APOKATASTASIS: PART II

On Theophanism

“Adam as Mankind” by St. Hildegard of Bingen

INTRODUCTION

In recent modern Eastern Orthodox thought Personalism has received criticism as not being authentically patristic but rather a moving beyond and modifying the fathers’ thought using existentialist and idealist philosophy and not staying true to patristic concepts. Of course, bringing patristic thought into dialogue with other ideas to expand theological reflection is the very essence of neo-patristic theology and what the best of the fathers did themselves, and so these critics are wrong in how they approach theology as a discipline. More specifically though, critics are wrong in their arguments that Personalist ontologies are illicit because “hypostasis” means individual. Firstly, they are wrong because, in thinkers like St. Maximus the Confessor, hypostasis does have the meanings personalists apply to it including transcending mere individuality, but secondly, they are wrong because Personalist thought does not stand on the ancient definitions of single terms, it is a theological anthropology that brings together patristic thought on the ontology of the human being and creation at large as nature and person under the categories of refined Church dogmatics and the best of amenable philosophy.

The above said, in continuing our argument for universalism and presenting the Personalist ontology which we believe should be the ground of Orthodox thought going forward, we will be turning to the theological, cosmological, and anthropological thought of St. Dionysius the Areopagite informed by Dr. Eric Perl’s book Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite. While some of the arguments to be presented have been discussed already in my two previous essays on the Theotokos (here and here) this essay will be very different, in part because I will begin from the divine side, the Good in its beneficent processions, which perspective I hinted at previously in saying that creation only proceeds forth from God as and because already returned to Him.

Before we begin it is prudent to reiterate the standard of criteria to which we hold our argument. The universalism to be argued for is an absolutely certain universalism rooted in the fundamental ontology of creation and the human being in particular, and so being able to justify finality absolutely. This universalism must be one in which all creatures are free, and so based upon a proper ontological understanding of creaturely freedom which includes absoluteness and self-determination. And all the above must be shown not only to be “like” the Incarnation, but to be the very logic and unfolding of the Incarnation, of God and World as Christ “who is transcendent mind, utterly divine mind, who is the source and the being underlying all hierarchy, all sanctification, all the workings of God, who is the ultimate in divine power.”[1]

GOD AS THE NON-ALIUD

St. Gregory Palamas summarizes the classic view of the Eastern Christian tradition of what it means for God to be transcendent as follows:

 Every nature is utterly remote and absolutely estranged from the divine nature. For if God is nature, other things are not nature, but if each of the other things is nature, he is not nature: just as he is not a being, if others are beings; and if he is a being, the others are not beings… But God is the nature of all beings and is referred to as such, since all participate in him and receive their constitution by this participation… Thus is he the very being of beings and the form in the forms as the primal form and wisdom of the wise and generally all things of all things.”[2]

The above is not a definition of divine transcendence as complete otherness to creation, nor do its affirmations that creatures are God insofar as they are at all amount to a reduction of God to creation as in a crude pantheism (of which it would be difficult to convict any of the great world religions). Rather what St. Gregory is expressing is a qualified monism, a view of transcendence which understands God as having no “other” but including the non-God, and he is drawing on the gold standard of metaphysical theology for East and West from the sixth century through the middle-ages, St. Dionysius the Areopagite.

As Eric Perl explains, for St. Dionysius, following the Neoplatonic tradition, God as the One and the Good has no “other” but rather is simply the ever-giving productivity of being.[3] God is transcendent in that he is not a being among beings, which is to say that he is not an intelligible unit delimited by and making up the contextual tapestry of the intelligible web of being, but he is not a being among beings precisely because He is the being of all beings as cause, unfolding all the content of what is enfolded in Himself (which is what cause means for the Neoplatonic tradition) into finite particularity and interrelation, e.g., the intelligible structure which is being:[4]

 For the unnamed goodness is not just the cause of cohesion or life or perfection so that it is from this or that providential gesture that it earns a name, but it actually contains everything beforehand within itself—and this in an uncomplicated and boundless manner—and it is thus by virtue of the unlimited goodness of its single all-creative Providence… From it derives the existence of everything as beings, what they have in common and what differentiates them, their identicalness and differences, their similarities and dissimilarities… [5]

St. Dionysius view of God as the transcendent non-aliud, if accepted as the Eastern Tradition has done, requires us to acknowledge three things. Firstly, that the question of whether God could not have created is nonsensical on its face because God simply is the free (as authentic expression of his nature and person) ever-unfolding Good, and therefore all that exists (insofar as it is true being) cannot but have existed. Secondly, that as Eric Perl says, “the entire content of any being is God present in it in a distinct, finite way,”[6] and so Fr. Sergius Bulgakov’s view that the logoi are not external but internal to the creature as both God for the creature and the being and potential of the creature itself, or more succinctly, that creatures are the hypostatized rays of God’s glory, is true and patristic.[7] Thirdly, and most importantly, that God is the noncompeting power, only motive, transcendental context, and final end of all creaturely movement, or actuality, or more precisely, will and willing.

It is this third acknowledgment which is of most importance to our argument. In Eastern patristic thought the will and willing of a creature fall under the metaphysical category of “movement” which concept is informed by the context of the uncreated God as the unmoved beginning, power, and end of the creature’s movement from potency to the full actuality of its being. For St. Dionysius creaturely movement, and thus freedom, is nothing but the structure of divine procession and return, and procession and return are together equally the arche (beginning or source) and telos (end) of the creature.[8] This “nothing but” is not reductive of the creature’s own identity, as Eric Perl explains that understanding creation as procession and reversion means to understand creatures as actively receptive to their creation because their constitutive activity (their self or personhood) is their activity of proceeding from and returning to the Good:

 The Neoplatonic understanding of the being of a thing as its reversion to its cause means that the “coming to be” of the effect, its being “made” or produced by the cause, is not merely passive… this dependence is an active receptivity on the part of the effect. Reversion represents existing as the activity of a being, of that which is: any being can be only by actively receiving its identifying determination, which is to say by performing the act-of-existing in its proper way, by enacting or “living out” its constitutive nature. Hence, the effect, or being, has a positive, active role in its own production, its being made to be. “Being caused” is an activity of the effect… The reversion of effects to their cause, in turn, forms the basis for Dionysius’ account of the ontological love or desire of all things for God… No being, then, can be without desiring or reverting to God, i.e. receiving him as its constitutive determination, its goodness… The very being of each thing, then, is its possessing, receiving, reverting to God according to its proper mode… a thing’s being made to be by God is not in any sense prior to its desire for him. Rather, the generation of the being consists in its tending toward God no less than in its coming from him. Thus reversion, as the activity of the being, is the being’s share in its own being made to be… For Dionysius, God cannot make beings without their active cooperation, for without that activity they would not be anything. In every being, including animals, plants, and inanimate things, there is an element of “interiority,” of selfhood, an active share in its own being what it is and so in its own being… For without this active selfhood, a being would have no unifying identity, it would not be this one distinct thing, and so would not be at all.[9]

At this point one might easily be confused by this metaphysical language, especially if one is only familiar with non-metaphysical or non-intellectualist definitions of freedom and free choice, so I will try to explain at length. For St. Dionysius free choice (choosing between options) is downstream of the actual definition of freedom as the actualization of any being as what it is and is teleologically directed towards (which are both together what the creature is). The creature is firstly and ontologically free because it is an active receptor/response to divine communion and is thus constituted as a subject. This activity/receptivity (which is procession and return and could be called love or communion) is the structure of the created being’s ontology (what it is) and the engine or power of its activity (its movement from potency to act). The creature only exists as itself because it is fundamentally this receptivity of and response to God, and this receptivity and response are at the same time God Himself proceeding out into being as the creature and returning to Himself, the distinction between God and creature being preserved by their co-positing of hypostatic identities.

When it comes to willing specifically, the will of the creature is its power of moving from potency to actuality. This power of will is identical to the power of movement which is procession from and return to God, that is, it is the power of divine eros or love within the creature. This power is generated by and directed towards the creatures ontological “ends,” those realities which the creature is (so its ontological structure) and is capable of actualization as or becoming (its telos), and these ends are the creature’s deification. This is the context or engine in which and as which “will” exists. Free will is thus inherent to the creature as what willing simply is, but it is also something achieved in each act of will whenever this act is in accordance with the creature’s being and proper ends.

Lastly, the temporal existence of the creature as freely actualizing its free self is ontologically (or from God’s perspective) subsequent to the state of the creature as fully actualized or deified. This is because God’s creation of the creature encompasses the whole existence of the creature from beginning to end as a communion of love between God and the creature. This whole act of creation is, as explained previously, thoroughly synergistic (God’s procession from and return to Himself being the active reception and response of the creature in its proper mode), and since beginning from and returning to eternity does not operate on the logic of before and after, the end of the creature as fully actualized in deification simply is the beginning of the creature or its arche (just as for God to act is to say the act is accomplished). While the interval between temporal beginning and end may admit of missteps by or oppositions between finite creatures (meaning evil on which more to be said later) the beginning/end/what the creature really “is” cannot.

The above view of created freedom in fact exceeds that of even the most brazen Luciferian Libertarianism, because it posits that from the perspective of true being (which is equivalent to the eschatological state) the creature’s self-determinately willed end for itself as a completely unique unfolding of the Good is not subject to any opposition by or compromise with any other being including God (as God is not a being). The creature’s will is ultimately equivalent to the will of God in the mode of the creature, it is the whole of God in being its unique self, a micro and macrotheos just as much as it is a micro and macrocosm. To admit this is also to say that true freedom not only is but must be non-coercive as the relationship between God and beings and ultimately between a being and all beings is one which admits of no competing wills but rather complete harmony while retaining uniqueness. Thus, the principle of rejecting all coercive power and authority (any authority or tyrannical power that rules by external force) and embracing self-determination for all is evidenced as the highest good for humanity in reaching the Good (for the Good only convinces by the inherent power of goodness and truth itself), and this is an ethics of freedom and communion as Personalism.[10]

In summary, St. Dionysius grounds freedom (which is the movement of a creature to realize its nature as a unique unfolding of the Good)[11] within the structure of love in which God as love distinguishes himself from the rays of his glory by loving them and so granting them unique identity (or hypostasis), and in which the creature is constituted as a person by its receptivity and return of the divine love to God. The creature is thus a unique person precisely because having as its cause and content the Person (or Tri-Personality) of God, and a free person precisely in its willing (in its self-determination as a unique unfolding of the Good) to receive and return to God.[12] Thus, insofar as any being is acting and willing according to its proper being, it is the same thing to say that it is God willing and acting as it is to say the being is, and since this is the true nature and state of freedom then any definition of freedom based on competing agencies is unacceptable. Finally, the free development of the creature along the arch of its existence is only possible because the creature is eternally for God the unique union of its procession and return as arche and telos (eternally the active recipient and giver of love), or from the creaturely ontological pole, the person of the creature is both the transcendent principle of its development (constituting its growth in and manifestation of freedom in its development) and its culmination, eternity as informing and summing up time. One could simply say that the creature only is as creature because always already God.

The above Dionysian view covers all our criteria for a confident Universalism. It is an absolutely certain Universalism based in the metaphysical necessity of divine nature and human ontology, in which freedom as self-determination (the creature is an active recipient of its existence who constitutes itself as an absolutely unique image of the Good) and as absoluteness (there is no power external to the creature ultimately impinging its absolute freedom) is upheld. However, it may be contended (wrongly) that without engaging with the problem of evil we do not yet meet the criterion of “finality,” that is, showing that all creatures will turn from evil and attain unalterable stability in the Good. That this contention is wrong-headed should be self-evident from the argument above but will certainly be so evident in addressing the contention below.

EVIL AS NON-BEING

Evil is non-being. This definition carried over from Neoplatonism has been the accepted Christian view since at least the fourth century and is a necessary affirmation if one subscribes to the view of God as the transcendent cause and being of all things. That said, the acceptance of this definition of evil does not mean its full implications have always been realized, especially regarding the issue of eternal damnation. As argued in the previous article, Libertarian defenses of Infernalism end up having to admit the state of being damned is just as much an actualization of the human being as who and what it is as the final state of salvation would be. Such a conclusion is absolutely unacceptable to St. Dionysius:

 On Dionysius’ view, there can be no actual desire for evil and therefore no positive activity which is evil. Following a common tradition of Greek thought, he argues that all desire is for some good… whatever is desired is by definition regarded as good, for to desire something means to take it as one’s good… Evil qua evil, as what is not good, has no attractive or motivating power and cannot be a goal, a purpose, an object of desire for anything. Evil, therefore, cannot be the cause of any activity. Rather, as we have seen, all the activities of all beings take place in desire for the Good… No activity, qua activity, then, is evil. Evil, therefore, lies not in a being’s acting contrary to its nature but only in its not acting according to its nature, and so not fully being… But this means that insofar as anything desires evil, it is really just not desiring at all… At bottom, then, evil as deficiency of being is a failure to revert to, to love, to desire God, who as the Good is the sole cause and end of all desire… Evil, then, is fundamentally passivity…[13]

Evil is not being, is not the activity proper to or constituting being, and so is not intelligible (having a cause or rational)[14] nor an activity. This means that insofar as someone is evil, which is the same as saying deficient in being, they are not acting, not willing, not being. Insofar as they are willing they are only willing the Good, and it is only in this sense that they are free. Thus, any argument that takes as its premise or results in evil being an actuality must be rejected if we affirm that evil is non-being. This includes the argument that God allows the damned to remain so eternally because he “respects their freedom.” Insofar as the damned are damned they are not free or even willing because to be free is to be fully actualized as what one is (being) and attain what one desires to have and be (participation in being and the source of being) and, according to St. Dionysius, all desire (will) is ultimately for the Good and for oneself to be actualized as a unique reflection of and within the Good. To leave the damned as damned would be, besides a metaphysical impossibility as a creature only exists at all because eternally united to God, nothing other than a respect for the institute of slavery under the eternal reign of death, a rejection of freedom by God.

The above view of freedom may be difficult to accept in our fallen perspective. We may look at the criminal and the monster as beyond redemption, but to do so is to give a rationale, and therefore justification, for their evil, and in doing so we deny the truth that the criminal and the monster in their depths, who they truly are, are God as the beloved of God. The Christian view St. Dionysius gives us is of all things as fundamentally good and desiring the Good, nobody is totally depraved, there is no massa damnata (and the moral unacceptability of the massa damnata doctrine is not lessened by a reduction of the number of the damned even to one person).

If evil then is non-being, non-willing, non-activity, is it still possible to salvage a doctrine of eternal damnation by appealing to this state of non-activity as final? This is the argument often used today, especially in apologetics, called “semi-annihilationism,” according to which the damned by free choice cut themselves off from God and the reality of all things and therefore, because reality is a communion of activity, they cease all activity and hell is their eternal state of isolation. However, the incoherency of this view is immediately obvious because choice, as an activity, is not evil and is actuality (which is at root God’s act) and so cannot be the rational for the cessation of activity, let alone truly “free” choice which is equivalent to the good of a creature. Furthermore, the cessation of all activity (which the semi-annihilationist believes is hell because he accepts that all activity is of and toward the Good) is nothing other than annihilationism period. The creature is constituted by, simply is, the structure of its procession and return from and to God, and therefore a cessation of this activity is the annihilation of the creatures simple self-constituting act of selfhood, or as St. Gregory Palamas said there is no nature without its proper activity, and this activity is God as the activity of being.

The key issue with semi-annihilationism, therefore, is its basis in an inability to think God as the non-aliud and so to properly think of creation as God in and as the non-God (in short, semi-annihilationism is tied to a kind of dualism). The creature is ontologically the structure of procession and return uniquely hypostatized, which is to say that the creature is itself only as being God for itself, “God is the nature of all beings… the very being of beings.” The activity of the creature which constitutes itself is God’s own activity, the love of the creature by which it loves God is the love of God for the creature. At any point of its existence the creature insofar as it is being is the God who is the fullness of the creature’s being, which is the same as saying that the creature only exists because always already a “yes” to the divine summons to be, which is again just to say that nothing proceeds from God except already returned to God because He is pure actuality, or to quote Holy Writ, “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it (Is 55:11).” That anything exists is the guarantee of its deification because existence is activity directed toward the Good, while evil is completely irrational, without justification or power, and necessarily ceases when the Good is active in all and the Truth makes all free (1 Cor 15:28, Jhn 8:32).

***

We have thus met the criterion to which we held our argument by presenting a metaphysically certain Universalism, rooted in a proper ontology of the human being, affirming freedom as self-determination and absoluteness in a way exceeding the claims of Libertarianism, and giving a proper unassailable ground for the finality of all creature’s state in deification. More than that, we have shown that affirming the classic Eastern Christian view of God’s transcendence and the nature of being entails, if it is not simply equivalent to, affirming Universalism or apokatastasis. That said, what of the claim that Universalism is the necessary unfolding of the Incarnation and nature of Christ our Morningstar? That too has been substantiated, for those with eyes to see, but that specific topic can only be dealt with now after the respective worldviews of Libertarian Infernalism and Personalist Universalism had been explicated.

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[1] Dionysius the Areopagite, “EH 1.1” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (The Classics of Western Spirituality). Colm LuiBheid & Paul Rorem, trans., (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1987), 195-196.

[2] Gregory Palamas, The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters. Robert E. Sinkewicz, trans., (Toronto, ON: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1988), 173-175. [Emphasis mine]

[3] Eric D. Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 25-26, 33.

[4] Ibid, 26-32.

[5] Dionysius, “DN 1.7, 4.7”, 56, 77.

[6] Perl, “Theophany,” 29-30, 32.

[7] Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God. Boris Jakim, trans., (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 17, 55, 92, 197, 222.

[8] Perl, “Theophany,” 39-42, 48.

[9] Ibid, 40-42. The Areopagite’s reasoning to the conclusion that the creation of a spiritual being is inherently synergistic and that there is no moment of unfreedom or impersonality in human ontology is the same as that advanced by Fr Sergius Bulgakov in “The Bride of the Lamb,” 85-88, which is also explicated and defended by David Bentley Hart in You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 119-122.

[10] The greatest patristic work on this point may be St. Gregory of Nyssa’s commentary on 1 Corinthians 15:28. See Gregory of Nyssa, “In illud: Tunc et ipse filius” Eclectic Orthodoxy, October 4, 2019. https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/10/04/in-illud-tunc-et-ipse-filius/. It is more important than ever that this understanding of freedom and of the kingdom of God as freedom be emphasized to combat the clericalism, authoritarianism and implicit (or in Russia’s case explicit) support for imperialism and fascism in the Church today.

[11] Perl, “Theophany,” 36-37.

[12] Ibid, 46-48.

[13] Ibid, 60.

[14] Ibid, 62-64. For a book dealing with the problem of evil in this way see David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005).