Genesis315:
If the soul is eternal, then where does it exist before we get
our bodies? Does that negate the idea of God being defined by his eternal nature?
**My soul, seek the Only One . . . My soul, you have no part with the earth; for you are from heaven. You are the image of God: seek your First Image. For like strives after like. Each object finds its rest in its center and element – fish in water, fire in its upward movement everything strives to its center. My soul, you are an immaterial spirit, immortal. . . In Him alone you will find your rest. **
St. Tikhon of Zadonsk
**Since angels and souls are incorporeal beings, they are not in a particular place, yet neither are they everywhere. They do not sustain all things, but themselves depend on Him Who sustains them. Hence they, too, are in Him Who sustains and embraces all things, and they are appropriately delimited by Him. The soul, since it sustains the body with which it is created, is everywhere in the body, although not in the sense of being located in a place or encompassed, but it itself sustains, encompasses and quickens the body, by virtue of the fact that it is in God’s image. **
St. Gregory Palamas
Genesis315:
Do angels/demons have power over the laws of nature? Or are they only more intelligent and pure spirit? To what extent can demons reek havoc beyond their powers of suggestion/temptation (which are formidable)?
**…The war which the demons wage against us by means of thoughts is more sever than the war they wage by means of material things. **
St. Maximos the Confessor
****The devil has a very close relationship and familiarity with the imagination, and of all the power of the soul he has this one as the most appropriate organ to deceive man and to activate his passions and evils. He indeed is very familiar with the nature of the imagination. For he, being created by God originally as a pure and simple mind without form and image, as the other divine angels, later came to love the forms and the imagination. Imagining that he could set his throne above the heavens and become like God, he fell from being an angel of light and became a devil of darkness. St. Dionysios spoke about this devil. "What is the evil in the devils? Irrational anger; unreasonable desire; and reckless imagination. **
St. Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain
**…we know there are Angels and Archangels, Thrones, Dominions, Princedoms, Powers, Splendors, Ascents, Intelligent Powers or Intelligencies, pure natures and unalloyed, immovable to evil, or scarcely movable; ever circling in chorus round the First Cause (or how should we sing their praises?) illuminated thence with the purest Illumination, or in one degree or another, proportionally to their nature and rank…so conformed to beauty and molded that they become secondary Lights, and can enlighten others by the overflowings and largesse of the First Light. Ministrants of God’s Will, strong with both inborn and imparted strength, traversing all space, readily present to all at any place through their zeal for ministry and the agility of their nature… **
St. Gregory Nazianzen
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