It seems often the Energies are often expressed as some sort of action.
This may or may not be a proper explanation, or it may be overly simplistic. Please correct me if so.
So, how would God be identified as being His actions?
Very clever fellow...A righteous tickler!!
Go to the head of the class....I am not joking to this point.
God is beyond BEING is he not?
That would make God beyond BUNDLES!!
So how can BUNDLES=HE?
God is BEYOND God, at least as we conceive Him.
We could speak of the essence of God and the actuality of God, but those are big words beyond my poor brain.
I know that Pope Shenouda and others in the Oriental Churches have problems with theosis and essence/energy and even attacked Father Matta on this matter for many years but I thought that Eastern Catholics had the same theology on this as the Orthodox?
Can you get me some documentation that Orthodoxy teaches that "God is BEYOND God"
That is quite a statement if you think about it. Much like the Wizard of Oz....
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!"
Besides....Lossky would not entirely agree and certainly does not phrase it that way.
I don't think that Eastern Catholics feel constrained to take St. Gregory's teaching on energies as the ONLY way to express what the teaching on energies are designed to express.
However their spiritual lives, in so far as they retain the eastern hours and liturgies as part of their spiritual lives, or recover it as it may be the case from family to family, are very much distanced from a more western approach to grace.
However there are saints and doctors in the Catholic Church who are also far closer to St. Gregory and the fathers before him with reference to the Prayer of Union, or the Way of Union as Lossky calls it.
One of Lossky's weaknesses was that he failed to take all that into account in his critique of the west. I don't fault him for that but I don't get trapped in his critique of the west either. You can take that or leave it. Makes no difference to me.
Mary