The Givenness of Things

METAPHYSICS

The debate between science and religion has been fundamentally misdirected. Physics has shown us a volatile, intricate, elusive substratum of reality that makes the great usefulness of the old nuts-and-bolts physics seem uncanny rather than obvious and inevitable. This new view of the cosmos does not supply or support a new Christian metaphysics, but it entirely discredits the antimetaphysics that has prevailed in Christian thought for some time, the huge and damaging concessions made to a crudely restricted notion of the possible. The basis for a new metaphysics is ready to hand in biblical and traditional theology. The terms that will make it Christian are established in passages like Colossians 1:15–20, notable for the collapsing of time and locus, which modern physics permits or requires us to respect as an ontological fact to be reckoned with.

My Christology is high, in that I take Christ to be with God, and to be God. And I take it to be true that without him nothing was made that was made. This opens on all being of every kind, including everything unknown to us still, and everything never to be known to us, for which our words and concepts may well be wholly inadequate. So, necessarily, I view cogency with considerable distrust. Pretty as it is in ordinary use, it breaks down at larger scales, and at smaller ones. And Christ as I understand him contains both of these absolutely. My favorite theologian at the moment is an Englishman named John Locke. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding he notes “what a darkness we are involved in, how little it is of Being, and the things that are, that we are capable to know.” He says that we must “sometime be content to be very ignorant.” Amen and amen. I would add only that Locke evokes an extraordinarily beautiful, tantalizing darkness, full of fragments of experience that become luminous and singular, with something of the character of the astonishing that is in fact appropriate to them. Any faith I have I understand to be another given — William James would say another gift — of my experience.

From this perspective my faith does not differ qualitatively from anything else I know. I take the exalted view of experience. I believe that we do indeed inhabit the theater of God’s glory. So I by no means intend to deprecate faith when I say that it is of a kind with our knowing of things in general. It raises profound questions, of course, as does everything else. I understand that this faith necessarily exceeds any account I can make of it, thank God, and will withstand every error I make in attempting to limn it out.

I am speaking here of Christ the Creator, the I AM Who exists, in the present tense, before Abraham. I am speaking of the Christ Who, in Paul’s words, “is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible … He is before all things, and in him all things hold together … For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things.” Good John Calvin was accused of unitarianism because often, in important contexts, he makes no distinction between Jesus Christ and God the Father. Like the New Testament writers, he uses the word “Lord” where either of them is intended, or, in effect, where both of them are. This is no doubt an inevitable consequence of his very high Christology. It acknowledges the Trinity as a mystery of the profoundest kind, one that eludes conceptualization. To me this seems entirely appropriate. And I am no more a unitarian than Calvin was.

Let us say that faith is given by God, and that it retains its character as given, as gift, despite the often bizarre and perverse transmutations it undergoes in the theater of human consciousness. On one hand this is to say that religion should always be subject to criticism, and that its accretions and distortions should be corrected against, granting the importance of acknowledging an equal human fallibility in the project of reform. It is to say also that such criticism can never finally be dismissive, because religion is always the encounter of a unique soul with a forgiving God. In any instance it is divine grace that is salient, first and last, and grace is the great variable that puts any reckoning of fault or merit very far beyond human competence. Ultimately a compassionate Lord must find our errors and insights to be of extremely limited interest in themselves, infinitesimally interesting at most, however fascinated we may be by the project of attempting to distinguish one from another, one mode of belief from another.

So it is with all respect for theologians and scholars of the modern period, my brothers and sisters in Christ, that I say the vision of Christ, of Jesus of Nazareth, they have retrieved out of the tempests and the droughts of their period is gravely impoverished. Metaphysics has been abandoned as if it were a mistake sophisticated people could no longer make, an indulgence an illusionless world would no longer entertain. I have seen this dire change laid to the influence of the Enlightenment, but I think this very common view of the matter is based on a misreading of basic Enlightenment texts. I have mentioned Locke’s Essay, which is most certainly a Christian metaphysics. The Enlightenment’s many critics have established a character for it, the lens through which it seems generally to be seen, offering nostalgia as an antidote for its supposed desolating effects on Western consciousness. These critics have themselves dismissed metaphysics by insisting that the Enlightenment with its barren rationalism has made metaphysics impossible. Once our eyes were opened there was no unbiting the apple, no way to reattach it to the bough.

In other words, the Enlightenment of the anti-Enlightenment imagination was right about everything factual, incisive in its methods, but wrong in thinking beyond certain conventions and boundaries within which a higher and precious but oddly fragile Truth once abided. This really is an updated version of the myth of the Fall, with the difference that it is, in this telling, we who banished God, reason and science being the flaming sword that makes the expulsion final. I know of no other way to construe this modern fable than as meaning that God is a human social construct whose existence, not to mention his power, is substantially dependent on what people think, and, crucially, dependent as well on authority and circumstance to preclude other kinds of thinking. This notion bears much less resemblance to piety than it does to anthropology of the type that claims to expound the primitive mind. Certainly it flies in the face of everything the Bible tells us about the nature of God.

Be that as it may. The modern predicament is apparently our fate, even though the assumptions it rests upon make no particular sense. They make no sense at all theologically or metaphysically. Of course their not answering to these standards cannot be understood as a fault in a worldview that disallows, however tearfully, both metaphysics and serious theology. Certainly, because they are metaphysical, therefore supposedly dispelled, the statements about absolute reality of the kind that are made by St. John and by St. Paul are not more possible for those who reject the Enlightenment on religious grounds than they would be in the terms of the crudest rationalism and scientism. That reality is sacred, and, as expressed in the being of Christ, is also profoundly human-centered, are statements that cannot be made if it has first been granted that it is possible for us to diminish God and diminish ourselves by thinking, and, within the limits of our capacities, by knowing, about this world. Paul speaks of “the knowledge of God’s mystery, of Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” This is a vision of the great Christ. There is a residual dualism in historic Christianity that has inclined many interpreters to take passages like this to have reference to a mystery more sacred than this shining Creation, a knowledge that looks past this world, that rejects it. Marcionism has never truly been overcome.

It ought to be. It blinds us. While, glorious as they are, the wonders we are shown as mortals will no doubt open on far greater glories, there are no grounds for supposing that they will differ altogether from those that dazzle us and move us in this life. We are told, after all, that God is love, and, based on what we have felt and yearned to feel, most of us have some sense of what this might mean.

When Locke dismisses the tendency to “let loose our thoughts into the vast ocean of Being; as if all that boundless extent were the natural and undoubted possession of our understandings, wherein there was nothing exempt from its decisions, or that escaped its comprehension,” his purpose is to disencumber us of the false conclusions that have been reached through the application of inadequate resources to very great questions. Assumptions and certitudes imposed on matters that should in fact be conceded to ignorance warp and obstruct legitimate thought. Locke would free thinking of artificial constraints by acknowledging real and insuperable limits to the kinds of things we can think about fruitfully. I nominate the venerable doctrine of predestination as a classic instance of an inquiry beyond human capacity, which has multiplied disputes and confirmed skepticism, and has distorted Christianity as often as the doctrine is embraced or evaded. The difficulty of the issues it raises regarding justice and free will are intractable. The problem must be considered in light of the freestanding fact that we, I should say contemporary physicists, have no account to make of either time or causality. Nor has anyone in all the centuries that the problem has been pondered and disputed. In the absence of some comprehension of them we have nothing useful to say about how, cosmically speaking, events exist in time or in causal relation. In principle, this might change, sometime, in some degree. In fact, the extent of our ignorance is so vast and so germane to this question that it must figure decisively in our response to it. Therefore the only appropriate response is to put the question aside.

And I can propose no solution, however tentative, to the problem of evil. Attempts to exculpate God by putting evil beyond his control come at the very high cost of diminishing the power of God, and returning, again, to a version of Marcionism, since what we call evil is an important energy in the world, and to put it beyond God’s power is to return to an implicit dualism. On the other hand, to attempt to assimilate evil to the nature of God leads to a temporizing with the great fact of human loss and suffering that does no credit to the divine nature or to the theological enterprise. Where there is no way to understand without compromising the nature of what is to be understood, I heed Locke’s advice. I am content to “sit down in a quiet ignorance” of those things I take to be beyond the reach of my capacities.

* * *

Christ is a response to certain of these questions — a response, not an answer. To the fact of human suffering he says, “I was hungry and you fed me.” There is gross and violent injustice, and he “took the form of a slave, and was obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” I know the Bible interprets his passion as expiatory, the world’s suffering as the consequence of sin, for which Christ is a guilt offering. I note as well that when God speaks through the prophets about sacrifice he treats it as the expression of a human need he tolerates rather than as anything he desires. It is remarkable how ferociously the prohibition against sacrificing one’s child must be made and insisted upon by Moses and the prophets, and still there is the suggestion that such sacrifices have occurred even among Israelites. Certainly the death of Christ has been understood as expiation for human sin through the whole length of church history, and I defer with all possible sincerity to the central tenets of Christian tradition, but as for myself, I confess that I struggle to understand the phenomenon of ritual sacrifice, and the Crucifixion when explicated in its terms. The concept is so central to the tradition that I have no desire to take issue with it, and so difficult for me that I leave it for others to interpret. If it answered to a deep human need at other times, and if it answers now to other spirits than mine, then it is a great kindness of God toward them, and a great proof of God’s attentive grace toward his creatures.

I do not by any means doubt the gravity of human sin or question our radical indebtedness to God. I suppose it is my high Christology, my Trinitarianism, that makes me falter at the idea that God could be in any sense repaid or satisfied by the death of his incarnate self. The tendency of some theologies to emphasize the attribution of sonship to Christ, and of others to see Jesus as a holy man but no more than a man, creates other problems around the concept of sacrifice or martyrdom — Christ as, in the ancient or the modern sense, the victim in an act that seems to epitomize the sinfulness of the world and nevertheless to be what God requires. Or else to be the exemplary death that has given Jesus of Nazareth an extraordinary place in history. Again, I defer to those who find these understandings right and moving. There is a richness of meaning overflowing from the text and the tradition and from experience itself, a glorious plenitude, that to my mind bears the mark of divine origins far more unmistakably than any scrupulously self-consistent teaching can do — with all respect to the gravity of attention that such teaching brings to bear on luminous particulars other doctrines minimize or overlook.

My Christology has awe as its first principle. It is a very generalized awe, since Creation is full of the glory of God. But it takes its essential quality from the belief that Christ was in the beginning with God, and without him nothing was made that was made. I take Christ in his eternal essence to have in some sense the character of humanity, since we are never encouraged to imagine him without this character. He is a beloved Son. The word “Christ” places him in the history of Israel, as the king or in any case the one to be anointed by God, anointed to be an actor in history, a Redeemer in the manner of the God who redeemed Israel from captivity in Egypt. Calvin integrates the testaments by seeing Christ in appearances of God in human form, in the visitors who come to Abraham, for example. To me this seems reasonable. Christians struggle to articulate a proper relationship with the Old Testament, but in their care to avoid supersession they alienate it inappropriately, refusing it continuity with the ingratiating, therefore “Christian,” elements in the New Testament. This makes no sense theologically, putting to one side the implicit disparagement of the Hebrew Bible and Judaism that it entails.

In light of the unvarying solicitude of the Old Testament toward the poor, it might be metaphysically respectable to infer that Christ was in some sense present even in the least of them from the primordial moment when human circumstance began to call for justice and generosity. Nothing in the text forbids the idea. Tradition seems to have wrenched the Testaments apart, to have reserved compassion of this kind for the Christian era. But if the divine for our purposes is to be understood as a Trinity, this cleavage leaves the being of Christ unexpressed from the beginning until the Incarnation. This sounds like Marcionism. The obvious solution to the problem is to make Jesus of Nazareth simply a man who appears at a particular historical moment as the rest of us do. But this is not interesting. Metaphysics collapses around it. And it abandons that widow who must not be deprived of her garment, the laborer whose heart is set on his pay, all those wandering orphans and strangers, all those pagans who do not know their right hand from their left — to Sheol, I suppose, or its conceptual equivalent.

On the other hand, in them we can see an unacknowledged Christ-presence who has no form or majesty that we should look at him, a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity. Anyone who reads the prophets or the newspapers knows who is wounded for the transgressions of their leaders, their notional betters, who bears chastisements in the place of the guilty. To my mind, the presence of Christ in nameless humanity, in all those images of God, Israelite or Scythian, would be a response to the problem of evil equal to the scale and gravity of the problem — not a solution, but a response. Jesus was not speaking to Christians or to the early church when he said “Blessed are you poor,” or “Blessed are you who weep and mourn,” since neither Christianity nor the church yet existed. He was simply speaking to a crowd whose attention he happened to have attracted. He is not teaching an ethic. He is giving assurance to those whose lives Moses and the prophets had seen as the objects of God’s solicitude.

We learn John 3:16 as children — God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. This is that same Gospel whose Prologue I have alluded to, and which has nerved me to embrace the thought that the presence of Christ in the moment of Creation would have meant that the nature of Christ is intrinsic to Creation, and an aspect of the relation of God to the world from the very outset. The Trinity would seem conceptually unsustainable if this were not true. John’s Gospel makes clear that, as surely as Christ’s death was a redemption, his life was a theophany. John emphasizes the godlike character of Jesus’ presence, and the other Gospel writers emphasize its human character, each of its aspects equally striking because the other is granted. If John’s vision of the life is interpreted as showing the influence of Gnosticism, as merely the literary manner of a school of thought important at the time, then the statement implicit in it, that the word became flesh and dwelt among us, that the presence of the mortal man Jesus of Nazareth must be understood as theophany, is lost, though in light of his Prologue, and of Trinitarian belief, this can only be true.

So the question — if God loved the world so passionately, would this gift of his Son, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” change the status only of those who lived after the Incarnation? The love would have long anticipated the gift. Calvin uses a beautiful phrase in his gloss on John 3:16. He says it is right for the gaze of faith “to be fixed on Christ, in whom it beholds the breast of God filled with love.” He says also that “the secret love with which the Heavenly Father loved us in himself is higher than all other causes” of our salvation, though “the grace which he wishes to be made known to us, and by which we are excited to the hope of salvation, commences with the reconciliation which was procured through Christ,” and “The death of Christ is the only pledge of that love,” and a proof of its great “fervor.” I understand Calvin to mean that the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth made manifest what was always true, that there was a love that could only be made known to us through a gesture of such unthinkable grandeur and generosity — over and above the grandeur and generosity of Creation itself. This is an interpretation I find more beautiful and more consistent with my understanding of the nature of God than the thought of Jesus’ death as sacrifice. In the forty-third chapter of Isaiah, after verses that describe the failure of captive Israel to offer sacrifices and their having instead wearied the Lord with their iniquities, he declares, “I, I am He / who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, / and I will not remember your sins,” a very godlike expression of power and grace.

How this secret love in the breast of God has existed in time is a question that always arises for me when I read the Old Testament. I know this may sound like the kind of question that has drawn the irritated dismissal of theologians down the ages — the “What was God doing before the Creation?” kind of question. But again, increasingly I seem to look past the kings and priests and prophets to the people who are its real subject, those nameless souls vulnerable to circumstance, liable to becoming “the poor,” to drifting through the grain fields and the vineyards, taking and eating, because God has reserved to himself true ownership of the land in order to feed and comfort them, so that they will know of his care for them. Jesus fed his three thousand and his five thousand. Of course he did. I do not wish to imply that Christ as presence in Creation should be looked for only in human beings and human life — it could perfectly well have charmed a quark — but I do think that the neglect of Adam’s children, their absence from “creation,” as the word is commonly used, impoverishes our sense of both cosmos and humankind.

Once the “vast ocean of Being” Locke speaks of, which so far exceeds our understanding, is acknowledged as our most immediate experience of the mystery of God, then it is also acknowledged as a revelation of the grandeur of God. What we do not know should always function as a corrective to anything we think we do know. This depends, of course, on our diligently seeking out our ignorance. Science is the invaluable handmaiden of theology in that it tells us how astonishing and gigantically elusive are all the particulars of existence. And nothing is more unfathomable than ourselves, individually and collectively, at any given moment and from the earliest beginning of human time. Calvin characteristically speaks of a human encounter as “presented” or “offered” or “given” to us. A gift, William James would say, a datum. The kingdom of God is among us. Mystery waits upon ignorance — in the positive, Locke’s sense of this word. Thinking that we know more than we do, therefore rejecting what we are given as experience, blinds us to our ignorance, which is the deep darkness where truth abides. And our wealth of ignorance grows and multiplies. Much more is known about the atom now than was known fifty years ago, and all the brilliant probing has brought on a cascade of new, more elegant, more pregnant mystery.

To be clear, I am not talking about the “black box” approach that reifies ignorance and makes it function as if it were fact, behave as another kind of erroneous certainty. It is always premature to say that something cannot be known or cannot be described or explained. In a dissertation, Houston Stewart Chamberlain pondered the fact that the rise of sap in trees was inexplicable by the fluid mechanics of his time. He asserted that a “vital force,” not accessible to physical measure, must be at work. Clearly his worldview exploited this gap in understanding. A true and disciplined ignorance can never serve as pretext for giving ignorance itself an inappropriate meaning and authority, although in fairness to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, which he hardly deserves, the rise of sap is still a kind of conundrum.

The Bible seldom praises God without naming among his attributes his continuous, sometimes epochal, overturning of the existing order, especially of perceived righteousness or of power and wealth. When society seems to have an intrinsic order, it is an unjust order. And the justice of God disrupts it. Hannah says, “Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread / But those who were hungry have ceased to hunger.” Mary says, “He has put down the mighty from their thrones, / and exalted those of low degree; / he has filled the hungry with good things, /and the rich he has sent empty away.” Jesus establishes the ethos that is to prevail among his followers in these terms: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; and whoever humbles himself will be exalted,” a verse that can be read to mean that the estimation in which one is held within the Christian community is the inverse of one’s claims or pretensions, and to mean at the same time that the divine tendency to cast down the proud and exalt the humble will be active in their case. One thing all this proves is that God is indeed attentive to the poor, the humble, the nameless, the hard-pressed and heavy-laden, and has been for as long as they have existed. In history as God sees it, they are the great potential who make his power in human affairs actual, and through whom his justice is vindicated. Granting a rather tenuous connection to the root of Jesse, Jesus of Nazareth is the great and culminating instance of the exaltation of the humble. He takes his place among them as one who is despised and betrayed. Christ humbled himself and took the form of a slave. He humbled himself not in the fact of being human, but to show us the meaning of making slaves of human beings. So if Christ is to be found as a presence in the world from the beginning, it is surely reasonable to suppose that he was to be found, so to speak, among the nameless and vulnerable, whether of Galilee or Babylon, whether of Egypt, God’s people, or of Assyria, the work of God’s hands. Again, I do not mean to relegate him to human things more than others, to divide the work of Creation among the divine Persons. I mean instead that Creation must have a quality at its center and in its substance to which we as human beings belong. I mean that God’s first act of grace toward us was to make us worthy of his attention and loyalty and love.

If Christ’s nature is in some high sense intrinsically human, then humankind by its nature must always have had a likeness or an affinity to Christ. Perhaps this is what is meant by our likeness to God. God names himself I AM. Christ in John’s Gospel says “I AM” in contexts that make his statements atemporal — if he is the Truth, he was and will be the Truth. And, universally and alone in creation, in whatever state of weariness or weakness or bafflement or boredom, we mortals say and deeply feel, I am. Science finds consciousness, or mind, or the self, to be a mystery of the highest order. And that mystery has been replicated in every one of us, since the first creatures that were by any measure human understood themselves as themselves.

All this is by way of dealing with questions raised by Trinitarianism. If Christ was present at the Creation, and if existence was made with or through him, how is this manifest in Being as we know it? To put it another way, what do we fail to see or sense in Being if we exclude the role of Christ, the hypostatic Person of Christ in the Divine Creator, in the making and sustaining of it? For me a high Christology implies a high anthropology. To properly value this pledge of fervent love, the Incarnation, we must try to see the world as deserving of it — granting our almost perfect incapacity for seeing as God sees. Calvin constantly distinguishes between merit, a theological concept important in his time that he and the Reformation vehemently rejected, and the objective fact that we are made a little less than God and crowned with glory and honor. To worship God in the Creation is to celebrate as well the fact that we ourselves are created, and strangely and wonderfully made. Our honor and glory are not our own doing, and are only more precious, more to be enjoyed and explored, for this reason. Earlier interpreters took Psalm 8 to refer to Christ rather than to humankind. That the point could be debated is itself suggestive.

What is man? And the son of man? When the questions are rephrased inclusively — What is humankind? What is a human being, a mortal? — their power dissipates a little. The singularity of the human person in the uniqueness of his or her experience of being, and experience of God, is lost when we are thought of collectively, as the unspecific member of a species, or as defined by the fact that death will overtake us. “Man” is a stark, brave word, unaccommodated, solitary. Our recent struggles with gender have had strange effects on our use of language and unexamined consequences for our intellectual imagination. The word “soul” is feminine in Latin, and this seems not to have troubled anyone through all the centuries in which theologies were written in that language, even though in poetry and painting the soul is often represented as having the form of a woman. Pico della Mirandola, writing in Latin, speaks of the soul welcoming her bridegroom “in a golden gown as in a wedding dress.” This is conventional. Perhaps our fastidiousness about gendered words is a consequence of the fact that they are much less common in English, and are fungible in theory.

In fact, however, since every life is stark and brave and singular, and God knows us by name, we are thrown back on the psalmist’s question: What is it about us, each in himself or herself, that could, so to speak, reward God’s mindfulness? The usual answers might be our piety, our suffering, or our sin. None of these seems to me to suggest a particular celebration of God’s nature or our own. Piety very readily turns smug and even mean, as Jesus noted more than once. Suffering is usually the loss or destruction of better possibilities, and exactly the same may be said of sin, though more emphatically. There is little here to undergird the faith that God would break into history to secure eternal life for us, which will also be life with him. Yet this is the faith, that we should not perish but have everlasting life. When our sins are behind us and our tears have been wiped away, what will remain? Presumably some human essence we have no name for, and perhaps very little sense of, but which must be precious enough to make God take note of our disfiguring and disabling sorrows and sins, and free us of them. To assume this essence, even if we cannot define it, and to suppose a grander and in fact more profound and cosmic human nature that could answer to the fact of Christ’s presence in the Creation, would honor God and exalt Christ, and give us reason to consider ourselves again.

I am not proposing anything new here.

Pico della Mirandola says, in his essay On the Dignity of Man, “I understood why man is the animal that is most happy, and is therefore worthy of all wonder; and lastly, what the state is that is allotted to man in the succession of things, and that is capable of arousing envy not only in the brutes but also in the stars and even in minds beyond the world. It is wonderful and beyond belief. For this is the reason why man is rightly said and thought to be a great marvel and the animal really worthy of wonder.” This was written in the late fifteenth century, by a man overwhelmed by the splendor revealed to him by his learning in the languages and literatures of antiquity and tradition, a man of the early Renaissance, when all that was known to the preceding ages of European Christianity and all that was added to it by the recovery of other ancient texts and languages together created an abrupt awareness of the brilliance of human achievement. This “animal worthy of all wonder” is earthly and intellectual, an epitome of Creation, indefinable in himself in that he participates in the whole of it. Pico imagines God telling Adam, “I have placed thee at the center of the world, that from there thou mayest more conveniently look around and see whatsoever is in the world. Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honorable, art the molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer.” His great exuberance cannot be dismissed as the privilege of a simpler age; the essay was written as preface to his defense against a charge of heresy.

If Pico were with us now, would he not be confirmed in his astonishment at the human capacity to know? Have we not become the center of creation by making this speck of planet sensory, as if it were a hundred thousand eyes and a sleepless mind? There would be an element of the seraphic in this, if we could grant Pico his terms.

A generation earlier, Nicolaus Cusanus had said,

Human nature it is that is raised above all the works of God and made a little lower than the angels. It contains in itself the intellectual and the sensible natures, and therefore, embracing within itself all things, has very reasonably been dubbed by the ancients the microcosm or world in miniature. Hence is it a nature that, raised to union with the maximum, would exhibit itself as the fullest perfection of the universe and of every individual in it, so that in this humanity itself all things would achieve their highest grade. But humanity has no real existence except in the limited existence of the individual. Wherefore it would not be possible for more than one real man to rise to union with the maximum; and this man assuredly would so be man as to be God, would so be God as to be man, the perfection of all things and in all things holding the primacy.

For Cusanus, human nature as microcosm implies the Incarnation. He goes on to say that this is “an order that by nature and perfection transcends time, so that he who exists with God above time and before all things, in the fullness of time and after many cycles of ages, appeared in the world.” In other words, Christ in his humanity was in the beginning with God. The eternal Trinity includes a quintessential humanity which is expressed in Creation as the union of all things.

In quoting I do not mean to imply that I embrace his theology in general or even this aspect of it. For the most part it is remarkably disembodied and mathematical. And yet, paradoxically, it accepts the wholeness of things — Cusanus says, “the highest nature that comprises no inferior” is deficient, “for the union of inferior with superior is greater than is either separately,” mathematics outflanking dualism. So we have humankind fully at home in the universe, anticipated in the nature of the Trinity itself and epitomized in Christ. This wholeness is achieved by acknowledging what he calls our intellectual nature as a part of our being that exists in its own right. The old association of knowledge with the divine made our participation in knowledge, warped and radically limited as it must be, a nimbus, a proof of godliness. And our exertions of intellect are another proof. Calvin, whose thought is full of the humanism of the Renaissance, interprets the verse in the Prologue to John “The life was the light of men” to mean that “Since this light, of which the Speech was the source, has been conveyed from him to us, it ought to serve as a mirror, in which we may clearly behold the divine power of the Speech.” (“Speech” is the translator’s uneuphonious attempt to render Calvin’s Latin translation of Logos as Sermo, word as act, utterance. Presumably his choice of “Speech” over “Word” reflects Christ’s creative presence in the beginning, by analogy with God’s speaking the world into being in Genesis.) Again, we are Christlike and enjoy the effect of Christ’s presence in the Creation in our possessing “the light of understanding.” I hasten to add that this passage is an instance of Calvin’s tendency to make no certain distinction between the Persons of Father and Son.

We moderns have accepted accounts of the human mind that make it a gratuitous compounding of the complexity potential in matter, not essentially specific to us, telling us nothing of the nature of God even where God is granted. There have been attempts at quantifying human intelligence that would effectively isolate it among a certain few of us. So it is refreshing to see intellect treated by Pico and Cusanus and Locke as well as a trait of our species, both Adamic and cosmic, by no means solely the gift of the privileged or the pretentious among us. Of course it is a very reduced conception of intelligence that has yielded such an idea.

I have read an article or two about the anthropic theory. I resist it because it is solidly based in our conventional model of reality. An argument in its favor, from a certain point of view, is that it does align with science as science is generally understood. My objection to it is that it does not lift the great issues of being out of the terms and limits of the physical universe as we know it. And I am not sure that it can be expanded to allow a reconception of human existence, a metaphysics, that would fully acknowledge the strangeness of our presence in the universe. The dust of which we are made has a cosmic origin and history. This can only mean that we were potential in the nature of the universe, the expression of possibilities inherent in it — an amazing thing to consider, enabling a kind of thinking different from the rather mechanistic and anthropomorphic language of design. I am no physicist, but when I read about phenomena like quantum entanglement that seem to discourage an excessively literal belief in space, time, and causality as we commonly understand them, I feel the need to establish a new ordering of priorities in inquiring into the nature of reality, by looking at its quintessential expressions, for example, those outliers relative to the implied norms of physical being that form the baseline of contemporary thought — norms that are arrived at by excluding outliers insofar as they are seen to differ qualitatively from the cosmic run of things. I take these to be the human mind, and the human soul as well, though the existence of the second is not so widely acknowledged. If reality is thought of in this way, then the sense of a bond of likeness between God and the whole of humankind, which can be understood as a Christ-presence in humankind, arises of itself.

I do not wish to be heterodox, and I do not wish to make a selective or tendentious use of Scripture. I do not wish to imply the kind of universalism that means nothing has really been at stake in this great storm of need and passion and beauty and brilliance that has swept and transformed the world in the few millennia of significant human presence. Leaving judgment to God, I do believe that we are capable of real evil, have proved this every day of those millennia and will prove it again tomorrow. The widow and the orphan will receive no justice, the laborer will be deprived of his pay, the man of sorrows will be crucified again. Revering Scripture as I do, I cannot doubt that these things matter absolutely.

At the same time, I feel a distinctly Christian dread at the thought that any good thing ultimate reality holds for the patient, the kind, the humble, the lovers of truth, the hopeful and enduring who are Christian will be denied to those excellent souls who are anything else. An ancient Egyptian aspired to be able to say, to the god who met him after his death, I never made anyone weep. This is a noble and gentle aspiration I can only imagine Christ would honor. All the people are grass, the grass withers and the flower fades. In Egypt and Greece and Assyria, in Gog and Magog. Such extravagance, such an outpouring, all of them living within the Providence of the Lord who forms light and creates darkness, and whose name they do not know, just as Cyrus, his shepherd, did not know his name. It is perhaps not irrelevant that Jacob was only one of the people Cyrus released, and Jerusalem was only one of the cities he helped to rebuild. We have no record of the joy these pagans felt at their rescue, but Isaiah lets us imagine it, the greatest probable difference being that the hosannahs would have been sung to other gods.

I feel strongly that Christians have misread the Old Testament out of some lingering Marcionist impulse to make it the opposite of the New Testament, for example, in their insistence on calling God “jealous” when the word could as well be translated “passionate,” a translation thoroughly justified by context. On the basis of such interpretation we encourage ourselves to forget the implications of God’s insistence that the whole world is his. If we broaden the ground of interpretation, taking into consideration the Book of Isaiah, for example, which is so important to Christianity that it is germane by any hermeneutical standard, we find the figure of the servant, who may be the people Israel and may be the promised Messiah, and we have the inspired generosity of the conquerer Cyrus, who is called God’s anointed. Christ, the Son of Man, the King of Kings, who for us emerges so hauntingly in these oracles, might be thought of as promised or anticipated in the very fact that he is also implicit, present in humankind before he, in the Incarnation, became present among them. Granted it is often difficult to see Christ, to see the image of God, in ourselves and our kind. But, by the grace of God, we have God as our judge.

There is a beautiful sequence in the third chapter of the Gospel of Luke. This chapter is very much concerned with establishing the identity of Jesus as Christ. First, the calling of John the Baptist is described and his proclamation of the imminent coming of one much greater than he. Then, when Jesus has been baptized, the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. “And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’” Then the remarkable genealogy, moving backward through time from Jesus’ putative father Joseph (Luke draws attention to the fact that Joseph was not really his father, therefore that the genealogy is not his in any ordinary sense), backward to Creation and the eponymous ancestor of the whole of humanity—“Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God.”