Lossky summarizes the problem for which the doctrine of divine energies is the solution as follows: “If we were able at a given moment to be united to the very essence of God and to participate in it in the very least degree, we should not at the moment be what we are, we should be God by nature.” Instead of being Trinity, God would become a “myriad of hypostases,” since “He would have as many hypostases as there would be persons participating in His essence.” Thus, God “is and remains inaccessible to us in His essence.” Perhaps we can be united not to the essence but to the persons? Lossky thinks not: “This would be the hypostatic union proper to the Son alone, in whom God becomes man without ceasing to be the second Person of the Trinity. Even though we share the same human nature as Christ and receive in Him the name of sons of God, we do not ourselves become the divine hypostasis of the Son by the fact of the Incarnation.” Thus, “we are unable . . . to participate in either the essence or the hypostases of the Holy Trinity.” Yet, Scripture calls us to be partakers of the divine nature. Thus, “we are compelled to recognize in God an ineffable distinction, other than that between His essence and His persons, according to which He is, under different aspects, both totally inaccessible and at the same time accessible. This distinction is that between the essence of God, or His nature, properly so-called, which is inaccessibly, unknowable, and incommunicable; and the energies or divine operations, forces proper to and inseparable from God’s essence, in which He goes forth from Himself, manifests, communicates, and gives Himself.” He quotes Gregory Palamas to the effect that the “divine and deifying illumination and grace is not the essence but the energy of God,” which is a “divine power and energy common to the nature of the three.” God’s nature is communicable “not in itself but through its energy.” This all seems wholly sub-Trinitarian. For starters, on this paradigm how can the Son become incarnate at all? Is His essence or person incarnated, or only His energies? Since it is a hypostatic union, it’s a union of flesh with the Person of the Son. But by Lossky’s reasoning, that seems impossible, quite apart from our participation in the incarnate Son. Further, the whole problematic betrays an inadequate penetration of Trinitarian categories. The language of “unknowable, incommunicable” is the most obvious; for doesn’t Trinitarian theology claim precisely that God is a communicable being, that this is His essence?