Uncreated Grace and Deification

What the essence–energies distinction is for. If grace is uncreated — if what the Christian receives is God himself in his act and not a created effect produced by God — then deification is a real union with God and not a metaphor. Lossky made this the point of the whole doctrine, set it deliberately against the Western framework of created grace, and carried it through to the vision of the uncreated light and the eschatological “feast of the kingdom” with which his masterwork closes.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Question

Christians say that they receive grace, that they are made partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), that they are being transformed from glory to glory. What exactly is received?

Two answers are possible in principle. Either what is received is created — a quality, disposition or habit produced in the soul by God, elevating it and rendering it pleasing to him — or what is received is uncreated: God himself, given in his own act and life.

Lossky’s whole account of the Christian life turns on the second answer, and the essence–energies distinction is what makes it sayable without absurdity. God’s essence remains imparticipable, so the creature does not become God by nature. God’s energies are truly God and are truly given, so the creature is genuinely united to God and not merely to a divine effect. Deification is therefore neither an absorption nor a figure of speech: the saint becomes by grace everything that God is by nature, except identity of essence (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, chs. 4, 10, 11; see Lossky as Expositor of Palamas; Theosis).

Against Created Grace

Lossky set this against the dominant Latin scholastic framework, and the contrast is one of the most consequential — and most contested — moves in his book.

The Western framework, stated fairly on its own logic: God is actus purus, utterly simple, identical with his own essence and his own act of being; there is in God no real distinction between essence and operation. Grace, accordingly, is gratia creata, a created quality infused into the soul that elevates it toward a God who remains in his essence inaccessible until the beatific vision, in which the blessed are held to see the divine essence itself by a created light of glory (see The Distinction, which sets out the Thomist position in its own terms; Orthodox vs. Catholic).

Lossky’s objection is that this leaves the creature short of God. If grace is created, then in deification and in the beatific vision what the creature is finally united to is a creature; and the compensating claim that the blessed see the divine essence either collapses divine transcendence or, if the vision is mediated by a created light, reduces salvation once more to the contemplation of a created thing. The Orthodox claim, as Lossky puts it, is that only an uncreated grace secures real union with God.

The Western counter-objection is equally serious and is recorded here in fairness: that distinguishing energies really from essence introduces composition into God and so compromises divine simplicity, and that the Palamite scheme multiplies uncreated realities (see The Distinction, where both the objection and the Orthodox replies are set out). The repository’s Palamas collection reports the state of the question as genuinely open at the level of ecumenical assessment — some holding the difference church-dividing, others a difference of theological idiom resting on a shared faith in real union with God — while confessing the distinction itself as Orthodox doctrine.

What must be said here about Lossky in particular is that his presentation makes the contrast maximal. The repository’s Palamas collection records that he framed the Western refusal of the distinction as evidence of “a fundamentally different — and impersonalist — theological vision” (Critique of Scholasticism), and the same collection notes that this sharp opposition “has been substantially softened by recent scholarship.” That is a judgment about Lossky’s frame, not about the dogma.

Deification as the Purpose of Creation

Theosis is not, for Lossky, a remedy for sin appended to an otherwise complete created order. It is what the human being was made for. The Incarnation would in some sense have been fitting even apart from the fall, since the union of created and uncreated in one hypostasis is the fulfilment of creation’s own vocation; sin makes the Incarnation also redemptive, but does not make it the reason there is an Incarnation at all. (Lossky handles this with the reserve proper to a question the Fathers left open; the theme is developed most fully by Maximus.)

The structure is the one described in the anthropology (see The Image and the Likeness): the image is the capacity, the likeness is the realization, and the realization is deification. The whole human being is its subject — soul and body together, since the body is destined for resurrection and for the light.

Synergy

Deification is not a process that overtakes a passive creature. Lossky’s tenth chapter, “The Way of Union,” sets out the Orthodox doctrine of synergy: grace and human freedom are not competing quantities such that more of one means less of the other, but cooperate on different levels — the uncreated energy of God and the created freedom of the person working together toward one end.

The practical shape of this is the ascetic tradition: the commandments, repentance, the struggle with the passions, unceasing prayer, the sacramental life. Lossky is emphatic that mystical theology is not an alternative to asceticism but its interior meaning, and that the sacraments are not adjuncts to a private mystical path but its objective ground (see The Holy Mysteries; The Jesus Prayer).

He is equally emphatic that there is no “created” intermediary in this process — no created grace mediating between God and the soul, and equally no sophianic principle mediating between God and the world. The polemic against created grace and the polemic against Sophia are, in his mind, the same polemic (see Lossky Against Bulgakov).

The Divine Light

The eleventh chapter, “The Divine Light,” is where the doctrine becomes visible.

The light that the three disciples saw on Tabor at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–8) is, in the Palamite confession, neither a created radiance nor a symbol but the uncreated glory of God, truly seen by purified human eyes. It is the same light that the hesychast fathers claimed to see in prayer, and the light in which the saints will be clothed in the age to come. Because it is uncreated energy and not essence, it can be seen without the seer either becoming God by nature or seeing what cannot be seen.

This is the point at which Lossky’s apophaticism, his anthropology and his Palamism converge: the God who is unknowable in essence is genuinely seen in his energies, by a human being whose whole nature — including his body — is being deified. The theme was carried into first-person testimony in the same generation by St. Sophrony of Essex, Lossky’s collaborator on the Exarchate’s journal (see We Shall See Him as He Is; St. Gregory Palamas).

The End

The book closes with “The Feast of the Kingdom.” Deification is not a private achievement but the destiny of the whole creation: the human person, deified, is the priest through whom the material world is offered and transfigured, and the end is a cosmos wholly permeated by the uncreated energies without ceasing to be creation. Lossky’s eschatology is accordingly of the transfigurative rather than the annihilationist kind (cf. Eschatology; Orthodox Eschatology).

He is characteristically reserved about the questions on which the tradition has not spoken with one voice, and he does not use his own system to settle them.

What Is Dogma and What Is Lossky

A closing distinction, per METHODOLOGY §4.1–4.2.

Dogma, confessed by this repository: the divine essence is imparticipable and the uncreated energies are participable; grace is uncreated; the light of Tabor is the uncreated glory of God; deification is the end of the Christian life; salvation is synergistic. These are the teaching of the fourteenth-century councils and of the Fathers, and Lossky expounds rather than invents them.

Lossky’s own: the systematic presentation of created grace as the defining Western error and the resulting portrait of two opposed theological civilizations. That frame belongs to him, has been enormously influential, and is exactly what current scholarship has questioned (see The de Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis).

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. 10, “The Way of Union”; ch. 11, “The Divine Light”; ch. 12, “The Feast of the Kingdom.”
Lossky, Vladimir. “Redemption and Deification.” In In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Vision of God. Trans. Asheleigh Moorhouse. London: Faith Press, 1963. (French orig. Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1962.)
Palamas, Gregory. Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts; Synodal Tome of 1351.
Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua; Questions to Thalassius. 7th century.
Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964.
Williams, A. N. The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Scripture: 2 Peter 1:4; Matthew 17:1–8; 2 Corinthians 3:18.
Repository: The Distinction; Apophaticism and Grace; Critique of Scholasticism; Theosis.