The Divine Reasons of Creation and the Knowledge through Faith (Complements to a Secular Epistemology) Fr. Joan CHIRILA, Ph.D. While preparing my paper for this conference, one image surged into my memory: it was a picture from a highschool manual of psycho-pedagogy, representing the tree of knowledge. I remember being excited about this idea of representation. But now I realize that we are seeking, very often, only those things that we know, we are looking for the tree of knowledge, although the first humans rather hoped to find the “tree of life”. It appears to me so rude: are we only looking for our food? 1 believe we should rather learn to seck out the tree of life, of which St. Siluan the Athonite says that it ,is alive, vibrant with what he calls “energies” or “electricity”; “full of most amazing activity”, the tree is cosmic in its dimensions, it is not “a separate or separable organism” but is “vast” and all-embracing in its scope, “rami i far into space... uniting the life of Earth and Sky”. Here is a vision of joyful wonder, inspired by an underlying sense of mystery. The tree has become a symbol pointing beyond itself, a sacrament that embodies some deep secret at the heart of the universe. The mystery to which the tree points out is not spelt out by in specifically personal terms. He makes no attempt to ascend through the creation to the Creator”! And through the Christ, the tree provides food both for the body and soul. Experiencing knowledge. The personal aspect that the above text introduces can rely also on the following old testamentary event: Ex 3:1-6 ~ the bush that burned without consuming. In the first place, the vision described in Exodus reaches out beyond the realm of the impersonal. The burning bush at Horeb acts as the locus of an interpersonal encounter, of a meeting face-to-face, of a dialogue between two "Bishop KALLISTOS of Diokleia, Through Creation to the Creator”, p. 2, apud ‘Iutp:/incommunion org/articles/older-issues/through-creation-to-the-creatorsubjects. God calls out to Moses by name, “Moses, Moses!” and Moses responds, “Here I am. “Through the creation to the Creator”: in and through the tree he beholds, Moses enters into communion with the living God. Nor is this all. On the interpretation accepted by the Orthodox Church, the personal encounter is to be understood in more specific terms. Moses does not simply meet God, but he meets Christ. All the theophanies in the Old Testament are manifestations, not of God the Father — Whom “no one has ever seen” (Jn 1:18) — but of the pre-incamate Christ, God the eternal Logos. For example, when Isaiah sees God enthroned in the temple, “high and lifted up” (Isa 6:1), and when Ezekiel sees in the midst of the wheels and of the four living creatures “something that seemed like a human form” (Ezek 1:26), itis Christ the Logos Whom they both behold. In the second place, God does not only appears to Moses but also issues a practical command to him: “Remove the sandals from your feet.” According to Greek Fathers such as St. Gregory of Nyssa, sandals or shoes — being made from the skins of dead animals — are something lifeless, inert, dead and earthly, and so they symbolize the heaviness, weariness, and mortality that assail our human nature as a result of the Fall. “Remove your sandals,” then, may be understood to sig off from yourself the deadness of familiarity and boredom; free yourself from the lifelessness of the trivial, the mechanical, the repetitive; wake up, open your eyes, cleanse the doors of your perception, look and see! ‘And what, in the third place, happens to us when in this manner we strip off the dead skins of boredom and trivi ry? At once we realize the truth of God’s next words to Moses: “The place on which you are standing is holy ground.” Set free from spiritual deadness, awakening from sleep, opening our eyes both outwardly and inwardly, we look upon the world around us in a different way. Everything appears to us “new and strange... inexpressibly rare, and delightful, and beautiful.” We experience everything as vital and living, and we discover the truth of dictum, “Every thing that lives is Holy.” This is the precise meaning that the formulations and definitions of contemporary humanisms lack. And here is why. shop KALLISTOS of Diokleia, art cit, p. 3,Reason - concept and meanings. Let’s take a look at the ways in which reason is defined in most encyclopedias. First of all, reason means the capacity of the human spirit to understand universal relations and their meaning and to act according to them, including regarding the proper situation in life. It is the most important epistemological faculty, which controls the understanding and which establishes its limits. ‘Thus, reason becomes the most important instrument of the spiritual reflection”. The concept of “reason” designates the way or the act of thinking, but it may express also the meaning of a thing’s or a being’s existence’. Since Aristotle, a clear distinction is made between intellect (vots), as the intui e faculty, and reason (logos), as the discursive or inferential faculty. Yet since Kant, the word reason has bbeen used to shelter a bewildering chaos of notions. The word was also employed in a transcendental sense as the function of subsuming under the unity of the ideas the concepts and rules of the understanding®. In its general sense, therefore, reason may be attributed to God, and an angel may be called rational. But in its narrower meaning, reason is man’s differentia, at once his necessity and his privilege; that by which he is "a litle less than the angels", and that by which he excels the brutes. Man is rational in the sense that he is a being who arrives at conclusions from premises. Our intellectual life is a process, a voyage of discovery; our knowledge is not a static ready-made whole; itis rather an organism instinet with life and growth, Each new conclusion becomes the basis of further inference. Hence, too, the word reason is used to signify a premise or ground of knowledge, as distinguished from a cause or real ground. So important is this distinction that one may say herein lies the nucleus of all philosophy. The task of the philosopher is to distinguish the a priori of logic form from the a priori of time; and that this task is a difficult one is testified by the existence of the many systems of » “Ratiune”, Wikipedia Encyclopedia, hitp:/ro.wikipedia org/wiki/Ratiune, 11.09.2008. * Etymologically the word comes to us through the French, from the Latin ratio, which is originally the think" (ie. I propose a res to my mind). According to Donaldson, functional noun of the verb reor, res-h-ra-is, a derivative from hirscheir (hand); hence res is “that which is handled", and means an ‘object of thought, in accordance with that practical tendency of the Roman mind which treated all realities as palpable, Rabilly, Alfred. "Reason." The Catholie Encyclopedia, Vol. 12, New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911, 15 Sept. 2008 . * “Ratiune”, on worw.dexonling,rosearch.php2cuv=ratiune, 15.09.2008, Alfred RAHILLY,, art. cit, 3.psychologism and evolutionism. Reasoning, therefore, must be asserted to be a process sui generis. This is perhaps the best answer to give to the question, so much discussed by the old logicians, as to what kind of causative influence the premises exert on the conclusi mn. We can only say, they validate it, they are its warrant. For inference is not a mere succession in time; it is a nexus thought-of, not merely an association between thoughts. An irrational conclusion or a misleading association is as much a fact and a result as a correct conclusion; the existence of the latter is explained only by its logical parentage. Hence the futility of trying to account completely for the existence of a human thought-the conclusion of a train of reasoning--s associations. imply by the accompanying sense-data and psychologi ‘The question of validity is prior to all problems of gene ; for rational knowledge can never be the product of irrational conditions. On Reasons and Divine Reason in the Pairistic Thought. To this wide range of meanings of reason, I would add only one more: the plenary meaning employed by the Eastern Fathers of the Church regarding reason: the divine reason, of man and of all hypostasis of creation. 1 would like to introduce here above all, the theological discourse of Saint Maximos the Confessor on this issue. The fact or mistery of Christ is the source and starting point of his entire theological thought. The Ressurection of Christ led Maximos to locate the truth concerning the world and humanity - that is to say, their eternal existence - within this eschatological event which is the union of created nature with God through man’. A theological approach of this kind towards creation also constitutes the essence of Saint Maximos’s teaching on ‘the inner principles of beings’. Everything that God has created has its ‘inner principle’, its logos, in the transcendental divine Logos. ‘The inner principles of beings, however, are no longer the logoi of Heracleitus, nor are they to be identified with the eternal ideas of Plato. According to St Maximos they are the ‘wishes’ of God concerning creation. This means that God created all things with the wish that they should find their eternal existence ‘in the divine Logos’, body. The relationship with God which that is to say, with the goal of becoming 7 Fr. IGNATIOS Midich, Bishop of Branichevo, ..The Relationship of Humanity with Nature and the Ecological Problem according to.-—-Saint_—- Maximos the Confessor", pe s_ehtml, p. 1 hupy/iwww.iskon.co,yu/3/ekologinature can only have through humanity (because God freely willed that human beings should participate in him) is needed by nature because she is created and corruptible.* On the basis of Saint Maximos the Confessor’s theology, S: Gregory Palamas will attempt to emphasize the difference between knowledge of a thing and participation. uncreated energies are merely pious, while those who participated in them become it, by saying that those who praise God through knowledge of his without beginning and without end by grace dvapyot and atekettmtor’. Man may certainly be considered as dvapyoc and atekebrmtos in the neoplatonic system, where all beings are of the same essence with the One. They come forth from the One and return to it, In this case however, there is no question of a personal existence, but only the id personalictic and at first it certainly seems strange and inconceivable that man can of man or the common existence of humanity. The position of Maximos is enter the course of the unereated. The uncreated is that which really exists, and is not subjected to number and movement, the unique. On the other hand the created is that which came from nothing, which is subjected to number and movement, the multiform'®. Maximos sententiously states this fundamental doctrine of Christian theology: "the distance and difference between the uncreated and the created is infinite". But the relation which exists between the uncreated and created nature, is expressed in terms of transcendence as well as goodness. In the first case, we might point out that the uncreated nature remains inaccessible as infinitely surpassing the out that the uncreated nature essentiated 2 created nature; in the second, we might poi and produced the knowledge preexisting eternally in itself have come forth from nothing according to the will of God and in appropriate time, All beings, although they have their A6you, reasons, preexistent eternally within the one Logos, i. * ibidem. ® Panayiotis CHRISTOU, “Maximos Confessor on the Infinity Of Man! Schonborn (ed), Actes du Symposium sur le Maxime le Confesseur ( Editions Universitaires, Fribourg Suisse, 1982. "Cf Carit. 4, 9: PG 90, 10498. "Amb. lo. 7;PG91, 1077A.. it. 4, and 5; PG 90, 1088. in Felix Heinzer — Christoph ibourg, 2-5 september 1980),God'*. Each one was made according to a corresponding reason, its logos, which defines its genesis and its essence. From this origin, creation dynamically rushes to its completion. ‘The term Logos, with its long tradition both pre-Christian and Christian, takes 4 particular meaning in Maximos connected with his teaching in image, likeness and participation'* "All beings have a preliminary participation in God, according to the analogy of their creation especially rational beings, which according to the reason of creation, are seated in God himself and therefore are called poipa Oco0, particle of God"'5 " In Saint Maximos the Confessor’s view, the destiny of man is the communi mn of the God's i within the world as a whole. The ine nature and the participation in the eternity of God, attainable through planting the respective logos into man in his creation and through his energy inction according to the Aéyos UaEnG is sharply contrasted with the uncreated, while the distinction according to the tpémoc ‘vaiipgems is not separating but uni ‘energies are goods which may be participated in by rational beings'*. ing. God is that which is participated in; his What St. Gregory Palamas seeks to express through the essence-energies distinction, St. Maximus the Confessor indicates by speaking in terms of Logos and ogoi , even though the specific concerns of Maximus, and the context in which he is writing, are not altogether identical with those of Palamas. According to Maximus, Christ the Creator-Logos has implanted in each created thing a characteristic logos, a “thought” or “word,” which is the divine presence in that thing, God’s intention for it, the inner essence of that thing, which makes it to be distinctively itself and at the same time draws it towards God. By virtue of these indwelling logoi, each created thing is not just an object but a personal word addressed to us by the Creator. The divine Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Wisdom and the Providence of God, © amb. lo, 42; PG 91, 1329A. Ch Lthunberg, Microcosm and Mediator. The theological anuhropology of Maxinus the Confessor, Lund 1965, 7881. LH. Dalmais, La théore des logo! des creatures che: S. Maxime le Confessew, i: RSPATH 36 (1982) 244-249. "Commentary to On the Divine Names 2,3: PG 4, 352 "Amb. Io. 7; PG 91, 10804 "Cap. Theol. 1,48; PG 90, 1100-1101constitutes at once the source and the end of the particular logoi, and in this fashion acts as an all-embracing and unifying cosmic presence'”. Anticipating Palamas, Maximus speaks of these logoi, as “energies,” and at the same time he likens them to birds in the branches of a tree: The Logos of God is like a grain of mustard seed: before cultivation it looks extremely small, but when cultivated in the right way it grows so large that the highest principles (logoi) of both sensible and intelligible creation come like birds to revive themselves in it. For the principles or inner essences (logoi) of all things are embraced by the Logos, but the Logos is not embraced by any thing. According to the interpretation of Maximus, then, the cosmic tree is Christ the the Creator-Logos, wh isin the branches are the logoi of you and me and all the created things. The Logos embraces all the logoi, but is not Himself embraced or circumscribed by them. Here Maximus seeks — as does Palamas in his use of the essence-energies distinction — to safeguard the double truth of God's transcendence and His immanence. Whether we speak, as St. Maximus does, of the indwelling logoi, or prefer to use the Palamite word “energies” — and we can of course choose to employ both terms — our basic me: tention remain the same. All nature is theophanic. 1g an Each created person and thing is a point of encounter with the Creator. We are to see God in everything and everything in God. Wherever we are and whatever we are doing, we can ascend through the creation to the Creator". The divine Logos is the supreme hypostatic Reason, the reasons of all created things existed and continue to exist in the supreme Logos'’. Creation produces a ramification of the reasons from their unity within the divine Logos and their movement produces their reassembly in this specific unity... their reasons (logoi) preexisted in Him...their reasons are understood by Maxim as ,uncreated energies”, that is why they are superior to the reason of repetition. Between the created reason — which is inclined, through righteous judgment, through knowledge, but also through personal will, towards the supreme Reason due to an interior desire, or towards a conformity, towards a more and more intimate © Bishop KALLISTOS of Diokleia, art. cit, p. 5. " rbidem ' Saint MAXIMOS the Confessor, Ambigua, in PSB 80, FIBMBOR, Bucharest, 1983, p.41-42.relationship with this Reason, as it exercises a certain attraction on the created voluntary reason — and the supreme Reason it exists an affinity or reciprocal personal love. And the closing up of the created personal reason to the supreme personal Reason means not only an ever greater actualization of her as personal reason, but also a development of her love towards the supreme personal Reason. This provides strength to the human reason to come closer to God not only through knowledge, thus, not only through herself, but to guide through virtues the whole human being, through love, towards God. Thus, Saint Maximos binds together love and reason; or, in other words, he provides a fundament for love, that is the relationship between the personal reasons of creatures and the supreme personal Reason, Who works on them by the models of these reasons, which tend to unify within the personal Word, together with the creatures themselves. Human reason reaches the surface and fortifies herself while consolidating the ontological reason of the human being, and imposes herself to man with her permanent desire for the supreme personal Reason, through the liberation of man from the power of temptations that attire him towards a passional, reductive and exclusive relationship with the sensitive surface of things; but also through virtues, ‘This doctrine on the divine reasons of things (t@ dvtwv) connects these reasons to the divine Reason. Denys the Areopagite” affirmed that reasons are wills. He reaffirmed through this expression the idea of Clement of Alexandri that creation is not a necessary result of the divine power or of the natural dynamics of the divine, but of the divine will. In the next centuries, theologians will no longer speak alternatively of paradigms (or reasons) and wills, in the manner of Denys, but they would rather use a composed expression: His volitive thinking” Reasons no longer are, like before, inert models, but rather volitive creational powers of God which imply the thinking of models of things. The reasons of creatures, although eternal - as there is nothing temporal in God - are not part of God's nature, but they are the expression of His divine will. The idea of creature, of ‘ine, is not part of the intimate necessity something apart from God, of a “me” non-di of the divine essence, is not produced in virtue of natural fecundity, because, in such 4 case, it would become a fourth hypostasis, and that is a sacrilege assumption. It was ® DV. nom. 5,8, P.Q.,3, col. 824.C. pseudo-Chiril, On the Holy Trinity, P.Q., 77, col. 1145 C; St, JOHN Damascene, De fide orthodaxa, 1,9, P.Q,, 94, col. 837 A.produced in a supreme liberty from all eternity. God is absolutely free regarding More than this, God ity of creatures themselves... The world, even possible creatures. There is no cause which stresses on His is eminently free even from the possil in the divine idea, is an absolute surplus, an added reality, or, better said, an added gift, free and good, of the almighty divine freedom and of the superabundant love... ty, which belongs exclusively to the Trinity, and contingent eternity of the free acts of divine grace™. We must di guish two modes of eternity: ontological ete Saint Maximos connects to these reasons the idea of purpose, of thelos. He declares that, by intuition of the divine reasons of created things, we intuit in the same time their purpose, their dynamics towards the accomplishment of a purpose. “All things created by God in the nature, if contemplated with the proper knowledge, mysteriously reveal us the reasons that came to existence and also their divine purpose”, God sees and wishes in the reasons of thing their movement and purpose, which is their deification. But, as the Fathers paradoxically affirm the eternal existence of divine reasons and their dependency to the divine will, so does Maximus ‘when he paradoxically unites the purpose of God concerning them with the creatures” I to come close or not to this specific purpose. To conclude, I will briefly introduce a paragraph on Father Stiniloae’s epistemological credo, which I always invoke when speaking about relationship between science (correspondent to natural revelation) and religion or fait. First of all, he considered that natural and supernatural revelations do not contradict but rather complement each other; there is no antinomy between scientific and theological knowledge, as there is no actual antinomy between cataphatic and apophatic knowledge; second of all, genuine knowledge is only possible within the framework of personal communion, and third, there is always a “two-way” continuity between the apophatic and cataphatic. These three ideas where the fundaments of a holistic epistemology which shapes his entire theological demarche. Throughout his research, Father Stiniloae reiterates these ideas incessantly, but within different contexts and from different perspectives. In our opinion, scientific knowledge is a part of natural revelation, therefore it cannot be opposed to theological knowledge. They are rather ® G. FLOROVSKL, "Lidée de la eréation dans la philosophie chrétienne", in Logos, Bucharest, 1/ 1928, p. 18-20. * Answers (0 Thalassius, 13, P.Q., 90, col. 293-296.complementary, in the sense of Matthew 5:17: “Think not that | am come to destroy the law, or the prophet sense of fulfillment that the divine reasons of creation and the knowledge through am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” And it is with this faith can become complements to a secular epistemology. On the path towards knowing myself as reason, or as image of the Logos, or ‘on the path towards the clear knowledge of the Logos which enracined His reasons or ‘words within the rationality of the world, I must imprint my reason within anger and desire, as irrational powers of the soul, and tum them into love and desire for the spiritual goods, bringing them together in a mind that only delights in God’s intimacy. As reason progressively imposes within myself, as my word progressively retrieves its ‘communicating function, undeceivable for the others and unclosing me in isolation, and as I progressively discover the rationality of the of the world, going beyond the surface of the mat world and body which only satisfies an irrational sensibility, as 1 progressively see in my neighbors the hypostatical images of the speaking Word, which demand my answer, the Logos or divine Word comes to light from the depths of the world, of myself and of every human person. 10