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So long therefore as I be absent from Thee, I am more present with myself than with Thee; and yet know I Thee that Thou art in no ways passible; but I, what temptations I can resist, what I cannot, I know not.
Originally negative, it soon acquired a rich positive connotation. An impassible God is one who is outside space and time. The attribute connotes creative power, eternity, infinity, permanence. A passible God is corruptible, i.e. susceptible to the processes of becoming, change, and decay.
On this showing, the Logos, who was incarnate, had no personal subsistence. The relation between God and man ever remains impersonal. Christ, qua divine, was only an aspect or effluence of deity. This, for the monophysite, was the one alternative to the doctrine of a passible God. He was faced with a desperate dilemma.
The disciples of Thales and Pythagoras grant that all bodies are passible and divisible into infinity. Others hold that atoms and indivisible parts are there fixed, and admit not of a division into infinity. Aristotle, that all bodies are potentially but not actually divisible into infinity.
Zeno son of Mnaseas, the native of Citium, avers these to be principles, God and matter, the first of which is the efficient cause, the other the passible and receptive. Four more elements he likewise confesses. The world being broken and confused, after this manner it was reduced into figure and composure as now it is.
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