Olympiada
31-12-2005, 12:32 AM
Dear Community
I am seeing a huge discrepancy between the thought of Johanna Manley and Archpriest Georges Florovksy in regards to the power of evil. I started reading her introduction to Job and the Holy Fathers and something she wrote struck me as contrasting with what Florovsky wrote:
The causes and reasons of evil are always an absurdity, more or less veiled. This strange causality is not included in the ideal "chain" of God's universal causality; it splits and disfigures it. It is a causality rivaling that of the Creator, coming, as it were, from a destroyer of the world. And this destructive power whence does it come? For all real power belongs to God alone. One wonders whether the existence of evil is compatible with the existence of God. Nevertheless, this illegitimate power is not at all an anemic phantom. It is a real force, a violent energy. The opposition of evil to God is very active. The Good is seriously restricted and oppressed by the revolt of evil. God himself is engaged in a struggle with these powers of darkness. And in this struggle there are very real losses, a perpetual diminution of the Good. Evil is an ontological danger. Universal harmony, willed and established by God, is truly decomposed. The world is fallen. The entire world is surrounded by a dismal twilight of nothingness. No longer is it that world conceived and created by God. There are morbid innovations, new existences existences which are false, but real. Evil adds something to what is created by God, it has a "miraculous" force of imitating creation indeed, evil is productive in its destructions. In the fallen world there is an incomprehensible surplus, a surplus which has entered existence against the will of God. In a certain sense, the world is stolen from its Master and Creator.
She said "St. Paul said "a great and effectual door is opened unto me, and there are many adversaries" (1 Cor. 16:9). And the same is happening around us whenever something especially godly is being done. But it happens only with the permission of God, for evil has no real power, as we learn here.
It seems to me that Florokvsky and Manley are contradicting each other.
What do you think?
In Christ
Olympiada Kane
I am seeing a huge discrepancy between the thought of Johanna Manley and Archpriest Georges Florovksy in regards to the power of evil. I started reading her introduction to Job and the Holy Fathers and something she wrote struck me as contrasting with what Florovsky wrote:
The causes and reasons of evil are always an absurdity, more or less veiled. This strange causality is not included in the ideal "chain" of God's universal causality; it splits and disfigures it. It is a causality rivaling that of the Creator, coming, as it were, from a destroyer of the world. And this destructive power whence does it come? For all real power belongs to God alone. One wonders whether the existence of evil is compatible with the existence of God. Nevertheless, this illegitimate power is not at all an anemic phantom. It is a real force, a violent energy. The opposition of evil to God is very active. The Good is seriously restricted and oppressed by the revolt of evil. God himself is engaged in a struggle with these powers of darkness. And in this struggle there are very real losses, a perpetual diminution of the Good. Evil is an ontological danger. Universal harmony, willed and established by God, is truly decomposed. The world is fallen. The entire world is surrounded by a dismal twilight of nothingness. No longer is it that world conceived and created by God. There are morbid innovations, new existences existences which are false, but real. Evil adds something to what is created by God, it has a "miraculous" force of imitating creation indeed, evil is productive in its destructions. In the fallen world there is an incomprehensible surplus, a surplus which has entered existence against the will of God. In a certain sense, the world is stolen from its Master and Creator.
She said "St. Paul said "a great and effectual door is opened unto me, and there are many adversaries" (1 Cor. 16:9). And the same is happening around us whenever something especially godly is being done. But it happens only with the permission of God, for evil has no real power, as we learn here.
It seems to me that Florokvsky and Manley are contradicting each other.
What do you think?
In Christ
Olympiada Kane