An Unconscious God

Now the archon who is weak has three names. The first name is Yaldabaoth, the second is Saklas, and the third is Samael. And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, 'I am God and there is no other God beside me,' for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come. – Apocryphon of John

Neo-Palamism. In the work of figures such as Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, Vladimir Lossky, and John Meyendorff, Neo-Palamism brought a revival of Orthodox theology and a widespread return to the patristic sources especially regarding the doctrine of Theosis. Its impact upon the Orthodox world in the 20^th century has done invaluable good, but, as with all projects and viewpoints within finite history, it also has had certain unfortunate consequences. Other just as promising and even amiable viewpoints springing from reflection upon the same sources were closed off for a time, and the Neo-Palamite’s necessary, for their historical moment, juxtaposition of Orthodoxy against certain forms of Western theology became a banner around which a new fundamentalism could spring up and mutate.

In the popular sphere of American Orthodox theology, especially online, Neo-Palamism has mutated in its use by the ever proliferating online “apologetics” community and its key influencers, whose character I have discussed before. Here we are only concerned with the peculiar character Neo-Palamism has taken in this community, molded as it is by reaction to perceived apologetic threats and the desire to provide easily digestible retorts, and its defining characteristics are as follows:

A.    Denial of God as Actus Purus (Pure Actuality):  It is characteristic of these apologists to claim that a view of God as actus purus is heresy, because it is asserted that it requires necessary and eternal creation, and to argue rather that in God there are certain energies that are unactualized and then become actualized temporally (e.g., creation), or simply remain unactualized.

B.     Insistence upon Real Distinction: Following from the above, these apologists insist that the distinction between essence and energies in God is a “real distinction,” or even an “ontological distinction,” and say that the energies are on another “metaphysical level” than the essence. A real distinction, classically, is considered a distinction of separable beings or of substances, and while one could argue for a kind of real distinction that does not imply this separability (such as the Formal Distinction), “ontological distinction” implies separate substances, if that is, it implies anything at all besides rhetorical vacuity.

Now, one may think that this is all a waste of time, haggling over minutia of no importance. However, I will contend that the above are issues that strike at the very heart of what it means for God to be God, the I Am that I Am (Ex 3:14), make hash of the Incarnation and eschatological creation effected in Christ, “for in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (Col 2:9),” and even perpetuate an inability to think God as love. To argue this though, we must first understand that the doctrine of God’s being actus purus is essential to the logic of our theology, not opposed to it.

Actuality is opposed to potency. Whereas creatures develop from potency to act (childhood to adulthood, ignorance to wisdom, weakness to strength, etc.), and in the gradual manifestation of their actuality to and by other created beings, God does not thus develop. He is always fully actualized as who and what He is within the communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father knows Himself fully in the Son, the Son knows Himself fully in the Father, and both rejoice in one another and resolve in the loving Holy Spirit. Focusing especially on the relationship between Father and Son helps to make this clear. The Son is “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his [the Father’s] person (Hb 1:3),” that is, the generation of the Son by the Father is the knowledge and actualization of the fullness of the divine life in all its power, the divine essence being the common life of the knowing Knower and the knowing Known. This is the precise theological meaning behind the argument put forward by Sts. Athanasius and Augustine that the Father can never have been without His Wisdom:

 How then does He create through Him, unless it be His Word and His Wisdom? And how can He be Word and Wisdom, unless He be the proper offspring of His Essence , and did not come to be, as others, out of nothing?[1]

 God does not receive wisdom from any one as we receive it from Him, but He is Himself His own wisdom; because His wisdom is not one thing, and His essence another, seeing that to Him to be wise is to be. Christ, indeed, is called in the Holy Scriptures, the power of God, and the wisdom of God.[2]

Thus, in God’s Trinitarian existence the fullness of his divine life, that is, all the divine powers or energies, are actualized. God is fully wise, powerful, beautiful, and all else that He infinitely is as living actuality with no dark potency still waiting to be actualized. If any one of God’s powers were not in actuality that would mean that God was, like us, a being with an unconscious side, waiting for His full actualization to reach the fullness of what He is according to some principal end above Himself. As creatures only fully become what they are in divinization, so God would need to be divinized by something higher, in short, he would be claiming to be the Most High while forgetting the place from which He came.

Seeing as a developing, and therefore creaturely, Demiurge is unacceptable for worship by Christians, God must be understood as actus purus. In the words of St. Sophrony of Essex:  

 The Church teaches us that God is a Being who has His cause in Himself and Who, apart from Himself, has no being that is independent and parallel to Him. She speaks to us of the perfect, living God Who is, consequently, pure act.[3]

But, one may argue, God’s pure actuality only refers to first actuality and not second actuality. First actuality is, for example, the actuality of an eye in that it has the power of sight, or of a muscle in that it is strong enough to lift a certain weight, while second actuality is to look at something or lift the weight. Some wish to separate these two in God so as to avoid the idea of a necessary eternal creation.

Of course, this distinction is necessary to affirm. God is Himself the power of creation and this power does not come into being out of nothing as creation does. However, can the two kinds of actuality be separated in God to the point where we say that God has certain powers which, for Him rather than for our perception alone, are not actualized eternally? No, and that is because God is eternal. While creatures experience God in their temporal context, God’s activity is always eternally realized for Himself.[4] As an analogy think of Flatland and the interaction of a 3D being with a 2D being, and then apply that to eternity and time, the eternal does not need to reduce itself to temporality to act on temporality. Thus, creating is an eternal action for God, as are all His acts, because He is eternal. The distinction to be drawn here is one of causal and logical priority; God’s eternal “substantial act” of consubstantiality is His essence and makes Him what He is, whereas creation is the result of His essential goodness bringing contingency into being beyond Himself. We can never know, as we cannot experience at least in this life, the mechanics of the power to summon contingent being from nothing, but we can know that to say it requires submission to temporality is absurdity. Indeed, temporality is only a created reality of movement from potency to act, so to say that God must temporally act to create is either to bite the bullet and ascribe temporality to God in Himself, making Him a creature, or is to say that God must create temporality to then act in it to create, but then how can he create temporality if we have said he must have temporality to create at all? It’s a hilarious infinite regress, one that the online apologists would screech about to no end at their non-Orthodox opponents, preening their harpy’s feathers in superiority with a complete lack of self-awareness.

But then, is creation really eternal as Origen would have it? Yes, and the only distinction required to affirm this without heterodoxy is to affirm the causal priority of the Trinity’s substantial act of consubstantiality to its creative act. Indeed, to accuse Origen of heterodoxy on this point is nonsense, as the best current scholarship by Fr. John Behr illustrates.[5] Origen’s understanding of God’s omnipotence over creation is eschatological, the omnipotence of all creation brought to its proper end in submission to the Father through the Crucified Christ, and therefore it is Christ who is the power and wisdom of God and not a created wisdom. This is not only the logic of the anti-Arian arguments of St. Athanasius, who incidentally considered Origen a father of the Church,[6] it is the argument picked up in full by St. Gregory of Nyssa in his commentary on 1 Corinthians 15:28.[7] It is the height of ahistorical fanaticism to try and condemn this idea by linking it to Origen who, for Sts. Athanasius, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Macrina the Elder and Younger and Gregory of Nyssa, was a saint and father of the Church. Seeing as these saints are the champions and backbone not only of Nicene Orthodoxy but also of Christological Orthodoxy, Gregory Nazianzen being labeled “the Theologian” at the Council of Chalcedon and Gregory of Nyssa being termed “father of the fathers” at Nicaea II, it is clear that any such smearing of Origen to discredit an argument as “heterodox” is at best ignorance and at worst willful deception to avoid dealing with the argument.

We now however come to the question of whether God is eternally fully actualized in second as well as first act, and we are necessarily led to this question by the eschatological framing of God’s omnipotence in creation. If the Father’s full actualization of Himself is precisely in the Son, and the Son not only actualizes the fullness of God’s own proper being but also the putting of that being into act outside and in return to the Father, that is, the procession into creation and the return into deification of St. Dionysius’ providences and St. Maximus’ logoi, can any divine power not be actualized in this total process of creation? Put in Scriptural terms, can the Son who is the fullness of God not create precisely of this fullness which he then converts and submits as His Body to the Father? I argue the answer must be negative for several reasons. Firstly, because the creative act of God is not simply directed towards finite creation as if it reached its terminus outside the divine life, it is directed back to God Himself as His own joy for and in it, and it is absurd then to think that God holds back from Himself the realization of His glory reaped in creation. God is one who, after all, even reaps where He has not sown and gathers where He has not strawed (Mtt 25:24). To return to the Christological import of this question, if the Son in assuming humanity assumes and becomes the perfect image of Himself as prototype, and in humanity assumes all creation, then it must follow He holds nothing back in the creation of His image and likeness.[8]

The above argument is perfectly situated within the patristic tradition. As Jordan Daniel Wood argues in the footnotes of his thesis That Creation is Incarnation in Maximus the Confessor, fathers such as Sts. Irenaeus, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Dionysius and Maximus all believed that creation necessarily followed from God’s being as goodness which overflows in its unimpeded self-giving.[9] This is not a necessity of an externally imposed or impersonal type, it is the necessity of a loving God who by His character cannot but share the fullness of Himself in creating. The logic of this is spelled out especially well by Fr. Dumitru Staniloae:

 On the other hand, in order to love a contingent world God has to bring it into existence, that is, he must have love for it before it can come to be. Only from an eternal and infinite act of love can we explain the creation of other existing things as well as all God’s other acts of love for them. Love must exist in God prior to all those acts of his which are directed outside himself; it must be bound up with his eternal existence. Love is the ' being of God”; it is his "substantial act.”[10]

Thus, Secondly, God as love must create and create of His own fullness, not as impersonal nor as externally imposed necessity but instead by his very character as love, and this love is perfect freedom as self-realization. Again, in creating God not only creates outside Himself but also creates the Body of His Son, and so a limit to the actualization of God’s power in creation would constitute a limit to His own self-love. Even if only viewed from the standpoint of creation it is necessary that God as who He is not hold back His actuality, as created persons are subjects of God’s absolute love and, love being defined as absolute self-giving to another, God would not truly love created persons if He held back any of His glory from them.

Thirdly, and following from the above, as God is eternal and not temporal then to say a certain power is not actualized in second act is to say that it is never actualized for God in relation to creatures or in God’s own life itself. It is effectively to say that God does not have the unactualized power, and is impious as it undermines God not only as the ever-giving Good but also implies a kind of Arianism. If the above were the case, it would seem to follow that the Father as transcendent unrevealing divinity would be withholding something in His own personal abyss from the fullness of relation to the Son and Spirit. It would be to propose a stagnant, self-enclosed aspect of God distinguished from His fecund Trinitarian life, as if the Father, Son, and Spirit were no longer three simultaneous and mutually defining moments of the self-revealing divinity but rather the Father was transcendent to them in some way. Here is where a shortcoming of Origen creeps in, excusable for him as he was pre-Nicene, but inexcusable for theology today.

Lastly, we come to perhaps the most important criticism of this idea that certain powers in God are not actualized in creation, or are not and then are temporally, or more importantly, that other than to simply affirm contingency one must say God could have created other than He did. This last idea is much more widespread in Orthodoxy, not just online, and it follows from the same errors. It is prudent to flesh out this idea further to understand why it must be rejected. Its claim is that God could have created otherwise than He created and completes in Christ. That is, God could have not created the Theotokos, or the Disciple whom Jesus loved, or Lazarus for whom Jesus wept, or any of the least of these that Christ identifies with, indeed that all those who were created to be conformed to Christ’s image could not have been and, in the end, the Son could not have been the Christ who is the only Saviour revealing the Father and slain from the foundation of the world. In short, it is to reject St. Irenaeus statements that “for inasmuch as He had a pre-existence as a saving Being, it was necessary that what might be saved should also be called into existence, in order that the Being who saves should not exist in vain.”[11]

I can hear the objections already that according to some sophistry of modal logic theology must bend to the idea that God could create some other possible world instead of this one, but theology follows the logic of persons and love. A person is a subject and act of relation constituted by love, mutually defining and defined with all other persons. This is as true of created persons as it is of divine Persons, the Father and Son being who they are only in relation to one another, and the only differences are that created persons are finite, and therefore their communion is characterized by existential distance needing to be overcome, and contingent. Have I introduced dispensability into the equation by affirming the contingency of created persons? I have not. God creates created persons out of His desire to love beyond Himself as the good and, in doing so, not only does he love the person prior to bringing them into being but this love as authentic love is one by which He cannot but bring them into being and be mutually defined in relation to them in creating them. The Theotokos is of course contingent, brought into being rather than being Being itself, but in creating her the Son of God is by the necessity of love the Son of Mary and can be no one else, likewise Mary is created from eternity as none other than the Mother of God, her “be it unto me” being her response to the divine summons from non-being.

As the saying goes, hatred is not the opposite of love, indifference is. For the Son to be indifferent as to whether He would bring Mary into being and be born of her is to say that He did not love her, and therefore He did not create out of love and thus creation does not have the divine goodness/love as its principle. This idea should be the ultimate scandal for Christians, and the picture of God which results from this is of an indifferent voluntaristic will willing inscrutably, even unintelligibly, and not based on love and goodness. Can a Christian conscience really conceive of Christ contemplating the creation of His mother indifferently among an infinitude of possibilities and, to wax anthropomorphic, saying to them all “whether the human world is left as is or destroyed and rebuilt, it is all sport to me” like a certain representation of the Gnostic Demiurge in popular fiction? I hope that it cannot.

And thus we come to the ultimate picture of such a God which the title and beginning quote of this article evokes, the imperfect if not malefic Demiurge, Yaldabaoth, Saklas, Samael. This God must deliberate between possibilities when creating, and to deliberate in this regard is to deliberate based upon the dictates of some higher principle which one seeks to achieve, rather than being the Good who is love itself whose creative act is its own free outflowing realization of its goodness into finitude directed to return back to itself as the sole principle and end of all things. Yaldabaoth, not being love himself and not creating out of love, cannot create love, that is, persons. The God of Christianity is love and creates love. The blind Samael, as a creature of potency and deliberation, is unconscious of his origin and does not create to incarnate. The Son of God, perfectly actualized in the bosom of the Father, fully realizes Himself again in and for creation, and the creation is nothing other than the only possible, because only loved, bringing into being and divinization of the Body of Christ.

In conclusion, while these gross errors do follow from certain mutations of Neo-Palamism, they do not follow from affirming a distinction between essence and energies in God. That is, as long as this is understood as being a possible explication of the actus purus God’s being in Himself and in relation to creation and viewed within the overall economy of God’s creating creatures from their eschatological ends in divine love. There is much good in the Neo-Palamite theologies of Orthodox theologians, and there is no reason it cannot work with the other re-emerging strands of Orthodox thought that themselves were formed in reflecting on the rediscovered Palamite, but the polemicist mutations of Neo-Palamism are worthless and their vision of God is more so. The only good a Gnostic Demiurge can do is to be the final boss of a videogame emphasizing the strength of human friendship and will, because man is better than that so-called God.

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[1] Athanasius, Against the Arians 2.22. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/28162.htm.

[2] Augustine, On the Trinity XV/3.9. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/130115.htm.

[3] Sophrony Sakharov, “Unity of the Church, an Image of the Holy Trinity” Orthodox Synaxis, accessed September 16, 2023. https://orthodoxsynaxis.org/2019/04/20/archim-sophrony-sakharov-unity-of-the-church-an-image-of-the-holy-trinity/.

[4] Tikhon Alexander Pino, “Being and Naming God: Essence and Energies in St. Gregory Palamas.” PhD Thesis. (Marquette University: https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/1054/, 2021), 153-162.

[5] Fr. John Behr, Origen: On First Principles Vol. 1 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), lvi-lxii.

[6] Athanasius, De Decretis 6.27. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2809.htm.

[7] Gregory of Nyssa, “In illud: Tunc et ipse filius” Eclectic Orthodoxy, October 4, 2019. https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/10/04/in-illud-tunc-et-ipse-filius/.

[8] “But I find the solution of these difficulties in returning to the very utterance of God: for he says, Let us make the human being in accordance with our image and in accordance with our likeness. The image is properly an image so long as it lacks nothing of what is conceived in the archetype; but where it falls from its likeness to the prototype, in that respect it is not an image. Therefore, since one of the things contemplated regarding the divine nature is incomprehensibility of essence, it is wholly necessary that in this point also the image should have the imitation of the archetype.” From Gregory of Nyssa: On the Human Image of God. Translated by Fr. John Behr (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023), 189.

[9] Jordan Daniel Wood, “That Creation is Incarnation in Maximus the Confessor.” PhD Thesis. (Boston College: https://dlib.bc.edu/islandora/object/bc-ir:108259,  2018), 132-134.

[10] Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, “The Holy Trinity: Structure of Supreme Love” in Theology and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 79.

[11] Irenaeus, Against Heresies III/22.3. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103322.htm.