Lift High the Cross

Thirty-one years ago, I gave a way-too-long sermon on the Feast of the Holy Cross. I reveled in the Troparion of the Cross sounding through Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, and I became positively sentimental about the cross-bearing insignia of a lost Christendom.

I recant that sermon.

And today I replace it with this one.

Today the Church lifts up the Cross.

That sentence should make Christians nervous.

Not because the Cross is shameful, but because we have become so practiced at decorating it that we can forget what it actually is.

The Cross was an instrument of imperial execution. It belonged to the machinery of domination. Rome did not erect crosses because it loved sacrifice, humility, reconciliation, or redemption. Rome erected them because crosses worked. They frightened populations. They humiliated bodies. They announced who ruled.

And Christianity makes the almost unbearable claim that God chose precisely this place to reveal his glory.

Not afterward.

Not despite it.

There.

In John’s Gospel, the Cross is not merely the dark passage Jesus must endure before arriving at glory. The Cross itself is his glorification.

“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

And what follows?

A grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies.

And then:

“When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”

John is doing something extraordinary with the language of exaltation. Jesus is “lifted up” on the Cross, and this lifting up is at once crucifixion, enthronement, revelation, and glory.

The Cross is Christ’s throne—the throne revealed at the right hand of the Father.

That is not because suffering is inherently holy.

It is because the Cross reveals what divine sovereignty actually is.

God does not conquer by becoming more violent than the violent. God does not defeat domination by constructing a larger domination. God does not save creation by learning Caesar’s methods and using them more efficiently.

The reign of God is revealed in the self-giving divine-human love of Christ.

The thorn-crowned man reigning from the tree is not God temporarily disguised as weakness.

This is what divine glory looks like.

Human beings close their fists.

Christ opens his hands.

And when we nail those hands open, they remain open still.

That may be one of the most terrible and beautiful truths Christianity has ever dared to say.

The primordial human temptation is enclosure.

We want life as possession rather than communion.

We defend ourselves against vulnerability. We turn neighbor into rival, creation into property, difference into threat, God into guarantor of our borders. We build little fortresses around the self and then call the fortresses identity, righteousness, security, even religion.

The Cross destroys this enclosure.

Christ gives himself without remainder.

He does not answer violence with retaliatory violence. He does not allow hatred to determine the shape of his love. He refuses to let the closed world make him closed.

The Cross is therefore not merely something Christ endured.

It is the opening of the human being into communion.

And this is why taking up the Cross cannot mean cultivating misery, romanticizing abuse, remaining beneath the boot of an oppressor, or imagining that God enjoys suffering.

To take up the Cross is to undergo the death of the enclosed self.

It is to become capable of communion.

It is to relinquish the terrible little ledger by which we calculate who deserves love, mercy, dignity, forgiveness, food, safety, welcome, or belonging.

The Cross is the end of the ledger because the Crucified gives himself even to those who crucify him.

And that is precisely how he reigns.

“When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”

Notice the direction.

Christ does not climb upward and summon the worthy.

He is lifted onto the instrument by which civilization throws people away.

And from there he draws the world toward himself.

We cast him outside.

He makes the place of exclusion the center.

We intend the Cross to say, “You have no place among us.”

Christ makes it say, “And from here I will gather everyone.”

This is the true footstool of the King.

The language of kingship is overturned at Golgotha. Christ’s enemies are not piled beneath his feet as trophies. They are among those for whom his arms remain extended.

His kingdom advances not through humiliation but reconciliation; not coercion but invitation; not conquest but service.

Its royal insignia is not Caesar’s eagle.

It is a towel and a basin.

Its throne is a Cross.

Which is why Christians should be considerably more scandalized than we usually are when the Cross is turned back into precisely the sort of thing Christ transformed.

A cross emblazoned upon the banner of domination is not thereby sanctified.

A war flag does not become Christlike because someone stitches a cross onto it.

A nationalist movement does not become Christian because it marches beneath Christian symbols.

And forgive the impiety, but there is something almost comically blasphemous about taking the sign by which God exposed the bankruptcy of imperial violence and converting it into the logo of imperial violence.

One might as well embroider the Beatitudes on a battering ram.

Or paint “Blessed are the peacemakers” down the side of a missile.

Or bless machine guns with holy water.

Which, God save us, has been done.

The contradiction would at least be easier to see.

The Cross has often been dragged behind armies, planted upon conquered lands, attached to racial mythologies, enlisted into fantasies of national innocence, and raised above political programs whose deepest instinct is exclusion.

Every time this happens, the Cross is humiliated.

Not defeated.

Humiliated.

The symbol of divine self-emptying is dressed in armor and ordered to salute.

The tree upon which Christ embraced the enemy becomes the boundary marker declaring which enemies may be hated.

If Dante were looking for additional furnishings for the vestibule of Hell—the region inhabited by the morally evasive, the spiritually noncommittal, those who would not finally give themselves to either love or rebellion—I suspect there might be room there for a few martial standards bearing badly misappropriated crosses, hanging in tatters and flapping forever in a fly-infested wind generated by their own contradiction.

The Cross does not bless our tribes.

It judges them.

It does not confirm our righteousness against our enemies.

It places us beside our enemies beneath the same outstretched arms.

And those arms remain open.

It does not make Christianity the religious department of the nation-state.

It reveals the Shepherd King, who washes feet and leads us toward the green holy hill where wolf and lamb lie down together.

That is why the Feast of the Holy Cross is not finally a celebration of an ancient instrument of torture.

It is the feast of the overthrow of the world that needs instruments of torture.

The wood planted on Golgotha marks the limit of the enclosed world.

Violence goes there.

Empire goes there, with every Caesar and would-be Caesar, all their standards, slogans, and cults.

Religious self-certainty goes there. So does frightened ego. That ledger of remembered trespasses against us.

Everything in us that says, “I will preserve myself by closing myself against you” goes there.

And Christ opens his arms.

The Cross is the absolute opening of the self in love.

To bear the Cross is therefore to follow Christ out of self-enclosure and into communion.

And perhaps this is why the Cross can truly be called the glory of God.

Because glory is not raw power displayed.

Glory is God being completely himself—revealing himself without disguise.

And God is love.

So there, on the hill outside the city, divine glory shines without disguise.

The King is enthroned.

The kingdom has been planted.

The grain of wheat has fallen into the earth.

And from his strange royal seat Christ says to the whole human race:

I will draw you to myself.

Not some.

Not the impressive.

Not the ideologically reliable.

Not merely those who already know the password.

All.

The Cross stands at the center of creation because self-giving love stands at the center of reality.

Love is the gravity of the universe.

And the Cross is where we see it.

Avicenna and Aquinas: Ruminating on Divine Freedom and Necessity

In 2022, I emailed Dr. Rahim Acar with several questions about the eleventh-century philosopher Avicenna’s understanding of divine freedom and creation. For purposes of publication, I have revised and extensively(!) expanded the letter. In other words, it’s no longer a real letter at all and only barely resembles the email Dr Acar received.

Dear Dr Acar,

We have never corresponded, but I have been reading your book on Avicenna: Talking About God and Talking About Creation. I am finding it fascinating and challenging. Until I began reading it, my understanding of Avicenna was largely confined to the familiar claim that he believed God was necessitated to create the world. I now see how misleading that characterization is, particularly given how closely he and St Thomas Aquinas agree on the voluntary character of divine creation. You note four shared characteristics of their respective positions:

1. God creates by will;
2. God primarily and essentially wills himself, and his volition concerning the universe is subsumed in his self-volition;
3. the universe is not the end of God’s will;
4. God does not need to create in order to be what he is; his being and goodness do not depend on the existence of other things.¹

This last point is crucial. God does not create out of any need or insufficiency. As you write: “For Avicenna, God creates out of his generosity, since he neither expects nor attains anything in return… God is truly generous, since God’s giving being to things can neither be compelled by something external nor required by something internal to God.”²

Avicenna and the Necessity of Creation

Despite the above commonalities, scholars have typically  identified Avicenna as teaching necessitated creation:

Avicenna usually is considered to have held that God’s creative action is similar to the actions of natural things acting through their natures. This interpretation of Avicenna’s position is supported by his denial of intention to God in creation and by his claim that the universe is necessary. Despite this, for Avicenna creation is a voluntary action. When he argues that God cannot have an intention in creation, he simply wants to state that other things do not constitute a final cause for God. Furthermore, the necessity of the universe does not make the act of creation like the actions of natural beings. Nor does it take God’s freedom away, since for Avicenna the necessity of the universe is neither imposed on God from outside, nor is it required by something internal to God. The existence of the universe, as well as the form the universe takes, is necessary because God is necessary in all respects.³

God creates voluntarily and freely. He does not need a world to be himself, nor does he gain anything from the world. Yet the creation of the world is nonetheless necessary because of the mode of divine existence—simple and necessary. Why? Because, as you observe, “Avicenna takes divine perfection properties only insofar as they are modified by divine formal features. For him, when talking about God divine perfection properties must be considered in the manner they are found in God.”⁴ That is to say, God’s knowledge, goodness, and will must be understood according to the mode of his simple and necessary existence. It’s not a matter of what God is but how God is.⁵

According to Avicenna, divine creation is simultaneously free and necessary. Free—because no external constraint or internal deficiency compels God to create. He has nothing to gain by creating and nothing to lose by not creating. Necessary—because in his divine simplicity God is his perfections. Everything that God is, everything that he has, and everything that he does is necessary because he is necessary in his self-existence. “The First is the willer (murìd) of his essence (li dhàtihi),” writes Avicenna. “This kind of pure intellectual (‘aqliyya) volition (iràda) and this life of his, similarly, are identical to him (bi ‘aynihi).”⁶ God is both the subject and object of his willing. He wills his essence, and his willing of the cosmos is comprehended therein. The Muslim philosopher refuses to explicate God’s freedom in creation without thinking together the formalities of divinity (simplicity, eternity, immutability, infinity, necessity):

Since the divine will is simple, God has one act of will. God primarily wills and loves himself, and God’s willing of other things must be subsumed under his self-willing. Besides being simple, God’s will is eternal and immutable, following from his eternity and his being pure act without any potency. Avicenna touches on the eternity and immutability of the divine will in various contexts, albeit indirectly, but notably to support the contention that God creates eternally. Since creation can be traced back to the divine will, if God’s will were not eternal and immutable, then God would be subject to change, or, in other words, receptive and in need of something external in order to be an efficient cause. Since God is eternal and since there is no change in God, God’s action must also be eternal. If God did not will eternally to create, nothing would be created because this implies a change both in God’s will and in God’s knowledge, due to the identity of will and knowledge in God.⁷

As you explain, Avicenna insists that God is free in his creation of the cosmos, while also denying God’s possession of free choice:

For Avicenna, nothing else constitutes an end for God, and God does not pursue an end distinct from himself in creating the universe. He gives two basic reasons for arguing this: (1) that only God exists by himself and everything else depends on him, and (2) that God is simple. Avicenna explains the first by arguing that there is nothing to be intended. Only God exists without a cause, and there can be no reason (sabab) unless it be because of God, in God or by God, or belongs to God. If we assume that God has an end distinct from himself, we propose a voluntary action similar to human voluntary actions, with possibilities independent of the agent. A voluntary agent may seek to realize one of these possibilities. However, with regard to God, since there can be nothing outside and independent of God to be intended, God does not act for the sake of something else. Hence, God creates other things even though other things do not constitute an end for God.

Avicenna’s second reason concerns God’s simplicity and perfection. If God is supposed to have an intention for the existence of other things, three things follow from this supposition: (1) In God there is something distinct from God’s self-knowledge which is the ground for whatever God intends. This thing is God’s knowledge of the necessity or lovability or goodness necessitating this act of intention; (2) God intends, and (3) there is a benefit to which the intention is directed. This is impossible for Avicenna, given that God is simple. God’s simplicity for Avicenna requires that God have one knowledge and one will, which are in turn identical to each other. Since God primarily knows, wills and loves himself, God’s will cannot be directed to an end other than God.⁸

I confess that I found the above paragraphs difficult. Let me briefly unpack them, and you can tell me if I have caught the gist. God can only will himself as the ultimate end of his willing, for nothing exists independently of God that could constitute an end for him. Everything other than God depends upon him for its existence. Hence God cannot create the universe for the sake of some good outside himself, as though his will were directed toward an independently existing possibility to be realized. God wills creation, but creation does not constitute the telos of his willing.

Yet this necessity of divine creation must not be confused with a natural, and therefore involuntary, emanation. I suspect this is where many of us have misunderstood Avicenna. This passage from The Healing seems clear enough:

The coming to be of the whole from Him is not by way of nature in that the existence of the whole comes to be from Him with neither knowledge nor satisfaction on His part… Hence, He must intellectually apprehend that the existence from Him of the whole is a necessary consequence of Himself… His essence knows that His perfection and loftiness are such that the good proceeds from Him and that this is one of the necessary concomitants of His majesty that in itself is the object of His love… Hence, the First is satisfied with the emanation of the whole from Him.⁹

We need, however, to be more precise about what kind of necessity Avicenna is denying and what kind he is affirming. An agent performs an action by natural necessity when its nature serves as the principle of its action. Avicenna identifies two features of natural necessitation:

• It does not involve the knowledge of the agent.
• It does not involve the approbation and consent of the agent.

The agent naturally produces its action akin to the way a fire begets fire. Given the right physical conditions, fire simply spreads. It has no knowledge of what it is doing, nor does it consent to its combustion. The agent’s nature determines its activity. Fire does what fire is. It’s all quite natural, involuntary, inevitable.¹⁰

Clearly God’s creation of the cosmos fails to meet Avicenna’s criteria for natural necessitation, as Julie Swanstrom explains:

God does not emanate by nature. Since an action performed by nature is an action occuring without the agent’s knowledge and without the agent’s consent, God would have to emanate without knowledge of the emanation and without consenting to the emanation. God intellectually apprehends Godself, which includes the apprehension of God as the principle of everything else that might exist. God knows Godself, and in knowing Godself, God knows God to be the cause of the existence of anything which might exist. In knowing Godself, God knows everything that is a concomitant of God’s existence. Because God has this knowledge, God fails to meet the first criterion of an act by nature.

God also fails to meet the second criterion of an act by nature, for God consents to the emanation. God is free from any impediment to emanating, and thus God consents to the emanation. Avicenna notes that God, knowing God’s own perfection and goodness, knows and loves Godself. Because knowing God’s own essence entails knowing the necessary concomitants of God’s essence, God also loves the necessary concomitants of God’s essence by extension. God’s object of knowledge and love is God, but God is aware of and approves of those things which follow from God’s essence. Accordingly, God consents to and approves of God’s emanation.¹¹

God is an intellectual, volitional, self-moving being. He always acts with full knowledge and consent in the perfect freedom of divine simplicity:

An action stemming from a being’s nature depends only on that being’s nature, not on its intellect or will. An action that involves an agent’s will (and, accordingly, its intellect) is a voluntary action. The involvement of the will, even though it is identical to God’s essence, means that God’s action is voluntary rather than natural. What it takes for an action to be voluntary is for God to have knowledge of the action and to consent to the action, which means that God’s faculty of will is involved in any voluntary action. The identity of God’s will, knowledge, and essence does not negate that God’s will is involved in God performing the action in question.¹²

That God creates because he is the Good does not mean that his act of creation is necessitated by nature, as both his self-knowledge and volition are involved, thus qualifying it as voluntary. Might God have chosen not to create? Avicenna thinks not and points us to the existence of the world as eternally and immutably willed by God. How do we think “ahead” of God’s eternal and immutable willing? Should we even try? The divine knowledge is identical to the divine volition is identical to the divine essence. Avicenna will not entertain the counterfactual of the world’s non-existence, and I think he is right not to do so. This does not mean that creatures are necessary existents in themselves. The world is necessary only because God is necessary in his transcendent simplicity. Avicenna will not entertain the counterfactual of the world’s non-existence, and I think he is right not to do so. This does not mean that creatures are necessary existents in themselves. They remain possible beings in themselves. As Avicenna explains, “whatever is possible in its existence does not exist unless rendered necessary with respect to its cause.”¹³ 

Aquinas and the Freedom of Creation

Aquinas, on the other hand, takes a different line on divine freedom of choice and elaborates it under the notion of suppositional, or hypothetical, necessity. He distinguishes what is necessary absolutely from what becomes necessary on a supposition. God necessarily wills his own goodness, since divine goodness is the proper object of the divine will. Yet God does not will creatures with the same necessity, for “the goodness of God is perfect, and can exist without other things inasmuch as no perfection can accrue to Him from them.”¹⁴ He wills creatures as ordered to himself. His willing of creatures is therefore voluntary rather than absolutely necessary. Yet once he creates, his willing is necessary: “supposing that He wills a thing, then He is unable not to will it, as His will cannot change.”¹⁵ God’s eternal decision to create is thus immutable and necessary by supposition, while creation itself adds nothing required for the perfection of divine goodness.

My question: Do you think Thomas is cheating (perhaps just a little bit) in his employment of hypothetical necessity? You note that on the matter of divine freedom, he separates free choice (God might not have created the world) from the formal features of divinity, allows God to make his choice, and then recombines his choice with the formal features and calls it suppositional necessity. It’s as if Thomas had said to himself: “Let’s pretend that the infinite, simple, eternal pre-creation-God—who in reality is identical to his essence and lacks all potentiality (actus purus)—is a finite being confronted with two alternative courses of action between which he has to choose, despite the mess this makes of our metaphysics of divinity.¹⁶ All we have to do is wave our wand, speak the magic word—”suppositio!“—and … voilà! God immutably wills the world in the mode of free choice, without violating divine simplicity. A brilliant metaphysical insight or impressive feat of prestidigitation?

That God creates freely and voluntarily is clear-cut, for all the reasons mentioned above (and below). But the assertion that he might have chosen otherwise seems at least debatable. In what sense is the pre-eternal decision to create a choice? Is he presented with alternatives? On what basis does he choose? Do we know what we are talking about? Avicenna does not think so:

For Avicenna God’s having free will does not mean that God has free choice. For Avicenna, the idea that God does not have free choice follows from the assertion that other things are not God’s end. If other things could be ends for God, then God would have free choice because one end could be distinguished from alternatives (naqìḍ) in a free choice (ikhtiyàr). Since the one with free choice (ikhtiyàr) chooses one end as better than its alternative, then in order for God to have free choice there must be alternatives placed in front of God. Then God would be required to choose the better alternative. However, there can be no set of independent “possible universes” facing God so that he may choose one. Since there is nothing for God to intend, there is nothing for God to choose over others.¹⁷

Hence the critical difference between Avicenna and Thomas on necessitated creation. Despite their fundamental agreements regarding the divine attributes, Avicenna will not isolate divine freedom from the formal features of transcendent existence:

For Avicenna, one may not even consider the possibility that God could not have created, because God is necessary in all respects. Such a possibility is applicable only to agents that are not fully in act. While Aquinas considers the divine perfections separately from the manner in which they exist with respect to human vantage point, Avicenna modifies his concept of the divine perfections in the light of the divine formal features. Consequently, he limits human speech to what actually is. By limiting himself with what actually is, he argues that the universe is necessary and that God does not choose from alternatives…

The difference between Avicenna and Aquinas concerning the necessity of the universe and God’s free choice can be traced back to their consideration of divine perfection properties. Since Aquinas was able to consider God’s will with regard to the existence of the universe in isolation from God’s formal features, i.e., immutability and eternity, he could make a distinction between absolute and hypothetical necessity. If God’s will concerning the universe is taken together with God’s formal features, Aquinas argues, the universe is necessary and God creates only this universe. This is what he means by the hypothetical necessity of the universe. Avicenna does not make a distinction between absolute and hypothetical necessity, since he does not consider God’s will with regard to the existence of the universe in isolation from God’s formal features. He takes, God’s perfections together with how God is, i.e., necessary, immutable, eternal. As a result, he simply argues that the universe is necessary. Given the fact that the premises on which Aquinas establishes his position are maintained by Avicenna as well, the necessity of the universe as argued by Avicenna corresponds to the hypothetical necessity of the universe in the theological language of Aquinas.¹⁸

Am I being unfair to Thomas? No doubt. But I am not persuaded that his assertion of suppositional necessity resolves the problems raised by the attribution of free choice to the transcendent Creator. Thomas should at least have posted a warning: “Caution! Pushing apophatic limits!”

At this point, Dr Acar, I find Norman Kretzmann particularly helpful, especially since you agree with him that Aquinas’s conception of divine Goodness and his account of the divine will toward creation are “not quite compatible.” Kretzmann identifies what he calls “libertarian and necessitarian strains” within Thomas himself. On the one hand, Aquinas insists that God freely chooses whether to create; on the other hand, Aquinas also holds that God necessarily wills his own Goodness. Kretzmann calls this freedom without freedom of choice “willingness.” “In God’s case, then,” Kretzmann comments, “willingness, not freedom of choice, characterizes the divine will  ‘in respect of its principal object, which is its own goodness.’”¹⁹

But why, on Aquinas’s account of the simple and fully actualized divinity, does God create the world? Aquinas rejects the suggestion that God creates by a necessity of nature. Kretzmann agrees that Thomas is unmistakably a “non-necessitarian regarding God’s volition to create.”²⁰ Yet he thinks that Aquinas’s own metaphysics points in another direction. God is not simply good; he is perfect Goodness itself. And Aquinas repeatedly appeals to the Dionysian principle that “goodness is by its very nature diffusive of itself and [thereby] of being” (bonum est diffusivum sui). Kretzmann asks whether Aquinas has fully reckoned with the implications of his own doctrine of divine Goodness. 

Kretzmann criticizes Aquinas for not adopting a necessitarian construal of divine creation based on the Dionysian principle of the diffusiveness of being:

For, according to the Dionysian principle, which Aquinas often appeals to in other contexts, goodness is by its very nature diffusive of itself and (thereby) of being. The principle expresses an important truth about goodness, most obviously about the goodness of agents—goodness essentially associated with volitional action informed by intellect—which is the only kind at issue here. There is no obvious inconsistency in the notion of knowledge that is for ever unexpressed, never shared by the agent who has it, even if the agent is omnipotent; but there is inconsistency in the notion of goodness that is for ever unmanifested, never shared by the perfectly good, omnipotent agent.²¹

Here is the heart of Kretzmann’s argument. If Goodness is essentially self-diffusive, then productivity belongs to perfect Goodness as such. Indeed, Kretzmann goes so far as to say that “it is owed to God’s perfect goodness that it have productivity and the other things that pertain to the nature of goodness.”²² Since perfect Goodness belongs to the divine essence, and self-diffusiveness belongs to Goodness, God’s bringing creatures into existence appears to follow with metaphysical necessity. 

This does not mean that God needs creation in order to become perfect. Kretzmann expressly rejects that inference. Creatures add nothing to the life of the Holy Trinity. The direction of dependence runs entirely the other way: created things depend upon divine Goodness for their being. His point is that the manifestation of Goodness follows from what perfect Goodness is:

If … the perpetually unmanifested goodness of an omnipotent agent is inconceivable, then such goodness is, a fortiori, also incomplete. No attribute of an absolutely perfect being could need the acquisition of anything external to it for its completeness; but creating as the metaphysically necessitated manifestation of perfect goodness is not the acquiring of created things for the completion of goodness that would otherwise be imperfect. And, of course, the Dionysian line is that goodness entails its own manifestation in bringing about goodness and, consequently, being. A being that is good (and not relevantly powerless) simply is a being productive of good things external to it. The external things it produces in manifesting its goodness are dependent on it, not vice versa.²³

Creation is therefore the finite expression of a plenitude already everflowing full in itself. 

Kretzmann thus thinks Aquinas has drawn the boundary between necessity and freedom in the wrong place. Aquinas already allows that God necessarily wills his own Goodness without thereby willing it involuntarily. Why should the self-communication of that Goodness be treated differently? Thus Kretzmann’s proposed revision of Thomas: God’s willing of creatures follows from the necessity of his nature precisely considered as perfect goodness. His conclusion could hardly be more explicit: “As I see it, God does (freely) create through the necessity of his nature.”²⁴

Kretzmann’s correction of Thomas has therefore moved him closer to Avicenna, while improving both. For Avicenna, too, the necessary procession of creatures is rooted in the divine Goodness. As we have already heard him say, God “knows that His perfection and loftiness are such that the good proceeds from Him and that this is one of the necessary concomitants of His majesty that in itself is the object of His love.” Kretzmann presses the Dionysian principle in a remarkably similar direction: if God is Goodness itself, and Goodness is essentially self-diffusive, then the communication of divine Goodness in creation belongs to what God freely and necessarily wills.

Beyond Choice and Necessity

Because of the divine aseity and plenitude, we may, I believe, affirm that God’s creation of the universe is voluntarily and freely willed.²⁵ If God is infinite Goodness, and Goodness is self-diffusive, the communication of his Goodness belongs to what he eternally is. God creates the world because in his goodness and love he wants—and thus freely wills—to communicate himself in a finite mode. He does not need the world; creation adds nothing to his perfection. Nor is his willing imposed upon him from without. He creates because he wants to create, and his wanting is neither accidental nor subsequent to who he is. His desire is his will, and his will is his essence (again, divine simplicity). There is no other God before the God who creates, no pre-creation Deity who first confronts the alternatives of creating and not creating. There is only the One who eternally and freely wills into existence the world in which we live.

I call this amatory necessity. I append the word “necessity” simply to highlight our need for a new category to speak of God’s free ex nihilo emanation. Perhaps freedom and necessity cease to be contraries when we are speaking of transcendent divinity. Perhaps God’s willing may be inevitable precisely because it is wholly his own—an expression of the Goodness that he eternally is. The fact that God would never do otherwise in no way compromises his freedom. Does this mean that God is necessitated by his nature? I am tempted to say yes and shoot back the terse rejoinder, so what? All amatory necessity means is that God always acts according to his overflowing Goodness and self-communicating Love. Why is it wrong to suggest that God creates because he is the Goodness and Love that he is? The necessity is neither imposed upon him nor occasioned by some deficiency within him. It is simply the necessity of God being God. Are we really required to imagine another Deity who is infinite, self-diffusive Goodness who eternally might have decided not to create? As common as it may be among theologians to define divine freedom in terms of alternative possibilities—God might have created or might not have created—are necessity and possibility truly proper categories for speaking of the One who utterly transcends them?

Aquinas describes divine creation as “fitting” (conveniens). Given the fact of creation and given what we know of God’s character as revealed in Jesus Christ, may we not also contrafactually ask: If God had decided not to create the world, would not the decision be fittingly described as unfitting, a denial of who he is as Goodness and Love? The Father’s generation of the Son and Spirit is itself the transcendent expression of diffusive Goodness,²⁶ yet will he not also seek to share his Goodness outside his Trinitarian life, not because he is compelled to but simply because he is Goodness and Love? Perhaps the question is not quite kosher, but I ask anyway. To suggest that God is free not to make the universe is to declare that divine creation is purely arbitrary and random. Toss a coin. If it’s heads, I emanate a world; if tails, I don’t. But the transcendent God and Father of Jesus Christ never acts haphazardly. He is the reason he acts.

Avicenna shares the classic theistic commitments with Aquinas, but he does not analyze divine creation through the lens of suppositional necessity. The two metaphysicians diverge on the question whether God might have chosen not to create the universe. Avicenna will not entertain the counterfactual. The existence of the world settles the matter.

Am I off-base? All the Christian classical  theists tell me that I am—with two exceptions: Norman Kretzmann and David Bentley Hart.²⁷ And so I seek out the wisdom of an Islamic philosopher who is not bound to the Christian theological tradition. I would very much appreciate your opinion on this perplexing question. And please forgive this long email.

Thank you.

Sincerely yours,
Fr Aidan Kimel

 

Footnotes

[1] Rahim Acar, Talking About God and Talking About Creation (2005), p. 131. For a succinct summary, see Rahim Acar, “Avicenna’s Position Concerning the Basis for the Divine Creative Action,” The Muslim World, 94 (2004): 65-79.

[2] Ibid., pp. 141-142..

[3] Ibid., pp. 132-133.

[4] Ibid., pp. 145-146. “We may further ask: if creation is not constitutive of God, why must the universe be a necessary concomitant? The answer to this question concerns not what God is, but rather how God is. That is, it does not concern the divine perfections, specifically the divine will, per se, but divine formal features like simplicity and necessity. Avicenna does not consider this question separately, hence he does not state in detail that the necessary concomitance of the universe is due to God’s being necessary, immutable, or fully actual. Nevertheless … Avicenna takes divine perfection properties only insofar as they are modified by divine formal features. For him, when talking about God divine perfection properties must be considered in the manner they are found in God” (ibid., p. 145).

[5] Following David Burrell, Acar describes the formal features of divinity as those properties that “modify the mode in which God has the perfection properties he has. While non-formal properties tell something about what their subject is, formal properties do not directly tell us what their subject is… Formal features concern the ontological constitution, or the mode of existence, of the subject” (ibid., p. 80). In more familiar theological language, the distinction roughly parallels that between God’s negative and positive attributes.

[6] Quoted by Acar, p. 137.

[7] Ibid., pp. 136-137.

[8] Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, trans. Michael E. Marmura (2005), IX.4.3.

[9] Ibid., pp. 138-139.

[10] Julie Swanstrom, “Avicenna’s Account of Creation by Divine Voluntary Emanation,” Otrosiglo 1 (2017): 115-116.

[11] Ibid., p. 118.

[12] Ibid., p. 122.

[13] Avicenna, I.6.6. “Since Avicenna [unlike Aquinas] considers divine perfection properties only insofar as they are modified by the divine formal features, God’s will to create and to create this universe is necessary and eternal” (Acar, p. 132).

[14] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.19.

[15] Ibid.

[16] “Philosophically speaking, the notion of a God who ‘might-or-might-not-create,’ and who ‘chooses’ to create in the sense of choosing between alternatives, is anthropomorphic nonsense.” Perl then goes on to say that he seriously doubts that Aquinas is guilty of such a blunder: “If God ‘might not create,’ or ‘might-or-might-not-create,’ then (a) God-creating is different from God-not-creating, (b) there is a real distinction in God between the divine essence and the act-of-creating, (c) that act is an accident in God, and (d) that accident is a real relation of God to the world. Aquinas expressly repudiates (a), (b), (c), and (d). So unless he’s totally inconsistent, he can’t mean that God ‘might-or-might-not-create.’” Eric Perl, email to author, 31 October 2022.

[17] Acar, .p. 143.

[18] Ibid., pp. 167-168.

[19] Norman Kretzmann, “A General Problem of Creation: Why Would God Create Anything at All,” in Being and Goodness (1990), p. 216.

[20] Norman Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Creation (1999), p. 126.

[21] Ibid., p. 134. “The inconsistency or ambivalence in Aquinas’s account stems … from his decided commitment to Aristotelian self-sufficiency in his conception of God combined with his hesitant appreciation of the insight and explanatory power of the Dionysian Principle, or Platonist self-diffusion as a basic characterization of God.” Kretzmann, “General Problem,” p. 224.

[22] Kretzmann, Metaphysics, p. 134.

[23] Ibid., p. 136.

[24] Ibid., p. 126.

[25] My reflections in this section are informed by my reading of The Divine Names by Dionysius the Areopagite. See my Substack article “To Let Be or Not to Let Be?” (5 September 2026), as well as the other articles in the series.

[26] Addressing the Trinitarian processions, St Bonaventure writes: “Good is said to be self-diffusive; therefore, the highest good is that which diffuses itself the most. Now, diffusion cannot stand as the highest unless it is intrinsic yet active, substantial yet personal, essential yet voluntary, necessary yet free, perfect yet unceasing.” Quoted by Kretzmann, Metaphysics, p. 225.

[27] “All too often, this is obscured in theological discourse by such questions as whether we are obliged to think of creation either as a free act of God’s sovereign will or as a product of some necessity incumbent on his will. But this is a false dilemma. God is not a finite being in whom the distinction of freedom from necessity has any meaning. Perfect freedom is the unhindered realization of a nature in its proper end; and God’s infinite freedom is the eternal fulfillment of the divine nature in the divine life. Needless to say, for any finite rational being, since its essence is not identical with its existence, any movement toward the realization of its nature is attended by the shadows of unrealized possibilities, and entails deliberative liberty with regard to proximate ends. This, though, is a condition not of freedom as such, but only of finitude. Every decision of the finite will is a collapse of indeterminate potentiality into determinate actuality, and therefore the reduction of limitless possibilities to the bare singularity of one reality. Yet that prior realm of possibility exists only because there is an inexhaustible wellspring of more original and transcendent actuality sustaining it. God, by contrast, simply is that actuality, in all its supereminent fullness: infinite Being, the source of every act of being. As such, he is infinitely free precisely because nothing can inhibit or limit the perfect realization of his nature, and thus, as Maximus says, he possesses no gnomic will; for God, deliberative liberty—any ‘could have been otherwise,’ any arbitrary decision among opposed possibilities—would be an impossible defect of his freedom. God does not require the indeterminacy of the possible in order to be free because he is not some particular determination of Being, some finite reduction of potency to act; he is instead that infinite actuality upon which all ontic possibility depends.” David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods (2022), pp. 115-116. Note the striking similarity of Hart’s judgment with that of Eric Perl’s.

Intermezzo—From the Other Side of Easter: Seeing Jesus As He Really Is

By John Stamps

“This is what Jesus was really like; we did not realise it then, but now we know it.” (T. E. Pollard)¹

This is the finest one-sentence description of the Gospel of John that I have ever read. I wish I had encountered it forty-six years ago. It encapsulates the Fourth Gospel in a sentence.

If you are even slightly familiar with the Quest of the Historical Jesus, Pollard’s claim is startling. Years ago, I mentioned to one of Shelly’s uncles that I was interested in the historical Jesus. “Oh,” he replied, “you mean the real Jesus?” I still wince when I remember it. His innocent remark captured an assumption that has shaped much modern study of Jesus. Historical criticism has taught us to peel away the theological interpretations of the evangelists to uncover “the real Jesus.”² To adapt Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum, we want to know wie er eigentlich gewesen—Jesus as he actually was. But St John turns von Ranke on his head. For John, we cannot see Jesus as he really was until we see him in the light of who he really is. Easter does not obscure the historical Jesus. Easter discloses him.

Claiming that John’s Gospel tells us “what Jesus was really like” is a bold conclusion indeed. John himself knows that people who saw the same deeds and heard the same words came to radically different conclusions about Jesus. Some called him prophet and Messiah; others called him deceiver, sinner, Samaritan, demon-possessed, even blasphemer. There is no “naked history” from which we can simply read off Jesus’ true identity. The question is not merely what happened, but how we learn to see what happened. We learn to see Jesus as he really is within the community of those who believe and trust in him, guided by the Spirit-Paraclete, remembering his words and deeds, and reading the Scriptures as witness to him.

John remembers Jesus from the other side of Easter, “from back to front.”³ The resurrection and the gift of the Spirit-Paraclete have taught the disciples to recognize what they had been seeing all along. John himself tells us so. When Jesus speaks of raising the temple of his body, the disciples do not understand: only “when he was raised from the dead” do they remember and believe (2:22). When Jesus enters Jerusalem, again “his disciples did not understand these things at first”; only after Jesus was glorified do they remember (12:16). And Jesus promises that this is precisely what the Spirit-Paraclete will do: “He will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have said to you” (14:26).

This retrospective vision is not unique to John. All four Gospels remember Jesus in the light of Easter. But John makes what is implicit in them unusually explicit: he makes retrospective understanding itself a major theme of his Gospel. 

Clement of Alexandria famously called John the “spiritual Gospel.” Quite right. Provided that “spiritual” does not exile Jesus to some cloud-cuckoo land of pious sentimentality. For John, the Spirit-Paraclete does not spirit Jesus away from history. The Spirit-Paraclete teaches the disciples to understand the history they have inhabited.

Again and again, the disciples encounter a Jesus whom they do not yet understand. Only afterward, in the light of resurrection and through the illumination of the Spirit, do they begin to comprehend whom they had encountered. 

Pollard’s point is crucial: “It is not that John is reading back into the earthly life [of Jesus] something that was not there.” Easter does not turn Jesus into someone he was not. Easter reveals who Jesus had been all along. The Logos-made-flesh had been standing before them all along.

The Fourth Gospel is therefore retrospective without being merely backward-looking. John looks backward from an eschatological event that has changed the meaning of past, present, and future. The resurrection disrupts ordinary chrono-logy and bends time back upon itself. As Harold Attridge puts it: 

“Time can be bent… when the eternal enters its realm.”⁴

The future has broken into the present and illuminated the past. This is more than retrospective reinterpretation. Easter is an ontological disclosure: in raising the crucified Jesus from the dead, God reveals who Jesus is and vindicates who he had been all along. What the disciples could not comprehend as events unfolded before them becomes intelligible from the other side of Easter. Jesus had spoken of his body as the temple. He had called himself the bread of life, the light of the world, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life. He had told Philip, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Only afterward could the disciples begin to grasp the astonishing coherence of what they had heard and seen.⁵

This helps account for the contemplative character of John’s Gospel. John is not simply chronicling what happened next. He is pondering what happened then in the light of what God has revealed now.⁶ The Gospel therefore asks something similar of its readers. We must linger over its words, return to them, allow one episode to illuminate another, and learn to see Jesus retrospectively with the disciples. John’s repetitions, misunderstandings, double meanings, signs, symbols, and long discourses are not ornamental. They train us how to see.

And what do we finally see? The claim could hardly be more audacious. “Nobody has ever seen God.” Yet the only Son, the one who is closest to the Father’s heart, “has made him known” (1:18). The Logos who was with God and was God has become flesh. To see Jesus is, somehow, to see the Father. Easter does not replace the earthly Jesus with a divine Christ. It discloses the depth of the identity that had been present in him from the beginning.

And John promises that this retrospective vision is not reserved for those who were there. Indeed, it is precisely for us that he has written his Gospel:

So Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book. But these things have been written so that you may come to believe and trust that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing and trusting you may have life in his name. (John 20:30-31)

Easter does not give us a second Jesus. It gives us eyes for the first.

Footnotes

1. T. E. Pollard, “St John’s Contribution to the Picture of the Historical Jesus,” inaugural lecture, Knox Theological Hall, Dunedin, 1964, published in Forum 16, no. 6 (August 1964): 2–9; quoted in John A. T. Robinson, The Priority of John, ed. J. F. Coakley (London: SCM Press, 1985), 362. I encountered Pollard’s remark through Marianne Meye Thompson, John: A Commentary, New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 11 n. 32. ↩︎
2. Luke Timothy Johnson famously challenged a related assumption of the historical quest in The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). Johnson argues that the “real Jesus” cannot be identified with the hypothetical figure historians reconstruct from the Gospel narratives. The real Jesus is the living and risen Lord to whom the New Testament and the worshiping Church bear witness. ↩︎
3. Marianne Meye Thompson, John: A Commentary, New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 9. Thompson writes: “In John, the dilemma of understanding Jesus is framed both theologically and chronologically: during his lifetime, Jesus’ identity was not grasped, or not grasped completely, because he could not be understood fully through the experiential faculties of sight and hearing. It was only after and in the light of his death and resurrection, the events and realities triggered by them, and the Spirit’s instruction, that the disciples would be able to fully articulate what Jesus had intended and accomplished, and who he was and is. Of all the Gospels, John most explicitly articulates the necessity of the postresurrection perspective for understanding Jesus, interpreting Jesus’ life retrospectively (see 2:22; 12:16). In John, Jesus is known ‘from back to front’; that is, beginning with the resurrection and reading the significance of his mission and identity from that vantage point.” ↩︎
4. Harold W. Attridge, “Bending Time: Time and Eternity in the Fourth Gospel,” in Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and Rhetoric: A Festschrift for David P. Moessner, ed. Robert Matthew Calhoun, Margaret M. Mitchell, Tobias Nicklas, and Janet E. Spittler, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 194 (Leiden: Brill, 2024), 9–25, at 16. ↩︎
5. Marianne Meye Thompson, “Jesus and the Victory of God Meets the Gospel of John,” in Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright, ed. Nicholas Perrin and Richard B. Hays (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 21-38: “If in the Synoptic Gospels Jesus’ identity is slowly unfolded throughout the narrative, to be known cumulatively and vindicated in the resurrection, so that the whole becomes the sum of its parts and more than the sum of those parts, then in John the whole of Jesus’ identity already appears in nearly every part of the narrative. In John, Jesus is known from the end. John might well find the project of JVG (JS: Jesus and the Victory of God)—to know ‘Jesus’ mind set, aims and beliefs prior to the crucifixion’—to be an odd project. It is not, as Sanders puts it, that the resurrection is the aftermath of Jesus’ life, but that what happened through the resurrection, and in the aftermath of the resurrection, is simply part of who Jesus is and what his life was all about. To a large extent, this conviction makes the Gospel of John what it is, and Jesus who he is in the Gospel of John. The Jesus who laid down his life is also the Jesus who took it up again, the one who is resurrection and life. If he is not living, then this statement cannot be true. Because there is no Jesus without the resurrection, there is no historical Jesus without the resurrection.” ↩︎
6. N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1–10 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), x: “[John] gives the appearance of being written by someone who was a very close friend of Jesus, and who spent the rest of his life mulling over, more and more deeply, what Jesus had done and said and achieved, praying it through from every angle, and helping others to understand it.” ↩︎

The Living and the Dead

Aeriel view of WTC in March of 2001

— Prelapsarian: the Two Towers before the Fall. Photo by Jeffmock — Own work, Public Domain.

It was a cool, clear, spotlessly perfect fall Tuesday morning in northeastern Pennsylvania at 8:46 a.m.

I was a priest then, serving the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox parish in Scranton. That day we were observing the Beheading of John the Baptist. Because my parish followed the Julian Calendar, the feast fell thirteen days later for us.

At 8:46, I was preparing the gifts.

In the Orthodox Church, the service of preparation, called the Proskomedia, is a complex affair. From a loaf of bread I had cut a perfect three-inch cube and placed it on the paten. That cube was the Lamb: Christ at the center of the diskos.

Then I cut an inch-wide triangular piece of bread and placed it at the Lamb’s right and my left. That particle represented the Virgin Mary. On the other side of the Lamb I arranged nine smaller triangles in three rows, each standing for various ranks of angels and saints.

Finally, I made two parallel rows of crumbs in front of the Lamb.

The upper row stretched almost the whole width of the paten. Each particle stood for one of the living people I knew about: my family, my friends, my parishioners. Especially the ones who were suffering, sick, frightened, or in trouble.

I remembered, too, former psychiatric patients and clients whom I had tried to help, especially those I still wondered whether I had helped enough.

Then I began the row below.

These would be the departed.

Every person I had ever buried. All my dead loved ones. Some particles I held a little longer between my fingers, my voice catching as I spoke certain names whose absence I still felt sorely.

Then Marsha came into the side altar.

She never did this.

Her eyes were wide, torn between horror and grief.

“You have to come, Jonathan,” she gasped.

Still vested, I ran with her the few yards to the rectory.

The television was on.

I saw smoke pouring from the side of the first tower. Flame. The soft, disbelieving voices of Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, sounding as though they were speaking from beneath a funeral veil.

The September sky over New York was impossibly blue.

Soon it would be obscured, not by any cloud native to creation, but by smoke, fire, ash, paper, and the pulverized substance of falling towers.

What a day that was.

We forgot to eat.

We huddled together on the couch and kept trying to get through by telephone to Somerset County, Pennsylvania, where my parents and my brother and sister and their families lived.

Jeff, my brother-in-law, was a barn painter. That morning he was working on a large dairy barn in Stonycreek Township, in the northern part of the county.

We could not get through.

I called to cancel the clergy luncheon scheduled for that day. One elderly priest seemed unable to understand why.

“The two towers are coming down, Monsignor,” I tried to explain.

I went into the church kitchen to tell the women who were making pierogies, pinching closed the edges of each potato-filled dumpling.

None of them believed me.

“The media’s just making it up.”

Later I forgave them all.

The news was simply too horrible to admit, too ugly and catastrophic to take fully into consciousness, too monstrous to accept as real.

It felt as though the whole sky had filled with darkness, a sky you could not run away from.

And then the sky went silent.

For the first time in our lives, there was not a single contrail.

The news kept coming, one blow after another.

We saw the second plane strike the South Tower live on television.

Then the towers fell, one after the other.

We watched people whitened with ash run through the streets. We watched crowds stream across the bridges out of Manhattan.

And we watched firefighters of the FDNY and officers of the NYPD running toward the towers while everyone else was running away.

I could not look away, though part of me desperately wanted to.

For a generation of young Americans, death ceased that morning to be an abstraction.

I finally got through to Somerset the next day.

Jeff was safe.

Shaken as hell, but safe.

Flight 93 had crashed only miles from where he had been painting that barn. Its passengers and crew had fought back against the hijackers. The Capitol may have been the intended target.

Those people had gone to work, boarded a plane, begun an ordinary Tuesday morning, and then found themselves called into an act of courage I am not sure I deserve even to describe.

The following night, people flooded into the prayer service we clergy—the same clergy whose luncheon I had canceled—had hastily arranged.

We prayed.

You could hear people sobbing.

We closed by singing “Amazing Grace.”

It was a soft, threnodic singing.

A plea.

A cry.

People poured into churches that Sunday.

Flags appeared on nearly every porch. The guard at Buckingham Palace played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” People gathered near the American Embassy in Paris and wept. Germans waved American flags.

For one brief moment, it seemed as though much of the world was grieving with us.

But before any of that, there was still a Liturgy to finish.

The Mass for the Beheading of John the Baptist had been scheduled for 9:00 a.m.

I was fifteen minutes late.

I returned to the side altar and finished the service of preparation.

Usually I kept the living in one row and the dead in another.

That morning I could not.

No one knew yet who was alive and who was buried beneath ash and steel.

So I cut particle after particle from the loaf for New York, the Pentagon, and Flight 93, and I made one large, ambiguous heap of crumbs.

The living and the dead together.

People who had gone to work that morning.

People whose families were still calling cellphones buried somewhere beneath rubble and dust.

Twenty-five years later, I still remember that heap of crumbs.

I remember how carefully I had begun the morning, separating the living from the dead, giving each name its proper place.

And I remember how completely those categories failed us by nine o’clock.

We like our categories.

The living and the dead.

Ours and theirs.

Innocent and guilty.

American and foreign.

Friend and enemy.

But around the Lamb, the rows finally disappear.

The dead of New York belong there.

The dead at the Pentagon belong there.

The passengers and crew of Flight 93 belong there.

The firefighters, police officers, office workers, cooks, secretaries, janitors, travelers, immigrants, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

And if Christianity means anything at all, then even our enemies are not permitted to fall outside the reach of prayer.

That is harder to say now than it was on September 12, 2001.

Perhaps that is why it must still be said.

Twenty-five years later, I no longer remember every word spoken that week.

I do not remember every headline or every photograph.

But I remember the bread.

I remember the living and the dead together.

And I remember Christ in the middle.

Naming the Unnameable God

In Book 13 of the Analects, Tsze-lu asks Confucius, what is the first thing to be done in the administration of government. The master replies, “What is necessary is to rectify names.” A curious answer, I would think, and so apparently thought Tsze-lu. Confucius then goes to to explain: “If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.” To rule wisely, a ruler must be able to name reality rightly.

Two millennia later, Juliet Capulet would ask, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Her lover Romeo immediately replies, “I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized; Henceforth I never will be Romeo.”

Three centuries later, Alice would step through a mirror into Looking-Glass Land. She eventually wanders into the Nameless Forest and finds she cannot remember the names of anything, including her own. She no longer knows herself. Alice comes across a fawn, who asks her, “What do you call yourself?” “I wish I knew,” Alice replies. She then asks the fawn its name. But it too does not remember. Both nameless, Alice and the fawn meander through the forest, her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they come out into another open field. Here the Fawn gives a sudden bound into the air, and shakes itself free from Alice’s arms. “I’m a Fawn!” it cries out in a voice of delight, “and, dear me! you’re a human child!” A sudden look of alarm comes into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it darts away. Remembering both who and what it is and what Alice is, the fawn knows that the human being is a possible predator. They can no longer be companions.

Names, both nominal and proper, give us the power to grasp and understand the world as it is and to respond accordingly. Yet as Juliet and Romeo discovered, names can also be dangerous. A name both discloses and delimits identity.

But what of God?

The Nameless God

The transcendent Creator, declares the Areopagite, is beyond our apprehension, beyond our comprehension, beyond our naming. How can we name the “beyond-beingly being,” who transcends all boundaries and categories, even thought itself?

It is cause of all;
but itself: nothing
as beyond-beingly apart from all. (DN I.5)

God is nothing—no thing—and therefore no name can comprehend him. Dionysius continues:

To none of those who are lovers of the truth beyond every truth is it permissible to celebrate the thearchic-beyond-beingness, whatever is the beyond-source beyond goodness, as logos, power, intellect, life, or being. For it is preeminently removed from everything whatsoever that is be-ing: from every habit, motion, life, imagination, opinion, name, logos, thinking, intellection, being, rest, foundation, unity, limit, and non-limit. (DN I.5)

And so, Dionysius asks, “For is not this truly the most wondrous name: the nameless beyond all names, which is placed beyond every name which is named ‘either in this age or in the future’?” (DN I.6). Christian Schäfer captures this paradox of the Nameless and Polynymous God:

Since we are unable to state anything about God’s essence…, He is the Nameless, ἀνώνυμος (anōnymos). Yet, since all reality is His manifold theophany, He is the Polynymous (πολυώνυμος, polyōnymos). Paul, whose disciple Dionysius claims to be, says in 1 Cor 15:28 that the Creator is all things in all, τὰ πάντα ἐν πᾶσι (cf. DN 596A and 596C). He is everything and nothing (πάντα τὰ ὄντα καὶ οὐδὲν τῶν ὄντων: 596C). He should be named simultaneously as nameless and polynymous (DN 596D), with a ‘nameless name’ (DN 596A) …, or with a ‘Name beyond any name’ (DN 596A). As far as the ontology is concerned we could say that God is hidden beyond being (DN 588A), yet reveals Himself through being, which is also an unmistakable sign of His ‘gnoseological’ Goodness. ( The Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite, p. 68)

Yet how can we worship and invoke the God who surpasses every name? How do we name the Nameless?

The Providential Processions

Dionysius is a Neoplatonist, which means that he teaches a metaphysics of participation. As David Schindler puts it, “To speak of metaphysical participation is to say that one thing has what it is with and indeed after and in pursuit of, another: it has its reality, in other words, by virtue of something other than itself” (“What’s the Difference?,” The Saint Anselm Journal 3 [2005]: 1). This well describes the basic logic of Dionysian participation. A creature possesses its being and its characteristic perfections genuinely, yet derivatively: it participates in the causal gifts that proceed from the One. Participation thus expresses both the creature’s real possession of its perfection and its radical dependence upon the divine source from which that perfection proceeds. For the Areopagite, created beings participate in God and thus receive their reality, yet God does not participate in finite beings and therefore remains unchanged. Divinity is “unparticipatedly participated” (DN II. 5)—between Creator and created there exists a relationship of asymmetrical dependence.

Dionysius is also a Christian, which means that he rejects subordinate divine causal principles—hence the challenge of the Dionysian project. Missing from his writings are the Plotinian hypostases of Intellect and Soul. Missing also are the henads of Proclus, intermediate divinities that mediate between absolute unity and the multiplicities of the cosmos. To invoke the immortal words of the Highlander, there can be only One—one source, one cause, one transcendent ground. Dionysius decisively separates himself from polytheistic henology:

The absolute being underlying individual manifestations of being as their cause is not a divine or an angelic being, for only transcendent being itself can be the source, the being, and the cause of the being of beings. Nor have we to do with some other life-producing divinity distinct from that supra-divine life which is the originating Cause of all living beings and of life itself… What I am trying to express is something quite different. “Being itself,” “life itself,” “divinity itself,” are names signifying source, divinity, and cause, and these are applied to the one transcendent cause and source beyond source of all things. But we use the same terms in a derivative fashion and we apply them to the provident acts of power which come forth from that God in whom nothing at all participates. I am talking here of being itself, of life itself, of divinity itself which shapes things in a way that each creature, according to capacity, has his share of these. From the fact of such sharing come the qualities and the names “existing,” “living,” “possessed by divinity,” and suchlike. (DN XI.6)

In his “good-formed processions [πρόοδοι] and manifestations of the godhead” (DN II.4), the One “goes forth to all things while yet remaining within himself” (DN XII.1). “It overflows in one unceasing, identical, over-flowing, and undiminished supply, thereby perfecting the perfect and filling all things with its own perfection” (DN XIII.1). The processions are therefore more than created effects and more than human descriptions of God. They are the differentiated ways in which the indivisible One gives himself as the cause of the perfections of creatures. The divine names designate God according to these emanations of his goodness. Creatures participate in them according to their capacities, thereby receiving their own finite perfections.

John Jones expatiates upon the dialectic of procession and differentiation:

The genesis of what is caused from its causes is the procession of what is caused out of its causes. This procession is a multiplication or differentiation of the cause. In proceeding out of its causes, what is caused is let be, both as distinct from the cause and as other than it. Or, more accurately, the cause proceeds out of itself and multiplies itself in what it causes; that is, the cause is let be or manifests itself as other than itself. Nonetheless, what causes abides apart from what it causes. For although it is wholly differenced in what it causes, it abides as the unity which it is. Moreover, what is caused abides in what causes it and, as such, is not other than it. (Introduction to The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, 43.)

Dionysius speaks of the “divine difference” (DN II.5), the differentiation of the one Holy Trinity through its ecstatic extroversion toward creation. The Trinity remains perfect and ineffable unity in its “thearchic beyond-beingness” (DN II.5), yet in its “good-showing processions” (DN II.11) the One “makes itself many and multiplies itself, beyond every way of unity, by its goodness” (DN II.5). The world thus becomes theophany. Its perfections image the manifold self-communications of the One, yet no image can exhaust the divine cause it manifests. As Dionysius comments: “What is caused has achieved an image of its causes, and the causes themselves are both apart from and founded beyond what they cause according to the logos of their own proper source” (DN II.8).¹

In the act of creation, the infinite, simple, and immutable Deity communicates himself in the modality of finitude. From soup to nuts, all of creation is theophany, icon, manifestation, presentation, appearance, revelation, and sacrament of the one eternal Creator. This is what it means to be a creature in the Dionysian vision. “In Dionysios,” writes Perl, “to be is to be a symbol” (“Symbol, Sacrament, and Hierarchy,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 39 (1994): 320).² Schafer explicitly ties together theophany and the divine names:

For, as God’s theophany, reality reflects the dynamics of the threefold One of which it is its extroversion. Strangely enough, Dionysius inverts this picture completely in his presentation of the Divine Names; God is the unknowable, and whatever we know of Him comes from talking about His Creation, which is not God Himself, but rather His theophany. Yet, Creation is only explainable by turning to God and by combining ontology and theology. (Schafer, 60)

The Divine Names

We name and hymn God from his processions as witnessed in Holy Scripture and manifested in creation. Out with the gods and in with the divine names—or more specifically, in with the intelligible divine names. The names denote Deity in its active determination of created beings. They are not, as Timothy Knepper remarks, “arbitrary signifiers that arbitrarily denote some arbitrary signified” (Negating Negation, p. 1). They are given in Scripture and constitute the metaphysical structure of the created order; they apply primarily to God as transcendent cause and secondarily to creatures:

They are divine processions that source and sustain the basic properties of the cosmos… Thus it is only because divine names are firstly and primarily causes of properties that those properties can be attributed to or denied of those beings that do or do not participate in them. (Knepper, p. 1)

God is being for he creates being and beings; God is life, for he bestows life on specific classes of beings; God is power, for he gives the capacity to act; and so on. The created properties which the intelligible names source are precontained within God in his inexpressible simplicity:

Thus, both nameless and all the names of beings befit the cause of all, be-ing beyond all, precisely so that it would be king of all and all would be about it—being raised to it as cause, source, and limit—and so that it would be”all in all” as the writings say. Thus, we truly celebrate it to be the support, source of guidance, connection, completion, protection and hearth of all, and as reverting [all] to itself. [It accomplishes] these in a unified, immeasurable, and excellent way. For it is not only the cause of connection, of life, or of completion such that the goodness beyond name would be named from one or another of its providences. Rather, it has anticipated the all simply and infinitely in itself: the all complete goodness of its one and all causing providence. Thus, it is to he harmoniously celebrated and named in terms of all things. (DN I.7)

The divine names must ultimately be negated because what they signify is precontained in God by way of ineffable excess and undifferentiated concentration. The finite perfections signified by these theonyms properly characterize creatures; in God they subsist according to their transcendent causal mode. The transcendent Deity exists beyond finitude, beyond goods and perfections, and therefore beyond intelligibility and nomination. Yet he is intelligibly and properly named by his self-revelation in divine creation. The divine names signify powers, but powers of the One; processions and activities, but always of the One.

For the truth is that everything divine and even everything revealed to us is known only by way of whatever share of them is granted. Their actual nature, what they are ultimately in their own source and ground, is beyond all intellect and all being and all knowledge. When, for instance, we give the name of “God” to that transcendent hiddenness, when we call it “life” or “being” or “light” or “Word,” what our minds lay hold of is in fact nothing other than certain activities apparent to us, activities which deify, cause being, bear life, and give wisdom. (DN II.7)

The divine names identify the metaphysical principles that inform the cosmos yet preexist in the triadic Deity who is “beyond be-ing beyond-beingly before all” (DN V.8). They designate the One in a pluralized form. We might think of the intelligible names as verbs rather than proper nouns, for they name God according to his movement out of himself into the world. “Both the divine names and the properties they source,” Knepper explains, “are pre-contained in god in a hyper-unifed and hyper-existent manner; thus there are important respects in which the divine names are true even of the transcendent god” (Knepper, p. 4).

The foundational theonym for Dionysius is the Good, for all the other divine names proceed from and express it. In his treatise Dionysius then presents a hierarchical triad of the divine names: the first comprises those divine perfections that define basic types of beings, the second those that empower the proper hierarchical ordering and functioning of those beings, and the third those that enable the enactment of unificatory ends by those beings.

Why then is the Good absent from the category of the “Divine Names of Ontological Procession”? Because the Good stands before and encompasses the ontological series as the name of God’s universal providence. Dionysius tells us that the name Good “manifests the whole processions of the cause of all,” extending even to “all that is and all that is not” (DN V.1). Being, Life, and Wisdom name increasingly determinate ways in which God diffuses his Goodness into creation. Being extends to everything that exists; Life to everything that lives; Wisdom to beings capable of intellect, reason, and sensation. The movement is therefore one of progressive differentiation: every being participates in Being, and every intelligent being participates in both Life and Being, while the converse does not hold. Being, Life, and Wisdom thus articulate the ontological structure assumed by the procession of the Good as creatures receive the divine gifts according to their capacities. The Good names God’s unbounded generosity that comprehends his processions; Being, Life, and Wisdom name the fundamental modes in which his generosity constitutes the ordered multiplicity of creation.

Conclusion

We return to the question with which we began. How can we name the God who lives in the Nameless Forest? We may do so because he has given himself to be known. Every creature bears the impress of the divine goodness from which it proceeds. The world is theophany, a manifestation of the hidden God, and its many perfections become names by which we praise their transcendent source. Yet every name finally points beyond itself. Goodness, Being, Life, Wisdom, Beauty—each opens upon the inexhaustible mystery of the One who gives himself without ceasing to transcend every gift. Here lies the wonder of Dionysius’s vision: the nameless God has filled creation with his names.

I close with Alexander Golitzin’s summary: “The intelligible names are not things, no longer have reference to objectively and independently existing entities, but are instead windows opening onto the sense—and reality—of God present in his powers or energies… They direct us to, and participate in, the greater sacrament, μυστήριον [mystery], of God’s self-giving love” (Mystagogy, p. 100).

 

Footnotes

1 “In the procession of things from God, differentiation must be considered along with union; differentiation because God seems to distribute Himself, that is, His likeness, into many images, just as the sun disperses its light into a multitude of rays, and one face close to a mirror renders its likeness into many images.” Marsilio Ficino, De divinis nominibus XLIV, in On Dionysius the Areopagite, I:207. Ficino was a Catholic philosopher and priest who lived in the 15th century.

2 “When, through a certain ineffable descent into the things that are, it [i.e., the transcendent Good] is perceived by the sight of the mind in those things that are, it alone is found to be in all things… Indeed, beginning to appear in its theophanies, it is said to proceed as though from nothing into something. What is properly judged [to be] above all essence is also known properly in every essence, and for this reason every visible and invisible creature can be called a theophany, that is, a divine appearance.” John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon 681A.

The Problem of Evil is a Trap: A Discussion of Robert Fortuin’s Apophatic Non-theodicy

Puddleglum Faith: On Converts and Their Reasons

Until a week or two ago, I had never heard of Ethan Muse. But suddenly my activity thread on Substack is getting bombarded by folks talking about him and his conversion to Christianity and Catholicism. This is apparently a big deal because Muse is reputed to be a very smart philosopher; therefore … therefore what? Are we supposed to believe that because an intelligent man with a Ph.D. has found compelling reasons (miracles, really?) for believing that the Catholic Church is the one true Church, that his conversion proves anything whatsoever?

Look, I’ve been down this road. I converted from atheism to theism and Christianity in the late ’70s and was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. I had my reasons, including what I thought at the time was a knock-down philosophical argument for the existence of God. It took me years to come to understand that my real reasons were deeper and more mysterious than the ones my intellect was telling me. As far as my knock-down argument for God, it has long been irrelevant to my faith. Maybe it’s sound, maybe it’s not. Heck if I know. It doesn’t matter.

In the mid-2000s, I had an ecclesial crisis of faith and conscience. I fell into a deep clinical depression. After 25 years of priestly ministry in the Episcopal Church, I began seriously asking myself whether I could remain in Anglicanism. A friend encouraged me to read John Henry Newman, a truly brilliant theologian. I read a goodly number of his writings, and he got into my head. As everyone knows, Newman left his Anglican home and was received and eventually priested in the Catholic Church. Newman’s conviction became my own, and so in 2005 I entered into the communion of the Catholic Church and was eventually ordained a priest through the Pastoral Provision. I had my reasons and presented them to others with the strident enthusiasm of a convert, I published them online on my old blog Pontifications. After several years, however, I realized that I had made a terrible blunder. All my “reasons” vanished into thin air. Once again I fell into deep depression. I even began to question whether God existed. One evening I stepped outside and yelled at God. “I don’t believe in you,” I cried. And then I heard myself thinking, “If you don’t believe in him, why are you yelling at him?” I then realized I was stuck with God whether I liked it or not. Puddleglum’s desperate exclamation became my own: “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.” As Pascal astutely observed, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” 

In 2011, I was chrismated in the Orthodox Church and re-ordained (my third ordination—does that make me a “real” priest‽). Thoroughly chastened by this point, my conversion lacked all the zealous qualities of a new convert. I became Orthodox because it is an apostolic and eucharistic Church. My only other option was to return to Anglicanism, and that was not a possible option for me. And so here I am. 

So why am I sharing all of this? Because convert Muse has shared on the internet his opinion on the doctrine of everlasting perdition. Apparently he does not find it troubling in the least. He has his reasons, the primary one, I suspect, being ecclesial authority: it’s true because the true Church says it’s infallibly so. Muse is, of course, entitled to his opinion, but the appeal to authority is a weak straw on which to hang one’s hat. His equanimity about everlasting perdition suggests that he has not yet reckoned with what the gospel means for the final destiny of those whom Christ loves and for whom he died.

Anyway, what prompted this article is a Substack piece written by Eric van Evans. Know that I cannot agree with the author’s affirmation, expressed near the end of his piece, of a non-institutional Christianity. The gospel is intrinsically embodied in the Church—in its witness and sacramental life. There would be no gospel of Jesus Christ apart from the Church. Like it or not. 

My counsel to new converts, which I have shared before: keep quiet! You have no business publishing your arguments in defense of your conversion. You do not know your true reasons for your conversion, nor do you know whether your arguments are true. That you presently find them compelling is immaterial. Your true reasons for being a Christian—whether of the Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant variety—may be revealed to you in the future by the grace of the Spirit through the furnace of historical life and suffering.

In the meantime, attend the liturgies of your parish church, say your prayers, repent of your sins, and cultivate your spiritual life and communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Perhaps in a few years you will be ready to be an evangelist of the gospel. Perhaps.

And remember, your heart has its reasons that your reason does not know.

The Ecstatic and Theophanic God

I vividly remember when I first read The Divine Names by Dionysius the Areopagite. I felt like I had fallen down the rabbit with Alice hole into a strange world in which words no longer made sense and the logic of theological discourse had been turned upside-down. Who is this God who is “beyond-beingly be-ing” and what is its relationship to the world? I found the Dionysian vision bewildering, baffling, disorienting … yet at the same time mesmerizing. I didn’t know if I had landed in a story alien to the gospel I had long preached, or whether this is how the gospel looks when presented through a Neoplatonic philosophical lens. All I know is that I was intrigued. And so I decided to remain in Wonderland for a while.

The God Who Emanates

Of the many questions I had, the ones that stood out concerned Dionysius’ doctrine of emanation. The super-essential God does not so much create the world from out of nothing; rather, he brings it forth from out of himself: “For this cause brings forth being in the going out of being” (DN V.8), and in so doing “both makes itself many and multiplies itself by goodness” (DN II.5). And again:

It is differenced in a unified way: being given to all beings overflowing the participations of the totality of those that are good, singly made many, non-wanderingly multiplied out of the one. Since God is beyond-beingly be-ing, and as being is given to beings and brings forth the totality of beings, that one be-ing is said to be multiplied by the bringing forth of all beings out of itself. (DN II.11)

Dionysius uses a variety of diffusive and effusive images to express divine creation:

All of these show that the providence and goodness which are participated in by beings proceed and flow forth out of the unparticipated God in an ungrudging stream precisely so that the cause of all would be beyond all and the beyond being and beyond nature would be wholly beyond-having all being and nature whatever. (DN XI.6)

Indeed, the divine good eros is good through the good. This good working eros of beings—before be-ing: thrown beyond into the good—does not permit it to abide in itself but has moved it to a fitness for doing through the generative thrusting forth of all beings. (DN IV.10)

The cause of all—through a thrusting forth of erotic goodness—comes to be outside of itself and into all through the providences of all beings. (DN IV.13)

To speak of perfection is to proclaim that it cannot be increased or diminished, for it is eternally perfect, that it contains all things beforehand in itself, that it overflows in one unceasing, identical, over- flowing, and undiminished supply, thereby perfecting the perfect and filling all things with its own perfection. (DN XIII.1)

Scholars debate the extent of the Areopagite’s transformation of Neoplatonic procession, but surely a difference is entailed by his elimination of the mediating Proclean henads and, more decisively, by his identification of the transcendent One with the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—from whom all beings receive their being. Andrew Louth argues that Dionysius has modified the Neoplatonic construal in two decisive ways:

First, he qualifies the notion of emanation by insisting that being is derived from God alone; and secondly, he turns the doctrine of divine names into a doctrine of divine attributes (that is, attributes of God, the one God). Emanation, in a Neoplatonic sense, is a doctrine about the derivation of being: being derives from the One, but in the stream of emanated beings, each being receives from the one above it (actually for Proclus, beings that are capable of self-presence, that is, self-conscious beings, are identical with that from which they proceed, and so are in a way self-created)—creation is not restricted to the One, the whole realm of being that flows from the One is creative. Denys takes over the Neoplatonic idea of a scale of being, and also the idea that lower beings are dependent on higher beings, but he rejects any idea that being is (as it were) passed down this scale of being: all beings are created immediately by God. The scale of being and the sense of dependence only has significance in the matter of illumination: light and knowledge flow from God down through the scale of being—each being becomes radiant with light and thus passes on light to beings lower down. (Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite, pp. 84-85)¹

Dionysius has thus radically compressed the Neoplatonic hierarchy of causation. Every being receives its being immediately from the one God, even as illumination descends through the ordered ranks of creation. The transcendent One is therefore immediately present to every creature as its creative cause. What kind of God creates in this way? For Dionysius, the answer is simple: the Holy Trinity who flows out of himself in love.

The Ecstatic God

The God of Dionysius is, in Eric Perl’s phrase, intrinsically ecstatic, “not a self-contained self but always already ‘out of himself’ and ‘in all things’ as their constitutive differences” (Perl, Theophany, 46). This dynamic movement Dionysius names eros and agape. “The divine eros is ecstatic,” he writes… “In an ecstatic power beyond being, it is brought down out of a separation from all and beyond all, to what is in all, yet does not wander out of itself” (DNIV.13). Daniel Heide provocatively describes God as othering himself through his creative processions:

Dionysius … states that the Good “by the fact of its existence (τῷ εῖναι τὸ ἀγαθὸν), extends goodness into all things” (DN IV.1 693B). It belongs to the very nature of the Good to bestow goodness—that is simply what the Good is. For the Good to cease to radiate goodness would mean a diminishment of its nature by which it would cease to be identical to itself as Good and become different (ἕτερόν). Because the Good is not providential, but Providence itself, its procession by which it constitutes all things is the activity by which it remains what it is; namely, the Good-as-Providence. Thus, while the “being-making procession” (οὐσιοποιόν πρόοδον; DN V.1 816B) of the Good in a sense constitutes itself as other (ἕτερόν), this very “self-othering” is, paradoxically, the key to its own timeless self-identity. As intrinsically ecstatic, God’s remaining is his proceeding, and his proceeding is his remaining. (Daniel Heide, “Divine Eros,” Dionysius XXXVII [2019]: 54.)

There is nothing static about this God. He is always in motion, an eternal outpouring of being and goodness, a going forth from himself in love and a returning in love:

The divine eros is like an everlasting circle—moving around in unerring convolution through the good, out of the good, in the good, into the good, always abiding, proceeding, and returning, in the same, and according to the same. (DN IV.14)

Creation is the ecstasy of divine eros!

The God Who Makes Himself Many

Dionysius speaks of a divine movement or procession from the indescribable and indivisible Trinitarian unity to the multiplicity of creation. Through the names, symbols, and images of Scripture and Liturgy, we are given to contemplate the God beyond being who clothes himself “in the terms of being.” Throughout The Divine Names we are presented with a subtle interplay between divine transcendence and divine immanence. We need to be careful not to interpret God’s otherness from creation as distance and difference, in the way two finite beings are distant and different. “Just as the form Fire, as that which is common to all fires, whereby they are fires, is not itself one of the fires,” writes Eric Perl, “so the One, as that which is common to all beings, whereby they are beings, is not itself one of the beings” (Theophany, p. 22). As the form is present in each of its instantiations, so God in his supra-beingness is present within beings, for he is all in all. God is immanent in his transcendence, transcendent in his immanence:

But now let me speak about the good, about that which truly is and which gives being to everything else. The God who is transcends everything by virtue of his power. He is the substantive cause and maker of being, of subsistence, of existence, of substance, and of nature. He is the source and the measure of the ages. He is the reality beneath time and the eternity beyond being. He is the time within which things happen. He is being for whatever is. He is coming-to-be amid whatever happens. From him who is come eternity, essence and being, come time, genesis, and becoming. He is the being immanent in and underlying the things which are, however they are. For God is not some kind of being. No. But in a way that is simple and indefinable he gathers into himself and anticipates every existence. So he is called “King of the ages,” for in him and around him all being is and subsists. He was not. He will not be. He did not come to be. He is not in the midst of becoming. He will not come to be. No. He is not. Rather, he is the essence of the things which have being. Not only things that are but also the essence of what they are come from him who precedes the ages. For he is the age of ages, the “predecessor of the ages.” (DN V.4)

The negations and antinomies of Dionysius’s rhetoric break open the veil between being and the beyond being. But he is not just speaking hyperbolically. This language flows from his Neoplatonic, yet now Christianized, metaphysics. God is the undetermined determination of every thing (“the essence of the things which have being”)—that which makes it to be and to be what it is. Perl elaborates:

We are now in a position to see what Dionysius means when he describes God as not any thing but the cause of all things and hence subject to no name and to all names. The operative principle is the Neoplatonic law that “the things that belong to the effects pre-exist in the causes” (DN II.8, 645D). Since determination is the cause of being to that which it determines, God is the cause of all things in that he is present to all things as the constitutive determinations by which each is itself and so is. God is the “illumination of the illumined and principle of perfection of the perfected and principle of deification of the deified and simplicity of the simplified and unity of the unified … and, to speak simply, the life of living things and being of beings” (DN I.3, 589C). He is present to all beings as being, the universal character common to all beings such that they are beings: God “neither was nor will be nor came to be nor comes to be nor will come to be; rather, he is not. But he is being to beings” (DN V.4, 817D). Likewise he is present to all living things as life, the universal determination by which they are living things as distinct from non-living things. But the determining, constitutive divine presence is not limited to such exalted attributes as being and life, but includes all the features of each thing, which constitute it as that distinct thing, as itself, and hence as a being. “In the cause of all things the paradigms of all beings pre-exist… Paradigms … are the being-making determinations, pre-existing unitarily in God, of beings, which theology calls pre-determinations, and good wills, determinative and creative of beings, according to which the beyond-being both predetermined and produced all beings” (DN V.8, 824C). Hence these “paradigms” or λόγοι contained without distinction in God, are explicitly identified as the defining or determining principles which make beings to be. God is thus present in each being as its determining or defining λόγος, by which it is itself and so is. All the features of all things, therefore, are God-in-them, making them to be by making them what they are, so that God is not only being in beings and life in living things but “all things in all things” (DN I.7 597C). (Perl, pp. 28-29)

Readers of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas will immediately think of the divine ideas; readers of St Maximus the Confessor, the divine logoi. What is important for us to see is the presence of the One in beings as their uncreated cause. Even difference, says Dionysius, may be attributed to God, “since he is providentially available to all things and becomes all things in all for the salvation of them all” (DN 9.5).

We may describe Dionysius’s view as creatio ex Deo, but only if we immediately qualify the God from whom all things proceed as nothing. “It is cause of all; but itself: nothing as beyond-beingly apart from all” (DN I.5). Creatio ex Deo thus becomes equivalent to creatio ex nihilo, which then becomes ex nihilo creatio procedit. In the act of creation the eternal Nothing unfolds itself as that which it is not. The Parmenidean dictum ex nihilo nihil fit (“nothing comes from nothing”) is turned upside down. I thought I was being particularly brilliant when I thought of this, but then I was informed that John Scotus Eriugena stole this from me over a millennium ago:

We believe that he made all things out of nothing, unless perhaps this nothing is he himself, who—since he is extolled as super-essential above all things and is glorified above everything that is said of what is understood—is not unreasonably said to be ‘nothing’ through excellence, since he can in no way be placed among the number of all things that are. For if he himself is at once all things that are and that are not, who would say that he is or is not something, since he is the being and more than being of all things? Or, if he is not something, by excellence and not by privation, it follows that he is nothing, by infinity. (Expos. ICH. 4.73-82)

And Eriugena was commenting on Dionysius! Surely this is compelling evidence for chronesthesia.

Creation as Theophany

Dionysius presents us with a remarkable vision: the ineffable, indescribable, illimited being-beyond-being manifesting, presenting, expressing himself in the mode of finite multiplicity. Although he does not use the word to name his understanding of divine creation, Perl proposes theophany as an appropriate descriptive term:

For Dionysius, then, as for Plotinus and Proclus, the whole of reality, all that is, is theophany, the manifestation or appearance of God. For the entire content of any being is God present in it in a distinct, finite way, and in virtue of this distinction, knowable in that being as its intelligible content. It is just as distinct, or finite, that God is present in the being, or that the being is a presentation of God. For to be “present” means to be given or available to thought, i.e. to be intelligible. And as intelligible, as given to thought, God is apparent, or manifest, in and as the being. To be present, to be manifest, to be finite, to be distinct, to be intelligible, are ultimately all the same, and all are elaborations of the only possible meaning of “to be.” The understanding of being as theophany is thus a strict consequence, developed in the Neoplatonic tradition, of the original principle that to be is to be intelligible.

To say that reality is the appearance of God, however, may be misleading, if it is taken to mean that God is, so to speak, “there,” behind or inside all the appearance, an object prior to and apart from them. If God is not any being, then what is reality the appearance of? Such a question again attempts to reduce God to a “what,” a being, an object of thought, violating all that has been said about divine transcendence and about all being as appearance. When we speak of reality as the appearance of God, we must remember that since all reality is theophany, God, as “that which appears,” is not another being, another member of reality. The doctrine of being as theophany means not that God is and is himself, and also appears, but rather that God is nothing but what is differently present, or appears, in and as all things. To pass from appearance to what is appearing, from being to God, is not to pass from one thing to another thing. Rather, since God is not another thing but the enfolding of all things, to go from beings to God is to gather the whole diverse content of reality together, and in so doing, since being necessarily involves multiplicity and distinction, to pass beyond being. (Perl, pp. 32-33)

Recall Dionysius’s bold words quoted earlier: “[God] both makes itself many and multiplies itself by goodness” (DN II.5). As John Jones puts it: “The cause proceeds out of itself and multiplies itself in what it causes; that is, the cause is let be or manifests itself as other than itself” (Introduction to The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, p. 42).

Critics of the Areopagite often raise the objection that he is presenting a pantheistic construal of divinity. Perl rebuts the objection:

It may be felt that such doctrines make Dionysius into a mere “monist” or “pantheist.” God, he insists, is not something other than the world but is “all things in all things.” Again, if being is nothing but theophany, does this not imply that the world is not real at all, but only appearance? Such objections, however, represent a failure to understand the Neoplatonic metaphysics of manifestation and intelligibility. Dionysius’ metaphysics is not a form of “pantheism,” if by this we mean the doctrine that all things are God. On the contrary: every being, precisely in that it is a being, i.e. something distinct, finite, and intelligible, ipso facto is not God. Indeed, since to be is to be intelligible and therefore to be finite, to be means to be not God. This, again, is precisely why God is beyond being. Every being, then, absolutely is not God. Nor are all things, taken as a totality, God, for “all things” is plural, a multiplicity of distinct intelligible beings. The God of Dionysius is “all beings and none of beings,” “all things in all things and nothing in any,” and in these formulas the “all” can never be separated from the “none.” As all things without distinction, God is neither any one thing nor all things in their plurality. All things, qua all things, the whole of reality, are absolutely other than God. (Perl, 33)

But neither is Dionysius a dualist. The Triune God is beyond being and therefore not another being standing alongside the beings of his creation.

Louth amplifies Dionysius’ theophanic vision in a more traditional Christian idiom:

The world is a theophany, a manifestation of God, in which beings closer to God manifest God to those further away. The world is God’s glory made manifest: it exists to display his glory and draw everything into contemplation of his beauty. The doctrine of creation is necessary to such an understanding of the world as theophany: God is immediately present to his whole creation as its creator; created reality is not, as created, an obstacle to his glory, neither because it owes its being to something other than (or even alien to) God, nor because it is an increasingly remote echo of God’s original creative urge. But if God is to manifest himself outside himself, that implies multiplicity, which in turn implies difference, which must be either ordered or disordered: and for Denys, only an ordered, hierarchical creation could manifest the glory of the One. (Louth, 85-86)

Theophany, the manifestation of divinity, the appearance of God—as I sit outside on my deck, watching the trees gently moving in the wind, listening to the birds, how can it not be that here is the sacramental presentation of the living God, not as some entity hiding beneath the physical but as the divine symbolizing himself in his creatures?2 And if here in my backyard, then also anywhere and everywhere. God is no thing and therefore not any thing that we perceive or intellectually apprehend, yet we see him and know him in everything:

God is therefore known in all things and as distinct from all things. He is known through knowledge and through unknowing. Of him there is conception, reason, understanding, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name, and many other things. On the other hand he cannot be understood, words cannot contain him, and no name can lay hold of him. He is not one of the things that are and he cannot be known in any of them. He is all things in all things and he is no thing among things. He is known to all from all things and he is known to no one from anything. (DN 7.3)

The antinomies are almost unbearable: known and unknown, perceived and yet invisible, available for intellectual cognition but beyond thought. The “all” and the “none” must be kept together if we are to catch the Dionysian vision. “Because God is all things in all things,” Perl comments, “to see anything is to see God in that thing. All knowledge is knowledge of God because all being, all that is given to consciousness in any mode, is nothing but the finite, differentiated presentation of God. Since all things are nothing but God-in-them, there is nothing to be known in anything but God-in-it.” For this reason Dionysius “revels in the contemplation of colors, shapes, sounds, scents, tastes: in all that we perceive, in our every sense-experience, we are encountering God, and the same content, the same glorious theophany, is found not less but more intensely as we ascend to higher modes of cognition” (Perl, p. 93). Our apprehension of the world necessarily entails apprehension of the divine.

In the act of creation, the infinite, simple, and beyond beingly Deity communicates himself in the modality of finitude. The cosmos is theophany, icon, manifestation, presentation of the one eternal Creator. This is what it means to be a creature in the Dionysian vision. “In Dionysios,” remarks Perl, “to be is to be a symbol” (Perl, “Symbol, Sacrament, and Hierarchy,” GOTR 39 [1994]: 320).

On the Areopagus, the Apostle Paul declared that he had come to declare the unknown Creator the Greeks had long sought (Acts 17:28).

“In him we live and move and have our being.”

To be is to be encompassed by God.

To be is to participate in God.

To be is to manifest God.

God is theophany.

 

Footnotes

[1] On the orthodoxy of Dionysius’s Trinitarian theology, see Alexander Golitzin, Mystagogy, chap. 2; and John D. Jones, “The Status of the Trinity in Dionysian Thought,” The Journal of Religion 80 (2000): 645-657.

[2] Centuries after Denys, George MacDonald would later promulgate the theophanic vision in his poetry and fiction. See “Cosmos as Theophany.”

* * *

Eight years ago I published a multi-article series on Dionysius the Areopagite under the series title “Dionysian Ponderings.” Perhaps some of you remember it. Several weeks ago I decided to republish them on Substack over a period of a month or two (or three). I quickly realized that they needed extensive revision. It seems only right and proper, therefore, to share some of my revised pieces with my Eclectic Orthodoxy brethren. If you want to read the entire series over at Substack, here’s the link to the first article.