Attempting To Have A Christocentric View Of Greek Philosophy: The Ground Of Being Takes On Human Flesh
The scandal of the incarnation, which is the culmination of the scandal of Yahweh, the I AM, who manifests specially in a particular culture, in contrast and often opposition to the surrounding culture, is one of the seemingly difficult things to reconcile with the "universal" view of God found in Greek metaphysics that was "baptised" and reconfigured in Christian theology.
When you read enough of metaphysics, it's easy to get lost in the categories of "being" and those immensely beautiful and what I can only describe as "clean" languages, carefully abstracted by a lot of us, from common life.
But as Eric Perl has remarked, metaphysics is not a detached exercise, it is a very religious undertaking. It is to be enraptured in ultimate things, and ultimate things are Divine things:
...as we shall find in all the philosophers to be examined, metaphysics as the thinking of being is intrinsically religious. Thales, the very first Greek philosopher reputed to have attempted an account of the whole, is said to have declared, “All things are full of Gods” (Aristotle, De An. Α.5, 411a7), a leitmotif that is repeated in various forms throughout the metaphysical tradition. Plato quotes it with approval (Laws 899b9); Aristotle remarks that “all things by nature have something divine in them” (Eth. Nic. Ζ.7, 1153b33); Plotinus says of the One, or God, that “not being anywhere, there is nowhere where he is not” (V.5.8.24–25); and Aquinas argues that God, as the cause of existence to all things, is “in all things, and innermostly” (ST I, 8, 1, resp.). That metaphysics leads to divinity is not an accident of history but is intrinsic to the very enterprise of metaphysics. [1]
In contrast to modern nihilism, classical metaphysics regards reality as substantive and rational in the highest sense.
It would then follow that at it's heart, metaphysics is as grounded as the reality is seeks to describe, yet what it describes necessarily transcends it's "object" of description. This is where I connect the strands: The "groundedness" or "immanence" of metaphysics, which is tied to it's "transcendence" is a mirror of Yahweh, who has grounded himself in history by his very act of creation, and furthermore in human nature and history through his dealings with Israel and ultimately in His incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth. Yet He is still transcendent in the radical split between the holy and the profane seen in his judgement brought about by such acts and incarnation.
Christ himself makes sense of the relationship between Jewish Religion and Greek philosophy, and by extension all religions and philosophies, for even as far away as South America and Australia are from the monumental events of the first century, they are ultimately not far at all, for He who is hidden from the world is revealed in flesh, and in so doing is to be "grasped" by all flesh, both figuratively and literally. Like what Eric Perl regards as a fundamental quote in metaphysics:
Consciousness is the grasping of being; being is what is grasped by consciousness. [2]
To be is to be manifest. To exist is to be known, to be grasped by thought. In knowing Christ we grasp Him, but He grasped us first. We grasp him in faith, but faith is not wishful thinking, it is our participation in Christ, and in believing we hold him, in anticipation of the day we hold him physically. But till then: Blessed are those who believe without seeing me. (John 20:29)
[1] Eric D. Perl, Thinking Being Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition. Pg 3.
[2] Eric D. Perl, Thinking Being Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition. Pg 9.