The biblical revelation, understood symbolically, confronts us with an uncompromising anthropocentrism, which is not physical but spiritual. Because Man is at once ‘microcosm and microtheos’, both a summing up of the universe and the image of God; and because God, in order to unite himself to the world, finally became a human being; humanity is the spiritual axis of all creation at every level, in every sphere. The saints see the universe in God, pervaded by his energies, held whole and entire, but tiny, in his hand. The movement of modern science from geocentrism to heliocentrism, and thence to the complete absence of centre in physical infinity, poses no threat to the pivotal character of humankind in God, but gives it a renewed significance. There is nowhere that the unlimited universe can be situated but in the creative love of God in which the human race can consciously share. The indefiniteness of the world is consequently situated in sanctified humanity and becomes the symbol of the ‘deep calling to deep’. Certainly, as Nietzsche declared while he was announcing the death of God, for those who reject or know nothing of the Living God, there is neither height nor depth, but only cold and shadows. But for those who believe and know – and this is the joy to which all are called – the heart of the saints is the ‘place of God’ and therefore the centre of the world; better than that, the heart contains the world and so situates it in love.
Certain Greek fathers, like Gregory of Nyssa, and certain Russian theologians in the first half of this century, some of whom, like Paul Florensky, were considerable physicists, formulated a dynamic theory of matter which incorporated the basic scriptural notions of the cosmic significance of the fall, the miracles of Christ, his spiritual corporeity, the resurrection of the body and its anticipation through holiness.
For Gregory of Nyssa, for example, matter results from the convergence of intelligible structures. We must be clear that Gregory attributes a certain materiality to the intelligible, God alone being immaterial. What he means is that ‘matter’ is the concretion of ‘thoughts’ ‘perceptible by the spirit and not by the senses’, and that these created structures are the place where divine Intelligence and human intelligence meet. We might ask whether modern science, when it discovers ‘systems’ and ‘structures’ of amazing complexity, without which the universe could not exist, is not coming to similar conclusions.
For the Fathers and for the great ascetics – who speak from experience – this conception shows that there exist very diverse spiritual states of materiality, which, in human terms, can be understood as states of contemplation or blindness. In other words, the condition of the cosmos, its transparence or its opaqueness to the divine light, depends on the transparence or opaqueness of humanity itself. In the beginning, and again now in Christ, in the Holy Spirit, humanity, by subjecting the universe to ‘futility’, renders itself subject to a state of matter ‘against nature’.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
