THE BASIC ISSUE BETWEEN 
EASTERN AND WESTERN
CHRISTIANITY 

© 2000 by Orchid Land Publications

[10-28-00]

    The following includes a question in a sending on an internet discussion board or list, with a slightly edited reply from the viewpoint of Eastern Christianity:

If there is no analogy of being between God and mortals, then 
there is no such thing as divine relatedness to the world since God would be  wholly Other and like Aristotle's God, He would be pure thought thinking  itself.  If we posit and have faith in a unipersonal God, we thereby solve the  problem raised by the ANALOGIA ENTIS, and most importantly, our thought more  closely aligns with Scripture when it plainly tells us that there is one God:  He is the God and Father over all (1 Cor. 8:5, 6; Eph. 4:4-6). He is the One  that Jesus called : "My God." Cf. Rev. 3:12.

REPLY:  This is an important issue and succinctly stated above.  Replying requires a discussion of the assumptions underlying the question and those of the reply.  The reply begins by observing that a paradigm, ideology, worldview/viewpoint, or axiomatic framework, is a set of cognitive assumptions.      Instead of saying "You are wrong, and I am right," I think it more correct as well as more polite to say: "In your paradigm, analogia entis is the only way to related uncreated Deity and created cosmos; in my paradigm, that is not true--the only way the LOGOS Creator (YHWH, as inscribed above the Savior on Eastern Icons; cf. Luke 1:43 in Aramaic or Hebrew) could relate to His created cosmos is through the uncreated Energies or in His Person--certainly not in terms of uniting an imparticipable divine Essence with a created finite essence or nature.  The uncreated  Energies are revelatory and participable in a way that God's Essence beyond being is not. Of the latter, all we can hope to know through revelation is what IT is not.
     Paradigms are no more true or false than definitions, but metatheology (or metapologetics) using paradigms is more objective than debating doctrines and interpretations favored by one paradigm but not another; those statements are not strictly translatable across paradigms.  One is not speaking of the sort of vulgar relativism that says, "It doesn't matter what we believe, since we are all ultimately saying the same thing."  But since paradigmatic axioms and premises invite us to interpret something in certain ways and exclude other concepts from our horizon, limiting our thinking to ideas within a given paradigm is a real limitation on investigating reality itself and bound to short-change the search for truth.  Copernicus is the classical example of paradigms, but Einstein and others offer further examples.  If Aquinas and Luther/Calvin were in the Eastern paradigm of first/second-century Christians, it remains (per  impossibile) to be shown.
     The presence of all of those energy words in the NT shows that the dýnamis "potential" : enérgeia relationship was common parlance among pagans and Christians in the first centuries, as were LOGOS and (h)omoíosis Theõ (mistranslated in the West as though non-energetic (h)omoíma Theou). That these concepts are untranslatable in the two second-second Western paradigms (Latin scholastics; Reformers) is evident when you look at the existing translations of energy, LOGOS, and (h)omoíosis.
     Analogia entis and other Augustinian contexts grew up in the West but never infected Eastern Christianity. The juridical-punishment view of Christ's work, the idea of inherited sin/guilt (contrast Deut. 24:16), etc. are not part of the Eastern paradigm; they grew up in a juridical environment.  Peter and Anselm were will-oriented Lombards, and the high-Mediaeval scholastics got their juridicalism not only from their founders--Ambrose and the other jurists from Carthage (Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine) who together founded Western theology--but also from the shari'aized/torahized Aristotle of Muslim Cordova. Where Salvation (omoíosis and théosis) is participation in the uncreated Energies of God in the East, the West has no realistic cognitive place for that sort of unity of a human with Christ (or indeed of Jesus with the LOGOS--except virtually, e.g. by analogy).  There is in the West no option of partipicating in another being at the personal level--sharing the other's life or energies--nor any participation of a Person, at least a divine Creator, in more than one nature.  Note that its energies (according to St. John of Damaskos and others) define an essence.  As for 2 Pet. 1:4, an essence-unity (apothéosis or deificatio) was put forward by Aquinas as a virtual unity (non autem quantum ad modum essendi), and as a covenantal unity with Christ by the Reformers.  Eastern Christianity accepts ontology qua energy throughout and an ontological unity of believers by Grace (uncreated Energy) with God's uncreated Energies--théosis "Divinization."  There is here nothing in common with Western preconceptions that I can see.
     So the real question about whether an unknowable and imparticipable divine Essence could relate to the LOGOS/YHWH's created cosmos of matter and time has different answers imposed by different premises and excluded by different assumptions.  In the East, the uncreated Energies are revelatory and participable, and the divine Person (not Essence) of the LOGOS could unite uncreated and human essences in His one Person.  In the West, the analogia entis must be resorted to; unity with the divine Essence--however "virtual"--is the only way out.  Could these Mediaeval views have been propagated or understood in Hellenistic culture?  How can it be made credible that they could have?  That is the task of Western theology and exegesis/eisegesis!!
     The vital question is whether a pagan or Christian of the early centuries of the first millennium who spoke Greek could have understood a non-energetic view of reality--Luther's extreme notion of virtual reality (simul justum et peccator), the notion of the LOGOS as a "word," the Crucifixion as a vicarious punishment (that depends partly on whether eph o in Rom. 5:12 is "because" or "in Whom"), or Salvation in terms of Mediaeval-juridical satisfaction, atonement, redemption, legal adoption, etc. in a framework invented in the second millennium.  How would a first-century Christian have understood the "new creation"? . . . as an ontological event consequent on Baptism with holy water, or as a juridical event in which words are effective but matter and time (En-flesh-ment, bodily resurrection, holy water, and  tradition sifting out truth out of errors [John 16:13]) are not energetic.  Don't the Latins say (pace Lonergan) that Sanctifying Grace is non-operativa?  Don't the Reformers say that justification and Grace are imputative/virtual?  Isn't John 6:53-54 understood by Calvin and others as virtual--when not Gnostic?  
     So this is the question--how can thinkers in the Greek paradigm have understood ideas first broached in new paradigms over a dozen centuries after the Resurrection that lacked all lineal continuity (after 750 years of Dark Ages and being cut off from Eastern learning) with thinking in an Eastern paradigm?
     Geo. Gabriel has shown WHY the Latins have got to have the Theotokos freed of sin (for the East, no one is born guilty or sinful); and how, if death is a punishment for Adam's sin, it had to be denied that she, sinless as she was held to be, could have died.  (The West teaches that she was carried off to Heaven before dying rather than, as in the E. after reposing.  The East accepts Deut. 24:16 and rejects the idea that newborns share Adam's guilt; among mentally capable adults, only the all-pure Theotokos remained sinless throughout life because of her special Energies of Grace, lacking to other humans.)  The East reads Hebrews through the lens or filter of a latreutic, non-juridical paradigm and distinguishes an ephápax (non-penal, non-substitutionary) Immolation of Christ on the Cross from an iterative offering of His Body and Blood--as an act of Worship, a return of a perfect part of creation to the Source of being by Christ in His members as an acknowledgement of God's  ownership and sovereignty over all.  The En-flesh-ment sanctified matter (Mysteries) and time and development (a developmental creation and a developmental Salvation, though "conversion" can be on-the-spot); and the Resurrection of the Flesh offers creation back to God, victoriously defeats sin and Satan, and saves believers.  Because one participates in a sacrifice by eating the Offering, John 6:53-54 says (in the Apostolic framework) that we share true Life through eating His Flesh and Blood. 
     This outlook was accepted by the early Greek-speaking Christians centuries before Augustine and Anselm came up with their juridical outlook (after all, Carthage was Punic (Semitic) and shared the same will-based outlook as the Cordovans and the Lombard tribe). The Eastern paradigm does not accept an inherent immortality of the human soul or transmissible guilt (or merit) from one Person to another--unless their Life is one, as is the case of Christians participating in the Christ's Life-giving  Energies and acting to produce works pleasing to God through the impulse (horm) or impetus of Grace conceived of as energizing; see Philp. 2:13, etc.  But as that possibility is not open to a non-energy paradigm, the West faces a dilemma. 
     The import of this for interpreting the New Testament is that one person's axiomatic framework will come up with different answers on many points from answers favored by a person in another paradigm; I have in a previous posting discussed this in connexion with charis, pistis, LOGOS, eph o in Rom. 5:12, etc.  Likewise, each framework will exclude answers invited and favored in another framework.  Unless this is recognized, the search for truth is not really a meaningful effort. 
     It should be made clear that I have not condemned any framework but tried to be objective in the foregoing, though I have questioned that the Mediaeval frameworks could have existed or even be understood in the first millennium, over a millennium before the Western frameworks were invented. Certainly, the Reformers' combination of Gnostic content with a juridical form was the mirror-image of the Apostolic framework with its Hebrew content--respect for matter and time as having religious rôles--interpreted according to "form" of Greek ontological concepts. Why else would the Incarnation have taken place at the time and place it did, if not because the crossing of cultures imbued with the right content and form were the ones favored by the Creator LOGOS/YHWH? This of course partizan, but the question is nevertheless objective; it does not try to psychoanalyse or second-guess God the way the Scholastics did but stays at the level of finite reason. If there were any analogy between God and creation, it would be between the uncreated LOGOS and SOPHIA and finite human lógos "ratio, reason" and wisdom (the practical correlate of "reason").   The cosmos is logikós, not lexikós . . . as it would be if LOGOS were WORD.

in Christ,