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You probably have no idea what his "deity" is like. You have never touched it, or held it in your hands, etc. But you CAN know him "personally." And that is revealed in Christ Jesus. Otherwise you would be saying that Christ is the perfect image of the Father's deity/essence; which you don't. You don't claim that. You do say that in Christ is seen "divine" virtues. But that is not the "deity" being talked of here.

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The Trinity is of "one essence, and undivided." the Onlybegotten Son of the Father knows (loose speach here) the essence of the Father, as it is His. The Spirit also. They know IN essence (again, loose speach) from the inside. We know God only from outside the Trinity.

It would be one false extreem to say that we dan "know God in essence": no creature can. But it is also a false exterem on the other end (And perhaps this is what some think the Orthodox mean--but this is an RCC view) to adpe a Thomist position of "created grace" as an intermediary between God and man. Orthodoxy does not say that. Aquinas' scholasticism said we can only know "about" God through reason.

But Orthodoxy says that we CAN (depending on our purity) know God directly in his devine uncreated energies. We can experience God's energies in the form of His Light. (Very biblical.)

• www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_1.htm


• www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_2.htm



Especially the section "God and man" : www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_2.htm#n2

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Orthodox religious thought lays the utmost emphasis on the image of God in man. Man is a ‘living theology,’ and because he is God’s icon, he can find God by looking within his own heart, by ‘returning within himself:’ "The Kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21). ‘Know yourselves,’ said Saint Antony of Egypt. ‘…He who knows himself, knows God (Letter 3 (in the Greek and Latin collections, 6)) ‘If you are pure,’ wrote Saint Isaac the Syrian (late seventh century), ‘heaven is within you; within yourself you will see the angels and the Lord of the angels’ (Quoted in P. Evdokimov, L’Orthodoxie, p. 88). And of Saint Pachomius it is recorded: ‘In the purity of his heart he saw the invisible God as in a mirror
(First Greek Life, 22).
(Same source cite and site. www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_2.htm )

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Glory to You, our God! Glory to You!

O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth; everywhere present and filling all things. Treasury of blessings and Giver of Life. Come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One.

Holy God! Holy Mighty! Holy Immortal! Have mercy on us! (3×)

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

O most holy Trinity, have mercy on us. Lord, cleanse us from our sins. Master, pardon our transgressions. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Your name's sake.

Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your Kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory: of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

Come, let us worship God, our King! Come, let us worship and fall down before Christ, our King and our God! Come, let us worship and fall down before Christ Himself, our King and our God!

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But, Sahid, the most relevant question
is how we can know God most fully in his divine light?

(THAT is why I made the other two posts!)

That fills Orthodox and Wesleyan hymns.

And the corrolary question is, what is
preventing us from...

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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

S: My question was why (we can't know God's essence). Why can't we know God's essence?

R: Then, as I said, read this -- the section "God and man": www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_2.htm#n2 I am pointing you in the right direction. Read what he says about "God and man" and what he says about Trinity. The rest is up to you.[/size=1]

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Originally posted by Sahid
I couldn't find anything on why they believe God's essence is unknowable. They just say it is. There has got to be some reason. Does anyone out there know it?

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• 1. God is absolutely transcendent. ‘No single thing of all that is created has or ever will have even the slightest communion with the supreme nature or nearness to it (Gregory Palamas, P.G. 150, 1176c (quoted on p. 77)).


• "God is not simply a single person confined within his own being, but a Trinity of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each of whom ‘dwells’ in the other two, by virtue of a perpetual movement of love. God is not only a unity but a union."


http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_2.htm#n2

Our positive statements about God — that He is good, wise, just and so on — are true as far as they go, yet they cannot adequately describe the inner nature of the deity. These positive statements, said John of Damascus, reveal ‘not the nature, but the things around the nature.’ ‘That there is a God is clear; but what He is by essence and nature, this is altogether beyond our comprehension and knowledge (On the Orthodox Faith, 1, 4 (P.G. 94, 800B, 797B)).
www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_2.htm#n2

• Thus, in the New Testament we have the full epiphany of God, the full manifestation of the Holy Trinity: the Father through the Son in the Spirit to us; and we in the Spirit through the Son to the Father.
  www.oca.org/pages/orth_chri/Orthodox-Faith/Doctrine/Holy-Trinity.html


• Orthodoxy believes most passionately that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not a piece of ‘high theology’ reserved for the professional scholar, but something that has a living, practical importance for every Christian. Man, so the Bible teaches, is made in the image of God, and to Christians God means the Trinity: thus it is only in the light of the dogma of the Trinity that man can understand who he is and what God intends him to be. Our private lives, our personal relations, and all our plans of forming a Christian society depend upon a right theology of the Trinity. ‘Between the Trinity and Hell there lies no other choice (V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 66). As an Anglican writer has put it: ‘In this doctrine is summed up the new way of thinking about God, in the power of which the fishermen. went out to convert the Greco-Roman world. It marks a saving revolution in human thought (D. J. Chitty, ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity told to the Children,’ in Sobornost, series 4, no. 5, 1961, p. 241).
  http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_2.htm#n2


• God is one and God is three: the Holy Trinity is a mystery of unity in diversity, and of diversity in unity. Father, Son, and Spirit are ‘one in essence’ (homoousios),...
  
  <MY COMMMENT: (You and I are not one in essence with them -- We DON'T. know them the way they know each other and themselves--so to speak. We ONLY know them as God has REVEALED Himself to us..)>
  
  http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_2.htm#n2


• The Incarnation is an act of God’s philanthropia, of His lovingkindness towards mankind. Many eastern writers, looking at the Incarnation from this point of view, have argued that even if man had never fallen, God in His love for humanity would still have become man: the Incarnation must be seen as part of the eternal purpose of God, and not simply as an answer to the fall. Such was the view of Maximus the Confessor and of Isaac the Syrian; such has also been the view of certain western writers, most notably Duns Scotus (1265-1308).
  http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_2.htm#n2


• ‘Partakers of the Divine Nature’
  
  The aim of the Christian life, which Seraphim described as the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God, can equally well be defined in terms of deification. Basil described man as a creature who has received the order to become a god; and Athanasius, as we know, said that God became man that man might become god. ‘In my kingdom, said Christ, I shall be God with you as gods’ (Canon for Matins of Holy Thursday, Ode 4, Troparion 3). Such, according to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, is the final goal at which every Christian must aim: to become god, to attain theosis, ‘deification’ or ‘divinization.’ For Orthodoxy man’s salvation and redemption mean his deification.
  
  Behind the doctrine of deification there lies the idea of man made according to the image and likeness of God the Holy Trinity. ‘May they all be one,’ Christ prayed at the Last Supper; "As Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, so also may they be in us" (John 17:21). Just as the three persons of the Trinity ‘dwell’ in one another in an unceasing movement of love, so man, made in the image of the Trinity, is called to ‘dwell’ in the Trinitarian God. Christ prays that we may share in the life of the Trinity, in the movement of love which passes between the divine persons; He prays that we may be taken up into the Godhead. The saints, as Maximus the Confessor put it, are those who express the Holy Trinity in themselves. This idea of a personal and organic union between God and man — God dwelling in us, and we in Him — is a constant theme in Saint John’s Gospel; it is also a constant theme in the Epistles of Saint Paul, who sees the Christian life above all else as a life ‘in Christ.’ The same idea recurs in the famous text: "Through these promises you may become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). It is important to keep this New Testament background in mind. The Orthodox doctrine of deification, so far from being unscriptural (as is sometimes thought), has a solid Biblical basis, not only in 2 Peter, but in Paul and the Fourth Gospel.
  
  The idea of deification must always be understood in the light of the distinction between God’s essence and His energies. Union with God means union with the divine energies, not the divine essence: the Orthodox Church, while speaking of deification and union, rejects all forms of pantheism.
  
  Closely related to this is another point of equal importance. The mystical union between God and man is a true union, yet in this union Creator and creature do not become fused into a single being. Unlike the eastern religions which teach that man is swallowed up in the deity, Orthodox mystical theology has always insisted that man, however closely linked to God, retains his full personal integrity. Man, when deified, remains distinct (though not separate) from God. The mystery of the ‘Trinity is a mystery of unity in diversity, and those who express the Trinity in themselves do not sacrifice their personal characteristics. When Saint Maximus wrote ‘God and those who are worthy of God have one and the same energy’ (Ambigua, P.G. 91, 1076C), he did not mean that the saints lose their free will, but that when deified they voluntarily and in love conform their will to the will of God. Nor does man, when he ‘becomes god,’ cease to be human: ‘We remain creatures while becoming god by grace, as Christ remained God when becoming man by the Incarnation (V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 87). Man does not become God by nature, but is merely a ‘created god,’ a god by grace or by status.
  
  http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_2.htm#n2

One of the Trinity has to share His with you.

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God is absolutely transcendent. ‘No single thing of all that is created has or ever will have even the slightest communion with the supreme nature or nearness to it (Gregory Palamas, P.G. 150, 1176c (quoted on p. 77)).

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You don't "get access" to that union.

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One of the Trinity "has to" share His with you.

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That there is a God is clear; but what He is by essence and nature, this is altogether beyond our comprehension and knowledge

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You and I are not one in essence with them -- We DON'T. know them the way they know each other and themselves--so to speak. We ONLY know them as God has REVEALED Himself to us..

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One of the Trinity has to share His with you.

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The Destiny of the Race of Man
An Orthodox Christian Understanding
By Dcn. George Zgourides

According to Meyendorff's Byzantine Theology, at the heart of the Byzantine understanding of humanity's destiny is the doctrine of participation in God, termed deification, or theosis (163). Along these lines, Meyendorff quotes Maximus the Confessor as follows:

In the same way in which the soul and the body are united, God should become accessible for participation by the soul and, through the soul's intermediary, by the body, in order that the soul might receive an unchangeable character, and the body, immortality; and finally that the whole man should become God, deified by the grace of God become man, becoming whole man, soul and body, by nature, and becoming whole God, soul and body, by grace. (164)

In other words, man is called to participate and share in the deified humanity of Christ, not merely in imitation of Jesus' moral and virtuous acts, but to actual life in Christ, particularly through the sacraments (164). The whole person, then, participates fully in the divine nature of the whole God (164). Ware, in his The Orthodox Church, adds that humans, created in the image of God, fully acquire God's likeness and in the process become deified (219). Because God became human that we might be made god (21, quoting St. Athanasius), humans become a created god, a god by grace or by status (232; c.f. John 10: 34-35). And as the three members of the Trinity dwell one in another, so are humans called to dwell in the God-head (231). Hence, theosis enables Christians to become by grace what God is by nature (21). For the Orthodox faithful, then, to be saved and redeemed is to be deified (231).

The doctrinal foundation of deification rests in the hypostatic union between the human and divine natures of Christ (Meyendorff 164). This human-divine hypostasis belongs to Christ alone (164), while the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are said to be three persons [hypostasis] in one essence [ousia] (Ware 23). There is, however, communication between the energies of Christ's hypostatic natures, and those who are in Christ also share in this communication (Meyendorff 164).

Union with God is union with His divine energy (actions, operations, power) but not His divine essence (nature, inner being). . . .

http://www.westernorthodox.com/destiny" target="_blank">http://www.westernorthodox.com/destiny

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