Divine Activities as an Accident in the Palamite Doctrine: Meaning, Historical Context, and the Context of Ideas on the Nature of Theological Language

Abstract

St. Gregory Palamas has faced a problem of compatibility of two theological provisions within his doctrine based on distinction in God of substance and non-created activities: these are, firstly, that God is unalterable, and, secondly, that He acts accordingly with the time in relation to the created world, in particular, having made the created being. This background caused polemical argumentations on possibility of signifying the divine activities as accident. We see that Palamas is moving towards a more detailed notion of accidental while considering its applicability to divine activities: this is the moving to the notion of inseparable accident. But even in this sense, the accident, compliant to Palamas, must not be attributed to God and divine activities, though the Church tradition used to do this. Palamas finds a solution of this tension by pointing out that the notion of accident was used by the Church tradition in an improper sense. Meanwhile, his associate David Dishypatus takes a more subtle position: he admits a possibility to apply the notion of accident to the divine activities, but minding core restrictions of the human language, which speaks of God only within the horizon of human nature.