Word Becoming World Becoming Word: Creation as Divine-Human Dialogos

General Note Regarding This Publication

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Before cycling through yet another reflection on some of the major recurring themes in my writing (i.e., the God-world relation, eschatology, creation/creativity, teleology, communion, personal dialogue, and the role of Christ as the God-man in all these things), I would like to say a few words about what I am doing in this publication—The Cud Chewer. Generally speaking, I am working out my own understanding of the world through dialogue with others: digesting their writings, regurgitating them in the form of my own thoughts, chewing on the resultant cud, and translating that into digestible written form for others to chew along with me. Each of my articles, then, can be viewed as another iteration in a broader process of digesting the communal cud and regurgitating it as my own for others to chew. Due to the perpetually recurring nature of this kind of activity, and the static form of written and published articles, imperfection doubtless abounds; but each time I take up the cud to chew anew, these theological themes reveal themselves to me as having deeper interconnections than I previously realized. So, in short, I see The Cud Chewer as a medium of personal discovery both for myself through others and potentially for others through me. Being grateful to you as my readers, I ask for your mercy and forgiveness for any impurities present in the cud I offer you; and accordingly, I ask you always to help me chew them out. With that, I conclude this digression.

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Commencing, then, let us consider the following two passages from Scripture as our point of departure:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.¹

“I do not pray for these [disciples] only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one,I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom thou hast given me, may be with me where I am, to behold my glory which thou hast given me in thy love for me before the foundation of the world.”²

In the first passage, God intimates through His prophet Isaiah that His thoughts and ways are ineffably higher than those of man; if such is the case with God in relation to man, who is the teleological crown and convergence point of all His creative works, then how much more does God  transcend the rest of creation in all its various aspects and characteristics; theologically speaking, this suggests that, as its Creator, He is essentially distinct from His creation, having spoken it into existence out of nothing through His Word (John 1:1-3). This Word is the Personal, pre-eternal point of origin through which time, space, and all their inhabitants began. Accordingly, God and creation are asymmetrically related in that creation has an absolute ontological dependence on God that God does not reciprocally share with creation, for He is beyond any beginning or end—or any graspable reality at all. But in spite of all this, is this very God, whose throne is heaven and footstool the earth, not communicating these words about Himself to the prophet Isaiah?

Indeed, God’s essential transcendence vis-à-vis creation does not imply that He, as Person, is impassably aloof, glancing down indifferently at the world from the ineffable heights beyond infinity; for God’s very Son became man through the Incarnation of the Word, and, as man, walked the earth, ate with His disciples, sent His chosen Apostles into the nations to proclaim the Gospel, and prayed for those who would come to believe in Him through their word—and all this without the slightest diminishing of His divine nature. Paradoxically, we have a God who is perfect Creator, Sustainer, and Savior of all, and yet He was born in Bethlehem, flesh and blood, of Mary, the Theotokos. In the second passage, Christ prays that His faithful may be one as He and the Father are one. Christ, as both God and man, desires that all who believe might come to share, as equals with Him, in His eternal communion with the Father. The more one dwells on this prayer of Christ, the more astonishing become its implications: man, who was in the beginning given dominion over the earth and, eschatologically, is tasked with transforming creation eucharistically into the very Kingdom of God, is to become thereby one with Him in Christ, an equal dialogical partner in this eternal communion of love—to become divine as the Word became flesh. Christ’s human birth is man’s divine birth, the latter occurring at the level of particular person first in Christ and after His resurrection and ascension in all other particular persons who are incorporated into His communal Body by faith. It is through their identity with Christ by eucharistic incorporation into His body that particular human persons come to share in Christ’s very communion with the Father, becoming one unified corporate Body with the Word as its supreme Hypostasis.

In addition to the above two passages from Isaiah and John, in order to anchor what follows, I provide a lengthy excerpt from St. Maximus the Confessor’s Ambiguum 10, in which, by way of comparing natural and written law (i.e., the Holy Scriptures), he expounds on the reciprocally analogous structures of world as word and and word as world, suggesting that there is one Logos to whom they both ultimately point:

The natural law, on the one hand, is to the highest possible degree evenly directed by reason through the marvelous physical phenomena that we see, which are naturally interconnected, so that the harmonious web of the universe is contained within it like the various elements in a book. For letters and syllables it has physical bodies, these being the first things that come to our attention, since they are proximate and particular, having acquired density through the conjunction of various qualities. It also has words, which are more universal than these, and are further removed from us and much more subtle, and it is from these that the Word, who has wisely inscribed them and is Himself ineffably inscribed within them, is rendered legible when He is read by us, communicating to us solely the concept that He exists, and not what He is, for through the reverent combination of multiple impressions gathered from nature, He leads us to a unitary idea of the truth, allowing Himself to be seen by analogy through visible things as their Creator. The written law, on the other hand, the knowledge of which is acquired through study, is itself like another world, constituted by all that has been wisely uttered within it, having its own heaven, earth, and what comes between them, by which I mean ethical, natural, and theological philosophy, proclaiming the ineffable power of the One who has spoken through it, showing that, by virtue of their reciprocal interchange, the one law is identical to the other, so that the written law is potentially identical to the natural law, and the natural law is by its permanent condition identical to the written law. Both laws simultaneously reveal and conceal the same Word: the one through written words and whatever is visible, and the other through ideas and whatever is hidden.³

St. Maximus here strongly associates the natural with the written law—the former defining the principles of order and dynamics of all things according to their natures, and the latter defining the principles according to which these natures become actualized according to God’s will—precisely because the one Logos, Jesus Christ, is the mediator of all dialogue between God and creation, a dialogue which is the mode of its eschatological development, containing within Himself both the principles of natural and written law.

Pre-eternally, from the foundation of the world, God thinks and wills the perfection of all things, from the cosmos as a whole to each of its particular creatures. Because He fashioned creation as an ontological unity harmonized and conducted by natural law (though in its initial state—and especially post-fall—the full potential depth of this unity is unrealized), all its resident beings are inextricably interconnected, interdependent, and mutually referential, deriving their purposes, meanings, and reasons in terms of one another—but foundationally from God’s will for all of them as a whole and each of them in particular. These are the logoi, God’s uncreated thought-wills regarding His creatures; they are alternatively referred to as the “divine reasons” or “inner principles” of things, depending on authorial emphasis. St. Dumitru Stăniloae says:

The divine reasons are not only meanings of the divine Logos's infinitely deep richness, but they are also rays of divine life and power which radiate from the ocean of life and power that is hypostasized in the Son and Word of God as well as in the Father and the Holy Spirit. Created things, too, as rational images of these rays radiating from them, are therefore units of power and life. Their ultimate substratum is the energy which has in itself a meaning or a complexity of meanings. This energy includes in itself the tendencies of certain indefinite interferences, which produce those units that are connected among them. Created things are the created images of the divine reasons given material form, images filled with power and carried by the tendency of innumerable references among themselves. In the state of these images given material form are reflected the meaning. the power, and the life of the divine reasons in their unity, which comes from the divine Logos.⁴

In pointing out these different dimensions of the logoi, St. Dumitru sheds light on a subtle but profound truth about them—namely, that their corresponding essences are not static images which imprison beings within a self-enclosed necessity, in the sense of being mere passive reflections of an unchanging God, but rather are dynamic “predestinations” determined by His free creative will and which leave room for man’s genuine freedom of response within a synergetic, dialogical, and divine-human co-creation. Fr. Nikolaos emphasizes this point: “Thus we are according to our divine logos, but we can also act according to it in order to fulfill it in freedom, and in dialogue with our Creator”⁵. Once created, existent creatures are expressions or icons of these uncreated thought-wills, though they are themselves created, being distinct in essence from the consubstantial Persons of the Trinity, but nonetheless expressions thereof, and meant to develop into deeper likeness with their respective logoi through their being spoken as words in the divine-human dialogue. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, divine persons in perfect eternal communion, constitute, in their perichoresis, the archetypal form of being toward and into which all creatures and the whole of creation were intentionally made to progress. In this way, God thus inheres and energizes in all things, actively willing their eschatological perfection in His Word, having brought them into existence as potential words to be spoken. Creation itself is a dialogical medium. Creatures’ eschatological perfection is realized through a progressive deepening of communion with God, a communion which is intrinsically eucharistic and dialogical. Such a dialogical “becoming-in-communion", as Fr. Loudovikos puts it, can occur only hypostatically in Christ on the basis of the Incarnation, through which He assumed the human nature without any change to His divinity. Indeed, God’s love for His creation spurred Him to send His Son into the world, in a uniquely special way, to become human in the fullest sense of becoming. But why did He opt to become human? Because humanity is the highest expression of God’s creative work and the natural teleological center in and through which all created things are brought eucharistically into the perfect trinitarian unity of God—precisely because the human logos is that through which all of creation becomes spoken as words in man’s free, interpersonal dialogue with God Himself. This reciprocal, conversational movement of divine-human dialogue is the eschatological movement of becoming for both God and the world: God’s becoming God-for-the-world through the world’s becoming the macroanthropic world-for-God. Fr. Loudovikos characterizes this dynamic as follows:

[T]he world, along with human nature, is an already graceful analogical gift of God to man, while the latter's possible dialogical gift to God is this world as Eucharist; that means that man offers to God the gift of a possibility to be also a God-for-the-world, while He is always a God in Himself.⁶

Creatures find their eschatological meanings by being conveyed as words in this dialogue—spoken first by God as logoi made into created hypostatic essences, and second by man’s dialogical response of synergetically actualizing/fulfilling these essences in accordance with their corresponding archetypal logoi—and no other than Christ Himself is able, as man, to speak these words perfectly in response to His Father. By becoming God’s human partner in this dialogue, Christ brings humanity, deified in communion with Him, into the conversation as equals, bringing all things through man into His divine hypostatic mode of existence. Drawing out the eschatological significance of the doctrine of the logoi vis-à-vis created being, Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos says:

[T]hat which is derived from the Maximian doctrine of logoi, is first, that each being is unique and unrepeatable as it consists of a unique uncreated call to existence out of nothing, thus being a created effect of God's divine will. In God's providence, all these unique beings are put in a process of possible unification as an image of divine eternal unity, without separation or confusion—a process or a becoming that can be promoted by human agency only. This is because only logical creatures can also respond to God's uncreated call and proceed to a conversation with Him, concerning the mode of existence of the given essences. No created being or part of any created being can be left out of this dialogue, which can be finally conceived as a reciprocal/dialogical exchange of gifts out of love. This exchange forms a full eschatological ontology of participation, by grace, in the Trinitarian mode of existence, conveying step by step, homoousion to creation.⁷

And so the Word becomes world through the actualization of created natures in accordance with their corresponding logoi, which exist eternally in the one Logos; and the world becomes the word of man as he, through participation in the divine logoi, enters into a transformative dialogue with God in the Word. God initiates this dialogue through creation, which involves His proceeding ecstatically out of Himself for the purpose of bestowing all things with genuine otherness and making them distinct creatures, while at the same time willing that they, from their condition of genuine otherness, return to Him perfected by incorporation into deified humanity in Christ through the rational medium of eucharistic dialogue. Because of the participatory dynamic of creatures’ active relation to God, they return into the bosom of their Creator in perfect unity without losing the gift of their otherness—and in fact, through this process, become their increasingly distinct eschatological selves opened in communion to all other things without becoming ontologically confused with them. The unity toward which this movement tends is rooted in and explained by the fundamental unity of the logoi (God’s uncreated thought-wills) as one Logos, who is uncreated, eternal, and consubstantial with the Father and Spirit.

Because the existence and coherence of each creature depends on its logos—which logos, as a non-exhaustive expression of God’s essence, is therefore distinct from it—God transcends all things essentially, but inheres in all things energetically, opening up the possibility for creation’s synergistic response to His will through the will of each creature. Par excellence, this response occurs through the free will of man, which God lovingly and gracefully bestows for the purpose of his personal response to God’s calling him into a genuine dialogue with Himself through His Word—a dialogue which encompasses the whole of created nature—commencing a divine-human, co-creative adventure into the eschaton of His infinite love. Through this active and progressive fulfillment of their essences, God becomes, to that extent, more fully their God because they are being transformed in accordance with His will through man in Christ, who is God’s High Priest of creation, and are being conveyed as words in a dialogue through which man comes to know God more intimately as He truly is. Fr. Nikolaos sums up these dynamics beautifully:

[C]reated being is returned back to its Creator as a free and unconditional gift to Him, according to Maximus, i.e., as a eucharistia, a thanksgiving to God as He is the first Who gives creation to itself out of love. In this way only, creation is really a gift back to God because it comes out of free intentional and unconditional love emerging from a real and free created otherness. Thus what is offered to God, as we have already said, is the possibility of His becoming a God for the created world, fulfilling eschatologically created beings' natures, i.e., transforming them in His Body; created beings themselves really exist in this dialogical process which makes them co-creators of their own unknown and mysterious final being. Thus the reality of evil can also be partially overcome, and the resurrection of the dead, i.e., the final victory over death, is anticipated. As this ontology of being shared and returned is a Eucharistic Ontology, then the very initiator must inevitably be the only completely eucharistic being we know: Jesus Christ. Christ is God completely and kenotically offered to man out of love and man freely and eucharistically offered out of love to God, and thus we have man as the intention of God and God as the intention of man, the logoi of God and the logoi of man in an absolutely kenotic, dialogical reciprocity, by the mystery of the Cross.⁸

In light of all this, we can begin to ascertain the ultimate purpose of God’s creation: to exist in a state of eternal becoming, as the medium of conversation between God and a genuinely personal other: man. Jesus Christ, our brother and Lord, is the hypostatic reality in which the divine and created natures—summed up in the human nature—are brought into union and thus communication with one another, without ever a confusion of one with the other, leading to the possibility of true dialogue-in-communion between God as Person and man as His personal likeness. To give him the last word, St. Dumitru captures the intimate relation between God, man, and world as follows:

Every human person is a thinking word in a dialogue with the Personal, divine Word and with the other human, personal words. Each human person absorbs power from the divine Word and also from the power of things as he gathers reasons in his thought as well as their power in his life. As he communicates these reasons to others, he receives from them their communication, and thus he deepens both his relation with the divine Logos and his understanding of their origin and meaning.⁹

1. Isaiah 55:8-11

2. John 17:20-24

3. St. Maximus the Confessor (Translated by Maximos Constas), , On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, pp. 195-97.

4. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 3, the Person of Jesus Christ as God and Savoir, p. 1.

5. Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor's Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity, p. 224.

6. Ibid, p. 233.

7. Ibid, p. 217.

8. Ibid, p. 214.

9. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 3, the Person of Jesus Christ as God and Savoir, p. 2.