Kolo: That’s good, Q, very patristic; divine essence (ousia) vs. uncreated divine energies. The latter we can experience and share in, the former absolutely not.
I don't know that I can agree 100% with the latter statement. Seems to me CHRIST IN US; HIS SPIRIT IN US AS IN THE TEMPLE indicates that we do/will share in the former. Not fully, of course. We shall always be finite compared to His INFINITENESS. Yet, we shall have a much more . . . HIGH BAUD RATE CONNECTION, IMPARTATION, COMMUNION WITH, INDWELLING OF; FEEDING ON; ENLIVENED BY; . . . HIS INFINITE NATURE AND ALL IT'S WONDEROUSNESS that He determines moment by moment to be fitting for each of us.
I think there's something INCREDIBLY AWESOME AND WELL BEYOND our finite comprehension--beyond what man has [been able] to imagine--something incredibly awesome about DADDY'S CHOOSING TO CREATE US, REDEEM US TO BE HIS KIDS AND HIS BUDDIES. I don't imagine the least bit of . . . stinginess [for lack of a better word] . . . about His SHARING on such scores.
If course, I don't pretend to have my finite mind wrapped well around such things either. Just seems that some notions fit my understanding of Scripture and God than others do.
” I don’t know that I can agree 100% with the latter statement. Seems to me CHRIST IN US; HIS SPIRIT IN US AS IN THE TEMPLE indicates that we do/will share in the former. Not fully, of course. We shall always be finite compared to His INFINITENESS.”
Look at it this way; God is Triune, as the Fathers put it, Three Hypostasia, One Ousia or using some kind of English translation, Three “Persons” in One divine Essence. Remember what you say when you recite the Creed and what Christians believe, that The Son and the Holy Spirit are “One in Essence” (omoousion) with The Father. There is no sharing of that. Here’s what +Gregory Palamas said:
“The Spirit of the supreme Logos is a kind of ineffable yet intense longing or ‘eros’ experienced by the Begetter for the Logos born ineffably from Him, a longing experienced also by the beloved Logos and Son of the Father for His Begetter; but the Logos possesses this love by virtue of the fact that it comes from the Father in the very act through which He comes from the Father, and it resides co-naturally in Him.
It is from the Logos’s discourse with us through His incarnation that we have learned what is the name of the Spirit’s distinct mode of coming to be from the Father and that the Spirit belongs not only to the Father but also to the Logos. For He says ‘the Spirit of Truth, who proceeds from the Father’ (John 15:26), so that we may know that from the Father comes not solely the Logos - who is begotten from the Father - but also the Spirit who proceeds from the Father. Yet the Spirit belongs also to the Son, who receives Him from the Father as the Spirit of Truth, Wisdom and Logos. For Truth and Wisdom constitute a Logos that befits His Begetter, a Logos that rejoices with the Father as the Father rejoices in Him.
This accords with the words that He spoke through Solomon:’I was She who rejoiced together with Him’ (Prov. 8:30). Solomon did not say simply ‘rejoiced’ but ‘rejoiced together with’. This pre-eternal rejoicing of the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit who, as I said, is common to both, which explains why He is sent from both to those who are worthy. Yet the Spirit has His existence from the Father alone, and hence He proceeds as regards His existence only from the Father. Our intellect, because created in God’s image, possesses likewise the image of this sublime Eros or intense longing - an image expressed in the love experienced by the intellect for the spiritual knowledge that originates from it and continually abides in it.”
In a later section of the same work, he wrote:
“Three realities pertain to God: essence, energy, and the triad of divine hypostases. As we have seen, those privileged to be united to God so as to become one spirit with Him - as St. Paul said, ‘He who cleaves to the Lord is one spirit with Him’ (I Cor. 6:17) - are not united to God with respect to His essence, since all theologians testify that with respect to His essence God suffers no participation.
Moreover, the hypostatic union is fulfilled only in the case of the Logos, the God-man.
Thus those privileged to attain union with God are united to Him with respect to His energy; and the ‘spirit’, according to which they who cleave to God are one with Him, is and is called the uncreated energy of the Holy Spirit, but not the essence of God.”
Because we are NOT God, we cannot share in His divine nature, but since and because of the Resurrection, we can respond to God’s uncreated divine energies (its a way of speaking about grace, in part; think about the sun and the rays of the sun), partake of them and come to better know God and when the entire focus of our being is on God, we will experience Him as a vision of uncreated light as the apostles did at Mt. Tabor.
In a way, your belief that we do share in God is correct because He does indeed dwell in us as the uncreated energies of the Holy Spirit. It is the reality of the uncreated energies which allows + Gregory Palamas to say that we share in those and not the divine essence and still be faithful to +Paul. As I understand it, the West has no concept of uncreated divine energies, only that of created grace. It is therefore understandable that since the scholastics of the Middle Ages, Western Christianity has said that humanity does share in the divine NATURE. Uncreated energies are in fact divine; created grace, while having a divine source, is in fact created and therefore quantifiable and if quantifiable, not divine. But +Paul says ‘He who cleaves to the Lord is one spirit with Him’. The only “thing” to be one spirit with is the divine essence if there are no divine energies.
Just as an exercise, and if you have the time and the inclination, think about the implications for Protestant thought carried by the concept of created grace vs. uncreated energies.