“I am lost!” he cried. “The devil has deceived me and I have succumbed, and my blood witnesses against my pride! What do I have left but to grow old in darkness and die without sight?”
“Indeed,” said the other, now standing over the old man, his eyes glowing and his teeth blackened and gnarled. “But are you not at least saved from the sight of your ailing flesh?” And he vanished with the dagger, leaving the old man to himself.
In the first beginning “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” The Word, the Son and Second Person, dwelled with the Father in eternity. This dwelling-with alone fails to sum up the interpenetration of Father and Son, for the Word was God, one in substance but different in person from the Father. The Father is an eternal and immutable person, a mystery subsisting in the fulfillment of its requirement, being as he ought to be and without possibility of improvement. In his fulfillment the Father transcends his form in the begetting and procession of persons, reaching out from a life perfect in its singularity to a mutual dwelling-in in which law ascends into love. The Trinity means the internal outpouring of a perfection in being so magnificent that it abides in a shared and personal celebration of that perfection. The love between Father, Son, and Spirit consists in the origin of the latter two in and from the Father and the unbroken harmony between the three. An untarnished obedience within the singularity of the substance and an irrepressible joy in that obedience within and among the persons, the transfiguration of the rhythm of conformity into a differentiated union, is the oneness of the God who is both three and one. God exists in the plenitude that seals Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with bonds so impregnable that by the divine will they extend into the creation of being from nothing.
“Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” Father, Son, and Holy Spirit created all that is as one God, the Father giving being, the Son bestowing law and life upon being in its form, and the Spirit sealing creation in communion. Yet one cannot parse the roles in the creation as if the persons stepped forward in distinction from one another and acted individually. God acted as one, so that the giving of being means the giving of form and communion: He creates no being that does not imply the destination of and growth toward form, limit, and unity, or in a word, toward nature.
What, then, of the formless matter that had yet to take shape, the waters over which the Spirit breathed when the earth was formless and void? As created by God, formless matter possessed an intrinsic vector toward form, with Christ present in it as He is present in all things. As created from nothing, and like all created natures after they receive their shape, this matter also possessed mutability, the possibility and freedom by which matter could advance toward form or shrink from it, in this case remaining in a state of formlessness. When the Spirit breathed over that which was formless and void, the inclination toward form had yet to distinguish its drive toward nature from the mutability. The inclination existed at such an embryonic state that it equaled and did not yet surpass the pure possibility of change. Thus matter’s freedom from form, not a freedom bereft of a drive toward form or of form annulled, not an empty and directionless matter, but a matter pregnant toward form as if having a will and desire for it, but not yet possessed of the power to assert that form over the mutability.
“Let there be,” says the Father, and the Word creates, elevating and limiting the matter destined for but lacking definition into the defined and the natural. In the Son who is the life of all things being created from nothing rose from indifferentiation into law, receiving grace. Formless matter gathered into particular beings, each receiving its nature as it received its law, molded by the beneficence of God into its particular beauty. Now being inseparable from law as way of being, now life inseparable from way of life. The tree receives a way of being with bark, leaves, and seeds, and in some instances fruit, and this is its law; likewise the fish receives its fins, scales, eyes, and the motion of swimming as its law; the leopard receives its paws, fur, tail, and skill to strike without warning by the same principle. These ways of being, bequeathed and instilled by the creator into the natural world in the words “let there be,” entail that creation was as it ought to have been, that God shaped each nature by a particular design and that each nature conformed to the design. This is the righteousness of the natural world and individual natures, their adherence to the way of being specified for each part and for the whole, nature’s living in the law that God decreed for it in the Son.
God fashioned man with a law unique and unparalleled in the physical order, a single law manifest in two, one being and one way of being in body and soul. The soul has its own law and way of being, its particular inscription toward life and fulfillment, and likewise for the body. The two laws are one for one man, a law that on one hand mandates the shape of the flesh, its ears, eyes, hands, and feet, and all the characteristics that identify the body as man’s body. The manifestation of these characteristics is the activity of man qua body, his visible and intrinsic obedience to the law by which he is what he is as a body. The same single law dictates a way of being for the soul, a law fit for it as the higher element in man’s nature. God molded the soul to contemplate him, intending its focus on his love so that the soul should orient both its own nature and that of the body toward harmony with the creator. The more the soul turns toward God, persisting in the contemplation of and obedience to him, the more it abides according to the law that defines and fortifies it as a soul, while man equally abides according to the single law that is his life as a man.
At its creation, the law of man’s nature established both the limits of body and soul and the mutual limitation between body and soul. The body discovered its limit in the boundary of the flesh, the acknowledgment of the space it does not occupy gained through physical feeling and encountered as an imposition. Then another, more profound limit confronted the body: though created good and without sin, God did not create it incorruptible. The body faced its finitude in the possibility of death, a potentiality necessitated by the freedom in which man might turn back toward nothingness, disobeying God. The soul likewise discovered its limit: as to origin, created by God; as to power, licensed to rule creation only under the rule prescribed by God; as to knowledge, allowed to know only what God saw fit for it to know. The soul knew that it is not the body and that its connection with the body does not entail confusion between the one and the other. The two abided as one in their respective limits, their definition the logical prerequisite for nature’s unity. This is the law of man, that his elements in their mutual limitation and solidity should interpenetrate, grounding his singularity. The soul thus understood the body as its link to the physical world and the lower limit to which it bestows life; it simultaneously encountered the law of God, the origin, rule, and knowledge prescribed for the soul by him, as the upper boundary. Beyond this, the soul faced the possible limit of death not in a physical perishing but in the life turned away from God.
Body and soul originally existed without confusion, division, or separation, with man enjoying the image of God in which law abides in and ascends toward love. In the rhythmic conformity of the powers of nature to the will of God and nature’s design man both dwells in God and finds his being at rest in God and his neighbor. The soul’s being gathered into God parallels its union with the body, its submission to the higher limit elevating it in the same overlapping harmony by which the soul grasps the body as its instrument and dedicates that instrument to life. Completely attuned to his intended way of being, man abides in the obedience that is joy and the joy that is love, a worship that humbly and gratefully desires God’s lordship at the same time that man discovers in that lordship the mercy that is law poured out and giving birth. This grace invigorates man’s appreciation of nature and his interpenetration as a nature, fortifying the elements in their solidity and giving them weight. Man seeks God above all and as Master, Creator, and King, yet he cannot enjoy God’s grace without giving thanks for his nature, he cannot know God without knowing body and soul as God’s creation, he cannot love God without loving body and soul as God’s handiwork and possession, practicing peace with his fellow men. So the divine nature bestows its likeness upon a unified man, filling man’s nature in