D: "Many divine energies" <=> "ONE whole fullness of divinity in each act" ONE LOVE. MANY EXPRESSIONS.

T: Divine energies. Fullness of deity in each act.
 
One question: Where are we? Where are the non-divine persons acting/doing and creatively expressing? I don't see them anywhere in your account of creation.
 
Oh, we're the "many expressions" of the "divine energies" which are "each a fullness of deity"? That's us in there? Ah, I see.
 
And you're not a monist when it comes to personal existence. Hmmmm. If you say so.

Quoting Fr. Hopko.  How We Speak of God - Part 3; From 34:00 onward

There are three who act...Father, Son, and Holy Spirit...but the activity is one. The action of God is one. There are many divine energies, but in each of those divine energies, you have the wholeness of divine activity in each one. And that's why the Holy Fathers would say...that in any operation and action of God, the whole fulness of divinity is in every single act. And that's why they would say...they use the expression called perichoresis...a kind of indwelling of the activities and graces. What this means in everyday language is this: If you have God's love, it's the love of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It's the love of the One God who is love through his beloved Son by the Holy Spirit by whom he has poured his love in our hearts, as St. Paul said in the letter to the Romans. So it says this action of divine love is one and the same.

In short, God's ONE eternal love perichoretically permeates ALL of God's MANY activities/actions/energies...no matter how infinite or infinitesimal.

(I'm thinking that this goes along with the idea that there is only ONE/SINGULAR DIVINE WILL among the THREE/MANY DIVINE PERSONS of the Godhead.)

Hope this helps, Tom.

Post Edited (Shekinah) : 7/22/2008 6:32:03 AM (GMT-5)

BUT...

To be "pure in heart" is to DIE DAILY...taking up one's cross in utter self-giving unto God for God's World.

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

"If truth is stranger than fiction, as we sometimes say, it may be that we live in a state of estrangement from the truth. Suppose it were all turned around and the fictions by which we lice were suddenly and starkly thrust, as on the Damascus road, into the light of a Truth so splendid we would cringe and hide our wounded eyes from it. Suppose we can only bear one glimpse of the Truth at a time. Then the Truth would be wonderful and terrible, and we would cherish our moments before it and long for more—yet we would be afraid lest we get too much all at once.

But suppose further that the Truth took on the nature of our fictions making—incredible!—our fictions bearers of the Truth. Who could conceive such a thing, even in retrospect? Perhaps only those who have once been partially blinded by the Truth—whether suddenly or gradually—come to the breath-taking realization that the One who sits at table and breaks bread and drinks wine with us is the One through whom and for whom all ten billion light years of creation, including our own come-lately, here and now existence, have their being. To sit at table with Him is more wonderful and terrible than a blinding light since it allows us no fictional existence in which to shroud ourselves, no place to hide from the relentlessly gracious claim that our very existence, fractured and fictionalized as it is, is of infinite worth, potentially a bearer of the very Truth which we fear could so easily crush us under the weight of it’s glory.

But suppose, finally, that this awesome condition in which we may find ourselves has in it a kind of comprehensive intelligibility we had not dared to consider before, a reason about reason, a supra rationem, that is so inclusive of us and the universe that we couldn’t see it unless it were shown to us in a gigantic mirror. If even cosmic chaos has in its hidden order, as we are surprisingly coming to understand, how much more astonishing and compelling is that greater intelligibility which unites all creation—even the turbulence and unpredictable upheavals of natural and human existence—to its creator. Such a union would have to be fully God and fully human. Yet this remains ancient text and obscure doctrine until, in that breathless moment, we see ourselves, the full dimensions of our existence, reflected in the Holy One at the table with us. In the broken bread and wine, He becomes a mirror in whom we see simultaneously the embodied chaos of human existence in a vast and meaningless universe, and the hidden order and sacred destiny which He by His Presence—and not separable from that Presence—in a moment of epiclesis would beget in us. Then—though we could never say how—we see that the fragment could contain the whole, we are captivated by the intelligibility of His nature which we long to embrace, and it draws us to the edge of the abyss of uncreated light, the inner life of God.

But alas—to lay hold on that remarkable intelligibility by which one’s fragmentary existence becomes the bearer of the whole, that intelligibility through which all things have been made---to lay hold on that by faith is to touch the ark of the covenant, it is to hear “the sound of a mighty wind,” as “the roar of the New Jerusalem”,” and it is to die. Who wants to die so that the uncreated light and life of God may indwell human flesh and turn everything we do into the work of God’s Spirit?

Holy in its nature, the life of the Spirit is stunning in its impact; the depths of its mysterious centered silence remains unmoved, intensely personal, even in its rush through the walls of the upper room, its pause to console, its power to disclose and to heal, and its provocation to joy and exuberant praise. This is marvelous and dangerous; ordinary human flesh should not have to consider such alternatives.

If we do die, then all that we saw in Him and in ourselves because of Him as He sat at table with us, now becomes in our death the transformation of ordinary existence. We become in our individual and common life the outer expression of His invisible nature, including the darkness of dereliction as well as the light or the transfiguration—that by which condemnation is condemned, false light is itself falsified, and daily life is a continuing intra-mundane ecstasy. Who will die to bear witness to the inner life of God, to become an expression of this higher order? Not many—or perhaps, in another way, somewhere inside, all of us know we are supposed to die. In moments of deeply centered reflection we know the death instinct is not biological but teleological—we have been given life so as to die for what is so much more important than our own lives. If we just knew a bit more—if we could just put our hand and touch it, to be sure we are not being deceived…”

James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment, pp. 211-213

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No one may "see God" and continue living?

Post Edited (Shekinah) : 7/22/2008 8:36:34 AM (GMT-5)

Self-similarity in the finite...that points to Infinitude?

How about this thought? Think of the picture above.

If each of us represented a "branch"...WHO would be the MAIN "VINE" that all the "branches" get life and purpose from?

Interesting...

Post Edited (Shekinah) : 7/22/2008 8:42:53 AM (GMT-5)

Hopko: There are three who act...Father, Son, and Holy Spirit...but the activity is one. The action of God is one. There are many divine energies, but in each of those divine energies, you have the wholeness of divine activity in each one. And that's why the Holy Fathers would say...that in any operation and action of God, the whole fullness of divinity is in every single act. And that's why they would say...they use the expression called perichoresis...a kind of indwelling of the activities and graces. What this means in everyday language is this: If you have God's love, it's the love of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It's the love of the One God who is love through his beloved Son by the Holy Spirit by whom he has poured his love in our hearts, as St. Paul said in the letter to the Romans. So it says this action of divine love is one and the same.

Tom: I don’t have any problems with this. But it says nothing in itself about the nature of the relationship of God’s activities to created, non-divine persons.

Now, watch what D does with this…

D: In short, God's ONE eternal love perichoretically permeates ALL of God's MANY activities/actions/energies...no matter how infinite or infinitesimal.

Tom: But an ‘activity’ belongs to the one ‘determining’ that activity. And if we’re left free by God to determine ourselves in creative expression, then those expressions are, personally speaking, ‘ours’; actions which God perceives as the determinations of personal others with whom he is in relationship. God’s love may permeate us, as created entities, in a sustaining sense, yes, but that doesn’t justify identifying actions determined by wills other than God’s will “as God’s actions.”

Thanks for summarizing it for me too, D. Sorry I don’t have time (now or for the next few months) to chase it down or listen to it. Life is what it is. I’ve got work to do here and PhD stuff that takes every other spare minute I have. I have this site I come to so that I can stay connect to you all; that's it.

D: I'm thinking that this goes along with the idea that there is only ONE/SINGULAR DIVINE WILL among the THREE/MANY DIVINE PERSONS of the Godhead.

Tom: No doubt that’s what he has in mind. But created persons have wills of their own the determination of which is left, as a matter of divine will, to the persons in possession of those wills. So all is not one singular will. It may be so for the Trinity, but it is not so for the Trinity’s relations with us.

POW: The fullness of God is totally in even the 'smallest' action of God.

Tom: Nobody’s disputing that. The question is, Are all ‘actions’ that obtain in the world ‘God’s actions’. I say it can’t be the case if God has decided that it not be the case. And he’s obviously decided that it not be the case by making us self-determining agents who ‘create’ our own actions. This leads back to my objection that D’s summary of all reality (following Hopko? I don’t know) reduces everything down to being an ‘act of God’. The question isn’t, Do F, S, and SP equally share in all that God does? Of course that’s true. The question is, does God do everything that’s done in the world? I say no. Our choices don’t reduce down to being an ‘act of God’. They reduce to the persons who determine those actions—us.

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 7/22/2008 10:27:49 AM (GMT-5)

Issues pertaining to human will that are really issues in one of the four 'namings' do not really present problems in another. (e.g., similie) That's why you sometimes talk past eachother.

It would help your conversation with D. if you'd listen.

D: Non-Jesus human beings only have ONE NON-DIVINE PERSON...with one human will that can perform the SAME perichoretic movement with the Divine Will (via the Holy Spirit) that Jesus' human will did.

T: This may be the WHOLE of our disagreement. Because the only way I see to explain the emergence of non-divine, creaturely personhood in our case (something that did NOT emerge in Christ's case) is for the human will to be 'let go' and given space to determine itself apart from the divine will, something I don't think occurs within Christ. If we DO say the human will in Christ was permitted and given space to develop and exercise itself freely throughout Jesus’ career in responsible ways the define personal becoming, then no doubt there WOULD have developed in Christ just what we call a 'person' standing in interpersonal relationship TO the Logos. But that doesn't occur in Christ, although it does occur in us. THUS...the perichoretic movement of divine and human wills in us does NOT strictly parallel the movement of the divine and human wills in Christ. If it did, we could NOT become the ‘persons’ we become who relate to the divine as a personal ‘other’ (which state of affairs DOES not follow from the way in which the divine and human wills relate in Christ). The ONLY thing to account for the emergence of created, non-divine, personhood in us is a difference in the structure and movement of the divine and human wills. This is why that structure as instantiated in Christ is NOT ‘the’ model for exactly how the divine and human in us relate to one another.

Sorry -- very sorry -- to make you feel bad. Forgive me.

Yes, I know you listen to D; but I meant to the programs (which you don't.)

Consequently you didn't "listen" to what was really being said, but simply said "I get that" without getting it.

But you do get an A+ for carefully trying to listen, without the podcasts.

Sorry, bro.

Post Edited (Shekinah) : 7/22/2008 4:49:53 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Shekinah) : 7/22/2008 5:01:47 PM (GMT-5)