The Eastern Fathers, no doubt. I don't recall seeing the West speak about "uncreated energies", I think most of the theological development came from the East on this subject (as in the West, other matters are more defined due to controversy from heretics, such as grace/free will). I know that some Western Fathers before the Schism wrote on the Trinity, such as St. Augustine and Ambrose, but I must admit that I am not able to give a detailed difference between the two thought patterns.
I think these positions are fundamentally different and that difference leads the Churches in different directions.
That is true, but I don't see that these "different directions" necessarily means you are right and we are wrong (or vice versus). I see our respective views on the Trinity as complimentary, different ways of using fundamentally incomplete human language to explain the inner life of the Trinity. We mean the same general thing when we recite the Nicean Creed and note that John's Gospel says that the Father sends the Spirit, and elsewhere, the Son sends the Spirit. We realize that there is only ONE divine principle "sending" into time the Spirit. As I have struggled to say, we do not believe in two different essences sending forth a third!
Does our respective views of the Trinity lead to different focuses? Sure. I don't think God would have it any other way! Do you think our respective views of the Trinity makes the Latin church null and void or vice versus? Certainly not!
Regards
Jo, I think you are missing the point. The issue isn't so much our differing views of the Trinity, which in fact may be merely differing ways of speaking about the same thing, but rather a fundamental difference between the Latin Church (and the entire West I suppose) and Orthodoxy on the distinction between the Divine Essence and uncreated Divine Energies. So far as I can see, the West makes no distinction between Essence and uncreated energies. The implications of this are vast. Think for a moment what this means with regard, say, to the Eucharist, but any sacrament will do. The West actually believes in the ability of a human to participate in the Divine Essence through "created grace". Your theology of the sacraments, where the priest himself is the operative force, amply demonstrates this. The Latin Church's concept of the "Treasury of Merit", indeed its concept of the Magisterium itself are examples of this. The distinctions are not at all complimentary but in many ways mutually exclusive ways of looking at God and more importantly, understanding the reality of theosis or salvation.
The modern Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras wrote a piece on this in 1975, here's an excerpt:
"The acceptance of this distinction between essence and energies means an understanding of truth as personal relationship, i.e. as an experience of life, and of knowledge as participation in the truth and not as an understanding of meanings that result from intellectual abstraction. It involves the priority of the reality of the person to every rational definition. In the infinite terms of this priority, God is known and communicable through His incomprehensible uncreated energies, remaining in essence unknown and incommunicable. That is to say, God is known only as a personal revelation (and not as an idea of active essence), only as a triune communion of persons, as an ecstatic self-offering of loving goodness. The world also is the result of the personal energies of God, a creation revealing the person of the Logos, witnessing to the Father through the grace of the Spirit, the substantiated invitation of God to relation and communion, an invitation which is personal and therefore substantiated heteroessentially.
On the contrary, the rejection of the distinction between essence and energy means exclusion of catholic-personal experience and priority of the intellect as the way of knowledge, reducing truth to a coincidence of thought with the object of thought (adaequatio rei et intellectus),28 an understanding of nature and person as definitions resulting from rational abstraction: the persons have the character of relations within the essence, relations which do not characterize the persons but are identified with the persons in order to serve the logical necessity of the simplicity of the essence. Thus, finally, God is accessible only as essence, i.e. only as an object of rational search, as the necessary first mover who is unmoved, that is pure energy, and whose existence must be identified with the self-realization of the essence. The world is the result of the first mover, even as the grace of God is the result of divine essence. The only relation of the world with God is the connection of cause and effect, a connection that organically disengages God from the world: the world is made autonomous and subjected to intellectual objectification and to (useful) expediency.
The problem of the distinction between essence and energies determined definitely and finally the differentiation of the Latin West from the Orthodox East. The West rejected the distinction, desiring to protect the idea of simplicity in the divine essence, since rational thought cannot accept the antinomy of a simultaneous existential identity and otherness, a distinction that does not mean division and fragmentation. For the western mind (expressed either with the directness of Thomistic rationalism or with the subordination of the patristic texts to a priori interpretations, as in the case of Fr. Garrigues) God is defined only in terms of His essence; whatever is not essence does not belong to God; it is a creature of God, the result of divine essence. Consequently, the energies of God are either identified with the essence, which is active (actus purus), or else any external manifestation of theirs is regarded as necessarily heteroessential, i.e. a created result of the divine cause.29
This means that, in the final analysis, the theosis of man his participation in the divine life,30 is impossible, since even grace, the sanctifier of the saints, is itself an effect, a result of the divine essence. It is created, even though supernatural, as western theologians have rather arbitrarily defined it since the ninth century.31"
Here's a link to the whole paper:
http://www.geocities.com/trvalentine/orthodox/yannaras.html
"We realize that there is only ONE divine principle "sending" into time the Spirit. As I have struggled to say, we do not believe in two different essences sending forth a third!"
We have here a confusion of terminology in this post that is truly going to take some teasing out, especially when combined with your later comments on the "divine nature."
I have only time for a couple of observations.
By using the term "one divine principle," you are, perhaps inadvertently, demonstrating how Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism look differently at the Trinity, and indeed the Nicene Creed differently from the first line.
At the heart of the fundamental problem with the filioque is the fact that it creates an impersonal center to the Holy Trinity.
In Orthodoxy, unity is found in a person -- the Father. Not in an essence, a nature, or a principle.
The Spirit proceeds from a person -- the Father. He is send, in the divine economy, by the Son. He is the Spirit both of the Father and of the Son. All of this is a Mystery. All of it is highly personal, none of it is abstract.
St. Peter certainly uses the phrase "partakers of the divine nature." As with so many things, *before* the advent of specific heresies, terminology was often used interchangably. The phenomenon is the same regardless of the terminology used at a given point in time in the Church.
Hence St. Ambrose and St. Hilary, we Orthodox would believe, lived their spiritual lives through participation in the divine energies no less than did St. John Chyrsostom or St. Gregory Palamas -- even if the terminology used did not have the precision and nuances of Palamite theology, which was honed because of facing heresy.