The Mystery of Created Being

Olivier Clément

Translated from:
Olivier Clément. Le Christ, terre des vivants. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2019.

I.

The Orthodox theology of creation emphasizes, on one hand, along with all Christian theology, the inherent density of creation, by which Judeo-Christian (and Muslim) creation radically distinguishes itself from the manifestation of archaic metaphysics and Hinduism, allowing for the scientific approach of the modern West. However, on the other hand, and no less radically, Orthodoxy emphasizes the transparency of creation, the presence of divine energies at its very root, which opposes it to closed cosmology, to the acosmism of inaccessible transcendence, Judaism, Islam,¹ and even, in its dominant currents, Western Christianity since scholasticism and the Reformation...

At the intersection of these two fundamental notions — density and transparency — appears an original conception of symbol and angelology.

The approach to the mystery of creation, said Vladimir Lossky, requires, just as does the approach to the divine mystery, the leap of faith and “a kind of reverse apophatism.”² The universe is not the simple manifestation of divinity; it does not emanate from it, nor does it come from the ordering, by a demiurge, of pre-existing matter; it is created, radically new, the οὐκ ὄν (and not the relational μὴ ὄν) of the Seventy.³ The concept of nonbeing is therefore a “limit-concept,” to suggest that God, who has no exteriority, makes a διάστημα⁴ appear — a distancing, an otherness “not by place but by nature,” permitting the appearance of a reality entirely other, by a process that Jewish mysticism calls a “withdrawal” (צִמְצוּם, tsimtsum) and Orthodox theology an initial kenōsis (κένωσις). Thus the metaphysical place of creation is love, a love supremely inventive, and by the same token, sacrificial on God’s part.⁵

Creation, the Fathers emphasize, is the work of God’s will, which they take care to distinguish from His inaccessible essence. They thus give the notion of divine ideas a dynamic, intentional character — let us suggest: evocative and “vocational.” This is the θελητικὴ ἔννοια (thelētikē ennoia) of Saint John of Damascus.⁶ This creative thought-will is therefore not the intelligible content of an essence, but the living work of a poet, according to the meaning of the Hebrew verb בָּרָא (bara), “to create,”⁷ which — being reserved for God alone — stands opposed to what is “manufactured” or “constructed.” The universe is therefore not, as in Platonizing conceptions, a copy, a degraded reflection of a divine world. It bursts forth new from the hands of the biblical God “who saw that it was good,” and here it is, willed by God, the joy of His Wisdom, rejoicing in that adoring lightness described in certain Psalms and cosmic hymns of the book of Job, where the constellations cry out for joy — “a musical ordering,” “a marvelously composed hymn,” says Saint Gregory of Nyssa.⁸

Hymn, music — because rhythm and becoming: the biblical and patristic conception of the created, situating the universe in an a-symptotic perspective in relation to the divine infinity, shatters the closed spatiality of the ancient cosmos in favor of a dynamic conception of the created.⁹ The creature, which has no foundation in itself, in a perpetual passage from nothingness to being through the magnetization of the infinite, is this movement in which time, space, and matter are simultaneously given. “This world is a semi-being, always flowing, in becoming and vibrant; and beyond... the sensitive ear perceives another reality”;¹⁰ logos alogos, theos atheos, said Origen, who showed that the biblical symbol of the waters designates this fluidity, this non-identity of the created in-itself,¹¹ stretched between its own nothingness and the call of divine love.

Thus, in the Christian vision, nature is a new, true, dynamic reality, animated by a luminous, “spermatic”¹² force that God introduced into it — not as an expression of Stoic immanence (despite the similarity of vocabulary among many Greek Fathers), but as a tension toward transcendence. This is why, as [St] Paul Florensky strongly emphasized, only Christianity has allowed the correct interpretation of the meaning of the created, such that every philosophical representation as well as every scientific exploration of nature presupposes biblical revelation:

“Only then did men cease to see creation as merely the demon’s husk, a kind of emanation or mirage of divinity — like a rainbow in a drop of water. Only then could the world be conceived as a creation of God, autonomous in its being, its justification, and its responsibility.”¹³

At the same time, the Greek Fathers, like the Russian religious philosophers, rejected — or ignored — any notion of “pure nature.” Uncreated grace, the omnipresent glory of God, and His energy are at the very root of things. This is the biblical sense of the כָּבוֹד (kabōd) and the שְׁכִינָה (shekhinah) that finds here its properly Christian expression. In its true being, the creature has heavenly roots. The created will-ideas determine the modes of difference according to which created beings participate in divine energies. According to his logos, his name, the living word by which and in which God calls him forth, the creature expresses in its own way — in an ontological doxology — the divine glory: “for one is the brilliance of the sun, another that of the moon, another that of the stars, and even one star differs in brilliance [in “glory,” δόξα (doxa)] from another star.”¹⁴

Here too, one must not be misled by the Stoic vocabulary of the Fathers: the logoi of which they speak are not “seminal reasons” in the substantial sense, but the words of creation and providence found in Genesis and the Psalms. Everything created has its point of contact with divine energy — virgin point, logos, sophianity — which both grounds it and draws it toward its fullness. Without the logos, the name, there would be in the created being only a “senseless collision of mute and insensible masses in an abyss of darkness.”¹⁵ All these logoi are contained in the Logos, second Person of the Trinity, who is the beginning and the end of all things. In a certain way, one might say that, in the noumenal depth, the Logos is this world, and that the world itself is a hierarchy of beings and names.

But the Logos is inseparable from the Pneuma: “The Father created all things by the Son in the Holy Spirit, for where the Word is and the Spirit by which the Word is brought forth, the Word receives its being in the Holy Spirit; indeed, the Psalm says: The heavens are made by the Word of the Lord, and all their host by the breath of His mouth.”¹⁶ In the transparency of the world is manifested the Trinity, as pre-Nicene thought loved to emphasize — taking up and clarifying the Epistle to the Ephesians — revealing in the cosmos the presence and action of each divine Person (“The Father above all, the Son through all, the Holy Spirit in all”):¹⁷ the Logos as structure and order, the Pneuma as life, movement toward fullness, the rhythm born of their encounter. “It is the Word that lays the foundation,” says for example Saint Irenaeus, “while it is the Spirit who extends these various forces toward their fullness and beauty.” And likewise the Apostle Paul quite rightly says: One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in all.¹⁸

Much later, but in the same line of thought, Saint Maximus the Confessor will show that we cannot perceive even the smallest thing without simultaneously realizing, through it, a kind of Trinitarian experience: the very being of things connects them to the principle of being, the Father; their intelligibility, the logical order (in the sense of the great mystical and intellectual Logos), which is at once in them and in the human intelligence, links them to the the Logos, to the Son. Finally, their life —or more broadly their movement — shows the presence in them of the Spirit, the “giver of life,” who fulfills and reintegrates.¹⁹ The world was created by the Word, but the Spirit hovered over the primordial waters, brooding over them and fertilizing them: a cosmic Pentecost, said Father Sergei Bulgakov.

At the convergence of these complementary approaches, a distinctive conception of the symbol is born. The created symbolizes the uncreated — but without the absorption of one into the other: the world is not called to become God, but to become the temple of God, His “place,” as the hesychasts say of the heart.

To ascend the mountain is to reach the “pastures of the heart” where God is revealed. The material ascent symbolizes the spiritual (in the most realistic sense: psychosomatic medicine today recognizes how well suited the mountain is for asceticism and contemplation), but the mountain is not abolished in some all-encompassing presence: it may become a “high place,” like the heart washed with tears. This symbolism does not express a kind of Neoplatonic participation that would empty the material world of its own reality. In the Bible, the more nature is full, living, rich with sap in its proper order, the more powerful its symbolic meaning. Nor, finally, can this symbolism be reduced to allegory or to a game of arbitrary signs like those employed by the prophets when God’s transcendence had been veiled and Christ had not yet reopened it in the light of Mount Tabor. The symbol is not merely “attached” to things: it is in their very nature — their density and their beauty — as these are fulfilled in God. Orthodox symbolism is “Chalcedonian”; the Incarnation gives us its key. Yet already in the Old Testament, the praise offered by sub-human creatures is shown as ontological, and its resonance angelic.

Mediators and messengers, the angels fulfill the symbolic function par excellence. The praise of creatures — whose beauty constitutes a kind of “crystallization of the joy of the universe”²⁰ — is inseparable from angelic praise. The cosmic “Eucharist” of Psalm 148 begins with an invocation: Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens, which sends us back to the cherubim of the Merkabah: “The sound of their wings was like the sound of many waters.”²¹ How angels act upon the physical universe, how they carry out their ministry of symbolization — of which they are, to use Tertullian’s phrase, the “workers of the flame” — we do not know, but then, but we also do not know what the relation is between our soul and our body, or why, when we are sad, tears form in our eyes.

Nourished by Kabbalah and alchemy, Renaissance science had a certain sense of the correspondences among the different levels of created being. But it risked forgetting both transcendence and the intrinsic reality of nature. Modern science, by contrast, developed horizontally. Yet from Goethe to Claude Bernard to Ruyer, the evidence persists of a “vital design” that traces the plan of every being and every organ, a “preconceived organogenic law” existing before any realized form. Perhaps the angels hold these invisible molds where life is arranged.

This theme was taken up in our time by a great Orthodox religious philosopher who was also a great scholar — [Saint] Father Pavel Florensky. For him, the link between a thing and its logos is safeguarded by a living and serving angelic presence. The glory of creatures appears, from a certain angle, as the liturgical celebration offered by their angels. This angelological perception of the world joins its symbolic perception: it discerns the depth of nature and, “at the same time, its belonging to another world.”²²

What was he weeping for? Oh, in his rapture he wept even for the stars that shone on him from the abyss, and ‘he was not ashamed of this ecstasy.’ It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, ‘touching other worlds.’²³

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II.

If the universe “stands before” man as a revelation of God, it belongs to man to decipher this revelation in a creative way, to consciously render the ontological praise of things. In the nuptial relationship — still inchoate — that unites man and the world, the world, as a mysterious femininity, both “stands before” him and forms with him one flesh. The entire sensible universe prolongs our body. Or rather, what is our body, if not the form impressed by our “living soul” upon the universal “dust”? There is no discontinuity between the flesh of the world and that of man; the universe is encompassed within human “nature” (in the theological sense of the term) — it is the body of humanity. Man is a “microcosm” who summarizes, condenses, and recapitulates in himself all the levels of created being, and thus can know the universe from within.

The first creation narrative in Genesis²⁴ shows us man as a microcosm, created after the other beings, but assimilated to them through the blessing that closes the sixth day and appearing as the summit where creation is accomplished and recapitulated: “For everything that has been created by God in the various natures comes together in man, as in a crucible, to be formed in him into a single perfection, like a harmony composed of different sounds.”²⁵ Thus, between the microcosmic man and the macroanthropic universe, knowledge is endosmosis and exosmosis, an exchange of meaning and of energy.

But man — and this is the liberating affirmation of Christianity — is much more than a microcosm: he is a person, created in the image and likeness of God. His creation, in the symbolic language of Genesis, does not arise from an order given to the “earth,” as it does for the other living creatures; God does not command, but speaks within His eternal counsel: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”²⁶

In his personal freedom, man transcends the universe — not to abandon it, but to contain it, to express its meaning, to communicate grace to it. If there is a theme attested on all sides in contemporary Orthodox thought, it is precisely that of the irreducibility of the person, by virtue of its capacity to encompass and qualify the whole. “The person is not a part, and cannot be a part of any whole,” wrote Nicolas Berdyaev, “even if that whole were the entire immense universe... Only the person is capable of bearing a universal content; it is, in a unique form, the universe in potential.”²⁷ And Vladimir Lossky: “A person is not part of a whole; it contains the whole within itself.”²⁸

This implicit perspective allowed Saint Gregory Palamas to show that man is superior to the angels: he is richer; he potentially encompasses the totality of the sensible and the intelligible, recapitulating within his corporeality the whole sensible world, while his higher faculties are akin to angelic realms. As the image of God and microcosm, he constitutes the hypostasis of the cosmos. In him occurs, “according to divine wisdom, the fusion and mingling of the sensible and the intelligible”; he is “the junction between the divine and the terrestrial,” and from him “grace spreads over all creation.”²⁹ The universe, through man, is called to become “the image of the Image.”³⁰ The Fathers interpreted in this sense the second account of creation³¹ which places man at the beginning of the created world. Only man is animated by the very breath of God; his existence is founded directly in the grace of the Holy Spirit. Without him, the “plants” cannot grow, for it is in him that they take root; and it is he who names the “animals,” deciphering their logoi for God.

Contrary to archaic conceptions, man is not called to save himself by “cosmizing” himself, by dissolving into an impersonal divine through the mediation of a sacred nature. On the contrary, it is through him that the universe can correspond to its secret sacramentality: “cosmotheosis” depends on “anthropotheosis.” This is why Saint Gregory of Nyssa, when he takes up the Stoic theme of the microcosm, does so with a touch of irony — for, he says, we are likened to mice and mosquitoes! The true greatness of man does not lie there, but in his irreducibly personal and metacosmic dimension, which allows him not to dissolve the world, but to “cultivate” it. Adam was placed as a gardener in Eden to bring its beauty to fulfillment. Man is logikos; he is the created logos who must gather and offer, as a priest and a king, the logoi of things to the uncreated Logos, in the creative diffusion of glory. He must, in every being and in every thing, discern the virginal point of sophianity from which divine Wisdom springs forth. To read and to write — as a co-operator of God — is to reveal the presence of the Word in the Liber Mundi. The vocation of humanity is that of a collective cosmic Messiah, said Vladimir Solovyov, called to “subdue the earth,” that is, to transform it into a Temple.

Man, for the universe, is thus the hope of receiving grace and uniting with God; but he is also the risk of failure and fall, for turned away from God, he will see only appearances, “the figure of this world that passeth away”³² — and their names will be false. Let us recall the fundamental text of Saint Paul, which corresponds to a condition of fall and redemption that we will analyze later, where the mediating and liberating vocation of Adam is reopened in the ecclesial body of the final Adam: “Creation [lit., the creature in its unity, κτίσις (ktisis)] waits for the manifestation of the sons of God. For it was subjected to futility, not willingly, but through him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption to enter into the glorious liberty of the children of God.”³³

Thus, everything that happens in man bears a universal significance and imprints itself upon the cosmos. The destiny of man determines the destiny of the universe. Biblical revelation — beyond the blockage it created between true symbolism and an archaic science now obsolete (if it ever truly intended to be science in the modern sense of the word, rather than a “vertical” knowledge, already symbolic in itself) — places us before a resolved anthropocentrism, spiritual rather than physical. Man — because he is at once, as Berdyaev says, microcosm and microtheos, and because at last God, to become universe, became man — is the spiritual center of all created being, of all its levels, of all its worlds. The metaphysical meaning of the earth is only revealed through an anthropological and cosmological gnosis — not merely the earth as a planet, but the earth as pancosmic, so that the symbolic relationship of man to the planets of the solar system, to the sun itself, and to the most distant nebulae may be illuminated. The transition, in modern science, from geocentrism to heliocentrism, and then to the absence of any center in infinite physical space, is rich with a spiritual meaning that remains for us to decipher. The cosmic indefinite is unintelligible except through the creative love of God, in which man can consciously participate. Thus the cosmic indefinite is situated in sanctified man and becomes the symbol of “the abyss calling to the abyss.”³⁴

Certainly, for “those outside,” there is no longer above or below, but only cold and darkness, as Nietzsche declares simultaneously with the death of God; but for those who believe and know — and all are called — the heart of the saints is the “place of God,” and thereby the center of the world. Ultimately, the universe is called to become, in man — or more precisely, within the field of personal relationships that men share among themselves and with God, in the realm of communion — the world is called to become the bridal chamber and body, Temple and eucharistic Gift. As Nikos Nissiotis emphasized,³⁵ God created the world in order to unite Himself with humanity through all of cosmic flesh, which has become Eucharistic flesh. Maximus the Confessor does not want “the particularity that circumscribes beings to receive, in distinction and separation, a force superior to that loving kinship mystically implanted in them to unite them. For in all things there is an aspect of the mysterious Parousia… of the Uniting Cause; a synthetic power that gives to beings a reciprocity stronger than their being-in-themselves.”³⁶

The flesh of the world is called to become in man, under the burning seal of the divine image, a true face, pure difference in transparency — that is, an icon. The symbolic presence of God in the cosmos is renewed, consummated, and surpassed in His iconological presence. In the face of Christ and the saints, one passes from symbol to reality. The world will blaze under the sun of the Holy Face, among the constellations of transfigured faces.

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III.

The Fathers, and especially the great witnesses of cosmological gnosis — Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Maximus the Confessor, to whom we constantly refer — developed a dynamic theory of matter, which makes it possible to take seriously — on the level of a higher intelligibility — the scriptural data concerning the cosmic significance of the Fall, the miracles of Christ, His pneumatic corporeality after the Resurrection, the resurrection of bodies and its anticipation in sanctity. Certain conceptions from the ascetico-mystical tradition of Eastern Christianity allow us to complete this vision, which reemerged with great force in the 20th century within Russian religious philosophy — a vast attempt to “remythologize” Christianity (by restoring to myth the sense of symbol and mystery).

For Gregory of Nyssa, matter — or rather, the sensible realm — arises from the concurrence, the convergence of intelligible qualities: “Nothing in a body — neither its shape, nor its extension, nor its volume, nor its weight, nor its color, nor other qualities taken by themselves — is the body, but [they are] pure intelligibles.” However, their σύνδρομη (syndromē) becomes a body.³⁷ Gregory immediately makes clear that he attributes a certain materiality to the intelligible, since only God is immaterial. What he means is that “sensible matter” is in sum nothing more than a concretization, a condensation of “intelligible matter,” luminous in itself, and in continuity with the created spirit. These qualities, he explains, are “perceived by the mind and not by the senses,”³⁸ “they are, taken in themselves, ἐννοίαι (ennoiai, thoughts) and ψιλὰ νοήματα (psila noēmata, pure concepts).”³⁹ It is by the synthesis of these intelligibles that matter manifests: νοήματα ὕλη γίγνεται (noēmata hylē gignetai, “thoughts become matter”).⁴⁰

Now the subject of these “thoughts” — and this is a point that, it seems to me, has not been sufficiently clarified in Gregory — is twofold, both divine and human: it is, on the one hand, the divine Logos who utters a word interior to the reality it brings forth; it is, on the other hand, man, the logikos being, capable of hearing — or not hearing, or hearing more or less — the voice that resounds “from within,” and whose splendor “surpasses all human thought.”⁴¹ The thing, the body, matter, exist within this interpersonal encounter between the divine Logos and the human spirit, so that “we might be led by the activity of the senses themselves toward a suprasensible reality, toward the logos.”⁴²

For Saint Maximus, God transcends both the sensible and the intelligible, and yet they are found in mutual correspondence, in a perichoretic relation, which allows the divine logoi to be diffused in symbols. “Visible things are deepened through the invisible by those who devote themselves to contemplation. For the symbolic contemplation of intelligible things through visible things is nothing other than the understanding and spiritual perception of visible things through the invisible.”⁴³

From all of this results a fundamental consequence: namely, that there are different degrees of materiality, which are not differences of nature but of state; let us clarify, with Evagrius and Nicolas Berdyaev, they are states of contemplation. That is to say, the situation of the cosmos — its transparency or its opacity, its liberation in God or its enslavement to corruption and death — depends on man’s fundamental attitude, on his own transparency or opacity to divine light and to the presence of the other. It is man’s capacity for communion that conditions the state of the universe. At least this has begun, and now unfolds in Christ, in his Church; for man, by enslaving the universe to “vanity,” found himself likewise enslaved to a new condition of matter, in which his freedom became frozen.

Thus, finally, we can understand another interpretation, which I believe is very important for Orthodox cosmology: the one which holds that the essential moments of the history of salvation have not merely a historical importance, but also a meta-historical one: they determine states, eons of cosmic existence that mysteriously persist in the becoming of the cosmos and, under certain conditions, remain accessible through it. The paradisiacal state, for example, still subsists to the extent that the universe rests in God, but it is concealed from humanity by its state of separation, which causes, like an encrustation, a kind of objectification of matter. The paradisiacal state reopens in Christ, who fulfills and surpasses it in an eschatological transfiguration; it is in this perspective of the Parousia that the mysteries of the Church offer it to us. But the state of decay, nourished by our sin, also persists — yet pierced through by the miracles of those who, fully communing with the Risen One, already resurrect the universe in themselves and around them. They already integrate, by the light of the Cross, the fallen modality of matter into its paradisiacal modality — or rather, because it takes upon itself all the pain and all the creation of mankind, into its eschatological modality.

Cosmology is therefore inseparable from the history of salvation.

1. This refers to Jewish and Muslim “exotericisms.” [Translator’s note: The original text of this footnote reads ésotérismes, which is an apparent misprint given the contrast being made here.] By contrast, in the Kabbalah as in Sufism, it is the archaic notion of manifestation, of emanation that reappears, probably through Neo-Platonic influence.

2. Lossky, Vladimir. Théologie mystique de l'Église d'Orient. Paris: Aubier, 1944, p. 87. English translation: Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Translated by Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976.

3. cf 2 Maccabees 7:28 LXX.
Translator’s note: The distinction between οὐκ ὄν (ouk on) and μὴ ὄν (mê on) represents an ontological concept in Greek thought with theological implications. These terms involve different types of negation: οὐκ ὄν signifies absolute non-being or complete nothingness, the total absence of existence; μὴ ὄν represents relative non-being or potential existence, something not yet fully actualized but not entirely non-existent. This distinction became central in theological debates about creation, where creation ex nihilo (from absolute nothingness, οὐκ ὄν) contrasts with creation from pre-existing, formless matter (μὴ ὄν). Clément affirms the Christian doctrine of radical creation οὐκ ὄν, rejecting both emanationism (where creation flows from God’s substance) and demiurgism (where God merely orders pre-existing matter).

4. Translator’s note: diástēma: an interval or space between things, a distance or gap.

5. Translator’s note: This observation recalls the Scriptural image of the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” in Rev. 13:8.

6. St John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa, PG 94, 949B–952A. English translation in John of Damascus: Writings, translated by Frederic H. Chase, Jr., The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 37. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1958.

7. Translator’s note: The Fathers (and many Jewish theologians as well) highlight that bara is used only with God as the subject; it implies a sovereign, divine, and original act of bringing into being something that did not exist before — not merely shaping or organizing preexisting matter.

8. St Gregory of Nyssa, In Psalmorum Inscriptiones, PG 44,441 B. English trans. Gregory of Nyssa: Gregory of Nyssa’s Treatise on the Inscriptions of the Psalms. Translated with introduction and notes by Ronald E. Heine. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Translator’s note: cf Tolkien’s Ainulindalë.

9. Cf. Eberhard Mühlenberg, Die Unendlichkeit Gottes bei Gregor von Nyssa: Gregors Kritik am Gottesbegriff der klassischen Metaphysik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966), especially pp. 147–205.

10. [St] Pavel Florensky, Les sources humaines de l'idéalisme, manuscript, p. 14. See [St] Pavel Florensky. The Meaning of Idealism: The Metaphysics of Genus and Countenance. Translated and edited by Boris Jakim. Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2020.

11. In Ps. 28:3, PG 12, 1290D

12. Cf. for example, St Gregory of Nyssa, In Hexaemeron 1, 77D, PG 44, 72–73.

13. [St] Pavel Florensky, Столп и утверждение истины: Опыт православной феодицеи в двенадцати письмах (Moscow: 1913), 288; English trans. Boris Jakim, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

14. 1 Corinthians 15:41

15. A. F. Losev, cited in B. Zenkovsky, Histoire de la philosophie russe, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 399; English trans. George L. Kline, A History of Russian Philosophy, vol. II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953.

16. St. Athanasius, In Psalmos, on Psalm 32:6.

17. To be precise, the Epistle to the Ephesians 4:6 says: “One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”

18. Cf. Démonstration de la prédication apostolique 5, 9, in Sources Chrétiennes, vol. 62 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964), 35–37; English trans. by John Behr as On the Apostolic Preaching (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997)

19. Maximus the Confessor, Quaestiones ad Thalassium, 13, PG 90, 296BC.

20. Frithjof Schuon, Perspectives spirituelles et faits humains (Paris: La Colombe, 1953), 33; English trans. as Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, trans. Mark Perry (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2007).

21. Ezekiel 1:24

22. Pavel Florensky, Le sens de l’idéalisme, p. 11; cf The Meaning of Idealism: The Metaphysics of Genus and Countenance, trans. Boris Jakim (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2020)

23. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Les Frères Karamazov (Paris: NRF), p. 328; English trans. English trans. by Constance Garnett, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912).

24. Genesis 1:26-31

25. St Maximus the Confessor, cited in Lossky, Théologie mystique, p. 103

26. Genesis 1:26

27. Nicolas Berdyaev, De l'esclavage et de la liberté de l’homme, trans. from Russian to French by L. Moulin (Paris: Aubier, 1947), 21; English trans. as Slavery and Freedom, trans. R. M. French (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944).

28. Théologie mystique, p. 102

29. St Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio Catechetica Magna, ch. 6, in Patrologia Graeca, vol. 46, 25C–28A. English tr. The Great Catechism, translated by William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 5 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995).

30. Idem, De hominis opificio 12, PG 44, 164A; English trans. H. A. Wilson, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 5, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994)

31. Genesis 2:4-25

32. 1 Corinthians 7:31

33. Romans 8:19-21

34. Translator’s note: cf Psalm 42:7 LXX

35. Nikos Nissiotis, Prolegomena to Theological Gnoseology, Athens: University Press, 1965, pp. 65–67, section titled “Love and Flesh” (in Greek).

36. Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogy, Chapter 7, PG 92, 685A–685B. English translation On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, translated by Jonathan J. Armstrong, Popular Patristics Series, no. 59 (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019).

37. Gregory of Nyssa, De anima et resurrectione, PG 46, 124C. English translation On the Soul and the Resurrection, translated by Catharine P. Roth, Popular Patristics Series, no. 12 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993).

38. Ibid., 124 D.

39. Gregory of Nyssa, Apologia in Hexaemeron, PG 44 69C–69D. English translation On the Hexaemeron, translated by Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, in Gregory of Nyssa: On the Hexaemeron, edited by Johannes Zachhuber and Anna Marmodoro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).

40. Ibid.

41. Gregory of Nyssa, De hominis opificio, PG 44, 113C.

42. Gregory of Nyssa, De anima et resurrectione, PG 46, 28C.

43. Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogy, Chapter 2, PG 91, 669D.