God in His Processions

Abstract

It has become an unfortunately typical Orthodox strategy, following the surge of "neo-Palamite" theology in the twentieth century, to pit Aquinas and Palamas polemically against each other as opposed archetypes of Western and Eastern theology. 1 Many Orthodox commentators, in adopting this strategy, have singled out Palamas's distinction between the divine essence and energy (οὐσία and ἐνέργεια) as a point of central incompatibility between his theology and that of Aquinas, and have argued that the latter's failure to draw such a distinction ultimately leads him to construe God's relation to creation in a manner anathema to Eastern theology. Although this charge of incompatibility between Palamas and Aquinas perhaps possesses a prima facie plausibility, it deserves critical reexamination for two major reasons. First, as Marcus Plested has recently demonstrated, several of Palamas's earliest Byzantine followers openly admired and drew from Aquinas in their own "Palamite" writings, and apparently perceived no insurmountable conflict between Aquinas's theology and that of their teacher. 2 It is only in the modern era, Plested argues, that Orthodox commentators have begun to vilify Aquinas with

Platonism as a Path to Palamism

“…A number of scholars have drawn attention to surprising theological convergences between Scotism and Palamism, on this and other points. See Bradshaw (2019); Iacovetti (2017); Jones (2005); Kapriev (2018); Knight (2016); Plested (2019);and Spencer (2017). 11 For a recent and accessible example, see the critique of absolute divine simplicity by Moreland and Craig (2017, 530-532).…”