The Case for God (20 page)

Today the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is regarded as the linchpin of Christianity, the truth on which theism stands or falls. So it is interesting to note how slowly and uncertainly this idea emerged. It was entirely alien to Greek philosophy. It would have seemed absurd to Aristotle to imagine the timeless God who was wholly absorbed in ceaseless contemplation of itself suddenly deciding to create the cosmos. Creation out of nothing represented a fundamental change in the Christian understanding of both God and the world. There was no longer a chain of being emanating eternally from God to the material universe, no longer an intermediate realm of spiritual beings that transmitted the divine energy to the nether regions. Instead, God had called every single creature from an abysmal and unimaginable nothingness and could at any moment withdraw his sustaining hand. Creation ex nihilo tore the universe away from God. The physical world could not tell us anything about the divine, because it had not emanated naturally from God, as the philosophers had imagined, but was made out of nothing. It was, therefore, of an entirely different nature
(ontos
) from the substance of the living God. A “natural theology” that argued from our rational observation of the world to God was no longer possible, because the new doctrine made it clear that, left to ourselves, we could know nothing at all about God.

Yet Christians did not feel that God was entirely unknowable. The man Jesus had been an image
(eikon
) of the divine and had given them an inkling of what the utterly transcendent God was like. They were also convinced that, in spite of everything, they had entered a hitherto-unexplored dimension of their humanity that in some sense enabled them to participate in the divine life. They called this Christian experience
theosis
(“deification”): like the incarnate Logos, they too had become the sons of God, as Paul had explained. But because this chasm had opened up between the material and divine worlds, they now realized that they could not have achieved this by their own efforts. It had happened only because of a divine initiative. The God
who had called all things into being had somehow bridged the immense gulf when “the Word was made flesh and lived among us.”
³
But who was Jesus? On which side of the abyss was the Logos “through whom all things came to be”?
⁴
Some Christians argued that because, as Saint John said, the Word had been “with God” from the beginning and, indeed “was God,”
⁵
Jesus, the incarnate Word, belonged in the divine sphere. But others pointed out that because he had become a man and died an agonizing death, he shared the fragility and contingency of matter. Did that mean that the Word had been created from nothing like everything else?

In 320, a heated debate about these issues erupted in Alexandria. It seems to have started with an argument about the meaning of Wisdom’s words in the book of Proverbs, which Christians had always applied to Christ—”Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded, before the oldest of his works”
⁶
—and went on to say that Wisdom had been God’s “master craftsman,” his agent of creation. Arius, a handsome and charismatic young presbyter of Alexandria, argued that this text made it clear that the Word and Wisdom of the Father was the first and most privileged of God’s creatures. It followed that the Word must also have been created ex nihilo. Arius did not deny that Jesus was God, but suggested that he had merely been promoted to divine status. God had foreseen that when the Logos became a man, he would behave with perfect obedience, and as a reward had raised him to divine status in advance of his mission. The Logos thus became the prototype of the perfected human being; if Christians imitated his wholehearted
kenosis
, they too could become “sons of God;” they too could become divine.
⁷
Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, and his brilliant young assistant Athanasius immediately realized that Arius had put his finger on an ambiguity in the Alexandrian view of Christ that needed to be cleared up.
⁸

The debate was not confined to a coterie of learned experts. Arius set his ideas to music, and it was not long before sailors and travelers were singing popular songs proclaiming that the Father was God by nature and had given life and being to the Son, who was neither coeternal with him nor uncreated. Soon the controversy had spread to the churches of Asia Minor and Syria. We hear of a bath attendant who engaged the bathers in heated discussion about whether the Son had come from nothingness; a money changer who, when asked for
the exchange rate, held forth on the distinction between the Creator and his creation; and a baker who argued with his customers that the Father was greater than the Son.
⁹
People were discussing the question with the same enthusiasm and passion as they discuss football today, because it touched the heart of their Christian experience. In the past, the creeds and explanations of the faith had often been changed to meet pastoral needs.
¹⁰
The Arian crisis showed that they would probably have to be changed yet again.

Over the centuries, Arianism has become a byword for heresy but at the time there was no officially orthodox position and nobody knew whether Arius or Athanasius was right.
¹¹
Arius was anxious to safeguard the transcendence of God. God was unique, “the only unbegotten, the only eternal, the only one without beginning, the only true, the only one who has immortality, the only wise, the only good.”
¹²
His power was so overwhelming that it had to be mediated through the Logos at the creation, because frail creatures “could not endure to be made by the absolute hand of the Unoriginate.”
¹³
The immense and all-powerful God could not possibly have been in the man Jesus: for Arius that would be like cramming a whale into a can of shrimp or a mountain into a box.

Athanasius wanted to safeguard the liturgical practice of the Church, which regularly referred—albeit imprecisely—to Jesus as divine. If, he argued, the Arians really believed Christ to be a mere creature, were they not guilty of idolatry when they worshipped him?
¹⁴
Like Arius, Athanasius had accepted the new doctrine of creation ex nihilo, but he argued that Arius did not understand its full implications. Creation ex nihilo had revealed an utter incompatibility between being itself and creatures that came from nothing.
¹⁵
The only things that we could know by our natural, unaided reason were the objects of the material world, which told us nothing about God. Our brains were equipped to recognize only finite realities created ex nihilo, so we had no idea what the substance
(ousia
) of the uncreated God was like. God was not like any immense thing in our experience, and Arius “should not think of him in [such] human terms.”
¹⁶
Further, being and nonbeing had absolutely nothing in common; it was impossible to speak in these human terms about the Logos, the agent of creation, “by whom all things were made”: “What sort of resemblance is there between things which are from nothing and the one
who rendered the things which are nothing into being?”
¹⁷
Jesus had not been linked to a very large and powerful being, as the Arians seemed to imagine; all that could be said was that there was an incomprehensible transcendence in Jesus that was entirely distinct from anything in human experience.

The relationship between the unknowable God and the incarnate Logos, who had brought all things into existence, must, therefore, be entirely different from a relationship between two created beings. If, like the Arians, you simply thought of God as another being, albeit bigger and better than us, then it was absolutely impossible for God to become human. It was only because we had no idea what God was that we could say that God had been in the man Jesus. It was also impossible to say that God’s substance was
not
in Christ, because we could not identify the
ousia
of God; it lay completely beyond our ken, so we did not know what we were denying. Christians would not have been able to experience the “deification” of
theosis
or even imagine the unknowable God unless God had—in some unfathomable way—taken the initiative and entered the realm of fragile creatures. “The Word became human that we might become divine,” Athanasius wrote in his treatise
On the Incarnation;
“he revealed himself through a body that we might receive an idea of the invisible Father.”
¹⁸
When we looked at the man Jesus, therefore, we had a partial glimpse of the otherwise unknowable God, and God’s Spirit, an immanent presence within us, enabled us to recognize this.

Unfortunately, Constantine, who had no understanding of the issues, decided to intervene and summoned all the bishops to Nicaea in Asia Minor on May 20, 325. Athanasius managed to impose his views on the delegates, and the council issued a statement that Christ, the Word, had not been created but had been begotten “in an ineffable, indescribable manner” from the
ousia
of the Father—not from nothingness like everything else. So he was “from God” in an entirely different manner from all other creatures.
¹⁹
The paradoxical terminology of the Nicene statement revealed the new emphasis on the absolute unknowability of the “ineffable, indescribable” God.
²⁰
But this authoritative ruling solved nothing. Because of imperial pressure, all the delegates except Arius and two of his colleagues signed the statement, but once they had returned to their dioceses, they continued to teach as they had always done—for the most part midway
between Arius and Athanasius. This attempt to impose a uniform belief on the bishops and the faithful was counterproductive. Nicaea led to another fifty years of acrimony, divisions, conciliar deliberations, and even to violence, as creedal orthodoxy became politicized. The Nicene Council would eventually become a symbol of orthodoxy, but it would be centuries before Athanasius’s formula was restated in a form that Christians were willing to accept—and even then there was no uniformity.

Eastern and Western Christians would understand the incarnation very differently. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) defined the doctrine of atonement that became normative in the West: God became man in order to expiate the sin of Adam. Orthodox Christians have never accepted this. The Orthodox view of Jesus was defined by Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662), who believed that the Word would have become flesh even if Adam had not sinned. Jesus was the first human being to be wholly “deified,” entirely possessed and permeated by the divine, and we could all be like him, even in this life. The Word had become incarnate in order that “the whole human being would become God, deified by the grace of God become man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body by grace.”
²¹
As a result of this divine initiative, God and humanity had become inseparable. The man Jesus gave us our only hint of what God was like and had shown that human beings could participate in some indefinable way in the being of the incomprehensible God. We could no longer think “God” without thinking “human,” or “human” without thinking “God.”

Maximus fully accepted Athanasius’s appreciation of the absolute transcendence of God. The revelation of the incarnate Logos made it clear that God must be absolutely unknowable. It was only because we did
not
regard God as an immense being (as Arius did) that we could say that God could remain the all-powerful God at the same time as assuming the frailty of human flesh, because any mere being of our experience could not be two incompatible things at once. It was only because we did not know what God was that we could say that human beings could in some way share the divine nature. Even when we contemplated Christ the man, God itself remained opaque and elusive. Revelation did not provide us with clear information about God but told us that God was incomprehensible to us. Paradoxical as
it might sound, the purpose of revelation was to tell us that we knew nothing about God. And the supreme revelation of the incarnate Logos made this clearer than ever. After all, we have to be
told
about something we do not know or we would remain completely unaware of it.

These matters could not be settled by doctrinal formulations, because human language is not adequate to express the reality that we call “God.” Even words such as “life” and “light” mean something entirely different when we use them of God, so silence is the only medium in which it is possible to apprehend the divine.

But this did not mean that people had merely to “believe” these unfathomable truths; on the contrary, they had to work very hard to achieve the mental stillness that made the experience of unknowing a numinous reality in their lives. Maximus’s theology was based on a spirituality that had developed shortly after Nicaea. At a time when many Christians recoiled from the specter of primordial nothingness, others moved forward to embrace it. While some were engaged in wordy disputes and technical Christological definitions, others opted for a spirituality of silence—not dissimilar to the Indian Brahmodya. The monks had become the Christian heroes par excellence; they flocked into the deserts of Egypt and Syria to live in solitude, meditating on the scriptural texts they had memorized and practicing spiritual exercises that brought them the same kind of serenity as that sought by Epicureans, Stoics, and Cynics. The Greek fathers regarded monasticism as a new school of
philosophia
. The monks practiced the Stoic virtue of
prosoche
, “attention to oneself;” they too prepared for death and adopted a way of life that made them
atopos
, an “unclassifiable” breach with the norm.
²³
By the mid-fourth century, some of these desert monks had pioneered an a pophatic or “wordless” spirituality that brought them inner tranquillity
(hesychia)
.