https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FvH_t2M5VSs
I mean, the basic concept of this essence energy’s distinction is, you know, the term energy emerges from Aristotle, right, and it’s initially emerges in the context of the unmoved mover and refers to a certain type of activity, right. So Aristotle being convinced that all this mutative changing stuff in our world has to stand upon something that’s unchanging, right, that doesn’t mutate, he had to draw, develop a term that refers to that type of perfect non-mutated activity that his God would do. And so he draws the distinction between kinesis, which is progressive, incomplete, you know, changing motion, like building a house, you know, goes through stages, abandon it, versus complete or perfect activity, like seeing every time I look at you, it’s complete in that moment. And then the Alexandria Jews thought this was really useful way of talking about God and his activity. And so they start to embrace this. But unlike Aristotle, who had said that God’s essence is in Ergiya, right, he is just nothing but pure, you know, perfect activity. The Alexandria Jews drew a distinction between God’s face and his back drawing from the story of Moses, right, show me your glory. And he says, I’ll show you my face. I can’t show you my face. I might see my face in the lip, but I’ll show you my back, which became interpreted, at least in people like Philo of Alexandria, like the distinction between God’s essence, who he is and himself and the energies, those aspects that exude from God and come down to us and convey who he is. And then that distinction plays its way out in a couple of different ways. In Alexandria Judaism, there was also this notion of transference, where the operative powers that express a nature in some ways communicable. So the favorite metaphor or the favorite analogy for the Church Fathers is always fire and metal, right? They stick metal and fire and then it starts to glow and burn and you move it. And now it has the energies, right, or the energy of fire and of heating and lighting. It’s still metal, right? But something of the nature of fire has been communicated to it. And that became the way of explaining things like demoniacs, how our demoniacs have secret knowledge or superhuman strength or whatever it is. They’re participating, they’re energized by those things, right? They’re participating in a foreign nature, the energies of that foreign nature. And it also became how they explain prophets, right? Energized by God or by the Holy Angels in 2nd Maccabees. It’s the Holy Angels that energize the Maccabees for war. And so, and that ends up in the New Testament. And then in the Church Fathers, it’s critical because they understand this is part of how you have two natures of Christ that don’t get confused and yet they commune with each other, right? The one energizing the other. And it also became critical to their understanding of us. And what is it that we’re doing in Christianity? What is it that we hope for participating in the nature of God? Now, the reason that there’s a way it’s important to specify that the energies of God are God, like it is not seen as a lower, even though there’s a distinction, they’re not seen as a lower form of divinity or as some kind of. Right. And this is the critical point. This is where I was going with this because because there’s a tendency to think in very binary terms, you know, in a Western context of there’s the divine nature and then there’s creatures. And what you get is a much more complex ontology when you’re talking about the Easter Church Fathers. Yeah, there’s the divine nature. There’s the the hoopasities, the subjects that have it and give it stasis. And then there’s also these divine energies that exude from it. And what’s fascinating is these are called by people like Maximus, the confessor, right? These are the works of God that precede creation. Well, if they precede creation, then they’re not creatures. And then you have this strange language like they’re the things around God that are God, they’re the processions, they’re the energies. And so you get all these sort of strange, the strange foreign language to us that’s there in people like pseudo-diabetes, the Cappadocians. And yet, as you pointed out, everything about that ontology says these energies are God. And so just like on the one hand, you know, you don’t get to peer into my mind as it is, but you do encounter these things that exude from it, right? The energies as I’m speaking right now, these are activities or operations in my mind. And they are part of me, right? And they are expressions of that mind. They’re punctuated, finite, particular expressions of the nature of my mind. And so in the same way, the divine energies are that. And the reason that’s critical is because if the energies themselves can be participated in by creatures, right, an image of God or an image in general, an image is capable of participating in the attributes of that which it images, right? Its shape, its color, things like that. We are images of God. And so can participate in God’s attributes, which of Eastern Church Fathers refer to the energies, not to the divine nature. Then what that means is those parts of God, which is one of the words Maximus, the confessor uses, right, can be resident in you and in me and in a relic and in an icon, right? And in nature, you know, and in some ways necessarily so, because it’s that which makes it exist. Right. Right. But that does make it kind of important. Yeah. But this is where that divide right there, even though it’s obviously it’s a lot of metaphysics that I just went through, that divide is critical so that even though you might find in the West this sort of hierarchy and this notion of participation in this memory of a certain theology, it’s essentially Christian. The very fact that grace is created in the Latin West and it’s primarily just an effect on the creature as opposed to in the East, where it actually is God imminently present in the creature. It’s part of God in the creature. That is such a, you know, a critical distinction in terms of ontology that has going back to something you mentioned before, remythologizing world. I mean, this is this is a critical feature of if you’re going to talk about a mythologized world and talking about the sort of spiritual dimensions of nature, like you talked about with the nuns, spiritual dimensions of you or me and the spiritual potential of the cosmos itself. This is where that sort of thing that you find in the Eastern Fathers, I think, is so critical to to to seeing how different the worldview really is, even though it sounds very similar on many points. And then I think in many ways it also comes, I’d say comes at a at a point where that the strong dualities of modernity are kind of breaking down. And we can see already the problem of the problem of this created grace problem or the creature as outside God, you know, is is the problem of a kind of radical duality, even though it’s maybe not formulated that way explicitly at the highest level, it ends up playing out that way where you have God above and then all these things that are created out there. And there’s an arbitrary relationship of will between God and the world. Whereas this this kind of way of mechanically describing also the phenomena in reality is it’s breaking down. It doesn’t doesn’t hold like it doesn’t even hold in terms of cognitive science and in terms of the quantum physics and these new these kind of limits of science that people are reaching. It just it doesn’t hold. And you need the notion of rather the inevitability of meaning is something that I talk about a lot like the inevitability of of identity and the inevitability of hierarchies of of identity for the world to actually exist is becoming more and more apparent. And what let’s say the ontology that St. Maximus proposes for us gives us a very powerful solution to avoid duality, to really have true non duality. Now, people love non duality. St. Maximus actually offers us a true non duality, which is not a collapse into a monad, but rather this this like like you said, it’s like this procession of of energy, this procession of grace that comes down from God and brings everything back into God, doesn’t deny the multiplicity of existence, but ultimately makes everything participate in this is hierarchy of meaning, this hierarchy of purposes. Maybe purpose is a better word, even the meaning. It’s all everything that exists has a ultimate purpose. And that ultimate purpose is actually God to the extent to which it can be embedded into all these others. And like a symphony is the way you’ve portrayed it as a symphony is much better way to to understand it. Like it’s all playing together, like to to kind of become the let’s say the creation is becoming the lover of God, you could say in a way that is fully unitive, like bringing it together into into him as in a mysterious union, you could say.