Cosmic Man and Reality: Micro? Macro? Por Que No Los Dos?

A question central to man’s search for the meaning of his own existence is this: what is man’s relation to the whole cosmos? It is immediately obvious, on the one hand, that man exists within the cosmos, and is in some sense contained, both living and moving, within it. On the other hand, however, man is conscious both of himself and the interconnected unity-in-multiplicity of the cosmos as a whole; to have this sort of consciousness requires, in one way or another, transcendence of the cosmos as a whole. Put another way, man finds himself both imminent in, as a part of, and standing transcendently above the cosmos in his consciousness of it. Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae recalls and contrasts two differing perspectives on this question of man’s relation to the cosmos: 

“Some of the Fathers of the Church have said that man is a microcosm, a world which sums up in itself the larger world. Saint Maximos the Confessor remarked that the more correct way would be to consider man as a macrocosm, because he is called to comprehend the whole world within himself as one capable of comprehending it without losing himself, for he is distinct from the world. Therefore, man effects a unity greater than the world exterior to himself, whereas, on the contrary, the world, as cosmos, as nature, cannot contain man fully within itself without losing him, that is, without losing in this way the most important part of reality, that part which, more than all others, gives reality its meaning.”

(Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 1, p. 4)

When St. Maximus points out that the cosmos “cannot contain man fully within itself without...losing in this way the most important part of reality, that part which, more than all others, gives reality its meaning”, he takes ‘cosmos’ as meaning the world, as nature, as distinct from God and man. The cosmos, in this sense, is imparted meaning ultimately by God in the Logos, who transcends it, but, more specifically, synergistically through man, who, being made in the image of God and Christ, also transcends creation as person and in his role of both comprehending and imparting meaning to the cosmos (which, of course, ultimately occurs only by his being in Christ). The whole of reality, both in its created and uncreated aspects, if I may speak this way, involves fundamentally both the absolute personal transcendence and imminence of God, and the relative personal transcendence and imminence of man, who mediates the meaning imparted by God to the cosmos. The necessity of man’s personal transcendence in fulfilling this purpose is why the cosmos, as nature, cannot contain him fully. And so, as St. Maximus insightfully points out, considering man a macrocosm, and not a microcosm, is closer to the truth because man potentially contains the cosmos fully within himself, whereas the converse—the cosmos potentially contains man fully within itself—is not true. For, if the cosmos as nature were to contain man fully within itself, the cosmos would swallow up the possibility of its own meaning and thus would become an acosmic absurdity. In the other direction, man’s relationship with God I find much more mysterious and will not here attempt to unpack, but rather find contentment listening to St. Paul, when he says, speaking of Christ, “For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col. 1:19) and again, speaking of Christ and man, “For in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fulness of life in him”(Col 2:9-10). 

Fr. Dumitru, as he is wont, adds his own brilliant theological insight to that of Maximus: 

“The idea that man is called to become a world writ large has a more precise expression, however, in the term ‘macro-anthropos.’ The term conveys the fact that, in the strictest sense, the world is called to be humanized entirely, that is, to bear the entire stamp of the human, to become pan-human, making real through that stamp a need which is implicit in the world’s own meaning: to become, in its entirety, a humanized cosmos, in a way that the human being is not called to become, nor can ever fully become, even at the farthest limit of his attachment to the world where he is completely identified with it, a ‘cosmicized’ man.”

(Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 1, pp. 4-5)

Explicating the relationship between man and cosmos in terms of God’s purpose for each, respectively, is a transformative move in this dialectic between man as microcosm and macrocosm. When we see that the cosmos was created for man, and man for Christ—and that Christ gives himself entirely, freely, and kenotically to the Father eternally—this divinely orchestrated ordering reveals clearly man's situation at the center of reality in Christ: above and within creation, on the one hand, and below but ascending to God and in God through communion with Him, on the other, bringing all of creation contained within him to God through a communion of infinitely progressive depth. This dynamic can likewise be seen as a chain of teleological fulfillment: the cosmos is fulfilled in man, through his activity in it, and man is fulfilled in God, through His activity in him.  

Taking Fr. Dumitru’s lead, in appreciation of his insight, and reflecting further on this threefold relation between cosmos, man, and God, we can see man as both microcosm and macrocosm in different senses. With Maximus, we can rightly consider man as macrocosm in relation to cosmos per se, since he transcends it and potentially contains the whole within himself. But we can also rightly consider man as microcosm, if we construe ‘microcosm’ in a sense asymmetrical to the way we have taken ‘macrocosm’—that is, as meaning something more along the lines of ‘microreality’, where ‘reality’ includes both cosmos and God. In this modified sense, then, man is a microreality because he is, as an embodied person, an image of God’s relation to creation, and unlike the cosmos, which cannot contain man fully within itself, God can and does contain man fully within Himself, precisely through the Incarnation. Thus man, within this frame, can be appropriately called micro—perhaps not quite microcosm, but perhaps microreality.