The Dynamism of Creation.

For Origen, the original, intellectual creation is static. It finds its true logical existence in the contemplation of God’s essence, and its first movement is a form of rebellion against God. Change and diversity in creation are consequences of the Fall and therefore fundamentally evil. For Maximus and the entire Byzantine theological tradition, the movement (kynesis) of creatures is the necessary and natural consequence of their creation by God.²⁰ God therefore in creating the world placed outside of Himself a system of dynamic beings, which were different from Him in that they changed and moved toward Him.²¹ The logos of every creature consists, therefore, in being essentially active;²² there is no “nature” without “energy” or movement.

This dynamic conception of created nature constitutes Maximus’ main argument against the “Monoenergists” of the seventh century whose Christology consideres Christ’s humanity as having lost its genuinely human “energy” or will because of its union with divinity. But for Maximus, created nature would lose its very existence if it is deprived of its proper energy, its proper purpose, and its proper dynamic identity. This proper movement of nature however can be fully itself only if it follows its proper goal (skopos), which consists in striving for God, entering into communion with Him, and thus fulfilling the logos, or divine purpose, though which and for which it is created. The true purpose of creation is, therefore, not contemplation of divine essence (which is inaccessible) but communion in divine energy, transfiguration, and transparency to divine action in the world. We shall discuss later the anthropological and Christological dimensions of this concept of creation. But it also has obvious cosmological implications.

In general, the Byzantines accepted cosmological concepts inherited from the Bible or from antiquity. So hesitant were to push scientific knowledge further that it had even been written that “the meager accomplishment of the Byzantines in the natural sciences remains one of the mysteries of the Greek Middle Ages.”²³ In any case, it does not seem that Byzantine theology is to blame for that failure, for theology affirmes the dynamism of nature and therefore containes the fundamental incentive for studying and eventually controlling its development.

During the entire Byzantine Middle Ages, Basil’s homilies On the Hexaemeron were the standard and most authoritative text on the origin, structure, and development of the world. Supporting Athanasius’ opposition to the Hellenic and Origenistic concept of creation as an eternal cyclical repetition of worlds and affirming creation in time, Basil maintains the reality of a created movement and dynamism in creatures. The creatures do not simply receive their form and diversity from God; they possess energy, certainly also God-given, but authentically their own. “Let the earth bring forth” (Gn 1:24): “this short commandment,” says Basil, “immediately became a great reality and a creative logos, putting forth, in a way, which transcended our understanding, the innumerable varieties of plants... Thus, the order of nature, having received its beginning from the first commandment, enters the period of following time until it achieves the overall formation of the universe.”²⁴ Using scientific knowledge as it existed in his time as well as the Stoic terminology of the “seminal reasons,” Basil remains theologically independent from his non-Biblical sources. For example, he rejects the Stoic idea that the logoi of creatures are the true eternal essences of beings, a concept which could lead to the eternal return “of worlds after their destruction.”²⁵ Like Athanasius and Maximus, Basil remains faithful to the Biblical concept of absolute divine transcendence and freedom in the act of creation; divine providence, which gives being to the world through the logoi, also maintains it in existence but not at the expense of the world’s own created dynamism, which is part of the creative plan itself.

The existence of the world as dynamic “nature” (i.e., as a reality “outside of” God — for whom it is an object of love and providence), following its own order of evolutive growth and development, implies the possibility of purely objective scientific investigation of creatures by the human mind. This does not mean however that created nature is ontologically “autonomous.” It has been created in order to “participate” in God, who is not only the prime mover and the goal of creation but also the ultimate meaning (logos) of its permanence. “God is the principle, the centre and the end,” writes Maximus, “insofar as He acts without being passive... He is the principle as creator, He is the centre as providence, and He is the end as conclusion, for all things come from him, by him, and toward him [Rm ll:36].”²⁶ A scientific knowledge, which would ignore this ultimate meaning of creation, would therefore be dangerously one-sided.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 573