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We can now understand the significance of the joy of the eternal Wisdom of which she tells us in Holy Scripture. She “rejoices” in summoning up before God the countless possibilities of all existences outside the Godhead and in reabsorbing them in her omnipotence, her absolute truth and her infinite goodness. In this joy of His essential Wisdom, God, one and threefold, in suppressing the power of the possible chaos, illuminating its darkness and penetrating its depths, is interiorly aware of Himself and proves to Himself from all eternity that He is more powerful, truer and better than any possible being outside Himself. This rejoicing of His Wisdom shows Him that all that is positive belongs to Him in fact and by right, that He possesses eternally in Himself an infinite treasure of all real powers, all true ideas, all gifts and all graces.
In the two first essential qualities of Godhead, God might limit Himself to His immanent manifestation,1 the eternal rejoicing of His Wisdom; as One almighty, just and true, He might well rest content with triumphing in Himself over anarchic existence in the inner certainty of His absolute superiority. But that does not satisfy grace and goodness. In this third quality, divine Wisdom cannot rest content with a purely ideal object, she cannot stop short at a realization that is only potential, a mere enjoyment. If, in His power and truth, God is all, He desires in His love that all should be God. He desires that there should be outside Himself another nature which may progressively become what He is from all eternity — the absolute whole. In order to arrive itself at the divine totality and to enter with God into a free, reciprocal relationship, this nature must be separated from God and at the same time united to Him; separated by its actual basis which is the Earth, and united by its ideal culmination which is Man. It is supremely in her vision of the Earth and of Man that the eternal Wisdom unfolds her rejoicing before the God of the Future: mesakheqeth bethebel artso, veshahashouhaï eth-bene Adam.
We know that the possibility of chaotic existence, eternally contained in God, is eternally suppressed by His power, condemned by His truth and absorbed by His grace. But God loves Chaos in its nothingness and wills that it should exist, for He is able to draw rebellious existence back to unity and fill the infinite void with His superabundant life. God, then, gives Chaos its freedom; He refrains from acting against it by His omnipotence in the first act of the Divine Being, in the element of the Father, and thus causes the universe to emerge out of its nothingness.
Unless we would repudiate the very notion of Godhead, we cannot admit outside of God any existence in itself, real and positive. What is outside Godhead can therefore only be the Divine transposed or reversed. And this is what we primarily see in the specific forms of finite existence which separate our world from God. This world is, in fact, constituted outside God by the forms of Extension, Time and Mechanical Causality. But these three conditions have nothing real and positive about them; they are simply a negation and transposition of divine existence in its principal categories.
We have distinguished in God (1) His absolute objectivity, represented by His substance or essence, which is the whole in one indivisible unity; (2) His absolute subjectivity or His interior existence, represented in its totality by three inseparable hypostases, mutually conditioning and completing one another; (3) lastly, His free relativity or relationship with what is not Himself, represented first by the joy of the Divine Wisdom, and then by Creation (and, as we shall subsequently see, by the Incarnation). The general characteristic of the Divine Being in these three categories or aspects is its autonomy, its perfect aseity, the absence of any external determining factor. God is (1) autonomous in His objective substance, for, being all in itself, it cannot be determined by anything; (2) He is autonomous in His subjective existence, for it is absolutely complete in its three co-eternal and hypostatic phases, which possess in their unity the totality of being; finally (3) He is autonomous in His relationship to what is not Himself, for this other is only determined to exist by a free act of the Divine Will. Thus, the three categories indicated are merely different forms and expressions of the divine autonomy. And it is on that account that in the terrestrial world, which is simply the reverse image of Godhead, we find the three corresponding forms of its heteronomy: Extension, Time and Mechanical Causality. (1) If the objective and substantial expression of the divine autonomy is “all in unity,” omnia simul in uno, the heteronomous objectivity of Extension consists, on the contrary, in the fact that every part of the world outside the Godhead is separate from all the others; it is the subsistence of each one outside the whole, and of the whole outside each one — it is the opposite of totality. Thus, our world, in so far as it is composed of extended parts, represents the divine objectivity reversed. (2) So, too, if the subjective autonomy of the divine existence finds its expression in the equal actuality and the close and indissoluble bond between the three terms of this existence which complete, without succeeding, one another, the heteronomous form of Time presents us, on the contrary, with an indeterminate series of moments challenging one another’s existence. Each of these moments, in order to enjoy actuality, must exclude all the others, and all of them, instead of completing one another, suppress and supplant one another without ever attaining the totality of existence. (3) Finally, as the creative liberty of God is the final expression of His autonomy, so the heteronomy of the world outside God is completely manifested in Mechanical Causality, in virtue of which the outward action of a given being is never the direct effect of its inward act, but must be determined by a chain of material causes or conditions independent of the agent itself.
The abstract principle of Extension is that two objects, parts of the whole, cannot occupy the same place at the same time, and similarly a single object, a single part of the whole, cannot be in two different places at once; this is the law of division or of objective exclusion between parts of the whole. The abstract principle of Time is that two interior states of a subject (states of consciousness, according to modern terminology) cannot coincide in a single actual moment, and similarly a single state of consciousness cannot be maintained as actually identical in two different moments of existence; this is the law of the perpetual disjunction of the interior states of every subject. Finally, according to the abstract principle of Mechanical Causality, no act or phenomenon is produced spontaneously or of itself, but is entirely determined by another act or phenomenon, which is itself simply the effect of a third, and so on; this is the law of the purely external and occasional relationship between phenomena. It is easy to see that these three principles or laws express but one general urge, tending to disintegrate and dissolve the body of the universe and to deprive it of all inner coherence and of all solidarity between its various parts. This urge or tendency is the very basis of Chaos, that is, of Nature outside the Godhead. An urge implies a will, and a will implies a psychical subject, that is to say, a soul. Since the world which this soul strives to produce — the whole disintegrated, disjointed, and only held together by a purely external bond — is the opposite or reverse of the divine totality, the soul of the world itself is the opposite or antitype of the essential Wisdom of God. This world-soul is a creature, the first of all creatures, the materia prima, the true substratum of our created world. In fact, since nothing can have any real and objective existence outside God, the world outside the Godhead can only be, as we have said, the divine world subjectively transposed and reversed: it is simply a false aspect or illusory representation of the divine totality. But even this illusory existence implies a subject putting itself in a false relationship and producing in itself the distorted image of truth. Since this subject can be neither God nor His essential Wisdom, a distinct subject or world-soul must be admitted as the principle of Creation, properly so-called. As a creature, it does not exist eternally in itself, but it exists from all eternity in God, in the state of pure potentiality, as the latent basis of the eternal Wisdom. This potential future Mother of the world outside the Godhead corresponds, in its complete ideality, to the eternally actual Father in the Godhead.
As pure indeterminate potentiality, the world-soul has a twofold and variable character (ή αόριστος δύας): it can will to exist for itself outside God, it can take the false point of view of chaotic and anarchic existence, but it can also abase itself before God and, by freely attaching itself to the Divine Word, bring all Creation back to perfect unity and identify itself with the eternal Wisdom. But to do this, the world-soul must first enjoy real existence in distinction from God. The eternal Father therefore created it by restraining the act of His omnipotence which suppressed from all eternity the blind desire for anarchic existence. This desire, becoming act, revealed to the world-soul the possibility of the opposite desire, and thus the soul itself received an independent existence, chaotic in its immediate actuality, but capable of changing into the opposite. Having conceived Chaos and given it a reality relative to itself, the soul conceives the desire for deliverance from this discordant existence of aimless and irrational agitation in an abyss of darkness. Drawn hither and thither by blind forces striving with one another for exclusive existence, rent asunder, disintegrated, reduced to a countless multitude of atoms, the world-soul feels a vague but profound desire for unity. By this desire it attracts the action of the Word (the Divine as acting or as manifested) which reveals itself to it at the beginning in the general, indeterminate idea of the universe, the world as one and indivisible. This ideal unity, realizing itself upon the basis of chaotic extension, takes the form of unlimited space or immensity. The whole, reproduced, represented or imagined by the soul in its state of chaotic division, cannot cease to be the whole or lose its unity completely; and since its parts do not wish to complete or penetrate one another in a positive and living totality, they are compelled, while mutually excluding one another, nevertheless to remain together, to co-exist in the formal unity of indefinite space, a form which is entirely external and void of the objective and substantial totality of God. But the soul is not content with external immensity; it wishes also to experience the interior totality of subjective existence. This totality, eternally triumphant in the Divine Trinity, is for the chaotic soul suppressed by that in-determinate series of mutually exclusive and indifferent moments which is called Time. This false infinity which enchains the soul constrains it to desire the truth; and to this desire the Divine Word replies by the suggestion of a new idea. By its action upon the soul, the supreme Trinity is reflected in the stream of indefinite duration under the form of the three times. In seeking to realize total actuality for itself, the soul is compelled to fill up every given moment of its existence by the more or less indistinct memory of a past without beginning and the more or less vague expectation of a future without end.
And, as a deep unchangeable foundation for this changing relationship, there are the three principal states of the soul itself, its three modes of relationship to the Godhead, fixed for it under the form of the three times. The condition of its primordial absorption in the unity of the eternal Father, its eternal subsistence in Him as pure potentiality or mere possibility, is henceforward defined as the Past of the soul; the condition of separation from God by the blind force of chaotic desire makes up its Present; and the return to God, the new reunion with Him, becomes the aim of its aspirations and efforts, its ideal Future.
As upon the anarchic division of extended parts the Divine Word establishes for the soul the formal unity of space, and as upon the basis of the chaotic succession of moments it produces the ideal trinity of time, so upon the basis of mechanical causality it manifests the concrete solidarity of the Whole by the law of universal attraction binding together, by an inner force, all the scattered fragments of chaotic reality to form a single compact and solid body, the primal materialization of the world-soul, the original base of operation for the essential Wisdom.
Thus, through the blind and chaotic struggle which imposes upon the soul an existence indefinitely divided in its parts, exclusively successive in its moments and mechanically determined in its phenomena; through the contrary desire of the soul itself aspiring to unity and totality; and through the action of the Divine Word in answer to this desire — by the united operation of these three agents, the lower world, that is, the world outside the Godhead, receives its relative reality or, in Biblical phrase, the foundations of the Earth are laid. But in the idea of Creation the Bible, like theosophical reason, makes no distinction between the lower and the upper world, between the Earth and the heavens.
Thus we have seen how the eternal Wisdom called forth the possibilities of irrational and anarchic existence in order to confront them with the corresponding manifestations of absolute power, truth and goodness. These divine reactions, which are nothing but “play” (jeu — a game)2 in the immanent life of God, become real principles of being when the anti-divine potentialities which provoke them cease to be pure potentialities. Thus, to the creation of the lower or chaotic world necessarily corresponds the creation of the upper or celestial world: Bereshith bara Elohim eth hasham-maïm v’eth ha’arets.
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1. Immanent in relation to God, transcendent in relation to us.
2. Prov. viii. 31.
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