating of religion from life and restricting it to credal statements, the technological violating of natural and historical reality and subjecting it to the demands of individualistic comfortable living — ending up finally in the "death of God" of the Western metaphysical tradition and the emergence of nothingness and the absurd as Western man's fundamental existential categories.

[...]

The energies of the divine nature as the ontological presupposition of a relation "outside of" that nature 

The nature's will or energy is distinguished from the nature itself. It refers to the nature's personal mode of existence, to the personal potentiality for the realization of relation outside of the nature. There is no necessity which determines the divine nature and can be regarded as the obligatory cause of the ecstatic summons that is the ground of ontic individuality and of humanity's personal existence. The Platonic and subsequently Augustinian and Thomist approach that refers the eternal causes of created beings to the essence rather than the volitional energies of God [19] attributes to God's creativity a character of natural necessity. At the same time it denies the ontological priority of the persons in relation to the nature, the fact that the nature's will or energy is expressed and realized only as personal disclosure, as a free act which is not determined by the nature but reveals the nature's personal mode of existence. [20]

If the ideas of beings are their eternal causes that are included in the essence of God, in the intellectual content of the divine essence ("in mente divina"), if they are determinations of the essence to which created beings refer as to their exemplary cause, the divine essence not only takes precedence but also becomes existentially autonomous with regard to the persons, and we are led inevitably to maintain that the principle of that which exists is predetermined by necessity, not by freedom. God in that event cannot not be that which he is required to be by his essence, and consequently the personal existence and freedom of God is dissolved by the necessity of the existential predeterminations imposed by the essence. On the epistemological level, we arrive at an ontic interpretation of the essence or at the identification of the essence with the intellectual conception of the whole. Any conception of the essence or nature in itself, as distinct from the mode of existence of the essence which is the persons, is a conception which is entirely schematic, divorced from the givens of existential experience, the experience of relation. The conception of the essence in itself, the rendering of the essence autonomous with regard to the persons, is the basis of an intellectualist ontology which restricts the question of being to an intellectual-etiological tracing back of beings to a causal universal (in the double sense of a common principle or a supreme divine cause) and restricts the fact of existence to the limits of ontic individuality, with no inkling of any question concerning mode of existence or the mode by which whatever is is. It thus becomes impossible for the uncreated divine essence or nature to share a common mode of existence with created human nature. It becomes impossible for God to be able to exist in the flesh as a person who unites two natures existentially, and it becomes impossible for man to be able to exist as a partaker of the fullness of the life of God.

The whole of Western metaphysics, both theological and philosophical, having denied the primary ontological distinction between essence and energies (the difference between the essence and its mode of disclosure through the energies, which are always personal), is inescapably imprisoned in an intellectual conception of essence [21] and in an etiological interpretation of existence.[22] It thus sets essence and existence in antithesis to each other, polarizing the abstract and the concrete.[23] This leads inevitably to the deterministic idealism of the principle "essence precedes existence," which traces back the ideas or causes of beings to the intellectual content of the divine essence, and presents ontic existence as the only existential reality. [24] At the same time this antithesis polarizes the divine and human natures not only ontologically but also existentially, and consequently interprets the "salvation" of humanity by the legal model of the justification of the individual or by positing the intervention of an ontologically inexplicable (and therefore rather magical) "grace."

By contrast, the ontological concepts of Eastern theologians were grounded primarily on the experience of personal relation that is attainable through the energies of the essence. The energies differentiate and reveal the personal otherness while simultaneously disclosing the homoousion of the persons, since they are the common energies of a common nature or essence. The ontological concepts of the Eastern theologians are consequently based on the priority of the mode of existence in relation to the essence.[25] We know the essence or nature only as personal mode of existence, the nature existing only as the content of the person. That is why the acts of will or energies of the nature, as the potentiality for revealing the mode by which the nature is, are not identified with the nature but are distinguished from it, for they refer to the nature's mode of existence.

From the book Person and Eros by Christos Yannaras

Notes

26. "Latin philosophy," says The. de Régnon, "first considers the nature in itself and then proceeds to the person; Greek philosophy considers the person and afterwards passes through it to find the nature. The Latins think of personhood as a mode of nature; the Greeks think of nature as the content of the person" (Etudes de theologie positive sir la Sainte Trinité 1:433, quoted in Vladimir Lossky, Teologie mystique de  l'Egllse d 'Orient [Paris: Aubier, 19441,57; ET, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church [London: James Clarke, 19571,57-58). See also H.-M. Legrand, "Bulletin d'Ecclesiologie: Introduction aux Eglises d'Orient," Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Theologiques 56: 709, where, commenting on the Western scholastic structure of P. N. Trembelas's Dogmatics, he notes: "puis vient le traité de Dieu (livre I), où le De Deo uno précède le De Deo Trino, comme dans la Somme de S. Thomas d'Aquin (cognossibilitd de Dieu, vrai notion de Dieu, attributs divins et aprés seulement le dogme trinitaire 'en general' puis 'en particulier')."

27. See M. Schmauss, Katholische Dogmatik, vol. I (Munich, 1960), 306ff.; Karl Barth, Die kirchliche Dogmatik, 2:390; Ch. Androutsos, Dogmatiki (Athens, 1907), 47ff.; P. N. Trembelas, Dogmatike, vol. I (Athens, 1959), 186ff. 

28 See Etienne Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, 2nd ed. (Paris: Payot, 1962), 2411T. , and Johannes Hirschberger, Geschichte der Phi-losophie, 8th ed., vol. 1 (Freiburg: Herder, 1965), 504-5. See also M. -D. Chenu, La Thiologie comme science au XIIIe siécle, 3rd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1969), 97ff., where the author affirms in the works of Thomas Aquinas a "grandiose" synthesis of theology's mystical-theoretical character with the demands of scientific rationality: "Verbe éternel ou Verbe fait chair, speculation contemplative ou règles de vie morale, symbolisme sacramentaire et communauté des saints, relevent tout uniment du mêrne principe de connaissance. Les catégories si fermement tranchées du philosophe entre le spéculatif et le pratique ne divisent plus ce savoir ... ces savoirs sont campés dans un même champ d'intelligibilité, que constitue la lumiere de foi en oeuvre de science: intellectus fidei." 

29. This is an expression well established in the theological literature of the Greek East, and the starting-point of its approach to the ontological problem. Cf., for example, Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua (PG 90:285a) and Mystagogia (PG 91:701a); Gregory of Nyssa, Against Enomius 1 (PG 45:316c); Justin Martyr, 1 Apology 3 (PG 6:1209b); John Damnscene. Against the Jacobites 52 (PG 94:1461b). 

30. See Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, 589-90: "Il y a, dans le thomisme, un acte de la forme elle-même, et c'est l'exister ... L'acte de l'essence n'est plus la forme, quo est du quod est qu'elle est, mais l'existence."

31. Lossky, La théologie mystique, 63-64 (ET, 64-65)

32. I have tried in an earlier study, again on the level of theoretical differences, to demonstrate on the basis of Heidegger's writings how the scholastic theological tradition of the West leads inexorably to the modern phenomenon of "European Nihilism." See Christos Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God, ed. Andrew Louth, trans. Haralam-bos Ventis (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2005), with reference to the Dionysian corpus and Martin Heidegger. 

33 Cf. his characteristic aphorisms: "Sein erweist sich also einhoch-stbestimmtes volig Unbestimmtes" (Einführung in die Metaphysik, 59); "Das Sein ist das Naschte. Doch die Nahe bleibt dem Menschen am weitesten" (Ober den Humanismus, 20); "Die Unbestimmtheit de-sen jedoch, wovor und worum wir uns angstigen, ist blosses Fehlen der Bestimmtheit, sondern die wesenhafle Unmoglichkeit der Bestim-mbarkeit" (Was ist Metaphysik? 32); "Das Sein als das Geschick, das Wahrheit schickt, bleibt, verborgen. Aber das Weltgeschicht kundigt sich in der Dichtung an" (Ober den Humanismus, 26). Cf. also J. Hirsch-berger's revealing comment on Heidegger's philosophy: "Was bleibt, ist eine Art Mystik und Romantik des Seins, bei der alles auf die Hinnahme ankommt" (Geschichte der Philosophie, 2:648). 

34. Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, 1.

80. Aristotle, Metaphysics 7.6:1071 b19-20.

81. "and the first mover must itself be unmoved" (Aristotle, Metaphysics 4.8:1012b31 [Oxford trans.]).

82 "But it is impossible that movement should either come into being or cease to be; for it must always have existed. Nor can time come into being, or cease to be; for there could not be a before and an after if time did not exist. Movement also is continuous, then, in the sense in which time is .... There is therefore a mover which moves without being moved, being eternal substance (ousia) and actuality [energeia]".

83. This transference took place within the context of the subordination of theology to Aristotelian epistemology: "par l'introduction de l'épistémologie aristotélicienne, s'était constituée au XIIIème siècle, dans une réflexion explicite, la théologie comme science. Saint Thomas d'Aquin etait le maitre de cette operation" (Chenu, La Theologie omme science, 9). And on p. 11: "Saint Thomas le premier a su — et osé — poser nettement le principe d'une integrale application du mecanisme et des procedes de Ia science au donndé revelé, constitutant par là une discipline organique où  l'Ecriture, l'article de foi est non plus la matiere meme, le sujet de l'expose et de la recherche, comme dans la sacra doctrine du XlIe siecle, mais le principe, prealablement connu, pair duquel on travaille, et on travaille selon toutes les exigences et les lois de la demonstatio aristotelicienne."

84. Cf. Summa Theologiae 1.1:7: "The object of our science is God .... In sacred science the ruling idea, to which everything is subjected, is God ...." See also Chenu, La theologie comme science, 55: "La foi qui a pour object la Verité premiere..."

109. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a:12.2: "Hence as other intelligible forms, which are not identical with their existence, are united to the mind according to a sort of mental existence by which they inform and actualize the mind, so the divine essence is united to a created mind so as to be what is actually understood and through its very self making the mind actually understanding" (Blackfriars trans., 3:11). Also 1a:12.5: "When however a created intellect sees the essence of God, that very divine essence becomes the form through which the intellect understands" (Blackfriars trans., 3:19.). Cf. P. N. Trembelas, Dogmatike, 1:139: "Man, being intelligent and possessing the capacity to know God, is led up by automatic reasoning from visible things to those which are beyond the senses and proceeds through the mind to the investigation of God."

110. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a:12.1: "If therefore the created mind were never able to see the essence of God, either it would never attain happiness or its happiness would consist in something other than God .... The view is also philosophically untenable, for it belongs to human nature to look for the causes of things — that is how intellectual problems arise. If therefore the mind of the rational creature were incapable of arriving at the first cause of things, this natural tendency could not be fulfilled. So we must grant that the blessed do see the essence of God" (Blackfriars trans., 3:5). The same conclusion is found in the Summa contra Gentiles 3:51: "Possibile sit substantiam Dei videri per intellectum."

111. "A person can neither pray nor even sacrifice to such a God ('causa sui'). Before the First Cause a person can neither fall on his knees in awe, nor can he praise or worship him. That is why atheistic thought which denies the God of philosophy, God as First Cause, is perhaps closer to God as he really is ('ist dem gottlichen Gott vielleicht naher')" (Heidegger, Identitat and Differenz [Pfullingen: Neske, 1957], 70-71). "The final blow against God and against the suprasensible world ... did not come from those outside, those who do not believe in God, but from the believers and their theologians" (Heidegger, Holzwege [Frankfurt: Klosterman, 1963], 239-40).

112. [The Greek expression: klese prosopike heterorousios ousiômene conveys more elegantly than the English the hypostatic reality of God's reaching out to us in the third Person of the Trinity. Trans.]

113. My setting down here the difference between the acceptance or rejection of the essence-energies distinction highlights what is perhaps a genuine weakness, or even non sequitur, in this book as a whole: I speak of the priority of personal relation and experience and the transcendence of conceptual definitions, using, however, conceptual definitions which I set out systematically. It is therefore possible for the reader to conclude that what this discussion is about is merely two different systems of ideas — not two radically opposed modes of life or attitudes towards it. Of course, the use of intellectual ideas and their systematic discussion can have a "semantic reference" to life, provided that the objectification of truth in concepts is constantly resisted. This resistance is not purely and simply a literary form. It articulates a social dynamic of the word. In the works of the Greek Fathers, readers may find and confirm for themselves this expression of personal experience, which gives language the iconological depth of the experiential dimension. Such an achievement is beyond my powers in the present work. Here an attempt is made to go beyond the objectification of truth in concepts, but again only through ideas expressed in concepts.

114. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 2:9: "God's actuality [=energeia] is his essences." And 2:8: "This divine power is the essence of God." See also Barlaam of Calabria, Against the Messalians, in The Works of Gregory Palamas [ed. P. Christou, 1:300.24-301.3]): "For if even the light [of God's energies] is uncreated, what is caused and participable and visible ... is necessarily called a divinity (theotes), and the nature of God, which is beyond any cause and participation, vision and apprehension, naming and exposition, how will it be one and not uncreatcd divinities, one superior and the other inferior?" And St. Gregory Palamas replies: "Not knowing that with regard to the uncreated energies and the essence such a distinction and the superimposition (hyperthesis) that goes with it does not impair the fact that there is one divinity. Indeed, rather, it strengthens it, as without it the things that are distinguished could not be brought together into one divinity in an orthodox manner" (Exposition of Impieties [ed. Christou, 2:579.18-22]).

115. "God's activity (actio), however, is not distinct from his power (potentia); each is the divine essence, identical with the divine existence .... we justify the meaning of power in God, not as being the principle of divine acting, which is identical with his being, but as the principle of an effect" (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1 a:25.1 [Blackfriars trans., 5:155]).

116. See the expression of this in the encyclical Mystici Corporis of Pope Pius XII: (in La foi catholique — Tales doctrinaux du Magistere de l'Eglise [Paris: Ed. de l'Orante, 1961], 364): "Ce qu'il faut rejeter: tout mode d'union mystique par lequel les fideles, de quelque façon que ce soit, depasseraient l'ordre du créé et s'arrogeraient le divin au point que meme un seul des attributes du Dieu éternel puisse leurs etre attribué en propre." And cf. the Eastern viewpoint expressed by Gregory of Nyssa: "Man transcends his own nature, becomes immortal from having been mortal, and imperishable from having been perishable, and eternal from having been transient, and wholly god from having been man .... For if what he [God] is by nature he grants as a property to human beings, what else is this other than that he promises an equality of honour through kinship? (On the Beatitudes 7 [PG 44:1280cd]).

117. See Chenu, La theologie au XIIe siecle, 294n. Scc also La foi catholique, 321: "La grace est gratuite et surnaturelle," with references to Roman Catholic dogmatic sources. See also Nicolas, Dieu connu comme inconnu, 218ff. On created grace there is a characteristic fragment of Gregory Akindynos cited by Gregory Palamas: "The hypostasis of the All-holy Spirit creates deifying grace in the saints, but in spite of that this created grace is said to be a hypostasis of the All-holy Spirit. And those who receive this created grace are said to receive the Holy Spirit, the very essence and hypostasis of the Spirit" (To Athanasius of Cyzicus 33 [ed. Chrestou, 2:443.20-25]).

118. See the study of Stylianos Papadopoulos, Ellenikai metaphraseis thomistikon ergon: Philothomistai kai antithomistai en Byzantio (Athens, 1967), 20, 137.

19. "[Selon Augustin, Dieu] contient éternellement en soi les modeles archetypes de tous les etres possibles, leur formes intelligibles, leurs lois, leur poids, leur measures, leur nombres. Ces modeles etemels sont des Idées, increées et consubstantielles a Dieu de la consubstantiabilite même du Verbe" (Gilson, La Philosophie au Morn Age, 132). See also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.44.3: "In divina sapientia sunt rationes omnium rerum, quas supra diximus ideas, id est formas exemplares in mente divina existentes." "Puisqu'elles subsistent dans l' intelligence de Dieu, les Iddes participent nécessairement a ses attribute essentiels. Comme lui-même, elles sont éternelles, immuables et necéssaries" (Etienne Gilson, Introduction a l'Etude de Saint Augustin [Paris: Vrin, 1969], 109). See also Augustine, De diversis questionibus 83, ques. 46.1-2, vol. 40, col. 29-30; Etienne Gilson, Le Thomisme (Paris: Vrin, 1972), 146-48.

20. "Dans l'explication de la Trinite, Augustin conçoit la nature divine avant les personnes. Sa formule de la Trinité sera: une seule nature divine subsistant en trois personnes, celles des Grecs au contraire disait: trois personnes ayant une même nature .... Saint Augustin au contraire, préludant au concept latin que les scolastiques lui ont emprunté, envisage avant tout la nature divine et poursuit jusqu'aux personnes pour atteindre la realité complete. Deus, pour lui, ne signifie plus directement le Pere, mais plus généralement la divinité" (E. Portaléd, "Augustin (saint)," Dictionnaire de Theologie Catholique, vol. I, col. 2268tf.).

21. "Toute essence, ou quidditd, peut etre conçue sans que l'on conçoive rien au sujet de son existence. Par example, je peux concevoir homme ou phénix et ignorer pourtant s'ils existent dans la nature. Il est done clair que l'existence (esse) est autre chose (aliud) que l'essence ou quiddite" (Thomas Aquinas, De ente et essentia, ch. 4, ed. M.-D. Roland-Gosselin [Paris: Vrin, 1948], 34).

22. For an interpretation of existence within the context of an objective-rationalist causality which bypasses the question concerning the mode of existence and confines the existential fact to an intellectual-aetiological combination of being and Being (ens = rem habentem esse) see Mar-tin Heidegger, "Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins," in Nietzsche, vol. 2 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 41611.; Gilson, Le Thomisme, 88-89, 186-87; Aime Forest, La structure métaphysique du concret selon saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1931); Jacques Maritain, Court traiti de l'existence et des existants (Paris: Hartmann, 1947).

23. "Les scolastiques opposent essentia et existentia: l'essence est la nature conceptuelle d'une chose; elle est conçue comme un pouvoir d'être; l'existence au contraire est la pleine actualite, ultima actualitas" (R. Eucken, Geschichte der philosophischen Terminologie, cited by Andre La-londe, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la Philosophie [Paris: PUF, 1972], 318). See also Heidegger, Über den humanismus, 18: 'Die in ihrer Wesensherkunft verborgenc Unterscheidung von essentia (Wesenhcit) and existentia (Wirklichkeit) durchherrscht das Geschik der abendlandischen und der gesamten europaisch bestimmten Geschichte."

24. "La signification principals et directe d'ens (selon saint Thomas) n'est pas l'exister, mais la chose même qui existe. Le thomisme devient alors un 'chosisme' que l'on peut accuser de 'réifer' tous les concepts qu'il touche et dc transformer en une mosaique d'entités closes dans leurs propres essences le tissu vivant du réel" (Gilson, Le Thomisme, 187).

25. St. Gregory Palamas writes in a famous passage: "When God was conversing with Moses, He did not say, 'I am the essence,' but 'I am the One Who is.' Thus it is not the One Who is who derives from the essence, but essence which derives from Him, for it is He who contains all being in Himself" (Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts 3.2.12 [ed. Christou, 1:666; trans. Gendle, CWS]).