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TGB

PoW-

I gotta know your take on this one. Please give me the low down (no pun intended):

1. Is there a distinction between a person's "essence" and "energies" (attributes, acts, etc.)?

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i. The power of love

The distinction of the sexes has its foundation in the nature, but it is not identical with the nature, just as it is not to be identified even with the hypostasis of man. It is one of the energies of the nature about which we have spoken above, one of the ways in which the existential reality of the nature operates, the unique, distinct and unrepeatable character of every specific human hypostasis. The science of psychology today assures us that the erotic urge does not appear in man simply at the age when it is needed to serve the propagation of the species. But from the first moment of his birth, the erotic impulse toward the mother constitutes the first possibility of a vital relationship– a possibility which makes up the personality itself of man and the beginning of his entry into the world of people, into the area of life as communion.

Without the distinction of the sexes and the erotic impulse which accompanies it, the fact of relationship, of communion, of love, of eros, would perhaps be defined at the level of behaviour, of communication, of a simple psychological bond. Thanks to the distinction of the sexes, eros is an impulse and presupposition of life, the fundamental presupposition for the realization and manifestation of the personal hypostasis of life. The personal hypostasis of man, even in its biological origin, is a fruit of the eros of two other people. But the composition itself and manifestation of the personhood of the subject is a result of the possibility of relationship, of communion, of erotic reference. The relationship of the infant with its mother is erotic, not of course because it intends the perpetuation of the species, but because it is a relationship constitutive of life. The mother transmits life to the baby, not metaphorically and symbolically, but literally and really: She gives it the nourishment which is a presupposition of life, and with it the caress, the affection, the first words which are addressed to it; that is, she gives it the first possibility of relationship, the feeling of a personal presence without which the baby can never enter the world of people, the world of language and of symbols, of existential identity and names.

The connection of sexual distinction with the creation of man "in the image of God" is not, then, by chance or simply metaphorical or by analogy. Man is the image of God since he is a person, a personal existence. But the person differs from the biological individual, precisely since his existence itself is not naturally given, but is realized as an event of erotic relationship and communion. The distinction of the sexes permits man to give a physical hypostasis (an hypostasis of nature) to his personal existence– permits the personal reference to be effected as an event constitutive of the hypostasis and unifying for the nature of man.

Therefore it is not chance either that God's relationship with man (the principal relationship constitutive of life as a personal hypostasis) is always portrayed by the erotic relationship of a man and woman. When Israel is unfaithful to God and worships idols, the prophets charge that he is committing adultery Uer 13.27), dishonoring the uniqueness of the relationship by which God had elevated him to the place of the "beloved" (Hos 2.23; Rm 9.25). The relationship of God with his people, with each member of his people, is a nuptial secret, erotic, and this is the only reason, for the ecclesial interpretation at least, that a clearly erotic song, the Song of Songs, takes a place among the books of the Old Testament.

But the erotic relationship of God with Israel is only an image and copy of the union which God has realized with humanity in the Person of Christ and by means of his body which is the Church. This is the "great mystery" which the Apostle Paul describes in his Letter to the Ephesians (5.23-33) and which the parables of the Gospels portray with scenes taken from wedding dinners and banquets. In the New Testament, Christ is the bridegroom of the Church and the bridegroom of the soul of each one of us– God is passionately in love with the person of each human. And especially in the Gospel of John, eternal life which Christ comes to give us is defined by the verb "to know", which always renders the Hebrew word which means, in biblical language, the erotic relationship of a man and a woman: "Eternal life is this, to know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" Un 17.3).

In the patristic tradition, God himself in his internal triadic life will be defined as "the whole of eros", the falness of continuous erotic unity: "This eros is love, and it is written, that God is love". And this eros is ecstatic, "stimulating the erotic inclination of God' I which founds and constitutes the beings "outside him": "He, the cause of the universe . . . through the superabundance of his erotic goodness . . . is outside of himself ... and it is as if he feels fascinated by ... love and eros; and he descends from the condition of preeminence before the universe and of separation from the universe." The only way for man to describe the experience of receiving this eros and his response to it is again the relationship of man and woman: "Love for you has come upon me as the love of women." In the ascetical literature, the copy of the love of God for man and of man for God likewise is to be sought in the forms of human eros and especially of bodily love, not of the idealistic forms of platonic nostalgia: "Let bodily love be an example for you of the desire for God". "The most passionate lover of his own beloved does not desire, as God desires the soul he desires to repent. "Blessed is the one who has acquired such desire for God, as that which the passionate lover has for his beloved.

If love as we usually know it expresses more a blind and instinctive impulse for selfish pleasure and not the liberation of the person from the necessities and demands of nature (given that life is supposed to be accomplished as a loving coinherence of two persons), this is because we know love in its fallen condition, we know it as sin, that is, as an existential failure and loss of its purpose and goal. But even in the condition of the fall and of sin, love makes possible the natural union of two different hypostases and the formation of new personal hypostases, because something is preserved from the power to love which has been imprinted on our nature as an image of God. It is the power of love which makes possible the union not only of different hypostases, but also of different natures, and shows man to be "a participant in the divine nature , the whole man to be "co-inhering totally with the whole God and becoming all that God is, except for the identity of essence" The writer of the Areopagitic texts sees an "obscure echo" of this power to love even in the dissolute who "desires the worst life in accord with an unreasonable lust". And St Maximus Confessor recognizes even in the erotic attraction of animals without reason, as in the attractive power which forms the "common alleluia" of the whole creation, a single erotic impulse and movement turning back to the single form of divine life.

All this means that for ecclesial anthropology, the distinction of the sexes neither serves simply the physical expedient of perpetuation of the species, nor only an extension of social roles an extension which permits the creation of the "cell" of social life which is the family. Before anything else, the distinction of the sexes in man and the erotic attraction of heterosexual existences leads the general erotic impulse placed in the nature to its "natural" end and purpose: It serves the imaging in nature of the triadic mode of life– the personal coinherence of life within the limits of created nature. It intends finally the deifying union of man with God.

If man refuses this goal and purpose, love is perverted into an eneluctable suffering of the nature: The nature suffers love, endures it as a tormenting and always unfulfilled desire for existential completion and a relentless expedient for perpetuation of the species. Sin is precisely the failure of love to realize the goal which it has in view, which is the union of man with God. Love is transformed into an everlasting repetition of the tragedy of the Danaids, into an insatiable impulse for the satisfaction of nature, hedonism and pleasure of individual senses. It is no longer an event of communion and loving relationship, but a subordination of the other to subjective demand and the need for sensual pleasure.

Only when the love which is directed to the person of the other sex leads to the loving transcendence of physical individuality (which means: for man to go beyond his individuality, his private desires, needs and demands, to cease to aim at individual survival and to begin to live forJoy of the other, from love for the other), only then is the way freed for man's response to the erotic call of God and for love to become a way of life and a gift of life. Therefore the love of Christ for the Church, to the point of the cross (Eph 5.23-33), is also an xample of conjugal eros, the willing mortification of physical individuality if life is to be realized only as love and self-offering. First Christ incarnates the example of "real love" and makes possible our own erotic reference to his Person: "He first loved us," says Photius the Great, "while we were enemies and hostile. And he not only loved, but he was also dishonoured on our behalf and was smitten and crucified and counted among the dead; and through all these things he presented his love for us".

Within the Church, which is the place of the Kingdom of God– the place where the triadic way of "real life" is realized– "there is neither male nor female" (Gal 3.28).

Within the Church we exist in the manner in which we will exist even after the death of our physical individuality: Not with the powers and abilities of our nature, its psychosomatic energies, but thanks to the love of God "who calls into existence the things that do not exist" (Rom 4.17)– thanks to his own erotic call which constitutes our existence as an event of communion with Him.

This does not mean that our nature is taken away within the space of the Kingdom. It means that the way by which our nature is hypostasized (becomes an hypostasis) is transformed. Nature does not become any longer an hypostasis (a particular living existence) thanks to its own functions and energies, but thanks to the call of God's love. Therefore we no longer have any need to pass by way of the natural possibility of the distinction of the sexes in order to realize our natural existence as an hypostasis of life, that is, of love and communion.

The gospel word wishes to mark this reality when it affirms that in the area of "real life" sexuality is abolished, the distinction of the sexes is abolished: "The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage; for they cannot die any more, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection" (Lk 20.34-36, RSV).

The resurrection which abolishes the marital relationship, as it also abolishes death, is a resurrection "from the dead". It presupposes the death of the autonomous physical mode for the composition of our hypostasis, the willing or unwilling death of the individual who draws his existence from the strengths and energies of his nature. It is necessary that a death interpose in order that "what is mortal may be swallowed up by life" (2 Cor 5.4, RSV). The monastics of the Church willingly brave this death. They refuse marriage, the natural way for the erotic self-transcendence of individuality and attempt the leap to hypostasize eros and the body in the mod, of the Kingdom, to exist only by obedience and spiritual exercise, only by self-renunciation from nature, to draw existence and life only from the call of love which God addresses to man.

Accordingly, the monastics of the Church are the pioneers and the first-fruits of the Kingdom– the Kingdom which is being brought to birth secretly within the bosom of the Church. We others, the majority, have need of a "helper" (Gen 2.18) of the other sex in order to arrive, with the example of Christ's cross, at the death and resurrection which the monastics attain with a leap. And both roads– both the monastic and the married– are equally revered and considered worthy within the Church, since the goal of them both is the same: Life free from space, time, corruption and death.

http://www.jbburnett.com/yannaras/yannaras-man.html

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