Neo-Church Fathers, hellenism, or extra nos proclamation

To help put the below in context, here is a picture of Chain of Being

"Like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their praises, and you can be saved." -St. Makarios the Great.
“Struggle until death to fulfil the commandments: purified through them, you will enter into life.”
—St Thalassios the Libyan

Response:  if all he means by this is struggle in sanctification, no problem.   

A person must first spend a long time in ascetic practice. He must begin by purifying his body from the actual committing of sin, whether great or small, and then purge his soul of every form of desire or anger. His moral impulses need to be disciplined by good habit, so that he does not do anything whatsoever through his five senses that is contrary to the purpose of his intellect, [This is very good Hellenistic philosophy, but very bad Hebraic revelation--JBA]  nor does his inner self consent to any such thing. It is then, when finally he becomes subject to himself, that God makes all things subject to him through dispassion and by the grace of the Holy Spirit. For a man must first submit to the law of God, and then he will rule as an intelligent being over all around him. His intellect will reign as it was originally created to reign, with judgment and self-restraint, with courage and justice. Now he will calm his wrath with the gentleness of his desire, now quieten his desire with the austerity of his wrath; and he will know that he is a king. All the limbs of his body, no longer abducted by ignorance and forgetfulness, will act in accordance with God’s commandment. Then through his devotion to God he will achieve spiritual insight and will begin to anticipate the snares prepared by the devil and his secret and stealthy attacks.St Peter of Damaskos

If this is true, and if this is being used as the ground of salvation, and this is the purported biblical teaching, then why did Paul worry about being accused of antinominism.  At least Roman Catholicism pretends to give grace a role.

“Forgiveness of sins is betokened by freedom from the passions; he who has not yet been granted freedom from the passions has not yet received forgiveness.”
—St Thalassios the Libyan

It's hard to imagine Paul being accused of antinominianism in Romans 6 if he were preaching the above.

The only path to salvation is the  unwavering following of the instructions of the Holy Fathers
~Ignatios Briannchaninov

Seems like Jesus got replaced.

“Chastity's wings are greater and lighter than the wings of marriage. Intercourse, while pure, is lower. Its house of refuge is modest* darkness. Confidence belongs entirely to chastity, which light enfolds.”
—St Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on the Nativity

Notice the language of higher/lower.  Spiritual (mind) stuff is higher on the scale than passional stuff.  This is Hellenism with a vengeance and it is foreign to the Bible.  My whole outlook on life is one total negation of this mentality.  

“Since Elijah repressed the desire of his body, he could withhold the rain from the adulterers. Since he restrained his body, he could restrain the dew from the whoremongers who released and sent forth their streams. Since the hidden fire, bodily desire, did not prevail in him, the fire of the high place obeyed him, and since on earth he conquered fleshly desire, he went up to the place where holiness dwells and is at peace. Elisha, too, who killed his body, revived the dead. That which is by nature mortal gains life by chastity, which is beyond nature. He revived the boy since he refined himself like a newly wind infant. Moses, who divided and separated himself from his wife, divided the sea before the harlot. Zipporah maintained chastity, although she was the daughter of pagan priests; with a calf the daughter of Abraham went whoring.”—St Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on the Nativity

This is funny since Elijah called down fire on men.  Was he doing it Jedi-style, with the passions neutral?  

Is Knowing a dominating? On God's Essence

Classical theism has said that we can know that God is but not what God is.  We cannot know  God’s essence.  They had a reason for saying this:  in the Hellenistic world (which was never fully rejected in Christendom and received a shot in the arm in Descartes, even until our present day) to know something was to “master” it and bring it under one’s control--it is to subsume all under “The Same” (Smith 31).

Thus, when the Fathers said we cannot know God’s essence (cf. Basil, Letters 231 and 234) they meant we cannot bring it under our grasp, seizing and dominating it.  And this is virtually the position of Christendom, East or West.  Later Western thought nuanced this approach with the valid distinction between apprehending and comprehending.  If the field of debate is Hellenism’s view of knowledge as domination, then I fully agree with the tradition on this point.  

But why should we let idolaters determine how we can talk about God?  I understand the distinction between knowing what/that God is, and I agree with the value it seeks to protect, but with Barth I think it is simply “impracticable” (II.1/187).  Jesus said if we know him, we know the Father.  Presumably we know the person of the Father.  Can we know the person of the Father without knowing what the Father is?  This is where classical metaphysics comes undone.  No one is saying we can “fully exhaust God’s essence.”  But neither do I think Jesus is saying, “You can know the Father but I am holding back on you. You can only have me in reserve.”

We can’t separate person from nature (assuming classical metaphysics for a moment).  If we know Jesus, and if Jesus is homousios with the Father, then does it really make sense to speak of a free-floating, abstract essence behind the two?  If you still maintain that the above classical metaphysics is a coherent model, then the only thing left is the frozen theology of Palamism and Eastern Orthodoxy.  They at least are consistent.  They posit that the persons and the nature is hyperousia, beyond being (Palamas, Triads 2.iii.8; 3.iii.17-20).  Still, I must cut this option off at the pass.  I echo Robert Jenson:  if the Persons are eclipsed by the energies and remain in the realm of hyperousia and “above” the biblical narrative, in such case that we can no longer identity the persons by their hypostatic propria, we can only conclude that Palamism, despite its best intentions, is a more frozen form of modalism than anything Augustine or Aquinas ever dreamed of.

Barth, Karl.  Church Dogmatics.

Palamas, Gregory.  The Triads, ed. John Meyendorff.

Smith, James K. A., jacques derrida: live theory.