/lit/ - Literature

>>19140407
>don't think that objects of awareness are truly existing things
>signifies a division
>he still believes in dialectics of division
>if it's fully transcendent I don't see how we can properly come to know it outside of apophatic reasoning

Oh no no no

>>19090035
This. Reading St. Maximus makes you impervious to most if not all delusions.

>>18988552
>which philosopher has some of the most difficult to fully comprehend and internalize work that is actually a worthwhile investment of time or stands above the work of other philosophers
St. Dionysius the Areopagite
St. Maximus the Confessor

>*refutes universalism*
Your response?

>>18854602
>David Bentley Hart
Lol

>>15423595
>"everything is ultimately the same thing" rather than "mind and body are apart"
False dialectic.
>monism can account for how mental experiences can interact with physical events
Are you implying Christians cannot account for this?

>>10329442
That which is in our power, our free will, through which the power of corruption entered into us, will surrender voluntarily to God and will have mastery of itself because it had been taught to refrain from willing anything other than what God wills. As our Savior himself said, taking what is ours into himself, Yet not as I will, but as thou wilt (Mt 26:39). And later St Paul, as though he denied himself and did not have his own life, said: It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me (Gal 2:20).

Do not be disturbed by what I have said. I have no intention of denying free will. Rather I am speaking of a firm and steadfast disposition, a willing surrender, so that from the one from whom we have received being we long to be received being moved as well. It is like the relation between an image and its archetype. (...)

It is absolutely necessary that everything will cease its willful movement toward something else when the ultimate beauty that satisfies our desire appears. In so far as we are able we will participate without being restricted, as it were, being uncontainably contained. All our actions and every sublime thought will tend eagerly towards that end "in which all desire comes to rest and beyond which they cannot be carried. For there is no other end towards which all free movement is directed than the rest found in total contemplation by those who have reached that point," as our blessed teacher says. For nothing besides God will be known, nor will there be anything opposed to God that could entice one to desire it. Instead, when God's ineffable majesty is made known, all intellectual and sensible things will be encompassed by him. It is like the light from the stars. The stars do not shine in the day. When the greater and incomparable light of the sun appears, they are hidden and cannot be seen by the senses. With respect to God this is even more so, for God is infinite, and uncreated things cannot be compared to created things.

When we learn the essential nature of living things, in what respect, how, and out of what they exist, we will not be driven by desire to know more. For if we know God our knowledge of each and everything will be brought to perfection, and, in so far as possible, the infinite, divine and ineffable dwelling place (Jn 14:2) will be ours to enjoy. For this is what our sainted teacher said in his famous philosophical aphorism: "'Then we shall know as we are known' (1 Cor 13:12), when we mingle our god-formed mind and divine reason to what is properly its own and the image returns to the archetype for which it now longs."

-St Maximos the Confessor, Ambiguum 7

>>10299147
Get the Orthodox Study Bible. The Old Testament is a translation of the Septuagint. The Septuagint is a Greek translation produced a few hundred years before Christ. The oldest surviving manuscripts of the Old Testament are of the Septuagint. The oldest Hebrew manuscripts come from 600 years closer to our time. Where the NKJV translation aligns with the Septuagint, the NKJV translation is used. Importantly, the Septuagint includes the "deuterocanonical" books which are removed from post-Reformation translations because certain reformers didn't like them. The New Testament uses the NKJV translation.

It is filled with footnotes drawing from the Church Fathers, and has other informative articles on various topics of theology and doctrine. The NKJV translation is very readable and one of the better English translations out there.

The Oxford Annotated Bible is a meme that people on /lit/ took seriously. Because it has "Oxford" and "Annotated" in the name. The NRSV pure adulteration and sanitization. The notes are from "scholars" who spend most of their time trying to undermine the texts more than the translation already does. The quality of the book itself is offensive. Picking it up feels like picking up a big block of jello. The paper is so thin that you can read 20 pages ahead.

In summary, The Orthodox Study Bible is the least adulterated Bible you can get in English, because it has the Septuagint. It's easily readable without being sanitized. If you decide you don't want that, get an ESV or a regular NKJV. Do not get the Oxford Annotated "Bible". Do not get an NRSV.

>When God created human nature, he did not create sensible pleasure and pain along with it; rather, he furnished it with a certain spiritual capacity for pleasure, a pleasure whereby human beings would be able to enjoy God ineffably. But at the instant he was created, the first man, by use of his senses, squandered this spiritual capacity--the natural desire of the mind for God--on sensible things. In this, his very first movement, he activated an unnatural pleasure through the medium of the senses. Being, in his providence, concerned for our salvation, God therefore affixed pain alongside this sensible pleasure as a kind of punitive faculty, whereby the law of death was wisely implanted in our corporeal nature to curb the foolish mind in its desire to incline unnaturally toward sensible things.

>Henceforth, because irrational pleasure entered human nature, pain entered our nature opposite this pleasure in accordance with reason, and, through the many sufferings (παθηματα) in which and from which death occurs, pain uproots unnatural pleasure, but does not completely destroy it, whereby, then, the grace of the divine pleasure of the mind is naturally exalted. For every suffering (πονος), effectively having pleasure as its primary cause, is quite naturally, in view of its cause, a penalty exacted from all who share in human nature. Indeed, such suffering invariably accompanies unnatural pleasure in everyone for whom the law of pleasure, itself having no prior cause, has preconditioned their birth. By that I mean that the pleasure stemming from the original transgression was ‘uncaused’ insofar as it quite obviously did not follow upon an antecedent suffering.

>After the transgression pleasure naturally preconditioned the births of all human beings, and no one at all was by nature free from birth subject to the passion associated with this pleasure; rather, everyone was requited with sufferings, and subsequent death, as the natural punishment. The way to freedom is hard for all who were tyrannized by unrighteous pleasure and naturally subject to just sufferings and to the thoroughly just death accompanying them.