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.”
Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, SVS Press, pp. 88–89The 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.
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.
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.
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.
The created lumen gloriae is the road. The uncreated divine essence is the destination. The road is created; the destination is not.
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. 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; 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 for receiving a gift that is itself wholly uncreated.
God infuses created grace → as a consequence, the Spirit dwells in the soul.
The created quality is logically prior; the indwelling is derivative.
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.
Rahner called the causal relation involved quasi-formal causality. God acts as the soul’s uncreated actuating principle without becoming part of its nature — already implied in Aquinas’s account of the beatific vision and traceable in a minority but unbroken Catholic genealogy from Denis Petavius (1583–1652) through Matthias Scheeben to Maurice de la Taille.
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 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. The intramural debate is real. But Rahner’s position represents a mainstream Catholic option, 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
“You claim union with the divine essence — but that is exactly what Palamism denies is possible. The essence is absolutely unknowable and unapproachable, even eschatologically. Your position doesn’t solve the problem; it creates a worse one.”
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.
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, 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.
“Rahner is one Catholic theologian whose position was contested within Catholicism. You haven’t shown that the Catholic position is what Rahner says — only that one Catholic said something closer to what we say.”
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. 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.
“Eastern Catholics who use Palamite language are using it in a different sense, filtered through Roman categories. Their existence proves coexistence, not convergence.”
This objection proves too much. If Eastern Catholic theologians formed in Byzantine theology, worshipping in Byzantine liturgy, and 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 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 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.
“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.”
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.
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.” Mark K. Spencer, in “The Flexibility of Divine Simplicity” (International Philosophical Quarterly 57, no. 2 [2017]: 123–139), developed this into a full systematic argument that Thomist, Scotist, and Palamite traditions 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.
What the Objection Ultimately Establishes
Taken honestly, Lossky’s objection establishes something real. The neo-Scholastic manualist presentation of grace 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.
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. 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 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.
Works Cited
- Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae I, qq. 12, 43; I-II, qq. 109–113; Summa Contra Gentiles III, cc. 51–53; De Veritate q. 27, a. 1.
- Palamas, Gregory. Capita 150, cc. 92–93 (PG 150); Against Akindynos III.
- Rahner, Karl. “Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace.” Theological Investigations, vol. 1. Trans. Cornelius Ernst. Helicon Press, 1961, pp. 319–346.
- Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. SVS Press, 1957; repr. 1976. Esp. ch. 4.
- Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. SVS Press, 1974.
- Williams, A.N. The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas. Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Cross, Richard. “Deification in Aquinas: Created or Uncreated?” Journal of Theological Studies 69, no. 1 (2018): 106–132.
- Russell, Norman. Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age. Oxford University Press, 2019.
- Hill, William J., OP. “Uncreated Grace — A Critique of Karl Rahner.” The Thomist 27 (1963): 333–356.
- Duncan, Thomas. “Breathing with Both Lungs.” Irish Theological Quarterly 86, no. 2 (2021): 156–173.
- Spencer, Mark K. “The Flexibility of Divine Simplicity.” International Philosophical Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2017): 123–139.
- Moeller, C. and Philips, G. The Theology of Grace and the Oecumenical Movement. Trans. R.A. Wilson. Mowbray, 1961.
- Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Strand, Vincent L., SJ. “Rahner and Scheeben on Grace.” Theological Studies 85, no. 1 (2024): 34–55.