FROM THE "TIME" THREAD

quote:

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Ethos of trinitarian communion
(CHRISTOS YANNARAS)
from "The Freedom of Morality", SVS Press, NY


In the life of the Church, God reveals Himself as the hypostasis of being, the personal hypostasis of eternal life, exhaustive expression of the truth of being. It is not the essence of the energy of God which constitutes being, But His personal mode of existence: God as person is the hypostasis and life: God is not a vague supreme being, and impersonal essence which may be approached only through the intellect or the emotions. Nor is He a "prime mover," a blind energy which sets in motion the mechanism of the world; not yet an image of man exalted into an absolute, and infinite magnification of the individual characteristics and psychological demands of the human being. The God of whom the Church has experience is the God who reveals Himself in history as personal existence, as distinctiveness and freedom. God is person, and He speaks with man "face to grace, as a man speaketh unto his friend" (Ex 33:11).

It is precisely as personal existence, as distinctiveness and freedom from any predetermination by essence or nature, that God constitutes being and is the hypostasis of being. When Moses asks the identity of the God whose will he is to proclaim to the Israelites, the answer is "I am He who is" (Ex 3:14. God identifies the truth of existence, the reality of being, with His personal hypostasis. This means that the divine essence or nature is not an ontological reality prior to God's personal existence and determining it: God's being is not an ontological datum, anterior to the distinctiveness and freedom of the divine person. Rather, it is the personal expression of His being. :And when speaking to Moses, God did not say, 'I am essence; but, 'I am He who is': for He who is,, is not from the essence, but the essence is from Him who is. He who is has comprehended within Himself all being."(1)

(1--Gregory Palamas, In Defense of the Holy Hesychasts; 3, 2-12)

The identification of being with the personal existence of God -- as identification with vital consequences for the truth of man and human morality -- explains the revelation of the God of the Church, who is one and at the same time trinitarian. The one God is not one divine nature of essence, but primarily one person: the one person of God the Father. The personal existence of God (the Father) constitutes His essence or being, making it into "hypsostasis": freely and from love He begets the Son and causes the Holy Spirit to proceed.(2) Consequently, being stems not from the essence, which would make it an ontological necessity, but from the person and the freedom of its love which "hypostasizes" being into a personal and trinitarian communion, God the Father's mode of being constitutes existence and life as a fact of love and personal communion.

The identification of being with the freedom of love -- of that love which forms being into hypostases -- reveals that the truth of the ethos or morality is equivalent to the truth of being. When we speak of the unity and communion of the three divine persons, we are referring to God's mode of being, which is the ethos of divine life. And the ethos of God is identical with this being. When the Christian revelation declares that "God is love" (1 Jn 4:16), it is not referring to one among many properties of God's "behavior," but to what God is as the fullness of trinitarian and personal communion.

(2--"God the Father, moved outside time and in love, proceeded to a distinction in hypsostasis, remaining without division or diminution) in the wholeness proper to Him, supremely unifies and supremely simple": Maxiums the Confessor, Scholia on the Divine Names, PG 4, 221A.)

Thus love is singled out as the ontological category par excellence, the only possibility for existence, since it is through love that God gives substance to His essence, and constitutes His being. Any other definition of God's ethos with evaluative content is ontologically unfounded: it applies a priori conventional predicates, taken from philosophical thought or social experience, to the mode of divine existence, which is nothing other than personal distinctiveness and the freedom of love. If we accept evaluative definitions of the Godhead, we make the personal distinctives of divine love subordinate to them, and consequently do away with it. Evaluative categories could refer only to nature or essence, but then personal distinctiveness would be subordinated to the necessity imposed by natural definitions, and consequently, once again, it would be non-existant or substantially curtailed.. In that case, the person of God would "undergo" whatever happened to the nature. The "accidents" of the nature would be "passions" of the person -- things undergone passively. This is why St. Maximus the Confessor affirms of the Godhead: "It is neither beautiful nor good: for these are as it were passions, and conditions and accidents." (3)

(3--Scholia on the Divine Names, PG 4, 412BC. Cf also Dionysius the Areopagite, On Mystical Theology 5, PG 3, 1045D-1048AB.)

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AND

quote:

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Vladimir Lossky’s “In the Image and Likeness of God” (Chapter 4: The Procession of the Holy Spirit , Section 4), pp. 80-83

If personal diversity in God presents itself as a primordial fact, not to be deduced from any other principle or based on any other idea, that does not mean that the essential identity of the Three is ontologically posterior to their hypostatic diversity. Orthodox triadology is not a counter-blast to Filioquism; it does not run to the other extreme. As we already have said, relations of origin signify the personal diversity of the Three, but they indicate no less their essential identity. In that the Son and the Holy Spirit are distinguished from the Father, we venerate three Persons; in that they are one with Him, we confess their consubstantiality16 Thus the monarchy of the Father maintains the perfect equilibrium between the nature and the persons, without coming down too heavily on either side.17 There is neither an impersonal substance nor non-consubstantial persons. The one nature and the three hypostases are presented simultaneously to our understanding, with neither prior to the other. The origin of the hypostases is not impersonal, since it is referred to the person of the Father; but it is unthinkable apart from their common possession of the same essence, the "divinity in division undivided”18 Otherwise we should have Three Divine Individuals, Three Gods bound together by an abstract idea of Godhead. On the other hand, since consubstantiality is the non-hypostatic identity of the Three, in that they have (or rather are) a common essence, the unity of the three hypostases is inconceivable apart from the monarchy of the Father, who is the principle of the common possession of the same one essence. Otherwise we should be concerned with a simple essence, differentiated by relationships. 19

It may be asked whether, in seeking to avoid the semi-Sabellianism of the Latins, their Greek adversaries did not fall into subordinationism because of their emphasis on the monarchy of the Father. This might perhaps seem all the more likely to happen, because in Greek patristic literature

16 "For us there is one God, for the Godhead is one, and the Three in whom we believe proceed from and are referred to the One... Thus when we look at the Godhead, the First Cause, and the Monarchy, the One appears to us; but when we look at the Persons in whom the Godhead is, who timelessly and with equal glory come forth from the First Cause, we adore the Three." St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 31, 14; P.G. 36, cols. 148D-149A.

17 ”St. Photius compares the Trinity to a pair of scales, in which the needle represents the Father, and the two platforms represent the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amphilochia qu. 181; P.G. 101, col. 896.

18 “St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 31, 14; P.G. 36, col. l48D.

19 “The one nature in the Three is God; but the union (^vcooiq) is the Father, from whom the others proceed and to whom they refer, not so as to be confounded but rather to have all in common with Him, without distinction of time, will, or power." St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 42; P.G. 36, col. 476B.


one often finds the idea of causality applied to the person of the Father. The Father is called the cause (cciTicc) of the hypostases of the Son and the Holy Spirit, or even the "God-head-source" (TTT^yaioc OsoTriq). Sometimes He is designated simply as "God," with the definite article 6 OEOC;, or even as auroO'soc;.

It is worthwhile to recall here what we have said before about the negative approach characteristic of Orthodox thought—an approach which radically changes the value of philosophical terms applied to God. Not only the image of "cause," but also such terms as "production," "procession," and "origin" ought to be seen as inadequate expressions of a reality which is foreign to all becoming, to all process, to all beginning. Just as relations of origin mean something different from relations of opposition, so causality is nothing but a somewhat defective image, which tries to express the personal unity which determines the origins of the Son and the Holy Spirit. This unique cause is not prior to his effects, for in the Trinity there is no priority and posteriority. He is not superior to his effects, for the perfect cause cannot produce inferior effects. He is thus the cause of their equality with himself.20 The causality ascribed to the person of the Father, who eternally begets the Son and eternally causes the Holy Spirit to proceed, expresses the same idea as the monarchy of the Father: that the Father is the personal principle of unity of the Three, the source of their common possession of the same content, of the same essence.

The expressions "Godhead-source" and "source of the Godhead" do not mean that the divine essence is subject to the person of the Father, but only that the person of the Father is the basis of common possession of the same essence, because the person of the Father, not being the sole person of the Godhead, is not to be identified with the essence. In a certain sense it can be said the Father is this possession of


20 "For He would be the origin (drpy^) of petty and unworthy things, or rather the term 'origin
• would be used in a petty and unworthy sense, if He were not the origin of the Godhead (Tf)<; ©£6Tr(TO(; APX^) and of the goodness contemplated in the Son and in the Spirit: in the former as Son and Word, in the latter as Spirit which proceeds without separation." St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 2, 38; P.G. 35, col. 445.

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the divine essence in common with the Son and the Holy Spirit, and that he would not be a divine Person if he were only a monad: he would then be identified with the divine Essence. Here it may be useful to recall that St. Cyril of Alexandria regarded the name "Father" as superior to the name "God," because the name "God" is given to God in respect of his relations with beings of a different nature.21

If the Father is sometimes called simply God—6 e£6<; or even ocuTo5£5(;—nevertheless we cannot find in orthodox writers expressions which treat consubstantiality as participation by the Son and the Holy Spirit in the essence of the Father.22 Each Person is God by nature, not by participation in the nature of another.

The Father is the cause of the other hypostases in that He is not His essence, i.e. in that He does not have His essence for Himself alone. What the image of causality wishes to express is the idea that the Father, being not merely an essence but a person, is by that very fact the cause of the other consubstantial Persons, who have the same essence as He has.


1 Thesaurus, assert. 5; P.G. 75, cols. 65, 68.
22 Such a concept may be found in the works of Ongen, e.g. Commentary on St. John 2, 2; P.G. 14, col. 109. On this subject the excellent work of Th. Lieske, Theologie der Logosmystik bet Off gen (Munster, 1938), may be usefully consulted.



(The scanning operator apologizes that his divice can’t read Greek. But aren’t all those substitutions creative on its part?)


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Rather, it seems to my neuronal epiphenomena that an event is "foreknown" by God simply because it is logoi, residing in His energies, in the eternal council of the Trinity (you know, "let Us make Man in Our Image"). That which is logoi will be realized, don't you know.

That said, I think that I can do something with your second post -- though I'm an ignorant guy and no sort of authority .

Exousia said:   divine "emanations" <=> ad extra divine contingent expressions?

Search Results for Vollenhoeven: Found 3 threads.

	Count	Date	Thread Name
	1	Dec 9 2006	Yannaras and Lossky
	1	Jan 20 2002	Response to Empiress on Free Will
	1	Mar 21 2004	God’s Two Wills in Openness – March 19 debate

TRYING TO HELP:

1. http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/HKPC/Orthodox_Wisdom_intro.htm

. . .

This brings us to the preceding phrase of Evdokimov's statement, "the saturation of every domain by the light of Christ, a saturation that is inherent to the Christian faith." The mystery is that the transcendent Word is also the one in whom "all the principles of things both are and subsist as one in an incomprehensible simplicity" (St. Maximus the Confessor). St. Maximus says that the created logoi (principles) of all things have their source, meaning, and plenitude in the diving Logos, "by whom all things were made." Therefore, comprehending a cosmos (and above all, man, the microcosmos) that is saturated "by the light of Christ" is communion with Christ. Herein lies the secret to the priesthood of all humanity. Humanity, through its apprehension of both the created and the uncreated, serves as the portal through which the cosmos passes on its way to transfiguration.

Pathway to the Truth: the Doctrine of Recapitulation

"At the center of St. Maximus’ theological and christological universe is the doctrine of Recapitulation. It is this doctrine which forms the basis of all that the New Testament and the Fathers have to say in connection with the Incarnation. While the term "recapitulation" itself appears only twice in the New Testament, the concept itself occurs repeatedly; one has only to recognize its principles of operation in order to know when it is being applied. These may be categorized as follows: 1) preeminence 2) repetition and recontextualization, 3) reversal, and 4) fulfillment.

"The Confessor elegantly summarizes this doctrine and its principles of operation in a compact sentence: "The One Logos is the many logoi, and the many logoi are the One Logos." (Ambigua 7, PG 91:1081C). In other words, in His incarnation and enhominzation, Jesus Christ possesses and is all the fullness of the universals common both to deity and humanity. In terms of the four principles enumerated above, then, this works itself out in a multitude of ways. In terms of preeminence, it means that Christ is both the presupposition, the method, the paradigm, and the summit of whatever might be said either about God or about man. God is truly, uniquely, ultimately, and finally revealed in the Word Incarnate. And man, perfect humanity, is also only understood properly in its union with the Word. In scriptural terms, Jesus Christ is the Alpha and Omega of all that can be said about God and man, and thus has the preeminence "in all things" (Col. 1:18). Being thus, preeminent in all things, Christ becomes the final context, the ultimate and perfect "recontextualization" and repetition, of the logoi, understood here as both the words of the Old Testament Scriptures and the principles of nature: of creation as a whole and man in particular. That is, not only are the typological themes of Scripture repeated in His Incarnate Economy from His conception of His Second Advent, but He also repeats all of the natural stages of humanity as a whole, and the stages of life of each individual human being in particular. In doing so, he reverses the effects of the Fall. As the Second Adam, the entire drama of the Fall is replayed, this time to an opposite conclusion. Instead of a Fall into passions and corruption, mankind in Christ is raised and exalted. Deification and the spiritual life, in other words, are integral components and implications of the doctrine of Recapitulation. By thus repeating, and in some cases reversing, the typological themes of Holy Scripture and the natural laws and stages of humanity, Christ is not only preeminent in all things, but fulfills all Old Testament prophecy and expectation concerning His Coming, there being nothing more that can be said about them outside of and without reference to Christ."

–Dr. Joseph P. Farrell (+Photios), Introduction to The Disputation with Pyrrhus Of Our Father Among The Saints Maximus the Confessor, p. iii-iv

 

MAYBE I'LL FIND MORE...

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 12/14/2006 9:36:05 PM (GMT-6)

D., ask THIS guy:  http://www.opentheismboard.org/profile.aspx?p=1878

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 12/14/2006 9:38:50 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Exousia) : 12/15/2006 12:19:55 PM (GMT-6)

There is NO "WHERE" that God's energies are not...because ALL CREATION is of God's energies.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

In physics, the zero-point energy is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical physical system may possess; it is the energy of the ground state of the system. All quantum mechanical systems have a zero point energy. The term arises commonly in reference to the ground state of the quantum harmonic oscillator and its null oscillations. In quantum field theory, it is a synonym for the vacuum energy, an amount of energy associated with the vacuum of empty space. In cosmology, the vacuum energy is taken to be the origin of the cosmological constant. Experimentally, the zero-point energy of the vacuum leads directly to the Casimir effect, and is directly observable in nanoscale devices.

Because zero point energy is the lowest possible energy a system can have, this energy cannot be removed from the system.

Just a thought.

Post Edited (Exousia) : 12/15/2006 3:02:13 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Exousia) : 12/15/2006 3:39:42 PM (GMT-6)

But your child is NOT a part of YOUR essential existence...and can never be.

Your child is of your "energy" or activity in the world.

IN LIKE MANNER...

fill in the blanks for me, Tom...

Post Edited (Exousia) : 12/15/2006 4:10:48 PM (GMT-6)

 

 

The Mystery of the Ages continues to be revealed...

Thanks, Tom.