God's River of Divine Providence: Headwater of Love, Delta of Unity

When dwelling on Divine Providence, one might give more attention to those of God’s works which have a more saliently marvelous and supernatural quality—the kind experienced by witnesses of acts which circumvent the natural order of causality, such as Christ’s multiplication of bread and fish (Matthew 14:13-21; Mark 6:31-44; Luke 9:12-17; John 6:1-15) or His raising of Lazarus from the dead, who had been in the tomb already four days (John 11:1-44)—as opposed to the work involved in the growth of a plant, for example. The modern mind often takes such natural activity for granted and attributes it to an impersonal form of natural law, when in fact and to the contrary, all good things are truly acts of God’s Providence. To be sure, raising a person from the dead and the growth of a plant are perhaps different kinds of miracles, with the former involving a transcendence of natural causality through the direct intervention and absolute power of God’s Word, Christ, whose commands “even the winds and sea obey” (Matthew 8:27); but they are nonetheless both miraculous in that even the growth of a plant is predicated upon God’s initial act of creation and continuous active sustenance thereof—which are also miraculous by any reasonable standard—and forms of Divine Providence. For no event occurs apart from God’s energy, nor is without a place in His comprehensive plan and purpose for creation: the unity and communion of all things in Christ through love. Indeed: God “accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:10), “God is love” (1 John 4:16), and “love…binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Colossians 3:14). In the eternal counsel of God’s will, according to His infinitely transcendent, all-encompassing knowledge and wisdom, He purposed, with the entirely free and loving assent of His Son, that the latter should, as the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8), bear the eternally significant Cross through which all things might be reconciled with both God and each other, across both the vertical and horizontal axes of being. The sons of Korah thus glorified this Cross prophetically in song:

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; 
     righteousness and peace will kiss each other. 
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, 
     and righteousness will look down from the sky. 
Yea, the Lord will give what is good, 
     and our land will yield its increase. 
Righteousness will go before him, 
     and make his footsteps a way.¹

That Christ is the lamb slain “from the foundation of the world” indicates that God’s knowledge and wisdom are inseparable from and wholly infused with His love, for in mercy He took man’s fall into account when He created, and, in perfect collaboration with His Son, set in place a providential, personal means by which His beloved human image-bearer might conquer sin, death, and the grave—those ancient enemies of man which threaten the unity-in-communion of the created order.

The Good Shepherd, our Lord Jesus Christ, is tasked not just with rescuing, protecting, and guiding His flock in the disjointed wilderness of post-fall history, leading it through death to the eternal land of promise, but, more broadly, with preparing the whole world to become a suitable venue for the marriage supper of the Lamb, at which He will, having consummated an eternal marital union with His Bride, the Church, share an eternal eucharistic meal with Her in the transfigured and reunified cosmos, a new heavens and new earth no longer torn asunder—nor disjointed within themselves—by sin. This new and spiritually unified creation is the end toward which Divine Providence works in all things: God’s eternal house, a universal temple in which deified human priest-kings will rule together with and in Christ forevermore, continually discovering, transforming, and sharing the infinitude of God’s gifts together in His Kingdom of integral love. We hear a promise of both man’s communion with Christ and participation in this divine rule directly from the mouth of the King:

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. He who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.²

The conquering to which Christ here refers is inseparable from the whole of His incarnational mission as the God-Man, but refers especially to His triumphing over sin, death, and the devil by His free, kenotic, and self-sacrificial offering of Himself on the Cross for both man and the life of the world, His descending into Hades to preach this gospel to all those who had since departed earthly life, His rising from the dead on the third day, His ascending to His Father’s throne to give Him the gift of Spiritually actualized humanity in perfect form—which itself implies the perfection of all created natures, for human nature is a kind of universal nature which circumscribes and contains all other created natures in itself—and, finally, His sending the Holy Spirit to infuse His Body, thereby communicating to it the fullness of His life, and, through it, to the rest of creation. Man's own conquering, then, because his eschatological perfection is wholly dependent on the crucified, risen, and ascended Christ, is achieved only by incorporation into His body and through participation in His death, resurrection, ascension, and thus His eternal life, which is the fruit of the gospel. For Christ’s life carries within itself and conveys the indomitable fact of final victory over all forces of disintegration and decomposition.

God’s perfect and spotless Body, the Church, whose Head is Christ Himself, is the communion of human persons who participate in His life and will extend an eschatological reign of freedom over all things—a freedom which “transcends any level that is attainable, and it is toward such liberty that we are advancing, always unhindered by any level we might have reached already”³. Christ’s life is thus boundless and is precisely that in which all shall partake together in the Kingdom of God’s Providence. This eschatological Kingdom comes as a new heavens and new earth which will descend at the end of time from the glorious reaches of the Father’s throne, upon which sits His Christ and Son. St. John the Theologian, in his account of the revelation given him by God on the isle of Patmos, says: 

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”

And he who sat upon the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”⁴

The old heavens and earth, through their corruption by sin—which, being parasitic on the good and an ontological contagion, devours the reality of that through which it spreads—are but a faint shadow of the new; and yet, by God’s Providence, the old creation was made a crucible for man’s healing through ascetical labor, which is participation in the Cross of Christ and by which his soul is melted and the dross within it removed so that, when his spiritual trajectory becomes fixed in the eschaton, it might be set on a permanent course of eternal newness and abundant life—of ever-deepening love and freedom in communion with God and neighbor. For, according to St. Dumitru Stăniloae:

We are not borne away to that ocean of love and freedom that is found in God, either on the unbounded slough of licentiousness or on the lake of fixed understanding where the water is held in its movement by the shores, but only on the river that flows continuously onward (and upward) between the very banks that safeguard its flow. With its dogmas that open out on the infinite and its services that purify the passions and nourish prayer, the spirituality of the Christian East constitutes the best method for those who seek to achieve true freedom in God and to progress in the knowledge and the communion of God and neighbor through experience. The spirituality of the Christian East represents the method by which advancement in the direction willed by God's providence is best assured, the providence that has reached its most sublime activity in Christ. For in Christ the providence of God is revealed as a plan and a real activity for the salvation and deification of creation in him.⁵

The perfect love and freedom of deified persons in eschatological communion with Christ, a love and freedom which characterize God's creation in its final spiritualized state of eternal well-being—the state for which it was created and in which it can be said to have genuine fullness of being—open up the whole of reality toward an infinite horizon of joyful newness and spiritual depth, for the riches of God are truly inexhaustible. As the Logos, being indivisibly and wholly present within all creatures while simultaneously transcending them infinitely, Christ will truly encompass and fill all things in a manner that becomes increasingly experiential for conscious, rational creatures on a trajectory of perpetual purification, illumination, and perfection. The profundity of this point calls for further explication. Since God, who circumscribes all things, is also energetically present in His fullness within each created thing, all things are contained—via the Logos of God—in each thing; and such containment will be actualized as fact in the eschatological communion of all things in Christ, the Divine One who contains the crown of created natures: perfected human nature. Thus, the eschatological horizon is not infinite only for creation as an integral whole—which whole cannot be conceived merely as a sum of finite parts, for the whole is transcendently present in each part—but is infinite also for each created thing precisely because the being of each creature is a function of and will be opened ontologically to the unified eschatological whole of creation in perfect communion with God, when the unity of the Trinity comes to be actualized in all things, in their being made one without confusion or separation. To be sure, this unity-in-communion of all creatures as one creation is not yet fully actualized, but it is precisely God’s Providence—as the infinite river of His love flowing toward perfect unity, Himself being both its headwater and mouth—that carries all things toward and into the perfect, eternal unity inherent in the Trinitarian communion, forming them together into a divine delta. Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos says:

The ultimate destiny and plan and Providence of God, the universal unification of all things, is the work of Christ, who is thus the mystagogue of this eschatological fulfillment of God's Providence. A Providence of unification, revealing creation as "one," "according to the one, simple, unbounded and undifferentiated concept of its creation out of nothing, according to which all creation can admit of one and the same inner principle, altogether undifferentiated, as one single gift from God, and one single gift offered by men back to God, because its nonbeing is temporally prior to its being." By analogy with the singular call that brought creation into being out of non-being, the entire creation ultimately admits of one singular essential principle, without any differentiation as regards the particulars. The connection made between the absolute unity-in-communion of the created order and creation ex nihilo demonstrates precisely, once again, Maximus's extremely profound understanding of unity. Nothingness is absolute non-coherence; and it is for precisely that reason that it is non-being. Being is constituted as such through and in the communion of the particulars with the universal and in the closing of rifts, as a progress in the communal life of entities ending ultimately in the "altogether undifferentiated logos" of creation.⁶

When brought into the dialogue between man and God in eternal communion, all things bear their eternal significance both as unique expressions of the fullness of Divine Life to all other things and, at the same time, as a multiplicity of interdependent tessarae comprising the fractal mosaic of creation unified in Christ. It is only because the infinite Logos as a whole inheres in all things and all things have their being, meaning, and purpose in Him that this perfect unification of multiplicity is possible. St. Maximus, speaking of the logoi (i.e., the images of the divine reasons inherent in all things) and the Logos who “hides” within them, says:

By hiding Himself mystically in reasons, the Word offers Himself proportionally for understanding through each of the visible things as through letters, whole and complete in everything, whole and undiminished; He who is undifferentiated and always the same in those that are differentiated, He who is simple and uncomposed in those that are composed, He who is without beginning in those subjected to a beginning, He who is unseen in those that are seen, He who is impalpable in those that are palpable.⁷

Through man’s seeking after and finding the Word who hides Himself in all creatures, all things become progressively transparent mirrors of God’s Uncreated Light and Life to all other things. Because creation is, in its very constitution, communal and personal, and its spiritual structure one of infinite fractal interconnectedness according to the unity of the Word in all things and all things in the Word, God’s providence touches all aspects of all things, at all places and all times, calling them together toward the boundless newness of eternal life. In each of God’s providential actions, not only is creation as a whole taken into account, but so also is each particular creature in relation to and as a function of the integral whole of creation, along with all the myriad interconnections between creatures across every level of the meaningful order of being. Only a Mind of infinite knowledge and wisdom could so coordinate the incalculably complex trajectory of the ark of creation through the floodwaters of history such that it finds safe eschatological harbor upon the mountaintop where He dwells—and, further, doing so while accounting for the seemingly intractable variables of free creatures’ right and wrong use of the power of choice bestowed on them, given that God’s Providence works in a world in which man ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But nothing is intractable to God, for He transcends all things infinitely in all His ways. Accordingly, and without qualification, the Lord assures us:

[M]y thoughts are not your thoughts,
     neither are you ways my ways …
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, 
     so are my ways higher than your ways.⁸

Since God is working providentially now—and has been since the moment He created, having woven His ultimate eschatological purpose into the very fabric of the world—it is not in the eschaton, at the end of time, that God commences this process of making all things eternally new in their communal unification; for the eschaton is contained potentially in this world, precisely because God inheres in all things now, in their logoi, holding them all together and working in them through their human spiritual center to open them into communion with one another. In the beginning, the Father thus initiated, in His act of creation through the Son, a cosmic march of eternal progress into the perfect joy He has in the Son. In this unfolding of all things out of themselves and into the infinite love of the Trinitarian communion, man and all things in him experience this march as an indefatigable and eternal escalation of newness. On this notion of newness vis-à-vis creation, St. Dumitru says:

This work of God is bound up par excellence with the category of the "new": "Behold, I make all things new" (Rev 21:5). This is the final perspective opened for us by God. But in the view of this final newness, humans must become new from now onwards (Eph 4:24; 2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15). Not at the end alone will all things be made new; it is true from the first coming of Christ (2 Cor 5:17). And this newness is not one that grows old, but one in which we must unceasingly be walking and growing: "[so that] ... we too might walk in newness of life ... so that we might serve not under the old written code but in the newness of spirit" (Rom 6:4, 7:6). To walk in "newness of life" or "newness of spirit" means to be always open to "the new." For the "spirit" is always alive, that is, spirit does not remain within the same things. This is that "stability" within the movement of ascent described by St. Gregory of Nyssa, a stability that is simultaneously motion and without which the human being no longer remains within continuous newness but as a consequence, falls.⁹

With all that has been set forth, Divine Providence cannot be seen as a strict, exhaustive determinism imposed by God on man in a manner which flattens the freedom inherent in his genuine personhood, so that He might accomplish His predetermined purposes, though God is by no means without such purposes “from the foundation of the world”. Rather, Divine Providence works in all things to call man—and all things through him—to launch and sail on the river current of God’s love and freedom, participating in them as the human image becoming actively resonant with its Divine Archetype, working synergistically with God to fulfill the loving purpose of His Providence through a free dialogue in communion with Him. Man thus moves from divine image to divine likeness. Christ, as both perfect man and God, has in fact accomplished the deification of human nature and thus is the One in whom the whole world finds its newness of life, its eschatological unification and fulfillment, its eternal actualization: its fullness of communion with God. Christ Himself is the quintessence of Divine Providence.

I conclude with a rather lengthy passage from Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos, but one which sums up quite well the exceedingly wise ways of our Father in heaven, who gave His only begotten Son providentially for the eternal life of the world—a life of divine unity through love:

Christ works through His human body, His senses and His soul, using these to make the corresponding parts of creation His own and ultimately recapitulating all things in Himself. The phrase Maximus uses is characteristic: Christ unifies the entire creation; He makes it one "like another sort of human being." The unification of creation, then, is identified with a certain sort of "humanization," in the sense that "the many things which differ from one another by nature converge around the one nature of man." The whole of the rest of creation converges on man and is contained in him; through his mediation, and specifically by his soul becoming for the body, and by extension for the world, what God is for the soul, God proceeds to sanctify the entire world through man's soul and body. Thus by taking flesh, the Word has literally "encompassed all things and given them real existence in Himself," because "God Himself has become all in all," precisely through the true and full human nature which he assumed. This was man's original goal, in which he failed and to which he was restored in Christ: it was for this "microcosm" to make the world into a "macroanthropos," enhypostatized in the Word. In unifying the world through his love and bringing it to God in accordance with His Providence, man would fulfil God's will in the world, leading the world to its eschatological fullness; thus the micro-eschatologies of the little things are fulfilled.¹⁰

1. Psalm 85:10-13 (MT)

2. Revelation 3:20-22

3. Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 2, pp. 195-196.

4. Revelation 21:1-5

5. Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 2, p. 200.

6. Loudovikos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor's Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity, pp. 135-136.

7. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua, PG 91:1285.

8. Isaiah 55:8-9

9. Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 2, pp. 194-195.

10. Loudovikos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor's Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity, p. 149.