ONE AND MANY: THE VISIBLE GOD
We have come to the end of this series. While we have covered the one immortal soul and his many mortal bodies, it is now time to look at their synthesis, and how the resurrection reveals that synthesis in ways that might have been obscured by the concept of the "immortal soul"
III
THE “OMNIFORM LORD”
Canute: "Then it is my turn to ask of you. If Ragnar had no love, then who in the world does embody real love?" Willibald: "He (the dead man) does. He is dead and therefore more beautiful than anyone alive. You might say he is love itself. For you see, He will no longer hate, nor will he steal. His body will be abandoned here. And his flesh will feed both beasts and insects alike. He will be blown about by the wind and pelted by the rain, and he will not raise a single word in complaint. It is death that completes a man"
Vinland Saga [1]
“He will not cry out, nor raise His voice, nor cause His voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed He will not break, and smoking flax He will not quench”
Isaiah 42:2-3
“I came forth from the Father and have come into the world; I am leaving the world again and going to the Father.”
John 16:28
“Jesus went on to say, 'In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me.'”
John 16:16
“And for their saying, “We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the messenger of God”—though they did not slay him; nor did they crucify him, but it appeared so unto them. Those who differ concerning him are in doubt thereof. They have no knowledge of it, but follow only conjecture; they slew him not for certain. But God raised him up unto Himself, and God is Mighty, Wise.”
Surah 4:157-158 [2]
Death
Death is, like many facts about existence, one side of a two sided principle. There is often a concentration on death as the dissolution of a particular modality. Not that it isn’t understandable, when I lost one of my friends to complications from Sickle cell anaemia, I did not first think about resurrection bodies and departed souls, all I saw at first was simply absence, a void that was as terrifying as it was inevitable, a void I knew was coming for me someday, although I hope a long time from now. The shock of death, I have come to think, is the shock of seeing our contingency, our vanity, and by contrast, the necessity of God, who alone can save us from the despair inherent in such a vision. Basically, fear of death is the other side of the fear of God, since the latter implies that you know your own mortality, and the finitude of attaching your identity to fleeting things. I have written before how fear of death can, instead of a way to remind us of God, a way to keep us chained to the world, to laws that do not reflect the divine, or at the very least have been made opaque to the divine. Now we have to see how death is, in its metaphysical necessity, God himself bringing us into reckoning with our destiny, a way to return us to himself. This does not negate the pain of losing someone, but nonetheless gives hope that whatever happens, we’re in his hands, and whatever the circumstances of our demise, God will use the tragedy as a gate into the eternal life we all so desperately need.
Jesus speaks of his death not as a defeat, but as a victory. It is not that Jesus lost a battle at death but won the war at resurrection. Jesus, in his death, secured the victory right there and then, or rather revealed the eternal victory right there and then. He specifically says “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself.” (John 12:32), the scripture even mentions in the next verse that “He said this to indicate the kind of death He was going to die”, and all this is a victory, because verse 31 says “Now judgment is upon this world; now the prince of this world will be cast out”. He barely mentions the resurrection, speaking of it as simply him “returning”. The resurrection event, at least if we can call it that, is for them to see him (John 16: 16, 14:19), and not think he did not fulfil his promise, or that he hadn’t defeated death and the devil. It was seemingly not for himself, but for us, and this means there is some hint here that there is something about Jesus’ death that is itself the substance of resurrection, something invisible that needed revealing to a world that was spiralling into decadence, leaving them with very little hope for salvation. It is something that is hidden and scattered all over the Roman world it was revealed to, but was drowned and hidden from the eyes of the people by “the god of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4). As David Bentley Hart put it:
Some Christians, it is my experience, become terribly anxious when confronted by the similarities between the language of Christianity in the early centuries and that of many of the pagan devotions of late antiquity (just as certain of Christianity’s cultured despisers rejoice in them). And, of course, some of the more primitivist strains of Protestantism have historically take these similarities as proof of something corrupt and even perhaps diabolical in the Catholic forms of Christian belief and observance. Whatever the case, it is simply a fact that neither in the intensity of its piety, nor in the spiritual longings it answered, nor even in its liturgical and sacramental conventions, did Christianity bring something entirely novel into the world. As early as the late first century, Christianity was in very many places—morphologically, but also in its dogma—a “mystery religion” of a sort known throughout the empire, offering salvation through sacramental initiation into a corporate association and sacramental devotion to a savior deity… The gospel entered the ancient world at a time of tremendous religious plurality and spiritual ferment: an age of religious anxiety, when mystery religions, Orphic cults, Gnosticisms, and innumerable devotional sects multiplied uncontrollably and continuously throughout the empire. And I suppose one can look at the issue from either direction. One can gaze backward and conclude that the rise of Christianity was simply the accidental evolutionary consequence of the cultural forces of a certain period and nothing else. But one might also conclude that Christianity endured, spread, and ultimately succeeded in large part because it provided an answer to seemingly unanswerable cultural and spiritual dilemmas, and addressed certain perennial human yearnings with perhaps unrivalled power.[3]
What was this mystery that the Gospel was supposed to reveal? What about the resurrection was hidden in the Roman world that was miring in sensual decadence yet longed for God in its often very profound, yet sometimes disturbing, cults? I think the answer lies in the kind of body Jesus returned with, and how the Scriptures themselves do not describe a “waking up” of Jesus, but an empty tomb, one which Jesus himself did not roll away. The tomb was opened to reveal that it was empty. Jesus had disappeared, or rather he was never there, or even both truths at once.
Spirit
“Spirit,” by contrast—πνεῦμα or spiritus—was something quite different, a kind of life not bound to death or to the irrational faculties of brute nature, inherently indestructible and incorruptible, and not confined to any single cosmic sphere. It could survive anywhere, and could move with complete liberty among all the spiritual realms, as well as in the material world here below. Spirit was something subtler but also stronger, more vital, more glorious than the worldly elements of a coarse corruptible body compounded of earthly soul and material flesh… This is why it is that those traditional translations of 1 Corinthians 15:35-54 that render Paul’s distinction between the σῶμα ψυχικόν (psychical body) and the σῶμα πνευματικόν (spiritual body) as a distinction between “natural” and “spiritual” bodies are so terribly misleading. The very category of the “natural” is otiose here, as would be any opposition between natural and supernatural modes of life; that is a conceptual division that belongs to other, much later ages. For Paul, both psychical and spiritual bodies were in the proper sense natural objects, and both in fact are found in nature as it now exists. He distinguished, therefore, not between “natural” and “spiritual” bodies, but only between σώματα ἐπίγεια (“terrestrial bodies”) and σώματα ἐπουράνια (“celestial bodies”). And this, again, is a distinction not between natural and supernatural life, but merely between incommiscible “natural” states: ἀφθαρσία (“incorruptibility”) and φθορά (“decay”), δόξα (“glory”) and ἀτιμία (“dishonor”), δυνάμις (“power”) and ἀσθένεια (“weakness”). In speaking of the body of the resurrection as a “spiritual” rather than “psychical” body, Paul is saying that, in the Age to come, when the whole cosmos will be transfigured into a reality appropriate to spirit, beyond birth and death, the terrestrial bodies of those raised to new life will be transfigured into the sort of celestial bodies that now belong to the angels: incorruptible, immortal, purged of every element of flesh and blood and (perhaps) soul.
David Bentley Hart [4]
Christ’s body is already here below what heavenly (Celestial) bodies are, with the sole difference that it is nevertheless affected by some of the accidents of earthly life.
Frithjof Schuon [5]
When Christ “returned”, he did not return with “flesh” as we know it. The accounts in Luke notwithstanding, it is generally known that we cannot teleport or shine like the stars in our fallen bodies. Luke’s report shows that it is indeed the crucified Christ that returned, not an imposter, and not that Christ’s body is made of carbon based molecules elements that decay with time, which would be pretty much against Paul’s words that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 15:50). In fact, Jesus has always had this body, as the transfiguration shows, “for the transformation on Tabor involved no change in Him whose eternal and celestial glory persisted throughout His earthly life; it was a transformation instead in the eyes of His apostles, who were now able to see His human nature as it had always been.”[6]. What Christ showed there was the unreality of flesh and blood relative to the heavenly body, and the utter weakness of death as conceived by the ordinary human. Death, understood as “cut off” from its greater purpose, is a phantom, a lord with power that is no power. Its kingdom is revealed as a fraud when Jesus makes the grave the holiest site on earth. Not that people don’t die, but he reveals what the real end of death is, and it is life. “He who loses his life for me will find it” (Matt. 16:25), because he who loses his life finds he never died, for “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live” (John 11:25), because “whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die” (John 11:26), he even adds “do you believe this?” in that same verse.
These are hard words for anyone to bear, because it seemingly spits in the face of our grief. But like Paul said, we do not mourn like those who have no hope (1 Thess. 4:13). Mourning is not irrational, it is a response to a real loss. The catch is, there are levels of “real”, and ultimately, all loss is unreal in the face of God, who is the God of the living not the dead (Matt. 22:32). But what is this body? What is so good about this body? And how does it relate to our original aim to bridge the “immortal soul” with “resurrection”? How does it preach the gospel of the self-giving Love of God?
David Bentley hart describes “Spirit, for instance, in certain antique schools of natural philosophy and medicine, could be defined as that subtle influence or ichor that pervades the veins and passages of a living body and, among other things, endows it with sense perception—by filling, for instance, the nerves or porous passages between eye and brain. For many persons, in fact, this vital influence was literally “physically” continuous with the “wind” that fills the world and the “breath” that swells our chests. This is almost unimaginable for us, of course.” [4]. This body is imperishable, immortal, and pretty much everything you’d want in a body. But, this body was not simply “individual”. It is freed from the illusions of fallen bodily life, including that of our absolute individuality apart from others. Another name for this principle is “intellect”. Lloyd Gerson provides a glimpse of what this relationship between intellects is like:
It would seem, then, that inter-awareness of this choir of angels or community of spirits must consist in each knowing the other as Form or intelligible object, not in some more intimate penetration of the subjective. [7]
In other words, they know each other not as separate intellects interacting “horizontally” like we do over here when talking to each other, but through their mutual participation in the “intellection” or “contemplation” of forms, that is, the “ideas” of God, which reveal his nature and activity. They know each other in worship. In fact, this is what worship is, unity with God, who is our true person, and the fullest way to know each other, because “Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me” (Matt. 25:40). In this way, they are ultimately one cosmic intellect that is “the body of Christ” as seen in the book of Revelation, where Christ is both the celestial man in the midst of the lampstands and the open heaven that calls to John. He is heaven, the Cosmic intellect, the “community of spirits”, whose “bodies” are not merely individual.
What I’ve just described is the “immortal soul” part of the bridge, where the “immortal soul”, that is, “the intellect” or “spirit” is itself the core of this resurrection body, or rather its very substance. Now we have to see the other side, how the resurrected body is exactly that spirit and how Jesus’ individuality masked, and revealed his universal body.
Resurrection
When Jesus died, he left behind a seemingly mortal body, or rather he seemed to leave it behind. But if Christ said he was returning to the father, then that body, which is part of his person, cannot be left out of it. It is often said that the verse where Christ preaches to “the spirits in prison” talks about his travels while dead. Dr Hart, however, thinks otherwise:
For one thing, whether or not the evangelization of Hades was understood as having occurred during the interval between Christ’s death and his resurrection, the tale cited in (1 Peter) chapter three is explicitly about something Christ accomplished after his resurrection. The parallel construction “θανατωθεὶς μὲν σαρκί, ζῳοποιηθεὶς δὲ πνεύματι” employs two modal datives—in or by or as flesh, in or by or as spirit—to indicate the manner or condition, first, of Christ’s death and, second, of his being made alive again, while the conjunctive formula ἐν ᾧ seems to make it clear that, by being raised “as spirit,” Christ was made capable of entering into spiritual realms, and so of traveling to the “spirits in prison.”[4]
Christ did not preach to imprisoned spirits as a dead man, but as a living one, but how can a living man be in the grave? If, contra Hart, Christ did preach to these spirits while his body was in the grave, how was he alive?
The individual intellect, when in its “highest” state, that is, in full “communion” and unity with the cosmic intellect, is, in acts, indistinguishable from the cosmic intellect. In contemplating the forms, it is, in Gerson’s words “cognitively identified” with them, “intellect is intelligible in the sense that it is identical with intelligibles cognitively, from which it follows that what is intelligible, i.e., each Form, is identical with every intellect” [7]. In addition, in this identification each intellect is also the one intellect that unifies them all, the intellect that is the “second arche” according to Plotinus, which Schuon identifies with the cosmic intellect that is also the essence of humanity, in other words, the humanity of Christ. This intellect in its fullness is both cosmic in its “spawning” and “inhabiting” the lower orders, and particular in the modes of operation of individual intellects in intelligent creatures like man. In fact, the role of the intellect in fleshly man is analogous to the role of the cosmic intellect in the “fleshly” universe, that is, the universe is its “body”:
The most famous account of the microcosmic body in the ancient world is found in Plato's Timaeus, which portrays not only the human body as a cosmos but, conversely, the cosmos as a body. In the Timaeus the cosmos is a tangible body, a "single living thing," a "visible living creature," and a "visible god"
Dale Martin [8]
The perfect man is attuned to the Cosmos as a whole, the “music of the spheres”, the harmony of the Stars, the “wind that bloweth where it listeth”; the wind that you cannot see. This man is no longer just a man, but the man, whose form is that of the universal man. Embodying that man to the fullest, he can never die. Though his body may die, that body "died" long before the manifestation. In being one with the cosmic body, he is that cosmic body, and hence, his physical form eventually disappears, like Enoch, who walked “with God”, and “was not”, for God took him. God became Enoch that Enoch might become God. Enoch becomes “not”, so that God “is”. Yet not I, but Christ. Jesus, being in his person Theosis itself, is himself not only that body, but all bodies. The Eucharist is the greatest explanation of this in the Christian symbolic language. Christ is bread, bread grown from the earth, so Christ is earth, and so we arrive again that Christ is man (earth). Christ, in his death, embodied the other side of the statement “to dust you shall return”, for the individual man is “extinct” in the universal man, or rather the individual man is to be a mode of the universal man. The Curse for Adam is revealed as the shadow side of the blessing of Christ, in whom we die as sinful, detached, “dusty” men and are reborn as his brothers and his “body”, the celestial man.
This resurrection, while technically immediate or short (if we count the three days in the grave) for Christ, is not immediate for most of us, as many of us, even in death, hold on to our identities as individuals at the expense of Christ. So it is that even paradise has “levels”, where there are “seven heavens”, “three heavens”, etc.; where our souls grow in knowledge of Christ from “outside the temple walls (in the ages) into the temple precincts, and finally (beyond the ages) into the very sanctuary of the glory- as one” [9]. Where these “ages” are themselves the various “levels” of reality, beyond the destructive time of our physical world:
For Plato, chronos and aion were not, respectively, time and eternity, but rather two different kinds of time: the former is characterized by change, and therefore consists in that successive state of duration (measured out by the sidereal rotations of the heavens) by which things that cannot exist in their entirety all at once are allowed to unfold their essences through diachronic extension and through a process of arising and perishing; the latter is characterized by changelessness and repletion, the totality of every essence realized in its fullness in one immutable state. Thus, the aeon above is the entire ''Age of the world”, existing all at once in a time without movement (which is to say, change), wherein nothing arises or perishes, while chronos is the "moving image of the aeon," the dim reflection of that heavenly plenum in a ghostly procession of shadowy fragments. Hence, Plato does not really use aionios to indicate endless duration, because (to employ a slightly later terminology) all duration is a "dynamic" process, a constant passage from possibility to actuality; in the aeon, however, there is no unrealized dynamis or "potency" requiring actualization, as all exists in a state of immutable fullness, and so nothing technically "endures" at all. Hence also, for Platonic tradition as a whole, it may very well be the case that the aeon above is thought to persist only so long as the present world-cycle endures, and that at the end of the Platonic Year, when the stars begin their great rotation anew, one heavenly Age will succeed another. This notion of a changeless heavenly aion or (in Latin) aevum, moreover, which stands utterly distinct from the mutability of terrestrial chronos or tempus, was very much a part of Christian cosmology from late antiquity well into the late Middle Ages: here below, the time of generation and decay; there above, the angelic "age," the ethereal realm of the celestial spheres; and then also, still higher up, the empyrean of God in himself, "beyond all ages." [9]
This is what we mean by the “second coming”, when God beyond the ages breaks into the ages, or rather, where we meet him at the “summit of the ages”. In this “place”, where time and space disappear, there is no hell, and no duration of hell. You embody the perspective of God, and from his perspective, hell is unreal, and has “ended”. All duration, even that of hell, disappears, and all souls in all worlds are free.
The profound meaning of all these allusions is as follows: towards the completion of a major cosmic cycle, in the words of a hadith: 'the flames of Hell will grow cold'; correlatively, but without there being any true symmetry - for 'My Mercy takes precedence over my Wrath’ - the Paradises, at the approach of the Apocatastasis, will of metaphysical necessity reveal their limitative aspect, as if they had become less vast or as if God were less close than before; they will experience a sort of nostalgia for the One without a second or for the Essence, for proximity is not Unity and comprises an element of otherness and separativity. Without involving suffering of any kind, which would be contrary to the very definition of Heaven, the aspect 'other than God' will manifest itself to the detriment of the aspect 'near to God'. This will be no more than a passing shadow, for then will come the Apocatastasis whose glory will surpass all promises and all expectation, in conformity with the principle that God never fulfils less than He promises, but on the contrary always more. At the very moment when, perhaps, one of the blessed will ask himself whether he is still in Paradise, the great veil will be torn asunder and the uncreated Light will flood all and absorb all: the 'garden' will return to the 'Gardener'; Universal Manifestation will be transmuted and everything will be reintegrated within the ineffable Plenitude of the Principle; Being itself, together with its possibilities of creation, will no longer be detached from the indivisible Self; its possibilities will expand into what might be called, notwithstanding a certain inherent absurdity in the expression, the 'absolute Substance'.
Frithjof Schuon [10]
This is the “evangelization to the spirits in prison” enabled by the “resurrection”, that is “awakening” of Christ in us, so that “when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). We are the spirits "in prison", whether imprisoned in our bodies here, or in the self induced hell of the afterlife, which is simply a continuation and intensification of our imprisonment. This full realization of unity is the resurrection itself. Because of it, one is able to take on the redeemed individual body (not fallen flesh) and identity in order to interact with us here below, and this is what Christ did, and is exactly why he and his Theotokos are “exalted above the cherubim”, for they are in the highest height of Theosis. Their bodies are not cages which we fight with like Paul says in Romans 7. Their bodies are perfect theophanies. In their unity with God, they become "all in all" with him, filling their bodies with his presence and redeeming it. We are disembodied (and even now we are not fully embodied, as our bodies rebel against us) until that theosis is achieved, and when it is achieved, no matter the “relative” time it takes for all to reach there, we will realize that we will all, all including those in hell, get there “at the same time”, in the “eternal present”. Each "disembodied soul" is then simply someone who hasn't fully reconciled with the cosmic body, and is still imprisoned in the "ego", the "false body" or "individuality", which is first known as the physical body, but also includes the individual soul. This liberation is a "right ordering". The ego, microcosmically the various “powers” of our body’s rebellion and macrocosmically the rebelling fallen cosmos, while it remains central, is false, only when God is central is it true, a pure "reflection".
“In descending to Hades and ascending again through the heavens, Christ has vanquished all the Powers below and above that separate us from the love of God, taking them captive in a kind of triumphal procession. All that now remains is the final consummation of the present age, when Christ will appear in his full glory as cosmic conqueror, having ‘subordinated’ (hypetaxen) all the cosmic powers to himself – literally, having properly ‘ordered’ them ‘under’ himself – and will then return this whole reclaimed empire to his Father. God himself, rather than wicked or inept spiritual intermediaries, will rule the cosmos directly.”[11]
It is difficult to describe how this works, but I can say that, in this vision, both “cyclical time” and “linear time” are resolved in that eternal present. All future ages on earth, no matter their “distance” in time, reach the summit “at once”, and then suddenly realize their celestial bodies, and the celestial body, and return to “earth”, while at the same time remaining in “heaven”, the unity of which is paradise. Their beginning is their end, and the golden age never ended, we were simply blinded and clothed in sin, the subsequent ages being the garments that blinded us.
Now, with the golden age in sight, the refrain of “already/not yet” regarding the reality of resurrection makes better sense, and we can say with our hearts believing in the resurrection of the body that “Come, Lord Jesus come”.
[1] Yukimura, M. (2019). Vinland Saga (TV Series 2019) - IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10233448/
[2] Nasr, S. H., Dagli, C. K., Dakake, M. M., Lumbard, J. E. B., & Rustom, M. (2017). The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary. HarperOne; Reprint edition.
[3] Hart, D. B. (2011). The Desire of the Nations. First Things. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2011/06/the-desire-of-the-nations
[4] Hart, D. B. (2018). The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients. Church Life Journal. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-spiritual-was-more-substantial-than-the-material-for-the-ancients/
[5] Schuon, F., & Cutsinger, J. S. (2017). The Fullness of God: Frithjof Schuon on Christianity. In World Wisdom. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1rfss2f.13
[6] Cutsinger, J. S. (2002). The Mystery of the Two Natures © 2002. 2(1998).
[7] Gerson, L. P. (1999). Plotinus (The Arguments of the Philosophers).
[8] Martin, D. B. (1999). The Corinthian Body. Yale University Press.University Press)
[9] Hart, D. B. (2019). That All Shall Be Saved. In Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvnwbzd4
[10] 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
[11] Hart, D. B. (2018). Everything you know about the Gospel of Paul is likely wrong. Aeon. https://aeon.co/ideas/the-gospels-of-paul-dont-say-what-you-think-they-say