Introduction
Introduction
Scripture and Metaphysics (in the Augustinian Mode)
What is the nature of things? What are things, ultimately and in their most basic structures and essence? You, O Lord, know, for you made them all, sustain them all in existence, direct and guide all things to your good ends. You know every thing, love every thing, are good to every thing. You know them all more nearly than they know themselves. But how shall we know?
Should I even ask, O Lord? Should I even ask? You have spoken, and you have acted, and you have called us to believe. You have taught us that we walk by faith and not by sight, by trust in your good promises of goodness, and not by understanding. It is enough that you know the nature of things. Should I ask?
If I ask, will I receive an answer? You are beyond all my thoughts, greater than all that I can say, incomprehensible in your eternal communion as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You cannot be encompassed with any concept, bounded by anything greater than yourself, since you are greater than all. All my efforts to encompass you are acts of idolatry and not true worship. And you made all things and all things shine with the bright radiance of your glory. Your world seems as incomprehensible as you yourself.
Should I even ask? Can I ask? Dare I ask?
Have not some of your servants turned to such idols? Have they not bound you in forms and substances and concepts of their own imagining and bowed to worship what their own hands have made? Have they not turned your glory, the glory of the incorruptible God, into idols more ethereal than four-footed beasts and crawling creatures, and worshiped and served the creature rather than you, their Creator? Have not your servants all but denied that you were Creator, following vain philosophers who spoke of eternal matter and changeless forms? Have they not said that you are subject to time and development, denying that you are eternally complete and fulfilled? Have they not danced and sung before other gods? They asked, what is the nature of things? And were they not turned from your ways?
Dare I ask?
Yet, I cannot escape the question, for others have spoken before me. Others have asked, what is the nature of things? and have given answers. Are their answers true? Should I, O Lord, ignore their questions and answers and devote myself to prayer and service to the poor? Or shall I seek to answer? Shall I seek to determine if they speak the truth? How can I not? Can I tell whether their answers are true without asking the same questions? If a philosopher says that all things exist by participation in forms, should I, O Lord, believe him? If another says that matter is eternal, shall I, O Lord, accept that? If yet another says that all substances are informed matter, shall I receive that? If another says that we can know nothing of things beyond their phenomenal appearances, what shall I say? If the philosophers are correct about the nature of things, do they also describe your nature, O God? Are you one of the things whose nature these philosophers describe?
If you would not have me believe these philosophers, I would know why. And if they are false, I would know what truth to speak in place of their falsehoods.
Blessed be God. You have not been silent but have spoken too about the nature of things. You have said that in the beginning you made the heavens and the earth, and all that is in them. You warn that we do not know the activity of God who makes all things, just as we do not know the path of the wind or how bones take shape in the womb. You give to all life and breath and all things. You cause all things to work together for good to those who love you. You have said that you were with your Word in the beginning, your Word that is God and yet also with God, and that you made all things through this Word, so that nothing is made without him. You have said that he is the light that lightens every man, the light that shines in all that you have made. You have said that in you we all “live and move and have our being.” You have said that Christ is before all things and that in him all things consist, and that you will put all things under his feet, and that you will sum up all things in Christ, who fills all things. You have handed over all things to your Son, even judgment and life, and all things are put in subjection under him. You have given us the Spirit of your Son, the Spirit that “searches all things, even the depths of God.” You have promised that at the end you will be all in all, and you have taught us to receive all things with thanks.
What is the nature of things? Can I say more than this, O Lord, that from you and through you and to you are all things? Need I say more? Dare I?
This is what you taught your servant, Athanasius. You taught him that exploring the nature of things was exploring the truth that is Jesus the Christ. You taught him concerning the eternal Word, who is your living will and your eternal “plan,” the radiance of your glory, the river of living water that flows from you, the never-barren fountain. You taught him that you were never speechless or without reason. You taught him that every created thing, and all the rationality, pattern, and harmony of things, comes from that Word. You taught him that when we look rightly at your creation, we look not at a portrait of some unnamed and unnamable God but at the traces of your Logos. You taught him that everything shines with glory, and the glory is the eternal radiance that is the eternal light that is the Father. Human beings are logikos, rational, but you showed Athanasius that we are so because we are made in the image of your Logos. You taught your servant Athanasius that when the world descended into corruption and the image of God was tarnished, when death dragged the human race toward the grave, your living Logos became man to transform creation from the inside, to overcome death on the cross and to rise again so that your light might shine within and through our flesh. You showed Athanasius that through your incarnate Son and Spirit, you are forming new, stable human beings, a deified human society, where death and the fear of death are overcome.
You taught your servant Athanasius that Christ unites Scripture and all things, for Scripture, as much as the world and human existence and history, is all about Christ. Scripture everywhere teaches about Christ. His life, death, and resurrection are the hinge on which the drama of Scripture turns, and you taught Athanasius to find shadows of Christ in the Old Testament, shadows that break forth in light with the fulfillment of the New. And you taught that Christ is the pattern not only for the Scriptures but for all things. You taught Athanasius that Christ impresses his form on Old Testament institutions and persons, and that those forms are revealed in their fullness when he manifests himself in the flesh. You taught him to see that same pattern within creation, for the Logos is the exemplar of created reality as he is of Scripture.
Through your servant, you have taught us metaphysics as “christic metaphysics,” which we might also call “typological” metaphysics—just as we can call his interpretation of the Scriptures with equal justice both “christic” and “typological.”
What is the nature of things? What is ultimately true of things? Shall we listen to Athanasius, O God? Shall our final answer be not forms, and substances, and hylomorphic unions, and possibility and actuality, but finally only this: from eternity to the eschaton, it is all about Christ?
Is that not the answer to my questions, O Father? Is that not the sum of all questions about Scripture and metaphysics? How could I speak more or other than the Word that is the first Word and the last, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega?
Should I say more? Dare I?