Tikhon Pino: Enhypostaton, or the Lack Thereof, in St. Gregory Palamas

The doctrine of 'enhypostatic' energy in the theology of St. Gregory Palamas has drawn significant attention since the publication of John Meyendorff's Introduction à l'étude de Grégoire Palamas (1959). Bolstered by personalist or 'existentialist' readings of the hesychast doctor, this doctrine has contributed much to the popularity of Palamas in the twentieth century, where he is sometimes seen as a champion of the hypostatic or personal orientation of divine action. Yet the doctrine of an 'enhypostatic' energy, drawn especially from the Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts, is not without its problems. Heavily qualified in Gregory's subsequent polemics, where the debate with Akindynos would often center on the person of the Son and the person of the Spirit as 'energies,' the sense in which the divine operations are 'personal' requires careful analysis and articulation. This paper looks at the entire corpus of Palamas in an effort to understand (1) how the divine energies relate to the distinct hypostases of the Trinity and (2) how Palamas actually uses the word 'enhypostatic.' The result is a nuanced portrait of the essence-energies distinction in which 'enhypostaton' plays a rather different role than is usually supposed.