SNC

Epistrophe

I

The greater the height, the greater the fall. The greater the gift, the greater the loss. And if the gift is the likeness of God, even the most high God of gods, the loss is very great, and the fall is to the lowest of the low. Thomas Traherne, in the Centuries of Meditations, recounts a parable of the creation of creatures in which each is given its position in the chain of being, from the angels to the stones. But having completed creation, God makes another being for whom there is no place, and so this creature instead is a given a share in every place without belonging to it, crowned with a share in God himself. Here we have a human being, fated to reside in terminal spaces—for there is nowhere else to go, other than beyond the limit of the high or of the low.

II

The essence of God is love, and all things are conceived in love. Nothing is foreign to love, but there is a created love and a creating love—the former is bounded into diverse forms, the latter is utterly unbounded. Creative love in itself is God, and is the image of God in which humans are made. It is therefore a source of an infinite duty whose performance is infinite joy. To hold and enjoy all things in perfect love, even as God sustains by the act of loving, is incumbent on the one who bears God’s image. To do so glorifies creation and exalts God more than all other exaltations. But to fail, and to withdraw love for even a moment is the pinnacle of depravity, for it bounds what must be boundless for existence itself to be. Such a bitter cup of weeping is offered in the moment of sin, not to be tasted by human beings alone, but shared in by every creature high and low by no fault of their own. Wherever human love fails, the entirety of creation falls broken at its feet, for such is the dependence of all things on unbounded love. For human beings to be true sharers in the likeness of God, this power is reserved to us: total desolation. We betray the world, we open up its gates to the accuser of love, and we see it despoiled and delivered into the hands of the evil one.

III

The creation of human beings was not a gamble on the part of God. It was not unforeseeable whether human beings, given the task which is the image of the task of God, would lapse into faithlessness. God creates the conditions for sin to happen and knows that it will happen, to the ruin of all. He foresees sin, and he preordains the conditions for its occurrence: does this mean that he preordains sin itself? Not necessarily—he does not preordain sin unless his act of creative love comes into accord with the treachery that our image of that act has engendered, if he likewise purposes a bounded love. But this is not the purpose of God. God acts consistently with unbounded love when he allows us to fall to the lowermost depths by our inconsistency, because in creating the lowest of the low, he sets the stage for a greater salvation.

IV

If human beings have authority in the world, it is not because of our goodness. The world has long since been delivered into the hand of the enemy, from a time which is outside chronological history, and the power of the world is not the power of the love of God. If human beings have authority in the world, it is because we reflect the state of the world in our supreme state of ruination. It is humans who are the class of beings which, unique among all natural life, can properly be said to sin against the love of God; therefore humans exalt themselves in the world whose state is brought about by sin. The lower bound of creation, which Neoplatonists associated with matter devoid of all form, is not the unshaped dust or mud: it is the human heart which hardens itself in hatred and cruelty. There is no lower being. There is nothing less.

V

The image of God, stranded in the hateful heart, may be rightly called "Hell." Creative love produces out of love, and draws out from love as from a bottomless storehouse the neverending works of love. But creative love which has abandoned love has nothing to draw from; it runs on less than fumes. Every treachery to which the image of God purposes vomits out a counter-eternity, an endless and hopeless striving to produce when there is nothing to produce from, and so an endlessly intensifying tremor of dread. Whenever I act uncharitably, and I look closely, I see the countless eons in the pit of fire spread out as though I myself was already subject to them, which in some sense I am. I see myself delivered over to my vain imaginations stripped of everything which gives them substance, and so tormented in a hundred thousand Hells. If I do not look closely into my uncharities, I go on contentedly enough, but this also is Hell: when we imagine that we can go on without the love in which we are conceived, and doom ourselves to an infinitely slow revelation that we cannot.

VI

There are many horrors in matter. Nature is full of suffering. But natural creatures suffice to fade away and die, and make no claim on everlasting things, whereas the human mind strives for a perpetuity whose only existence is in the eternity of God’s act of love. Stripped of this recourse, we alone among all beings have infinite suffering, and so we stand iconically for the horrors of all beings, the epitome of their sad condition. We become tragic beyond compare, having had an alternative of eternal joy, and having taken on instead damnation, for ourselves and for all else.

VII

Yet God is not a creature, and God still stands in the shadow of tragedy, and darkness itself will not darken for him: in him there is no darkness at all. All creation is nevertheless in God; only Hell, it seems, is not in God, not because it truly escapes God but because it perpetually flees from God, approaching the limit of death. Yet even in the heart which architects Hell within itself, the likeness of God remains distortedly. The lower limit of being is not only, as Neoplatonists have it, at the greatest variance with God, but also holds the potential of a communion with God which is so vast that it goes beyond existence itself. The human heart, having fallen to the lowest point, does not know how to correct itself, and yet it is corrigible and by its nature can never cease to yearn for the love which is its mould and calling. Placed beneath the heel of the chain of being, in Hells of its own creation, the human heart continues to cry in silent prayer for its deliverance from evil. And if the human heart is delivered, it is not delivered alone, because all things are above it: in reconciling what is lowest, all that is above is reconciled also, and drawn again to God. Having washed the feet, we find the whole body is made clean, from the bottom to the top.

VIII

If, in the classical sense of freedom, we are freest when we are most able to follow our vocation, and so we our most perfectly ourselves when we have become free, a perfect human being is one with the freedom to love unconditionally and universally. Yet no human is free, because we are all bound up in the treachery of our genus through the sin the world, and we fail at all times to love truly. Though we have been given the image of the creative love of God, we have retained no copy; the perfect image has been lost. The only act of creative love which remains which would perfect us is the love of God itself, if it were delivered into our dramatically inadequate human frames. The aftermath of the fall leaves us with no hope of a human being freely living in the image of God unless that image is God himself, who fulfills and is far greater than the image. To be perfectly in the image of God requires God to bequeath us the perfect image of God, schisming us from our schism with God in being perfectly human and perfectly God. The prayer of the heart finds no other answer except in the incarnation of that act of love who must remain faithful when we are faithless. We find, unexpectedly, that we ask for Christ.

IX

The love of God cannot be known by the world which has been marked by the hatred of love. It is the nature of sin to look upon the image of God and seek to destroy it, because this is what sin has already done within the hearts of humankind. It is in the nature of the sinful heart to froth at the mouth for the blood of the love of God, and to mock its impotence, to cry out, remove yourself from the cross if you can. Yet every invective is also a plea, because the heart can only hope for freedom in the fulfillment of its cruelest jests—for if Christ removes himself from the cross, perhaps the heart also can cease to be crucified. The incarnate love of God, however, does not function by the fulfillment of the imaginations, but by their subversion. The heart which is conquered by sin imagines the Anointed as a mighty and powerful king who does not submit like the heart submits. The working of Christ, by contrast, is to submit all the more and descend even further than wickedness, even to the depths of Hell. But this submission is to love, and not to sin. Submitting to love to the point of death, the limit of being is shattered in the greatest suffering, and is no longer held by sin; now it is held by love which ministers to the healing of sin.

X

Christ must harrow Hell; Christ must plumb the depths of human lowliness in the greatest self-emptying, and so change what it means to be empty. The self-emptying of sin is the expulsion of love, but Christ’s self-emptying creates the world again from nothing as he finds in emptiness the pinnacle of love. Darkness refuses to darken like it never has before, and nothing remains the same. Hell is shattered, Hell is damned, Hell has lost its sting—one hundred billion Hells abolished in the blink of an eye. Hell no longer stands as the sure future, but as the future which is cancelled and replaced with a wonder which cannot be understood, only received in rapturous delight. The desperate plea for salvation is fulfilled infinitely beyond what any prior hope could have imagined. The body wounded by sin breaks forth into view again, the wounds still present but their meaning transformed. Here is the resurrection and the life.

XI

Lowliness loses its shame with Christ, and our eyes are unveiled as to how God could have allowed for sin without contradiction with perfection in love. The Comforter we did not know we needed has arrived, the Spirit of love through which we can bear all things, for if we are not beyond it there is nothing beyond it. How can you really torment someone whose trust in God is impassable, and continues to love their neighbour and their God under the worst conditions? Hell becomes a source of glory because, while it was real just yesterday, the truest representation of a hateful trajectory, it has suddenly become unthinkable, because an attitude of love which we are now made able to receive makes even the deepest nightmares blossom into joy. Sin becomes a source of glory because it leads to repentance and correction, and in every such case there is a new exaltation of God and a new source for rejoicing. Good works are given new splendour, for they do not come from the raw nature as a matter of course, but from the regenerate nature as a matter of grace, and occur because they operate through him whose glory is beyond that of all the ages. And the human position at the foot of being, as the worst of the worst, is made good—for by this position we know that, if we are redeemed to this height, all that is above us is redeemed also.

XII

We have passed out of reason and into something greater, something which cannot be compassed about and measured. What can you even say of the peace into which the world is drawn, so far beyond the peaks of what has come before? The void blooms.