Perennial Transcendence and Giving the Gift of Creation

Being primarily yet another installation in my reflections on St. Dumitru Stăniloae’s work—and specifically, on The Experience of God, Volume 2—but also incorporating some ideas from Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos, who I have begun to read with great profit, this article builds on and branches out from themes I have discussed previously in For What and For Whom Is the World? At the outset, I would like to note that much of my thinking here resounds in an eschatological key, focusing on the spiritual dynamics involved in right relations between God, man, and world; as such, though I do not speak in much detail of the fallen state of man and the world¹, nor the effects of sin, I certainly affirm them. I thus proceed as one fallen, of Adam’s seed, longing for God from within a fallen world. In what follows, I explore the notion of transcendence vis-à-vis man’s inherently creative spiritual life of giving and receiving gifts in dialogical communion with God. Man’s creativity is neither an aimless outlet for his subjectivity nor without transcendent purpose, as one might suspect if his only example of it were the increasingly self-relational expressions of the various forms of postmodern art to which we have become so accustomed. However, my subject here is not postmodernity, nor my purpose to soapbox about its plenteous pitfalls, so I summarily digress. Rather, and in stark contrast, man’s creativity is given for the purpose of his giving himself back reciprocally to God and other persons through creation—having received himself and all of creation initially as a gift from Him—as an original and collaborative work of intelligible, artistic beauty and thanksgiving. This dialogue of giving and receiving gifts comprises the spiritual garden of man’s communion with God, and these gifts are its fruit. Since creativity is integral to man’s ability to fashion such gifts and is a distinctive mode and revelation of his human form of life as an image of God, let us begin by considering briefly the notion of life vis-à-vis God, man, and the world, focusing on their spiritually dynamic relation.

All forms of life, at all levels—from the amoeba, to the sycamore tree, to the busy family’s pet golden retriever, to the father’s reading his son the book of Ecclesiastes, to the desert-dwelling hesychast enveloped by God through the prayer of the heart—are, to various degrees of clarity and depth, expressions of the life and communion of the Holy Trinity, the infinitely transcendent, tripersonal God who in generosity created and bestows all things as gift, sustains all things in love, and cultivates all things providentially toward their perfection in the Word. Since they are gifts of God to man, given to him for his spiritual benefit, and ultimately his deification, man possesses the ability to call all living creatures—and, indeed, potentially all creatures more broadly—to participate in his trajectory of spiritual transcendence by fashioning them as gifts to give back freely to God in reciprocation and thanksgiving. This transcendence unfolds out of man’s free, creative activity, which is the manifestation of his divine vocation of participation in God’s ongoing act of creation—of making all things eschatologically real. Accordingly, humans can present other humans as gifts to God and each other by rearing them in the faith and assisting their development toward spiritual maturity. Creatures below man in the created order too, through their teleological relation to him, can themselves be incorporated into his life and so ascend with him and in him, to the extent their natures are capable, into the higher levels of spiritual transcendence he achieves, and thereby be presented to God as gifts. Such ascension, of course, is predicated on Christ’s ascension to the Father and depends on man’s free response—by grace and in the Holy Spirit—to God’s initial loving call. Apart from humans and lower forms of life, even what is considered inanimate can be called up in man to have its being in the highest forms of spiritual life and activity, such as when gold becomes a communion chalice in the Eucharist. Man’s living—and, in a derivative sense, that of all created things in him—is described in its eschatological significance by Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos, who, presenting the thought of St. Maximus the Confessor, says:

Living, then, is the fullness of being, its authentic realization; for Maximus, to be ultimately means to live in an absolute sense, i.e., to live immortally. And this immortal life is possible only as communion with the Trinitarian God within the eucharistic experience of the perpetual circulation of gifts (being as gift from above, life as a gift to the others, the world as a human gift to God) in the Church.²

The telos of man, the purpose and eschatological end of his life, is eternal dialogue in communion with God through Christ, who, being God incarnate as man, is becoming incarnated in all those of his flock given Him by His Father, and, indeed, in all of creation through synergy with His human Body, the Church. Thus, for the whole of humanity, and, by extension, for the whole of the created order, Christ is the true Way into the endless depths of Trinitarian communion—man’s deification in solidarity with Him in kenotic self-offering as gift of love to God and neighbor, his spiritualization by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and, on this basis, his adoption in Christ as son of the Father by grace. Having been created to be king and priest of all creation, man in Christ consciously draws into himself the whole of creation—which God has put under his feet eschatologically in Christ—and transforms it through the spiritual operation of his free will, bringing it into participation with his own spiritualization and deification. Through this process, man becomes more like God, in whose image he was made, and all of creation under him becomes thereby humanized and, ultimately, spiritualized and deified through its relation to him as the unified conscious contents of human subjectivity, and through its functioning as words within eternal divine-human dialogue.

God created all things in their multiplicity as an interconnected unity. Through his rational mind, man can, even now, apprehend a weakened form of this unity despite the fallen and fractured condition of the world in the present age. Christ came to save this world, and as God in Him heals its wounds by the Spirit—who sheds abroad divine love in the heart of man, and through man into the world—the unity of creation will deepen as all things become more real, through man, in their infinite movement toward the perfection of unity in the communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—absolute personal Reality—who, as three Persons sharing completely in the divine essence, called all existing things into being out of nothing for the purpose, eschatologically, of making them truly real through participation in their communion of love. Such is the wondrous work of God. In this trajectory from non-being into eschatological reality, the symphonic movement of creation—itself having a hierarchical structure of myriad nested meanings and purposes, all pointing to their mutually ultimate meaning and purpose in the Word—tends infinitely upward as it progresses, yet all together in an orderly and harmonious circular dance around God, according to the form of communion between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Regarding this motion, St. Dumitru says:

The motion of spiritual beings is movement of ascension, which will last eternally. St. Gregory Palamas said: "The proof for this hiddenness beyond all knowledge is Moses' desire, request, and ascent toward a more and more acute seeing, but also the continuous advance of the angels and of the saints in the endless age toward ever clearer visions..." The created subject never comes to an end in the act of understanding the absolute subject. But this movement is at the same time given the name of stability because the motion is maintained permanently in its path. This is the stability of angels. "How is it that they both stand and also move? It is clear that they do stand, assisting [at the throne], but they also move toward that illumination. For, although the universe, to give it this name, moves circularly, it is also eternally mobile and unmoved. It is unmoved as a whole for it does not pass from one place to another, but it is eternally in motion according to its parts. So it is with the heavenly Perichoresis. For it, too, is stable in an eternally mobile way, as it were remaining fixed turning eternally round its center and inclining toward it, which is not the case with linear motion.”³

At the heart of man’s ascendant spiritualization lies the notion of transcendence. Broadly construed, it is the creative work of man, aided by the angels, which actualizes the world’s transformation into higher states of spirituality; this transformation occurs on the basis of man’s ontological exegesis of and response to the infinite depth of potential meaning and purpose latent within each of God’s creatures and in all their relations, and, as such, has a genuinely dialogical character. Put simply, man’s creative activity is a response to God’s, and a dialogue is possible between them because God made man in His image expressly for this purpose. God initiated this dialogue by creating man, but all His creative activity before this crowning event—and, indeed, even His initial act of creation per se—was teleologically oriented toward this higher purpose of bringing man into dialogical communion with Himself. By this, we can see that God’s very first act was to prepare a gift for man’s birthday; and, more generally, we can see that God has set the precedent of gift-giving as the foundational teleological dynamic of communal dialogue. Thus, for both God and man, the ultimate purpose of their creative activity is gift-giving.

The spiritual fulfillment of the world—which can be conceived as a gift given and received mutually by both God and man, imprinted with the consciously and freely expressed creativity of both, and to be enjoyed together in eternal communion—occurs in Christ, the Word, who is Himself both God and man; this fulfillment is actualized by the progressive deepening of communion between man and God in Christ, which communion is manifested through the development of higher forms of dialogue between them. For man’s dialogue with God to become increasingly spiritually sophisticated, he must continue to expand his capacity to cognize deeper levels of the meaning and purpose inherent in creation by becoming continuously more spiritually pure and thereby rendering the world more perfectly transparent of a God whose depths are interminable. Indeed, “[t]o the pure, all things are pure…” (Titus 1:15) and “[b]lessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). St. Dumitru says:

[T]he world has a meaning only because, being malleable, it can be led toward a mode of existence that is higher and eternal, toward the perfect truth or good that consists in love and union between God and the world, between humans and God, and among humans themselves, that is, only if the world is seen as a transparency that grows finer and finer to promote the relationship of total love between humans and God and among humans themselves.

Creation has been ordered in such a way that it might be a place where God can speak and work with this purpose in view and where we can respond to God through our words and deeds and set out on the path of this developing communion that God has willed. Creation fulfills its purpose when it continues to remain a place wherein our human being can undertake a dialogue of some sort with God. For this dialogue can grow only if the world continues to be seen, at least in part, as a gift of God, a foundation for the higher gift of salvation through which the world will be delivered from its present state of corruptibility and death.⁴

Accordingly, a peculiar kind of upward movement—a transcendence of love—is essential to the the world’s “being led toward a mode of existence that is higher and eternal”. Man’s perennial loving transcendence of the world and spiritual ascent to God are interdependent and complementary, together making possible the eschatological fulfillment of the meanings and purposes of all things, for, in its very constitution, as mentioned above, all of creation is teleologically bound to him. Where man goes, so goes the world. This kind of transcendence of the world vis-à-vis the development and growth of man’s communion with an infinitely transcendent God is a movement upward, a perpetual rising beyond himself and the world, but one through which man does not abandon what has been transcended; rather, what has been transcended is seen in new light, and as having significance which has not previously been grasped. To the one who transcends, what has been transcended opens itself up to purposes higher than before conceivable. Indeed, for the spiritualization of creation—its fulfillment of meaning and purpose—to occur, it must be assimilated by the consciousness of man so that he might engage it rationally and exert himself creatively upon it; such labor requires man to stand transcendently above and outside those things upon which he is so working, precisely so that he might put them, consciously and intelligently, into new and fruitful relations with one another. But once he has done such creative work in the Spirit and thereby offered it up to God as gift, he must transcend again even the fruit of this labor, ever continuing to bring his creations into the new levels of spiritual life he has attained in God, further into their infinitely progressive fulfillment of meaning and purpose, and ever putting them to new and higher creative use for the glory of God, lest he mistakenly come to suppose that any given static form of the world is ultimate and thereby fashion himself an idol.

Simultaneous to the upward movement of man’s infinite and perpetual transcendence of the world as it ascends in him toward God is God’s downward condescension from His heights beyond infinity down to each new spiritual level man reaches, where He awaits him joyously. Indeed, it is in this very process of performing such Spirit-imbued creative labor that man, in Christ, rises higher toward God in fulfillment of his own eschatological meaning and purpose, which is eternal creative dialogue within the trinitarian communion. Via these movements—God's and his own—of condescending and transcending love—man is able continually to see all things revealed in new light, to grasp endlessly new dimensions of their meaning, and thereby to carry on his creative labor anew with expanded capacity. God is both the ultimately transcendent axis and immanent energizer of this movement, but, in Christ, man himself becomes its center of gravity relative to the rest of creation, and through his work participates in this divine energizing of love which propels the communal dance onward and upward eternally. This spiral of spiritualization toward and within God involves man’s loving and being loved by both God and other human persons (not to exclude the rest of creation under man and the holy angels who serve him according to God’s will); and yet, because Christ is also man through the Incarnation, He experiences and participates alongside us in our love of God and creation both vertically and horizontally according to the cruciform axes of this dance. To visually represent the shape of this movement, imagine a cross turning about its vertical axis and moving upward, with its arms moving inward, drawing all things in its orbit into the infinite depths of its loving embrace. The combined motion of love in these two directions form a helical shape and is described by St. Dumitru as follows:

This universal ascent is eternal. Dionysius the Areopagite understood it as a helical movement around God that draws continuously nearer to him, a kind of “column of the infinite" in ascending motion that simultaneously approaches nearer to God. This eternal movement goes in the direction of the divine persons of the Holy Trinity, and especially toward the Son of God who, seated as man on the divine throne, manifests in a thoroughly transparent manner the depth of his life and judgments through his humanity. St. John Chrysostom, on the basis of St. Paul's words in Eph 1:10 and Col 1:20, said that the angels, too, have been recapitulated together with the human person in the common head of the Church, which is Christ, and have thereby drawn closer to one another (see Heb 12:22-23).⁵

This spiritual helix of love and communion carries creation—within man, within Christ—into the infinite depths of life shared by the divine Persons in eternal communion; man plumbs these depths through apprehending the uncreated meanings and purposes of all things, which exist eternally in the Word and are given to him as gifts to be reciprocated by his response of freely and creatively working to actualize more fully and more perfectly these meanings and purposes for the benefit both of all men and the whole of creation. Such creative work is the distinctly human mode of man’s refashioning God’s initial gift of creation into one new to be given reciprocally back to God. Because the dynamic of this endless exchange of gifts between man and God is distinctly eucharistic, not only is such a divine-human dialogue only possible through the incarnation of the Word, it is precisely the means by which Christ becomes, through man’s participation, incarnate in the whole of creation. Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos, in his work, A Eucharistic Ontology, describes the dynamic at the heart of this incarnational and eucharistic process brilliantly:

The innumerable distributions of Christ and His saving purposes are His multiple eucharistic incarnations, which give substance to the movement that brings individual believers into one universal whole, i.e., incorporates the many in the One—the movement that follows the eucharistic distribution of the One to the many. It is evident at this point that pneumatologically, this eucharistic incarnation is formed primarily within each believer. Christ thus seems to assume every human act/energy in a synergy where human act forms a gift to God, while God gives back the divinization of this act. These multiple incarnations of Christ for the sake of those who participate in Him, His multiple acts of kenotic interpenetration and self-offering, constitute the many different ways in which he assumes all the "houses" and "ranks" and "states" through which human longing for God passes, and transforms them into divine gifts through the Eucharist, i.e., through a synergetic dialogue of love between man and God.⁶

God’s gift of creation, in its myriad unified folds and facets of potentially infinite realizable meaning, is waiting to be grasped by the powers of the human soul imbued with the Holy Spirit and, after having been creatively transformed, given back to God anew as a distinctly human gift, who in turn blesses what is offered as a genuinely unique and peculiar means by which all may then experience new frontiers in God, such that man ultimately receives back from Him, multiplied, all he offers up in thanksgiving—pressed down, shaken together, running over (Luke 6:38). Eschatologically, as man steps into the fullness of communion with God, his very act of giving gifts to Him itself becomes their reception back from Him because, when man is in perfect communion with God, all things are his in Christ, who, as the first-born of all creation, shares with his brothers and co-heirs all that is His. Fr. Nikolaos says:

“Not only God Himself but also all of us reciprocally distribute the gifts, as they consist in our own offerings to the community, transformed in the Spirit. So the distributed gifts are God’s and ours at the same time: Eucharist thus becomes the matrix of a universal gift-giving and gift-sharing.”⁷

The spiritual ascent of all things in man through his perennial transcendence of the world, in its characteristic helical motion, can also be said to be man’s participation in the ascension of Christ. In His ascension, the Incarnate Word and Son of God, having taken human nature as His own and perfected it on the cross, ascends to His Father in the utmost heights of heaven and, as the archetypally perfect gift, presents Him the human being in the fullness of his eschatological glory—a gift which, in its perfection, contains all possible gifts within it. Man is left, in Christ, with the task of discovering, fashioning, and presenting to the Father all these gifts hidden as potential in his relation to the world. We are reminded of what the Spirit tells us in the Proverbs: “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out” (Proverbs 25:2).  Through man’s progress in this eternal adventure on which God sent him, all things continue their paradoxical movement both deeper into and toward the transcendently brilliant core of the divine Sun, which even now, in this age, peeks—albeit imperceptibly to most—over the horizon of this world, whose radiant light, shining forth through creatures more clearly and brightly as they draw ever closer to it, reveals progressively their infinite depth of meaning, and conveys to all who have eyes to see the endless brilliance of God’s love-infused wisdom—a wisdom He shares freely, and through which man further develops his creativity, enabling him to offer and receive from God continually greater and more profound gifts—deepening the communion between them. In this trajectory of supercosmic transcendence in Christ to the Father, man must maintain, in love and humility, an orientation of spiritual openness and responsible care toward others in their personal particularity—and all the multiplicity of creatures more broadly in their respective peculiar modes of expressing the character of their Creator—while at the same time generously using his freedom to convey his own unique creative contribution to the communal divine-human project of bringing creation to fullness of being. Indeed, genuine communion between persons implies a dynamic balance of these two dispositions. Such kenotic spiritual openness and caring curiosity aid in man’s clear intellective apprehension of the complex array of meaning inherent in all things, helping him consolidate it coherently within unitive consciousness, but these must be accompanied by a loving disposition toward the creative action necessary to fashion gifts. Without the latter, there is no dialogue, no transformation, and only a limited, stagnant spiritual transcendence. Thus, meanings gleaned in this way should never be taken as ends in themselves, but as always not only pointing to something beyond themselves but calling the person to move beyond them toward the other persons—and, ultimately, Divine Persons—to which they point. All things were made for Christ, having not only their existence, but also finding the consummation of their meaning, in Him; and when human images of Christ become the transparent likeness of their divine Archetype, they become, by grace, inexhaustible sources of energy, newness, and life. In communion, they constitute for each other both personal destinations of ever-moving spiritual rest and abundant wellsprings of creativity. Having characterized human nature as involving intrinsically both personhood and freedom, St. Dumitru characterizes personalized nature as follows:

Personalized nature feels in itself the power that comes to it from full relation to the nature found in other persons because it can thereby be continually both source and continuous recipient of new acts and thoughts that are generous, good, and at the same time original, for in every person nature finds an original expression of itself while remaining simultaneously in communion with all other persons. By its openness and the reciprocal enrichment it receives in these positive relationships between persons, nature understood in this way is profoundly human and creative.⁸

What is seen of human creativity in this age, genuinely wonderful though it may be, is nevertheless limited by the heaviness of sin and uncooperative disposition of the natural order toward fallen man. In this world, human persons in various degrees of communion with each other and God carry out their creative dialogue by acting freely in proportion to their spiritual purity, but do so through the mediation of a created order weighed down by natural causality; through spiritual maturity and development in Christlikeness, even now man may experience some lightening of this burden, as indeed the Church has experienced from its beginnings through the present in its beloved saints—but especially in the Lord Jesus Christ, the first fruits of man’s resurrection, through His countless miracles, which He worked in the 1st century, and works still. For now, in Christ we bear the cross of our sufferings and sin-imposed limitations, but when the Sun rises, when Christ comes in power and great glory, we will know the Truth and thereby be set entirely and eschatologically free. St. Dumitru gives a lucid description of the world’s potential for supporting the full transcendent expression of man’s creativity:

At every point within each causal series the world still allows for the choice of many causal directions, indeed even for the realization of certain effects which surpass the effects that lie within the power of natural causality. But the world no longer affords the possibility to make easy use of the whole of its malleable character, while among humans it is rare to find those who by their efforts acquire enough spiritual force from their link with the divine energy as to overcome natural causality itself and open up an exit from it and at the same time a prospect of the future dawning of the full meaning of existence and of the fullness of life, goodness, and genuine spirituality.⁹

Ultimately, man’s continual apprehension of deeper meanings in creation helps him build a lexicon to enable higher forms of creative dialogue in holy communion with the divine persons of the Trinity. The Father is the absolute, boundless, and inexhaustible source of all goodness, in whose bosom is the true destination of all things being made real, where dwells their fullness of meaning, purpose, and being: Christ. As the crown of creation, man finds his eschatological abode in Christ the eternal Word, who has united human nature to the divine in His very person and brought it in perfected form to the Father as the epitomic gift. And by God’s good pleasure and generosity, man has been specially created in His image to be the personal being in whom all the rest of creation finds its ontological consummation. I conclude with the words of the Apostle Paul, who never fails to express, in his characteristic sweeping grandeur, the ineffable glory of the gift in heaven which awaits those who love Christ: all things united in Him.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace which he lavished upon us. For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

In him, according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will, we who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of his glory. In him you also, who have heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and have believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, which is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.¹⁰

1. For a clear presentation of the sin which led to the fall of man and the dynamics thereof, among other pertinent related themes, see St. Dumitru Stăniloae‘s The Experience of God, Volume 2 (specifically chapter six).

2. Loudovikos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity, p. 29.

3. Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 2, p. 145.

4. Ibid., pp. 172-173.

5. Ibid., p. 146.

6. Loudovikos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity, p. 36.

7. Ibid., p. 40.

8. Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 2, p. 153.

9. Ibid., p. 173.

10. Ephesians 1:3-14