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Creator and Creatures.

For Athanasius,2 creation is an act of the will of God, and a will is ontologically distinct from nature. By nature, the Father generates the Son — and this generation is indeed beyond time — but creation occurs through the will of God, which means that God remains absolutely free to create or not to create and transcendent to the world after creating it. The absence of a distinction between the nature of God and the will of God was common to Origen and to Arius. To establish this distinction constitutes the main argument of Athanasius.

It is totally impossible to consider the Father without the Son because “the Son is not a creature, which comes into being by an act of will; by nature, He is the proper Son of the essence [of the Father].”3 The Son therefore is God by nature while “the nature of creatures, which come into being from nothing, is fluid, impotent, mortal, and composite.”4 Refuting the Arian’s idea that the Logos is created in view of the world, Athanasius affirms that “it is not He who was created for us, but we were created for Him.”5 In God, the order of nature precedes the order of volitive action6 and is both superior to and independent of it. Because God is what He is, He is not determined or in any way limited in what He does, not even by His own essence and being.

Divine “nature” and created “nature” are therefore separate and totally dissimilar modes of existence. The first is totally free from the second. Yet creatures depend upon God; they exist “by His grace, His will, and His word..., so that they can even cease to exist if the Creator so wishes.”7 In Athanasius, therefore, we have advanced quite far from Origen’s cosmos, which was considered a necessary expression of God’s goodness identified with divine nature itself. At this point one discovers that the notion of creation, as expressed by Athanasius, leads to a distinction in God between His transcendent essence and His properties, such as “power” or “goodness,” which express His existence and action ad extra, not His essence.

The difference in nature between God and His creatures, as well as the distinction between the “natural” generation of the Son by the Father, and creation “by act of will,” is emphasized by both Cyril of Alexandria8 and John of Damascus.9 The difference also represents the ontolojKcal raison d’etre of the Chalcedonian definition on the “two natures” of Christ. The two natures can be understood as being in “communion” with each other, as “hypostatically” united, but they can never be “confused” — i.e., considered as “one nature.”

Athanasius’ insistence on the transitory character of creation should not mislead us. What he wants to show is a contrast between the absolute, self-sufficient nature of God and the dependence upon Him of all created nature. He certainly does not want to reduce created existence to a mere “phenomenon.” God’s creative act produced a new “created” order, another “essence” distinct from His own, an “essence” worthy of God deserving of His love and concern and fundamentally “very good.” God does not create, as in Origen, simply a collection of equal intellects, which find a meaning of existence only in contemplating the essence of God and which are diversified only as a consequence of their Fall. Because creation is an essence and not simply a phantom or a mirage, there is a sense in which its meaning is found in itself, for even God “loves” the world, i.e., considers it as a reality vis-a-vis Himself. Even when it is assumed by the Logos in a hypostatic union, the created nature, according to the Chalcedonian definition, “preserves its properties.” The implication of this created autonomy was developed in particular by Maximus the Confessor and by the Orthodox theologians of the iconoclastic period. Let us only emphasize here that the very ideas of providence, love, and communion, which reflect the creator’s action toward the world, presuppose difference and distinction between Him and His creation.



 

The Divine Plan.

Creation in time — i.e., the possibility of a true beginning of created existence — presents the major cleavage between Greek thought and Biblical Revelation. But the idea of an eternal plan which God put into effect when He created the world in time is not inconsistent with the concepts found in the Jewish “wisdom” literature, even more concretely in the Johannine theology of the Logos, and responds to at least some preoccupations of Greek philosophical thought.

Throughout its history, Byzantine theology, both “Greek” and Biblical as it was, struggled with the possibility of integrating into a consistent Christian view of creation, a theory of divine “ideas” about the world. The Platonic kosmos noẽtos had to be rejected inasmuch as it represented an eternal reality outside of God, both impersonal and “substantial,” which would have limited the absolute freedom of the creative act, exclude creation ex nihilo, and tend to diminish the substantial reality of visible creation by considering it only as a shadow of eternal realities. This rejection was accomplished implicitly by the condemnation of Origen in 553 and explicitly in the Synodal decisions against John Italos in 1081. Meanwhile, patristic and Byzantine thought developed in reaction to Origenism. Gregory of Nazianzus, for example, speaks of “images of the world” as thoughts of God.10 These “thoughts” do not limit the freedom of a personal God, since they remain distinct from His nature. Only when He creates in time, they become “reality.”11 The thoughts are the expressions also of divine will,12 not of divine nature; they are “perfect, eternal thoughts of an eternal God.”13 Since there cannot be anything created “in God,” the thoughts, or ideas about the world, are uncreated expressions of divine life, which represent the unlimited potentiality of divine freedom. God creates the world not “out of them” but out of nothing. The beginning of the world is the beginning of a totally new reality put forward by the act of creation, which comes from God and conforms to His eternal plan.

The existence in God of eternal, uncreated “potentiality,” which is not God’s essence, either the world’s nor an essence in itself, but which implies a certain contingency toward creation, presupposes an antinomical concept of God, which finds different forms of expression in Byzantine theology. To describe it, Georges Florovsky writes that “we have to distinguish as it are two modes of eternity: the essential eternity in which only the Trinity lives and the contingent eternity of the free acts of Divine grace.” 14 Actually on this point, Byzantine theology reached a direct sense of the difference between the impersonal philosophical notion of God as an absolute and the Biblical understanding of a God: personal transcendent and free.

To express the relationship between creator and creatures, the great Maximus the Confessor uses the old theology of the Logos as centre and living unity of the logos of creation. The terminology already existed in Philo and Origen. But whereas for Origen, the logoi as logoi exist only in an essential unity with the one Logos, for Maximus — their real and “logical” existence is also expressed in their diversity. The great difference between Origen and Maximus is that Maximus rejects Origen’s view of visible creation as diversified only through the Fall. The “goodness” of creation, according to Maximus, resides in creation itself, and not only in its unity with divine essence. But creation cannot be truly “good” unless its differentiated logoi, which pre-existed as “thoughts” and “wills” of God, are fixed in Him and preserve communion with the one “super-essential” divine Logos.15 Creatures therefore do not exist only “as logoi” or only by the fact that God eternally “knows them;” they exist “by themselves” from the very moment when God put His foreknowledge into action. In His thought, eternally, creatures exist only potentially while their actual existence occurs in time. This temporal, actual existence of created beings is not autonomous but centred in the one Logos and in communion with Him. There is a sense, therefore, in which “the one Logos is many logoi, and the many are one;” “the One is many according to creative and unifying procession of the One into the many, but the many are One according to the providence, which leads the many to turn up toward the One as their all-powerful principle.”16 Paradoxically, therefore, the creatures are one in the one Logos, who however is “super-essential” and above participation.17 “Thus, the logoi are, to Maximus, not identical either with the essence of God or with the existence of the things in the created world. In fact, an apophatic tendency is combined, in Maximus, with an anti-pantheistic tendency... This is affected, above all, thanks to the understanding of the logoi as decisions of God’s will.”18

By remaining faithful to the Athanasian distinction between nature and will, Maximus succeeds in building an authentically Christian ontology of creation, which remains throughout the history of Byzantine thought, a standard and virtually unchallenged authority.19 This ontology presupposes a distinction in God between “nature” (or “essence”) and “energy,” a distinction, which would later be called “Palamism.” It presumes a personal and dynamic understanding of God as well as a dynamic, or “energetic,” conception of created nature.

 


Date: 2016-01-14; view: 522


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