ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 of this study seeks to give the first comprehensive overview of the arguments and proofs used by St Gregory Palamas over twenty years of polemical writing to distinguish the energies of God from the essence of God. It organizes his wide-ranging syllogisms and appeals into five general categories, centering on (1) the coincidence of unity and multiplicity in God; (2) the simultaneity of transcendence and immanence and its ramifications for epistemology; (3) the distinction between necessity and contingency in the Divine, focused especially on the role of the divine will; (4) the linguistic dimensions of how energeiai are predicated of the ousia; and (5) the characteristics of specific energies that make them distinct from God’s substance or quiddity.
