The Feast of the Transfiguration

The Transfiguration is one of the most critical, glorious, enigmatic texts in the Gospel story, not to mention one of the most neglected. I sat in an Episcopal church yesterday morning, and no mention was made of the upcoming feast at all. (Labor Day, on the other hand, is going to be a big to-do.) The Catholics didn't even decide to uniformly celebrate it until the fifteenth century. Only the Orthodox seem to have afforded the story and its commemoration the appropriate place of importance in their corporate life.

Perhaps it's not as sexy as the various smaller, less central passages about sexual ethics or gender economics. It's certainly not as gory as the Passion. But, in spite of its gross inability to satisfy our western lust for sex and violence, the Transfiguration represents a crucial moment in the Christian narrative when God manifests Himself to the world, glorifies His Son, and declares our hope and our promise in Christ. Jesus is revealed for who he truly is, and we glimpse what we will be through conforming ourselves to his likeness.

So, to commemorate the Transfiguration--in addition to eating grapes--consider the following quotes from two great theological masters for whom the Transfiguration was central.

Maximus the Confessor, First Century on Theology, 13-14:

If a man seeks spiritual knowledge, let him plant the foundation of his soul immovably before the Lord, in accordance with God's words to Moses: "Stand here by me." But it should be realized that there are differences among those who stand before the Lord, as is clear from the text, "There are some standing here who will not taste death till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power"...To those who follow him as he climbs the high mountain of his transfiguration he appears in the form of God, the form in which he existed before the world came to be...

When the Logos of God becomes manifest and radiant in us, and his face shines like the sun, then his clothes will also look white. That is to say, the words of the Gospels will then be clear and distinct, with nothing concealed. And Moses and Elijah--the more spiritual principles of the Law and the prophets--will also be present with him.

Gregory Palamas, Triads, I.3.5:

So, when the saints contemplate this divine light within themselves, seeing it by the divinizing communion of the Spirit, through the mysterious visitation of perfecting illuminations--then they behold the garment of their deification, their mind being glorified and filled by the grace of the Word, beautiful beyond measure in his splendor; just as the divinity of the Word on the mountain glorified with divine light the body conjoined to it. For "the glory which the Father gave him," he himself has given to those obedient to him, as the Gospels says, and "He willed that they should be with him and contemplate His glory."

..It is necessarily carried out in a spiritual fashion, for the mind becomes supercelestial, and as it were the companion of him who passed beyond the heavens for our sake, since it is manifestly yet mysteriously united to God, and contemplates supernatural and ineffable visions being filled with all the immaterial knowledge of a higher light. Then it is no longer the sacred symbols accessible to the senses that it contemplates, nor yet the variety of Sacred Scripture that it knows; it is made beautiful by the creative and primordial Beauty, and illumined by the radiance of God.

Christ, Jain, and the Material World

Perhaps the most constant--and, in the opinion of many, damning--critique leveled against Eastern religions by Westerners is their negative view of the world and their apparently escapist approach to soteriology, borrowing from Christian theological jargon. There is a perception, right or wrong, that Eastern religions see the world as a fundamentally broken place which must be fled and that flight from the world involves the absorption of the self into a cosmic consciousness or nothingness or both. Jain is certainly at least as open to this criticism as any other Eastern faith. While the commitment to life that is apparent in ahimsa would suggest a profound respect for the world, Jain religion does not actually protect life because it believes it is in some sense enduring, sacred, and intrinsically valuable. Instead, the respect for life is, in some sense, merely a subtle act of self-interest, a necessary ethical step on the path toward liberation, an escape from the cycle of death and reincarnation. Included in this escape is an escape also from the confines of materiality and anything which is in any sense associated with the world. In the Acaranga Sutra, the reader encounters once again the teachings of Mahavira which here describe the nature of existence after liberation is finally achieved:

The liberated is not long nor small nor round nor triangular nor quadrangular nor circular; he is not black nor blue nor red nor green nor white; neither of good nor bad smell; nor bitter nor pungent nor astringent nor sweet; neither rough nor soft; neither heavy nor light; neither cold nor hot; neither harsh nor smooth; he is without body, without resurrection, without contact of matter, he is not feminine nor masculine nor neuter; he perceives, he knows, but there is no analogy whereby to know the transcendent; its essence is without form; there is no condition of the unconditioned. There is no sound, no color, no smell, no taste, not touch--nothing of that kind. Thus I say.

The idea certainly has an aesthetic appeal. The idea of a conscious, non-corporeal existence has such an appeal to the Christian mind that it has been adopted (from Greek philosophy rather than Jain) into Christianity's own escapist soteriology in the form of the soul's flight to heaven. While that expression of Christian thought is deeply suspect, there is admittedly a strong affinity between the way Mahavira speaks of the transcendent and the way orthodox Christian thinkers have spoken of it. Consider this roughly parallel thought of Gregory Palamas:

Every nature is utterly remote and absolutely estranged from the divine nature. For if God is nature, other things are not nature, but if each of the other things is nature, he is not nature: just as he is not a being, if others are beings; and if he is a being, the others are not being. If you accept this as true also for wisdom and goodness and generally all the things around God or said about God, then your theology will be correct and in accord with the saints.

Gregory describes transcendent reality--in this case, God--in many of the same terms as Mahavira: real and aware, but invisible, non-corporeal, and fundamentally indescribable. There is, in both, the bare minimum agreement that philosophical materialism must be rejected. It is part of an intuitive function of human psychology that scientists explain as evolutionary attempt to grapple with and quantify the unknown but which theologians more liberally suggest may be an innate sense of the divine common to the species. Beyond this, Jain and Christianity diverge in their understanding of the relationship of the transcendent to the divine. In spite of what many Christians have suggested about Orthodox theology, for example, there are no Christian bodies which believe that humanity's ultimate goal is to become that transcendent reality which is non-corporeal and indescribable. The essence of the transcendent God, in Christianity, is what all reality is defined against; at the moment when the creation is absorbed wholesale into the Creator, both cease to exist in any meaningful sense as Christians conceive them.

More importantly, and with significantly less flavor of the esoteric, the Christian view of the transcendent and its relationship to the material world reveals an essential disagreement with Jain about the value of material existence. In creating the material world, God declared it good, and, whatever evil occurs in it, His handiwork has never ceased to be good at its core. That would explain why the Christian picture of redemption is not one of the transcendent calling people out of the material but of the immaterial taking on physical form in order to redeem creation. The Christian story of salvation has never been one of Christ leading people out of the world (in the sense of material existence). Just the opposite: the promise of Christian salvation centers around the idea that humanity will be resurrected into a new body to enjoy the presence of God on a new earth. A Christian respect for life and for creation is centered, therefore, not on a self-serving ethic but on a commitment to the eternal value of God's creation. Christian liberation is not a liberation from the world (again, in the sense of materiality) but liberation for the world. Christians have been freed from sin so that they might free the rest of the creation from the consequences of sin and so that all creation might then share in the experience the transcendent, not in ceasing to be creatures but as creatures were intended to experience the Creator.

The Absurd and Christian Knowledge

In the course of a discussion on humanity's attempt to find clarity in the world, Camus wrote:

Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify.

It is intriguing how closely this idea parallels the hesychast understanding of what it was to know. For Camus, the act of trying to know was an attempt to impress a distinctly human character onto a decidedly inhuman world. Understanding was at its heart the human superimposition of its nature onto the nature of everything. This is his recognition of the human character of constructed meaning: because understanding is the effort to compose meaning and because meaning has the human intellect as its composer, to understand is ultimately to give an artificial human quality to reality.

This behavior is born from a desire for clarity and unity which is absurd insofar as real clarity and unity is impossible. This despair in the effort to know and the total inaccessibility the object to be known is echoed (or perhaps prefigured) in the hesycahst thought of the fourteenth century. Like Camus, the hesychasts recognized that the effort to know was an effort for unity (though they understood this unity metaphysically rather than in terms of mere logical clarity) but that the foreign nature of the world which was to be known made this ultimately impossible.

Unlike Camus, who stressed the flaw in humanity's expectation of unity, the hesychasts stressed the flaw in humanity's perception of ultimate disunity in the world. Relying instead on the knowledge the unity must be there (in part because of an existential predisposition to assume a unified, comprehensible universe) they translated the desire to find unity from a natural human yearning to an ethical imperative. Unity existed in the world and to know that unity was to have transcended the human predicament. This, incidentally, was achieved through union with the one object, unlike the perceived world, with which that union was possible: God. In union with the divine, the hesychasts expected to achieve a unified understanding of all reality. In an eschatological vision of perfect knowledge, Gregory Palamas writes of a time when humanity will know everything as it is because, through God, humanity has become a participator in the unifying principle of everything that is: light.

For it is in light that the light is seen, and that which sees operates in a similar light, since this faculty has no other way in which to work. Having separated itself from all other beings, it becomes itself all light and is assimilated to what it sees, or rather, it is united to it without mingling, being itself light and seeing light through light. If it sees itself, it sees light; if it behold the object of its vision, that too is light; and if it looks at the means by which it sees, again it is light. For such is the character of the union, that all is one, so that he who sees can distinguish neither the means nor the object nor its nature, but simply has the awareness of being light and of seeing a light distinct from every creature.

This is by no means an attempt to collapse Christian eschatology (or even epistemology) with absurdism. Camus and Gregory could hardly have arrived at more divergent conclusions about the possibility of knowledge. They begin, however, with a similar observation that when humanity attempts to understand the world the behavior is essentially unitive, born out of an innate human desire to collapse everything into a single system or schema. They both recognize the natural human despair when, by our own efforts, the desired and expected unity cannot be achieved. What is left, then, is to decide what to do with those observations.

A Musing about the Difference between Fact and Truth

In conjunction with the work that I have done on hesychast epistemology, my mind has been continually drawn back to the question of truth: what is truth and, particularly, what distinguishes truth from fact? Several possible answers come to mind, the most obvious of which is that there is no substantial difference. If something is factually accurate than it is true. If something is a fact than it is also the truth. This certainly accords with our everyday usage of the term. A truth is the opposite of a lie, any statement which is not factually accurate. There is a sense, however, in which this understanding of a lie is dependent on this assumed definition of truth. Another option, which also finds expression in common speech, is to understand truth as that macro-reality which is the accumulation of particular facts. All the individual scientific facts which point away from an intelligent creator and toward total human autonomy make the conclusions of secular humanism true.

A decidedly less modern view of the relationships between facts and truth makes the former the common bricks of a personal or cultural paradigm and the latter the appropriation of them. The translation into the vernacular would be “what is true for you is not necessarily true for me.” Few, if any, dispute the fact that the earth is round, that gravity keeps us bound to it, and that death is the inevitable end of all. How those facts are incorporated into one another in order to shape a picture of the world shared by an ethnicity, a community, or even kept private is what constitutes truth. What is true for me in my rendering of facts is truth.

While we toy with and borrow from both the scientific and the post-scientific mindsets described above, Christians cannot draw a meaningful conception of truth from any of these suggestions. With these as our tools, how are we to meaningfully understand Jesus famous declaration in John 14:6? Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Is he the truth merely because he preached only that which was factually accurate, that which corresponded to reality? Or is he the truth because what he preached and who he was functioned for those societies, communities, and individuals who have elected to have faith in him? If he were talking to A. C. Grayling would he be forced to say, “For someone else, I am the way, the truth, and the life. I don’t work for you.”

The temptation when reading John 14 is to treat the three terms as referring to three complimentary aspects or qualities of Jesus. Undoubtedly hundreds of excellent three-point sermons have been based on this reading. After reading the hesychasts, however, I am inclined to think that all three terms are ultimate futile attempts to describe a single, ineffable reality. Jesus is not the truth because he always speaks the truth. Jesus is not the way because he is the means for getting where we are going. Jesus is not the life because he brings with him the promise of eternal life. That makes for a nice Sunday morning soporific but it ultimately trivializes the nature of Jesus. Those may be factual representations of what Jesus does but they do not get to the nature of the thing being commented on, namely what Jesus is.

Here then, is my proposal, for what the triad of epithets means, admitting beforehand that just as language proved inadequate for Jesus to convey his meaning to his disciples my own language is more feeble still. When Jesus declares that he is the truth (and all the correlative terms which aim toward the same reality), he is revealing the mystery that God, in the self-giving act of Incarnation and redemption, is the normative Reality on which all other reality is contingent for whatever truth content it may possess. Jesus is the way not because he is the means to the appropriate end but because he constitutes means themselves. Jesus is life because everything apart from the self-giving, self-effacing, self-sacrificing God who enfleshes himself is dead. It may have a heartbeat. It may have neurons firing. It is dead nevertheless. Jesus defines what life is, and his use of the term is less an accommodation to our language than it is a corrective for it.

Thus, when Jesus makes the definitive declaration about his character and claims exclusivity (“no one comes to the Father except through me”), he clues us in to the absolute and transcendent nature of these claims. Gregory Palamas rights that terms like truth “would not, properly speaking, apply to [God], or else would properly apply to [God] alone.” This is because,

Every nature is utterly remote and absolutely estranged from the divine nature. For if God is nature, other things are not nature, but if each of the other things is nature, he is not nature: just as he is not a being, if others are beings; and if he is a being, the others are not being. If you accept this as true also for wisdom and goodness and generally all the things around God or said about God, then your theology will be correct and in accord with the saints.

When we admit that Jesus is the truth and that there are no other truths, it is not merely a rejection of religious pluralism. It is a rejection of idolatry in any form. Whatever we do is either true because it imbibes of the Truth, because the Truth works in us and through us or it is a lie. In every moment we are either alive because we partake of the Life, because Life enlivens us or we are dead. For every end, we achieve through the Way because there is only the Way or our means are in fact anti-means which achieve nothing. All other grounds for all other absolutes are illusory. Only in this way does Jesus declaration fully and appropriately answer Thomas’ question, “We don’t even know where you’re going. How can we know the way?” Thomas missed the mark. He was looking for a contingent means to a finite end, much in the way we often understand faith as a concert ticket into heaven. Thomas didn’t know the way, but only because he did not yet know Jesus. To know Jesus is to know the way. To know Jesus is to know truth and to make all the facts known true.

This then is my conclusion. If we take the essentially tautological (and Socratic) definition that truth is that normative reality by which all true things are true and translate it into the Christian terminology above, we are left with this: the loving, saving, self-emptying God is that normative reality by which all things-factual or not, rational or not, scientific or not, pleasant or not-are true. Facts may be correct but they can be declared true only from the perspective of the One who created them and defined their content and purpose.

Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas

Scripture:


Matthew 5:8

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Isaiah 58:3-11

“'Why have we fasted, and you see it not?
Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?'
Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure,
and oppress all your workers.
Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to hit with a wicked fist.
Fasting like yours this day
will not make your voice to be heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose,
a day for a person to humble himself?
Is it to bow down his head like a reed,
and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?
Will you call this a fast,
and a day acceptable to the LORD?

"Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

“Then shall your light break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up speedily;
your righteousness shall go before you;
the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
you shall cry, and he will say, 'Here I am.'
If you take away the yoke from your midst,
the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness,
if you pour yourself out for the hungry
and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
then shall your light rise in the darkness
and your gloom be as the noonday.
And the LORD will guide you continually
and satisfy your desire in scorched places
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters do not fail.”

History:

Gregory Palamas, To the Most Reverend Nun Xenia, 42

You cannot extinguish a raging fire by slashing at it from above; but if you pull away the fuel from below, the fire will die down immediately. So it is with the passions of impurity. If you do not cut off the inner flow of evil thoughts by means of prayer and humility, but fight against them merely with the weapons of fasting and bodily hardship, you will labour in vain. But if through prayer and humility you sanctify the root, as we said, you will attain outward sanctity as well.

Reflection:

Reference to Gregory Palamas seems much more appropriate for the Feast of the Transfiguration than for Lent, at least upon first blush. After all, he dedicated most of his polemical career to defending the uncreated nature of the Thaboric light. Yet, mixed into that debate, was a constant focus on knowledge of God through experience of Him, and experience of God through a purified heart and the mediating power of Christ.

I have made reference before to encountering God (in Christ) in the Lenten fast, and I stand by that language. It is important to remember, and both Gregory and Isaiah remind us of this, that it is not the fast itself that facilitates this experience. It is, at best, a secondary cause. The outward fast is intended to engender in us both prayer and humility. In truth, we find that this follows very naturally in practice. Particularly with reference to food, the nagging nature of hunger and the knowledge of the cause of that hunger is a constant call to prayer and a persistent reminder of our own fragility and finitude.

In essence, the outward fast creates within us an inward fast, a true fast of the kind that Isaiah describes. It is a fast of good works and dedication to God. It is a spiritual fast that is helped but not summed up in our physical fast. Self-denial becomes a means of affirming God. This isn't to say that we need to abolish the self in order to truly affirm God, because, in Christ (and the experience of God he brings), we find the only true and substantial affirmation of our being. Humanism--of a genuine sort--embraces the true essence of humanity which is perfected and typified in Jesus Christ. In essence, by emptying ourselves and approaching Christ in the forty days of fast we enounter ourselves as we ought to be and as we truly will be some day.

So by grace we are offered the chance to die to ourselves in order to find our life in Christ, to be purified, and, ultimately, to see God.

Prayer:

Oh that my words were written!
Oh that they were inscribed in a book!
Oh that with an iron pen and lead
they were engraved in the rock forever!
For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and at the last he will stand upon the earth.
And after my skin has been thus destroyed,
yet in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see for myself,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another.
My heart faints within me!
--Job 19:23-27

Appendix to the Apology: More Quotes on Passion and Impassibility

My presentation of the patristic evidence in my Apologia Apatheia was at best haphazard. More unfortunately, it was incomplete. So, without attempting any kind of deliberate systematization, I would like to offer an additional list of relevant patristic quotations which will hopefully further illustrate my point that impassiblity is primarily a question of the sinlessness of God in the Fathers, not a lack of emotions. I intend to continue to update this post as I, inevitably, find more quotes which support my thesis about the truly classical definition of impassibility.

Maximos the Confessor, Four Centuries on Love, 2.16

Passion is a movement of the soul contrary to nature either toward irrational love or senseless hate of something or on account of something material. For example, toward irrational love of food, or a woman, or wealth, or passing glory or any other material thing or on their account. Or else it can be toward a senseless hate of any of the preceding things we spoke of, or on account of any one.

Gregory Palamas, Triads, II.2.7

To become “insensible” is in effect to do away with prayer; the Fathers call this “petrification.” (This importance of this post is highlighted in a note by the translator which discusses the word for “insensible”: “analgesia – lit. incapability of feeling pain, i.e., spiritual blindness or obtuseness: not to be confused with impassibility, control of the disordered passions, or purity of heart.”)

Triads, II.2.19-20

Impassibility does not consist in mortifying the passionate part of the soul, but in removing it from evil to good, and directing its energies towards divine things…and the impassible man is the one who no longer possesses any evil dispositions, but is rich in good ones, who is marked by virtues, as men of passion are marked by evil pleasures; who has tamed his irascible and concupiscent appetites (which constitute the passionate part of the soul), to the faculties of knowledge, judgment and reason in the soul, just as men of passion subject their reason to the passions. For it is the misuse of the powers of the soul which engenders the terrible passions, just as misuse of knowledge of created things engenders the “wisdom which becomes folly.”

…the prize goes to him who has put that part of his soul under subjection, so that by its obedience to the mind, which is by nature appointed to rule, it may ever tend towards God, as is right, by the uninterrupted remembrance of Him..Such is the way which leads through impassibility to perfect love, an excellent way which takes us to the heights.

The Declaration of the Holy Mountain

If anyone does not acknowledge that spiritual dispositions are stamped upon the body as a consequence of the gifts of the Spirit that exist in the soul of those advancing on the spiritual path; and if he does not regard dispassion as a state of aspiration for higher things that leads a person to free himself from evil habits by completely spurning what is evil and to acquire good habits by espousing what is good, but considers it to be a deathlike condition of the soul’s passible aspect, then, by adhering to such views, he inevitably denies that we can enjoy an embodied life in the world of incorruption that is to come.

For if in the age to come the body is to share with the soul in ineffable blessings, then it is evident that in this world as well it will also share according to its capacity in the grace mystically and ineffably bestowed by God upon the purified intellect, and it will experience the divine in conformity with its nature. For once the soul’s passible aspect is transformed and sanctified – but not reduced to a deathlike condition – through it the dispositions and activities of the body are also sanctified, since body and soul share a conjoint existence. As St. Diadochos states, in the case of those who have abandoned the delights of this age in the hope of enjoying the blessings of eternity, the intellect, because of its freedom from worldly cares, is able to act with its full vigor and become capable of perceiving the ineffable goodness of God. Then according to the measure of its own progress it communicates joy to the body too, and this joy which then fills both soul and body is a true recalling of incorruptible life.

Peter of Damascus, A Treasury of Divine Knowledge, I

[The hesychast] loves the supernatural God with all his soul and imitates His dispassion with all his strength.

A Treasury of Divine Knowledge, XIV

Dispassion is a strange and paradoxical thing: once someone has consolidated his victory over the passions, it is able to make him an imitator of God, so far as this is possible for man. For though the person who has attained the state of dispassion continues to suffer attacks from demons and vicious men, he experiences this as if it were happening to someone else, as was the case with the holy apostles and martyrs. When he is praised he is not filled with self-elation, nor when he is insulted is he afflicted. For he considers that what is pleasant come to him by the grace of God and as an act of divine concession of which he is unworthy, while what is unpleasant comes as a trial: the former is given us by grace to encourage us in this world, while the latter is given us to increase our humility and our hope in the world to be. Such a person is impassible, and yet because of his power of discrimination is acutely aware of what gives pain.

Dispassion is a not a single virtue, but is a name for all the virtues. A man is not merely one limb; for it is the many limbs of the body that constitute a man; and not merely the limbs, but the limbs together with the soul. Similarly, dispassion is the union of many virtues, while the place of the soul is taken by the Holy Spirit. For all activities described as ‘spiritual’ are soul-less without the Holy Spirit, and it is given by virtue of the presence of the Holy Spirit that a ‘spiritual father’ is given this title. Yet if the soul does not reject the passions, the Holy Spirit will not come to it; nor, on the other hand, unless the Holy Spirit is present can one properly speak of the all-embracing virtue of dispassion. And if someone were to become dispassionate without the Holy Spirit, he would really be, not dispassionate, but in a state of insensitivity…The one who attained dispassion becomes impassible out of his perfect love for God.

Diadochos of Photiki, On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination, 98

Dispassion is not freedom from attack by the demons, for to be free from such attack we must, as the Apostle says, “go out of the world;” but it is to remain undefeated when they do attack…we can break through the black ranks of the demons if, because of our good works, we are protected by the armor of divine light and the helmet of salvation.

Pseudo-Anthony, On the Character of Men, 89

Evil is a passion adherent to matter, but God is not the cause of evil. He has given men knowledge and understanding, the power of discriminating between good and evil, and free will. It is man’s negligence and indolence that give birth to evil passions, while God is in no way the cause.

Some Miscellaneous Wisdom

Some thought-provoking quotations from three Church Fathers:

Gregory Palamas

Do you not understand that the men who are united to God and deified, who fix their eyes in a divine manner on Him, do not see as we do? Miraculously, they see with a sense that exceeds the senses and with a mind that exceeds mind, for the power of the spirit penetrates their human faculties, and allows them to see things which are beyond us.

It should be remembered that no evil thing is evil insofar as it exists, but insofar as it is turned aside from the activity appropriate to it, and thus from the end assigned to this activity.

God is not only beyond knowledge but also beyond unknowing.

No one has ever seen the fullness of this divine Beauty, and this is why no eye has seen it, even if it gaze forever: in fact, it does not see the totality such as it is, but only a measure in which it is rendered receptive to the power of the Holy Spirit. But in addition to this incomprehensibility, what is most divine and extraordinary is that the very comprehension a man may have, he possesses incomprehensibly.

Not only are man’s knowledge of God and his understanding of himself and his proper rank (which knowledge now belongs to those who are Christians, even those considered uneducated laymen) a more lofty knowledge than natural science and astronomy and any philosophy in these subjects, but also our mind’s knowledge of its own weakness and the search for its healing would be incomparably superior by far to the investigation and knowledge of the magnitude of the stars and the reasons for natural phenomena, the origins of things below and the circuits of things above, their changes and risings, their fixed positions and retrograde motions, their disjunctions and conjunctions, and, in general, the entire multiform relation that results from their considerable motion in that region. For the mind that realizes its own weakness has discovered whence it might enter upon salvation and draw near to the light of knowledge and receive true wisdom which does not pass away with this age.

Maximos the Confessor

The wise man who gives or receives instruction wishes to give or to receive it only in useful matters. However, when the man who appears wise seeks information or is questioned, he advances only more contrived things.

Those who are still timid in the war against the passions and who fear the inroads of invisible enemies should be quiet, that is, not engage in warlike behavior above their strength, but by prayer abandon the care of themselves to God’s concern.

Who knows how God is made flesh and yet remains God? This only faith understands, adoring the Logos in silence.

The one who has joined the body to the soul through virtue and knowledge has become a lyre and a flute and a temple. A lyre, firstly, because he beautifully maintains the harmony of the virtues; next, a flute because through the divine experiences he receives the Spirit’s inspiration; finally a temple because through the purity of his mind he has become the Word’s dwelling place.

John Chrysostom

A drop of grace filled all things with knowledge; through it wonders took place, sins were loosed.

Apologia Apatheia

My thoughts here are largely in response to this post, though I hope that they have value on their own as well.

It has been suggested that the classical doctrine of impassibility is an assertion of the emotionlessness of God. I reject this, both as a depiction of the history of dogma and as a theological assertion. While it may be said that the post-scholastic, Western conception of impassibility necessitates a God without emotion, the historical doctrine of impassibility, even the basis of that Western doctrine, is not directly related to the ability of God to feel.

The doctrine of God's impassibility (formulated, as was almost all early doctrine, in Greek) regarded His apatheia (impassibility or dispassion), that is His lack of pathos (passion). As with most theological discussion, the language here took on a specialized meaning so that passion cannot simply be equated with emotion (which was never the meaning of "pathos" to begin with). Therefore, to truly understood what is meant in an authentically classical definition of impassibility, one must first determine the classical defition of that which impassibilty says God is without: pathos.

Kallistos Ware, in his introduction to John of Sinai's Ladder of Divine Ascent, writes that passions are "regarded as the contranatural expression of fallen sinfulness." Pathos represents the human perversion their emotions, their natural impulses. Pathos are the sinful impulses of a fallen creation. If a direct relationship to emotion is necessary, then passion can be said to be our subjugation to our corrupted emotions rather than our domination and purification of them. Anger, for example, is pathos not because it is an emotion but because it has been perverted to ungodly ends. Desire is a pathos not because it is an emotion but because it has been coopted by humanity for the purpose of indulgence. Pathos is by its very definition sin.

Impassibility then becomes an ethical imperative, rooted in the nature of God, which is intended for humans. God governs His pure emotion rather than being governed by them, so humanity must transfigure and govern their emotions. The impassibility of God is a goal for man to achieve; in Ware's words "...it is a reaffirmation of the pure and natural impulses of our soul and body. It connotes not repression but reorientation, not inhibition but freedom; having overcome the passions, we are free to be our true selves, free to love others, free to love God. Dispassion, then, is no mere mortification of the passions but their replacement by a new and better energy."

Clearly passion refers to something other than the emotive aspect of the human soul, as the fathers vigorously affirm the God given virtue of emotionality:

"Hatred against the demons contributes greatly to our salvation and helps our growth in holiness." Evagrius Ponticus, "On Discrimination," 9.

Evagrius also writes that one should experience, while fasting, the emotions of joy "at the blessings that await the righteous" and fear of resurrection and "that fearful and awesome judgment-seat," because "in this way you will have the means for helping others and for mortifying the passions of your body" ("On Asceticism and Stillness")

"We should be afraid of God in the way we fear wild beasts. I have seen men go out to plunder, having no fear of God but being brought up short somewhere at the sound of dogs, an effect that fear of God could not achieve in them." John Climacus, "Ladder of Divine Ascent"

The dichotomy between emotion and passion is evident in Diadochos' contrast of real joy (an emotion) and counterfeit joy (a diabolical passion): "When we experience things in this manner, we can be sure that it is the energy of the Holy Spirit within us. For when the soul is completely permeated with that ineffable sweetness, at that moment it can think of nothing else, since it rejoices with uninterrupted joy. But if at that moment the intellect conceives any doubt or unclean thought, and if this continues in spite of the fact that the intellect calls on the holy name...then it should realize that the sweetness it experiences is an illusion of grace, coming from the deceiver with a counterfeit joy. Through this joy, amorphous and disordered, the devil tries to lead the soul into an adulterous union with himself."

Passion then is not simply equated to emotion but is the corruption of and domination by emotion. This, at least, is the testimony of the Church Fathers.

(This, I might add, is a view of passion and impassibility consistent with the Bible, if not the exclusive biblical view. While apatheia is never used in the New Testament, the three instances of pathos and its forms are all negative leading one to conclude that the absence of passion is a virtue. The three occurrences of pathos, moreover, never tie pathos to emotion strictly but always in some sense to control by passion as opposed to self-control: 1 Thess 4:3-5: "It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God;" Rom 1:26: "For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions;" Col 3:5: "Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil lust, and greed, which amounts to idolatry." Notably God is never described as being "passible" since pathos is a sinful state.)

Therefore, in its original formulation, impassibility is not a feature of the divine distinct from humanity. Instead, it is the shared possession of God and His creature in its natural state. Impassibility is a mandate for humanity in an attempt to once again recapture our created purity, our image of God. "Blessed dispassion raises the poor mind from earth to heaven, raises the beggar from the dunghill of passion." (John Climacus) It requires that people not be subject to their pathos (sinful impulses) but that purified emotion should be subject to them in order that they may be subject to a dispassionate God. Quotes from a few fathers should suffice to demonstrate that this is the case.

"When the intellect rescues the soul's senses from the desires of the flesh and imbues them with dispassion [apatheia], the passions shamelessly attack the soul, trying to hold its senses fast in sin; but if the intellect then continually calls upon God in secret, He, seeing all this, will send His help and destroy all the passions at once." Isaiah the Solitary, "On Guarding the Intellect," 14.

John of Carpathia parallels sin and passion: "Once certain brethren, who were always ill and could not practice fasting, said to me: 'How is it possible for us without fasting to rid ourselves of the devil and the passions?' To such people we would say: you can destroy and banish what is evil, and the demons that suggest this evil to you, not only by abstaining from food, but by calling with all your heart on God." ("Texts for the Monks of India," 68)

More telling still is the exposition of impassibility/dispassion (both apatheia) by Ilias the Presbyter in his "Gnomic Anthology," I.71-74, where he intimately connects passion to sin and impassibility to sinlessness: "Pasionateness is the evil matter of the body...the self-indulgent man is close to the impassioned man; and the man of impassioned craving to the self-indulgent man. Far from all three is the dispassionate man. The impassioned man is strongly prone to sin in thought, even though for a time he does not sin outwardly...the man of impassioned craving is given over freely or, rather, servilely, to the various modes of sinning. The dispassionate man is not dominated by any of these degrees of passion...Dispassion is established through remembrance of God."

Gregory Palamas notes that the goal of ascetic practice is the attainment of impassibility, that is to no longer be "dominated by passionate emotions:" "In every case, those who practice true mental prayer must liberate themselves from the passions, and reject any contact with objects which obstruct it, for in this way they are able to acquire undisrupted and pure prayer...for the body's capacity to sin must be mortified" ("The Hesychast Method of Prayer," II.ii.6).

In addition to an ethical goal for humanity restored to its pure created state, there is another function of the impassibility of God in the Fathers. The insistence on impassibility is a tacit affirmation of the incomprehensibility of God, part of a theology of negation which says that God is no confined to our categories of emotionality. Therefore, the kataphatic assertion that God loves/hates/rejoices/burns with anger is both accepted and countered with the apophatic assertion that God is impassible, and this in turn should be accepted and then met with the even more apophatic assertion that God is beyond impassibility. Nikitas Stithatos expresses the paradox in "On Spiritual Knoweldge, Love, and the Perfection of Living," 1: "God is dispassionate Intellect, beyond every intellect and beyond every form of dispassion." [And as a way of cheating to further prove my previous point about the ethical implications of this, he immediately continues:] "If on account of your purity these qualities have been bestowed on you and are richly present in you, then that within you which accords with the image of God has been safely preserved and you are now a son of God guided by the Holy Spirit; for all who are guided by the Spirit of God are sons of God."

Thus, when Anselm formulates what becomes the "classical" doctrine of impassibility for the West, he is not truly reiterating what has always been held by the church universal. Instead, he is expressing and justifying what he believes has been taught in proto-scholastic terms that will take hold in the West. His sentiment is rooted neither in the sinlessness nor the incomprehensibility of God expressed by the fathers who preceded him:

But how are You at once both merciful and impassible? For if You are impassible You do not have any compassion*; and if You have no compassion Your heart is not sorrowful from compassion with the sorrowful, which is what being merciful is. But if you are not merciful whence comes so much consolation for the sorrowful?

How then are you merciful and not merciful, O Lord, unless it be that You are merciful in relation to us and not in relation to Yourself? In fact, You are [merciful] according to our way of looking at things and not according to Your way. For when You look upon us in our misery it is we who feel the effect of Your mercy, but You do not experience the feeling. Therefore You are both merciful because you save the sorrowful and pardon sinners against You; and You are not merciful because You do not experience any feeling of compassion for misery. (Proslogion, 8)

In fact, just the opposite, this view of God's impassibility is motivated by our ability categorize God, the opposite intention of the original proponents of impassibility. Rejecting these scholastic trends that were creeping into Eastern theology, Gregory Palamas writes:

By examining the nature of sensible things, these people have arrived at a certain concept of God, but not at a conception truly worthy of Him and appropriate to His blessed nature...wrapped up in this mindless and foolish wisdom and unenlightened education, they have calumniated both God and nature. (Triads, I.1.18)

A good formal theology will always be fundamentally apophatic, and thus affirms that God transcends all human categorization including form and emotion, but the motivation is something quite different than a scholastic understanding of impassibility. The beautiful paradox of God is that we can at one time affirm that He transcends all emotional categorization and at the same time truly declare that we experience His love: not feigned love or effects which are analogous to the effects of love but love that is true and pure, the perfect expression of how He created His creatures to experience love. When true impassibility is applied to God it is first and foremost a defense of God's sinlessness, since pathos is a patristic term which refers to our contranatural impulses (which all ought to agree are absent in God). From there, impassibilty may be employed as an apophatic category which rejects the finitude of God, even from being restricted truly into the category of impassibility. What impassibility can never be is an assertion that we have an unfeeling God, indifferent to the plight of His creation and incapable of interacting with it in any genuinely personal way. Neither Scripture nor the Fathers who formulated the doctrine of impassibility necessitate this, and all good sense seems to prevail against it. Most importantly, the testimony of the Incarnation positively precludes it, or else the sorrow of Jesus in the garden and the anger in the temple are instances of the divine succombing to the human rather than the human conforming to the divine, something which is particularly untenable.

See also: Appendix to the Apology

*As almost a curiosity, it is worth noting that Anselm's problem here is undoubtedly partly linguistic. In Latin compassion and passion clearly have the same root, the Latin pati for "to suffer." A Greek would never have seen dispassion as opposed to compassion, since in Greek pathos forms no part of the etymology of either mercy (eleos) or compassion (oiktirmos).