quote:

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BYZANTINE THE0LOGY:
HISTORICAL TRENDS AND DOCTRINAL THEMES
by John Meyendorff
13--The Holy Spirit,
and 14--The Triune God



By accepting Nicaea, the Cappadocian Fathers eliminated the ontological subordinationism of Origen and Arius, but they preserved indeed, together with their understanding of hypostatic life, a Biblical and Orthodox sub­ordinationism, maintaining the personal identity of the Father as the ulti­mate origin of all divine being and action: "The three [are] one God when contemplated together; each [is] God because [they are] consub­stantial; the three [are] one God because of the monarchy [of the Fa­ther]." Developing his well-known doctrine of the divine image in man, Gregory of Nyssa defines one aspect of human personal existence which is clearly different from that of God: each human person possesses the power of reproducing himself, while, in God, there is only "one and the same Person of the Father from whom the Son is born and the Spirit proceeds," Thus, the human race is in a constant process of fragmentation, and can recover its unity only through adoption by the Father in Christ-i.e., by becoming children of the one single hypostasis which generates without fragmenting, or multiplying. The origin of unity in the Trinity, the Father restores the unity of creation by adopting humanity in His Son, the New Adam, in whom humanity is "recapitulated" through the activity of the Spirit.

Not an abstract intellectual speculation, the doctrine of the Trinity stands at the very center of Byzantine religious experience: the immanent Trinity manifests itself as the "economic" Trinity, i.e., the saving revelation of God in history. This is made particularly clear in the liturgy, especially in the Eucharistic canon. As a solemn prayer to the Father by the adopted human community, united in the incarnate Son and invoking the Spirit, the Eucharist is indeed the sacrament of divine unity being bestowed upon men. The same Trinitarian reality is expressed in innumerable hymns, scattered throughout the Byzantine liturgical cycles. Here is a solemn hymn of Pentecost, attributed to the emperor-poet Leo vi (886-912), and con­stituting a variation on the famous Trisagion:

Come, 0 peoples, let us venerate the tri-hypostatic Deity,
The Son in the Father, with the Holy Spirit.
For before time the Father generated a Son, sharing His eternity and His Throne;
And the Holy Spirit was in the Father, glorified together with the Son. One Power, One Essence, One Deity, whom we all venerate and say:
Holy God, who created all things through the Son, with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit;
Holy Mighty, through whom we knew the Father and the Holy Spirit
dwelt in the world;
Holy Immortal, the Spirit Comforter, who proceeds from the Father and
abides in the Son, Holy Trinity, glory to Thee.

In the classical Latin Trinitarian doctrine, "Father, Son, and Spirit are only 'relatively' distinct." Whatever the interpretation given to the idea of "relation" implied in this statement, it is clear that Western thought recognized the ontological primacy of essential unity over personal diversity in God; that is, that God is essentially one, except in the divine Persons, who are denned in terms of relations. In Byzantine thought, however-to use an expression from Maximus the Confessor-"God is identically monad and triad," and there is probably a tendency in both worship and philo­sophical formulations (as distinct from doctrinal statements) to give a certain pre-eminence to the personal diversity over essential unity. A refer­ence to the Nicaean "consubstantial" was the Byzantine response to the accusation of "tritheism."

This reference, however, could not be decisive in itself, simply because Greek patristic thought, and particularly that of the Cappadocians, always presupposed the starting point of apophatic theology: that God's being and, consequently, the ultimate meaning of hypostatic relations were understood to be totally above comprehension, definition, or argument. The very no­tion of God's being both Unity and Trinity was a revelation illustrating this incomprehensibility; for no reality, accessible to the mind, could be both "one" and "three." As Vladimir Lossky puts it: "the Incomprehensible reveals Himself in the very fact of His being incomprehensible, for His incomprehensibility is rooted in the fact that God is not only Nature but also Three Persons."

The knowledge of God is therefore possible only inasmuch as He re­veals Himself, inasmuch as the immanent Trinity manifests itself in the "economy" of salvation, inasmuch as the transcendent acts on the immanent level. It is in the fundamental oneness of these "acts" or "energies" of God that the Greek Fathers, particularly Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, discover the decisive and existential sign of the unity of God's essence. Basil's well-known argument in favor of the divinity of the Spirit is that He has the same "energy" as the Father and the Son. Similarly, Gregory of Nyssa proves the essential unity of Father, Son, and Spirit from the unity of their operation. This argument also fits into the context of the Cap­padocians' polemics against Eunomius, who affirmed the possibility of knowing God's essence; no knowledge concerning God, they asserted, was possible, except from His "energies." The "economic" Trinity, re­vealed in God's action in the world, is, therefore, the only possible basis for affirming that God is indeed, paradoxically and incomprehensibly, a transcendent and immanent Trinity. Gregory of Nyssa's doctrine of the "energies" is well described by G. L. Prestige:

In men . . . , in spite of the solidarity of the whole race, each individual acts separately, so that it is proper to regard them as many. This is not so . . . with God. The Father never acts independently of the Son, nor the Son of the Spirit. Divine action . . . always begins from the Father, pro­ceeds through the Son, and is completed in the Holy Spirit; there is no such thing as a separate individual operation of any Person; the energy invariably passes through the three, though the effect is not three actions but one.

==========================


AND IT "MATTERS" HERE:


==========================



'"The Palamite formulations of the fourteenth century were preceded by theological developments which dealt with the same triple distinction. In 1156 and 1157, two local councils held in Constantinople debated the prob­lem whether the sacrifice of Christ, in both its historical and its Eucharisdc dimensions, was offered to the Father alone, or to the Holy Trinity. Soteri-chos, a theologian, was condemned because he held that the acts of offering and of receiving constituted the hypostatic characteristics of the Son and the Father respectively, an opinion the councils considered to be a confusion between the "immanent" and the "economic" Trinity, or between the hypo-static characteristics and "energies." And, indeed, the Byzantine liturgies of Basil and of John Chrysostom include, at the offertory, a prayer addressed to Christ: "For it is you who offer and are offered, who receive and are yourself received." The mystery of the hypostatic life, as it is revealed in the Incarnation and in the act of redemption, is also expressed in a Byzan­tine Easter troparion (repeated by the priest during the offertory, at the Eucharist): "0 Christ undescribable! You filled all things: bodily in the grave, in Hades with your soul as God, in Paradise with the thief; you also sat on the divine throne with the Father and the Spirit."

Therefore, even if the Father alone is the addressee of the Eucharistic prayer, the act of "receiving" the sacrifice is a Trinitarian act, as are all the divine acts ad extra. The mystery of the Incarnation, however, consists in the fact that the divine hypostasis of the Logos assumed also the role of offering, bringing humanity with itself to the throne of the Father. The Eucharistic sacrifice is precisely this offering, accomplished in the body of Christ, where human nature is penetrated with divine energy, assumed as it is by the hypostasis of the Logos.

The hypostatic, personal existence implies an "openness," which makes it possible for the incarnate Logos to "offer" and to "receive," to be man and God, and to remain, with the Father and the Spirit, the "actor" of the "energies" characterizing divine nature.

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quote:

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Originally posted by echo

This quote is for Tom when he gets back to the Trinity, and the immanent and economic terms.

(I get tricked because it is the "essential" versus the "immanent" that I want to distinguish. Meyendorff qualifies that we only know the immanent from what is revealed in the economy--so I suppose that you might say that the economy is the event that make the immanent evident; while the essential is still unknown. And as Tom insists, nothing in the economy can contradict the immanent Trinity.)

HERE IS SOMETHING FOR YOU, TOM.

FOR LATER!

quote:

---

BYZANTINE THE0LOGY:
HISTORICAL TRENDS AND DOCTRINAL THEMES
by John Meyendorff
13--The Holy Spirit,
and 14--The Triune God



By accepting Nicaea, the Cappadocian Fathers eliminated the ontological subordinationism of Origen and Arius, but they preserved indeed, together with their understanding of hypostatic life, a Biblical and Orthodox sub­ordinationism, maintaining the personal identity of the Father as the ulti­mate origin of all divine being and action: "The three [are] one God when contemplated together; each [is] God because [they are] consub­stantial; the three [are] one God because of the monarchy [of the Fa­ther]." Developing his well-known doctrine of the divine image in man, Gregory of Nyssa defines one aspect of human personal existence which is clearly different from that of God: each human person possesses the power of reproducing himself, while, in God, there is only "one and the same Person of the Father from whom the Son is born and the Spirit proceeds," Thus, the human race is in a constant process of fragmentation, and can recover its unity only through adoption by the Father in Christ-i.e., by becoming children of the one single hypostasis which generates without fragmenting, or multiplying. The origin of unity in the Trinity, the Father restores the unity of creation by adopting humanity in His Son, the New Adam, in whom humanity is "recapitulated" through the activity of the Spirit.

Not an abstract intellectual speculation, the doctrine of the Trinity stands at the very center of Byzantine religious experience: the immanent Trinity manifests itself as the "economic" Trinity, i.e., the saving revelation of God in history. This is made particularly clear in the liturgy, especially in the Eucharistic canon. As a solemn prayer to the Father by the adopted human community, united in the incarnate Son and invoking the Spirit, the Eucharist is indeed the sacrament of divine unity being bestowed upon men. The same Trinitarian reality is expressed in innumerable hymns, scattered throughout the Byzantine liturgical cycles. Here is a solemn hymn of Pentecost, attributed to the emperor-poet Leo vi (886-912), and con­stituting a variation on the famous Trisagion:

Come, 0 peoples, let us venerate the tri-hypostatic Deity,
The Son in the Father, with the Holy Spirit.
For before time the Father generated a Son, sharing His eternity and His Throne;
And the Holy Spirit was in the Father, glorified together with the Son. One Power, One Essence, One Deity, whom we all venerate and say:
Holy God, who created all things through the Son, with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit;
Holy Mighty, through whom we knew the Father and the Holy Spirit
dwelt in the world;
Holy Immortal, the Spirit Comforter, who proceeds from the Father and
abides in the Son, Holy Trinity, glory to Thee.

In the classical Latin Trinitarian doctrine, "Father, Son, and Spirit are only 'relatively' distinct." Whatever the interpretation given to the idea of "relation" implied in this statement, it is clear that Western thought recognized the ontological primacy of essential unity over personal diversity in God; that is, that God is essentially one, except in the divine Persons, who are denned in terms of relations. In Byzantine thought, however-to use an expression from Maximus the Confessor-"God is identically monad and triad," and there is probably a tendency in both worship and philo­sophical formulations (as distinct from doctrinal statements) to give a certain pre-eminence to the personal diversity over essential unity. A refer­ence to the Nicaean "consubstantial" was the Byzantine response to the accusation of "tritheism."

This reference, however, could not be decisive in itself, simply because Greek patristic thought, and particularly that of the Cappadocians, always presupposed the starting point of apophatic theology: that God's being and, consequently, the ultimate meaning of hypostatic relations were understood to be totally above comprehension, definition, or argument. The very no­tion of God's being both Unity and Trinity was a revelation illustrating this incomprehensibility; for no reality, accessible to the mind, could be both "one" and "three." As Vladimir Lossky puts it: "the Incomprehensible reveals Himself in the very fact of His being incomprehensible, for His incomprehensibility is rooted in the fact that God is not only Nature but also Three Persons."

The knowledge of God is therefore possible only inasmuch as He re­veals Himself, inasmuch as the immanent Trinity manifests itself in the "economy" of salvation, inasmuch as the transcendent acts on the immanent level. It is in the fundamental oneness of these "acts" or "energies" of God that the Greek Fathers, particularly Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, discover the decisive and existential sign of the unity of God's essence. Basil's well-known argument in favor of the divinity of the Spirit is that He has the same "energy" as the Father and the Son. Similarly, Gregory of Nyssa proves the essential unity of Father, Son, and Spirit from the unity of their operation. This argument also fits into the context of the Cap­padocians' polemics against Eunomius, who affirmed the possibility of knowing God's essence; no knowledge concerning God, they asserted, was possible, except from His "energies." The "economic" Trinity, re­vealed in God's action in the world, is, therefore, the only possible basis for affirming that God is indeed, paradoxically and incomprehensibly, a transcendent and immanent Trinity. Gregory of Nyssa's doctrine of the "energies" is well described by G. L. Prestige:

In men . . . , in spite of the solidarity of the whole race, each individual acts separately, so that it is proper to regard them as many. This is not so . . . with God. The Father never acts independently of the Son, nor the Son of the Spirit. Divine action . . . always begins from the Father, pro­ceeds through the Son, and is completed in the Holy Spirit; there is no such thing as a separate individual operation of any Person; the energy invariably passes through the three, though the effect is not three actions but one.

==========================


AND IT "MATTERS" HERE:


==========================



'"The Palamite formulations of the fourteenth century were preceded by theological developments which dealt with the same triple distinction. In 1156 and 1157, two local councils held in Constantinople debated the prob­lem whether the sacrifice of Christ, in both its historical and its Eucharisdc dimensions, was offered to the Father alone, or to the Holy Trinity. Soteri-chos, a theologian, was condemned because he held that the acts of offering and of receiving constituted the hypostatic characteristics of the Son and the Father respectively, an opinion the councils considered to be a confusion between the "immanent" and the "economic" Trinity, or between the hypo-static characteristics and "energies." And, indeed, the Byzantine liturgies of Basil and of John Chrysostom include, at the offertory, a prayer addressed to Christ: "For it is you who offer and are offered, who receive and are yourself received." The mystery of the hypostatic life, as it is revealed in the Incarnation and in the act of redemption, is also expressed in a Byzan­tine Easter troparion (repeated by the priest during the offertory, at the Eucharist): "0 Christ undescribable! You filled all things: bodily in the grave, in Hades with your soul as God, in Paradise with the thief; you also sat on the divine throne with the Father and the Spirit."

Therefore, even if the Father alone is the addressee of the Eucharistic prayer, the act of "receiving" the sacrifice is a Trinitarian act, as are all the divine acts ad extra. The mystery of the Incarnation, however, consists in the fact that the divine hypostasis of the Logos assumed also the role of offering, bringing humanity with itself to the throne of the Father. The Eucharistic sacrifice is precisely this offering, accomplished in the body of Christ, where human nature is penetrated with divine energy, assumed as it is by the hypostasis of the Logos.

The hypostatic, personal existence implies an "openness," which makes it possible for the incarnate Logos to "offer" and to "receive," to be man and God, and to remain, with the Father and the Spirit, the "actor" of the "energies" characterizing divine nature.

===================

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quote:

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Originally posted by TGB

Let's see:

Selah posts "Women" and I think of Animal's grunt "Woman, Woman, Woman."

Somebody posts "Boyd's creatio ex mente dei" and I think "Boyd's excrement day."

Somebody posts "Tom's Trinity Tuck-away" and I think of a three-fold treatment for hemorrhoids.

I am one sick cookie.

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quote:

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Originally posted by TGB

Doc is the guy top center way in the back with the party hat on.

I'm being manhandled by ? Who are the two guys? Who's the cute blonde?

SPRINGS!

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quote:

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Originally posted by TGB

PoW: Looking through Zizioulas' second chapter I see something relevant to why Rahner's "immanent IS economic" should be taken as a simile. It has to do with these two things: participation and communion. With repset to those two what God does and what we do is not symetical with what God does. WE can participate in the communion of the Trinity, but God does not participate in us. God has communion with us and with God. (I lost which page--sorry.)

Thinking about that it occurs to me that while economic and immanent are similar--worthy of a simile--WE participate in the economy and not the immanent trinity.

I feel like I'm messing this up a bit. But I hope this is a clue to why the distinction will never evaporate. With respect to "within God" immanent and economic are "IS." But with respect to us, they are different aspect of the same thing.

Tom: I didn’t understand a single word of what you said. Not a word.

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