Перевод Творец и Сотворение. Creator and Creation

Перевод Творец и Сотворение

Creator and Creation

Elizabeth Theokritoff

According to the Christian understanding, the universe is God’s creation. God does not simply give form to pre-existent matter, like Plato’s demiurge; he invents the material world, bringing it into being out of nothing. This doctrine speaks of both the fragility of creation, in that it has no necessary existence, and its firm foundation in that it exists by God’s choice. It is less a theory of origins than a doctrine of relationship between the universe and God. In the striking image attributed to Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow in the nineteenth century, ‘All things are balanced upon the creative word of God as on an adamantine bridge: above them is the abyss of the divine infinitude, below them the abyss of their own nothingness.’

This doctrine of creation ex nihilo leaves many questions to be explored. How does God exercise his will in creating and sustaining the world? What is the ‘point of contact’ between the uncreated and his creation? How can God be present in a universe that is by definition other than himself? What is God’s intention for his handiwork, and what role does the human being play in his purposes? We will look first at some patristic approaches to these questions, and then at ways in which patristic insights are developed in modern Orthodox thought.

In the second century, the Church was challenged by the dualist cosmology of Gnostic sects who held that Christ and his Father were not responsible for the created world, and that salvation consisted in transcending material creation. It is in response to this teaching that Irenaeus sets out the basis for Christian cosmology.

Irenaeus rejects outright the Gnostics’ shadowy world of semi-created intermediaries. God himself is the maker of all things by his Word and Wisdom (Irenaeus identifies divine ‘Wisdom’ with the Holy Spirit); and God’s will is the substance of all that exists. He drives this point home by emphasising the continuity between the work of the Word in creation and in his incarnate life: Christ ‘came unto his own’ (Jn 1:11) in that he is truly the Creator of the world, invisibly containing all creation and inherent in all creation.

The affirmation that the Creator is also the Saviour has clear eschatological implications. As later Fathers will repeatedly affirm, it is the fashion of this world that will pass away (1 Cor 7:31); its substance and essence will not be annihilated but renewed, because God is faithful.

No less seminal is Irenaeus’s appeal to the Eucharist as the paradigm for God at work in creation from beginning to end. How, he expostulates, can the Gnostics believe that the Lord gives us his Body and Blood through ‘eucharisted’ bread and wine, if they do not accept that the very growth of corn and grapes is equally his handiwork? And looking forward, we can be confident that our bodies will rise from the dead, precisely because the grain of wheat itself has fallen to earth and died, and been raised and received the life-giving Word of God. Irenaeus lays the firm foundation for the sacramental cosmology still characteristic of Orthodox Christianity – a vision of a world created at God’s hand for incorruption and union with him.

Athanasius inherits Irenaeus’s vision of the Word of God at work in the universe; but much of his energy was spent on dealing with problems left by Origen. Origen’s failure to distinguish clearly between generation from God the Father and creation by him allowed the Arians to claim that the Son was some sort of superior creature: was not the Father the origin of both? Athanasius responded by making a clear distinction between the essence of God and his will. The generation of the Son belongs to the divine essence. Creation, on the other hand, is the product of God’s will, his freedom, a truly new reality which has no essential affinity with God.

Athanasius’s sharp distinction between Creator and creation might seem to create a problem. If the world has no essential affinity with God, and if the Creator Word is not God’s instrument but the uncreated God himself, where then is the point of contact between God and the world? How can we affirm that he is present in it? Athanasius gives a very clear answer, but one that requires the acceptance of a paradox. God in his essence has no affinity with the world, but by his powers the Word pervades the whole universe. Without this distinction, which we see refined over the next millennium in the Eastern Church, cosmology risks oscillating between pantheism and some sort of deism.

If the ‘powers’ of God pervade creation, then we would expect the created world itself to be constantly making him manifest and drawing us to him; and this is a recurrent theme in the Cappadocian Fathers. A sustained example is Basil’s Hexaemeron, a set of sermons on the six days of creation celebrating the variety and dynamism of a world where the Creator has ‘left everywhere visible memorials of His wonders’. The Cappadocians use the Platonist language of their day; and the modern reader, to whom this language is alien, can easily mistake their Platonic starting point for their conclusion. They do speak in terms of a divide between the intelligible and the sensible, and even of an ‘affinity’ between intelligible creatures and the Godhead. But the main thrust of their thinking is the way these inequalities are evened out in the Christian doctrine of creation. After creating the intelligible world, says Gregory the Theologian, God creates the material world – to show that he can just as easily bring into existence a nature utterly alien to himself. The tangible no less than the intelligible manifests the grandeur of the creator Word and proclaims his mighty works. So we are left wondering whether the ‘affinity’ really counts for much. Gregory of Nyssa draws the logical conclusion as to the truly fundamental division: in comparison with the exalted nature of God, all created things are inferior to the same degree. The ‘unity in universal sympathy’ which Basil perceives in the world is more clearly defined as unity in createdness. It is for the sake of the whole creation that man the microcosm receives the divine inbreathing, so that nothing in creation should be deprived of a share in communion with God. This sense of solidarity in createdness has remained a leitmotif of Eastern Christian theology.

Up to this point, the sources of Christian cosmological doctrine are essentially the same for East and West. Thereafter, however, Western cosmology is dominated up to modern times by Augustine and his spiritual heirs; many contemporary writers would see in this legacy a narrowing of the early Church’s cosmic vision. In the East, by contrast, the development of that cosmic vision is only beginning at the turn of the fifth century.

The enigmatic figure of (Ps-)Dionysius the Areopagite influenced both East and West, but in rather different ways. Vladimir Lossky maintains that in the East, the tradition of (Ps-)Dionysius marks a triumph over Platonic hellenism; whereas in the West, (Ps-)Dionysius’s work became a vehicle for Neoplatonic influences. (Ps-)Dionysius takes up the Neoplatonist idea of the scale of being; but he turns it into a structure of theophany, revelation of God. Its purpose is to allow each creature to reflect the divine glory in its own unique way, according to its analogy

with its Creator. (Ps-)Dionysius’s cosmic vision may be too spiritualized for modern tastes; but he does envisage a structure in which vastly incommensurate elements – angelic, human, animate and inanimate – are all held together and function as a coherent whole, focused on their Creator.

And it is a cosmos shot through with the radiance of divinity. God is at once totally other, totally beyond everything that is, and ‘in everything by the ecstatic power inseparable from himself’. This is the vision that will be developed in the supreme cosmological synthesis of St Maximus the Confessor. Maximus the Confessor remains to this day the single most important figure in Orthodox cosmological thought. Using the traditional ideas of divine ‘conceptions’ or ‘predeterminations’ and of logos in creation, he explores in unprecedented depth and detail the meaning of creation in, through and for the Word (Logos) of the Father. Maximus’s doctrine of the logoi of things (their ‘words’, rationales, intelligible principles) can in no way be reduced to a static world of Platonic forms.

The logoi of things express the creative will of God, according to which each thing comes into being at the appropriate time; but they equally express God’s presence within each entity, his providence for it and its ultimate goal. The logoi of all things are united in the Logos, and through them the one Logos is wholly present in the infinite variety of creatures. Maximus breaks definitively with Origen in giving full value to both the multiplicity of things and their dynamism: movement, change and becoming are not the result of a fall but part of God’s intention. Stability and rest in God is the goal of all things, not their beginning.

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