“If the whole cosmos was created in the image of the invisible God, in the First-born of creation, by him and for him, and if this latter resides in the world through the Church of which he is the head, then the world is in the final analysis a ‘body’ of God, who represents and expresses himself in this body in virtue of a principle of union that is not pantheistic but hypostatic.”
- Hans Urs von Balthasar
Reality itself is personal, and only discloses its true nature to those that approach it as such, intending a loving relationship.
Rather than personhood being something attained at a certain level of evolution or development in the cosmos, Norris Clarke claims that existence itself is personal, and all things that are not persons — rocks, dirt, your old car — are not persons because they are constricted in their being.
It is as if some constraining device diminished the personal aspects of beings, so they only existed in some diminished form.
Norris Clarke tells us,
“…. the person is not something added on to being as a special delimitation; it is simply what being is when allowed to be at its fullest, freed from the constrictions of subintelligent matter.”
There’s also a way in which the cosmos being a person is quite literal, Stephen R.L. Clark in his God, Religion and Reality writes :
“A human person requires a cosmos to sustain it: of anyone it is literally true that the whole world is her body, since the light of the sun, and the respiration of algae, are essential to her bodily survival.
If there is a human person who is God, then the whole world, centered on that person, is God’s body.
As further elements of that one body become obedient to God, the world is healed: we may, bizarrely, speak as if God’s body is at present maimed by human or demonic rebellion. On this account, perhaps, God renews His involvement with the world of finite things by making them His body (as once, before His limbs rebelled, it was).
Only because He is more than the cosmos can He heal the cosmos.
Incarnation gives us all that honest pantheists can really want: at present we are not God, but hope to join Him.”
St Maximos famously said that the Cosmos is fractured in five distinct ways.
We now live with the dualities of created and uncreated, intelligible and sensible, heaven and earth, paradise and universe, male and female.
Man, being microcosm and mediator of the spiritual and material, is called to heal these divisions within himself.
To unite heaven and earth by virtue, to unify the tangible and intelligible worlds by acquiring angelic gnosis, and to reunite by love the created and the uncreated.
We heal the Cosmos, Being itself, by letting God’s grace overcome these divisions within our own being
Andrew Louth writes that,
“All the divisions of the cosmos are reflected in the human being, so the human being is a microcosm, a ‘little cosmos’ (a term Maximus does not use explicitly here, though he does elsewhere).
As microcosm, the human person is able to mediate between the extremes of the cosmos, he is a ‘natural bond’ (physikos syndesmos), and constitutes the ‘great mystery of the divine purpose’.
Christopher Alexander is a British-American architect and designer, in his monumental study called The Nature of Order he claims that “life” is a quality not just of organisms, but of space, and therefore in some sense universal. He says :
“There is a sense in which the distinction between something alive and something lifeless is much more general, and far more profound, than the distinction between living things and nonliving things, or between life and death.
Things which are living may be lifeless; nonliving things may be alive. A man who is walking and talking can be alive; or he can be lifeless. Beethoven’s last quartets are alive; so are the waves at the ocean shore; so is a candle flame; a tiger may be more alive, because more in tune with its own inner forces, than a man.”
So, perhaps there is a sliding scale of both “aliveness” and “personhood” potentially sleeping in all matter.
Peter Leithart writes about the Irish philosopher William Desmond’s project :
“Thinghood has been de-selved, objectified, reified in a homogeneous neutralization of thereness; selfhood has been abstracted from things in their concretenes and hovers mathematically over the quantitative homogeneity of exeternality, ready to impose the categories of its mathesis on that homogeneity.”
As an alternative, Desmond suggests that we have to learn to think “beyond univocity,” and recognize the “aesthetic presencing” of things that “present themselves” and are recognized as such “when the mind as other is in proper community with them, in proper rapport with things.”
This is similar to Norris Clarke’s vision, as if things disclosed themselves to us by way of signs and symbols — he says beings are self-symbolizers.
Basically, he says beings are dynamic, relational, and self-comunicative byway of action and “signs”.
Just as phenomenology points out consciousness is intentional, of something, so too beings intend, or point to, some knower as signs.
Clarke says :
“Hence every self-communication of one being to another through action of one on the other necessarily brings forth a self-imaging, a self-expression, one might say a self-symbolization, of the cause in the effect.
If every being, then, turns out to include a natural dynamism toward self-communication through action, we can say truly, in more than a metaphorical sense, that every being is naturally a self-symbolizer, an icon or image-maker, in some analogous way like an artist, expressing itself symbolically, whether consciously or unconsciously. “
The great Catholic theologian Stratford Caldecott, in his essay, Is Life a Transcendental? broaches this subject, he writes,
“A stone, in other words, possesses a kind of interior life of low degree, which is related to the fact that God creates it from within, not without. It has a nature, into which God breathes existence: it receives the power of self-gift in the measure of its own essence.
It plays a part in the whole, and it may be fashioned into a statue or a building whose form is given to it by another. Its degree of aliveness increases depending on the ways in which it receives and gives itself. A beautiful, harmonious pattern contains more self-gift than an ugly or broken one. An animal contains more kenosis than a stone, or even a statue.”
Caldecott goes even further though, noting,
“my own existence implies that of others, and my flesh is porous to the influences and elements of the environment around me. In fact it is only for that reason that I am able to live at all, since the war against entropy depends on my not being a closed system.
This means that the whole world, in a sense, can be seen as an extension of my own body. The fact that I am alive, and that other creatures are alive, is a function of our connectedness to the world, including the inorganic world.
The inorganic is necessary to the organic; one might even say that it is given a meaning or brought to fruition by the organic, just as the organic (a Christian philosopher might add) culminates in the personal and is given a meaning by man.
Which is to say, if I may complete this thought, that the word as a whole must be alive if we are alive, since all inorganic elements are parts, more or less remote but nevertheless essential parts, of an organic process. In themselves, of course, viewed in isolation, these elements lack an animating soul.
But this is only one way of viewing them. In reality they are part of something much greater, to which we also belong, and this greater whole is alive. We recall that Plato in the Timaeus (at 30b) describes the world formed by god as “a living being, endowed thanks to his providence with soul and intelligence.”
He then explains his particular Catholic vision,
“An interior relationality binds the whole world together, and this is made explicit in the liturgy of the Church. It is by participating in man as priest of creation, and in his sacrifice perfected in the Eucharist, that all creatures, including the inanimate elements, achieve the fullness of their own being by giving themselves to God and thus sharing his eternal life.”
One can either think of this as the Person of God speaking through the Cosmos, or in a panentheistic way (NOT pantheism, the idea that the cosmos IS God) — that is, God and the world are inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world, which many have squared with St Maximus the Confessors philosophy.
This is certainly true upon more idealist philosophy’s, that matter, as many Quantum physicists say, arises from mind, as Rolland, David Bentley Hart’s dog, puts it,
‘If you believe that everything arises from an infinite act of mind — the rock over there no less than the intelligence in you — then you believe there’s a presence of a… of an infinite knowing logos within the discrete logos that constitutes each thing as what it is.
There’s a depth — even a personal depth, so to speak — in everything, an inner awareness that knows each reality from inside … or from deeper than inside — an act of knowing it’s *interior intimo suo*. There is *one* who knows what it’s like to be a rock.
And wouldn’t that infinite personal depth have to express itself, almost of necessity, in a finite and personal interiority of sorts? Surely the knowledge of what it is to be a rock is already the spirit of the rock *as* a rock — the rock knowing itself.
So isn’t that very knowledge of ‘what it’s like’ already the reality of a finite modality of personal knowledge, a kind of discrete spiritual self? A personal, reflective dimension as the necessarily contracted mode in which the uncontracted infinite act of mind is exemplified in that thing?
….All part of an endlessly complex, infinitely divisible hierarchy of conscious perspectives, containing and contained, reflecting and inflecting in one another. And the subjectivity of persons, too, like me — and I suppose you too, in a manner of speaking — would be one mind of modal contraction within the total hierarchy of modes of mind, an ever more particular and ever more comprehensive subjectivity and autoaffection and intentionality.”
Stratford Caldecott ends his own reflections thus :
“Briefly put, even if the world as a whole cannot convincingly be said to be “alive” right now, it will be alive when it attains its end.
It is not alive yet, because the cosmic Fall has introduced death into it. Life — the life of God, that is, Trinitarian life — has not yet been fully revealed.
Death has not yet been defeated, except in principle, by Christ. It is the eschaton that will reveal the true nature of the world that, right now, is still “groaning” to be born.
We might speak of a “personalized” cosmos, a world that through union with Christ becomes a kind of theological person — namely the Church in her cosmic extension.
And if the world is, or is becoming, a person, it is also, or is becoming, alive. The Holy Spirit is coming to “renew the face of the earth,” by filling all things with the life of God — and “death shall be no more”.
