Impassibility and Love - St Anthony the Great, with Q & A

Saint Anthony the Great

God is good, without passions and unchangeable. One who understands that it is sound and true to affirm that God does not change might very well ask: how, then, is it possible to speak of God as rejoicing over those who are good, becoming merciful to those who know Him and, on the other hand, shunning the wicked and being angry with sinners.

We must reply to this, that God neither rejoices nor grows angry, because to rejoice and to be angered are passions. Nor is God won over by gifts from those who know Him, for that would mean that He is moved by pleasure. It is not possible for the Godhead to have the sensation of pleasure or displeasure from the condition of humans, God is good, and He bestows only blessings, and never causes harm, but remains always the same.

If we humans, however, remain good by means of resembling Him, we are united to Him, but if we become evil by losing our resemblance to God, we are separated from Him. By living in a holy manner, we unite ourselves to God; by becoming evil, however, we become at enmity with Him. It is not that He arbitrarily becomes angry with us, but that our sins prevent God from shining within us, and expose us to the demons who make us suffer.

If through prayer and acts of compassionate love, we gain freedom from our sins, this does not mean that we have won God over and made Him change, but rather that by means of our actions and turning to God, we have been healed of our wickedness, and returned to the enjoyment of God’s goodness. To say that God turns away from the sinful is like saying that the sun hides itself from the blind (St Anthony the Great, Cap. 150).

Q & A

Brad Jersak:

Vladika, might I say it this way: Impassibility can be hard to grasp if we think it means God cannot feel and therefore cannot not love. Rather, God IS love. His immutability and impassibility ensures that he cannot be constrained by externals to be other than love.

Lazar Puhalo:

The impassibility of God means precisely that He is love and, being God, does not change from love to any passion or emotion, but His only sense or feeling is love. It is tricky to avoid saying His only emotion is love, because emotion is a purely human concept and cannot apply to the Divine. He IS love and does not become what He is not nor experience feelings and emotions that are contrary to His Being.

I would express it this way: Christ is an expression of His co-suffering love, for which the Word became what He was not in that He became human, but at the same time He did not become something contrary to His being, because Christ is the express image of God's love for humanity.

Brad Jersak: 

In God's divine impassibility, I take it that he could only suffer 'in the flesh' through the Incarnation. That is, God seems to enter a state of passibility [only] by assuming a human nature and [only] in his human nature. But there I have taken a step from 'in the flesh' to 'in his human nature,' because even now, Christ continues to be the eternal God-man (fully human and fully divine) -- continues somehow to identify with a glorified, incorruptible, but nevertheless human body (yes? no?). So the question is whether an incorruptible, divinized human Christ is passible or impassible. That is, since Christ remains fully human even now, does he continue to be able to co-suffer with us, or has passibility been expunged even from his humanity?

If God is compassionate (lit. co-suffering), is there a sense in which it is Orthodox to affirm co-suffering (even prior to the Incarnation) in God's nature (I'm thinking of Psalm 102(103), etc. What are the bounds of a revelation of compassion alongside a doctrine of impassibility?

Father John Behr:

One really needs to understand ‘impassibility’ as being ‘unconstrained’ - we cannot force God to do something, he cannot be moved (from without), but he is certainly capable of moving (whatever that might mean for divinity): “he so loved his world that …”

And our guarantee that this is indeed so is in fact Christ, about whom Moses is already speaking.

Comments

[Deacon Mikias Asres]

The Article is so awesome.... it give a wise perspectives... but can you provide me the "Book" from which St. Anthony the Great is quoted? or at least can you direct me through the link? Thank you very much.

Mikias Asres

[Mark Northey]

Thank you for this Q&A, Brad.

I have never really understood Divine impassibility correctly. I liked it when used to move us away from an "angry God", yet grew uncomfortable with the implication that God does not "suffer with us."
As I've heard Met. Kallistos Ware say, this is not the picture we get from the Scriptures. (Instead he argues this sort of impassibility is imported from Aristotle, and is something in need of correction. Met. Kallistos suggests that it can be corrected by discarding the assumption that 'emotion' or feeling can only be caused (externally). I dont know if this solves our problem, but seems to arrive close to what Fr John Behr is saying).

[Roger Haydon Mitchell]

I must admit that I find the whole idea of God's impassibility really weird. It seems to come from elsewhere than the person of Christ who was moved with compassion by sickness and snorted with anger at death. I begin with the assumption that there is no other God than one like Jesus. "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father" is the whole deal as far as I get it!