A Digest of Christian Faith

A Brief Commentary on the Creeds

For Michael.

The primary genre of A Perennial Digression is the short essay, but with healthy amounts of preterition and errancy from whatever topic I elect to write on. I have, on occasion, been asked to present more formally what I believe, especially given that I rather liberally draw in this dispatch on Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Neoplatonic, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and other resources as having various degrees of authority for my thinking. Because I have but a little more time before the school year falls upon me like fire from heaven, I thought I might indulge that request by laying out, in seven points, the Christian Faith as I understand it, or, rather, the Christian Faith that I possess.

Let the reader be aware that what follows is almost entirely unoriginal to me, insofar as it is more a synthesis or digest of reading in biblical studies, comparative religion, philosophy, and theology that I have undertaken for most of the last ten years. Let the reader also be aware that one of the core concepts that I embrace as a thinker and a writer is what Jains call anekantavada, “not-one-sidedness” or “many-sidedness,” and as such I try not to grow attached to systems as master keys to thinking about reality but rather try to use them to describe the collective of individual and communal experiences, texts, and traditions that I find significant of divine, absolute, or ultimate reality in some way. The following should not, then, be misconstrued as a new Peri Archon. It is, instead, something like what it means to me to call myself a Christian today, something that I have written on here before, but which rightfully continues to grow and evolve as I do, without losing its connection to the past. But I note this up front largely to explain the absence of footnotes and links from this article, which is to allow for greater length, and unusual for my writing here. If there are questions about further reading, I am happy to offer suggestions.

1. One God, the Father Almighty. By “One,” we do not simply mean that God is numerically one, but that he is himself the transcendent Unity from which all things proceed (Latin: exitus) and to which they return (reditus). By “God” (Greek: ho theos) we name that which is the simple, infinite (Hebrew: ein sof; Sanskrit: brahman), purely actual ground and goal of being (sat), consciousness (citta), and bliss (ananda). As Boethius says, of God, in this ultimate sense, there is one by nature, but once this is established, there is nothing to prevent an infinite number of gods by participation (De Consolatione Philosophiae III). The One God is “the Father” and “the Almighty,” which is really to say the Pantokrator, the Greek translation of YHWH Tzeva’ot, “YHWH of Hosts.” In the world of Ancient Israel and Judah, it was certainly the case that YHWH was a corporeal and male god who was regarded, after his fusion with El, the chief deity of the Levantine pantheon, as the divine husband and father of the goddess Asherah, the people of Israel, and the universe at large. In that context, and in the context of Early Judaism and Christianity where God the Father was still sometimes thought to be embodied in a humanoid form, “Father” indeed names a male god. But in the more philosophical vision of later generations, beginning already in the Second Temple period, God’s paternity names him as the generative principle of the universe: God the Father is God in the tropos hyparxeos, or “mode of existence,” as the superabundant force of generativity that is the source of both the divine triad consisting of Son and Spirit as well as the created world. Nicene theology differentiated between the Father’s generation of the Son and his creation of the universe, but this is difference requires nuance. The Father eternally generates the Son, who is therefore coeternal, coequal, and consubstantial with the Father; but in generating the Son, the Father also eternally creates the noetic and sensible world(s) that come to be and subsist in and through the Son; creation is a natural overflow of the Son’s generation. Consequently, the incarnation of the Son as the heart of the creation and deification of the world is both logical and likewise an eternal act. The Father also eternally breathes or sends forth the Spirit upon the Son, in his delight with the Son; consequently, he also sends the Spirit forth upon the noetic world(s) contained within the Son, producing the sensible world(s) also so contained. Origen of Alexandria pointed out that God’s title of “Almighty,” in the apostolic and ecclesiastical preaching, comes after Father, implying that God is Almighty in and through the Son; but because Scripture establishes that God’s supremacy in and through the Son, incarnate as Jesus Christ, is an eschatological reality (Phil 2:5-11; 1 Cor 15:20-28; Matt 19:28), it is not the case that God is presently Almighty in the divine economy of the sensible world’s providential administration. He will only be Almighty in that future cosmos where all things freely consent to their creation by God in their willful submission to Jesus Christ as exalted YHWH or Kyrios, “Lord,” and Christ’s yielding of all things to the Father that he might be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). Origen calls this God’s ktisis, the eschatological creation which is, from God’s perspective, always, already realized. He differentiates it from God’s poiesis, the noetic blueprint of the universe resident in the Divine Mind (Greek: Nous or Logos), the created subject of the first, Priestly creation account in Genesis (Gen 1:1-2:3), and from the plasis, the subject of the second, Yahwistic creation account in Genesis (2:4-3:24; though Origen did not know the contemporary academic terminology of “Priestly” and “Yahwistic,” the difference between these stories was recognized at least as early as Philo of Alexandria). It is in each of these three senses that God may be said to be “Creator.” He is primarily the Creator of the eschatological universe, when the poiesis and the plasis are fully united one to the other; he is secondarily the Creator of the noetic, poetic creation, the noetic universe which resides in the Son as Divine Wisdom; and he is tertiarily the Creator of the sensible, plastic creation, the aesthetic universe which resides in the Son as Creaturely Wisdom.

   

2. One Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God. Jesus of Nazareth was a first-century Jewish apocalyptic and social prophet who was crucified by the Romans but seen alive afterwards by his disciples, who proclaimed him as Messiah or Christ, Son of God, and Lord. In addition to these titles, his earliest disciples gave him several more derived from Jewish apocalyptic literature and philosophical speculation: Power of God, Glory of God, Wisdom (Hebrew: Chokmah; Greek: Sophia) of God, Word (Greek: Logos) of God. In the preaching of the first, second, and third-century churches, Jesus was often presented as the incarnation of a deuteros theos, a secondary divine principle or entity mediating between God and the world in the divine economy of creation and consummation, functioning in angelomorphic offices and receiving divine honors as Savior and Benefactor of the kosmos. In the late third and throughout the fourth century, in response to various internal and external pressures, the Christian churches reformulated their understanding of Jesus to stress his consubstantiality with God the Father and therefore his full divinity. This is signified by his title “Lord,” Kyrios, which is the normative Greek substitution for the Divine Name YHWH: Jesus is the YHWH to God the Father’s Tzeva’ot, the Kyrios to his Pantokrator, and therefore everything that it is to be God without being the Father. In Nicene theology, rather than a subordinated secondary divine principle, he is the second tropos hyparxeos of the divine nature, which subsists first and foremost in and as God the Father. In Neoplatonic terms, Jesus Christ is not simply the Nous of God, which would be an emanated reality one step removed from the One, but is the One himself in a generated rather than generating mode. Insofar as he is the generated expression of the One God, then, he is called the Logos of God, the Divine Reason or Word of God; he contains the noetic universe while exceeding it. However, it is in this generated mode of the One that Nous, Soul, and kosmos as described by Plotinus and his successors all reside. But because the Son is, like the Father, simple, purely actual, and infinite, being simply a distinct mode of existence of the One God, he is the hypostatic ground and reality of the noetic and sensible universes which come to be in and through him. But insofar as each Form and Divine Idea subsisting in the noetic universe simply is him, both in their particulars and in their relationships, he is called the Divine Wisdom, for he hypostatizes all the things that the Father sees in the Son which can come to be in and through him (each of which are finite in themselves but susceptible to participation in the infinity of God and to which there can be no numeric limit). Insofar as the Son is more than but also is the Divine Wisdom or noetic universe, and insofar as the noetic universe already contains the archetype of Humanity, and insofar as the creation or emanation of the sensible, plastic universe is nothing other than the manifestation in time, space, and matter of the noetic universe, the creation of the world is the embodiment of the Son, and the miraculous conception, birth, life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is his enfleshment as a human being in the sensible cosmos, as it is Christian Faith that in and as Jesus true humanity was first seen and therefore also true divinity. In this sense, the personal presence of the Son as Jesus within history, hypostatically and prosopically uniting divinity and humanity “without confusion, change, separation or division,” instantiates the providence (Greek: pronoia) of the sensible universe (in Jesus’ birth and resurrection) and its judgment (krisis, in his suffering and death). The deification of Jesus is nothing other than the first-fruits of the full deification of the cosmos in the consummation of the Son’s embodiment and therefore the Father’s becoming “all in all”; it is for this reason, as Origen says, that he is called “firstborn from the dead” and “firstborn of all creation.” Currently, the ktisis is realized in the resurrected, fully deified Jesus and in the creation which has so far willingly aligned with him and received this same glorification. He both manifests the divine intention of the noetic/poetic universe as well as transforms the plastic/sensible universe to meet it. His future coming to judge and rule is understood by Christians to be the completion of this process, but the timing, character, and scope of this consummation vary in biblical and related literature and are variable in realization, for God, ruling the world in and through Christ, retains perfect freedom to consummate the created order as he sees best fit, in conjunction with the free will of his creatures.

   

3. The Holy Spirit, the Lord and Creator of Life. God the Father eternally sees the Son as his own Logos, the manifestation of the transcendent Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that he himself is, as well as the Divine Wisdom of the noetic universe and its radiation into the sensible universe that come to be in and through him, and rightly desires (Greek: eros) to be united with the perfect reflection of himself which he has generated and all that it contains. He therefore spirates the tertiary divine hypostasis or tropos hyparxeos, the Holy Spirit, who comes to rest upon the Son from the Father and, through the Son, returns to the Father in adoration and praise. This is the perichoresis of the Divine Triad, by which Father, Son, and Spirit all indwell and interpenetrate one another, the One God simultaneously existing in and as all three. It is the Spirit, as the Father’s knowledge of himself only in the direct knowledge of the Son, and love of himself only in the direct love of the Son, and the responsive knowledge and love of Son for Father, that is also called “Lord”—i.e., he, too, is YHWH, fully divine with Father and Son—and “Creator of Life” (Greek: zoopoion). That is, when the Spirit comes upon the Son, all that is within the Son which the Son can be said to be, but which cannot be said to be the fullness of the Son himself—that is to say, the noetic and sensible worlds—is vivified. This is the origin of the principle of Soul, as a distinct reality from the Divine Nous, which resides in the Son: by the Spirit’s presence, the Forms and Ideas in the Divine Wisdom receive their own hypostatic instantiation as the hypercosmic and cosmic gods and angels, and the sensible world itself becomes animated by participation in Soul, which is the World Soul, Creaturely Wisdom, the mirror of the Divine Wisdom. Of this World Soul, all souls within the sensible universe are a part; and because Soul and World Soul both are derived from the presence of the Spirit, and the Spirit is both “Creator of Life” and “everywhere present, filling all things,” everything is ensouled. And because the Spirit proceeds from the Father upon the Son, and reciprocally, by the Father’s initiative, secondarily from or through the Son and back again to the Father, the Soul, World Soul, and individual souls which constitute distinct emanations or contractions of the Spirit’s infinity are capable of participation in the noetic world and the Son who is its substantial reality, meaning that everything must also be thought to have some degree of mind or consciousness. The World Soul, or Creaturely Wisdom, because it is the emanation of Soul, itself an emanation of the unique tropos hyparxeos that is the Spirit, as present in the material substrate of the universe, is tensed between the Being and Goodness that God is as Father, Son, and Spirit, from which it ultimately derives its existence, on the one hand, and the evil of non-being which matter, as the nothingness of pure potency and indeterminacy, is. Hence, evil exists, neither in Father, Son, and Spirit, nor in Nous or Soul as such, and therefore not formally or finally at all, but only in the World Soul, the souls subsumed within it, and the sensible universe, as a consequence of the matter which is its substrate. It is for reason of the evil that matter is that souls are able, consonant with the degree of their participation in mind, to be clouded in their vision of the genuine reality, subject to illusion (Sanskrit: maya, in its epiphenomenal aspect), especially the illusion of separation from God, and the ignorance (avidya) which this causes about the relationship of innermost self (atman) to the infinite (brahman) God. Paradoxically, one of the primary such illusions is the misidentification of a perennial self with the changing flux of mental and physical phenomena which the individual being experiences in succession and mistakes for selfhood; the sensible, plastic world, at least as it presently exists or is experienced, is by nature emptiness (śunyata), that is, empty of essential content, merely echoing in the insubstantiality of matter the transcendent absolute which is mediated to it and can only be experienced through extinction (nirvana) of the consciousness inflamed by craving (tancha) for the finite and sensible and the dissatisfied suffering (dukkha) such craving causes, including the desire to enjoy the fruits of one’s good actions (karma). As all souls are part of the World Soul, and as not every soul attains liberation (mokśa) from the sensible universe in this its fallen aspect (samsara), either lamenting the evil age (Kali Yuga) or craving the good age (Satya Yuga), it seems reasonable to say that some souls remain attached to the world and undergo rebecoming or rebirth (punarjanma). Here, however, Christians, who have traditionally rejected rebirth as such, might want to make the qualification that either what is reborn is some aspect or principle of soul that is distinct from the most hypostatic, personal aspect of the individual being, which stands forever in God’s sight and is forever beloved for what it really most significantly is, or that rebirth is better understood as reembodiment or transmigration to the infernal or heavenly regions, in which case souls rarely if ever simply assume new bodies of flesh or new human identities. The moral weight of each soul’s life matters, and the actions and their fruits, unless they are overcome through divine grace and the detachment it enables, will follow them beyond this life. Whatever the case—for death is a mystery, being the principle of change occluded by the evil of the material world—this subjection to illusion, ignorance, craving, suffering, and the fruits of action are also possible for the encosmic gods, angels, daimones, and other spirits, natural evil occurs; they are also the cause of moral evil through the psychic illness of vice and the attachments it creates. Indeed, the world itself may well undergo an infinite number of deaths and rebirths, and cycle through various ages. All this stands under the providential governance of the Spirit, whose grace is mediated by Soul and World Soul to individual souls, in each of whom the Spirit itself subsists as the individual spirit, and whose economy of vivification will only be complete when the World Soul, Creaturely Wisdom, is united to its divine paradigm in the Divine Wisdom, and the ktisis comes forth, which is to say when soul in general is transformed completely into spirit: for soul is a contracted or diminished participation in spirit, and the psychic order of change, death, and rebirth is only overcome by the pneumatic order, which is what Christ, empowered by the Spirit, brought into the world, but has not yet consummated, as evidenced in the enduring presence of general evil and rebellious spirits. The Spirit also “spoke through the prophets”—that is to say, inspired the human authors of the Hebrew Bible to know and love God, being the knowledge and love of God himself, as far as each was able in their particular context, and also, so Christians believe, the authors of the New Testament. This is not to say that everything which Scripture contains is of equal value, moral imperative, or spiritual clarity, but that in some general way, Scripture is to the cosmos what Christ is to Scripture: the fully divine and fully human manifestation of the noetic pattern of reality. If for Christians, Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh, then the Bible is the Word made text, with respect to the differing degrees of sanctity perceived in different books by Jews and Christians, preserving rather than annihilating the humanity of the authors. And because Scripture is as it were interwoven with all other literature, ancient and modern, by threads direct and indirect, there is some sense in which Christians may say that the Spirit’s grace of prophecy has been ubiquitously offered to humankind, in all the apocalypses, traditions, and scriptures by which they have accessed the divine, even as Christians recognize in the person of Christ and the way he teaches us to read Scripture that paradigm according to which the whole is moderated.

   

4. One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. The Church (Hebrew: qahal; Greek: ekklesia) or Divine Assembly is, properly speaking, the ingathering of all creation around the divine throne in the divine ktisis, where every creature, by the indwelling Spirit, confesses Jesus Christ as Lord to the glory of God the Father, and in that universal “Amen,” the one world of God—infinite with respect to number—is brought to be. In the noetic/poetic creation, the universe of the Divine Wisdom, it is the Divine Humanity itself, not restricted to Homo sapiens, but rather inclusive of the entire creation of which humanity is the microcosm, the Adam Kadmon, the Macranthropos, Purusha, the Cosmic Man. But here in the fallen sensible creation, it exists piecemeal, nowhere whole and entire, but divided by matter and those souls who, blinded by matter, engage in schism. For Christians, the historical realization of the Divine Assembly is preeminently the people of Israel, of whom the Jewish people, the Samaritans, and the various gentile Christian churches are all the primary heirs (together, too, we might say, with Muslims and Druze). It is these communities, currently disparate, whom Jews and Christians alike expect to be eschatologically united, together with all humanity, at the advent of the messianic and divine kingdom, whether within intrahistorical time (in a new Satya Yuga, one might say) or at the end of historical time (in the transition from the current iteration of the sensible world to its transfigured state in the divine ktisis). Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all also been willing at different times and places to acknowledge that other religious communities, dharmic, pagan, and indigenous, all participate in the mystery of divine covenant (Hebrew: b’rit), qahal, ekklesia, and/or umma, especially in the holiness of their inspired lawgivers, prophets, philosophers, teachers, scholars, and saints. Where the true Unity, Sanctity, and Universality of the Divine Assembly at present exists only at the end-time or in the noetic world, in this world it is refracted in these best expressions of the world’s religious communities, even as each of them, including Christians, assign to themselves the ecclesial priority within history. It is for this reason that Christian schism is at one and the same time tragic, unavoidable, and to be overcome where possible. Christians in particular also see the mission of realizing the assembly within history and on earth (for it also includes the gods and angels and even, in their way, though they are discordant in its liturgy and disobedient to its laws, the demons) as having been entrusted by Christ to the apostles, who had the task of proclaiming the Kingdom’s inauguration with his own resurrection and ascension to the Jewish Diaspora and to the gentile nations. Many Christian communities can authentically claim some kind of historic connection to the apostles and continuity with their faith, practice, and mission; the apostolic charismata endure in many of them, for “the Spirit blows where it will” (Jn 3:8). Attempts to collapse the historically contingent manifestation of the eschatological and noetic reality of the Assembly into its paradigms confuse the order of creations and reflect an overrealized eschatology. The Assembly is spoken of with respect to the Son as the Body and Bride of Christ—Body with respect to the noetic, where it is the bulk of the Divine Humanity of which Christ is the Head; Bride with respect to the sensible, where waits to be joined with Christ at the eschaton—and with respect to the Spirit as a Temple for it. The unity and sanctity which these images imply is not and logically cannot be fully manifest in any one institution, but they have periodically been realized to various degrees in individual saints, especially the martyrs, prophets, and apostles, and in no one more completely, Christians have historically believed, than the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Theotokos or “Mother of God.” Where in the incarnation of the Son, the hypostasis of Divine Wisdom assumed the Creaturely Wisdom, humanizing the former and deifying the latter, in Blessed Mary, the Creaturely Wisdom has put on the Divine Wisdom, hypostatizing the former and showing the latter to be particible. In the narrative of Mary’s miraculous conception, perfect life, consent to be the Mother of God, ever-virginity, Dormition, and Assumption—though faith in these things is an ecclesial mystery not demonstrable by the same means as the major articles of the Creeds—Christians see the ideal image of their own destiny manifest in the sensible and reigning in heaven with Christ, making Mary both Virgin Daughter of Zion, Queen Mother of Israel, and Mother of the Church for Christians. (Jews, disputing of course the significance of Mary understood by Christians, have nevertheless found in her a sympathetic Jewish figure, just as Muslims have found in her a superlative exemplum of holiness.) The Apostles’ Creed adds a confession of the communio sanctorum, or “communion of saints.” The first and foremost communion of saints is participation in Christ by the grace of the Spirit operative in the church, particularly in its preaching and sacraments; but the Spirit also, second, creates a bond between the church in heaven, already experiencing some degree of eschatological unity, the church undergoing purification in preparation for that rest and reigning, and the church on earth, still presently struggling to unite Divine and Creaturely Wisdom in the church and in Christian Life. Time, space, and matter, especially, which is the principle of both of the first two, are incapable of overwhelming this bond, which is created by the Spirit himself between all souls, but knowable and participible only to those who have cultivated unity, sanctity, and catholicity, by purification (Greek: katharsis), illumination (photismos), and being made one with God, in the action (Sanskrit: karma) of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, beyond the mere limits of our one’s responsibilities (dharma), the devotion (bhakti) to God of the sacraments and prayers, and the knowledge (jnana) of the encompassing and beatifying vision (Greek: theoria) of God in contemplation.

5. One Baptism. Water is a universal human symbol and immersion in it for sacred purposes a near-universal ritual practice. Christians are not the only baptists, and they practice baptism because Jews in particular practiced it first, as a way of ritually purifying after something ritually polluting occurred. John the Baptizer, the Forerunner of Jesus in Christian sacred history, deepened the significance of baptism further by associating it with moral purity and repentance. Jesus was baptized by John, as were many of his followers, and after his lifetime baptism became the fundamental ritual of initiation into groups of Jesus’ followers, who associated it with a ritualized performance of Christ’s own death and resurrection (Rom 6:1-11) by which one received the Spirit and the grace of divine and Abrahamic adoption through incorporation into Christ (Gal 3:26-28). But baptism does not exist alone: it is initiation into the Christian ritual life and moral life of discipleship to Jesus. By partaking of Christ’s death and resurrection at baptism, the new Christian has hands laid on her or him and is anointed with oil to signify anointing with the Spirit, just as Christ was anointed with the Spirit at his baptism. Baptized and anointed, the new Christian is now permitted to partake of the eucharist, the ritual meal of bread and wine instituted by Christ as a sacrifice of memorial for his death and covenantal renewal, in which Christians, believing Christ’s own words, trust that by the Spirit’s overshadowing the bread and wine are transfigured to become Christ’s own crucified, risen, glorified, and deifying body and blood, partaking of which Christians are incorporated into Christ, spiritually nourished, and progressively sanctified. This meal is the central Christian sacrament, after baptism; for Christians, it is a foretaste of the messianic banquet that Jews and Christians together expect at the eschaton. It is by sharing the one bread and the one chalice that many become one body and that there is any kind of communion of the saints at all; it is for one’s ability to appear and partake of the eucharist that all other sacraments are administered to some degree or another. Baptism also initiates the Christian moral life of seeking, by obedience to the commandments of Christ, the cultivation of virtue, and the self-abnegation of the cross, to realize the sophianic ktisis in their own lives. Baptism is thus “for the remission of sins,” both insofar as it forgives all sins committed prior to baptism, and insofar as it is a perennial well of living water from which the grace of cleansing for post-baptismal sin may be drawn through prayer, fasting, almsgiving, repentance, confession, anointing (for illness), effort in marriage and ordination, and through good deeds. Christ, the Spirit, and the Church indeed reveal sin to us, unveiling the fallenness and evil of the sensible world due to matter and ignorance and propose to us a path back to the truth of ultimate reality, which is purely good, since evil is in fact the absence of good and therefore only the misfiring of being down here below.

6. Resurrection of the Dead. The Apostles’ Creed clarifies “of the flesh,” but the earliest Christian doctrine of resurrection involved flesh’s transformation into spirit, originally understood as a superior kind of substance to that of flesh, and therefore the body’s elevation. Even in those New Testament and early patristic texts which envision resurrection as simply the reconstitution and reanimation of flesh, it is rarely the case that the world and life which follow resurrection are simply coterminous with that of the present life. It is possible either to embrace a purely pneumatic view—the resurrection is the soul’s assumption of a pneumatic body—or a synthetic view, in which soul and flesh are reunited before both are mutually transfigured into spirit. It is also possible to hold that in some sense both eventualities will occur, though when, how, and where are subjects of constant debate amongst Early Jews and Christians who believed in resurrection: perhaps the soul’s ascent after death in its spiritual vehicle constitutes the first resurrection, and the actual restoration and assumption of the sarkic psychocorporeal entity the second, or perhaps some other combination of the views. I do not pretend to know, and those who do are misleading themselves and others as well: both in Early Judaism and in Early Christianity, no single concept of resurrection so prevailed as to enjoy full consensus and therefore to wield interpretive authority over all rivals, just as no single concept of the eschaton (restored Israel? heavenly ascent? reborn world? etc.) prevailed. But I would highlight two thinkers in particular for their differences and their influence. The first is Irenaeus of Lyons, who owes much of his eschatology both to the Johannine Apocalypse as well as to the early Jewish apocalypse 2 Baruch. For Irenaeus, what awaits us in the future will sound familiar to premillenialists of all stripes: a future antichrist, defeated by a returning Jesus, who rules the world in a temporary messianic kingdom with his saints (resurrected early), and then presides at the general resurrection, final judgment, and recreation of the universe, at which point the saints will take up their roles in different positions of the cosmos with respect to their different merits. The millennium for Irenaeus, it is important to point out, is not a literal thousand years, but an indefinite expanse of time in which Christ acts as pedagogue for the eternal state: his is a gradualist eschatology. So too is Origen’s, the second figure I have in mind, who, although he disputes the chiliastic hope as “too carnal” and “too Judaic” (the latter of which is language to be pitied, since “Judaic,” to my mind at least, is a compliment), also has a gradualist eschatology. For him, death ushers in an immediate resurrection of the soul in a bodily vehicle suited to its merits, either more demonic or more angelic, which, beginning from a terrestrial paradise, ascends through the various cosmic spheres, gaining intimate knowledge of the universe and of God’s divine economy as it goes, until it at last comes to the perfect knowledge of God and to the spatiotemporal point at which God has become “all in all” in and through Christ and the willing consent of all creatures—i.e., the ktisis. There may be a theoretically (endless and beginningless!) succession of worlds or aeons here below while this is happening, but eventually, all creatures meet at the ktisis and are willingly reconciled to God, undergoing judgment as the pathway to restoration. Later Christians tended in a more Origenian direction, though they never wholly abandoned the more Irenaean concept of a future eschaton; more recent Christians have flocked to Irenaeus, perhaps in part because of new developments in relationships to Judaism. My own view is that the great synthesis of these views, if one is even possible, has yet to be attempted. Minimally, Christians may hope to be alive with Christ after death, and that this life will involve a body that is continuous with the present one, though also utterly changed and transfigured beyond the limitations and humility of the flesh. It is also perhaps the case that Christian belief in resurrection is ultimately compatible with belief in some form of rebirth, dependent on the specific construction. On the one hand, many doctrines or possibilities of rebirth match at least the more Origenian doctrine of resurrection: when Hindus and Buddhists, for example, describe rebirth in a svarga as assuming a heavenly body or divine identity of some kind, retaining memory of one’s previous historical life, one has to wonder what difference there is between this and an immediate postmortem resurrection. On the other hand, early Christians generally believed in more than one principle at work in the self: spirit and soul are not quite the same thing, and it is possible that one is subject to rebirth while the other is not, in such a way that the individual life and its consequences retain their significance. Finally, even if resurrection means the reconstitution of flesh, all the way down to the actual specific particles used to make up my current body (a frequent point made in some traditional descriptions of the resurrection), one must acknowledge that the atoms making up my present flesh have a.) not always been mine (they used to belong to other entities) and b.) will not always be mine (at my age I have actually replaced every cell in my body about four times) and c.) any attempt to return them to me would mean denying them to whatever other creature is currently using them, if the point is to return one’s specific microscopic bits. But that also means, because of the linkage between soul and body, that in some sense my soul is related to other bodies, and in some sense my body is related to other souls; and because all souls are subsumed in the World Soul, there is some sense in which my soul is existentially connected to lives other than my own, such that I am somehow standing in succession to them and am conditioned by them and their experiences, and such that my own actions will condition those who come “after” me; such that even if it is not me who is reborn but, as Coomaraswamy put it, “The Lord is the only transmigrant,” then nevertheless I experience something like rebirth. And in that sense perhaps those thinkers are correct who posit that the “resurrection unto life” belongs only to those who become immortal through patiently doing good, while those who do evil are, as so many Scriptures say, finally destroyed—not the hypostatic spirit which is the Spirit as the core of who they are, but the psychocorporeal unity that grows up, as it were, around the spirit, so that on the one hand God does indeed “destroy both body and soul in Gehenna” but, on the other hand, “the spirit is saved as though through fire,” and brings about another attempt. Or perhaps it is that every individual life a spirit endures is also saved, not only in but also with the one that finds salvation through resurrection. This is, again, beyond us.

7. The Life of the Age to Come. Just as two variations on belief in resurrection predominated in Early Christianity, so too did two more or less irreconcilable concepts of the eschaton. One view of the “age” or “world to come” (Hebrew: olam haba) was much more temporally horizontal, while the other was much more spatially vertical: one focused on a future golden age (Satya Yuga) or messianic era, the other on a heavenly or cosmic ascent to God’s abode. Again, neither was ever fully victorious over the other. Perhaps it is the case that this sensible cosmos experiences periodic golden ages followed by successive ages of decline and decay, while souls in each one that attain liberation progress on to the noetic and perhaps even the sophianic creations; perhaps it is the case that there will be some final, transformative auxesis of the sensible universe that defies all present speculation and will bring the Kingdom of God forcibly in. Different biblical and later authors seem to speak with different points of view on the matter. The important points, really, are less the details of the eschaton and more its criteria: Christians hope to live with Christ and to reign with Christ. Christians, in fact, hope to be fully by grace what Christ is by nature as God, which is to say, completely deified, all the way to the point of, as St. Maximus puts it, becoming uncreated and participating completely in all that God is as though iron in a fire (borrowing Origen’s image). Scripture also fails to speak clearly about the ultimate fate of the wicked. Most texts simply speak as though the wicked will be destroyed; others, that they will be permanently imprisoned and tortured. But some texts speak also of all creation, even the wicked, being reconciled to God. It must logically be the case that this last possibility is so, philologically, hermeneutically, and philosophically: philologically, for neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament ever speak of an “eternal hell,” even when they do sometimes speak of destruction and punishment without aftermath as well as of universal reconciliation; it is only universal reconciliation which can fully accommodate some degree of annihilation and punishment, but if one prioritizes one of those sets of texts, the other two cannot be accommodated; and only universal reconciliation is worthy of God (dignum Deo). For if all things go out (exitus) from God as their point of origin, they can have no other end than return (reditus) to God: unfolding from the Father in and through the Son, who is the substantive reality of their noetic and sensible manifestation, by the vivifying power of the Spirit, who is the substantive reality of their participation in Soul and World Soul as the particular spirit or soul they are, and returning by the gift of the Spirit who unites them to the Son and through the Son offers them back to the Father in worship. The only life of the age or world to come, whichever age or world is meant, can be one of ceaseless striving (Greek: epektasis) into God’s infinity, in which all things experience no end of deification but instead by the Spirit, in and through the Son, draw ever more intimately near to the God and Father, becoming thereby members of the perichoresis of the Trinity. That is the sophianic ktisis: neither a pure mutability nor a final stasis, but an ever-moving rest and a perfected dynamism, a full participation in the movement of the Godhead itself, knowing and loving God as God knows and loves the creature in knowing and loving himself.