Meditations on "Creation is Incarnation" Pt. 2
The entire meditation was inspired from reading Jordan Daniel Wood’s paper Creation Is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor. You can get it here. To start, read part 1 here.
If Christ is the revelation of the salvation that is the result of God's boundless freedom to create, then God's identity, in His Logos, is bound up in the creation itself. This is not pantheism, where creation is divine by nature; or a panentheism where creation is an aspect of the divine. This is a Christology that takes both and breaks them under the weight of the Christ event.
It is of the very nature of God to become creaturely precisely because he is no creature. Not crude pantheism – for his infinite nature precedes and exceeds every created nature, even Being itself. But neither a crude “creationism” – for His infinite nature proves most transcendent when He becomes hypostatically identical to every created nature, even Being itself. The logoi, as the cosmic Incarnation of the Logos, describe a Procession from One to Many both inevitable and superfluous. This is but the logic of the historical Incarnation writ cosmic: creation is the Word’s condescension to become what he is not by nature – wherein he offers himself for the creation of beings from nothingness, for their consumption by being, being-well, and being forever – wherein he offers himself, finally, to be who they are and they who he is. Creation is the Word’s protological death that all might enjoy eschatological resurrection.
Jordan Daniel Wood; Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor: Pg 18.
Christ takes our extreme and and warped categories into himself and breaks their power[1]. The only way creation participates in God's identity is in the person of Christ, that is, by grace rather than nature[2].
Creation is, because it is to be united to it's creator by the very act of creation. If Christ is the truth of creation, where God isn't at all determined by creaturely realities, then the fullness of the creative act is Christ Himself. Creation is the Word's Incarnation. God becomes what He is not, not because the Divine nature is "diluted" or "degraded" into a creature, but because in His very act of creation, He unites us all; who are not, to Him; who is. A unity without mixture, such that our creation is our submission; and He acts through us, pulling us ever closer into an ever expanding unity in the circle of the Trinitarian life in the Logos Himself, whose particular incarnation is the revelation of the cosmic incarnation.
[1] Gerard Loughlin, "Radical Orthodoxy: Erotics: God's Sex", 152, uses the example of the virgin Mary as an example of this: "Here it is Mary who attains to the pitch of parodic substitution, since she is both the mother of Jesus and, as Mother-Church, of each member of his body; but as the Church she is also the bride of Christ, not only the mother but the wife of her son. (Here we are reminded that what I have been calling parodic substitution allows Christianity to place at its symbolic centre certain cultural taboos—against cannibalism, incest and homosexuality—and there break them.)"
[2] Nature being finite and mutable nature, nothing in creation makes it participate in God's identity. It's source is transcendent.