The message of Christ, like that of the Bible, is not a priori a teaching of metaphysical science; it is above all a message of salvation, but one that necessarily contains, under cover of an appropriate symbolism, metaphysics in its entirety.

Evidence and Mystery

 

God created the world out of nothing; this is the teaching of the Semitic theologies, and by it they answer the following difficulty: if God had made the world out of a preexisting substance, that substance must be either itself created, or else Divine. The creation is not God, it cannot therefore emanate from Him; there is an unbridgeable hiatus between God and the world, neither can become the other; the orders of magnitude or of reality, or of perfection, are incommensurable.

 

The main concern of this reasoning is not a disinterested perception of the nature of things, but the safeguarding of a simple and unalterable notion of God, while making allowance for a mentality that is more active than contemplative. The aim is therefore to provide, not a metaphysical statement that does not engage the will or does not appear to do so, but a key notion calculated to win over souls rooted in willing and acting rather than in knowing and contemplating; the metaphysical limitation is here a consequence of the priority accorded to what is effective for the governing and saving of souls. That being so, one is justified in saying that Semitic religious thought is by force of circumstances a kind of dynamic thought with moral overtones, and not a static thought in the style of the Greek or Hindu wisdom.

 

From the point of view of the latter, the idea of emanation, in place of creatio ex nihilo, in no way compromises either the transcendence or the immutability of God; between the world and God there is at once discontinuity and continuity, depending on whether our conception of the Universe is based on a scheme of concentric circles or on one of radii extending outward from the center to the periphery: according to the first mode of vision, which proceeds from the created to the Uncreated, there is no common measure between the contingent and the Absolute; according to the second mode of vision, which proceeds from the Principle to its manifestation, there is but one Real, which includes everything and excludes only nothingness, precisely because the latter has no reality whatsoever. The world is either a production drawn from the void and totally other than God, or else it is a manifestation "freely necessary" and "necessarily free" of Divinity or of Its Infinitude, liberty as well as necessity being Divine perfections.

 

As tor the contention that the creationist concept is superior to the so-called emanationist or pantheistic concepts because it is Biblical and Christ-given, and that the Platonic doctrine cannot be right because Plato cannot be superior either to Christ or the Bible, this has the fault of leaving on one side the real fundamentals of the problem.

 

First, what is rightly or wrongly called "emanationism" is not an invention of Plato, it can be found in the most diverse sacred texts; second, Christ, while being traditionally at one with the creationist thesis, nevertheless did not teach it explicitly and did not deny the apparently opposed thesis. The message of Christ, like that of the Bible, is not a priori a teaching of metaphysical science; it is above all a message of salvation, but one that necessarily contains, in an indirect way and under cover of an appropriate symbolism, metaphysics in its entirety. The opposition between the Divine Bible and human philosophy, or between Christ and Plato, therefore has no meaning so far as the metaphysical truths in question are concerned; that the Platonic perspective should go farther than the Biblical perspective brings no discredit on the Bible, which teaches what is useful or indispensable from the point of view of the moral or spiritual good of a particular humanity, nor does it confer any human superiority on the Platonists, who may be mere thinkers just as they may be saints, according to how much they assimilate of the Truth they proclaim.

 

For the Platonists it is perfectly logical that the world should be the necessary manifestation of God and that it should be without origin; if the monotheistic Semites believe in a creation out of nothing and in time, it is evidently not, as some have suggested, because they think that they have the right or the privilege of accepting a "supralogical" thesis that is humanly absurd; for the idea of creation appears to them on the contrary as being the only one that is reasonable and therefore the only one that is capable oflogical demonstration,as is proved precisely by tlfe method of argumentationused in theology.

 

Starting from the axiom that God created the worldout of nothing, the Semites reason thus, grosso modo: since God alone has Being, the world could not share it with Him; there had there fore to be a time when the world did not exist; it is God alone who could give it existence. On the religious plane, which so far as cosmology is concerned demands no more than the minimum necessary or useful for salvation, this idea of creation is fully sufficient, and the logical considerations which support it are perfectly plausible within the framework of their limitation; for they at least convey a key truth that allows a fuller understanding of the nature of God, as it is pleased to reveal itself in the monotheistic religions.

 

More than once we have had occasion to mention the following erroneous argument: if God creates the world in response to an inward necessity, as is affirmed by the Platonists, this must mean that He is obliged to create it, and that therefore He is not free; since this is impossible, the creation can only be a gratuitous act. One might as well say that if God is One, or if He is a Trinity, or if He is all-powerful, or if He is good, He must be obliged to be so, and His nature is thus the result of a constraint, quod absit.

 

It is always a case of the same incapacity to conceive of antinomic realities, and to understand that if liberty, the absence of constraint, is a perfection, necessity, the absence of arbitrariness, is another.

 

If, in opposition to the Pythagorean-Platonic perspective, the concept is put forward of an Absolute which is threefold in its very essence, therefore devoid of the degrees of reality that alone can explain the hypostatic polarizations - an Absolute which creates without metaphysical necessity and which in addition acts without cause or motive - and if at the same time the right is claimed to a sacred illogicality in the name of an exclusive "Christian supernaturalism'', then an explanation is due of what logic is and what human reason is; for if our intelligence, in its very structure, is foreign or even opposedto Divine Truth, what then is it, and why did God give it to us? Or to put it the other way round, what sort of Divine message is it that is opposed to the laws of an intelligence to which it is essentially addressed, and what does it signify that man was created "in the image of God"?

 

[According to Genesis "God created man in his own image" and "male and female created He them." Now according to one Father of the Church, the sexes are not made in the image of God; only the features that are identical in the two sexes resemble God, for the simple reason that God is neither man nor woman. This reasoning is fallacious because, although it is evident that God is not in Himself a duality, He necessarily comprises the principia! Duality in His Unity, exactly as He comprises the Trinity or the Quaternity; and how can one refuse to admit that the Holy Virgin has a prototype in God not only as regards her humanity but also as regards her femininity?]

 

And what motive could induce us to accept a message that was contrary, not to our earthly materialism or to ourpassion, but to the very substance of our spirit? For the "wisdom according to the flesh" of Saint Paul does not embrace every form of metaphysics that does not know the Gospels, nor is it logic as such, for the Apostle was logical; what it denotes is the reasonings whereby worldly men seek to prop up their passions and their pride, such as Sophism and Epicureanism and, in our days, the current philosophy of the world. "Wisdom according to the flesh" is also the gratuitous philosophy that does not lead us inwards and which contains no door opening on to spiritual realization; it is philosophy of the type of"art for art's sake” which commits one to nothing and is vain and pernicious for that very reason.

 

The incomprehension by theologians of Platonic and Oriental emanationism arises from the fact that monotheism puts in parenthesis the notion, essential metaphysically, of Divine Relativity or Maya; it is this parenthesis, or in practice this ignorance, which inhibits an understanding of the fact that there is no incompatability whatever between the "absolute Absolute", Beyond-Being, and the "relative Absolute", creative Being, and that this distinction is even crucial.

 

The Divine Maya, Relativity, is the necessary consequence of the very Infinitude of the Principle: it is because God is infinite that He comprises the dimension of relativity, and it is because He comprises that dimension that He manifests the world. To which it should be added: it is because the world is manifestation and not Principle that relativity, which at first was only determination, limitationand manifestation, gives rise to that particular modality constituting "evil". It is neither in the existence of evil things that evil lies nor in their existential properties nor in their faculties of sensation and of action, if it be a question of animate beings, nor even in the act insofar as it is the manifestation of a power; evil resides only in whatever is privative or negative with respect to good, and its function is to manifest in the world its aspect of separation from the Principle, and to play its part in an equilibrium and a rhythm necessitated by the economy of the created Universe.

 

In this way evil (wholly evil though it be when looked at in isolation) attaches itself to a good and is dissolved qua evil when one looks at it in its cosmic context and in its universal function.

 

Platonists feel no need whatever to try to fill the gap which might seem to exist between the pure Absolute and the determination and creative Absolute; it is precisely because they are aware of relativity in divinis and of the Divine cause of that relativity that they are emanationists.

 

In other words, the Hellenists, if they did not have a word to express it, nevertheless possessed in their own way the concept of Maya, and it is their doctrine of emanation that proves it.

 

 

Done