Emanation (Eastern Orthodox Christianity)

Emanation (literally "dripping") is a belief, found in Neoplatonism, that the cause of certain beings or states of being consists of an overflow from the essence of God or other higher spiritual beings, as opposed to a special act of creation. This overflow is usually conceived in a non-temporal way as a permanent relationship of causation rather than as an event causing an entity to come into existence at a given point in time. The word "emanation" can refer either to the process of emanation or to the thing emanated.

Equivalent concepts are found in Gnosticism and in Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism). This article explores similar concepts in Eastern Orthodoxy.

Concepts

The Neoplatonic concept of "emanation" can be compared to the statements made by fourteenth-century Eastern Orthodox theologian Gregory Palamas. He drew a distinction between God's "essence" and "energies", affirming that God was unknowable in His essence, but knowable in His energies. [Lossky, Vladimir, "The Theology of Light in the Thought of St. Gregory Palamas," in "In the Image and Likeness of God," New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1947]

Palamas never enumerated God's energies (whereas St Gregory of Sinai does in "On the Different kinds of Energy") but described them as ways that God could act in the universe, and particularly on people, from the light shining from the face of Moses after he descended from Mt. Sinai, to the light surrounding Moses, Elijah and Jesus on Mt. Tabor during the transfiguration of Jesus. For Palamas, God's energies were not separate from God, but were God. However, the idea of energies was kept distinct from the idea of the three Persons of the Trinity, the unity of the Three Persons of the Trinity being united by God's transcendent Essence.

The Kabbalistic belief in ten successive emanations, known as sefirot, can be paralleled in the writings of Nikitas Stithatos:

:Nikitas Stithatos' decad has affinities with the decads of both the foregoing theories (kabbalistic and pythagorean decads), although it cannot be identified with either. It has roots in the conception of the celestial hierarchy or concatenation formulated by St Dionysios the Areopagite [Pseudo-Dionysius; Luibĥaeid, Colm; Rorem, Paul; "Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works," The Paulist Press, 1987] .

This hierarchy constitutes a threefold structure, each level of which consists of three orders or ranks of celestial intelligences, giving a total of nine such interlocking and mutually participating orders. The function of the lowest of these orders, that of the angels, has two aspects. The first is to transmit the divine grace and illumination, which it has received from God through the meditation of the orders about it, to the order below it, the human order, that taken as a whole thus represents the tenth order, the second is to convert the human intelligence, the "finest of all the offerings; that can be made by this human order, so that it mounts upward and stage by stage returns, again through the meditation of the celestial hierarchy, to a state of union with its divine source and in this way achieves Divinization. This double meditation descending and ascending, constitutes the cyclic movement...." [Palmer, G.E.H.; Sherrard, Philip; Ware, Kallistos, "The Philokalia: Vols 1-4", New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1953]

He further states in "On Spiritual Knowledge", verse 99, that, "The nine heavenly powers sing hymns of praise that have a threefold structure...." [Palmer, G.E.H.; Sherrard, Philip; Ware, Kallistos, "The Philokalia: Vols 1-4", New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1953]

*The Highest Rank: Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim.
*The Middle Rank: Authorities, Dominions and Powers.
*The Lowest Rank: Principalities, Archangels and Angels.
*Humanity is the last component to complete the Decad.

In Judaism, a similar hierarchy can be found in the entirely non-Kabbalistic system of Maimonides, who posits ten ranks of angels (from the different Biblical terms for them), the lowest of which is "Ishim", literally "men".

References

External links

* [http://www.attan.com Neoplatonism and Emanationism]
* [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qFLpXKsNeVYC&dq=&pg=PP1&ots=qbaYvvGw8D&sig=QRNMQRTW5-dfvfoAifndbDLeaOQ&prev=http://www.google.co.uk/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3D%2BPseudo-Dionysius%26btnG%3DGoogle%2BSearch%26meta%3D&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title Pseudo-Dionysios]