ONE AND MANY: THE PLEROMA OF HOUSES
In the previous post, we saw the only transmigrant that is the true "Self". Now we see look at his "vessels", the particular individuals, who are the many mansions in the Father's house (John 14:2).
II
THE MANY “MORTAL BODIES”
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”
Genesis 2:7
“Man being 'made of clay' is corruptible, whence the necessity of his ransom.”
Frithjof Schuon [1]
“The ‘higher’ (para) Brahma is that ‘One, the Great Self, who takes up his stand in womb after womb… as the omniform Lord of Breaths”
Ananda Coomaraswamy [2]
So what exactly is the point of my individuality? Why am I this particular person and not that particular person? We have seen in what way we are united, now what separates us? Or, in a better way of framing the question, what aspect of this unity warrants our necessary separation?
Starting from the unity that is God, we see the “tendency to dispersion”, the “diffusiveness of the Good” that is personified in the divine Son that is “given” (John 3:16) and the Spirit that is sent (John 14:26). This “distance” that is the act of creation is also a distance that tends to death. This is often best known in the physical phenomenon of “Entropy”, which is both the cause of life, and the cause of death. From the unity of the essence comes the multiplicity of manifestation. It is because God gives that things divide and die, because the gifts itself are only temporary reflections, a means rather than an end. They are portals to the one true Gift that is the Giver Himself. You are an individual human that you may realize the universal human. You are human that you may realize God. “God became man that man might become God” is a popular affirmation in the Orthodox Church, however it is easily forgotten that the statement is as much creational as incarnational. God became man in Christ that man might become God in Christ, but it could also be re-written as "God became man in Adam that man might become God in Christ". Why? A look behind Paul’s letters, especially that written to the Romans shows that Adam and Christ are two names for the two roles of the same man.
For Paul says “Just as it is written: "God has given them a spirit of stupor, eyes that they should not see and ears that they should not hear” (Romans 11:8), and also “For God has committed them all to disobedience”, why? “…that He might have mercy on all.” (Romans 11:32). Yet then again it was not simply God who gave us all to disobedience, but Adam, by whose “disobedience many were made sinners” (Romans 5:19), yet the letter to Timothy says “And Adam was not deceived” (1 Timothy 2:14). That letter to Timothy is itself the cause of so much controversy today concerning misogyny and how that chapter itself is interpreted. But despite the abuses, scripture is for teaching, and one of the things to learn about scripture is that the mystical is the highest interpretation. If the literal is a stumbling block, like it is for a lot of the Old Testament and as it is for Timothy, then the allegorical, and afterward, the mystical, is even more warranted.
So how is Adam both the source of our fall and even our individuation, yet also “not deceived”? The answer lies in who Adam is made in the image of, or for whom the individual man named Adam (that is, all of us as individuals) is made an image. David Bentley Hart has an example of these two senses of viewing man as seen in St. Gregory of Nyssa:
“All of created time is, he believed, nothing but the gradual unfolding, in time and by way of change, of God's eternal and immutable design. For him, in fact, creation is twofold; there is a prior (which is to say, eternal) creative act that abides in God, as the end toward which all things are directed and for the sake of which all things have been brought about (described in Genesis 1:1-2:3); and there is a posterior creative act, which is the temporal exposition-cosmic and historical-of this divine model (whose initial phases are described in Genesis 2:4-25). From eternity, says Gregory, God has conceived of humanity under the form of an ideal "Human Being" (anthropos), at once humanity's archetype and perfection, a creature shaped entirely after the divine likeness, neither male nor female, possessed of divine virtues: purity, love, impassibility, happiness, wisdom, freedom, and immortality. But this does not mean, as we might expect, simply that God first created the eternal ideal of the human, and only then fashioned individual human beings in imitation of this universal archetype. Rather, for Gregory, this primordial "ideal" Human Being comprises-indeed, is identical with- the entire pleroma of all human beings in every age, from first to last. In his great treatise On the Making of Humanity, Gregory reads Genesis 1:26-7-the first account of the creation of the race, where humanity is described as being made "in God's image" -as referring not to the making of Adam as such, but to the conception within the eternal divine counsels of this full community of all of humanity: the whole of the race, comprehended by God's "foresight" as "in a single body," which only in its totality truly reflects the divine likeness and the divine beauty. As for the two individuals Adam and Eve, whose making is described in the second creation narrative, they may have been superlatively endowed with the gifts of grace at their origin, but they were themselves still merely the first members of that concrete community that only as a whole can truly reflect the glory of its creator. For now, it is only in the purity of the divine wisdom that this human totality subsists "altogether" (athroos) in its own fullness. It will emerge into historical actuality, in the concrete fullness of its beauty, only at the end of a long temporal "unfolding" or "succession" (akolouthia). Only then, when time and times are done, will a truly redeemed humanity, one that has passed beyond all ages, be recapitulated in Christ.” [3]
This is seen in the Icon where Christ is the one who gives Adam the breath of life. If you recall a previous post, Christ is himself the “cosmic intellect”, the “Nous” of Plotinus. His “humanity” is precisely that nous, for the cosmic intellect is the essence of humanity:
“He (Man) is the 'field of manifestation' of the intellect, which reflects the universal Spirit and thereby the divine Intellect; man as such reflects the cosmic totality, the Creation, and thereby the Being of God”.
Frithjof Schuon [1]
It is important to note that this “Cosmic intellect” is precisely Christ’s deified humanity, the eternal “form of man”, not His divinity as such. There is a distinction in Schuon’s thought between the created “Cosmic and divine Intellect”, or “Universal Spirit”, and the uncreated “Divine Intellect” that is the Logos’ divinity, the “Being of God” in the quote above. The divinity of the former is derived from the latter, just as Christ’s humanity is deified by his divine nature. Plotinus intuited from the perspective of the former. The Cosmic Nous is not absolutely simple like “The One” (God) [4]. It is created, meaning it is a manifest union of Spirit/Being (breath of life) with “nothingness” (dust of the ground). In other words, it depends on the One for Being. Christ’s divinity is precisely the One’s (and by the One’s, I mean the Father’s) “reflected” goodness, its image and return, which is seen in the cosmic nous, but only as a “created” image of a greater reflection that is the One’s “logos”. This divinity is only seen in the humanity, as there is no divinity of the Son that does not entail humanity. There is no Logos without “flesh”, even if “cosmic flesh”. He eternally creates man by incarnating, and this is why Plotinus doesn’t have a “hypostatic union”:
Plotinus did not mention—though without denying it—the distinction between Being (Son) and the supra ontological Absolute (Father); and if Plotinus appears to consider archetypes only on the level of supra-formal manifestation (Cosmic Nous, i.e. Christ’s cosmic body) and not on the level of Being (Christ’s Divinity)—a valid point of view since ontological causality is less direct, while being more essential, than cosmic causality
Frithjof Schuon [5]
This division of Adam into Principle and Manifestation is not exact, and requires continuity. This is why Adam’s naming of the animals is Him living up to His name. He, as individual Adam in cosmic Adam, takes on the role of naming, something God is seen doing in the previous chapter. In that act, there is no separation or meaningful distinction between the God who brought the animals and the Man who named them. As the facial resemblance between Christ and Adam in the Icon shows, when Adam is speaking “in the Spirit”, He is God. “Yet not I but Christ” are Paul’s words. Adam (Christ, our immanent and cosmic Nous) is not deceived, however Eve (His body, including men and women who make it up, that is, individual Adams and Eves) were the ones deceived, having been “given over to disobedience”. In their garden fall, suddenly there is an “exteriorization”. Rather than “one flesh”, they became two. Rather than One Adam, there were two. One walked in the garden, the other fled it. Adam (Christ) gave Adam (and Eve), whom are in fact part of a greater “Eve”, unto disobedience that they might be saved. We, the cosmic Eve, are to be silent while Adam (Christ) speaks. Our silence is not a “Cosmic Misogyny”, it is rather a “Cosmic submission into equality”. In the silence of our egos, Christ speaks. And when Christ speaks, we are speaking. Our silence is paradoxically our loudest and most convincing voice, because our individual persons unmoored from Christ conflict and cancel. But when they are “silent”, that is, not speaking of their own accord, they are unified, loud, and clear. Christ speaks through women and men, blurring their distinction on a higher level than fallen flesh, because we are “One flesh”, “one body”. Christ is King and Priest, but only through his “Kingdom of Priests” (Revelation 5:10), a hierarchy that is steeped into a greater equality of union, a union seen in how Adam himself becomes feminine in “birthing” Eve from His side, as Christ’s Church is birthed from his pierced side in death, and as his mother birthed him, being greater than him, yet less than him, and still yet equal.
This is the point of our individuality, to manifest in a microcosm a “form of God”. To manifest in actuality a possibility of humanity “in the image”. You are unique only in that sense. Detached from the eternal possibility you manifest, you become an anonymity, a mere animal, or even less. In this state, man is “bemused, and does not see the bountiful Giver of being and Actuator within him, but conceives that ‘this is I’ and ‘that is mine,’ and therewith binds himself by himself like a bird in the net” [2].
“On the other hand, he does conceive that in some other respects he can do what he likes, so far as this is not prevented by his environment—for example, by a stone wall, or a policeman, or contemporary mores. He does not realize that this environment of which he is a part, and from which he cannot except himself, is a causally determined environment; that it does what it does because of what has been done. He does not realize that he is what he is and does what he does because others before him have been what they were and have done what they did, and all this without any conceivable beginning. He is quite literally a creature of circumstances, an automaton, whose behaviour could have been foreseen and wholly explained by an adequate knowledge of past causes, now represented by the nature of things—his own nature included.”
Ananda Coomaraswamy [6]
This is why governments can, with research and especially today’s computing, predict the general behaviour of their population. It is also why religion is such a touchy topic for them. Being inherently atheistic, they want simply the immanent, deterministic human animal, but not the spiritual man, who is unpredictable and will generally oppose them. This is the tension between the church and state, the former with the tendency to drag men up, and the latter’s tendency to drag them down. One without the other tends to destroy the masses by supressing one aspect of their being. What is required is balance. I am not the person to tell you what that is, however I can state the principle.
The individual is a transitory state, the step before dissolution. The actualization of a possibility that ends with the individual caught up in a greater person, realizing a “larger body”. What this body is, and how it is both a resurrection and a death, is explained in the next and last post of this series. We will see how the individual named “Jesus” is glorified in death that is at the same time a resurrection.
[1] Schuon, F., & Nasr, S. H. (2005). The Essential Frithjof Schuon. In The library of perennial philosophy. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0513/2005014071.html
[2] Coomaraswamy, A. K. (1944). On the One and Only Transmigrant. Journal Of The American Oriental Society, 3, 28.
[3] Hart, D. B. (2019). That All Shall Be Saved. In Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvnwbzd4
[4] Gerson, L. P. (1999). Plotinus (The Arguments of the Philosophers).
[5] Schuon, F. Form and Substance in the Religions.
[6] Oldmeadow, H. (2007). Light from the East: Eastern Wisdom for the Modern West.