Dr. David Bradshaw on Palamism (Interview with Michael Lofton)

welcome to the reason and theology show I'm your host Michael Lofton on a Saturday afternoon pleased to announce that I have a discussion with Eric Ibarra a Roman Catholic and also esteemed guest dr. David Bradshaw an Eastern Orthodox dr. Bradshaw how are you I'm doing fine yes sir it's great to have you it's truly an honor I followed your work for for quite a bit of time and definitely appreciate it so it's definitely an honor to have you on today thank you Eric always good to have you on how are you I'm doing actually Michael thank you for having me and I share the honor you take from having dr. Bradshaw thank you again doctor yes indeed well let me go ahead and introduce dr. Bradshaw formally dr. Bradshaw is an Eastern Orthodox philosopher with a PhD from the University of Texas he teaches at the University of Kentucky and is also the author of Aristotle east and west metaphysics and the division of Christendom which is available on amazon.com I highly recommend that anybody who is listening or watching go to Amazon and get a copy it is crucial to understanding the essence and energies debate that is prevalent among Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics dr. Bradshaw I'd like to ask you a few questions about this book in particular I was reading in preparation for this interview a review of your book by one Matthew bolter and he he notes that your book is essentially about the fact that you would claim the West the beginning with Augustine has failed to assimilate the Greek understanding of God's energy ax or energies a failure due in part to the exigent exigencies of language none of the major renderings of this term in Latin operatio actus or actual as fully capture the semantic nuance of inner Ghia in greek so he says that this leads to all kinds of problems from at least that you conclude in your book this leads to all kinds of issues in the list would you agree with that analysis and if so what exactly are the deficiencies in those Latin terms that really don't captivate the nuance that you have in the Greek term inter Ghia yeah I would agree except I do want to just make clear that I wasn't writing the book in order to demonstrate that in particular or really to demonstrate anything I got started writing the book actually before I even went to grad school I already had a mind to write something like this because I was just puzzled by that word itself an idea the Greek word from which we get our term energy and in Greek patristic theology people like discussing people like Paula Moss it's usually translated as energy but I also knew that an ancient Greek philosophy it's not translated energy typically but rather either activity or actuality and Aristotle actually coined that word and you find both of those translations in Aristotle depending on the context so my original project was just to understand sort of how'd it get from point A to point B and and in fact I also had a question is is to translate it as energy really helpful and appropriate to what the meaning of the word actually is and so I wanted to try to trace that whole arc of development starting from Aristotle ending up with with Paulo Moss in the 14th century along the way I realized well this gets really interesting and pretty complicated because what happens and the latter fourth early fifth century is a kind of a parting of the ways a division that occurs at two levels in the Roman Empire there's the Christian Church and you know we famously agust in a histology sort of takes a different direction from say the Cappadocia fathers but even within pagan Neoplatonism there's a very similar division between the Western neoplatonist like porphyry and Marius Victorino's and whoever wrote the anonymous comment here in the Parmenides I discuss all those with the book and the Easter neoplatonist like the Ambika some protists and you can see this partly through their use of his cuter in area and one thing I realized was that the way that an area gets used by the Western neoplatonist then became very formative for Western scholasticism because it influenced boethius who was such a key transitional figure from ancient Neoplatonism into scholasticism but not because he had a particular term that was exactly relative and rather influenced the way he was understanding s A to B and so it actually is one of the contributing streams that leads to the concept of the act of being into mystic thought okay so in a way I'm just pointing that out to say this project turned out to be bigger than I originally and and that's why the book ended up taking on a dimension dealing with the West as well as the East although a lot of reviewers complained I didn't deal as thoroughly in the with the West as with the East and that's true because I wasn't aiming to I just wanted to trace that particular line of development that goes from an area to essay now all that being said I do think it's true that an area doesn't have any direct equivalent in Latin it has those three different translations you mentioned act to sin actually toss and operati oh and they're all appropriate I mean as translations depending on it you know the context but it's one thing to be appropriate as a translation and another to be an equivalent term so to bike to get to your question then finally well what is there that's a different and distinct about an area for that I think it's helpful to go all the way back to Aristotle and see what this term meant for him you know it's sort of I have in the first two chapters a pretty lengthy discussion of that word in Aristotle but all culminates with the theology of the prime mover and the really distinctive thing about the prime mover is in metaphysics lambda that he is an area with no Dunamis no capacity your potentiality simply pure an area this later became in the West you know sort of in Latin actors purists but it's already there in Aristotle and if you ask well what is what what is that in area that the prime mover is it's a very interesting answer that it's the self-subsistent activity of thought a no is's the activity of noose and and he had hairstyle identifies God the prime mover with noose much like say an exact or is have you know for an exact ERISA noose is sort of the cause that moves all things for Plato noose mind intellect as the Demiurge so it's not a new idea in Aristotle that God can be identified with noose with intellect but Aristotle much more than the earlier authors has a lot to say about what is that activity of thinking you know and he has his famous line in lambda nine that is thinking is a thinking of thinking okay Hegel quotes that it's a famously cryptic description of what God does but it's it's a sort of self-subsistent and self constituted activity of thought in which there's no external object that God simply observes externally for Aristotle that's very important to realize okay this is you know the underlying metaphysical idea mind when it is fully active is identical with its object something he argues in the day anima all right so because of that and because the prime mover is always fully actual always fully active never moves from one thought to another is always thinking all possible thought you could say it's also identical with the object of that thought okay and so that's the sense in which the prime mover is thinking itself it's not that he's just sort of gazing at his navel it's that he is thinking the intelligible content of the world and his own thought simply is that content it's like if I'm entirely focused on the Pythagorean theorem and I'm not thinking of anything else no distractions whatsoever the content of my thought is the Pythagorean here and there's no reality to the Pythagorean theorem other than what I'm thinking all right so because of that all right an area always had this connotation in Greek that it can it's a kind of activity that constitutes or at least potentially can constitute other things as what they are all right this is what I argue in Chapter two of the book in particular that the self thinking thought of the car mover because it is fully ACTRA and eternal and not derived from the world it constitutes the world and even though Aristotle doesn't believe in a creator god there's no creation X Neil oh there is a very clear ontological dependence that the prime mover is fully actual and all the rest of reality depends upon him so what that means in detail is that every natural process of the realization of some natural form well that natural form already exists in full actuality in the thought of the prime mover so when the Acorn grows into the oak tree what it is to be an oak tree is already fully present and fully actual in the divine thought and is then sort of realized sequentially within nature and you know I I talk about plutinos as well in the book - I think is someone who understood this very clearly and this is partly what motivated his way of ranking and organizing the three hypotheses where the second hypothesis news is more or less plutinos as equivalent to the Aristotelian news that continually thinks all intelligible content including all the natural forms and then nature which in purple kindness is part of soul it's the lower level of soul which is the third hypostasis nature is constantly realizing in time the things that are already eternally present within intellect or news well alright so I'm sorry that was a long at all this is excellent no that was excellent well that's all you know the metaphysical background to understand the connotations of the word in area that it always had this sense of an an activity that can be present and active in something else constituting that thing enabling that thing to be what it is okay and that's very different you know you have a number of words in Greek that have to do with activity there's like poses there's a drama and drawing the verb but they don't have this connotation it's it's I think this is why Aristotle had to invent a new word because he really wanted to to get us something very important here well okay so what happens then in the Hellenistic era kind of leading up to the New Testament you know an area becomes a German in common usage particularly you know it seemed kind of drops out initially after the death of Aristotle there's a I tried to find occurrences of it and there are very few and say the 3rd and 2nd century BC first century BC starts to reappear you find it fairly prominent in Hellenistic Judaism places like the wisdom of Solomon for instance but it really then you know in these Hellenistic usages for the most part it just means activity it kind of has that simpler more basic meaning but if you're talking about the activity of God I mean and even if this is not the Aristotelian God now this is saying the Jewish God the activity of God is still unique in that God is active in his creatures in a way that no creature is ever active in another creature God is the Creator sustains things in being he knows them more deeply and they know themselves and so I think you know I discuss in the book some examples of that in Hellenistic Judaism but the person I think he really takes this idea and runs with it is st. Paul and I have to admit when I wrote the book I hadn't fully worked through everything that st. Paul does with this word group because there's not only the verb the noun and area energy but there's also the verb enter gain which also has a passive form and a gay spy and Paul uses that whole word group about about two dozen four times two dozen occurrences much more than anyone else in the New Testament I mean there's one occurrence and mark and one in the book of James and otherwise they're entirely in Paul and what I what I realized is I kind of got into that and this was what I something I worked on right after I'd written the book but it's written up in an article that's not line called the divine energies in the New Testament if you search my name in that title find that Paul I think latches on to this word group because he wants to be able to sort of indicate the same sort of thing Aristotle had indicated in a different context a much more philosophical context the idea of a divine activity that is present in creatures empowering them enabling them to be what they are and who you know to for Paul what's very important is to be conduits of divine activity and divine grace and in fact really what he's talking about here was Grace and one of the key passages is first Corinthians 12 where he talks about the gifts of the Spirit kind of the first half of that chapter if you look at that passage in Greek he uses words from this word group he uses enter game on top for the gifts of the Spirit they're things done and are performed it uses also uses the verb enter gain a couple of times in there for how the Holy Spirit is is actually I'm working or acting or actualizing these gifts within us as Christians and the gifts themselves are they're both miraculous gifts like healing and prophecy but they're also things like faith and wisdom and so they're not only miraculous they're also continually present alright and in other passages this is very clear one of my favorite is Colossians 1:29 and I like this one because it has both the noun and the verb okay so he's using here what's called a cognate accusative where he's using a verb and it's object is is the noun that's related to that and he's polish to describing himself in his own ministry and he refers to the inner Gita of Christ that is being an egg remaining within him okay and an arrogant man named there means realized form a defective so it's the activity the working of Christ that's being made real and effective within him and what's really key there that I think is so central to st. Paul is that this is a kind of synergy between Paul and Christ or God and what he means by that is not that he's just sort of cooperating with God who is acting externally to him you know like two people people pulling on the same rope or something um synergy and Paul is a lot more intimate than that and when he does so when he acts in the Ministry of the gospel that doesn't cease to be God's activity simply because it is now also his activity okay it's equally both that's the Pauline idea of synergy there's another passage and you know that I'm sure you're familiar with Philippians 2:13 work after salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who worketh in you ho n are gone that's the bird the one who is working in you both to will and to do who entered and when it says its to will and to do you can ask well who is doing okay who's doing is that they were talking about well it's God's doing and the Philippians but it's also that they're doing the Philippians doing what he's describing a synergy it's it's where God is actively at work in them so that what they do is also what he does okay that's what's really key about this whole word Group an area as well as the verb enter gain and it has kind of built into it the capacity for that Pauline understanding of synergy now to finally I'm going to finish answering your question it's a long answer but I want to give it to the Latin now so that article I did look very closely at the Latin translations of these passages in st. Paul and what happens in Latin is you've got a fundamental roadblock the nearest now on you've got to an area is operati oh and that is the noun that's used consistently in all these passages one problem is just well operati oh isn't relief doesn't really capture a full semantic range of an area doesn't have that philosophical connotation I was talking about but another problem also that I hadn't even realize when I wrote the book is that then the corresponding bird popper re that's used is ad opponent okay passive inform active and meaning and if you look at these passages in the bogit they use that verb consistently but they're using it both for the active voice and passive voice enter gain and enter gaze thigh without any distinction and it ends up really really blurring what st. Paul is actually saying in those passages and and to compound that a little bit more in the Volga at that same word group is also used to translate other words as well like Connor gods as thighs translated as a Berber re and so you have no sense that this is really a distinctive and important word group in st. Paul that he's using for this very distinct purpose and so you know that's where I it is a linguistic problem that arose very early and it's really no one's fault in particular it's just that languages are different and it wouldn't have been a problem except that you know in the 4th century early fifth century then you got this situation where educated people on both sides were no longer learning the other language Oh at the collapse of the Empire and sort of the contraction of the Empire into the east and so for most of the Middle Ages people were just reading the Latin translation of the ax Testament and so I think a lot was lost because of that yeah and then yes when in late in the Middle Ages when works of Greek philosophy began to be translated into Latin or even patristic theology like the works of Dionysius I think that's where the translation of kinetic energy is practice first originated the translation of Dionysius and then with the translations of aristotle you've got also actual accounts and those are all fine for a particular context but because of the division you know you're never getting the whole concept of what this word group meant for the Greeks oh okay so that's sort of what emerged it wasn't what I had set out to argue but it is what I think I discovered and so I guess it would be the case that Paulo masa was able to preserve the meaning of energy better than the East because of course he would have been reading in Greek is that accurate yeah it is and of course there was a lot of water to the bridge between Palmas in the 14th century so he's also looking at the Cappadocia Fathers Dionysus and Maximus John of Damascus those are all really key figures for him and one thing I do try to do in the book is trace how an area is used and how it develops and all of those authors and how it becomes a key term for them and Paula Moss as I see it is really just kind of tying the threads together and unifying a lot of ideas that have been out there for a long time but he's the first person to really sanitize it yeah now you mentioned something interesting and please correct me if I'm wrong I may have misunderstood but it sounded like you were saying that God thinks of a form and then it actually exists by his very thinking of it but I can think of forms that don't exist and so I'm sure that God has some forms in his mind that don't exist for instance maybe dragons or something or unicorns or whatever so it would seem that not every form that God could think of actually exists so how perhaps do we reconcile that yeah good question so there's a difference between thinking as we use that word in English and gnosis which is this verb corresponding to the noun news know assist has for its object that knoweth all the things that are intelligible and Plato those are the forms all right that's the traditional platonic term for the forms Aristotle he wouldn't want to say forms per se but it ends up being fairly similar in that they it is the intelligible structure essences that make things what they are but it would would definitely exclude anything that we imagined or conjecture because news pipes nature see news is reason that's one way you could translate that word intellect reason imagination is fantasy a totally different faculty so far as the Greece of concern I think we kind of blur the two together in our English word thinking but for them the only objects of Knossos are things that actually do exist and are real and in fact are not only real they're the highest reality okay and in Plato in the divided line noose is the Faculty corresponding to the highest segment of the divided line where the objects are the forms of the noh8 ah you have three other lower kinds of thinking like dia neue discursive thinking for instance Isis's perception and I Casilla which is sort of thinking with images those are the lower segments the line and so Plato and Aristotle drew these distinctions pretty sharply between no assists and all other forms of okay and and perhaps does that explain why you know you have the instance where God thinks of creation and therefore creation exists does that not somehow mean that creation would then be eternal and necessary well so for a Plato and Aristotle I think the answer is yes yeah and certainly barrows dawdle I mean he has no bones about that eros clade oh it's a little more ambiguous because in the Timaeus there is a story of creation and he sort of presents the Demiurge being there and then deciding to create I think the personification of the Demiurge is somewhat mythical in Plato certainly later Platon is like latinas understood the emanation of the world is a necessary process so you're right though that when you try to translate and sort of incorporate this terminology into Christian thaad you're going to have some fundamental issues to face so you know I think what you're kind of getting at is well so how much of that Aristotelian picture of divine thought can Christianity really take on board because our God is different from Aristotle's God our God is a creator who does to create who didn't have to create there's nothing necessary about it and furthermore does envision and sort of contemplate or have present to the divine mind things that he did not create so you know they're somehow different types of content available to the divine money I think still the predominant the Greek father's Elise would still probably for the most part reserve the word gnosis when they use it for the actual knowledge of the way things are and particularly of eternal and necessary truths which is the you know the traditional meaning it had coming out of ancient Greek but they also would use other words for divine thought you know they were not as kind of parsimonious as Plato and Aristotle about that so I think they they would use say oh goodness well I was going to say da Noya I think I'd have to check on that but what other words with their own gnosis well yeah that's that's probably the most common word for divine knowledge is Miska gnosis okay which is sort of knowledge by acquaintance coming from the verb conozco and it's a biblical term used widely in the Bible so they had no reservation about that and that's a that's not a technical term in Greek philosophy so that would encompass sort of all the different kinds of diviner did okay and one more follow-up question and then I'm going to shift over to Erik and have him ask you some questions would you say that there was an individual in particular who corrected Aristotle on this point of creation being necessary other than Aquinas was there somebody else maybe perhaps the Cappadocia shines or Maximus or someone else yeah I think it was a pretty prominent theme in early Christian thought particularly in the 4th century as they became more aware of plutinos you know so interesting about Latinas that there are long excerpts from plutinos in the preparation of the gospel by Eusebius so even people who didn't read directly read Eusebius and so encountered Neoplatonism in that way and so you find the Cappadocia --nz reacting pretty strongly to this the images that Platonists uses of sort of a fountain that overflows or a fire that just innately gives off heat and radiance and they say no that's not what creation is like so the Cappadocia is actually insist very strongly the creation is an act of choice / Iris's since the greek word they use and that becomes the standard teaching I think in both East and West I do have an article again if anyone's interested it's called divine divine freedom and Greek patristic thought and that one also is online I have a site on academia.edu with a lot of good articles and that's yeah after the show put a link in the description to this video to the academia.edu page that you're referencing so anybody who wants to look it up it'll be available there I have a lot more follow-up questions but let me go ahead and shift over to Eric and let's see if we can get to some of his yeah so you know thank you for that linguistic background that was excellent but to take it to where you're saying this becomes somewhat of a contribution in Christian theology in the 4th century when do you see Christian theologians articulating a distinction between God's essence in God's action or energy or operations and how that relates to the way we understand God relating to the world and also maybe the Trinity because that seems to be the you know the the huge debate in the 4th century was over the identity of Christ and whether he is consubstantial with the father and how that works out do you see the essence and energies that distinction in any authors that were you know Trinitarian authors of the 4th century yeah I do I think in the Cappadocia --nz especially but you kind of have it's helpful I think to to see how this sort of unfolds and stages of course the word Essen sucia isn't really a biblical term in the sense that we're using here it does occur in the Bible that it means other things there it's not really used as a term for God it was though pretty prominent in Greek philosophy and also in Philo of Alexandria okay so there's a work that and in the ancient world was thought to be by Aristotle scholars today think it was probably written maybe first century BC a pseudo Aristotelian work called the de mundo and it describes how it sort of uses the the image of the Persian great king who had these satraps who ruled for him throughout his empire and it says God is like the Persian Great King he has his powers that rule for him or not for him better sort of his active presence within creation executing the Divine Will the Greek word is tsunamis okay and I believe the del mundo also uses the word Lucia then for God himself as he is distinct from that active in creation and that's certainly true in 500k followed Alexandria is a really important figure here because Philo introduces or or maybe adapts from middle platonism this idea that the lúcia of God has no name and is unknowable in itself except insofar as it can be known through its powers it's due nominees and if you know Philo there are two main powers there's the creative power and the ruling power and he says the creative power has a name Theo's gamma and the ruling power has a name kurios lord and so you know if I was reading the Old Testament in the Septuagint those are the two mein names used for God and he sees them both as being names of divine powers and when he says that the divine Lucia has no name you might say well of course it does because I just referred to it right I've just called it the divine to see it but you got to remember that anima name in Greek doesn't just mean label it's a little different from the English word name which typically we can just assign I labeled anything and say that's going to be its name in Greek the name of something in a term that somehow indicates and reveals that thing's true character all right there's a lot about this in Plato's dialogue the Cratylus you know they debate this whole issue how is that possible what would that be like for a name to reveal somethings character and it leads to a lot of discussion of etymologies and these sort of you know cooked up etymology as well maybe Apollo comes from an alpha primitive alpha plus Pollos because he's not many or something like that you know it's very unclear what this means in practice I think I mean the best illustration might be in chemistry where a chemical formula does exactly that if you say water is h2o if you call water HTML you're using a name h2o it indicates what water actually is all right well that's the idea here with Philo that the divine essence has no name in that sense because we can't say what it is we don't have any knowledge of that and in fact phylum kind of hollows that the middle play tennis in saying that God has no form form being that which you know enables something to be defined and cognized make it an object of gnosis God is not an object of gnosis because he has no form he's the source of form but he is himself beyond form so you've got all that in Philo already okay and I just bring that up to point out how that word Lucia already had a lot of theological connotation even before was adapted into Christian usage and if you look at the early patristic writings you can find in both Clement of Alexandria and Origen a sort of an avocation of this full-on ik framework where Clement will contrast the divine Lucia that is unknowable with the divine Dunamis or power now he doesn't talk about two powers specifically but it's pretty prominent I think in book five of this ramada where five chapter twelve I think where the Dunamis the divine power is what we can know a name and the divine Lucia has no name okay so he's got that same sort of polarity as as Philo do and another thing that he picks up from Philo but I think is really important here that a lot of people haven't noticed or when people write about this I don't think they do it justice is that both Philo and Clement identified the divine Dunamis with the divine glory out of Scripture okay and that's actually a very important part of the story that people who just focus on essence and energy I think tend to overlook that you have in Scripture already a kind of an idea that there is God as he is in himself and God as he is manifest and present to us and that manifest present form of God is what's called the divine glory in Scripture and it takes many forms you know there's you could talk about the pillar of fire you know that follow the Israelites in the wilderness the divine glory that's in the tabernacle and in the temple you know so radiant and overwhelming that no one can even be present inside when they when they first dedicate the tabernacle but maybe the most important passage is Exodus 33 okay because that's where Moses ascends Mount Sinai the darkness on Mount Sinai this dark cloud and he asks God let me see your glory and God says I'm going to place you in this cleft of the rock and I'll pass by and I will show you my glory and you will see my backside but not my face because no one can see my face and live okay if you remember that passage this is a bit you know a very important passage for a lot of later mysticism Gregor Nisa just loves this passage and so does Gregory Nats hands and a lot about dynasties theory out the guy they all make use of this but once you get out of that or I think what the Greek father's anyway took from it was that God's face is sort of as he isn't himself the way that he is and can be known only to himself the backside that Moses sees as the divine glory which is the divine presence and reality active present within creation and so that fits very well on to that file on ik contrast of Lucia and Dunamis okay and Philo in fact does refer at one point to the divine Dunamis as the divine glory and so does Clint they adopt that identification they evolve got all that in play all right that's you know third century AD well fourth century the Aryan crisis is and the Council of Nicaea you know settles upon the term homo you see on in order to identify what it is that the father and the son shared have in common the same Lucia and that really ups the ante and kind of puts the focus on Lucia as a term important in his own right in a way that it hadn't been before okay and then so what happens then in the Arian controversy and I talked about this in the book but just summarize it in when you get to the sort of the latter phase of the controversy with the Nevada McKeon's in the 360 ad okay just for those who aren't familiar this is toward the end of lifetime walkin ages there is this group who came to be called an anonymity which means those who war against the spirit and they were willing to accept the divinity of the Sun but not that from the Holy Spirit and so that posed the challenge to Athanasian how do I give an argument not only for the divinity of the son which he had been doing against areas but also for the divinity of the Holy Spirit okay and so he wrote a work called the letters to serape on serape on was a bishop in egypt who written to him about this and he says it kind of develops a biblical argument who says that look at the in scripture everything that god the father does the son does also and God the Holy Spirit does also there all three engaged in every form of activity so and he goes through a lot of passages you know with creation he says we'll look the spirit Spirit of God was hovering upon the waters God speaks presumably that's God the Father but he creates by speaking that's the logos the word that comes forth that is his creative power okay that's God the Son and so all three print persons are there at creation present and active if you look at the inspiration of the prophets you know that's the Word of God but for spicen because it is the word the logos it's God the logos and of course it's the Holy Spirit that inspires them if you look at the Incarnation well it was the Spirit who moved you know and and cupon came upon the Virgin Mary but everything that Christ does is the will of the Father you know in Christ says that repeatedly in the Gospel of John that I do nothing of myself only what the father has taught me so there's this synergy again okay and this does become a term used often by the patristic authors synergy here it has a little different connotation because we're not talking about divine human synergy we're talking about the synergy of the three persons of the Trinity okay how whatever they do they they have a common activity the common area all right and that's the argument that Afton asia's makes and the letter letters to Sir opulent he says scripturally they have the same in area and when it wherever there's the same in area there must be the same Lucia because the you SIA is the source of the narrative it's that that which is active in or through the entire Ghia all right and so he's sort of using I think you know in a way similar to Philo and Clement this notion of the divine Lucia has sort of God as he isn't himself except now he's shifted from the word Dunamis to the word in area because he wants to focus on the active prep activities that God performs in Scripture but he's the one who kind of introduces then that in a systematic way that contrast and correlation of Lucia and an area well then one last stage then the cabin oceans writing just shortly after Athanasian sand 360s 370's they take this idea and they kind of generalize it you know they agree and they amplify that idea that wherever there is one an area there's one who SIA but they say even more specifically kind of going back again to Philo you remember her Philo the word fails is the name of one of the divine powers well gregory of nyssa says the word Theo's is the name of a divine and area activity or operation although I think he actually it's maybe more than that here but at least let's taken that for the moment divine it's the name of a divine of an operation that God performs namely mad at oversight and care and provision for creation and he derives it from the verb they hasta which means to see and behold and it's actually kind of a tradition for the word fail that he uses there the reason he does this is because he wants to dislike phyllo he wants to say the you SIA has no name okay because for him just like phyllo and Clement and I think the whole Greek tradition the Apple fattest ISM has always got to be part of the way you're thinking about God even as you go on to give names of God and to describe what God does and what God is you know which they do profusely they always want to insist well that's never going to take us to sort of the inner reality of what God is that's known only to himself that idea no man can see my face and live okay they want to keep that and so the way they express it is by saying that the you SIA has no name it is beyond any name it's in fact they use some of this platonic language you know where the good is beyond being this is where Dionysus the erotic guy will come along and who used the phrase boo bear who co sucia that God is the who Peru CIO's he's being hasty beyond being being well anyway so for Gregory all the names that are give to God both Theo's but also in other words like good and powerful and wise and just and holy these are all names of divine and air guy okay so let me just complete the thought band because there is something I think that that implies the people who you know who heard us reading these works in translation often don't really in through it's usually translated as operation if you look at say Nicene and post nicing fathers though they're pretty consistent rendering an air via his operation and of course they're doing that you know coming out of the latin tradition where that was the traditional translation in the West the problem is going to be that if you think of it as an operation that God does each of these things as operations that God does and all the names that we use for God are names of these operations then whose operations are you know how do you ever identify the active subject performing those operations and so what I've argued in the book and other articles I've written is that what we see here is that Gregory is actually using that deeper level of the meaning of an area where it's not just an activity or operation it's actually a sort of an activity in which God is the active agent is present as bad activity all right in this again there's a parallel to this in Aristotle where the prime mover is a zone activity of thinking okay well the idea here it's not quite a it's not a simple identity it's more a sort of an active presence it's like the divine glory being the active presence of God well this activity of oversight that we give the name Theo's is not just something God does it's something that God is as he is manifest and present to us and that's what I think the end they won when we talk about the divine energies in Greek patristic theology that's what what that word means is God as he is present and can be experienced in them all right in all these different forms to which we give many different names but and they do contrast that to the divine who SIA which is again God as he is beyond knowing and the Asiya is the source of the energies it is manifested by the energies and they use analogies like the Sun and it's rays for example but it's not you know I know we want to talk about divine simplicity here at some point so let me just anticipate that it's not a Division of Parks it's it's a reality and the way that reality is is active yeah nation you know the one figure that comes up in this discussion all the time is San Agustin because we see his his explanation and really this is also a reaction to the Arianism that that that grew out in the fourth century and that is the the Old Testament in the Old Testament theophanies there were a lot of Bible scholars and Christian commentators that were saying that this was the the second person of the Trinity made manifest before his incarnation and one of the arguments that the Aryans were using was well if the second member of the Trinity of your Trinity is showing up in a sensible and visible way then that must mean he's a creature of some sort and so Agustin anticipated this objection well rather he saw the objection and his response to that was and interestingly enough I believe in letters 147 and 148 of agustín's epistolary he took he says that these these theophanies are not just the second person of the Trinity made manifest as if the second person of the Trinity he was passable sensible and visible because anything that's visible sensible impassible would have to be creature and so agonist ins gloss on these theophanies really seems to be understood by a lot of historical theologians I think of one Michelle Renee Barnes over at Marquette and in Wisconsin he thinks this is such a radical departure of how the Christians have understood the Old Testament theophanies that a God Agustin's latent distinction there is it renders God's presence in the world pretty much impossible and because of that pretty much the it seed in seed form the destruction of what the the Bible calls the Union that the gospel promises between human beings and God that leads to the next question though how can the divine operations the blind energies which are in some sense equal with God because they're uncreated they're there you know the the the Greek patristic tradition will come to say that these these manifestations of God in the Old Testament are uncreated and it leads to the question of how how can that which is admittedly being stated as beyond being impassable eternal invisible Vietnam sense how does that break into the created order and then manifest itself by sensory composition with visibility closed in with matter in the time-space format and then still be uncreated and I think a lot of the you know the medieval scholastics you know they would be scratching their heads and I'm sure they're missing some distinctive aspect of what became more fleshed out for example in Gregory Palamas well how could that be you know I mean for the listeners and because we have some listeners who are on the intermediate level beginning level of this subject how can we because from a lot of people what it looks like from the outside is that the East is trying to get God to participate with creation and so we can just break them into two pieces one piece is participial and other pieces in participial and wallah we solved the problem but obviously that's not what the East is saying because there's an admitted stuckness you know there's a glad acceptance of simplicity in God but at the same time the East is saying that there is this lúcia essence beyond being nothing basically the most in the thing absolutely which is no thing at all and then at the same time this manifestation energies these actions and operations that are equally uncreated as the essence but they're working in the time-space continuum how would used you know engage the beginner who's really looking at that and says huh how can we say that this is uncreated no well that's the ethics I'm really important to try to get a get your mind around this because it does have to do with the way we think about creation itself and the whole natural world you may know the book by Eric pearl called theophany yes yeah - is your up guide well I think pearl is I don't agree with Carl about everything but I do agree that for Dionysius and for the whole Greek patristic tradition especially sort of in the wake of Dionysius creation is theophany all of creation is a manifestation of God in some way and the way Dionysius gets to that is you know in Dionysius there's the who Peru CO CO SIA I was referring to you know sort of the the being beyond being that has no name that is unknowable and then there are the divine processions proto I and all the names are names of divine processions and he goes through these in his book divine names the first procession is the good or equivalently the beautiful okay and then you have that's in chapter 4 and chapter 5 you have being chapter 6 you have life chapter 7 wisdom and truth and knowledge and then others like power and so forth later what he's doing here is he's taking what for Plato had been forms all these would have been forms and Plato things that you know in Plato he would have said so visible things are what they are by participating in these four while Dionysius is reworking that idea to say visible things are what they are because God is active in them in these ways all right and so everything that exists you have that divine procession of being present there making it to be and living things you also have that a procession of life and in things that are alive and rational you also have the procession of wisdom or knowledge at least to some extent and and things you know that are active or active agents you have the procession of power and their other processions - like unity and so forth that are going to be present in all things but they're all processions and so you know it's a really tricky question than what it what does that word mean procession it is a Neoplatonic term he takes it for a purpose no question about that it's not though referring here to an emanation in the sense of a you know sort of those Platini and metaphors of an overflow or an automatic process it's referring to a conscious hat that God performs and now this is their complexities here not not every act is conscious is chosen in the sense that it could have been otherwise okay so my act of giving off heat and my heart beating and my my lungs breathing and so forth those are things I routinely regularly do they just sort of constitute me as a living being I'm aware of doing them I'm I'm not opposed to them in fact I'm very much in favor of them they're they're part of what make me what I am I do them voluntarily but they're not things that I choose okay I couldn't choose not to give off heat well so God could not choose not to be good or not to be being to be reality or not to have life and so forth these processions are already real in God as part of what he is what he does choose then is to manifest also at the level of creation okay and here's where this is where I mentioned I would disagree with pearl pearl actually has a more Neoplatonic reading Dionysius he thinks that bird iodine is this really isn't emanations I do not I think the Dionysius is sort of in the wake of the Cappadocia Fathers and he he thinks that God does choose to create and could have created otherwise but given that he does choose to create his creating consists in these divine processions being present and manifest within creatures okay and because of that everything the creatures are to the extent that it's real and what God means them to be is a manifestation of God of course the the counter side to that is the existence of evil and so the whole second half of chapter 4 the divine names is all about what is evil and this is where you know the privation theory of evil is very important and ideas has some wonderful things to say about how how evil is a sort of a a lack of being that is ultimately self-defeating and it's a choice not to be in a sense and so there is that but it's a kind of a shadow cast by the choice made by free creatures both the demons and us as humans but apart from evil everything in creation is theophany and if you think in those terms then the question about the biblical theophanies you know I think it's just it just kind of falls into place that the biblical theophanies are forms of theophany that are particularly vivid and focused and and manifest God in a higher and more clear and radiant way but all of creation is manifesting God at all times and so there's nothing particularly surprising that God manifests himself even more vividly in these particular events yeah you know as you know in you know san agustin in the City of God it's booked and paragraph 13 he talks about this seeming deficiency that his explanation of the theophanies would have because I'm assuming some people may have pushed back and said well you're not really dealing with God there you're dealing with a creative effect or you know just like a slug is created or a worm has created this divine theophany that you're calling it quote unquote it's still sub circumscribed into into the creature world and he responded to that and said that I would read the quote but it's too long he basically said that just like the thought of a human gets conveyed through you know the tongue and the you know the brain the tongue sound waves the person who's listening and receives the thought is receiving something about the person and he tried to analogize that with the Fiat Connect communication I guess a good analogy for today so that the listeners who are unfamiliar with this stuff could could could used is if I was speaking into a microphone and every person in the world had a radio to hear my voice and I was giving some sort of a powerful message about life or something the thoughts are originating in me but and then on the other end they're receiving the thought in the form of a procession out of my tongue formulating you know sound waves that gets translated it gets transverse Eve and then put into radio signal reproduced on another volumous sound format where they are i would not be equal to the sound waves or the the receiver of the microphone and the technology makes that radio transmission and I wouldn't be equal to the mind of the other person their ear in the way they receive it but at the same time they are receiving something about me that that began inherently in me and so Agustin would say that the we don't we we don't want to just put this all on the plane feel of creation as if there was no passing through of the divine and so he you know he comes up with this analogy of the of the thought and the way it gets conveyed none of those things in between are equal to me but at the same time they're carrying me in some way to the other person do you think that that do you think that that still comes far short of a kind of uncreated mode that that the Greek Christian tradition is trying to convey yeah I do I mean it's a valuable way to think about things you know Gustin was a great rhetorician and he you know you know the book de doctrina Christiana you know he has this very insightful analysis of what it is to signify and so forth so I don't want to say he's just wrong but I think if that's the only way you think about it then it's always going to be inadequate because it has room for the dimension of communication okay and that's what he's focusing on and that is part of what's taking place but what it doesn't have room for is the dimension of participation in that divine reality okay and for the Greek father's what they really found important in this whole discussion was the divine light what they were they ultimately referred to is the uncreated light that they see as you know what is manifest in these some of these Old Testament theophanies like the divine glow that descends on the temple but even more so at the Transfiguration and for them it's really really important that that light of Christ that glory of Christ that's radiant of the Transfiguration is something in which we can share right ontologically and this you find already in the Desert Fathers and in pseudo macarius and others that Marcus Plested has written about this others that to share in the divine life is also to share in that radiant glory that is eternally present to God and their stories and the Desert Fathers you know the fathers praying and just glowing with this light and saints him the new theologian you know who byzantine of the I guess the 11th century is famous for that for some of his experiences of that and then they think this certainly as well so that that's what I would say would be not there if you just focus on the dimension of communication good answer good answer thank you so much I'll pass it back to my uncle I'm done I appreciate that yeah you know I have a follow-up question because y'all we're talking about emanations from Dionysus I find that very interesting I have so many questions about Dionysius because I was recently reading through his treatise on the divine names but let me just at least stick to the imitation topic I was reading father copyist I guess is how you pronounce his name he was interacting with some of your material and you know other points and he was noting how it would seem that Paulo mas may have affirmed the pagan Proclus who taught that there were emanations from God do you agree with that if so does that maybe cause some problems for the Paulo my position no it not it not put that way maybe if what he means is that Palmas uses the word proto's procession that's certainly true because he just takes it over from Dionysius okay but I think in the in English the word emanation means something a little different from that at least typically when people use the word emanation and talking about Neoplatonism they're talking about something that comes forth through a sort of an automatic process that then takes on a self-subsistent reality of its own and that's what you get with the three hypotheses and plutinos that the one emanates intellect and then intellect is its own hypostasis that in turn emanates soul which is also its own hypostasis and Paulo mas is very clear that the energies are not hypotheses okay they are what he says they're an hypostatic which means that they have continuing in and in many cases an eternal reality so they're real and they but they're also an hypostatic in that they have to be present in a hypotheses I mean there were or the acts of a hypothesis and so there are still only three divine apostasy Father Son Holy Spirit okay what do you think in general father compasses work of your material have you read I'm sure you've read it what are your thoughts well he's written an awful lot you know he's an amazing scholar about late Byzantine period and I'm grateful for the work he's done particularly a mark of Ephesus it has helped to clarify Mark's role in relation to the later discussion of essence and energies I guess you're referring to that long review article yeah Paloma is among the Scholastic's where he's interacting with some of your material I'd have to look back specifically you know there he was dealing with that later anthology not with my book directly but with that anthology that was articles about my book and then had my response and sort of the main thrust of that review essay was to say well there needs to be a lot more attention to the statistic line and Western scholasticism and you know to the extent that they're critical of me I think it's because I didn't deal with SCOTUS in my book or and it he only came up fairly instead in this later anthology and so the authors of that review essay are I think at least some of them anywhere maybe all of them are Byzantine Catholics who Lucas CODIS has a potential sort of a bridge figure and there's some truth to this you know because SCOTUS has the formal would agree with that well I would agree that it's it's the fruitful area to look at and think about I would be I would caution against just what what a lot of people want to do is to sort of say so the Pala might distinction of essence and energies and just as the same as the statistic distinction formal distinction between the divine essence and attributes I would say to that kind of yes and no there's a lot of similarity but you've still got this basic difference of framework that an energy is an activity it's a it's a it's something that God does that in which he is manifest all right and so it's not a distinction of essence an attribute or subject an attribute like SCOTUS is addressing and one sign of that is that there are a lot of divine energies that are not attributes at all they're things like the gifts of the Spirit are our energies you know I mentioned earlier first Corinthians 12 was a very formative passage for this Greek concept also what Dynasty is a maxim is called the divine lowboy which are actually acts of will by which God individually wills each individual creature those are also divine energies for palamas so it's just a complicated comparison to try to make and people often focus on just that one aspect of the what they both say about divine attributes so I would have that caution but I do think it's a you know I would agree I think if I could rewrite my book I should have added a little bit about SCOTUS the truth is I had a word count if I had to try to fit under and I was already over it but in blood but yeah you know you may know Mark Spencer or you may have heard this article he wrote that was published in international philosophical quarterly I think 2017 and he teaches at the University of st. Thomas he's a very respected Thomas Tew scholar there in the philosophy department but he wrote this article about divine simplicity and Aquinas go to San Paolo mas in which he essentially said as a Thomas I want to incorporate what Skoda says about the formal distinction between the essence and the person's and what Paloma says about the sort of energetic distinction between the essence and the energies I think I can kind of be a Toma stand you know have my cake and eat it - mm-hmm because he went when he says he's a Thomas what he means is sort of in his metaphysics and the idea of the act of being and the identity and God essence and si and so forth he thinks all that's compatible with draw and further distinctions that Aquinas himself is not drawn so I you know that I think is a good kind of direction to look for how this discussion might want to go and cop you know father compass as well I think he's doing good work but I would just be cautious about kind of leaping onto the statistic bandwagon a little okay um I have few chat questions if it's okay for us to get to those oh yeah Pedro actually brings up a really interesting question because he brings up father Peter toddling a Dominican priest who has written about the issue between East and West when it comes to column ISM in fact he's going to be on the show later actually I was gonna say later this month we're still in August September 25th so he's gonna be on but in in the paper kind of towards the end he begins to interact with some of your material have you had a chance to read it and if so dude do you have any thoughts about it yeah I'm sorry could you come in that name again father Peter Peter totleben how do you spell that tio TL e in yeah I'm sorry I'm totally unfamiliar with that yeah and I'm trying to you know recall here what exactly he was saying cuz it's been a few months since I've read it but I was just curious if you had a chance to read it but yeah there there's a part there where he deals with your book Aristotle east and west and he's he essentially is saying that there really is no way to reconcile the view of the east and the west when it comes to essence energies but he would say this is on a lower level than dogmatic issues so it's essentially something that East and West can agree to disagree on what would you perhaps agree with that that perhaps these these views might be incompatible although they do not rise to a church dividing level as he puts it yeah I would agree with that although I got a qualified a little bit I'm a little cautious of this whole idea that there's sort of the core doctrines and then that there the audio fora you know that people can just form their own opinions and that actually is a kind of a Protestant formulation I think in terms of traditions I think in terms of what does it mean to be in a tradition in a way that you're seeking to learn from and sort of enculturate yourself to the way that the saints and the holy leaders of your tradition have have led you you know have brought you to and that tradition itself is very important okay and now there are different there multiple traditions in Christianity right there's certainly in the Eastern Western even within the West you could probably identify multiple traditions so I agree it's not a doctrinal issue I don't know of any dogmatic definition that would you know create a hard fast line here but at the same time what happened was that because the East had this way of thinking this more I think synergistic and participatory sort of framework and metaphysics it did lead to a different form of Christian life you might say then what developed in the West and I won't I don't want to say that's just sort of an optional thing or like a kind of a nice little frill that we can take it or leave it I actually think that way of life is very important and so that's the only qualification you know I think I don't I'm not a theologian at all really I don't deal in what's a dogmatic definition but I do deal as a philosopher and what are important philosophical frameworks that help to enable you know a rich and complete form of life and that's that's really what's most important to me okay Brandon Thorpe asks what do you think of the trends in dental argument for God's existence the logic is impossible without God it is there a corollary for it in tome ISM [Music] yeah roughly speaking I do endorse that argument and in fact I've given a kind of a version of it myself in an article that was in touchstone a couple of years ago does Aquinas have a version of that not to my knowledge I think it wouldn't be too difficult to kind of develop a domestic version because certainly the thought is there I mean the thought is clearly there in Augusta I think a Gustin would be a more direct place to look say particularly book two of his book on on free choice you know de libro of entry oh he talks about well how do we have our basic concepts by which we form judgments such as you know that the incorruptible is better than the corruptible that's I think one example he uses he thinks that those are not empirically derived they're rather part of the framework that we'll have to bring to bear in order to make empirical judgments and what he argues is that these basic concepts and sort of what we today would call authorized entrants are given to us by God as sort of a divine illumination present to the mind and that's what enables rational thought so that I think is you know a really valuable point to make and it's one way that by the way I think a Gustin you know a lot of things in Gustin they're not in the Greek father's been a very good but I think is one of them and he develops this particular line of thought more fully than anyone else among patristic authors and as you know people like Ansem and others develop this in various ways so a lot of ways you can go but I would I would agree with the basic idea okay and focus the gardener asks what is your assessment of Aquinas as Fiveways I'm pretty skeptical by and large so some of the reasons are sort of the stock reasons that most modern philosophers are skeptical that so much of it is built on an Aristotelian physics and particularly the idea that motion requires a mover who is continually active okay that's very important for the first way and even the second way and pretty much all five ways are coming out of the medial peripatetic tradition except with the exception of the fourth okay the fourth is more Augustinian it really comes I think by us at Nana's home but the third which is on necessity and contingency you know was developed originally by Avicenna and then formulated again by Maimonides and Aquinas is probably taking it and sort of summarizing it from those sources the reason I'm skeptical is so I mentioned Aristotelian physics and also when you get into these arguments where you're trying to argue there cannot be an infinite regress it gets very tricky sometimes aventurine regress are okay sometimes are not and you have to look very closely at what kind is at stake here the reason I'm worried of these in particular in in those first maybe the first three ways especially is that they do lean very directly to the idea of God as packed as purest all right and of course Aquinas embraces that the reason I'm worried that is that it's very hard to make room for divine freedom if you're going to have God as pure act with no unrealized capacities okay you know that's the heirs to T an idea that Aquinas adopts in this through the first way especially but also the second and third way well how then can God have unrealized capacities in the sense to create differently than he did that becomes a very problematic thing you know I talk about this in my book and many others have addressed it too and trying to find some answer but but the very fact that it's problematic the problem is created by the five ways okay and so that's why I kind of prefer to think about the existence of God differently more like the previous caller you know more like God as the ground rationality and which I think also incorporates the role of faith in a way that the five ways really do not that's another sort of drive I have against the five ways is that they're so systematic they're so sort of quasi scientific that you indra i'm wondering well where where does faith enter into this because these are things I know rationally based on empirical thought and reason so that to it ends up kind of making face the faith the caboose with reason pulling the Train you know and I just don't think that's a good way to kind of formulate things well what is the relationship between Palmas in philosophy get mixed reviews I've read the Triads and it seems that he is a little skeptical of philosophy was still embraces it and it seems in his later works he employs it so does Damascene apparently and so does Galerius and so would you say that the proponents of the essence and energies distinction are generally hostile towards philosophy are they generally just skeptical but they employ it or did they just use a wholesale or you know what what really exactly is the relationship between faith and reason among them well okay so first thing to realize is the word philosophy can mean a lot of different things and one thing it meant in the Byzantine tradition was Christianity itself you know and that goes back to some of the early fathers like Justin Martyr and clement of alexandria for whom christianity is simply the true philosophy because philosophy is one of wisdom christ is the divine wisdom he is Sophia and so the love of wisdom properly understood is the love of Christ and what happened in in re Christianity was that then that understanding sort of got refined a little bit so that philosophy became in many contexts a synonym for the monastic life because it's in the monastic life that once sort of dedicates oneself wholly and completely to the love of Christ without any distractions from the world so another meaning that the word took on was sort of a monastic or ascetic pursuit of Christ at the expense of bodily pleasure and and goods obviously those philosophy and those sense you know was Palmas was a philosopher in that sense what you're really asking about is the role of what they would have called the external learning because that was the term used in Byzantium for this sort of external curriculum external in the sense it was derived from non-christian authors where he read Aristotle's Organon and some commentators on the organ primarily as the basis of your secular education Palmas had had that kind of education and you know where criticizes or announces it and in fact you probably know one of his early works he defended the use of syllogistic reasoning in theology against Farland who had protected he had no problem with Aristotelian logic I think though for him it's it's very much of a kind of preparatory set of tool toolkit but not you know what they would never say you know in scholasticism you got this idea that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology and so the philosophy becomes like a sort of a constant aid there to help you and they didn't think they did never raised it to quite that level to them it was more like I said a sort of a toolkit useful terms useful distinctions nothing wrong with using those but if we're doing Christian theology we have to listen always first to the Christian father's right well in one of the reasons why I bring this up is because from what I was reading it seems that it was actually barb Lam who said syllogisms cannot be employed for theological formulations because he was given the task of refuting those who maintain the Filioque and one of his one of his reputations was well you know you should be using syllogisms to formulate theological positions whereas it seems that Palomares took the opposite and employed syllogisms for theological formulations would that be accurate or am i entirely off-base here didn't did Paula Moss and some of the other fellow might successors did they not employ syllogisms and their use in theological formulations yeah no that's and that is correct yeah the work he wrote against Berlin was called the apodictic treatises and apodictic means demonstrative right and they're defending the possibility of demonstration in theology particularly in relation to the Filioque issue now having said bad it's also true I think when he writes about essence and energies he's much more dispersive and you don't find it formulated very often in simple syllogistic form there's a lot of appeal to Authority and a lot of an attempt to sort of cash out what's presupposed by the experience of the Hezekiah monks but he has no objection to syllogism and principle certainly right okay and last question to posit distinct divinities ie uncreated essences is not uncreated energies as Eastern Orthodox say or do doesn't this equate to two gods yeah you know I saw a video somewhere yeah that was by the diamond brothers yeah they're right there setting the contest and that's essentially what they are positing so how would you respond to that okay well you got to know what the word divinity peyote's means in Greek and how it's used in Greek you know I was talking a while ago about how the word word Theo's God in Greek for the greek fathers like rigored Nisa is the name in the name of a divine energy and Dionysus is the one he comes along and he kind of he makes Theo tease divinity a name of a divine procession okay so kind of just following in the footsteps of Gregory on that point and for him what that means is it's the divine procession just like being is the divine procession in which God gives being two creatures feo T's is the divine procession in which God bfi's creatures because belief in theosis deification is very important you know to this whole tradition and they believe that that is the aim of human life is to be deified and of course let's understand what that means it doesn't mean ever participating in the divine essence or being equal to God in that sense it means participating in the divine energies well alright so that's what the word feo T's means and so it is already in Dionysius you've got this sort of you know there's the Hooper who she owes you SIA and then there's the Theo tase which is the divine procession and so Paula masa does a doc that sort of distinction and say there's one there's sort of a higher Theo T's divinity and a lower Theo T but that's all it means it's just the old Dionysian distinction between the Hooper osios Lucia and the divine processions and that's really all it is yeah you know you know when I read Dionysius I guess I get a little confused I guess because it seems that he seems to be asserting that God is beyond being and I I guess I just I'm trying to understand what exactly he means by that because elsewhere it seems that he defines that as simply meaning that God is just beyond any other kind of being but then in other places it almost sounds like he's saying he has no big in this you know higher divinity could you maybe clarify that for me if you don't mind yeah I agree it's a puzzling term but I don't think the idea is really anything new compared to the earlier authors like Philo and Clement and the Kappa Dacians because all of them already had this idea that the divine Lucia has no name and no form or intelligible structure that could be an object of cognition of gnosis and all the Dionysus is doing is taking that idea that very traditional idea and kind of giving it a fancier name because he wants to incorporate this terminology from Plato that the good is beyond being taken a taste Perseus which is in the Republic and the myth of the Sun part of the Republic well okay let's so really to understand this language you have to go back to play know what Plato means when he says the good is beyond being Lucia he doesn't mean that the good doesn't exist I mean obviously it exists it's in fact the highest reality the source of all other reality but the idea is that precisely because it is the source of SIA being it is beyond me so Lucia here would be the being of any particular thing that has some definite form okay eligible structure that's what you see it yes and that's also how the word is used by Aristotle when he in the metaphysics is a doe when he identifies Lucia with poor fineness and that became sort of the predominant philosophical meaning of that term so when they say that God is that the divine Lucia is beyond Lucia that's sort of what Dionysus is saying oh he means is that whatever God is it's the source of Lucia as we know it but I'm still going to call it the Hooper who co-co-co because there's no better word in Greek right there's no other word he can use for that which is real other than Lucia so you're still stuck with that term so what he does is to use that term and then sort of transcend it in the same breath you know who bear who she owes beyond the beyond who Cena Lucia is what he's saying okay two meanings of it one meaning it's the more specific something that has definite form the other meaning is the broader anything that's real okay good I really appreciate that clarification and everything else that you've been able to discuss with us today I don't see any other chat question so I guess we'll go ahead and call it there but thank you so much for coming on the show this has been excellent extremely enlightening I can't tell you how grateful I am for your time and what you've done for us today thank you so much well thank you both for having me I enjoyed it and I hope it'll be helpful thank you again in the future oh I hope so yeah yeah absolutely and and also how can the viewers maybe learn more about you you mentioned the academy a link is there anything else that you would point them to well the book I think would be the main place to go if they really want to delve in more deeply and Academy aside does have a lot of articles I've written since the book and some of them do sort of summarize the main points there's one called the concept of the divine energies that is really largely a summary of the book and actually you know we're talking about Aquinas a while ago there was a conference paper I gave at a conference on Aquinas and the Greek fathers that was held at Ave Maria College a couple years back and it's just on Aquinas and the essence energies distinction and the first half of that paper is simply summarizing the essence energies distinction where it came from you know some of these patristic sources and then the second half is looking at Aquinas and that issue of divine freedom and I actually do talk there a little bit about Mark Spencer's paper and and the comparison to SCOTUS as well so that's just a like a 15 page paper so it's a shorter work that might address a lot of these issues and is then edu it is there's a section there and for conference papers so yeah either okay well very good I'd love to have you on again there's so much more that we could discuss I think it would be helpful maybe to have you on some time and we could also get a tow mist and a SCOTUS on and we can have a roundtable discussion but yeah I think that would be very very helpful but we'll talk more about it off the air but again thank you so much for coming on this was extremely enlightening and helpful okay I'm not play all right in Eric again always a pleasure thank you for coming on you know thank you again we'll see you next time all right everybody please like comment subscribe take a look at the reason in theology comm website click on show and you'll see all kinds of stuff coming up for September and October but everybody thank you for watching God bless and until next time go share your faith

Channel: Reason & Theology

Views: 9,408

Keywords: reason and theology, david bradshaw, essence/energies, philosophy, gregory palama

Id: 5b6CRoI980k

Length: 94min 32sec (5672 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2019