Formal Immanence, Effective Transcendence

As discussed previously here and here, the Greek understanding of reality, form, and meaning was all bound up in the notion of kosmos wherein that which was real possessed by nature the urge to reveal itself, to make itself manifest.  That quality of self-revelation was the logos and it was what animated the intelligibility of the kosmos.  In my last post, I distinguished this from the Christian metaphysical paradigm in which the logos is not a quality belonging to the physical universe itself but is rather located within the Godhead where He, not it, resides as the Second Member: Jesus Christ.  So, using the Greek understanding of logos, the Incarnation can be conceived of as a necessary manifestation of the nature of the Logos himself, a nature which always makes itself appear.

Returning to Creation itself, Dupre continues his discussion on Greek and Christian conceptions of nature, stating:

If nature for the Greeks emerged, for Christians it was brought to emerge. [...] Nevertheless, since the creative act transfers a form aboriginal in God to an extra-divine existence, a divine presence somehow continues to dwell in creation.  Divine causality is formally immanent as well as effectively transcendent. (30)

Put more simply, this should be no more difficult to express than through the words of the Psalmist when he rejoices that “the heavens declare the glory of God.”  Creation necessarily bears the personal imprint of its Maker and this imprint is not the equivalent of some divine name-tag stuck upon the world; as Dupre indicates, God is present in the forms of the universe because those forms are His but the existence of those forms are credited to His transcendence over their manifestations.  Therefore, as Dupre continues:

The doctrine of creation redefined the teleology of the Greek physis by rendering the course of nature intrinsically dependent on a transcendent principle.  But it did not reduce nature to a mechanism that was moved from without, as the later theory of creation as efficient causality was to do.  Indeed, the idea of God’s immanent presence in creation soon drove Christian theologians, especially in the Greek-speaking world, to Neoplatonic philosophy.  In Plotinus’s and Proclus’s theologies the One — which Christians identified with God — remains present in its emanations while nevertheless transcending them.  Nature itself re-presented God and this representation laid the basis for a theology of the image and for an original Christian mysticism.  Already the Epistle to the Colossians (1:16) had referred to Christ as ‘the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creatures.’  The creature, archetypically present in the Son, is an image of that uncreated image.  For the fourth-century Cappadocians Gregory of Nyssa and his brother Basil, human physis bears the image of its divine archetype, the Logos, image of the Father.  The soul recognizes the divine image in itself and in the cosmos and returns both it to their divine archetype. (31)

So, the bridge of intelligibility that lies between the human subject and the cosmos around him is a shared possession of the divine image which is, as Dupre said, “archetypically present” in Jesus Christ.  The means by which we apprehend the beautiful  in others and Creation is the soul’s perception of the common representation, the epitome, of the Triune God that is manifestly expressed in all that exists.

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