A Study Of “On The Character of Men And the Virtuous Life”: Part IX

Introduction and Part II

God, by His Logos, created the different kinds of animals to meet the variety of our needs: some for our food, others for our service. And He created man to apprehend them and their actions and to appraise them gratefully. Man should therefore strive not to die, like the non-rational animals, without having attained some apprehension of God and His works.

One must know that God is omnipotent; nothing can resist Him who is omnipotent. For man’s salvation, out of nothing He created and creates by His Logos all that He wills.[1]

Since we desire what will bring us happiness, we should seek after and follow the will of God. This alone is what will bring us true happiness. Many things which promise us happiness might, for a short term, appear to give what we seek; but they are limited, and once that limit has been attained, our happiness will turn to sorrow. God, being omnipotent, is capable not only of bringing us the happiness we seek, but to give it to us eternally. There is no defect in God: there is no limit to God. God, who can make anything happen as he wills, nonetheless has given us freedom; the only reason why we can go against God is because God has granted us freedom, a freedom which is given to us by God because God loves us and wants us to freely return that love to him.

God, out of his love for us, wills for our happiness. His will provides the means by which we can attain this happiness. This will, known as providence, sees our life and our situation in life, and creates opportunities for us, opportunities which will lead us back to him and our beatitude. Not only has God has given us the freedom to discern his direction in our life and to follow it, but he has given us the ability to creatively interact with his will, to use our own initiative with the direction he has given us. Our interaction with God’s will allows us to express ourselves, to use our free will for some positive good. God doesn’t want to force us to follow him, nor force us to act in a specific way; rather he wants us to freely follow him, and to join our will with his and to create a course of action which unites the two, leading to an end which God desires for of us and yet allows us to be free persons who retain their unique personalities. We are united with God, not absorbed by him. By following providence, we gain the grace needed to be ourselves, to truly be ourselves no longer trapped by the dictates of sin. For this reason, we should seek God, so that when we find God we can have God and all that God would give us in eternity. It is better to find God now, and to have all that God offers for eternity, than to neglect God, to lose God, so that we lose the beatitude God desires for us in eternity.

God seeks to have us work with him, to follow his will, and to be the executors of his will. Thus, those who come to know him and follow his ways become a means by which God works in creation. But he also works in and through himself; each person of the Trinity has a special relationship with creation, that is, each has a special way in which they direct creation.[2] The Son, the Logos, as Logos, relates to the world as logos, as the rule and foundation of their essence. Everything is made in and through him – as the Logos, he provides everything their own logos, their own essence. Thus, when we say, in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God – and all things which were made, we made through with and through this same Logos – we are saying that the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, has used himself as the image in which all things are made.

This Christian understanding of creation brings with it the philosophical concept of the Logos with the Jewish understanding of creation; to understand all the implications of this merger would take more than a lifetime of investigation, and move us beyond our task here. What we can offer here is only a foundation for such an exploration.

The world is created in and through the Logos, through a grounding principle, a principle which is God and not merely one of God’s instruments. This Logos establishes everything, giving to them their form as a reflection of its Form. The logoi of creation come out of the Logos, willed by the Logos, out of nothing of its own, but find themselves eternally in the Logos, for the Logos is eternal. Each thing has its logos, its center of being, which gives it its form, its way of being known; this logos, by being a logos, is capable of being seen as analogous to the Logos, though each logos, according to the level of being imparted to it, reflects this analogy differently. Nonetheless, the fact they all come from and are established in the Logos, and their form represents different analogous representations of this Logos, establishes the Logos as being a commonality and link which unites them all. For this reason, while the logoi of creation have been deformed, the Logos is able to reform them, to reestablish them in their purity; and this is what happens when the Logos becomes a part of creation, becomes incarnate as a man. There is a new creation established; this new creation is not had by the nihilistic destruction and elimination of the old, but by its transformation.

What was created in the world has been deformed; it is not true to itself and so it must give up its defaced form, must allow it to wither away, in order to have its true form renewed.  The original defacement allowed entropy to take effect, to use the power of change to continue the deformation of each and every logos. The Logos took on entropy in itself in through the incarnation; now entropy has become a tool by which the Logos can overcome the deformation of every logoi. The Logos has found the end to their deformed state by grasping to itself the full of entropy, by finding the end which entropy would bring to everything, and taking control of that end, of making it a part of itself. In the death of Jesus, Jesus went to that end, and showed himself to be that end. He is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end (cf. Rev. 22:13). In the resurrection, the Logos shows that what was deformed, what was put to death, what was destroyed by entropy, does not constitute a victory for anti-being, for nihilism; rather, it is taken in by him and raised up, so that those who attain the end of entropy do not have to stay there but can return to their original, pristine form – and then transcend it. Death itself is self-destructive, and cannot contain itself; it leaves open a place where restoration of being can be had, where a reformation of the forms can be accomplished. A recreation takes place in the Logos, and it is at the point where the power of entropy ends. This recreation is similar to, but transcendent to, what the Logos accomplished in their creation; it transcends the original work of the Logos because the Logos has made the recreation eternal. In the resurrection of the Logos, we find this recreation is the restoration and deification of the original creation; what was created by the Logos has been taken up by the Logos and deified through the resurrection of the Logos. Just as it is the same Jesus who died who is resurrected, so it is the same creation which is deified, but it has found itself in a higher, greater modality of being.

Because the Logos has chosen to become human, humanity has been given a special task. We have been called to come to know and grasp the logoi of creation, so that we can help guide them and bring them to fulfillment. As the Logos is the Word, that is, since the Logos is the Essence of all essences, we are to find and disclose the essences of creation as we look at and reflect upon the Logos. We are to discern the word of each thing and to label it, knowing of course, our label is not univocal with that word itself (we must not confuse our constructs as being more than they are, and believe we can establish creation by our word; we can only map it out). While many have understood this task as granting us dominion and absolute control over the world, so that the world was seen as being made exclusively for us (which, of course, this passage also suggests), we must see it differently; the world was made for the glory of God and all that is in it has their own share in the glorification of God. Our power over creation is not meant to make creation ours, but to help us guide creation in achieving its end, in bringing glory to God. We are to follow the example of Christ, who, when shown the world, understood lordship as servitude and not domination. We are called to apprehend the world, to understand it, so that we can guide it. The ancients understood our authority over the world, nonetheless, many of them, such as the author of this text, misunderstood the reason for this authority. That such a mistake is had here should not detour us from appreciating the value of what is being said – we can see in it the foundation for the theology of the Logos which St Maximus the Confessor would later embrace, a theology which would then reexamine the logoi of creation and see that they have value in and of themselves so that they can and will be saved by the Logos. Theology, after all, develops, not by rejecting its inner principles, but by letting those principles come to term and show what theological misconceptions have to be rejected.

There is here the hint of a Christian theology of the Logos (though the Logos is not named Jesus Christ). There is, therefore, the hint of Trinitarian theology, though of course, as other ancient authors show us, a theology of the Logos does not have to end up being Trinitarian, nor even Christian. Nonetheless, there is something strongly Christian in the sentiment being expressed here – Christians after all, call themselves Christians after Christ, who is the Logos. While this does not prove the author is Anthony, let alone a Christian, it helps in establishing circumstantial evidence to suggest that this is the case. And, if we follow Athanasius, it is clear Anthony did discuss animals as irrational beasts, indicating that what we have here fits with Anthony’s opinion of animals.[3] This, once again, helps strengthen the case that this text could be by Anthony or one of his disciples, but that is as far as we can go with this section of the text.