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World, reiterates Guitton, is bilateral and reciprocal in Hellenism, unilateral and subordinate in Judaeo-Christianity.86
None of these Hebrew ideas, the Creator-Creature covenant bond, the omnipotent Word,87 and creation ex-nihilo, nor Christianity’s ergative Word (Hebrews 11:3, 1 Peter 3:5, identified in John 1:14 with the incarnate godhead of Jesus Christ)88 were ever envisioned by either Grecians in their Demiurgos-ποιητην, or by Neo-Platonists in their “One.”89 Theirs is ποίησις’, and philosophia’s, and mimesis’, and aesthesis’ song, never omnipotence’s, or the ergative Word’s discourse.
Yet, what lingers most, are the hermeneutic traces, those imperceptible, and intriguing journeys of astute Hermes revealed in the dramatic leaps in nuance from εποίηοεν, “to make,” “to
86 Guitton. Le Temps et L’Eternite Chez Plotin et St. Augustin. 1933. 154-155. 87 Some philosophers argue that God’s omnipotence is not absolute. If it were, the consequences would be absurd, as argued earlier, in page 20. The infinite power of God would permit him not only to establish, for example, that a square is round, or that 2+2 is 5, or that p or not p, but also cause him to punish the innocent and make the wicked prosper (Book of Job, Abraham’s command to kill his only son, etc.), or cause the immoral to be moral or vice versa, and the impossible to be possible. To this claim that God indeed plays dice with humanity, exists the counterclaims that God cannot be limited by anything, and that God’s lack of rationality is simply due to the narrowness of our own reason (Augustin, Aquinas, St. Anselm).
88 Indeed, the familiar portrayal of the Holy Spirit as a dove in Matthews 3:16, says Anderson, mirrors the cosmogonic “spirit of God hovering on the face of the waters” of Genesis. This is also found in rabbinic sources (J.T. Hag. II. 77a; B.T. Hag. 15a; Toseft. Hag. II.5). Anderson, B.W. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. An Illustrated Encyclopaedia. “Cosmogony.” Ed. Arthur Buttrick and Emory Stevens Bucke. Volume I. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962. 708.
89 This is Plotinus’ idea of Creation.
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