Creation

It is the intent of these papers to be short, understandable introductions of important topics of Wisdom. Thus their content cannot be considered a balanced or full discussion of the topic, but rather suggestions for thought, reflection and discussion. The first topic "Creation" is more than immense and to attempt much enlightenment in one brief essay is perilous, further, what it means to be a created being must also be considered. The word "Creation" or "The Creation" brings to mind for those of us having our roots in the Christian tradition an immediate association with the story of Genesis and the ideas of Christian theology which we have heard. It is helpful to put all that aside at the outset to avoid confusing ourselves or blocking out clear thinking. The perspective enunciated here is taken from the contemplative tradition and represents a narrow sample, but a representative one from those sources.

A good many years ago, a book was published with the perceptive title "Your God is Too Small".. Almost every idea we have of God is too small for the world in which we actually live. Thus our first consideration is to realize that any description of God worthy of consideration must be large enough to allow the creation of this almost unimaginably vast and complex world from atoms to stars and nebulae. To ask how big is God is about on a par with asking how many angels can dance on the head of pin. Dimensional thinking is simply not applicable to theological language. Yet it is useful to say a few words about our universe, as we currently know it. In age, the universe is believed to be more than twenty billion years and in size to be larger than twenty billion light years. As little grasp as we have of that first figure, the second is even more beyond our experience. A light-year is simply the distance that light travels in one year at its usual rate of about 186,000 miles per second. Think how long it would take one to fly 186,000 miles at 600 miles an hour; that�s a mere 310 hours, 12.9 days to travel the distance that light does in one second. Even at the speed of light, it requires several years to reach the nearest star, or more accurately for the light from that star to reach us. The light from the most distant fringe of the universe presently known has been traveling for billions of years to reach us. The point of all this is that any God concept must be big enough in concept, time and space to encompass that universe. Retreating to a simplistic "creationist" theory is really of no help here either, especially so if thereby one tries to deny, contrary to geological and archaeological evidence, every notion of successive forms in earth�s history. The creationists are right in denying neo-darwinian evolutionary theory, but wrong is denying geological and archaeological facts.

Then comes the matter of complexity. Our earth is a small planet, rather rare in that it is the only one we know of which supports life. But note, I said "the only one known to support life". In our current astronomical knowledge there are believed to be one to four hundred billion stars in a galaxy. Further, there are believed to be some one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. Doubtless some of these trillion stars are similar to our sun in quality and quantity of radiation and many, it seems likely, have planets situated like the earth making life feasible on them. Thus the medieval notion that we, i.e., we humans, are God�s only children in this universe must be carefully circumscribed. We are the only children of God that we know. More accurately, we are the only "thinking" beings with a self-concept that we know. It is, of course accurate and necessary to regard the whole of the realm of nature as God�s children.

Next we come to that troublesome matter called time. Does time flow carrying us all along as in a flowing stream? Is time in any sense reversible as some physicists claim? Certainly psychologically time does not flow at a steady pace. Some moments are dragged out and others speed by. Some days take an eternity to pass, others are gone like a puff of smoke. Can any time be reversed? Perhaps so, the physicists say, but what about morally? Sometimes the past can be undone a bit, but seldom cancelled. It seems that morally speaking we cannot go home again. The problem is that we have changed and thus home has changed.

What about time for God? How does God experience time or does God experience time? Is all time equally present now for God? And if time be a stream where is God in that stream? Using the text from Rev. 21:16, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end." Paul Tillich wrote a fine essay called "The Eternal Now". In it he points out that our sense of the flow of time really begins when we realize that time, for us, will come to an end; that we have a terminus in this life that is inescapable. Christian thought has always spoken of time as flowing toward an end, a final termination of the world�s process, but it has also spoken about eternity. Tillich wrote, "The mystery of the future is answered in terms of the eternal of which we may speak in terms of images taken from time. But if we forget that the images are images, we fall into absurdities and self-deception. There is no time after time, but there is eternity above time." Tillich points us in an interesting direction with the concept "eternity". How does eternity relate to time? This is the same question with which this paragraph began, how does God experience time. Our answer is that God transcends time.

What does it mean to say God transcends time? The astro-physicists now theorize that time began with the beginning to the universe. Their statement is like the poetic line of e. e. cummings

Now we must ask what is meant by eternity. It is certainly not time without end. Nor, as the great English preacher of the nineteenth century remarked of most people�s view of heaven as a life like this one only better oiled, eternity is not simply another life with no bumps, warts, or pimples. Eternity is another dimension altogether. It is necessary to give up any form of applied logic from ordinary human life to try to understand eternity. Ordinary logic, even the most sophisticated logic, is simply transcended here. A parallel is found in the human experience that is characterized as "bliss", "ecstasy" or "nirvana" which, in the face of evil, simply says, but all is well. Like Dame Julian of Norwich�s famous words, "All is well, and all manner of things are well, all is well". When I was in my second parish, a woman, perhaps in her fifties, fell ill with incurable cancer. When I visited her in the hospital, perhaps the day of or after she had been told that she had only a short time to live, she gave me an astonishing story. In the midst of her worry and her pain, she had begun to hear like a repeated record in her mind the words, "fear not, all is well". From that day on she had pain, but maintained a radiant outlook. She was not afraid; she knew that all was well. If we are to grasp at all the meaning of eternity, it will have to be by taking advantage of the insights God gives which transcend logic. Fortunately, the contemplative tradition can be of great help here as can the perennial philosophy. Now a brief consideration of the philosophical matter. In the view of the perennial philosophy, creation occurs not in time, but in eternity. Further, creation is ordered hierarchically. To give a simple illustration, we speak of inert matter, living matter (life), mind, soul and spirit. This is the simple hierarchy of being. Before further consideration of how this hierarchy is represented in the world, it is useful to consider hierarchy in God. If there is hierarchy in the world and it is clear that there is, there must necessarily be hierarchy in God the source of all being. In the contemplative tradition this hierarchy is usually rendered as the Godhead overall, then as the Trinity, as God facing the world, so to speak., yet all God is Spirit. From the physicists we should learn the difficulty of talking about anything supposedly before the beginning, before time was. But, to paraphrase a Biblical quote used earlier, "before Time was, I Am". Thus we must not think of any hierarchy in god as a temporal one; it is rather a qualitative one. From the perennialists view God first (an atemporal, or trans-temporal first) calls into being in Godself the logos.

The logos is the whole realm of possibilities. This realm is helpfully considered as the archetypal realm. There is an ancient axiom that can be helpful here, "as above, so below", meaning that all things of the world are in some respect reflections of heavenly possibilities. Plato spoke of this as the realm of ideas, sometimes also called forms. Each thing in the world is a combination of substance and form. For example, consider a tree. It is a concrete object, but it also has about and in it the idea of treeness and as such represents a universal, an archetype. The logos is the whole realm of the archetypes, the total realm of possibilities, everything that ever could be and every way it could be and every relation possible. The perennialists argue that this must be true in God if God is to be perfect, i.e., complete, whole, full, without lack.. Thus with the logos God "calls into being" the whole realm of possibility. Caution! Do not think there was once a time when the logos was not; remember we are speaking of eternity, not time. In eternity one could say all times are equally present, or that there simply is no time.

Now a word about the relation of eternity (God) to time. Being is the first fruit of the Infinite and the highest level of Maya, the contingent realm. "God as Beyond Being is Reality absolutely unconditional, while Being is Reality insofar as it determines itself in the direction of its manifestation." As metacosmic Reality, beyond all manifestation (i.e. being) Being is sometimes called the uncreated Logos. Being then means the personal God of the various religions who is called Creator, Legislator, Preserver, Judge of the world, to give a few of the world�s religious ideas. The distinction between Beyond-Being and Being is a distinction in fact, in divinis, i.e., within Godself. It must be reiterated that all of Reality is only God�everything that exists is only the metaphysical Infinite, which is Totality. Yet it is correct to speak of metaphysical levels. Reality-God is a single indivisible Essence (Spirit) so the idea of levels must not preclude God being in all and through all. This is implied in an ancient insight, "As above so below", but also every below is in the above. The world may be described as within God and is an expression of god. "Every above is within the below, not just in Heaven but on Earth as well, and it is this which makes possible Revelation, incarnation, intellection, inspiration and a host of other divine disclosures."

The Logos as all possibility may, as I suggested, be compared to, or illustrated by, the concept of archetypes. In order better to understand this matter of the archetype consider a particular and omnipresent archetype, the "Great Mother", or the Divine Feminine if you prefer. As with every archetype, the Great Mother has both what we may term positive and negative aspects. It is incorrect to think of positive and negative as equal to good and bad because they may be either, in moral or in practical terms. To give some indication of the complexity of this archetype�s manifestation in life, consider that Erich Neumann, a great Jungian psychologist, wrote a book specifically about the Great Mother. This book contains well over 300 pages of small print, plus another 200 pages of the pictorial representation of the Great Mother throughout the world. More specifically some of her manifestations are, in relation to the child, to nourish and protect, to keep warm and hold fast. The child comes to be within the mother�s body, nourished by her blood. But also the Great Mother has her dark, or negative side, the witch, Terrible Mother. Insofar as she nourishes her children, it is to feed her own ego. Like the witch of fairy tale, she fattens them in order later to eat them. She is thus the devouring maw of the earth, the continual threat of death and destruction. Our relation to this side of the archetype is one of fear and abject dependence, thus cutting the string of any possible individual development. We should be aware that not only our life mothers, but institutions often act in, or are related to, in this way. Think of how institutions, the Church, the Corporation, the University, the Government can and do devour those who relate to them. Think also of the complicity of those who get devoured. This mention of only the one archetype, but one of major importance is all that space permits, however, a few others without illustration will be mentioned. The Great Father, The Child, the Archetype of Transformation, the Hero, and so on virtually ad infinitum. The archetypal realm, the Logos, is indescribably vast, and each is not only a unit with its own potential, but is dynamic and interrelated to the whole. Jung�s work with the archetypal theory is useful and helpful. However, it is necessary to be cautious here and not confuse Jung�s use of the term/concept archetype with that of the perennial philosophy and contemplative tradition; they have much in common, but are not exactly equivalent. Jung often denies the metaphysical implication of his archetypal theory because he did not want to be cast as either a metaphysicist or a mystic, but in fact he ventured into both realms more than a little. Jung�s concern was most often the function of the archetypes within the psyche; that is not the concern here, at least as yet. In Jung�s vision and research the archetypes of the collective unconscious function more or less autonomously, yet are all interrelated. One can imagine them as being like currents in the vast ocean which vary in intensity and volume and even a bit in location, yet have perennially stable characteristics that identify them from one another. Being infinite, God has no fixed boundaries, thus the relationship between what is God and what is not God is fluid, like the oceanic currents. The most important thing for us to realize about this archetypal realm, the logos, is its omnipresence. Jung often quoted an old saying that "all the gods are within you" to support, or illustrate, his thesis of the archetypal nature of the unconscious. For him the unconscious was a boundless realm; no limits could be set on its extent.

We have noted God as the Godhead or as Beyond Being, but God is also Being Itself. Creation occurs as God emanates the being of the world. The older doctrine of creation ex nihilo was based on the presumption that God must not in any way be sullied by too much contact with the finite, the world. But if we push more deeply into the idea involved, it is clear that God as "beyond-being" overcomes the nothingness of "not-being" in order that there may be the realm of "being". Eternity beyond time brings about being with time. So, simply, it may be said that God overcomes nonbeing in order that there be a world. This overcoming is not a one-time thing. Clearly the notion that God seizes on chaotic matter and imposes an order which is then left to run its course is unacceptable. The insight of the contemplative traditions is that God is continually involved in the creative process. Without God�s creative activity nothingness, not-being would absorb the being of the world instantly. Thus when the Psalmist cries out "Whither would I flee from God?" there is no answer, for there is no place, no state of being without God.

The problem of nothing is a special problem and akin to the problem of evil has no fully satisfactory solution. Yet within perennial philosophy there is a suggestion of great merit. It is simply that "If God is Absolute�All Possibility--, then by definition [the Absolute] must include its own impossibility." It is quite difficult to understand nothingness because we tend usually to turn it into something positive. An analogy that may help is that of coldness. In physical terms we know that there is no such thing as coldness, only less heat, or the radiation of heat leaving something less warm than it was. Coldness is purely a matter of human perception and convenience, a way of speaking. The reality is only less or more heat, or warmth. Even one degree above absolute zero, that theoretical temperature at which molecular action ceases, is heat and not cold. We may also refer to the Hindu notion of Maya, the relative. "In a certain sense, Maya represents the possibility for Being of not being." Just as we call something that is neither real nor unreal an illusion, so Maya is the illusion that God produces in order to seem not to be. God thus veils Godself under the cloak of existence as if He/She were not. "Thus the world is antinomic by definition, which is a way of saying it is not god." In another saying "Reality has entered into nothingness, so that nothingness might become real."