The bright sun in the sky lies far beyond us in space. Standing on the earth, we cannot reach out and touch it no matter how far we stretch up toward this distant, untouchable ball of fire. (For perspective, consider that the sun is located 93,000,000 miles away or 150 million kilometers. The sun is also meltingly burning hot at 27,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit or 15,000,000 degrees Celsius). The sun itself remains unreachable and unknowable to us by our own direct experience. God is also unreachable and unknowable to us. More precisely, the Divine Essence is totally beyond our ability to understand, absolutely unknowable, infinitely distant (transcendent), entirely unreachable, and completely inaccessible to our experience.
God is the Existing One. Only He, the Uncreated God, exists by Himself. Everything else exists because He gave it existence by bringing it into being out of nothing. All things are contained within Him, Who alone Is without boundary and limit. The Divine Essence is so indescribably distant beyond imagination from the created universe that we refer to the Essence of God as even beyond Being and beyond Existence.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are One in Essence, that is, One God. So, the Essence of God is Personalized in the Person of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is no impersonal Divine Essence apart from the Persons. If you could know God in His Essence, then you would be God Yourself, equal to God in every way. As a new Divine Person – a fourth Person added to the Holy Trinity – you would then know God as God knows Himself (His Inner Self, so to speak). Of course, a created being cannot know or experience the the Uncreated Essence. Pantheism (the false belief that created things in the universe are divine) results from ignorance of the proper separation between the Uncreated Essence and created beings.
No one knows the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as thoroughly as they know one another because the three Persons share the same Uncreated Essence. They know each other on the level of Essence. Whoever we humans think that God is or think that God is like according to our human opinions, philosophical ideas, and creative imagination, the Divine Essence is not that. We really can say little about the Essence of God other than how far and untouchable from the created universe that the Divine Essence is.
If God is so completely unknowable and separated from us, how can we be saved? Here is the good news: God is unknowable and beyond, yet He is also knowable and near.
Although we cannot know the sun by experience directly from our place on earth, we do experience the sun’s rays. We participate in the light of the sun and the warmth of the sun through its rays. Our experience of invisible ultraviolet rays enables our body to produce Vitamin D. We are nurtured by the distant sun through the sunshine that draws near to us on Earth. While God is also completely unreachable, unknowable, and untouchable in His Essence, we can know and experience Him by His Energy, which flows from His Essence. The Energy is not a created power that connects us with God, but God Himself. We call this Divine Uncreated Energy by such names as these: the Grace of God, the Glory of God, His Power, the Uncreated Light, the Divine Presence, Uncreated Fire, or Divinity. We refer to the Energy as God’s movement, operation, condescension, action, activity, or work within the creation. We can know nothing about God other than what He reveals to us about Himself, so since He reveals Himself through His Energy, then we may refer to the Uncreated Energy as God’s revelation to us. Sometimes we refer to the Energy as plural Energies since we can distinguish between the different ways a human being experiences the Uncreated Energy as Divine Life, Light, Wisdom, Love, Humility, Healing Power, Joy, Peace, and so on.
Remember this: God is One. The Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is One Essence and One Energy. We cannot know God or experience God in His Essence, but we can know God and experience Him directly in His Energy. In fact, participating in the Divine Energy so that we are healed, transformed, and perfected by His Energy is salvation.
No analogies based on rational concepts or created things can succeed in explaining the Mystery of the Uncreated One. So, our use of the sun and its rays as a teaching concept to explain the distinction between the Uncreated Essence and Energies is helpful, but we should not overthink it. Analogies do not capture the Truth, but they keep us on the path toward the Truth so that we may pursue experiential knowledge of the Truth for our salvation.
Read: Exodus 33.1-23; Job 38.1-42.6; Matthew 11.27; John 1.18; 6.46
Text copyright © 2018 by Fr. Symeon D. S. Kees