The Mountain and the Plain: Prolegomenon to a Physics of Genesis
Peter Leithart
Biblical topography implies a metaphysics and a politics. God dwells on the high places – Eden, Sinai, Zion, the high mountain of Ezekiel and John, the mountain of Jesus’ sermon. On the mountain, the Lord reveals heavenly patterns in word and vision, but these heavenly patterns are intended to be replicated on earth. He speaks Ten Words, which Israel, gathered at the base of Sinai, is to obey. He reveals the tabnit of the tabernacle to Moses in the cloud (Exod 25:9, 40), a blueprint for building the sanctuary in the camp. The earthly city of God is always a city conformed to the disclosures on the mountain.
What happens when earth doesn’t conform to the pattern of heaven? Genesis presents two paradigmatic cases. Babel is erected on the plain of Shinar, an attempt to construct an artificial mountain, a man-made earthly heaven. We can be certain the Creator-God would not speak from that mountain; it would only amplify and divinize the word of man. Lot settles near Sodom, one of the cities of the plain in the region of the Jordan (Gen 19:29). Both are experiments in a politics of the “immanent frame.” Neither is successful, for they cannot escape the God of the mountain. Yahweh descends to see and scatter the men of Babel and rains fire and brimstone on Sodom.
The metaphysics of the mountain assumes communication between heaven and earth. The politics of the mountain seeks to shape life on the plain to the words and visions of the mountain. This is the City of God. The metaphysics of the plain is detached from heaven, if there is any. politics of the plain is immanent, ignores or persecutes messengers from the mountain. This is the City of Man, which will be scattered and destroyed. This biblical topography is relevant in our evaluation of different forms of “natural law” ethics and politics. Insofar as natural law presents an ethics and politics of the plain, which closes itself off to the words and visions of the mountain, it is unChristian and doomed. For no account of the politics of God can refuse to reckon with the God of the mountain.
My paper unfolds in three movements. First, and most briefly, I will address the question of natural law, especially the fairly recent atheological forms of natural law theory that exclude appeals to written revelation. Second, I will take up the notion of “nature,” asking whether it is a theologically compelling concept. This discussion will circle back to “natural law,” since moral and political theories concerning natural presume some notion of nature. Finally, the third movement resolves with a consideration of the biblical account of “nature.”
I. Natural law.
John Courtney Murray’s mid-century We Hold These Truths has loomed large in my imagination for decades. Natural law, Murray argues, arrives at its understanding of moral and political truth solely from a consideration of man as man, without any consideration of revealed truth.[1] Murray’s account is, effectively, a Christianized politics of the plain.
Classic accounts of natural law are, fortunately, not of this sort. Thomas Aquinas cites Scripture to justify his appeals to natural law and theological principles pervade his account. Thomas does not, in my view, have a theory of natural law at all. In the Summa theologiae, he presents a theory of law, which includes eternal law, natural law, positive human law, as well as the old and new law of the Scriptures. And this account of law is embedded within an even larger account of human action, habit, and virtue and vice. He devotes only one question of the Summa to natural law, while giving eleven questions to the old and new law.
In Thomas’s account, all of these forms of law are theologically rooted and none makes sense without the others. Eternal law exists because the Creator “stands as the artificer to the products of his art” and “governs all the acts and movements that are to be found in each single creature.” As the pattern for creation, the “type of the Divine Wisdom” has the character of “art, exemplar, or idea”; insofar as Divine Wisdom moves all things toward their intended ends, it “bears the character of law.” Eternal law is, then, “nothing else than the type of Divine Wisdom, as directing all actions and movement.”[2] Eternal law, the paradigm and root of all law, depends on an explicitly biblical understanding of creation as a work of a divine Artist.
Natural law is man’s participation in the eternal law. As rational beings, men are not moved passively toward their end simply by the governance of providence. We are agents who can discern our ends and deliberately move toward them. The precepts of natural law derive from observation of human inclinations toward various goods – toward life, toward procreation and raising of offspring, toward knowledge, including the knowledge of God. But these inclinations would have no prescriptive force at all except that natural law shares in the Divine Wisdom of the Creator.
Natural law, further, is drastically limited. Even discounting the issue of sin, natural law gives only the most general guidance for human life and must be supplemented by positive law. Once sin is introduced, natural law is no longer adequate to guide human action or political decisions. Thomas’s theology of law is shaped, like the entire Summa, by the redemptive- historical movement of exitus and reditus, or, in more contemporary terms, by the narrative of creation, fall, redemption, glory. Though Thomas cites Romans 2:14-15 in support of a natural law, he does not think Paul teaches that Gentiles untouched by grace can know and do God’s will; that would be Pelagian! And, though the abstract “most general principles” cannot be expunged from the human heart (e.g., good is to be done), yet the “secondary and more detailed precepts” can be blotted out by concupiscence and evil persuasion, or by “vicious customs and corrupt habits,” so much that “among some men, theft, and even unnatural vice . . . were not esteemed sinful.”[3] Revelation embodied in the old and new law of the Scriptures is absolutely necessary if fallen human beings are going to know their duty and do it.
Faux Thomistic accounts that extract natural law from this theological framework are biblically insupportable. Direct verbal revelation is not a postlapsarian corrective; God spoke to sinless Adam in the garden. Verbal revelation is necessary to human life as such, for Adam could not have known his duty apart from God’s specific word. The New Natural Law attempt to construct an ethic by attending to basic goods, without input from revelation, misconstrues the character of basic goods. Is it a basic good to acknowledge Jesus as Lord? Are baptism and the Eucharist basic goods? If natural law is an attempt to describe the basic goods of human life as such, the question surely is: What business do Christians have justifying the shape of human life as such – without reference to the Sources of life in Word and Spirit?
More abstractly, we may ask whether the historical experience of humanity provides material for natural law reasoning. It must needs, or else we are reasoning about an ahistorical and non-existent human nature. Once we introduce history as a factor in natural law reasoning, we then have to ask whether or not that history includes acts of God – flood, exodus, Sinai, conquest, the Davidic dynasty – and the words of God’s chroniclers and prophets who recount and interpret those events. Excluding this “data” from consideration is not a scientifically neutral position, but unbelief, and so is treating this data as just another mass of historical data. Once God’s historical acts and His written records are accepted as material for moral reasoning, we are no longer working in the framework of modern natural law theory.
Some might accept the bulk of this argument and still suggest natural law provides an effective rhetoric for public engagement in a pluralistic world. Following the lead of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, we translate our convictions into publicly acceptable categories. To this, I have two main objections. First, anyone with an ounce of theological savvy (Andrew Sullivan) will recognize and expose disguised theological claims for what they are. Second, and more importantly, the fundamental Christian political convictions do not admit of translation. “Jesus is Lord” does not mean “An unnamed prophet of an unspecified religious tradition rules.”
II. Nature.
Nature seems to be a natural concept. There needs no philosopher come from Stagira to tell us that ducks lay duck eggs that produce ducklings, that all normal ducks have feathers and flat bills, and swim and waddle and survive on a diet of worms, bugs, slugs, and snails. We do not need a theory; that things have natures, that they reproduce according to natural kinds, that their nature determines the kinds of things they are – all this stares us in the face as soon as we open our eyes.
All of these observations are, of course, true, but they do not constitute a concept of nature. “Nature” is not a set of observations but an explanation of the world’s regularities. It is not merely the claim that we form abstract names to designate groups with common characteristics; that is nominalism. A theory of nature claims ducks have webbed feet because they all share some non-physical nature or essence of duckness. Ducklings grow into ducks because (on an Aristotelian account) they have an inner principle of movement and change that drives them toward the telos of full ducky development. “Nature” is not an observation about appearances, but a way of saving appearances.
Everyone tries to save the appearances, but these efforts are always relative and partial. There are always other ways of to save appearances. Materialists attempt to explain the same phenomena by reference to genetic or chemical or environmental factors. Occasionalists will say there is no causation but divine causation, and so, as Malebranche put it, “the nature or power of each thing is nothing but the will of God . . . all natural causes are not true causes but occasional causes.”[4] Fire does not cause heat; rather, God (usually) causes heat in the presence of fire (cf. the exceptional case of Daniel 3). “Nature” is not a natural idea that was discovered; it has to be constructed or, as G.E.R Lloyd put it, “invented.”[5] To suggest that “ducks beget ducks” entails the claim that “nature is what makes ducks beget ducks” is not a piece of logic, but a rhetorical trick.
According to Lloyd, physis makes its first appearance on the stage of Greek thought as a skeptic, a tool of demythologization, weaponized against supernaturalist accounts of the world. Greek medical writers insist, for instance, that all disease have a natural explanation, never ab effect if of offending the gods. The “natural” mode of discourse systematically excludes divine causation. Even if medical writers get the causal factors wrong, they set a methodological criterion: Rational explanation must rigorously exclude appeal to extra-natural forces and actors. Their theory is not, Lloyd argues, disinterested. While offering natural explanations for medical phenomena, they simultaneously attack traditional “quack” medicine men who prey on the superstitious. For Greek medical writers, “nature” is a matter of branding and a bid for market share.
Aristotle does not use physis to eliminate the divine, but his theory does eliminate particular accounts of God’s relation to the world. Ancient thinkers assumed a homology between the origin of the world and the way the world is currently governed. If a personal being(s) is responsible for the original ordering of things, that order must be maintained and those things governed by a personal being(s). At least in the Timaeus, Plato portrays the order of universe as a work of such a divine craftsman, the demiurge, who, taking his cues from eternal forms, shapes the pre-existing chasm into a good world, as good as it can be, given the fact that it is not the perfect world of forms.
Aristotle agrees with the premise: The same principle explains both the origin and perpetuation of world order. But Aristotle turns Plato upside down. He does not believe the world came into being, nor does he believe it is directed toward its end by a personal God. Rather, the cosmos and everything in its is driven by a desire to emulate God, the unmoved mover. Far from being a meddlesome ruler of the cosmos, the unmoved mover is not even conscious of the world’s existence. Ze lives a life of contemplation so pure that it is not even contemplation of anything but only self-reflective contemplation of contemplation.
This, David Sedley suggests, is the motivation for Aristotle’s shift from Platonic personalism. He perceived a dissonance between the perfect human life of contemplation and the busy practical lives of the gods. He departs from Plato for Platonic reasons, positing that God is the perfect divine philosopher, resting in eternal detachment. As the supreme object of desire, the mover moves everything; he is the supreme explanatory principle that keeps this changing world swirling on its merry way. Ze does this while remaining utterly detached in his leisurely nowhere, controlling everything without having to lift the finger ze of course does not have.[6] It’s what the kids call a neat trick. For my purposes, what is noteworthy is the specific form of demythologization at work here: Not an elimination of God at all, but the elimination of a certain conception of deity and its transformation into an impersonal, all-pervading power.
Aristotelian physis fits into this theological framework. Substances are hylomorphic, composites constituted by forms informing prime matter. This is arguably a craft account of the world, with “form” playing the role of artificer. And Aristotle does indeed work out his fourfold account of causation with a craft analogy. He justifies the analogy by repeating the axiom that art follows nature, but the argument actually goes in the opposite direction. The four causes are easier to discern and distinguish if we examine a bronze sculpture or a machine than if we examine a lichen, but there are presumed to be more occult causes in nature that correspond to the sculptor, the bronze, the shape, and the purpose. Given Aristotle’s theological commitments, though, no natural cause can literally correspond to sculptor; there are no personal natural causes. To push the analogy through, Aristotle must insist that even the causes of artifacts are not personal. What forms the house is not the builder but the skill of building that resides in him.[7] Persons are effectively erased from the order of the world.
It is not easy to pin down where physis fits in this account. Forms and prime matter possess physis, that is, these principles have distinguishable qualities. At the same time, the form-matter complex constitutes the physis or ousia of a thing, determining its properties and setting its trajectory toward perfection. The form of duck informs prime matter to produce the living duck whose webbed feet and bill and waddle, growth and realization as a duck, are determined by its physis, by the way a particular form has stamped itself onto propertyless matter. The duck’s physis is moved by love, by desire for the unmoved mover, such that the duck’s growth as a duck is a bid for ducky deification.
There is an indisputable grandeur to this picture: Neither a swirling Heraclitean chaos, nor a frozen Parmenidean stasis, but a world of stately grace, each thing moving toward its place, each thing valued as good because each thing grows toward its particular perfection. Yet it is more in continuity with the demythologizing efforts of medical writers than with the mythologizing tendency of Aristotle’s teacher. Despite its theological frame, it is finally a metaphysics of the plain.
Like nearly every medieval thinker, of course, Thomas tries to make a place for nature. Thomas stuffs Aristotelian nature into a creationist framework, but it is a difficult fit. The point of Aristotelian nature was precisely to fill the gap left by the evacuation of personal, supernatural actors. But Thomas’s God is precisely that. It would seem there is no place for natura to rest. Earlier medievals made sense of the quasi-personal, quasi-volitional quality of natura by positing a goddess, subject to the Creator’s control but a distinct agent in the cosmos.[8] That has the advantage of coherence, the disadvantage that it brushes close to idolatry.
Thomas does not endorse this viewpoint, but his use of nature leads him into some conundrums. Nature is a contrast term,[9] taking its significance from the category to which it is opposed. Nature is what is not-art; natural movement is what is not-violent; natural causation is what is not-supernatural. For Thomas as for Aristotle, nature is an intrinsic principle of motion, change, and coming to rest. This stands in contrast to art, which exists first as a form in the mind of the craftsmen and then is imposed extrinsically on natural material. Natural movement stands in contrast also to violent change, change forced on a natural object by some external power, change that diverts the object from acting naturally. Made of earth, rocks naturally descend to find their proper place in the hierarchy of the universe, but I can launch a rock from a trebuchet, “violently” causing the rock to fly. Of course, the rock still seeks its place and will eventually come to rest.
As soon as we introduce human innovation, though, we face difficulties. It is not in the nature of steel to fly, but steel airplanes fly for hours and hours all over the world. Of course, the steel flies because of the “natural” explosive properties of jet fuel, but on Aristotle’s account the harnessing of fuel to make metal tubes fly across oceans has to be classified as “violent” movement. And from here it is difficult to escape the sense that technology is itself an act of violence inflicted on the world, insofar as it diverts natural things from the actualization of their natural potencies. We might say that techne is natural to man, but that seems to mean only that man “naturally” does violence to the world.
Aristotle and Thomas leave artifacts in an ambiguous position. Aristotle denies artifacts are substances at all. Thomas’s position has some subtleties, but in the end he appears to conclude that artifacts are fragile assemblages of natural things, rather than substances in their own right. A table has no “nature,” though the wood and the screws of the table retain their natural properties. More accurately, they retain some of them, because the wood of the table is not the same as the growing natural wood of the tree. Turning a tree into lumber, and lumber into a table, denatures the tree, at least in part. Like the rock launched from the trebuchet, it prevents the tree from acting according to its nature, to grow, leave and lose leaves, bear fruit, reproduce. I own a table only at the cost of denaturing the tree from which it was made.
The situation is arguably even more dire. After all, we do think of artifacts as things with particular natures. An airplane that can no longer fly does not fulfill the purpose of being an airplane; a grounded airplane is contrary to the nature of airplanes. Metal does not naturally fly, but it is natural for metal formed into a winged tube and equipped with jet fuel to fly. We have, no doubt, equivocated on “nature” here; we have moved from “what is the normal for living things without human intervention” to “what is normal for human artifacts.” But the equivocation is there already, when we talk about the “nature” of the table’s wood, even though the table will never again grow leaves or produce persimmons. Human alterations of the world limit natural potencies, but also create new potencies, a new normal. A metaphysics without a strong explanation of human modifications of the world does not describe the world as it is.
Aristotle proposes two extrinsic forces that modify nature – art and violence. Thomas adds a third, God. Unlike Aristotle, Thomas believes in a personal, active God who acts as an efficient cause, not merely drawing things to Himself as final cause. As Creator, God is the cause of all natural things and of all natural actions, since He gives things the power to act: He “causes all the actions of nature, because he gave natural things the powers whereby they are able to act.”[10] Yet God is, like art and nature, an extrinsic cause. To naturalize God’s causation, Thomas proposes that creatures are given a potentia oboedientialis, an obediential potency, by which all things created are inclined to receive God and obey His will. Thus, what God does is never contrary to nature. It is perfectly natural for an axe head to float whenever God demands it, since the iron is designed to obey its Creator.
This softens but does not resolve the problem, since even on this account the Creator remains an “extrinsic” cause. To say creation is “open” to God implies that it exists and can trundle along, awaiting God’s external interventions. Perhaps it would trundle along in the same way even if there were no Creator. So long as God is pictured as outside creation, His actions will resemble violent modifications or the modifications of an artist.
Exploring the theological coherence of the concept of “nature” is relevant to the question of natural law, because the latter presumes at least a rough homology between the way the world is and the way humans ought to behave. Social Darwinism is viciously consistent: Because nature is red in tooth and claw, and because humans are natural creatures, they are engaged in the same brute struggle for survival as everyone else. Aristotle’s account of nature is teleological. It is a principle of motion and rest that drives things toward their telos, that actualizes potency. What kind of ethics and politics does this imply? Callicles and Thrasymachus offer an ancient anticipation of Nietzsche: Nature is power, so it is natural for the powerful to do what they like with the weak.
Aristotle of course rejects that option. Nature is shaped by virtuous habit. Nature must be pruned for individuals to reach their full realization. “First nature” – the basic human desires for rational reflection, moral action, imitation, knowledge – is too weak to bring human beings to the full realization of their humanity. Education and practice develop virtuous habits. We might say this: Precisely because human beings are, among other things, rational animals, they have a capacity for self-shaping lacking in other creatures. While acorns become oaks kata physin, without conscious intention, human beings do not.
But there are tensions in Aristotle’s account. Contemplation is, he thinks, the highest end of man. That might seem to imply a society ordered to enable all to pursue a life of contemplation; but then who picks the grapes? Perhaps some are naturally suited for grape-picking instead of contemplation. While many slaves are accidentally so, some are slaves by nature. But then we have equivocated again on nature. Nature is no longer about reaching the full human telos; instead, different people have different natural ends.
Besides, if “first nature” contributes so little to the realization of human excellence, why are women, slaves, non-Greeks, and some Greeks not able to achieve virtue by the same process of education that works for male Greek citizens? Why should nature be an obstacle for male slaves when it is not for male freemen? “Nature” no longer describes what all human beings share, but rather names what some individuals or classes of individuals possess. One is tempted to draw a cynical conclusion: Applied as a social principle, nature is a propaganda trick to legitimate whatever form society happens to have taken, to ensure the high they should be high, to pacify the restless low who might clamber to climb higher. The nose of nature begins to appear mighty waxy.[11]
Aristotle also runs into difficulties with respect to the artificial character of virtue and of political and social order. A virtuous man is the product of artifice, not nature. Whatever we might say about man’s natural political inclinations, society too is constructed: Laws are passed, decisions made, communal habits formed, institutions shaped by human action over time. What is the relation between physis and the inescapably nomic order of the polis? Aristotle’s ambiguity about artifacts emerges here. The polis is natural insofar as man is a political animal, but the particular constitution of the polis is the product of art and accident. One might, following Sophists of every age, suggest that nomos is a constraint on nature, and conclude that nature needs to be liberated from its bondage so all can live purely natural lives. The natural law tradition has argued, of course, that artificial laws must conform to nature, they must express the truth about the nature of man. But that runs back into the earlier question: What is this nature? What is the human end?
Thomas does not have these difficulties because, as noted above, he does not develop a purely natural account of ethics or politics. Grace and revelation are essential to the formation of moral individuals and moral societies. But that means, of course, that his theory is no longer a theory of the plain. It is instead a Christian ethics and politics of the City of God. Metaphysically, ethically, politically, Thomas is a mountain man.
III. The Physics of Genesis.
What happens when we take Genesis 1 as fundamental physics? Genesis, of course, does not use any Hebrew equivalent to “nature.” In place of nature, Genesis offers several other categories: heaven and earth, create or make, Spirit, Word.
Contra Aristotle, the world is not eternal. There is a “beginning” of all things, including created time. That beginning is the product of a creative act by the God identified in Genesis 1 as ‘elohim and in Genesis 2 as YHWH ‘elohim, the God of Israel. He is a speaking God, who speaks to and of Himself as “us” (Gen 1:26). As the Bible unfolds, He walks, confronts, curses, provides clothing, hears, sees, regrets, commands, destroys, renews. He is a personal God, personally involved at every moment in the life of every creature. The physics of Genesis is a personalist physics.
The created “whole” is not single but dual, “heaven and earth.” Aristotle has his own version of this duality, but it functions differently in the Bible. Heaven directs earth because heaven is the realm of the Creator, whose decrees govern reality. Heaven is, I have argued, where things happens first.[12] It is where the future is presently realized, where the Lamb reigns and is acknowledged, where “all things in” heaven, earth, and sea offer glory, honor, dominion to the Enthronement and the Lamb (Rev 5:13). The telos of every creature is worship and praise of the Creator and Redeemer.
We might take the formless void as a rough equivalent of pure matter, but what shapes matter is not form but the Spirit and Word of ‘elohim. The Creator’s involvement with creation is Spiritual, that is, by means of His Spirit, identified as the “Spirit of ‘elohim” (Gen 1:2). The Spirit hovers over the face of the dark and empty deep, so as to light and form and fill. As soon as earth exists, the Spirit is face-to-face with it, interior to it, sculpting it from within over time, moving creation to its telos, union with the liturgy of heaven. The interior principle of growth and maturation for the creation is not “nature” but the Holy Spirit. He (not it) is the world Spirit, the source of the liveliness of living things. If trees clap hands and rocks sing, if we live in a world where all things join in praise, it is because we live in a world charged with the Spirit or ‘elohim who is the Lord and Giver of life.
The Spirit is the living Breath whom ‘elohim exhales in order to speak. Creation is by Word. God’s Word is a speech act, an effective Word that brings into being what it speaks – light, a firmament, the gathering of the waters. That Word, we later learn, is not a what but a Who, the eternal Speaking of the eternally speaking Creator. As a product of speech, creation is speech, a dynamic living transcript of what the Word spoke and speaks. Light is not a natural phenomenon to which we attach meanings, but a word of the Radiance who spoke “Let there be light.” If we wish to abstract, “verbalization” and “signification” are more accurate descriptions of the world than “nature.”
Because the speech that creates is the speech of the Lord, it has the character of command. There is a kind of obediential potency here, but it does not imply God as an external power to which the creation is “open.” The Lord’s command is not given to a creation that already exists; His Word is not a reality added to creation. Creation has no existence at all except as obedience to the command of the Creator.[13] Since creation comes to be by the living Speech of God, it rests on and bears the authority of the Creator. This is the truth of Christian natural law theory: There is perfect continuity between what God has spoken in creation and history and what He speaks and writes in human language. There is perfect continuity because both history and Scripture are the explicatio of the Father’s one eternal Word. Creation, as Paul insists, reveals the eternal power and divine nature of God, so that all men inescapably know the living God by what He has made (Rom 1:18-21). Here what Thomas calls the “eternal law” and “divine wisdom” is specifically the Second Person, the decree of the Father.
On the third day of the creation week, ‘elohim begins to enlist creation into the ongoing work of creation. He commands the dry land to produce grains and fruit-bearing trees and vines, and it obeys. On Day 5, He speaks to the sea and it teems with fish, and on Day 6 He summons land animals from the dry land. Earth is fecund only because ‘elohim speaks His empowering that summons the creation to divine work. He does the same with the heavenly lights, to which He delegates the divine task of dividing light from darkness and ruling. Filling is part of the work of creation, and much of the creative filling of Genesis 1 is done by creation itself. Genesis attributes creation’s creativity to the same Word that brought light into being ex nihilo. The power by which heaven and earth came to being is the same power at work in creatures. It is the power of the Word.
This is not a mere deistical kick-start, as if the Word addressed the land and sea then retired to see how the creation responds. According to Hebrews, the Son by whom the world was made “bears” (φερω) all things by the Word of His power (1:3). Grass keeps growing, fish keep reproducing and maturing, ducks keep laying eggs that hatch ducklings, because the Father continues to speak His empowering Word to the creation. The one and only principle (ἂρχη) of all things is the Son who has first place in everything (Col 1:18). Working with the two hands of His Word and Spirit, the Father causes every individual thing to move toward its fulfillment, and moves the whole of creation toward its glorious climax. He is interiorly, personally involved in each and every moment of each and every creature, which move and live and grow in obedience to their Maker. The biblical picture more resembles the childishness of Chesterton’s “do it again” than Aristotle’s Really Very Serious Idea of Nature. The continuity of the world is not located in the world. What keeps the duck a duck does not belong to the duck. Duckiness persists because of God’s continuing work on and in every duck. The duck’s continuity is entirely the fruit of the faithfulness of the Creator.
The physics of Genesis comes to sophisticated expression in the work of Maximus Confessor. He applies the logic of incarnation to creation to formulate an account that does not rely on NeoPlatonic concepts of participation. There is an absolute distinction of nature between God and the creation. God does not modify Himself into new modes of His own nature, as in Plotinus or Proclus. He creates wholly new essences, rather than merely generating finite qualities. Yet, crucially, these created essences are not detached from the Creator, any more than the nature of the incarnate Son is distant from His humanity. Hypostasis grounds a union, even an identity, that is not natural identity.
Maximus explicates this using the concept of logoi, not understood as “divine ideas” but within the context of his Neo-Chalcedonian Christological convictions. Once again, there’s an infinite natural difference between the one eternal Logos and the many created logoi, yet the many logoi are the one Logos, one with Him without confusion. The One Logos is many logoi, not by a natural fusion but by a hypostatic identity. This differs from Plotinian participation because the Logos is not subordinate to a first principle and because the unfolding of the One Logos as many logoi doesn’t weaken the Logos’s identity with creatures. The identity of Logos and logoi is stronger for Maximus than for Plotinus, because the principle of creatures is not an attenuated mode of the one essence but the eternal Logos Himself dispersed as logoi. There is no leakage of divinity in the Son’s union with the world, whether in creation or incarnation. The whole Logos unites with created natures.[14] Because the Logos is One existing as the many, He binds the cosmos into a single universe; Word and world are one as the divine and human are one in Christ, by hypostatic identity. The logoi aren’t separated subsistences participating in ideas or forms, but “the personal Logos crafting all things within himself, within them.”[15] As Wood puts it, the “Logos becomes and is the ‘is’ of both uncreated and created natures.”[16] In Him all things cohere. He is the most intimate interior of all things. To use the language of Nicholas of Cusa, what exists folded in the inexhaustible Word, the Word that contains all words, the Name that includes all names, is explicated in creation and history.
This is why, Cusa says, the inner reality of things remain elusive. We construct categories and frameworks (form, matter, nature, four causes) to help us grasp reality, but they never capture everything or give us transparent access to reality in the raw, so to speak. They are conjectures, more or less useful heuristics that need to be supplemented by other heuristics and perspectives. The singularity as an object, its continuity through time, is an image of the divine unity, in which God contemplates His own perfect Triunity, othered in a plurality of created things. Everything is a “finite infinite,” providing a partial glimpse of the one infinite God. The only thing that is a creature’s own is its otherness from God and from everything else. Its positive reality – its unity, its qualities, its powers – are simply God’s intimate presence and activity within them. For Cusa, it is axiomatic: “Take away God from the creature and you are left with nothing.”[17]
Put all this in the more concrete terms of Genesis 1. God speaks His eternal Word as the sentence “Let there be light.” Light comes to be as a creature, which did not exist before the Creator uttered the sentence. But the interior essence of light, the reality that gives it its mysterious qualities and sustains light in existence, is the Word of the Father. There is no “nature” beneath appearances. There is the Word of the Father dispersed as logoi of creatures, and the animating Breath of that Word. God speaks plants by directing His commanding Word to the ground, and the ground obeys. Still today, God speaks His commanding Word to keep the ground fertile, to make seeds sprout and plants grow.
Genesis 1 elevates “creation” as a master metaphysical category, superior to being, nature, or ideas. Among other things, this resolves the impasses that Aristotle and Thomas fall into with regard to artifacts. Instead of an abyssal gap between natural reality and human creations, there is fundamental continuity, because creation and everything in it is the product of divine artifice. Thus, as Cusa says, “all human crafts are images, as it were, of the infinite and divine craft,” which serves as exemplar of all arts, “their beginning, middle, and end, their rule, measure, truth, and perfection.” For Cusa, “art” encompasses all human making, including humble craftsmanship. Human artifice is not “violence” to the natural qualities of a created thing, but instead “perfects natural shapes.” The mental image of a spoon shines “in the shaped proportions of this wood as in its image.”[18]
IV. Conclusion.
Genesis 1 leaves physis, natura, nature with very little to do. We may employ the concept if we like, but only under the Cusan proviso that it is one conjecture among many others, not the single, unsurpassable key to creation. What we must employ, if we are going to construct a Christian metaphysics, is the metaphysical apparatus of Genesis 1: creation, the speaking God, His Word, and His Spirit.
Such a metaphysic leaves natural law with very little to do. The internal Word drives man toward his telos. The breath of Yahweh makes man a living soul, and directs every action of every man. Impelled by this interior Word, man seeks his fulfillment as the particular individual human being he is. That fulfillment depends on other humans, and non-human creatures, all orchestrated by the same Word and Spirit. But from the beginning, the interior Word is accompanied by an external word, equally necessary if man is to fulfill his eschatological destiny. The physical capacities, forms, and powers that enable man to take dominion over the creation are the capacities, form, and powers of the Word and Spirit, and this internal inclination is accompanied by the external command, coming from the very same Word: “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth.” At times, of course, the command is negative, stating a limit on his powers and inclinations: “Of the tree at the center of the garden, thou shalt not eat.” Man cannot reach his eschatological destiny relying only on obedience to the interior Word that is his essence. He must also hear, trust, and obey the vocalized Word of God, the Word communicate in human sounds, words, and sentences. Man cannot be man, nor human politics human politics, if he is a mere man of the plain dwelling in a city of the plain. He must ascend the mountain with ears and eyes open to what the Creator will show and speak.
[1]Murray, We Hold These Truths (London: Sheed & Ward, 2005).
[2]ST I-II, 93, 1.
[3]ST I-II, 94, 6.
[4] Oeuvres complètes de Malebranche (André Robinet, ed.; Paris: Vrin), 2.312, cited in “Occasionalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/occasionalism/.
[5] GER Lloyd, “The Invention of Nature,” in Lloyd, Methods and Problems in Greek Science: Selected Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
[6]Sedley, “Teleology,” Aristotelian and Platonic,” in James G. Lennox and Robert Bolton, eds., Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 5-29.
[7]Sedley, “Teleology.”
[8]George D. Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). Natura’s function in medieval thought is not unlike that of Sophia in Bulgakovian Russian Orthodoxy.
[9]Robert Spaemann, “Nature,” in A Robert Spaemann Reader: Philosophical Essays on Nature, God, and the Human Person (D.C. Schindler and Jeanne Heffernan Schindler, eds.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 22-36.
[10]De Potentia 3.7, quoted in Jan Aertsen, Nature and Creation: Thomas Aquinas’s Way of Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1988) 289-90.
[11]For different answers to these questions, see Richard Kraut, “Nature in Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics,” Social Philosophy and Policy 24.2 (2007) 199-219; Julia K. Ward, “Aristotle on Physis: Human Nature in the Ethics and the Politics,” Polis 22.2 (2005) 287-308.
[12]Leithart, Revelation 1-11 (London: T&T Clark, 2018) 210.
[13]Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, I: The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 7: “God commands the world to be, this command is obeyed, and the event of obedience is the existence of the world.”
[14]To my mind, this Christo-logic is superior to the Sophianic speculations of Bulgakov and his followers. For a critique of Bulgakov, see my Creator: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1 (Downers Grove, IL: IVP., 2023) 133-48.
[15]Quoted in Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus the Confessor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022) 71.
[16]Quoted in Wood, Whole Mystery, 72.
[17]This entire paragraph is dependent on Clyde Lee Miller, “Aristotelian Natura and Nicholas of Cusa,” 96 Downside Review (1978) 13-20.
[18]Cusa, Idiota de Mente; The Layman, About Mind (Clyde Lee Miller, trans. and ed.; Abaris Books, 1979).
