The Mystical Union: Maximus and the Christologic Beyond What Can be Conceived

If problem and solution are stated in the broadest terms, whether scientific, social, psychological, or spiritual, this is captured in the terms dualism and synthesis. An unresolvable difference, or a disunion, in which two systems, two facts, two grounds of meaning, or simply two people, stand opposed, is this sense of a duality. In turn, synthesis is union without dissolution, accounting for difference but integrating this difference into a larger, harmonious field. Union without dissolution describes the goal of field theory in science, but it also potentially describes every solution or resolution. All peace and harmony, all problem solving, depend upon a synthesizing harmony. The problem is, that unresolvable difference (dualism) characterizes human thought, whether that of wave and particle, Jew and Gentile, or male and female. Maximus the Confessor, in describing the work of God in Christ, demonstrates how it is that Christ overcomes otherwise irresolvable difference. He shows that the way God is at work surpasses any philosophical, religious, or logical system, whether that of Plato and Aristotle, the apophatic and cataphatic, or simply systems grounded in being and nonbeing. Cause and effect, existence and nonexistence, sensible and rational, silence and speech, being and nonbeing, or knowing and beyond knowing, describe the working parameters of human conceptuality. The history of thought, religion and theology, are summed up in these parameters of possibility, and yet Maximus maintains God in Christ surpasses these categories.

He begins On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy by laying out an alternative parameter:

Let God be the guide of the things that are perceived and spoken, for he is the only mind of those who perceive and of that which is perceived, and he is the only word of those who speak and of that which is spoken. He is the life of the living and of the things that have been endowed with life. On account of the very things that are and that are becoming, he is the one who is and the one who “becomes all things to all” (I Cor. 9:22).[1]

Maximus explains that, “on account of himself, he neither in any way whatsoever belongs to nor comes to belong to the things that are or that are becoming, whose essence he constitutes.”[2]  Being and becoming are inadequate ways of conceiving of God as “He is by nature in the same class as absolutely nothing of the things that are, and for this reason, he allows us to say rather that he is not, because it is more properly said of him that he transcends being.”[3] But this Platonic notion of the God beyond being, taken up by Neo-Platonists and many modern day Platonic theologians, is also inadequate in Maximus’ estimate. He acknowledges that we might contemplate the “difference between God and creatures,” and he recognizes that negation and affirmation are both limited possibilities which might be a reverential part of acknowledging God, “yet,” he says, “neither is possible in a proper sense – I am speaking of the existence and non-existence of God.”[4] Maximus acknowledges both of these approaches (and allows for the theological traditions which depend upon either the negative or the positive), while at the same time suggesting neither is “possible” or adequate.

So, this abstract approach to God, focusing on God as cause, might conclude positively that all things speak of God as they can be traced back to their origin, while at the same time maintaining that nothing can be said of God on the basis of cause, as God precedes all effects. It may be correct in a limited sense to speak of God as cause of all things, but as Jordan Wood notes, something is smuggled into God as cause, that is inadequate, as cause speaks of sequence or has reference to an unfolding in time which would never arrive at God.[5]

Maximus argues that neither existence nor non-existence “is possible in a proper sense, because neither establishes the very essence and nature of what existence is concerning the one whom we seek. For nothing at all – whether it exists or does not exist – is united with him by nature because he is their cause; neither anything of the things that are and are spoken nor anything of the things that are not and are not spoken in any way comes near to him.”[6] God is “beyond every kataphatic and apophatic statement”[7] – He is beyond either negation or affirmation or silence and speaking – all are inadequate. In other words, God is beyond any possibility that has been conceived or could have been conceived, and even to conclude to a negative not knowing is a claim about what can and cannot be known.  

While the tradition from Dionysius, which Maximus is referencing, would privilege the apophatic – and which Maximus allows has partial validity, even in itself it would negate the supposed understanding that imagines negation and silence alone are adequate. To claim to know what must be negated (the apophatic), or to know what cannot be spoken or made incarnate, is to claim to know what cannot be known (a self-defeating position). In both Protestant and Catholic understanding, this form of theology has laid the ground for delimiting what God can and cannot do, even in the incarnation. An apophatic theology which goes beyond itself, to that which is otherwise unthinkable, must be open to the possibility of God revealing himself in a manner that is not conceivable.

Yet, in the Christian theological tradition, this neo-platonic apophaticism predominates in Catholicism (East and West) and Protestantism. For example, the hard demarcation often made between faith and reason, presumes to tap into a reason that imagines it has the power to mark the limits of affirmation and negation, faith and reason. It makes a judgment and marks a delimitation taken up in nominalism and forms of Thomism. It limits the possibility of revelation and sets the limits of what God can do in incarnation, yet as Maximus argues, the accessible or inaccessible, the describable or indescribable, the knowable or unknowable do not in any way come near to him. Abstractions devolve into irresolvable differences, differences upon which they either implicitly or explicitly depend, but which are self-defeating.

Maximus moves directly into demonstrating how the incarnation and the church as a continuation of incarnation, goes beyond abstraction to a fulness of synthesis. The church, like Christ, “bears the representation and image of God because she possesses the same activity as his according to imitation and representation.”[8] God binds together those categories, such as the intelligible and sensible: “he makes the things that have been set apart from one another by nature to be the things that have converged with one another by the one power of relationship with him as their beginning.”[9]

Nothing has an origin or nature which establishes some absolute difference; rather all things have a common origin and cause which synthesizes or overcomes difference. “This relationship nullifies and covers over all individual relationships that are contemplated according to the nature of each of the things that are, not because it corrupts and destroys them and causes them not to be, but because it surpasses and outshines them. . .”[10] There is a unified relationship, or a final unified field theory, if you will, in which the unification of all things is posited. “And it is by this relationship that the totality itself and the parts of the totality shine and by nature are, because the parts possess the whole cause, which shines more brilliantly than themselves. And just as the sun is more brilliant than the stars in nature and power, so also its appearance covers over them as a cause does its effects.”[11]

All things relate to God, but humans have the capacity to obscure and fracture this relationship, which infects human recognition of how it is that all things  achieve unity with one another. As Maximus’ translator explains, “nothing in its original, created form is oriented to the division and discord that comes as a result of the fracturing of relationship with God.”[12] As Maximus explained earlier, this restoring of relationship is the work of the church instituted by Christ: “This contract for spiritual work in the spiritual vineyard restores the spiritual denarius of the divine and most royal image that was stolen by the evil one in the beginning through deceit according to the transgression of the commandment.”[13] The church “works the same things and in the same way as God does” – “as an image relates to its archetype.”[14]

For example, though there are a nearly boundless number of people from many different races, tribes, tongues, customs, manners and pursuits, through the body of Christ they are regenerated and recreated: “to all he gives equally and grants freely one divine form and designation, that is to be and to be called from Christ.”[15] Maximus quotes Galatians 3:28 to make the point: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The Church, as the image of God, works the same divine synthesis and oneness around the faithful. “God himself works this oneness by nature without confusion around the substances of the things that are, alleviating and making identical that which is different around them by the reference to and oneness with himself as their cause and beginning and end” and what God is doing in the universe he is doing through the faithful in the church.[16]

Maximus uses the architecture and various offices of the church to illustrate the point that the body of Christ is unified. There are priests and ministers working in the sanctuary, and there is the nave which is accessible to all the faithful, but the church is one. “In the same way, the entire universe of everything that is which was brought forth from God at the creation and is divided into the intelligible realm, which is comprised of intellectual and bodiless substance, and the realm that is sensible and bodily and which has been ingeniously interwoven from many forms and natures” is unified in the Creator.[17] Maximus describes this unity, synthesizing difference (in the body of Christ and the cosmos) as constituting two churches. “The universe possesses a sanctuary, which is the realm above and is assigned to the powers above, and it also possesses a nave, which is the realm below and is traversed by those whose lot it is to live through sense perception.”[18] The universe, like the church, “is not divided by its parts” as the divisions are limited. All differences resolve to an undivided unity as “these realms are alternately identical with the universe and are without confusion with one another.”[19] Just as Christ unifies the church, so too all the facets of the sensible and intelligible are unified in God. If the things that do not appear are clearly perceived on the basis of the seen (Rom. 1:20) then how much more is this the case for those who devote themselves to this spiritual knowledge.

The church is God’s unifying activity in which participation in Christ (deification), is made explicit and visual, in the unifying work of communion, baptism, and priestly mediation. God makes himself known and seen bodily, becoming His own sign. The eucharistic moment, in which Christ gives himself to all who would receive him, constitutes a Christo-logic, exceeding (and unifying) all difference in a unifying synthesis. God is his own symbol in Christ, unifying beginning and end, the lowest and the highest, time and eternity, the cosmic and the heavenly, the sensible and the rational. This action of God in Christ is beyond what could otherwise be conceived, but this logic beyond all other logic, points to a fullness in which God is all in all. “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free,” no earthly or heavenly, no sensible or rational, no apophatic or cataphatic, no mere abstraction, “but Christ is all, and is in all” (Col. 3:11). In this realization there is the transfiguration of the human and a new order of understanding – Christologic.


[1] Saint Maximus The Confessor, On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, trans. By Jonathan J. Armstrong (Yonkers New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019) 50.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 50-51.

[5]In a lecture at PBI http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/jordan-wood-on-christologic/

[6] Mystagoy, Ibid, 51.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 52

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid, footnote 23.

[13] Ibid, 49.

[14] Ibid, 53.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid, 55.

[17] Ibid, 56.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

What Is The Proper Christian Response To Evil Government?

As we enter this confusing period in our nation, the response and responsibility of Christians to government is being brought front and center. Rethinking the Christian role in Empire may prove to be the silver lining to the cloud of the present chaos. It was under the darkest of circumstances, after all, that Paul outlined the responsibility of Christians to the state. During the period in which Nero ruled Rome, Christians, by their very existence, were thought to be a danger to the Empire. Paul provides instruction as to how to proceed in light of the fact that Jesus has been slain and Paul himself will shortly be murdered. Continue reading “What Is The Proper Christian Response To Evil Government?”

The Therapeutics of Desire in Maximus’ Bible Reading

As long as a merely historicizing exposition of the Scriptures predominates, the reign of the mind absorbed in transitory and temporal things has not been toppled, and the children of the dead Saul continue to live, along with his offspring, which are seven in number, that is, the corporeal and transitory observance of the law. Maximus the Confessor [1]

Maximus the Confessor demonstrates that his understanding of Christ as the Word who would be incarnate in and through all things, is always the Word made flesh or the exegetical reality of God (John 1:18) and this is his biblical hermeneutic. For example, the story of David handing over the children of Saul to be executed by the Gibeonites, is a story about a literal, historical reading versus a Christ centered-theological-spiritual reading. In an explanation of 2 Kings 21, Maximus describes those who might stick to a literal understanding or cling to the law as controlled by the flesh. In the story “Saul signifies the written law, which rules over carnal Jews according to the power of the carnal commandment. In other words, he signifies the corporeal way of life or thinking that rules over those who are guided solely by the letter of the law.”[2] In a riff on the meaning of Rizpah (Saul’s concubine), he explains that her name means “course of the mouth.” “The course of the mouth is the learning of the law that is limited solely to the pronouncing of words. The person who occupies himself solely with the corporeal observance of the law unlawfully cohabits with such learning, and from their union is born nothing that is pious or loves God.”[3] Such a one gives birth to miserable offspring – “anathema and shame.”

One attached to the flesh, the letter, or the law, is attached to pleasure, having a “passionate attachment to the world.” Maximus equates “love of the world” and “love of the body” with love of “physical configuration of the letter of the law.”[4] Such a one has made the letter his concubine, and Maximus emphasizes the “corporeal” nature of this desire of the law, is aimed at “the enjoyment and satisfaction of the body,” such that to pursue the letter of the law is the same as one “absolutely subject to the activity of the passions and to the shame of the defilement of the vile thoughts they produce. He will be subject to this corrupted world and preoccupied in his thoughts with love for the body and the matter and forms of the passions.”[5] To love the law or to be attached to the letter, is as one who “’reckons his stomach to be God, and who boasts in his shame as if it were his glory,” such a one “knows only how to embrace eagerly the dishonorable passions as if they were divine, and thus attends only to what is transitory, that is, to matter and form, and to the misuse of the activity of his five senses. . .”[6] Maximus describes an incapacity of thought, or an inability to escape the symbols and to arrive at “a natural principle or thought.”[7] Saul, or one attached “to the letter of Scripture,” is consumed with “enjoyment of the flesh, which he thinks is prescribed by the law” and devoid of “divine knowledge” but experiencing a “famine of spiritual nourishment.”[8]

One can rise above corporeal desire, and attachment to the world, only through interpretive lens of Christ. Maximus explains that “Jesus, the Word of God,” does not do away with the medium of thought or what he calls the bearers of wood and water” but he ignites in these materials “the light of divine knowledge” which “washes away the stain of the passions.”[9] Maximus’ point seems to fit naturally with the experience of the two unnamed disciples going to Emmaus.

Though we might imagine an encounter with the historical Jesus would be proof enough, knowledge enough, or experience enough to confirm the reality of faith, the two on the Road to Emmaus, walk and talk with the historical Jesus without recognizing him. Given the best tools of historical criticism, the finest textual criticism, the most elaborate working of all linguistic and textual critical tools, none of these will bring us as close, and certainly no closer to the reality of the historical Jesus, than that experienced by two on the Road to Emmaus, yet this historical, physical, embodied encounter with Jesus did not produce recognition, understanding or faith. It is only the eucharistic moment of breaking of bread that produces understanding and faith, and it is at this moment that Jesus fades from sight. As the two explained later, “He was recognized by them in the breaking of the bread,” when he disappeared (Lk. 24:35). A reading of the Bible that sticks, to the history, to the text, to the letter, or to the flesh, will never arrive at Christ.

While the incarnation is necessary and central to the person and work of Christ, Christ is not recognized on the basis of history, or on the basis of the flesh. Divinity is not the flesh itself, but made manifest in the flesh. Looking upon the flesh of Jesus, Jesus in the body, even the raised body, does not guarantee or equate with comprehension; rather an impassioned attachment to the flesh, to embodiment, can be equated with sin, even when it is the flesh of the historical Jesus. So too an impassioned attachment to the letter of Scripture, to the historical aspect of Scripture, or to Scripture per se, is on the order of attachment to the flesh. Both can be equated with clinging to the finite, to the medium, to the sign, rather than to the Spirit and to Christ.

In this sense, only Christ exegetes God (Jn. 1:18). Scripture, the law, history, the book, the flesh, do not exegete or explain. Certainly, each of these is taken up as a medium of explanation, but the explanatory point is the exegetical reality of Christ. This is the distinction that the early church made between law and Gospel. The law, as an end in itself was presumed to be on the order of taking the flesh as an end in itself. Thus Origen argued that there need be no distinction between the Old and New Testament, as the law or the Old Testament becomes such only where it is not read in conjunction with the Gospel. The law, “becomes an ‘Old Testament’ only for those who want to understand it in a fleshly way; and for them it has necessarily become old and aged, because it cannot maintain its strength, but, “for us, who understand and explain it spiritually and in an evangelical sense, it is always new.”[10] Both Testaments are new in that it is in the newness of understanding brought by Christ that they are to be understood. 

This exegetical or hermeneutic problem as with all human fallenness, is a matter of desire, but it is not desire per se but a stunted desire set on making the finite, the letter, or the flesh an end in itself. Maximus compares it to Potiphar’s wife attempting to seduce Joseph, and left only with his clothing, “completely failing to attain intercourse with the object of her desire.” So is one who only reads Scripture historically or literally. “The garments of the Word are a symbol of the words of Holy Scripture . . . but we must necessarily take thought for the ‘body’ of Holy Scripture, by which I mean its inner meanings, which are far superior to its ‘garments,’ for is not ‘the body more than clothing’? [Mt 6.25].”[11]

In Maximus’ description, with the pursuit of the body of Scripture there arises a desire that is “stretching out alongside God’s infinity.”[12] As Paul Blowers points out, desire in Maximus (who is following Gregory of Nyssa), is not “an unfortunate superaddition to reason or the human intellectual constitution” but “lies at the very core of human nature.” Desire is a necessary component of what it means to be human. As Blowers argues, “Called to the highest knowledge of, and participation in, the Trinity the intellect is helpless without the inclination and passionate pursuit afforded by desire.”[13]

Desire per se is not the problem with humanity, but a deviant desire that can cause the mind to “slip downward from above” but, according to Maximus “God redirects irrational lust for the things of this life to a natural object of desire.”[14] It is “by means of its desire and the whole power of its total love,” as they “cling closely to God through knowledge, and, growing in likeness to God,” that one is “divinized.”[15] Deification, Maximus writes,

is precisely . . . the return of believers to their proper beginning according to their proper end, which is the fulfillment of their desire. The fulfillment of their desire, in turn, is the ever-moving repose of desirers around the object of their desire. The ever-moving repose of desirers around the object of their desire is, in turn, their uninterrupted and continuous enjoyment of the object of desire. And the uninterrupted and continuous enjoyment of their object of desire is, in turn, their participation in supernatural divine realities.”[16]

Reading Scripture with Christ as center and interpretive key, redirects desire toward its proper end (and beginning), not through satiation of desire but through its increase. “For it is simply not possible that those who once come to be in God should reach satiety and be drawn away by wanton desire.”[17] Wanton desire proves empty and trivial, it is easily quenched or it is “repulsed and nauseated by things that were base and repugnant.” However, desire of God opens one up to an infinite desire. God “who by nature is infinite and infinitely attractive. . . increases the appetites of those who enjoy Him owing to their participation in that which has no limit.”[18]

Divinization is a stretching out and proper ordering of desire, which Maximus pictures as inherent to human immortality. Desire is part of the means of breaking out of the finite, the fleshly, the historical, and breaking through to the indwelling presence of the Creator, “making God Himself—who bound together the body and the soul—the body’s own unbreakable bond of immortality.”[19] Desire points to its proper end and beginning in desiring and infinitely attaining God.


[1] St. Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios (hereafter, Q Thal, Translated by FR. Maximos Constas (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press), 65.14, 528.

[2] Q Thal, 65.3, p. 521.

[3] Q Thal, 65.5, p. 521.

[4] Q Thal, 65.6, p. 522.

[5] Q Thal, 65.8, p. 523.

[6] Q Thal, 65.11, p. 525-526.

[7] Q Thal, 65.9, p. 524.

[8] Q Thal, 65.12, p. 526.

[9] Q Thal, 65.9, p. 525. Jordan Wood illustrates this point, made below, with the two on the Road to Emmaus in this lecture http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/jordan-wood-on-maximus-view-of-the-word-as-continuing-incarnation/

[10] Origen, Hom Num 9.4.2/GCS 7, 59.10-15. Cited in Peter W. Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 203.

[11] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 10.29, 33. Cited in Q Thal footnote, p. 527.

[12] Opusc. theol. et polem. 1 (PG 91:9A). Cited in Paul Blowers, ”The Dialectics and Therapeutics of Desire in Maximus the Confessor,” (Vigiliae Christianae 65 (2011) 425-451) p. 432.

[13] Blowers, 432.

[14] Ambigua 8.2, p. 145.

[15] Ambigua 7.31, p. 119.

[16] Ad Thal. 59 (CCSG 22:65), Cited in Blowers, p. 433.

[17] Ambigua 7.28, p. 115.

[18] Ambigua 7.28, p. 117.

[19] Ambigua 7.31, p. 121.

Finding the Center in the Midst of Despair

In this strange time in our nation’s history, with the general bewilderment as to what has gripped our neighbors, our churches, or perhaps our family, no explanation seems adequate. The culture wars, the extremes of political correctness, the deconstruction of gender, the concern for the life of the unborn, are not to be dismissed, but neither is the seeming failure to recognize evil, or the willingness to deploy evil for the supposed greater good. Clearly a form of despair and desperation is at work. The center is not holding, especially where that center is presumed to be biblical. To the degree that the Christian faith has played a key role (e.g., Christian nationalism, religious fanaticism), the disagreement among Christians is fundamental. Clearly, there is a sharp divide over the meaning of the Gospel, the meaning of the Bible, and the identity of God. That is, the political and social crisis is a reflection of an even more deep-seated theological despair and crisis. The most fundamental question concerns the very identity and meaning of Jesus.

While it may seem that evangelicals, or those who hold to biblical inerrancy and the “authority of the Bible” are taking the high road in regard to faith, could it be there needs to be a literal and metaphorical “coming to Jesus”? That is, the evangelical notion that the Bible and correct Bible reading provide the cure to every disagreement and heresy, is not only missing the primacy of faith (or in terms of the early church, the primacy of the Gospel), but the nature of faith and the primacy of Christ. A faith given over to cultural and political pragmatism – the deployment of evil for the greater good – may have missed the central idea/ideal of the Christian faith, attaining to the perfection of Christ. So, in this moment of political turmoil reflecting a deep theological crisis, I propose a foundational and simple shift, a literal coming to Jesus as the basis of the harmonizing center of the Bible and the Christian faith.

The founding premise of Scripture is set forth by John: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has exegeted Him” (John 1:18). The revelation of Christ precedes and makes possible the writing of the New Testament and the formation of the canon of Scripture. There would be no canon of Scripture apart from its formation around the work of Christ. It is not just that Christ precedes Scripture, but faith in Christ (the “rule of faith”) precedes and is the means of exegeting Scripture (and in particular was the early church’s means of incorporating the Hebrew Scriptures into the Christian canon of Scripture).[1] This means that the reality of Christ not only precedes Scripture, but precedes the unfolding political and cultural realities of our day.

The primacy of Christ implies an exegetical method which is not primarily  historical, literal, or attached to a book. That is, if we take this passage (John 1:18) literally, this means the rest of Scripture must fit this fact. The primacy of Christ is the means of Scripture and its interpretation, and apart from this primacy the letter is bent in every direction (e.g., Jesus the warrior, the upholder of national and cultural interests). The Old Testament is filled with conflicting images, which if given equal weight (and literality), displace the literal fact of Christ as exegete. Christ brings together the sign and signified, enfleshing meaning, such that to make Scripture the foundation of meaning is to set the sign afloat, separating it from it from its signified. A biblicism or sola scriptura which does not recognize Scripture as derived from Christ has taken images of violence and warfare, images of sacrifice and law, or simply interpretations of history, and imagined that Christ must be made to accommodate this order. Rather than recognize the images of God in the Old Testament as requiring Christ, requiring the Gospel, requiring that all of the Bible be read in the light of faith in Christ, the Gospel and Jesus are made subsequent to and conditioned by the Old Testament and by universal violence (only dispelled by the peace of the Gospel). The necessity of violence, the necessity of scapegoating, the necessity of a Janus-faced God, means that Jesus is used to support the worst sorts of fascism, Zionism, and nationalism.

In other words, the tradition of the Church for its first fifteen hundred years has been abandoned.[2]  As Origen, the first to write a handbook on interpretation put it, “If you want to understand, you can only do so through the Gospel.”[3] It is the meaning of this “through the Gospel” that has been lost. What Origen meant was that the Gospel makes the Bible the Word of God for each of its contemporary readers. The analogy of faith, or the rule of faith or, to say the same thing, the Gospel, is a hermeneutic or interpretive lens which unveils the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures (among many other things). As Paul explains to the Corinthians, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3-4). Paul is referencing the only Scriptures he knew, the Hebrew Bible. Apart from these events in the life of Christ, it would be hard to locate such things in the Scriptures, but given the reality of the life of Christ, the Scriptures become a means of understanding these events and these events unveil the meaning of Scripture. As Robert Wilken describes, contained within the early church’s exegetical method there was “a complete and completely unified dogmatic and spiritual theology.”[4] Christ is a revelation which inspires Scripture, and this revelation constitutes the center of Christian thought. Apart from this center, it is not clear Christian thought survives.

To reduce it to an allegorical reading may be to miss the presumed spiritual reality and difference Christ makes. According to Paul, Christ is the true Subject of the Old Testament: “For I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food; and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ” (1 Co 10:1–4). Paul goes on to make his readers the primary recipients and beneficiaries of this spiritual reading: “Now these things happened as examples for us” (10:6). It is not that those who experienced these events are left out of the picture: “Now these things happened to them as an example,” but the writing is “for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come” (10:11).

Origen, follows Paul and the early church, in seeing all things in light of Christ, giving rise to a spiritual reading of the Old Testament, but more accurately, giving rise to a spiritually centered reading of all reality. In Origen’s view, like the Apostle(s), there is no Old and New Testament, but there is one revelation who is the Alpha and Omega, the First and Last, and this all-encompassing revelation brings about the unity of all of Scripture. Origen illustrates this through the Mount of Transfiguration: it is always the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah (on the Mt.) who bear witness to Jesus. It is the glory of Gospel reflected onto the Old Testament, but when the spectators lift their eyes, they see only Jesus. As Herve du Bourg-Dieu deploys Origen’s imagery:

The cloud has been lifted, and as Moses and Elijah disappear, Christ is the only one that can be perceived. Because the shadow of the law and the prophets has departed, the true light shines forth in the blazing beauty of the Gospel. For when the shadow of the law and prophecy, which covered the minds of men with its veil, recedes, both can be found in the Gospel. For although there were three of them, they have become one.[5]

If one is only looking at history, the letter, the Scriptures, rather than Christ, then law, prophecy, Moses and Elijah and the Old Testament appear as a multiplicity, but in Christ (and understood spiritually) they are none other than the teaching of the Gospel. In Origen’s imagery, all things, including the unity of revelation in the cosmos are exegeted through Him, but this interpretive strategy is not for the simple or undisciplined.

As Peter Martens describes, in Origen’s conception “ideal scriptural interpreters embarked upon a way of life.”[6] All of Origen’s training and energy was geared toward his way of life as an interpreter. In Eusebius biography of Origen, scriptural study occupied him for all of his life, from his conversion. This constitutes a life, as the interpreter’s response (his living it out) is also part of the interpretive process. Martens’ project is to demonstrate how it is that Origen’s interpretive method can only be understood as part of his biography (he is an exegete). As De Lubac argues, Origen’s exegesis could not be disentangled from “a whole manner of thinking, a whole world view … [a] whole interpretation of Christianity.”[7] But this would seem to be the proper goal of every Christian exegete.

Perhaps even this needs to be taken one step further, in that the original exegete, Jesus Christ, is the mind toward which the biblical exegete is striving. The exegetical task, is a life task in which salvation is being realized, as one puts on the mind of Christ. According to Martens, the exegetical life “when seen as a whole, made this life both expressive of, and in continual search for, salvation.”[8] Scripture is for the cure of the soul, the fulfilling of the pursuit of salvation in attaining the divine likeness as one arrives at the unifying image of Christ.

In a long section in his commentary on John, Origen makes the case that the Word of God is singular: “The complete Word of God which was in the beginning with God is not a multitude of Words, for it is not words. It is a single Word consisting of several ideas, each of which is a part of the whole Word.”[9] As long as one is hung up on the multiplicity of words and images in Scripture, she has not attained the singular Word. Those who do not attain to the singular image, even if they are declaring words about truth, according to Origen, are stuck in letters and words and miss the unity and harmony of the singular Word:

. . . but because of disagreement and fighting, they have lost their unity and have become numbers, perhaps even endless numbers. Consequently, according to this understanding, we would say that he who utters anything hostile to religion is loquacious, but he who speaks the things of truth, even if he says everything so as to leave out nothing, always speaks the one Word.[10]

As Origen goes on to argue, Christ is mentioned throughout Scripture, in the Pentateuch, the prophets, the Psalms, and “in all the Scriptures,” as Christ testifies sending us back to the Scriptures, “Search the Scriptures for you think you have eternal life in them. And it is they that testify of me” (Jn 5:39).[11] Origen finds this singularity testified throughout Scripture. In his commentary of John (Jn. 12:12-19) for example, “Jesus, therefore, is the Word of God who enters the soul, which is called Jerusalem, riding on an ass which has been loosed from its bonds by the disciples.”[12] The ass, in Origen’s explanation is the Old Testament, set loose by the teaching of the disciples (the Gospel), so that these things might be received into the soul.

For Origen, the Bible constitutes a singular book, with a singular message in spite of the variety and types of writings, because it is written for salvation:

For the whole book contains the ‘woe’ of those perishing, and the ‘song’ concerning those being saved, and the ‘lamentation’ concerning those in between. But John, too, who eats one roll on which there is writing ‘on the back and the front,’ has considered the whole Scripture as one book, which is thought to be sweet at the beginning, when one chews it, but which is found to be bitter in the perception of himself which comes to each of those who have known it.[13]

Fitting with his notion that the Bible is a singular book, Origen believed it ultimately had a single author. Origen, like modern interpreters, held that the intent of the original author is important, but unlike modern interpreters, he assigns authorship directly to God (while taking into account the fleshly and soulish parts of Scripture). The goal, even in the details of the law, is to achieve the mind of God revealed in Christ.  With Paul he argues “All Scripture is inspired of God and profitable.’”[14]

Scripture is profitable in Origen’s imagery as food for the soul and as medicine to cure the root human sickness: “each individual, insofar as he perceives himself healthy and strong, takes in all these things, which are the words of God, and in which there is different food according to the capacity of the souls.”[15] Readers are like sheep that feed and water on such “profitable” pastures that have “saving power.”[16] He also compares Scripture to almonds which consist of three parts: the bitter and hard outward shell, followed by a second protective layer, but only in its third layer does it feed and nourish the one who eats it. So too Scripture has a bitter shell (like the flesh), a second layer (on the order of the soul), and only at its center is it spiritually nutritious. Only “in the third place you will find hidden and concealed in the [law and the prophets] the meaning of the mysteries’ of the wisdom and knowledge of God’ [Col 2:3] by which the souls of the saints are nourished and fed, not only in the present life but also in the future.”[17]

Likewise, he compares Scripture to a medicinal herb. In his Homily on Psalm 37 he says God “prepared remedies for the soul in the words He has sown and scattered throughout the divine scriptures, so that those who are brought low by some illness, as soon as they sense the first inkling of sickness or perceive the prick and pain of a wound … they might seek out an appropriate and fitting spiritual discipline for themselves, drawn from God’s precepts, which might bring them healing.”[18]

Scripture, exegeted in Christ is nothing less than the means to advance human salvation.[19] Church and society are plagued by a soul sickness aggravated by a contentious and violent religion. A return to the unifying person of Christ as exegete is the singular cure for this crisis of despair.


[1] This is the argument of Origen in First Principles, 4.1.6.

[2] Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis; The Four Senses vol 1, translated by Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998) see the Forward by Robert Louis Wilken, ix.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, xi.

[5] Quoted in De Lubac, 235.

[6] Peter W. Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xi.

[7] H. de Lubac, Histoire et Esprit: L’Intelligence de I’Ecriture d’apres Origene (Paris:

Aubier, 1950), transl. A. E. Nash and J. Merriell, History and Spirit: The Understanding of

Scripture according to Origen (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 295, 194. Cited in Martens, 7.

[8] Martens, 11.

[9] Origen, Commentary on John books 1-10, translated by Ronald Heine (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989) 5.5, p. 163.

[10] Commentary on John, 5.5 p. 163.

[11] Commentary on John, 5.6 p. 164..

[12] Commentary on John 10,174, p. 295.

[13] Commentary on John, 5.7,  p. 165

[14] Commentary on John, 1.16, p. 35.

[15] Hom Num 27.1.1-2 and 27.1.5/GCS 7, 255.22-256.1 and 257.10-12. Cited in Martens, 199.

[16] Phil 11.1/SC 302, 380.4-13. Martens, 199.

[17] Hom Num 9.7.3/GCS 7, 64.7-10. Cited in Martens, 199.

[18] Hom 1.1 Ps 37lPrinzivalli, 256.11-248.21. Cited in Martens, 200.

[19] Martens, 200.

Finding Christ in the Collapse of Civilization

 So Jesus also suffered outside the city to make his people holy with his own blood. So let us go to Jesus outside the camp, holding on as he did when we are abused. Here on earth we do not have a city that lasts forever, but we are looking for the city that we will have in the future. Hebrews 13:12-14

Within the Republican Party Christianity is being weaponized, as either the means of establishing a Christian civilization, or as an instrument by which Christians, at least a few, might manipulate the masses. The former notion, of establishing or “recovering” a Christian civilization is the well-known stance of Steve Bannon (the ideologue behind Donald Trump), who maintains that “we” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or be overrun by dangerous outsiders who will impose a different identity upon us.[1] The fusion of the Republican party with evangelical religion runs from Ronald Reagan, Pat Roberson, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, but in Trump and company it has taken on a more virulent form, with its heightened rhetoric against immigrants, people of color, and notions of civilizational war.

JD Vance however, falls into the second category in that his is not the goal of Christian civilization, but is aimed at a ruling elite (perhaps Christian) taking power. Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel and a student of the work of René Girard, converted to Catholicism, after hearing a lecture by Thiel and recognizing through the work of Girard, that his life was given over to mimetic desire and competition (the heart of Girard’s theory). In this talk, as described by Vance, Thiel described the coming reality of future Yale graduates: “We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness.”[2] Vance came to recognize that raw ambition and mimetic desire were the driving force in his life: “The end result [of all this competition] for me, at least, was that I had lost the language of virtue. I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.” That realization brought a change of heart: “That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things.”[3] He even describes how he and his friends used to find a scapegoat to abuse, whether consciously or unconsciously, yet it is clear that his conversion, and entry into politics has not ended his scapegoating but simply redirected it. Now he cynically deploys what he formerly counted as sin, for the greater good. His attack on Haitian immigrants, which he acknowledged was a fiction, is useful for garnering political support. As he put it on CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He counts himself a Christian, but his Girardian Christianity presumes society will continue to operate through mimetic desire and scapegoating, and if Christians are to rule (to accomplish good), they must deploy this mechanism (evil?) to their advantage. As Ward describes, “Vance is consciously stoking the conflict to promote cohesion among his native-born political base, even if doing so results in real threats of violence against Springfield’s non-native population.” In this, he is following Thiel, for whom Girard has provided an insight into how to manipulate markets and politics, not so as to follow Jesus, but to gain the upper hand in the rivalries constituting culture. The Jesus stuff pertains more privately and locally, but at the level of culture and civilization many Girardians eschew the notion that Christianity can serve as cultural or social foundation. Culture is built upon scapegoating and sacrifice, and Christians, presumably a Christian elite, can only deconstruct and manipulate this reality.

However, even in the former category of those promoting Christian civilization, the deployment of Christianity is no less instrumental and cynical. Jordan Peterson, among the most well-known promoters of Christian civilization, is unique in that he makes no pretense of being a Christian. In his “Message to the Christian Churches,” he describes the key role churches can play in fighting the culture wars, especially on behalf of young men (presumably white) who are made to feel the brunt of cultural guilt. He characterizes this cultural moment as the war against boisterous male children playing with toy guns, competing against one another, and the demeaning of patriarchal male dominance (which he seems to promote). He sees the attack on masculine exercise of power, the war against marriage, the presumption that healthy human activity is despoiling the planet and that human wants and needs are to be curbed, as leading to docility (the feminine?). All of this, in his picture of political correctness, is blamed on healthy male competition, pursuing the masculine virtues, or the masculine spirit of adventure (which Peterson encourages). Peterson names Derrida’s attack on the logos or logocentric society (seeming to confuse Derrida’s phallocentric logos with Christian Logos), equating the enemy with politically correct anti-masculinity, a bloody Marxism, or the work of deconstruction. He notes that the church needs to steer young men back to the adventure of life, to find a woman, to care for a garden, to build an ark, to conquer a land, to build a ladder to heaven, to make a more abundant life. The church he notes, may be rooted in the dead past, but nonetheless there is wisdom to be found in this tradition – the primary thing is not personal belief, but duty to the past, and the broader community of family, city, and country. So, the church must target young men and revitalize a masculine form of civilization.[4]

As Paul Kingsnorth notes in a talk at First Things, the one thing left out of Peterson’s recommendations is Jesus Christ, and of course along with Christ the virtues of humility, peacemaking, giving up worldly possessions, love of God and enemies.[5] He cites the passage in James, “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days” (James 5:1-3). As Kingsnorth describes, what is encouraged could be equated with the seven deadly sins. Pride in masculine acquisition (greed), an open allowance for sexual desire (lust), and acknowledgement of mimetic rivalry (envy, wrath), all topped off with industrious leisure (sloth). Civilization clearly precedes the particulars of Christianity, Christian teaching, or Christian notions of redemption in Peterson’s formula. Christianity is an instrumental means to engage in the culture wars, and in Peterson’s description, Christ does not enter into the discussion at all.

Another example of this instrumental deployment of Christianity on behalf of civilization is from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who describes her “conversion” to Christianity from atheism as a necessity to equip for “civilizational war.”[6] She describes her passage through radical Islam to atheism, and then to Christianity, with the last being motivated by concern for engaging in the war for civilization. The threat of “great-power authoritarianism and expansionism” from the Chinese Communist Party, Putin’s Russia, and the rise of global Islamism, threatens the West ideologically and morally. As she says, “The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Though her faith may be sincere, she expresses the key motive of her Christianity as civilizational. Afterall, “We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools.”[7] Much as Vance is willing to engage in violent scapegoating for pragmatic purposes, pragmatism and civilizational survival are key to Ali.

Of course, this instrumental deployment of a civilizational Christianity has nothing to do with the actual Christian faith. Christ is not on the side of this sort of civilization or culture, which is seen as foundational and in which religion is simply a support. God and Christ are not on the side of kings and cultures, but these are consigned to the Evil One, who is the power behind the throne (in Luke 4:5-8 the devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms in the world and says all these kingdoms “have been handed over to me, and I give them to whomever I wish” and Jesus does not challenge his claim). As Kingsnorth points out, there is a good argument to be made that Jesus should have taken the deal. Why not rule, so as to bring about a more benevolent state, and as with Vance to do good for the poor, or with Thiel so as to bring about a more successful technological innovation, or with Peterson to combat political correctness, or as with Ali, Bannon and Trump, to combat other civilizations. Politics for the greater good, Christian civilization, Constantinianism, world peace through greater strength, feeding the poor on the leftovers of an over-abundant wealth, isn’t this worthwhile, or could it be that the Devil is wrong? Perhaps he is not wrong, in that he has a winning formula, but wrong in that this is not the plan of God for his people.

God is not to be found among the powerful, the cultural elites, the men of war, or in the stability of culture, but he came as a poor carpenter, and associated with the poor and the sick, mostly avoiding the centers of power, and was crucified outside the city in the name of a civilization already failing (and which like all human civilizations was bound to disappear) . As the verse of the epigraph indicates, those who follow him are to imitate this humble life-style, leaving everything for his sake, and taking up the cross of affliction outside the camp (the circle of civil powers). The choice is between the logos and city of man (civilizational Christianity or Constantinianism) or the Logos and communion of Christ (outside the city).  


[1] See my piece running this down, “Have the Dark Ages Returned?” Here

[2] JD Vance, “How I Joined the Resistance: On Mamaw and becoming Catholic” in The Lamp (Issue 25), https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-i-joined-the-resistance

[3] Ian Ward, Politico, 09/18/2024 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/18/jd-vance-springfield-scapegoating-00179401

[4] See the talk here https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/blog-posts/article-message-to-the-christian-churches/

[5] https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/against-christian-civilisation-ea2

[6] Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Why I am now a Christian: Atheism can’t equip us for civilisational war” in Unherd (November 11, 2023), https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/ 

[7] Ibid.

Reciprocity in Paul, Bulgakov, and Maximus as the Resolution to Futility

The day’s din of temporality alternates with night’s whisper of eternity, and under the swelter of life, the icy breath of death occasionally blows by, and when this breath enters а soul, even just once, that soul can thereafter hear this silence even in the middle of the din of the market, can feel this cold even under the scorching sun. And he who in his own experience has recognized the real power of evil as the foundation of worldly tragedy loses his erstwhile credulity towards history and life. In the soul, sadness settles deep within, and in the heart there appears an ever-widening crack. Thanks to the reality of evil, life becomes an auto-intoxication, and not only the body but also the soul accepts many poisons, in whose face even Metchnikoff with his antitoxins is powerless. A historical sense of self is colored by a feeling of the tragic in life, in history, in the world, it is freed from its eudaimonistic coloring, it is made deeper, more serious—and darker. Sergius Bulgakov [1]

We are thrown into the world (as Heidegger describes) and this thrownness, in which we do not comprehend either our beginning or end, our relation to others and the world (our place), and in which the inevitability of death is the one incontrovertible fact, this reality can be tyrannical, transforming every seeming significance into futility. The existential angst and frustration precede the various abstractions articulating the paradox of human existence: the relation of the one and the many, the universal and the particular, heaven and earth, or in the most intimate sense, the relation of male to female, one’s self-relation, or the relation to death. New Testament Christianity poses an answer to this otherwise irresolvable frustration, but it does so through a peculiar logic, recognizing two orders of creation (one true and one false) and two beginnings for humanity (one true and one false), and each of these orders and beginnings contains its own necessary logic and experience.

In one world order there is beginning and end, the historical, consecutive and sequential, birth and death, and even where a religious element is added, time is separate from eternity, and heaven from earth, and futility reigns. In the other, the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning, the historical is not bound by the consecutive and sequential, and death precedes birth, and time partakes of eternity and eternity partakes of time, and heaven and earth are intersecting realities. Or to put it most succinctly, in one world there is only fragmentation and difference, and in the other there is an overriding synthesis and reciprocal unity. The logic of the incarnation (the Logos), resolves what is otherwise irresolvable, not simply philosophically (though the philosophical is an articulation of the same problem) but in an existential and personal sense of the tragic reality of evil.

The logic of this second order is expressed in many passages in the New Testament describing the incarnate Christ in the middle of history as the beginning of all things (e.g., John 1:1; Col. 1:18) and the summing up of all things or the alpha and omega (e.g., Eph. 1:8-10; Rev. 22:13). As Paul writes, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him” (Col 1:15–16). What is accomplished through him and for him is not a failed or temporary arrangement. Incarnation completes, heals, and fulfills creation. The early church took these verses at face value, taking the the cross to be the beginning point of creation. According to The Martyrology of Jerome, “On March 25, our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, conceived, and the world was made.”[2] According to Hippolytus, “It is in the preaching of Jesus Christ, the proclamation of the one who died on the cross, interpreted and understood in the matrix, the womb, of Scripture, that the Word receives flesh from the Virgin.”[3] According to Maximus, creation is incarnation and incarnation is creation.[4] This then is accompanied by a series of paradoxes in which God dies on a cross, in which creation proceeds through incarnation, in which the creator is created, and in which a virgin is mother of God. In each of these paradoxical understandings, cause and effect, time and eternity, God and humanity, are put in a reciprocal relation, in which the reality of the one cannot be understood or posited apart from the reality of the other.

The modern tendency is to flatten this biblical logic, such that the Logos/creator is disincarnate, and Christ as beginning refers only to the pre or post incarnate Christ, making his incarnation a necessity posed by creation, and making Jesus’ birth and death a necessity preceded by another order of human birth and death, all of which pictures the incarnation as a reaction to creation. The reality and logic which this modern reason refuses, is the reciprocal relation between Father and Son, Creator and creation, or between time and eternity. The problem with this flattened version is that it pictures the work of Christ as secondary (a reaction), a step removed from the reality of God, and ultimately the saving power of Christ becomes inexplicable, in this false logical frame. Instead of Christ joining God and humanity, Creator and creation, heaven and earth, his incarnation and all of creation are assigned a secondary reality. This too shall pass, as if it were a temporary situation. Perhaps the two alternatives are best illustrated in Christ’s work in regard to death, which is either the entry point for understanding the gospel, or the point at which gospel logic is confounded.

In Paul’s illustration in Romans 5, death plays three different paradoxical roles (an understanding first refused by Augustine whose misreading is now standard, see here). First death is a result of sin (5:19), an understandable reference to Adam, but then death is pictured as the condition of sin. It is the reign of death which accounts for the spread of sin and interwoven throughout the passage is the universally observable truth that death reigns (“death spread to all men” v. 12; “death reigned” v. 14; “the many died” v. 15; “death reigned through the one” v. 17; “as sin reigned in death” v. 21). Though Adam is at the head of the race of sinners, the sin of Adam is marked by the same all-inclusive orientation characterizing all enslaved to sin and death. As Paul describes in Romans 8, orientation to the flesh and death constitutes a slavery to fear: “for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die” (8:13) and this orientation results in “a spirit of slavery leading to fear” (8:15). So, “sin reigned in death” (5:21) and it is this explanation of sin, and salvation as an overcoming of this orientation, Paul explains from chapter 4-8.

In chapter 4 Abraham is depicted as relinquishing sin’s struggle through resurrection faith. Though he is as good as dead due to his and Sarah’s age and childlessness (4:19) – nonetheless they believed God could give them life, summed up as resurrection faith (4:24). In Romans 5, Christ, through death, defeats sin and death: “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous” (5:18-19). In chapter 6, Paul explains that in baptism we are joined to Christ’s death, making his death the means of defeating sin and death: “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?” (6:3). By taking on the “likeness of His death” Christians take on the likeness of his life (v. 5), crucifying one orientation to achieve the other (v. 6). As Paul explains in chapter 8, “if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (8:13). It is not clear how death and resurrection would have anything to do with sin were it not for the fact that sin is the orientation to death reversed in Christ. This then resolves to the paradoxical solution that death is result, cause, and resolution for sin.

The theologian who has devoted the greatest effort to explaining this paradox (sin as the condition and wage of sin, as well as its cure) posed in Romans, is Maximus.[5] In Maximus’ explanation, the turn to sensory objects, which comes with its own pleasure, is a deceived desire.[6] The attachment to the sensory or the finite and passable, results in a masochistic play between pleasure and pain. “Wanting to escape the oppressive sensation of pain, we sought refuge in pleasure, attempting to console our nature when it was hard-pressed with pain’s torment.”[7] The greater the pain, the more desperate the pursuit of pleasure, such that there is a reciprocal role for death, creating both the peculiar pleasure of sin and its painful end.

Maximus maintains this is part of God’s providential plan so as to limit the pursuit of this futility: “God, however, in His providential concern for our salvation, attached pain to this pleasure, as a kind of power of chastisement, whereby the law of death was wisely planted in the nature of our bodies in order to limit the madness of the intellect in its desire to incline unnaturally toward sensory objects.”[8] Maximus, following Paul, describes death as both giving rise to this condition and resulting from it. “Therefore, death, which came about because of the transgression, was ruling powerfully over all of human nature, having as the basis of its rule the pleasure that set in motion the whole process of natural generation, which was the reason why death was imposed on our nature.”[9] Death rules over human nature through illegitimate pleasure, but this same death is imposed to delimit the deception. This explains the beginning to be found in Adam, which is neither a legitimate nor real beginning.

The true beginning is found in Christ: “His death was something opposed to and which surpassed that principle, so that through death He might obliterate the just end of nature, which did not have illegitimate desire as the cause of its existence, and which was justly punished by death.”[10] Through his death, Christ “made that very passibility a weapon for the destruction of sin and death, which is the consequence of sin, that is, for the destruction of pleasure and the pain which is its consequence.”[11] Christ ushers in a new birth, a new beginning, which is no longer caught in the closed loop of pain and pleasure: “But the Lord manifested the might of His transcendent power by establishing within human nature a birth—which He himself experienced—unchanged by the contrary realities of pleasure and pain.”[12] In the midst of suffering and death, he negates the deadly orientation of sin and imparts the power of eternal life: ”For by giving our nature impassibility through His Passion, relief through His sufferings, and eternal life through His death, He restored our nature, renewing its capacities by means of what was negated in His own flesh, and through His own Incarnation granting it that grace which transcends nature, by which I mean divinization.”[13] Christ delivers from the futility of death, though death remains, but no longer as cause and condition of sin, but as part of salvation. Maximus describes this death as “a natural condition that counteracts sin.”[14]

“For when death does not have pleasure as a mother bringing it to birth—a pleasure which death by its very nature punishes—it obviously becomes the father of eternal life. Just as Adam’s life of pleasure is the mother of death and corruption, so too the death of the Lord, which came about for the sake of Adam, and which was free of the pleasure associated with Adam, is the progenitor of eternal life.”[15]

All of this is part of Maximus’ explanation of how it is that “The time has come for judgment to begin from the house of God.”[16] As long as the tyranny of sin ruled human nature, judgment could not begin, but now in Christ sin is judged and condemned. Christ became a perfect human, bearing the condition and punishment of Adam’s nature, and thus he “condemned sin in the flesh” and he converted death into the condemnation of sin (judgment).[17] Life is no longer controlled by the futility of death, but in Christ and those joined to his life and death, death is the judgment of sin. There is a true beginning, a true birth, a true creation, which does not destroy human nature but delivers it to its proper end.

Jordan Wood in a Ploughshare’s seminary class describes how Maximus here (in Q Thal. 61) demonstrates the reciprocal logic, which orders his entire corpus: the particular death of Christ is universal, as is his resurrection as his life is the beginning and end of all things; the cosmos which seems to arise in fragments and difference, complexifies and unifies in his broken body; he lives and dies to join himself to our false beginning and end, hypostasizing his nature into our beginning and end, making of them a different, unified, reality; Jesus died because of you, but you died because of Jesus (you have been crucified in Christ, in Christ all have died, the whole world has died to me) and thus with the death of the Son of God a true death entered the world; death is no longer your own, but yours is the death of Christ – Christ dying in you; he hypostasized an unchanging reality into finitude.[18]

Likewise, Bulgakov counters his view of evil (cited in the epigraph), with a view of the reciprocal relation of life in Christ, which changes the futility of death into the Sophiology of death, recognizing life is from God:

For non-religious consciousness, life simply happened, it is an accident; for religious consciousness, life is given and, as given from above, it is holy, full of mystery, of depth and enduring significance. And life is given to our consciousness not in the form of an isolated, individual existence, but rather of the lineal, the historical, the universal, the global; it arises in the infinite flow of life proceeding from the Fountain of life, the God of the living [Mark 12:17] who does not know dependence and who created not death but life [Wis 1:13]. In the face of this universal and cosmic life, and, therefore, in the face of history, responsibilities are placed on us, along with the “talents” entrusted to our use [Matt 25:14–30] from the very moment of our birth. For religious consciousness, history is a holy sacrament, and one that furthermore possesses meaning, value, and significance in all of its parts, as was deeply felt in German classical idealism, especially in Hegel.[19]


[1] Bulgakov, Sergius. The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal (pp. 3-4). Cascade Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] John Behr, cited in Wood, Jordan Daniel. The Whole Mystery of Christ (p. ix). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition, introduction.

[3] This is the explanation of John Behr in, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 18.

[4] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington D. C.:  The Catholic University of America Press) 60.3.

[5] His translator suggests that a portion of his work On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios is an exposition of Romans 5:12-21. QThal, 441.

[6] QThal, 61.5. p. 436.

[7] QThal, 61.6, p. 437.

[8] QThal, 61.2, p. 434.

[9] QThal, 61.10, p. 440.

[10] QThal, 61.5, p. 436.

[11] QThal, 61.6, p, 437

[12] QThal, 61.6, p, 437

[13] QThal, 61.6, p. 437.

[14] QThal, 61.7, p. 438.

[15] QThal, 61.7, p. 438.

[16] QThal, 61.1, p. 434.

[17] QThal, 61.8, p. 439.

[18] Jordan soars in this lecture, and is the inspiration behind this blog. http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/jordan-wood-on-reciprocal-causality-in-maximus/

[19] Bulgakov, p. 2.  

Joy

In Scripture the path to joy is to be found in and through the presence of God (Psalms 16:11, Isaiah 61:10, Psalm 9:2), through being present with/to others (Romans 15:32, Romans 12:15) and this joy is integral to salvation (1 Peter 1:8-9). Joy is linked to ecstasy (Acts 15:32), or going outside of the self, which accords with being present with and loving others. There is a mutual indwelling, a giving, a going outside of the self, which is definitive of love, joy, and peace. The reason the presence of God is linked with joy is that God is, by definition, continually pouring himself out in Kenotic self-giving love (Philippians 2:7). As Dionysius describes, “He who is the cause of all, in His beautiful and benevolent longing (eros) for all, is carried outside Himself in His providential wills for all creatures through the superabundance of His loving goodness, being, as it were, beguiled by goodness, love, and intense longing.”[1] God is by definition, ek-static, or always going outside of himself (in the self-giving of the Father, through the Son by the Spirit). Though some may think of God as above all and removed from all, He comes to all in Christ. This ecstatic power of love is inseparable from who He is. God is defined as love (I Jn. 4:7), and this intense love is a longing for the beloved, and thus we are drawn to Him as His great love attracts us to Him. As David describes, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God” (Ps. 42:1). We were made for God and for love, and this love is as necessary to our spiritual well-being as water is to our bodies. God moves us as he moves toward us, or as Maximus puts it, “He thirsts to be thirsted for, and longs intensely to be longed for, and loves to be loved.”[2] As John says, He ignites in humanity a desire for Him: He “will draw all men unto Me” (Jn. 12:32).

But there is a reciprocity in this drawing, in that those drawn to and by the love of the cross, must take up their crosses and follow Christ (Matt. 16:24-26). There is a giving and receiving, in which the receiving calls for a giving, and this reciprocal identity (in and through the other) nurtures an outward bound, and continually expanding love. Just as Christ is consubstantial with the Father and Spirit, we are conjoined in a body whose identity is ever-enlarging. Just as we are drawn into the love of God, so too others are drawn into the love we carry (John 13:35). As we open our life to the life of others, we expose the lie of self-contained self-sufficiency (the world’s definition of happiness). Whether we know it or not, everyone seeks mutuality, reciprocity, the sustenance of life with the other.[3] True eros or desire recognizes the infinite opening of love, true desire, true love. As Rowan Williams states it, “this means that finite being tends towards being spoken, being apprehended, represented, regenerated in human response and engagement.”[4]  We are made for communion and interpersonal love, which means that like God, we are to be continually moving out of ourselves, beyond our person, beyond our nature. In the explanation of Maximus, “man is not his person, nor his nature, nor even a sort of an addition of them, but his wholeness. . . (is) something beyond them, and around them, giving them coherence, but itself not bound with them.”[5] To be fully human (like Christ) is to be in continual synthesis, moving toward the other, toward mutual indwelling, toward participation.

The Bible gives us a variety of metaphors or pictures of this synthesis. Baptism is to be joined to Christ in his death and resurrection (Romans 6:3-4); communion is a partaking of Christ (Mark 14:22–24); the Holy Spirit is for indwelling (I Corinthians 3:16); to be joined to Christ (as pictured by Paul) is on the order of being joined in marriage (Eph. 5:31-32). Christ as Logos is God’s way to ecstatically offer himself. He offers himself in the incarnation as Logos (Jn. 1:1) but this Word is interwoven in Creation: “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:3). The Logos, the person, “upholds all things by his powerful Word” (Heb. 1:3); “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). He is the ordering person or arche behind all things. He is the world’s reason, at multiple levels, to be experienced intellectually, erotically, or emotionally. He is for apprehending, speaking, and consumption.

As I have written previously (here), Michael Polanyi, a scientist and philosopher, describes the research scientist as being drawn in by the world, in a kind of longing for satisfaction, in which a presence in the world seems to look back at the scientist looking into the world. “Potential discovery may be thought to attract the mind which will reveal it inflaming the scientist with creative desire and imparting to him a foreknowledge of itself; guiding him from clue to clue and from surmise to surmise.”[6] Nature, in Polanyi’s description calls out to be realized. “In this light it may appear perhaps more appropriate to regard discovery in natural sciences as guided not so much by the potentiality of a scientific proposition as by an aspect of nature seeking realization in our minds.”[7] There is a presence, a deep joy, a profound satisfaction, in discovery, understanding, and meaning, all of which can be attributed to synthesis with the Logos, which is all-inclusive.

As Paul says, there is “the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph. 1:10). There is only one person, one energy, one principle operating in and through all things. God interpenetrates the universe and he also interpenetrates persons, and the realization of this synthesis is holistic – knowing God, knowing others, knowing the world. Caught up in this exchange, we lose our enclosed egos and are made alive in Christ: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20). I or ego is crucified, opening the self to life in Christ (inter-Trinitarian love), and escaping the bonds of self-enclosure.

If participation in God is joy, then non-participation is hell. Hell seems to be a world of our making, inspired by the devil (Matt. 25:41) as the one who would be God, envies God, who refuses to participate in God, and who declares that freedom is self exploration.[8] The danger is in being seduced by something less than the divine, perhaps our own image, our own ego, and instead of being drawn to life, love and ecstasy, we are drawn into a suffocating finitude. In our sin, we would obtain being, obtain life, obtain self. In Christ’s warning in each of the Gospels, those who would save themselves lose themselves (e.g., Matt. 16:25). The rivalries, the imitated desire, the jealousy, the earthly, all describe a failure to escape the self. Paul describes this stifling world as compulsive, neurotic, law bound, Godless, spiritless, and ultimately as the body of death (Rom. 7:24). This self-enclosed ego is split between the law of the mind and the law of the body, and no Other appears on the horizon for this sick soul (of Romans 7). The lost treasure of self requires a constant turn inward. All one can do is enjoy their symptom, and compulsively repeat, in the deadly drive toward possessing the self. Instead of ecstasis, there is stasis in the refusal to enter into dialogue with God, the world, and nature. Here there is no history, no movement, no growth, no reciprocity, no meaning, and certainly no joy.

This dark picture (summed up in Romans 7), stands in contrast to the joy of chapter 8. This joy, which resonates throughout the chapter, is built upon being joined to the love of God in Christ (8:38-39). In Paul’s description, nothing can separate us from the love of God. Throughout, he is describing a metamorphosis as we are “set free” (v. 1), through mind transformation (v. 7) and through the gift of the Spirit (v. 9) “made alive” (vv. 10-11) and adopted as God’s children and enabled to call God Abba (vv. 15-16) as we are transformed into the image of the Son (v. 29) through love. Being joined to God, participating in the body of Christ, finding love, means transformation through this inter-hypostatic, synergistic, reciprocal, joyfulness.[9]   


[1] On the Divine Names, IV.13, PG 3: 712AB. Cited in Nicholas Loudovikos, “Analogical Ecstasis: Maximus the Confessor, Plotinus, Heidegger and Lacan” (https://www.academia.edu/20373350/_Analogical_Ecstasis_Maximus_the_Confessor_Plotinus_Heidegger_and_Lacan), 1-2.

[2] Ambigua, PG 91: 1206C. Cited in Loudovikos, 2.

[3] See Rowan Williams, “Nature, Passion and Desire, Maximus’s Ontology of Excess”  In Studia Patristica, LXVIII, 267-272.

[4] Ibid, 271.

[5] In the summation of Nicholas Loudovikos, “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will” in Participatio: The Journal of the T. F. Torrance Theological Fellowship (https://tftorrance.org/journal/v4/participatio-2013-v4-14-Loudovikos-258-286.pdf) 285.

[6] Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, (London: Oxford University Press) 19.

[7] Ibid, 21.

[8] Nicholas Loudovikos, “Ecstatic or reciprocal Meaningfulness?: Orthodox Eschatology between Theology, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis” (www.academia.edu) 6.

[9] Ibid, 11.

Paul Blowers: From Creation Ex Nihilo to Creation Ex Deo or From Being to Well-Being in Maximus the Confessor

In Genesis the formless void, or the chaos of creation, in the view of Tertullian[1] and Gregory Nazianzen,[2] did not mean that matter was intrinsically formless, but apart from the light of Christ, which illumines and tames it, matter carries the possibility of lapsing into chaos and the nothingness from which it arose. This means Christ creates and sustains in the same self-giving love by which he saves, with death and nothingness as the other possibility. To state it clearly, creation and saving are part of the same kenotic self-giving of God in Christ. In the words of Paul Blowers, a leading specialist on Maximus the Confessor (who is the premiere innovator on the Chalcedonian Formula), there is a passage from being to well-being, inclusive of eternal well-being, as part of the same gift of grace flowing from God.[3] God calls from out of death and nothing in creation and salvation, and this is the all-inclusive work of Christ.

There is a progression of creation through salvation which unfolds not only in the Bible’s first chapters but its final chapters in which the purposes of creation are met in salvation. That is the eternal – joined to, shaping, holding together, from out of the ex nihilo is realized through Jesus Christ. The summing up (ἀνακεφαλαίωσις) of Ephesians 1:10, ties the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, directly to the incarnation. The death and nothingness which Christ overcame in his life, death and resurrection, is that which is continually overcome, through him, in creation. Or to say the same thing differently (if a bit redundantly), God’s grace in Christ is one, in salvation and creation. The sin which gives way to death, opens creation to the nothingness from which it arose and which Christ in his saving work turns back. This turning back is the completion of creation’s purpose. This is the mystery, hidden since the foundation of the world, revealed in Christ: “He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him” (Eph. 1:9). The purposes of creation are found in incarnation.

This is the clear teaching of the New Testament, which has profound ramifications. Obviously, there is no nature grace duality or an ungraced nature, but it also implies a radically different understanding of the relationship between God and creation and time and eternity.

Creation Ex Deo

Creation ex nihilo is primarily a negative statement and is not meant to describe the how of creation, nor does it convey the positive interpenetrating relationship of God with his creation. The ex nihilo, even in the work of Aquinas, plays the primary role of combating both the doctrine of the eternality of the creation, or the notion that creation was made from out of some pre-existent matter. The doctrine does not refer to creation being called from out of nonbeing, but refers to the Creator as the cause, the source, or the power behind all being.[4] Nothing exists apart from Him, but He exists and the universe is a result, in one way or another, of His existence. This is not an explanation of how God did it but is simply a pointer to the fact that creation is His doing. According to A. Maryniarczyk, “the Creator is the cause of everything that is – form, matter, properties, and substance – and that nothing exists apart from Him that did not come from Him. The universe was and is a work of creation (creatio continua).”[5]

The danger with creation ex nihilo is that the nihilo will be conceived as an actually existing void or nothingness, or that creation will be pictured as something separate from God. The point of the doctrine is, that apart from God, nothing exists. All things are created and sustained through his active presence. According to Irenaeus, “God drew matter, and the very substance and form of things, ‘from himself’ (a semetipso) by willing the creation into being.”[6] Gregory of Nyssa argues that apart from God’s active willing matter has no existence. He assigns it to an “ineffable intellection” but does not speculate as to how this might be, but clearly there is the sense of ex Deo, or creation coming from out of God.[7] Dionysius the Areopagite directly explains the ex nihilo through the ex Deo. He asserts that God has brought the universe into being out of his goodness, and that “the Divine who transcends being is the being of all that is.”[8] As Blowers points out, “Dionysius adds the crucial caveat that God is creatures’ being only in the sense of their relative participation in him, and that the God who “is all things in all (1 Cor 15:28) is no-thing among any existent.”[9]

The passage from nonbeing to being is a possibility only through the direct act and continuing activity of God. As Blowers puts it, “In creating, God not only produces and shapes matter and bodies, he already saves them from nonbeing, from unfulfilled potential.”[10] The nothing or what is not, is filled in by what is and what is becoming in the creating/saving work of Christ. According to Gregory of Nyssa, the power of the Creator-Logos is “creative of what is, inventive of what is not, sustaining of what has come into being, and foreseeing of what is yet to be.”[11] There is a teleological purpose in which what we will be has not yet appeared (I John 3:2). This unrealized potential is not yet, but in Christ will be. It is only in contrast to what is and what is becoming, through Christ, that nothing or what is not can be posited. So creation ex nihilo is another way of saying that all that is has its being through Christ.

This then raises a series of problems (recognized by Dionysius), in that creation might be thought to be an emanation from God in a Greek sense, and that ultimately all things reduce to God (pantheism). God might be pictured as a multiplicity of beings, though everything is just his one Being (producing a plurality) with a loss of distinction between Creator and creation. The resolution to this potential (and real) misconstrual is a proper understanding of the role of Christ.

Jesus Christ as Mediating Divinity to Humanity

Maximus the Confessor goes further than his predecessors in distinguishing creation from a Greek emanation, but also in explaining how it is that Christ completes creation (through incarnation) while maintaining a creation/Creator distinction. He notes that beings become, through his being “all in all” (1 Cor 9:22), but that God never becomes. He cannot be said to be a being: “In this way he can in no way be associated by nature with any being and thus because of his superbeing is fittingly referred to as nonbeing. For since it is necessary that we understand correctly the difference between God and creatures, then the affirmation of superbeing must be the negation of beings, and the affirmation of beings must be the negation of superbeing.”[12] Both being and beyond being (or nonbeing) must be ascribed to God. “In one sense they are both proper to him, one affirming the being of God as cause of being, the other completely denying in him the being which all being have, based on his preeminence as cause.”[13] Maximus creates a sharp divide between Creator and creation, or between the divine and the human, but this divide is bridged by the one who is both Creator and created, both human and divine. These categories are absolutely separate, but this separation is overcome by the one bearing both realities in his singular personhood.

Salvation as the Means of Creation

For Maximus, not only are salvation and creation the work of Christ, they are of the saving work. Maximus posits the saving work of Christ as having precedence over his creating work: “insofar as [the Creator] preexisted as the one who saves, it was necessary that what would be saved should also come into existence, in order that the Savior should not exist in vain.”[14] He describes the incarnation of Christ as a “’a super-infinite plan infinitely preexisting the ages,’ with a view to which God created the very essences of all creatures.”[15] In other words, Christ as savior is the Creator. As Peter puts it and as Maximus notes, “But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot: Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you” (I Peter 1:19-20). The slain lamb manifest at the end of time is the foundation of creation. His sacrifice in the middle of history serves as the arche at the beginning and the goal realized at the end of history.

As Maximus writes, “The mystery of the incarnation of the Logos holds the power of all the hidden logoi and figures of Scripture as well as the knowledge of visible and intelligible creatures. Whoever knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb knows the logoi of these creatures. And whoever has been initiated in the ineffable power of the resurrection knows the purpose (logos) for which God originally made all things.”[16] He goes on to note, one cannot abstract from the slain lamb to the arche of all things through either the intellect or the senses. That is, it is this particular person, and not an intellectual (in the Greek sense) or sensible abstraction, that accomplishes creation in incarnation:

All visible things require a cross, meaning the capacity of preempting the attraction to them of those who engage them by sense experience. And all intelligible things need a burial, meaning the complete immobilization of those who engage them by intellect. For when all activity and stimulus toward all (sensible and intelligible) things is suspended together with all inclination to them, the Logos, who alone exists in and of himself, appears anew as if rising from the dead, since he encompasses all those (created) things that come from him, though none of them has any intrinsic connection to him at all by natural relation. For he is the salvation of the saved by grace and not by nature.[17]

The logoi or undergirding arche by which Christ creates and sustains are not extrapolations, abstractions, intellections, senses, apart from who he is. Thus, though Maximus may occasionally sound Greek, he is not appealing to a Greek sort of Forms, but is appealing directly to Jesus Christ as forming the logic, the purpose, the arche or the logoi of creation. Christ’s embodiment in incarnation is the same presence found throughout creation. As Blowers sums up,

Through the logoi, the Logos has pre-evangelized all things and prepared them for the Christophany in which all things are ‘recapitulated’ according to their proportionate participation in the work of Christ. Maximus frequently speaks of this ongoing work of recapitulation as the ‘mystery of Christ,’ within which the creation of the cosmos ex nihilo is perpetually culminating in the deification of humanity and the transformation of all creatures.[18]

The participation in Christ of the Christian is the creation power which gave the first birth but which leads to the second birth. According to Maximus, “Indeed, this divine power is not yet finished with those beings created by it; rather, it is forever sustaining those – like us human beings – who have received their existence from it. Without it they could not exist. This is why the text speaks of the riches of his goodness (Eph 2:7), since God’s resplendent plan for our transformation unto deification never ceases in its goodness toward us.”[19] God’s creative purposes encoded in the logoi are part and parcel with his salvation purposes worked out in the incarnate Logos. In the pithy phraseology of Blowers, “When Christ spoke of ‘working still’ along with the Father, he was speaking in his own role as Creator, effecting a new integrity of creation, a new unity of its universals and its particulars, and a new condition in which creatures that are by nature moved by the Creator move on their own toward well-being.”[20]


[1] Tertullian, Contra Hermogenem 29.1–6; 33.1 (SC 439:140–50). Cited in Paul Blowers, “From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being: Creation ex nihilo in the Cosmology and Soteriology of Maximus the Confessor,” in Light on creation: Ancient Commentators in Dialogue and Debate on the Origin of the World, eds. Geert Roskam and Joseph Verheyden [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017], 173.

[2] Gregory Nazianzen, Poemata arcana 4 (De mundo) (Moreschini, 16). Cited in Blowers, Ibid.

[3] Blowers, 176.

[4] See Daniel Soars, “Creation in Aquinas: ex nihilo or ex deo?” (New Blackfriars, DOI:10.1111/nbfr.12603)

[5] Andrzej Maryniarczyk, ‘Philosophical Creationism: Thomas Aquinas’ Metaphysics of Creatio Ex Nihilo’, Studia Gilsoniana 5 (2016, 217–68), 240. Cited in Soars, 4.

[6] Adv. haer. 2.30.9 (SC 294:318); 4.20.1 (SC 100:626). The Citation and full quote are from Blowers, 175.

[7] De hominis opiicio 24 (PG 44:212D–213C). Blowers, Ibid.

[8] De caelesti hierarchia 4.1 (PTS 36:20); cf. Ep. 8.1 (PTS 36:173–4). Blowers, Ibid.

[9] Blowers, 175, referencing Dionysius De divinis nominibus 7.3 (PTS 33:198).

[10] Blowers, 174.

[11] Oratio catechetica (GNO 3/4:16, ll. 20–2). Cited in Blowers, Ibid.

[12] Mystagogia, prooemium (CCSG 69:9, ll. 106–19), trans. George Berthold, Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1985), 185 (altered). Cf. Cap. theol. et oecon. 1.4 (PG 90:1084B–C). Cited in Blowers, 175.

[13] Ibid.

[14]Adversus haereses 3.22.3 (SC 211:438). Cited in Blowers, 179-180.

[15] Blowers, 180 referencing Quaestiones ad Thalassium 60 (CCSG 7:75–7).

[16] Capita theologica et oeconomica, 1.66–67 (PG 90:1108A–B). Cited in Blowers, 180.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Blowers, 181.

[19] Q. Thal. 22 (CCSG 7:143), trans. Paul Blowers, in Paul Blowers – Robert Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 118. Cited by Blowers, 181.

[20] Blowers, 182.

The Teleological Argument: The Maximian Answer of Michael Polanyi to Paley and Kuhn

William Paley’s version of the teleological or design argument, pictures someone discovering a watch in a field and presuming that the watch was made by a watch-maker. So too, the universe displays a complexity that implies a universe-maker. If someone is walking over the heath and kicks up a stone, he might presume the stone has always been there, but if he kicks up a watch, he cannot make the same presumption. The watch is put together for the purpose of telling time through the motion of the hands, and all the gears and springs of the watch serve this purpose, and it all speaks of human artifice. Yet every manifestation of design found in the watch is displayed by the universe, with the universe far exceeding the complexity of the watch.

I mean that the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtlety, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office, than are the most perfect productions of human ingenuity. . . [1]

Notice the focus on “mechanical” and “mechanism” in Paley’s argument, which are very much interconnected with the rise of the clockwork universe and a deistic understanding of God (which will in turn give rise to a pervasive atheism). While Paley’s argument is a fine argument for limited purposes, his image of a clockwork universe had captured his age, not simply because of Paley but because the revolution in time surrounding the development of mechanical clocks reframing basic perceptions of time, the universe, and the role of God. As in the kalam argument, the implicit assumptions of the teleological argument (which are developing not simply due to the argument but arising with the beginnings of the industrial and scientific revolution) will have an impact on religion, science, and human experience, and it is in this context that Paley’s argument seems so convincing. God is the divine clockmaker who relates to his creation like a mechanical engineer, who may need to occasionally adjust the mechanism, but otherwise is a hands-off machinist.

This conclusion is driven by a scientific and social revolution which captured and included the best scientific minds (Galileo, Newton, Hooke, Leibniz, Huygens, and Pascal himself), the best mathematicians (the brothers Bernoulli, La Hire, and Leonhard Euler) and the finest master clock- and watchmakers (Solomon Coster in the Hague, Isaac Thuret in Paris, the Fromanteels and Thomas Tompion in London).[2] Meanwhile there is a shift, largely due to the watch, to a privatized sphere (no longer subject to the time kept by the church), to a separation between natural and mechanical time, and to a separation between perception and ultimate reality (the sun is not the ultimate timekeeper but time controls and exceeds the limitations of this natural marker).

Isaac Newton, who is very much involved in the developments of the mechanical clock (sitting as one of the judges who would award the 20,000 pounds to whoever could develop a timepiece which would work at sea, on the deck of a rolling ship) is also behind the revolution in science, in which the laws of the universe are perceived as absolute and independent entities. For Newton (an anti-Trinitarian) space is the “sensorium of God,” the organ through which he perceives the universe and flowing through space “equably without regard to anything external,” is time.[3] Newton’s entire science functioned like a teleological argument, but as with Paley’s watch, the implications outpaced the need for God. Within the next generation Pierre-Simon de la Place proposed a purely mechanical universe, making God superfluous. Napoleon is said to have asked Laplace, “Newton spoke of God in his book. I have perused yours, but failed to find His name even once. How come?’. To this came Laplace’s famous reply, ‘Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.”[4]

The next revolution in time, arising with Einsteinian relativity, brings in its wake two competing models of science and two very different notions of the universe, but also two very different notions of teleology. Michael Polanyi writes a groundbreaking work, and yet will spend most of his life in relative obscurity, compared to Thomas Kuhn, who borrows many of his ideas (though he is inconsistent in acknowledging his debt to Polanyi). Both left their work as scientists (Polanyi as a chemist, and Kuhn as a physicist) to take up philosophy of science. They both rejected Newton’s and Paley’s mechanical universe, with its positivist notions of “objectivity” and its refusal to recognize the biases which it allowed to foster. Polanyi had experienced both the fanaticism of National Socialism and Soviet Communism and he laid the blame directly on the doorstep of mechanical science. “The mechanical course of history was to bring universal justice. Scientific skepticism would trust only material necessity for achieving universal brotherhood. Skepticism and utopianism had thus fused into a new skeptical fanaticism.”[5] The lesson he learned was that science and human knowledge is not based on a detached impartiality, but is derived from an acknowledged “rootedness” in the universe. His picture of “tacit knowledge” is that we always know more than we can say. We recognize faces, we ask questions, we intuit understanding, in a way in which we are not fully aware. There is no positivist, impersonal, grounding to knowing.

Both Kuhn and Polanyi see the key role of persons and the personal in the scientific enterprise. Where the mechanical science of Newton counted the human observer out of the observation, relativity theory depended upon noting the location and perspective of an observer. Kuhn and Polanyi not only take the observer into account in the specific sense of Einstein, but both recognize that science as a whole depends upon human perspective, belief, culture, community, and intuition. Kuhn captures this in his notion of paradigms, as he traces the history of science through paradigms, with paradigm crises, paradigm shifts, and normative science, in which there is a reigning paradigm accepted by the majority. These paradigms are very much like worldviews, though it seems Polanyi recognized this and built upon it, where Kuhn did not account for his own worldview or even his notion of truth. Thus, though Kuhn will deny it, his theory seems to end in a kind of fideism, without any role for objective truth.  

The clear difference between the two thinkers concerns their basic understanding of the universe, with Polanyi acknowledging his theistic understanding, and Kuhn denying any objective ground for truth. Thus, Polanyi will found a new order of knowing, based on persons but also imagining a personal dimension to the universe. In the first instance there is the fittingness of the personal, as the only means of arriving at discovery.  “I have shown that into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge.”[6] Polanyi finds the person and his insight as standing at the center of a literal Copernican revolution. Though the Copernican revolution is often read as a displacement of a man centered perspective, Polanyi takes the opposite tact. He acknowledges that Copernican theory is more objective, but not because it displaces the egocentric view of Ptolemaic theory. The Copernican theory is more intellectually satisfying, thus, “We abandon the cruder anthropocentrism of our senses-but only in favour of a more ambitious anthropocentrism of our reason.”[7] Human thought, embracing all of what it means to be human is enabled to comprehend the entire cosmic array, not through mere observation, but through a depth of consciousness.

His understanding of science and knowledge is grounded in a larger picture of meaning. In the book entitled, Meaning, he pictures freedom and meaning as contributing to intellectual freedom and perspective.[8] Scientific meaning takes part in a larger dimension of truth and meaning grounded in the eternal. Polanyi’s vision, partially shared by Kuhn, takes on a broader meaning, with Polanyi encompassing the whole of human life in his theory. He had experienced Nazi persecution, and the impingement of Soviet Communism upon freedom, and he saw scientific freedom as dependent upon an all-inclusive (political, intellectual, religious) understanding of human freedom.

In The Tacit Dimension, he tells of his encounter in Moscow with a Soviet scientist, soon to be executed, who said that pursuit of pure science “was a morbid symptom of a class society; under socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to problems of the current Five Year Plan.”[9] A society built upon a presumed independent scientific thought had produced a “mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science and history itself.”[10] Polanyi agrees that the pursuit of science for its own sake had ended badly in the fanaticism by which he was surrounded in Germany and the Soviet Union. So, he seeks to set science on a firmer foundation:

I SHALL re-examine here the suppositions underlying our belief in science and propose to show that they are more extensive than is usually thought. They will appear to coextend with the entire spiritual foundations of man and to go to the very root of his social existence. Hence, I will urge, our belief in science should be regarded as a token of much wider convictions.”[11]

As Polanyi writes in the conclusion to The Tacit Dimension,

Men need a purpose which bears on eternity. Truth does that; our ideals do it; and this might be enough, if we could ever be satisfied with our manifest moral shortcomings and with a society which has such shortcomings fatally involved in its workings.

Perhaps this problem cannot be resolved on secular grounds alone. But its religious solution should become more feasible once religious faith is released from pressure by an absurd vision of the universe, and so there will open up instead a meaningful world which could resound to religion.[12]

In this meaningful world, Polanyi, very much in the mindset of Origen and Maximus (in speaking of the meaningful particulates of logoi), describes the meaning of the universe reaching out to persons. “Potential discovery may be thought to attract the mind which will reveal it inflaming the scientist with creative desire and imparting to him a foreknowledge of itself; guiding him from clue to clue and from surmise to surmise.”[13] The conditions for discovery unfold or emerge slowly, not through the strained efforts of the scientist, but almost in spite of them. After giving up the frantic measurements and operative actions, during a cup of tea perhaps, things begin to emerge. “All the efforts of the discoverer are but preparations for the main event of discovery, which eventually takes place if at all by a process of spontaneous mental reorganization uncontrolled by conscious effort.”[14] Suddenly the climber finds himself elevated to the top of the mountain, after relinquishing his efforts, his mind transformed.

Nature, in Polanyi’s description calls out to be realized. “In this light it may appear perhaps more appropriate to regard discovery in natural sciences as guided not so much by the potentiality of a scientific proposition as by an aspect of nature seeking realization in our minds.”[15] As in Maximus’ doctrine of the logoi, which Dionysius had called “paradigms” and “divine wills,” Polanyi speaks as if the discoverer is not only looking into the world, but the world looks back and calls to him. The thoughts and will of God found in the logoi, in the Maximian notion of creation’s purpose found in incarnation, specifically identifies this beseeching presence with Christ. As Balthasar puts it in regard to Maximus, there is a “teleological structure to all being, and especially of conscious, finite intellectual being,” and in turn the transcendence of this teleology shows itself in all being, in the call to theosis.[16] As Balthasar clarifies, this is not a pantheism, but the realization of synthesis with God, an “incorporation and initiation of the Christian into him, Christ.”[17]

Where Kuhn had disparaged Polanyi’s “occult” like picture of intuition, Polanyi pictures this tacit dimension as the very substance of discovery. “The solution of riddles, the invention of practical devices, the recognition of indistinct shapes, the diagnosis of an illness, the identification of a rare species, and many other forms of guessing right seem to conform to the same pattern.”[18] In his list he includes “the prayerful search for God.” They all share the same “creative rhythm” shared by both artists and explorers. “It suggests that great discovery is the realization of something obvious; a presence staring us in the face, waiting until we open our eyes.”[19] The waiting presence seeks to make itself known, and seeks realization in our minds. It is a spiritual realization, which Polanyi connects to every mode of discovery, but particularly the natural sciences.

Polanyi notes that these significant “meanings” in the universe seem to reveal themselves simultaneously to a community or plurality of persons, with the interesting result that all may arrive at the same meaning, but may tend to portray it differently. In regard to quantum mechanics he says, “Thus we may think of Heisenberg and Schrodinger both penetrating to the same meaning but drawing different pictures of it; so different that they did not themselves recognize their identical meaning.”[20] In regard to electrons: “In 1923 de Broglie suggested that electrons may possess wave nature and in 1925 Davisson and Germer, not knowing of this theory, made their first observations of the phenomenon soon after to be recognized as the diffraction of these waves.”[21] He provides several examples, but one more must suffice: “And we may add the prediction of the meson by Yukawa’s theory of nuclear fields (1935) and its contemporaneous discovery in cosmic rays, finally established by Anderson (1938).[22] He concludes, “Could it be that the same intuitive contact guided these alternative approaches to the same hidden reality?”[23]

Polanyi, unlike Kuhn, anchored discovery to an external reality, but this reality is not simply external but extends into and appeals to the knowing subject. He recognizes with St. Augustine that all knowledge is “a gift of grace” and that depth of insight depends upon guidance through this antecedent belief (“Unless ye believe, ye shall not understand).”[24] Polanyi concludes, that belief must be acknowledged as the source of all knowledge. He concludes, “It says . . . that the process of examining any topic is both an exploration of the topic, and an exegesis of our fundamental beliefs in the light of which we approach it; a dialectical combination of exploration and exegesis. Our fundamental beliefs are continuously reconsidered in the course of such a process, but only within the scope of their own basic premises.” There is a continual dialectic occurring in exploration as we arrive at a proper exegesis. He claims,

We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.[25]

Michael Polanyi may have been too far ahead of his time, or too far behind, depending on one’s perspective. His deep insights into scientific method were overshadowed by the weak imitation of his thought found in Thomas Kuhn. As Martin X. Moleski puts it in contrasting Kuhn and Polanyi, “From my point of view, all that is good in Kuhn’s position is found in Polanyi, while there is no trace in Kuhn whatsoever of Polanyi’s orientation toward purposes which bear upon eternity. Polanyi’s worldview goes far beyond Kuhn’s in its orientation toward truth as a metaphysical prerequisite for the progress of science.”[26] In contrast, “Because of his empiricist outlook, truth is not something that can appear in Kuhn’s system—it is not something that can be ‘observed’ impersonally.”[27]

Polanyi would be obscured as Kuhn’s more postmodern notions were embraced in nearly every field of human endeavor. As Moleski writes, “After immersing myself in the story of Polanyi’s life, it seems to me that I can feel his anguish at seeing a limited and inadequate philosophy of science sweep the field, bring Kuhn the accolades and fame that Polanyi never enjoyed in his own lifetime.”[28] Polanyi wanted to change the worldview of his scientific peers in such a way that science could be carried out with a teleological purpose, which it often lacks, but Kuhn’s a-teleology has won the day.


[1] William Paley. Natural Theology. Philadelphia: Parker, 1802.

[2] David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983) 112.

[3] Query 31 of the Opticks (1718).

[4] Stephen D. Snobelen, Newton’s Heterodox Theology, 1.  https://isaac-newton.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/newtons-heterodox-theology-and-his-natural-philosophy.pdf

[5] Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966) 4.

[6] Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, ( Routledge & Kegan Paul 1962) Preface.

[7] Ibid,  4-5.

[8] Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning, (University of Chicago Press 1975), 3.

[9] The Tacit Dimension, 3.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, (London: Oxford University Press) 7.

[12] The Tacit Dimension, 92.

[13] Science, Faith, and Society, 19.

[14] Ibid, 20

[15] Ibid, 21.

[16] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, Translated by Brian E. Daley, S. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988) 148.

[17] Ibid, 283.

[18] Science, Faith, and Society, 20

[19] Ibid, 21.

[20] Ibid, 22.

[21] Ibid, 23.

[22] Ibid, 23.

[23] Ibid, 23

[24] Cited in David K. Naugle, “Michael Polanyi’s Tacit Dimension and Personal Knowledge in the Natural Sciences” Summer Institute in Christian Scholarship, 5. mp_eerdmansbook.pdf (dbu.edu)

[25] Personal  Knowledge, 267. Cited in Naugle, 6.

[26] Martin X. Moleski, “Polanyi vs. Kuhn: Worldviews Apart” in Tradition & Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical, 33:2, 21. https://polanyisociety.org/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD33-2/TAD33-2-fnl-pg8-24-pdf.pdf

[27] Moleski, 22.

[28] Ibid.

Origen’s Completion of the Kalam Cosmological Argument

My claim in this blog, is that the particular failures of William Lane Craig’s version of the Kalam Cosmological argument inadvertently point to something like Origen’s picture of the relation between time and eternity as found in Christ. The fact that Origen is wrongly accused of believing in the transmigration of souls may be an indicator of the flatness of the reason by which he was judged and the difficulty of recognizing the orthodoxy he represents.

The standard cosmological arguments (which usually make no reference to Christ) depend upon arguments which confirm, rather than challenge, the standard order of reason. The revolutionary realization of the New Testament pertains to how creation reconceived (as ex nihilo) in light of the resurrection of Jesus, gives rise to an entirely new order of rationality. These two beliefs (creation ex nihilo and resurrection) are at the center of a new identity (resurrection faith) and worldview, which arise together historically. The cosmic order and its material make-up are reconceived in the full recognition and meaning of Jesus is Lord. His Lordship demands a reconceptualization of all things (including time and eternity), and yet the standard arguments making this case tend to betray resurrection rationale, though this failure itself can be enlightening.  One of the premiere apologists in the Western world, Craig and his Kalam Cosmological argument, demonstrates the point.

Craig states the argument as a brief syllogism: Whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause. This cause is God. Throughout Craig’s argument the contradiction of an actually existing infinite series is indicated (the universe cannot be infinite but must have a beginning). For example, it cannot be rationally conceived that there is an infinite library, because if half the books go missing, there are just as many books (which is a contradictory outcome). By the same token there cannot be an actually existing infinity before creation commenced, as the point of the start would never be reached.

But then Craig, absent any reference to Christ, moves this contradiction, unwittingly, into the mind of God. “His timeless intention to create a world with a beginning, and His power to produce such a result” are conceived as two distinct points. The distinction is between, “His causal power in order for the universe to be created” and “God’s timeless intention to create a temporal world.” Causal forces exist in time (this side of the nothing in creation ex nihilo) and exist over and against the eternal (prior to nothing) and so the thought (which is eternal), and “God’s undertaking to create” (which has a definitive beginning), must be differentiated.[1] 

Wes Morrison points out that Craig maintains that “’prior’ to the beginning of the universe God was outside of time.” As he writes, “Craig makes it sound as if God ‘used to be’ outside of time, but ‘then’ he created the world and put himself into time. But this can’t be right if there is no time prior to the beginning of the universe.”[2] Craig posits a point prior to creation when God decides to act, but he is dependent upon the sequence of before and after, which do not pertain in eternity. Is God temporal or non-temporal, in time or out of time. Can God cause the universe in time prior to the time of the universe? Can something “begin to exist” without there being a time before it began to exist? The way in which time and eternity are interrelated in Craig’s argument, creates a picture of time and eternity as related consecutively or sequentially. There is a divide between the “before” the beginning and the beginning, as a point in the decision making of God. Morrison’s critique of Craig is as stilted as Craig’s argument but neither of them relates time and eternity, through Christ, in the manner of Origen.

In Origen’s picture, it is the Logos, or Jesus Christ alone, who bridges the gap between time and eternity. Jesus Christ is simultaneously created and divine and in him all things (time and eternity) hold together. The “logoi” or “eternal things” or Wisdom of God or the Body of the Logos, pervade all of creation. All things hold together through the constituent parts of the eternal wisdom which Origen calls “logoi.” As Panayiotis Tzamalikos describes, “Since the logoi are the object of creation and make up the Body of Logos, the logoi are the means through which the Logos becomes History. They are incorporeal causes (hence, they stand outside of time and space), and yet it is by means of them that Time is realised; indeed, in a hypothetical absence of logoi, Time would be blind and meaningless, actually, it could not exist at all.”[3] The reality of time continually takes place in and through its beginning. Christ is the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, the source of reality.

Christ is not the beginning in a temporal sense, but in the sense of John 1:1 – the source (άρχή) of reality. Christ is the continual resource, the continual beginning, or the wisdom of God applied to the world. In Him there is an intersection between time and eternity: “In this Wisdom, who ever existed with the Father, creation was always present in form and outline and there was never a time when the prefiguration of those things which were to be hereafter did not exist in Wisdom.”[4] The Logos is the ordering matrix of eternity imprinted upon time.

Origen distinguishes between wisdom and Logos in that the Logos is the communication of God enacted. “Speaking either of Wisdom or of Logos one actually refers to the same person, namely the son of God himself. The difference nevertheless is that Wisdom indicates the living incorporeal personal substance in herself, without any allusion to the world or to anything else, while the Logos is the Wisdom conceived in her communication to rational creatures.[5] In Tzamalikos explanation, “Origen’s notion about ‘conceptions’ of the son is exactly what allows him to portray his perception of the correlation of timeless God to the temporal world. This correlation is possible through the assertions of Origen’s about the Logos. For the Logos actually becomes a kind of span, through which this relation is established.”[6]

In Origen’s description:

…it is along those ways that the son of God is moving decorating, taking thought for, making benefaction, favouring, into this [sic. the world] which was made in wisdom. In saying therefore that the Logos was in άρχή it is not implied that the Logos is different from her (sc. the άρχή, that is the wisdom) in terms of substance, but only in terms of conception and relation, so that it is the same being who in named in the scripture and who, in as much as she is conceived in her relation to God himself, is named wisdom, and again, in as much as conceived in her relation to creatures she is called as Logos the creator.[7]

 In Origen’s conception, “Creation flows perpetually from the Godhead in the same way that rays of light flow from the sun.”[8] There is an eternal aspect to all of creation, though Origen certainly confirms creation ex nihilo. The corporeal world has a beginning in time, but its true beginning or resource for existence is beyond time in eternity. Origen holds that time arose with creation and did not precede it, so that the picture of a six day creation is simply to accommodate human capacities. He states emphatically that “everything was made at once…. but for the sake of clarity a list of days and their events was given.”[9]

The Logos created the world and sustains it, and is constantly related to it, and yet the world is external to God. “Hence we should conclude that Origen conceives the Logos as being both ‘in’ wisdom, that is to say into timelessness, and into the world, that is ‘out’ of the Trinity.”[10] The Logos is the mediator between the timeless God and the temporal world. The Logos is with God but also in the world, though not identified with the world. (Though He is identified with each rational being created in his image.)

So the distinction which Craig would attribute to God’s intention and God’s acting on that intention can be directly attributed to Christ. There is no “before” creation any more than there is a before Christ. According to Tzamalikos, “There are no turning points nor moments nor succession nor temporal flux in timelessness. Subsequently, any question pertaining to timelessness and involving notions of this sort is groundless and misleading.” [11] Succession, change, before or after, may be necessary to human thought, but are not proper to timelessness or eternity. It is not that the world is eternal, or that Origen thought as much, but God acts directly in the world through his Son who is divine and human.

The person of Jesus Christ explains how there is a beginning coming out of a timeless corporeal nothing. Science, and big bang cosmology do not presume to describe the big bang (in scientific terms as science breaks down). There is no actual, knowable, “infinite density” (describing what existed before the big bang) anymore than there is an actually existing nihilo. In this Origen accords with the Einsteinian notion that time and space are singular. As Gerald Bostock states, “Origen . . . would be quite happy with the concept of a ‘Big Bang’. He would also, to judge from his writings, be happy with modern scientific theories about the nature of matter.”[12] As modern theories indicate, and Origen would concur, matter is not fully knowable: “By the intellect alone the substance which underlies bodies is discerned to be matter . . . when our mind by a purely intellectual act sets aside every quality and gazes at the mere point, if I may so call it, of the underlying substance in itself, then by this artificial mode of thought it will apparently behold matter.”[13] But this is a theoretical exercise, on the order of modern physics. Matter can take on every possible form but it is the nonmaterial which makes its imprint. God can transform matter “into whatever forms and species he desires, as the merits of things demand. The prophet points to this when he refers to God making and changing the form of all things (Amos 5:8).”[14] As Bostock notes, “It is through the interplay of subatomic randomness and of transcendent causes that all the potentialities of life are actualized and the wonders of creation emerge. Whether we are looking at the indeterminacy of the electron and the stability of crystal or the interaction between genetic mutations and the ordered structure of a biological organism we are seeing the polarities of chaos and cosmos.”[15]

Just as God imposed order on the chaos of the primal waters, Origen sees God as continually bringing order into the cosmos. The order of the universe is God’s transcendent cause continually at work. “A cause is not the physical antecedent of a physical process but an active force impinging on a passive subject and, because reality is ultimately spiritual, such a force must be of a spiritual character. It is given expression in Origen’s concept of transcendent λόγοι or intelligible forms, which determine both the nature and the meaning of created things.”[16] As Origen writes: “the works of divine providence and the plan of this universe are as it were rays of God’s nature. . . . our mind understands the parent of the universe from the beauty of his works and the attractiveness of his creatures.”[17]

There is not a divide between time and eternity, in the manner conceived by Craig, but creation relies upon eternity in Christ. In turn, the world is comprehensible (Einstein called the world’s being comprehensible the most incomprehensible thing about it). It is comprehensible through the Logos bridging the creation and Creator in all who are made in His image. In Origen’s description, “The life added to us, when the logos in us is brought to fulfilment through our participation in the primary Logos, . . . becomes the light of knowledge . . . with some a potential light and with others an actual light.”[18] The light of Christ is available potentially to all, as this is the eternal image in whom all are made, and He is the eternal rationale undergirding the world.


[1] Wes Morrison “Must the Beginning of the Universe Have a Personal Cause?: A Rejoinder,” forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy, 151. accessed at https://spot.colorado.edu/~morristo/kalam-not.pdf

[2]Ibid.  

[3] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Guilty of Genius: Origen and the Theory of Transmigration (New York: Peter Lang, 2022) 248.

[4] Origen, De Principiis 1,4,4. Cited in Gerald Bostock, “Origen’s Doctrine of Creation” THE EXPOSITORY TIMES February 2007. Vol.118, No.5, 2.

[5] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, The Concept of Time in Origen (University of Glasgow, PhD Thesis, 1986) 142.

[6] Time in Origen, 143.

[7] Origen, Commentary on John John, 1.  Cited in Time in Origen, 143-144.

[8] Bostock, 5.

[9] Origen, FrGn 2,2. Cited in Bostock, 3.

[10] The Concept of Time, 144.

[11] The Concept of Time in Origen, 142.

[12] Bostock, 3.

[13] Origen, De Principiis 4,4,7. Cited in Bostock, 3.

[14] Origen, De Principiis 3,6,7. Cited in Bostock, 4.

[15] Bostock, 4.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Origen, De Principiis 1,1,6. Cited in Bostock, 7.

[18] Origen, CIo 2,24. Cited in Bostock, 7.