The Eastern Orthodox distinction between God’s essence and energies is, at best, a convoluted philosophical workaround, and at worst, a theological error that undermines divine simplicity and ultimately fractures God into metaphysical compartments.

The Palamite framework came out of a context of defending hesychastic mysticism, not from consistent theological development rooted in the Fathers. You don’t find this neat two-tiered God in the early Church. You find simplicity. God is one, not divided into unknowable essence and knowable “energies” that somehow aren’t created, yet aren’t God in essence, either.

If grace is “uncreated” but not identical to God's being, what is it? Some kind of divine radiation? A halfway-God? And how is this not reintroducing a kind of Neoplatonic emanationism that Christianity was supposed to leave behind?

God’s operations are God. They aren’t ontologically distinct from His nature. Yes, we experience God differently than we comprehend Him in Himself, but that doesn’t require inventing new metaphysical categories to bridge the gap.

Is this distinction really a legitimate development of patristic theology, or is it a philosophical patch job to justify experiential mysticism? And if it’s not heretical, is it at least redundant?

>>17763911 (OP)
It's post-kantianism

>>17763911 (OP)
Pretty sure God made it as simple as can be, and didn't try to make it a bloated jerk off fest for pretentious blowhards wanting to complicate it so they could smell their own anal fumes. Heretical? Most likely. Redundant? Absolutely.

>>17763911 (OP)
>OP's shitposting on this website is ontologically identical with OP