A DISCUSSION OF THE ORTHODOX

PERCEPTION OF THE NATURE OF GOD

 

This talk was presented by Steve Rodakis as part of a seminar on the Church Fathers.

 

    As a beginning premise, we shall state that the nature of God is a mystery.  We cannot completely understand it,  nor do we seek to delve into the mind of our Creator.   The revealing of the Holy Trinity through scripture and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ has given us some perspectives concerning the attributes of God, however, and by relying on the writings the Fathers of the Church have left us, we can discuss these qualities.

    In discussing the nature of God, only Orthodox Christians make the distinction between His “essence” and his “energies”.  God’s essence (ousia), according to the Fathers, is that which defines His being, and it is a mystery to man.  We cannot know it.  His energies are His acts or operations in Creation, and those are revealed to us by the legacy of sacred persons to whom He has spoken,  by inspired scripture, and above all, by the incarnation, teaching, life, death, resurrection, and continuing presence through the Church and its sacraments of His Son, the Logos, Jesus Christ. 

    Some of the reasoning which led the Church Fathers to this difficult concept may be summarized in the following:

• One of the revealed pointers or indicators of a truly authentic experience  of God is that of awe.

• Using the apophatic approach (that is, defining God in terms of what he is not), we can say that God is not a supreme being among other beings.

• He is of an order above all beings.

• If He created all (the Pantocrator), He is greater than and different from His Creation—that which created cannot itself be created.

• As created beings ourselves, we can comprehend only in terms of creation;  man cannot know God’s essence, only His energies as man observes them within Creation.

    Though God is transcendent—apart from being and non-being—He is not cut off from His Creation.  All of man’s relationship in the Judeo/Christian tradition with his Creator teaches him that God is approachable.  To quote the prayer to the Holy Spirit, “…Who are everywhere present and fills all things…”

    How, then do we reconcile God’s seeming remoteness in our ignorance of His nature with His accessibility which we accept as His children and inheritors of His grace?

    St. Gregory Palamas, writing in the fourteenth century, but echoing the thoughts of Orthodox Fathers from ages past, particularly St. Dionysios the Areopagite, enunciated most clearly the distinction between God’s essence and his energies.  Of God’s essence, St. Gregory spoke in negative terms, that is,  of what we do not know.  Of His energies, he was more specific.  Consider these notions:

• God is present to us through His energies (or operations, or activities)

• God’s energies descend toward us

• The saints have achieved a direct experience of God,  they most clearly know God in His energies

• In the Christian understanding, Creation is the product of the energies of God

• Time, space, and all material things are God’s creations

• God creates through His will and because of His love

• Man is created in the “image” and “likeness” of God

• Man’s being created in God’s image means that man has a soul reflecting God as a person

• Man’s soul is endowed with God’s energies;  one of these is love

• The image of God in man is the potential given to man to unite with God

• The likeness of God in man is the act of becoming more God-like

• As a result of ancestral sin (called “original sin” in the West), man’s image was tarnished, disfigured, as a consequence of Adam's disobedience

• The potential of the original image is still present in man, though it is clouded

• Man can attain or clarify his original image and proceed toward its likeness through his free-will commitment, made possible through the saving acts of Jesus Christ

• God’s energies permeate His creation and we experience them in the form of grace

• The notion of theosis, or the deification of man can be understood as union with God in His energies

• Man does not become God by nature, but God-like by grace

• Finally, from St. Gregory,  the highest form of this ongoing revelation to living man is the vision of "uncreated light," the same light of the Transfiguration of Christ on Mt. Tabor.

     The Christian West, which tries so hard to define all aspects of God and man, misses this distinction of essence and energies.  The West defines sin as a violation of a legal relationship between God and man, and the church’s role is to inflict punishment as a means of correcting and healing the violation.  The Christian East sees sin as a loss of the substance of the image of God,  which is restorable through grace.  Redemption from sin is a fulfillment of man’s image, the potential for union with God is always present, waiting to be resurrected. 

    As a result of this difference in theological approach, the West fell into such errors as purgatory, the hoarding of surplus grace and its dispensing by the hierarchy, and other abuses that flowed from such flawed thinking.

    St. Paul urges us to “become partakers in the Divine nature…”.  It is one of the many references used by the Fathers in formulating the doctrine of theosis, or “deification”, as man’s goal in his spiritual journey. The partaking of which St. Paul speaks is understood by Orthodox as participating in God’s energies.

    All energy (or action) originates with the Father, being communicated eternally by the Son, through the Holy Spirit.  By becoming partakers in God’s nature by grace, we can become all that God is by nature, except for the identity of that nature.  We remain creatures—created beings—while becoming deified by God’s grace just as Christ remained God in becoming man through the Incarnation, which was itself an act of grace. 

    If we understand the core of the distinction between God’s essence and His energies, we can more completely appreciate St. Athanasios famous teaching,  that  “God became man that man may become God.”