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Originally posted by honorman

Any books out there on the nature of God from an Orthodox perspective?

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John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology. Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, 2nd edn. New York: Fordham University Press, 1983. Pbk. ISBN: 0823209679. Price: $20.00 www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0823209679/qid=1064870507/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-6252342-3923938?v=glance&s=books


The Orthodox Way, by Kallistos Ware, ISBN: 0913836583
Paperback $10.95


OR FOR HARD READING...
V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Cambridge, 1977.

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With his natural but transfigured eyes, the saint contemplates an immaterial light but his visions and his knowledge are granted to him. They are never a “possession” of the divine. God, in manifesting himself, safeguards his mystery and his total transcendence. If he accords us a participation in his life and his presence, he hides himself in his very manifestation. He hides his inaccessible Being. The hesychastic tradition is very firm on this point: the transcendence of God is not due to man’s weakness but to the nature of God. Unknowable by nature, God is more than God. Even in uniting himself to man, God remains transcendent to him. Participation in God is participation only in his energies, in his grace; this is the burning intimacy of his presence. According to St. Symeon: “God is the more invisible the more he radiates in man’s spirit.” This superessential principle of the divine essence conditions human love, its eternal epektasis, its tension toward God, of which St. Gregory of Nyssa speaks.

Tradition rapidly eliminated all imagination, all mystic intoxication with suffering, and imposed the greatest sobriety. Even ecstasy was held suspect. “When it seems to you that your spirit is drawn toward the heights by an invisible force, do not put any faith in it, but oblige yourself to work. By work a monk avoids all romantic abstraction and exercises charity. Very often one thinks that it is a spiritual joy, and it is only sensuality aroused by the enemy; those who have had this experience can distinguish it,” teaches Gregory the Sinaite.108 Evagrius said, “Do not desire to see either evil powers or angels under pain of sinking into madness.”

The liturgy offers an efficacious means of filtering out every disordered emotion. That is why the life of a monk is centered more and more on psalmody, prayer and prayerful meditation on the Scriptures. The soul listens to the Word and allows itself to be penetrated and filled with it. Biblical ontology forms the categories of emptiness and fullness, absence and communion. Every spiritual person aspires to the communion that fills him with God, as the Blessed Virgin or St. Stephen was filled with the Holy Spirit. From this biblical source comes the patristic definition of theology: the experimental [i.e., “experiential”— ed.] way of union with God. “If you are a theologian, you will truly pray, and if you truly pray, you are a theologian.”110 This experience of “the sense of God” permits one to transpose into eucharistic terms the nuptial dwelling of God in man. Man does not speculate but he changes. This clear-sighted realism of the ascesis affirms for all times in its essential principle: No ascesis deprived of love approaches God. “We shall be judged for the evil we have done but especially for the good we have neglected and for the fact that we have not loved our neighbor.” The Shepherd of Hermas is likewise explicit in declaring that anyone who has omitted to help a man in spiritual distress will be held responsible for his loss.112 At Mount Athos today the old maxims have lost nothing of their value: “The true monk is the one who in the present life possesses nothing but Christ.” “The one who has in his heart even a trace of wickedness is unworthy of the charity of Christ.”

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Reading presupposes then “the state of prayer” that brings words to maturity. “Prayer causes God to illumine man’s mind in order that it can grasp what he reads.” God became man “in order to be closer to us than our own soul”, and to give us “the same mind which was in Christ Jesus”.103 That is why for Nicolas Cabasilas, “the Gospel figures Christ”104 which means that it lets Christ speak by himself, inviting us to fill our eyes and hearts with “the one who attracts to himself alone and unites to himself alone”.105 For St. Justin, the Scriptures effect a decisive encounter,106 and every martyr by his death testifies that he has read them correctly.

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www.oca.org/pages/orth_chri/Orthodox-Faith/Doctrine/God.html

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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

With his natural but transfigured eyes, the saint contemplates an immaterial light but his visions and his knowledge are granted to him. They are never a “possession” of the divine. God, in manifesting himself, safeguards his mystery and his total transcendence. If he accords us a participation in his life and his presence, he hides himself in his very manifestation. He hides his inaccessible Being. The hesychastic tradition is very firm on this point: the transcendence of God is not due to man’s weakness but to the nature of God. Unknowable by nature, God is more than God. Even in uniting himself to man, God remains transcendent to him. Participation in God is participation only in his energies, in his grace; this is the burning intimacy of his presence. According to St. Symeon: “God is the more invisible the more he radiates in man’s spirit.” This superessential principle of the divine essence conditions human love, its eternal epektasis, its tension toward God, of which St. Gregory of Nyssa speaks.

Tradition rapidly eliminated all imagination, all mystic intoxication with suffering, and imposed the greatest sobriety. Even ecstasy was held suspect. “When it seems to you that your spirit is drawn toward the heights by an invisible force, do not put any faith in it, but oblige yourself to work. By work a monk avoids all romantic abstraction and exercises charity. Very often one thinks that it is a spiritual joy, and it is only sensuality aroused by the enemy; those who have had this experience can distinguish it,” teaches Gregory the Sinaite.108 Evagrius said, “Do not desire to see either evil powers or angels under pain of sinking into madness.”

The liturgy offers an efficacious means of filtering out every disordered emotion. That is why the life of a monk is centered more and more on psalmody, prayer and prayerful meditation on the Scriptures. The soul listens to the Word and allows itself to be penetrated and filled with it. Biblical ontology forms the categories of emptiness and fullness, absence and communion. Every spiritual person aspires to the communion that fills him with God, as the Blessed Virgin or St. Stephen was filled with the Holy Spirit. From this biblical source comes the patristic definition of theology: the experimental [i.e., “experiential”— ed.] way of union with God. “If you are a theologian, you will truly pray, and if you truly pray, you are a theologian.”110 This experience of “the sense of God” permits one to transpose into eucharistic terms the nuptial dwelling of God in man. Man does not speculate but he changes. This clear-sighted realism of the ascesis affirms for all times in its essential principle: No ascesis deprived of love approaches God. “We shall be judged for the evil we have done but especially for the good we have neglected and for the fact that we have not loved our neighbor.” The Shepherd of Hermas is likewise explicit in declaring that anyone who has omitted to help a man in spiritual distress will be held responsible for his loss.112 At Mount Athos today the old maxims have lost nothing of their value: “The true monk is the one who in the present life possesses nothing but Christ.” “The one who has in his heart even a trace of wickedness is unworthy of the charity of Christ.”

......

Reading presupposes then “the state of prayer” that brings words to maturity. “Prayer causes God to illumine man’s mind in order that it can grasp what he reads.” God became man “in order to be closer to us than our own soul”, and to give us “the same mind which was in Christ Jesus”.103 That is why for Nicolas Cabasilas, “the Gospel figures Christ”104 which means that it lets Christ speak by himself, inviting us to fill our eyes and hearts with “the one who attracts to himself alone and unites to himself alone”.105 For St. Justin, the Scriptures effect a decisive encounter,106 and every martyr by his death testifies that he has read them correctly.

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• Center...on psalmody, prayer and prayerful meditation on the Scriptures.



• “If you are a theologian, you will truly pray, and if you truly pray, you are a theologian.”



• Man does not speculate but he changes.

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by Vladimir Lossky
God in Trinity, Chapter 3 of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY (1976), pp. 44-67.

www.jbburnett.com/auctor/lossky/lossky_myst1-trinity.pdf


The apophaticism characteristic of the theological thought of the Eastern Church is not an impersonal mysticism, an experience of the absolute divine nothingness in which both the human person and God as person are swallowed up.

The goal to which apophatic theology leads— if, indeed, we may speak of goal or ending when, as here, it is a question of an ascent towards the infinite; this infinite goal is not a nature or an essence, nor is it a person; it is something which transcends all notion both of nature and of person: it is the Trinity.

St. Gregory Nazianzen, who is sometimes called the minstrel of the Holy Trinity, tells us in one of his theological poems: 'From the day whereon I renounced the things of the world to consecrate my soul to luminous and heavenly contemplation, when the supreme intelligence carried me hence to set me down far from all that pertains to the flesh, to hide me in the secret places of the heavenly tabernacle; from that day my eyes have been blinded by the light of the Trinity, whose brightness surpasses all that the mind can conceive; for from a throne high exalted the Trinity pours upon all, the ineffable radiance common to the Three. This is the source of all that is here below, separated by time from the things on high.... From that day forth I was dead to the world and the world was dead to me.1 At the close of his life he longs to be 'there where my Trinity is, and the gathered brightness of Its splendour.... Trinity, whose dim shadows exalt me'.2

If the very foundation of created being is change, the transition from non-being to being, if the creature is contingent by nature, the Trinity is an absolute stability. One would say, an absolute necessity of perfect being: and yet the idea of necessity is not proper to the Trinity, for It transcends the antinomy of what is necessary, and the contingent; entirely personal and entirely nature; liberty and necessity are one, or, rather, can have no place in God. There is no dependence in relation to created being on the part of the Trinity; no determination of what is called 'the eternal procession of the divine persons' by the act of the creation of the world. Even though the created order did not exist, God would still be Trinity— Father, Son and Holy Ghost— for creation is an act of will: the procession of the persons is an act 'according to nature' (kata physin).3 There is no interior process in the Godhead; no 'dialectic' of the three persons; no becoming; no 'tragedy in the Absolute', which might necessitate the trinitarian development of the divine being in order— that it be surmounted or resolved. These conceptions, proper to the romantic tradition of nineteenth century German philosophy, are wholly foreign to the dogma of the Trinity. If we speak of processions, of acts, or of inner determinations, these expressions— involving, as they do, the ideas of time, becoming and intention— only show to what extent our language, indeed our thought, is poor and deficient before the primordial mystery of revelation. Again we are forced to appeal to apophatic theology in order to rid ourselves of concepts proper to human thought, transforming them into steps by which we may ascend to the contemplation of a reality which the created intelligence cannot contain.

It is in such a spirit as this that St. Gregory Nazianzen speaks in his oration on baptism: 'No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the One. When I think of any One of the Three, I think of Him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking of escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the undivided light.4 Our thought must be in continuous motion, pursuing now the one, now the three, and returning again to the unity; it must swing ceaselessly between the two poles of the antinomy, in order to attain to the contemplation of the sovereign repose of this threefold monad. How can the antinomy of unity and trinity be contained in an image? How can this mystery be grasped save by the aid of an idea— be it that of movement or of development— which is inadmissible? Nazianzen's conscious adoption of the language of Plotinus can delude only those unimaginative and pedestrian souls who are incapable of rising above rational concepts: those who ransack the thought of the Fathers for traces of 'Platonism' or 'Aristotelianism'. St. Gregory speaks to the philosophers as a philosopher, that he may win the philosopher to the contemplation of the Trinity. 'The monad is set in motion in virtue of its richness; the dyad is surpassed (for the deity is above matter and form); the triad contains itself in perfection, for it is the first which surpasses the composition of the dyad. Thus, the Godhead does not dwell within bounds, nor does it spread itself indefinitely. The one would be without honour, the other would be contrary to order. The one would be wholly Judaic, the other Hellenistic and polytheistic.'5 One gains a glimpse of the mystery of the number, three; the deity is neither one nor many; its perfection goes beyond the multiplicity of which duality is the root (we recall the interminable dyads of the gnostics, and the dualism of the Platonists), and expresses itself in the Trinity. The term 'expresses itself' is improper, for the divinity has no need to manifest its perfection, either to itself or to others. It is the Trinity, and this fact can be deduced from no principle nor explained by any sufficient reason, for there are neither principles nor causes anterior to the Trinity.

. . . . (continues)

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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

by Vladimir Lossky, God in Trinity, Chapter 3 of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY (1976), pp. 44-67.

www.jbburnett.com/auctor/lossky/lossky_myst1-trinity.pdf


In the tradition of the Eastern Church there is no place for a theology, and even less for a mysticism, of the divine essence. The goal of Orthodox spirituality, the blessedness of the Kingdom of Heaven, is not the vision of the essence, but, above all, a participation in the divine life of the Holy Trinity; the deified state of the co-heirs of the divine nature, gods created after the uncreated God, possessing by grace all that the Holy Trinity possesses by nature.

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