The
problem for Christian theologians is that their affirmation of divine
impassibility is difficult to reconcile with the suffering of Jesus, as
reported in the New Testament. An example of the difficulty is Origen’s
commentary on Matthew, where he explains away the evidence of Christ’s emotions
of anguish in Gethsemane. Origen introduces a distinction between being
vulnerable to the anguish and actually experiencing it. The state of initial
vulnerability to passion, the pre-passion state (προπαθεια), is as if one is on the doorstep of the
intense emotional experience. This vulnerable state was distinguished from passion
(παθος) as the state experienced after the soul
becomes imbalanced and caught by the full emotion of anguished fear. Passion
was thought to lead necessarily to being susceptible to sin, which was
unthinkable regarding Christ because he was also God. As with Origen, Christian
theologians commonly believed that a necessary relation exists between
possibility and evil, reinforcing the belief that God incarnate cannot be
passible any more than God can be passible. (John E. McKinley, Tempted for
Us: Theological Models and the Practical Relevance of Christ’s Impeccability
and Temptation [Paternoster Theological Monographs; Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and
Stock, 2009], 89; the reference from Origen is that of Commentaria in
Evangelium secundum Mattheam [ed. C. and C. Vicentii Delarue, PG 13 [1857]:
1741, on Matt 26:37)
Another
example is Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 6.3, where he writes that
passions are a diseased condition of the will that tend to sin; Jesus had only
a natural sort of passions that are different from those of fallen humanity so
he could be passible without also being sinful. (Ibid., 89 n. 29)
