I had thought that His Divine Nature WAS to include His Personhood. In other words, God, His nature, consists of Three Persons. Thus, when we "know" His Person, we also "know" His Essence. Of course, this knowledge can never be but mysterious
Thus, we invoke the Holy Trinity knowing that worshiping God in that way will not lead to pagan Greek humanized God, that is often seen in the West.
God is anthropomorphized in Scriptures so that we can understand the concepts of revelation given to us by Him. But seeing God as essence leads to a pagan God? I think that the Personhood of God can also lead to polytheism, don't you?
Regards
That's what we know about God. We do not know His nature, the way God really "is." (the is is also a construct for our limited minds, because God does not "exist" in our created sense).
But seeing God as essence leads to a pagan God? I think that the Personhood of God can also lead to polytheism, don't you?
It can lead to paganism because we begin to associate/confuse His nature with ours. Thus, we begin to think of an "angry" God, a "vengeful" God, a passionate God, just the way we are. Western Europe underwent strong Greek pagan influence in the Age of Reason, deifying man and humanizing God, leading to a false and arrogant notion that mankind is capable of accomplishing and conquering anything.
When a group of communist Romanian officers asked Elder Cleopa, a Romanian monk, what he thought of the feat of Yuri Gagarin (first man in space), he said "nothing." Perplexed, the confronted him by saying something to the effect that we conquered space and so on...and Elder Cleopa simply replied "It's like a bee came out of the next and flew around it three times, and the rest of the world knew absolutely nothing about it."
In other words, compared to the whole Creation, man is nothing. Our only measure of divinity is ineffable and incomprehensible God, and our only measure of Man is Jesus.
We know of God through His Hypostatic revelations. One, the Word, became Incarnate, so that we may establish a loving and personal relationship with God, and never confuse our nature with His.