4. Toward a Theological Methodology of Mediation with Science

Philosophy and Apophaticism – Scientific Monism and Apophaticism –

Antithetic Dialectics and Antinomial Monodualism – Theological Apophaticism and Transcendental Philosophy – The logoi of Creation and the World –

The logoi of Creation and Antinomies – Hypostatic Dimension in Theistic Inferences from Creation – The Universe as “Hypostatic Inherence” in the

Logos of God

As established in chapter 3, mediation between theology and science requires the use of philosophical language, not as the highest capacity of reason, which transcends both theology and science, but rather as a tool to express both the differences and the similarities between the two. Theology and science, seen in abstract philosophical definitions, constitute two different but related ontological systems. Simply saying that philosophical expression of theological views can be characterized as ontologi­cal dualism will not express the meaning of theology in full, for God, being tran­scendent to the world, still exercises his will in order to overbridge the gulf between himself and the world and to become known to men. The transcendence of God implies God’s immanence to the world, although the being of God in himself will always be a hidden and mysterious essence.²⁰²1 This means that no simple philosophi­cal formula exists to describe the relationship between God and humankind, between God and the world.       The philosophy thus required to express this mystery must undergo a change in which ordinary logic is replaced by “logic of mystery” (called an open epistemology in? chapter 3). This demand can easily be comprehended if one remembers that any formal theological statements, in whatever language they are expressed, never exhaust the truth about God and our relationship with God, for this truth, as we dis­cussed at length in the previous chapter, is the truth of our personal participation in the Divine – direct knowledge of God achieved not by bypassing discursive reason, but directly, via the spiritual intellect (nous), whose operations cannot be expressed in simple logic.

In other words, religious philosophy, or any attempt to reduce theology to philosophy, will fail to realize that the substantial part of theology (understood Patristically) – that is, its experiential part – will be missed. This latter part reveals that any philosophical expression of religious truth has limited value; any affirmation or negation of the realities beyond this world has a mere symbolic meaning, giving no access to the divine realities in themselves. The incompleteness of philosophy in its attempt to talk theologically has its origin in deep mysticism, which underlies true theology. This is a mysticism that originates not in us but in the very Word of God, which we receive as a gift of God’s grace. According to St. Dionysius the Areopagite, while speaking of the living God, “we must not then dare to speak, or indeed to form any conception, of the Godhead, except those things that are revealed to us from the Holy Scriptures.”²⁰³

It follows, then, that any straightforward scientific attempt to form a coherent view of the Divine will be deficient because it is devoid of scriptural truth. There are at least two reasons for this; first is its nonexperiential, nonhypostatic nature, which makes doubtful its realistic claims;²⁰⁴ second is that science makes its state­ments by using affirmations as a major tool. These affirmations, treated philosophically, can approach the realm of the Divine in terms of the properties imported from the finite physical world. Formally stated, science, polished philosophically, can pretend to offer a set of cataphatic (that is, positive) statements about the attributes of God as they relate to the world in which we live. Theoretically, this set of definitions is open from its “end”; we will never stop our discursive approach to the expression of the Divine using these definitions. A seri­ous question, typical for any so-called natural theology, arises, then, as to whether the chain of intelligible series that ascends from the world to God leads us to knowledge of really existent being or, alternatively, produces only an intellectual ideal of what is sought as the Divine. It is at this point that the deficiency of the cat­aphatic approach to the Divine reveals itself: all attributes that one wants to predicate of God are constructed with reference to aspects of this world; in other words, they are conditioned by something that is outside God.

The Fathers of the church conveyed a different message, asserting that true knowledge of God cannot be achieved by attempting to make a syllogism, referring God to anything beyond God. St. Maximus the Confessor, for example, formulates the mys­tery of God as follows: “God is one, unoriginate, incomprehensible, possessing completely the total potentiality of being, altogether excluding notions of when and how, inaccessible to all, and not to be known through natural image by any creature.”²⁰⁵

God is presented here as the principle of existence, which does not allow one to use any definitions based on worldly ontology, that is, taken from outside God. It is impossible to talk about God in terms of God’s origin because there is nothing beyond God that could determine God’s origination with respect to anything beyond God. This is why God is atemporal, beyond time. God is not accessible to us as part of a causation from one thing to another in time; in addition, any natural (that is, creaturely) image of God is inadequate.

Maximus articulates here that relational logic cannot be applied to affirm any­thing about God if one attempts to do so through a series of causations starting in the created world, for the category of relationship cannot be invoked in order to predicate on God.²⁰⁶ Maximus writes: “No origin, intermediary state or consummation can ever be altogether free from the category of relationship. God, being infinitely beyond every kind of relationship, is by nature neither an origin, nor an intermediary state, nor a consummation, nor any of those things to which it is possible to apply the cat­egory of relationship.”²⁰⁷

In a different passage, Maximus clarifies his point by making an interesting link between the employment of the category of relationship and affirmations of the cre­ated things as existing in space and time: “Ages, times and places belong to the cate­gory of relationship, and consequently no object necessarily associated with these things can be other than relative. But God transcends the category of relationship; for nothing else whatsoever is necessarily associated with Him.”²⁰⁸

Relational logic can be applied to all things that are in space and time as well as to our (human) relationship with God. But since God is beyond any relationship, our participation in God does not affect God’s being; in other words, our intellection about God does not provide us with any knowledge of God as he is in himself. As we will discuss below, the being of God is relational being, based on the communion of love of the persons of the Trinity. Still, despite being a relational being, God is not involved in any relations with things that follow the creaturely logic.

The paradox we face here is that the logic of references based on the principles of discursive reasoning can point toward God’s existence, but it will never succeed in affirming anything about God as he is in himself. We are in relationship with God, but this relationship does not allow us to penetrate God’s mystery, if we only use the rational ability (dianoia) to predicate about God. This is the basic assertion of the apophaticism of Orthodox theology, its truly mystical nature.

The mind always faces the difficulty of meeting the opposite outcomes of its own judgments about God, such as the recognition that God (that is, the Holy Trinity) is a relational being but the relation asserted here has nothing to do with the relation­ship of God to creation – that is, to anything that is beyond God – for the latter rela­tionship cannot condition or influence God’s essence. At this point the mind stops in front of an intellectual mystery, a kind of antinomy, which demands for its solution that one transcend the ability to think discursively to the spiritual intellect (nous), which alone is capable of resolving the paradoxes and having a direct vision of God.

Even God’s very existence is not self-evident if one attempts to grasp it by reason. In another passage, Maximus writes about knowledge of God: “God is not accessible to any reason or any understanding, and because of this we do not categorize His existence as existence. For all existence is from Him, but He Himself is not existence. For He is beyond existence itself whether expressed or conceived simply or in any particular mode.”²⁰⁹

This mode of vision of God, called apophaticism above, is quite different from what is meant by abstract “theologies”, which are based on deductions from scientific and philosophical theories. Theology is dualistic in terms of not only its onto­logical references but also its method because of being rooted, on the one hand, in the ecclesial experience and Scripture and, on the other hand, (as the system of knowledge) in the human ability to think philosophically, using categories and logic. It is apophatic not only in its experiential dimension but also in its philo­sophical setting. The latter does not mean that theology values philosophy only as negative philosophy, or, in different words, that philosophy in its function tells us everything about the world and its unity, that is, about everything that is not God. As mentioned repeatedly in previous chapters, philosophy was an indispensable tool for the Fathers of the early church, who had to defend the Christian faith in the Greek world, a world whose mentality and psychological makeup “was incompatible with obscure mysticism and naive sentimentality” ascribed to the Christians.²¹⁰ The Greek mind demanded to express the Christian mysteries in its own language, a demand that constituted a great challenge to the Christian thinkers. The Fathers never dismissed philosophy as a divine tool to accommodate faith in a concrete culture, and it is their success in creating a synthesis that history has not known since.

While employing the language of philosophy, Christian theology’s apophaticism is always honest in doing so – that is, it clearly states that philosophy has been used as a tool, exercised in its extreme, to express the transcendence of human experience beyond the world, using the language and philosophical rules that are inferred from this world. For the Fathers, who used philosophy to express the relationship between God the creator and the world, it was not an easy task. The Greek philosophical ontology, being monistic, circumscribed the orders of the sensible and intelligible and, being closed in itself, did not provide enough means to express the dualism between the Divine and the world; in other words, the ontology of the world is rela­tional upon and rooted in the internal life of God. The Fathers employed philosophy in theology not to reason about God but rather to explain faith and its demonstra­tion by using philosophical language, providing what, since Clement of Alexandria, has been called gnosis, or demonstrated faith. Since faith implies the ecclesial experi­ence and scriptural tradition, this employment of philosophy was justified. Theology, assimilating the philosophical language but being at the same time faithful to the spirit of the Scriptures, developed an apophatic culture of reasoning that, with no threat to dogmas (treated as the boundaries of Christian faith), allowed one to exercise any faculty to express this faith.

Realization of this apophaticism in philosophical terms creates a difficulty for reason. On the one hand, as V. Lossky writes, apophaticism “is, above all, an attitude of mind which refuses to form concepts about God. Such an attitude utterly excludes all abstract and purely intellectual theology which would adapt the mys­teries of the wisdom of God to human ways of thought.”²¹¹ On the other hand, the human mind, has to undertake a “journey to the inarticulate,” to something that cannot be known from our everyday experience and cannot be expressed in ordinary language. The mystical and discursive are united in apophatic theology under­stood along these lines.

In philosophical abstraction and in methodology, the apophaticism thus can be understood as two modes. First is the direct mystical experience of God, which transcends the world and can hardly be expressed through the earthly system of references. The second mode is based on knowledge that starts from the world, and then, when the knower through the extreme exercise of the knower’s faculties reaches the limit of the world, the knowledge denies itself, pointing toward its nonworldly foundation. This apophatic knowledge of God can bring the person who exercises this knowledge to a direct experience of God at whatever moment. This implies that intellectual, apophatic knowledge of God, be it through the world or through direct cognition, is ultimately grounded in the experience of God.

The same can be said about the affirmative way of ascending to God, despite the fact that this way is always connected with the world.²¹² The deduction from the world, which is always a term in all chains of affirmation, to God, who is the creator of the world, still assumes some direct and prior vision of the Divine, as the cause of the world and who is outside the world.

But this means that the apophatic way of knowledge of God includes the cataphatic and that cataphatic knowledge is dependent upon the apophatic. By no means do we want to claim that the cataphatic, positive way of knowledge of God is not important for theology. Rather, the cataphatic way of knowing God from the cre­ated world is insufficient if it is taken in itself, that is, if an awareness of its dependence on the apophatic mode in theology, either intellectual or experiential, is lost.²¹³ In the latter case, the infinite chain of affirmations of the Divine, which is produced by discursive reason, leads to the idol of the abstract god of philosophers, which, in Kantian parlance, functions rather as the demiurge, an architect of the universe, than the almighty God-Creator of the world, who is beyond the world.

If, however, cataphatic reasoning is not detached from its ultimate apophatic foundation – that is, if the affirmations on the nature of God are imbued with faith and refer to the experience of God – it can be a valuable tool in our attempt to medi­ate between science and theology. This is because scientific knowledge, by its own nature, is cataphatic, as all philosophical generalizations of science are built as affir­mations.

The difficulty of making a clear-cut demarcation between the apophatic and the cataphatic ways of theology was experienced by the Fathers; when necessary, they used either negative or positive ways of talking of God and God’s revelation, always finding a resort in the personal experience of God when any reasoning and talking could not proceed further, and would use allegories and poetry, music, and art to symbolize this experience.²¹⁴

The following section spends more time on the question of how to employ the interplay between the apophatic and cataphatic approaches to make use of some theological inferences from science. The cataphatic approach will be used to demon­strate that predications of God, made from within some scientific theories, are useful for theology. These predications are based on an a priori theological assumption that any cataphatic inference to the Divine has sense if and only if it is placed in the wider scope of theological apophaticism, which is present explicitly or implicitly with its dualistic ontology and such human faculties that allow one to express this dualism epistemologically.

When theologizing scientists attempt to speculate about God, they never recognize explicitly and honestly that everything which is affirmed by numerous scientific theories is circumscribed philosophically by what can be described as monistic “realism”. That is why their ambition to mediate with theology, whose ontology is, strictly speaking, nonmonistic, should be carefully justified. Since the following sections will discuss ontological monism, a brief mention of monism in the context of the cataphatic/apophatic approaches to knowledge of God is needed here.

The monistic ideal of knowledge has been known since Classical Greek philosophy. This view maintained that the world is ontologically self-sustained and, epistemologically, fully explainable from within itself, with no need for appeal to any entity or agency that does not belong to the world, for example, the transcendent God.

One particular realization of the monistic ideal is naturalism, which is defined, for example, as “a species of philosophical monism according to which whatever exists or happens is natural in the sense of being susceptible to explanation through meth­ods which, although paradigmatically exemplified in the natural sciences, are continuous from the domain of objects and events. Hence, naturalism is polemically defined as repudiating the view that there exists or could exist any entities or events which lie, in principle, beyond the scope of scientific explanation.”²¹⁵ Naturalism can be purely methodological, that is, it does not make any ontological claims in general, leaving this issue to philosophy and claiming its own relevance only to what it can justify. Proponents of this kind of naturalism, as it is concerned with religious issues, can be idealists, materialists, atheists, or theists. One strong representative of methodological naturalism in modern cosmology is Stephen Hawking. Hawking states straightforwardly that he is a positivist and that he does not demand that his cosmological theories correspond to reality, for he does not know what reality is.²¹⁶ At the same time, when in his famous phrase “What place, then, for a creator?” he attempts to dismiss God as an original cause of the universe from scientific explanations, he exhibits himself as a naturalist of a methodological kind.²¹⁷ One can see a logical contradiction in this position, for in denying God, Hawking denies not only the idea of God but also God’s ontological reality. In this case, the many critical commentaries by religious thinkers with respect to Hawking’s claim make sense.²¹⁸ Otherwise – that is, if God in Hawking’s thought is just a hypothesis (as he himself states, Hawking does not know what reality is; thus he does not know what the real­ity of God is) – there would be no serious clash with the living religious tradition, which affirms the God-Creator ontologically.

Those who follow ontological naturalism – that is, materialism (in all its forms: reductive, nonreductive, and so forth) – have no interest in theology. Their major strategy is to defend naturalism with the argument that all levels of complex reality are described by science with no need for nonscientific insight.

What does it mean, then, to predicate about God if one positions oneself in the framework of monism/naturalism? The theistic methodological naturalists could attempt to mediate with theology in scientific terms, paying no attention to the onto­logical differences between theology and science. This, however, makes the method­ological theistic naturalism quite problematic. Does it really mean that one can infer to the Divine by using intelligible series of causation if one constrains oneself to the boundaries of philosophical monism? The Kantian response, based on Kant’s critique of the physico-theological argument, would be negative. Using our terminology, one could state that the chain of cataphatic statements of God will never lead us to the otherness of the whole series of definitions, leaving us only with the idea of the good architect of the universe, not its creator.²¹⁹ According to Kant, any attempt to predicate to God from the world leads to the antinomian difficulty of reason, which, if one remains bounded by the monism, cannot be resolved, leaving the idea of God as empty logical form, that is, a form with no content.

As we will see later, Kant’s skepticism, with respect to the methodology that derives the notion of God from the world, is ultimately based on the fact that his philosophy exhibits some features of monism. This means that one who wants to make theological inferences from the order and harmony of the world must either ignore Kantian objections to this attempt or develop a suitable method to overcome the dif­ficulty pointed out by Kant.

Many writers on science and theology who argue in favor of “theistic insights” in science use the observations of complexity in the universe (including different forms of life on earth) as well as the existence of conscious observers to make an inference either to the “Mind of God” or just to the notion of God (in a vague sense).²²⁰ How do they deal with the possible objection to their claims raised from the perspective of the Kantian criticism? The usual position is to not pay too much attention to the “old-fashioned” Kantian critique of classical theism or to consider it as an erroneous one.

It is amazing, however, to discover that some modern theologizing scientists, who argue for God through a deep intellectual insight into the modern scientific world-view, invoke for their defense an argument similar to what we used above to justify the cataphatic approach to reasoning about God (that is, that cataphatic theology has its foundation in the apophatic mode of theology, in the direct mystical experience of God). An example of this comes from J. Polkinghorne, who offers a kind of contem­porary theistic argument, deeply rooted in evaluation of the scientific experience as a whole. For example, from a claim made upon observation of scientific research – that the world is the carrier of values at all levels (cataphatic proposition) – Polkinghorne makes an inference similar to the classical axiological argument for the existence of one true God, who is sustainer of the value in the universe and who is “worthy of worship.”²²¹ We observe here ascension from the world to God, which is performed in a cataphatic way, when the reality of God is associated with the value present in the universe. In this case, value (hypostasized as a universal attribute of all created things) acquires the status of one of God’s names. Affirming this name (which is meaningful only in the context of the apophatic, immediate vision of God), Polkinghorne exercises an extreme vigor, and a truly theistic insight, when he states immediately afterward that the vision of God as a provider of value is “confirmed by our worshipping experience, mediated through public liturgy and private prayer.”²²²

What a fascinating apophatic conclusion! Indeed, in order to see God through the value present in the universe, one should have an immediate vision of God through one’s personal participation in ecclesial and liturgical life. We observe here that despite logical difficulties with the ascent from nature to its creator, the vision of God can be expressed as an existential claim, based on the experience of God, rather than on any advanced abilities of arguing. In this, we observe the interplay between cataphatic knowledge of God (through reasoning) and the apophatic, experiential mode of contemplation of God, which are both present in the context of the modern dialogue between science and theology. It is not surprising to discover that the relationship between theologia (apophatic theology) and economic theology (cataphatic theology) is reaffirmed in a nonobvious fashion by some authors in the modern dialogue between science and theology; this is an inevitable consequence of any true theologizing (including its contemporary form), which is, according to Evagrius Ponticus, true prayer.²²³

We see thus that the argument from the world to God exercised by Polkinghorne overcomes the antinomial difficulties of reason (as they were formulated by Kant), when the latter tries to articulate the transcendent God by replacing de facto the faculty of reason by that of nous (in other words, the difficulty of understanding in predicating on God is removed by implying the direct cognition of God by the nous through worship and liturgy).

As we have clearly seen before, the inference to God made from the cataphatic set of definitions drawn from the world can be useful for theology if and only if it is accompanied by direct, apophatic experience of God. This latter mode of experience restrains our thinking about the Divine from being absolutized – that is, it forbids us from substituting the concepts that we employed cataphatically in the place of the spiritual realities they are to describe. This means that if we want to demonstrate that the spiritual insights drawn from the scientific theories are really theistic (that they offer the vision of the transcendent God-Creator), we must know how to express discursively that the cataphatic inferences co-relate with their apophatic foundations (this would be to follow the ways of the apophatic/cataphatic dialectics, which we consider below). Alternatively, if the latter is not possible, we should appeal to our direct intuition of the Divine, rooted in faith (this is exactly what was done in the Polkinghorne’s case analyzed above). In the latter case, there will be a lack of demon­strative power; all words will be helpless, for any proclamations on the presence of the living God originate from the silence of thought, or “mystical ignorance,” understood by Maximus the Confessor as contemplation of the “division that divides creation from God.”²²⁴ This is the contemplation that allows one to grasp the logos (principle) of the world, namely, that the world has its ground in its otherness.²²⁵

The above example of Polkinghorne’s theistic inference represents exactly what was said by Maximus: to conclude from the world to God, one must transcend the division between them. A kind of transcendence, which we observed in Polking­horne’s case, is done by a simple act of “re-cognition” that God who is affirmed in words is ontologically confirmed through religious experience, but in a complete ignorance (that is, ignorance understood in an apophatic theological sense).²²⁶ The monism of the world is broken, but mystically, rather than discursively.

A more serious question emerges if we want to make demonstration of the presence of the threshold between the world and God more scientific, that is, more philosophical and formal. This would require a different tool, one based, as mentioned before, on the more elaborate dialectics of the apophatic and cataphatic, which will enable us to reinterpret Kantian antinomies in terms of their ontological references. Despite the negative nature of apophatic reasoning, such reasoning tacitly contains a positive core, which is inseparable from the antithetic structure of thought that unites positive and negative propositions about God.

The antithetic dialectics of cataphatic and apophatic propositions about the Divine was developed in a more complete form by St. Maximus the Confessor, who advanced some ideas of his intellectual and spiritual forerunners Dionysius the Areopagite and Evagrius Ponticus. When discussing the apophatic theology of Maximus, L. Thunberg makes a distinction between an ignorance based on the inadequacy of our knowledge of God in comparison with that of other objects of under­standing (which was discussed by Dionysius) and an ignorance based on the naked inadequacy of the mind in relation to God as the supreme object of its desire (which was defended by Evagrius).²²⁷

Dionysius’s apophatic attitude is developed in its extreme: the nature of God is inaccessible to humans, and they are not able to arrive at knowledge of God outside the negative way. For Dionysius, negative theology implies an ascending tendency toward higher and higher attributes, which must be understood as a gradual transcendence. When one starts from the ideas of the world, the more one ascends to the convergence of these ideas toward God, the more one loses the ability to use discur­sive reason, images, and parables to affirm God. Dionysius believed that the high attributes of God cannot be treated simply as nonaffirmation; rather, they are achievable through mystical contemplation and thus represent a “superaffirmation,” a real knowledge in a sense of theologia. Thus Dionysius establishes a kind of dialectic through a combination of positive expressions about God (based on the use of analogy) and negative predications (because of God’s impenetrable nature). This leads to antithetical affirmations, such as unintelligible intellect, superdivine divinity, and so forth, which are not nonsense and are above pure negation. This paradoxical attitude indicates that, in the end, this is a matter not of subject and object in the mode of dis­cursive thinking but of mystical union.²²⁸

It is interesting, however, that the antithetical arrangement of positive and negative predications about God in Dionysius is highly affirmative. This means that the oppo­sition in thinking about God, who is treated as being through his relationship to the world, as well as nonbeing, because of his radically different nature in comparison with the world, retains its importance and relevant certainty within the realm of the relationship between God and the world. The Divine, being either affirmed or negated from within the world, thus is revealed only through its immanence to the world. If one tries to lift this dialectics beyond this relationship, everything becomes uncertain, dissolved in the fog of the inarticulate.

The alternative, which is expressed in the theology of Evagrius, regards the mind (identified with man’s rational faculty) as fallen from an original contemplative rela­tionship with God and obscured by the flesh. Consequently, according to Evagrius, the mind has to break away from the sinful dependence of the body in order to return to its perfect communion with God. But this means that this purified knowledge of God (in the naked mind) is different from all other kinds of knowledge. It is the naked mind that contemplates God and the Trinity, and its nakedness implies that nothing is left in the mind but the divine reflection itself. This is opposite to Dionysius, because with Evagrius the divine reality is revealed within the very self of humankind. It is interesting that here we have another form of immanentism, that of divine presence in the mind.²²⁹

The ethos of apophatic theology was pushed forward by Maximus the Confessor, who followed the thought of neither Dionysius nor Evagrius but learned from both of them.²³⁰ Maximus’s position is of particular interest to our analysis, since his profession of ignorance in relation to God is not a formality but a constructive way of revealing that God is. According to Maximus, what we can understand from natural contemplation and through manifestations of God’s creation is merely the fact that God is – not what he is, because God is above all we know. Since the logoi of cre­ation can be detected by man, it is believed that God does exist, but no more than that. Contemplation of the logoi of creation (which is an advanced stage of religious spiritual development) proclaims the meaning of existence for things themselves and thus provides an indirect knowledge of God. It is, however, essential for Maximus that he is interested not in apophatic expressions as such as the right way to God but rather in the maintenance of a striсt transcendence and a gulf between God and the created world. According to Maximus, the method of negation does not bring us to its goal, for nothing can be defined through negation. The negative way is therefore not more effective than the affirmative (cataphatic) way, since the essence of God remains inexpressible. Maximus states that God is above both cataphatic and apophatic definitions. God is not close to anything else that is or that is expressible, nor is God close to anything else that is not or that is not expressible:

If you theologize in an affirmative or cataphatic manner, starting from positive statements about God, you make the Logos [Word of God] flesh, for you have no other means of knowing God as cause except from what is visible and tangible. If you theologise in a negative or apophatic manner, through the stripping away of positive attributes, you make the Logos spirit or God as He was in His principal state with God: starting from absolutely none of the things that can be known, you come in an admirable way to know Him who transcends unknowing.²³¹

Finally one can say that Maximus professes a certain dialectic of affirmation and negation. He says that affirmation and negation are opposite to each other and yet go well together. He explains this as follows: “the negations show what God is not, while the affirmations tell us what it means to say that the being thus negated is. And, on the other hand, the affirmations tell us that this being is, or what it might be, while the negations tell us what it means to say that the being thus affirmed is not”²³² Two passages from Maximus’s Two Hundred Texts on Theology illustrate how this dialectics works. In the opening of the first passage (1.4), Maximus invokes a set of nega­tive statements about God (highlighted here in italic type): “God is not a being either in the general or in any specific sense of the word, and so He cannot be an origin. Nor is He a potentiality either in the general or in any specific sense, and so He is not an intermediary state. Nor is He an actualization in the general or in any specific sense, and so He cannot be the consummation of that activity which proceeds from a being in which it is perceived to pre-exist as a potentiality.”²³³

According to the logic of Maximus, the negations show what God is not: the existence of God is not the mode of existence on the level of substance typical of the world. Because of this, God is not the origin of the world; God is not a potentiality of the world’s existence; and God is neither the actualization nor the consummation.

In the second half of the same passage, Maximus makes affirmations about God that show us what it means that the being, which is negated in the first half of the passage, is (affirmations appear here in italic type): “On the contrary, He is the author of being and simultaneously an entity transcending being; He is the author of poten­tiality and simultaneously the ground transcending potentiality; and He is the active and inexhaustible state of all actualization. In short, He is the author of all being, potentiality and actualization, and of every origin, intermediary state and consum­mation.”

According to this part of the passage, God is the creator of the world (being transcendent to the world and existentially distinct and free from the being of the world). God is the creator of the natural states of origin, impasse, and consummation.

In passage 1.10 from the same text, Maximus follows the inverse logic. He starts with affirmations about God, telling us what the being of God is: “God is the origin, intermediary state and consummation of all created things… He is origin as Creator, intermediary state as provident ruler, and consummation as final end. For, as Scripture says, ‘All things are from Him and through Him, and have Him as their goal’ (Rom. 11:36).”²³⁴

Then Maximus explains what it means to say that God thus affirmed is not: God is not the origin, intermediary state and consummation of created things in an immanent sense, but he is “as acting upon things not as acted upon, which is also the case where everything else we call Him.” This implies that God, being the origin of all created things in temporal flux, is transcendent to all things, that is, God’s being can be understood as the negation of those things that he brought into existence.

This example demonstrates that any attempt to catch the mystery of the Divine, which is initially given to us in living experience, by discursive thinking and to express this mystery in the form of a proposition such as “A is B” (where A stands in this case for the notion of God), must be declined, for it is inadequate with respect to what we mean by God. In other words, the algorithm of object-oriented thinking, which follows the pattern “A is B,” is not applicable in theology, for God cannot be an object for that type of thinking. The natural reaction to such a conclusion would be to say that the negative form of the proposition – “A is not B” – would be more suit­able in order to say something about God, which is, however, still an inconceivable mystery. The difficulty with this negative proposition is that it indeed affirms that A is not B, that is, it still predicates on A, but in a negative sense. This means that the very form of the proposition “A is not B” is, in fact, different, but of the same quality as, the form of predication used by object-oriented thinking. But “A = God” is not an object. We observe here a paradoxical situation: the negative proposition “A is not B” also is inadequate for reasoning about God.

Both kinds of propositions that are logically possible, the affirmative “A is B” (cat­aphatic) and the negative “A is not B” (apophatic), appear to be inadequate with respect to the Divine. We thus can think of the Divine simultaneously in two equivalent ways as being (B and not B), or as not being (neither B nor not B). There is no contradiction, however, in this encounter of opposite propositions about God, for God, not being an object of object-oriented thinking at all, is above affirmation and denial. Dionysius the Areopagite formulated this principle of reasoning about God explicitly in his Mystical Theology: “When we make affirmations and negations about the things which are inferior to it [universal cause, Godhead] we affirm and deny nothing about the Cause itself, which, being wholly apart from all things, is above all affirmation, as the supremacy of Him who, being in His simplicity freed from all things and beyond everything, is above all denial.”²³⁵

In a different passage, Dionysius clarifies this view further by saying that affirmation of the universal cause of things (God) does not contradict its denial: “While It [the universal cause] possesses all the positive attributes of the universe… yet in a stricter sense It does not possess them, since It transcends them all, wherefore there is no contradiction between affirming and denying that It has them inasmuch as It precedes and surpasses all deprivation, being beyond all positive and negative distinctions.”²³⁶

Let us pay attention to the use of the word deprivation in this English translation of the passage. Deprivation in this context means “limitation”; God transcends all limitations posed by either affirmative or negative propositions. This is a crucial point, for the reason both kinds of propositions – “A is B” and “A is not B” – are not applicable to predication of God is that both limit God. In other words, object-oriented think­ing, by its epistemological structure, limits an object at which it is aimed, as the object of knowledge. This reduces our knowledge of this object to particular aspects that are selected by the form of the propositions “A is B” and “A is not B,” that is, to those spe­cial modes of A’s existence that are limited by B, which enters in both cases into the relationship with A. In this situation, A is known only as long as B is known, which means that A (as it is in itself) appears to us only through its limitation by B.

One can illustrate this conclusion further by using the dialectics of J. G. Fichte.²³⁷ Imagine that we want to create a logic of propositions that is similar to those of “A is B” or “A is not B” but in which both A and B stand for the ultimate being, which we call God. In this case, there are both the hope that we can avoid the limitation of God and the temptation to affirm that the simplest possible cataphatic predication of God (that is, “God is God”) is adequate from a theological point of view, since it supposes first of all that God is (God exists) and that this existence can be understood as the self-identity and integrity of our notion of God (epistemologically) and the uniqueness and unity of God (ontologically).

Following Fichte’s logic, we must admit, however, that this innocent affirmation means a lot and that it immediately involves the limitation of God in thought. Indeed, the proposition “God is God” assumes that there is a relation of God to him­self, that is, a relation that affirms God’s self-identity, or personhood. The form of this relationship that is conceivable by human reason through the proposition “God is God” introduces differentiations in the wholeness of the immediate experience of the living God. In order to define (but not to contemplate) God, discursive reasoning makes the notion of the indivisible God to be self-transcending, that is, self-differentiating through the relationship of the unity split in itself: “God is God.” This self-transcendence of God indicates that there is now something in God that has not been in God before the act of self-transcendence has taken place. The clearest indication of this is the form of the proposition “God is God,” for the form (as a special type of the link between God and God) transcends the primary intuition of God and, as a result, leads us to the affirmation that there is something in God that is not God in Himself, for the affirmation of God has a special form. It is not difficult, then, to understand that the proposition “God is God” manifests, in fact, the limitation of God by that something which is not God. We face an inevitable limitation that our reason imposes on God while it attempts to rationalize about God.

Pushing this thought further, we must accept then that in saying that there is something in God that is not God, we at this very moment attempt an apophatic approach to the definition of God, that is, we try to define God in terms of some­thing that is not God because we want to explain what it means to say that the being affirmed in the proposition “God is God” is not. Our explanation, according to Fichte’s logic, is simple: the very form of the proposition “God is God” is not God. The affirmation of God through the formula “God is God,” which, as we have seen, by its form contains some elements of negation, implies thus the negation of this proposition itself, which means that the proposition “God is God” is not true. This leads us to the negative proposition “God is not God.” Since we now have two propositions about God, we are tempted to follow the same logic, as we did before, and to predicate on God in terms of the coincidence of the opposites, to say that the form of a genuine proposition of God is “God is God and is not God”. This is not a satisfactory result, for the form of this contradictory proposition follows the same pattern of object-oriented thinking, assuming tacitly that “God” in this proposition is an object and that one can predicate on this object both positively and negatively simultaneously, thus uniting both predications logically in one object of thought. Apophatic theology must now be considered in order to clarify this point.

The logical construct “God is God and is not God” shows that we can say nothing concrete and specific about God, except that the form of any proposition about God will look like a contradiction or, to be more precise, like an antinomy. We referred above to Dionysius, who explained clearly that theology deals not with contradictions but rather with antinomies, for the “object” that is affirmed in the cataphatic proposition (thesis) and negated in the apophatic proposition (antithesis) is, by its theological constitution, beyond the realm where the human logic of affirmations and negations works. In other words, the presence of antinomies (and this is in a complete coherence with the classical Kantian claim made more than a thousand years after Dionysius and Maximus) indicates that human reason not only is limited in arguing about something that is beyond the limits of the created realm but also is not a sufficient instrument in theology, whose subject is mystery, the “inconceivable reality” of God, requiring some alternative abilities to inquire about him.²³⁸

It is important to observe here that the negative proposition we deduced through our logic was tacitly present in the affirmative proposition with which we started. This indicates that one cannot separate entirely affirmations and negations present in the mode of discursive thinking based on the laws of the logic of differentiation.

In this, both the cataphatic and the apophatic ways of reasoning about God encounter each other in their limited ability to produce nontrivial statements about God. This limitation brings the two methods close to each other, revealing their unity and similar capacity for theological implications. Since both negative and affirmative propositions about God are limited, they meet each other, showing their relatedness to each other and to God. Maximus says that both methods, compared with each other, manifest the antithetical opposition, but in relation to God they show their kinship by effecting an encounter of the extremes.²³⁹ In their opposition, they do not express anything about God, but they mark the limit of human knowledge. Because of the nature of propositions, they affirm God in their mutual and integrated limitation.

Two methods of reasoning, cataphatic and apophatic, bring us only to a limited result, namely, to a recognition that God is. We are not able to know of what God is, because of the limited nature of logical propositions in both positive and negative approaches; they give us only indirect knowledge of God. This indirect knowledge, by its rational construction, has a fundamental feature: in all its attempts, it is unable to overcome discursively the gulf between God as he is in himself and the created. We know that God is but we cannot affirm anything about him; such an affirmation, if made, would be limited by the horizon through which we search for the Divine from the perspective of the created world.

The main conclusion that we can draw from our discussion of the apophatic method in this section is that theology is antinomial in both its essence and its form. In its essence, theology is mystery: “We see [God] through a mirror in a riddling, enigmatic way” (1Cor. 13:12). In its formal structure, as it is given to human reason, theology is constituted by antinomies. According to P. Florensky, “antinomies are constitutive elements of religion, if it is thought of by the reason.”²⁴⁰ Indeed, on the one hand, we have seen that the intuition of the living God cannot be captured adequately by discursive thinking in a form of judgment. On the other hand, we need knowledge of God in order for it to be reflected in the form of judgment, for the lat­ter is the only tool that is given to human reason. The result of our attempt to predi­cate on God is the contradiction, a statement that unites positive and negative definitions of God, creating an abstract conception of God as unity split in itself. To overcome this abstraction and, at the same time, to keep the reflection of the living God in the form of reason’s judgment, we are forced to admit that the only theolog­ically viable option is to speak about God “through a mirror, in a riddling, enigmatic way” by overcoming the unity and division of the opposites in the cataphatic and apophatic approaches, by lifting up our thinking beyond them to an antinomial vision of God, in which reason never reaches God adequately but catches God’s image through the form of the antinomial knowledge. The antinomial knowledge, by its form, constitutes learned ignorance.²⁴¹ The ignorance follows from the fact that the proposition about God that we construct has an antinomial form, that is, it contains both affirmation and negation; in this, the ideal of rational, object-oriented thinking to overcome the opposition is not achievable. It is important, however, to realize that the positive knowledge of God obtained through the same antinomial proposition comes from the very fact that the antinomy has the form such that it always contains thesis and antithesis; in other words, the antinomy always contains two statements, which seem to contradict each other.

Acceptance of this simple result – that is, an intentional escape from an attempt to make an accomplished logical synthesis of what is predicated in both positive and negative judgments in the antinomy by means of unification of their content – leads us to a stable factor of any knowledge that aims to transcend the world and to find the roots of the worldly existence in its own otherness. Such a conclusion on the nature of our ascension to knowledge of God through discursive reason forms in its turn a kind of synthesis, which we cannot, however, call rational, for antinomial knowledge is not rational since it does not follow the logic of object-oriented think­ing. Instead, one can call this knowledge transrational (transcending ordinary rationality). The freedom that antithetic dialectics of affirmations and negations in theology acquires is amazingly similar to what was called in chapter 3 open episte­mology, that is, epistemology that does not follow the logic of syllogism and is determined by the unfolding dynamics of the reality of the Divine, which creates a proper epistemology in order to grasp this reality. Can our conclusion on the role of learned ignorance, the antinomial nature of thinking in theology, be treated as the “pattern” of open epistemology we are looking for? We believe that the antinomial pattern of open epistemology does not make open epistemology “closed” or fixed, for the antin­omial form of the antithetic dialectics tells us only one important thing: that the real­ity of God, inconceivable in his essence, always enters the relationship with our finite comprehension in the form of mystery, whose logical expression will be a riddle of antinomies in which God appears as affirmed and negated at the same time. The ultimate truth of God’s reality, which can be experienced directly through faith and by means of the nous, will still be inaccessible to precise grasp by the dianoia, leaving only a trace of its presence, with no definite logical location “between” the thesis and the antithesis in the antinomy. Thus the form of antithetic propositions, as a pair of theses and antitheses – that is, the aspect of theological thinking we associate with the adjective learned (ignorance) – shapes constructively the operation of open epistemology in theology. In other words, all theological statements are always mysterious and “contradictory,” leading human reason to incessant wonder between the poles of conviction and doubt. When reason tires of this wonder, it submits itself deliberately to the silence of faith, as a truly apophatic knowledge of God.

What is the major lesson of the antithetical dialectics in an ontological sense? What is affirmed and negated together in the antinomy? If we say “God,” we make only a philosophical statement about being, whose reality cannot be established with certainty by discursive thinking. Still, we are far away from experiencing this God as the living God of Christian faith, for in order to have this experience we have to appeal to the spiritual intellect, the organ of faith. This means that the antino­mies, even if they bring us closer to God, by themselves cannot bring us beyond a certain point. What is this point? As stated earlier, the antithetical dialectics makes it clear that our ability to predicate about God is limited. But the limited ability of the reason can be demonstrated not only with respect to the transcendent aspects of reality (God). The parallel result is that we also have limited ability to speculate about the grounds of the unity of the world as it is seen from within the world – for example, about the unity of different realms of the world, its ages, and things, as having their grounds in their own otherness. The antinomial knowledge expresses our experience of this otherness, its fundamentally contradictory nature. In fact, it is through antinomies that reason expresses the inadequacy of its attempt to grasp its own creaturely roots.

The otherness thus is given to our comprehension in the form of dualistic antinomial formulas. Thesis and antithesis express differently the same aspect of the existence of everything in the world, namely, that everything has ground in its own otherness that is in nonbeing. This aspect of knowledge unites thesis and antithesis in a single expression of the fact that the world is creation and has a creator. In this, the form of antinomies in theology – that is, the cataphatic-apophatic dualism of discursive thought – can be overcome by referring to the single ontological reference of this dualism, to the otherness of the world, the ground of its existence in the Divine. The antinomial dualism of our thought is resolved ultimately into monistic dualism, as dualism that is overcome through the unity of opposites in their non-worldly grounds.²⁴² But epistemological monistic dualism is still based on the onto­logical differences between the world and the otherness of the world, which is in God. Thus the relational ontology of the world, as contingent on God, can be adequately expressed only through the antithetical dialectics, which, while being dualis­tic in its form, is inherently monistic in its ontological references to the Divine.

Even this modest achievement of apophatic theology is crucial for us, because, when speaking about mediation between science and theology, we should clarify the meaning of their mutual agreement on the existence of God, that is, what it means that God is in theology and in science. As discussed earlier, theology proposes the antithetical dialectics of affirmations and negations of God as a tool for reason to establish the presence of the Divine in the world. Can we use the same or a similar method in the scientific discourse to infer from the created realm to God? If yes, what will be our final result, the ultimate frontier in our knowledge of the Divine, which we cannot overcome further without invoking the mystical mode of contemplation (theologia)? That this limit exists evidently follows from Maximus’s argument that we are in a position to claim only that we know that God is, that there lies the limit of human knowledge. What does this limit mean from an ontological point of view? If God reveals his presence in the world, to what extent can science, treated from a the­ological perspective, advance its inferences of the Divine? The answer to this ques­tion would form a theological methodology of science, in which the different stages of scientific research would be given their theological status.

Having established a general pattern for any reasoning about Divine – its fundamentally antinomial structure, which is rooted ultimately in the apophaticism of the­ologia – it is reasonable now to ask how the antithetic dialectics can be used in the mediation between theology and science. In particular, what are the implications of the antinomial method in an attempt to make inferences about God from the created world? We return here to one particular problem of natural theology, to Kant’s objections to a physico-theological proof of God. As asserted in chapter 3, any natural the­ology has to face the Kantian criticism. To successfully argue about God from the world, this issue must be addressed carefully, for Kant, by constructing his antino­mies of reason, intended to demonstrate that no ontological claims about God were possible along the lines of physico-theological argument. This is exactly the opposite of our aim here, to demonstrate that by starting from the created domain and by using science one can affirm that God is.

Our strategy assumes at least two things: (1) positively resolving the antinomial difficulties raised by Kant, by using them as antithetical propositions that affirm God as the ground of the world in its otherness; and (2) showing to what particular ontological references (in the constitution of the relationship between God and the world) the antinomial structures point. The last point is particularly important, for it will be based on the distinction between God’s essence and God’s will (or energeia). The apophatic theology dealing with the direct comprehension of God forbids us to make any reasonable conclusions about the essence of God, for God is incomprehensible in his essence. As discussed earlier, this incomprehensibility is expressed by reason in the form of antinomies, which cannot be overcome if one approaches the Divine from the created realm. This is exactly the point to be made here: the antinomies, being formulated through the series of affirmations in the cre­ated world, attempt to assert God from the side of God’s creation. This means that antinomial propositions about God reflect not his essential features but rather God’s willing activity, the activity of his Word, his energeia. The antinomial nature of our reasoning about God from the world, whose ontology is based on the will of God, not his essence, point to the otherness of the world rooted in the will of God, to the ground of the willing activity of God, to his existence (that he is).

It should be reemphasized that the purpose here is to develop a methodology of mediation between theology and science free from possible Kantian criticism. The objective of this methodology is not to use creation to argue about what God is, which is impossible anyway, but, by following the rules of the antithetic dialectics applied to scientific concepts, to demonstrate that God is. This corresponds to the idea of Maximus the Confessor that the being (substance) of the created world is the teacher of theology: “Through it we, seeking the source of all things, teach through them that He is. Not endeavoring to know how He is essentially, for there is no indication of this in the things that are; but through it we return, as from a thing caused, to the cause.”²⁴³

In order to make our analysis more specific, we must analyze briefly the nature of Kant’s objections to the inference of God from the world, with a particular emphasis on the ontological difference between a Kantian and a Patristic understanding of God. We consider, as an example, a classical form of an argument from design, which was a subject of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The theistic argument from design in the universe is still a very popular topic in the science-religion discussions. It is often argued that the cosmological fine-tuning and anthropic principle points toward the divine purpose behind the fruitful and beautiful universe.²⁴⁴

The argument from design is especially amplified when the fact of man’s existence is considered from the perspective of the vastness of the universe. What is the significance of man, whose typical spatial scale (let’s say 100 centimeters) is hardly comparable with the 1028 centimeters used to represent the size of the observable universe? Modern cosmology states that, in order for biological life to emerge, the universe must be large and old. This leads to another question: Does the whole uni­verse really have a plan to evolve in its vast space, and, during a long time, sustain life in a nearly infinitesimal island of physical being? In other words, does the physical universe indeed bear the pattern of design at its ontological level? Or, alternatively, is the design that we infer from modern cosmology instead the design of our intellect?

Recall from Kant that the inference from design is a natural tendency of human understanding to find order and harmony in a manifold of objects and events where the order could not exist “naturally” because of the vastness and a priori decoherence of existence. Kant himself described an attempt at this physico-theological proof of the existence of God in the Critique of Pure Reason as “the oldest, the clearest, and the most accordant way of common reasoning of mankind… This way suggest ends and purposes, value and meaning, where our observation would not be able to detect them by itself, and extends our knowledge of nature by means of the guiding-concept of a special unity, the principle which is outside nature.”²⁴⁵

The transition from observations of the universe in its varied content and unlimited extent to the intellectual assumption that the universe is built with some determinate purpose is based on an observation of contingency applied to the order of the universe. From observing the order that science uncovers in the universe (such as large-scale structure, cosmic coincidences, fine-tuning, and the anthropic principle), one comes next to the conclusion that this order and beauty do belong to the uni­verse contingently, because it is hardly to be believed that the diverse things in the universe could cooperate themselves in order to fulfill the formation of the order to which we attribute purpose and design. At this point, reason appeals to some wise cause of the order in the whole world.²⁴⁶

The notion of contingency of the order in the universe leading to the accomplishing cause of the universe is applied, in fact, only to the form of the world, not to its matter, or substance.²⁴⁷ The wise cause, or the concept of the unity of the world, functions as an architect (a demiurgic god) who is constructing the world from the given material but who is not the creator of the world, for in order to prove the latter we must prove the contingency of the substance of the world. The wise cause cannot be understood on purely empirical grounds. Indeed, in order to make any meaningful statements about it, one should appeal to the cosmological idea, that is, employ the concept of the world as a totality of the series of alterations.

In theory, this concept serves as an ultimate foundation for diversity of phenomena and their contingency. But the concept of the world in this sense does not devi­ate from the series of appearances, which regresses in accordance with the empirical laws of causality, and therefore, it assumes that the world itself is a member of this series. The main problem, however, is that by ascending through the series of empir­ical conditions, there is no chance to find any first beginning or any highest member (as a primary or an ultimate cause) in the series as a concluding term of the series.

At this stage, discursive reason makes a jump from the physico-theological argument for the existence of God to the cosmological argument, transferring (illegitimately, in Kant’s view) the causation in the temporal series to the causation in the purely intelligible series, the completeness of which is based on the existence of an absolutely necessary being, which is free from empirical conditions.

On the other hand, according to Kant, the contingency of everything that is determined in the temporal series cannot bring us through the empirical analysis to the existence of an absolutely necessary cause that would not be contingent itself. This is why, despite the inference from design about the existence of the cause of the order in the universe made by an appeal to intelligible series of causations, one can state on purely empirical grounds that there is no necessary cause (being).

This paradox constitutes the subject of the fourth antinomy of Kant:

Thesis: There belongs to the world, either as part of it or as its cause, being that is absolutely necessary.

Antithesis: An absolutely necessary being nowhere exists in the world, nor does it exist outside the world as its cause.²⁴⁸

Kant uses this antinomy to make a negative conclusion with respect to all claims about the existence of an absolutely necessary being. Any possible theoretical expression of its existence would correspond to the transcendence of the understanding over the domain of the intelligible series of causation beyond any empirical and tem­poral determination. This would lead to the conclusion of existence of an absolutely necessary cause beyond space and time, that is, according to Kant, in a sphere of pure thought, with no reference to anything ontological.

In Kant’s view, the very fact of the appearance of the antinomies indicates that the object of the antinomies (that is, an absolutely necessary being) is an illegitimate construct if one attempts to establish its references in the empirical realm. Kant argues that in order to resolve the antinomial difficulties, reason must be reinstated to its proper limits within the experiential world; it must not transcend beyond the empirical realm, thus preventing the antinomial difficulties as well as refraining from introducing illegitimate ideas, such as an absolutely necessary being.

According to such a treatment of antinomies, the construct of reason – the “absolutely necessary being” – inferred from the contemplation of the purpose and order in the world and appearing as a term in the thesis and antithesis of the antinomies, can only be considered in relation to objects as objects of thought in general, whether phenomena or not. Then the object of antinomies is sought by reason as the unconditioned unity of all possible predicates. This cannot be found in the stuff of empirical perfections but has to pass beyond the conditioned. It thus objectifies the indeterminate goal of its search as an ideal.²⁴⁹

Despite the fact that an object of an ideal of reason is referred to as the “primordial being” (ens originarium), the “highest being” (ens summum), and the “being of all beings” (ens entium), all these terms do not signify the objective relation of an actual object to other things; rather, they signify the relation of the idea to concepts. That is why Kant emphasizes that we have no knowledge as to the existence of such a being.²⁵⁰ This unconditional completeness through all predicates ascribed to the object of the ideal leads to the concept of God taken in a transcendental sense. Kant asserts that there is no way to prove the existence of this God within speculative reason.²⁵¹

The Kantian approach in general manifests a kind of immanentism that origi­nates from his conviction that the only knowledge that is possible is established within the epistemological horizon constituted by the forms of sensibility and cate­gories of the understanding, which form by definition the references to the phenomenal world. Whatever transcends this horizon cannot be objectified as existent ontologically, for, by definition, whatever is beyond space and time is not objective and, hence, real. The constructs or ideas of things, which are outside the horizon – the wise cause of the universe and transcendental God, for example – play only a regulative function in ordering the data; they reflect the integrity of human intelligence rather than the integrity of the cosmos and thus of God. In this sense, accord­ing to Kant, the argument from design cannot be a proper theistic argument for the God-Creator, for it manages to demonstrate the contingency of only the form of the world, not its substance.

Kant, in his negative assessment of the transcendental arguments for the existence of God, revealed a methodologically weak aspect of all theistic inferences from the contingent creation, namely, their attempts to find a foundation for the world, its substance, in the world itself. Kant demonstrated that this is impossible to do. The ground for the world order is represented to the discursive reason as an ideal, which is constituted as the intelligible reality, that is, the reality of transcendental thought. Kant treated this reality as a subjective one in the sense that it is deprived of an ontol­ogy, independent of human thought. Despite the many ingenious findings of his phi­losophy, the transcendental ideas, as forming principles of unity of knowledge and reality, do not acquire any independent ontological status – for example, in a Platonic sense. This happens because the very question of a transcendent origin of the transcendental ideas – that is, the ontological grounds of the ideas themselves – was foreign to the spirit of Kantian philosophy. This is why we can assert that the ideas in his philosophy are immanent to the world, as being produced by humans, if we think of humanity in a transcendental sense as a collective of subjects endowed with two forms of sensibility and twelve categories of the understanding.²⁵² This point makes Kant’s philosophical system suspiciously monistic, different, for exam­ple, from that of Platonism, in which the place for the ideal could be the world of ideas, distinct from the world of empirical things, and also distinct from the mental world, derivative from the physical one. For Kant, however, it was difficult to imagine that the intelligible domain could be hypostasized by a transcendental subject as a distinct ontological realm, which accommodate the ideas of the reason and of the ideal in particular.

Kant’s implicit monism stopped him from finding a truly theistic argument from design, namely, that the foundation of the world (its ground) has an ontology dis­tinct from the ontology of the world itself; that the ideal, being by its constitution only the intelligible image, forms together with the varied empirical world a basic dichotomy in creation (that is, the difference between the sensible and the intelligi­ble). This difference, if treated Patristically, points toward the basic constitution of the world as created out of nothing, and ultimately to a common principle of being, that the ground for the empirical and the intelligible is in their nonbeing, in the will of God.

One can state now that the problem for all “classical” forms of the argument from design is connected with an attempt to justify the design of the world without breaking the closed ontology of the world. The breakdown of this closed ontology requires a philosophical change such that the foundation of the world must be sought in its otherness. This implies that the methodological approach to an inference of God from design in the science-theology dialogue must be radically changed in order to make possible the demonstration of the existence of the transcendent ground for the world from the world design.

A historical example of such a breakdown of the closed, monistic ontology of the world can be found in the Christian Patristic theologians, who struggled with the monistic Hellenism of the pressuring culture and who by their genius developed a theological synthesis between the Gospel message and the Greek culture, which never existed before.

Ontological “substantialism” as a philosophical platform can be traced back to Hellenistic thought, in which the fundamental issue of any philosophical inquiry was being, which constituted a principle of unity of all things existing separately. The meaning of the word being can be connoted with such terms as substance and essence. Being, according to the Greeks, was a concluding term of the world, but at the same time it was a principle of harmony among existent things, a principle that is characterized by the word cosmos. Nothing, according to the Greeks, could escape from the ontological unity of being; even God was in the world. This was the manifestation of the closed nature of the Greek ontology, its fundamentally monistic character.²⁵³

Observed from this ancient perspective, the meaning of the Kantian critique of the arguments for the existence of God at the end of eighteenth century could be easily interpreted as a demonstration of the inability of human intelligence to break the closed ontology of the world (as it was in the Greeks) and to find the grounds of this ontology beyond the world (that is, in God). This is because Kant was arguing that any reference to an absolutely necessary being as the cause of the world was an unjustified transcendence of the understanding beyond its legitimate realm of sensible experience, toward the world of intelligible forms, with no hope to hypostasize ontologically (that is, not only in thought) that being, which has been stated as God.

Kant’s critique does not leave a chance to infer from the world to God, because his philosophy is a monistic transcendental phenomenalism, in which the phenomena are circumscribed by the transcendental experience such that the experience does not provide an access to reality as it is in itself, that is, to genuine ontology. Any attempt of the understanding to find substance behind the experiential data through an intelligible synthesis is, according to Kant, a vain activity, for there is no gateway to reality in itself apart from the way of experiencing the effects of this reality, as it appears to us through a “prism” of transcendental human perception. According to Kant, any claim about an ultimate reality, as inferred from the experience, is an incorrect epistemological conclusion.

In spite of all this, modern scientific advance has on its agenda substance (matter, ultimate fields, particles, and so forth); it rejects the Kantian critique. Science intro­duces the notion of ultimate reality on the level of constructs, conceptual realities that express rationally the aspects of observable empirical things that are not seen but whose existence is inferred in the chain of logical causations. Scientists sincerely believe that there are objective references corresponding to their concepts, which, by their constitution, transcend the experiential domain. This belief in the existence in themselves of entities that stand behind scientific concepts constitutes the difference from the Kantian position, for conceptual realities in science are considered ultimately to have the same ontology as empirical data.²⁵⁴ We observe here a kind of an extended monism that incorporates intelligible realities. This, however, in contradistinction to Kant, makes the task of separating the worldly aspects of existence from those associated with the energeia of God even more difficult, for there is a risk of ontological identification of some aspects of the extended notion of the world – for example, its intelligible pattern and order – with the Divine. The Christian theistic position would be threatened by this kind of “theistic” insight. This results in the fact that the extended but still monistic scientific substantialism is not able to detect that the ontological basis of the world is beyond this world, that is, in its otherness, in the nonbeing of the world, in the God-Creator who is. What, then, is the place for the inference from the world to God in modern scientific attempts to bridge science and Christian theology?

In order to justify the inference from the world to God and to make it a useful instrument in the science-religion dialogue, one should adopt a different method­ological approach, one that is ultimately based on breaking the monistic trend and its view of the world, and which will fit properly into the methodology of the theologi­cal monodualism discussed above. This requires one to shift from monistic substan­tialism in philosophy to the view of relational ontology of the world, as created by God through his will and his Word.

It is in Patristic thought that the idea of Greek substantialism was eventually removed from the search for truth and ontological monism was broken. This shift was associated with two fundamental steps: the first was the employment of the con­cept of hypostasis as ousia; the second was the identification of the hypostasis of a being with person (Gk. prosopon) in the theology of the God-Trinity.²⁵⁵

The introduction of the hypostasis into the heart of being makes this being existence – that is, the ontology of being becomes an existential ontology, based on the relationship of those hypostases that are involved in this being. But this implies the whole transformation of the idea of substance; substance acquires a relational char­acter.²⁵⁶ The difference between the substantial and the hypostatic properties of God made it possible to break the closed ontology of Greek philosophers in order to develop the theology of the Trinity. The break was explicitly achieved by Athanasius of Alexandria, who made a distinction between the notion of substance and the will in God. He argued that to be, to exist, does not mean to act. In the context of the trinitarian discussions of the fourth century, this distinction had a fundamental implication: the ontology of God as Trinity, with its internal life, is based on the sub­stance of God, whereas the ontology of the created realm, of the world, is based on the will of God. Because the substance of God and God’s will are distinct in God, the ontology of the uncreated realm and that of creation are different.²⁵⁷

This manifests roughly the ontological dualism between God and the world that has been affirmed earlier; it states in simple words the essence of the philosophical position of theology.²⁵⁸ There is a difference, according to theology, between the Creator, God as he is, and the created, which is dependent on the will of the Creator but is ontologically distinct from the world of God.²⁵⁹

Athanasius expressed his vision of ontological dualism as follows: There are two modes of existence, radically different and totally dissimilar. On the one hand is the being of God, eternal and immutable, “immortal” and “incorruptible.” On the other hand is the flux of the cosmos, intrinsically mutable and “mortal,” predisposed to change and corruption. With respect to the created world, Athanasius used such adjectives as impotent, precarious, unstable, mortal, and liable to corruption.²⁶⁰ J. Zizioulas rephrased Athanasius’s assertion by using the term otherness: “Between God and the world exists an otherness, founded on the fact that the world’s being is based on the will, not the substance of God.”²⁶¹

In modern, rather technical philosophical terms, one can repeat the same thought: there are two incompatible (incommensurable) modes of existence. Creatures have their own mode of existence: they are outside God. Creatures cannot “coexist” with the eternal God. The “beginning” of temporal existence and existence in time is the manifestation of the “nature” of created things. The world has a begin­ning because it is contingent, and it moves toward an end that has been designed by God. The two modes of existence, the Divine and the creaturely, can be respectively described as necessary and contingent, or absolute and conditional.²⁶²

The fundamental, final step in setting up the ontological priorities in the Christian concept of God and God’s relationship to the world was made by the Cappadocian Fathers, who identified the hypostatic properties of God’s existence with personhood. The ontological primacy of person over substance shaped the Christian ontology in a way that had never existed before. The trinitarian vision of God has an enormous impact on the understanding of a person, as a theologizing and philosophizing being, in created existence, which is hypostasized by God through an unrepeated and unique existential link of every person with God. The Chalcedonian definition emphasizes the unity of the humanity and divinity in Christ. But this also indicates a fundamen­tal change in the approach to a human person in the Christian context, in comparison with the Hellenistic dualism of body and soul. Christ’s humanity, being complete by comprising a spiritual soul and body, does not prevent him from being the incarnate Word – that is, Christ is not a human person in the ordinary understanding of this word. Rather, Christ is a divine person, the Son coeternal with the Father. The human person “is not identifiable with the body, or the soul, or the spirit. It arises from another order of reality.”²⁶³ It is the existence of this divine dimension in human beings that makes it possible to infer from nature to God. It is exactly this understanding of human being as the unity of natural (body, soul, reason, and so forth) and personal, achieved by Patristic theology, that enables us to overcome the Kantian implicit natural monism and to infer from the world to God through the divine dimension in the person. It is the person, through an ability to be in communion with God, via a spiri­tual intellect (nous), which is granted as a gift to know God from within the created world, who establishes the meaning of reality and the criteria for its truth. For without communion with God, the reality, articulated by persons in the created realm as knowledge of events and objects, theologically speaking, has no being at all.

Using the Kantian language, knowledge is possible only because of man’s natural ability to sense, to think, and to contemplate. The difference between the Patristic vision of knowledge and Kant’s is, however, enormous. The knowledge achieved by the person is in its content a hypostasized form of ontological reality, articulated by the person through the person’s link with God; it is not a subjective impression and mental construction, because this knowledge is not dependent on only the natural in man. According to Kant, however, knowledge of the appearances of things does not guarantee that these appearances bear any ontology, because for Kant man is capable of affirming only natural things, given within the horizon of man’s faculties, based on the body and the soul. To affirm the genuine underlying ontology, human being has to transcend its naturalness; this is exactly what is achieved through the experi­ence of personhood. For Kant, it was impossible not only to affirm God (because one would transcend beyond nature in doing so), but also to accept an independent ontological existence of conceptual realities (that is, constructs in science), which, being a part of nature, require one to have a soul in order to access them, a soul that together with the body forms a composite hypostasis of the human person.

The difference between the Kantian view of ideas and their relation to the empirical realities and the theology based on Patristic ideas refers ultimately to the ontological differences in understanding the whole creation. Patristic theology confesses a twofold ontological dualism: between God and the world and, in the created domain, between the sensible and the intelligible.²⁶⁴ The concept of this dualism is linked by the Fathers to the Christian idea of creation of being out of nothing. According to T. Torrance, this idea “represented a far-reaching epistemological revolution, for it meant that the whole universe of invisible and visible or celestial and terrestrial realities was regarded, while creaturely and not divine, as nevertheless permeated with a unitary rational order of a contingent kind.”²⁶⁵ Both the empirical and the intelligible – for example, the ideas – do belong to the created order, but both, despite being united in their otherness with respect to the Logos of God, who ordained the world by intelligibility and rationality, are ontologically different.

This means that the ideas and constructs in science, which are the subjects of human reflection, do possess an independent ontological reality that, however, dif­fers in comparison with the ontology of sensible things.²⁶⁶ It is only a person that can mediate between these two realms in creation because it is only through personhood that one can hypostasize the sensible domain and intelligible domain in creation, as distinct ontological realms.²⁶⁷

Kant disagreed with this, saying that the intelligible forms are not objective, because they are beyond space and time; they have no ontological significance. Because his ontology is based on sensible, spatiotemporal experience, it is clear why, for Kant, the physico-theological argument could not have any profound theologi­cal meaning: the order and harmony of the universe, its wise cause or architect, all are treated as merely mental constructs, as ideas with no ontological references independent of the human mind. Thus they do not provide a base for a theistic inference for the God-Creator, based on the observation of the basic dichotomy in the created domain, the dualism between sensible and intelligible.

In contrast, for the Patristic mind the design-like argument (as an inference from the world to God) can have an ontological significance, not so much in the sensible domain but, rather, as an intelligible pattern of the empirical world, which is objectively present in the domain of intelligible forms and which has an independent ontological mode of existence. The fundamental result that follows from the latter is that this argument cannot provide any evidence for God as he is in himself (this is similar to the Kantian claim), because God as substance (ousia) is separated from the creation. However, the argument can be used for evidence of the willing activity of God in the creation – that is, to point to the will of God, who created the world and made it intelligible by his Word – by identifying the fundamental ontological difference in the created realm between the sensible and the intelligible.²⁶⁸ This dif­ference, being a constitutive element of creatio ex nihilo, provides the contemplative mind, the nous, with the vision that both the empirical order and the intelligible order have a common root in their otherness, in the fact that they both are created; thus it can establish the knowledge of the underlying and forming principle of cre­ation, its logos.

If we return to the initial point of our discussion in this section – a possible Patristic response to the Kantian denial of the theistic inference to God the creator from the structures of the visible world – we should admit that from a Patristic view of the creation as constituted by the dichotomy between empirical and intelligible (Christian Platonism, not Classical Platonism), all difficulties of the reason, expressed in term of Kant’s antinomies, receive new expression.

Let us analyze again the fourth antinomy of Kant quoted earlier. It is stated in the thesis that there is an absolutely necessary cause of the world, which is in the world. The Patristic view of the created realm would suggest reading the thesis through Platonic eyes. Indeed, the inference from the order and harmony of the empirical world leads the reason to claim that there is a principle of the integrity of the visible order that is treated as the cause of this order; this principle, being deduced not by the syllogism from the structure of the world but, rather, through the inference from the variety of the visible to the intelligibility of its order, constitutes itself as an intel­ligible entity, as an idea of the cause of the universe which, by its constitution, belongs to the intelligible realm in the created. This is why the proposition made in the thesis can be treated by a Christian Platonic philosopher as the inference from the empirical world to the intelligible world (which exists ontologically, not only mentally, in contradistinction to Kant), that is, as an expression of the dichotomy between the empirical and the intelligible in creation.

When Kant argues for the antithesis, he tries to make a connection between an absolutely necessary cause, assuming that it exists either in the (empirical) world or outside the (empirical) world, with a temporal series of causation in the world: he argues, for example, that “this cause, as the highest member in the series of the causes of changes in the world, must begin the existence of the latter and their series.”²⁶⁹ It is exactly at this point that we disagree with Kant, for, from a Platonic point of view, the temporal series of causation in the empirical world cannot be caused or uncaused ontologically by an absolutely necessary cause, which is the idea of reason, existing in itself (that is, independent of any empirical causations) in the intelligible world. The link between the two is established by a human person, who, according to its hypostasis, embraces both the empirical and the intelligible worlds and is able to catch the interplay between the temporal series and the idea of its ultimate term. A person, then, can hypostasize both separately – empirical series as well as an absolutely necessary cause – treating them as two ontologically distinct entities. In this, the antithesis, in analogy with the thesis, affirms the interplay between the two worlds, which is successfully identified by reason as a part of the constitution of the whole created being.

The antinomial nature of the proposition about an absolutely necessary cause points, as established before, to two things: (1) no positive (cataphatic) definition of this cause is possible (our ignorance about this cause is expressed exactly by the antinomial difficulty); and (2) the very form of the antinomy provides some positive knowledge about an absolutely necessary cause of the world, namely, that it always appears in reflection together with the empirical series of the world in the form of antinomy. This points out that the Kantian antinomies can be treated as antithetical structures of discursive reason, leading, as understood earlier, to the affirmation of its ground in the otherness of both terms of the antinomies, that is, the empirical world as well as the intelligible world (which is represented in the fourth antinomy as an absolutely necessary being). In this, the antinomies, understood theologically, point toward the ground of the world in its differentiated constitution (the empirical and intelligible), to the principle of creation of the world by God out of nothing, to the logos of creation.

This section will explain that the Kantian antinomies, if seen through Christian-Platonic eyes and treated with reference to the dichotomy in the creation, can be used as a tool for affirming the presence of the logoi of creation.

The dualism between God and the world articulates the distinction between God’s essence, which is not accessible to man, and God’s creative activity in the world, manifested through God’s energies and described through his words, the logoi. According to V. Lossky, the doctrine of energies expresses itself as an antinomy: “The energies express by their procession an ineffable distinction – they are not God in His essence – and yet, at the same time, being inseparable from His essence, they bear witness to the unity and the simplicity of the being of God.”²⁷⁰ The Word of God was hypostasized in the world through the effected events that we call nature.

It is the ontology of God’s activity in the world (which is distinct from the existence of God in his essence) that is rooted in the energeia of God, or the logoi, which, being themselves not from this world, form and sustain the existence of all things vis­ible and invisible in the world. The distinction between the essence of God and God’s energies leads to a fundamental antinomy in human knowledge about God, which is expressed in the words of St. Gregory Palamas, quoted by V. Lossky: “We attain to participation in the divine nature, and yet, at the same time it remains totally inaccessible. We need to affirm both at the same time and preserve the antinomy as a criterion of right devotion.”²⁷¹ The antinomial form of our discursive arguments about God becomes inevitable in one’s attempt to predicate on God from within the cre­ated world.

Some similarity exists between the concept of the logoi of created beings in the theology of Maximus the Confessor, which we have referred to many times in this text (see, for example, chapter 2), and the concept of the energies that was introduced in Patristic theology by Grigory of Nyssa and Dionisius the Areopagite and developed later by Gregory Palamas. In his Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Lossky interpreted the logoi in Maximus’s theology as uncreated energies in the sense of Gregory Palamas. Despite an ongoing discussion about a possible lack of sufficient evidence for this interpretation as well as some differences between the two concepts in terms of their function in theology, we employ their similarity here for the pur­poses of uniformity in considering the concept of the logoi, which plays an important role in our search for mediation between science and theology.²⁷² In other words, while discussing the logoi of created things, we will assume some analogies between them and the divine energies. To elucidate these analogies, we now must discuss fur­ther the nature of the logoi of natural being.

The logoi of natural created beings, which are the forming principles and ideas of the sensible and intelligible worlds, are our primary interest here. On the one hand, we apprehend these logoi as existing through the links with their common source, the divine Logos; on the other hand, the same logoi can be considered with respect to the world, which is constituted by them. This latter inquiry into the nature of the logoi is exercised through “natural contemplation” (philosophically speaking) of the created being and thus represents a subject of theological ontology.²⁷³

The whole created world is seen, then, as manifesting the different intensities (condensations) of the incarnation of the Logos, which is mysteriously hidden in God’s logoi under the surface of the created being.²⁷⁴ The task of ontology is to con­template these logoi, that is, to establish the fact of their existence with respect to sen­sible and intelligible things and then through generalization to establish their unity with respect to the common source of their existence, the divine Logos.

The important point, which was raised by Maximus, is that the logoi have a complex relationship to the Divine (the Logos of God) and to the concrete created world in the multitude of its manifestations. On the one hand, according to Maximus, the logoi are preexistent in God. On the other, God called them to realization in concrete creation to show the continual presence of God and the Logos in Creation. One can assert, then, in an antinomial fashion, that the logoi are both transcendent to and immanent with the created world. As immanent, they manifest the divine intentions and principles of every single nature, that is, of every object, law, and intelligible image. They actually manifest the existential purpose of everything: “As realized in the existence of things, they materialize in the created order”²⁷⁵ One can say that the logoi are realized in the existence of things, but they are not themselves created or part of the created order; in other words, their “material” manifestations through sensible things and their intelligible images do not condition them from within the creation, for they are in themselves beyond the created, and the ground of their immanent manifestations is in the transcendent side of their rootedness in the divine Logos.

One observes here, however, a kind of dialectics that argues that the logoi, by having their source in the Logos of God, do not dissolve in this Logos – that is, their unity, being in Logos, does not eliminate their individuality. In other words, it is God-Logos who preserves the logoi in their unity; at the same time, the logoi are fixed in the Logos as they are, that is, they are in the unity, which is split in itself: “The logoi are thus not identical with the essence of God, nor with the empirical forms of existence of the things of the created world.”²⁷⁶

A geometrical analogy – that of the radii and the center of a circle – has been used since Neoplatonism to describe the relationship between the Logos, who is the center of a circle, and the logoi, which represent the radii of the circle, originating from the center and terminating on the boundary, which imitates the created realm. This analogy can help illustrate the twofold nature of the logoi as transcendent and imma­nent: the logoi as the radii of the circle have their origination in the center of the cir­cle, which is paralleled with the Logos of God. In this, they are transcendent to the world. On the other hand, all radii in the circle terminate on the circumference – that is, in the things created – thus the logoi face the world in their immanent mode, turned out from the Logos to the world. Every radius has two points: the beginning and the end. In their “beginnings” (in the divine Logos), the logoi are transcendent; in their “ends” (their manifestations in the world), they are immanent. Any logos itself represents the unity of the transcendent and immanent with respect to the world, but in no way does it belong to the world. The world is held by the logoi; thus one can argue about the presence of the logoi in the world, but not in an ontological sense, for the logoi, being uncreated, do not share the ontology of the created things, visible and invisible. Still, the ontology of the created things is relational upon the uncreated logoi.

To elucidate the asymmetry in the relationship between God and the world (described previously as monodualism) – which we affirm through the twofold nature of the logoi, that is, that human knowledge of God can be advanced only through contemplation of the uncreated energies of God, not God’s essence – we appeal to a different “geometrical analogy,” which arrives from the Greek term diastema (Gk. διαστημα). In Classical Greek geometry, this term meant the distance between two points; in music, the interval between two notes. In theology, the term was used by St. Gregory of Nyssa to characterize the created world as extended in space and in time. Gregory used this term in a negative sense to predicate about God by affirming that there is no diastema (in the spatiotemporal sense) in the being of God. It is more important for us here to point out a different use of the term diastema, which Gregory applied to describe the theological distinction between God and the world. This distinction contains in itself a kind of a dialectics that is present in the relationship between God and the world, a dialectics that is asymmetrical: on the one hand, there is the diastema between God and the world, which is unbridgeable from within the world; on the other hand, God knows the world, which God cre­ated, through the logoi, which the Logos uses to cognize the world. The diastema in this case can be represented by an asymmetrical, one-way extension in relationship between God and the world. Yes, there is a basic diastema if one attempts to cross the gulf between the word and God from within the world; however, there is no exten­sion, no diastema, in the divine condescension to the world. It is worth quoting P. M. Gregorios, who describes the usage of the term diastema by Gregory of Nyssa as apophatico-cataphatic antinomy:

Apophatic:

“There is no way, conceptually or ontologically, to pass from the ousia of the creation to the ousia of the creator.”

Cataphatic:

“In the other direction, that is, from the creator to the creation, there is no diastema, since the whole of creation from the beginning to an end and from boundary to boundary is permanently co-present with the creator.”²⁷⁷

      This passage elucidates our understanding of the transcendence and immanence in the logoi of created things. Indeed, the contemplation of the immanent aspects of the logoi, which is considered by the Fathers a phase of one’s spiritual development, means thus the “knowledge” of the Logos of God in his energies, not in his essence. The transcendent aspects of the logoi, which constitute the ground for the immanent mode contemplated by humans, are rooted in the otherness of God’s willing activity in the world. This otherness is exactly what is inaccessible to any creature. The par­ticipation of man in the energies of God, that is, the contemplation of the immanent modes of the logoi), which was defined by Gregory as the principle of existence of all creation, does provide the knowledge that there is a transcendent ground for exis­tence of the logoi, but what this ground is remains the divine mystery.

From a formal point of view, the antinomy just quoted manifests the pattern of the theological thinking described above as antinomial monodualism. Dualism between God and the world is affirmed in the apophatic part of the passage, and monism (as panentheism) is affirmed in the cataphatic part of the same passage.

The geometrical analogy of the Logos and the logoi as the center and the radii of a circle can be accompanied now by one important detail, which reflects an asymmetry in the relationship between the Logos (the center of a circle) and the world (the boundary of a circle): they are connected by the logoi (the radii) in only one direc­tion, from the Logos to the world. In other words, the logoi meet the world on the circumference; this meeting provides one with the knowledge that there are logoi. But no movement is possible in the opposite direction from the circumference (the world) toward the center of the circle (the Logos).

The one-way diastema, however, which is present in the thought of Gregory of Nyssa, does not prevent humankind, and in fact all of creation, from participating in the Divine through the energeia. In other words, according to Gregory, in order to overcome the radical ontological dualism, which is just a different expression of the diastema from the world to God, participation (Gk. metaousia) in the energies of God, not knowledge of God, provides a way to assert that God is by a simple fact of the existence (of everything) and that it is God who sustains all levels of existence, empirical and intelligible.²⁷⁸ The different orders in the universe are all dependent on the single reality of the energy of God, manifested through different logoi. All levels of reality in created being do participate in the energies of God; thus all of them carry an ontology relational on the energies of God, or God’s logoi.

It is in this context that created matter, as a theological problem, receives some interpretation. Since everything in the created world depends on the energies of God – physical bodies, particles, planets, human bodies, and human senses and intellect – it is self-contradictory, theologically, to argue that God is not present in some aspects of nature, that is, that nature is freed from God, de-divinized. Indeed, the Fathers of the church affirmed that a fundamental distinction exists between God and the created, so that God is not creation in the pantheistic sense. On the other hand, by affirming that the ontology of the created world is relational upon God’s energy and will, and that the latter is manifested in the creation through the logoi, the Fathers saw God present in nature while being distinct from nature. In this sense, any attempt to excommunicate the presence of God from nature contradicts the very view of matter as a manifestation of the energies of God. The denial of the presence of God in nature would reduce everything to nothing.

Humanity and the whole creation do participate in the energies of God across the basic diastema, and it is through this participation that humans form the image of matter: matter is the energies of God, made palpable to our senses and to our intellectual grasp. It now becomes clear how humankind can participate in establishing nature, together with God. It is through Christ, the Logos of God, who created all things, and granted man the chance to participate in matter as an effected event because of his composition of body, mind, and intellect (nous), that humankind knows matter and that matter knows itself through humankind. Ultimately, humans, as a divine image, were granted reason in order to be in a dialogical relationship with another reason, the reason of God. As God hypostasizes his words in effected events (in nature), humans can participate in the effected events, contributing through the dialogue with God toward the formation of nature.

It is important to stress that Christianity understands the dialogical relationship with God as the dialogue with the person whom we know through the historical name of Jesus Christ. The name Jesus manifests the personal hypostasis of God – that is, the meeting with God is an event of relationship, a call out of nonbeing into being (Rom. 4:17). Thus the formation of matter and its knowledge is a dialogical relationship of the hearing and articulation of God’s words in human thoughts and words. Matter understood as a logical possibility is not possible as reality without the hypostatic existence of those who affirm the existence of matter and, in so doing, bring matter, as hypostasized existence, out of nothing. This results in the outstanding conclusion, which was reached by the Greek Fathers, that nature is empty before Christ – that is, that its full theological meaning becomes comprehensible only through the hypostasis of the Logos of God, through Christ. The makeup of matter, its existence as hypostasized in the effected words, the logoi, contemplated and participated in by men, is shaped by the incarnation of the Logos of God. Matter and nature in Orthodox theology receive their ultimate ontological foundation, their hypostasized existence and meaning, from Christ as the Alpha and Omega of every­thing in the created world. Humankind made as an image of God constitutes such a matter, which started to be able to know itself (where matter acquired the hypostatic properties).

The fact that we can sense matter does not imply, however, that the deep source, or the possibility of its sensation, is also disclosed to human being easily. The awareness that the logos exists in the human composite hypostasis, which is similar to the logos of creation of all things, and that it is this similarity that makes it pos­sible for humans to participate in the logoi of creation through knowledge of things, represents an advanced stage of human cognitive and spiritual capacities. This kind of awareness differs from simple cognition by the senses to an enormous extent, for material nature itself is seen now as a sacrament, in which humankind is gifted to participate. Indeed, if one accounts the presence of the Logos in all things, holding their logoi together – that is, that the world is pregnant with divine reality – then the knowledge of it, which is exercised through the rational qualities of man, through his own logos, is itself treated as a kind of communion with God, a participation in divine things through the purposes and ends of things that are recognized in creation.²⁷⁹

One must make, however, a distinction between knowledge of the presence of the principles of creation – that is, that there are the logoi that hold the creation – and the contemplation of the logoi as a special stage of an advanced spiritual development. If the former is probably accessible to discursive reason (through scientific research, for example), the latter requires one to have made an advance in religious contem­plation, which is sustained by one’s participation in ecclesial life. When both knowl­edge of the existence of the logoi and their contemplation are combined in one human person, then science definitely can be said to participate in the contemplation of the logoi of creation. On average, however, it would be a modest task to demon­strate only the presence of the logoi in created being.

On the relation of knowledge of the logoi to knowledge of the Logos, which holds them together, Maximus the Confessor asserts that the contemplative activity reflects the convergence of the logoi to the divine unity and the unifying intention of God and the Logos. The Logos is itself the many logoi, but then the logoi may be said to be the one and only Logos, although what we know of them and their variety does not exhaust what is contained in the Logos. Thus there is no complete identity. In addition, what we know about the logoi can contribute only to our knowledge of the Logos as the common source of their differentiated inhabitation in the created world. In other words, knowledge that the logoi exist does not provide itself the infer­ence to the divine Logos, as the personal God of Christianity. The latter requires one to advance in apophatic mystical theology, that is, in religious life in God.

Because natural contemplation of the logoi is not entirely based in discursive thinking, it is important to try to formulate an algorithm of demonstration of the presence of the logoi (not their contemplation) in the rubric of a purely discursive analysis of scientifico-philosophical affirmations about created nature. In a way, this task is quite paradoxical, for we are trying to discover through analysis of worldly things their logoi, the presence of the uncreated principles of the existence of created beings, which manifest that the ontological grounds of the worldly things studied by science are beyond the world and that everything in the world is rooted in its otherness. This is why these transcendent principles, if they exist, are present in scientific or philosoph­ical arguments only in a hidden, mystical way. They can be revealed only from an a priori theological perspective and expressed in an apophatic and paradoxical way.

As established previously, a typical example of paradoxical thinking that points toward the transcendent source of that which is affirmed or negated has an antinomian structure. It consists of a cataphatic proposition (thesis) and an apophatic proposition (antithesis) with respect to the same notion. Remember that, for Kant, it was natural to claim that the presence of an antithetical structure in thought indicates that this thought is in trouble, that it speculates about notions that are beyond the legitimate sphere of application of the thought. Kant denied the ontology behind the notions that are affirmed or negated in the antinomy and thus claimed that the source of the difficulty is associated with a fallacy of the mind but is not inherent in the nature of things. For Kant, any notion that was not experiential (that is, empirical) was a product of intelligible causations and thus was not ontologically real.

Theology, in contradistinction to Kant, offers a different understanding of the antithetical structures of knowledge, one based on a basic dichotomy in the created realm, that is, on the difference between the sensible and the intelligible domains in creation. As established earlier, the thesis and antithesis of the antinomy demonstrate that the ontology of the empirical domain cannot have its ground in the intelligible domain, and vice versa, the ontology of the intelligible domain cannot have its ground in the empirical domain. The further step is based on the mediation between sensible and intelligible, which, in the theological terms of Maximus, corresponds to the ascension to a mystical knowledge of God.²⁸⁰ Performing the mediation between the sensible and the intelligible in man’s creaturely state of existence and with the whole human nature, one comes to the conclusion that there is the logos of all cre­ation and that there is a principle of creation. There is no way, however, to develop this principle further because of the one-way diastema between God and the world. To understand this principle, one would have to be immanent to God. The transcen­dent gulf between God and creation prevents us from knowing why God created at all. The principle of why God overbridged the gulf between himself and all that can be created is a mystery and is hidden from us in God as he is in himself.

How, then, can the contemplation of the presence of the logos of creation be formulated discursively? Maximus approaches this by using his idea of humankind as microcosm. As a microcosm, humankind “recapitulates the universe in himself,” that is, it is able to communicate with the universal logos of the world at large, the macrocosm.²⁸¹ The basic point for Maximus is that there is a parallel dichotomy in humans, one of sense and mind, that resembles the ontological difference in creation between the sensible and the intelligible.

The position of humankind as microcosm implies that by their senses humans are linked to the sensible world, to empirical things, whereas the human mind provides access to intelligible entities. Since humans are consubstantial to both kinds of real­ity in creation, they are able to mediate between sensible and intelligible. This com­posite nature of humans does not violate their unity because there is an underlying and forming principle of humans, their logos, which binds their elements together. Maximus explains this as follows: “As a compound of soul and body he is limited essentially by intelligible and sensible realities, while at the same time he himself defines these realities through his capacity to apprehend intellectually and to perceive with his senses.”²⁸²

It is exactly this point – the human ability to hypostasize both sensible and intelligible realities as different, on the one hand, and at the same time united with respect to humans as a source of their hypostasization – that makes the mediation between the sensible and the intelligible in humankind itself possible without violation of its logos.²⁸³

As mentioned before, creation as macrocosm is formed also by the fundamental principle of being: macrocosm has the foundation for its being from nonbeing; it is created, and the constitutive principle of this creation is the difference in creation between sensible and intelligible. This means that humankind’s mediation between its elements as microcosm does not violate these elements but holds them together; this is true not only for microcosm but also for macrocosm, being at large. The medi­ation between constitutive parts of creation, between the sensible and the intelligible, does not violate their ontological difference (diaphora) because it does not violate their different logoi, which all preexist in God.

Finally, the universal logos of creation must be accessible to humankind, and at the same time it must remain a secret, the divine secret (that is, although we can detect the presence of the logoi, we do not know their ultimate meaning and purpose). Maximus treats the antinomial difficulty, based on this one-way diastema between God and the world, by appealing to the principle of creation of the world out of nothing in accordance with which “the whole of creation admits of one and the same undiscriminated logos, as having not been before it is.”²⁸⁴ L. Thunberg reexpresses this thought more clearly: “The divine principle which holds the entire creation together is that it should have non-being as the ground of its being.”²⁸⁵ This helps to give the discursive explana­tion of what it means to detect the logos of creation: detection of the presence of the logos of creation from within the created domain means the understanding that every object in the created realm, be it intelligible or sensible, has one and the same tran­scendent ground of its existence in its nonexistence (nonbeing) or its otherness. This formula implies that the principle of creation is one that states the limit that divides creation (in its being) from its nonbeing. Given this, can antinomies of discursive rea­son, invoked when it attempts to predicate on the ultimate reality, help detect the pres­ence of the principle of creation in scientific thinking?

Maximus’s extraordinary formula, which describes the root of the created in its own otherness, its nonbeing, can be used methodologically as follows. Starting with the antinomial difficulty with respect to some aspects of created things, we separate through them two dimensions in the composition of everything, namely, its empiri­cal display in contradistinction to its intelligible mode, revealing thus the fact that both the intelligible and the sensible have their own logoi. To overcome the negative aspect of the antinomy, the spiritual reason refers, then, to the common source of both aspects of the existence of the thing, which is beyond both intelligible and spir­itual aspects of its being, in its otherness, or nonbeing. In doing so, the reason asserts that there is the logos of creation of this thing and of any things at all. The achievement of the reason can be summarized in two points: (1) creation is contingent upon the uncreated (nonnatural) source, and (2) the composition of creation (the dichotomy between the sensible and the intelligible) points toward the common principle of creation. Again, reason is able to assert only that it detected the presence of the logos of creation – that it is, but not what it is. Detection of the logos of creation through the antinomy changes completely the negative tonality of the antinomy, pointing thereby to the fact that the very form of the antinomial proposition con­tains the affirmation of the transcendent source of the references in thesis and antithesis, which unites them both in a single unity, the logos of creation.

The mediation between intelligible and sensible creation, which leads man to the knowledge that there is the logos of creation, reflects, so to speak, only an epistemological participation in the universal logos – that is, it results only in a dispassionate knowledge of its existence, with no ontological effect on either man or creation at large. The contemplation of the logos of creation, on the other hand, is a liturgical process in which, through mediation, humankind holds the entire creation together in its relationship to the divine Logos, the Creator.²⁸⁶ This brings humans to the frontier of natural knowledge, to the contemplation of the logos of creation itself, beyond which there is only the mystery of the transcendent gulf between creation and cre­ator, which is the beginning of genuinely theological knowledge in the mystical sense of apophatic theologia. One must caution, then, anyone who attempts to ascend to God through natural knowledge by using discursive reason: there is an absolute limit in this ascension leading to the detection of the logos of creation. The overbridging of this limit (that is, the mystery of creation, one-way diastema), is impossible without the grace of God, which can be granted to humans as a gift through their participa­tion in ecclesial life.

Before turning to specific scientific problems, in order to demonstrste how the antinomial monodualism works in discovering the presence of the logoi of creation, we must discuss in what sence the detection of these logoi can provide further inference to the Divine Logos, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, by whom the logoi of all things are embraced. Can scientific research, if it is subjected to theological inspection, provide us with pointers to the presence of God in the world personally or, in different words, hypostatically. For the presence of the impersonal logoi, if it is estab­lished, does not indicate that these logoi are inherent in the hypostasis of the Logos of God. We need some “extra” insight in order to extend theistic inference from the cre­ated universe to what is specific for Christian faith, namely, that God who is affirmed is the community of Love among the Persons of the Holy Trinity. For otherwise, using the words of Basil the Great, “if we have no distinct perception of the separate characteristics, namely, fatherhood, sonship, and sanctification, but form our conception of God from the general idea of existence, we cannot possibly give a sound account of our faith. We must, therefore, confess the faith by adding the particular to the common.”²⁸⁷ In our case this particular is the personality of the Logos of God who is in intricate relationship with the world he created, and which should be pointed at.

Orthodox theologians never separated the arguments for the evidence about the intelligibility of the universe rooted in the Logos of God from the context of the living faith in the incarnation of the Logos in Jesus Christ, through whom the creation of the world by the Holy Trinity has received new assertion, dictated not so much by the observed necessities of the created world, but rather by the logic of Divine Providence and God’s plan for the salvation of man and the universe, revealed through Jesus Christ. This is the reason why our expectation of the utility of modern physical science for making the inferences about God is very reserved in general, for if physics is detached from the experience of the living God of Christian faith, its assertions about the Divine, which always play in this case the role of transcendent references, will only end in the idea of the philosophical God with no correlations with God, who condescended to the universe and took human form in order to reveal the truth about himself as well as about the place of human beings in the immense cosmos. Thus the reality of the living God can never be achieved through cosmological gnosis as such unless the latter is sanctified by human faith and eccle­sial life, in order to become the manifestation of the relationship between human beings and God, the relationship which inevitably involves the universe as its term.

T. Torrance has argued persuasively, by reference to Patristic thought, that natural theology is possible in the Christian context if its subject is driven by the reality of God himself, both revealed in faith in Jesus Christ, as well as detected through scien­tific knowledge as the boundaries of the worldly references, pointing toward the almost incredible contingent intelligibility of the universe, rooted in the Logos of God. This implies that the rationality of human reason and inferred rationality of the universe, especially when they pretend to affirm some truth about their own foundations, have sense only as conceived in the light of the intelligibility of the Logos of God who conferred the intellect on human beings in order that they might contem­plate the contingent intelligibility of the world. Thus all forms of intellectual arguments about the existence of God that constituted classical natural theology can have only limited value, for, using the words of Torrance, “no argument from created intelligibility, as such, can actually terminate on the Reality of God, but in accordance with its contingent nature can only break off.”²⁸⁸

Can, then, the articulation of the personhood of God be achieved if one argues about the Divine from within creation? It is important to stress here that the central position of human beings in the universe plays a pivotal role in articulating the real­ity of the world in specific and concrete intelligible forms, which function in human beings through the intelligibility of the Logos of God who holds the logoi of human beings; this means that the reality of what we call the universe is articulated by human beings, and it is the same human beings who can make the inferences from the universe to God. This is the reason to suspect that the image of the universe, that is, its existence as apprehended in human hypostases, contains inevitably the image of God and his intelligibility. Physics and cosmology, then, articulate the reality of things in human hypostasis, and human beings can then be treated as cocreators of the universe who are responsible for and who can sanctify the universe by relating it to its own ground in the living and personal God. It is through this insight that we articulate a nontrivial ontological conviction that the universe exists inwardly through human consciousness, the potentiality and possibility of which is rooted in the Logos of God, whose image all human beings experience hypostatically through their individual logoi.

The detection of the hypostatic presence of God in the world thus becomes a task of understanding nature not in abstract terms as “objectively” existent matter (sub­stance), but as “nature” existent in the personality of God himself, that is, as having its ultimate origin in the person of God. How, then, can this hypostatic dimension of the universe, as inherent in the Logos of God, be revealed by scientific research?

One of Patristic theology’s achievements was to articulate the difference between “natural” and “hypostatic” existence, which shaped the concept of nature and matter as being closely linked to the concept of hypostatic, personalized existence. That is why any reasoning about the universe involves human agency. It is the same human agency which provides the arguments for God’s existence from observing the created world. This implies that these arguments are shaped by the limits of human creaturely existence, and they can be addressed in words and thoughts developed within created human nature which is inherent hypostatically in the Logos of God. Here we need some further clarification.

The meaning of the term hypostatic comes from the Greek word hypostasis, which was used in the Patristic theological context in order to underline the “personal”, active as well as intransitive dimension of existence as different from impersonal substance (ousia) or nature (physis). The difference was articulated in Patristic thought in the context of the trinitarian and christological discussions throughout the fourth to seventh centuries. Ousia (as related to universals, families, or species) tends to be used with regard to internal characteristics and relations, or metaphysical reality (in this it almost identical with physis), whereas hypostasis regularly emphasizes the externally concrete character of the substance, its empirical objectivity, and the exis­tential aspect of being, expressed through the realization of freedom, movement, and will. It is important to stress that though every individual substance moves and is moved, the personal element in the realization of the potentiality of the substance is not included in the concept of substance itself, that is, the hypostatic aspect of indi­vidual existence is not immanent to what is included in the substance.

The difference between ousia and physis can be elucidated in the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nigilo, which asserts that the world was created out of nothing as an ecstatic act of interpenetrating love among the persons of the Holy Trinity. In Patristic theological language there were different expressions of this belief. It was affirmed that the world was created by the will of God and this implied that the ontology of the world was rooted in God’s will, but not in his essence (ousia) (Athanasius of Alexandria).²⁸⁹ This entails that God is present in the world, not ontologically (i.e., on the level of the world’s substance), but rather relationally and personally, on the level of his loving kindness to the world, expressed through his will and realized by his Word. It is affirmed since the times of the Gospel of John that it is the Word-Logos of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, who entered the world by creating it and preparing his incarnation in Jesus as the meeting of the uncreated Divine with created humanity. It is at this point that the cosmological mystery of the presence of the onto­logically transcendent God in the world acquires christological (and anthropological) dimension. For the presence of God in the world cannot be understood without the hypostatic mystery of Christ as a locus of the divine and human.

Nature or substance (in its self-realization, which is accounted for by God’s will as creator) can be divided and shared while the hypostasis of a particular being is indivisible. The reality of substance (i.e., its transcendence) is made available to human beings because of God’s economy, which relates independent creation to the Creator through communion; that is, substance becomes evident and real only in hypostases, that is, in what is indivisible. In a theological context hypostasis is similar to prosopon, that is, person in modern parlance. This implies that the nature of things becomes evident if it is personified. The hypostasis, then, is seen as the foundation of being, for it is that in which nature exists.²⁹⁰

The distinction between nature and hypostasis allows one to articulate the unity of all creation in two different senses. On the one hand, all varieties of sensible objects share the same nature (e.g., the same elementary particles). On the other hand, if one considers the world in relationship to its creator, then natural existence acquires the features of existence for someone, that is, the Creator, who is not an impersonal sub­stance or essence of the higher order (in which other individual substances partici­pate), but who is the personal God. Thus when Christianity affirms that the world was created by the Word-Logos of God and that through the Logos everything was made, it effectively affirms that the natural existence of the world is existence in the personhood of God, that is, in his hypostasis; this means that whole creation is brought to unity in the hypostasis of the Logos and that the link between God and the world is nonnatural (i.e., nonontological, nonphysical, nonbiological, etc.), but hypo­static, which, can be expressed as the relationship between the Divine and the world in the personhood of God. The creation of the world and its existence have sense, then, only in relation to the person who is acting as the creator and provider of meaning of the existence: there cannot be impersonal creation as well as existence.

The universe, however, being created by God, is not capable of knowing that it has its creator, for impersonal physical objects are not hypostatic creatures: they have no ability to contemplate their own existence and relate it to their ultimate source. Thus the intelligibility of the universe and its meaning are accessible only to hypostatic human beings, who are created in the Divine image, and whose hypostasis is capable of personifying objects in the universe, that is, making the universe self-conscious of its own existence and origin. Maximus the Confessor strongly argued that man as a person cannot be isolated from the fact that human nature has its hypostasis in the Logos and it is in this sense that it can be said that human nature is itself enhypostasized. In other words, it is hypostatically inherent in the Logos; this means that a per­sonal relationship with God cannot be excluded from human nature and is identical with fully realized human existence.

The term hypostatic inherence refers theologically to the Greek words enhypostatic or enhypostasis, which were introduced into theology by Leontius of Byzantium in the context of christological discussions of the sixth to seventh centuries, and whose meaning (appropriate for the purposes of our research) in Greek Patristic usage can be described as: “being, existing in an hypostasis or Person,” “subsistent in, inherent.”²⁹¹

One can refer to a theological view of “participation” in the Divine in order to illustrate the idea of “hypostatic inherence” of the universe in the Logos of God. When it is said that created beings know about God, it means that they participate in God through a mode which is distinct from his essence (uncreated energies, for example). However, the very ability to participate in God is willed by God himself, for it is God who brought into existence participating beings; the knowledge of why this participation is possible at all is concealed by God from participating beings and known only to himself.²⁹²

It was natural, then, for Maximus the Confessor to argue that “everything that derives its existence from participation in some other reality presupposes the onto­logical priority of that other reality”;²⁹³ he meant the priority of the Logos of God with respect to all other created things which do participate in him.²⁹⁴ The “hypostatic inherence” of the universe in the Logos of God can then be interpreted in Maximus’s words as the Logos’s eternal manifestations in different modes of participation by cre­ated beings in him. This participation takes place in spite of the fact that the Logos, is eternally invisible (i.e., ontologically distinct from creation) to all in virtue of the surpassing nature of his hidden activity.²⁹⁵ But this participation does not assume any ontological causation; for to participate in the Logos means to be made by the Logos a participating being, that is, to be made as a being in the hypostasis of the Logos him­self. This implies that existence through participation in the Logos is subsistence in his personhood, that is, the inherence in his hypostasis. In short, one can say that hypo­static inherence in the Logos is the same as participation in his person.

Another example, which illustrates what the existence in a hypostasis or person means, can be brought from a sphere of theological anthropology, which asserts that “man is hypostasis [personality] of the cosmos, its conscious and personal self- expression; it is he who gives meaning to things and who has to transfigure them. For the universe, man is its hope to receive grace and to be united with God.”²⁹⁶ The uni­verse as the expressed and articulated existence is possible only in human hypostasis, that is, it acquires some qualities of existence if it is reflected in the personality of humanity. Using the words of Maximus the Confessor, every intellection about the universe inheres as a quality in an apprehending being.²⁹⁷ The universe thus acquires qualitative existence in the being who apprehends it.²⁹⁸ The link between the universe as articulated existence and the apprehending being is not ontological, but rather hypostatic or personal. A Patristic theologian would say that existence of the universe as the articulated existence is hypostatic existence, that is, the universe is enhypostatic.

Can, then, hypostatic human beings, because of apprehension of the universe as inherent in the Logos, interact with the Logos and change him? Maximus the Confessor has already prepared a response to this by saying that the Logos, who is beyond intellection, unites himself to human intellection, which is purified from any manifold and temporality, and makes it his own, giving it rest from those things which by nature change and diversify it with many conceptual forms they impose upon it.²⁹⁹ This means that human intellection of the universe does not affect the Logos, which is beyond intellection. The link between the Logos and the world is not subject to temporal change and instability of nature, which human intellect operates with. The world is in the hypostasis of the Logos of God from ages to ages, so that the Logos experiences the world as being in rest from his works, “just as God did from His (Gen. 2:2; Heb. 4:10).”³⁰⁰

One should not think that the ideas about “hypostasis” are some outdated relics of the old tradition, which have no links with modern philosophical development and its fusion with theology. For example, the term hypostasis was used by a contempo­rary French phenomenological philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in a very special way that will be useful for elucidating our thought.³⁰¹ Levinas puts a stress on the difference between the transitive existence of beings, through relationships, for example, and the absolutely intransitive element of one’s own existing as freed from intentionality and relationship. The existent and its existing do not coincide in every creature.

For if, according to Levinas, the existent “contracts”³⁰² its existing, it forms an event which he calls hypostasis. One can say that the hypostatic existence of human beings, as existents (and of the whole humankind), is the event of contracting by them their existing. What will happen, then, if we consider the situation when the existent cannot contract its own existing, but can be existent in the existing of the other? Are we still obliged to talk about the “event” of hypostatic existence? For example, some physical object has no inclination to perceive its own existence. This means that it is existent without its own existing. But, at the same time, the same object can be artic­ulated in the existing of a human being, so that it contracts its existing in the other, that is, in human being. A human being, being itself a hypostatic event, makes the contraction of an existent physical object its existing in the apprehension of human being an event, so that the “hypostatic inherence” of a physical object, in the knowing subject, has some features of temporality and emergence, which follow from the event of human hypostasis. The situation drastically changes if the existent receives its existing from the Logos of God whose hypostatic ever-being is not involved in any chain of worldly relations and events; in this case the “hypostatic inherence” as con­traction by the universe of its existing in the hypostasis of the Logos of God has no features of emergence and temporality. This is the reason why we do not want to express the existence of the universe in the person of the Logos of God, in order to deliver the reader from the temptation to think about the universe as “personalized” by the Logos. Personalization is an emergent notion usually applied to something which has already been in existence. This is why the Greek term enhypostasization would be more appropriate for us in order to affirm that “the universe is enhypostasized by the Logos of God.” We express this thought by using the language of “hypostatic inherence” in order to make it easier for a modern reader to comprehend the term; by so doing we avoid the danger of affirming the link between God and the world in emergent terms.

The creation and existence of the universe thus can be seen as enhypostatic in two senses: (1) the universe as mere nature exists in the hypostasis of the Logos; (2) but the very knowledge of this, that is, the transcendence beyond substance from within the universe, can only be achieved if nature is contemplated in the human hypostases (which in turn exist in the hypostasis of the Logos). The universe thus acquires the features of its hypostatic inherence in a twofold sense: in the Logos of God who brings the matter into existence through His effected words, and in hypostatic human beings, who through analysis and differentiation of this matter lead the universe to self-awareness of its purpose and end, that is, to realized existence in God and for God. It is in this sense that one can argue that human beings are cocreators of the universe: the universe is brought into being as the meaningful and self-conscious existence in the personhood of humanity. The universe, as articulated existence in the human hypostasis, can be treated in turn as the hypostatic event, contingent upon the human phenomenon, which constitutes an element of God’s economy for salvation.

One then concludes that the link between the Logos of God and the universe is hypostatic, that is, the universe is seen as hypostatic inherence in the Logos of God. But this signifies that once the universe is apprehended by us in its connection and unity with the primordial ground of the Logos, it becomes for us something greater and other than “only the universe,” because the specific “worldly” character of the universe is overcome without the universe itself being “removed” or “eliminated.” The meaninglessness of the universe, its pure factuality and impersonality, its indifference to the Divine truth, are overcome. This signifies that the presence of God in the world can only be detected through manifestations of the enhypostatic mode of the world’s existence.

A word of caution must be said if one attempts to treat the notion of the hyposta­tic inherence in terms of the bilateral relationship between God and the world. We stress the Patristic belief that God is hypostatic being but the world is not. Since the link between God and the world is hypostatic (as we have argued above), any bilat­eral relationship between God and the world would only be possible if the world as such exhibited hypostatic features. Then the bilateral relationship between God and the world might be understood as the relationship between two persons: God and the world. But it is exactly at this point that our position states clearly that the created world as such is not hypostasis at all, it has a mode of existence which is inherent in the hypostasis of the Logos of God, and that is why the relationship between the Logos and the world is established through the one-way diastema, that is, as the permeation from God to the world, but not vice versa.

The claim of the so-called generic panentheism about the bilateral relationship between God and the world, as seen through Patristic eyes, runs the risk of affirming something similar to the old Patristic idea of perichoresis (co-inherence) of God to the world. Certainly this similarity must be analyzed with caution, for it must not be understood as analogous to the trinitarian formula of co-inherence as interpenetration and mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity (it would be a theological nonsense to affirm that created nature is capable of interpenetrating the Divine).³⁰³ It can rather be paralleled with perichoresis in the christological context as the interchange and reciprocity of the human nature with the divine nature in Christ. Then by analogy, one might affirm panentheistically the perichoresis of the Divine and the created in a sense of “interchange” and “reciprocity” (bilateral relationship) between God and the world. But even in this, so to speak “weak,” form of the perichoresis, panentheism must not forget the origin of this perichoresis, i.e. that it proceeds from the personhood of the Divinity, not from the matter of the world. The Divine, having once permeated through the world, bestows on its matter an ineffable perichore­sis with itself. The interchange or reciprocity of the Divine and the created is ultimately initiated and held by the hypostasis of the Logos of God. One can see again that the process of the Divine permeation of the world is one-sided and entirely determined by the Logos himself. This has been demonstrated by God through the incarnation of the Logos in Jesus Christ.

The world as such has no hypostasis of its own and cannot initiate and sustain the perichoresis to the Divine. It is possible, however, to speak about hypostatic agencies in the world, i.e. human beings, through whom the world acquires some personal qualities, in the sense we have explained above. Human beings can initiate the inter­change between the world and God through the apprehension of the created uni­verse, so that the world, being articulated by human beings, is related to God as its uncreated source. Any panentheistic claim, then, about the world which is brought to godself must be understood in the context of human deification and involvement of the world in the transfiguration, which brings it back to the union with God. But all this is initiated by the Logos of God, who created human beings with such logoi as to allow human beings to relate to God through personal interaction as well as through apprehension of the universe created by him. This is the reason why the universe, being personified by human beings, still exhibits its hypostatic inherence in the Logos of God. Human beings thus become the locus points in creation through whom the evidence of the hypostatic inherence of the universe in the Logos can be seen.

From what we have said above, namely, that the presence of God in the universe can be detected only through the enhypostatic mode of the universe’s existence, it is clear that science is closely connected with the articulation of the created nature of things and their foundation in the effected words of God-Person, and it cannot be alienated from theology at all; for, by its function, science articulates the human par­ticipation in creation and through it the participation in the relationship between the world and God. This relationship is articulated by created human beings who are the inevitable part of this relationship.

Human consciousness thus cannot be alienated from physical research and its theological generalizations, being in fact a part of those equations which drive the whole universe. It is clear, then, that any knowledge of things, and their ultimate foundations (the logoi) must involve subjects of knowledge in the entirety of their human constitution. The theistic inferences made in this perspective have by their constitution the hypostatic dimension pointing toward the source of the personalized existence of everything, that is, to God. The mediation between science and the­ology then acquires a strong anthropological dimension, which manifests that both modes of articulation of God’s creation – through science discursively and through religion mystically and liturgically – have a common source of origin which is the human intentional subjectivity and transcending spirituality which manifest the essence of human being-in-the-world-with-God.