Uncreated Energies

 

The mystical relationship between God and the creation is difficult to grasp with language. St Gregory the Theologian writes in a poem:

The high Word plays in every kind of form, mixing, as He wills, with His world here and there.

The word "play" in this case does not mean recreational activity, rather, the way light plays across a surface, connoting constancy, movement and dynamism. The vitality of existence, found in mere whispers in the natural world, is this movement of the Logos mixing with His world. The goodness in what we call good and the beauty in what we call beautiful is the manifestation of the uncreated energies of God playing in every form.

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The fathers have maintained that while God remains incommunicable in His essence, He is communicable in His energies. St Basil the Great writes, "His energies descend to us, but His essence remains unapproachable." The energies of God, or grace of God, is that which radiates from Him like light from the sun, mingling with all of creation and shining most clearly in mankind. If all created objects are like opaque objects bearing grace dimly, man was made a prism, bearing the "unparalleled divine radiance of blessed glory appropriate to him" (a phrase of St Maximus). To shine forth the grace of God in this way, man must first be made like God by grace. St Maximus again elaborates: Through the abundant grace of the Spirit it will be shown that God alone is at work, and in all things there will be only one activity...God will be all in all wholly penetrating all who are his in a way that is appropriate to each.

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For Orthodox Christians, this doctrine has a deeply personal reality. The emanation of grace is the gift the Spirit gives, transforming the faithful into the image of Christ, that we may have true union with God; a life in the Trinity by energizing grace rather than by nature. It is not without praxis that this new life is attained, nor without the constant activity of the Spirit to spur us onward. It is the life of ascesis to mortify the passions, the life of liturgy to partake of the divine nature, the life in Christ, that He may play in every place.

(Part 12 of 14 of Mimetic Reality series)