Lossky as Expositor of Palamas

In 1944, when Lossky made the essence–energies distinction the fourth chapter of the Mystical Theology, Palamas was largely a specialist’s subject in the West, treated in Catholic scholarship — above all by Martin Jugie — as a late-Byzantine aberration. Lossky presented the distinction instead as the dogmatic core of Orthodox theology and the condition of all genuine mystical experience. The judgment of the repository’s Palamas collection is that his book “brought the essence–energies distinction to a wide audience, Orthodox and non-Orthodox,” and the reading has shaped every subsequent discussion.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

What the Distinction Is

The doctrine Lossky expounds is not his own. It is the teaching defended by St. Gregory Palamas (c. 1296–1359) against Barlaam of Calabria and confirmed by the Constantinopolitan councils of 1341, 1347 and 1351, whose Synodal Tome of 1351 gave it conciliar form (see St. Gregory Palamas; The Distinction).

Stated compactly: in God there is a distinction — not a separation, and not a composition — between the divine essence (ousia), which is absolutely transcendent, unknowable and imparticipable, and the divine energies (energeiai), which are uncreated, are God himself in his act and self-manifestation, and are genuinely participated by creatures. Each energy is the whole God, not a part or an emanation; God is not assembled out of components. The distinction is what allows Orthodox theology to affirm both that God is utterly beyond us and that the saints truly partake of him.

Lossky’s Framing

Lossky’s contribution was not to discover the doctrine but to place it at the structural centre of an account of Orthodox theology as a whole, and to explain what it is for.

His governing claim is that the distinction is the dogmatic guarantee of the reality of mystical experience. If the essence were participable, the creature would become God by nature and the Creator–creature distinction would collapse. If nothing uncreated were participable, then the “grace” the Christian receives would be a creature, and union with God would be union with a created effect — which is to say, no union with God at all. The essence–energies distinction is the only way to say both things at once. In Lossky’s formulation, quoted in the repository’s Palamas collection: “The energies are not ‘something of God’ but God himself in his action and revelation… The distinction between essence and energies is the dogmatic basis of the real character of all mystical experience” (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, ch. 4, as cited in Apophaticism and Grace).

From this he derives the apophatic–participatory balance that is the signature of his theology: the negation falls on the essence, the participation on the energies, and the two together describe one God who is at once utterly beyond us and utterly near (see The Divine Darkness).

He also puts the distinction to work in creation and anthropology. The divine ideas, the logoi of created things, are located — following Maximus — not in the essence but in the divine will and energy, so that creation is a free act rather than an outflow of the divine being (Lossky, Mystical Theology, ch. 5). And the human being’s capacity for God is a capacity to receive the energies, which is what makes deification thinkable without pantheism (see Uncreated Grace and Deification).

There is, further, the polemical use, which must be attributed to Lossky rather than to the councils. He made the Western refusal of the distinction, together with the Filioque, the marker of a fundamentally different and — in his judgment — impersonalist theological vision, so that Palamism became the badge of an Orthodox identity defined over against Latin scholasticism. The repository’s Palamas collection records this precisely as Lossky’s move and flags it as such (see Critique of Scholasticism, which notes that Lossky “framed the Filioque and the Western refusal of the essence-energies distinction as not a verbal difference but a fundamentally different — and impersonalist — theological vision,” and attributes the framing to him).

The State of Palamas Studies in 1944

The context explains why the chapter landed as it did.

For most of the modern period Palamas had been a marginal figure in Western theology and an under-read one in the East. The dominant Western treatment was that of the French Assumptionist Martin Jugie, whose articles in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique presented Palamism as a doctrinal deviation — a real distinction in God, hence a compromise of divine simplicity, hence effectively heretical (see The Palamite Revival, on Jugie’s hostile reading and the long post-Byzantine dormancy).

Against that background, Lossky’s chapter was an act of recovery. He did not argue with Jugie point by point; he simply set out the doctrine as the living centre of the tradition and showed what an entire theology built on it looks like. Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae’s Romanian monograph of 1938 had preceded him, and Fr. John Meyendorff’s Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire Palamas (1959) — the study that made Palamas a scholarly subject in the modern sense — followed fifteen years later (see Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae; Fr. John Meyendorff; The Palamite Revival).

Lossky and Meyendorff

The two great modern expositors differ in kind, and the difference is worth naming.

Lossky approaches Palamas as a systematic theologian: he takes the distinction as dogma and asks what follows for the whole of theology. His Palamas is timeless — the fourteenth-century synthesis of a doctrine already implicit in Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus.

Meyendorff approaches Palamas as a historian: he situates the doctrine in the concrete controversies of fourteenth-century Byzantium, edits the texts, and offers what has been called a “Christological corrective” reading, arguing that Palamas’s concern is the reality of the Incarnation and of the deified body rather than a metaphysics of the divine being. That reading has itself been contested, notably in Fr. John Romanides’s celebrated review (see The Palamite Revival).

Both readings are in circulation, and both derive from the same conviction that Palamas is central rather than marginal. The complementarity is real: Lossky supplied the theological ambition, Meyendorff the historical apparatus.

The Objections

Per METHODOLOGY §4.2. The essence–energies distinction itself is dogma, confessed by the councils of the fourteenth century and by this repository; what follows concerns Lossky’s presentation of it.

That the systematization outruns the texts. Rowan Williams’s essay “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism” (Eastern Churches Review 9, 1977) is the classic statement of the worry that the modern Palamite synthesis — Lossky’s above all — imposes a philosophical architecture on Palamas that his own writings do not straightforwardly bear. The repository’s Palamas collection records the same caution: Lossky’s apophatic–participatory framing “has been both enormously influential and, more recently, qualified by scholars wary of over-systematizing Palamas” (Apophaticism and Grace).

That the East–West opposition is a modern construction. This is the more consequential objection and is treated at length in Section 08. The short form: the picture of “Palamas versus Aquinas” as a civilizational contrast is largely a twentieth-century construction; Palamas engaged Barlaam’s epistemology, not Thomism; and Marcus Plested’s Orthodox Readings of Aquinas (2012) has shown that the Byzantine world read and in part appropriated Aquinas, including in the Palamite century (see Critique of Scholasticism; The de Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis).

That the Thomist alternative is caricatured. A. N. Williams’s The Ground of Union (Oxford, 1999) argues that Palamas and Aquinas stand much closer on deification than the textbook contrast allows — a rapprochement thesis itself contested by other readers of both authors (see The Distinction).

That energies displace persons. From outside Orthodoxy, Dorothea Wendebourg argued in Geist oder Energie (1980) that Palamism amounts to a “defeat of Trinitarian theology,” the energies displacing the hypostases — a charge Orthodox writers reject on the ground that the energies are the common operations of all three hypostases and not a fourth divine reality (ibid.). From within Orthodoxy, Metropolitan John Zizioulas moved in the opposite direction, prioritizing the hypostasis over the energies as the ground of divine–human communion; Aristotle Papanikolaou’s study of the Lossky–Zizioulas divergence identifies this as a genuine paradigm question in contemporary Orthodox theology (Papanikolaou, “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood,” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 [2003]; Being with God, 2006).

The repository’s settled position on the underlying dogma is firm and is not affected by any of this: the essence–energies distinction is Orthodox doctrine. What is contested is the historical frame and the degree of systematization, and those questions are reported as open.

References

Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Trans. members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. London: James Clarke, 1957. Ch. 4, “Uncreated Energies”; ch. 5, “Created Being.”
Lossky, Vladimir. The Vision of God. Trans. Asheleigh Moorhouse. London: Faith Press, 1963. (French orig. Vision de Dieu, Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1962.) (The patristic history culminating in Palamas.)
Palamas, Gregory. Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts. 14th century.
Synodal Tome of 1351 (Council of Constantinople).
Meyendorff, John. Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire Palamas. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1959. English: A Study of Gregory Palamas, trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964.
Stăniloae, Dumitru. Viața și învățătura Sfântului Grigorie Palama. Sibiu, 1938.
Williams, Rowan. “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism.” Eastern Churches Review 9 (1977): 27–44.
Williams, A. N. The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Wendebourg, Dorothea. Geist oder Energie: Zur Frage der innergöttlichen Verankerung des christlichen Lebens in der byzantinischen Theologie. Munich: Kaiser, 1980.
Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Papanikolaou, Aristotle. “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood: Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas on Conceiving the Transcendent and Immanent God.” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 (2003): 357–385; and Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
Repository: The Distinction; Apophaticism and Grace; Critique of Scholasticism; The Palamite Revival.