Impassibility
Impassibility (from
Latin in-, "not",
passibilis, "able to suffer, experience emotion") describes the
theological doctrine that
God does not experience
pain or
pleasure from the actions of another being. Some theologies often portray God as a magnified human being subject to many (or all) human
emotions and imperfections: for example, in the
Hebrew Bible Yahweh is portrayed as experiencing
anger,
jealousy, and
disappointment, and in Greek
mythss Zeus is portrayed as experiencing
lust. Ancient
Greek philosophers like
Aristotle and
Plato challenged these ideas and introduced the concept of God as a perfect,
omniscient, timeless, and unchanging being not subject to human emotion (which represents change and imperfection). The concept of impassibility was developed by medieval theologians like
Anselm and continues to be in tension with more emotionally satisfying concepts of God.