I don't understand how the choice of creating isn't a movement from potentiality to actuality. I can understand how the act of creation isn't a movement from potentiality to actuality. Yet i cannot see how the choice of this act is not a movement from potentiality to actuality. To me it seems that God had to change in order to choose something that he previously didn't choose
ruclips.net/video/0ufYL6UPO_c/видео.htmlsi=q2fRT-AYexT_mhiV Go to the time stamp on the wrath of God. It’s a contingent expression of God’s love for creation against those who corrupt it.
Basically, “first actuality” is God’s eternal intra-Trinitarian life/power. This is the indivisible divine energy that contains the abundance of all the divine names and logoi. And then there is the contingent and free manifestation of this power in relation to creation, which is often called “energies” by Palamas. These are second actualities and have no effect on the first actuality, God’s own power.
I am hardly Philosophically trained, but what you described, as God knowing all possible worlds, sounds a bit like Molonism, which is a Catholic opinion, brought up around the time of the reformation. Are you aware of any Orthodox speaking on similarities of this topic?
Orthodox theology is not necessarily complicated or difficult. There are plenty of simple introductions, after which you can always go a step further. I would suggest Jonathan Pageau :)
Theology is revealed, it does not rely on philosophy or philosophical arguments. Power and potency are the same word with the same meaning and the same root. "Being beyond Being" requires potency... And non-dualism requires God's potency to be greater than His act, His essence to be greater than His energies... Otherwise God would have no essence as we Orthodox understand it and He would be absolutely divinely simple in the same manner that Thomas Aquinas taught. You are a thomist who doesn't understand they're a thomist, or at best a scotist. *The essence and energies distinction is real, not virtual nor formal.* Orthodoxy starts from revelation, from multiplicity moving into unity, from the persons moving to the Godhead, not the other way around. We don't know God's essence. By reducing God's essence to unrealized energies you performatively reduce God's transcendence and denature God's essence as such. You don't know God's essence or what it consists of. Also, you're probably wrong about the "potential logoi". God's essence is not the "potential logoi", but something else entirely. Logoi are by definition both uncreated and created, and uncreated logoi are different from potential logoi, and they are not logoi. Your spergy speculation is Western and not Orthodox. It's also obsessed with creation, trying to look at God's essence from within creation. Reminds me of Roman Catholic's analogia entis. You are not understanding the meaning of the words you are using in your abstract reasoning. Logoi means purpose. There can't be different counterfactual and disparate purposes, even if God's mind could in theory contemplate them, because such things would entail contradiction in God. You are theorizing the devil, not our God from Revelation who created a good world. By saying there could be counterfactual purposes you are giving Being in God to non-being... and also ironically, reducing God to Being instead of the utterly transcendent non-dualism of Being beyond Being. Like Dyer has said, "this doctrine leads to the Origenist and Platonic conception of “creation” as an essentialist emanation of God, and not an ex nihilo, free creation of God. Since, in Western theology, God’s will is His essence, and God’s divine patterns and archetypes are also His essence, the created patterns are therefore just as necessary as the Divine Essence. Because God is the origin of all things as First Cause in Thomism, the created effects bear some likeness to their Origin - which, unfortunately in Thomism is the essence of God, as God is Actus Purus, with no potentiality. In Thomism, the “natural knowledge of God” which is had by reflection upon creatures back to their “First Cause” must later be supplemented by “supernatural grace” and revelation, built upon the foundation of “natural knowledge.” "
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God is also beyond pure act
Yes, He is in essence. But the term “energy” basically means “actuality.” It’s crucial to make the distinction between essence and energy, of course.
Yes, He is both essence and energy (Pure Act)
I don't understand how the choice of creating isn't a movement from potentiality to actuality. I can understand how the act of creation isn't a movement from potentiality to actuality. Yet i cannot see how the choice of this act is not a movement from potentiality to actuality. To me it seems that God had to change in order to choose something that he previously didn't choose
Where do attributes/actions like wrath, judgment and chastisement fall into this?
ruclips.net/video/0ufYL6UPO_c/видео.htmlsi=q2fRT-AYexT_mhiV
Go to the time stamp on the wrath of God. It’s a contingent expression of God’s love for creation against those who corrupt it.
Trey can you try doing this again because i am a slowboi
Yes I’ll do a better explanation soon. even in the past few days I’ve talked with some people who have helped me be more precise
Basically, “first actuality” is God’s eternal intra-Trinitarian life/power. This is the indivisible divine energy that contains the abundance of all the divine names and logoi.
And then there is the contingent and free manifestation of this power in relation to creation, which is often called “energies” by Palamas. These are second actualities and have no effect on the first actuality, God’s own power.
I am hardly Philosophically trained, but what you described, as God knowing all possible worlds, sounds a bit like Molonism, which is a Catholic opinion, brought up around the time of the reformation.
Are you aware of any Orthodox speaking on similarities of this topic?
What do I have to read to understand even a fraction of what you just said. Where should one begin in the study of Orthodox theology?
One of the very good book you can check out for this, are one of David Bradshaw's work: especially "Divine Energies & Divine action"
Orthodox theology is not necessarily complicated or difficult. There are plenty of simple introductions, after which you can always go a step further. I would suggest Jonathan Pageau :)
Theology is revealed, it does not rely on philosophy or philosophical arguments. Power and potency are the same word with the same meaning and the same root. "Being beyond Being" requires potency... And non-dualism requires God's potency to be greater than His act, His essence to be greater than His energies... Otherwise God would have no essence as we Orthodox understand it and He would be absolutely divinely simple in the same manner that Thomas Aquinas taught. You are a thomist who doesn't understand they're a thomist, or at best a scotist. *The essence and energies distinction is real, not virtual nor formal.*
Orthodoxy starts from revelation, from multiplicity moving into unity, from the persons moving to the Godhead, not the other way around. We don't know God's essence. By reducing God's essence to unrealized energies you performatively reduce God's transcendence and denature God's essence as such. You don't know God's essence or what it consists of.
Also, you're probably wrong about the "potential logoi". God's essence is not the "potential logoi", but something else entirely. Logoi are by definition both uncreated and created, and uncreated logoi are different from potential logoi, and they are not logoi. Your spergy speculation is Western and not Orthodox. It's also obsessed with creation, trying to look at God's essence from within creation. Reminds me of Roman Catholic's analogia entis.
You are not understanding the meaning of the words you are using in your abstract reasoning. Logoi means purpose. There can't be different counterfactual and disparate purposes, even if God's mind could in theory contemplate them, because such things would entail contradiction in God. You are theorizing the devil, not our God from Revelation who created a good world. By saying there could be counterfactual purposes you are giving Being in God to non-being... and also ironically, reducing God to Being instead of the utterly transcendent non-dualism of Being beyond Being.
Like Dyer has said, "this doctrine leads to the Origenist and Platonic conception of “creation” as an essentialist emanation of God, and not an ex nihilo, free creation of God. Since, in Western theology, God’s will is His essence, and God’s divine patterns and archetypes are also His essence, the created patterns are therefore just as necessary as the Divine Essence. Because God is the origin of all things as First Cause in Thomism, the created effects bear some likeness to their Origin - which, unfortunately in Thomism is the essence of God, as God is Actus Purus, with no potentiality. In Thomism, the “natural knowledge of God” which is had by reflection upon creatures back to their “First Cause” must later be supplemented by “supernatural grace” and revelation, built upon the foundation of “natural knowledge.” "