Activity and Participation in Late Antique and Early Christian Thought by Torstein Theodor Tollefsen (review)

The present volume is a study of the concepts of activity (energeia) and participation in late antique and early Christian thought with the aim of showing that Gregory Palamas was a traditional thinker and no innovator in the Byzantine tradition. Tollefsen, a philosophy professor interested in the philosophy of the Greek church fathers within the period of 300–900, does not want to engage in the Palamitic debate per se. Instead, in six of the book’s eight chapters, he explores the concepts of activity and participation in non-Christian thought (Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus), two of the Cappadocian fathers (Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa), pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and Maximus the Confessor. Only in the seventh chapter does he deal with Gregory Palamas proper. Chapter Three deals with the Trinitarian generation as the internal activity of the godhead, while Chapters Four and Five deal with two examples of external activities of the godhead—cosmology and incarnation, respectively.

The concepts of participation and activity go back to the Neoplatonic and early Christian idea that lower strata of being depend on higher principles, in the sense that these same lower levels are constituted by some kind of participation in these higher principles. While this sounds like abstract philosophy, Orthodox Christianity has developed a practical understanding of this in its doctrine of salvation that is conceived as deification (theosis)—that is, participation in God and becoming godlike. The most well-known expression of this doctrine is encountered in the theology of Gregory Palamas (14th century), who provided a defense of the hesychast practice of participation in God’s uncreated divine energies (or activities). Tollefsen contends that the modern reception of the controversial distinction between God’s uncreated essence, the divine activity, and participation tended “to blur the fact that the distinction and relationship between such concepts … originally belonged to a central philosophical consideration partly developed to highlight the relationship between higher and lower reality, God and what comes ‘after’ God; originally in pagan thought and later in Christian thought” (3).

Going into individual details about the arguments of this book is too complex a task for a book review. But we should note, for example, that Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor share Plotinus’s view of participation, according to which an intelligible principle is received by “a power of the activity ad extra of the principle that is made present according to the receptive capacity of the recipient” (31). Also, while engaging some of the older research on participation, the book is conversant with some of the newer research and complements the latter with serious analysis. In regard to cosmology as an external activity of the godhead, both Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus hold similar views that God, like an artist who left his stamp on his work, has left his stamp on his work, the cosmos, and we may observe the ineffable wisdom of God in the orderly arrangement of the world. Unlike Aristotle, however, for whom the human activity of building has no existence beyond the completion of the structure built (perhaps with the exception of a few outcomes), for Maximus and Gregory, the wisdom and goodness observed in the cosmos are not just the stamp left by the artist, but testify to the permanent and sustaining presence of God in the world.

When it comes to Gregory Palamas, Tollefsen argues that his thinking with regards to the philosophical ideas of essence, activity, and participation are in line with those of Gregory of Nyssa, pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus. Unlike his predecessors, however, who used those concepts without being too concerned that they would be misunderstood, Palamas saw himself attempted to explain them using the difference between essence and activity, a vocabulary which was not easily accepted during his time and by his adversaries.

While the book is complex (and I must admit a few times even unclear) and...