Only with respect to ‘acts of will’ could the Son mediate the Spirit, and vice versa, but since there is no intervening attribute between Son and Spirt or Spirt and Son, they do not originate each other’s hypostasis. Same is for Maximus, same is for Gregoory of Nyssa.

Photios

This paper also helps provide a framework that I was looking for in how the Trinity relate to each other,

“This is so for Gregory since the identity of the energeiai that the Spirit possesses, is the same energeiai as the Son and the Father, meaning it is something said about—or more accurately around—their nature.94 This manifesting of the Spirit by the Father through the Son cannot be thought of as a Hypostatic origination, precisely because Gregory identifies this act with the act of willing, that is in God there is no difference between will and energy.95 As we have shown previously, every operation and divine name is common to all the Hypostases. Gregory expresses this manifestation in even more explicit terms as a circular movement among the Persons in another work against Macedonius:

You see the revolving circle of the glory moving from Like to Like. The Son is glorified by the Spirit; the Father is glorified by the Son; again the Son has His glory from the Father; and the Only-begotten thus becomes the glory of the Spirit. For with what shall the Father be glorified, but with the true glory of the Son: and with what again shall the Son be glorified, but with the majesty of the Spirit? In like manner, again, Faith completes the circle, and glorifies the Son by means of the Spirit, and the Father by means of the Son.96

It appears that in this passage that Gregory has in mind a manifestation of glory that is irrespective of creation. A real relation that would characterize and constitute God’s internal Being, in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will to manifest the divine love as energeiai in many different ways to Them. It is at this level that we could say that the economic Trinity reflects the theological Trinity.97″

Yes, the Orthodox do affirm a form of simplicity, specifically in ruling out composition in God. But since God is NOT being, simplicity doesn’t imply that the energies and the essence are identical. What it does imply is that each of the energies is metaphysically distinct without being “cut off” from the essence or the Triadic actors. Each of the energies interpenetrate each other without a kind of reductive identity. Simplicity then is an energy unifying all of the energies so that God is equally and fully present in each of them without an identity between all of them. (Knowledge and will are not identical in God for example.)

I would start with Gregory Palamas’ Triads and then the Capita.

Yes. This paper: http://energeticprocession.wordpress.com/2006/04/26/gregory-of-nyssa-and-eunomius-trinitarian-structures-investigated/

Photios

In Saint Athanasius, the distinction between essence and will appears to be a real, metaphysical one:
A man by counsel builds a house, but by nature he begets a son; and what is in building began to come into being at will, and is external to the maker; but the son is proper offspring of the Father’s essence, and is not external to him; wherefore neither does he counsel concerning him, lest he appear to counsel about himself. As far then as the Son transcends the creature, by so much does what is by nature transcend the will. And they, on hearing of Him, ought not to measure by will what is by nature.25

Thus, St. Athanasius’s defense of the deity of Christ and His necessity from the Father, along with the free contingency of the world depends on a real distinction between essence and will.

I was mistakingly seeing the Father’s relationship to the Son as external. But if we, and the cosmos, are in Christ… we are in His humanity which was divinized by His energies, by His will. Another thought – this is irreversible so I guess God’s will though free, is stable and committed. Sorry Arius and the Anglicans and Plato for not giving you your due attention.

Well, anyway the Edwards quote could really be taken as redolent of neoplatonism on its face….at least I think so…the more educated people here can correct me if I am wrong. Of course, I don’t think he means it that way, but it certainly sounds like emanations of some sort. God may be the source by which anything else can exist, but that doesn’t mean He is the “substance” and they are merely shadows of it.

It is like saying whatever good we experience in the material world is just a shadow of the greatest form, the good. I can see someone reading something like this and making a connection that the material world is worthless, and in some cases evil.

Then was Christ in this world just an emanation or shadowy figure of God? Was the divine actually connected to the human? I know it seems like I am reading a lot into this quote, but if we consider it in an already thoroughly reformed mindset, it seems like a logical way to think.