Mystical Metaphysical Anthropology

That's the title of the last section of this chapter, and it sounds right up our alley, going to "the meaning of the human being as a dynamic analogy between the image and the likeness of God in Christ." 

Which implies that we are not a static analogy, rather, always moving up -- or down -- the cosmic telovator, which is to say, toward or away from our archetypal end.

Again, analogy is not sameness, rather, similarity-in-difference and difference-in-similarity. 

In this case the difference with the Creator is that he IS, full stop: his essence is to exist -- as in I AM WHO I AM -- whereas creatures "exist in a state of potential with regard to who they are, in short, between Being and becoming."

Nevertheless, I suspect that the principle of our own becoming must be gorounded in the Principle of the Father's "becoming," so to speak, in the Son -- which is like an orthoparadoxical "eternal becoming." 

When you think about it, any sort of "-ing" applied to God implies some kind of eternal movement, e.g., "engendering," "proceeding," "giving," "receiving," "creating." 

In any event, "to be a creature is precisely to be a nonidentity of essence and existence." Our essence "is given as a potentiality that is to be realized in time," and here we are, with an essence that is simultaneously "in" and "beyond" us. 

Sounds mysterious, but this is how any teleology operates, for example, the oak tree that is somehow "in" and "beyond" the acorn:

what does "essence 'in' existence" mean but that the likeness is somehow hidden away "in" the image, waiting to be "born again" in the Logos..., into the "likeness" of the Logos that it was always intended to be.

This movement forms "the metaphysical basis for the journey of time," or of finding "ourselves in finding God," the one entailing the other. 

And here again I can't help thinking that this is an analogy of how the Father "finds himself" -- in a manner of speaking and with all due dissimilarity -- in the Son, and vice versa. 

At any rate, Christ "restores the broken relationship between us and God, and so between our own existence and essence," such that "a new life has been given to us like a seed to be elaborated over time," the question being "whether the little seed will grow into its full stature."  

To bring Voegelin into the discussion, we are always situated between immanence and transcendence, and don't default to one side or the other: don't immanentize the eschaton, but don't eschaton-ize the immanent either, if you catch my drift: respect the tension! 

For there are two ways of showing one's disrespect, usurping God or rejecting him altogether. 

Secular humanism, for example, is the "essentially unconverted image living by itself in its own light" -- a purloined light for which it can never account. 

At one end there is an illicit or Promethean "grasping at the divine essence" (a la Hegel), or, at the other, an "essentializing of existence" (a la Nietzsche). Which is to say rationalism or existentialism.

Neither of these alternatives respects the Tension, which requires 

the "patience" of standing within the genuinely creaturely interval between creaturely essence and creaturely existence.

Or in other words, "within the potency of the creature to the Logos," i.e., "in the midst of becoming who we are."

That's about the size of it. The rest of the book is a little inside baseballish for me, dealing with various disputed theological questions and showing how the analogy of being might resolve them -- for example, "the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom," both of which must be respected and harmonized and not collapsed or separated. 

Let's just summarize some conclusions, for example, vis-a-vis the circular -- or in-spiraling -- movement  between creature and Creator: "as the circle is drawn upward, at its top it begins to turn downward": 

For we ourselves ascend with Christ to the extent that we descend with him.... 

"[I]f Christ is essentially the descending God" and if the ascent of our "participation in God" occurs solely through participation in God's descent, then "logically, the practical Christian life is is the living out of this descent"... 

Therefore, "to be human" is "to be an analogy of the self-emptying Logos." 

This was an abbreviated post, but we'll tie the cosmic room together in the next installment.