Not the fire itself…
Not the Fire Itself
Aquinas, Rahner, and the Eastern Catholics on why the road still reaches the destination
The two preceding articles in this series established that Catholics and Orthodox describe the same destination: union with the uncreated God, participation in the divine nature, deification. The Same Fire argued that Aquinas and Palamas, read carefully, are not contradictory. Can Catholics Be Deified? showed that Catholic dogma has always affirmed theosis under its own terminology.
But a theologically serious Orthodox interlocutor will not stop there. The sharpest version of the critique is not that Catholics deny deification — it is that the instrument Catholic theology uses to accomplish deification is, by definition, the wrong kind of thing for the job. This objection has a name and a precise source, and it deserves to be confronted on its own terms.
The Objection: Lossky’s Structural Critique
Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958) is the theologian who gave this argument its modern form. In The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944), he stated the charge plainly:
“For Eastern Tradition the created supernatural has no existence. That which Western theology calls by the name supernatural signifies for the East uncreated — the Divine Energies ineffably distinct from the Essence of God. The difference consists in the fact that the Western conception of grace implies the idea of causality, grace being represented as an effect of the Divine Cause, exactly as in the act of creation; while for Eastern theology there is a natural procession, the Energies shining forth eternally from the Divine Essence.” — Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, SVS Press, p. 88–89
The argument runs as follows. Catholic theology — particularly in its post-Tridentine and neo-Scholastic expression — treats sanctifying grace as gratia creata: a created quality inhering in the soul, a supernatural accident infused by God but ontologically finite. If what the soul receives is a created thing, how can that created thing unite the soul to the uncreated God? You cannot arrive at the infinite by accumulating the finite. The instrument is the wrong kind of thing for the destination. Worse, positing a created tertium quid between God and the soul as the formal basis of union risks repeating the Arian error of an ontological intermediate — something neither fully God nor fully creature mediating what should be direct participation in divine life.
This is a precise argument, not a vague complaint. It does not dispute the Catholic intention; it disputes the Catholic mechanism. And it has real force against the neo-Scholastic manualist presentation, where sanctifying grace is defined as “a permanent supernatural quality of the soul” and the indwelling of the Spirit is treated as a consequence of that created quality rather than as the primary gift. Against that presentation, Lossky’s critique lands.
The question is whether it lands against Catholic theology as such — or only against one historically contingent way of presenting it.
What Aquinas Actually Says: Instrument, Not Union
The first response is that Lossky’s critique, when aimed at Aquinas specifically, collapses a distinction Aquinas is at pains to maintain throughout his account of grace and the beatific vision.
Aquinas does affirm that the lumen gloriae — the light of glory that elevates the intellect in the beatific vision — is a created quality. But he insists with equal force that what this created quality does is dispose the soul to receive something that is itself entirely uncreated: the divine essence itself, known immediately and without any created intermediary standing between soul and God.
“The divine essence itself becomes the intelligible form of the intellect” in the beatific vision — not a created representation of God, but God himself, present to the intellect directly as its actuating form. — Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 12, a. 2
The lumen gloriae is not the union; it is the condition for the union. The created quality elevates the capacity; the uncreated God is what that elevated capacity directly receives. This is not a quibble about terminology. It means the Catholic claim is structurally the following: the soul is united — immediately, without a created screen — to the divine essence itself. The instrument is created; the terminus is not.
The Palamite account locates deification in participation in the divine energies, which are real and uncreated but distinct from the inaccessible divine essence. The Catholic account in the beatific vision locates deification in union with the divine essence itself, directly and immediately. If the Palamite concern is that Catholic theology interposes a created medium between the soul and God, the Catholic response is: our account of the terminus is actually stronger than yours — we claim union with the essence, not participation in its emanations.
The created lumen gloriae is the road. The uncreated divine essence is the destination. The road is created; the destination is not. What matters is that the road reaches it — and Aquinas insists it does, immediately and without remainder.
Whether this fully satisfies the Palamite intuition is a genuine question, and we will return to the Orthodox counter-response below. But the basic logical structure of Lossky’s objection — that Catholic theology interposes a created medium between soul and God as the formal object of deifying union — does not accurately describe Aquinas’s position on the beatific vision.
Karl Rahner and the Priority of Uncreated Grace
The Thomistic response handles the beatific vision, but the Orthodox objection applies equally to sanctifying grace in this life — the grace that deifies the soul here and now, not only in glory. And here the neo-Scholastic presentation is more vulnerable. It is also here that Karl Rahner made a contribution that Orthodox polemics consistently overlook.
In a 1939 essay — “Zur scholastischen Begrifflichkeit der ungeschaffenen Gnade” (ZKT 63 [1939]; ET in Theological Investigations I, pp. 319–346) — Rahner argued that the Scholastic tradition had quietly inverted the proper order of two aspects of grace that Scripture and the Greek Fathers had always held in a specific sequence. Post-Tridentine theology treated the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as a consequence of created sanctifying grace: God infuses the habitual quality, and therefore the Spirit dwells in the soul. Rahner reversed this priority: the fundamental and primary reality is the uncreated gift — the self-communication of the divine persons themselves to the soul, God giving not merely the effects of his action but his very self. Created grace is the real but secondary correlate: the soul’s creaturely disposition, its “dispositive formal effect,” for receiving a gift that is itself wholly uncreated.
Rahner called the causal relation involved quasi-formal causality. In standard Aristotelian causality, a formal cause determines its subject intrinsically, inhering in it as its constitutive form. God cannot be a formal cause in this strict sense without the soul becoming divine by nature. But Rahner argued there is an analogous mode of causality — God acting as the soul’s uncreated actuating principle without becoming part of its nature — already implied in Aquinas’s account of the beatific vision (where the divine essence replaces a species impressa in the intellect) and traceable in a minority but unbroken Catholic genealogy from Denis Petavius (1583–1652) through Matthias Scheeben to Maurice de la Taille.
This is not a departure from Catholic theology. It is a recovery of what the tradition always implied and the Greek Fathers consistently foregrounded. When Paul writes that “the Spirit himself dwells in us” (Romans 8:11), when John speaks of “abiding in God and God in us” (1 John 4:13), the primary datum is the uncreated personal indwelling. Rahner’s argument is that neo-Scholasticism obscured this priority without the tradition ever having formally denied it.
Neo-Scholastic order: God infuses created grace → as a consequence, the Spirit dwells in the soul.
Rahner’s corrected order: God communicates himself — uncreated, primary → created grace is the soul’s real but secondary creaturely disposition for receiving that uncreated self-gift.
The soul is not united to a created quality. It is united to God, who gives himself. The created aspect describes the soul’s transformation; it does not describe the object of union. Lossky’s objection targets the neo-Scholastic presentation, not the deeper structure of Catholic theology correctly ordered.
It should be noted that Rahner’s thesis was contested within Catholic theology. William Hill, OP (“Uncreated Grace — A Critique of Karl Rahner,” The Thomist 27 [1963]: 333–356) argued that the Council of Trent defined created grace as the unica formalis causa of justification and that quasi-formal causality is metaphysically incoherent. Rahner’s reply was that Trent addressed the forensic-imputation controversy of the Reformation, not the ontology of divine-human union, and that the “quasi-” of quasi-formal causality precisely guards against any suggestion of pantheistic composition. The intramural debate is real. But Rahner’s position represents a mainstream Catholic option, traceable through five centuries of the tradition, and its existence demonstrates that the resources to answer Lossky are present within Catholic theology itself — prior to any borrowing from Palamas.
The Orthodox Counter-Responses — and the Answers
A well-prepared Orthodox interlocutor will not concede at this point. Three counter-responses are predictable, and each deserves a direct answer.
This is Lossky’s own deeper argument, drawn from his reading of Palamas and the Cappadocians. The Catholic response has two parts. First, it is not Catholic teaching that the divine essence is exhaustively comprehended in beatitude — Aquinas explicitly distinguishes videre (seeing the essence) from comprehendere (exhaustively grasping it), and insists only God comprehends himself (ST I, q. 12, a. 7). Divine transcendence is fully preserved. Second, and more pointedly: if the divine essence is so absolutely unapproachable that even the blessed cannot be united to it, then Palamism faces a version of its own problem — the energies, being genuinely distinct from the essence in the Palamite scheme, are not the essence. Union with the energies is not union with God in the fullest sense. The Catholic position actually makes a stronger claim about deification: the soul is united to God himself, not merely to his radiance.
Fair as far as it goes, but it understates the depth of the genealogy. Rahner is not an innovator; he is a recoverer. The trajectory runs from Petavius (17th c.) through Thomassin, Lessius, and Scheeben (19th c.) to de la Taille and Rahner — a continuous minority stream within Catholic systematic theology spanning four centuries, all reading the Greek Fathers as foregrounding uncreated grace. More decisively: the structure Rahner recovers is already present in Aquinas’s account of the beatific vision, which Catholic theology has never disputed. Rahner did not import an Eastern category; he showed that the Western tradition had always implied what it had failed to articulate clearly. The objection that “Rahner is just one theologian” would carry more weight if a sustained Orthodox engagement with the 1939 essay had been published and found it deficient. As of now, the primary Orthodox responses (Yannaras, Romanides, Loudovikos) reject the framework of formal causality rather than engaging Rahner’s specific argument about the priority of uncreated grace.
This objection proves too much. If Eastern Catholic theologians who were formed in Byzantine theology, worship in Byzantine liturgy, and have been in direct continuous contact with Orthodox theological tradition are still held to be using Palamite categories in a “filtered” sense, the charge amounts to claiming that any Orthodox theology that reaches a positive conclusion about Catholic compatibility is thereby suspect. That is not an argument; it is an immunizing strategy. The relevant point is not that Eastern Catholics are crypto-Latins but that their existence demonstrates a lived historical fact: Palamite participatory theology and communion with Rome have coexisted for centuries without the Church requiring Eastern Catholics to abandon or reinterpret their theological heritage. Rome has never condemned the Palamite essence-energies distinction as heretical. The floor of compatibility is established by the Church’s own ecumenical practice.
Palamas Himself Accepted Created Grace
There is a further response that cuts directly against the rhetorical force of the objection, and it comes from within the Palamite tradition itself.
John Meyendorff — the 20th century’s greatest scholarly interpreter of Palamas — documents in A Study of Gregory Palamas (SVS Press, 1974, p. 164) that Palamas himself explicitly accepted both created and uncreated grace as valid categories:
“There is nothing strange in using the word ‘grace’ both for the created and the uncreated and in speaking of a created grace distinct from the uncreated.” — Gregory Palamas, quoted in Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, p. 164
Palamas could speak of the new heart as created, and the Spirit given to that heart as uncreated. The founder of the Palamite tradition did not regard “created grace” as a category to be abolished but as one half of a necessary distinction. When Lossky says “for Eastern Tradition the created supernatural has no existence,” he is stating a position sharper than Palamas’s own.
Norman Russell, in Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age (OUP, 2019, p. 209), makes the same point: the popular neo-Palamite reading of the essence-energies distinction as an absolute ontological divide is a 20th-century construction — Lossky’s construction — rather than a straightforward reading of Palamas. This does not dissolve the disagreement, but it should deflate the rhetorical certainty with which the objection is sometimes deployed.
The Scotist Option: A Third Path
For the reader who wants to go deeper, Catholic theology contains a third resource that has been remarkably underused in Catholic-Orthodox dialogue: the Scotist distinctio formalis a parte rei.
John Duns Scotus posited a distinction in re — in the thing itself — between “formalities” that are nevertheless really inseparable, stronger than a merely conceptual distinction but weaker than a real distinction between two separate things. This was identified as the closest Latin analogue to Palamas’s essence-energies distinction by the 15th-century Orthodox theologian Gennadios Scholarios himself, who argued that had Aquinas known Scotus’s metaphysics he would have placed essence and energies in a formal rather than real or merely virtual distinction.
The Louvain theologian G. Philips, at the 1953 Chevetogne ecumenical dialogues, argued that Palamism “is not an ‘ontological’ distinction but, rather, analogous to a ‘formal distinction’ in the Scotist sense,” and called it “a typical example of a perfectly admissible theological pluralism” compatible with Rome. Mark K. Spencer, in “The Flexibility of Divine Simplicity: Aquinas, Scotus, Palamas” (International Philosophical Quarterly 57, no. 2 [2017]: 123–139), developed this into a full systematic argument that all three traditions — Thomist, Scotist, Palamite — can be reconciled within a coherent account of divine simplicity and creaturely participation.
This is a permissible Catholic option. Rome has never defined that the Thomistic account of divine simplicity is the only admissible metaphysics of grace. The existence of the Scotist bridge shows that the disagreement between Catholic and Palamite theology is not a wall but a family of overlapping positions, several of which are closer to each other than either is to the popular caricatures.
What the Objection Ultimately Establishes
Taken honestly, Lossky’s objection establishes something real. The neo-Scholastic manualist presentation of grace — the Catholic manuals that dominated seminary education from Trent to Vatican II — did develop a technical vocabulary that differs significantly from Eastern theological vocabulary, and the difference is not merely terminological. The question of whether the formal cause of deification is a created quality or the uncreated God himself is a genuine theological question, not a confusion that dissolves on inspection. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions have real disagreements about how to articulate the mechanics of divine-human union.
What the objection does not establish is that Catholic soteriology fails to reach its destination.
The Aquinas answer: The created lumen gloriae is the soul’s disposition; the uncreated divine essence is the immediate formal object of beatifying union. The instrument is created. The terminus is not. Catholic theology claims union with the essence, which is a stronger claim than Palamite participation in the energies.
The Rahner answer: The priority of uncreated grace — God’s self-communication as quasi-formal cause — is present in Scripture, the Greek Fathers, and a continuous minority stream of Catholic systematic theology from Petavius to de la Taille. Created grace is the soul’s real but secondary creaturely response to a gift that is itself wholly uncreated. Lossky’s objection accurately targets the neo-Scholastic inversion; it does not target Catholic theology correctly ordered.
The Palamas answer: Palamas himself accepted created and uncreated grace as complementary categories. The “no created supernatural” thesis is Lossky’s sharpening, not Palamas’s own position. The disagreement is real but narrower than the polemical tradition suggests.
The road is not the fire. But the road reaches it — and Catholic theology has always known this, even when its schoolmen failed to say it clearly.
- 01 — Development of Doctrine: Innovation or Organic Growth?
- 02 — When Did Hesychasm Begin?
- 03 — Can Catholics Be Deified?
- 04 — The Same Fire
- 05 — Not the Fire Itself (this article)
Primary sources: Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 12, 43; I-II, qq. 109–113; Summa Contra Gentiles III, cc. 51–53; De Veritate q. 27, a. 1. Gregory Palamas, Capita 150, cc. 92–93 (PG 150); Against Akindynos III. Karl Rahner, “Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, trans. Cornelius Ernst (Helicon Press, 1961), pp. 319–346 [original: “Zur scholastischen Begrifflichkeit der ungeschaffenen Gnade,” ZKT 63 (1939): 137–156].
Secondary sources: Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (SVS Press, 1957; repr. 1976), esp. ch. 4. John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, trans. George Lawrence (SVS Press, 1974). A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford University Press, 1999) — the most rigorous academic treatment of the convergence, with important caveats; see the critiques by Richard Cross, “Deification in Aquinas: Created or Uncreated?” Journal of Theological Studies 69, no. 1 (2018): 106–132. Norman Russell, Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age (Oxford University Press, 2019). William J. Hill, OP, “Uncreated Grace — A Critique of Karl Rahner,” The Thomist 27 (1963): 333–356. Thomas Duncan, “Breathing with Both Lungs: The Uncreated Grace of the Holy Trinity in the Works of Karl Rahner and St Gregory Palamas,” Irish Theological Quarterly 86, no. 2 (2021): 156–173. Mark K. Spencer, “The Flexibility of Divine Simplicity: Aquinas, Scotus, Palamas,” International Philosophical Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2017): 123–139. C. Moeller and G. Philips, The Theology of Grace and the Oecumenical Movement, trans. R. A. Wilson (Mowbray, 1961). Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2004). Vincent L. Strand, SJ, “Rahner and Scheeben on Grace: Reexamining a Forgotten Resemblance,” Theological Studies 85, no. 1 (2024): 34–55.