More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite

Hart, Beauty of the Infinite
Part 2, section I: Trinity

Proposition 3: The Christian God shows the beauty of the infinite, and thus can be “traversed” by way of beauty.

i. Desire’s Flight.

God, Hart suggests is “all” but not a totality. That is, He is not a pantheistic all, but instead “contains and exceeds, give creation its breadth and difference, but at the same time infinitely transcends his gift” (p. 188). God’s infinity not only surpasses finite creation “qualitatively,” but also “quantitatively” since He is the world’s “supereminent plentitude, whose radiant beauty is truly declared in creation’s swift and shifting play of forms and distances” (p. 188). As he has emphasized before, Hart insists on the uniqueness of Christianity in affirming a determinate and formed, and therefore a beautiful infinite. God, in fact, is transcendently determinate – more fully Himself than any creature is itself. What is beautiful is never the product of some “enfeebling, deceptive, or violent stilling of the prior tumult of being, but is itself the grammar and element of an infinite motion, able to traverse all of being without illusion or strife” (p. 189).

No theologian, in Hart’s view, captures this vision of God’s boundless beauty more clearly than Gregory of Nyssa, whom Hart describes, following Ekkehard Muhlenberg, as “the first ‘Greek’ thinker either to attribute to God, or to develop a philosophical description of, positive infinity” (p. 190). Nyssa recognized clearly, for instance, that the creation is essentially movement. The original act of creation was a movement from “the darkness of nonbeing toward the light of God” (p. 189), and since that original act creation has been nothing other than ceaseless change: “the created dies every moment, writes Gregory, to be reborn the next” and “if it ceased to change, it would cease to exist.” An individual it never merely an individual but a nation and “the whole of humanity is an unfolding ‘series,’ a successive realization of the creative word (the first Adam) that God uttered in making humanity in his image” (p. 189).

To say that created things are in constant motion is to say that they are constantly pulled by something beyond them, by a desire for good or evil. Human being is ecstatic, longing for an elusive beauty, ultimately for the beauty of God: “Desire is the energy of our movement, and so of our being” (p. 190). Hart argues that Plotinus, for all the advancements of his thought, never reached a truly transcendent infinity, and never had any notion of transcendent difference. Because of his Trinitarian convictions, Nyssa developed a metaphysics in which multiplicity leads toward the highest truth; we don’t skim off the multiplicity of the world to get to the truth of the one, for God Himself, infinite truth, is multiple. Thus, “to pass from the vision of the world to the theoria of the divine is not simply to move from appearance to reality, from multiplicity to singularity, but rather to find the entirety of the world in all its irreducible diversity to be an analogical expression (at a distance, in a different register) of the dynamism and differentiation that God is” (p. 192). Creation “co-responds” and “corresponds” to God in a way that Plotinus could never have conceived. Our responsiveness is thus not an impulse that leads to a final stasis; “our desire does not subserve a return to the stillness of our proper being: it is our being” (p. 192).

ii. Changeless Beauty.

Much of what Nyssa means by “infinity” overlaps with the conceptions of Plotinus. For both, infinity means “incomprehensibility, absolute power, simplicity, eternity” (p. 192). For both, the infinite is boundless. Hart intends to defend precisely this “classic theism,” and in this section the classic conceptions of God’s immutability and eternity in particular.

God is boundless because of His fullness. Boundaries arise only where contraries arise, and since “God is without opposition . . . transcendent of all composition or antimony” He is boundless, and in this sense He is simple (p. 193). God is eternal not only in the sense that He is without beginning and end but also in the sense that He experiences no succession or sequence of moments. For Hart (and Nyssa), this does not render God inert or static; He is eternally dynamic, and the dynamism of creation is precisely an increasing participation in the eternal dynamism of God. Creation moves in a temporal series, and exists in a spatial extension that is foreign to the order and movement of the Triune Persons, but this succession in creation is dependent upon the boundlessness of God’s own existence: “the Trinity’s perfect act of difference also opens the possibility of the ‘ontico-ontological difference’” (p. 193). We embrace God’s infinity in an endless series of finite instances, so that the Creator-creature distinction is (again) not a difference of appearance and reality, stasis and change, but two different modes of apprehending the infinite. The soul’s ascent to God is not a departure from distance and movement but “an endless venture into difference” (p. 194). Thus finite reality belongs to the infinite, though the opposite is the case only “ecstatically: possessed, that is, in dispossession” (p. 194).

For Gregory, desire can move away from the infinite toward the “evil” of nonbeing. Gregory treat evil as “that purely privative nothingness that lies outside creation’s motion toward God” and “never stands in relation to the infinite but is always an impossible attempt at an ending, a constant breaking of the waves of being upon an uninhabitable shore, the ceaseless cessation of time” (p. 194). Yet, negativity is in no way for Gregory (as it is for Hegel) constitutive of being. There is no necessary sacrifice, no contradiction and sublation. Thus creation “is a symphonic and rhythmic complication of diversity, of motion and rest, a song praising God, the true, primordial, archetypal music”; more succinctly, “we are music moved to music” (pp. 194-195), moved to endlessly various variations by our desire for the boundless and eternal music of God.

For Christian thought, then, human beings are created as vessels of the glory of God, as a site where the infinite and finite meet without violence to the finite. In this context, created change is not something to be regretted or escaped. Change is a grace: “the good is infinitely various in its intonations. For creatures, who cannot statically comprehend the infinite, progress in the good is, Gregory observes, the most beautiful work of change, and an inability to change would be a penalty” (p. 195). Creaturely mutability marks our difference from God therefore; He is always already an infinite fullness, containing the end and the beginning. But creaturely mutability is also the way to God. We are capable of attaining an excellence of soul through participation in God precisely through our ability to move, to change, not as though we could become substantively what God is. By successive motion toward and constant expansion in our desire for God, we come to apprehend the infinite God. As Hart rightly and profoundly points out, our capacity to receive God does not have any pre-existing limits; citing Nyssa, he suggests that the “soul partaking of divine blessings” is like “a vessel endlessly expanding as it receives what flows into it inexhaustibly; participation in the good, he says, makes the participant ever more capacious and recep
tive of beauty” (p. 196). Gregory does not confine this progress in “deification” to Christology alone. Rather, the infinite has been “introduced into the entirety of the common human nature” in the incarnation (p. 199). This is salvation: Not freedom from change, but ever-greater apprehension of and ever nearer movement toward God, who remains forever infinitely beyond us and infinitely near to us.

iii. The Mirror of the Infinite.

Our access to God thus comes through our yearning for Him. We attain to a vision of divine beauty through a likeness to that beauty: “the likeness to divine splendor that one achieves in oneself through participating ever more fully in the beauty of God’s light” (p. 202). Filled with God, “one becomes a sign, entirely, an inflection and reflection at a distance of the divine glory, a deferral of God’s presence that is simultaneously a real embrace of his infinite, an impression of God that is also another emphasis, another expression” (p. 202). In this state, “every dualism, especially that between flesh and spirit, is overcome, so that ‘the manifest exterior is within the hidden interior, the hidden interior within the manifest exterior’” (p. 202).

The invisible God thus moves within the visible, only because the visible is always first a movement within God’s infinity. Hart suggests that God is invisible in two senses: First, in the sense that God is infinite in His divinity, and thus invisibility is a property of all three persons; but in another sense, there is the invisibility of the Father that becomes the manifestation of the Son and the illumination of the Spirit. The invisibility of transcendence “proceeds” from the Trinitarian invisibility, and this is the reason why our “restless mutability” can become “a way of mediation between the infinite and the finite” (p. 203). Hart explains: “We can mirror the infinite because the infinite, within itself, is entirely mirroring of itself, the Father’s incomprehensible majesty being eternally united to the coequal ‘splendor of his glory,.’ His ‘form’ and ‘impress,’ in seeing whom one has seen the Father; we can become images of God that shine with his beauty because the Father always has his image in the Son, bright with the light of his Spirit” (p. 203). But this would be impossible if God were not invisible in His transcendence, since that allows God to be “inapprehensible to the soul” yet “present to the soul as a creature never could be – within its very being” (p. 203).

For creatures there is a real distinction between “subject and object, motion and motion’s aim, ecstasy and form, participation and ‘substance,’” since this is the “essential act of ‘repetition,’ its need to participate in even its own essence.” But precisely this “dyadic oscillation” makes it possible for us to participate in and be united to the infinite God. God’s transcendence thus does not conflict with a doctrine of participation and deification; the former is the necessary assumption of the latter.

Hart wonders whether Gregory would have accepted the later Orthodox distinction between God’s essence and energies, and adds this in a footnote: “I am not at all convinced that Palamas ever intended to suggest a real distinction between God’s essence and energies; nor am I even confident that he energies should be seen as anything other than sanctifying grace by which the Holy Spirit makes the Trinity really presence to creatures. I take the distinction to mean only that God’s transcendence is such that he is free to be the God he is even in the realm of creaturely finitude, without estrangement from himself and without the creature being admitted thus to an unmediated vision of the divine essence” (p. 204, fn 75).

In this context, Hart makes some intriguing comments about signification. God, he argues, is not merely at an infinite distance, but IS that distance, the infinite distance “that cannot be, but must be, and throughout eternity is being, traversed” (p. 205). All distance belongs to the interTrinitarian act that gives being to everything. And this means that “the divine image is not . . . some distant facsimile of God: the soul’s virtue is God’s own overflowing goodness within it” (p. 205). Such is the nature of signs in general: “in its deferral and difference from what it indicates, in its constant motion of difference, it may yet be the form of presence” (p. 205). Created things are images (temporally successive) of the “complex simplicity” of the Triune life, and thus “when the soul is adapted to the diversity of perfections it perceives in the divine life, it becomes an ever clearer expression, a visible and living sign of God. The creature’s extension in time becomes an endless commentary, an endless series of particular perspectives, on God’s unextended eternity” (p. 205). This neatly captures the postmodern insight into the sign as “trace” and “absence” while also challenging the nihilistic implications that often accompany that insight.

For Gregory, salvation is creation (and Gregory sees this universalistically): “Salvation, for Gregory, is simply the same act – but made perfect in Christ – by which God rouses us each moment form nonbeing, as a pure stirring of love, seeking union with him” (p. 206). Evil must be overcome if the finite is joined to the infinite that draws it out of its limitations. There is no dark side to God, no negative or contrary, and the soul must move beyond evil toward infinite good. All evil is, for Gregory, single, “the single fact of that which strives against the will of God in creation, a limitation absurdly opposing itself to his limitlessness.” Were God to fail to bring all creation to union with Himself, it would imply “an impossible dualism,” in which an “endless godlessness” stood over against the “endlessness of God” (p. 207).

iv. Infinite Peace.

Hart summarizes some of the themes of the preceding sections here. God is in Himself the gift of distance, and the distance and difference within the creation is not a contrary to Him but an expression of an infinite reality within God Himself. Hart also returns to the theology of the sign. The structure of the image reflects the reality of God, in which there is an uncreated and eternal dynamic of sign and signifier: “Not by dissolution into a higher essence, but by an analogical correspondence of its created structure of difference and mediation to the God whose inner life is one of differentiation and mediation, the image expresses the truth of distance, of the God who is Trinity” (p. 208). Creation announces the glory of God not only according to “a logic of substances” but primarily “as a free and flowing succession of semeia.” Instead of a strong distinction between substance and sign, “one should perhaps speak of ‘substantial signs’ or of ‘semiotic substances’” (p. 208), and then launches into a dense discussion of a “baroque” reading of Gregory through the lenses of Deleuze’s treatment of Leibniz. But enough.