Divine energies

The distinction between God’s essence (ousia) and God’s energies (energeiai) is the central teaching of Gregory Palamas and of later Orthodox theology. God’s essence is wholly beyond creatures and can never be known or shared. God’s energies are God’s uncreated activities, God’s life, power and grace, by which God is truly present in creation and truly shared with the saints.

Palamas developed the distinction in the fourteenth century to defend the hesychast monks of Mount Athos, who claimed to see in prayer a divine light, identified with the light of Christ’s transfiguration on Mount Tabor. Their critic Barlaam of Calabria argued that such a light must be either created, and so not God, or God’s essence, which cannot be seen. Palamas answered that the light is uncreated and divine, yet not the essence: it is God’s energy.

Church councils in Constantinople in the 1340s and 1351 endorsed Palamas’s teaching. Western theologians have often criticized the distinction as compromising divine simplicity; Orthodox theologians regard it as the condition of real communion with God without pantheism.