Human Persons as Media of Creative Transformation

I have an acute awareness that, whenever I reflect on a matter, whatever truth I might manage to convey is, at best, incomplete. I am called back to mull things over repeatedly in hopes of finding a coherent throughline in my various attempts to understand. “Always be chewing the cud,” I tell myself. “The inexhaustible cud.” I preface the article this way because I am speaking of things I am struggling to understand, and in writing out my thoughts, I am attempting to lay bare their inadequacy, in hopes of finding a foothold from which to continue learning. If perhaps this helps you do the same, even by refutation, that is enough. In this spirit, I will proceed. 

Man, as a microcosm of creation, can take creation into himself and, as a personal being, transform it creatively through the grace of God. Man uses his perceptual, linguistic, and rational capacities to bring creation into his mind and thereupon perform various kinds of operations; he is subsequently able to effect those operations back into creation through his sensory apparatus and his body. The unity and coherence of this process are imparted ultimately by the Spirit, but, at a lower level, by the unified consciousness of man, which penetrates potentially from top to bottom across his levels of being, but is typically manifest only serially and in part through the lens of his attention. The synergistic process of transforming creation, made possible by God, and in which man participates, can be seen to have the form of chewing cud: man ingests creation through his senses, regurgitates it into partitioned form in the mind, where it becomes expressible, translatable, and modifiable in the form of language, chews it rationally, and then digests it back down into physical form through his sensory apparatus, whether as words to communicate or as creative action to refashion the world. The results of this iterative process—the modified and new state of creation—he is then able to take back up, again through the senses, into his mind, to chew as cud rationally again, so on and so forth. 

We can see that this process involves both body and soul, in the unity of their respective multiplicity and difference of nature, since, on the one hand, it is creation at a physical level which is the ground floor of this transformation, and it is within the mind of man, on the other hand, that the vectors of this transformation are specified. In this relationship between material and immaterial, there exists an open channel of communication, as it were, in that the material can effect change in the immaterial, and the immaterial in the material. But within what medium can such transformation take place? I would submit that the necessary medium is the person—and, more specifically, the human person—which is a living, transcendent unity of two kinds of natures, material and immaterial. 

Being essentially transcendent, persons are ineffable yet accessible from the outside through their public activity; but from a subjective, internal perspective, this ineffability is paradoxically yet directly experienced by the subject through his being both a unified source of and receptacle for identity and activity. Man experiences consciously the unity-in-multiplicity of his personhood through the dynamic relationship between its self-reflexivity and simultaneous orientation of open, yet regulated, reception toward the other. Moreover, being fundamentally communal in nature, the person can be seen to serve as a medium of creative transformation for that with which he comes into active communion. However, it must be noted that, when man acts creatively, the resultant transformation is bidirectional: creation is transformed by man, and man is transformed by the God of creation, who works through him, insofar as he works in accordance with His will. But this transformation in both directions can only occur in the context of communion: man with God, on the one hand, and man with creation, on the other. These two vectors, as it were, are synthesized in God’s incarnation as man—a microcosm of creation—which makes possible man’s communion with God in and through creation. In this way, man comes to participate in the ever-abounding newness of God’s ongoing creative act, and in some sense, perpetual recreation, of the world. Indeed, because of the incarnation of the Word, man’s capacity for transforming creation, and being transformed thereby, is boundless, since microcosmic man—and so the whole of creation in him—is recapitulated in Christ. 

The human person, as a particular being, constitutes an utterly unique mode of expression of the shared human nature. However, in some sense, the depth of this uniqueness is expressed to greater and greater degrees precisely by a person’s participation in the synergistic process of creation, through the iterative feedback loop of bi-directional transformation, made possible only by the incarnation of the Word. On this basis, in the playing out of this process, eternity opens to receive time into its bosom and constitutes a boundless ceiling for its development. Creation will never be finished, just as we will never cease becoming, ever more deeply, who we are; and, paradoxically, the eternally anchored unfolding and development of all things in their multiplicity serves only to express more fully the glory of their unity. 

If what I have described above captures, even if only crudely, an aspect of our constitution as persons, then how might we understand sin? When a person sins, either in heart, mind, or body, he inverts his creative capacity for transforming and being transformed into a destructive capacity for deforming and being deformed. Notice that, according to this conception, sinful action isn’t creative action, in that it does not in itself actualize anything real; it simply turns our creative capacity in on itself, inverting its effects accordingly and in both directions by a divergence of the will toward non-being, resulting in a less real version of something that already had being—i.e., it results in the deformation and destruction of both creation and person. When Christ became sin for us, indeed He laid down his life and died voluntarily; but death could not hold Him because it is contrary to the nature of the Existent One ultimately to suffer dissolution into non-being; death, rather, is swallowed up by Life, and non-being by Being. 

[T]he Word of God, being something essential and hypostatic, was demonstrated to be himself both God and Word, who has embraced all creative power, and even more is power itself, and has an impulse to all good, and accomplishes all that he wills by having power concurrent with his intention, whose will and work is the life of existing things, by whom man was also led into life, having been adorned in godlike manner with all the best things. And since the only thing that is unalterable by nature is that which does not come into being through creation, but as many things as are brought into substantial being out of nonbeing by the uncreated nature, as soon as they begin to be as a result of change, always proceed by alteration, if they should act according to nature the alteration is always for the better for them, but if they should turn aside from the straight path, a movement toward opposite things takes its place. Since, then, man was also in the midst of these things, the changeable [part] of his nature fell to the opposite, and once the withdrawal of good things introduced every form of evil in order—so that by turning away from life death was introduced, and by the privation of light darkness resulted, and by the absence of virtue vice was introduced, and for every form of good a catalogue of opposites replaced them; having fallen among these things and the like out of thoughtlessness (for it was not possible for him who had turned away from prudence to be prudent, and for him who withdrew from wisdom to take any wise counsel)—by whom was it necessary for [man] to be recalled once more to the grace [he had] from the beginning? To whom belonged the setting upright of him who had fallen, the recall of him who had perished, the leading back by the hand of him who had gone astray? To whom other than to him who is altogether the Lord of nature? For it was at once both possible and fitting for him alone who had given life from the beginning also to recall him who perished, which we hear from the mystery of the truth, learning that God made man at the beginning and has saved him who has fallen.”

— St Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Discourse, 2.4.17-20