 |
| Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Questions about Christianity > The Person and Freedom of God | Forum Quick Jump
|
| 
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 1/18/2002 12:12 PM (GMT -6) |   | This portion of text from a contemporary Greek (He is a university professor in Athens, Greece) scholar is integrally related to the quote from Basil the Great's comments in "Epistle CCXXXIV" in the "a classic apophatic statement" thread. There Basil says:
"But we say that we know our God from His operations,
But do not undertake to approach near to His essence.
His operations come down to us,
But His essence remains beyond our reach."
The Yannaras text below is differnt, though. it is written to us and our thinking. In the last paragraph he elaborates on this sentence: "If we accept evaluative definitions of the Godhead, we make the personal distinctives of divine love subordinate to them, and consequently do away with it." to get into that one you will have to read below. Here is a clue: "being stems not from the essence, which would make it an ontological necessity, but from the person and the freedom of its love which 'hypostasizes' being into a personal and trinitarian communion..." The impact of what he writes is seen in: If we accept evaluative definitions of the Godhead, we make the personal distinctives of divine love subordinate to them, and consequently do away with it. Evaluative categories could refer only to nature or essence, but then personal distinctiveness would be subordinated to the necessity imposed by natural definitions, and consequently, once again, it would be non-existant or substantially curtailed.. In that case, the person of God would "undergo" whatever happened to the nature.
The topic is VERY important!
============================================
from Christos Yannaras' "The Freedom of Morality",
(Ch. 1 -- The Masks of Morality and the Ethos of the Person, pp. 16-18)
--------------------------------------------
. . .
In the tradition of the Orthodox Church, we define morality through studying the existential truth of man. This means beginning with the ontological question: what is being, and what does it mean for man to be? What relationship is there between what he is as a biological entity and being in itself, the definitive and immutable potential for existence? Does the individual distinctiveness of each human being, the unique distinct and unrepeatable expression of his physical build, his speech, his thought, his creative capacity and his love, partake in being and have ontological substance? Or is it simply an ephemeral and incidental biological differentiation, inexorably predetermined by the necessity of man's "species" or "nature"?
It is clear that without answering the question about being, about the boundless and true potential for existence, it is impossible to approach the existential adventure of man's freedom -- the way he preserves or loses the universal potentialities for life, which is to say his morality. In the Orthodox Church, therefore, when we are to study the truth about man and his morality we start with the truth about being with its source and cause: we start from the acceptance of God's revelation, from the truth about God.
4. The ethos of trinitarian communion
In the life of the Church, God reveals Himself as the hypostasis of being, the personal hypostasis of eternal life, exhaustive expression of the truth of being. It is not the essence of the energy of God which constitutes being, But His personal mode of existence: God as person is the hypostasis and life: God is not a vague supreme being, and impersonal essence which may be approached only through the intellect or the emotions. Nor is He a "prime mover," a blind energy which sets in motion the mechanism of the world; not yet an image of man exalted into an absolute, and infinite magnification of the individual characteristics and psychological demands of the human being. The God of whom the Church has experience is the God who reveals Himself in history as personal existence, as distinctiveness and freedom. God is person, and He speaks with man "face to grace, as a man speaketh unto his friend" (Ex 33:11).
It is precisely as personal existence, as distinctiveness and freedom from any predetermination by essence or nature, that God constitutes being and is the hypostasis of being. When Moses asks the identity of the God whose will he is to proclaim to the Israelites, the answer is "I am He who is" (Ex 3:14. God identifies the truth of existence, the reality of being, with His personal hypostasis. This means that the divine essence or nature is not an ontological reality prior to God's personal existence and determining it: God's being is not an ontological datum, anterior to the distinctiveness and freedom of the divine person. Rather, it is the personal expression of His being. :And when speaking to Moses, God did not say, 'I am essence; but, 'I am He who is': for He who is,, is not from the essence, but the essence is from Him who is. He who is has comprehended within Himself all being."(1)
(1--Gregory Palamas, In Defense of the Holy Hesychasts; 3, 2-12)
The identification of being with the personal existence of God -- as identification with vital consequences for the truth of man and human morality -- explains the revelation of the God of the Church, who is one and at the same time trinitarian. The one God is not one divine nature of essence, but primarily one person: the one person of God the Father. The personal existence of God (the Father) constitutes His essence or being, making it into "hypsostasis": freely and from love He begets the Son and causes the Holy Spirit to proceed.(2) Consequently, being stems not from the essence, which would make it an ontological necessity, but from the person and the freedom of its love which "hypostasizes" being into a personal and trinitarian communion, God the Father's mode of being constitutes existence and life as a fact of love and personal communion.
The identification of being with the freedom of love -- of that love which forms being into hypostases -- reveals that the truth of the ethos or morality is equivalent to the truth of being. When we speak of the unity and communion of the three divine persons, we are referring to God's mode of being, which is the ethos of divine life. And the ethos of God is identical with this being. When the Christian revelation declares that "God is love" (1 Jn 4:16), it is not referring to one among many properties of God's "behavior," but to what God is as the fullness of trinitarian and personal communion.
(2--"God the Father, moved outside time and in love, proceeded to a distinction in hypsostasis, remaining without division or diminution) in the wholeness proper to Him, supremely unifies and supremely simple": Maxiums the Confessor, Scholia on the Divine Names, PG 4, 221A.)
Thus love is singled out as the ontological category par excellence, the only possibility for existence, since it is through love that God gives substance to His essence, and constitutes His being. Any other definition of God's ethos with evaluative content is ontologically unfounded: it applies a priori conventional predicates, taken from philosophical thought or social experience, to the mode of divine existence, which is nothing other than personal distinctiveness and the freedom of love. If we accept evaluative definitions of the Godhead, we make the personal distinctives of divine love subordinate to them, and consequently do away with it. Evaluative categories could refer only to nature or essence, but then personal distinctiveness would be subordinated to the necessity imposed by natural definitions, and consequently, once again, it would be non-existant or substantially curtailed.. In that case, the person of God would "undergo" whatever happened to the nature. The "accidents" of the nature would be "passions" of the person -- things undergone passively. This is why St. Maximus the Confessor affirms of the Godhead: "It is neither beautiful nor good: for these are as it were passions, and conditions and accidents." (3)
(3--Scholia on the Divine Names, PG 4, 412BC. Cf also Dionysius the Areopagite, On Mystical Theology 5, PG 3, 1045D-1048AB.)
Edited by - potonwheel on 01/18/2002 5:17:24 PM | | Back to Top | | |
 | Forum Information | Currently it is Monday, November 09, 2026 10:57 AM (GMT -6)
There are a total of 97,718 posts in 6,040 threads.
In the last 3 days there were 0 new threads and 0 reply posts. View Active Threads
|
Forum powered by dotNetBB v2.42EC SP3
dotNetBB © 2000-2026 |
|
|