Eternal Hell and Neo-Palamism as a Metaphysics of Evasion

Posted on 24 March 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

by Robert Fortuin

The Obscenity Everyone Pretends Not to See

For more than a few years now I have found myself asking why the majority of Christians refuse to connect a few very obvious dots: God is good… God wills the salvation of all … and the doctrine of eternal hell is morally repugnant. (For a case in point, see how Dante stops short of ‘connecting the dots’ in John Stamps’ latest installment “The Love That Moves the Sun and the Other Stars.”) Here’s my take: the one reason above all that the doctrine of eternal hell survives is that we have become very skilled at teaching believers not to look at it directly. If Christians did look at it directly, viz. without pious fog, without metaphysical evasions, without corrective rhetoric about “mystery” and “humility” – the very idea of an unending hell would collapse under the weight of its own moral ugliness. For what is the claim, stripped of ornament? It is that the God revealed in Christ as love, mercy, forgiveness, and the seeker of the lost either wills, permits, or forever ratifies an everlasting order of ruin and cruelty for some rational creatures. However one decorates the picture, be it as punishment, self-exclusion, the subjective pain of divine love, the natural consequence of freedom – the final result remains the same. Evil is never wholly overcome. Misery is never wholly healed. The Paschal victory of God contains an eternal remainder of defeat. And if that does not strike the conscience as monstrous, then the conscience has already been trained not to see.

How Infernalism Breaks the Conscience

That, I think, is the real issue. Infernalism is not only a doctrine; it is also a pedagogy of moral accommodation. It teaches people how to accept what they should reject. It teaches them how to describe the indefensible in sanctified language until they can endure it without nausea. This is why David Bentley Hart’s polemic, whatever one thinks of its tone, lands where it does. If you haven’t read his brilliant That All Shall Be Saved, do yourself a huge favor and get your copy today. His point is not merely that eternal hell is mistaken. His point is that belief in eternal hell deforms the moral imagination. It trains Christians to call evil good. It instructs them to bless what, under any other description, they would condemn as cruelty. And that charge, however unwelcome, cuts very near the bone.

One must be fair here. The matter is not that every believer in eternal hell is personally vicious. Most are not. Most inherited the doctrine, absorbed it through catechesis, and learned very early that Christian reverence may require them to suppress their moral recoil before it. The deeper problem is more disturbing than simple personal malice. It is that infernalism can conscript decent people into defending a picture of reality they would otherwise recognize as intolerable. The corruption is often structural before it becomes personal. The system bends the conscience first, and only then the person begins speaking in its accent.

The Quarantine of God

But this moral corruption requires a metaphysical mechanism. Infernalism cannot survive by fear alone. It needs a theology capable of insulating the doctrine from the obvious objection: if God is truly the Good revealed in Christ, how can God eternally uphold the damnation of creatures? That objection is so devastating that, unless some conceptual shelter is built, the doctrine cannot remain standing. And that shelter is what I have called quarantined ontology (see my previous post: “Let’s Give the Heave Ho to Neo-Palamism”).

By quarantined ontology I mean the construction of a protected zone in God beyond or behind the God revealed in Christ: a hidden metaphysical reserve, an ontological back chamber, a deeper register where what appears intolerable in the economy of salvation can still be justified in theology. Christ reveals mercy, forgiveness, solidarity with sinners, love of enemy, and the relentless pursuit of the lost. But perhaps, one is told, this is not all there is to say. Perhaps revelation is true, but not exhaustive. Perhaps Christ shows us God as he acts toward us, but not God “in himself.” Perhaps behind the face of God we see in the Gospels there remains a divine depth in which justice, holiness, transcendence, or freedom authorize outcomes the Evangel itself would seem to disallow. The contradiction between Christ and eternal hell is therefore not resolved: it is relocated. It is quarantined in a place where conscience is no longer allowed to speak with ordinary confidence.

This is why infernalism so often comes wrapped in a rhetoric of reverence. Reverence is needed because contradiction is present. Mystery is invoked because the doctrine cannot be morally or conceptually maintained in the light of Pascha. One keeps Christ for devotion and prayer, but reserves another register of deity for explanatory work. One keeps the beauty of the Gospel on the surface, and a darker metaphysical permission in reserve. In this way believers are allowed to say that God is love while quietly withholding from love any final sovereignty over the destiny of creatures.

Neo-Palamism and the Ontological Escape Hatch

And this, I think, is precisely where a great deal of modern Neo-Palamism has functioned as an extraordinarily useful underwriter of quarantined ontology in many Eastern Orthodox defenses of eternal hell.

To be clear, the issue is not every possible reading of Gregory Palamas, nor the legitimate apophatic conviction that God exceeds creaturely comprehension. The issue is far more specific. In much modern Neo-Palamite theology, the essence/energies distinction is treated not merely as a disciplined conceptual distinction, but as a real distinction in God. God’s essence is utterly hidden, inaccessible, beyond all participation and all knowledge; God’s energies are the uncreated modes of manifestation, communion, participation, and revelation. However subtle the formulations, the practical result is obvious enough. A partition has been established. The God who is encountered and participated in is not simply, without remainder, identical to the God who remains hidden in himself. Theological speech has acquired two levels.

Once that move is made, infernalism has found its metaphysical refuge.

Now one can say that Christ really reveals God, but only within the immanent economy of salvation; that Christ really manifests divine love, but only as energy, that he really gives us communion with God, but not in a way that permits us to identify the full truth of God’s inner life with what is revealed in the incarnation of the God-Man. At that point the ontological quarantine is in place. What the Gospel shows us is true, yes, but perhaps not decisive. Christ displays mercy, but mercy may not be ultimate. Christ seeks the lost, but perhaps this cannot be taken as the final logic of divine intentionality. Christ reveals the Father, but not in a way that excludes a darker finality hidden beyond revelation in the divine essence. So it is that the contradiction between Christ and eternal hell is displaced into the essence/energies distinction. Neo-Palamism becomes, in practice, a metaphysics of evasion.

Mysticism Does Not Make Cruelty Holy

One sees this very clearly in certain Orthodox accounts of hell where heaven and hell are said to be “the same divine fire,” the same uncreated energy of God experienced as joy by the blessed and as torment by the damned. This is often presented as a spiritually elevated alternative to Western infernalism. But too often it is simply infernalism in mystical costume. The cruelty is not removed; it is aestheticized. God remains the everlasting condition of agony or ruin for some creatures. The scandal remains intact. Indeed, in one sense it grows worse, because the divine life itself becomes the medium of endless suffering. And yet the Neo-Palamite framework makes this easier to defend, because it permits the theologian to speak of God as love in revelation while shielding the final contradiction behind apophatic reserve. The cruelty is not denied. It is transfigured into “mystery.”

That is why I keep pressing the point that quarantined ontology is not a minor speculative error. It keeps people from connecting the dots. It is a theological device that allows churches to preserve a morally impossible doctrine by partitioning the divine life. Once the partition is in place, every contradiction becomes survivable. Every protest from conscience can be dismissed as conceptual confusion. Every moral objection can be neutralized with the same gesture: you are mistaking the economy for theology, revelation for essence, what is revealed through Jesus Christ for what remains hidden in God in se. But if that move is permitted, then Christian theology has already forfeited its center. For Christianity does not proclaim Christ as one helpful manifestation among others. It proclaims him as the image of the invisible God. It dares to say that in Jesus the truth of God, God’s moral character, is revealed. If that truth can be indefinitely qualified whenever a cherished doctrine becomes embarrassing, then revelation has become little more than a devotional screen placed in front of an ontological darkness.

Dissonance as Doctrine

This is where the psychological dimension becomes unavoidable. Infernalism generates severe cognitive dissonance because it asks believers to hold together claims that do not sit naturally together. God is love. Christ reveals the Father. God desires the salvation of all. Divine goodness is absolute. And yet some creatures are eternally lost, or eternally tormented, or eternally fixed in hopeless ruin. Those claims cannot be harmonized without strain. The strain is immense. A healthy conscience feels it immediately. That is why the usual defenses of infernalism are so repetitive and so brittle: freedom, mystery, justice, holiness, transcendence. These are not arguments so much as pressure valves. They do not heal the contradiction; they help the believer live with it.

And the believer must live with it, because the church teaches him to reinterpret his own moral revulsion as a spiritual defect. What should be taken as evidence that something is wrong with the doctrine is instead treated as evidence that something is wrong with the person. If you recoil before eternal hell, perhaps you are sentimental. If you think endless, hopeless torment contradicts divine goodness, perhaps you are rationalistic. If you trust the face of Christ too much, perhaps you have not yet grasped the hidden severity of holiness. In this way the conscience is slowly retrained. Compassion becomes suspect. Moral clarity becomes pride. Psychological dissonance becomes a test of obedience. The believer is not taught to resolve the contradiction, but to survive it.

That is what Dr. Hart sees so clearly. The doctrine of eternal hell does not merely describe a corrupted order; it tends to corrupt those who defend it. Not always in grossly visible ways, not always by making them cruel in ordinary life, but by training them to make peace with a picture of God that should have been rejected at the outset. It teaches them to accept a final universe in which evil is never wholly healed and still call it victory. It teaches them to look upon everlasting separation from God and call it justice. It teaches them to hear Christ’s forgiveness of enemies and still leave open the possibility that God’s final word over some enemies is their eternal ruin. That is not a harmless mistake. It is a deformation of Christian moral language at the root.

The Church Against Moral Clarity

The institutional church has played an enormous role in preserving this deformation. One should say that plainly. The Church as organized religion does not simply hand on revelation in a pure state. It also develops reflexes of self-preservation, mechanisms of control, habits of rhetorical management. Eternal hell has historically served not just as an eschatological doctrine, but as an instrument of seriousness, a sanction behind authority, a magnifier of ecclesial mediation, a disciplinary shadow cast over the faithful. It is not difficult to see why institutions become attached to it. A religion that claims to manage the only escape from everlasting catastrophe has a powerful hold over the conscience. And once such a doctrine is embedded deeply enough, metaphysical ingenuity will always arise to defend it.

This is one reason Neo-Palamism has proven so useful in contemporary Orthodox settings. It offers a highly sophisticated vocabulary for preserving transcendence, but in the hands of infernalism it also offers something else: a way of limiting the practical finality of revelation. The essence/energies distinction, when turned into a real ontological partition in God, allows one to affirm Christ with great fervor while quietly refusing to let Christ decide the decisive question. One can praise the divine light, celebrate theosis, extol the beauty of participation in God, and still reserve for the hidden depths of deity the right to underwrite eternal hell. In that sense Neo-Palamism becomes not merely a theology of transcendence, but a theology of quarantine.

The God Hidden Behind Jesus

And a quarantined God is finally no God at all, at least not the Christian God.

For once revelation is no longer trustworthy “all the way down,” theology loses the right to speak confidently of divine goodness. If Christ shows us mercy, but behind Christ there may remain an ontological reserve in which mercy is not final, then mercy has been relativized. If Christ seeks the lost, but the hidden depth of God may still permit the everlasting loss of some, then the Gospel has been rendered penultimate. If Christ is what God looks like toward us, but not what God is in himself (where it matters most!), then we are left not with revelation but with a religious appearance. The whole Christian claim begins to hollow out from within.

Revelation or Theater

This is why I think the real issue beneath infernalism is not merely hell, but whether Christians still believe that Christ reveals God without remainder. And the Nicene faith sharpens that claim to its highest possible intensity: Christ is not merely a messenger, symbol, or partial disclosure of God, but is homoousios with the Father, consubstantial with God, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. In Christ, God has not offered us a secondary image standing at some remove from the divine reality, but has made himself known in an absolute and definitive manner. If this is true, then there cannot be a darker God hidden behind him. There cannot be an ontological cellar beneath the Gospel where theology stores the cruelties that revelation has rendered intolerable. There cannot be one God in prayer and another in metaphysics. There cannot be one face turned toward us in Christ and another, more terrible face turned away from us in the hidden essence. If Christ is the ‘express image of the invisible God’ (John 14:9, Colossians 1:15, Hebrews 1:3), then the Father is not less merciful than Christ, not less beautiful than Christ, not less determined to save us than Christ. To put it plainly: there is no hidden surplus of divine harshness waiting behind the Incarnate Son.

But if the infernalist use of Neo-Palamism is right (if the essence/energies distinction really can be used to protect a real division between the God revealed and the God hidden, precisely so that eternal hell may be kept in play) then Christian theology has become an exercise in bad faith. Christ gives us the consoling surface; ontology keeps the dreadful remainder in reserve. The Church proclaims mercy and shelters terror. It tells the faithful to look at Jesus while warning them not to infer too much from what they see. It calls this humility. It calls this Holy Tradition. It calls this mystery. But the plain truth is uglier. It is a refusal to let the Gospel judge the metaphysics erected to defend a doctrine that conscience cannot honestly bless.

No Ontology Behind Christ

And that, finally, is why the issue is so grave. Eternal hell is not just one bad doctrine among others. It is the point at which Christian speech about God is tested to destruction. And Neo-Palamism, whenever it is deployed as a metaphysical underwriter of quarantined ontology (and make no mistake, it is very popular) becomes one of the chief means by which that test is evaded. It gives infernalism an ontological hideout. It lets the church preserve contradiction under the name of transcendence. It teaches the conscience to distrust what Christ reveals whenever Christ becomes inconvenient to inherited theology.

Enough!

Either Christ reveals God, or he does not. But the Nicene faith does not permit us to reduce that claim to the weak sense of a merely symbolic or partial disclosure. Christ is homoousios with the Father: consubstantial, true God from true God. In him God has not given us a secondary appearance, a ‘pastoral accommodation’ in the economy of salvation, or a surface-level manifestation beneath which some deeper and less evangelical deity remains concealed. In Christ, God has made himself known definitively and absolutely. Therefore either the mercy, the beauty, and the self-giving love we see in Jesus Christ are the very truth of God, or Christian theology has collapsed into theater. There is no ontological cellar beneath the Gospel. There is no harsher God hidden behind the Son. There is no metaphysical remainder in God that may finally contradict what is revealed in the one who is of one essence with the Father.

And if Christian theology must partition God to defend eternal hell, if it must retreat behind Neo-Palamite ontological quarantine whenever conscience remembers what goodness and love mean, then the doctrine has already condemned itself.

Because the one thing the Church cannot do, and still call itself Christian, is hide from Christ behind ontology.

(Return to first article)

Posted in Robert Fortuin, Universalism and Eschatology | Tagged essence and energies, eternal damnation, God, hell, Jesus Christ, Neo-Palamism, Palamite distinction | 3 Comments

St Cyril of Alexandria and the Sacraments of Deification

Posted on 23 March 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

by Daniel A. Keating, Ph.D.

Cyril of Alexandria has often been identified as the theologian par excellence of what is variously termed ‘divinization’, ‘deification’, or ‘theosis’. One survey of this doctrine in the early church concludes that ‘the doctrine of divinization in Cyril of Alexandria appears, in fact, as the sum of all that the previous Fathers wrote on this subject’. Another study favorably cites the view that ‘Cyril brings the doctrine of deification … to full maturity’. Other scholars have judged that Cyril ‘probably represents the pinnacle in the development of teaching on theosis’, and that ‘Cyril’s magnificent doctrine on sanctification and the presence of the Holy Spirit in the justified souls recapitulates the whole Greek theology of theopoiesis, deification.

As an entrée into Cyril’s account of divinization, I have identified – and propose to trace – what may be termed Cyril’s ‘narrative of divine life’. The following selections exhibit the manner in which Cyril employs this narrative of divine life to link the inter-trinitarian life of God with our reception of that life through the Incarnate Word and in the Spirit:

For God the Father is Life by nature, and as alone being so, he caused the Son to shine forth who also himself is Life; for it could not be otherwise with the Word that proceeds substantially from Life. For he must, I say must, also himself be Life, as being one who sprang forth from Life, from him who begat him. God the Father therefore gives life to all things through the Son in the Holy Spirit. And everything that exists and breathes in heaven and on earth, its existence and life is from God the Father by the Son in the Holy Spirit. Therefore neither the nature of angels, nor anything else whatsoever that was made, nor aught that from non-existence was brought into being, possesses life as the fruit of its own nature. But on the contrary, life proceeds, as I said, from the substance which transcends all, and to it only [Life] belongs, and is possible that it can give life, because it is Life by nature.

It was not otherwise possible for man, being of a nature which perishes, to escape death, unless he recovered that ancient grace, and partook once more of God who holds all things together in being and preserves them in life through the Son in the Spirit. Therefore his Only-begotten Word has become a partaker of flesh and blood (Heb. 2:14), that is, he has become man – though being Life by nature, and begotten of the Life that is by nature, that is, of God the Father – so that, having united himself with the flesh which perishes according to the law of its own nature,… he might restore it to his own life and render it through himself a partaker of God the Father… And he wears our nature, refashioning it to his own life. And he himself is also in us, for we have all become partakers of him, and have him in ourselves through the Spirit. For this reason we have become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Pet. 1:4), and are reckoned as sons, and so too have in ourselves the Father himself through the Son.

The Holy Mystery of Baptism

We will take Cyril’s exposition of the baptism of Jesus in John’s gospel as our starting point. This event uniquely captures and reveals for Cyril the entire economy of salvation. The baptism of Jesus, in Cyril’s hands, comes to signify the re-creation of the human race, pointing back, as it were, to the creation of Adam, and pointing forward to the completion of the re-creation of humanity in the resurrection and ascension of Christ. Cyril’s exposition of the baptism of Jesus also presents the Incarnate Word as both agent and recipient of salvation, and establishes the central place of the gift of the Spirit in the narrative of divine life.

Cyril then exposits Jesus’s baptism itself by appealing to two aspects of the creation in Genesis 1-2. First, Cyril reminds us that the human race was made ‘in the image and likeness of God’ (Gen. 1:27). Secondly, he interprets Gen. 2:7, ‘And he breathed into his face the breath of life’, as the inbreathing of the Holy Spirit. The first man was sealed in the divine image by the Spirit who was at the same time ‘putting life’ into the first man, and stamping him with his own ‘features’ in a divine manner. Cyril seemingly has in mind a two-stage process here, or at least two distinguishable aspects of the one creation: (1) the first man is made in the image and likeness of God; (2) the Spirit breathes life into him, impressing his own divine characteristics upon him. Although the relationship between these two actions is not further specified here, a selection from his commentary on Jn. 14:20 clarifies Cyril’s conception of the creation of Adam and the divine inbreathing:

No one, I deem, rightly minded would suppose that the inbreathing which proceeded from the divine essence became the creature’s soul, but that after the creature was ensouled, or rather had attained to the distinctive property of its perfect nature by means of both – I mean of course, soul and body – then like a seal of his own nature the Creator impressed on it the Holy Spirit, that is, the breath of life, through which it was being moulded to the archetypal beauty, and was being perfected according to the image of the one who created it, being established for every kind of excellence, by virtue of the Spirit given to dwell in it.

The recovery of the divine image in us is, therefore, not simply the recasting of our deformed nature, though this is also an integral part of Cyril’s conception. It necessarily involves the re-acquisition of the divine life through the Spirit.

Cyril then identifies a third aspect of the original creation, the giving of ‘the commandment which preserves’ to the ‘reasonable living creature’. The mention of the commandment underlines the moral element of the created order, and so the moral capacity and responsibility of the first man. Cyril presents Adam in Paradise, ‘still carefully guarding the gift, and illustrious in the divine image of the one who made him, through the Holy Spirit given to dwell within’. The divine image is in this sense a gift, properly granted and guaranteed by the indwelling Holy Spirit, a gift which requires an ethical preservation lest it be squandered.

An account of the Fall follows: the man, tricked by the deceits of the devil, despises his creator, and by trampling on the law marked out for him, impugns the grace given to him and hears the sentence, ‘Dust you are and to dust you shall return’, as the penalty for his sin. The divine likeness, curiously, is not in Cyril’s view forfeited all at once. Rather, through the inroads of sin it loses its brightness, becoming fainter and darkened over time. This detail of Cyril’s treatment of the Fall is unusual. As the human race multiplies and sin comes into dominance, ‘nature is stripped of the ancient grace’ and ‘the Spirit departs altogether’. Corruption and death follow directly upon Adam’s transgression, but the complete loss of the original gift of the Spirit occurs only by stages. And crucially, the final stripping of grace is marked by the decisive departure of the Holy Spirit. It is noteworthy that the creation and Fall are cast here in terms of the gift of the Holy Spirit and its subsequent loss. Other traditional elements are included, but the decisive feature of Cyril’s account is the acquisition and forfeiture of the Holy Spirit.

It comes as no surprise that the re-acquisition of the Spirit figures prominently in Cyril’s account of the redemption. God in his goodness determines to transform human nature anew through the Spirit, ‘for it was not otherwise possible for the divine features to shine out in him again, as they did previously’. And in order to show how ‘the Spirit was again rooted in the human race, and in what manner human nature was renewed to that of old’, Cyril re-tells the story of the creation and Fall, positioning the baptism of Jesus within the narrative as the decisive event for the re-acquisition of the Spirit. The incarnate Word receives the Spirit at the Jordan, Cyril assures us, not for himself, but for us and ‘as one of us’. The very one who is ‘the supplier of the Spirit’, receives it as man, so that ‘he might preserve’ the Spirit ‘for our nature’, and so that the original grace might once again be rooted in us. For Cyril, the ‘remaining’ of the Spirit on Jesus is more than just the anointing of an individual, even the promised Messiah. The descent of the Spirit on Christ represents the decisive return of the Spirit to the human race, now abiding in one who can reliably ‘preserve it’.

Cyril plainly reads this text in the light of Paul’s Adam-Christ typology (Rom. 5:12-21; 1 Cor. 15:20-22, 44-49), enabling him to accomplish two ends at once. First, by viewing Christ as a representative man, Cyril resolves the exegetical crux of why Christ submitted to baptism: he did so not for himself – for being the Son of God he required nothing – but for us, as the firstfruits of the ‘new’ human race. Secondly, the Adam-Christ typology also enables Cyril to unfold from this one event the overall scope of the plan of redemption. By viewing the baptism of Jesus in this light, Cyril transfers the significance of the text from Jesus’s own career per se to a revelation of the redemption of the human race. Cyril envisages the Adam-Christ typology in such a way that Christ becomes, in his capacity as the Second Adam, not only the agent but also the recipient of redemption, though it is the latter role which predominates here. On this view, the Incarnation is more than a means whereby God has access to the human race and can accomplish a work of salvation in us. Christ also carries out the work of redemption and re-creation upon himself, as representing in himself the new humanity.

If the baptism of Jesus displays in a particularly poignant way the divine plan of salvation in Cyril, other events in the life of Christ are essential for the completion of that plan. In Cyril’s view, our human nature, which received the Spirit in Christ at his baptism, is only fully renewed in Christ’s resurrection. Cyril’s commentary on Jn. 20:22-23 – Jesus breathing the Spirit upon the disciples on Easter day – exhibits with particular clarity this progressive restoration of human nature:

And how did the Son restore [humankind]? By slaying death through the death of his holy flesh, and raising up the human race to a mounting incorruption. For Christ was raised for our sake. Therefore, in order that we might learn that it is this one who was the creator of our nature in the beginning, and who sealed us by the Holy Spirit, the Savior again for us bestows the Spirit through a visible inbreathing on the holy disciples, as on the firstfruits of our renewed nature. For Moses writes concerning our creation of old, that he breathed into his face the breath of life (Gen. 2:7). As therefore from the beginning he was fashioned and came to be, so too is he renewed. And just as then he was formed in the image of his creator, so too now, through participation in the Spirit, he is re-fashioned to the likeness of his maker.

As Christ in his baptism is the firstfruits of our sanctification, this select number of apostles on Easter day become the firstfruits of the reception of the Spirit. The one who featured as the recipient of the Spirit in the baptism at the Jordan is now displayed prominently as the giver of the Spirit. As the Spirit was breathed into Adam, so the Spirit returns upon the Second Adam at the Jordan, Christ receiving it as a firstfruits for us. But as the Second Adam, Christ is also a ‘life-giving Spirit’ (1 Cor. 15:49), and so gives the Spirit to the disciples.

The divine plan of salvation is not complete for Cyril, however, without Christ’s ascension and enthronement in heaven in bodily form:

It was necessary, then, to lead human nature up to the summit of all good, and not only to set it free from death and sin, but to raise it already even to the heavens themselves, and to display man a sharer and fellow worshipper with the angels. And just as by his own resurrection he opened a new way for us to be able to escape from corruption, so it was necessary to open for us the passage heavenwards too, and to set in the presence of the Father the one who had been expelled from his countenance because of Adam’s transgression… He places us in the presence of the Father, having departed into heaven as the firstfruits of humanity. For just as, being himself Life by nature, he is said to have died and risen again for our sake, so too, ever beholding his own Father, and in turn also being seen by his own Father, he is said to be manifested now (that is, when he became man, not for his own sake but for us) as man. And therefore this one thing was seen to be lacking in his dispensation towards us, our ascension into heaven itself, as in Christ, the firstfruits and the first [of all].

The ascension and enthronement of Christ, then: (1) brings the divine plan of salvation in Cyril to its completion in Christ the firstfruits; (2) reveals the end intended for the whole human race; and (3) inaugurates a renewed human life on earth through the gift of the Spirit.

Cyril’s commentary on Jn. 3:3-6 opens up for us his understanding of baptism and the gift of the Spirit. He begins his commentary on v. 3, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God’, by drawing directly upon another text, Matt. 7:21, ‘but he who does the will of my Father in heaven’, which in turn shapes the direction of the exposition. Cyril writes: ‘But it is the will of my Father that man be exhibited a partaker of the Holy Spirit, and having been born anew to an unaccustomed and strange life, that the citizen from the earth be called a citizen also of heaven’. Such a statement reveals the theological priority of the gift of the indwelling Spirit in Cyril’s theology of sanctification and divinization. In its own context, Matt. 7:21 would seem to point to works of human response and obedience, but in his use of that text here Cyril positions the gift of the Spirit as the first and fundamental element of God’s will for the human race, presumably as the basis for all other works of obedience which follow.

Cyril interprets v. 5 as Jesus making explicit what was hinted at in v. 3. Interpreting the term anothen ‘from above’, since this new birth comes from the Spirit who is ‘from above’, Cyril delineates the consequences of baptism through a collection of related expressions: we become partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4); we are formed anew to the ancient beauty through and in the Spirit; we are regenerated to newness of life; and we are remoulded to divine sonship. Cyril next explains the phrase, ‘of water and the Spirit’, in terms of the correspondence between a duality in human nature and a two-fold agency in baptism. To the spiritual aspect of human nature corresponds the Holy Spirit, and to the bodily aspect the water. Baptism effects a two-fold sanctification, the Spirit sanctifying and healing the human spirit, the water sanctifying and healing the body. For Cyril the water itself is efficacious, at least in the role of sanctifying the body, but only because ‘through the working of the Spirit the sensible water is transformed to a certain divine and ineffable power’.

Two key principles of Cyril’s theology are illustrated here. First, sanctification in the sense intended here is always a work of God, and can only be a work of God. The act of sanctifying can also be a human work, e.g. the act of dedicating something to God, or of purifying oneself for service to God. But when the term is used in the context of baptism and the reception of divine life, it is reserved for divine action alone, because only God can sanctify in this sense. Only the triune God can truly make something holy. Secondly, the divine power is made effective in us in part by and through a material medium, the water of baptism. There is a parallel here between the efficacious power of the water of baptism to cleanse and sanctify, and the life-giving power which Cyril sees invested in Christ’s flesh (and therefore in the Eucharist) – but the parallel would appear to be analogical, not identical. The power granted to the water in baptism appears to be limited to the sphere of the body, and to the initial cleansing work of sanctification. The scope of the Eucharist, as we shall now explore, is much broader.

The Holy Mystery of Eucharist

Cyril’s magisterial treatment of the Eucharist is found in his commentary on Jn. 6, of which only a schematic summary can be offered here. In treating this text, it is imperative to view Cyril’s commentary on the miracle of the loaves and fishes and the subsequent bread of life discourse as one unit, and to resist the temptation to seize upon the specifically eucharistic texts which make up the last part of the commentary, without recognizing the overall shape of his treatment.

In the first part of the exposition, the miracle of the loaves and fishes (vv. 10-14) is interpreted in terms of a spiritual feeding upon the Scriptures. The five loaves signify the five books of Moses and the two fishes the gospels and apostolic writings: ‘The Savior, having mixed the New with the Old, by the law and the teaching of the new covenant, nourishes the souls of those who believe in him to life, plainly eternal life’. Given the more explicit eucharistic references later in the commentary, it is all the more striking that Cyril identifies the feeding of the multitude here exclusively with nourishment through the divine Word in Scripture.

In the first instalment of the Bread of Life Discourse (vv. 27-37), Cyril speaks both of a spiritual feeding upon Christ and a nourishment for both body and soul, a plain reference to the eucharist. But he notes that the Eucharist is more properly the subject of the latter part of the commentary. The topic of these verses is, for Cyril, Christ himself, the bread of life. The true bread from heaven is not the manna, ‘but the Only-Begotten Word of God himself, who proceeds from the essence of the Father, since indeed he is Life by nature, and gives life to all things’. This section of the commentary, then, is dominated by Christ himself as the prime gift of the Father, who nourishes us by various means, and notably imparts life to us through each of them (and here the Scripture, the gift of the Spirit and the Eucharist all appear).

The second instalment of the bread of life discourse (vv. 48-63), in which Christ speaks more provocatively of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, is the occasion for Cyril’s most extensive exposition on the Eucharist. Cyril’s theology of the Eucharist appears to be quite straightforward: by eating the consecrated bread, we in fact partake of the flesh of Christ, and so receive into ourselves the life that is in Christ through the medium of his very flesh, flesh which has become life-giving by virtue of the ineffable union of the Word to this flesh. In his commentary on v. 51, ‘And the bread which I will give is my flesh for the life of the world’, Cyril writes:

For since the life-giving Word of God was living in the flesh, he transformed it to his own proper good, that is to life, and according to the manner of the inexpressible union, suitably rendered it wholly life-giving, as he is himself by nature. For this reason the body of Christ gives life to those who partake of it. For it expels death, whenever it comes to be in those who are dying, and expels corruption, bearing in itself perfectly the Word who abolishes corruption.

Here we see a special quality of Christ’s flesh alone, based upon the unique union between the Word and the flesh he assumed. By this union, the flesh obtains the capacity to give life, not from itself, as possessing a property that now pertains to it by nature, but only on account of the ongoing union it has with the Word.

In eucharistic communion, Cyril underscores the mingling of ‘like to like’, the flesh of Christ under the form of bread becoming ‘mingled’ with our bodies, and so passing onto them the life it possesses by virtue of its union with the life-giving Word. The life-giving power of the Word is in his own flesh like a ‘spark buried amid much stubble’, giving to that flesh a life-giving power, which will also serve as the seed of immortality in us, causing us to rise on the last day. Our participation in the Eucharist, the eating of Christ’s flesh and drinking of his blood (v. 56), is likened to ‘wax joined to wax’; we become intermingled with Christ through the mingling of his flesh with ours. At times, Cyril speaks of the Eucharist as primarily destined for giving life to our flesh, in apparent distinction to the soul: ‘For it was indeed necessary, not only for the soul to be re-created to newness of life through the Holy Spirit, but also that this material and earthly body be sanctified through the more material and kindred participation, and called to incorruption’. Does Cyril then envisage a separate pathway for the re-creation of the soul on the one hand, and that of the body on the other, the former through the Holy Spirit, the latter through participation in the Eucharist? In a text just three verses following (v. 56), however, Cyril speaks of the healing power of the Eucharist in us, expelling the law of sin in our flesh and the passions which dwell there. It would appear from the latter text that the life-giving power of the Eucharist pertains to the restoration of the soul as well.

Cyril’s commentary on Jn. 6 is multifaceted, meandering, and at times repetitive.It does not make for easy summary and synthesis. Still I would like to suggest that the basic structure of the liturgy may provide a framework for integrating the various parts of his commentary. Cyril speaks first of the nourishment which comes from the written word of the Old and New Testaments, and then of the Eucharistic feast in which the faithful feed upon the body and blood of Christ. It is suggestive that he makes no mention of the Eucharist in treating of the feeding of the five thousand (vv. 10-14), which he interprets strictly in terms of nourishment on the written Word in Scripture. The initial bread of life discourse (vv. 27-37), which speaks of the bread from heaven, is then focused on Christ himself as the prime gift of the Father, who nourishes us by various means. These verses function as the interpretative center of the commentary, linking the first and last parts around the figure of Christ, who is himself the true manna from heaven. The second bread of life discourse (vv. 48-63), developed at some length, completes the exposition: nourishment through Christ, the bread of life, culminates in the Eucharist. If this assessment is accurate, Cyril’s commentary on Jn. 6 not only offers us a developed treatment of his views on the Eucharist; it also places the Eucharist in a wider, liturgical context, through which Christ, the true life-giving bread from heaven, nourishes the faithful through the divine word in Scripture, through the indwelling Holy Spirit, and through his life-giving flesh.

In summary, we can express in the following statement the means by which the divine life in Christ is appropriated to us: we receive Christ into ourselves, participating in him and his life, and thus in the divine nature, through a two-fold means: through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, normally related to baptism, and through partaking of the flesh and blood of Christ in the Eucharist.

Cyril’s emphasis is plainly on the means by which Christ comes to dwell in us. Christ dwells in us, first of all, through the indwelling Holy Spirit, and secondly through his flesh and blood, which by eating we take into ourselves. The theological principle at work here is that only God himself can truly sanctify, vivify, justify and cause us to be adopted ‘sons of God’ through participation in his divine nature. The presence of God dwelling in us, and conversely our participation in him, is the sine qua non of newness of life in Christ, and a characteristic mark of Cyril’s thought. It is only by means of Christ dwelling in us, through the Holy Spirit and through his own flesh, that we can be conformed to the image of the Son and bear the fruits of the Spirit.

For Cyril, the indwelling Spirit operates not only upon our spiritual nature, accomplishing a moral purification and renewal, but also upon our corporeal nature, preserving us for incorruption and resurrection. Likewise, the Eucharist affects not only our corporeal nature, but transforms the whole of our nature, body and spirit, and accomplishes as well our moral healing. Is Cyril incoherent here, or at least inconsistent in his explanation of the means by which we are, body and soul, made alive and united to Christ? Cyril is at times, I believe, tempted to press the anthropological duality too far, and to speak in terms of strict lines of correspondence between the somatic manner of indwelling and the effects on our bodies on the one hand, and the pneumatic manner of indwelling and the effects on our spirits on the other. Such expressions are not fully consistent with his aim elsewhere expressed to show that each manner of indwelling brings the full fruit of Christ’s life to both body and soul.

This is not to suggest, however, that in the end the somatic-pneumatic distinction is either meaningless or simply incoherent. His primary use of these terms distinguishes the mode of Christ’s indwelling, spiritually by the Holy Spirit, and somatically by his flesh and blood, and the manner of reception by us; that is, that we receive the somatic mode of Christ’s presence in our bodies in the Eucharist, and receive the Spirit of Christ in our spirits through baptism. In this primary use of the distinction, then, Cyril’s use is coherent and consistent with his overall theological approach. The two-fold modality is designed to express the point of union and the manner of union between Christ and the believer, and the goal is to show that the whole of human nature, corporeal and spiritual, receives a fitting remedy in the Incarnate Christ.

This understanding of the two-fold means of union with Christ brings a corrective to certain readings of Cyril which emphasize the somatic, eucharistic mode of union and indwelling to the diminution or exclusion of the pneumatic mode. For Cyril, each manner of indwelling has its own distinctive and particular characteristics, each its own virtue and excellence. When viewed together – as Cyril himself wants to view them – they display a remarkably well-balanced, if not fully integrated, account of the gift of divine life through the Incarnate Christ.

The indwelling of Christ through participation in the Eucharist possesses a certain excellence for Cyril because of the ‘natural participation’ it establishes. Baptism and the Eucharist each have both a somatic and spiritual effect, that is, they each bring the divine life to the whole of human nature, but the unique character of the Eucharist for Cyril is that it bonds Christ with the believer according to a common nature, that is, according to the flesh. In the eating of Christ’s flesh and the drinking of his blood, Cyril perceives a particularly apt means of union, made possible by the Incarnation of the Word, and expressive of that ‘enfleshment’. The parallel union between the Spirit of Christ and our spiritual nature is only analogous to this, because our spiritual nature is not of the same nature as the divine Spirit, and the union achieved is rather of a created spiritual nature with the divine Spirit. This ‘natural participation’ obtained by the commingling of Christ’s life-giving flesh with our bodies, captures in the most profound way for Cyril, the true kenosis of the Word and the reality of the Incarnation, and so gives to the eucharistic manner of indwelling a virtue and particularity of its own.

The eucharistic manner of indwelling also possesses a certain sacramental priority on two counts. First, it is the event towards which baptism leads, the fulfillment of the Passover made possible by the crossing of the mystical Jordan and spiritual circumcision. There is a sacramental order and progression which culminates in the Eucharist. Secondly, the Eucharist is a repeatable reception of Christ, and so is a renewable event of union with Christ, for the healing of sin, the taming of our passions, and participation in the One who is life. Cyril is not unwilling to berate his congregation for failing, out of misplaced reverence, to participate in the life-giving power of the Eucharist.

Yet the indwelling of Christ through participation in the Holy Spirit in baptism also possesses its own distinctive virtue and importance in Cyril’s theology of sanctification and divinization. On the sacramental level, if the Eucharist is the summit to which baptism leads, baptism marks the point of transfer, that initial indwelling of God which makes us in truth, for Cyril, new creations, ‘children of God’, and partakers of the divine nature. There is a complementarity, then, in the sacramental order, a certain bi-polarity of the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, each essential and each possessing its own distinctive qualities.

But the indwelling of the Spirit through baptism is not simply ‘a beginning and way’ of new life which leads to the Eucharist. It possesses for Cyril a theological importance, representing the endpoint and culmination of Christ’s redeeming work. The return of the Spirit to the incarnate Word brings to fulfillment the work of creation, and expresses most precisely God’s intention for the human race. As we have seen, it is significant that in Cyril’s view the original manner of divine indwelling at the creation was the gift of the Holy Spirit to Adam. No other patristic writer places so much emphasis upon this initial in-breathing of the Spirit in Gen. 2:7. And indeed the most common soteriological narrative in Cyril moves from the Creation and gift of the Spirit to Adam, through the Fall and the loss of that Spirit, to the re-acquisition of the Spirit through the Incarnate Christ. The return of the Spirit to the human race is the fulfillment of God’s intention in creation, now made stable in the Word made flesh, who has given the Spirit a secure anchor in human nature. The Spirit is the mark of the New Covenant, defining the difference between the greatest representative of the old covenant, John the Baptist, and those who are least in the kingdom of God through possession of the Spirit. And significantly, Cyril presents eternal life in heaven in terms of the fullness of the Spirit dwelling in us.

As the eucharistic manner of indwelling most aptly and fully expresses the enfleshment of Christ and our union with him according to the flesh, so the indwelling of the Holy Spirit most aptly and fully exhibits God’s purpose for the human race and the restoration which brings us to our final goal. When the eucharistic manner of indwelling and union is viewed as the chief or exclusive means to our divinization, Cyril tends to be read as teaching a physicalist soteriology governed by a quasi-automatic transfer of divine life through contact with Christ’s flesh. But when the return of the Spirit and the pneumatic mode of indwelling is accorded its proper place in Cyril’s thought, in complementarity to the somatic means of union, then we are enabled to see the telos of Cyril’s theological perspective more clearly: the full spiritualization of human nature, accomplished in Christ first through his reception of the Spirit, and encompassing the whole of our nature, spiritual and corporeal.

* * *

Dr Daniel Keating is Professor of Theology at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary and the author of The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria and Deification and Grace, as well as several commentaries on the New Testament. This article is excerpted (minus footnotes) from his essay “Divinization in Cyril of Alexandria” in The Theology of St Cyril of Alexandria.

Posted in Cyril of Alexandria, Patristic and Byzantine theology | Tagged Baptism, baptism of Christ, Cyril of Alexandria, deification, Eucharist, theosis | Leave a comment

Beauty and the Rumor of Angels

Posted on 23 March 2026 by Jonathan Tobias

the world, even now, is deeper than its brutalities

by Jonathan Tobias

— Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation (c. 1434–1436): not sentiment, but interruption — the irruption of divine beauty into a shadowed world, as Gabriel’s word and Mary’s consent open creation to the impossible.

A Tuesday Morning in Edenton

Last Tuesday morning I stepped outside early with our two Westies, Wendell and Watson, and was met by birdsong. White-throated sparrow, tufted titmouse, red-headed woodpecker, American robin, red-winged blackbird, Carolina wren, mourning dove, and the neighbor’s rooster, who never quite accepts that morning is over when morning is over. On that day there was also an Eastern bluebird.

They were not putting on a concert for my uplift. They were simply being birds. And yet what I heard did not feel merely incidental. It felt like gift.

For a few moments the world did not seem merely to stand there like neutral fact. It seemed expressive. The air itself felt inhabited. The world was not merely there. It was speaking.

Beauty still does this. It interrupts us. It catches us unprepared. It breaks through the mesh of habit. In a culture trained to ask what things do, what they cost, what they can be used for, beauty remains one of the few things that still startles us into receptivity. A shaft of light over water, birds lifting from the marsh, the stillness of trees before dawn, the layered cadence of a morning chorus—such things do more than please. They address us. Or seem to. They awaken the lovely and rather unnerving suspicion that reality is more than what can be measured, managed, or used.

That suspicion is one of beauty’s mercies. It does not argue. It does not bully. It arrives as annunciation without violence.

God, after all, never forces. There is indeed an object so big that God cannot move. And that is you.

He does not force. He persuades. By beauty.

A World Flattened by Use

Modern people are well trained in certain habits of mind and badly trained in others. We know how to classify, optimize, monetize, explain, and exploit. We know how to ask whether something performs, whether it serves our interests, whether it is efficient, useful, advantageous, strategic. We are much less practiced in beholding. We are bad at reverence. We have become suspicious of gratuity.

So beauty gets demoted. It becomes ornamental, nice but nonessential, an aesthetic side dish to the serious business of life. But that demotion is already a metaphysical blunder. Beauty is not a decorative fringe draped over bare reality. It is one of the ways reality shows itself. It is not merely what we happen to feel when certain objects strike us pleasantly. Beauty is a mode of manifestation. It is the splendor of form. It is being in radiance.

This is why the old language of the transcendentals still matters: beauty, goodness, and truth. These are not pious stickers placed on a neutral world. They name something about being itself. To say that reality is true, good, and beautiful is to say that it is not finally ordered to utility, leverage, efficiency, profit, or tribal victory. It is ordered to what is worthy of love, reverence, trust, and contemplation.

And once that older grammar is forgotten, the deformations come quickly. A culture that forgets beauty soon forgets how to revere anything it cannot use. A culture that forgets goodness begins to confuse cruelty with seriousness. A culture that forgets truth turns every claim into tactic and every word into positioning. Politics becomes theater. Religion becomes branding. Public life degenerates into reciprocal contempt among people who have mistaken spiritual malnutrition for realism.

What often passes for “the real world” is just disenchantment with a confident tone of voice. Yet this is not truly disenchantment. It is, as Eugene McCarraher suggests, a re-enchantment with a dark myth: the myth of objects isolated in a tragic, empty field of commodification.

Why Angels Make Moderns Fidget

At this point some readers will happily tolerate a little metaphysics, but begin to fidget as soon as angels enter the room. Fair enough. The modern imagination has been badly served here. Angels have been sentimentalized into gauzy ornaments, greeting-card fluff, pious kitsch, and nauseatingly cute religious décor. We have made them unreal by making them adorable.

But the deeper problem is philosophical. We cannot stop imagining angels by extrapolating from ourselves. We picture human beings with wings, improved versions of ourselves, celestial cousins with better posture. That is exactly the wrong way to think about them.

The older Christian tradition asks something much stranger of us. Angels are not human beings with plumage. Nor are they simply one species among others, many examples of one shared angelic nature. Much of the classical theological tradition suggests something far more arresting: that each angel is a unique created intelligence, irreducibly itself, a singular beam of created light. Here Thomas Aquinas says something genuinely startling. Since angels are immaterial substances, not individuated by matter, each angel is in some profound sense a species unto itself.

That is hard for modern minds to imagine because we are addicted to classification. We expect many individuals under one common nature. Human beings share one human nature. Golden retrievers share one canine nature. We understand multiplicity by likeness. But the angelic order, in this view, is not repetition within sameness. It is superabundant singularity: as many natures as there are angels. Not infinite, because only God is infinite, but so vast in number and so differentiated in splendor that to us they verge on the innumerable.

We cannot wrap our heads around that because we keep universalizing our own mode of creaturehood. We imagine that every personal intelligence must exist the way we do. The angelic order quietly explodes that assumption.

A Cosmos Alive with Mediation

Once one begins thinking in this older Christian way, angels cease to be decorative extras and become part of the deep grammar of reality. This is where Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite still matters so much. In his vision the cosmos is hierarchically luminous, not a ladder of domination but an ordered diffusion and return of divine goodness. The celestial hierarchies are not ornaments hanging off the edge of reality. They belong to the world’s liturgical and intelligible structure. The angels transmit illumination. They awaken praise. They purify, disclose, mediate, and perfect.

The same broad vision appears, with different emphases, in Maximus the Confessor. In Maximus, creation is thick with logoi, divine intentions or words according to which beings are constituted and drawn toward fulfillment in the one Logos. The world is not a pile of mute objects. It is a manifold of meanings. It is articulate before it is analyzable. It is praise before it is inventory. In such a world, angels are not mythological leftovers. They are participants in the cosmic liturgy.

And if one wants a more daring Orthodox register still, one naturally thinks of Sergei Bulgakov, with his insistence on the sophianic depth and radiance of creation, and of David Bentley Hart, whose work has so often reminded modern readers that beauty is not subjective fluff but inseparable from being’s intelligibility and splendor.

The point is not to produce a patristic or modern-Orthodox name-drop. The point is that older Christian thought, in several of its richest moments, presents a world far denser, more alive, and more sacramental than the thin little universe modern disenchantment calls “realistic.”

My Own Weird Conviction

Here I admit I become strange by contemporary standards.

I do not think there is a single region of the universe empty of angels. Not one corner of reality is spiritually vacant. The cosmos is not a machine running in metaphysical loneliness. It is threaded through with intelligence, praise, mediation, and disclosure.

Angels, then, are not occasional intrusions from outside. They belong to the depth-structure of created reality itself. And they are not “messengers” if by that we mean merely carrying information from one place to another. They are conveyers in a much richer sense: bearers of intelligibility, ministers of relation, communicators of radiance.

I would even go further: angels are not only beautiful. They are beautifiers.

By that I do not mean that beautiful things would be ugly were angels not flitting nearby sprinkling glamour dust on them. I mean something subtler. Beauty is not a static property waiting passively to be registered by a detached observer. Beauty is communicative. It goes outward. It shines. It establishes relation between the form of the thing and the awakened attention of the beholder. It is manifestation. And the angelic, I suspect, belongs precisely to this communicative middle, this living conduction of splendor from thing to perceiver and of praise from perceiver back toward God.

That is what I mean by beautifiers. Angels are among the ministers of manifestation.

Why This Is Not Fantasy

To modern ears this may sound fantastical. But only because we have become accustomed to a much duller fantasy: that matter is mute, meaning is projection, beauty is private sensation, and intelligence is an accidental latecomer in a cosmos fundamentally indifferent to mind. Compared with that barren mythology, the old angelic imagination begins to look less like fantasy and more like realism.

None of this requires denying natural explanation. Birds sing for reasons quite legible to ornithology. Light refracts according to describable laws. The sciences rightly investigate proximate causes, structures, and mechanisms. The Christian claim is not that such accounts are false, but that they are not final. Explanation is not exhaustion. To know how a thing occurs is not yet to know the depth of what is occurring.

So when the birds sang in the yard last Tuesday morning, I was not handed a proof of transcendence. No feathered syllogism unfolded before me. The sparrow, robin, wren, blackbird, dove, bluebird, and ridiculous faithful rooster did something gentler and more persuasive. They made reductionism feel threadbare. They made the world seem more fully itself and therefore less reducible.

They gave, if only for a moment, the rumor of angels.

Rumor is exactly the right word. Not proof. Not possession. Not unveiled sight. Rumor is how realities beyond our management brush the edges of awareness. It is a whisper from beyond the range of our control. It is knowledge chastened by humility. Beauty does not force belief. It awakens desire, steadies attention, and leaves behind a trace.

Recovering the World

This is why beauty matters so much now. We inhabit a world grown noisy, shallow, feverish, and exhausted. We are angry too often, hurried too often, and trapped within systems of appraisal that reduce persons to leverage, speech to impact, and value to utility. We have become increasingly unable to contemplate, increasingly suspicious of wonder.

Under such conditions beauty is not decorative. It is medicinal. It interrupts the zero-sum liturgies of modern life and recalls us to receptivity. To recover beauty is not merely to improve our taste. It is to recover our capacity for reverence. And to recover reverence is already to begin recovering the world as creaturely, symbolic, and filled with praise.

So on that ordinary Tuesday morning in Edenton, with two small white dogs at my side, I stood in the yard while the birds commenced their office of praise. For a few moments the world seemed more than matter and more than noise. It seemed given. It seemed radiant. It seemed, in its own quiet and unargumentative way, to be telling the truth.

And perhaps that is why the rumor of angels still clings to beauty. Not because we are naïve, and not because we wish to flee the world into pious unreality, but because beauty keeps suggesting that the world, even now, is deeper than its brutalities, wider than its distractions, and more alive with glory than our exhausted imaginations usually allow.

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The Love That Moves the Sun and the Other Stars: God’s Cosmic Tractor Beam

Posted on 21 March 2026 by johnstamps2020

by John Stamps

I recently finished reading Dante’s Divine Comedy, following the Robin Kirkpatrick translation while listening to the audiobook.¹ Even with my tin ear for poetry, the experience was remarkable. But when the final canto ended, I realized that one question from the poem refused to leave me.

Dante’s Divine Comedy raises the most disturbing theological question any Christian can ask: Is God just?

The bedrock question lurks behind every stage of Dante’s journey. It emerges in the Inferno when we meet Virgil, the greatest poet of the ancient world, eternally confined to Limbo simply because he was born before Christ. It resurfaces in the Purgatorio as the human will is purified and reordered. And it reaches its most perplexing form in the Paradiso, where unexpected figures like the emperor Trajan and the Trojan Ripheus appear among the blessed.

Dante’s poem is not merely a vision of heaven and hell. It is a profound meditation on the mystery of divine justice, and on whether that justice can finally be reconciled with the love that “moves the sun and the other stars.”

The Problem That Begins in Hell

When people mention Dante’s Divine Comedy, they usually talk about the Inferno. That is understandable. The punishments are lurid, the imagination unforgettable, and the moral geometry of Dante’s hell is brutally clear.

But if we stop with the Inferno, we misunderstand what Dante is doing. We only get one-third of the story. The Comedy is not ultimately about damnation. It is about the long journey of the human soul toward beatitude.

Early in the poem, Dante confronts a troubling reality. His guide through hell is the Roman poet Virgil. Virgil represents the highest achievements of pagan reason. Dante reveres him. At one point, he nearly worships him:

You are my teacher. You, my lord and law.
From you alone I took the fine-tuned style
that has, already, brought me so much honour. (Inferno 1.85-87)

Virgil is Dante’s teacher, his literary hero, the poet who shaped his imagination. And yet Virgil is damned. Not because he was vicious. Not because he rejected Christ. He didn’t get a chance to! He is damned simply because he was born before the Incarnation. Virgil resides in the first circle of hell, Limbo, alongside Homer, Socrates, Plato, Euclid, and the other great minds of antiquity.

The punishment there is not physical torment. It is something subtler and sadder. Dante describes the atmosphere with haunting restraint:

Here in the dark (where only hearing told)
there were no tears, no weeping, only sighs
that caused a trembling in the eternal air –
sighs drawn from sorrowing, although no pain.
This weighs on all of them, those multitudes
of speechless children, women and full-grown men. (Inferno 4.25-30)

These souls are not tortured. They sigh. They long. They hope for nothing. And then Virgil explains the terrible logic of their fate:

These never sinned. And some attained to merit.
But merit falls short. None was baptized.
None passed the gate, in your belief, to faith. (Inferno 4.34-36)

In other words, the greatest minds of the ancient world are excluded from heaven not because they were wicked, but because they were born too soon. And that raises an uncomfortable question. Does Virgil really deserve this?

Dante the Pilgrim Is Not Yet a Saint

At one point midway on our path in life
I came around and found myself now searching
through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost.” (Inferno 1.1-3)

Part of the sheer brilliance of the Inferno is that Dante himself is not morally finished. The pilgrim walking through hell still carries the vices that landed so many souls there: anger, pride, resentment, and more than a little satisfaction at the punishment of his enemies. One of the most striking scenes occurs when Dante accidentally kicks the frozen traitor Bocca degli Abati in the head (Inferno 32). When Bocca refuses to identify himself, Dante doubles down, tearing out tufts of his hair and threatening him. In that moment, Dante the pilgrim is revealed as morally compromised. He is not just observing hell. He is participating in its logic. Dante does not simply walk through hell. Hell is still inside him. And we recognize it.

We are not watching a perfected saint surveying the moral order of the universe. We are watching a pilgrim who still needs purification. That realization changes how we read the poem. When Dante writes that he found himself midway in “our life’s journey,” the key word is our. The poem is not merely about Dante. It is about us.

The Inferno is not an invitation to gloat over the punishment of the wicked. It is a mirror held up to our souls so that we can see ourselves clearly.

The Long School of Purgatory

The Purgatorio is where Dante’s theology of the human person comes into focus. At the end of the ascent, Virgil gives Dante one of the most beautiful lines in the entire poem:

Your will is healthy, upright, free and whole…
Lord of yourself, I crown and mitre you. (Purgatorio 27.140-141)

The goal of purification is not merely moral improvement. It is the healing of the will itself. Dante is drawing here on the anthropology of St Augustine: sin is not simply wrongdoing; it is disordered love. The fires of purgatory reorder those loves. The soul finally becomes free to want the good.

Reason, Revelation, Contemplation

The structure of Dante’s guides reveals the deeper architecture of the poem. In the Inferno, Dante is led by Virgil. Virgil represents natural reason: what human beings can know without revelation.

In the Purgatorio, the limits of reason begin to appear. Virgil can guide Dante only so far. At the summit of the mountain, he must yield to Beatrice. (One of the joys of the audiobook is hearing her name pronounced “bay-a-TREE-chay.”)

Virgil himself warns Dante about the limits of reason when it comes to divine mysteries:

It’s madness if we hope that rational minds
should ever follow to its end the road
that one true being in three persons takes. (Purgatorio 3.34-36)

Reason can lead us far. But it cannot penetrate the mystery of God.

Beatrice represents revelation and theology. Under her guidance, Dante ascends through the radiant intellectual order of the heavenly spheres. Yet even here, the limits of human knowing remain. Beatrice reminds Dante that divine justice cannot be fully grasped by reason alone. Reflecting on the mystery of the Cross, she explains:

The sentence, therefore, that the Cross imposed,
if measured by the nature thus assumed,
was just and true; no pain was ever more.
Conversely, none was ever so unjust,
considering what person bore the pain.
Thus from one self-same act flowed different things:
one death delighted both the Jews and God,
At this earth trembled, Heaven opened wide…
That ordinance, dear brother, lies entombed,
unseen by anyone whose mind, as yet,
is immature, untempered by love’s flame. (Paradiso 7.40-48, 58-60)

Even revelation does not dissolve the tension. It deepens it. The Cross itself, the very center of divine justice, appears under two contrary aspects at once. The intellect reaches its limit not because truth is irrational, but because it is too radiant to be grasped without love.

But even good, solid theology does not carry Dante all the way to the final vision. Near the summit of Paradiso, Beatrice yields to a third guide: St. Bernard of Clairvaux.² Bernard represents mystical contemplation. The movement of the poem now becomes clear:

Reason → Revelation → Contemplation

Dante seems to be suggesting that theology itself eventually reaches its limits. The final step toward God is not argument but prayer. Bernard’s decisive act in the final canto is not explanation but intercession. Turning toward the Virgin Mary, he prays that Dante may receive the grace to behold the divine light:

Return now. See that face resembling Christ
closer than all. For that bright light alone
can make you wholly fit to look on Christ. (Paradiso 32.85-87)

The last ascent is not philosophical. It’s not even theological. It is contemplative. As Dante approaches the final vision, he confesses the limits of all human understanding:

All powers of high imagining here failed (Paradiso 33.142)

At the summit of heaven, Dante replaces Beatrice with Bernard because reason and even theology have reached their limits. What remains is contemplation and prayer. Dante must be given the vision. It cannot be reached. It can only be received.

A Shock in Paradise

And yet Paradiso contains one of the most surprising moments in the entire Comedy. Before revealing the mystery, Dante offers a warning to his readers:

The One who turned His compass
around the reaches of the universe
could not fail, in doing so, to leave
as infinite excess His truest word.

From which it’s clear that natures less than His
are all too shallow to contain that Good
which has no end and measures self by self.

It follows that the sight your world receives
in sempiternal justice sinks itself
as deep as eyes in an open sea:
although you see the bottom near the shore,
the ocean floor you can’t. And yet it’s there.
(Paradiso 19.40–62, condensed)

Human eyes cannot see the bottom of the ocean, and the human mind cannot pierce the mystery of divine justice. In Canto 20, Dante learns that the emperor Trajan is in heaven. According to medieval legend, Pope Gregory the Great prayed so fervently for Trajan that God resurrected him and gave him the chance to accept salvation.

Even more startling is the presence of Ripheus, a minor character from Virgil’s Aeneid. Ripheus loved justice so much that, Dante tells us, God secretly opened his eyes to grace. As the Eagle explains:

Regnum celorum will submit to force
assailed by warmth of love or living hope,
which overcome the claims of God’s own will. (Paradiso 20.94-96).

“The violent take the Kingdom of Heaven by force.” (Matthew 11:12) Flannery O’Connor would not be surprised. Ripheus, after all, believed in the redemption to come long before Christ appeared in history. These examples explode our tidy theological categories. For much of the poem, Dante seems to affirm a strict vision of predestination. But suddenly heaven contains figures nobody expected. Divine justice turns out to be deeper and stranger than our theological spreadsheets.

The Beatific Vision and Time

Another puzzle emerges in Paradiso. Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida foresees Dante’s future exile from Florence. How could the blessed in heaven see the future of events still unfolding on earth?

The answer lies in the classical doctrine of the beatific vision. The saints do not see the future by their own power. They see all things in the eternal light in which all times are present. As Dante realizes, the blessed behold time from the point at which all things are present:

You see contingencies before they come to be,
your eye set on the point at which
all times are present time.
Contingency… is framed and painted in eternal sight.
This does not, though, imply necessity,
as when a glass reflects a ship
swept onward by a raging stream. (Paradiso 17.13-42, condensed)

God does not experience time as we do. For God, all moments are present. God sees all things in a single, ever-present “Now.” St Augustine of Hippo,³ St Severinus Boethius of Pavia,⁴ and St C.S. Lewis of Oxford all famously wrestled with this problem. Dante’s heaven assumes their solution. St Augustine discovers time within the restless stretching of the human soul. Boethius defines eternity from God’s standpoint as a single, simultaneous “Today.” Dante turns both into vision: all of history gathered into one act of divine knowing.

Amazingly, the saints see history not as a sequence unfolding in time, but as a single act of divine knowing. Near the end of the poem, Dante describes what that vision is like. In the divine light, he perceives:

Grace, in all plenitude, you dared me set
my seeing eyes on that eternal light
so that all seeing there achieved its end.
Within its depths, I saw contained,
bound up and gathered in a single book,
the leaves that scatter through the universe—
beings and accidents and modes of life—
as though all were fused together in one.
(Paradiso 33.85-90, condensed)

Past, present, and future are gathered together in the vision of God. And at the very center of that vision, Dante beholds the deepest mystery of Christian faith. Within the divine light, he sees a circle that “seemed—as painted now, in those same hues—to show our human form.” (Paradiso 33.130-131)

We should not be surprised that Dante sees God with a human face. God the incarnate Word has taken on our humanity. The humanity of Christ stands within the divine reality itself. The Incarnation appears not as an afterthought in history, but as the key to the whole structure of the cosmos.

The Knot That Remains

And yet the poem does not resolve every tension. Near the end, Dante introduces St. Bernard, the great mystic and lover of the Virgin Mary. Bernard insists that nothing in heaven is arbitrary. Everything corresponds perfectly within God’s providential order. As Bernard tells Dante:

Now you’re in doubt and, doubting, do not speak.
But I shall disentangle this tight knot,
which your own subtle reasonings have tied. (Paradiso 32.49-57)

He goes on to insist that nothing in heaven is accidental:

Look up in wonder at God’s providence…
Within the broad expanse of all this realm;
there cannot be a single point that’s chance..

But some readers may feel that the problem of justice has not fully disappeared. Why Trajan and Ripheus but not Virgil? Why grace for some and not others? Dante seems to operate within a deeply Augustinian framework of predestination. Yes, everything is grace. Yes, everything is love. But grace is not distributed evenly.

From a modern perspective, the arrangement can feel disturbingly arbitrary. Bernard assures us that nothing in heaven is unjust. But instead of resolving the questions Dante himself has raised, the poem tightens them into a deeper mystery. What if the tension in Paradiso does not arise simply from the mystery of divine justice, but from the theological framework Dante inherited?

For all that you may see is here decreed
by God’s eternal law; hence, right and fit,
all corresponds as finger to a ring.

I’m not buying it. St Bernard’s final discourse on providence insists that nothing in heaven is random or unjust. Everything fits perfectly within God’s eternal order. But instead of resolving the questions Dante himself has raised throughout Paradiso, Bernard ties them into an even tighter knot. Grace, election, and divine justice are affirmed with great confidence, but the problem of fairness never quite disappears.

Also, I am assuming Dante represents genuine 14th-century mainstream Christianity. In Paradiso, he passes the faith exam with St. Peter, the hope exam with St. James, and the love exam with St. John.

Dante writes under the enormous shadow of St Augustine. St Augustine’s doctrine of predestination, including the weird idea that the number of the elect balances out that of the fallen angels, has hung like an albatross around Western theology.⁵ Everything is grace; everything is love. Yet grace is distributed unevenly. Some are elected, others are passed over. But the poem itself keeps destabilizing this framework. Trajan appears in heaven. Ripheus appears in heaven. These are not minor details. They are fissures in the system. Dante seems compelled by the sheer beauty of divine mercy to open doors that his inherited theology struggles to keep closed.

The Final Vision

And yet the poem ends not with a philosophical argument but with a vision. Dante finally beholds the divine light. His intellect fails. His imagination collapses. Words abandon him. And the poem concludes with one of the most famous lines in Western literature:

But now my will and my desire were turned,
like wheels that move in equilibrium,
by love that moves the sun and the other stars. (Paradiso 33.143-145)

God’s love moves the sun and the other stars. But Dante’s final line may say more than he himself fully realized. The love that moves the cosmos is not merely a metaphysical principle. It is the crucified love revealed in Jesus Christ. If the universe is moved by divine love, then the decisive revelation of that love is the cross.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus makes a startling promise:

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:32)⁶

If Dante imagines the universe moved by divine love, John imagines something even more dramatic. The cross becomes a kind of cosmic tractor beam. All things come forth from God, and all things are drawn back toward him. In fact, the verb ἑλκύσω/helkysō is stronger.⁷ Jesus will drag all people back to himself. Dante himself hints at this earlier in Paradiso: the whole cosmos, he says, is ordered toward its source.

But Jesus doesn’t drag us to himself kicking and screaming. He attracts us. Like iron to a magnet, we are drawn by a love that awakens desires we barely knew we had, desires we had forgotten. The cross does not override our will. It remakes it, until God’s will becomes our deepest desire.

Yes, the Fourth Gospel mysteriously speaks of election. “Did I not choose you?” Jesus asks the disciples, adding soberly, “Yet one of you is a devil.” But alongside this language stands an even more staggering universal horizon. Just as Peter dragged the 153 fish to the shore all by himself, the crucified Christ promises to drag all people back to himself.

How? When? Jesus does not explain the mechanics. But he tells us who, why, and where.

“For God so loved the world…” (John 3:16)

If Dante leaves us contemplating the mystery of divine justice, John leaves us contemplating the deeper mystery of divine love. Love is the gravity of the universe, and the cross is its center.

Remember that the Bible is an opera. It is the grandest, oldest opera of them all. Discord, friction, and conflict abound on the lips of every singer in Sacred Scripture. Some singers shriek. Others moan and lament. Some rejoice with great rejoicing. Others wail with bitter wailing.

Abraham, the father of us all, sings the aria that shapes all of Scripture: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?” (Genesis 18:25) Will God actually set things right?

Job staggers onto the stage next, demanding an explanation: “I will say to God, Do not condemn me; cause me to know why you contend against me.” (Job 10:2) If you’re going to condemn me, you owe me an explanation.

Habakkuk raises the ancient cry of bewildered faith: “How long, O Lord, shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?” (Habakkuk 1:2) How long will you let injustice stand?

Amos thunders against injustice with prophetic fury: “Let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24) Justice must not trickle. It must flood the world.

Isaiah sings a haunting solo of judgment and mercy: “Come now, let us argue this out, says the Lord: if your sins are like scarlet, they shall become white as snow.” (Isaiah 1:18) Judgment is real, but mercy gets the final word.

Jonah storms in from stage left, furious that God’s mercy has gone too far: “For I knew that you are a God gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting over disaster.” (Jonah 4:2) You’re too merciful!

St Paul lifts the music into a sweeping theological chorus: “For God has imprisoned all people in disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all people.” (Romans 11:32) All fall, so that mercy may reach all.

To which the Book of Revelation replies with terrifying cymbals and drums: “Hallelujah!
The smoke from her goes up unto the ages of ages.” (Revelation 19:3) Evil is not reformed. It is judged, decisively and forever.

But remember: the opera is not over until the fat lady sings. And when the final voice rises above the orchestra, the theme returns in its fullest form: Christ is all, and in all. (Colossians 3:11)

Footnotes

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Robin Kirkpatrick (Penguin Classics, 2006–2008). I followed this translation while listening to the audiobook recording. ↩︎
I like St Bernard for the most part. He is a passionate lover of the passion of Christ and is traditionally associated with my favorite hymn “O Sacred Head Now Wounded.” Yet Bernard is directly responsible for preaching the Second Crusade (1147–1149), an ill-advised venture that is morally and theologically bankrupt in every possible way. ↩︎
St Augustine defines God’s eternity as an abiding present rather than a succession of moments: “Your ‘years’ neither go nor come… All your ‘years’ subsist in simultaneity, because they do not change… Your ‘day’ is not any and every day but Today… Your Today is eternity” (Confessions XI.13.16). Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 230. God does not exist in our stretched-out temporality. God exists in an eternal present, a “today” that does not pass. ↩︎
Boethius famously defines Eternity as “the complete and perfect possession of everlasting life all at once.” God doesn’t foresee future events but sees all things in a single, abiding act of knowing. The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Scott Goins and Barbara H. Wyman (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), 167. ↩︎
Available at: CCEL, Augustine, Enchiridion, Chapter IX. ↩︎
All translations from the Greek and Hebrew Bible are my own, unless otherwise indicated. If you’re curious about my translation choices, I always defer to BDAG and HALOT. When I don’t, it turns out to be a mistake. ↩︎
In BDAG (A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature), ἕλκω is glossed generally as “pull, drag, draw,” and includes the following senses: (1) “to move an object from one area to another in a pulling motion, draw”; (2) “to draw a person in the direction of values for inner life, attract”; and (3) “to pull or drag, in the direction of oneself.” ↩︎

Posted in Apostle Paul, Bible, Dante, John Stamps, Theology, Universalism and Eschatology | Tagged damnation, Divine Comedy, God, Gospel of John, hell, Jesus Christ, justice, St Bernard of Clairvaux | 4 Comments

“Christ wants us to be received into union with God the Father, and at the same time he bestows the benefits from the Father on our nature through himself“

Posted on 20 March 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

“The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:22-23)

We are quite right to say that the Only Begotten has an essential and natural unity with his Father, since he was begotten with a true begetting and is from him and in him. Though he seems to be separate and distinct from him due to the difference of his own subsistence, yet by the innate identity of his essence he is understood to be one with the Father. But for the sake of the oikonomia on our behalf and for our salvation and life, he departed, as it were, from the place he had at the beginning (I mean equality with God the Father). He even seems to be tossed about, so to speak, so that he transgressed his invisible glory. That is what “he emptied himself” means. Therefore, he who of old and from the beginning was with the Father receives this glory in the flesh (the earthly and perishable garment of the human form—I mean when it is considered according to its nature), appropriately requesting as a gift what actually belongs to him by nature. He was and is, after all, in the form of the Father and equal to him. Now since the flesh from the woman (or the temple that is completely from the virgin) is not of the same substance with God the Father, and neither is it identical in nature, it is considered to be one with him once it is received as the body of the Word. After all, there is one Christ and one Son, even after he becomes human. He is understood to receive unity in this way: he is taken into unity with his flesh included, which does not inherently possess unity with God. And if it is necessary to state this more clearly and succinctly, the Only Begotten says that what was given to his flesh was given to him—given, of course, by the Father through him and in the Spirit.

There is only one way union with God can take place, even in the case of Christ (insofar as he appeared as and bears the name of a human being). That way is this: the flesh is sanctified by union with the Spirit in an ineffable manner of concurrence and thus ascends to an unconfused union with God the Word and through him to a union with the Father—a union by disposition, that is, not by nature. This grace and glory that you have given me, Father, he says (namely, the grace and glory of being one with you), “I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.” We are united with one another in the way that was just explained, and we are united with God. And the Lord has given us a crystal-clear explanation of how or in what way this takes place. He lays out the glorious benefit of his teaching as follows. He says, “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.” The Son is in us corporeally as a human being, comingled and united with us through the mystical blessing, but spiritually as God, re-creating our spirit to newness of life by the activity and grace of his Spirit and making us sharers in his divine nature. Christ, then, is clearly the bond of our unity with God the Father, uniting us to himself since he is a human being, and to God his Father since he is God by nature. It was not possible for the nature that is subject to decay to rise up to incorruption unless the nature that is superior to all decay and change came down to it and somehow lifted up to its own good attribute that which always falls. By communion and mixing with itself, it practically pulled it outside the limits of what is proper to originate nature and refashioned to itself that which was not that way of itself. We have been brought into complete unity, then, with God the Father through Christ the mediator. We who have received in ourselves both corporeally and spiritually him who is true Son by nature and who has an essential union with the Father, as I just said, have been glorified by becoming participants and sharers in the nature that is above all.

Christ wants us to be received into union with God the Father, and at the same time he bestows the benefits from the Father on our nature through himself. He says that the power of his grace will be a clear refutation, as it were, of those who think that he is not from God.

What grounds will remain for this false accusation if he, through himself, raises to unity with the Father those who belong to him (namely, by faith and sincere love)? Indeed, Father, when they gain unity with you through me, then the world will “know that you have sent me,” that is, by your good pleasure I have come to help the earth and to accomplish salvation for those who err in it. In addition, he says, those who have become participants in such a thrice-longed-for grace will know just as much that you “have loved them even as you have loved me.” Surely he who received into union him who was like us and from us (that is, Christ) and considered him worthy of such great love (we are once again speaking of Christ as a human being), and gave us the ability to attain this blessing—how could he not speak of his love in the same way? No one who is intelligent should be disturbed by this. It is clear and beyond question that what is servile will never overcome its master in any way, and God the Father will not love his Son in the same measure as he loves creatures.

However, we must consider this: we see him who was beloved for ages now starting to be loved when he became human. Therefore, he had this by receiving it, but he certainly did not receive it for himself. Rather we shall find that he received it for us. When he came to life, after all, destroying the power of death, he did not accomplish the resurrection for himself, insofar as he is Word and God, but he granted this to us through and in himself (since the entire human nature was in Christ, trampling on the chains of death). In the same way he should be understood to receive the Father’s love not for himself (since he was always and forever loved), but he received this love from the Father when he became human in order to bestow the Father’s love on us. Therefore, just as we will be conformed to his resurrection and glory, and in fact we already are, as this comes about first in Christ, the first fruits of our race; so also we have conformity, as it were, to his love as we yield the victory to the Only Begotten in all things and justly marvel at the incomparable mercy of the divine nature toward us, which graces those whom he has made with what belongs to him and shares with his creatures what belongs to himself alone.

St Cyril of Alexandria

Posted in Cyril of Alexandria | 2 Comments

Theosis as Trinitarian Communion: St Cyril of Alexandria

Posted on 17 March 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

The doctrine of theosis expresses one of the most striking claims of the Christian faith: salvation is not merely forgiveness or moral renewal; it is participation in the life of the God made known in Jesus Christ. Christians are called not only to be reconciled to God but to share in his life—to become, in the language of Scripture, “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).”¹ In modern Orthodox theology, this participation is often explained by way of a metaphysical distinction associated with St. Gregory Palamas: God is imparticipable in his essence but participable in his energies. Gregory creatively elaborated the distinction in the fourteenth century in defense of monastic hesychasm. In that historical context, it functioned to safeguard two essential truths: the transcendence of God and the reality of deification.

Yet the Christian tradition spoke of deification long before the fourteenth century, and it did so without appealing to the distinction between essence and energies. Earlier Christian writers generally described theosis in Trinitarian terms: participation in the uncreated life of the Father, through union with the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, actualized by the transforming love and power of the Holy Spirit. They did not place the primary emphasis on a metaphysical distinction within God but on the living communion of the Trinity revealed in Christ’s saving work and experienced in the holy mysteries. The purpose of this series is to recover this primitive grammar of deification.

Over the next two months, my presentation will unfold in four steps. We begin with St Cyril of Alexandria, whose Christology provides one of the clearest patristic accounts of deification as participation in the life of God through the Incarnation. We then turn to St Nicholas Cabasilas, whose sacramental theology describes how believers are united to Christ within the life of the Church. The third article will examine the modern theology of Thomas F. Torrance, whose account of the Incarnation and the vicarious humanity of Christ offers a powerful contemporary articulation of this same pattern of participation. Finally, the series will reconsider the Palamite distinction itself and ask how it relates to this older Trinitarian grammar of communion.

The Witness of St Cyril of Alexandria

Cyril of Alexandria presents a compelling patristic account of deification grounded in Trinitarian communion. In his theology, deification arises directly from the Incarnation: “For he became man though being God by nature, in order that he might make us gods.”² Deification is the goal of the Incarnation, the purpose for which the eternal Word assumed humanity in Jesus Christ. In his bountiful love for mankind, the freely takes our human nature upon himself in order to render it capable of sharing in the glorified communion of the Trinity. John McGuckin elaborates:

Thus the incarnation was a restorative act entirely designed for the ontological reconstruction of a human nature that had fallen into existential decay as a result of its alienation from God… In the case of the incarnation, the divine Logos appropriates” human nature. This human nature becomes none other than the human nature of the one who is God, and is thereby lifted to an extraordinary glory. More than this, it becomes the economic instrument” of the divine Logos; that is, the primary way the Logos has chosen to effect the regeneration of the human race, concretely, intimately, and personally.³

Theosis thus follows from the hypostatic union itself. He who possesses the life of the Father by nature assumes, regenerates, and deifies human nature in himself, thus making possible the communication of uncreated life to all. To be united to the risen Lord is to be taken up into the communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Cyril frequently appeals to the scriptural promise that we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) as the biblical warrant for this teaching.⁴ In his Commentary on the Gospel of John, Cyril incorporates the phrase in this statement of humanity’s life in the Holy Trinity:

As God and from God, he is naturally joined to God the Father. And as a human being, he is joined to humanity, having the Father in himself and himself being in the Father. He is the imprint and radiance of his hypostasis, not distinct from the essence of which he is the imprint and from which he proceeds as radiance, but being in it and having it in him. And he likewise has us in himself in that he bore our nature, and our body is called the body of the Word. “The Word became flesh,” as John says. He bore our nature and thus fashioned it in conformity with his life. And he himself is in us, since we have all become partakers in him, and we have him in ourselves through the Spirit. Therefore, we have become partakers in the divine nature and we are called children, since we have the Father himself in us through the Son. Paul testifies to this when he says, “Because you are children, God sent the Spirit of his Son into your heart, crying, ’Abba! Father!’” After all, the Spirit of the Son is no different than the Son, at least when it comes to the way they are identical (I mean their identical nature).⁵

The Son becomes what we are so that we may share in what he is. It is rather like a king who enters a ruined village, not merely to inspect the damage but to dwell among its people and rebuild their homes from within. Humanity is divinized not by climbing upward toward God but by the descent of the Son of God into the depths of the human condition. In Christ’s birth, baptism, death, resurrection and ascension, our nature—long subjected to corruption, sin, an death—is healed and remade. To partake of the divine nature, therefore, is to partake of Christ himself, as branches share the life of the vine into which they have been grafted.

Cyril interprets the history of salvation through the typology of the two Adams: the original Adam and Jesus Christ, the new or second Adam. Humanity was created in the image and likeness of God, and this image was sealed upon Adam when God breathed into him the breath of life, the Holy Spirit. “At the same time the Spirit put life into the one who had been formed,” writes Cyril, “he also imprinted his stamp on him, in a manner appropriate to God.”⁶ But when Adam fell into sin, the divine likeness was marked with a “false stamp” and the image was obscured. Like a cancer, sin took its hold of humanity’s heart and imagination, “and nature was stripped of the original grace. The Spirit also departed completely, and the rational creature fell into utter irrationality, not even recognizing the creator himself.”⁷

Humanity lost the life of God through Adam’s disobedience and fell under the power of corruption and death. In the Incarnation the new Adam restores the human race by renewing human nature within himself. Cyril suggests that the Apostle Paul was pondering about this when he wrote: “For just as we have borne the image of that which is earthly so shall we bear the image of the heavenly, for the first man was from the earth and earthly, but the second is from heaven” (1 Cor 15:49):

All those who belong to the earthly one bear the character of the earth, but all those who belong to the Heavenly One bear a heavenly character. We are earthly beings insofar as the curse of corruption has passed from the earthly Adam even to us, and through our corruption the law of sin entered in the members of our flesh. Yet we became heavenly beings, receiving this gift in Christ. He is from God, from on high, and naturally God, yet he came down to our condition in a strange and most unusual manner, and was born of the Spirit, according to the flesh, so that we too might abide in holiness and incorruptibility like him. Clearly grace came upon us from him, as from a new rootstock, a new beginning.⁸

The Fall did more than introduce sin; it shattered the very life of man. As the Spirit who breathed the divine likeness into our clay slowly withdrew His hand, paradise fell prey to the creeping rot of corruption and the absolute tyranny of death. We were forged for glory, only to wake trapped in a prison of misery and darkness. For humanity to live again, the uncreated life had to take root in us anew. And this, Cyril says, is precisely what God accomplishes in Christ. The Son enters our condition as the second Adam so that the human race may begin again from a new root. The moment in which this new beginning becomes visible is the baptism of Christ:

Since the first Adam did not preserve the grace given by God, God the Father planned to send us the second Adam from heaven. He sent his own Son, who is by nature without variation or change, into our likeness. He knew no sin at all so that, just as through the disobedience of the first we came under God’s wrath, so through the obedience of the second, we might escape the curse, and its evils might come to nothing. When the Word of God became human, he received the Spirit from the Father as one of us. He did not receive anything for himself personally because he himself is the supplier of the Spirit. But the one who knew no sin received the Spirit as man in order to keep the Spirit in our nature and root in us once again the grace that had left us… Therefore, he receives the Spirit through himself for us, and he restores to our nature the original good.⁹

Christ receives the Spirit as the representative man in whom the history of Adamic existence is recapitulated; and in him, now redeemed and sanctified, human nature is brought to its proper end in communion with God.¹⁰ What Adam lost—the indwelling presence of the Spirit—is restored to humanity in the flesh of the son of Mary. The Spirit now rests upon the humanity of the incarnate Word. When we are reborn into that humanity, we receive the same gift—as water from a single spring flowing through channels to nourish every garden it reaches. “The Second Adam thus came to this world to restore the Holy Spirit,” writes Andrew Hofer, “and he did so in a way more wondrously and more bountifully than what Adam received.”¹¹ In the waters of the Jordan, a new human race is born.

For Cyril, our baptism by water and the Spirit is inseparably joined to our adoption as children of God. When believers receive the Spirit, they are incorporated into Christ and thus share in the Son’s own relationship to the Father. We take the words of Jesus upon our lips, “Abba, Father.” Comparing Israel’s passage through the waters of the Red Sea with the baptism of the Church, Cyril comments:

But those who rise to divine sonship through faith in Christ are baptized not into anything originate but into the holy Trinity itself through the Word who is the mediator. He joins what is human to himself through the flesh that was united to him, and he is joined by nature to the Father since he is by nature God. In this way, the slaves ascend to sonship through participation in the true Son since they are called and so to speak raised to the honor that is in the Son by nature. Therefore, we who received the new birth through the Spirit by faith are called born of God, and that is what we are… Therefore, we are called gods not only because we fly up to glory beyond ourselves by grace but also because we have God now dwelling and abiding in us.¹²

In baptism we pass with Christ through death into the indomitable life of the Kingdom. The tyranny of sin is broken, the dominion of Satan is cast down, the old man is slain. From the waters a new creation emerges. Joined to Christ, we are reborn into his sanctified humanity, and the Spirit comes to dwell within us. We are gathered into the never-ending dance of the Holy Trinity:

That which knits us together, as it were, and unites us to God is the Holy Spirit. When we receive the Spirit, we are made participants and sharers in the divine nature, and we receive the Father himself through the Son and in the Son.¹³

This is adoption—the gift of sonship. Those who belong to Christ dwell within the Son’s relationship of love with the Father. To be deified is to become a son in the Son.

The newly reborn are led from the font to the table of the Lord. In the Eucharist the baptized feast upon the life-giving flesh of the incarnate Word. Commenting on John 6:53, he writes:

He is, after all, life by nature, as he was begotten of the living Father. His holy body, too, is no less life-giving, as it is somehow brought together and ineffably united with the Word who gives life to all… Since the flesh of the Savior has become life-giving (in that it has been united to that which is by nature life, namely, the Word from God), when we taste of it, we have life within ourselves. This is because we are also united to that flesh, just as it is united to the Word who dwells within it… After all, he will surely transform those who participate in the blessing so that they will possess his own good attribute, that is, immortality.¹⁴

In partaking of the body and blood, believers are united to the incarnate Son and infused anew with the grace that is Holy Spirit. “In his flesh dwells life, that is, the Only Begotten.”⁠¹⁵ How intimate is this communion with Christ? Cyril illustrates it with the example of two pieces of wax. When they are joined, we see that they have “come to be in the other.” In the same way, he says, “the one who receives the flesh of our Savior Christ and drinks his precious blood … is found to be one with him, mixed together, as it were, and mingled with him through participation so that they are found in Christ, and Christ in them.”¹⁶Cyril does not mean that believers are absorbed into Christ or cease to be creatures. The image instead expresses the intimacy of communion: through participation in Christ’s life-giving flesh, they truly abide in him and he in them.¹⁷

Conclusion

The evangelical grammar of theosis that emerges from Cyril’s theology is thoroughly Trinitarian: the Father is the source of divine life; the Son is the mediator through whom that life is given to humanity in the Incarnation; the Spirit is the one who unites believers to the Son and embeds that life within them. Cyril’s understanding of deification is summed up in this passage:

Thus he who is God by nature is called and truly becomes the heavenly man… He is God and a human being in the same person so that by uniting in himself, as it were, things that are very different by nature and essentially distinct from each other he may make humanity share and participate in the divine nature. The communion and abiding presence of the Holy Spirit extended to us, beginning through Christ and in Christ first, when he became human like us and was anointed and sanctified—even though he is by nature God, in that he arose from the Father—and sanctified his own temple by the Holy Spirit along with all creation, which came to be through him and to which sanctification applies. The mystery of Christ, then, has become a beginning and a way for us to attain participation in the Holy Spirit and union with God.¹⁸

Cyril stands as an important patristic witness to the understanding of theosis as communion in the Trinity.

I would like to briefly share my personal assessment of St. Cyril’s construal of deification. Speaking as a priest, preacher, and pastor—albeit now retired—this is the doctrine (with my own tweaks, of course) that I would teach in a parish setting. Cyril’s account is compelling because it is firmly rooted in the biblical story of salvation, in the faith confessed by the Nicene Creed, and in the sacramental and ascetical life of the Church. I think of it as theosis for the hoi polloi. When preached, it is immediately heard as gospel and summons.

Deification is not an abstract doctrine of interest only to philosophers and monks. It is the daily life of all who have died with Jesus and now live by the Spirit in anticipation of the coming of their Father’s Kingdom. Theosis begins with Christ, flows from Christ, and is consummated in Christ.

Footnotes

1 See Norman Russell, “‛Partakers of the Divine Nature’ (2 Peter 1:4) in the Byzantine Tradition,” in ΚΑΘΗΓΗΤΡΙΑ, ed. J. Chrysostomides (Porphyrogenitus, 1988), 51-67.

2 Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, trans. John A. McGuckin (SVSP, 1995), 80. Cyril carefully clarifies that when he speaks of believers becoming “gods” through incorporation into the incarnate Son, he does not mean that they cease to be creatures. The faithful remain creatures by nature, yet by grace they truly participate in the divine life. As Cyril explains elsewhere, believers become “participants and sharers in the divine nature” and even, in one striking formulation, “participants and sharers in the essence that is above all things,” through communion in the Holy Spirit. For Cyril, “divine nature” and “divine essence” are synonymous. Deification therefore means participation in God’s own Trinitarian life—his vitality, immortality, and incorruptibility—while the asymmetry between divine nature and created participation remains intact. Read in this light, Cyril’s account affirms both the transcendence of God and the reality of deification, without introducing a metaphysical distinction between different ontological levels within the divine being. See Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John [In Jo.], trans. David R. Maxwell, two vols. (IVP Academic, 2015), 1:4 (1.32-35), 6:27 (1.200-201), 17:18-19 (2.298-299).

For scholarly discussions of Cyril’s understanding of theosis, see Daniel A. Keating, The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria (Oxford University Press, 2004); Daniel A. Keating, “Divinization in Cyril,” in The Theology of St Cyril of Alexandria, ed. T. Weinandy and D. Keating (T & T Clark, 2003), 149-185; Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (OUP, 2004), 191-204; and Andrew Hofer, “Cyril of Alexandria,” in The Oxford Handbook on Deification, ed. Paul Gavrilyuk et al. (OUP, 2024), chap. 11. Also relevant: Daniel A. Keating, “The Christology of Cyril of Alexandria,” Religions 15: 688. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15060688.

3 John McGuckin, Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy (SVSP, 2004) , 184-185.

4 Russell, 52, 57.

5 In Jo. 14:20 (2.188).

6 In Jo. 1:32-33 (1.81).

7 Ibid.

8 Cyril, Unity, 63-64.

9 In Jo. 1:32-33 (1.82).

10 “The baptism of Jesus, his reception of the Spirit, and his death, resurrection, and ascension are for Cyril more than just the means of our salvation and the pattern for us to follow. These events display the actual sanctification and divinization of Christ the Second Adam, the new root and first fruits of redeemed humanity. In fact, the entirety of Christ’s human existence displays the progressive sanctification—and indeed, divinization—of our nature, which he assumed and transformed in himself first of all.” Keating, Appropriation, 191.

11 Hofer, 178.

12 In Jo. 1:13 (1.61).

13 In Jo. 17:18-19 (2.298).

14 In Jo. 6:52-53 (1.236-237).

15 In Jo. 6:63 (1.247).

16 In Jo. 6:56 (1.239). “If one combines one piece of wax with another and melts them both with fire, one piece is made from both. In the same way, by participation in the body of Christ and his precious blood, we are united so that he is in us, and we are in him.” Ibid., 2.214.

17 “For Cyril, the Eucharist provides the most intimate type of union that is possible with Christ. It is a sharing in the Life of the Word made flesh—not only on a spiritual level but also on a physical level. To receive the Eucharist is to be planted into the Life of the God-Man.” Ezra Gebremedhin, Life-Giving Blessing (Uppsala, 1977), 91.

18 In Jo. 17:20-21 (2.304).

(cont)

Posted in Cyril of Alexandria, Patristic and Byzantine theology, Theology | Tagged baptism of Christ, Cyril of Alexandria, deification, Eucharist, Holy Spirit, incarnation, Jesus Christ, partakers of the divine nature, theosis | 4 Comments

Let’s Give the Heave Ho to Neo-Palamism

Posted on 15 March 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

By Robert F. Fortuin

After being asked to respond to David Bentley Hart’s provocative substack reflections on Neo-Palamism,¹ I’m taking the opportunity to revisit the essence/energies distinction and to argue that Neo-Palamism deserves a firm, grateful Heave Ho. Hart’s polemic against Neo-Palamism is memorable partly for its stylistic relish and partly for the severity of its verdict (nothin new under David’s sun): Neo-Palamism is “a silly school of thought” that has “done grievous harm” to Orthodox self-understanding. Yet the deeper philosophical interest of his essay is not the insult; it is the diagnosis. Neo-Palamism—at least in the modern form Hart has in view—does not merely propose an imprecise distinction between divine essence and “energies.” It reconstructs the past, narrows the range of legitimate Orthodox thought, and installs a metaphysical architecture that subtly changes the grammar of God, the Trinity, and theosis.

In what follows, I want to build on Hart’s critique by naming a pattern that helps connect his metaphysical objections to his sociological and ecclesial ones. I will call that pattern ontological quarantine: the impulse to protect transcendence by placing God behind an ontological barricade, then offering a regulated form of access to what has been cordoned off. If this sounds more like cultural theory than theology, that is exactly the point: a metaphysics can become a strategy of identity and control. Hart hints at this when he says Neo-Palamism functions like “grand systems of ideological or institutional or ethnic identity,” involving a “reconstruction of the past” that can be “violent or confining.” Ontological quarantine is how that reconstruction becomes spiritually persuasive.

The burden of my claim is simple: a quarantined God is not the God of Nicaea, and a quarantined theosis is not deification but managed proximity. The tragedy, if Hart is right, is that the quarantine has come to be mistaken for Orthodoxy itself—especially by those “recent converts who have been fooled” into thinking Neo-Palamism is “convertible with Orthodoxy as such.”

Neo-Palamism builds a barricade and calls it intimacy

Hart’s most incisive observation is that Palamas (whatever his own coherence) aimed to articulate and defend the possibility of divine intimacy with deified creatures, while Neo-Palamite frameworks often sound like they are doing the opposite: building an “insurmountable barricade” between God’s “eternal energies” and God “in himself.” If that is accurate, it is not merely an interpretive mistake; it is an inversion of the spiritual telos. Theosis becomes a doctrine about why we cannot touch God, rather than how God has drawn near.

Here is where ontological quarantine clarifies the dynamics. Modern Eastern Orthodox imaginations—formed by a strong apophatic instinct, and often by a certain philosophical anxiety about the limits of creaturely knowing—are tempted to treat God’s essence (ousia) not merely as inexhaustible but as absolutely unknowable in such a way that any immediate communion with God must be ruled out in principle. God becomes the ultimate unapproachable reality: not simply beyond comprehension, but beyond any immediate encounter with God “as God is.”

Quarantine is comforting because it seems to preserve two claims at once:

Transcendence: God remains inaccessible “in himself,” the ousia sealed off from creaturely participation; and
Religious access: we still have a robust spiritual life because we can “participate” by way of something else: God’s operations, effects, “energies,” or modes.

But notice the cost: the very structure meant to safeguard the unknowability of the ousia risks reifying that unknowability into a metaphysical architecture: a real, not conceptual distinction in God; that is to say—essence behind, operations in front so that transcendence becomes not simply the infinite depth of God, but a kind of ontological remoteness. What begins as apophatic humility can harden into a layered model of God, where God’s essence is treated as a distinct, unreachable object and “energies” function as an intermediate zone of contact. And when Hart complains that Neo-Palamites expend “neurotic” energy insisting on the barricade, he is diagnosing not reverence but a pathology of mediation: the fear that any claim of immediate communion would trespass upon the inviolability of the divine essence.

A quarantined God, on this model, is not primarily worshiped as Father, Son, and Spirit encountered in the economy of salvation; rather, God is approached through a metaphysical interface that promises genuine participation while ensuring that the ousia remains untouched, unentered, and functionally absent from communion.

Essence and operations: everyone distinguishes—so what is the dispute?

Hart insists (correctly it seems to me) that “all Christian tradition, East and West,” distinguishes divine essence from divine operations, and that the question is whether this is a conceptual distinction or a real one. That move matters because it deprives Neo-Palamite apologetics of its favorite posture: We have a unique Orthodox metaphysical key that the West lacks. Hart’s counterclaim is: no, everyone has the distinction; what differs is the ontological weight assigned to it. This is where philosophical precision is indispensable. A conceptual distinction can mark two true ways of speaking about one and the same reality: God as unknowable in essence, God as knowable in action; God as infinite depth, God as self-manifestation. A real distinction, however, implies that there are two (or more) ontologically distinct items: essence as one “thing,” operations as other “things,” perhaps multiple operations each with their own subsistence.

The logic of ontological quarantine pushes toward the real distinction, because quarantine is only effective if what mediates is not simply a way of speaking but a reified layer. If “energies” are merely the living God in act, then the barricade collapses. If “energies” are ontologically distinct, then the barricade stands: you can have communion with what is “of God” without communion with God “in himself.” The quarantine has been secured.

Hart believes that once you do this you have left the mainstream patristic grammar behind: Neo-Palamism is “irreconcilable with the Eastern Patristic tradition,” including the Cappadocians and Maximus. Indeed. But whether one accepts that full historical claim or not, the philosophical point is yet sharper: a real distinction in God invites composition. It turns God into a layered reality. And a layered absolute is not absolute.

The “logical cypher” problem: why a real distinction fails even as metaphysics

Hart’s metaphysical critique peaks in his claim that “the very notion of a real distinction of essence and operations is a logical cypher,” one that “means nothing much even in regard to finite beings,” and is “preposterously nonsensical” when applied to the infinite God. That is a strong charge, but it can be stated as a crisp argument:

If essence and operations are really distinct in God, then either God is composed (essence + operations), or there is some further principle that unites them, or they are simply un-unified.
If composed, God depends on constituents and is not ultimate.
If united by a higher principle, that principle is more ultimate than God.
If not unified, God is internally divided.

A real distinction therefore runs afoul of the doctrine of divine simplicity. The typical attempt to avoid this, claiming the distinction is real but “not like creaturely composition”, often sounds like an exemption from intelligibility. One may certainly say God is not comprehensible; but to say the doctrine is not even coherent is a different matter. Hart’s point is that the real distinction, as often deployed, is not merely mysterious but vacuous.

Ontological quarantine again helps explain why such a logically unstable notion can nevertheless feel compelling. When a community needs an identity marker, a “clear enunciation of a true Orthodox system,” as Hart describes the historical conditions, coherence can be traded for boundary maintenance. A doctrine can function as a badge even if it is metaphysically brittle.

“To be is to act”: the metaphysics of presence and the illusion of a hidden substrate

Hart’s section title “To be is to act” signals that the dispute is not only about a particular distinction, but about the basic metaphysical grammar of being. David argues that in finite beings there is a conceptual distinction between essence and any particular activity, but that we do not treat the activity as something ontologically other than the agent. He pushes the thought further: what is an operation “other than a mode of real presence,” and what is real presence “other than the immediate reality of an ‘essence’”?

This is the point at which ontological quarantine is revealed as a category mistake. Quarantine imagines essence as a hidden substrate behind presence, a “thing unto itself” separable from manifestation. But that is precisely the metaphysical picture that classical theism resists. God is not a substrate. God is not an entity that “has” operations the way a creature “has” actions. If God is the source of being, then God is pure actuality actus purus and thus cannot be divided between what God is and what God does. Hart recounts being “corrected” by David Bradshaw, who suggested God must have unrealized potential because God could have created infinitely many worlds he did not create. Hart treats this as philosophical ineptitude, and rightly so, but the deeper point to be made here is metaphysical: Bradshaw’sargument imagines God as a being among possibilities, standing before external options, defining himself by a choice among them. That is exactly the “modern” picture of freedom many analytic philosophers assume. And it is precisely the picture that the patristic insistence on divine simplicity is meant to refuse.

A quarantined God is typically a God with “room” in himself—unrealized potential, internal reserve, layers of accessibility. But the God of Nicene metaphysics is not a being with internal slack; God is infinite fullness. If one accepts that, the real distinction between essence and operations becomes not a safeguard but a distortion.

The trinitarian corruption: essence as an object “distinct from the Trinity”

Hart’s “greatest objection” is that Neo-Palamism corrupts both trinitarian theology and metaphysical cogency. The trinitarian critique is perhaps the most theologically consequential: Neo-Palamite discourse can depict the divine essence as an unattainable object “distinct from the order of trinitarian relations.” Hart even cites the notorious formulation ascribed to Palamas: “In God, there are these three: the essence, the trinity, and the energies”—a statement Hart calls clumsy.

Why is this so destructive? Because Nicene trinitarianism is not a theory about three divine individuals “over there” and an essence “behind” them. The logic of Nicaea is that we know God as Father, Son, and Spirit precisely through the economy of salvation: the Spirit unites us to the Son, and thus we are brought into the presence of the Father. The “taxis” of trinitarian relations is known through the “taxis” of the economy, and this depends on the absence of any subsistent mediation between us and God.

But ontological quarantine requires mediation. It requires something that is “of God” but not God-in-himself. That is why quarantine tends to push the Trinity to the margins: the Trinity becomes, at best, a community of hypostases behind the energetic interface. The “energies” do most of the work; trinitarian relations become an afterthought.

This is not merely a doctrinal inconvenience. It changes the meaning of deification. If theosis is entry into trinitarian life, then any framework that places an ontological layer between us and that life risks turning theosis into participation in a divine periphery rather than communion with God.

The sociological engine: identity systems, reconstruction, and convert enforcement

Hart’s essay is not only metaphysics; it is ecclesial sociology. He explains why Neo-Palamism gained prominence: it filled a vacuum, served a survival strategy for embattled churches, and offered an identity differentiator, especially against Roman Catholic manualist Thomism. Then he adds the sharper claim: the system’s triumph has been enforced with “strident” zeal by “converts who know nothing of the wider tradition,” producing an “incalculable impoverishment” of Orthodox intellectual life.

This is the social ecology of ontological quarantine. Quarantine is not only about God; it is about boundaries: who is “inside” true Orthodoxy and who is suspect. A doctrine becomes attractive as a marker precisely when it can be used to police belonging. Once it becomes a marker, its metaphysical deficiencies can be ignored because its social function is fulfilled.

Hart’s recounting of the effacement of Byzantine scholasticism and suspicion of the Russian Silver Age illustrates how a system can “reconstruct the past” and confine present imagination. Neo-Palamism, in this telling, becomes not an interpretive option but a gate: it tells you which Fathers count, which centuries matter, which modern Orthodox thinkers are “gnostic,” which philosophical vocabularies are permitted. Sounds familiar?

This is why Hart is so harsh with the claim that many converts have been “fooled” into equating Neo-Palamism with Orthodoxy. The question is not whether converts are sincere; it is whether the system they inherit has been packaged as “the tradition” in a way that flattens the tradition’s actual plurality.

Ontological quarantine thus appears as a spiritual-political technology: it provides a metaphysical rationale for why God must remain behind a boundary, and an ecclesial rationale for why Orthodoxy must remain behind a boundary to safeguard against the corruption of the West.

The analytic infection and the domestication of mystery

Hart adds an especially modern twist: Neo-Palamism in the Anglophone world has been amalgamated with analytic philosophy of religion—often through former evangelicals accustomed to formalizing fundamentalism. That is significant because it reveals a peculiar double movement:

Neo-Palamism is marketed as mystical, anti-scholastic, beyond “logic-chopping.”
Yet it is increasingly expressed in the idioms of analytic metaphysics, with their own hidden assumptions about possibility, freedom, and being.

This is not a harmless translation. Analytic habits tend to treat “possibility” as a landscape of options external to the agent and “freedom” as selection among those options. That model almost forces the Bradshaw-style claim that God has unrealized potentials because he could have done otherwise.

But if God is the infinite act of being, “possibility” cannot be an external field in which God is a chooser. The more one imports that model, the more one is tempted to picture God as finite—qualified by relations, modified by choices, internally structured by options. Hart thinks Maximus would have found this abhorrent.

Ontological quarantine thrives in such conditions because it can appear as a solution to analytic anxieties of converts. If God is one item among many, we need a theory of access and mediation. If God is pure act, we do not.

Toward an unquarantined transcendence: what the essence/operations distinction should do

If the real distinction collapses into incoherence or composition, why does the essence/operations language persist? Because it is genuinely useful when used as a conceptual distinction that protects two truths simultaneously:

God is incomprehensible (no finite concept exhausts God).
God is immediately present (God is not hidden behind a layer of being).

An “unquarantined” account would say: we encounter God in God’s operations not because operations are something other than God, but because our knowledge of essence is always knowledge of essence as in act. Hart appeals to John of Damascus precisely to show that knowing a thing through its operations does not imply operations are ontologically distinct entities; it is how all knowledge works—of God and neighbor alike. The traditional wisdom here is not “God is behind a curtain,” but “God is inexhaustible.” Inexhaustibility is not distance; it is depth. The error of ontological quarantine is to treat depth as separation.

If we accept Hart’s principle that “all ousia is parousia” that being is presence, presence is encounter, then the “energies” are not a buffer zone but the living God as personally present. Theosis then becomes intelligible again: not attachment to divine emanations, but participation in the trinitarian life into which the Spirit incorporates us.

Theosis without intermediaries: communion as participation in trinitarian life

Hart’s claim that Neo-Palamism undermines theosis is not incidental; it is central. He argues that Gregory of Nyssa condemned Eunomius’ proto-Palamite move because it renders deification “fundamentally meaningless” by breaking the logic of Spirit–Son–Father communion. If there are enduringly subsistent, ontologically distinct “energies” mediating between creature and God, then deification risks becoming participation in those entities rather than entry into God’s own life.

An unquarantined vision of theosis emphasizes that:

The Spirit’s indwelling is not contact with an intermediary level but immediate union with God.
The Son is not a veil behind which essence hides; the Logos is the eternal manifestation of divine depth.
The Father as archē is not a metaphysical object “distinct from the Trinity” but the personal source of the one divine life.

On this account, transcendence is not secured by distance but by the very fact that the divine life we enter is inexhaustible. We do not become God by nature; we participate by grace in the divine communion. No quarantine is required because intimacy does not threaten God’s otherness; it reveals it as non-competitive.

Why the quarantined God became plausible: modernity’s allergy to immediacy

It is worth asking why ontological quarantine has such appeal now. Modernity has trained many of us to believe that immediacy is either impossible or dangerous:

In epistemology: immediacy sounds naïve; everything is mediated by language, culture, interpretation.
In politics: immediacy sounds authoritarian; power must be checked by procedures.
In technology: immediacy is risky; access must be gated by interfaces.

So, it is not surprising that some forms of theology become interface-theologies: they describe God as if God were accessed through protocols. Neo-Palamite “energies” can be made to function like a metaphysical API: real access, but never direct contact with God “in himself.”

Hart is outraged because, on his reading, this is not merely a modern adaptation but a betrayal of Nicene logic. The Fathers did not invent intermediaries to protect God from us; they confessed that God gives himself: Spirit to Son to Father, in the economy that reveals the eternal life. This also explains why the quarantine approach can be so attractive to converts. Converts often need clarity; they want a system. In a fragmented world, a system that claims to be uniquely “Orthodox” and absolutely necessary for theosis is intoxicating. Hart notes exactly this apologetic posture: the essence/energies distinction is treated as uniquely Orthodox and indispensable.

Once the doctrine becomes the badge of authenticity, its internal incoherences become less visible, because its primary work is social and psychological.

A constructive proposal: replace quarantine with covenantal immediacy

If one wants to preserve what is spiritually motivating in Neo-Palamite language (God’s unknowability, the reality of participation) without importing the quarantining structure, one might reframe the entire matter in a more personalist and trinitarian key:

Essence names God’s inexhaustible depth: God is never captured by our concepts.
Operations name God’s personal self-giving: God is truly present, truly acting, truly encountered.
The distinction is conceptual (our modes of speech and knowledge), not an ontological cleavage within God.

This framing preserves both apophatic humility and sacramental realism without turning divine transcendence into a locked room.

It also undercuts the tendency to treat the Trinity as decorative. If God’s operations are God’s presence, then God’s presence is trinitarian: the Spirit unites to the Son, the Son brings to the Father.

There is no “third realm” of energies between us and God.

Ending where Hart ends: the curious triumph of a “rickety” touchstone

Hart closes with astonishment: how strange that a “rickety” and “jarringly un-patristic” school has become the touchstone of Orthodoxy for so many, even for those who presume to speak for “the tradition of the fathers.” That line can sound like mere lament, but it names a genuine philosophical and ecclesial problem: when identity systems capture a tradition, they often mistake the badge for the body.

Ontological quarantine is a name for that capture at the metaphysical level. It is what happens when a tradition, anxious to preserve transcendence or distinctiveness, reimagines God as an inaccessible core and reimagines participation as regulated contact with a mediating realm. It is not simply a bad theory; it is a posture toward God. And it has consequences: it can impoverish intellectual life, flatten historical memory, marginalize trinitarian grammar, and turn theosis into something like managed exposure to divine “energies.”

If Hart is right, the antidote is not to reject all distinctions, nor to collapse mystery into easy familiarity, but to recover a more classical metaphysics of presence: to be is to act; God is pure act; and the divine life we enter by grace is not behind a barricade, but infinitely deep. Unquarantined transcendence is not less reverent. It is more trinitarian. It dares to say that the God who is incomprehensible is also the God who gives himself—without intermediaries—because the only “distance” between creature and Creator is not a metaphysical wall but the joyful, endless asymmetry of participation: ever truly united, never exhausted, always drawn deeper into the life of love and knowledge that is God. For that we will have to give the Heave Ho to Neo-Palamism.

Footnotes

1 David Bentley Hart, “Thoughts In and Out of Season 16,” Leaves in the Wind (1 July 2025).

(Go to “Eternal Hell and Neo-Palamism”)

Posted in David B. Hart, Philosophical Theology, Robert Fortuin | Tagged David Bentley Hart, divine transcendence, essence and energies, God, Neo-Palamism, Palamite distinction | 33 Comments

What Do Angels Sing? Recent Reflections on the Pythagorean Harmonia Mundi

Posted on 14 March 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

by Ryan Haecker, Ph.D.

What is the origin of music? Can we think a thought of music before the sound of music? Was music, perhaps, first performed by artificial instruments, by singing, or, before both; in nature; as by the birds; and even among the planets and stars? And if the music of nature is, in some way, prior to that of men, may there not also be another music, before both; that is sung by the angels; in the harmony of the worlds – which we can, perhaps, call the very principle of music itself?

Angels are said to sing before any sound. Biblical scripture have preserved such an account. In The Book of Job, God asks of Job:

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? … When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4/7, KJV)

The Book of Isaiah similarly records a vision of the six-winged Seraphim:

I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne… Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings… And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. (Isa. 6:4, KJV)

This same vision is later repeated in The Book of Revelation.

And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come. (Rev. 4:8, KJV)

And the Roman liturgy also recites this thrice-holy Trisagion in the Preface to the Eucharistic liturgy:

SANCTUS, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth
HOLY, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts

The angels are, on this account, thought to sing in heaven before we may sing any song on earth. And such an angelic music could communicate divine into human music.

Choirs of angels could, perhaps, be imagined to be heard throughout the whole created cosmos. Yet this account may also appear to present a problem: for if any song is music, and music must be made in the intervals of time, and angels are said to exceed any duration in time, then there may be neither space nor time where angels may be said to sing. Angelic music may thus seem, for us, to be but a most impossible music, neither in nor beyond the time of any sound, which could ever be sung for earthly ears to hear and songs to celebrate.

Augustine wrestles with a semblance of this problem when, in De Musica, he describes how music may be bound in time even as he gestures upwards towards a, higher, trans-temporal, and heavenly music that resounds in the moving image of eternity. Such a heavenly music may be, for Augustine, as for Orpheus, the primordial origin of music.

Angels are, beginning with Origen, and continuing in Augustine, the numinous spiritual intelligences, created first among all creatures on the first day of creation to think through all of the ideas. Angelic light is, then, but an semblance of this angelic intelligence, and the intellectualization of all ideas – including the idea of music itself.

Angelic music must, it seems, impossibly enter into, even as it exceeds, both in and beyond the boundaries of time. Augustine suggests a divine source of musical rhythms: for music, if it is divine, may not pass away in time, yet music, if it marks the intervals in time, must astonishingly also enter into time. Yet how, if music must be made in time, may angels sing in and beyond time? If music is nothing if not made in time, how may we say that the angels sing? And if the angels are said to sing, what, we may say, do the angels sing? We have perhaps, with the scholastic formulation of modern musicology, long since forgotten how to ask and answer this question, of the essence, of the metaphysics, and, we may dare to say, even of the angels of music. We must, if we are to recall this music of the angels, recollect, from the primordial past, the first thought of the first music.

Pythagoras is said, by ancient authorities, to have first counted to construct the harmonic chords of music, the universal music (musica universalis), and the harmony of the worlds (harmonia mundi). The harmonia mundi that is sung as by the angels through the movement of the celestial spheres. This music can, no doubt, never be directly seen or heard, not because it is too dim and soft, but only because it is too bright and loud. The pillar of Pythagorean arithmogony, the hidden ‘hearth’ (hestia), is, here, the central fire and first principle of arithmogony, which radiates and reflects its invisibly brilliant pure light through the streaming spatialized signs of the numbers, ratios, and proportions of the countable cosmos. The pure light of the hidden hearth can, in this way, shine forth from its inmost centre to its most outstretched periphery, where, at last, it can be reflected from its antipodes to be imitated in and by all of the intermediary lesser lights, spheres, and spirits. The sun, moon, and stars may, then, by reflecting this light to light, intermediate so as to communicate this pure light to any and all lesser lights, mathematics, and music.

Plato describes, after the allegory of the cave of The Republic, the dialectical division and combination of the Pythagorean Quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Music is, for Plato, as mathematical as it is dialectical, deliberative, and free. It results, in The Parmenides, from the production of proportions in the idea of number, and, in The Republic, as it is determined by dialectic. And it is through this dialectic, beginning at the start of the Timaeus (34b-36d), that Plato then divides, combines, and mixes the elements of the cosmos according to harmonic ratios and proportions across the mediating silence of the emergence of any music in time (Plato, Timaeus, 1238-40). The interstitial intervals of silence are, then, nothing more than the negative judgments of dialectical division in all of its recombined relations. And these relations are, moreover, mediated, even as each may be messaged by the celestial daemons, lesser gods, and angelic spirits. Platonic musicology, like Pythagorean arithmogony, is thus principally this music of the ideas, the worlds, and even of the angels, which is, primordially prior to any music that we may hear.

This Pythagorean-Platonic metaphysics of music was thereafter to be fatefully subverted and subsumed into a more empirical and mathematical physics by Aristotle and his student Aristoxenus. Aristotle had, in the Posterior Analytics (75a38-b20), denied any trans-generic demonstration of empirical music from mathematical forms when he denied any demonstration from the higher genera of arithmology and astronomy to mathematics and music (Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 122). Musicology could, thereafter, be developed as an autonomous and specific science, without regard for the sovereign science of metaphysics.

Aristoxenus, in Elementa Harmonika, similarly started, at the advent of ancient musicology, with this same presupposition by bracketing any prior mathematical musicology. He thus studied music as merely a system (systemata) of the tones (tonoi) in the place (topos) where it may be heard to situate the systematic structure of the tones in phenomena, where music is, at last, nothing more mathematical than the intervals of the rhythm that is heard amongst any and all empirical sounds.

Angelic music could, we may argue, then create the conditions for the modern spatialization, mathematization, and petrification of the dialectical dynamic of music in a flattened field of univocal representation. Modern musicology can be narrated to begin, after the spatialization of Descartes and the conceptualization of Kant, as an abstraction of the musical in the mathematical. Music could thereafter be essentialized in and by an entirely apriorist spatialized geometry of a fully formalized musicology, culminating, perhaps, in musical set theory, with its concomitant corollary in the atonal, anarchic, and ultimately unenjoyable music of Arnold Schönberg and John Cage. Such a fully mathematisized musicology would per impossibile need no performance, audibility, and creative spontaneity.

And if postmodernity, in the fully realized nihilism of modernity, appears as but a perverse nihilistic parody of this ancient angelic metaphysics of music, then it may, without the ecstatic participation, sacramental liturgy, and holier music of salvation of a cosmic poetry, be all the more liable to commercial commodification and fascistic domination.

Augustine’s angelology has, however, preserved a precedent for this metaphysics of music. For his hidden Platonism is no less a hidden Pythagoreanism. And he could, perhaps, have answered this problem by arguing, following from the Pythagoreans, that the music of the angels is, not so much contained in, as creative of the time of music: for if angelic music is truly, as it was the Pythagoreans, a way of counting out the cosmos, in any space, time, and place, then we may imagine that the angels can also create time by making music. Angelic music may, in this way, be more originary and creative than the time of any other music.
Spatial reality may, in this way, be generated by music, just as music is made by the angels, in an angelic generation of space, time, motion, along with the whole created cosmos. Music can thus be considered to create the cosmos: angels sing by singing the thought of the creation of the cosmos, as a whole, in its part, and in every place.

An echo of this creative conception of angelic music can be heard to resound in the later literary tradition of angelic music. Dante Algieri writes, in Paradiso 28 (94-96):

And rising, choir to choir, I heard ’Hosanna’ sung to that point which, fixed there, hold them all, and always will, ubi they’ve always been.
(Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, 273)

And John Milton writes, in Paradise Lost (IV.682-88):

“Celestial voices to the midnight air…With heavenly touch of instrumental sounds In full harmonic number joined, their songs Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to heaven.” (John Milton, Paradise Lost, 124)

And he writes, again, in At a Solemn Music (25-29):

O may we soon again renew that Song And keep in tune with Heav’n, till God ere long To his celestial consort us unite, To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light.
(John Milton, At a Solemn Music, 58)

What, then, do angels sing? Angels sing, we may say, as ‘all the sons of God shout for joy’, the continuous creation of the whole harmony of the worlds: celestial chains, eternity in an instant, and an instant of eternity, seen as it is sung in every time, space, and punctiliar place.

(Originally published in Noesis: Theology, Philosophy, Poetics, Issue 6, in 2019)

* * *

Dr. Ryan Haecker is a theologian and philosopher whose research in systematic and historical theology explores the absolute theological questions of logic, science, and technology. He is the editor of the book New Trinitarian Ontologies (Cascade Books), and the author of the forthcoming book Restoring Reason: Theology of Logic in Origen of Alexandria (Verlag Karl Alber).

Posted in Philosophical Theology | Tagged angels, Augustine, harmonia mundi, harmony, music of the spheres, Plato, pythagoras | Leave a comment

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Eclectic Orthodoxy

Eternal Hell and Neo-Palamism as a Metaphysics of Evasion

St Cyril of Alexandria and the Sacraments of Deification

Beauty and the Rumor of Angels

A Tuesday Morning in Edenton

A World Flattened by Use

Why Angels Make Moderns Fidget

A Cosmos Alive with Mediation

My Own Weird Conviction

Why This Is Not Fantasy

Recovering the World

The Love That Moves the Sun and the Other Stars: God’s Cosmic Tractor Beam

The Problem That Begins in Hell

Dante the Pilgrim Is Not Yet a Saint

The Long School of Purgatory

Reason, Revelation, Contemplation

A Shock in Paradise

The Beatific Vision and Time

The Knot That Remains

The Final Vision

Footnotes

“Christ wants us to be received into union with God the Father, and at the same time he bestows the benefits from the Father on our nature through himself“

Theosis as Trinitarian Communion: St Cyril of Alexandria

Let’s Give the Heave Ho to Neo-Palamism

What Do Angels Sing? Recent Reflections on the Pythagorean Harmonia Mundi

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A Tuesday Morning in Edenton

A World Flattened by Use

Why Angels Make Moderns Fidget

A Cosmos Alive with Mediation

My Own Weird Conviction

Why This Is Not Fantasy

Recovering the World

Share this:

The Problem That Begins in Hell

Dante the Pilgrim Is Not Yet a Saint

The Long School of Purgatory

Reason, Revelation, Contemplation

A Shock in Paradise

The Beatific Vision and Time

The Knot That Remains

The Final Vision

Footnotes

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