www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West "East vs. West" is Inaccurate

Not being the Son is not a "thing" in God, thus I hold by the statements that I have made. Anything common in God is essential, and anything particular, is particular to only one hypostasis individually and cannot be shared.

The error, if there was one, was made early in the thread by you. Instead of adhering to "proper characteristics" you advanced the idea that "anything" held in common by two must be held in common by all three and must be an essential characteristic. This idea, by methods that you interestingly consider Western, was shown to be inadequate - my example was advanced simply as test case to probe your idea. I am delighted that it has led to the "proper characteristics" reformulation, which eliminates the problems induced by your implicit extrapolation beyond the Eastern Fathers.

I reiterate: I advanced the proposition simply to test your statement, with no deeper significance, and for no speculative reasons.

I agree. I have no interest in academic theology either, because that is a Western way of looking at things. Theology is the experience of God in the life of the Church. Thus, doing theology is never a speculative endeavor; instead, it is always experiential.

No. But I admit I made an error, because I assumed that you were familiar with the writings of the Cappadocians and other Eastern Fathers on this topic, and I should not have assumed that to be the case.

My apologies.

Thus, I reiterate that anything that is common in God is essential, while the distinctions in God are peculiar to each hypostasis individually.

No need to schlep to this victory by definition; we already have the three required proper characteristics.

It is a victory not by definition, because God is beyond definitions. It is a victory by revelation. As I said before, you would make a great Scholastic, and I say this because I was one myself, but thankfully I saw the light and left Scholasticism behind.

Whatever. If you assumed familiarity then what was the point of these posts which gave the same rote repetition of the relevant writings? Whatever you were assuming it was not familiarity with the Cappadocians.

This statement is inconsistent with others made here. It is necesssary to qualify "anything" and "distinctions" so that they are limited to "proper characteristics"; morever it appears from what you have written that the latter could be limited to causation, begottenness, and procession.

And what a proper "thing" is or is not, is not revelation it is your definition.

DJS,

My apologies, and let me reword it again to make it clearer.

My use of the phrase "anything in God" refers to the divine essence and the hypostatic distinctions, beyond this we have no knowledge of God, because beyond this nothing has been revealed. The Scholastics of course would speculate beyond this and come up with many other things in God, but the Eastern Fathers hold only to what has been revealed.

So when I use the word "things," I am referring to the "things" that we know about God, and which are revealed to the Church as a gift of grace. Beyond this we know nothing of God. In fact, although it may seem curious to us, some of the Fathers referred to the hypostases as "things" (pragmata).

Thus, anything in God that is common is essential, and anything that is distinct is peculiar to each hypostasis individually. In using the word "anything" I am applying it to all that is known about God by divine revelation.

That being said, earlier in this thread I emphasized that the Eastern Fathers distinguish the persons (hypostases) only by their modes of origin, and I apologize because I assumed that you were familiar with what that distinction meant, when clearly you did not. The idea of oppositional relations as distinguishing the persons (hypostases), which you brought up a few posts ago, is a Scholastic notion that has never been accepted in the East. In fact this philosophical notion has been explicitly rejected by the Eastern Churches on several occasions in the past, and it is constantly criticized by Eastern Orthodox theologians (e.g., Lossky, Staniloae, Meyendorff, Yannaras, et al.) even today. Once again I apologize for not being clearer, but I assumed that you as an Eastern Catholic were familiar with these theological distinctions.

Blessings to you,
Todd

I forgot to mention in my previous post that the uncreated divine energies are also referred to as "things" by many of the Fathers (e.g., Maximos, Palamas, et al.). But they are not hypostatic "things"; instead, they are the enhypostatic essential energies of the three divine hypostases (cf. St. Gregory Palamas, Topics of Natural and Theological Science and on the Moral and Ascetic Life, no. 75]

Myles,

Have you ever considered starting your own theology blog?

Todd,

Several pages back you asked me a good question that I did not respond to. I've been busy with the "real world" but am still planning on getting back to it at some point. I guess the short answer is that I think the problem with the filioque in the west is not Florence but the lack of an explicit distinction between essence and energies (or something equivalent) and that gets the west into trouble sometimes when describing the Trinity. If some distinction was formalized in western thought I think the filioque would resolve itself though. Moreover, I have yet to be convinced that making such a distinction is completely incompatable with the western tradition.

Matt,

I know of only two Western theologians who came close to making a distinction between God's essence and His uncreated energies, the first was John Scotus Eriugena, and the second was Gilbert de la Porr�e.

Below is a link to an article that you may find interesting, because it compares the ideas of Eriugena to the theology of St. Gregory Palamas:

An Orthodox Evaluation of Certain T...t of the Theology of St. Gregory Palamas [web.archive.org]

As far as Gilbert de la Porr�e is concerned, I believe that he made a distinction (at least of some kind) between God's essence and His attributes (energies), but I think he was condemned by a local council of the Western Church for making it.

Blessings to you,
Todd

Dear Todd,

Just a note to say that the John Scotus Eriugena the article refers to above is NOT Blessed John Duns Scotus Eriugena who lived at a later date and is the Western theologian whose writings paved the way for the development of the Immaculate Conception dogma defined by the Pope in the 19th century (Pope John Paul II formally beatified him some years back, although he enjoyed a local cult in Italy for a few centuries prior to this).

The John Scotus Eriugena you refer to and who is discussed in the article is a theologian who lived in the 9th century, I believe.

Certain Celtic groups in the U.S. have canonized him a saint as well and there are several of their parish churches named for him . . .

Alex

Yes, he lived from A.D. 810 to 877.

There is a great book on Eriugena's thought entitled "The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena" by Willemien Otten, which covers some of the issues discussed in the article that I referenced above.

Blessings to you,
Todd

Dear Todd,

I think you've really been unfair to djs.

As I see it, he interpreted:

"if something is common to two of the hypostases it must be common to all three"

to mean that any statement which can be made about two of the hypostases can be made of the third as well. The confusion could have been easily cleared up if you had simply told him that this is a wrong interpretation.

-Peter.

Dear Todd,

Thanks for the Tomus link. It was an interesting read -- they certainly didn't skimp on the anathemas.

There's something I've been wondering about: one of the recommendations in "The Filioque: A Church Dividing Issue?" is "that the Catholic Church, following a growing theological consensus, and in particular the statements made by Pope Paul VI, declare that the condemnation made at the Second Council of Lyons (1274) of those 'who presume to deny that the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son' is no longer applicable."

Reading this, one would tend to expect a similar recommendation regarding the Tomus of 1285. But there isn't one. Can you shed any light on this?

(Some of the other recommendations are "that in the future, because of the progress in mutual understanding that has come about in recent decades, Orthodox and Catholics refrain from labeling as heretical the traditions of the other side on the subject of the procession of the Holy Spirit" and "that Orthodox and Catholic theologians distinguish more clearly between the divinity and hypostatic identity of the Holy Spirit, which is a received dogma of our Churches, and the manner of the Spirit�s origin, which still awaits full and final ecumenical resolution".)

Many years,
Peter.