(pp.50-52)

 

The Philanthropy of God

 

At the request of a pagan who asked him, "Show me thy God," Theophilus of Antioch replies, "Show me yourself, and I will show you my God."1 He means that man, "created in the image of God," reflects the divine mystery and that the two are unutterable. When God fashioned the man Adam, "He considered the Christ-man, the Christ who was one day supposed to be what was now this clay and this flesh."2 The profound reason for the Incarnation does not come from man, but from God, from His desire to become Man and to make of humanity a Theophany, the beloved ground of His presence. The liturgical sense understands this superbly and calls God the philanthropist, the lover of man. His love is outstretched toward the highest degree of communion; with or without the Fall, God has created the world to become Man therein so that man could become "god by grace," a participant in the conditions of the divine life, the immortality and the chaste integrity of His being.

 

The Constitution of the Human Being: The Spirit and the Flesh

 

Scripture knows nothing of the Greek dualism of two sub¬stances in conflict, of the body being the prison of the soul.

It knows of only the moral struggle between the desire of the Creator and the desires of the creature, between the standard holiness and sin-perversion. The conflict between carnal man I (homo animates) and spiritual man (homo spirituals) takes place in the totality of the human being. An indivisible entity, an incarnated spirit, man essentially "participates in being," to such an extent that St Peter defines the goal of his life: "that you may become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pt 1:4). As homo viator, in a "state of passage," he fulfills his resemblance, his affinity, with the divine, or indeed the demonic, through his participations; he leads the entire visible creation in one direction or the other.

The soul vivifies the body and makes of it a living flesh; the spirit spiritualizes the entire human being and makes of him a spiritual man. The spirit is not a third element—body, soul, spirit—but a qualifying principle. It expresses and manifests itself through the psychic and the corporeal by qualifying them in terms of its energies. Indeed, asceticism constitutes a vast culture, a true science whose aim it is to make the body and the soul transparent and submissive to the spiritual. By contrast, man can "quench the Spirit" (1 Th 5:19), cause the source of his life to dry up, have carnal thoughts and reduce himself to mere animal flesh, the flesh of the flood, the prey of hell.

 

 

The Biblical Concept of the Heart

 

The heart the Bible speaks of is not the same as the emotional center of the psychologists. The Jews thought with the heart. As a metaphysical center, it integrates all the faculties of the human being; reason, intuition, and the will are never strangers to the choices and sympathies of the heart (Reason and the reasons of the heart of which Pascal speaks). Radiat¬ing and penetrating everywhere, it is nevertheless hidden in its own mysterious depth. "Know thyself" is addressed above all to this secret heart: "Enter within thyself, and there find God, the angels, and the Kingdom," as spiritual men say. "Who can understand the heart?" Jeremiah asks, and He replies, "I, the Lord, search the mind and try the heart" (Jr 17:9-10). This means God can penetrate to the obscure sphere of the unconscious and the subconscious. St Peter speaks of the "hidden man of the heart" (homo cordis absconditus) ; it is at this unfathomable depth that the human self is found. Its mystery, in the likeness of God, is well indicated by the words of St Gregory of Nyssa: "Since the nature of our mind evades our knowledge, it has an accurate resemblance to the Superior Nature; in that it cannot be explored, it shows the character of the Incomprehensible/'3 To the hidden God, mysterious in His essence (Deus abscon-ditus') corresponds his "image" (homo absconditus).

"For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Mt 6:21). Man is worth what the object of his love and the desires of his heart are worth. The "Jesus prayer," called the "prayer of the heart," makes of the heart the place of the perpetual presence of Christ. The Gospel and asceticism assign to the heart the hierarchical primacy in the structure of the human being; it colors this structure with its health or with its diseases. In contrast to Leonardo da Vinci, all knowledge is the offspring of a great love. "I love, therefore I am" (amo ergo sum) indicates an original intentionality, innate and as if magnetized. "Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee," St Augustine confesses.4 "It is for thee alone that I live, speak and sing."5 "God has placed in the human heart the desire for Him,"8 whence comes this magnificent name that St Gregory gives to God, "Thou, whom my soul loveth."7

 

Post Edited (plato's_playdough) : 5/10/2008 1:16:47 PM (GMT-5)

From you, Bruce...

http://www.holytrinitymission.org/books/english/byzantine_theology_j_meyendorf.htm

In Maximian thought, man occupies quite an exceptional position among the other creatures. He not only carries in himself a Logos; he is the image of the divine Logos, and the purpose of his nature is to acquire similitude with God. In creation as a whole, man’s role is to unify all things in God and thus to overcome the evil powers of separation, division, disintegration, and death. The "natural," God-established "movement," "energy," or will of man is therefore directed toward communion with God, "deification," not in isolation from the entire creation, but leading it back to its original state.

One could understand at this point why Maximus felt so strongly that both Monoenergism and Monotheletism betrayed the Chalcedonian affirmation that Christ was fully man. There cannot be a true humanity if there is no natural, authentic human will or "movement."

But if the human will is nothing but a movement of nature, is there a place for human freedom? And how can the Fall and man’s revolt against God be explained? These questions to which Origen gave such great importance find in Maximus a new answer. Already in Gregory of Nyssa, true human freedom does not consist in autonomous human life but in the situation, which is truly natural to man’s communion with God. When man is isolated from God, he finds himself enslaved — to his passions, to himself, and ultimately to Satan. Therefore, for Maximus, when man follows his natural will, which presupposes life in God, God’s co-operation, and communion, he is truly free. But man also possesses another potential, determined not by his nature, but by each human person, or hypostasis, the freedom of choice, of revolt, of movement against nature, and therefore of self-destruction. This personal freedom was used by Adam and Eve after the Fall in separation from God and from true knowledge ¾ from all the assurance secured by "natural" existence. It implies hesitation, wandering, and suffering; this is the gnomic will (gnomĕ opinion), a function of the hypostatic or personal life, not of nature.

In Christ, human nature is united with the hypostasis of the Logos and while remaining fully itself is liberated from sin, the source of which is the gnomic will. Because it is "en-hypostasized" in Logos Himself, Christ’s humanity is perfect humanity. In the mysterious process, which started with His conception in the Virgin’s womb, Jesus passed through natural growth, ignorance, suffering, and even death — all of experiences of the fallen humanity, which He had come to save, and He fulfilled through the resurrection the ultimate human destiny. Christ could thus be truly the saviour of humanity because in Him there could never be any contradiction between natural will and gnomic will. Through the hypostatic union, His human will, precisely because it always conforms itself to the divine, also performs the "natural movement" of human nature.

The doctrine of "deification" in Maximus is based upon the fundamental patristic presupposition that communion with God does not diminish or destroy humanity but makes it fully human. In Christ the hypostatic union the communication of idioms (perichõresis tõn idiõmatõn). The characteristics of divinity and humanity express themselves "in communion with each other" (Chalcedonian definition), and human actions, "energies," have God Himself as their personal agent. Therefore, it can be said that "God was born," that Mary is the Theotokos, and that the "Logos was crucified" while birth and death remain purely human realities. But it can and must also be said that a man rose from the dead and sits at the right hand of the Father having acquired characteristics, which "naturally" belong to God alone: immortality and glory. Through Christ’s humanity deified according to its hypostatic union with the Logos, all members of the Body of Christ have access to "deification" by grace through the operation of the Spirit in Christ’s Church.

The essential elements of Maximian Christology provided the permanent terminological and philosophical framework for Byzantine thought and spirituality. They were adopted with the Trinitarian doctrine of the great Cappadocian Fathers together in the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith of John of Damascus (first half of the eighth century), which served as a standard doctrinal textbook in Byzantium. They also provided the most authoritative frame of reference in most of the doctrinal controversies, which arose in the East during the Middle Ages.

St. Maximos the Confessor was mutilated for insisting that Christ, having divine and human natures, wills, energies and operations, had no "gnomic will," which is to say that he never made choices based on deliberations since he possessed perfect freedom in his perfect union with God the Father (a condition which is also theoretically possible to "mere human beings" by faith and grace.) The Sixth Ecumenical Council confirmed this doctrine.

The Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, By Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos http://www.orthodoxresearchinstitute.org/articles/fasts_feasts/hierotheos_vlachos_annunciation.htm

Compare these two categories of will employed by Damascus: (1) The “natural will is associated with "wanting”. . .the natural will comprises the perfection of nature.” (2) an “opinionated will” is distinguished by the ignorance of a thing, by the doubt and and wavering in the end incapability of selection. One can see parallels to Augustine’s “knowledge of its goodness” in the converse lack of knowing that the trap of the opinionated will. Vlathos summarizes: “the opinionated will comprises the imperfection of nature, since it presupposes a person who does not have knowledge of the truth, is not certain about what he must decide.” Mary, though fearful did not hesitate to decide, and neither did her son.

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 5/12/2008 12:58:07 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Tom) : 5/14/2008 1:00:55 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited ("I am-in-I Am") : 5/15/2008 7:03:27 AM (GMT-5)

From Daniel Jones (“Synergy in Christ According to Saint Maximus the Confessor” [2005], my italics):

“The natural will presents possible courses of action to the hypostasis that then—in the personal mode of willing—chooses to employ the natural will toward an object that it [the natural will] is directed to. This precludes any form of determinism for a hypostasis, but the tripartite distinction of the will must be maintained: the will as the natural will, the will as the personal mode of willing, and the will as the object of the will. If Christ in Gethsemane and the Saints in the Eschaton are going to have true free-choice, then there must be alternate courses of action that are all equally good, all the while excluding the possibility of sinning.”

“The logoi of God define the type of movement we are to have in Heaven….”

“The movement of the Saints in the Eschaton according to the rational principles is defined by Maximus as an “ever-moving rest.”* This rest is a divine logoi of God’s nature and one of the logoi of man’s motion in Ever-Being: “He [God] rests when each being, having obtained the divine energy in due measure, will determine its own natural energy with respect to God (Maximus).”

"*The phrase “ever-moving rest” implies that “rest” is the fixity of one’s habit and obtaining the goal while the phrase “ever-moving” implies that man does not cease from choice even while fixed upon a certain good. Man therefore still retains the power of self-determination towards any particular good he would wish to enjoy in God."

----------------------

Precisely what I’ve been arguing all along. To be free in Christ—so far as our fulfilled existence in the eschaton is concerned—is to be confirmed (“at rest” or “fixed”) in love so far as our character is concerned but freely creative (“ever-moving”) so far as self-determination and personal expression are concerned. God determines us inasmuch as God “defines the type of movement” we are to have in heaven, but beyond that we determine ourselves within the ever-creative life of love. A truly divine-human free-for-all.

I agree it takes gnomic deliberation regarding good/evil to occasion any evil choice. And inasmuch as this capacity is necessary for us to become what God desires, the gnomic will MUST be viewed as a good and perfect gift from above, no questions asked. Essentially, this risk is a good thing. It ‘became’ warped and spoiled, but that’s not a strike against the gnomic will per se.

For me, the relevant question regarding the gnomic use of the will (and I suppose it’s more academic than anything) is whether we ought to think of the freely determined expression of love on the part of humans as involving any deliberation whatsoever, not with respect to whether good or evil is done, but with respect to the choice of creative expression. Ultimately the question is: Does (or May) creative expression involve deliberation of any kind? And should the answer necessarily be the same for divine vs human personal expression? And then I suppose, what’s the point of the question might be important to ask as well!

Tom