Contemplation for a Sunday: God as Wondrous Being

The relationship between God the Father and the Son of God normally has been conceived as the Son having been begotten of the Father outside of time, that is, the Son has been begotten of the Father in eternity. The relationship between the two is seen as analogous to human understanding of the relationship between a parent and a child, but not exactly the same[1]. The eternal begetting of the Son by the Father gives all that the Father has to the Son, so that, as the Nicene Creed states, the Son is “God from God” and “Light from Light.” Or, as the Gospel of John states, the life of the Father is given unto the Son and becomes the life of the Son, so that “…just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.”[2] In regards to the relationship of the persons of the Trinity, St. Augustine sees this as a way to understand the procession of the Spirit from the Son – that as the Spirit is said to proceed from the Father, so it must be understood, that the Son also has that same procession[3].

However, if we apply the Mahayana approach of emptiness, we can see that the generation of the Son is seen to be the emptying of the Father into the Son, but we must not confuse this emptying of the Father as being temporal.[4] The glorifying of the Father, of God, of the Absolute, is the self-emptying of the Absolute into the Son, and the very glory of the Son is, in parallel, the emptying of the Son back into the Father. As Masao Abe beautifully puts it, “God the Father and God the Son glorify each other through an inverse correspondence, through an ‘other-self’ affirmation via own-self negation.”[5] The Father’s glorifying the Son is the production, the generation of the Son, by the Father’s eternal self-negation and emptying of all the Father into the Son. The Father, the absolute sunyata, empties himself completely into the Son, giving to the Son all that is the Father, all that is had in the pure suchness of the dharmadhatu. This should lead us to understand Abe’s consideration of true emptiness as the emptiness which empties itself so that it can be called Wondrous Being; for this is how Being transcending the dualities of being and non-being, of affirmation and negation, by being both self-negating (becoming empty of itself) and glorification at once. “True emptiness is the ever self-emptying activity that is incessantly turning into being. Thus true Emptiness is neither being nor nothing, and both being and nothing at one and the same time. That is why True Emptiness is called Wondrous Being.”[6]

Wondrous Being. The Glory of the Father who gives his all to the Son. The Glory of the Son Who Gives His All to the Father. The Glory of the Spirit who completely turns himself over to the Father through the Son. That is indeed the God we worship, for that is what we find in the God who is love. The persons whose wondrous self-giving receive back their very all, a giving and receiving which is eternal and therefore without end.

Footnotes

[1] “As we have said above, so now we repeat, that the divine generation must not be compared to the nature of men…” St. Athanasius, Discourse I, 1 in The Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Volume 4 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), VIII.28, p.322.

[2] John 5:26. With this also is the relationship of the Father and the Son understood, when the Gospel of John indicates that if you have seen the Son you have seen the Father (John 14:7) – for the Son has within himself all that the Father has within himself.

[3]“Let him, I say, understand, that as the Father has in Himself that the Holy Spirit should proceed from Him, so has He given to the Son that same Holy Spirit should proceed from Him, and be both apart from time: and that the Holy Spirit is said to proceed from the Father that it is to be understood that His proceeding from the Son, is a property derived by the Son from the Father. For if the Son has whatever the Father has, then He certainly has of the Father, that the Holy Spirit proceeds also from Him.” St. Augustine, On the Trinity, 1 in The Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volume 3 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), XV.47, p.225. It is therefore to be understood that St. Augustine sees two distinct aspects of the procession of the Spirit – first in that the Spirit proceeds directly from the Father, but it proceeds from the Son in the shared possession of the attributes of the Father. At least following St. Augustine’s understanding, the East does not need to fear that the special function of the Father is denigrated by the filioque clause in the Western creed, because the relational primacy is still shown to reside in the Father.

[4] Time is a part of samsara, it is a part of the imputations of reality, but reality in its pure suchness transcends the dualistic temporal distinction between “now” and “another time.” But this Mahayana interpretation of the generation of the Son finds support in the works of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Sergius Bulgakov both – for Balthasar, in presenting the kenosis of the Father refers to Bulgakov’s notion of kenosis: “It is possible to say, with Bulgakov, that the Father’s self-utterance in the generation of the Son is an initial ‘kenosis’ within the Godhead that underpins all subsequent kenosis,” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama IV: The Action. trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 323.

[5] Masao Abe “Beyond Buddhism and Christianity: Dazzling Darkness” in Divine Emptiness and Historical Fullness: A Buddhist Jewish Christian Conversation with Masao Abe,  ed. Christopher Ives. (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995), p.229.

[6] Masao Abe, “Double Negation as an Essential for Attaining Ultimate Reality: Comparing Tillich and Buddhism,” in Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue. Ed. Steven Heine. (Honolulu: University of Honolulu Press: 1995), p.107.