Incoherent Parts of the Deity: A Response to Carey

Jeremiah Carey has defended the position that God is the formal cause of everything in the sense of being literally a metaphysical ‘constituent’ of each thing akin to a substantial form in scholastic metaphysics. Carey believes this position is preferable to that on which God is merely the exemplar cause of all things, as he thinks this panentheist vision would allow a more literal and charitable interpretation of the Greek Fathers’ claims about God’s relation to creation, that God is ‘in all things.’ Carey’s position has been subject to criticism. My concerns here will focus chiefly on the recent response Carey makes to those objections. While Carey clarifies his position on key points, his responses to the initial objections imply that he has abandoned his position or is drawing ambiguous distinctions that fail to address the critique. I conclude by diagnosing how Carey got himself into the conclusions he did, and then offer a prospective outline for how we ought to understand Palamas’ and Aquinas’ shared perspective on which God relates contingently to creation. This allows us to affirm unproblematically that creation is a manifestation of and participation in divine ideas and energies.