Today, on the Second Sunday of Lent, we feast the great luminary of Orthodoxy, Saint Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessaloniki.
Let us today remember the doctrine of the one whom we hymn as "the invincible champion of theologians" (τῶν θεολόγων ὑπέρμαχος ἀπροσμάχητος). 🧵
1. St Gregory teaches us that the confession of faith (and hence all Christian theology) begins with with the one God, worshipped in three persons — a monad in triad and triad in monad, subject to neither confusion nor partition:
Here St Gregory begins with the divine nature common to the persons, and perfectly balances one and three, essence and hypostasis.
Following St Gregory, let us reject any supposed "ordo theologiæ" which demands that we begin with some "personhood" set in opposition to nature
2. St Gregory teaches us that, not only is God the Father autotheos (i.e. himself God), but that the very divine power through which the saints are deified is also itself divine, and hence also autotheotic:
Here St Gregory does not restrict the notion of the autotheotic exclusively to that which is "a se" and does not proceed.
So let us follow St Gregory and reject the neo-Origenist error of claiming that, since only God the Father is without principle, only the Father is autotheos
With these words, St Gregory shows his affinity to Bl. Augustine's teaching of the Holy Spirit as a vinculum amoris (bond of love) between Father and Son.
So let us not be hasty to simply reject the idea of any positive interpretation of Augustinian themes in Orthodox theology.
And lest we be in doubt about St Gregory's positive estimation of the theology of Bl Augustine, consider the following text, in which St Gregory directly quotes from the Greek translation of Bl Augustine's De Trinitate:
4. In his teaching on the divine ἐνέργεια ("operation" or "energy" of God), St Gregory is explicit in his insistence on the fundamental singularity of God's energy:
Here too, let us follow St Gregory's own teaching, and uphold the singularity of divine ἐνέργεια.
Let us reject any polytheistic conception of God as some "one–many" hybrid, composed of a multitude of energies, each distinct from the others by major real distinction.
Here too, let us follow the teaching of St Gregory.
Let us reject the intrusion into Orthodox theology of the gender-ideological insistence that the "true person" is some "pure subject", independent of nature, which at best "has" a nature as a secondary accident.