By: Thomas Palmieri

Thomas Palmieri — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 17:15:59 +0000

The Nicene Creed of 325 A.D. dogmatically teaches that the Son of God is ‘only begotten out of the essence of the Father Light out of Light, co-essential with the Father’. Nearly all of the major Church fathers prior to the Pseudo Dionysius (Palamas’ mentor) taught that the Son of God is Hypostatic Light – viz., that the Divine Light at the level of Godhead is synonymous with the essence of God itself. The Eastern fathers also generally taught that God interacts with creation with respect to His energies, but these were not conceived of as eternal uncreated energies, but rather as specific exertions of the Deity in creation. ‘Dionysius’ borrowed from Neoplatonic emanationism and speculated that the divine processions of the pagan philosophers were God’s manner of interacting and revealing Himself to creation – but in the Neoplatonic systems from which He borrowed, they were actually the pagan dieties – which ‘Dionysius’ re-introduced into Christianity by granting to his ‘processions’ an ontological reality. Palamas then combined these various strands of Eastern thought and reified them into a doctrine of divine energies. At any rate, since the Ecumenical Nicene Creed identified the Divine Light of Godhead itself with God’s essence itself, Palamas’ teaching and that of the Synodikon of Orthodoxy denying that the Divine Light is synonymous with the essence of God and is in fact merely divine energy infinitely transcended by the invisible essence of God itself is in fact heretical, and contrary to the teaching of the fathers, and yet they pronounced anathema on those who held fast to the Nicene faith. One need not adopt the theology of the Scholastic philosophers to oppose the teaching of Palamas, but merely seek to uphold the Nicene definition of faith. Which is my standpoint.

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By: Thomas Palmieri