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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

"Poetic" is good. Seeming contraditions make points energetically.

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Originally posted by sometimesisquint

...this struck me as more than a bit odd.

Even poetic or flowery language is accountable to truth and logic. Simply making something pretty does nothing for its intrinsic value.

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The Inconceivable is conceived in the womb of a Virgin
[writes Theodore the Studite];
the Unmeasurable becomes three cubits high,
the Unqualifi-able acquires a quality;
the Undefinable stands up, sits down, and lies down;
He who is everywhere is put into a crib;
He who is above time gradually reaches the age of twelve;
He who is formless appears with the shape of a man,
and the Incorporeal enters into a body...
Therefore, He is describable and indescribable.

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The Origins of Monastic Thought: Evagrius and Macarius.

The role of Evagrius Ponticus († 399) in the shaping of early monastic spirituality was recognized by historians early in this century. The authentic text of his Gnostic Centuries with their quite heretical Christology explains his condemnation by the Council of 553. Seen as an expression of his metaphysical system — a developed Origenism, Evagrius’ spiritual doctrine itself becomes somehow suspect. But in the Byzantine tradition taken as a whole, it will be used for centuries out of its original and heretical context; and its extraordinary psychological relevance will be exploited fully. We will mention here two major aspects of Evagrian thought because of their permanence in later tradition: the doctrine of the passions and the doctrine of prayer.

According to Evagrius, the true nature of the "mind" is to be fixed in God, and anything, which detaches it from God, is evil. Thus since the Fall, the human mind is captured with self-love, which generates "thoughts;" "thoughts," a definitely pejorative term in Evagrius, imply interest in sensible things and distraction from God. Acting upon the passible part of the soul, they can lead it to passions. These passions form a very definite hierarchy beginning with the casual attachment to the most inevitable of all human sensible needs, such as food, and ending with demonic possession, with love for oneself. The eight steps, which constitute this hierarchy are: gluttony, fornication, avarice, grief, wrath, weariness, vainglory, and pride.1 With very slight variations, this classification of the passions and the psychological structure of the human mind, which it presupposes, are retained by John Cassian, John Climacus, Maximus the Confessor, and almost all the Eastern ascetical writers. The first goal of monastic "practice" is to subdue the passions and reach a state of "passionlessness" — a detachment from senses and "thoughts," which makes a restoration of the true original relationship between the mind and God possible. Beginning with the elementary monastic virtues, fasting and celibacy, the life of the monk can gradually subdue the other passions and reach true detachment.

Union then becomes possible through prayer. It was Evagrius who first coined the term "prayer of the mind," which became standard in Byzantine hesychasm. Prayer is "the proper activity of the mind,"2 "an impassible state,"3 the "highest possible intellection."4 In this "state" of prayer, the mind is totally liberated from every "multiplicity;" it is "deaf and dumb" to every perception of the senses.5 According to Evagrius, as we know now, prayer also means that the mind is in an "essential union" with the deity; thus, Evagrian monks of the sixth century could boast that they were "equal to Christ." But Evagrius’ teaching on prayer will be understood in a much more orthodox way by generations of Byzantine monks, and the credit for this reinterpretation of Evagrian spirituality belongs in a large degree to the writings attributed to Macarius of Egypt.

Macarius of Egypt was a contemporary and teacher of Evagrius’ in the desert of Scete. Fifty Homilies and several other writings of an unknown author of the early-fifth century had been attributed to Macarius, who, it is now certain, was never a writer. The influence of this anonymous writer, conventionally called "Macarius," was enormous.

While Evagrius identifies man with the "intellect" and conceives Christian spirituality as a dematerialization, Macarius understands man as a psychosomatic in whole, destined to "deification." To the Origenistic and Platonic anthropology of Evagrius, he opposes a Biblical idea of man, which makes it inconceivable for the "mind" or the "soul" to have its final destiny in separation from the body. From this, anthropology follows a spirituality based upon the reality of Baptism and the Eucharist as ways of union with Christ and of "deification" of the entire human existence in all its aspects including the corporeal. "The fire, which lives inside, in the heart, appears then [on the last day] openly and realizes the resurrection of the bodies."6

In Macarius, the Evagrian "prayer of the mind" thus becomes the "prayer of the heart;" the centre of man’s psychosomatic life, the heart, is the "table where the grace of God engraves the laws of the Spirit;"7 but it also can be a "sepulchre" where "the prince of evil and his angels find refuge."8 The human heart is thus the battlefield between God and Satan, life and death. And the monk devoting his entire existence to prayer chooses, in fact, to be at the forefront of this battle in a direct and conscious way, for the presence of God is a real fact, which the "inner man" perceives "as an experience and with assurance."9 In Macarius, just as in some books of the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms, the role played by the heart is undeniably connected with a physiology, which sees in this particular organ the centre of the psychosomatic life of man. This means in practice that whenever the "heart" is mentioned the author simply means man’s inner personality, the "I" at its very depth. In any case, the "heart" never designates the emotional side of man alone as it sometimes is in the West.

The notion of the coexistence of God and Satan in the heart of man and the call for a conscious experience of grace have led some modern historians to identify the Homilies of Macarius with the writings of a Messalian leader. If this accusation is true, it would involve Macarius as well as much of the later monastic spirituality of Byzantium where Macarius enjoyed unquestionable authority and where his ideas, especially the notion of the conscious experience of God, remained dominant. But the exact definition of what Messalianism really means and the absence in Macarius of some basic Messalian positions — such as anti-sacramentalism — make the hypothesis highly improbable. Even if the unknown author of the Macarian Homilies belonged to a tradition, which eventually bifurcated between sectarian and orthodox spirituality, his anthropology and his concept of human destiny were certainly closer to the New Testament than was that of the Evagrian Origenists; and his influence acting as a Biblical counterpart contributed indirectly to salvaging for posterity the tradition of pure prayer, which, in Evagrius, had a rather dubious context.

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Grace hides its presence in the baptized, waiting for the initiative of the soul; but when the whole man turns toward the Lord, grace reveals its presence to the heart through an ineffable experience... And if man begins his progress by keeping the commandments and ceaselessly invoking the Lord Jesus, then the fire of holy grace penetrates even the external senses of the heart…

(John Climacus, The Ladder of Paradise, Degree 28)

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Originally posted by Sahid

Maybe it's just a personal preference ... nicer sounding

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Originally posted by Sahid

My answers to 1, 2, and 3 are the same. John 3:16 and John 4:13,14. It's strange that you gave me that homework seeing as how it has nothing to do with impassible suffering.

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1. What are some verses having to do with... gaining freedom from the bondage of sin?
2. What are some verses having to do with... surrendering to Christ's lordship?
3. What are some verses having to do with... being transformed inwardly and outwardly?

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Originally posted by Sahid

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Correspondence
First Things 137 (November 2003): 2-10.
Timothy George replies:

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. . . First, let me say that I do not believe that all traditions are created equal.

But what about impassibility? Again, confusion arises from a failure to see how this term has functioned in the history of theology. True enough, the language of impassibility is deeply embedded in patristic theology going back to Ignatius of Antioch. But, as G. L. Prestige has shown, apatheia as a divine attribute was understood by the early fathers to undergird God’s indefectible stability (Barth uses the word “constancy”) and perfect moral freedom. “It is clear that impassibility means not that God is inactive or uninterested, not that he surveys existence with Epicurean impassivity from the shelter of a metaphysical insulation, but that His will is determined from within instead of being swayed from without.” Understood in this sense, divine impassibility is no barrier to God’s self-giving love, but rather a guarantee that the God of the Bible is not like the fallible, mutable, passion-driven deities of the ancient world. Thus the Alexandrian school of Christology could say, in the language of paradox, “he suffered impassibly,” and Gregory of Nazian-zus, long before Luther, could speak of “a God hanging on a cross.” As Geoffrey Wainwright has noted, “Modern theologians with deistic or unitarian tendencies will obviously be unhappy” with such language, but it is the language of both Catholic liturgy and evangelical piety (“And can it be that thou my God shouldst die for me?”—Charles Wesley).

Now apatheia is not a biblical word and it may well be that, given the meaning this term has assumed in a post-Cartesian world, we should no longer apply it to God. But that is a different move than the radical revisioning of the doctrine of God attempted by process and openist thinkers. The God Augustine describes in his Confessions—creating, loving, supporting, filling, protecting, nurturing—is “impassible” in the historic sense but not unresponsive or “unaffected” by the world He has made. Rather, He is “unchangeable, yet changing all things, never new, never old, making all things new, yet bringing old age upon the proud, and they know it not; always working, ever at rest; gathering, yet needing nothing.” Only by denying this “yet . . . never . . . ever . . . yet” aspect do we get the caricatured deity of deism against which open theism (rightly) reacts with disdain.

. . .

Aristotle’s understanding of God’s love falls far short of the Trinitarian model based on the incarnation and the atonement of Jesus Christ. The story of Jesus is not just a nice overlay on what we can know about God some other way. “If you have seen me,” said the Master, “you have seen the Father.” Open theists are not wrong to question certain forms of classical theism that reduce God to an impersonal monad devoid of communicability and love. But what they fail to see is that theologians of the Great Tradition from Irenaeus to Barth and von Balthasar also reject this kind of sterile deity. Faithful to Scripture, the consensual teachers of the Church invariably portray a dynamic, generous God who gives and loves, and even grieves and groans, without ever compromising His eternal freedom and holy Lordship over everything in heaven and on earth, the future no less than the past.

The statement, “Divine sovereignty and significant human freedom are not competitive exclusives,” is not a line from a Fosdick hymn, though I dare say that even that crusty old liberal would have agreed with it. Michael Rennier proves nothing by constructing a syllogism in response to which, he says, open theists deny God’s knowledge of future contingents. The real issue, of course, is what is meant by “alternative choice” or “free will.” Finally, I think I’ll stick with “seminiscient” as an apt term to describe the open theist construal of God’s knowledge. In a brilliant move anticipating Einstein’s theory of relativity by 1,500 years, Augustine in Book XI of the Confessions claims that space and time were cocreated by God simultaneously. Thus to say that God knows everything that can be known, except the future, and to call this omniscience is like saying that God can be everywhere one can go, except Texas, and to call this omnipresence.

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www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0311/correspondence.html

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Originally posted by Sahid

Not until you tell me what this has to do with "suffered impassibly".

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O God who suffered for us and yet remained impassible, deliver us from the passions and save our souls.
(THE THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT: THE ADORATION OF THE PRECIOUS AND LIFE-GIVING CROSS -- AT MATINS)

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Gospel speaks is never the mechanical destruction of evil, but a cure, and Christ “has conquered death by death”. As long as the last human being has not freely participated in this victory, evil will continue to condition history. God could take our place in order to suffer and to die, but he cannot do so for our acts of freedom, of choice and of love. Liberty frees only the one who desires it. (From Paul Evdokimov's "Struggle with God", top, page ten jbburnett.com/resources/evdokimov_strugglewGod1966.pdf

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. . .We will mention here two major aspects of Evagrian thought because of their permanence in later tradition: the doctrine of the passions and the doctrine of prayer.

According to Evagrius, the true nature of the "mind" is to be fixed in God, and anything, which detaches it from God, is evil. Thus since the Fall, the human mind is captured with self-love, which generates "thoughts;" "thoughts," a definitely pejorative term in Evagrius, imply interest in sensible things and distraction from God. Acting upon the passible part of the soul, they can lead it to passions. These passions form a very definite hierarchy beginning with the casual attachment to the most inevitable of all human sensible needs, such as food, and ending with demonic possession, with love for oneself. The eight steps, which constitute this hierarchy are: gluttony, fornication, avarice, grief, wrath, weariness, vainglory, and pride. With very slight variations, this classification of the passions and the psychological structure of the human mind, which it presupposes, are retained by John Cassian, John Climacus, Maximus the Confessor, and almost all the Eastern ascetical writers. The first goal of monastic "practice" is to subdue the passions and reach a state of "passionlessness" — a detachment from senses and "thoughts," which makes a restoration of the true original relationship between the mind and God possible. Beginning with the elementary monastic virtues, fasting and celibacy, the life of the monk can gradually subdue the other passions and reach true detachment.

. . .Prayer is "the proper activity of the mind," "an impassible state," the "highest possible intellection." In this "state" of prayer. . .According to Evagrius, as we know now, prayer also means that the mind is in an "essential union" with the deity...

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Now apatheia is not a biblical word and it may well be that, given the meaning this term has assumed in a post-Cartesian world, we should no longer apply it to God. But that is a different move than the radical revisioning of the doctrine of God attempted by process and openist thinkers. The God Augustine describes in his Confessions—creating, loving, supporting, filling, protecting, nurturing—is [/maroon]“impassible”[maroon] in the historic sense but not unresponsive or “unaffected” by the world He has made. Rather, He is “unchangeable, yet changing all things, never new, never old, making all things new, yet bringing old age upon the proud, and they know it not; always working, ever at rest; gathering, yet needing nothing.” Only by denying this “yet . . . never . . . ever . . . yet” aspect do we get the caricatured deity of deism against which open theism (rightly) reacts with disdain.

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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

Squint, there is GREAT intrinsic value to expressions like that.

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"Poetic" is good. Seeming contraditions make points energetically.

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And that the value is "intrinsic" is the point. And there is a reason that these couplets are used as they are.

And as a Christian I believe these energetically.


Now its your turn, Squint. . .

What do you think of those couplets?

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Strawberry Shortcake was introduced in 1979 as a greeting card character that was translated into doll form by the Kenner toy company. Each doll had a sweet smell and came with individual pets.

In 1981, Kenner introduced a series of international friends for Strawberry Shortcake. Almond Tea was supposed to be the Chinese entry, despite the fact the doll doesn't really have an Asian appearance at all. With purple hair and purple eyes, she's as Chinese as Strawberry Shortcake herself. However, if you look at her greeting card image or even the Miniature toys, the Asian features are much more prominent. But, whatever way you look at it, we're glad that the kids of Strawberryland did have an Asian friend.

In 1984, Kenner release ten dolls in festive outfits for the Party Pleasers line. Almond Tea and her pet Marza Panda were part of those ten. With the new costume, Almond Tea looks even less Asian than when she is dressed in her regular costume.

From:

http://www.lorenjavier.com/toychest/asian/strawberryshortcake.html

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The Inconceivable is conceived in the womb of a Virgin
[writes Theodore the Studite];
the Unmeasurable becomes three cubits high,
the Unqualifi-able acquires a quality;
the Undefinable stands up, sits down, and lies down;
He who is everywhere is put into a crib;
He who is above time gradually reaches the age of twelve;
He who is formless appears with the shape of a man,
and the Incorporeal enters into a body...
Therefore, He is describable and indescribable.

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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

… moving on beyond whether some people have no good taste in poetry…

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Can we be done with all the silly (and unseemly) criticisms?

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And, Squint, what do you think of JOHN and CHARLES WESLEY???

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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

sometimesisquint, don't waist my time with posts like that.

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Further, you do not have permission to use my "name." You do not have the right to post conversations that I was not a part of and use "PoW."

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I asked YOU, and assumed you are a Christian, what you think of these couplets.

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How about it. Speak for your self. What you think of these couplets. What's YOUR answer?

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Maybe after that we can look at what this has to do with John and Charles Wesley.

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Originally posted by sometimesisquint

PotOnWheel: … moving on beyond whether some people have no good taste in poetry…

sometimesisquint: First of all “taste” is relative, so applying a value of good or bad to someone’s taste is akin to saying, “Your opinion is wrong.”

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Originally posted by sometimesisquint
PotOnWheel: And, Squint, what do you think of JOHN and CHARLES WESLEY???

sometimesisquint: That really has nothing to do with my point of contention. If you truly want to avoid irrelevant tangents that are either “silly” or in which case you would like to send them to some other “thread”, then I think you should avoid questions like this one that have no bearing on the discussion.

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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

No, that was gallows humour, in the face of rudeness.

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I agree that no one has to "like" the aethetic or sensability of something; but to say that one's personal taste causes something from the past to not exist is wrong.

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Sorry, you came to class unprepared. It has EVERYTHING with where this thread came from and is heading.

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Read the other posts.

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And then leave off the rants about not liking the "logic" of historical gramatical usages, or cultural tastes.

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Begin, please with Timothy George's quote. And then see what Meyendorff had to say.

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I took beginning acting. Method acting is just fine. Not for everything; but for "The Godfather" it was great!

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Originally posted by sometimesisquint

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Begin, please with Timothy George's quote. And then see what Meyendorff had to say.

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Where was that again? Sorry, the Yorkie ate my preparatory lesson plans and my map of the thread.

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