Gregory Pajamas' Radicalization of the Essence, Energies, and Hypostasis Model of God

Thomas L. Anastos, The Greek Orthodox Theologiacal Review,
Volume 38, Numbers 1-4, 1993, pages 335- 349

GREGORY PALAMAS' THEORY OF DEIFICATION, THE IMMEDIATE Ex­perience of God by a created being in and through divine grace is spun through the terms and logic of the essence, energies, and hypostasis scheme previously embodied by Palamas' predecessors, for its demonstrated utility in the Trinitarian and Christological debates. For want of a better term, the essence, energies, and hypostasis scheme will be referred to throughout as a conceptual model, a metaphysical explanation of created being appropriately qualified in order to develop a theory of God, or a theology.

The conceptual enhancements Palamas made to the model are a function of the use to which we put it, that being to explain the vertical relationship between God and created being culminating in deification. Palamas radicalized the model in two opposing directions: the theory of deification conceptualized the immediate experience of God by created being, and this in turn provoked the theological restatement of God's transcendence over created being.

Palamas' theology is not a model of clarity, the reason for this being that he theologized true to the apophaticism which serves as the baseline for all Eastern theology. Crispness of concept for Palamas gives way to the ultimate primitive of God's unknownability, setting the stage for a programmed and self-conscious destabilization of theological language.

The Baseline Apophaticism

The baseline apophaticism underlying Palamas' theology is that God, as uncreated, is beyond all being and therefore incomprehen­sible and inexpressible. 1 It is a recognition of the deficiences of created beings' knowledge of and language about God, a recogni­tion from the outset of the restrictions and limitations on theological language. According to Palamas:

Every nature is as far removed as possible from the divine nature, and is absolutely foreign to him: if God is nature, then all other beings are not that; and if any other being different from God is nature, he is not that, just as he is not a being if the others are. 2

All language about God is defective to one degree or another because God is outside the world of being and “every concept which strives from below towards the One who transcends all and is separated from all comes to a halt once detached from all created beings.” 3 Palamas goes as far as to say that God so transcends the senses that man cannot possibly model God's characteristics after created be­ings. 4

The baseline apophaticism governs the interpretation of the essence, energies, and hypostasis model as employed by Palamas which, like all other conceptual schemes, must not come to a halt once detached from created beings. The model is employed theologically under the proviso that its inadequacy in the face of God's ontological transcendence receive equal billing alongside its intricate conceptual framework. Theological language, while conceptualizing created beings' experience of God, must also call attention to and acknowledge its own shortcomings.

The first imprint of the baseline apophaticism is the distinction between profane knowledge and the true knowledge of God which can be acquired through man's natural faculties with divine assistance. Profane wisdom can be acquired by anyone and its object is exclusively the natural world. No worthy conception of God can be attained through the intellect alone, as true knowledge of God comes from God, leads to God, and conforms to God the one who acquires it. 5

The knowledge of God accessible to man through his ‘natural eye' is ‘‘the apprehansion of power, wisdom, and providence of God, and in general knowledge of the Creator through the creatures.” 6 As op­posed to profane knowledge, which is a gift of God accorded to all, spiritual knowledge is a supernatural gift accorded only to those who are worthy of it. 7 A basic fear of God and the form of life which ac­companies it—prayer, practice of the commandments, love of God— are the prerequisites to adequate knowledge of divine things. 8 A spiritual philosopher gains true knowledge of beings, and from such a knowledge the existence of God and his attributes can be infer­red. 9

The positive and negative theology resulting from man's natural faculties with divine assistance is true knowledge of God but, as a result of the baseline apophaticism, Palamas downplays its intrinsic value. Such knowledge is always analogous, as it is mediated through creatures.

Mediate positive and negative theology then can take a distant second to the vision of God:

As the act of submitting to and seeing divine things differs from cataphatic theology and is superior to it, the act of sub­mitting to negation in the spiritual vision, negation linked to the transcendence of the object, differs from negative theology and is superior to it. 10

The light in which man meets God is superior to the light of knowledge, superior even to the light of the Scriptures." Similarly, negation, its goal being to remove the mind from the realm of being, is inferior to the vision of God:

But, despite this inexpressible character, negation alone does not suffice to enable the intellect to attain to superintelligible things. The ascent by negation is in fact only an apprehen­sion of how all things are distinct from God; it conveys only an image of the formless contemplation and of the fulfillment of the mind in contemplation, not being itself that fulfillment. 12

Positive and negative theology are subordinate to the vision of God because God is beyond both knowing and unknowing. 13

The influence of the baseline apophaticism culminates in the description of the immediate vision of God. While God is knowable through the meditation of creation, mystical “knowledge” of God is the manifestation of God's incomprehensibility. God transcends every intellectual light and the face-to-face encounter with or vision of God is an ineffable experience which surpasses linguistic expres­sion. 14 Palamas admits that he is trying to express the inexpressible, and his choice of language signals his apprehension. 15

The ontological gulf separating God and created being prohibits any direct contact between the two insofar as the created subject's natural senses and intellect are concerned. No created being, be it a man or an angel, can see God through its natural faculties for percep­tion. 16 The uncreated can be seen only by the uncreated, meaning that if a created being is to “see” or “know” God, then its senses and intellect must first be radically transformed:

And what I am to say of this union, only when the brief vision itself is manifested only to chosen disciples, disengaged by ecstasy from all perception of the senses or intellect, admitted to true vision because they have ceased to see, and endowed with supernatural senses by their submission to unknowing . . . their organ of vision was properly speaking neither the senses nor the intellect. 17

Uncreated divine grace is the supernatural “addition” which enables created beings to transcend their normal capabilities. Grace makes the nous divine, “uncreating” it so that raised to the proper ontological level it is able to receive divine things. 18 The ontological gulf between God and created being is crossed in deification, as the created subject “transcends humanity, is already God by grace; he is united to God and sees God by God.” 19

Transformed by grace, the created being's natural faculties are in a state referred to as one of “inaction surpassing action,” a divine state which words cannot adequately describe. 20 No substantive knowledge of God arises in the union in the divine light, and Palamas concedes that it is ‘intelligible' only in a very extended sense of the term. 21 The union with God takes place beyond both knowing and unknowing, and Palamas notes that it could just as easily be called “ignorance” as “knowledge”. 22 The light is indescribable and in­conceivable; the mind becomes the light and sees by the light, but it is incapable of distinguishing its means of seeing, the object it sees, or the nature of the object. 23

All that clearly arises from the experience of God in the light is the fact that the light is divine, and that it, God, is incomprehensi­ble. The light “bears the mark of the Master” in that it accomplishes the transcendence of created being. 24 God's incomprehensibility is first manifest in the inadequancy of mediate knowledge of God, and “in the spiritual vision itself, the transcendent light of God appears only more completely hidden. 25 The incomprehensibility of God is more perfectly recognized in the immediate vision of God then it is when God is approached mediately through either symbols, concepts or negation. 26

The linguistic twists and juxtapositions to which Palamas resorts while nominally within the framework of explaining the various modes of knowledge of God draw attention back onto the object of the in­quiry itself and reveal the commanding influence of the baseline apophatism. That is, “these possessions and gifts are ineffable: If one speaks of them, one must have resource to images and analogies—not because that is the way in which these things are seen, but because one cannot adumbrate what one has seen in any other way.” 27 Spiritual knowledge is marked off from profane knowledge, the ob­ject of which is the natural world. Spiritual knowledge, which culminates in mediate positive and negative theology, is then marked off from the vision of God in deification, which is beyond both affir­mation and negation because “deification is in fact beyond every name.” 28 In deification God then appears as an “intellectual light” to the uncreated created subject who is in a state labeled as one of “inaction surpassing action,” a state in which the subject ‘com­prehends incomprehensibly.' As a result of the ontological separa­tion between God and created being, the potential for knowledge of God varies inversely with the intimacy of contact between the two.

The Radicalization Wrought by Deification: Energies vs. Personalism

Deification theory as expounded by Palamas revolves around the essence and energies moment of the model to conceptualize God's inaccessibility and accessibility, but the hypostatic element is always implicitly present. Palamas' theology of “essence and energies” makes sense only within the context of the general scheme of essence, energies, and hypostasis used by his predecessors to model God's Trinitarian existence and the union of God and man in Christ. Palamas was not a radical innovator; he concentrated on and developed the meanings of “essence” and “energies” in relation to God's inac­cessibility and accessibility, and the semantical shifts he made are intelligible only within the context of the preexisting theological tradition.

Palamas' methodology of qualifying the familiar technical terms of essence, energies and hypostasis in order to accommodate a theory of deification was in keeping with that employed by his predecessors, the Cappadocians. In short form, Gregory of Nyssa and Basil ap­propriated the Aristotelian terms essence, energies, and hypostasis, colored them where necessary with platonic hues and recast their meanings in order to conceptualize the unity of the Trinity and the Trinity of the unity. The changes made in converting the triad from a metaphysical description of created being into a theological model included, among other things, that one divine hypostasis can enact one and the same divine essence, that the three divine hypostases share identically the same energies, and that the divine hypostases are differentiated according to their mode of origin rather than through their qualitatively distinct energies. The three divine hypostases enact identically one and the same divine essence and ex­hibit identically one and the same energies. The hypostases are in­dividuated according to the peculiar mode of origin each has, these modes being a function of the divine essence.

For the Cappadocians the conceptualization provided by the model accounted by the antinomy of the inaccessibility and accessibility of God by saying that man knows and names the three divine hypostases who are God through their concrete energetic enactment of the in­comprehensible divine essence, much in the same way that humans come to know and name one another. All attributes of God—his greatness, power, wisdom and goodness, for example—are common attributes of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rather than attributes of the divine essence. 29 Essences are not wise or good. Individual personal beings are, their wisdom or goodness being manifest in their concrete acts or energies.

Gregory of Nyssa's theory of divine names demostrates the pro­minent role of the personalized hypostatic element of the model. The attributes of God are personal attributes of the Father, Son, and Ho­ly Spirit rather than attributes of the divine essence. The energies of God lead directly to knowledge of the hypostatic subject who together are God—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the hypostases which are responsible for the concrete energetic enactment of the divine essence. The attributes of God contemplated only in the in­dividual hypostatic subjects, as by definition no essence itself “acts.” In the statement “God is a judge,” Nyssa says, “we conceive of him some operation judgement, and by the “is” carry our minds to the subject, and are hereby clearly taught not to suppose that the ac­count of his being is the same with the action. 30 The Son is called by various names—Shepherd, King, Physician, Bridegroon—but “these titles do not describe his nature, but. . . are concerned with his manifold energies, by which he satisfies the needs of each of his tenderheartedness to his own creation.” 31

The divine names signify only the diversity of God's energies, his activities in creating and maintaining the world, and “we are none the more able to learn by our knowledge of his operations the nature of him who works.” 32 Even the names “Godhead” and “God,” Gregory says, are derived from the divine energies. 33

While Cappadocians used a limited essence, energies, and hypostasis model to conceptualize God's noetic accesssibility and in­accessibility, Palamas needed more from the triad in order to con­ceptualize the crossing of the ontological gulf between God and man in deification. In short, he needed an explanation for what grace is, and how it works. The essence and energies distinction provided a mechanism for explaining the vertical movement of man to God, and vice-versa, and, therefore, the intimate and direct contact between God and man.

Virtually all of the elements of Palamas' conceptualization of his vertical movement are apparent in the following:

But you should not consider that God allows himself to be seen in his superessential essence, but according to his deifying gift and energy, the grace of adoption, the uncreated deification, the enhypostatic illumination. You should think that that is the principle of divinity, the deifying gift, in which one may supernaturally communicate, which one may see and with which one may be united. But the essence of God, which is beyond principle, transcends this principle, too. 34

The basic principle behind the theory of deification is that God acts in and through the deified individual as the nous is energized or put into action by the divine energies rather than according to the energies defined by the created essence of the individual. 35 In accord with the Eastern version of the nature and grace distinction that the fulfill­ment of created being is its return to its uncreated Creator, Palamas points out that the nous has the ability—naturally, but as a function of divine grace—to transcend itself, to assume the divine energies as its “natural” activity. 36 Deification is a gratuitous state wherein the created subject objectively transcends its ontological level as it is adopted by God and given the status of the uncreated realm: “Those who attain it become thereby uncreated, unoriginate and in­describable, although in their own nature they derive from nothingness.” 37

The deifying energy is a function of the superessential essence of the Holy Spirit. 38 It is enhypostatic, meaning that as an energy having no hypostatic independent existence of its own, it exists as a function of the three divine hypostases insofar as they enact the divine essence, and it exists gratuitously in created hypostases which are given the privilege of ‘acting' the divine essence. 39

The intimacy of the contact between God and man accentuates the radical nature of accessibility of God in the divine energies and heralds Palamas' departure from the Cappadocians' more limited understanding and use of the energies component. One possible description of the created subject's encounter with God—the descrip­tion which have followed from the Cappadocians' personalistic understanding of the divine energies—would be that it occurs ‘energies to energies' in the same fashion in which all hypostases come into contact with one another. God and man would meet in the manner of a personal encounter between two hypostatic beings of the same ontological stature.

According to Palamas' interpretation of deification, however, it is not merely the case that the deified subject is given to the uncreated realm. Rather with God as the only being who occupies that realm, the deified being is energetically united to the Father, Son, and Ho­ly Spirit who enhypostatically dwell in him. The divine energies dynamically act through the ‘uncreated' deified subject making him, by adoption, all that God is by nature:

This energy does not manifest itself in deified creatures, as art does in the work of art; for it is thus that the creative power manifests itself in the things created by it, becoming thereby universally visible and at the same time reflected in them. On the contrary, deification manifests itself in these creatures ‘as art in the man who has acquired it,' according to Basil the Great. 40

Deification is becoming God, seeing through the eyes of God, rather than more modestly being able to see God though transformed by grace. God is contemplated as the divine energies of the divine form of being are passed on to a created hypostasis. The result is an en­counter between God and man such that, still hypostatically distinct, the Trinity and the deified individual are energetically one. 41

The state of “inaction surpassing action” is one in which the natural ‘action' of a being—the energies of the being as they are enacted by its hypostasis—are suspended as the divine energies of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are acted through it. 42 The deified that is “have received an energy identical to that of the deifying essence,” without, of course, receiving the divine essence itself. 43 The hypostasis of deified individual graciously acts the divine essence, theoretically alongside and in harmony with the identical enactment of the divine essence by the three divine hypostases. Uncreated by grace, by the divine energy of deification, the deified individual hears, sees, and comprehends by the incomprehensible Holy Spirit, 41 mean­ing that it is able to hypostatically exhibit otherwise energies, such as prophesizing, speaking in tongues, and healing. 45

Palamas' theory of deification, built on the framework laid by his predecessors, breaks down much of the barrier of mediation bet­ween God and created being as the deified subject, while maintain­ing its created essential and hypostatic elements, is united with God in the uncreated energies. It remains true to the apophaticism, however, as the inaccessibility of God is proserved in three levels. In the first instance, the apophaticism itself dictates the theory's in­adequacy, as all language comes to a halt when removed from created being. The drive toward conceptualization is pitted unrelentingly against God's ineffability. Secondly, within the theory itself the inaccessibility of the uncreated realm is preserved by the fact that no knowledge of God results from the unions as the deified nous com­prehends incomprehensibly. Finally, and again within the theory itself, the inaccessibility of God is preserved by the radical transcendence of the divine essence, a transcendence which is a necessary reaction to the intimacy of the union in the divine energies.

Radicalization Part 2: Essence vs. Superessence

In conceptualizing the experienced dichotomy of God's mediate accessibility and his absolute inaccessibility, the Cappadocians posited that God is known and named according to his energies, his works in creating and maintaining the created world, 46 but that the essence of God is inaccessible and unknowable. For Gregory the Theologian God's nature was incomprehensible and illimitable. 47 Ac­cording to Gregory of Nyssa, the divine essence “transcends every act of comprehensive knowledge, and it cannot be apprehended or attained by our speculation.” 48 Basil summed up the matter by holding that the divine essence is so incomprehensible that “knowledge of the divine essence involves perception of his incom­prehensibility, and the object of our worship is not that of which we comprehend the essence, but of which we comprehend that the essence exists.” 49

According to the logic of the essence and energies model, God's perceived self-manifestation presupposes that the essence of God exists; the self-manifestation marks the essence's existence but does not reveal what it is in itself. The divine energies of the three divine hypostases performed in creating and maintaining the world reveal the identical definite descriptions of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit 50 and only indirectly manifest the existence of the incomprehensible essence of God. The idea man has of God, or actually of the identical energies of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit who are God, arises from his (their) operations or energies; the essence which transcends these energies and which is responsible for them remains wholly inaccessible.

Palamas agreed that the essence of God transcends the knowledge of God derived from God's self-exteriorization in his energies and that all God-talk refers to God's energies rather than to his essence. The essence of God is inequivocally unknowable, as God is known and named through the divine energies: “But the divine essence that transcends all names, also surpasses energy ... and he who is beyond every name transcends what is named according to the same measure.” 51 The divine essence transcends all affirmation and nega­tion, 52 to the extent that the term ‘essence of God' is itself misleading. The term “essence” is so laden with conceptual content that it cannot properly be used to indicate the absolute inaccessibility of God, and Palamas in fact went so far as to say that ‘essence' when used in respect to God actually designates one of the divine energies, the substantifying one. 53

In conceptualizing the vertical movement of man to God as op­posed to theorizing regarding knowledge of and language about God, Palamas needed more from the “essence” term that did his predecessors. Conceptualization of deification through the essence and energies distinction required a retrenchment of the inaccessibility of the God in light of the intimacy of contact in the divine energies and the threat of complete ontological confusion. Accordingly, Palamas chose to signify the radical transcendence of the inaccessible aspect of God by qualifying “essence” with “superessential” or replacing it altogether with “superessence”:

Thus, neither the uncreated goodness, nor the eternal glory, nor the divine life nor things akin to these are simply the superessential essence of God, for God transcends them all as Cause. But we say that he is life, goodness and so forth, and gave him these names, because of the revelatory energies and powers of the Superessential. 54

The substitution of superessence for essence linguistically dramatized the inaccessibility of God which remains beyond the state of deifica­tion. “Superessence” for Palamas denoted the absolutely transcen­dent, inaccessible, incommunicable, and imparticipable aspect of God which defines the divine being as what it is. The superessential essence of God transcends all linguistic distinctions, including that between being and non-being. Even the primitive uncreated/created distinc­tion would appear to be inoperative beyond the level of the divine energies.

The radicalization of the transcendence of the divine essence in the Palamite theology is a necessary reaction to the pressure applied to the model by Palamas account of the radical nature of God's ac­cessibility in the divine energies. While the Cappadocians asserted the inaccessibility of the divine essence, Palamas' use of the model to account for the intimate contact between God and man required an added layer of protection to safeguard God's inaccessibility. The ontological gap between God and created being is crossed in deifica­tion, with the resultant danger that God's inaccessibility would be lost in God's immediate accessibility. The incorporation of the adjective “superessential” into the model creates a new level of in­accessibility which successfully skirts this danger. Conceptually, the term “superessence” designates the radical transcendent essence of God which defines the divine form of being and which is identically enacted by the three divine hypostases. Logically, “superessence” functions as nothing more that a designator for that part of God which is wholly and absolutely inaccessible, the what of God. In deification the ontological gap between created and uncreated realms is cross­ed via the uncreated divine energies, but beyond this distinction there is something of God which is absolutely inaccessible, designated by the term “superessence.”

The superessential essence of God, as the term itself indicates through its meaningless hyperbole, is nameless; God is named on the basis of the “revelatory energies and powers of the Superessential.” 55 Even the name “God” refers to the deifying energy, the result effected by this particular energy being the deifica­tion of created being. 56 That is, “the Holy Fathers affirm unanimously that it is impossible to find a name to manifest the nature

of the uncreated Trinity, but that the names belong to the I energies.” 57 The referrent of the divine names is God, but not the j divine superessence; the divine names refer directly to the divine energies which are immediately a function of the three divine hypostases.

The end result is a sophisticated interplay between the baseline apophaticism and theological language. Negative theology is the move­ment which runs in opposition to the drive towards conceptualiza­tion, a movement resulting from the ontological separation between the uncreated and created being which dictates that all theological language is deficient. God really is not what the divine names say he is. Nor is God what the divine model says he is. God is known and named on the basis of the divine energies, but the ontological transcendence of God has a constant destabilizing affect on this pro­cess; positive and negative theology dialectically influence and op­pose one another in a movement which mirrors God's inaccessibility and accessibility, a movement which recognizes and accepts the premises of the apophaticism.

The hierarchy of God's noetic, linguistic, and experiential rela­tionship with the created world as sketched by Palamas illustrates the interplay between God's inaccessibility and accessibility. Positive and negative theology are a function primarily of the knowability of God through creation, as God is known and named indirectly accor­ding to the results produced by his energies acting in creation. The full thrust of the uncreated/created distinction is operative at this level, as man is wholly unable to penetrate the ontological dimen­sion in which God resides.

God is then directly accessible in the divine energies. The object of the vision in deification is technically inaccessible, in that as created being cannot approach the divine energies. Deification requires the “uncreation,” and is beyond sensation, intellection and all forms of knowledge. The divine light transcends all beings, 58 or, as Palamas equates the two, all “created things.” 59 The deified subject ‘sees' the divine light to the extent that the subject is “uncreated,” but no knowledge follows from this state. God's noetic accessibility decreases as his experiential accessibility increases.

There is, however, a third level to the hierarchy which signifies God's absolute inaccessibility, a level which technically transcends and exists even beyond the uncreated/created distinction. The superessential essence of God transcends the inaccessibility and ac­cessibility of the divine energies. “God” and all of the rest of the divine names refer to the three divine hypostases based on the divine energies. The name “God” itself refers to the deifying energy. The divine superessence, however, is “more than God,” more than the energetic revelation of God, existing beyond all affirmation and nega­tion. 60 God is both “God,” the sum of the names attributed to God based on the divine energies, and “more than God,” the superessential divine essence. 61 There is a not-being by transcendence which is ac­cessible to created things when they are uncreated, a not-being which is not the divine essence; the superessential essence of God logically transcends even this not-being. 62

The inaccessibility of God dominates or at least counterbalances God's accessibility, even given the intimacy of the contact with God in deification. The knowledge of God expressed in positive theology is inadequate, and negative theology—the creation of a void—is in­ferior to the real presence of God. When created being crosses into the uncreated dimension, it experiences both the immediate presence of the God and God's incomprehensibility. Beyond this, however, there still lies the hypertheos, the “more than God,” the absolutely inac­cessible superessential essence of God.

1. Tr. 1.3.10, 2.3.17.

2. Physieal, Theological, Moral and Practical Chapters, 78, PG 150.1176B. Trans. John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas (London, 1974) p. 162.

3. Tr. 1.3.18. Gentle translation, p. 35, Italics mine.

4. Tr. 2.3.5.

5. Tr. 1.1.3.

6. Tr. 2.3.15. Translation by Nicholas Gendle (New York, 1983), p. 60.

7. Tr. 2.1.25.

8. Tr. 1.1.7.

9. Tr. 2.3.44.

I0. Tr. 2.3.26.

11. Tr. 2.3.18.

12. Tr. 1.3.19. Gendle translation, p. 36.

13. Tr. 1.3.4.

14. Tr. 1.3.4.

15. Tr. 1.3.19.

I6.Tr. 2.3.31.

17. Tr. 2.3.17. Gendle translation, p. 35.

l8. Tr. 2.3.36. Gendle translation, p.66

19. Tr. 2.3.52.

20. Tr. 1.3.19.

21. Tr. 2.3.6.

22. Tr. 2.3.33.

23. Tr. 2.3.36.

24. Tr. 2.3.9.

25. Tr. 2.3.31.

26. Tr. 2.3.57.

27. Tr. 1.3.18. Gendle translation, p. 36.

28. Tr. 3.1.32. Gendle translation, p. 87.

29. See Basil's Ep. 234, PG 32.868C.

30. Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomios, 7.5, PG 45.761C. Traslation from LNPF 5, p. 198

31. Basil, On the Holy Spirit, PG 32.97A. Translation by David Anderson (New York, 1980) p. 35.

32. Gregory of Nyssa,On the Holy Trinity, p.80, par.8, Mercati edition. Translation from LNPF 5, p. 329.

33. 0n the Holy Trinity, p.80, par.8, Mercati edition; On Not Three Gods, PG 45.121D, respectively.

34. Tr. 3.1.29. Gendle translation, p. 84.

35. Tr. 2.3.24, 2.3.48.

36. Tr. 1.3.45.

37. Tr. 3.1.31. Gendle translation, p. 86.

38. Tr. 3.1.8.

39. Tr. 3.1.9, 3.1.18.

40. Tr. 3.1.33. Gendle translation, p. 88.

41. Tr. 2.3.36. Gendle translation, p. 66.

42. Tr. 2.3.6., 2.3.31.

43. Tr. 3.1.33.

44. Tr. 1.3.18.

45. Tr 2.2.11.

46. Basil, Ep. 234, PG 32.869A; Gregory the Theologian, Or. 38, PG 36.317B; Gregory of Nyssa, On the Holy Trinity, p. 80, par. 8, Mercati edition.

47. Gregory the Theaologian, Or. 28, PG 36.32B. Translation from LNPF 7, p. 290. See also Gregory the Theologian, Or. 28, PG 36.29A.

48. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Beattitudes, 6, PG 44.1268B; From Glory to Glory, trans. and ed. Herbert Musurillo (New York, 1961) p. 98.

49. Basil, Ep. 234, PG32.869C. Translation from LNPF 8, p. 274. See also Basil, Against Eunomios, 1.14, PG 29.544A.

50. See Against Eunomios, 1.14, PG 29.544B, for example.

51. Tr. 3.2.10. Gendle translation, p. 97.

52. Tr. 3.2.11.

53. Tr. 3.2.11.

54. Tr. 3.2.7. Gendle translation, p. 95.

55. Tr. 3.1.7.

56. Tr. 3.1.8.

57. Tr. 3.2.10. Gendle translation, p. 97.

58. Tr. 1.3.28.

59. Tr. 2.3.66.

60. Tr. 2.3.8.

61. Tr. 3.1.31.

62. Tr. 2.3.37.