The Word and the Spirit are two rays of the same Sun, or, in the words of St. Gregory the Theologian, "or rather, two new Suns" in Their manifestation of the Father, inseparable, and yet, as two Persons proceeding from the same Father, inexpressibly different. If, according to the Latin formula, a new relation of origin were introduced between them, allowing the Holy Spirit to proceed from the Father and the Son, then the oneness of the Father's authority, that personal relation which at the same time creates unity and trinity, would give way to another concept, that of one substance, in which the relations would substantiate the difference between the Persons, and where the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit would be only a mutual relation between the Father and the Son. If we grasp the difference in the aspects of these two teachings on the Holy Trinity, we will understand why the Eastern Fathers always defended the ineffable, apophatic procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father as the one Producer of Persons, against a more rational teaching which, by transforming the Father and the Son into the common principle of the Holy Spirit, placed the general over the personal; in this teaching there was a tendency to "depersonalize" the Hypostasis, as it were, by confusing the Divine Persons of the Father and the Son in the natural act of the Spirit's effition, and thus transforming the Third Person into a connection between the first two.

Insisting on the unity of the Father, the one Source of the Godhead and the Beginning of the Trinity, the Eastern Fathers defended the concept of the Trinity, which seemed to them more concrete and more personal. However, one may ask oneself whether such a triadology does not fall into an extreme opposite to that of which the Greeks reproached the Latins, whether it does not place Persons above nature. This would be the case, for example, if nature were understood as the general revelation of the Three Persons, as we see in the sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov, a contemporary Russian theologian, whose teaching, like that of Origen, reveals the possibility of dangerous deviations of Eastern thought, or rather the temptations inherent in Russian religious thought. But the Orthodox tradition is as far from this "Eastern" extreme as it is from its "Western" antithesis. Indeed, as we have seen, if the Persons exist, it is precisely because they possess nature: their very origin is that they receive nature from the Father. Another objection may seem more justified: is not this "one-man rule" of the Father some kind of expression of subordinationism? Does not the One Source, the Father, in this understanding receive the character of the Divine Person predominantly? St. Gregory the Theologian foresaw this difficulty: "I would be ready to call the Father greater, from Whom the Equals have equality, as well as being..., but I am afraid that the Principles may be made the beginning of the lesser and offended by preference. For there is no glory to the Beginning in the humiliation of Those Who are from Him" [90]. "The one Godhead does not increase, or diminish through additions and decreases, everywhere is equal, everywhere the same, as the one beauty and one majesty of heaven. It is the Three Infinites, the infinite co-naturalness," where Each, contemplated by Himself, is God, as the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, with the preservation of a personal attribute in each, and the Three, conceived together, are also God: the former by reason of consubstantiality, the latter by reason of unity of authority" [91].

In this way, the apophatic contemplation of God of the Fathers, in formulating the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity, was able to preserve their mysterious equivalence in the distinction between nature and hypostases. In the words of St. Maximus the Confessor, "God is equally One and Trinity" [92]. This is the end of the path that has no end, the limit of the boundless ascent: the Unknowable One is revealed precisely by the fact that He is unknowable, for His unknowability lies in the fact that God is not only nature, but three Persons; the unknowable essence is such in so far as it is the essence of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God is unknowable as the Trinity, but also revealing Himself as the Trinity. This is the limit of apophaticism: the Revelation of the Trinity as a primordial fact, an absolute reality, a first cause, which can neither be deduced, nor explained, nor found from any other truth, for there is nothing that precedes it. Apophatic thinking, rejecting all support, finds its support in God, Whose unknowability is revealed as the Trinity. Here thought acquires unshakable stability, theology finds its foundation, ignorance becomes knowledge. For the Eastern Church, when they speak of God, it is always a concrete God. "The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ." It is always the Trinity - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and vice versa, when in the concept of trinity the common nature comes to the fore, the religious reality of God - the Trinity is inevitably somehow erased, giving way to the well-known philosophy of the Divine essence [93]. The very concept of eternal bliss acquires a certain intellectual aspect in the West, as a vision of the divine essence. Man's personal relationship to the Living God will no longer be his conversion to the Holy Trinity, but rather will have as his object the person of Christ, who reveals to us the Divine essence. Both Christian thought and Christian life will become Christ-centered [94] and will be connected primarily with the humanity of the incarnate Word, which can be said to be the anchor of salvation for the West. For under the dogmatic attitudes characteristic of the West, any purely theocentric speculation, relating first of all to nature and then to Persons, could be transformed into a kind of mysticism of the "abyss of the Godhead" (compare, for example, Meister Eckhart's Gottheit), into an "impersonal apophaticism" of the Divine non-being, which would precede the Holy Trinity. Thus, by a certain paradoxical detour through Christianity, it is possible to return to the mysticism of the Neoplatonists.

In the tradition of the Eastern Church there is no place for a theology of the Divine essence, much less for its mysticism. The ultimate goal of spiritual life and eternal bliss in the Kingdom of Heaven is not the contemplation of the essence, but first of all participation in the Divine life of the Most Holy Trinity, the deified state of "co-heirs of the Divine nature," as gods created after the uncreated God, and possessing by grace all that the Most Holy Trinity possesses by nature.

For the Orthodox Church, the Most Holy Trinity is the unshakable foundation of all religious thought, all piety, all spiritual life, all spiritual experience. It is Her that we seek when we seek God, when we seek the fullness of being, the meaning and purpose of our existence. For our religious consciousness, the Holy Trinity is the primordial revelation, the source of all revelation and all being. It must be accepted as a fact, the reliability and necessity of which can only be substantiated by himself. According to the modern Russian theologian Father Pavel Florensky [95], in order for human thought to acquire absolute stability, there is no other way out for it than to accept the Trinitarian antinomy. By deviating from the Trinity, as the only foundation of all reality, of all thought, we doom ourselves to a hopeless path, we come to aporia, madness, to the rupture of our being, to spiritual death. There is no other choice between the Trinity and hell. This is truly a question of the cross in the literal sense of the word: the Trinitarian dogma is the cross for human thought. The apophatic ascent is the ascent to Golgotha. Therefore, no speculative philosophy could ever rise to the mystery of the Holy Trinity. For this reason, too, human minds could receive the revelation of the Divinity in its entirety only after the cross of Christ, which triumphed over death and hell. For this reason, finally, the revelation of the Most Holy Trinity shines forth in the Church as a purely religious given, as a predominantly catholic truth.

Chapter IV: Uncreated Energies

The revelation of God the Trinity – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – is the foundation of all Christian theology; it is "theology itself" in the sense that the Greek Fathers attached to this word, which most often denoted for them the Trinitarian mystery revealed to the Church. This is not only the foundation, but also the highest goal of theology, for, according to the thought of Evagrius of Pontus, which was developed by St. Maximus the Confessor, to know the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity in its fullness means to enter into perfect union with God, to attain the deification of one's being, that is, to enter into the Divine life, into the very life of the Most Holy Trinity, and to become, according to the Apostle Peter, "partakers of the Divine nature," ????????????????????? (2 Pet. I, 4). Thus, Trinitarian theology is a theology of unity, a mystical theology that requires experience and presupposes a path of gradual changes in created nature, an ever deeper communion of the human person with God the Trinity.

The Apostle Peter says definitely: divinae consortes naturae – "partakers of the Divine nature". After such words, there is no doubt about the possibility of a real union with God: it has been promised and proclaimed to us as the ultimate goal, as the blessedness of the age to come. It would be naïve and impious to see here only a figurative expression, a metaphor. For to attempt to remove difficulties by depriving of their own meaning those words of Revelation which might contradict our way of thinking and not agree with what seems appropriate to us in relation to God would be to apply too simple an exegetical method. However, it is perfectly legitimate to try to determine the meaning of any expression which, as it seems to us, contradicts other testimonies of Holy Scripture and the tradition of the Fathers about the absolute incommunicability of the Divine being. It would be possible to establish two sets of contradictory texts extracted from the Holy Scriptures and the works of the Holy Fathers, one of which would testify to the complete inaccessibility of the Divine nature, the other would assert that God allows Himself to be known by experience and that He can indeed be attained in union. St. Macarius of Egypt (or, if you like, pseudo-Macarius, which in no way changes the great value of the mystical works known under this name), speaking of the soul entering into union with God, insists on the absolute difference between the Divine nature and the human nature in this unity: "He is God, and it is not God. He is the Lord, and she is a slave, He is the Creator, and she is a creature... there is nothing in common in His nature and hers" [96]. But, on the other hand, the same author says that "our souls must be changed into the Divine nature" [97]. Thus, God is completely inaccessible and at the same time He can really communicate with man; here neither one nor the other side of this antinomy can be eliminated or in any way restricted. For if Christian mysticism cannot be reconciled with a transcendent God, how much more could it be reconciled with a God immanent and accessible to the created. Gilson beautifully expresses this fundamental principle of spiritual life: "Remove," he says, "even for a moment and only at one point, the barrier which the accident of created existence erects between God and man, and you will deprive the Christian mystic of his God, and consequently deprive him of the mystical life. He can do without any god who is not unapproachable, but only God, who is by nature unapproachable, and is the only one without whom he cannot do without" [98].

Thus, the real union with God and mystical experience in general confront Christian theology with an antinomic question, a question of the accessibility of inaccessible nature. How can God the Trinity be an object of unity and mystical experience in general? In the middle of the fourteenth century, this problem provoked vital theological controversy in the East and led to conciliar decrees that clearly formulated the teaching of the Orthodox Church on this issue. The Archbishop of Thessalonica, St. Gregory Palamas, the herald of the Councils of this great epoch of Byzantine theology, devoted one of his dialogues, entitled "Theophanes," to the question of the Divinity incommunicable and communicable. Analyzing the meaning of the words of the Apostle Peter "partakers of the Divine nature," St. Gregory of Thessalonica asserts that this expression is characteristically antinomic, which makes it akin to the Trinitarian dogma: just as God is at the same time One and Three, so the Divine nature should be spoken of as both incommunicable and in a certain sense communicable: we come to communion with the Divine nature, and yet it remains completely inaccessible to us. We must affirm both of these propositions at the same time and preserve their antinomic nature as a criterion of piety.

In what respect can we enter into unity with the Most Holy Trinity? If at a certain moment we could be united with the very nature of God, at least to some extent participate in it, we would not be what we are at that moment, we would be God by nature. God would then not be God the Trinity, but God "with a thousand hypostases" (?????????????), for He would have as many hypostases as there would be persons who participated in His essence. It follows that God in His essence remains inaccessible to us. Can we say that we are united with one of the three Divine Hypostases? But this would be a hypostatic union, inherent only in the Son, God, who became man and remained the second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. Although we have the same human nature, although we receive in Christ the name of the sons of God, nevertheless, by virtue of His incarnation, we do not become the Divine hypostasis of the Son. This means that we cannot be participants in either the essence or the Hypostases of the Holy Trinity. However, God's promise cannot be an illusion: we are called to partake of the divine nature. Consequently, it is necessary to confess in God a certain ineffable distinction, different from the distinction between essence and Persons, such a distinction according to which He would be both completely inaccessible and in many respects accessible. It is the distinction in God between the essence or, in the proper sense of the word, nature, unapproachable, unknowable, incommunicable, and the energies or divine actions, natural forces, inseparable from the essence, in which God acts outwardly, manifesting, communicating, giving: "Illumination and grace, Divine and adoring, is not the essence, but the energy of God" [100], it is "the general energy and Divine power and action of the Triune God" [101]. Thus, according to the teaching of St. Gregory Palamas, when we say that the Divine nature is communicated not in itself, but in its energies, we remain within the bounds of piety" [102].

We see that it was precisely the need to dogmatically substantiate the possibility of union with God that compelled the Eastern Church to formulate a teaching about the real distinction between the Divine essence and the energies. However, St. Gregory Palamas did not create this teaching. Although expressed with less dogmatic clarity, this distinction can be found in most Greek Fathers up to the first centuries of the Church. This is the very tradition of the Eastern Church, closely connected with the Trinitarian dogma.

The Holy Fathers saw in "theology" in the proper sense of the word the teaching of the Divine Being in itself, the teaching of the Most Holy Trinity, while the external manifestations of God, the Trinity, cognizable in Its relationship with the created, entered into the realm of "oikonomia" [103]. The ecclesiastical writers of the first centuries, the epoch preceding the compilation of the Nicene dogma, often confused these two aspects of doctrine when they spoke of the Person of the Word as ???????????????? , the Logos, which manifests the Divinity of the Father. It is in this way of thinking, in the plan of the Divine economy, that they sometimes call the Logos the "power, the might" (???????) of the Father, or His "action" (????????). Athenagoras called the Logos the divine "thought" and "energy" manifested in creation [104]. The text of the Apostle Paul about the invisible things of God, His eternal power and Divinity (?????????????????????????????????????), which became visible from the creation of the world (Rom. 1:20), is interpreted either in the sense of the Logos - "Power and Wisdom", manifesting the Father, or in the more precise sense of "energies" - the general action of the Most Holy Trinity, manifested in creatures: "what can be known about God" (???????????????????), according to the same text of St. Paul (Rom. 1:1). 19). It is in this sense that St. Basil the Great speaks of the manifestation action of energies, contrasting them with their unknowable essence: "We assert that we know our God by actions, but we do not promise to approach the essence itself. For although His actions descend to us, yet His essence remains unapproachable" [105]. In the act of creation, the One-in-Essence Trinity gives knowledge of Itself through Its natural energies.