Both traditions [Eastern and Western], when they talk about the knowability or unknowability of the divine ousia or essentia, are for the most part talking pious nonsense. There is no such ‘thing’ as the divine essence; there is no such object, whether of knowledge or ignorance. It is ultimately immaterial whether we prefer to use the term ousia to indicate the transcendence and incomprehensibility of God in himself or to use the term ‘incomprehensibility of the essence’ instead. God is essentially Father, Son, and Spirit, and … there is no other reality prior to, apart from, or more original than the paternal arche, which perfectly reveals itself in an eternal and coequal Logos and communicates itself by the Spirit who searches the deep things of God and makes Christ known to us. There is no divine essence, then, into the vision of which the souls of the saved will ultimately be admitted, nor even from the knowledge of which human minds are eternally excluded, and any language that suggests otherwise—whether patristic, Thomist, or Palamite—is an empty reification. The question of the knowledge of God, properly conceived … is the question of how we know the Father in the Son through the Spirit, even as the Father infinitely exceeds our knowledge.

~ David B. Hart, “The Hidden and the Manifest,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, p. 214