The Eye of Fire (Part Four)

Olivier Clément

Translated from:
L’œil de Feu: Deux Visions Spirituelles du Cosmos
Olivier Clément
Fata Morgana, 1994

TO TRANSFIGURE THE UNIVERSE: THE COSMOS IN THE MYSTICISM OF THE CHRISTIAN EAST

I. Some Cosmological Approaches

The thought of the Christian East emphasizes, on one hand, the inherent reality of the “created” universe, but also, on the other hand, its potential transparency to divine “energies” through man. All this exists within a very particular temporality that is both irreversible and reversible.

The Inherent Reality of the “Created” Universe

From this perspective, the world is conceived not as an emanation of divinity, nor as the simple ordering of preexisting “matter” by a demiurge. It is “created” from “nothing”: this latter term is a limit-concept, suggesting that God, who has no “outside,” allows the appearance of a reality “other” than Himself through a kind of sacrificial withdrawal that the Christian East calls kenosis (κένωσις), and Jewish mysticism tzimtzum (צמצום).

Creation is the work of the free and loving “will” of God. The Greek Fathers thus give to the Platonic notion of divine “ideas” a dynamic, intentional character, which takes up the Biblical conception of the “word.” ¹ The universe is not the copy or degraded reflection of a divine world; it springs forth new from — and within — the creative Word whose music it somehow expresses: the Greek Fathers call it “musical ordinance,” “wonderfully composed hymn.²

Hymn and music also because of rhythmic movement, becoming born from the ever-renewed communication of “in-formations” coming from transcendence. The creature thus passes from nothingness to being in the magnetization of the infinite. “This world is a semi-being always fluid, becoming and vibrating; and, beyond, the spiritual ear perceives another reality.”³

The Transparency to Divine “Energies”

Simultaneously, the Greek Fathers, the great mystical theologians of Byzantium, and the Russian religious philosophers have refused any opacity of the sensible and thus both any Aristotelian substantialism and any subjectivism of faith. The “glory” of God, His “uncreated grace,” His “energy” are at the very root of things. Divine “volitional ideas” determine the modes by which created beings participate in these energies. Each being, each thing, each interconnection between beings and things is carried, brought forth by a living “word,” a logos. Without the logos, the name, there would be in created being only an absurd clash of deaf and mute masses in an abyss of darkness.⁴ And all these logoi are so many words of the Logos or Wisdom of God.

God speaks the world. He speaks to man through the world. God and man speak to each other through the world. The Logos of God structures the world and His Breath animates it, makes it tend toward fullness and beauty. And both are “the hands of the Father”⁵ Who is the source of all reality.

Comparisons here impose themselves: with the Kabbalah, which sees in the depths of Hebrew words the spiritual roots of beings; with an entire cosmological tradition of the West, which speaks of the signatura rerum; with the philosophy of language in India which distinguishes seed-words (sphota), which structure the universe, and sound-words (dhvani), subject, in a usual manner, to the rules of phonetics and grammar: a distinction that would be found again in Greek Patristics with, on one hand, the quasi-Kantian conception of the ideas of things among the Cappadocians and, on the other, the logoi as their spiritual essences in Maximus the Confessor. Certain contemporary research, scientific or para-scientific, can also be evoked: I think for example of the “universal mother tongue” spoken of by the Princeton school, of Arthur Koestler’s “holons...”

In sum, one can say that only the spiritual, only the intelligible (in the sense of divine intelligence and angelic intelligences) allow the manifestation of the sensible. The Bible ignores the notion of “body.” It speaks only of “animated flesh” or “living soul.” For Gregory of Nyssa for example, it is the syndromē (σύνδρομη),⁶ the meeting and concretion of intelligible qualities — the Romanian theologian [St] Dumitru Stăniloae says: their “plastic realization” — which allow the appearance of the sensible. The visible is thus the epiphany of the invisible, its symbol. Now the subject of these “thoughts,” of these “pure intellections”⁷ is the Divine Logos on one hand, and on the other, logikos man, called to express the logoi, the “spiritual reasons” of things.

The Role of Man

The logikos man is the spiritual center of the universe. He summarizes it as a microcosm, but as the image of God, he transcends, contains, and qualifies it. Man is a “hypostasis,” a “person,” not in the psychological and sociological sense that does not go beyond the individual level, but in the Trinitarian sense of a unique, incomparable mode of subsistence of the whole. “The person is, in a unique form, the universe in potential.”⁸ Man is thus called to become the “hypostasis” of the cosmos, to express the meaning of this logos alogos.⁹ In him occurs, “according to divine wisdom, the fusion and mixing of the sensible and the intelligible”; he constitutes “the juncture between the divine and the terrestrial” and through him “grace [can] diffuse throughout all creation.”¹⁰ The universe, through man, must reveal itself as “image of the Image.”¹¹ The logikos man is the priest-king who gathers the logoi of things to offer them to the Logos and thereby radiate the glory from the “infinitely small” to the “infinitely large” that his intelligence explores.

Certainly, for those who know nothing of spiritual experience, the world is an infinite prison where all is solitude, “cold” and “shadow” as Nietzsche proclaims simultaneously with the death of God. But for those who access the knowledge of the logoi, the heart of a saint is the “place of God” and therefore the radiating center of the world which must be said, in all metaphysical rigor, to be unbounded but not infinite: St Benedict of Nursia for example contemplated the entire universe as gathered in a ray of divine light.¹²

A Dramatic and Sacramental Temporality

The mystical cosmology of the Christian East is inseparable from temporality. An irreversible temporality since it is inscribed in an interpersonal drama — a reversible temporality since the Visitations¹³ and then the Incarnation of the divine Word recapitulate it, open it, unite it to eternity, allowing a liturgical and spiritual circulation between the “alpha” and the “omega,” the “omega” of the God “all in all” and “all in each” of the Apocalypse including the “alpha” of “paradise” and of the “return to paradise.”

The creation of the beautiful-and-good (tob in Hebrew) is constantly interrupted by the Fall, which gives to nothingness, through the freedom of men and angels, a paradoxical consistency — or rather allows it to fracture and decompose being itself. The “Fall” occurred in another modality of universal existence, where the relation of exterior and interior was different (of which the deepest memory of men everywhere bears witness), where integral Man, the Adam Kadmon of Jewish mysticism, encompassed the universe. “Evolution” can then be read as the progressive externalization of the cosmos which, in relation to man, moves from a state of being encompassed to one of encompassing, from interior to exterior, and now appearing as prior. Man, “having reduced nature to the state of mechanism through his own servitude, encounters before him this mechanicity of which he is the cause and falls under its power... The force of necrotized nature provokes the suffering of man, its dethroned king. In turn, it pours into him the poison that changes him into a cadaver, forces him to share the destiny of stone, dust, and mud...”¹⁴

This intuition of “evolution” not only as permanence of the creative process, but as an inversion through this process of a deadly collapse, Teilhard de Chardin had in 1924, before elaborating what appears in part as a concordism:¹⁵ “Where does the universe get its original task?” he wrote. “Would it not be, as the Bible seems to formally indicate, that original multiplicity was born from the dissociation of an already unified being (First Adam), such that, in its current period, the world would not progress, but would return toward Christ (Second Adam)? In this case, before the current phase of evolution (of spirit out of matter), there would be a phase of involution (of spirit into matter), a phase clearly inaccessible to scientific investigation since it would have developed in another dimension of the Real.”¹⁶

If therefore all good creation is henceforth pierced with nothingness, veiled in illusion, if beauty has become ambiguous — the beauty of the Madonna but also of Sodom, says Dostoevsky — nevertheless, the Wisdom of God allows the logoi to continuously bring forth life from death, the most complex structures from disintegration and entropy. Man, bearing within himself an unseen fallenness, reappears in this new modality of existence symbolized, according to Philo of Alexandria and the Greek Fathers, by what Genesis calls the “coats of skins.” The divine project — to unite the created through man, to deify it — is taken up again in a context become tragic where the actualization of the imago dei through revelation and wisdom (what the tradition of ancient Christianity called the “Visitations of the Word”) demands a sharp ascesis, where the cosmic cross, universal symbol, must become the Cross of Golgotha before rising as a new Tree of life... Everything culminates indeed, in this perspective, in the mystery of Christ, in his Incarnation, his Passion and his Resurrection, which complete the restoration to mankind of the possibility of transfiguring the universe. “The mystery of the Incarnation of the Logos contains in itself (...) all the significance of sensible and intelligible creatures. He who knows the mystery of the Cross and the Tomb knows the true meaning of things. And he who is initiated into the hidden meaning of the Resurrection knows the purpose for which, from the beginning, God created all...”¹⁷

Dramatic Theology, then: that is the title of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s final summa. An irreversible temporality, certainly. But the essential moments of salvation history are inscribed in meta-history as so many states of contemplation (or refusal of contemplation): the liturgy offers them to us according to the cycles of sun and moon, and, in each person’s spiritual life, these cycles arrange themselves in a spiral of integration where the symbol, little by little, becomes reality. “The paradisiacal state is near, and wild beasts,” says Saint Isaac the Syrian, “sense in the sage or the saint the perfume that was Adam’s before the fall; they approach him in peace.”¹⁸ Orpheus still sings, but he is still torn to pieces: the Fall too is permanent. The Word never ceases to be born in the heart, his Death-Resurrection triumphs also now, in our depths, over death and Hell. Nearer than all is the “Kingdom,” which Saint John simply calls “Life”: transparency, illumination, a condition that knows nothing of death, the earth as sacrament, no more externality, nothing but faces. Man is called to a knowledge that is both contemplation and the ultimate transformation of the world: “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God: for the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, that the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.”¹⁹

1. This is for example the “thought-will,” thelikēn ennoia, of which St John Damascene speaks in De fide orthodoxa, II, 2.

2. St Gregory of Nyssa, In Psalmorum inscript., PG 44, 461B.

3. [St] Paul Florensky, The Human Sources of Idealism, ms. p. 14.

4. A. Lossiev, cited by B. Zenkovsky, History of Russian Philosophy, Paris, 1955, volume II, p. 399.

5. St Irenaeus of Lyon, Adversus haereses, IV, 20, 1.

6. De anima et resurrectione, PG 46, 124 C.

7. St Gregory of Nyssa, In Hexaëm., PG 44, 69 C.D.

8. Nicolas Berdiaev, Freedom and Slavery (Russian edition: Paris, 1939, p 21)

9. Origen, In Ps. XXVIII, 3, PG 12, 1290 D.

10. St Gregory of Nyssa, Catechesis, chap. 6, PG 46, 25 C-28 A.

11. Idem., Hominis op., chap. 12, PG 44, 164 A.

12. St Gregory the Great, Dialogues II, 35, PL 66, 198-200.

13. The theme of the “visitations of the Word” is often used by the apologists of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, notably Justin, regarding the religious traditions of non-Biblical humanity.

14. Nicolas Berdiaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, tr. Fr., Paris, 1955, p. 99 (Russian edition: Moscow, 1916).

15. Translator’s note: “Concordism” is a theological and interpretive approach that attempts to reconcile or harmonize scientific findings with Biblical accounts, particularly regarding creation and natural history.

16. “My Universe,” reprinted in Science and Christ, Paris, 1965, pp. 109 ff

17. St Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua, PG 91, 1360 A B.

18. Ascetic Treatises, 20th treatise, ed. Spanos, Athens, 1895, tr. Fr. Spiritual Works, Paris, 1981, p. 78.

19. Romans 8:18-21