Posted on by Jack Kilcrease

The Faithfulness of East and West: Post-Nicaea Rejection of Onto-Theology Part 2

The Eastern Theological Trajectory

The Cappadocians

The writings of the Cappadocian Father St. Gregory of Nyssa illustrate the Eastern theological trajectory.  In the mid-Fourth century, Gregory confronted a Neo-Arian theologian named Eunomius.1  Beyond holding that the Son could not be homoousios with the Father because being “generated” and “not generated” would make God compounded of two realities and not simple,2 Eunomius also asserted an extremely crass version of onto-theology.3  According to Eunomius, God was as knowable as any other being and therefore easily intellectually dissected, a point which he based his early criticism of Nicene doctrine upon.4  This was also backed up with a strongly univocal conception of language.5

In response, Gregory noted that Eunomius was engaged in a category confusion. Being ingenerate and generate was not a property of the divine substance, but rather the persons within the common substance of divinity.6  The divine substance and the divine persons were two distinct, yet related realities.  The personal relations within God spoke of the “howness” of God and were knowable from the common actions of the persons of the Trinity in the economy of salvation. 

Nevertheless, contrary to the claims of Eunomius, the “whatness” of God in the form of the divine substance was unknowable, in this life or even the next.7  Hence, it was not part of the system of being, and it was not therefore subject to Eunomius’s logic chopping.  In keeping with this view of the divine essence, Gregory of Nyssa composed a mystical text entitled The Life of Moses. 

In this work, Moses’ ascension into the darkness of Sinai in Exodus 21 becomes a metaphor for Christian existence.  Spiritual progress means an ever-increasing movement into the luminous darkness of the divine life.8  In this, Gregory rejects the notion that the soul is capable of ever spiritually beholding the divine essence, and therefore categorically denies what Western theologians have typically called the “beatific vision” (visio beatifica).9

Pseudo-Dionysius and Gregory Palamas

The traditionary trajectory begun by Gregory of Nyssa was further developed by Pseudo-Dionysius and Gregory Palamas. Pseudo-Dionysius was likely a Syrian monophysite theologian living sometime in the fifth century writing under the pseudonym of one of Paul’s converts at Athens.10  He draws on the work of the Neo-Platonic philosophers of late Antiquity for his tools of conceptualizing God.11 

Among these appears to be Proclus,12 who in his work The Platonic Theology (or sometimes translated as On the Theology of Plato)offers a description of reality according to the typical Neo-Platonic metaphysical hierarchy.13  At the top of the cosmic hierarchy is the “One” (monad), with emanations descending to the various pagan gods and material creation.14  What is innovative about Proclus’s treatment is his development of the notion of apophatic and kataphatic theology. 

The dialectic of apophatic/kataphatic theology works on a principle of affirmation and negation.  One could speak of the divine in two ways: making affirmative statements of divine attributes (kataphatic theology), or by demonstrating what the divine is by saying what it is not (apophatic theology).15  Regarding the latter attributes, one says what God is by saying what he is not.  For example, when one says that God is infinite, we do not so much mean that he is analogous to a series that does not end, that is, something like a Hegelian “bad infinite” (schlect Unendlichkeit”),16 but rather negatively that he lacks limits.

Pseudo-Dionysius attempted to Christianize this Neo-Platonic framework in his work On Divine Names and The Mystical Theology.17  In these works, Pseudo-Dionysius claims that all the attributes of the divine essence transcend the category of being and therefore can only be spoken of negatively.18  Indeed, God is above being, and if he could be spoken of positively then he would be part of the system of being.19 

Hence, we cannot make any positive affirmations about the divine essence and attributes that do not contain a negation.20  For example, instead of saying that “God is good,” it would be more appropriate to say that he is “more than good.”  Instead of saying that he is wise, we should say that he is “more than wise.”21  Indeed, he is only properly called these things because he is the source of these things in creatures.22 

Although the divine essence is unknowable,23 the fact that God is the source of being means he can be spoken of in a positive sense.   If the unknowability of the divine essence represented negation (apophatic theology), but the fact that God is the positive source of creaturely attributes makes him capable being spoken of in a positive sense (kataphatic theology).24  

Centuries later and operating in the same trajectory, Gregory Palamas formalized the theology of divine total transcendence begun with Gregory of Nyssa in his famous distinction between the unknowable essence of God and the knowable energies.25  One would himself have to be God to know God’s essence.  Nevertheless, creatures can directly experience and see the energies.26  Palamas used the distinction to explain the experience of divine light claimed by many of the monks at the monastery of Mt. Atmos, wherein they perceived a mystical light after meditation and recitation of the Jesus Prayer (i.e., Hesychastic mysticism).27  

The Western Trajectory

St. Augustine of Hippo

St. Augustine with a burning heart, quill, and open book looking toward the Truth

The Western rejection of onto-theology runs through St. Augustine and arguably culminates in St. Aquinas.  Interestingly, the Western understanding of the divine essence and attributes also draws upon the conceptual resources of Neo-Platonism.  Nevertheless, it appropriates Neo-Platonism in a somewhat different direction. The key figure in this story is Augustine.  Prior to his conversion to Christianity, Augustine studied the Neo-Platonists intensely28 and in some passages of The Confessions attributes his encounter with them as a factor in his turning to the Christian faith.29  

Augustine agrees with the Eastern Greek tradition that God is utterly transcendent and beyond the system of being.  He also agrees with the Eastern theological trajectory that God is ultimately incomprehensible.30  This being said, Augustine distinguishes between knowing God in himself, and indirectly knowing him through concepts and signs.31  For example, it is possible to know and understand the concept of infinity, but it is impossible to comprehend it.32 

For this reason, Augustine affirms that the purified human mind can know God, and even directly perceive him in his essence.33  This is not because God is a being among other beings, or first among a series of beings, but because the soul was made for God: “Thou has formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are ever rest in Thee.”34  Although the godly soul, enlightened by grace will gain a vision of the divine essence in the next life, they have a partial access through nature and external signs of authority in this life such as the Word and the sacraments.  The Word and the sacraments are visible analogies for what God is invisibly doing and therefore also who God is.35  

Therefore, in Augustine a new and significantly different trajectory opens up regarding the divine essence and its knowability that stands in contrast with that of the Eastern theologians.  Whereas Palamas saw the theophanies of the Old Testament as a genuine experience of the divine energies,36 Augustine tended to see them as created signs pointing beyond themselves analogically to the divine essence. 

In On the Trinity, the Bishop of Hippo suggest that such divine appearances in the Bible were angelic spokes persons, created coverings, or visible analogies for the invisible essence of God.37  All external signs are symbols or analogies that point beyond themselves to the invisible divine essence that will become intellectually visible in the next life.38  Christ’s humanity is a supreme example of this, since as something knowable through empirical means (scientia) it is a springboard into higher divine truth (sapientia).39 

Here the same method of affirmation and negation is present but interpreted differently.  God’s positive attributes can be affirmed analogically (due to the fact that they indirectly become unveiled through signs) but are also negated in that the external created signs do not fully present the limitless reality of the divine life.

St. Thomas Aquinas

St. Thomas conversing with the crucified Jesus

Aquinas’s thought has a variety of sources (including Pseudo-Dionysius, Aristotle, and Augustine),40 but basically remains within the Western version of the Neo-Platonic trajectory in his hotly contested concept of the analogy of being (analogia entis).41  Although God is the cause of all being, he is not the first of a series but rather the transcendent foundation of being.42  In a word, he is not the first domino that knocks over all the other dominos, but the table which the dominos rest and therefore the condition upon which it is even possible for dominos to knock each other over.  Therefore Aquinas’s elaborate proofs of God’s existence43 that rely on the notion of God as the “first cause” should not be confused with the onto-theological supposition that God is the first in a series of causes. 

Rather, God is the ground of cause which supervenes upon and concurs with all temporal causes.44  Following Aristotle, Aquinas affirms that effects tend to resemble their causes, and therefore as Paul noted God is known in created things (Rom. 1:20).  Hence, both ontologically and linguistically there is an inherit similarity in even greater dissimilarity between creature and creator.45  Like Pseudo-Dionysius, the similarity of creature and creator results in an affirmation, but with a simultaneous negation of dissimilarity, albeit applied in a more Augustinian manner.46 

Hence, analogia entis does not mean that God is somehow simply more of what creatures are.  Rather, since God’s existence and essence are identical with one another (a formulation borrowed from Avicenna47), God is properly what creatures are only by derivation and participation.  To paraphrase an old Thomistic maxim: God properly is what creatures only have.48 

The Faithfulness of Both the East and West

Both Eastern and Western trajectories regarding the doctrine of God were faithful to Scripture by successfully avoiding the metaphysical pitfall of the onto-theology displayed by the Ante-Nicene Fathers.  In both trajectories, God is the creator of the system of being, he is not a being within the system. 

This being said, due to the baggage of Neo-Platonism, both systems still labor under a concept of God primarily as a metaphysical ideal, and therefore is constrained by the rubric of the law.  In both the Eastern and Western trajectories, although God is above all metaphysical hierarchies, the metaphysical hierarchies of reality are in varying degrees echoes of his eternal being.  This results in a concept of grace that enables correspondence to the divine being, which is primarily conceptualized as a metaphysical ideal and therefore a system of law. 

In this view of salvation, God does not create new possibilities for his creation by his creative word of promise.  Rather, by grace he augments his creature’s capacity to correspond through their increasing ontological completeness to his eternal being.  In both Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas, the whole system is very clearly arranged around the old Neo-Platonic scheme of exitus-reditus.  Creation moves out from God as an inferior copy (analogia entis) and returns to God by grace, which serves the purpose of actualizing an ever-increasing process of resembling God as the ground of being.  In this, God’s constriction within the framework of the law remains unchanged from the ancient metaphysical trajectory.  In that sense, although both Eastern and Western trajectories seek to disentangle themselves from onto-theology, they still have one foot planted firmly in it. 

  1. Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, Gregory of Nyssa’s Doctrinal Works: A Literary Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 76-110. ↩︎
  2. Radde-Gallwitz, Gregory of Nyssa’s Doctrinal Works, 105. ↩︎
  3. Kahled Anatolios Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 74. ↩︎
  4. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, 862-863. ↩︎
  5. Holmes, The Quest for the Trinity, 100. ↩︎
  6. Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, 2.1; NPNFb, 5:102-103. ↩︎
  7. Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, 3.5; NPNFb, 5:146-147. ↩︎
  8. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978). ↩︎
  9. Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, 1.42; NPNFb, 5:99. ↩︎
  10. Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 14. ↩︎
  11. Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 52. ↩︎
  12. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius, 17, 52. ↩︎
  13. Proclus, The Six Books of Proclus, the Platonic Successor, on the Theology, 2 vols., trans.
     Thomas Taylor (London: A. J. Valpy, 1816). ↩︎
  14. Proclus, The Six Books, 1:1-146. ↩︎
  15. Proclus, The Six Books, 1:118. ↩︎
  16. Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Absolute: An Introduction to Reading the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 116. ↩︎
  17. Pseudo-Dionysius, “On Divine Names” “The Mystical Theology,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibhéid, Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 47-132, 133-142. ↩︎
  18. Pseudo-Dionysius, “The Mystical Theology,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 140. ↩︎
  19. Pseudo-Dionysius, “On Divine Names,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 50. ↩︎
  20. Pseudo-Dionysius, “The Mystical Theology,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 138-140. ↩︎
  21. Pseudo-Dionysius, “On Divine Names,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 107. ↩︎
  22. Pseudo-Dionysius, “On Divine Names,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 110-111. ↩︎
  23. Pseudo-Dionysius, “On Divine Names” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 107-108. ↩︎
  24. Pseudo-Dionysius, “On Divine Names,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 110-111. ↩︎
  25. Tikhon Pino, Essence and Energies: Being and Naming God in St Gregory Palamas (London: Routledge, 2023).  Also see: Gregory Palamas, Dialogue Between an Orthodox and Barlaamite, trans. Rein Ferwerda (Binghamton, NY: Global, 1999). ↩︎
  26. See: Gregory Palamas, The Triads, trans. Nicholas Gendle (New York: Paulist Press, 1983), 93-112. ↩︎
  27. John Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, trans. Adele Fisk (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 81-121. ↩︎
  28. See: John O’Meara, “The Neo-Platonism of Saint Augustine,” in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, ed. Dominic J. O’Meara (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982), 34-45. ↩︎
  29. Augustine, The Confessions, 7:20-21; NPNFa, 1:113-115. ↩︎
  30. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.6; NPNFa, 2:524. ↩︎
  31. Augustine, On the Trinity, 2.16-17; NPNFa, 3:50-53. ↩︎
  32. See discussion in Gerard O’ Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind (Berkley: University of California Press, 1987), 213-216. ↩︎
  33. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1:10; NPNFa, 2:525. ↩︎
  34. Augustine, The Confessions, 1.1; NPNFa, 1:45. ↩︎
  35. See: Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 2.1-7; NPNFa, 2:535-538.  See discussion in: Philip Cary, Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 116-126. ↩︎
  36. Gregory Palamas, The Triads, 21, 74. ↩︎
  37. Augustine, On the Trinity, 3.2; NPNFa, 3:65-68. ↩︎
  38. Augustine, The City of God, 22.29; NPNFa, 2:507-509. ↩︎
  39. Augustine, On the Trinity, 13.19, 14.1; NPNFa, 3: 180-181, 3:183-184. ↩︎
  40. Hill, The History of Christian Thought, 148. ↩︎
  41. Reinhard Hütter, “Attending to the Wisdom of God- From Effect to Cause, From Creation to God: A relecture of the Analogy of Being in According to Thomas Aquinas,” in The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or Wisdom of God?, ed. Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), 229. ↩︎
  42. ST, I, q. 3, art. 4; FDP, 1:17. ↩︎
  43. ST, I, q. 2, art. 3; FDP, 1:13-14. ↩︎
  44. ST I, q.44, art. 3-4; FDP, 1:230-232. ↩︎
  45. ST 1, q. 13, art. 1-10; FDP, 1:59-70. ↩︎
  46. ST 1, q. 13, art. 12; FDP, 1:71-72. ↩︎
  47. Damien Janos, Avicenna on the Ontology of Pure Quiddity (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2020), 2. ↩︎
  48. See similar observations in: Etienne Gilson, Thomism: The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Laurence Shook and Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2002), 133. ↩︎

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

Cover images from St. Mary Summer School of Faith, “2014 #1 Fathers of the Church–Intro and Theology of St. Paul,” YouTube, 2014, accessed July 10, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=g-F-L46Yqrs; other images from Matthew Y. Emerson, “Meet the Cappadocian Fathers,” Center for Baptist Renewal, May 6, 2019, accessed July 10, 2024; Charles Strang, “Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite…,” Harvard Divinity School, October 11, 2012, accessed July 10, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rGKBjX1Ld0; https://www.centerforbaptistrenewal.com/blog/2019/5/6/meet-the-cappadocian-fathers; “Eastern Orthodox View of God’s Essence and Energies,” Academia, accessed July 14, 2024, https://academia.edu/resource/work/46713439; Philippe de Champaigne, detail of Saint Augustine, 1645–1650, Wikimedia Commons, accessed July 10, 2024, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Augustine_by_Philippe_de_Champaigne.jpg; and Detail of stained glass window in Saint Patrick Church, Columbus, Ohio depicting St.Aquinas and the crucified Christ, at Isabelle Gagnon. “St. Thomas Aquinas: Rebel, Academic, Mystic,” SL Media, January 28, 2021, accessed July 10, 2024, https://slmedia.org/blog/st-thomas-aquinas-rebel-academic-mystic;