The Accomplishment of the Concept:
A Genealogy of Divine Intelligibility from Eunomius to Aquinas (and the Modern Collapse)
I. Introduction: The Logic of the Hyper-Essential and the Metaphysical Firewall
The history of Christian metaphysics is frequently misread through the lens of a false dichotomy, viewed as a pendulum that swings erratically between an overconfident rationalism that claims to know too much and a vague, pietistic appeal to mystery that claims to know nothing. This binary suggests that the theologian must choose between the clarity of the concept and the cloud of unknowing. However, read from within the rigorous God-as-First-Principle framework, the true struggle appears in a radically different light. It is not a battle between reason and faith, but a sustained, agonizing, and architectonic effort to maintain what we can call the metaphysical firewall: the absolute, ontological distinction between the Uncreated Cause and the created effect, while still allowing for a real, positive, and saving intelligibility of God.
The central question is precise, and the stakes are nothing less than the possibility of revelation itself. How can the infinite God be intelligible without being reduced to a creaturely genus? How can He be named without being defined? How can we possess a concept of God that does not turn God into a “thing” among things, subject to the same logic that governs finite objects? If God is totally equivocal to us, revelation is silence. If God is univocal to us, God is a creature. The solution to this aporia, I will argue, lies in the specific tradition of the Divine Names that runs from the Epistle to the Hebrews, through the Dionysian corpus, to the scholastic synthesis of Thomas Aquinas. In this tradition, we name God not by capturing His essence in a finite definition, but by identifying Him as the super-substantial act that grounds all definitions. The Divine Names are the regulated way of speaking across the firewall without breaking it.
The Epistle to the Hebrews already gives us the core grammar of this logic by distinguishing hypostasis from essence through the language of origin and derivation. The Son is not introduced as a second deity alongside the Father, nor as a fragment of a shared stuff, but as the radiant and perfectly intelligible manifestation of the one divine reality. The Epistle describes the Son as “the radiance of the glory and the exact imprint [charaktēr] of his nature [hypostasis], and he upholds the universe by the word of his power” [1]. This text is the Christological anchor for all subsequent metaphysical reflection. The radiance is distinct from the source, yet possesses the same act of shining. The imprint is the fully adequate intelligibility of the nature, yet not a second nature. The logic of origin here confirms that the Son possesses the whole essence by derivation, not by partition or multiplication of natures. Distinction lies at the level of who (origin), not at the level of what (essence).
Dionysius the Areopagite formalizes this intuition into a metaphysics of the hyper-essential, the hyper-ousia. He refuses to be silenced by the transcendence of God, but he also refuses to trap God within the category of being as applied to creatures. In The Divine Names he writes: “He is the Cause of all beings, but is not Himself a being as being one of several beings, but as standing above all beings, and even above being itself… He is all things in all things and nothing in any, and is known to all from all things and to none from any” [2]. This is not a modern “God without being” in the sense of a void or a suspension of reality. It is God as the superabundant source of being. Dionysius secures the concept by raising it to the level of the source. We name God from His effects, we deny the finite mode of those names, and we affirm that in God they signify a reality that exceeds all creaturely measure.
In the background of this essay lies an explicitly relational-first metaphysics. Act and origin are primitive. Identity is a verdict that comes downstream from act. The Father is the unoriginate source, the Son is the radiance and imprint by origin, and the Spirit is the procession from the Father in the Son. The divine essence is simple and identical with these subsisting relations of origin. This is the framework within which “concept,” “name,” and “intelligibility” are judged.
A few axioms quietly govern what follows, functioning as the constraints on any legitimate concept of God. First, God is pure actuality, not a composite of act and potency. Second, God is not in any genus, and therefore has no common measure with creatures. Third, God is absolutely simple, so that whatever is in God is identical with His essence, and any real multiplication within Him would require a higher unifier and so destroy His status as first principle. Fourth, God is the necessary existent, whose essence is existence itself. Taken together, these principles rule out any view of God as a being among beings, a composite of parts, or a process that becomes.
This ancient synthesis constitutes what I will call the Accomplishment. It anchors intelligibility in pure act (DE) and in relation of origin (DP), preserving the distinction between the what (essence) and the who (hypostasis). The Divine Names provide the “operating system” of this metaphysics. They regulate how language about God preserves both the firewall and real knowledge. The story I tell below is the story of how this accomplishment was lost and how it can be recovered. On one side lies what I will call the path of logicism found in Eunomius, Leibniz, and Hegel, which attempts to define God by way of a complete concept and makes identity primitive, collapsing the mystery into syntax. On the other side lies the path of accomplishment found in the Cappadocians and Aquinas. The tension, I will suggest, is not resolved by abandoning metaphysics for phenomenology, as Jean-Luc Marion proposes, nor by fracturing the divine essence into essence and energies, as Gregory Palamas risks, but by returning to the Dionysian logic of the first principle and integrating it with a precise account of reference and sense in divine naming.
II. Eunomius: The Error of Syntax and the Collapse of the Firewall
The Arian crisis of the fourth century was not merely a quarrel about the honor of the Son, nor was it simply a debate about biblical exegesis. It was, more fundamentally, a failure of logical typing and a collapse of the metaphysical firewall. Eunomius of Cyzicus offers the first major collapse of the “identity as downstream of act” framework into an “identity as primitive concept” framework. Eunomius believed that the human mind, equipped with the correct technology of names (technologia), could penetrate the very essence of God. The name “Unbegotten” (Agennetos) was treated not as a relational description of the Father, but as the very definition of the divine essence itself.
His own account of naming makes this explicit. Eunomius operated with a “Cratylian” confidence that names are not merely conventional signs, but natural manifestations of the essences they signify. In a reading summarized by modern commentators, Eunomius says: “Name is to acknowledge the presence in our minds of the Essence it represents. Our knowledge is thus ‘real’ because in this, as in other instances, the name brings us into contact with a really existing non-material essence whose existence does not depend upon whether or not we are thinking it. To know the name, therefore, is to gain ‘real’ access to an intelligible reality…” [9].
Here, the name has both the reference and the sense of the essence. In Fregean terms, there is no distinction between a way of presenting the object and the object’s own inner constitution. For Eunomius, the concept and the reality coincide perfectly. The concept “Unbegotten” does not merely point to God; it contains God’s definition.
By equating the conceptual name with the substantial essence, Eunomius collapses the ontological gap between Creator and creature. If the concept in our mind corresponds perfectly to the reality of God, then God ceases to be the unconditioned source and becomes an item in the field of human cognition. Eunomius does not shy away from this conclusion. In a fragment that scandalized his contemporaries—and which serves as the ultimate manifesto of theological rationalism—he declares: “God does not know anything more about his essence than we do, nor is that essence better known to him and less to us; rather, whatever we ourselves know about it is exactly what he knows, and, conversely, that which he knows is what you will find without change in us” [10].
In this view, identity of concept becomes identity of knowledge, and in practice, identity of status. The metaphysical firewall is replaced by an epistemic mirror. God is no longer the Hyper-Ousia who dwells in unapproachable light; He is the sum of the logical predicates available to the human dialectician.
The Trinitarian consequence follows mechanically once this syntactic error is committed. The Father, for Eunomius, is defined as Unbegotten, and the Son is defined as Begotten. If “Unbegotten” and “Begotten” are opposed predicates within the same conceptual field—that is, if they are definitions of the substance rather than descriptions of origin—then they cannot both be predicated of the same essence. On this basis he concludes that the Son cannot be consubstantial with the Father. The name “Unbegotten” has been mis-typed. It is treated as an essential definition, when in fact it is a relational property of the hypostasis of the Father. Eunomius confuses a personal property with the definition of the nature. As one summary of his teaching reports, he argued that “he who creates by His own power is entirely different from him who does so at the Father’s command” [11]. The Son becomes a supreme minister, a creature of the first order, but not the First Principle.
From the standpoint of Hebrews, this is a direct denial of the radiance and imprint logic of 1:3. From the standpoint of the Divine Names tradition, it is a confusion between reference and sense. “God” as a name and “Unbegotten” as a title rightly refer to the one divine essence. Eunomius, however, loads the sense of “Unbegotten” with essential content, and then deduces exclusion from that content. The result is the fracture of the divine unity. St. Basil the Great identifies this as a deliberate diminution of Christ’s glory: “But Eunomius… in order to diminish the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ, separates the Spirit from the Father and imputes him exclusively to the Only-begotten…” [12]. The Spirit is peeled away from the Father, the Son is demoted, and the Trinitarian life is recast in creaturely terms of hierarchy and division.
III. The Cappadocian Correction: The Logic of Origin and the Re-typed Name
Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa do not defeat Eunomius by retreating into an apophatic silence that says nothing about God. Instead, they correct the grammar of naming. They insist that “Unbegotten” speaks to a relation of origin and does not define the divine essence. In doing so, they preserve the right reference (the Father is God), while repairing the sense (He is God as Unoriginate Source).
Basil employs the concept of epinoia (conceptualization) to break the Eunomian deadlock. He argues that names are not natural icons of essence, but concepts generated by the mind as it reflects on the activities and relations of the object. When we call the Father “Unbegotten,” we are not gazing into the naked essence; we are noting a property of His hypostasis—namely, that He is from no one. This allows the essence (e) to remain simple and ungraspable, while the relations (f, s, sp) provide the intelligible structure of the Trinity.
Gregory of Nyssa deepens this correction by introducing a concept that is largely alien to earlier Greek philosophy: the positive infinity of God. In classical Greek thought, the infinite (to apeiron) is often associated with the formless, the chaotic, or the imperfect. Perfection was found in limit, form, and definition. Gregory reverses this. God is perfect precisely because He is infinite and uncircumscribable. The divine essence is not a genus that can be delimited by a finite concept. Every definition is a boundary. The infinite has no boundary. Therefore, to define God is to deny His deity.
He illustrates this with one of his most vivid images, attacking the static conceptualism of Eunomius with the dynamism of the infinite: “The bubbling spring – a metaphor for the infinity of God. It is just as if you could see that spring which Scripture tells us rose from the earth at the beginning… As you came near the spring you would marvel, seeing that the water was endless, as it constantly gushed up and poured forth. Yet you could never say that you had seen all the water. How could you see what was still hidden in the bosom of the earth?” [13].
The spring is always present, always giving, always overflowing, but never exhausted. The concept fails to contain God not because God is irrational, but because God is Pure Act and any given concept is a static limit. The mind can drink from the spring, but it cannot encompass the source.
For Gregory, our names track the manifestations of this act without seizing the essence. He uses another image to make the point, shifting from sight to smell to emphasize the delicate nature of theological language: “Whatever name we may adopt to signify the perfume of divinity, it is not the perfume itself which we signify by our expressions; rather, we reveal just the slightest trace of the divine odour by means of our theological terms” [13]. The name picks out a real divine perfection. The reference is correct—it is the perfume of God, not of something else. The sense, however, is that of a trace, a waft, an effect that bears the mark of the cause while remaining immeasurably less than the cause.
If we translate this into the language of reference and sense, we can say the following. For Eunomius, the name “Unbegotten” has both the reference and the sense of the divine essence, and so when it cannot be predicated of the Son, the Son is excluded from the essence. For the Cappadocians, the name “God” and all the divine titles refer to the one simple essence which is common to Father, Son, and Spirit, while the senses of “Unbegotten,” “Begotten,” and “Proceeding” are carefully restricted to relations of origin. The firewall is preserved. Identity in reality lies in the common essence. Distinction lies in the relations. Naming is re-typed so that concept serves origin instead of replacing it.
IV. Aquinas: Simplicity, Analogy, and the Divine Names as Semantic Rules
Thomas Aquinas represents the systematic perfection of this accomplishment in the Latin West. He refuses to allow the concept to capture God, not because he abandons reason, but because God, by nature, is Simple. In the Treatise on the One God in the Summa Theologiae, he argues that God is not composed of matter and form, essence and existence, act and potency, or genus and difference. God is subsistent being itself (Ipsum Esse Subsistens). If God were in a genus, He would be composite, and therefore posterior to something more fundamental. Since the first principle cannot be posterior to anything, God is not in a genus.
This has immediate consequences for our knowledge. Human intellect knows by abstracting forms from sensible composites. God is not a sensible composite. We cannot know what God is in Himself in the way we know created essences. We can know only that He is and what He is not. Aquinas states the point bluntly: “Now because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not” [14]. The via negativa is not a pious flourish. It is the direct implication of divine simplicity and transcendence of genus.
Yet Aquinas does not end in silence. He develops the syntactic rules of the Divine Names tradition in Question 13 of the Prima Pars. He takes up the problem that Eunomius mishandled: in what sense can multiple names be true of the one simple God? Are names like “good” and “wise” synonymous? If they were strictly synonymous, then saying “God is wise” and “God is good” would add no intelligible content. If they were really distinct in God, then we would have parts in God, which would violate simplicity and the cause of unity. Aquinas resolves this by distinguishing between what the names refer to in reality and how they signify in our minds.34
His classic example is the term “hea5lthy,” which 6is predicated of different things in different ways. He writes: “Therefore it must be said that these names are said of God and creatures in an analogous sense, i.e. according to proportion. Now names are thus used in two ways: either according as many things are proportionate to one, thus for example ‘healthy’ predicated of medicine and urine in relation and in proportion to health of a body, of which the former is the sign and the latter the cause…” [15].
The analysis of “healthy” is not a throwaway. It is the template for the Analogia Entis (Analogy of Being). There is one focal reality: health in the animal. Medicine is called “healthy” because it causes health. Urine is called “healthy” because it is a sign of 7health. The term8 is not univocal across all three (urine is not an animal), but neither is it sheerly equivocal (the word means something related). There is a structured reference to one focal perfection under different senses.
Aquinas treats the divine names the same way. There is one reference: the simple, subsisting act of God. The creaturely senses are derived from the perfections we find in creatures as effects of that act. When we say “God is good” or “God is wise” we speak truly because God is the cause and exemplar of creaturely goodness and wisdom. Yet we must negate the finite mode in which we understand these perfections and affirm that they exist in God in a super-eminent way.
Aquinas then deploys what later tradition calls the triplex via, even if he does not always use the label. First, by way of causality or affirmation, we attribute to God all pure perfections found in creatures, because He is their source. Second, by way of negation, we deny the finite, composite, and temporal mode in which we experience them. Third, by way of eminence, we affirm that these perfections exist in God in a manner that surpasses every creaturely mode. The reference of all the divine names is one and the same—the simple subsistent act of being. The senses differ according to the created effects from which we ascend and the finite modes we negate.
In Fregean language, the Divine Names tradition as Aquinas articulates it can be stated as follows: The name “God,” and indeed every divine name used properly, refers to the same simple act in reality. The diversity of names lies in their senses, which are drawn from different creaturely effects and regulated by causality, negation, and eminence. Identity in re is preserved, so the cause of unity is protected. Distinction lies only in ratione, in the order of our thought and speech. In this way, Aquinas gives us a semantic discipline that matches the metaphysical firewall. There is one first principle, pure act, outside of every genus. Our language can approach this principle only by a play of reference and sense that strictly refuses to turn any single name into a complete concept of the essence.
V. The Palamite Temptation: Energies, Participation, and the Risk to Simplicity
In the fourteenth century, the Byzantine East confronted a different kind of crisis. Whereas the Latin tradition was preoccupied with reconciling Aristotle and the God of Abraham, the East was wrestling with the reality of mystical experience. Gregory Palamas, defending the monks of Mount Athos and their claim to see the uncreated light, introduced a distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies. His intent was to secure a real participation of creatures in God without collapsing the Creator into the world. The metaphysical cost of his move, however, is serious when measured against the first principle constraints outlined above.
Palamas insists that God in His innermost nature is unknowable and imparticipable. In this he is in agreement with the Cappadocian apophaticism. At the same time he distinguishes this essence from the energies, the uncreated activities of God in which creatures can truly participate. These energies are themselves uncreated and are God as He gives Himself. A provocative formulation, transmitted in later Palamite sources, runs: “God is not an essence; and even he is not if other existing things are; but if he is then other things are not existing” [18].
Palamas also affirms: “The energies of God… are ‘manifestations’ and ‘exteriorizations’ of God Himself. They are uncreated” [19]. The essence is one thing, unknowable and incommunicable; the energies are another, manifest and participable.
Palamite defenders insist that this distinction is real but not compositional. They reject the suggestion that God is literally split into parts. They present the essence and energies as inseparable and mutually implicative aspects of the one God. From within the God-as-First-Principle framework, however, any real distinction in God that is more than a distinction of reason will trigger the simplicity constraints. If essence and energies are really distinct in God, then there are two uncreated items that must be related. Either they are unified by a nature that is more basic than both, in which case that nature is the true first principle, or they stand in some kind of coordination that itself calls for a cause of unity. Either way, the absolute simplicity of the first principle is compromised.
From the point of view of the Divine Names tradition, the problem can be restated in terms of reference and sense. In Aquinas and Dionysius, there is a single reference—the simple divine act—to which all names and all experiences ultimately point. The variety appears in the senses produced by different effects and modes of participation. In Palamas, if read realiter (as a real distinction), essence and energies seem to introduce two references in re, even if tightly bound together. The metaphysical firewall is relocated from Creator and creature to inside God. A fracture that was meant to solve the problem of participation is placed in the source.
The Thomistic solution remains cleaner and more robust for the First Principle. There is one simple act in God. Creaturely participation is real, but always by an analogical share in that one act, according to the finite mode of the creature. The Vision of God in glory is a creature elevated to see the whole simple act by a created light (the Lumen Gloriae), not a fusion with a new uncreated “side” of God.
None of this denies that Palamas is trying to safeguard something essential: that God is not a distant object of conceptual speculation but the living source in whom we are called to participate. His famous line, “Philosophy does not save,” is a necessary reminder that salvation is not an intellectual exercise. The question is whether the metaphysical form of his solution preserves the first principle. Within the present framework, the answer has to be no. By risking a real distinction in the Uncreated, Palamas violates the Cause of Unity principle: anything composed of Essence + Energies requires a unifier, and thus cannot be the First Cause.
VI. Leibniz and Hegel: The Return of the Logical Idol
Modernity, in key respects, represents a regression to something like the Eunomian error, but now transposed into the register of logic and history. In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the concept ceases to be downstream of act. It becomes a kind of metaphysical primitive. Substance is defined as a complete concept that contains all its predicates. Identity is treated as the sameness of conceptual content rather than as a verdict grounded in act and origin.
In the Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz illustrates this with the example of Alexander the Great: “God, who sees the individual notion or ‘thisness’ of Alexander, sees in it at the same time the basis and the reason for all the predicates that can truly be said to belong to him, such as for example that he would conquer Darius and Porus, even to the extent of knowing a priori (and not by experience) whether he died a natural death or by poison—which we can know only from history” [20].
Here the conceptual “notion” of Alexander is not a thin label. It contains within itself the reason for every true predicate that can ever be affirmed of him. The historical event “Alexander conquers Darius” is no longer contingent in the robust sense. It is an analytic unfolding of what was already contained in the complete concept. Identity is fixed by the total set of predicates. In such a model, a concept has more explanatory weight than any particular exercise of act. A concept has no act of its own. It is a pattern, a ghost, not a living source.
Leibniz enforces this vision with the principle of sufficient reason and the identity of indiscernibles. Nothing happens without a reason, and no two substances can share all their predicates. God surveys all possible complete concepts and actualizes the best possible world. Freedom is defended at the level of God’s choice, but once a particular world is chosen, everything in it is contained within the conceptual structure of that choice. There is no remaining apophatic distance between the name and the thing, between the concept and the reality. The divine act itself is folded back into the calculus of concepts. The God of Leibniz is the supreme Logicist, whose “Concept” of the world is more real than the world’s act of being.
Hegel radicalizes this movement. In the Science of Logic, the concept is no longer merely a structure held in the divine intellect. It is the very life of reality. Hegel writes: “The science of logic does not describe the self-articulation of the concept… Rather, logic is the self-articulation of the concept. This means that the reading or writing of the science of logic is itself the self-determination of the concept…” [22].
Here the concept begins in abstraction as pure being, collapses into nothing, and then moves forward through becoming into nature and spirit. History is the process by which the absolute becomes what it truly is. Hegel views the static perfection of the Aristotelian God as an emptiness that must be filled by the labor of the negative.
This narrative, however, violates the principle of pure actuality. A God who genuinely becomes moves from potency to act. Hegel is clear that finite being is unstable. “The nature of the being of finite things is that they have within them the seeds of their own destruction; the hour of their birth is the hour of their death” [23].
If the absolute is structurally bound to this dialectic, then God too lives by a rhythm of death and resurrection that is intrinsic to His own being. The “speculative Good Friday” becomes a necessity of the divine process. From the standpoint of classical theism, this is indistinguishable from a refined atheism. The first principle has been demoted to a particularly grand historical process. The firewall is gone. The divine is absorbed into the unfolding of a logical process. The “concept” has become an idol, a structure that replaces the living act of the creator with the self-movement of Geist.
VII. Marion and the Dionysian Corrective: Saving the Gift from the Void
Jean-Luc Marion enters this scene as a critic of conceptual idolatry. He sees, more clearly than many analytic or neo-scholastic thinkers, how “being” itself can be used as a tool to trap God within a conceptual framework. He is particularly sensitive to the way metaphysical systems can function like mirrors. The “God of the philosophers” becomes the projection of a certain understanding of being or causality rather than the living God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ.910
In God Without Being and related works, Marion distinguishes between idol and icon. The idol satisfies the11 gaze by staying within the limits of what 12the subject can project and control. He writes: “The Idol is a mirror. It ‘ceases to transpierce visible things… it stops being a medium and is transformed into a fixed and fixating end’.” [25].
The idol is not necessarily an image on a pedestal. It can be a concept, a system, a metaphysical definition. What makes it idolatrous is that it terminates the gaze on something humans can fully master. It is the theological version of Leibniz’s complete concept or Hegel’s absolute spirit.
Against this, Marion proposes to break this captivity by suspending “being” as a predicate for God and by describing God instead as a saturated phenomenon. The icon does not result from a vision that we control; it provokes a vision. It looks at us rather than being looked at. In Being Given, Marion develops this in terms of givenness and flesh. The flesh is not mere biological body but lived, affective selfhood. “More, it belongs only to my flesh to individualize me by letting the immanent succession of my affections… be inscribed in it… the flesh therefore shows itself only in giving itself—and, in this first ‘self,’ it gives me to myself” [26].
The self is constituted as gifted, l’adonné, by a givenness that precedes its own initiative. Marion proposes that God is best approached not as a being that fits within the horizon of being, but as the Giver who shatters that horizon. Erich Przywara had previously attempted to navigate this with an “oscillating rhythm” [24], describing creaturely life as “simultaneously sustained and interrupted by points of intersection between immanent and transcendent…” [24]. Marion, however, goes further.
This phenomenological reorientation has real value. It reminds theology that the subject is first of all a receiver. It warns us that our concepts can easily become self-enclosed. Yet, if God is rigorously detached from being and act, another danger appears—a danger perhaps greater than the idolatry Marion fears. A gift that does not exist is not a gift but a mental placeholder. If God is “without being” in the strong sense, and if nothing is said to recover something like necessary existence or pure act, then the divine reduces to the structure of a call with no ontological subject.
Principle Five of our earlier summary—that God is the Necessary Existent (Wajib al-Wujūd) whose essence is existence—is silently dropped. A God who is not at least super-eminently related to being is indistinguishable from non-being. If God is not “Necessary Existence,” He is contingent. He becomes a phenomenon in the mind of the philosopher, but loses the power to sustain the universe in existence.
Here the older Dionysian logic offers a better path. Dionysius is as severe as Marion in warning against conceptual idolatry, but he does not abandon being. He introduces a hyper operator. God is above being, hyper-ousia, yet as cause of all beings He cannot be unrelated to being. To call God super-essential is to say that He is being and essence in a mode that surpasses every creaturely form. He is not “existing” like a cat exists. He is the super-substantial act that causes the cat.
The Divine Names tradition shows how this can be said. We affirm names like “good” and “being” of God because He is their cause. We deny the finite way in which we understand them. We then re-affirm them in an eminent sense. Kataphasis (affirmation) and apophasis (negation) are not rivals; they are stages in one ascent that ends in the silent eminence of the cause.
Against Marion’s proposal of “God without being,” then, we can say: the problem is not that God is too related to being, but that being has been misconstrued as a genus. Once the classical constraints are in place, the word “being” itself must be analogized. God is not a being. He is the very act of to be in a hyper-essential way. This preserves the mystery while safeguarding the first principle character of God. It also allows us to integrate the best of Marion’s phenomenology—his emphasis on givenness and the gifted subject—into a metaphysics of pure act, rather than leaving it to float free in a phenomenological void.
VIII. Conclusion: Returning to the First Principle
The struggle for the concept can now be seen with clearer lines. It is not a confusing history of shifting opinions, but a genealogical tree where specific syntactic errors lead to specific theological collapses.
In Eunomius, and later in Leibniz and Hegel, the concept attempts to take the place of act. Identity is made primitive. The divine is recast as the complete definition of a subject or as the self-articulation of a logical process. The firewall between Creator and creature erodes. Either God is pulled inside the order of objects, as in Eunomius, or He becomes a function of the historical logic, as in Hegel.
In the Cappadocians, Dionysius, and Aquinas we see the opposite trajectory. The divine essence is infinite, hyper-essential, and outside every genus. Our names for God have correct reference to this one simple act, but their senses are strictly regulated. Properties of origin are kept at the hypostatic[1] level. Attributes are treated as conceptually distinct presentations of the one simple act. The Divine Names function as an accomplished semantic system that honors the metaphysical firewall. Identity is downstream of act and relation, not the other way around.
Gregory Palamas and Jean-Luc Marion emerge as important but ultimately unstable attempts to respond to genuine pressures in the tradition: the pressure of participation and the pressure of idolatry. Palamas rightly insists that we truly participate in God, but risks placing a fracture inside the first principle by introducing a real distinction between essence and energies. Marion rightly insists that God cannot be captured by the concept of being, but risks losing the necessary existent by crossing out being rather than analogizing it.
The resolution lies in a return to the God-as-First-Principle with the full resources of the Divine Names tradition, now articulated with the tools of reference and sense and with a relational-primitive metaphysics in the background. Hebrews gives us the logic of origin: the Son as radiance and imprint, possessing the whole essence by derivation. Dionysius gives us the hyper-essential source, cause of all beings and above being. Aquinas gives us the semantic discipline of analogy, identity in re and distinction in ratione.
Within this frame we can say: the concept does not grasp God completely, not because He is a void, but because He is the Act that makes all concepts possible. Our speech about God accomplishes something real when it follows the rules of this tradition. It names the first principle without pretending to define Him. And it does so precisely by allowing the concept to be converted, from a sovereign that seeks to contain God into an icon that points beyond itself to the living source who is pure act and hyper-essential being.
Bibliography
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[4] Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Prima Pars, Q. 3. “Q3: God’s Simplicity.” In Reading The Summa. Accessed November 30, 2025. http://readingthesumma.blogspot.com/2009/10/q3-gods-simplicity.html
[9] “The Unbegotten Eunomius.” Eclectic Orthodoxy. Accessed November 30, 2025. https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2013/06/23/the-unbegotten-eunomius/
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[1] Hypostatic (adjective) refers to the unique, incommunicable reality of the Person (the Suppositum or Subsistence). In the technical logical syntax I’m using here (DP vs. DE), “Hypostatic” refers exclusively to the domain of the Divine Persons (DP: Father, Son, Spirit). Thus, “Unbegotten” describes Who the Father is (His relation of origin); it does not describe What God is (the definition of the deity).