CREATION: Being & Becoming

The following paper is inspired by the writings of Sergius Bulgakov from The Lamb of God.

God created the world out of nothing. “Creation out of nothing” signifies the absence of any foundation for the creation of the world other than God Himself, for there is only God. God, as the eternal creative potential, coexists with the nothing or the unmanifested creation which is the eternal fertile field from which God’s creative Ideas are actualized. The nothing is like a mirror in which God’s reflection is revealed; this reflection is the emanation of God’s Divine Being reflected in non-being. “And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehends it not.” (John 1:5) Thus, God can contemplate, realize, and create the fullness of His Divine nature from “nothing.” In the Bible, God’s Divine nature is referred to as Love and Wisdom: God is Love and His Divine nature (Wisdom, in Greek is Sophia) is His Divine world or eternal Creative Life. Stated more correctly, God, the Creator is Love and Intelligent Light, and His Divine nature is Creative Life; Love, Light and Life are one and the same. Here the source of life is identical to life itself; God’s Divine nature is precisely the creative life of God which lives in God’s Divine World.

The temporal world is the time/space universe created from the unmanifested or non-being by the Eternal God. “Nothing” does not exist as something separate from God; it is not an abyss or a void surrounding God. God is the All in All so there is nothing outside of God; therefore, the nothing arises from God as He is also the nothing. Nothing is a relative concept which correlates with something already in existence, but something incomplete. In other words, nothing is the beginning of being, albeit incomplete being in the process of becoming. Nothing understood as the potential of becoming makes this the state of non-being from which intelligent beingness arises. Intelligent beingness in the state of becoming is Divine-Humanity in the making. Divine-Humanity is the Bride of Christ or the Church without walls.

Creation out of nothing is the calling forth of life in which nothing finds a place for itself as emerging life and becoming intelligence. The Divine nature of God exists as creative life in humanity in its becoming state, that is, only in becoming the fullness of God’s Divine Image, the Christ, actualized in Divine-Humanity; this is the purpose of Creation. From The Lamb of God, Bulgakov states, “The Godhead manifests itself through a process of self-unfolding in the subsequent multiplicity of being while maintaining its unity.” Out of the nothing God creates the seen and unseen universe including humanity which exists in a state of perpetual becoming corresponding to the definition of time as having a beginning, a continuous becoming, and a fulfillment; the Alpha and Omega. In creating the becoming world, it seems as if it has always been God’s intention to experience human life in order to reveal to humanity how a human being is also divine as the example of Jesus Christ clearly represents.

God experiences Creation through humanity. In this divine union, the Creator extends His Beingness into Creation by infusing Himself into an image of Himself outside of Himself in the time/space universe. From The Lamb of God, “In Himself God is thus the Absolute, but for the world He is the Absolute-Relative, existing in Himself but also outside of Himself. To go outside of Himself into His other, to place Himself in extradivine being and to repeat Himself, as it were, to make an image of Himself outside of Himself – this is the work of the Divine absoluteness as omnipotence.” This is the revelation of God outside of Himself so His love and divine nature are known and His omnipotent Being exists in relation to Creation.

If God, the Absolute existed without Creation and remained in solitude and silence, He would be unlimited potential residing in the non-being of the nothing; He would be the depth and silence of the Absolute where beingness is non-existent. He would not exist for anything or anyone outside of Himself, meaning He would not exist insofar as existence is to exist for another. God as spirit is incomprehensible and cannot be known directly. He is eternal, without beginning or end and is the ultimate origin of all things; Eternity contains the fullness of His life. He encompasses all things without being encompassed. God is inaccessible outside of His relationship to the world. Creation exists in God’s Divine Presence, but there is no place for the time/space elemental universe in Eternity itself. God in his Eternity creates the world for time, and therefore in time. Although it is not possible to surmount the abyss that lies between the Creator and creation, in His omnipotence, God Himself surmounts it because He is the Absolute existing for another – existing for humanity.

Being and Becoming

The becoming world follows a cosmic path in which human consciousness is created to reflect upon that part of God’s Divine nature in which we are still unconscious. This Divine nature is the foundation of the world’s being and is in a state of potentiality which humanity must realize and actualize. This cosmic potential of God’s nature is being actualized by humanity in the continuing ongoing process of becoming. In the beginning was the Word and that Word continues to resound from the inner depths of Eternity, and it will continue to reverberate until the Alpha and Omega are fulfilled. For humanity, our becoming consciousness is submerged in and modified by non-being (the collective unconscious), thus our personal unconscious slowly awakens and is being liberated from non-being. The becoming world, in its awakening, must follow the Way of Life until humanity, as a whole, fully reflects and actualizes God’s omnipresent Divine nature, meaning the Light (Christ or Logos), Life (Wisdom or Sophia) and Love.

In our human world, God’s Divine nature is the evolving creaturely life of fallen humanity. In other words, God’s Wisdom or Creative Life is in different degrees of awakening or becoming beingness; creaturely life in the state of becoming is creaturely Sophia. That which exists pre-eternally as God’s perfect Idea, in His self-revelation, exists in the world only in becoming, as becoming divinity. God established His Divine Creative Life not as an eternally fixed world but as a becoming world. God repeated Himself in creation, so to speak; He reflected Himself in nonbeing; one and the same consciousness is revealed in God and in creation.

The temporal world which exists in time as well as time itself can be understood only in connection with eternity which is their foundation; and conversely, eternity has its image or reflection in time. Divine creative activity is absolute creative activity, which does not have or need anything for itself outside itself. God created the world out of Himself, out of His essence, and nothing more. In order to be, nothing must arise having been established in God, who is one with the nothing as well. Creation out of nothing is nothing other than the calling forth of life in the temporal world of becoming being, in which one can apply the definition of time as beginning, continuation, and end. This nothing is the source for the infinite variety of forms in the world as well as the laws and principles governing them; in this sense it is also the proto-matter of the world in which the world is created. The becoming world must, in its becoming, follow the long path of cosmic being to the end before it can reflect in itself the countenance of God’s Divine nature, which, being the foundation of the world’s being, is only in a state of potentiality, which the world must actualize in itself.

The Absolute–Relative

The creation of heaven and earth is an act of God’s love, flowing beyond the boundaries of His Divine eternal Life into the time/space universe. This act is a metaphysical kenosis or a voluntary self-diminution of His Divine Being; in other words, along with His Absolute Beingness, God establishes a relative being with which He enters into an interrelationship with the world as God and Creator. This loving, selfless embrace expresses the sacrifice of the Creator’s love for the world. This is a love of the Absolute for the relative, in which the Absolute becomes the Absolute-Relative. God is not diminished when He goes beyond the boundaries of Eternity into a loving relationship with the world, “…in Him we live, move, and have our being.” Jesus Christ opened the door in which we creaturely humans can become conscious of the relative-absolute and can reflect within ourselves upon the miracle of the Absolute-Relative, a relation which defines our spiritual beingness.

Bulgakov explains, “The creation of the world is therefore not an inner self-positing of Divinity, which is God in the Holy Trinity, but a certain work of God consisting of a series of works as creative acts… God’s proper being belongs to eternity, where there is no beginning and no end, where the actuality of His self-positing is never exhausted, and thus the categories of time are totally inapplicable there. But the world, as a becoming world, belongs to time, which is precisely becoming.” As we know, Creation occurs in time, it has a beginning and an end, consequently, what we experience in the Absolute-Relative is a transition of God’s divine life from eternity to time, from the immobility of the Absolute to the becoming of the relative.

The love of the Creator is the divine inspiration in the creation of the world; it is God’s self-inspiration which is the Holy Spirit… “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2). From the Lamb of God, “The world is created by God in the Holy Trinity, and each of the hypostases reveals itself in the creation of the world in conformity with its properties.” The Father creates by the Word, “And God said, Let there be…” The Son, as the Word of God is the content of creation, in all its forms and aspects, and is identified with it as the Word of the All in All. The Holy Spirit, the third hypostasis, clothes in beauty the structure and order of creation. Bulgakov summarizes, “The Holy Spirit, as the accomplishment of creation, is the Creator’s joy in His creation: for the Father, it is joy in the manifested Word; for the Son, it is joy in the revelation of the Father in the world. The Holy Spirit is the inspiration of God’s creative activity in the creation of the world.”

The Holy Spirit reposes upon the Son in eternity as the love of the Father and the Son and proceeds outward into creation as the Father’s love for the Son. The Holy Spirit reposes upon the Son, the Logos of the world, to the extent that the becoming world can receive Him. By this action, the Holy Spirit actualizes the becoming world in the realization of its content. The life of the world is the Holy Spirit, while the Son is its foundation. The work of the Holy Spirit is to help the world, in its state of becoming, transition from incompleteness to fullness, that is, to encompass the fullness of Christ’s love and the fullness of His transfiguration. The Absolute descends from the throne of its absoluteness to the relative and the light of God’s eternity falls upon the world. Even though the world in itself is creaturely and non-eternal, in its relation to the Creator, it is co-eternal with God, and so are you and I.

WHOLENESS

It is the perceiving of light, life, and love which turns the soul into spirit, like elements into oxygen;
And it is this wind which exalts and then returns the wholeness to its ever-present origin.
Round and round and round in a great, endless cycle of night and day and pleasure and pain,
We sow and reap our lives upon the earth as the wind is gathering clouds and making rain;
And there is nothing better for us than to think of such true beauty and let it lead us to a higher place,
As we consciously transform our own dust and wind into the oxygen of grace.