Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 12/3/2006 8:33:14 PM (GMT-6)

Vladimir Lossky

“Created Being”

Chapter 5 of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

(St Vladimir’s Seminary Press: Crestwood, New York, 1976)

pp. 91-113.  (found in part of this)

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http://jbburnett.com/resources/lossky/lossky-createdbeing.pdf

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His will for us is a mystery, for the will is a relationship with another, and there is nothing which is 'other' to God:  creation ex nihilo is in comprehensible to us. We only know the will of God in so far as it is His relationship to the world which is already created; it is the point of contact between the infinite and the finite, and in this sense the divine 'willings' are the creative ideas of things, the logoi, the 'words'. In spite of the terminological identity, these 'words' have little in common with the logoi spermatikoi or 'seminal reasons' of the stoics. Rather they are the 'words' of creation and of providence which are found in Genesis and the Psalms (Ps. cxlvii). Every created thing has its point of contact with the Godhead; and this point of contact is its idea, reason or logos which is at the same time the end towards which it tends. The ideas of individual things are contained within the higher and more general ideas, as are the species within a genus. The whole is contained in the Logos, the second person of the Trinity who is the first principle and the last end of all created things. Here the Logos, God the Word, has the 'economical' emphasis proper to antenicene theology: He is the manifestation of the divine will, for it is by Him that the Father has created all things in the Holy Spirit. When we are examining the nature of created things, seeking to penetrate into the reason of their being, we are led finally to the knowledge of the Word, causal principle and at the same time end of all beings. All things were created by the Logos who is as it were a divine nexus, the threshold from which flow the creative outpourings, the particular logoi of creatures, and the centre towards which in their turn all created beings tend, as to their final end. For creatures, from the moment of their first condition, are separate from God; and their end and final fulfilment lies in union with Him or deification. Thus the primitive beatitude was not a state of deification, but a condition of order, a perfection of the creature which was ordained and tending towards its end.1

Revealing himself through His creative 'thought-wills', God can be known in creatures and by means of creatures, but He can also be known immediately in mystical contemplation, in His uncreated energies which are the splendour of His face. It is thus, in His Godhead, that Christ appeared to the apostles on Mount Tabor, and it is thus that He makes Himself known to the saints who detach themselves from all created things, renouncing all finite knowledge in order to attain to union with God. And we see here why, when they have abandoned all, the saints receive in the end perfect knowledge of the created world, for in being lifted up to the contemplation of God, they possess in the same instant the knowledge of the whole world of being in its first reasons which are the 'thought-wills' of God, contained in His simple energies. We are reminded here of the ecstasy of St. Benedict of Nursia, who saw the whole universe as if it had been gathered together into a beam of the divine light.1

Post Edited (Namaste 2.0) : 12/3/2006 9:51:53 PM (GMT-6)

Thanks, D.

typo? - or explain:  We are God's "energies"

http://www.amazon.com/Maximus-Confessor-Selected-Classics-Spirituality/dp/0809126591

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 12/4/2006 7:12:39 AM (GMT-6)

http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/orth_plato.aspx

 

. . .

The west was captured by an ousiological metaphysics. This metaphysics held western theology in captivity. It is in its nominalist form coming from William Occam that we find it still in captivity in the Calvinist’s even having the very question of whether God knows future contingents in light of predestination, and time. This was a metaphysics, St. Maximos the Confessor points out, that saw time as an enemy and thus sought that stable enduring thing through change that thereby is the most fundamental kind of being. Thus, that kind of perdurance was dubbed with the past participle he says. In essence, what is called by contemporary philosophers "the metaphysics of presence" according to Maximos is really the metaphysics of the past, as fully complete and determinate, used paradigmatically to colonize all the other temporal modes of present and future. The present is the predestined creature of the past both in Calvin and Newton. The essentialism downgrades accidental being or sumbebekos. Now sumbebekos as accidental being was also not well understood in the west. It is not being that exists in another like a form of being found within one of the predicate categories. It designates the happenstantial, the contingently situational so it is not precisely necessary-essential that my wife has auburn hair; that she has this hair color is accidental in the sense of sumbebekos, it is fortuitous in the sense that her hair could have indifferently been auburn or not auburn but it is necessary that it have some color. This kind of accidental being can be found in every category. Thus, in the pagan Greek view, that a human is this or that individual is accidental but it is necessary that a human be somebody. The distinction then between accidental being in the sense of sumbebekos from an accident-predicate is that the accidental being is the contingent or fortuitious actuality according to every necessary category. So, accidental being in this sense is the contingent affection or actual constellation or situation or event that takes place according to the necessity of different categories. On the Orthodox reading, this sumbebekos is really God’s governance or the concrete realization of God’s purpose in time. To downgrade it is a spiritually sick symptom of the religiosity of sarx that finds time to be a corrosive force that bears no faith or hope. Thus, accidental being just as the unique particularity of persons and the future, is downgraded in pagan metaphysics in favor of fully determinate being-essences (the dead, fully completed and determinate and deterministic past idealized as enduring presence) or ousiological being for the paradigmatic past participle. It was not till Scotus developed his concept of haecceity and the individual’s will did you find the beginning of the overturn of a ousiological metaphysics in western Christian theology. Maximos pointed out the original meaning of sumbebekos was not negative as it as in pagan philosophical theology but was positive. It meant the adventurous and creative way things are "brought together." So, in Orthodox theology coming from Maximos, the pagan agenda to make (persons and) reality in its concreteness, in all its contingency, fortuity, distinctiveness, and unique unrepeatibility unreal in favor of impersonal, universal, and necessary is set on its head. Thus, sumbebekos, as very purposeful counterpoint in Byzantine theology, is the creative way (Logos) that God brings all things together (sumbebekos) in the existential fullness of their realization (uparktikos) of his eikonomia. This lead Maximos to revolutionize Aristotle’s categorical analysis of Being in one of its meanings.

 

But, maybe that is what D. has been saying. 

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(o)

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 12/4/2006 8:13:02 PM (GMT-6)

So, Thomist and Calvinist discussions seem, from an Orthodox perspective to, too uncritically inherit a pagan concept without sufficient critical reflection on the legacy of its pre-Christian meaning and implications. The on-going issue of the relation of Greek philosophy and Orthodox theological expression is an issue for any properly responsible theology that has to be methodologically fastidious about the concepts it uses and/ or may read into Scripture. Proof of this, at least in the case of Thomas and Calvin, is the very need to be concerned about whether or not God knows individual souls, particulars, or future contingents. The Orthodox understanding is that the pagan concept of divine immutability was an allergic reaction to time and contingency that needed to find a time-proof foundation of necessity for religious reassurance. Time was the evil Kronos who ate its children. So, the concept is symptomatic of a spiritual sickness of the religiosity of sarx (which in Orthodoxy is not "flesh," but deathliness, related to sarcophagus, it is the opposite of spirit, it is de-spiritedness that emotionally believes in death more than God despite what the head believes). Pagan philosophical theology sought a predestinied necessity in a time-proof order or an anti-time God. Since everything human is temporal, one gets the unknown God because God is what anything temporal-mortal is not.

Using a Biblical base to modify Greek pagan concepts, divine immutability in Orthodoxy is God’s loyalty to his promise (his Word, his Church) to his (Church designed) creatures. It is the immutability of his commitment through and outside of time. It is the basis of the fact that economia was the telos, and thus, foundation of the creation. Church is the fulfillment of covenant. Covenant is the inner purpose for creation. Creation is the outer staging for the inner purpose. So, the Church, as Body of Christ, is the fruit from which the tree that bore it, the cosmos, was itself borne and born, as St. Diadochus of Gaza puts it. God’s immutability is that he is agape, essentially and contingently, immutably a sharer of Person with Persons, uncreate or create. Time has no nature apart from this agenda, and thus, is nothing in relation to it, and thus, is not an obstacle or issue for or about divine immutability unlike the unregenerate paganism of the insufficiently methologically critical Calvinism.