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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

THAT is disingenuous. I just spent several pages dialoguing and answering questions with someone. I have my interests, and he has his. I'm as entitled to continue as he is to bow out if he wants. And anyone is welcomed to enter this ongoing inquiry at any point they want. Squint, if you don't want to, then that's your prerogative. But if you do, then you may. Period.

The point of the thread -- at least for me -- is NOT "personal study" just about anything. "Passible" and "impassible" are used in the early church BOTH to refer to God AND ALSO to refer to mankind when s/he grows in grace. For ME, the topic of this thread is "growing in grace." And suffering and impassibility are linked in that topic.

Since you didn't actually read what I just posted, you will have to take my word for it that those two are active elements in the above posts. If you read them, you will see for yourself. Your choice. You are welcomed to join.

PoW

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Originally posted by sometimesisquint

a one-sided information binge.

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"...The Word of God then itself endured all in the flesh, while His divine nature which alone was passionless remained void of passion. For since the one Christ, Who is a compound of divinity and humanity, and exists in divinity and humanity, truly suffered, that part which is capable of passion suffered as it was natural it should, but that part which was void of passion did not share in the suffering. For the soul, indeed, since it is capable of passion shares in the pain and suffering of a bodily cut, though it is not cut itself but only the body: but the divine part which is void of passion does not share in the suffering of the body.

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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

So, while Christ's divinity, sharing the will of the Father, willed that Christ should die on the Cross, his humanity, by the Choice of the Word to suffer what would not have to be suffered, suffered the fear of dying and the whole horror of dying for the world.

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("Let the words of my mouth...be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord...my Redeemer.")

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Wherefore, although314 He died as man and His Holy Spirit was severed from His immaculate body, yet His divinity remained inseparable from both, I mean, from His soul and His body, and so even thus His one hypostasis was not divided into two hypostases. For body and soul received simultaneously in the beginning their being in the subsistence315 of the Word, and although they were severed from one another by death, yet they continued, each of them, having the one subsistence of the Word. So that the one subsistence of the Word is alike the subsistence of the Word, and of soul and body. For at no time had either soul or body a separate subsistence of their own, different from that of the Word, and the subsistence of the Word is for ever one, and at no time two. So that the subsistence of Christ is always one. For, although the soul was separated from the body topically, yet hypostatically they were united through the Word."

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But in the second meaning of the word “corruption,” we confess that our Lord’s body is incorruptible, that is, indestructible, for such is the tradition of the inspired Fathers. Indeed, after the resurrection of our Saviour from the dead, we say that our Lord’s body is incorruptible even in the first sense of the word. For our Lord by His own body bestowed the gifts both of resurrection and of subsequent incorruption even on our own body, He Himself having become to us the firstfruits both of resurrection and incorruption, and of passionlessness320 . For as the divine Apostle says, This corruptible must put an incorruption321

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Chapter XXIX.

Concerning the Descent to Hades.

The soul322 when it was deified descended into Hades, in order that, just as the Sun of Righteousness323 rose for those upon the earth, so likewise He might bring light to those who sit under the earth in darkness and shadow of death324 : in order that just as He brought the message of peace to those upon the earth, and of release to the prisoners, and of sight to the blind325 , and became to those who believed the Author of everlasting salvation and to those who did not believe a reproach of their unbelief326 , so He might become the same to those in Hades327 : That every knee should bow to Him, of things in heaven, and things in earth and things under the earth328 . And thus after He had freed those who had been bound for ages, straightway He rose again from the dead, shewing us the way of resurrection.

322 Cf. Ruf., Expos. Symbol. Apost.; Cassian, Contr. Nestor, bk. vi.; Cyril, Calech. 14.
323 Mal. Iv. 2.
324 Is. Ix. 2.
325 Is. Lxi. I; St. Luke iv. 19.
326 1 Pet. iii. 19.
327 Iren., iv. 45; Greg. Naz., Orat. 42.
328 Phil. ii. 10.BOOK IV

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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

What is a biblical attitude on that last remark?

("Let the words of my mouth...be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord...my Redeemer.")

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18. For "through Him" comes every succour to our souls, and it is in accordance with each kind of care that an appropriate title has been devised. So when He presents to Himself the blameless soul, not having spot or wrinkle,154 like apure maiden, He is called Bridegroom, but whenever He receives one in sore plight from the devil's evil strokes, healing it in the heavy infirmity of its sins, He is named Physician. And shall this His care for us degrade to meanness oar thoughts of Him? Or, on the contrary, shall it smite us with amazement at once at the mighty power and love to man155 of the Saviour, in that He both endured to suffer with us156 in our infirmities, and was able to come down to our weakness? For not heaven and earth and the great seas, not the creatures that live in the water and on dry land, not plants, and stars, and air, and seasons, not the vast variety in the order of the universe,157 so well sets forth the excellency of His might as that God, being incomprehensible, should have been able, impassibly, through flesh, to have come into close conflict with death, to the end that by His own suffering He might give us the boon of freedom from suffering.158 The apostle, it is true, says, "In all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us."159 But in a phrase of this kind there is no suggestion of any lowly and subordinate ministry,160 but rather of the succour rendered "in the power of his might."161 For He Himself has bound the strong man and spoiled his goods,162 that is, us men, whom our enemy had abused in every evil activity, and made "vessels meet for the Master's use "163 us who have been perfected for every work through the making ready of that part of us which is in our own control.164 Thus we have had our approach to the Father through Him, being translated from "the power of darkness to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light."165 We must not, however, regard the oeconomy166 through the Son as a compulsory and subordinate ministration resulting from the low estate of a slave, but rather the voluntary solicitude working effectually for His own creation in goodness and in pity, according to the will of God the Father. For we shall be consistent with true religion if in all that was and is from tithe to time perfected by Him, we both bear witness to the perfection of His power, and in no case put it asunder from the Father's will. For instance, whenever the Lord is called the Way, we are carried on to a higher meaning, and not to that which is derived from the vulgar sense of the word. We understand by Way that advance167 to perfection which is made stage by stage, and in regular order, through the works of righteousness and" the illumination of knowledge;"168 ever longing after what is before, and reaching forth unto those things which remain,169 until we shall have reached the blessed end, the knowledge of God, which the Lord through Himself bestows on them that have trusted in Him. For our Lord is an essentially good Way, where erring and straying are unknown, to that which is essentially good, to the Father. For "no one," He says, "cometh to the Father but ["by" A.V.] through me."170 Such is our way up to God "through the Son."

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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

Note:

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"...The Word of God then itself endured all in the flesh, while His divine nature which alone was passionless remained void of passion. For since the one Christ, Who is a compound of divinity and humanity, and exists in divinity and humanity, truly suffered, that part which is capable of passion suffered as it was natural it should, but that part which was void of passion did not share in the suffering. For the soul, indeed, since it is capable of passion shares in the pain and suffering of a bodily cut, though it is not cut itself but only the body: but the divine part which is void of passion does not share in the suffering of the body.

Observe, further309 , that we say that God suffered in the flesh, bat never that His divinity suffered in the flesh, or that God suffered through the flesh. For if, when the sun is shining upon a tree, the axe should cleave the tree, and, nevertheless, the sun remains uncleft and void of passion, much more will the passionless divinity of the Word, united in subsistence to the flesh, remain void of passion when the body undergoes passion310. ..."

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Thomas Mether:

. . .Using a Biblical base to modify Greek pagan concepts, divine immutability in Orthodoxy is God’s loyalty to his promise (his Word, his Church) to his (Church designed) creatures. It is the immutability of his commitment through and outside of time. It is the basis of the fact that economia was the telos, and thus, foundation of the creation. Church is the fulfillment of covenant. Covenant is the inner purpose for creation. Creation is the outer staging for the inner purpose. So, the Church, as Body of Christ, is the fruit from which the tree that bore it, the cosmos, was itself borne and born, as St. Diadochus of Gaza puts it. God’s immutability is that he is agape, essentially and contingently, immutably a sharer of Person with Persons, uncreate or create. Time has no nature apart from this agenda, and thus, is nothing in relation to it, and thus, is not an obstacle or issue for or about divine immutability unlike the unregenerate paganism of the insufficiently methologically critical Calvinism.

http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/orth_plato.aspx

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SEE THE DISCUSSION AT:  http://www.opentheismboard.org/default.aspx?f=10&m=89274&p=3  "Alien Invasion: Creation Alpha (The New Creation)"

AN ARTICLE RELATED TO THE "ESSENCE/ENERGIES" THREAD:

“The Universe as ‘Hypostatic Inherence’ in the Logos of God”
from Light from the East: Theology, Science, and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition, Alexei Nesteruk
 

 

The Universe as “Hypostatic Inherence” in the Logos of God

The meaning of the term hypostatic comes from the Greek word hypostasis, which was used in the Patristic theological context in order to underline the “personal,” active as well as intransitive dimension of existence as different from impersonal substance (ousia) or nature (physis). The difference was articulated by Patristic thought in the context of the trinitarian and christological discussions throughout the fourth to seventh centuries. Ousia (as related to universals, families, or species) tends to be used with regard to internal characteristics and relations, or metaphysical reality (in this it is almost identical with physis), whereas hypostasis regularly emphasizes the externally concrete character of the substance, its empirical objectivity, and the existential aspects of being, expressed through the realization of freedom, movement, and will. It is important to stress that though every individual substance moves and is moved, the personal element in the realization of the potentiality of the substance is not included in the concept of substance itself, that is, the hypostatic aspect of individual existence is not immanent to what is included in the substance.

The difference between ousia and hypostasis can be elucidated in the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which asserts that the world was created out of nothing as an ecstatic act of interpenetrating love among the persons of the Holy Trinity. In Patristic theological language there were different expressions of this belief. It was affirmed that the world was created in God’s will, but not in his essence (ousia) (Athanasius of Alexandria). This entails that God is present in the world, not ontologically (i.e., on the level of the world’s substance), but rather relationally and personally, on the level of his loving kindness to the world, expressed through his will and realized by his Word. It is affirmed since the times of the Gospel of John that it is the Word-Logos of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, who entered the world by creating it and preparing his incarnation in Jesus as the meeting of the uncreated Divine with created humanity. It is at this point that the cosmological mystery of the presence of the ontologically transcendent God in the world acquires christological (and anthropological) dimension. For the presence of God in the world cannot be understood without the hypostatic mystery of Christ as a locus of the divine and human.

Nature or substance (in its self-realization, which is accounted for by God’s will as creator) can be divided and shared while the hypostasis of a particular being is indivisible. The reality of substance (i.e., its transcendence) is made available to human beings because of God’s economy, which relates independent creation to the Creator through communion; that is, substance becomes evident and real only in hypostases, that is, in what is indivisible. In a theological context hypostasis is similar to prosopon, that is, person in modern parlance. This implies that the nature of things becomes evident if it is personified. The hypostasis, then, is seen as the foundation of being, for it is that in which nature exists.

The distinction between nature and hypostasis allows one to articulate the unity of creation in two different senses. On the one hand, all varieties of sensible objects share the same nature (e.g., the same elementary particles). On the other hand, if one considers the world in relationship to its creator, then natural existence acquires the feature of existence acquires the features of existence for someone, that is, the Creator, who is not an impersonal substance or essence of the higher order (in which other individual substances participate), but who is the personal God. Thus when Christianity affirms that the world was created by the Word-Logos of God and that through the Logos everything was made, it effectively affirms that the natural existence of the world is existence in the personhood of God, that is, in his hypostasis; this means that the whole creation is brought to unity in the hypostasis of the Logos and that the link between God and the world is nonnatural (i.e., nonontological, nonphysical, nonbiological, etc.), but hypostatic, which can be expressed as the relationship between the Divine and the world in the personhood of God. The creation of the world and its existence have sense, then, only in relation to the person who is acting as the creator and provider of the meaning of existence: there cannot be impersonal creation as well as existence.

The universe, however, being created by God, is not capable of knowing that it has its creator, for impersonal physical objects are not hypostatic creatures: they have no ability to contemplate their own existence and relate it to their ultimate source. Thus the intelligibility of the universe and its meaning are accessible only to hypostatic human beings, who are created in the Divine image, and whose hypostasis is capable of personifying objects in the universe, that is, making the universe self-conscious of its own existence and origin. Maximus the Confessor strongly argued that man as a person cannot be isolated from the fact that human nature is itself enhypostacized. In other words, it is hypostatically inherent in the Logos; this means that a personal relationship with God cannot be excluded from human nature and is identical with fully realized human existence.

The term hypostatically inherent refers theologically to the Greek words enhypostatic or enhypostasis, which were introduced into heology by Leontius of Byzantium in the context of christological discussion of the sixth to seventh centuries, and whose meaning (appropriate for the purposes of our research) in Greek Patristic usage can be described as: “being, existing in an hypostasis or Person,” “subsistent in, inherent.”

One can refer to a theological view of “participation” in the Divine in order to illustrate the idea of “hypostatic inherence” of the universe in the Logos of God. When it is said that created beings know about God, it means that they participate in God through a mode which is distinct from his essence (uncreated energies, for example). However, the very ability to participate in God is willed by God himself, for it is God who brought into existence participating beings; the knowledge of why this participation is possible at all is concealed by God from participating beings and known only to himself.

It was natural, then, for Maximus the Confessor to argue that “everything that derives its existence from participating in some other reality presupposes the ontological priority of that other reality”; he meant the priority of the Logos of God with respect to all other created things which do participate in him. The “hypostatic inherence” of the universe in the Logos of God can then be interpreted in Maximus’s words as the Logos’s eternal manifestations in different modes of participation by created beings in him. This participation takes place in spite of the fact that the Logos is eternally invisible (i.e., ontologically distinct from creation) to all in virtue of the surpassing nature of his hidden activity. But this participation does not assume any ontological causation; for to participate in the Logos means to be made by the Logos a participating being, that is, to be made as a being in the hypostatis of the Logos himself. This implies that existence through participation in the Logos is subsistence in his personhood, that is, the inherence in his hypostasis. In short, one can say that hypostatic inherence in the Logos is the same as participation in his person.

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Part II of “The Universe as ‘Hypostatic Inherence’ in the Logos of God”
from Light from the East: Theology, Science, and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition, Alexei Nesteruk
Pages 114-117


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Another example, which illustrates what the existence in a hypostasis or person means, can be brought from a sphere of theological anthropology, which asserts that “man is hypostasis [personality] of the cosmos, is conscious and person self-expression; it is he who give meaning to things and who has to transfigure them. For the universe, man it is hope to receive grace and to be united with God.” The universe as the expressed and articulated existence is possible only in human hypostasis, that is, it acquires some qualities of existence if it is reflected in the personality of humanity. Using the words of Masximus the Confessor, every intellection about the universe inheres as a quality in an apprehending being. The universe thus acquires qualitative existence in the being who apprehends it. The link between the universe as articulated existence and the apprehending being is not ontological, but rather hypostatic or personal. A Patristic theologian would say that existence of the universe as the articulated existence is hypostatic existence, that is, the universe is enhypostatic.

Can, then, hypostatic human beings, because of apprehension of the universe as inherent in the Logos, interact with the Logos and change him? Maximus the Confessor has already prepared a response to this by saying that the Logos, who is beyond intellection, unites himself to human intellection, which is purified from any manifold and temporality, and makes it his own, giving it rest from those things which by nature change and diversify it with many conceptual forms they impose upon it. This means that human intellection of the universe does not affect the Logos, which is beyond intellection. The link between the Logos and the world is not subject to temporal change and instability of nature, which human intellect operates with. The world is in the hypostasis of the Logos of God from ages to ages, so that the Logos experiences the world as being in rest from his works, “just as God did from His (Gen. 2:2; Heb. 4:10). “

One should not think that the ideas about “hypostasis” are some outdated relics of the old tradition, which have no links with modern philosophical development and its fusion with theology. For example, the term hypostasis was used by a contemporary French phenomenological philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in a very special way that will be useful for elucidating our thought. Levinas puts a stress on the difference between the transitive existence of beings, through relationships, for example, and the absolutely intransitive element of one’s own existing as freed from intentionality and relationship. The existent and its existing do not coincide in every creature. For it, according to Levinas, the existent “contracts” its existing, if forms an event which he calls hypostasis. One can say that the hypostatic existence of human beings, as existents (and of the whole humankind), is the event of contracting by them their existing. What will happen, then, if we consider the situations when the existent cannot contract it’s own existing, but can be existent in the existing of the other? Are we still obliged to talk about the “event” of hypostatic existence? For example, some physical object has no inclination to perceive it own existence. This means that it is existent without its own existing. But, at the same time, the same object can be articulated in the existing of a human being, so that it contracts its existing in the other, that is, in the human being. A human being, being itself a hypostatic event, makes the contraction of an existent physical object its existing in the apprehension of human being an event, so that the “hypostatic inherence” of a physical object, in the knowing subject, has some features of temporality and emergence, which follow from the event of human hypostasis. The situation drastically changes if the existent receives its existing from the Logos of God whose hypostatic ever-being is not involved in any chain of worldly relations and events; in this case the “hypostatic inherence” as contraction by the universe of its existing in the hypostasis of the Logos of God has no features of emergence and temporality. This is the reason why we do not want to express the existence of the universe in the person of the Logos of God, in order to deliver the reader from the temptation to think about the universe as “personalized” by the Logos. Personalization is an emergent notion usually applied to something which has already been in existence. This is why the Greek term enhypostasization would be more appropriate for us in order to affirm that “the universe is enhypostasized by the Logos of God.” We express this thought by using the language of “hypostatic inherence” in order to make it easier for a modern reader to comprehend the term; by so doing we avoid the danger of affirming the link between God and the world in emergent terms.

The creation and existence of the universe thus can be seen as enhypostatic in two senses: (1) the universe as mere nature exists in the hypostasis of the Logos; (2) but the very knowledge of this, that is, the transcendence beyond substance from within the universe, can only be achieved if nature is contemplated in the human hypostases (which in turn exist in the hypostasis of the Logos.) The universe thus acquires the features of its hypostatic inherence in a twofold sense: in the Logos of God who brings the matter into existence through His effected words, and in hypostatic human beings, who through analysis and differentiation of this matter lead the universe to self-awareness of its purpose and end, that is, to realized existence in and for God. It is in this sense that one can argue that human beings are co creators of the universe: the universe is brought into being as the meaningful and self-conscious existence in the personhood of humanity. The universe, as articulated existence in the human hypostasis, can be treated in turn as the hypostatic event, contingent upon the human phenomenon, which constitutes an element of God’s economy for salvation.

One then concludes that the link between the Logos of God and the universe is hypostatic, that is, the universe is seen as hypostatic inherence in the Logos of God. But this signifies that one the universe is apprehended by us in its connection and unity with the primordial ground of the Logos, it becomes for us something greater and other than “only the universe,” because the specific “worldly” character of the universe is overcome without the universe itself being “removed” or “eliminated.” The meaninglessness of the universe, its pure factuality and impersonality, its indifference to the Divine truth, are overcome. This signifies that the presence of God in the world can only be detected through manifestations of the enhypostatic mode of the world’s existence.

A word of caution must be said if one attempts to treat the notion of the hypostatic inherence in terms of the bilateral relationship between God and the world. We stress the Patristic belief that God is hypostatic being but the world is not. Since the link between God and the world is hypostatic (as we have argued above), any bilateral relationship between God and the world would only be possible if the world as the world might be understood as the relationship between two persons: God and the world. But it is exactly at this point that our position states clearly that the created world as such is not hypostasis at all, it has a mode of existence which is inherent in the hypostasis of the Logos of God, and that is why the relationship between the Logos and the world is established through the one-way diastema, that is, as the permeation from God to the world, but not vice versa.

The claim of the so-called generic panentheism about the bilateral relationship between God and the world, as seen through Patristic eyes, runs the risk of affirming something similar to the old Patristic idea of perichoresis (co-inherence) of God to the world. Certainly this similarity must be analyzed which caution, for it must no be understood as analogous to the Trinitarian formula of co-inherence as interpenetration and mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity (in would be a theological nonsense to affirm that created nature is capable of interpenetrating the Divine. ) It can rather be paralleled with perichoresis in the christological context as the interchange and reciprocity of the human nature with the divine nature in Christ. Then, by analogy, one might affirm panentheistically the perichoresis of the Divine and the created in the sense of “interchange” and “reciprocity” (bilateral relationship) between God and the world. But even in this, so to speak “weak” form of the perichoresis, panentheism must not forget the origin of this perichoresis, i.e. that it proceeds from the personhood of the Divinity, not from the matter of the world. The Divine, having once permeated through the world, bestows on its matter an ineffable perichoresis with itself. The interchange or reciprocity of the Divine and the created is ultimately initiated and held by the hypostasis of the Logos of God. One can see again that the process of the Divine permeation of the world is one-sided and entirely determined by the Logos himself. This has been demonstrated by God through the incarnation of the Logos in Jesus Christ.

The world as such has no hypostasis of its own and cannot initiate and sustain the perichoresis to the Divine. It is possible, however, to speak about hypostatic agencies in the world, i.e. human beings, through whom the world acquires some personal qualities, in the sense we have explained above. Human beings can initiate the interchange between the world and God through the apprehension of the created universe, so that the world, being articulated by human beings, is related to God as its uncreated source. Any panentheistic claim, then, about the world which is brought to godself must be understood in the context of human deification and involvement of the world in the transfiguration, which brings it back to the union with God. But all this is initiated by the Logos of God, who created human beings with such logoi as to allow human beings to relate to God through personal interaction as well as through apprehension of the universe created by him. This is the reason why the universe, being personified by human beings, still exhibits its hypostatic inherence in the Logos of God. Human beings thus become the locus points in creation through whom the evidence of the hypostatic inherence of the universe in the Logos can be seen.

From what we have said above namely, that the presence of God in the universe can be detected only through the enhypostatic mode of the universe’s existence, it is clear that science is closely connected with the articulation of the created nature of things and their foundation in the effected words of God-Person, and it cannot be alienated from theology at all; for, by its function, science articulates the human participation in creation and through it the participation in the relationship between world and God. This relationship is articulated by created human beings who are the inevitable part of this relationship.

Human consciousness thus cannot be alienated from physical research and its theological generalizations, being in fact a part of those equations which drive the whole universe. It is clear, then, that any knowledge of things, and their ultimate foundations (the logoi) must involve subjects of knowledge in the entirety of their human constitution. The theistic inferences made in this perspective have by their constitution the hypostatic dimension pointing toward the source of the personalized existence of everything, that is, to God. The mediation between science and theology then acquires a strong anthropological dimension, which manifests that both modes of articulation of God’s creation—through science discursively and through religion mystically and liturgically—have a common source of origin which is the human intentional subjectivity and transcending spirituality which manifest the essence of human being-in-the-world-with-God.

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Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 7/20/2007 9:20:50 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 7/20/2007 9:56:49 AM (GMT-5)