To say Relative is of course to say Absolute, and vice versa — and it is the second proposition that traditionalists reject: that to say absolute Creator necessarily implies a relative creation. But there it is and here we are, and you can’t argue with the facts. So let’s start with the way things concretely are rather than an abstract idea of how they ought to be.
In Book I we already described how the doctrine of creation does not so much imply an efficient cause in the past; rather, it implies an ongoing vertical dependence of the Cosmos on the Theos, even if the former were eternal (which of course it is not).
Which naturally leads to the question of how it would be metaphysically possible for an absolutely immutable and self-enclosed God to create at all? For no amount of nouns adds up to a verb. Even the creation of time would take time, albeit of a different nature: supra-temporal as opposed to atemporal. Moreover, supposing the creation of time, then the Creator has really stepped in it. You can’t just run away from your progeny like some deadbeat deity.
Besides, there is no reason to slander time, as if it is too déclassé for the likes of an aloof and aristocratic God who is above such vulgarities, or as if time is somehow not kosher. To the contrary, in inventing the Sabbath, for example, God sanctifies time for the purposes of reluxation and rejewvenation, giving it his eternal seal of approval.
Balthasar speaks of a “transformed temporality” which “is intrinsic to eternity itself” (O’Hanlon). Instead of having mere horizontal extension, as does our time, it is more as if it has vertical intension (or intensity), which we have reasons to believe is why we experience the same thing in this world. For have you never had an intense time? Of course you have. Now just imagine it could always be that intense.
That would be exhausting.
Not necessarily, because the relaxation — or Celestial Slack — would be equally intense — like removing your boots after a long day of skiing.
That’s the only reason why I ski. The rest is a bit repetitive.
In Balthasar’s view, eternity would not be the absence of time; rather, a mysterious “supra-time” which is quite different from the nunc stans of antiquity, in which nothing happens in eternity because there is no time for it to happen. Supra-time would have all the benefits of temporality without any of the privations or nuisances, like death and taxes.
For Leithart, the timeless and abstract Absolute “is no more than a conventional placeholder,” much like our symbol O. But the absolutely relative God is the only God who could be, and certainly the only one we know about or could know about.
For Leithart, our knowledge of the nature of God “inevitably follows from the fact that he created.” And the very first sentence of the Bible tells us that this is precisely what the Creator did do. Now, did he only become the Creator when he created this world? No — any more than there was a time when he wasn’t Father. Rather, just as Father and Son define one another, so too do Creator and creation.
For cosmotheandrism this another eternal and primordial complementarity, for — at least in the Judeo-Christian stream — we find “nothing at all about a God who might-or-might-not create.” Rather, we know only of a Creator “who has in fact created.” Therefore, “A non-Creator is, in the strictest possible sense, a nonentity. God-without creation is an idol. No such God exists, because the only God who is is the God who created…”
Note that it is the same with regard to Taoism or Vedanta: in the former, the Tao is inexhaustible and “gives birth to infinite worlds,” while in the latter “The whole universe came forth from Brahman” — although it should be pointed out that in Christianity the motivations for the creation are different. But that’s — that’s just nitpicking, isn’t it, the point here being that Creators gonna create.
Genesis begins with God creating a Cosmos and thereby establishing a relationship to something other than himself, but there is already something other than God in God, because the second Person isn’t the First.
Thus, for Christianity, “‘Creator’ is an inherently relative term. If ‘Creator’ is the first name of God, then our theology must be, from top to bottom, a theology of the related God” (ibid.). Jews, of course frown on the Trinity, equating it to polytheism, but there are nevertheless some kind of relational goings-on going on up there. For example, when God says Let there be light, to whom is he speaking?
Nobody. Just thinking out loud.
Okay, but to whom is he referring when he says Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, hmm?
The royal we?
Can’t be. The Jews didn’t yet have royalty, let alone the majestic plural. Kings Saul, David, and Solomon come later, but even they refer to themselves in the first person.
And of course, as we have seen, the book of Proverbs provides abundant witness to an eternal Withness, with Wisdom herself saying such things as “I [note the personal pronoun] have been established from everlasting” and “from the beginning.” Even when God was otherwise preoccupied drawing a circle on the face of the deep and marking out the blueprints of the world, I was there getting coffee and sharpening His pencil.
Perhaps this would be a good place to remind the reader that we are not proposing cosmotheandrism because of the Christian revelation of a triune Godhead, rather, that this revelation makes total sense in a cosmotheandric framework. In other words, it fits the requirements of all our Axioms, in this case substance-in-relation, for the Creator himself “is internally related,” and “This internal relationality is the condition of the possibility for creation.... this God is always already related to what is other than himself” (ibid.).
Perhaps it is enough for Christians to believe that God has revealed his triune nature, but for us the deeper point is that this just so happens to be in perfect accord with cosmotheandrism.
∞
Henri Le Saux was a French Catholic monk who was fascinated by Vedanta, for which reason he spent his life as a renunciate in a Hindu ashram. He never renounced his Christianity, rather, endeavored to harmonize it with the experiences and insights he gained from Vedanta. Here is his attempt to square Christian trinitarian thought with his own experience of ultimate reality — Satchitānanda — in Vedanta: “Now that the Christian jñāni has penetrated to the heart of Satchitānanda and experiences his ‘connaturality’ with God, the Spirit of Wisdom makes known to him his last secrets,” among which are “that Being, sat, opens itself at its very source to give birth eternally to the Son”; that “being is essentially being-with, communion, koinonia, the free gift of self”; and “that self-awareness, cit, only comes to be when there is mutual giving and receiving, for the I only awakes to itself in a Thou.”
As for the third term, ānanda, “There cannot be a solitary bliss, any more than there can be solitary being or solitary self-awareness. There is no joy, as there is no being, except in communication, in giving and receiving.”
No doubt both Christians and Hindus will have their objections, but not the cosmotheandriac. Rather, we call that a metaphysical bingo:
In the depth of this total void, of which only Being and nothingness are capable, and indeed only in the “silence” of being, there can be heard the Thou which eternally calls the Son into being. In the utterance of that Word which fills eternity, Being awakes to itself in its own Source, which is the Father.
The concept of revelation does not exclude the previous existence of notions similar or identical to the notions revealed. The revelation does not consist so much in teaching a new idea as in authenticating an existing one.
In Hinduism the “word that fills eternity” is OM. Is it absolutely identical to the Christian Logos? No, but it does a lot of the same work. For Abhishiktananda it is the primal sound that emerges from “that silence from which all words have come,” so let’s not quibble, for it is the Word that is spoken from the wordless ground, and that’s good enough for me.
In the spirit of superficial religious syncretism, now do Taoism.
There are not as many serious books on the intersection of Christianity and Taoism as there are Vedanta, one of which being Christ the Eternal Tao by Hieromonk Damascene. In it he reworks the Tao Te Ching to produce a “Gospel according to Lao Tzu,” noting first of all “that the ancient Chinese placed great significance on the number Three, seeing in it the first principle of order,” thus foreshadowing its later articulation in Christianity. For example
The triangle is the first full form,
The Three is the Principle of Order.
The Order that must exist before the multiplicity of things.
Therefore the Ancient Sage said:
“The Three produces all things.”
The Three acting as One,
One not acting without the Others.
This primordial Triad “is beyond the distinction of the one and the many,” for “Two is the power that separates” while “Three is the number that transcends all separation,” so “the Triad, being many, is also a Unity.” Three surpasses two, because “exclusive love between two persons, like self-love can be self-absorbed,” whereas “Perfect Love must pass on to a Third, whose existence represents the transcendence of self-absorbed duality.” This is identical to how Gregory Nazianzen characterized it: “The Triad contains itself a perfection, for it is the first which surpasses the composition of the dyad.”
Damascene reproduces an ancient Chinese seal that prefigures this “Triadic mystery” in depicting three terms: “Shang Ti corresponds to the Father/Mind (the Originating Principle of the Godhead); Tao corresponds to the Son/Word (the Operating Cause of the creation); and Ling corresponds to the Spirit/Breath (the Perfecting Cause).”
Another book, The Tao of Christ, by Marshall Davis, says that “When I came to know Christ, I recognized Him as the One celebrated in the Tao Te Ching,” and why not? For “God has revealed his divine nature to all peoples at all times and places. Therefore it is not strange to find evidence of God’s general revelation in the spiritual literature of the world’s peoples.”
“Tao,” of course, means “way,” the question being whether this is in any way analogous to Jesus’ self-identification as “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Interestingly, the earliest Chinese translation of the Gospel of John reads “In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God.” If Socrates and Plato, in the words of Justin Martyr, could be “Christians before Christ,” why not Lao Tse? St. Augustine famously said that “The very thing which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients also,” so “the true religion, which already existed” only later “began to be called Christian.”
Marshall proceeds to translate the entire Tao Te Ching in Christian terms. We could cite numerous passages from the text, but for the purposes of cosmotheandrism it is enough to know that it can be easily done without distorting either Christianity or Taoism. Whether one calls this creative principle Logos, Tao, Wisdom, or Shabda Brahman, one would have to be rather uptight and even un-Dude to not appreciate the parallels.
Judaism represents a special case, being rigorously monotheistic. However, as Chesterton suggested, it was vital for human beings to first discover monotheism, otherwise the idea of the Trinity would have been interpreted as polytheism. Nevertheless, there are hints, for example, that time in the Bible (Genesis 18) when the Lord appears to Abraham in the form of three men to whom he bows and addresses as one. In Jewish thought, of course, God does not take human form, so the three might be seen as angelic messengers.
Nevertheless, Judaism is fully compatible with cosmotheandrism and vice versa. For example, rabbi Adin Steinsaltz describes the Theos-Anthropos relation as follows: “In its profoundest being, the soul of man is a part of the Divine and, in this respect, is a manifestation of God in the world.”
Moreover, Judaism has its own way of talking about the Logos, for example, that the essence of Torah “is the manifestation of the divine wisdom.” Steinsaltz suggests that before creation, even God himself consulted the Torah, “By which it is implied that the Torah is the original pattern, or inner plan, of the world: Torah and world are, inseparably, a pair.” Of course, this may be just “in as manner of speaking,” but nevertheless it is speaking of a relationship between God and his Wisdom. And theomorphic man is already a kind of revelation (Axiom 7), in the sense that he is “a symbol or model of the divine essence” who “manifests different aspects existing in that supreme essence.”
There is another implicit cosmotheandric principle in Judaism whereby “One who is immersed in Torah becomes a partner of God,” such that both parties participate in “the common dream of the existence of the world.”
Full or junior?
The latter no doubt, but when a fellow “broods over himself so too does God yearn for him and look for him,” so it is a cosmotheandric case “of man seeking himself and of God seeking man. Together they can approach a solution of the problem of man’s existence.” Moreover, the practice of tikkun olam, so central to Judaism, involves assisting God in the reparation of a broken world. Here God waits upon the choices of the Anthropos, so he obviously has a lot of patience for our habitual failure to achieve.
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