7. Humanity as Hypostasis of the Universe

Defining the Humankind-Event – The Humankind-Event and the Anthropic Principle – Hypostatic Dimension of the Humankind-Event – From Anthropic Transcendentalism to Christian Platonism – Intelligibility and Meaning of the Universe: The Participatory Anthropic Principle – The Humankind-Event and the Incarnation – The Universe as Hypostatic Event

There are in personality natural foundation principles which are linked with the cosmic cycle. But the personal in man is of different extraction and of different quality and it always denotes a break with natural necessity… Man as personality is not part of nature, he has within him the image of God. There is nature in man, but he is not nature. Man is a microcosm and therefore he is not part of the cosmos.

– Nicolas Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, pp. 94 – 95

The fact that the universe has expanded in such a way that the emergence of conscious mind in it is an essential property of the universe, must surely mean that we cannot give an adequate account of the universe in its astonishing structure and harmony without taking into account, that is, without including conscious mind as an essential factor in our scientific equations… Without man, nature is dumb, but it is man’s part to give it word: to be its mouth through which the whole universe gives voice to the glory and majesty of the living God.

– Thomas F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, p. 4

This chapter develops the idea that the phenomenon of intelligent human life in the universe, which we call the humankind-event, is not entirely conditioned (in terms of its existence) by the natural structures and laws of the universe. The actual happening of the humankind-event, which is treated as a hypostatic event, is contingent on nonnatural factors that point toward the uncreated realm of the Divine. We develop an argument that modern cosmology, if seen in a wide philosophical and theological context, provides indirect evidence for the contingency of the universe on nonphysical factors, as well as its intelligibility, established in the course of the humankind-event, which is rooted in the Logos of God and detected by human beings through the logoi of creation. The universe, as experienced through human scientific discur­sive thinking, thus becomes a part of the humankind-event; that is, the universe itself acquires the features of the hypostatic event in the Logos of God.

Before we discuss the anthropic inference in cosmology, we must look at the phenomenon of human life from a cosmological perspective. We intentionally talk about human life but not about biological life in general, for we are interested here in the meaning of human conscious life, life that has not only natural (physical and biologi­cal) dimensions but also hypostatic dimensions, whose essence is to affirm that human beings are not isolated creatures but are relational beings, whose personhood is formed through the relationship of these beings to one another as well as to the source of their existence in the Divine. Thus the phenomenon of human life in the cosmos is to be seen from the point of view of the whole economy of salvation of man, which includes the creation of the world and its redemption and ultimate transfiguration.

This is why we want to separate the issue of biological forms of life in the universe in general from the particular issue of the existence of intelligent human beings, who are able to contemplate the overall order in the universe, its meaning, and to detect the transcendent source of this order, and who can have beliefs and purposes, which can influence their own nature as well as nature of the whole universe.⁴³⁰ Theology contemplates the meaning of human life as that of persons in their relationship to one another and to God. It characterizes humans, who were created in the image of God, through the view that the line that demarcates creature and creator cannot be abolished, yet human beings have the potential of self-transcendence to attain the likeness to God (that is, to be deified). It is through this hypostatic mode of existence that human beings are capable of gratitude to God for creation and can offer the world back to the Creator in thanksgiving, contemplating thus, through their eucharistic function, the meaning of the whole world as God’s good creation.⁴³¹

What we are affirming here is that the phenomenon of man, if seen from a wide perspective, is not something that is inherent in the story of a large and various uni­verse but, rather, is an event in the whole cosmic history (as understood now by modern cosmology). This event is unique not only in a sense of the fine-tuning of some particular aspects of its happening in the universe but literally as the unrepeatable experience of existence in the universe, which cannot be modeled scientifically in different places and different ages of the universe. Our aim, then, is to assert that the whole experience of the world, which is performed by humankind, is a flash of the cosmological memory, incarnate in a particular place in the universe for a fixed aeon, destined to disappear in order to fulfill its eschatological destiny.

Thus the humankind-event can be treated similarly to the Christ-event as a happening of an extraordinary nature, requiring for its explanation the appeal to transnatural principles that will have to elucidate not only the reasons for the humankind-event to happen but also the ultimate purpose of this event for the fate of the entire universe.

When we insist that the phenomenon of humanity is the event, we want to make it clear that there is an element of historicity in it, that is, some fundamental, irre­versible change in the history of the universe that makes the emergence of human life in the universe not a blind fact of chance but, rather, a hypostasized existence that is fundamentally different compared with other forms of matter and different forms of biological life.

In order to convince the reader of this claim, we start with a simple observation: that the phenomenon of man, if seen from a cosmological perspective (that is, from the point of view of the place and age it occupies in the overall history of the uni­verse), and simply in physico-biological terms, represents a tiny island in the vast ocean of physical being. Indeed, according to modern cosmology, the universe is old and large. Its estimated age T varies from between 10 and 15 billion years, and its maximal observable size, corresponding to the distance that light can travel during the time T, is equal to RU ≈ 1028 centimeters. If we accept that the humanoid type of life appeared on the earth approximately 1 million years ago, it is not difficult to estimate, in relative units, that the amount of time that human life exists in the universe ∆t with respect to the age of the universe T is

∆t/T ≈ 10–4.

As to the relative space occupied in the universe by humankind (we mean the earth, with a radius of RE ≈ 109 centimeters), the ratio will be even more impressive:

RE/RU ≈ 10–19.

It is not difficult to realize that the volume occupied by humans on the earth will be ≈ 10–57 of the volume of the observable universe. The illustration in figure 7.1 makes these calculations even more impressive.

Figure 7.1

It is important to realize that the universe, being old and large, was unsuitable for the existence of human life most of the time and is probable unsuitable for life in most of its space (assuming, of course, that when we think about humankind, we mean exclusively our own civilization, refusing any speculations about extraterrestrial intelligent life). This brings us to the conclusion that the universe, understood as overall space-time, is effectively empty and dead in terms of life, with only one exception, the life on the earth.

We can easily illustrate this point by appealing to an anthropic argument that is known as the “fine-tuning” of physical constants and other cosmological parameters in the universe. This argument makes a link between the global physical conditions in the universe and the fact of existence of life on the earth. One of the simplest argu­ments that life could not exist in the universe’s past is that the universe was hot, which prevented the existence of such stable physical states as atoms. The stability of atoms is a fundamental condition for the existence of all possible biological forms of life. This stability is measured in physical terms by binding energy, which for an atom of hydrogen is determined as EH = ae2me2c2, where ae ≈ 1/137 is the constant of the electromagnetic interaction (the force which makes atoms stable), me is the mass of an electron, and c is the speed of light.⁴³² It is known from atomic physics that in order to destroy atoms, it is enough to expose atoms to external electromagnetic radiation, that is, to highly energetic photons, whose energy is greater than EH. This implies that since all atomic structures are embedded in the external cosmological background, filled in, for example, with intergalactic gas (IGG) and microwave relict background radiation (MBR), the energy of particles in IGG and MBR must be less than EH.If we express this condition in terms of the effective temperature of particles and photons, using the connection between energy and temperature E = kT (k is Boltzmann’s con­stant), we can state that

TMBR [≈3K] < TIGG [≈100K] < TH [≈104K].

Through experimentation, it is clear that this inequality is satisfied at the current age of the universe. In the universe’s past, however, this inequality would not hold, because, for example, the TMBR is the function of the radius of the universe T ~ 1/a and it increases in the past when a → 0. At some point, TMBR exceeded TH and all atoms could not exist, so that no physico-biological form of life would be possible.

Certainly, this simple observation is true if we assume that the constant of electromagnetic interaction αe does not change in time, that is, that it is a genuine “constant.” It is interesting to find, however, that its particular numerical value is critical for the condition of the stability of atoms to hold. Indeed, if we change its value, for instance, if we decrease its value ten times αe* ≤ αe/10, then the corresponding temperature TH* = 10–2TH ≈100K will be comparable with TIGG and atoms can potentially be destroyed by interactions with the particles from IGG. In a similar way, if we decrease the same constant one hundred times, the corresponding temperature of atoms will be less than the temperature of MBR, so that atoms could not exist in the cosmological background at all. These simple arguments remind us again about the so-called fine-tuning of fundamental physical constants and external cosmological parameters, which provide the sustenance of life in the universe.

What is important for us, however, is that the brute fact of the observable values of the physical constants and cosmological parameters allows us to conclude that the conditions for life, understood in this context only in physical and biological terms, did not exist in the universe forever; that is, the universe was not always “anthropic.” On the contrary, one can conclude that it was “anti-anthropic.” One can object to this affirmation by saying that the universe is an evolutionary complex and that the emergence of life at a certain point of its evolution and in a given place was conditioned by the previous history of the universe; it is in this sense that one could assert that the universe was anthropic from the very beginning – that is, its initial condi­tions evolved later on, leading to a cosmic environment such that the necessary con­ditions of the emergence of life were fulfilled. The fact that we stress the word necessary (conditions for life) here reflects the weak point of any physical cosmology and even biology as being unable to reflect reasonably on the nature of the sufficient conditions for life to emerge in the universe.⁴³³

The difficulty that cosmology runs into if it attempts to justify the sufficient conditions for the emergence of life can be easily illustrated by referring to what is accepted by modern cosmology as fact that life (again understood in physical and biological terms), existing in the universe here and now, is destined to disappear from its surface because of either terrestrial physical or cosmological reasons. J. D. Barrow and F. J. Tipler provide a possible upper bound for the length of the existence of the earthly biosphere nearly equal to forty thousand years, which could support the evolution of the human species. This is a short future in terms of cosmological scales.⁴³⁴

In the astrophysical context, the upper bound on the existence of life on the earth follows from the finite age of existence of the sun (≈5 billion years from now), whose termination in an explosion will bring any life in the surrounding cosmos, including the earth, to extinction. Even if we disregard this local cosmic catastrophe and assume that humankind could spread beyond the solar system into outer cosmic space, we still have to face some global cosmological constraints on the duration of its existence, following from the theory: either the eventual collapse of the universe in the big crunch (the so-called closed universe) or the eternal frost of the ever-expanding (open) universe. In the former case, the termination of life is inevitable because the universe will heat up and prevent any possibility for life to survive. In the latter case, some cosmologists have tried to argue that there will be a possibility to extend the “existence” of “life” in the universe by abandoning the human body and adjusting the new form of life to an absolutely different environment. These hypotheses are based on the speculative assumption that life can be defined in terms of mechanisms producing information, so that the question of supporting life in the universe is a question of producing information with no ending. It is enough to remind us the long-standing paper of F. Dyson on life in the cold and dark future of the universe, in which he argued that civilizations can survive there by constantly reducing their rate of energy consumption and information processing.⁴³⁵ Dyson’s argument was that, despite these measures, the total amount of information produced in the universe may still be infinite, which would imply that the posthuman “civilization” could live forever in its subjective time.⁴³⁶

Despite the a priori speculative nature of this proposal, which is doubtful first of all on purely anthropological grounds, for it definitely departs far from what is usually understood by humanity as the existence in body and soul, the physics of Dyson’s model was revised recently with a very pessimistic conclusion that his scenario of existence forever is physically unachievable.⁴³⁷

It is now important to stress that all forecasts for the upper bound of duration of conscious life in the universe assume tacitly that humankind intends to continue to exist and does not participate actively in reducing its chances of survival, avoiding intentionally the situation on the terrestrial scale, which could be called a “doomsday syndrome.” The latter is usually associated with the global ecological crisis, nuclear holocaust, some lethal experiments with germ warfare, or experiments with high-energy physics that could lead to the destruction not only of our planet but of the whole universe.⁴³⁸ It is the possibility of the termination of the humankind-event by conscious beings themselves, when their activity threatens the natural roots of their existence, that points out that the sufficient conditions for the endurance of this event are partially rooted in the sphere of thought of these beings, in the realm of value and ethics, which is not rooted in nature but whose origin is the same as the human hypostasis itself, that is, in the realm of the divine goodness and wisdom.⁴³⁹

This brief reference to the future evolution of the universe and the conclusion about the inevitable termination of life in physical and biological terms leads us to the assertion that the universe is essentially (that is, in terms of its nature) “anti-anthropic” in the future, despite that its present state provides the necessary condi­tions for the existence of life. We can summarize our point in the following formula: The universe is anthropic now. It was anti-anthropic in the past, and it will be anti-anthropic in the future. This leads us naturally to the assumption that the phenom­enon of life in the universe, considered at this stage only with respect to its grounds in physics and biology, is finite in regard to time and space. This is why we talk about the phenomenon of humanity as the humankind-event, that is, as a physical event whose spatial scale is finite and whose duration, despite being extended in time, is still finite and tiny (if seen from the present) with respect to the age of the universe. This event is not exactly what is usually meant by an event in the physics of relativity, in which an event is assumed to have no temporal extension – that is, it is treated as an instant, the set of which forms space-time. What is important in using the word event as applied to the phenomenon of humanity is that this event is not inherent in the cosmological background (there is no ultimate causal link between cosmology and anthropology); it depends on it – that is, the phenomenon of life is conditioned by physics – but only in terms of the necessary conditions. This means that in order for the humankind-event to happen – to become a part of history different from the dynamics of the cosmological background – there must be present some nonnatural factors making the event contingent on these factors. What are the factors? With no ambition of giving a final answer to this question, we will at least discuss this problem in the following sections.

To elucidate the meaning of the humankind-event as contingent on nonnatural factors, in a cosmological context we should relate it to the series of ideas that are broadly called the anthropic cosmological principle (or AP).⁴⁴⁰ The AP has a variety of formulations, which can be found in Barrow and Tipler’s work The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.⁴⁴¹ This section will discuss only the formulations known as the weak AP (WAP) and the strong AP (SAP).

The WAP concentrates on the privileged spatiotemporal location of intelligent observers in the evolutionary universe: they find themselves at a rather specific site and at a later stage of the history of the universe, for which the physical parameters that are treated as fundamental constants are not arbitrary but, rather, are fine-tuned with the conditions that enable carbon-based life forms to evolve.⁴⁴² The WAP emphasizes that there are some necessary conditions that make it possible for life to emerge and to continue its existence in the universe. These conditions include, first of all, the size and the age of the universe: the universe must be old and large in order to create the conditions for carbon-based life-forms to emerge. If we translate this into the language of the previous section, the universe must be empty (that is, anti-anthropic) in its past in order to prepare the conditions for its anthropicity at present.

The positive feature of the WAP approach in cosmology is that it does not claim too much; in other words, it does not demand any inherent causality between the cosmological evolution and the emergence of life. It does not say anything about the laws of physics themselves or about the values of the fundamental physical constants, for example, about the actual value of the constant of electromagnetic interaction αe. It accepts these values as given and then attempts to explain some features of the uni­verse. The WAP simply says that in order for the humankind-event to happen, some cosmological conditions must be fulfilled. The WAP does not link the phenomenon of humanity to the overall evolution of the universe, for example, to the initial con­ditions in the universe that would inevitably lead to the humankind-event.

In stressing the necessary conditions, the WAP does not, in fact, address the issue of what the actual cause of the humankind-event was. It is also clear that the WAP does not discuss the future of the universe; in other words, it leaves the question of the indefinite continuation of life out of its scope. It is also important to note that the WAP does not attempt to assert causality between the humankind-event and the structure of the whole cosmos, that is, to use the fact of the existence of life to predicate from it to certain special properties of the universe.

The question of whether the anthropic arguments provide some explanation in cosmology is still at the heart of scientific discussions. There have been some attempts to dismiss these arguments as physically explanatory by appealing to so-called string theory, which is not yet confirmed by experiments but which predicts specific values for the fundamental physical constants. If this prediction is correct and unique in its nature, the anthropic reasoning in physics becomes redundant; that is, the fact of the existence of intelligent life in cosmos cannot be used per se to argue from it to the structure of the universe.⁴⁴³ But the replacement of the anthropic argumentation by string theory, which consistently justifies the physics of the surrounding cosmos that permits life, does not mean that string theory removes the issue of the origin of conscious life in the universe. Even if this theory provides the explanation of the background that is necessary for the existence of life, it cannot address the issue of the sufficient conditions that actually made the potentiality of life become reality, to become the humankind-event.

One can reformulate the last thought by using more philosophico-theological terminology. From a wider system of thought, which is not restricted to the monistic vision of science, it becomes evident that cosmology and physics, although they try to put the conditions of the existence of humanity in a cosmological context, deal only with the natural dimension of the humankind-event, that is, with the existence of humans as physico-biological bodies. Physics itself can hardly speculate at present on the nature of human consciousness or the soul, and even less on the human com­posite hypostasis of body and soul.⁴⁴⁴ In other words, physics and cosmology can dis­cuss the human phenomenon only from a perspective of its materiality, in terms of physics and biology, which can be communicated from one being to another and form a large uninatural population. The hypostatic, or personal, dimension of human existence is out of the scope of physics and biology. Certainly, the conscious nature of humans is tacitly present in all cosmological insights, because all are made by intelligent human beings, so that any claim about the universe has sense only in the context of the human intelligence in the cosmos. But cosmology has no key to the explanation of this intelligence itself. The intelligence is not obviously inherent in the cosmological observations and theories; it can be established only by metascientific introspection, not by physics itself.

One establishes, then, a correlation between the terminology used in cosmology and that used in theology. The necessary conditions for life to exist asserted in the WAP correspond in a theological frame of mind to the natural conditions for the exis­tence of human persons. The WAP affirms the natural conditions for the humankind-event, but it does not relate to the issue why this event has happened, that is, why the existence of human beings understood as hypostatic creatures, as differentiated per­sons, became possible, why the humankind-event happened as hypostasized exis­tence, not just as an element in the natural chain of impersonal and dispassionate interplay between chance and necessity. One sees, then, that the problem of the suffi­cient conditions for life to emerge and to continue to exist in the universe in cosmol­ogy correlates with the mystery of the personal, hypostatic existence of human beings in theology. We can anticipate, then, that the issue of the existence of life in the cos­mological context cannot be fully addressed without an appeal to theology, for the insufficiency of cosmology to clarify the riddle of intelligent life in the universe points toward the grounds of life, which transcend the cosmological context, making the humankind-event relational (or contingent) upon nonnatural factors.

It follows from what we have just said that the issue of the necessary conditions for intelligent life in the universe must not be separated from the issue of the suffi­cient conditions. The AP is logically incomplete if it tries to affirm something about the structure of the universe relying only on the natural aspects of human existence. It follows, then, that the genuine anthropic principle must consist of both scientific and theological insights, which would open a route to the demonstration of the contingency of human existence in the universe and to a more intricate involvement of human beings in the communion with the grounds of the intelligibility of the universe.

It becomes clear that even the more speculative strong AP in cosmology does not reach its goal of proclaiming that the whole structure of the universe is to be subordinated to the fact of the existence of intelligent life in the universe: “The universe must have this properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history.”⁴⁴⁵

An attempt that the SAP makes in subordinating the entire history of the universe to the requirement that life can emerge in this universe has a modest utility in cosmology.⁴⁴⁶ However, it raises some problems in a theological discourse. Indeed, if the SAP refers only to the natural aspects of human existence, then it obviously does not address the issue of sufficient conditions for the existence of life in the universe, for even if the universe is physically “designed” to contain biological life, it is still unknown what particular cause led ultimately to the emergence of biological organisms. The problem of consciousness in biological organisms is not even addressed by the SAP inference explicitly. There is some contingent element in the whole story of the appearance of life in the universe that is fundamentally unavoidable if one thinks about it in purely physical terms.

To illustrate this last thought, we employ a simple model of the emergence of complexity (which is often used to describe complicated living systems) in physics to show that it is always accompanied by a fundamental uncertainty, which cannot be resolved on a physical level but requires one to appeal to some transphysical (and nonpredictable) factors. Our example is based on two assumptions. The first is that the phenomenon of life, from a physico-biological point of view (we disregard con­scious life in this example), is associated with the “manifestation of the attainment of a particular level of organised complexity in a physical system.”⁴⁴⁷ It is clear that this definition is an extreme form of reductionism, in which the whole spectrum of bio­logical phenomena is treated from the point of view of physics. It is, however, suffi­cient for our present purposes to accept this model of living systems. The second assumption is that, for heuristic modeling (not a truly scientific one) of the emer­gence of the organized complexity, one can use any physical model of complex phe­nomena that involves an interplay of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the complexity to emerge.

Under these two assumptions, we intend to demonstrate that the emergence of “life,” understood simply as a definite level of complexity in a physical system, requires one not only to satisfy the necessary conditions, serving as a background for complex phenomena, but also to realize that a particular outcome of these phenom­ena (one that could be more precisely associated with the emergence of life) will be a priori unpredictable and contingent on factors that are not conceivable by the physics that operates with the given complex phenomena.

The simplest example of complexity in a physical system is known as the Bernard instability, which provides us with an example of chaotic behavior and emergence of complexity in the physical situation when we consider heat convection in the liquid contained between two planes with different temperatures and embedded in the external gravitational field.⁴⁴⁸ The meaning of the Bernard instability can be explained in simple terms as the transition from an initially uniform liquid to the state where this liquid becomes ordered in space, in terms of the Bernard cells, with a typical size of one-tenth of a centimeter, in which 1021 molecules experience a spe­cial type of correlation. The transition from the uniform liquid to the structured liq­uid can be compared to the transition from a physical state of the universe with no life to the state when life emerged. In the case of the Bernard phenomenon, the tran­sition from the uniform state to the complex state depends on satisfying some con­ditions that can be called the necessary conditions. In particular, there must be two factors: (1) the presence of the external gravitational field and (2) the presence of the difference in temperature on the upper and low plains ΔΤ. When this difference reaches some critical level ΔΤc, one observes the transition from the uniform liquid to the liquid that is formed by cell tubes.

If we make an analogy between the external factors in the Bernard experiment (that is, the external gravitational field and the difference in temperature between the two planes containing the liquid) and the external cosmological conditions that are necessary for the emergence of life (such as the strength of the cosmological gravita­tional fields and the temperature of the background radiation, which decreases as the universe expands), then the necessary condition for the Bernard phenomenon to occur (ΔT > ΔTc) can be paralleled with some cosmological event, when the temper­ature of the background radiation dropped to such a level that the stability of the constituents of the biological factors on the earth were achieved and life could emerge.

The most intriguing part of the Bernard experiment, however, is that the phenomenon of complexity can be of two different types. The Bernard cell in a given place of the liquid can have either clockwise (right, or R) or counterclockwise (left, or L) chirality, so that the spatial structure of complexity, attained in a fixed point of the liquid, can be depicted as a sequel of cells with different order of chiralities, namely, either A (… RLRLRL…) or B (… LRLRLR…). It is important to realize that the complexity of the Bernard type will necessarily emerge if ΔT > ΔΤc, that is, the phenomenon is deterministic with respect to the external, necessary conditions. But it is practically impossible to predict what particular outcome – either A or B – will take place when the necessary conditions are satisfied. This means that if one repeats the experiment, leading to the Bernard instability many times, one can predict only the probability PA = 1/2 that there will be an outcome A and the probability PB = 1/2 that there will be an outcome B.

If we now make a hypothesis in our model, that the state A corresponds to such a level of complexity that leads to “life,” whereas the state B is “infertile,” then one can affirm that despite the deterministic external conditions (necessary conditions) for complexity to emerge, the actual happening in the system, leading either to “life” or to “no life,” is not in causal relation to the necessary conditions (for the actual hap­pening is not conditioned by deterministic “law” but is the outcome of this law corresponding to a broken symmetry between A and B). It is probabilistic in nature and depends on factors that are not described by physical theory. What is the actual cause of a spontaneous choice between “life” and “no life” remains unclear. In other words, the sufficient conditions that led to the emergence of life are not explained. We observe here the display of the fundamental contingency in the physical system that demands for its explanation an appeal to factors that transcend physics.

Some authors, approaching the problem of chaos and organized complexity from a wide philosophical and theological perspective, invoke ideas about informa­tion, whose input could be a decisive factor in determining whether the complex state will be life-giving or not. J. Polkinghorne defends this idea in the context of chaos theory.⁴⁴⁹ Indeed, the information type of consideration is possible in the case of Bernard’s instability if we consider the experiment before and after the complex structure emerged. It is clear from what we have said before that the prior probabil­ity for the liquid to make a transition either to state A or to state B is the same and equals one-half. This means that the uncertainty in this system can be estimated in terms of the informational entropy I by the formula Ibefore = PAlnPA + PBlnPB = –ln2. There is, however, no uncertainty after the complexity has been established, for the outcome of the experiment is fixed and a posteriori probability for A and B is distributed either PA = 1, PB = 0 or PA = 0, PB = 1. In both cases, the informational entropy is zero: Iafier = 0. Then, in order for the system to “make a decision” as to what complex state to make a transition (that is, either to A or to B), the system needs to eliminate the informational uncertainty that equals ΔI = Iafter – Ibefore = ln2. This example thus provides some justification for invocating the idea of the active input of information in the chaotic systems in order to deal with an epistemological uncertainty.

What is, however, suspicious in such arguments is that this information is associated sometimes with a sort of divine agency. There are two major objections to this hypothesis. The first is physical and is based on the observation that, in order to overcome the informational uncertainty, one should use some sources of physical energy.⁴⁵⁰ The uncertainty in information is connected with the uncertainty in energy according to the second law of thermodynamics: ∆I ~ ∆E/T (where T is the temper­ature of the environment in which the system is embedded). This means that an active input of information needs to be supported by an input of energy from the physical world. In the case of Bernard’s instability, this source of energy is hidden in the difference of the temperature ∆T between two flat boundaries of the liquid, which means that an attempt to use the idea of information by contraposing it to physical agency is not justified. The second objection is theological in nature, for it questions whether the information – understood, for example, by Polkinghorne as the divine agency – is part of creation or not.⁴⁵¹

The Orthodox appropriation of this proposal of Polkinghorne’s would be possi­ble only if the notion of information were clearly defined in ontological terms. What is this information? If information is understood in the sense of “theory of informa­tion,” which is based on the laws of physics, it cannot be treated as an uncreated entity. In this case, it is probably better to refer to the information as some agent from the intelligible realm of the created world. Even in this case, the link between infor­mation and divine agency is still unclear, for the Divine is uncreated, whereas the intelligible information is created; since information is part of the creation and any talk about divine intervention (input) into physical process is theologically incorrect. The input of information from the “intelligible heaven” (treated as a noetic entity) can lead, however, to an outcome in a physical system that will have nothing to do with a divine purpose and will. The ontological difference (diaphora) in creation between the sensible and the intelligible (which is the constitutive element of the cre­atio ex nihilo) means that any influence (input of information) of the invisible upon the visible is possible only if it has been already encoded in the creatio ex nihilo itself; only in this sense can one claim the presence of the divine in their interaction.

It is more consistent, however, to look at the “causal joints” of matter and information from the perspective of the contingency rooted in the created world in both the visible and the invisible realms. This can take different forms, so that the divine action sought by an intellectual mind can be found encoded in the independence and freedom that the created world has received from God through the creatio ex nihilo.

When we observe chaos in the natural world and claim that it represents a kind of contingent order that is distinct from predictable aspects of nature, we contem­plate, in theological terms, the difference between the logos of chaos and the logos of predictable and regular processes. The input of active information, to use Polkinghorne’s language, could only mean, from an Orthodox point of view, a qual­itative change in contingent order that would probably have been caused by a “switching over” of the logoi responsible for these two types of processes. We cannot treat this “event” as an input of information because the logoi are preexistent in the divine Logos. Thus we are dealing here not with an active input of information (provided by God?) but with a change in the contingent order, which already has its own logos.

Finally, one can agree with J. Haught that information as such is a “mystery that science cannot comprehend through its atomizing reduction.⁴⁵² Similarly to our pointing out that the origin of information lies in the uncreated logoi, Haught asserts that informational patterning is a metaphysical necessity for anything to exist, for it must have form, order, or pattern.⁴⁵³ In other words, the existence of a thing means that there is information about this thing; that is, its existence is the informed exis­tence. But what does it mean? The informed existence assumes that there is the other, which is informed about the existence of some thing; this manifests the existence of this thing for the other and in the other. This can be rearticulated by saying that there is an inherent intelligible pattern of anything that is revealed through its relation to the other agency, who possesses the ability to enhypostasize this pattern as specific and concrete existence. Here we return to the issue of intelligible agencies in the uni­verse, for only these, by sharing the intelligibility of the universal Logos, can reveal and operate with the information that enters scientific inquiry. It is only in this sense that information can be appropriated as a kind of divine agency, revealing itself through intelligible human beings, capable of grasping forms, orders, and patterns in the universe.

In concluding our discussion of a simple physical model of the emergence of complexity (which can be interpreted in a reductionist way as the emergence of life), we must rearticulate two important achievements: (1) the sufficient conditions for the actual emergence of life in the universe cannot be part of physical theory (this indicates the presence of a fundamental, unavoidable contingency in cosmological theory), and (2) the anthropic arguments deal only with the natural aspects of the humankind-event, whose actual happening is contingent upon some nonnatural grounds. This brings us finally to the understanding that the mystery of the humankind-event and the attempt of cosmology to inquire into it through anthropic arguments is linked with the mystery of the hypostatic existence of human beings; that is, their origin in the divine image and with the whole divine economy followed from the creatio ex nihilo. But the mystery of the creation out of nothing, as discussed in chapter 5, is theologically linked with God’s plan of the salvation of humankind. This means that the humankind-event, if seen not only from its natural (physico-biological) dimension but also philosophically and theologically, can be understood only through the chain of creation, incarnation, and resurrection.

The strong AP, then, can be reinterpreted, not so much physically but theologically. The status of this interpretation will be, in the parlance of J. Leslie, as a logical explanation of the link between the humankind-event and the structure of the universe, rather than a causal explanation in physical terms of how the presence of human life in the universe cascades up and down to physics in order to explain its laws and their particular outcomes leading to the existence of life.⁴⁵⁴

This means that the causation that is effectively present in the universe, starting from its creation and up to the point when human life emerges, is subordinated not only to the logic of physics but also to the logic of the divine plan to create such a uni­verse in which human beings, being in God’s image, could live and could learn the truth about God and themselves, in particular, that they are not only natural creatures but also hypostatic and ecclesial beings who can enlighten and personify the universe through their presence. It is these human beings who can follow the way of deviation from the necessity of nature in order to transfigure its own cosmological roots according to their ultimate ecclesial aim to achieve the union with God.

It is clear, then, that the theological link between the universe and the humankind-event is not entirely natural. When we talk about the divine plan of sal­vation of humankind, we assume that this plan is to be incarnate in the realm of con­tingent creation. This makes it legitimate to assert that since, in the divine reason, the creation of the world out of nothing is linked to the fact of the salvation of humankind, there must be some display of the connection between the world and humanity that is encoded in the theology of creation. In a sophisticated way, this link can be revealed by reasoning we have used several times in this book, namely, by referring the display of the universe and the presence of human beings in it to their common ground in their otherness, that is, in the transcendent God-Creator. Theologically speaking, the existence of a link between the world and humans is inevitable. The major problem, then, is to articulate this link not only in natural terms, for it cannot be fully expressed from within its worldly manifestations. Otherwise, it would mean expressing in worldly terms the contingency of creation, which cannot be done.⁴⁵⁵ The challenge to science is to detect the presence of this con­tingency in scientific theories with no full explanation of its origin; the latter is exactly what theological methodology can offer.

Cosmology taken in its purely scientific realization can pretend to reveal the fundamental contingency of human existence in its natural dimension on some specific conditions that have been realized in the universe. It will be, however, extremely dif­ficult for cosmology alone (that is, with no support from philosophy and theology) to reveal the ground of the universe and of human beings in it beyond the universe in the realm of the uncreated (we have already seen examples of the theological rea­soning on the issue of creation in cosmology and the origin of temporal irreversibil­ity in the universe in chapters 5 and 6 that point toward the transcendent grounds of existence). But this means precisely that cosmology should look for the presence of contingent necessity in its laws and facts about the existence of human beings in the universe (that is, the necessity that by its display in the universe never acquires the features of sufficiency), for the sufficiency, if it were to be possible to reveal it in the display of the universe, by its logical constitution, would be an ultimate ground of contingent necessity in the world, which would correspond to the hidden knowledge of the divine plan of creation and salvation.

If we now look more closely at the affirmation of the SAP – that the universe must have some properties in order to allow human life to develop in the universe – and if we treat this idea theologically, we can see the referral to the creation of the universe with the purpose of the salvation of human beings as creatures with a particular anthropological constitution. For human beings to be made in a particular hyposta­sis (that is, to be a unity of a body and a soul), there must be conditions for the nat­ural aspects of the human hypostasis to be realized, namely, conditions for the existence of the human body, which is made from the same material available in the universe. The SAP, treated from this perspective, provides in its above form a theo­logical affirmation of the design in the universe in order to fit the human body. But the SAP, as we have established before, deals only with the natural aspects of the humankind-event; that is, it does not address the origin and existence of the human hypostasis as the union between the bodily functions and the abilities to think and contemplate things and ideas as well as to integrate them in a single consciousness. It is exactly at this point that the analysis of the SAP reveals the presence of fundamen­tal contingency, as an inability to provide any inference on the mystery of the hypo­static dimension of human existence.

It must be also noted that the SAP does not address the future of human life in the universe; it does not treat the phenomenon of man as an event. An event means not just a happening in the chain of causal physical factors; rather, it is by itself a consti­tutive element for physical reality, something that makes the undifferentiated matter “the reality.” Thus an event itself is a hypostatic notion, which is called to constitute the elements of nature in space and time. Any event by definition is contingent upon some agency that is not entirely rooted in the natural. An event has a beginning and an end. Similarly, the humankind-event has a beginning and an end. This implies that what the SAP asserts is that at some stage of the evolution of the universe, there must be necessary conditions for the humankind-event to happen. This means that the evolution of the universe is constructive from the point of view of the history of salvation only up to the humankind-event. This implies in turn that the link the SAP attempts to make between the whole evolution of the universe and the humankind-event is actually subordinated to the latter; yes, the universe must evolve in order to allow the humankind-event to happen, but the future evolution of the universe is not subordinated anymore to the humankind-event, which, according to modern physics and theological eschatology, is finite in time. This implies that the most that the SAP can say about the structure of the universe (in terms of the humankind-event) is to affirm something about its past as contingent on the present, not the future.⁴⁵⁶ The final AP of F. Tipler, which attempts to extend the assertion of the SAP to the indefinite future, does not seem to be a plausible version of things in the con­text of the notion of the humankind-event. The critique of this principle will be touched on briefly later in this chapter.

One can conclude thus that the phenomenon of man in the universe, analyzed in the context of the anthropic arguments in cosmology, is in its essence finite and contingent on nonnatural factors, which can be elucidated only by appeal to the theol­ogy of creation. Being an element of creation, the phenomenon of humanity acquires the features of an event. It is in this sense that all assertions of the WAP and SAP can be interpreted as indications of the fundamental contingency present in cosmologi­cal theories, open to further explanation and based on nonphysical assumptions.

This section articulates in detail what is meant by the hypostatic dimension of the humankind-event. To do this, we start with elucidating the role of human hypostasis in the process of knowing the universe. It can sound tautologous that the very fact that physics can speculate about the universe and the place of humankind in it is based on the ability of humans to contemplate the universe and form a coherent picture of the world. This ability is associated with the intelligence that makes human beings fundamentally different from other forms of biological life. This fact, despite being tacitly present in the very foundation of science, and in cosmology in particu­lar, is disregarded as constitutive for modern knowledge. Human beings as intelligent observers and conscious agencies in the universe are downgraded to the level of pas­sive observers, so that the presupposition of the observations themselves (that is, human consciousness) is excluded from the subject matter of physics. B. Carr stated this situation in physics and cosmology, treated as man’s model of the world in which he lives, by saying: “Yet one feature which is noticeably absent from this model is the creator, man himself. That physics has little to say about the place of man in the uni­verse is perhaps not surprising when one considers the fact that most physicists probably regard man, and more generally consciousness, as being entirely irrelevant to the functioning of the universe. He is seen as no more than a passive observer, with the laws of Nature, which he assiduously attempts to unravel, operating everywhere and for all time, independent of whether or not man witness them.”⁴⁵⁷ The fact that such a vision of humans’ place in the universe is fundamentally incomplete can be easily elucidated by a simple example.⁴⁵⁸

Let us analyze a typical diagram from popular scientific books that depicts different objects in the universe, starting from atoms and finishing with galaxies, in terms of their spatial sizes or their masses.⁴⁵⁹ The position of human beings in this diagram is seen as mediocre: its typical spatial size is 1012 times higher than the atomic one, and the place they occupy in space is 10–19 times less than the size of the visible universe. Despite that the existence of human beings depends on atoms and the size (or age) of the universe (this is a typical anthropic line of reasoning), if it is seen from a purely physical point of view, the position of human beings in the universe is insignificant. For every contemplative and psychologically oriented thinker, the internal inconsistency of a purely physical view is hidden in the fact that human reason, which is not present in the diagram explicitly, is encoded in it implicitly, for all objects starting from atoms and finishing with the universe as a whole are integrated in a single logi­cal chain, which is possible only because the human insight is present everywhere. Thus all objects in the chain of physical being are united by human reason in a single consciousness of the whole that is sustained from the “vertical” dimension of human intellect, which is linked to the natural conditions of human existence but at the same time transcends this existence, revealing itself as dependent not only on physico-cosmological factors but also on nonnatural or, as we call them, hypostatic factors.⁴⁶⁰ This idea is illustrated by the diagram in figure 7.2, which presents the position of humans in being in terms of two dimensions, natural and hypostatic.

One could object to our use of term hypostatic by pointing out that what we mean by it is human intelligence,which assumes the ability to contemplate objects in nature, form their meaning, and communicate this meaning to the whole humankind. Some would say that all these functions of human intellect have naturally emerged, so that they constitute a part of nature, although quite different from what one means by physical nature.⁴⁶¹

(Spatial scale)

Atoms Human being as Natural

10–10cm 102cm physical substance 1028cm Dimension

Figure 7.2

In this case, one could say that, instead of naming the vertical dimension hypostatic, it would be easy to call it an intellectual (or psychological) dimension and not to make a sharp difference between horizontal and vertical dimensions in figure 7.2. Our response to this objection would be that the presence of intellect and consciousness, even if they are treated in a reductionist way as epiphenomena of physical and biological function, do not explain and justify the aspect of personhood in human existence, that is, genuinely human hypostasis as personified existence of human beings in different bodies. The personhood of human beings implies not only that they have self-consciousness (that is, the perception of one’s own ego), but also that there is a fundamental distinction from and, at the same time, relatedness to other existences, or other hypostases.⁴⁶² The personhood as hypo­static existence means that it cannot be communicated to another person (in contrast with the natural, for example, biological factors, which are shared by all human beings and can in principle be communicated from one human being to another, such as the transplantation of organs). Every particular existence is unique and inexpressible in terms of the other. Despite the fact that the hypostatic unity of the human composite of body and soul cannot be communicated in a physical or bio­logical sense, the hypostasis of the human person is formed only through its relation to other hypostases (that does not necessarily imply interaction on the level of sub­stance) and to the common source of their origination.⁴⁶³ In other words, the non­natural aspect of the hypostatic dimension in human beings points toward the fundamentally relational essence of this existential dimension. This literally means that the symbol of human being in figure 7.2 as hypostatic (large and gray) stands for the whole of mankind (in contrast to natural man, small and black) as the community of beings with a common principle (logos) of human nature related to God and realized in different hypostases (different persons).⁴⁶⁴

One can say that the integral knowledge of the universe contains in itself an implicit premise that there is a “way” of communication with the universe that would allow human reason to find truth about the universe and to share this truth among the members of the whole community. But the establishment of the “meaning” of what is contemplated by the members of the community presupposes that there is a common ground of sense and intelligibility, which is shared not only naturally (that is, biologically, on the level of the corporeal) but also hypostatically (that is, it is not deduced from nature through a chain of physico-biological and physiological causa­tions), the very possibility of which is rooted in their common relationship to the common source of existence in creation, to the Logos in whom the whole universe and human persons are inherent hypostatically.

Since all things in creation can be treated as effected words of God, knowledge of these things implies the ability to “hear” the words of God, not simply through nat­ural faculties of the body (which provide only the outward impression) but through immediate participation in these words, which takes place on a nonnatural level. The fact that human reason can penetrate space and time and contemplate in different symbols things invisible and nonobservable, microparticles and cosmological struc­tures, points toward man’s ability to transcend empirical nature to the realm of intel­ligible forms. At this point, the importance of the hypostatic dimension for understanding humanity’s place in the universe becomes clear. It is because of the hypostatic unity of the body and soul, which forms the logos of man and originates from the divine Logos, that it is possible to argue together with Maximus the Confessor and other Patristic writers that man, in a way, imitates in his composition the whole universe, empirical (that is, explicitly visible) and intelligible (invisible); that is, it manifests itself in the basic diaphora in creation that points to the logos, which holds different parts of creation together.

Maximus developed an allegorical interpretation of the universe as man, and conversely, of man as microcosm and mediator between the parts of the universe and between the universe and God.⁴⁶⁵ Maximus articulates the similarity between the composition of human beings and the composition of the universe from the point of view of the hypostatic unity of different parts in them. A passage from Maximus’s The Church’s Mystagogy (chapter 7) elucidates the meaning of this similarity:

Intelligible things display the meaning of the soul as the soul does that of intelligible things, and… sensible things display the place of body as the body does that of sen­sible things. And… intelligible things are the soul of sensible things, and sensible things are the body of intelligible things;… as the soul is in the body so is the intel­ligible in the world of sense, that the sensible is sustained by the intelligible as the body is sustained by the soul;… both make up one world as body and soul make up one man, neither of these elements joined to the other in unity denies or displaces the other according to the law of the one [the Creator] who has bound them together. In conformity with this law there is engendered the principle [logos] of the unifying force which does not permit that the [hypostatic] identity unifying these things be ignored because of their difference in nature.⁴⁶⁶

In a scientifico-cosmological context, this text can be interpreted as an insight that can lead a cosmologist beyond the sphere of the visible universe (which is accessible to the senses) to that which is invisible and described in terms of mathematical objects (which human reason, being an analytical part of the soul, operates with because the reason is indwelling in the body), so that through the visible universe the reason reaches the intelligible universe, which also indwells in the visible despite being different from it. It is because of the hypostatic unity of the body and soul in a cosmologist that one can reveal the hypostatic unity of the visible and intelligible universe. A cosmologist relates opposite phenomena: small (atoms) and large (galaxies), visible present cosmos and its invisible past; cosmos as multiplicity of different visible facts (stars, galaxies, distribution of clusters of galaxies) and the mathematical cosmos (as uniform and isotropic space).

The human ability to recapitulate in its knowledge all constituents of the universe, and to recognize that human being is deeply dependent on the structural and nomistic aspects of the microworld as well as of the megacosmos, makes the position of humans in the universe exceptional and unique. The recapitulation of the universe in man takes place not only on the natural level (which is affirmed in the anthropic arguments) but, and this is much more nontrivial, on the hypostatic level; this implies indirectly that human beings are participating in outward hypostasization of their own existence by revealing the meaning of various levels of the universe. The latter is possible because human beings can use their own hypostasis to bring the undifferentiated existents in the universe to their proper, personal existing, that is, as the exis­tence through the apprehension in the persons. Such an existence of the universe through the transferral to it of the personal dimension of humankind can be described in theological terms as the enhypostasization of the universe. In different words, human persons, or humankind in general, despite being physically located in one particular point of the universe, share through the fusion of knowledge their exis­tence with all other places and ages of the universe. It is this existence of the universe in the other, that is, in human beings, that means that the universe is enhypostasized by human beings. One can affirm at last that the humankind-event, being made hypostatically inherent in the Logos, is itself the source of further expansion of the hypo­static inherence toward the universe, which has the form of a revelation of the intelligibility of the universe, its purpose and end through the human personhood.⁴⁶⁷

The place of humankind in the universe can be expressed by using the old idea of microcosm, as the world in the small. It is clear, from what we have discussed above, however, that the major feature that puts humans in the “central” position in the uni­verse is the fact that the reality of this universe is articulated by humankind; that is, the universe is revealed to itself in the hypostasis of human being. This adds to the man as microcosm the title of mediator, for it is man who establishes the link between the universe and God, not naturally or physically, but hypostatically; that is, the universe as the part of creation is offered to God in the hypostasis of humankind through its thanksgiving wonder of the good creation and its “cosmic liturgy” of knowledge, which, being an open-ended advance of human intelligence, also changes (transfigures) the universe.

The fundamental problem, however, in asserting that the universe is made hypostatically inherent in human apprehension, and that the universe appears to us as intelligible reality, is rooted in the origin of the intelligence of human beings and its relation to the intelligibility of the universe, which is discovered through the scien­tific quest. It follows from what we have said before that the root of human intelli­gence lies in the hypostatic dimension of human existence, which can be expressed in such words as the relation to the ultimate source of intelligibility, which is beyond the world. We also stressed that the analogy between human being and the universe, which is expressed in terms of the commonality of their logoi, points to the fact that there is contingent intelligibility in the world that is ultimately of the same origin as intelligence in humans. This leads us to the conclusion that the act of making the universe hypostatically inherent in human apprehension means, in fact, recovering the contingent intelligibility of the cosmos (which is not contemplated by the cos­mos itself) through the human hypostasis. It is clear, then, that for this to be possible, one should assume that human intelligence is somehow tuned with the intelligibility of the universe. This leads us back to the idea that the intelligence of human beings, rooted in their hypostases, and the intelligibility of the universe, which is not self-evident and which is revealed to human beings when the universe is apprehended and articulated by them, have a common root, one beyond creation and hidden in the Logos of God.

The central position of humankind in the universe can now be described in a different formula by saying that man is positioned between God and the universe in the following sense: human beings are made inherent in the hypostasis of the Logos of God as the accomplished hypostases, whereas the other objects in the universe are made inherent in the Logos without having their own hypostases, so that their exis­tence is not personal and as such is devoid of the realization of purpose and end. It is only through the hypostatic inherence of these objects through human apprehension that they are brought to a realization of their function in the divine plan, when the objects themselves receive their meaning in terms of purposes and ends.

We now have come to the central question in our discussion of the place of man in the universe: Why is the hypostasis of human beings an accomplished one, so that they can mediate between personal God and impersonal nature, or, in other words, Why do human beings exhibit such existences in the universe that resemble the image of the Divine and, at the same time, recapitulate in themselves the whole uni­verse? Repeating the same question in different terms: Why does the humankind-event take place in the universe? We do not expect to reveal the answer in a form like “God created the universe and human beings in it because of this and this.” By posing this question, we simply want to express our main concern and argument that the mystery of the phenomenon of humanity in the universe can only be uncovered partially by the sciences in terms of the natural conditions suitable for the existence of life; the genuine problem of the humankind-event still remains a philosophical and theological issue, in which other (nonscientific) sources of human experience must be invoked. This points precisely to the fact that the human hypostasis is capa­ble of insights and intuitions that are not accessible to discursive thinking.

The question posed above is not scientific in origin. However, it follows logically from what we have discussed in a scientific context. This implies that a response to the question on the position of human beings in the universe will finally be theolog­ical in nature, based on the understanding as well as the direct experience of the cos­mic meaning of the incarnation of the Logos of God and of the Christ-event. Before we turn to this issue, which is central for this chapter, it is important from a methodological point of view to rearticulate the meaning of the enhypostasization of the universe in the human hypostasis in rather contemporary terms, which are closer to present-day scientific discourse and its dialogue with science.

We leave out for a while the question of the origin of the human hypostasis, assuming that it is somehow in place and that it initiates cognitive faculties in human beings. If describing these faculties empirically, or even philosophically, one can ask what it means that the universe is brought into being (that is, enhypostasized) or selected by observations. In other words, what are the epistemological consequences of our ability to know anything about the universe and how is this reflected in mod­ern discussions about the status of cosmological knowledge as being anthropic by definition? These issues can be illustrated by examples from the concept of the anthropic principle considered in its epistemological dimension.

The presence of the hypostatic dimension in the humankind-event can be illustrated through analysis of the AP from an epistemological point of view. It sounds nearly tautological that the fact that we observe the universe as it appears to us is deeply embedded in the nature of our cognitive faculties. In other words, we can observe only things in the universe that can enter into the process of our cognition. We can­not observe those “realities” that cannot cause in human being any cognitive or emo­tional response. This leads us to the simple observation that the visible universe is, in a strange way, selected by acts of human cognition.

This conclusion is not new at all, for in science, especially in the experimental sciences, it was recognized long ago that the instruments and experimental arrangements affect the results of observations and constrain the structure of the sought-for realities. Quantum mechanics, in its Copenhagen interpretation, for example, asserts explicitly that the phenomenon becomes an element of reality only if it is registered, that is, observed and measured.⁴⁶⁸ This means that the notion of reality as it is in itself has no sense in such a context. In astronomy, for example, our knowledge of the objects in the universe is predetermined by our ability to see or detect different types of radiation that comes from the cosmos – for example, electromagnetic radiation can be detected by optical telescopes or radio telescopes; gamma rays need a differ­ent type of equipment sensitive to them; cosmic rays can be detected by special tracking devices; gravitational waves are expected to be measured by either solid-state antennas or laser-interferometers. The visible universe, as we define it through all different observations, is thus deeply connected with the nature of our cognitive fac­ulties extended by apparata. This reflects the well-known philosophical view that reality can be defined only within a subject-object relation.

It is enough to recall the Kantian treatment of experience as bounded by two forms of sensibility and twelve categories of understanding. It is within this experi­ence that we can know nature and can claim that our knowledge is objective. We can rephrase this by saying that there is an epistemological horizon in the advance of knowledge that is circumscribed by our cognitive faculties. This implies that what we know is, by definition, the world of phenomena, which is self-selected because of our faculties. This line of thought can lead naturally to a claim that the AP is an episte­mological tautology, namely, that the visible universe, which is fine-tuned to sustain the life of human beings, is what is called in Kantian terms the phenomenal world, so that it must by its constitution include observers who perceive this world through the “prism” of their cognitive capacities. The question of how particularly the Kantian epistemology can cascade down into the methodology of scientific research was dis­cussed in a paper by W. I. McLaughlin, who tried, for example, to make a link between the number of observed astronomical phenomena and the possible infor­mation that can be obtained in principle in this subject area because of the limited number of categories of the understanding.⁴⁶⁹ In McLaughlin’s approach, the AP is trivial because we can see the world only from within the horizon circumscribed by our faculties, so that what we see is immanent to what we have at our disposal.

Kantian philosophy, however, does not provide any explanation of why we have the cognitive faculties we have and what is the ultimate source of them and, as a consequence, of the structure of the universe we observe. Kant’s invocation of the idea of the “noumenal world” (things-in-themselves) was just a way of referring to something that is beyond the world of phenomena but which, being completely inaccessible to us, functions as an empty logical form, playing the role of a delimiter that outlines the boundaries of our knowledge, which separates being from nonbe­ing. It is important to realize, however, that to affirm that the world of phenomena is self-selected by our cognitive faculties, one should assume, at least in pure thought, that this world is hypostasized in its concreteness with respect to something that transcends it and that is not the world. This assumption, according to Kant, leads to antinomies of the reason that warn that the transcendence of the understanding beyond the world of phenomena is an illegitimate procedure. The paradox here is that, in order to affirm the concreteness of this world, one has to assume that there is nonbeing of this concreteness that cannot be grasped within the human cognitive faculties. According to Kant, transcendence of the world of phenomena was a break beyond the realm that is formed through the relation between subject and object, whereas Kant’s follower J. G. Fichte treated this not as a break beyond the subject-object relation but, rather, as the hypostasization of the abstract transcendent realm by the reason within its purely subjective capacity. This means that if, for Kant, the existence of the world of noumena was problematic by its definition, for Fichte, its existence was immanent with the existence of thought itself, which produced this notion.

If we apply this philosophy to the AP, we must admit that the AP functions in modern cosmology as the principle that sets the boundaries to our own knowledge of the visible universe. In other words, any cosmological theory that pretends to describe adequately the visible cosmos should satisfy all the constraints imposed by the strong AP. It does not mean that the AP, as a sheer metascientific statement, explains why the universe is as it is but that the AP acts as the inference that affirms in physico-mathematical terms the concreteness of the visible universe. The novelty of the AP in formulating the specificity of the subject-object relation in cosmology, however, has a profound significance that had not been recognized before this prin­ciple was established – namely, it articulates the concreteness of the world, expressed in terms of the fine-tuning of physical and cosmological constants, in terms of its stability. This means that the being of the universe where we live is not an obvious thing, for it is fundamentally unstable with respect to imaginary changes of physical parameters. Stability in this sense is associated with the existence of the visible uni­verse and of human life in it, whereas instability of the universe with respect to small changes of physical constants implies that there is nonexistence of life in all other “imaginary” universes with different sets of fundamental parameters. This fact rearticulates the epistemological dimension of the AP, namely, that in order to assert the concreteness of the visible universe in terms of its adjustment to the cognitive faculties of the observers, one should assume that it is contraposed to its own other­ness, that is, to such a state of affairs that excludes life and observers and that can be called the noumenal world in Kantian terms or as a different universe in physical terms. This comparison of the noumenal world with the different universes has a limited validity, for in the Kantian context, the noumenal world is not part of any experience, including the experience of abstract mathematical creativity. It is, how­ever, possible to argue that the concept of different universes, which is invoked in a modified version of the strong AP, functions in cosmology as a “model” of thing-in- itself. These fine distinctions in the pursuit of the idea of transcendence in cosmol­ogy are not important in the context of this research, however, for we have already established the vision of the Kantian transcendental method through the eyes of Christian Platonism.

It is evident from what we have said above why the further development of the strong AP led to its reformulation in terms of the ensemble of the universes. Indeed, if the SAP is treated as a principle of self-selection of the visible universe, then to make such a global selection legitimate, there should be that from which to select; otherwise, no justified explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe in ontological terms can be established. Indeed, while the strong AP “explains” why we do not observe universal characteristics incompatible with our existence, it does not explain why the observable characteristics of the universe, evidently compatible with our existence, take place at all. This is why, for a full-value strong anthropic explanation, certain additional assumptions are needed. These are provided by a world ensemble hypothesis, the indispensable part of the strong anthropic inference.

The concept of many worlds sounds extremely exotic and nonscientific because it postulates something well beyond the boundaries of what is scientifically “known or knowable” at this time.⁴⁷⁰ There is, however, a popular belief among some physicists and philosophers that it can be given some physically realistic meaning based on certain present-day cosmological ideas that depict the universe as a whole as consisting of many physically disjoint domains governed by different laws of their “physics.”⁴⁷¹ From this point of view, all possible “physical” arrangements can be realized in small universes comprising the ensemble. At least some universes will, in this case, be suitable for life and intelligence. Further, to explain why we find ourselves in such a well-designed universe – with its specific laws of nature, initial con­ditions, spatial topology, and so forth – we have to apply the strong AP, which makes our existence impossible in any of the universes that are designed in a differ­ent fashion, with no pattern for the fine-tuning necessary for the existence of human beings.

If, then, one assumes in a physically realistic sense that the ontological existence of the ensemble of universes is of the same quality as the visible anthropic universe, then the modified statement of the strong AP (MW-SAP) that “an ensemble of other different universes is necessary for the existence of our Universe” must be critically appraised, for it pretends to be a scientific statement that is subject to verification or falsification on purely scientific grounds.⁴⁷² Since this justification is quite problematic, it would be more reasonable to treat this statement not as empirical but as theoretical, that is, mathematical. This implies that it must have, instead, the form of a theorem. The MW-SAP theorem can be formulated in this way: an ensemble of universes as a part of our world must exist (its existence is necessary and sufficient) for our universe to exist. For our universe to be chosen from something, it is necessary for the ensemble of universes to exist. If the ensemble of universes does exist, it is sufficient for our universe to exist, since the plurality does always contain all kinds of universes, including the one where we live. To attempt a proof of this theorem, there must be established a priori a concept of many universes, which can be done only with a great extent of metaphysical speculation.⁴⁷³

The metaphysical concept of the world ensemble refers back to the block of ideas associated with the long-standing concept of plurality of worlds but renewed by ideas either from the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics or from chaotic inflationary cosmology (as well as from the old model of the oscillating universe). Probably the best way to give an idea of this model is to quote one of its authors: “The universe is constantly splitting into a stupendous numbers of branches, all resulting from the measurement-like interactions between its myriads of components. Moreover, every quantum transition taking place on every star, in every galaxy, in every remote corner of the universe is splitting our local world on earth into myriads of copies of itself.”⁴⁷⁴

Branching in MWI, associated with the measurement-like interaction, is usually said to lead to the creation of copies in interacting subsystems, each representing a separate world. Despite the fact that the branching of the universe is supposed to be a physical phenomenon and that it ought to find a precise description within the theory, there is no indication about the time and the way in which splitting occurs. The claim of the MWI is that all “branches” of the universe “are “actual,” none any more “real” than the rest.”⁴⁷⁵ However, only one outcome of an individual observation is actualized in practice, or, in other words, only one branch of the universe is real in the sense that this is the universe in which we live. This raises the problem of a dis­tinction between actuality and possibility. Nothing in the theoretical formalism of the MWI accounts for such a distinction.

The fact that the “dynamics” of branching, as well as the branches as separated worlds, has no spatiotemporal description leads immediately to the philosophical conclusion that the plurality of the worlds must be understood in a logical and philosophical sense.⁴⁷⁶ Because of an actual infinity of acts of interactions, the number of worlds with all possible values of the fundamental “physical” constants is actually infinite and contains all potentialities, including the physical constants sustaining our universe. But the possible worlds are not part of our visible universe. This requires us to rethink their ontological status, for it appears that they represent conceptual worlds and belong to the nonexperiential realm (what Kant would call the world of pure thought, or the noumena), which we have already encountered many times in the context of theoretical cosmology and call the intelligible world, the world of Platonic ideas.⁴⁷⁷

Such a view of the ensemble of the universes that enters the formulation of the SAP changes radically the whole status of this principle, depriving it of being called scientific. Since the objects that appear in its formula – that is, the visible universe and an ensemble of universes – have absolutely different ontological status (empiri­cal versus intelligible), the SAP needs to be reformulated in order to avoid any con­tradiction of leveling in its formulation of two ontologically distinct terms. This can be done only if the title “principle” disappears from the anthropic inference in order to give up its place to the strong anthropic antinomy:

Thesis: There belongs to the world an ensemble of universes whose existence is absolutely necessary for the visible universe to exist.

Antithesis: There nowhere exists an ensemble of universes as the cause of the visible uni­verse, either in the world or out of it.

We meet here again the epistemological situation in scientific discourse that has been already analyzed in chapters 5 and 6. The idea of many worlds (MW) has been invoked to articulate the specificity of the visible universe (W), its fundamental specificity, and then its instability and contingence on factors that transcend the uni­verse W. In other words, in order to explain W, one should introduce MW as a possi­ble cause of W. On the one hand, it was a way of thought when W was a primary logical cause for introducing MW in the transition W → MW; on the other hand, according to the modified version of the AP, it was MW whose existence had been assumed prior to W and that was a “cause” of the existence of W. This can be expressed as the reverse causation MW → W.

It is obvious from the nature of this construction that both “causations” have no direct physical meaning on the level of substance (ousia). In the direct transition W → MW, the invocation of the idea of MW has been methodologically justified as a hypothesis, produced by a simple operation of abstraction from a concrete set of conditions to an indefinite and infinite set of conditions, in which the initial ones have been a part of the whole. In the inverse transition MW → W, which is sup­posed to describe the process of selecting the W out of MW, the actual physical mechanism has not yet been invented, so the causation can be understood only on a hypothetical, explanatory level, with no reference to physics.

The antinomy formulated above reflects the difficulty that inevitably arises if one attempts to level both W and MW ontologically and to predicate about their connection in substantial terms. The way out of this epistemological difficulty, which we have already established in previous chapters, is to treat antinomy as the indication of a split in the created being between the sensible (W in our case) and the intelligible (MW), which inevitably appears in discursive thinking when it tries to explain away the contingency of the visible universe by subjecting the universe to some necessity that originates from beyond it. In this case, the antinomy instead demonstrates the complex nature of reasoning about the specificity of our universe using the anthropic arguments, which requires one to step out from the visible universe in order to explain its nature from outside. It is at this point that discursive reason is caught by a temptation to ontologize its conceptual schemes of the transcendent uni­verses in the same way it does for the visible universe. It is important, however, to recognize that the ultimate aim of discursive reason is to mediate between conceptual realities and the empirical world. This feature of anthropic reasoning in cosmology underlies again the fundamental fact that human beings are hypostatic creatures who can transcend the realm of the empirical to seek its origin in its otherness. One should point out, however, that in the case of the MW-SAP, this transcendence is not accomplished, for it reaches only the intelligible realm, where all the many universes exist as ideas. Reason that mediates between the sensible and the intelligible reveals itself in hypostatic unity with the human body, thus reflecting that created being is differentiated in itself through basic diaphora between the sensible and the intelligi­ble. But this fact has not been revealed by discursive thinking within cosmology itself, for the latter, by trying to explain away the contingency of the visible universe, missed the fact that the many worlds that it treated as a safe ontological ground for the visi­ble universe are themselves contingent because (1) they are created, and (2) because the MW is in fact a form of reality that is enhypostasized by human beings; that is, it represents a type of intelligible reality existing in the human hypostasis. This is why the MW-SAP, subjected to antinomial analysis, demonstrates indirectly that human beings occupy a special position in the whole creation, for their hypostasis – that is, the unity of the differentiated body and soul – resembles the basic diaphora in cre­ation, whose unity is sustained by God. Thus the MW-SAP does not explain why this is so, that is, why human beings are destined to be a mediator between the sensible and the intelligible in creation, why they resemble the created being at large. What it does provide is an interesting demonstration of how the human hypostasis manifests itself through the process of analytical knowledge by transferring its own principle of existence (logos) to the whole universe.

One can probably anticipate the main conclusion to be drawn at this stage, namely, that the MW-SAP, by revealing the basic diaphora in creation, leads us again to understanding that the mystery of human hypostatic and natural existence in the universe, as well as the universe itself (their logoi), is hidden in God’s economy of the creation of the world out of nothing. The universe, as it is enhypostasized through human knowledge, receives, in a way, a second birth through man’s participation in the effected words of God about the universe and their articulation in language and scientific discourse. We can state that the universe is created out of nothing by God but that its logos is being articulated in the human hypostasis during the whole his­tory of the humankind-event.

It is interesting to note that our analysis of the MW-SAP contributes to the theological assertion that the sustenance of our visible universe is based on a fine split in creation between the visible universe and the intelligible ensemble of universes, which are both held together by the transcendent creator through the logos we have revealed. This makes our treatment of the MW problem different when compared with what is usually contraposed in the literature as the creator hypothesis versus the MW “explanation.”⁴⁷⁸ Our analysis shows that the creator hypothesis has an advantage if the problem of MW explanaition is treated a priori from a theological perspective. As pointed out by D. Temple, the creator hypothesis itself does not constitute theology, for the latter is brought into the center of the argument from outside.⁴⁷⁹ It is evident, then, that in our analysis the only viable option is to treat the life-permitting conditions of the visible universe, as well as the imagined ensemble of universes where these conditions do not hold, as grounded in the realm of the Divine; that is, the creation hypothesis naturally incorporates the MW explanation.

It is not difficult to realize from what we have just discussed that the question of the intelligibility of the universe is closely connected with the issue of the existence of the universe in human hypostases, that is, in a mode of its articulation that is enhypostasized by intelligent human beings. The whole question of the existence of the universe in its particular appearance to us is contingent on the existence of human beings, who articulate its existence in data records, theories, language, and so forth. This view is similar to what is known in cosmology as the participatory anthropic principle, which was developed by J.A. Wheeler and formulated in a compact form as follows: “Observers are necessary to bring the universe into being.”⁴⁸⁰

The reasoning that underlies this formulation is not at all popular among physicists, who find Wheeler’s approach “unpalatable in view of its rather mystical overtones.”⁴⁸¹ One should recognize, however, that Wheeler is the only physicist of our time who inquires about the genesis of physical concepts and the meaning of the realities that stand behind them in an ontological sense. He advocates the view that we now enter a “third era of physics,” which should operate not with given a priori fundamental concepts, such as space, time, fields, particles, and so forth, but actually explain the genesis of these concepts epistemologically as well as ontologically: “We have to account for all the structure that makes physics what it is.”⁴⁸² Wheeler believes that the question “What makes meaning?” is the existential question, for it also addresses the issue of our own existence and that of the universe, which has properties that allow us to exist. Can physics itself respond to this question: “Tomorrow, will it not be existence itself that comes under the purview of physics?”⁴⁸³

Wheeler argues that his approach to understanding the place and role of human beings in the universe contrasts with the selection mechanism of the MW-SAP in the sense that the participatory AP (PAP) is “founded on construction.”⁴⁸⁴ In other words, it attempts to explain the genesis of all physical entities in the universe – including human beings and, of crucial importance here, the meaning of objects and the intel­ligibility of the universe in general – as established through conscious communication. He articulates this contrast by comparing the MW-SAP and his PAP as an opposition in views on the place of human beings in the universe as mediocre versus central: “Life, mind, and meaning have only a peripheral and accidental place in the scheme of things in this view [MW-SAP]. In the other view [PAP] they are central. Only by their agency is it even possible to construct the universe or existence, or what we call reality. Those make-believe universes totally devoid of life are (according to this view) totally devoid of physical sense not merely because they cannot be observed, but because there is no way to make them.”⁴⁸⁵

Wheeler’s argument is similar to our view asserted in the previous section that the many universes assumed to exist prior to the existence of the visible universe, so that the process of selection could be possible, function in the theory of the MW-SAP as intelligible realities that are brought into existence or, phrased in theological terms, enhypostasized by human beings as specific intelligible realities.

The main feature of Wheeler’s concept is its ambition to deduce the “meaning” and “reality” of the universe in strictly physical terms. He seeks the meaning of phys­ical objects in acts of observation and in the measurement of certain properties of these objects. The physical happenings that are assumed in a naively realistic view to take place without being observed and measured are contraposed to those events that were brought into being through observations irreversibly, so that traces or memories of them cannot be erased.⁴⁸⁶ Wheeler believes that the meaning of what is observed does not preexist a measurement itself; rather, it is brought into existence through observation-participation, treated as a complex of the questioning of nature together with the reception of its response, which is correlated with the question.

The important element in Wheeler’s scheme of being is the network of observers, who by means of communication establish the intersubjective meaning of what is called physical reality. It is obvious that Wheeler makes a distinction between undifferentiated reality, which brings human beings and their networks into existence, and the reality known and thus defined and structured by human reason. He follows an emergent philosophy here by asserting that consciousness is a product of blind phys­ical forces and myriads of particles in the universe, but that in order to affirm the presence of conscious observers in the universe, this same consciousness must develop the picture of the universe. This, according to Wheeler, has been done at the “late” stage of construction of the universe, when physics, as scientific theory, has been developed, and then the meaning of the universe has been established. It is nearly tautological to claim that the universe is known to us in human rubrics of thought. What is nontrivial in Wheeler’s claims, however, is that the universe as the “world of existences” does not exist prior to the phenomenon of humankind in an ontological sense.⁴⁸⁷ This is why “observers are necessary to bring the universe into being.” The universe thus is a participatory universe, whose existence is relational upon the existence of intelligent observers. Wheeler sincerely believes that a science will be able to provide an explanation of the origins of human intelligence in the future.⁴⁸⁸ This corresponds to his desire to treat both intelligence and the intelligible image of the universe as emergent properties.

The humankind-event, then, would be an inevitable result grounded in purely natural factors, and the “tangible reality of the universe” would be simply natural as well, although of a different, animated or self-reflected, order. In one of his famous diagrams, illustrating the transition from the view of the dead mechanical universe to the universe as the world of existences, Wheeler presents the universe as a self-exited circuit, that is, as developing through a cycle (a closed loop) that excludes any reference to a preexistent ultimate foundation of physics and phenomenon of humankind outside this circuit.⁴⁸⁹ This means that the self-awareness of the universe through human intelligence, represented by Wheeler as the network of observer-participants, completes the “evolution” of the universe in Wheeler’s sense as the move­ment along the closed circuit. There is no way out from this circuit; there is no further foundation of the circuit itself. From a philosophical point of view, this means that since the circuit is closed, and the universe receives its explanation from within this circuit, no question on the purpose of the universe and its end can be posed; it is just an emergent mode of the world of existences. The world’s existence is explained from within itself and results in a monistic view with a closed ontology, which does not require any appeal to transworldly factors. Wheeler argues that his model of a closed circuit escapes the danger of an infinite regress of causations toward the ultimate substance.⁴⁹⁰ Instead, the central notion is the network of human observers who create physics. This removes the search for the ultimate element of the universe from its substantial level (ousia) to the existential level, that is, to the community of observer-participants who establish the meaning of what we call the universe. It is in this aspect that it can be affirmed that Wheeler’s model is very close to the view that the universe, as we know it through science, is inherent in human hypostasis – that is, that its reality can be thought of only as enhypostasized by human beings.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between Wheeler’s model and the Patristic view of the hypostatic feature of the human phenomenon. All human beings are treated theologically as created in the divine image, which is present in the logoi, which hold together soul and body in a hypostatic union. This implies that nature, conceived as real and concrete, is objectified through the logoi of human beings; that is, in Patristic terms, nature exists as enhypostasis of human beings. The latter is similar to some extent to what Wheeler advocates. The difference between Wheeler’s thinking and Patristic teaching becomes transparent when one asks about the origin of the human composite. For Wheeler, human consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the network of communications, based on purely physical grounds, and, as a result, is an emergent property of this network. In contrast to this, in theol­ogy it is believed that the logoi of human beings originate in the Logos of God. The Logos thus is the foundation of both the intelligence of human beings and the intel­ligibility of the universe.

From a theological point of view there is a gap in Wheeler’s reasoning on the universe as the emergent meaning circuit, for it offers no explanation of why the intelligent observers, who reveal the intelligibility of the entire universe, are even possible. Wheeler does not discuss what the ultimate logical premise is that makes the intelli­gibility of the universe, as realized through the intelligence of observers, a sheer fact.

There is a tacit anthropological assumption present in Wheeler’s theory of the universe as a self-exited circuit, namely, the constitution of intelligent observers, as the unities of sensible physical bodies and the analytical soul, which is integrated with a body in order to produce the coherent view of the universe as the unity of impersonal physical agencies (light, pressure, sound) and their hypostatic structuring in the human reason. There is no firm explanation of why this particular struc­ture of the human hypostasis was brought into being. The logic of explanation is different; that is, the universe has a dual structure: as undifferentiated stuff with no meaning (before the observers developed), on the one hand, and as sensible agencies and objects with meaning (or, in different words, as the sensible and the intelligible) after the network of observers developed the intersubjective meaning of what was observed, on the other hand. This is why the observers are necessary to bring the uni­verse into being, to transform it from an undifferentiated state of affairs to something sensible and intelligible. This implies ultimately that the intelligibility of the universe is rooted in the ability of human beings to establish its structures and patterns through communication, starting from some elementary observations/measurements in a quantum sense.

But it is clear to any contemplative mind that the deposit of intelligibility has been tacitly present in the pursuit of Wheeler’s scheme of being from the very beginning. Human observers who explain the universe and their own place in it in intelligible terms are already there, as the potentiality of existence itself, which does not logically follow from a simple physicalist view of the universe. This also makes it clear that, despite human beings’ “central” position in Wheeler’s meaning circuit, the position is not central enough, for the very existence of this circuit, if it is observed from outside as the unity of the universe, is possible because man can transcend from its par­ticular place in this scheme (the top of Wheeler’s diagram) and integrate the whole circuit in a single consciousness.⁴⁹¹ This implies that, while being a part of the meaning circuit, human beings transcend it in a sense, that they have an a priori ability to contemplate the universe as a whole and position themselves in it before they appear at some stage of development of the meaning circuit.

This can be clarified by appealing to the analogy with transcendental philosophy. Indeed, if Wheeler claims that the observers bring the universe into being, including its space, time, and so forth, one can reasonably ask: where do human observers dwell at all, if there is no preexistent space and time?⁴⁹² This question is reminiscent of the famous Kantian affirmation that human being is phenomenon and noumenon at the same time. On the one hand, human beings, as natural physical and biological entities, are in space and time. On the other hand, according to Kant, space and time represent transcendental forms of sensibility attributed to the whole humanity; that is, they form absolute and necessary conditions of human experience, including perception of the physical bodies. This means that because human beings initiate space and time from the depths of transcendental unity of their ego, which is prior to any particular form of experience, they “exist” prior to space and time, in the realm of what is called by Kant things-in-themselves. Projected into Wheeler’s case, this analogy creates a difficult epistemological situation with respect to Wheeler’s affirmations that human beings bring space, time, and the whole universe into being, for the reasonable question arises then: where do they do this from? Wheeler attempts to claim that the meaning of space and time, as well as of all other attributes of the universe, is constructed through observership-participation in quantum acts of immediate cognitions of undifferenti­ated being; that is, the emergence of space and time in physics is the result of blind interplay between chance and necessity, which leads to the emergence of human beings and their ordering forms of experience, such as space and time. Kant would object by saying that the sense data alone cannot constitute the notions of space and time and that it is the opposite: the ordering of the sense data can be done only in rubrics of space and time, which are a priori forms of human sensibility understood in a tran­scendental sense. Can physics pretend to solve the mystery of the genesis of space and time as existent in human hypostasis? It is extremely doubtful. If this were possible, it would mean that the emergence of such notions as space, time, fields, and particles (which constitute the structures of the intelligible realm, the cosmos noeticos) would be ultimately grounded in the undifferentiated and nonreflective physical world. This would definitely deviate from the Christian Platonic position on the unity of the cre­ated being (which is split in itself into the sensible and the intelligible) as having its ground in its nonbeing, in the realm of the Divine.

The Kantian response to Wheeler’s conjecture on the nature of space and time, or the universe as a whole, would be to say that they all, as meaningful inductions from experience, are brought into being by transcendental observers out of the world of noumena, which is, by definition, an abstract entity, devoid of any description of the sensible world such as space and time (that is, existing only as an idea of the reason). The philosophical version of the PAP, then, could be rephrased in the following form: the observers (as noumena) are necessary to bring the universe (as a world of phe­nomena) into being (from the timeless and spaceless realm, that is, from the world of things-in-themselves).

It can be anticipated that any attempt to provide a coherent picture of the “gene­sis” of the concept of the universe – that is, to speculate about its ultimate grounds on the ontological level (the physical level in Wheeler’s case) – will inevitably lead reason to an antinomian difficulty. Indeed, the thesis that “observers are necessary in order to bring the universe into being” makes the notion of the network of observers similar in how it functions in Wheeler’s concept to the idea of an absolutely necessary being that appears in the fourth antinomy of Kant. Thus the epistemological situa­tion in the context of Wheeler’s proposition can be characterized as a participatory anthropic antinomy:

Thesis: The network of intelligent observers understood in a transcendental sense as existing in the realm with no time and no space is absolutely necessary for the visible universe in space and time to be brought into being.

Antithesis: The existence of the visible universe with spatiotemporal attributes is not con­tingent on the existence of the network of intelligent observers (understood in a transcenden­tal sense) as its cause either in the visible universe or out of it.

According to the methodology of the antinomial monodualism established in chapter 4, we are inclined to treat this antinomy as indicating the dichotomy of what is affirmed and negated, that is, the network of intelligent observers, in the sense that this network is in space and time (that is, in the empirical realm) and, at the same time, transcends space and time, for it establishes the sense of space and time out of certain a priori faculties that define the observers also as intelligible beings. This, according to the method advocated by us, indicates not so much a paradox as a split in the constitution of human beings, between their bodily functions and their analytical soul, which, however, is overcome by positioning it with respect to the com­mon source of both terms of this dichotomy. This means that the phenomenon of humankind, affirmed in a characteristic way by the PAP, if understood with the help of transcendental analysis in the perspective of Christian Platonism, leads us to the affirmation that it has two dimensions: the sensible and the intelligible, which cannot be reduced to each other in any hypothetical theory of the world. The presence of the phenomenal and noumenal in the human constitution (in a Kantian parlance) is treated by us through the eyes of Christian Platonism as the dichotomy between body and soul in human being, which is overcome through the relationship of both of them with respect to the common ground, which is beyond both the sensible and the intelligible in the realm of God, who created human beings in his image.

In the antinomy above, we have articulated again the presence of the basic diaphora in the very constitution of human beings. It is because of the similarity of the constitutive principles for both human beings and the universe that the universe can be known and can be presented in the human hypostasis as the unity of the sen­sible and the intelligible, which is split in itself. Finally, this diaphora points toward the hypostatic dimension of human existence, as relational upon God, and, as a result of this, that the universe, as we know it, exists in the human hypostasis; that is, it is enhypostasized by human beings.

Since the human hypostasis cannot be recovered from the impersonal chances and necessities of contingent created being, its presence in the universe can be treated as an event of not entirely natural origin, which we have called the humankind-event. This event is indeed formative for the universe to exist in human hypostasis. The universe itself, as enhypostasized by human beings through contemplation and analytical knowledge, is an event in the whole history of creation and salvation. The mystery of its existence and its knowledge by human beings is thus hidden in the mystery of our abilities to reveal its meaning and intelligence as grounded in the effected words of God. This is why we now turn to the culminating point of this chapter, to the ground of our knowledge of the universe, as well as to the foundation of our destiny, not only to know the universe but also to transfigure it and to bring it back to communion with God. This ground is the incarnation of the Logos of God in nature, in the words of Scripture and in Christ.

We now address why the humankind-event has happened in the universe and what is the ground of possibility for human intelligence to grasp the intelligibility of the universe. The microcosmic position of human beings makes the question of the ori­gin of humanity intimately linked with the issue of the creation of the universe and of humankind in its particular incarnation in nature. However, we have established that the ultimate understanding of why the universe was created – that is, what God’s intention was in doing so – cannot be achieved from within scientific or even theological discourse. We recall Maximus the Confessor’s assertion that we know from creation that God is but that we cannot know God’s motivations on creation, for in his essence God is separated from us through the basic diastema. Some further clarification to this issue can come from the christological dimension of this prob­lem, that is, when the idea of the humankind-event is linked to the concept of the Christ-event.

The fact that we cannot avoid theological reflection while contemplating the place of humanity in the universe becomes evident in the very definition of humanity. As we have seen, science is able to position all human beings in the universe in terms of their nature, of the physico-biological constants of their existence. This makes it clear that there is no difference whether science speaks about a particular human being or about the whole humankind. Since human nature (that is, physics and biology) is communicable from one being to another, one particular being represents the whole humankind. It follows, then, that what is meant by humankind in the context of physics and cosmology is just an abstract collective of beings functioning at this par­ticular moment of cosmic history. Cosmology and the anthropic arguments do not risk speculating about the links between the universe and humanity, understood in a rather religious sense, as a whole, that is, as those who live now, who lived before, and who will be living in the future. Cosmology does not discuss the fullness of humankind as an event that begins from the first born human being and finishes with the last one. It assumes that the phenomenon of man is an inherent, continuous, and indefinite part of cosmic history. In this case, the unity of man in the uni­verse is a result of the ongoing evolution of complexities, so that man is made of whatever material is available in the universe.

For the Patristic writers, such as Gregory of Nyssa, it was clear that a simple articulation of humankind’s microcosmic position – that is, its unity with the universe – does not position human beings in the universe in a really central place, not in a cosmographic sense (as in space and time), but in a spiritual sense (as a creature made in the image of God). Gregory writes: “There is nothing remarkable in Man’s being the image and likeness of the universe, for earth passes away and the heavens change… In thinking we exalt human nature by this grandiose name (microcosm, synthesis of the universe) we forget that we are thus favouring it with the qualities of gnats and mice.”⁴⁹³

The central point for Gregory is not to articulate human nature but to stress that all human beings bear the image of God, which makes them united in the fullness of humanity as manifestation of this image. At the same time, this fullness does not dis­solve the personhood in human beings, making them one and the other through the hypostatic qualities of existence. This enables human beings to personalize the uni­verse in the sense of establishing its meaning for the whole humankind not only in natural anthropic terms but also from the perspective of the divine image in it. The universe was created by God together with humankind, and it is through humankind that the universe can become aware of its divine origin. It is through knowledge and creative transformation that human beings participate ontologically in affirming and praising things in the universe.

The biblical assertion that human beings are created in the image of God provides us with the understanding of humanity in its fullness, as related (from the first born man to the last one) to its Father, who endowed all human beings with his image.⁴⁹⁴ This implies that humanity as an event in the history of salvation recapitulates all human lives in the past, present, and future: “Just as any particular man is limited by his bodily dimensions, and the peculiar size which is cojoined with the superficies of his body is the measure of his separate existence, so I think that the entire plenitude of humanity was included by God of all, by His power of foreknowledge, as it were in one body, and that this is what the text teaches us which says ‘God created man, in the image of God created he him.’ For the image is not in part of our nature, nor is the grace in any one of the things found in that nature, but this power extends equally to all the race.”⁴⁹⁵

This provides a theological weight to our assertion that humankind understood in the Christian sense is worldly only on the part of its particular incarnation in nature in the image of God, whereas in their creaturehood, human beings are hypo­static and ecclesial beings.

Christianity rearticulated the biblical idea of the fullness of humanity by referring it to Christ, the incarnate Logos of God. Irenaeus of Lyons, in developing the idea that it is in the incarnation that the fullness of humanity was recapitulated by Christ, writes that “in times past it was said that man was made in the image of God, but not shown, because the Word, in whose image man was made, was still invisible.”⁴⁹⁶ In the incarnation in flesh, “God recapitulated in Himself that ancient handiwork of His which is man,”⁴⁹⁷ and “He recapitulated in Himself the long history of mankind.”⁴⁹⁸ Irenaeus asserts that by taking human flesh, made of the substance of this world, and uniting it to the Divine in Christ, God confirmed that the substance, which God used initially to create human beings, is linked to God’s first plan to save humanity, and that the incarnation fulfills this plan. This means that the substance of the world has a fundamental importance for the fulfillment of God’s plan. It implies that for the incarnation and recapitulation of all human nature in Christ to take place, the sub­stance of the world was chosen by God in his plan of creation of the world and sal­vation of humanity, thus making this particular substance to be closely linked to the Divine hypostatically (relationally), that is, existing not as it is in itself but only in the hypostasis of God, who created it. This was demonstrated by the incarnation of the Logos of God with a new force.

One can then speculate that the structure of the natural world has a direct rela­tion to God’s providential activity in the world in order to fulfill God’s plan. This implies that for the incarnation of God to take place on the earth, in the visible uni­verse, this universe must possess some features such that the making of human beings in God’s image, as well as the incarnation of God in human flesh, would be possible. This links the creation of the universe and its structure to the phenomenon of man, and the incarnation articulates this link, making the whole sense of it rather hypostatic (that is, grounded in the will and love of the personal God, who transfers the image of his personality to human beings, who in turn can articulate the uni­verse as being amazingly fashioned in order to sustain life). It is the recapitulation of man in the incarnation that, theologically speaking, links the Christ-event with the humankind-event.

Here we would like to make one critical comment with respect to G. Ellis’s attempts to formulate a Christian anthropic principle by linking the presence of life in the universe with the “nature of the creator.” Ellis builds his argument on Temple’s interpretation of the prologue in John l:4–5.⁴⁹⁹ The words “What came to be in it was Life, and the Life was the light of men, and the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness did not absorb it” in Temple’s interpretation were used by Ellis to state that “we have arrived at the Cristian antropic principle, a profound version of the SAP…: the creation had to have as its product, life, for that is the nature of the creator.”⁵⁰⁰ The worrisome aspect of this statement is that it tries to connect the existence of human beings in the universe as it is understood in the SAP – that is, on the substantial (natural) level – with the essence (nature) of God, which, as apophatic theology asserts, is inaccessible to human grasp and hypothesis. This is why it is safer, theologically, to treat life as “the light of men” in the prologue in the sense of God’s plan of the salvation of humanity, which preexists the world in the same sense as the Logos of God, who himself, according to the Nicene Creed, was begotten before ages. This means that one can possibly argue that the life is the inherent characteristic of the universe only in a relational sense; that is, that every­thing in the world, including the lives of human beings, is sustained by the logoi, originating from the Word-Logos of God, and that the logoi of human beings can be associated with the uncreated light of men. But the meaning of this light was revealed only after the incarnation of the Logos in Christ, in which the Divine and the human were joined by the hypostasis of the Son of God. The physical environment in the universe, as we have established, provides the necessary conditions for the existence of human beings. This points toward the contingent necessity displayed in the world and reflecting its dependence on God. But sufficient conditions for human life to exist are deeply rooted in the mystery of humankind’s creation, which (being linked to the physical aspects of humanity) is nonnatural and hypo­static. It is only in this hypostatic sense that one can argue that there is a link between the whole creation and life, that is, that the universe and humankind are inherent in the hypostasis of the Logos of God.

The Christ-event has another important meaning, namely, the renewal of the whole humankind to a mode of existence that can be called ecclesial. Not only are human beings united to the source of their existence in the Logos of God, but they also participate in the ongoing accomplishment of the body of Christ, God’s church, thus making their own existence more hypostatic in an ecclesial sense.⁵⁰¹ The whole universe, then, is seen through the human ecclesial hypostasis in the context of building the body of Christ. This implies that all humans ever living are included in this body, which becomes the definition of humanity. Since the accomplishment of the body of Christ is an eschatological tendency – that is, it must stop together with the formation of man – the humankind-event means that it will have its end; that is, it is indeed an event of cosmological nature and of ecclesial reality. From the Christian perspective, this entails that the whole history of the universe understood as a natu­ral process will transform consequently (as existent in the renewed hypostasis of humanity) toward its ecclesial mode; that is, the universe itself will acquire more hypostatic features.

This observation allows us to conjecture that the development of the universe before the incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh on the earth and after has, theologically speaking, a drastically different meaning. It was necessary for the universe to be in a state of constructive development in order to sustain life on the earth and to allow God to condescend to us and to assume human flesh in order to initiate the new stage of salvation history. This means that nature as it existed before the incarnation (being lost in the sense that it did not know its own divine origin) was transfigured through the knowledge of its meaning and destiny, which it received from humankind, that is, in human hypostasis. This is because the acquisition of the eccle­sial hypostasis through the building of the body of Christ leads human beings to the transfigured state, where the balance between their natural and hypostatic qualities should change in favor of the latter; the sustenance of the natural dimensions of human existence, which has been conditioned by the cosmological conditions, prob­ably ceases to function as the precondition of the fulfillment of the divine plan. This confirms our conjecture that the constructive development of the universe as evolving toward the conditions where human beings could exist had to take place only prior to incarnation.

What will happen afterward, in the remote future, is difficult to say, for, even according to the cosmological predictions, there is a natural limit of the extension of human life in the cosmos. Together with our theological argument, one can reassert that the universe in the future is anti-anthropic in a physical sense, but that it becomes more dependent on humanity in Wheeler’s sense when its reality depends on the condition of humankind; the causation between the universe and human life has reversed in relation to what has been proposed by the SAP. The matter of the sal­vation of the universe becomes, then, an ecclesial activity of the transfiguration of nature and its unification back to God. Humanity is not just a purpose of creation (this would be suggested by the SAP); it can be understood only in the context of the promise of God for its salvation as constituting the locus point of the meeting of God and God’s creation, as the mediating agency that is supposed to bring the whole uni­verse through its knowledge to the new creation. This implies that the purpose of the universe is not human beings considered in their natural condition but unique crea­tures in whom the Logos of God is indwelling and who are chosen to transfigure the universe by bringing it to the ultimate union with God.

The humankind-event, as seen through theological and scientific eyes, thus acquires hypostatic and ecclesial features, which make the position of human beings in the universe similar to the position of the worshiping community in the church: humanity establishes itself as a priest of creation. To develop this thesis as a conclu­sion to our discussion, we should touch on one particular aspect of the hypostatic dimension of human existence, which can be articulated in terms of space and time.

The nontrivial connection between the problem of the space of the universe and the incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh has been articulated by T. Torrance.⁵⁰² This section will develop further his argument that space and time are relational entities whose concepts reflect the contingent rationality of the world, which depends on the transcendent God-Creator. Our intention is to build an argument that the relational nature of space, understood as a physical (natural) place for human beings to live, points toward an ontology of created things and human beings that is relational upon the Logos of God or, in other words, is inherent in the hypostasis of the Logos.

The belief in the incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh plays a central role here; on the one hand, Jesus Christ, being in his nature fully human, lived in the space and time of the empirical world, located in body in a particular place and time of earthly history; on the other hand, Jesus was fully God, who did not leave his “place” in the Holy Trinity and who, being God, not only was present in Palestine two thousand years ago but was always present in all places and times of the universe created by God. We have here a nontrivial, historico-topological relation between the finite track of Jesus in empirical space and time, which in an extraordinary way is linked to the whole history of the visible universe.⁵⁰³

Let us provide here a couple of Patristic references. It was Origen who first reflected on the extraordinary position of Christ, being human and God, in the universe in terms of space: “Though the God of the whole universe descends in His own power with Jesus to live the life of men, and the Word which ‘was in the beginning with God and was Himself God’ comes to us; yet he does not leave His home and desert His state.”⁵⁰⁴

Origen stresses here that God, who is the creator and governor of the whole universe, being incarnate in flesh in Jesus Christ, did not cease to be God as a provider of existence and intelligibility of everything at every point in the universe. Being incar­nate in flesh – that is, being a human being among humankind, Christ as God was still ruling the whole universe and holding the entire creation together. God, in creating the universe and making sense of it in order to receive his Son-Logos in flesh, prepares a place for himself, but in such a way that, while descending into the created world, in a particular place in Palestine and in a particular time, God still holds the entire creation together, being present in all possible “places” of the universe. One thus says that the incarnation recapitulates the whole creation.

Being incarnate at one point of space and not ceasing from God’s “place” as the transcendent creator, holding the wholeness of space through his logoi, God demonstrates that his relationship to space is not a spatial relation. Origen asserts this explicitly: “The power and divinity of God comes to dwell among men through the man whom God wills to choose and in whom He finds room without changing from one place to another or leaving His former place empty and filling another. Even supposing that we do say that he leaves one place and fills another, we would not mean this in any spatial sense.”⁵⁰⁵ God descended to humankind from the kingdom, but God is still there in his kingdom. This means that the message of the kingdom is about human ascension to God (deification), which, being in its movement opposite to God’s descension to humankind, has no spatial expression. Rather, it has a tempo­ral expression as an expectation of the age to come, as an eschatological future, in which human beings, following the type of the resurrected Christ, will be able to ascend to God and to dwell in God’s kingdom forever.

Athanasius of Alexandria expresses the unity of the Divine and the human in Christ in similar terms to Origen, by appealing to the analogy of space. Athanasius explains the incarnation of the Word-Logos of God as follows: “Then the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed he was not far from it before, for no part of creation had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are.”⁵⁰⁶ Athanasius argues in this passage that despite that the Son-Word of God descended to the earth to live with human beings, in a way he did not become closer to us, for he was ever in everything of the universe, which was made by him. Athanasius recognized that there is a paradox that the Son of God is fully present with us in our space and time and yet remains with the Father. This paradox is a serious issue if one employs the receptacle notion of space, which confines God within the receptacle. Athanasius felt intuitively that, in order to resolve this mystery, the receptacle notion of space must be replaced with a relational understanding of space, a form of comprehensibility that is unfolded by the divine agency, who set forth this space in order to reveal himself.⁵⁰⁷

Athanasius develops the thought that by becoming human, the Word of God “became visible through His works and revealed Himself as the Word of the Father, the Ruler and King of the whole creation.”⁵⁰⁸ Athanasius argues that despite the fact that the Father provided the works of creation as a means by which the maker might be known, this did not prevent men from wallowing in error.⁵⁰⁹ Because of this, the Word of God descended to men in order to “renew the same teaching.”⁵¹⁰ In On the Incarnation (17), Athanasius analyzes the difficulty one can face while dealing with the incarnation of the Word of God.⁵¹¹ Torrance points out that Athanasius attempted to make an analogy of the human soul and body and its relation in function to what is outside the body, but that this analogy does not hold, for human beings, for exam­ple, are unable to control the motion of heavenly bodies by their thought.⁵¹² Space in the case of the Word of God is God’s predicate; it is determined by God’s agency and is to be understood according to God’s nature. This means that the “spatial relation­ship” between the Father and the Son has no analogies with the spatial relations among creaturely things.

The human nature in Christ was operating within the reality of empirical space and historical time, whereas Christ’s divine nature was always beyond the empirical and intelligible aeons, in the uncreated realm of the kingdom of God, which can be expressed symbolically in terms of the boundaries of the created if these boundaries are seen from the vertical (divine) dimension. It is from this “outside” that Christ the Logos of God coordinated the empirical space where he indwelled in the body with the rest of the created universe. This helps us to understand the space-time of the physical universe as the manifestation of the hypostatic mode of the relationship between God and the world.

One can rephrase this idea by using a different analogy. Indeed, space and time are perceived by human beings from within creation. In this sense, one can specu­late that this space-time is an internal form of the relation of the universe with the transcendent Divine. This internal form of space and time, being contingent and dependent on the interactions between the parts of the universe and being essential for the existence of human beings and their history, cannot be conceived, however, without its “external” counterpart, its “boundary,” which can be articulated only from “outside,” from the perspective of the uncreated. This links empirical space and time with its moving “boundary” (which originates from the divine dimen­sion), so that in no way are the space and time of the physical universe accomplished and fixed forever in the shapes that we can comprehend at present.

The question, then, is how the internal space-time of the universe is held in relation to the divine “environment” in which it is embedded, or, in other words, what is the principle of the borderline between the universe and its nonworldly ground associated with the external side of the space of the universe? Here, the analogy with the hypostatic union of two natures in Christ can be employed. Indeed, it is because of the hypostatic union of the divine and the natural in Christ that one can argue by analogy that the interplay between the space and time of the universe and its uncre­ated ground in God is upheld also hypostatically by God in the course of God’s economy of creation. The fulfillment of this economy took place in the incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh, when the link between the humanity of Christ (in space) and Christ’s divinity as the Logos (which is beyond space but yet holds all space together) was established. This manifested that space and time are linked to the Divine. It is from this perspective that Torrance’s assertions on the relational nature of space, as the form of rationality created by the Logos God to communicate his presence to us, receive further interpretation – namely, that the space and time of the universe manifest in natural (physical) terms the relation between the visible universe and its “external” uncreated and divine “form,” which constitutes the ground for the natural one. This implies that a particular appearance of space and time in the physical universe is not complete in itself and is open to the unfolding rationality of God, whose presence in the space and time of the universe has not an essential but a hypostatic character. Indeed, the very relation between the space and time of the universe and its uncreated ground is hypostatic; that is, it exists only in the hypostasis of the Logos God.

When we turn our attention to human beings, we admit that, in their natural mode, they all exist within the internal space-time of the universe. The importance of a particular structure of this space for providing the necessary conditions for exis­tence of human beings can be supported by physical arguments. It is enough to remind the reader that the dimension of space that is equal to three (the number of degrees of freedom of any object in this space) is vitally important for the existence of stable structures in the universe (such as atoms and planetary systems), which contribute toward the natural conditions for the existence of living beings.⁵¹³ It is important to assert here that the structure of space is intimately connected with the nature of those interactions experienced by objects in this space. It is difficult to say in abstraction what came first – the dimension of space or the stability of the world – but it remains a fact that both space and the form of physical forces are closely linked to each other. It is also worth remembering that the uniformity of time and space, which is widely exploited in physics, implies the conservation of particle energies and momenta. In fact, empirical physics, which measures the conserved quantities and establishes the laws, is indebted greatly to the relative uniformity of space and time. In general relativity, the links between matter and space-time are even closer.

The SAP and cosmology deal in general with the internal aspect of the “boundary” that separates the created from the uncreated. It is, however, possible to trespass this boundary in pure speculation by appealing again to the idea of many worlds with different geometries. In this case, the positioning of the space-time of the visi­ble universe, with respect to that which is not actualized in physics (but that can be imagined), can be treated as an apophatic affirmation of space-time in its actuality with respect to its possible other being, for example, with respect to the worlds with different dimensions and different topological properties. Here, the relation between actual space-time and conceptual universes can be understood in ontological terms with reference to the idea of the basic diaphora in creation that we have already used several times. The conceptually different space-times cannot be treated as an onto­logical ground for the existence of empirical space and time; they are contingent on their own nonbeing in the uncreated realm. In other words, the MW-SAP-like expla­nation of the dimension of space n = 3 as a selection out of the ensemble of the uni­verses with different dimensions in the visible universe cannot achieve its goal, because it does not explain the nature of the space and time of the visible universe in hypostatic terms, that is, its purpose and end as conceived by the divine hypostasis before all ages. The appeal to the MW hypothesis can be treated as an unfortunate attempt to establish the relational nature of space and time with respect to its intelli­gible nonactuality. As we have argued earlier, the genuine result of this abstraction, from the actuality of space-time to conceptual potentialities, consists in the manifestation of the basic diaphora in creation, which points toward their common uncre­ated ground.

What is important in Torrance’s arguments about the links between the incarnation and space-time is that space should be considered in the context of the divine hypostasis, that is, as the expression of the personal rationality of God in the world, accessible to us. One should not, however, understand that space and time and their possible theories represent the embodiment of the Logos of God, as was conjectured by W. Pannenberg.⁵¹⁴ Rather, space and time can be treated as a natural counterpart in the hypostatic constitution of the world in its relation to the Divine, which was confirmed through the union between the Divine and the human in the incarnation of the Logos of God, Jesus Christ. It is because of this – that is, that space and time are linked to the ground in the uncreated via the hypostatic (nonontological) union – that any particular perception of space and time and the theory of them is fundamentally open-ended and unfixed in terms of a natural incarnation of the Logos in the flesh in Jesus Christ (which is commonly perceived as the nativity of Jesus). It can mean that the space and time of the universe as we know them were important for the Logos to be incarnate in this particular spatiotemporal form, but, as mentioned before, this fact does not preclude space and time deviating in the future, for the logic of this change follows the logic of the hypostasis of the Logos, who is balancing God’s uncreated nature with the world, which has been created by God, rather than by any intrinsic processes in the universe.

It is only through this vision of the universe as held in the hypostasis of the Logos that it is possible to reaffirm that human hypostatic beings occupy a special position in the universe, by being microcosm in a very nontrivial sense. In the same way as Christ, being the incarnate Logos of God in a particular place in the space and time of the universe (and, at the same time, not ceasing from his “place” in God, being in all possible places and times of the visible universe as well as in intelligible orders), human beings (whom Christ recapitulated in the incarnation), being present in a particular place of the universe, control it in various locations and times not by power but by their knowledge, recapitulating the universe in a single consciousness. This thought was developed by Maximus the Confessor in his The Church’s Mystagogy, when he argued that “the word is said to be a man, and in what manner man is a world.” Maximus paralleled the basic diaphora between body and soul, held together hypostatically, in man.⁵¹⁵

The incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh, which entails the annunciation of the kingdom of God, brings the whole humanity to the realization not only of its microcosmic function but also of its ecclesial function to build the universal church as the body of Christ and to be a “priest of creation.” The whole universe, then, having participated through its creation and the incarnation in the hypostasis of the Logos, is represented for human beings in the holy church, which, according to Maximus, being divided in its outward appearance into sanctuary and nave, is held together hypostatically (“through their relationship to the unity”).⁵¹⁶ It is from this analogy that one sees again the meaning of the incarnation: for the whole church represents the world, and it is Christ who is the head and the foundation of the church; the uni­verse, being mirrored in the church, is held hypostatically by the Logos of God, who is the head of the universe understood as a church.

The incarnation thus reveals for Christians and affirms for modern science the ecclesial nature of the universe as well as of human beings. This is why knowledge and exploration of the universe in the context of the science-religion dialogue can be treated as an activity of uncovering the hypostatic features of the universe, which can mean at the same time the praising of the personal creator of the universe. This activ­ity reinstates the existing split between the church and the universe, returning them to their unity in the communion with God, revealing thus the work of scientists as a para-eucharistic work.⁵¹⁷

To make a final refinement in our vision of the humankind-event in the universe as a hypostatic happening, we refer here to Torrance’s analysis of the arguments of Athanasius of Alexandria about the difference in relationships between Christ and his Father, on the one hand, and between humanity and God, on the other hand. These can be illustrated as the difference in spatial constitution of Christ as being in space and, at the same time, being with the Father beyond all space versus human beings as enclosed in the place as contingent things. Athanasius’s argument assumes the presence of a parallel relation between human nature and God, which points beyond the natural aspects of existence. Torrance quotes a passage from Athanasius in this context that is important here: “We shall not be as the Son, nor equal to Him for we and He are different. The word as is applied to us inasmuch as things differing from others in nature become as they, in view of certain reference beyond them. Wherefore the Son is simply and without any reservation in the Father, for that belongs essentially to Him by nature, but so far as we who are not like that by nature are concerned, an image and a pointer are needed.”⁵¹⁸

Torrance stresses that the presence of the word pointer, as translation of the Greek paradeigma, is crucial in order to articulate the image of God deposited in human nature without transgressing the difference between them. In other words, the pointer does not touch on the ontological relationship between human nature and God; rather, it points toward the hypostatic dimension of human existence as originating in the Logos of God. The Christ-event, being thus the manifestation of the spatiotemporal relationship between God and the physical universe, and being expressed as an open-ended interaction between God and human beings, “eternal and contingent happening,”⁵¹⁹ recapitulates the humankind-event in the universe, making the latter the expression of an interaction between humankind and God and of contingent happening in the eternity of God.

In a similar manner, by referring to the resurrectional aspect of the Christ-event, it is plausible to argue that while Christ after resurrection and ascension left us with a message about God in space and time, which we know, on the one hand, through the history of succession in the church and, on the other hand, eschatologically through the presence of God’s kingdom in the liturgy of the church, the present historical reality of the humankind-event in the universe experiences an eschatological pause, which is granted to cosmic humanity to transfigure and deify the universe. In the same way that church and its liturgy manifests explicitly the historical and escha­tological presence of Christ among us, the ecclesial essence of human beings in the universe manifests that the universe and its knowledge are revealed to us in the hypostasis of the divine Logos.

Now we come to the discussion of the finality of the humankind-event. We have recognized earlier that the humankind-event is understood as constructive for forming the inward existence of the universe and its self-conscious expression in the appre­hension of human beings and their creative activity in the cosmos. It has also been recognized that hypostatic human beings are dependent on those conditions in the universe that allow them to sustain the unity of their soul with a material body; it is in this sense that the process of giving the universe its existence in the hypostasis of human beings is deeply rooted in the universe as itself hypostatically inherent (“prior” to human beings) in the Logos of God. In other words, the physical condi­tions of the universe and the environment on the earth form the necessary condi­tions for human beings to exist. It is important to understand, however, that the position of human beings in nature, despite their ability to transcend it, was very pas­sive up to some point in history, that is, human beings were not able to change the natural conditions of their existence using the power of their intellectual and technological activity, so that the environment was stable and immutable, experiencing no serious influence from human activity. The balance between the intellectual exploration of the intelligible and sensible worlds and the stability of the natural environment was considered as an obvious fact; human apprehension of the universe and its technological implications had never before threatened the natural physico-biological conditions of human existence.

This balance between hypostatic and natural in human beings – the balance between the human longing for the spiritual and human beings’ rootedness in nature – assumed that any particular development of human thought, being directed toward nature, should not cross a line such that the apprehension of nature and its implications in technology could be detached from the morality and wisdom inher­ent in human hypostasis and responsible for preserving the gift of life and for supporting the balance between natural and spiritual. What we observe nowadays is a shift in this balance, when human reason, freed from its living fullness of spiritual apprehension of the universe and the Divine, attempts to explore peculiar aspects of creation and to develop artificial conditions of living and technologies, which can, because of either an accident or just human naïveté and ignorance, threaten the natu­ral conditions of living for humans.⁵²⁰ This creates a serious philosophical and theo­logical problem as to how to balance the human ability to think and to discover novelties in nature and technology with the fact that the progress of this development must preserve the very possibility of these hypostatic human beings to function on the natural level. One can question to what extent the development of the human intellect and its apprehension of the universe and its technological transformation can advance while preserving the unity of the sensible and intelligible in humanity, that is, in its hypostatic constitution, with which human beings were endowed by God.

It is interesting to note that the problem of human survival in the course of technological progress came into existence only in the twentieth century, when the expansion of technology brought human beings for the first time in the history of the humankind-event to the point where they can influence global conditions of their own existence and even terminate existence as such by destroying its natural dimensions. In the words of the Russian philosopher N. Berdyaev, man has become a cosmic force, or “cosmiurger”, who not only passively observes nature but also participates in its formation and transformation. The impact of the technological revolution that has been taking place since the eighteenth century has changed the relation of human beings to nature, resulting in the replacement of the belief in the immutable and objective order in nature, in which human life was embedded and to which it was subordinated. This has happened because the power of technology destabilizes the human world and the cosmos connected with that world. Berdyaev wrote as far back as 1933 that “it will be soon that peaceful scientists will be able to make shocks not only of historical but of cosmic character,” since “man has in his hands the power, by means of which he can operate the World and he can annihilate the most part of mankind and culture.”⁵²¹

When we studied the humankind-event from a cosmological perspective above, we realized that the natural conditions of the existence of human beings in the cos­mos cannot be sustained forever. This is why we have introduced the terminology of the humankind-event: to underline the finitude of the human phenomenon in the universe. The questions important for our discussion here, however, are as follows: If the humankind-event is a constructive event for the whole universe in both the phys­ical and the hypostatic senses, how then can the cessation of the natural dimension of the humankind-event affect the existence and destiny of the universe? What would be the consequences for the universe itself if the humankind-event were to be untimely terminated by an accident or by intentional suicide? Would there be a big difference, in terms of the finality of humankind, between a global disaster on earth (for example, being a hit by an asteroid), which would terminate the existence of human beings prematurely, and the passive expectation of humankind’s extinction in the course of the predicted cosmological evolution? One anticipates that religion and theology should play the pivotal role in answering this question, for it is for human beings to decide what particular future for which to expect and to hope. The future can be defined by the power of human intellect in different ways, using either ideas from scientific fantasies and utopias or religious beliefs and prophetic visions. It is crucial here to recognize that the very existence of the future of human beings in the universe is entirely open to their own hypostatic definition and judgment. It can also clearly be seen here that the issue of morality and ultimate values in the definitions of the future arises: “All becomes dependent on the spiritual and moral state of man, on what will be the goal to use his power and on what kind of spirit he has.”⁵²²

To make this point stronger, we can appeal to the observation made in previous sections that, theologically speaking, the constructive evolution in the universe, which is aimed to create conditions that allow the human body to function, was decisive prior to the incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh. This implies that the future of the universe as such does not have any particular goal if it is not seen from the per­spective of the destiny of human beings, the vision of which can be established only theologically, not scientifically. What this means is that the role of human beings, in the future development of the universe, is crucial, for it is human beings who can impose goals on the development of the universe according to their own vision. The role of religion and theology becomes indispensable indeed for making any feasible predictions about the future of humankind and the universe, if these predictions are supposed to be rooted in ethics and wisdom. The Christian vision of the destiny of human beings and their function in the universe as microcosm as well as mediator with God is deeply rooted in the ability of human beings to transcend actuality, being hypostatically inherent in God, and to perceive their place and the place of the uni­verse in the context of the deification and transfiguration of the universe, that is, through unification with God in God’s kingdom.

Despite the fact that human life, seen in a theological perspective, transcends its natural appearance (being inherent in the hypostasis of the Logos of God), science tends to treat the phenomenon of human life monistically, reducing it to physico-biological factors and making the intellectual dimension of human existence purely epiphenomenal. In some “scientific” futuristic accounts, one can see scenarios of the future based on the idea of indefinite human life in purely naturalistic terms, in which it is assumed that the human phenomenon had a beginning in time (and, in this sense, is finite in the past), but in which it is also hoped that this phenomenon will endure indefinitely in the future. What is important in these models is that human beings are assumed to be capable of directing the development of the uni­verse to a very special end.

Let us analyze briefly, as a case study, some ideas of F. Tipler that he calls the “Omega Point theory,” the “theory of evolving God,” or the “physics of immortality,” which offer an eschatological scenario for life to exist forever in the universe.⁵²³ These ideas have their origin in the final anthropic principle (FAP), which attempts to extend the validity of the weak and strong anthropic inferences beyond the present-day state of affairs in the universe toward the remote evolutionary future.⁵²⁴ In gen­eral, cosmology predicts that the future of the universe may be extremely anti-anthropic, leading ultimately to the fireball of the final collapse (the big crunch) in a closed universe or to the “eternal cold” (the open universe). The FAP postulates the eternity of life (understood in a reductionist way as the running of software on a computer): “Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out.”⁵²⁵

The fundamental inconsistency of this proposition is rooted in the fact that the life the FAP is talking about is the “life” of machines, some kind of intelligent automata, but not of hypostatic human beings. Tipler make this clear by saying that intelligent life is associated with a computer: “A living human being is a representation of a definite program, rather than the program itself,”⁵²⁶ and “a living being” is any entity that codes “information.” Thus life is a form of information processing, and “the human mind – as well as the human soul – is a very complex computer pro­gram.”⁵²⁷ This is why it is believed that life (understood in such a strange way) could be possible not only in a human body but also in other material structures where the processing of information is possible.

The very existence of the phenomenon of intelligent life, then, is dependent on natural conditions: “If the laws of physics do not permit information processing in a region of space-time, then life simply cannot exist there. Conversely, if the laws of physics permit information processing in a region, then it is possible for some form of life to exist there.”⁵²⁸ This is true in any case even if life is treated in ordinary biological terms: it needs an appropriate physical environment in order to function. But the nat­ural conditions constitute only the conditions necessary for the existence of life; life’s actual coming into existence remains a mystery and cannot be understood in terms of nature alone. The same is true with respect to the endurance of life. From what we have discussed above, it is clear that the actual continuation of intelligent life on the earth now depends on the will and aspirations of humankind, its desire to survive in worsening ecological conditions as well as to avoid a social and political situation that could lead to global nuclear conflict, which could wipe out life from the surface of the planet. This explains why Tipler’s assertion that if life comes into existence “it will never die out” is very optimistic.

If life did depend entirely on physical and biological conditions, then, indeed, the survival of this life would require a suitable universe; according to Tipler, it would be enough to have a universe that allows for intelligent information processing to con­tinue all the way to the future, final temporal boundary of the universe. This kind of a universe must be closed and must contain a single final point (the Omega Point, in Tipler’s terms) in which the world lines of all events in the universe will coincide and in which there will be no horizons. The quantity of information processed in all these curves coming to Omega Point must be infinite, since “only if there is an infinite number of thoughts in the future it is reasonable to say that intelligent life has existed ‘forever.’ ”⁵²⁹ The Omega Point itself acquires some “divine features” replacing space and time and containing all information about the universe.

We have no intention of discussing here the flaws and problems associated with the pseudo-theological terminology employed in this context, for it has been done elsewhere.⁵³⁰ The epistemological naïveté of some claims of the theory of the evolving God have also been analyzed before.⁵³¹ Here, we are mostly concerned with the implications of the FAP (certainly in a purely hypothetical form) with respect to the universe as nature, as well as to the fate of human beings as hypostatic unities of bodies and souls. Elementary physics contained in the assumptions of the FAP tells us that, in order to produce an infinite amount of information in the universe, all structural elements of the material universe must be effectively destroyed. Theologically speaking, if one believes in the natural order in creation provided by God, this order is supposed to be not only distorted but also removed. One can make a rough anal­ogy by saying that the sensible creation is supposed to be entirely replaced by the realm of intelligible forms, to which the Omega belongs.⁵³² The FAP, it can then be said, tends to remove, or at least to modify, the basic ontological difference in cre­ation (the diaphora) between the sensible and the intelligible. It is not surprising, then, that this intention, which is tacitly present in Tipler’s theories, led him to the affirmation of the divine properties of the Omega Point, for, indeed, it is only in the power of God to set a particular structure of the world as a constitutive element of the creatio ex nihilo. Theology affirms that the basic diaphora, as the ontological dif­ference between sensible and intelligible creation, is not subject to any change, even in the process of deification, which, leading to union with God, does not touch on the basic ontological difference.

One can then speculate that if the setting up of the basic diaphora is associated with the providential activity of the Logos of God, in the course of creation of the universe, its replacement, implied in the FAP, corresponds to something that is oppo­site to the creatio ex nihilo. Indeed, the attempt to claim that the Omega Point is immanent and transcendent to the universe is a tacit assertion that the difference between the created and the uncreated is removed in such a way that the ultimate union with the “evolving god” assumes de facto the annihilation of the world. Amazingly, the initial anthropic motivation of the FAP turns out to be absolutely anti-anthropic, for the destruction of physical nature implies the destruction of the physico-biological component of human existence.

Taking a strong stance, one can argue that the Omega Point theory of Tipler proposes a mathematical prescription as to how to organize intentionally the “cosmological crisis” (that is, the “ecological crisis” on cosmic scales).⁵³³ This immediately leads to two theological observations. First, by destroying nature, the “posthuman” kind of intelligent processing machines desanctifies the good creation of a good God, which is tantamount to the view that the sensible creation is evil and is worth replacing in favor of an intelligible world, which is full of disembodied “softwarelike” souls. The second unsatisfactory feature of this scenario is that the human hypostatic constitution is supposed to be destroyed together with the divine image with which human beings are endowed.

One fears that such a scenario probably indicates a deep spiritual crisis of human scientific thought, in which the vision of nature as sacrament, as well as the understanding of human life as deeply rooted in the reality of the Divine, is lost.⁵³⁴ Why does this happen? Why does the exaggeration of the naturalistic dimension in anthropic cosmology lead in theory to the eclipse of the human-divine image and to the lack of balance and responsibility for nature, which God handed to human beings?

To answer these questions, it should be reemphasized that cosmology in general has been a powerful tool in sketching the picture of the world and influencing the beliefs of society; it has always entered the social institutions under the cover of some ideology. The social function of cosmology was active in practically all human cultures that existed before Christianity and that coexist with it nowadays. Cosmology orientates a community in its world, in the sense that it defines, for that community, the place of humankind in the cosmic scheme of things. Such cosmic orientation tells the members of the community in broad terms who they are and where they stand in relation to the rest of creation; it is also active in the prescrip­tion of a system of norms contributing to the normative ethics of the community. This system of norms circumscribes the aspirations of the community, which are proportional to its expectations. Expectations, in turn, depend on the information summarized in the concept of the environment. This conception, built on local, empirically accessible data about the environment, shapes the expectation in simple ways, but since the nature and stability of the local environment depend on remote cosmological factors, the shaping of expectations, and, hence, moral norms, social order and ecological strategy themselves are dependent on cosmologies.⁵³⁵ Cosmology not only plays an eschatological function for societies but also had a direct impact on the practical life of ancient societies, which projected the cosmic order onto their institutions, for example, through the spatial arrangement of ancient settlements and cities on the basis of their correspondence to the images of the cosmic environment such that the information about the universe was encoded in the track a particular society left in its earthly history.⁵³⁶

This social function of cosmology was implemented sometimes as a cosmic religion, in which the gods were positioned in the cosmic space in planets and stars and the whole cosmos was endowed with a “cosmic soul.” Cosmological views were often used either to defend or to refute a particular form of religiosity. Cosmology can be used in opposite ways too, either to affirm the importance of the human phenomenon in the universe, an exceptional role that human beings are destined to play in the universe, or to condemn humanity to its purely natural state of existence, which implies its insignificant and indifferent position in the cosmos. The adoption of different views on the role of man can have different social implications if the relationship between man and the universe is projected into the relationship between a person and society.⁵³⁷

Cosmology can also penetrate the minds of people in the form of so-called cosmism, which is a philosophical and spiritual longing for fusion with cosmic entities. Cosmism in this sense means not only the affirmation of our commonalities with nature and our contingence upon its laws and accidents but also a much more sophisticated kind of spirituality, which longs for fusion with “cosmic life” and its mystery and which is ecstatic in its essence. Berdyaev called this spiritual tendency “the lure of the cosmos” and described it as man’s slavery to cosmos (and nature in general), as opposed to the freedom of hypostatic existence in the divine image.⁵³⁸ The danger of this kind of cosmism is evident nowadays, when the cosmic fantasy of science fiction and endless television serials makes the dream of cosmic travel and indwelling to be the psychological enervation of the masses, appealing to cosmic nostalgia as the last resort in their attempt to overcome the discomfort and stress of modern life here on the earth.⁵³⁹ This is why the science-fiction cosmologies, such as Tipler’s cosmological physics of immortality, are capable of competing with all sorts of paganistic religions, whose tendency is to turn the minds and souls of human beings from the contemplation of the God-Creator of the universe in order to enslave them spiritually to the impersonal and unarticulated forces of the cosmos, visible or invisible. The Omega Point of Tipler’s theory or his “evolving god,” which represent the final destination for “human” disembodied programs to exist, thus strongly resemble those impersonal cosmic deities of the Hellenistic philosophy that were so strongly rejected by the Fathers of the early church. The coming of paganism through the back door of scientific terminology indicates, from a Christian perspec­tive, the loss of the perception of the human-divine image in modern scientific dis­course by those who invent such cosmic fantasies.

The apology for slavery to the forces of nature and the lure of existing forever through physical machinery, which is present in finalistic cosmologies, indicate the lessening of the soteriological and ecclesial perception of human existence, its sacred qualities and function in creation as microcosm and mediator, transfigurer, and redeemer. It is interesting to observe that a single theological fallacy – namely, the distortion of the human image in the perspective of its link to God – leads, if it is implemented in cosmology, to the cascade of philosophical, methodological, and physical obscurities. This shows that no genuine and adequate cosmology is possible if the anthropological dimension of the universe is not properly taken into account. It is at this point that Tipler’s cosmology deviates considerably from the Christian view of the universe as the hypostatic inherence in the Logos of God, an existence articulated by hypostatic human beings. The latter view implies that the inward existence of the universe is possible only in conjunction with hypostatic human beings, so that any deviation from Christian anthropology in theory should lead to a change in the inward existence of the universe. If this anthropology is replaced at all in favor of disembodied computer programs, the inward existence of the universe should change too, so that its “physics” would be non-anthropic and unarticulated in human terms.

This argument demonstrates once more the fallacy hidden in the final anthropic cosmology, which treats people as finite state machines and in which the fullness of human life is substituted by “intelligibility” treated as computability of thoughts. It is clear, however, that there is something in human beings that is completely noncomputable and irreducible to any objective expression. Faith (and revelation in response to it), mystical experience, and various individual feelings and emotions can hardly be reduced to any kind of objective computation and reproduced through their encoding in a computer program. This is why a “life” in the final anthropic cosmol­ogy has some remote similarity to what is meant by human life as the experience of personhood.

The scale of the distortion of the idea of human life through reduction to com­puter software becomes manifest when compared with Christian anthropology. Christianity offers an alternative idea of divine humanity that establishes the norm for man. Christ, our idea about Christ, is the perfect model by reference to which we can answer the question about who are we are. He is the man, “the first-born of every creature” (Col. 1:15), the archetype of which every human being is, in terms of his or her potentialities, the image. The difference between Christ and us is that Christ is eternally God’s son, while we are God’s sons because we are created in the image of Christ’s divine humanity. To be a son of God is to have the Divine as the determining element of our being, that is, to be inherent in the divine hypostasis. It is precisely this that makes us human and that constitutes our humanity. To the degree to which we fail to attain a full realization of this, we fail to be human.

If it is true that without the divine dimension the genuine human dimension would be deprived of reality, it is equally true that without the human dimension the divine would be deprived of self-manifestation. If one allows the divorce with God (let us say, only in thought), one, in fact, risks denying the existence of God and hence the existence of human beings. It is not surprising, then, to hear from Tipler that the “traditional God is superfluous,” for he denies not only the existence of the Christian God but also the existence of all human persons as hypostatic unities of body and soul inherent in the Logos of God.⁵⁴⁰ In a way, we observe here an explicit logical and ethical contradiction to the initial aim of the final anthropic cosmology to promote human life in the universe. The future of the universe predicted by a theory that contains this contradiction is sorrowful, as we have argued before. In the words of P. Sherrard: “Having rejected the understanding that his life and activity are significant only in so far as they incarnate, reflect and radiate that transcendent spir­itual reality which is the ground and center of his own being, man is condemned to believe that he is the autocratic and omnipotent ruler of his own affairs and of the world about him, which it is his right and duty to subdue, organize, investigate and exploit to serve his profane mental curiosity or his acquisitive material appetites.”⁵⁴¹

For although the body of human beings comes into existence from the underlying matter of the world and is independent of the soul in some ways, there is an indissoluble hypostatic relationship between soul and body that has an affinity with the Divine. This gives human beings a key position and role in the universe. They stand as mediators between God and the material world, between heaven and earth. Nothing is external to them, for everything is articulated, enhypostasized by human beings. This is in sharp contrast to the scientific view of things that presupposes that the universe is an object external to humanity and that it is possible to manipulate the universe without limit without the risk of losing one’s own roots in it. In this pic­ture, there is a loss of the consciousness in which nature is considered a part of the subjectivity of human beings; consequently, there is a loss of the sense of humanity’s decisive role in relationship to the rest of creation.

Christian theology teaches that the destiny of the universe is in the hands of human beings, who are made in the image of God, because it is only through human­ity’s fulfilling its role as mediator between God and the world that the world itself can fulfill its destiny and be transfigured in the light and presence of God. This is a pos­sible Christian theological alternative to all scientific utopias of the indefinite cosmological future.

The discussion of the destiny of the universe in the Orthodox context requires one to emphasize one particular point of its eschatology, namely, a close link of Orthodox eschatology to the theology of creation of universe and its further articulation (enhypostasization) by human beings, whose existence forms the humankind-event. This is why the future of the universe can be understood only in the perspective of the final destiny of human beings. The existence of the universe for us (that is, its articulated existence) is inseparable from the continuity of human consciousness, beginning from the very “first” event, when consciousness contracts its existing in the hypostasis of the Logos, and finishing with the “last” event, which accomplishes human history, so that the articulation of the universe as the display in space and time and as a set of different happenings and physical events ceases to be inherent in the human apprehension.

St. Gregory of Nyssa describes this final stage of the humankind-event in terms of the ceasing of human generation, which, because of the divine plan of salvation, will have fulfilled it purpose, so that flowing time will stop:

God, Who governs all things in a certain order and sequence… foreknew the time coextensive with the creation of men, so that the extent of time should be adapted for the entrances of the predetermined souls, and the flux and motion of time should halt at the moment when humanity is no longer produced by means of it; and that when the generation of men is completed, time should cease together with its completion, and then should take place the restitution of all things,…and also humanity should be changed from corruptible and earthly to the impassible and eternal.⁵⁴²

According to Gregory, the possibility of the end of the world in the sense described above is connected with the fact of its beginning (understood either as the creatio ex nihilo in an absolute sense or as the creation as articulation of the world through human apprehension).⁵⁴³ However, if one asks about how and when the end of the world is supposed to happen, Gregory insists that this question must be abandoned, for the end of the world as well as its creation is a mystery, which is inconceivable to our grasp.⁵⁴⁴

What is important here is that Gregory describes the end of the world in terms of the end of humanity, for with no humanity there is no universe as articulated exis­tence. This implies immediately that the universe itself, being articulated through human apprehension, acquires the features of a hypostatic event, in the same sense that the humankind-event is inherent in the hypostasis of the Logos. This thought provides another argument to assert that the change of human hypostatic constitu­tion, its progress toward the dominance of the ecclesial mode in human existence, its deification and return to the kingdom of God, will result in a complete change of the articulation of the universe. This change can be called its renewal or transfiguration.

For Maximus the Confessor, for example, the transfiguration of the universe was directly linked to the mediating function of human beings, who remove all divisions in creation on the level of morality and will, so that the change of human hypostatic constitution itself results in the changes in the universe (the removal of the divisions in it). These changes can be understood as changes of the image of the world and its articulation, as being inherent in the hypostasis of the Logos of God, by human beings who are supposed to restore the integrity of their personhood in Christ. As the perception of flowing time in the ordinary life of a human being is transfigured into an atemporal “instant” of eternity through the liturgical invocation of the kingdom of God in church, suspending the temporal order⁵⁴⁵ and bringing the praying com­munity in the eschatological realm, the physical time of this age is supposed to be transfigured by the whole community of human beings through their mediating function between creation and God, so that the cessation of the humankind-event in the universe will mean, in fact, the cessation of a temporal image of the universe, which, in physical terms, will mean its end. In no way, however, does the change of the image of the universe as a result of the cessation of the humankind-event assume the destruction of the universe and its natural order. On the contrary, the universe itself will probably be seen through the light of the Logos, manifesting itself as the ultimate sacrament , united back to God.

It is important to realize, finally, that it is the Christ-event that can be paralleled with the humankind-event and which can be said to have recapitulated the humankind-event, its beginning and its end, setting thus a vision of the destiny of humankind and the universe in the perspective of the resurrection.

Christ himself was treated as “the New Man” and the last Adam. The divine plan of salvation was consummated, the kingdom of God inaugurated through Christ, but the ultimate things were yet to come in fullness and glory. The king had come, but the kingdom was still to come. The promise of the kingdom was granted to the church by the Holy Spirit. The church has lived since then in two dimensions: in sight of ongoing secular history and world events in the time of decay and oblivion, but also in the time of the heavenly kingdom inaugurated by the risen savior (in which the church has lived epicletically in the expectation of the kingdom).⁵⁴⁶

The coming of Christ and the resurrection changed completely the human situation, for in fallen existence, the time form of the world is characterized by law (nomos); this implies that humans were involved in an irreversible chain of decay and corruption, which led them to mortality with no hope of undoing the things they had done. Everything that had been done became ontologically necessary, so that there is no way to overcome this necessity, which is indicated by the word law. The coming of Christ and the resurrection relieved us from this law; we are still living in the world of “fallen” temporal order, but we are relieved from the necessity of the law; that is, we have a chance of renewal and of entering the kingdom, cleansing ourselves through constant participation in the resurrection of the Lord.

Christian thought acquired a fundamental change in the understanding of history through the expectation of the kingdom. Since history has not been accomplished through the historical resurrection of Christ, the whole historical development is treated now as from the perspective of the completion of the work of Christ, that is, from the completion of his body, the church, in its ultimate, final understanding as an “event” of the eschatological future. Even the mystery of the incarnation now receives eschatological meaning: in order to accept death, and to be resurrected, Christ must have a body.⁵⁴⁷ One can speak of the historical Jesus from birth to resur­rection as “sheer miracle or downright resurrection from the beginning to end.”⁵⁴⁸

That is why Gregory the Theologian in his Orations (45) preaches on the celebration of Pascha, the mystery of the Passover, as celebration of “both the Birthday and the Burial of Him Who was born for thee and suffered for thee.”⁵⁴⁹ We do the same in the service of Palm Sunday when we celebrate during the Paschal service the econ­omy of the incarnation, exalting, “Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord.”⁵⁵⁰ It has some correlation with the baptismal overtones of the same service when, to enter the new life of resurrection, the baptized must be symbolically buried together with Christ in order to be resurrected through baptism to the new life.⁵⁵¹ In this ceremony, Christ’s coming inaugurates the eschatological age when the fulfillment of his promise is seen from the perspective of the age to come, from the age of the kingdom.

We have thus seen that the eschatological vision of history links two elements of Christian history – the incarnation and the resurrection – both of which we comprehend as the divine design for the salvation of man. The eschatology of the age to come, of the kingdom of God, does not mean, however, that there will be no “end” in the historical progression that moves us along and sets us in the kingdom to come. Rather, it means that nothing is static in our eucharistic experience of communion with the kingdom.⁵⁵² This implies not only that the whole creation is in movement but that this movement is irreversible and progressive toward its eschatological end.

As discussed earlier, the Christian eschatology is conceivable only in connection with the concept of the true creation, the creatio ex nihilo. This is because, if we have the beginning of the world through the creation, we can grasp the meaning of the expectation for the age to come, when the whole creation will be transfigured and space and time will be redeemed through the resurrection.⁵⁵³ Gregory the Theologian makes this link with the creation in Paschal celebration explicit when he starts his preaching from the exposition of the Cappadocian understanding of God and his ecstatic love, resulting in the free creation of the world and of humankind.⁵⁵⁴ Gregory insists that the history of the creation is an inevitable part of the celebration of the Passover.⁵⁵⁵ This is why we read the first chapter of Genesis at the beginning of the Easter vespers: the creation of the world is a Passover or Easter event and, in fact, the first of all Passover events.⁵⁵⁶

There is a correspondence between Old Testament creation and the “new cre­ation,” the “Paschal creation” of the Christians (2Cor. 5:17; Gal. 5:17). We observe here the development of the motif present in the Old Testament that results in the correspondence between creation and redemption, between creation to the new life through the resurrection and the fulfillment of the Lord’s promise for the kingdom to come. The creation of the world, the redemption, and the eschatological salvation are all interrelated as three paschal events at the beginning, middle, and the end of time: “The one God who acts paschally through his ‘word’ is at once creator of the world (Gen 1:1), ‘creator of Israel’ (Is 43:1,15), and creator of new heavens and new earth’ (Is 65:17; Rev 21.1)”⁵⁵⁷

We know about the kingdom of God and the ultimate destiny of this world because we know the Christ-event. Christ through the cross, resurrection, and ascension left us with historical memory of the event and liturgical memory of the king­dom. The condescension of the Logos of God into the world through the incarnation in Christ, and Christ’s coming back to the kingdom through the resurrection and ascension, provide Christians with the typology of the events that will happen to human beings, in particular with the image of the end of the world and the human being, as both transfigured and united back to God, leaving behind the images of the world in its present state of flowing time.

One can imagine that when human beings reintegrate their personhood in God, so that their hypostatic constitution will no longer resemble the divisions in creation, human apprehension will change fundamentally. The vision of the universe, its artic­ulation in space and in time, will cease to function at all, resembling more and more the hypostatic “apprehension” of the universe by the Logos himself, for whom the whole universe in its spatial and temporal span exists as an instant of truth, as the “eighth” boundless day, the aeon with no duration.