“The connection between apatheia and self-giving love (agapé) is crucial. In teaching apatheia as a spiritual discipline, the constant emphasis of the patristic theologians is on growing to be free of irrational feelings and fantasies that stem from self-love, from vanity and wounded pride. That is, apatheia, as either an attribute of God or a Christian virtue in this world and ‘beatitude’ for the world to come, is the opposite of what we normally call an emotional reaction. It is, rather, an aspect of the ‘eternal changelessness’ of divine love, ‘God’s everlasting outpouring,’ flowing in and (sic) from the Godhead and at work also in the human creature.
“Viewed in relation to divine love, it seems clear that the doctrine of apatheia functions to make two crucial assertions about God’s involvement with the world. Negatively, it refutes the possibility that the God known to Israel can ever become estranged from humanity or any part of it–unlike the highly emotional and therefore fickle gods worshiped by the Mesopotamians, the Greeks, or the Romans. Positively, the doctrine of apatheia affirms that God can be genuinely involved in events that happen in time, in human events, without either being formed or diminished by them.
“It is especially apt to consider the patristic teaching of apatheia . . . because I believe that the biblical concept of covenant is a way of making, through the medium of narrative, these same crucial assertions. Covenant is the stabilizing mechanism that allows God to remain profoundly involved in the contingent events of history, responding in various ways to the often distressingly unstable human situations and heart, yet without essential change in either the divine being or the divine disposition toward those whom God has made. The first indication of this function of covenant occurs within the early chapters of Genesis, when the original covenant is established, through Noah, with ‘all flesh’ (Gen 9:17). It is telling that the recognition that hurts God to the heart and leaders to the flood–namely, that ‘every inclination of the thought of [the human] heart is purely evil all the time’ (Gen 6:5)–is the very recognition that, immediately after the flood, moves God to forswear further destruction and enter into covenant with this creature whose heart inclines to evil ‘from his youth’ (8:21). And from this recognition the whole of biblical history unfolds. Now, it is foreseeable that there will be other occasions for God to be ‘hurt to the heart,’ yet covenant represents God’s own renunciation of an emotional reaction. It is God’s choice, one might say, of the spiritual discipline of apatheia.”
Ellen F. Davis, “Vulnerability, the Condition of the Covenant,” in The Art of Reading Scripture (Eerdmans, 2003), 292-293.
Ellen F. Davis, “Vulnerability, the Condition of the Covenant,” in The Art of Reading Scripture (Eerdmans, 2003), 292-293.
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