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Bereshith — εν αρχη or better, εν κεφαλαιω1 — in principio, seu potius, in capitulo: To suppose that the opening words of Genesis are only an intermediate adverbial expression, like our modern phrase, “in the beginning,” and so forth, would be entirely to misunderstand not only the genius of the Hebrew language, but also the general spirit of the ancient East. When the Hebrew language uses a substantive, it takes it seriously, that is to say, it has in mind an actual being or object denoted by this substantive. Now, it is undeniable that the Hebrew word reshith, here translated αρχη, principium, is a genuine substantive of feminine gender. The corresponding masculine is rosh, caput, head. The latter term is used by Jewish theology pre-eminently to denote God, the supreme and absolute Head of all that exists. But what, from this point of view, can reshith be — the feminine of rosh? To answer this question we need not turn to the ingenuities of the Cabbalists. The Bible is there to give us a decisive solution. In chapter 8 of the Proverbs of Solomon already quoted, the eternal Wisdom, Khocmah, tells us (v. 22): Jahveh qanani RESHITH darco — Jahveh possessed me as the (feminine) beginning of His way. It is then the eternal Wisdom which is the reshith, the feminine principle or head (source) of all being, just as Jahveh Elohim, the triune God, is its rosh, its active principle or source. Now, according to Genesis, God created the heavens and the Earth in this reshith, in His essential Wisdom; which means that this divine Wisdom does not only represent the essential and actual uni-totality of the absolute being or substance of God, but also contains in itself the unifying principle of the divided and disintegrated being of the world. Being the accomplished unity of the whole in God, it becomes also the unity of God and of existence outside the Godhead. It is thus the true rationale and end of Creation — the principle in which God created the heavens and the Earth.
While it exists substantially and from all eternity in God, it realizes itself effectively in the world and is successively incarnate therein, in drawing it back to an ever more perfect unity. At the beginning it is reshith, the pregnant notion of absolute unity, the unique principle which must unify all; at the end it is malkhouth (βασιλεία, regnum), the Kingdom of God, the perfect and completely realized unity of the Creator and the creature. It is not the soul of the world; that is only the instrument, the medium and ground of its realization, which it approaches by the action of the Word and gradually raises to an ever more complete and real identification with itself. The soul of the world, considered in itself, is the indeterminate subject of Creation, equally accessible to the evil principle of Chaos and to the Word of God. The Khocmah, Σοφία, the Divine Wisdom, is not the soul, but the guardian angel of the world, overshadowing all creatures with its wings as a bird her little ones, in order to raise them gradually to true being. It is the substance of the Holy Spirit Who brooded over the dark waters of the forming world. Verouakh (feminine) Elohim merakhepheth al pene hammaïm. But let us follow the order of the sacred record: Bereshith bara Elohim eth hashammaïm v’eth ha’arets. No research is needed to discover the meaning of the last word: ha’arets, Earth. The inspired writer goes on at once to explain; ve-ha’arets haïethah tohu va bohu: and the Earth was Chaos. But if by the Earth, in the Biblical account of Creation, we are to understand Chaos or the lower universe outside the Godhead in its chaotic condition, it is clear that the expression hashammaïm, the heavens, which the sacred text puts in close relation to the Earth as the opposite pole of Creation, indicates the upper universe or the invisible world of the divine reactions, established or realized distinctly as a counterbalance to chaotic existence.
This invisible world is not without reason denoted in Hebrew (as in Old Slavonic) by a word of dual number, rendered as plural in Western languages. This dual answers to the primordial division of the divine world. We know that the efficient cause of Creation (αρχη τες γενέσευς) is the act of will by which God refrains from suppressing by His omnipotence the potential reality of Chaos, or ceases to react against this potentiality by the special power of His first hypostasis, limiting Himself to reaction by the second and third — by justice and goodness, truth and grace. Since the first hypostasis of the Most Holy Trinity, the Eternal Father, refrained from reacting against the possible Chaos in His specific quality, that is, from suppressing it by His omnipotence, and since this was the prime condition or efficient cause of Creation (for which reason God the Father is preeminently the Creator of the world), it follows that to constitute the sphere of divine reactions to Chaos, we have only the specific manifestations of the other two hypostases; and this fact imposes a primordial duality on the invisible universe. We have (1) a system of the immediately creative reactions of the Word, which form the ideal or intelligible world properly so-called, the sphere of pure intelligences, objective ideas and divine thoughts hypostatized; and (2) a system of reactions of the Holy Spirit, more concrete, subjective and living, forming the spiritual world, the sphere of pure spirits or angels.
It is in the creative sphere of the Word and the Holy Spirit that the divine substance or essential Wisdom is determined and appears in its proper character as the luminous and heavenly being separated from the darkness of earthly matter. The proper sphere of the Father is absolute light, light in itself having no relation with darkness. The Son or the Word is as light manifested, the white ray which lights up external objects, not by penetration, but by reflection from their surface. Finally, the Holy Spirit is the ray which is refracted by the non-divine medium and breaks up and creates in this medium the heavenly spectrum of the seven primordial spirits like the [seven] colors of the rainbow.
The pure intelligences which form the world of ideas are absolutely contemplative, impassible and changeless beings. Like stars fixed in the firmament of the invisible world, they are above all desire, all will and therefore all freedom. Pure spirits or angels have a subjective existence more complete or more concrete. Beside intellectual contemplation, they know affective and volitional states and have movement and freedom.
But the freedom of pure spirits is quite different from that which we experience. Not being subject to the objective limitations of matter, space and time, nor to all the mechanism of the physical world, the angels of God have the power to determine their destiny by a single interior act of their will. They are free to declare themselves for God or against Him; but as by their nature (inasmuch as they are immediate creatures of God) they possess from the first a superior light and force, they act with a full awareness and complete effectiveness and cannot go back on their actions. By virtue of the very perfection and greatness of their freedom, they can exercise it only once for all in a single decisive act. The inner decision of their will, encountering no external obstacle, produces instantaneously all its consequences and exhausts their freedom of choice. The pure spirit which freely decides for God enters immediately into possession of the divine Wisdom and becomes, as it were, an organic and inseparable member of the Godhead; love towards God and voluntary participation in the divine action are from henceforward its nature. On the other hand, the spirit which decides to the contrary can never revoke its decision; for it made the decision in perfect knowledge of what it was doing, and it can only have what it desired. It desired separation from God because it had conceived an aversion for Him. Since this aversion could have no sort of motive — for in God can be found no shadow of evil whatsoever to justify or explain a feeling of hostility towards Him — this hostility is purely and simply an act of the spiritual will, having its whole reason in itself and subject to no modification; it becomes the very nature or essence of the fallen angel.
Being, as it is, absolute master of itself, independent of any external and temporal cause or circumstance, the will against God is necessarily eternal and irrevocable. It is an infinite abyss into which the rebel spirit is immediately hurled and from which it can spread its rebellion throughout the material chaos, the physical creation, right to the confines of the divine world. It knew well, in deciding against God, that it would not lack a sphere of action; for the Divine Will had already called forth from the void the world-soul, in awakening in it the chaotic desire, the basis and material of all Creation. This world-soul is an indefinite and indeterminate principle (απειρον και αόριστον), and it will always impart this character in a certain degree to all that issues from itself. Thus there will be a vast no-man’s-land remaining in suspense between God and His adversary and providing the latter with the means by which to nourish its hatred, practice its rebellion and prolong its struggle. Its existence, therefore, will not be inert and vacuous, it will have an abundant and varied activity, but the general direction and inner quality of all its activity are predetermined by the primordial act of will which separated it from God. To undo this act and to return to God is for it an absolute impossibility. The contrary teaching of Origen, condemned by the Church, shows that that lofty and gifted mind had but a poor conception of the essence of moral evil, a fact which incidentally he proved in another connection by seeking deliverance from evil passions by means of a purely material and external process.
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1. According to the Hexapla of Origen, the word bereshith was thus translated by Aquila, the celebrated doctor to whom the Talmud applies the words of the psalm: “Thou art fairer than the children of men.”
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