The lead quote:
So, following the saintly fathers, we all with one voice teach the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity; like us in all respects except for sin; begotten before the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days the same for us and for our salvation from Mary, the virgin God-bearer as regards his humanity; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only- begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation; at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being; he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same only-begotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as the prophets taught from the beginning about him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ himself instructed us, and as the creed of the fathers handed it down to us.
(—The Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (a.d. 451) in God after Metaphysics A Theological Aesthetic, by John Panteleimon Manoussakis, 2007)
Followed by:
There is always the question, here applied to The Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon’s statement, whether the words…It is nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious Maker of the world has visited His world in person. It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand down myths; the Man who made the World. That such a higher personality exists behind all things had always been implied by the best thinkers as well as by all the beautiful legends. But nothing of this sort has ever been implied by any of them . . . The most that any religious prophet had said was that he was the true servant of such a being. The most that any visionary had ever said was that men might catch glimpses of the glory of that spiritual being; much more often of lesser spiritual beings. The most that any primitive myth had ever suggested was that the Creator was present at the Creation. But that the Creator was present at scenes a little subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked with tax collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be firmly asserted by the whole of that great civilization for more than a thousand years—that is something utterly unlike anything else in nature. It is the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word . . . it makes nothing but dust and nonsense of comparative religion.
(—G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, Ibid)
“ the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being; he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same only-begotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as the prophets taught from the beginning about him”
…are, indeed, true.
For a moment, if I imagine they are true, does/did a single individual exist from/through whom what we experience as this apparent cosmos comes into existence, is sustained by, and moves through a spiritual/energetic holism toward an, as yet, unknown and undetected teleology signatured for all creatures and all elements encircled by this creative physics/theological explanation?
In Chesterton’s assertion, “the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word” — namely, “the creator present at scenes talking with tax collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire” — is, indeed, unusual. The creator entering creation and attempting to steer it toward a happy conclusion.
The Jesus phenomenon has intrigued thought and activity for some two thousand years.
Could the story, the speculation, the antagonisms, and heuristic possibilities actually be so intimate to our narrative DNA as to ultimately and unexplainably be true and accurate?
If we push a little further, do we suspect that this narrative is one auto-generated by an organism grown in sophistication and knowledge to such an extent that the activity of unfolding consciousness begins to encircle the possibility that everything that is is the expression of everything as it is becoming manifest in the visible experience of that which visualizes from the inside out?
How do we see such a story? How incarnate and embody such curious explanation of the origin and contemporary expression of this creation/existential reality?
The circumstances.In a Dark Time
BY THEODORE ROETHKE
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
(Poem by Theodore Roethke, "In a Dark Time" from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright © 1963)
The correspondences.
The natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Is “One” and “God” and “mind” all of a piece?
And, are we, in the interim, and, at best, dust and nonsense?
Maybe, joyfully so?
