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Because no-one making these arguments is as based as St. Maximus the Confessor.

>>20348285

The uncreated nature is fundamentally different to the created nature, and so there is nothing in created nature that has the uncomposed simplicity of the unity of the holy trinity, but all of the triads that exist in nature are pointers to the reality of the Holy Trinity. Past Present Future, Height Width Breadth, Beginning Middle End, Bigger Smaller Equal, etc.

St Maximus the Confessor wrote that all of the created nature works according to three metaphysical categories - essence, person, and energy, with different word choices in this excerpt - and that these three irreducible principles are exemplified by the three persons of the holy trinity respectively, but they apply at the same time for created things.

>>20234584

Orthodox Christian here.

I would be interested in actually hearing your understanding of Vishishtadvaita, because every single vedic I've talked to that subscribed to it couldn't explain it to me in a way that didn't ultimately reduce to advaita.

At the level of the difference between God and the creation, there is an ontological division. This simply cannot be worked around with any philosophical reading, unless you go into heretical interpretations like Origenism, since he had elements of platonic syncretism. This is because it is dogmatic that time has a beginning, and was created out of nothing, and all of the created order is bound by time. God Himself is not bound by these limitations.

This does not imply a dvaita-style total separation, since creation is sustained by and permeated by God without being part of God.

So, neither vishistadvaita or bhedabheda apply in the distinctions between creation and creator in Orthodox Christianity.

However, when it comes to explications of the Holy Trinity, there is a lot of language that the Saints use that sounds a lot like bhedabeda language. Particularly in a confession of the faith cited one of the councils - I don't particularly remember who it was, but I remember it uses language like "God is divided indivisibly, and indivisibly divided" in regards to the reality of one God in three persons. So in this respect, I can understand why that thought can come about.

However, the explications of Orthodox Christian metaphysics involve clarifying not two distinctions (difference and non-difference), but THREE sets of orthogonal distinctions that do not ontologically collapse into each other, yet are fully unified in the eternal life of God.

St Maximus the Confessor writes the following, and I will post the image of his writings saying this:

There are three ontological realities:

Essence, Person(hypostasis), and Energy.

In created things, these ontological realities are unified within the same subject.

However, in the Holy Trinity, each of these principles is enhypoastatised as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit respectively.

One reason that the Son became incarnate, and acquired a human nature, is to not only overcome the division between the fallen human nature and God (and if bhedabeda were true, there *is* no difference to overcome), but to reveal the ontological mystery of Personhood, and show that one person of the Godhead has two natures, while the Father and Spirit only have one.

All of creation fits into these three categories, and other triads are extant in the created order(Beginning-middle-end, height-width-breadth, inside-outside-border, etc). If strict bhedabheda were true, and the created order as an icon of God reflected difference and non-difference, duality and non-duality coinciding, then this triadic structure is completely inexplicable and unexplainable.

What is necessary here is the Orthodox Trinitarian understanding of God.

>>18723222

The multiplicity in reality must be understood from the Orthodox viewpoint, since only the Orthodox doctrine explicates and distinguishes the three ontological categories - essence, person(hypostasis), and energy.

Essence is what something is, person(hypostasis) is who something is, and energy is what the person does, proper to their nature.

I'm using "who" in the sense of "I am a specific human person", as well as "That onion is a specific onion". Both onions and humans are considered "persons" in Orthodoxy, since personhood is not the same category as essence.

A person with a human essence is capable of rational thought, since rational thought is an energy proper to human essence, but a person with an onion essence is not capable of rational thought, since rational thought is not an energy proper to onion essence.

The distinction between essence and energy, in the vast majority of non-Orthodox worldviews, is collapsed and reduced to the same thing - reducing the worldviews into absurdity, as God becomes unknowable and therefore truth is unknowable (if you are not God, since you have come into existence in time), or all of experience is illusory since it is bound by time, and truth correspondingly becomes unknowable in this case as well (if you are God, since you must be eternal).

>>18721089