The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (review)

It is heartening to read a book that one agrees with and even more so when it is a scholarly work on a controversial issue. Gavrilyuk's monograph is just such a work. The author acknowledges from the onset that it is commonplace among contemporary theologians to hold that God is passible and therefore suffers. Although there are a number of interrelated arguments for such a position, Gavrilyuk concentrates on one that is fundamental to this claim, i.e., that the Fathers of the Church innocently but mistakenly abandoned the God of the Bible and instead embraced the god/s of Greek philosophy or what Gavrilyuk calls "The Theory of the Theology's Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy" (5). He sets out to demonstrate that such a claim is historically flawed, philosophically naïve, and theologically disastrous. He rightly grasps that the Incarnation, not Greek philosophy, is the hermeneutical key to the Fathers' notion of God. It is precisely the Incarnation that decided the Fathers' rejection of all popular pagan notions of God as well as the more sophisticated Greek philosophical notions of God (8).

Gavrilyuk devotes the first chapter to examining what exactly Greek philosophy did say concerning God's passibility or impassibility. He wisely establishes that, contrary to any simplistic and therefore deceptive contemporary perception, the multiple Greek philosophical schools did not themselves hold a common understanding of God's impassibility or passibility. For example, the proponents of a passible God have mistakenly supposed that because the Stoics championed apatheia as a moral ideal, their god was its chief exemplification and was one which the Fathers naively appropriated. However, as Gavrilyuk notes, their deity was an impersonal force and so "the moral ideal of apatheia is never applied to God in the Stoic writings" (29). Of course, the real philosophical influence was Platonism, for God is utterly transcendent since he exists completely apart from all else. Thus "it was impossible for him to enter the world of becoming without relinquishing his perfections, such as transcendence, immutability, and impassibility. The supreme God would betray, diminish, and contaminate himself if he entered the order of sensible things" (34). Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover" merely accentuates this understanding of God as utterly isolated from and so uninvolved with everything else.

In contrast to such notions of God, Gavrilyuk argues that the Fathers consistently defended and fostered a biblical view of God, particularly by the revelation that God did actually become man. Moreover, since Greek philosophy never offered one consistent view of God, it was impossible for the Fathers to develop their incarnational idea from these sources. Gavrilyuk concludes that "the Theory of Theology's Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy must be once and for all buried with honours, as one of the most enduring and illuminating mistakes among the interpretations of the development of Christian doctrine" (46).

In consecutive chapters Gavrilyuk studies various authors and controversies involving the nature of God. For example, "By calling God 'impassible' Justin and other Apologists were clearing the decks of popular theological discourse in order to make space for the God-befitting emotionally coloured characteristics such as mercy, love, and compassion" (51). Moreover, the Fathers grasped that impassibility, in denying to God many negative anthropomorphic attributes, actually allowed him to be the active personal God of the Bible. "Far from being a barrier to divine care and loving-kindness, divine impassibility is their very foundation" (62).

It is within the trinitarian and christological controversies that the issue of God's impassiblity or passibility is most clearly seen. Precisely because human nature is passible, the Docetists held that taking on such a nature would necessarily jeopardize the divine transcendent and immutable perfection. Yet, Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus, while upholding God's unchanging love, argued that faith required that God did actually assume passible flesh (chapter 3). In his excellent chapter on Arianism Gavrilyuk clearly demonstrates that the Arians...