 |
| Andrei Rublev's Trinity Icon |
"ἐν αὐτῷ γὰρ ζῶμεν καὶ κινούμεθα καὶ ἐσμέν…" (In God we live
and move and are… Acts 17:28).
Perhaps
what is going to be central in my thought here is the topic of the God who is love and who
is three and yet cannot be contained by the “isness” of existence. Moreover, it
is this communion of God’s strange transcendent nearness that is the basis for
all that is. We are an age twisted by the work of self-mastery and the need to
purge ourselves of mystery by naming, explaining and containing all that can be
quantified and worse yet all that cannot. But this would be a mistake and will put
us at odds with all that we are to be in relation with, not least our Source
of being.
I
must begin with a metaphysical look at God. I honestly never gave this much
thought until I read D. B. Hart’s essay, The Destiny of Christian
Metaphysics, which itself is a defense of Erich Przywara’s, Analogia
Entis. In this essay Hart makes the point that God cannot be enumerated as
a “divine” or “supreme” being. It is a categorical error of sorts. We
Christians affirm that creation comes into existence ex nihilo, so a being
which comes from nothing is by its nature coming from a source. So if God is a being, that would mean God has a source from which God came and that source must
then contain both God and God’s creation.[1]
But, if we affirm that God is all goodness and truth from which knowledge and being
comes from, then God transcends being. Thus we stumble upon the thing, as Hart
says, that “no self-sufficient and perfectly systematic metaphysics could ever
properly admit into its speculations: the radical contingency and nonnecessity
of the created order.[2] In other words, all that “is” is an unnecessary
excessive expression of God’s glory. This
is “…the delightful and terrible principle of the creature’s utter
groundlessness; it is the realization that we possess no essence, no being, no
foundation that is not always, in every moment, imparted to us from beyond
ourselves, and that does not therefore always exceed everything that we are in
any moment of our existence.”[3]
Stating
it this way makes the whole scope of existence a sacred act of God’s incarnation.
We are all the word of God being echoed and manifested. The unspeakable present
secret is that Paradise, Heaven, the Kingdom of God is all around us and in us and we do not comprehend it. Now I am not attempting to define
anything beyond this, but rather it is illuminating our present enigma of
“isness” and being within God’s hiddeness that we should never be ready to
solve but always in the midst of perceiving, grappling with and even celebrating.
In
Andrei Rublev’s Trinity icon (as seen above) we are offered an interesting
story of the Trinity in the desert at Abraham's table, but what is most unique to its theology is that there
is a fourth place set at the communion table with a rectangular imprint that is
believed to be the place where a mirror once set. The point being that the one
who saw themselves in its reflection is invited into the infinite communion
table of the Trinity. We are not separate from what awakens us and tells us to “be”.
God awakens finite being into fellowship of essence and existence that overlaps within
the transcendent immediacy of God's eternal Being; that is not to speak of God as a divine being but Being itself. This is where our residence in Life ultimately
subsists.
[1] David Bentley Hart. The Hidden and the
Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans
Publishing, 20017), 100.
[2] Ibid.99.
[3] Ibid.
No comments:
Post a Comment