06 — Essence and Energies

Lossky is one of the two men chiefly responsible for restoring St. Gregory Palamas to the modern Orthodox mind — the other being Fr. John Meyendorff, whose 1959 study followed a decade and a half later. Chapter 4 of the Mystical Theology, “Uncreated Energies,” made the distinction between the unknowable divine essence and the participable uncreated energies the axis of a whole account of Orthodox theology, and set the terms in which the doctrine has been discussed, defended and disputed ever since.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

What This Section Covers

The first file treats Lossky as expositor: what he took from Palamas, how he read the fourteenth-century councils, what he added, how his reading relates to Meyendorff’s and to the wider “neo-Palamite” movement, and where scholarship has since questioned the systematization.

The second file treats the doctrine’s payload: uncreated grace, the rejection of created grace, deification, and the vision of the divine light — the point at which Lossky’s apophaticism, his anthropology and his Palamism converge.

The repository’s own dogmatic treatment of the essence–energies distinction is in the St. Gregory Palamas collection, and this section is consistent with it: the distinction is confessed as the dogma of the fourteenth-century councils, while Lossky’s particular framing of it — as the marker of an Orthodox identity defined over against Latin scholasticism — is attributed to Lossky and flagged as contested.

Files

File Description
Lossky as Expositor of Palamas Chapter 4 of the Mystical Theology; the fourteenth-century councils; Lossky, Meyendorff, and the Palamite revival; the objections
Uncreated Grace and Deification Uncreated versus created grace; theosis; the divine light; the ecumenical stakes

See Also