Jane Sloan Peters: Gregory Palamas’s Indebtedness to Maximus the Confessor’s Dyenergist Christology

John Meyendorff claims that “It is only within the perspective of the Maximian doctrine of the two energies or wills of Christ that it is possible to understand the terminology of St. Gregory Palamas.”While scholarship on the Christological controversies prior to the sixth ecumenical council tends to focus on the question of Christ's wills,the Confessor’s early articulation of Christ’s two energies contains important aspects of his Christology that inform Palamas’s thought.This paper establishes Palamas’s reliance on Maximus the Confessor’s dyenergist Christology, particularly his treament of Dionysius’s term“new theandric energy”in Ambiguum5. Maximus’s efforts to clarify the Dionysian phrase in light of Chalcedon resulted in a Christology in which the human energy of Christ mediates the concealment and disclosure of the divine energy. This paradigm becomes important for Maximus and Palamas’s exegeses of the Transfiguration. Maximus's efforts also led to a more substantive characterization of deification, such that the saints’ mode of acting reflects Christ’s mode of theandric activity. Gregory Palamas profited from these efforts on several fronts as he articulated the essence-energies distinction, the uncreated quality of divine light, and the deified life of the hesychast. This paper focuses on Palamas's account of the Holy Spirit's role in deification, in which he draws on Cappadocian pneumatology, Chalcedonian Christology, and Maximian dyenergist Christology.