 Classical theists certainly made provisions for speaking of God in ways that suggested divine passion and even mutability. As Paul Gavrilyuk argues, for the Church Fathers, divine impassibility was less a denial of God’s emotional life than it was a qualifier that ruled out “passions and experiences that were unbecoming of the divine nature” (Gavrilyuk 2004, 16). In a similar vein, Michael Dodds emphasizes that Aquinas did not construe divine immutability as an attribute of God nor did he think that it implies inertness or stagnation. Nevertheless, Dodds, interpreting Aquinas, maintains that immutability “seems to signify divine being (esse) more appropriately [than mutability] since it more clearly indicates its distinction from all other things and its transcendence of all human thought and language” (Dodds 2008, 157–158).