Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (review)

In Aristotle East and West, David Bradshaw has two goals. On the one hand, he provides a survey of uses of the Greek term 'energeia' from Aristotle through the Byzantine era. On the other, he aims to provide an intellectual history of the division of Eastern and Western Christian traditions, driven by a spirited defense of the Eastern tradition. The two broad purposes are not as disparate as might first appear, since a major difference between Eastern and Western traditions lies in how they understand the relation between God's energeia and God's essence or substance (ousia).

The first five chapters—originally Bradshaw's doctoral dissertation in ancient philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin—tell the history of energeia, from its Aristotelian beginnings to Neoplatonic developments, in a way that compromises neither the breadth of authors covered nor the depth of analysis. One of Bradshaw's strengths is his ability to discuss non-philosophical uses of energeia in rhetoric and (in chapter six) in popular religion and magic. Chapter one offers a developmental account of Aristotle's understanding of energeia, suggesting that the ambiguity in Aristotle between the senses of 'activity' and 'actuality' allows later Eastern theologians to subsume necessary attributes of God (e.g., God's infinity) and contingent ones (e.g., God's act of creating the world) within the single class of energeiai. To show how, in the fourth chapter, Bradshaw discusses Plotinus's notion that certain substances (like the One) are characterized by two kinds of energeiai: one internal and necessary, the other external manifestations. For Bradshaw, this distinction underlies later "Eastern" theologies of the divine energeiai—though he suggests, rather than demonstrates, Plotinus's influence here.

Generally, Bradshaw's execution of his first goal is irenic and scholarly. The same cannot be said for the way he handles his second goal; this discussion comes across as unnecessarily contentious and operates in apparent ignorance of major pieces of scholarship on the theologians under review. The "Eastern" and "Western" traditions Bradshaw constructs only appear as unified classes because Bradshaw reads them backwards. The debate he constructs between Thomas Aquinas and the fourteenth-century Byzantine Gregory Palamas structures how he treats earlier figures.

This becomes apparent in his discussion of the Cappadocians (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus). They provide, he claims, patristic pedigree for the Palamite distinction between ousia and energeiai in God—a claim familiar enough from mid-twentieth-century Orthodox authors like Vladimir Lossky. This distinction, we learn later, is important for two reasons. First, it allows theologians to view salvation as involving "synergy" (sun-energeia), since humans can participate in the divine energeia without participating in God's ousia. Second, it allows one to claim that "God can do otherwise without being otherwise" (272). For Bradshaw, both of these points show the superiority of the Greek tradition, since both are religiously necessary and neither is compatible with how westerners after Augustine understood divine simplicity. According to Augustine and Aquinas, divine simplicity entails that God's essence and activity are identical. This smacks of "Platonism" for Bradshaw, who reads Augustine (rather quaintly, given the past century of scholarship) as a thinly-veiled follower of Plato's middle dialogues (267).

Bradshaw's claim to find the Palamite distinction in the Cappadocians is problematic. The Cappadocian texts he examines justify only the claim that humans gain knowledge of God through God's energeiai, not the claim that divine attributes such as goodness and wisdom are energeiai. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa predicate such terms of the divine ousia—an impossibility for a strict Palamite. Furthermore, Bradshaw overlooks significant Cappadocian scholarship, for instance, by David Balás and Michel Barnes. Barnes has demonstrated that Gregory of Nyssa understands causality as proceeding from ousia to dunamis to energeia; Bradshaw omits the crucial middle term. Moreover, in order to claim (against Augustine and Aquinas) that "Eastern" theologians uniformly believe that divine energeiai can...