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Chapter Two: Eschatology and Creation
“good” or “very good,” and whatever happened to it as a result of the fall of the human being does not affect its being but its well-being. In other words, the being of creation, once established, was not threat- ened by the nonbeing from which it came. The dialectic between created and uncreated existence ceased ontologically with the com- pletion of the work of creation on the sixth day.
This approach to creation is accompanied by the view that cre- ation was endowed with powers of survival, even beauty, in its nature. Some would call these powers divine/created “Wisdom” or “Sophia,”4 while others would prefer the more patristic language of divine en- ergies .5 In both cases, the being of creation is regarded as having been well and firmly established protologically. Any reference to a threat of creation returning to nonbeing would be described as a “dualism.”6
4 Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, p. 63: with creaturely Sophia “uncreated [his em- phasis] forces and energies, submerged in nothing, receive a creaturely, relative, limited, multiple being and the universe comes into being. The world as the creaturely Sophia is uncreated—created. That is the world’s divine, uncreated ground in eternity [my empha- sis].” And further on p. 80: creaturely Sophia, who is the image of divine being, is “the world’s soul and entelechy, who is being actualized or becoming (his emphasis) in the world. She is the life of the world.” The eschatological resurrection is the manifestation in glory of what is “hitherto hidden and obscure” in creation (p. 451).
5 Vladimir Lossky is the most famous exponent of the application of the concept of uncreated energies to the doctrine of creation. See his The Mystical Theology of the East- ern Church which has exercised an immense influence on contemporary Orthodox the- ology. An excellent discussion of Lossky’s theology appears in A. Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). Lossky draws mainly from the doctrine of cre- ation of Dionysius the Areopagite who sees creation as participating in God through the divine energies permeating the world. The appeal to St Maximus for support does not seem to be justified, since the location by Lossky of the logoi of creation, with which Maximus expresses the relation of creation to God, in the divine energies, appears to be questionable (see P. Sherwood, The Earlier Ambigua of St . Maximus the Confessor [Rome: Pontificium Institutum S. Anselmi, 1955], p. 179). Cf. the discussion of the relative texts by A. Riou, Le monde et l’Église selon Maxime le Confesseur (Paris: Beauchesne, 1973), p. 60 and L. Thunberg, Man and the Cosmos: The Vision of St . Maximus the Confessor (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1985), p. 137ff. Maximus prefers a Chris- tological approach to the God-world relation. As to St Gregory Palamas, who uses the language of divine energies extensively, his interest in applying this concept seems to lie more in anthropology than in cosmology.
6 Thus, A. Papanikolaou, “Creation as Communion in Contemporary Orthodox Theology,” in Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation, eds. J. Chryssavgis and B.V. Foltz (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013), p. 119, cf. pp. 106–120.
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