 
# The Concept of Nature in the Thought of John Philoponus  
And Other Essays

###### By John McKenna

###### Copyright 2013 Grace Communion International

###### Cover image: Grace Communion International

######

Table of Contents

The Concept of Nature in the Thought of John Philoponus

Endnotes

The Interface Between Theology and Science in the Thought of John Philoponus

Transformations in the History of Cosmology

Endnotes

About the author

About the publisher

Grace Communion Seminary

Ambassador College of Christian Ministry

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## The Concept of Nature in the Thought of John Philoponus

#### "We must now ask how this dynamic and relational way of thinking in his science, strictly in accordance with the nature or reality of things, affected Philoponus' theology in giving it a dynamic form in the doctrine of God and of salvation."

—Thomas F. Torrance in _Theological and Natural Science_ , p. 6

_This essay is an attempt to clarify the way that the great 6_ th _Century Alexandrian Grammarian, John Philoponus, thought to employ his concept of_ _nature_ _both in his philosophical or scientific works and in his theological works. It is argued that, for Philoponus, there exists a real cognitive interface between the science of his theology and the science or philosophy of his physics and cosmology_. _It is further argued that, standing on the holy ground of this interface, we may seek to understand the contingent order of the Universe as it comes to us from the Word or Logos of the Almighty._

Take the concept associated with the term "Israel." It means different things to different people, even in the Biblical World. It signifies differently to different peoples in various epochs in the history of the Biblical World. At Fuller Theological Seminary, the Bible scholar William Sanford LaSor, in his book entitled _Israel_ , explored the meaning of this term across the epochs of the Biblical history with some sense of its mystery in its times and spaces in the history of the world. As a concept, the term possessed various significations across different centuries in numbers of diverse contexts, indicating a range of meanings with regard to the realities to which such a concept belongs. The Bible reader if referred all of these realities by this one term.[1]

In a similar way, the concept of _Nature_ had meant different things to different people in various times and different contexts in our efforts to read the _nature_ of the Universe. The great Quantum physicist, Paul Dirac, could employ the term in his science with the assumption of the real solidity of its significance for his physics.[2] Yet only a few years later, the Cambridge physicist, Roger Penrose, in his magisterial work entitled _The Road to Reality_ , can write about the possibility of understanding the wholeness of this Universe: "True—so they might argue—we have been fortunate enough to stumble upon mathematical schemes that accord with Nature in remarkable ways, but the unity of Nature as a whole with some mathematical scheme can be no more than a 'pipe-dream'. Others might take the view that the very notion of 'physical reality' with a truly objective nature, independent of how we might choose to look at it, is itself a 'pipe-dream'."[3] In contrast to the reserve of our more modern scientists about the concept of _nature_ , we find with our philosophers about science, like André Mercier, ample attention to the concept along the lines of Dirac's assumption.[4] What has happened here?

Professor Penrose's only reference to the term _nature_ in his Table of Contents is made with regard to the 'holistic' _nature_ of the wave function in the Quantum World.[5] However, he has contributed to a study exploring the concept of _nature_ where he has distinguished SUPERB theories from USEFUL or TENTATIVE ones about the _nature_ of the physical world.[6]. Still there is no reference in his index to the term. No effort is made to define the Universe as a whole.[7] We will not find a discussion of _nature_ as a general principle or concept in his thought. It seems implicit in his many of his explications of the various phenomena throughout this magisterial work, whose science he attempts to show us, but the concept of _nature_ as a whole, it seems, remain something of a 'pipe-dream' for scientists today.

Evidently, we can speak about the _nature_ of various fields, with their continuums and their particles of energies, as we speculate about the ways we might become able to integrate these fields and particles in the future, yet knowledge of the _Nature_ of the Universe as a whole must remain presently beyond our grasp. Unlike the ancient philosophers, today's physicists are reluctant to conceive of the _Nature_ of the whole Cosmos or Universe, let alone the _Nature_ of God Himself.[8] Concepts like 'Israel' then and _nature_ , face us with perplexing referencing power. They belong to a realm of consciousness and conscience that confronts us with on-going challenges as to the actual substance of their significance. I would refer to them as 'fluid axioms' in the history of thought. We may employ them without a final definition, even as we are free to seek to discover and understand some real correspondence between them and the realities to which they would refer us in our times. The history of our experience with these axioms evidently requires an appreciation of our freedom to learn with our use of them of realities we apprehend only with a deep appreciation for the incomprehensible.

These problems that we face about some real correspondence between theory and experience, the intelligible and the sensible, when we seek to understand the whole and parts in any field of knowledge, is wondrously evident throughout the works of Philoponus.[9] Evidently, the use of terms and concepts associated with _nature_ , their universal and particular properties, their wholes and their parts, are to be variously assessed in diverse fields of knowledge across the centuries of the development of human thought. Our efforts to understand the fundamental realities that belong to the vital correspondence between thought and experience in our relations with _nature_ is in fact at the very heart of the interface of our concerns both then and now. In 6th century Alexandria, the Grammarian, John Philoponus, sought to understand anew the _nature_ of the Creator and the _nature_ of the physics of His Creation, the _nature_ of God and the _nature_ of the Cosmos as it was conceived in his time. This same problem has confronted the both ancient and modern philosophers in fact, both modern researchers and ancient seekers of wisdom among the ages of civilization. It remains fundamental to our progress for human thought and knowledge.

In these efforts, wonder and knowledge, freedom and the human imagination, are seen to resonate across centuries of civilized endeavor. They mark with steady progress the miracles of our understanding, the blood, sweat, and tears of human life and endeavor. We believe, with Philoponus, that those who seek the fruits of such efforts in our Creator become Incarnate in His Cosmos may find directions in their times that characterize the advance of civilization. If we work for the joy and beauty of this understanding, we work to obey His Command among the nations in our world. Perhaps in our time the confrontation between the Biblical World and the Physical World is more vital than ever for this progress. Perhaps it will take a new courage for philosophers, scientists, and theologians alike to discover our obedience to this Command. In any case, we may and we must seek still today for such resolutions between these worlds that must belong to the real future of our race upon this earth.[10]

Such challenges arise when we seek to understand the wholes and the parts of our experience, the universal with its particulars, in dynamical fields of knowledge that together make up the potential and actual relations between the physical universe and human consciousness. These challenges that Philoponus sought to face still face us today.[11] It appears evident that both ancient and modern wisdoms are required for real openness to the transcendent in the _nature_ of the Truth with which we have to do in our time. Einstein could refer to God in this sense as the 'Old One'.[12] The changeless and the changeable in created time and created space belong to his reason incarnate in existence. What is eternal and what is temporal in relationship with one another give us pause always to meditate upon the question of the _nature_ of space and time and motion and energy and matter in this world. We will always need our philosophers and scientists in this case. It seems incredible to me that some can think that the theologian and the philosophers and scientists are free to view themselves as enemies.

It seems not at all impossible that we shall need to learn to think as friends of those things for which John Philoponus loved to contemplate. Questions at the interface between uncreated realities and created realities remain fundamental for us today. They challenge all of us. To think that science and theology are enemies is to think, I believe, with very old habits of thought indeed. Who can conceive of the day when those who seek to possess knowledge of the _nature_ of the Universe will be able to pretend that the _nature_ of God, of which the Bible speaks, remains silent in our efforts? I believe it is evident that, when the universe speaks to us of its _nature_ , it cries out ever for an explanation that must come from beyond itself. God has always answered this cry with His Word, with His Silence only in some fearsome judgment upon us. His answer is what we talk about when we speak about a created reality, made out of nothing, as an object made out of acts only the Transcendent One, the Redeemer-Creator, can commit.[13]

Dr. Thomas Spear Torrance has gathered some of his father's later essays into a collection entitled _Natural and Theological Science_.[14] The Right Reverend Professor Thomas F. Torrance has explored, explicitly and implicitly, the concept of _nature_ in these essays. He argues that it is vital to grasp the cognitive interface that must exist between our knowledge of God and our knowledge of the Universe. In this collection of essays, Professor Torrance has continued to champion rational contingency whose intelligibility is fundamental at this interface, the contingency of a world as God's Creation out of nothing is bound up with the Church's doctrines of _creatio_ _ex nihilo_ in the Beginning and _the_ _Incarnation_ of the New Beginning.

Among these essays he refers again and again to John Philoponus and the Academy at Alexandria in Justinian's Empire where the Grammarian labored in the fields of science and theology. Torrance seeks to bring to light the rational substantiality of the concept of the _nature_ of the contingency of the world, against the abstract necessities and arbitrary subjectivities we may employ in our seeking to understand the fundamentals of this created _nature_. In this light, it is right that we discover a proper ground upon which we may stand to apprehend the fundamentals of both physics and theology, the Cosmos with its God, whose doctrines the Church seeks to articulate. Torrance seeks to make both theologian and scientist aware of our need to stand on this ground, where we may precisely embrace that interface between created and uncreated realities where real progress may be made. I believe he points us to the Alexandrian in the hope that we may face our futures with the grace and truth of this God and Lord.[15]

In this essay, then, I would like to explore the concept of _nature_ as it is found in the thought of John Philoponus. The Grammarian wrestled hard with both Platonic claims and the physics (nature) of Aristotelian forms of knowledge regarding the fundamentals of space and time and matter and energy and motion in the Cosmos.[16] He wrestled with some genius and great courage. He was perhaps the first Christian[17] to take seriously for the physics of the world the Christian doctrines of 'Creation out of nothing' and 'The Incarnation' in its space and time, and the fruit of this serious work has just begun to become apparent for us in our time. With his Christian faith, he sought to give definition, meaning, and significance to the concept of _nature_ in the full light of the Lord's Day, when time itself would be seen to serve His purposes in the world.[18]

What appeared as a very new way of thinking about things had to fight its way into the history of the world's thought about them. The Neo-platonic fashions of his day, championed by Simplicius, could read Philoponus as something of maniac seeking some sort of fame among the ignorant. Simplicius attacks upon Philoponus appear today the passions of a very mean spirited man, in spite of his denial of any personal animosity against the Grammarian.[19] With Professor Torrance, I believe Philoponus' way of thinking about God and the Universe could very well and significantly help our efforts in science and theology in our time. We need a theological science and scientific theology if we are to make any significant advance.[20]

Professor Torrance and I first met at Fuller Theological Seminary in 1982. He had come that year to deliver the Peyton Lectures and, because of it, I changed my Ph.D. dissertation topic from the Book of Isaiah to a study of John Philoponus. My dissertation is published as 'The Setting in Life of "The Arbiter" by John Philoponus.'[21] Philoponus had produced an Christological treatise on the Incarnation of the Word of God for the Emperor Justinian aimed at the concerns of the 5th Ecumenical Council of the Church at Constantinople (553 AD). Eventually, the Church, East and West, Byzantine and Roman, condemned his efforts.

I argued in my dissertation that the Anathema was a tragic mistake of epoch making proportions.[22] Philoponus has only recently begun to receive the credit and attention that he deserves. Both Professors Sorabji and Torrance have helped to end the way he has escaped the attention in philosophy and theology. I have attempted, as steadily as possible, to seek to penetrate into the significance of the Grammarian's thought at the interface even for the Church's proclamation of the Gospel today.[23] I believe that Torrance's challenge at the interface between Faith and Reason, Belief and Knowledge, Revelation and the Nature of Created Reality, is a call for some real progress to be made in our time, a progress that will take us quite beyond the many fashions prevailing in so much of our so-called post-modern world. The direction in which Torrance has sought to send the Church is, I believe, and imperative one.[24]

Along these lines, I would like then to analyze the use of the concept of _nature_ in the thought of John Philoponus. I would seek to understand the way that the Alexandrian employed the term in his interaction with Aristotle and the Neo-Platonism of his time as well as with his contemporaries in seeking positive resolutions to theological problems in the Church. His penetration into the _nature_ of the Creator, made known to him in the Incarnation,[25] and his understanding of the _nature_ of the Creation cannot be divorced from one another in the development of his thought. I would hope to clarify the dynamical use he made of his concept of _nature_ in the light of their relationships. I believe that he was able, because of these relationships, to introduce a new way of thinking and understanding the Church's Christology, as well as a new grasp of the physics of the Ptolemaic Cosmology with which he worked in his time. I believe we need to begin with the development of his Christology as read in 'The Arbiter'.[26] Then we may hope to hear his thought resonate with understandings he is able to achieve about the _nature_ of the Cosmos.[27]

The dynamical and kinetic character of Philoponus' definition, I would argue, when viewed through Platonic or Aristotelian lenses can easily be misconstrued and leads to his condemnation. But the concept of _nature_ in the thought of Philoponus is mistakenly interpreted when Neo-platonic categories are employed to comprehend the science of the Alexandrian. Categories such as Eternity and Time and so forth, understood in the Light of the Incarnation and the Creation out of Nothing in the Beginning possess very different definitions and properties than those formed by Greek philosophy, when it is not believed that anything can come out of nothing and that the world must Eternal if God is to be our God.[28] Even with his fellow Christians,[29] Philoponus could be interpreted in just this manner, so as to become viewed as a heretical Monophysite and Tritheist. When seen through such lenses, antecedent conceptual systems conceived outside of the time of God Self-Revelation as the Word of God and imposed upon the significance of the Incarnation in the Creation, Philoponus could become condemned by both friend and pagan, by both Byzantine and Roman authorities.[30] Yet I believe that, properly understood, Philoponus' concept of _nature_ may be brought to bear fruitfully upon the problem of correspondence even in our modern sciences, and that our modern attempts to understand the _nature_ of the world with our experiences of it and its relationship to the _nature_ of God can be helped by the thought of the great Alexandrian scientist and theologian.[31]

The Creator-Redeemer, whose Word Philoponus believed he had heard, could not rightly be conceived of except in the Light of the Lord that He is of all space and time, energy and matter, belonging to the Cosmos. In this way, the very Being of God Himself as the Father, Son, and Spirit of God's Eternity has been revealed as the Creator. Without the Incarnation's Revelation of this Triune Creator, no one is free to seek to apprehend _nature_ with its powerful purpose, meaning, and significance as the Universe of Man. The Triune Creator is thought to exercise a personal power with the contingent rationality of the created orders that cannot be understood without Him, potentially or actually. We may become enabled to grasp the potential and actual cognitive interface between the _nature_ of the Creator as the Blessed Trinity and the _nature_ of the wholeness of a unique Universe that is His Creation. In this way, the substantial and rational contingency of the world's space and time, matter, energies, and motions, experienced phenomenally by the human race upon the earth, may be grasped as time as times being overridden by its Redeemer-Creator. My belief is that, unless we are able to deal with the dynamics of a physics at just such an interface, we will not to be free to seek to understand, with our imaginations and very human wills, why this Creator-Redeemer is in His relationship to the world is the One that He truly is for us.[32]

Thus we cannot employ static necessary logical definitions of the term _nature_ when we seek to grasp its real significance in time. If we look up 'phusis' or _nature_ in the Liddell-Scott Lexicon, where seven species of _nature_ can be read, we cannot simply select one of them to serve our purposes at the interface between the divine and the human _natures_ in which we are interested.[33] For instance, 'The realm of _nature_ for Aristotle', writes P.H. Wicksteed, 'includes all things that move or change, or that come and go, either in the sense of passing from 'here' to 'there', or in the more extended sense of passing from 'this' to 'that', which latter phrase is equivalent to 'becoming something that is and was not'—a solid becoming a liquid, or a hot thing becoming cold, for instance.'[34]

_Nature_ is thus a principle, and the principle of change along with its relations to changeable things belongs to what is permanent, to the Eternal. _Nature_ belongs to a principle that belongs to the imperishable as well as to the imperishable. The translators point out, quite rightly, that his 'Lectures on _Nature_ ' are better read as 'Principles of Natural Philosophy', since Aristotle seeks always to understand the relationships between the particulars of change with their causes in relationships with his eternal 'logos', a concept of order embedded in a Cosmos defined by heavenly permanence and earthly change. As eternal principles, the causes of changing belong in first place and inherently to the very _Nature_ of Eternity, where there is no becoming. It was not easy understanding the way these two realms belonged to the one world. But in any case, for the Philosopher, _Nature_ was necessarily defined by an eternal principle whose rationality informed all other rational existence. If it did not, then the phenomenal was merely accidental and impermanent and irrational. The relationship between Change and Eternity possessed a necessity the causality and logic of which was none other than the ' _divine logos_ ' of the great Demiurge of the world's Eternity. Not to understand this ' _logos_ ' was to be more than stupid about God, Man, and the Cosmos. To apprehend the _nature_ of the principle of this ' _logos_ ' meant the discovery of all that was good and beautiful and true in the very power and passion of the Divine embedded in this world. But for Philoponus, the 5th sphere was no more divine than the four of the fire, air, water, and earth. Contingency and contingent rationality and intelligibility meant the world was not eternal, but created out of nothing.

It ought to be easy for us to see here the positing of a necessity that possesses an abstract assertion about the _nature_ of the contingency of the world. This necessity then acts like a 'Natural Theology' in the form of an antecedent conceptual system providing arbitrary definitions of the potentials and actualities that we seek to understand about the Cosmos. We do not experience the motions of the world against such an Eternal Sky. The God of this Sky and the Necessity with which He reigned was named the Prime Mover. It was with this First Cause that the experience of Mankind upon the earth was gripped. The ' _demiourgos_ ' of the elements of this Cosmos became known as the Unmoved Mover, who overrides all our experience upon the earth of all change beneath the heavens. It was this Necessity and this sort of ' _divine logos_ ' that John Philoponus with his Christian beliefs worked against so strongly.

For the cause of the Logos who is and was and will be the Creator of the whole of the Cosmos, come as a man among us for the sake of the Redemption of 'All', Philoponus worked tirelessly and with some genius in the community of the Church. In his attack upon the Eternity of the Word and Aristotle's physics, the Alexandrian championed a concept of the contingency that denied any necessity whatsoever between God and the world and also any arbitrariness between them. Wisdom was the God of the Bible in the Beginning. So Philoponus sought to grasp and development his physics in the Light of the Creation as it belonged to the Revelation of the Logos. The independence of the _nature_ of the Cosmos was to be understood as rooted freely in and freely depended upon the Divine Freedom of this Word, a freedom to be who He truly is as the Creator and as the Redeemer of His Creation out of nothing of the Beginning. It was with this same personal power that He could be depended upon for His promise of the New Creation. It involved a concept of _nature_ that was new and required a new dynamical and integrated view of God and the world, a view we will seek to understand as best that we can.[35]

Richard Sorabji's team of translators appears to be mostly interested in the interaction between the Alexandrian and Aristotle.[36] C.J.F. Williams, while recognizing that the Grammarian sought to assert a new conception of 'prime matter', deals mostly with the problems that exist between understanding Aristotle's 'eternal world' as the first cause of the 'temporal' and ever changing world of our experience. In _nature_ , the ancients seek for the harmony that exists between them. External and internal changes belong differently to eternal causes. This holds the key to the problem with regard to the whole that belongs to the eternal heavens and the parts of the temporality we experience on earth everywhere below the moon? Aristotle's famous '5th substance' among the elements, fire, air, water, earth, provided the basis upon which we may seek to understand the connection between this 'temporal' world and this 'eternal' world. To break with the logical-necessity inherent in their connection to one another was simply blasphemous to the Master and then his commentators in Greek Neo-Platonism.

Mathematics and reality, infinity and finiteness, the perishable and the imperishable present us with problems that demand logical explanation if we are to understand the Divine Logos. What is the _nature_ of the connection between those divine heavens and this temporal earth? How do we understand the intelligibility we understand of them and the sensible experience of our lives? How may we grasp of the relationship between the wholeness of that eternal world with the particular phenomena of this changing one? What is growth and becoming mean to the imperishable and unchanging One? What is the relationship between the infinite and the finite and the eternal? What happens between the potential and the actual of the infinite in relations with finite processes?[37]

To read the works of these translators is to wrestle with some very fundamental questions indeed. But nowhere in Williams do I find any substantial appreciation of Philoponus' concept of the contingency of created things and his doctrine of Creation out of nothing at work.[38] Here the world of Aristotle's physics is assumed and employed to translate the Grammarian's thought. It is as if the dynamical _nature_ and kinetic energies of Philoponus' arguments could not be understood except based upon the supposition that the heavens were eternal and everything else below the moon was temporal. But William Charlton's translation of Philoponus on Aristotle does wrestle with the role of contingency in the logical dialectics between possibility, potentiality, and actuality in the Greek Cosmos.[39] He translates the Greek _endexomenos_ as contingence with much the same thrust that we find in Torrance's understanding of it.[40]

The concept of the contingent _nature_ of the Creation still struggles today for its real, rational, and substantial function in the dynamics and kinetics of our modern physics. It can yet be thought of as impossibility for the rational unity of the universe. With the Greeks, even for many today nothing can come out of nothing and the something that is what it is must be explained in necessary, logical terms. But for Philoponus, it is not impossible that these things are what they are as created realities in our experience of them—where both a perishable heaven and a perishable earth shape the context in which we have our being, with a beginning and end—rationally and substantially, and form the context in which we are to we work out our destiny with the Almighty.

We may point, however, to Christian Wildberg's translation of Philoponus' attack against Aristotle's notion about the Eternity of the World.[41] Here, it is understood that, in place of the Necessity posited by the Greeks between the Divine and the temporal of the Cosmos, split into the two realms of the eternal heavens and the temporality of earthly processes of its elements, along with 'the 5th substance', Philoponus invented his concept of the '3-Dimensional', whereby he was able to articulate his relational view of space and time. The relationship between the place of matter in motion in the world and the space of the world is conceived with the use of the 3-Dimensional in dynamic and kinetic way that binds space to the places of matter in motion in the world while maintaining, at least in thought, its independence of them. Space is bodiless dimensionality that provides structure to the invisible aspects of the visible world. Space is not to be thought as the identical with the place of matter and motion, however much it is bound up with them in our experience of them. We can think of the 3-dimensionality of a space free from containing any matter and motion, even while we must experience it with that motion and matter.

The extended intervals of this free space are in dynamic and relational kinetics with cosmic motions and matter. Space possesses in this way a bodiless structure free from the place of matter and motion and free also to participate with them in our experience of them. It is this 3-Dimensional concept that provides the basis upon which we may understand the physics of the world and not Aristotle's divine '5th substance' or Aether.[42] This relational view of space and place very much reminds me of John Archibald Wheeler's saying about the '4-dimensionality' of Einstein's space-time: "Space tells matter how to move; matter tells space how to curve."[43] Space and time and matter and energy are all bound up together with one another dynamically and kinetically in an invariant objectivity that is pure diamond for those who seek to understand and measure the physics of the Universe. John Philoponus' '3-Dimensionlity' appears to function within the Ptolemaic Cosmos appears in analogy with the 4-dimensionality of Einstein's Legacy and cosmos of his General Relativity Theory. But John Philoponus understood the dimensionality of the invisible world as a contingent and created intelligibility the rational sensibility of which was utterly dependent upon the personal will and power of the Incarnate God, whose Creation out of nothing in the Beginning and in the present was and is what it was and is by His Word, sustaining very purposively the matter and energy, motion, space and time of the Cosmos of light. Einstein simply considered a miracle that we can understand such a Universe.

In any case, it was this way of thinking that drove Simplicius, the adversary of Philoponus, to such distraction about the Grammarian. Much of what is extant of Philoponus belongs to Simplicius' dislike of the Alexandrian's physics. He could call Philoponus a maniac, a blasphemer, nothing more than a man writer lengthy works to the ignorant as a fame seeker, and despise him.[44] It was not until the Copernican revolution, and then Galileo, and finally Newton that the triumph of Philoponus' impetus theory, based upon his concept of the Beginning of the Creation, was put to fruitful us in the development of our physics.[45] It was not until Maxwell and Einstein then that his light theory as a bodiless energy enfolding the whole of the Cosmos, a field theory that could explain sight as well as the heavens, could win the imaginations of our race and make its contribution to the experience of our scientific culture.

What Simplicius' called a 'passing garden' has proven in history to be a more solid and permanent conception than the thought of his adversary.[46] Galileo Galilee, in fact, used the name of Simplicius in his adversary in his 'Dialogue'[47] and he knew well the work of Philoponus and his impetus theory and its resonance with his discoveries and his own understanding of the motion and matter in his new world of physics. The new concept of a definition of _nature_ , the goal indeed of the great Alexandrian both in his theology and his science takes time to take in. Viewed with condemnation by many of scientific colleagues, condemned by the Church, it is tempting to contemplate what history would have been like if the Anathema had not branded him with indifference and ignorance.[48] If we study the history of science as the struggle for the substantial and intelligible and positive grasp of the contingency of the world as it comes from the power of the Creator and His interaction with us in His Creation, it can readily be shown that His Purpose is fulfilled in His Incarnation of His Word. I think then we may be able to gain some insight into this history and what the Bible means when it accuses the peoples of the nations of making idols against the supreme Majesty of His Truth.[49] Evidently, it would indeed be helpful if could appreciate the substantial contingency of the actuality of the world with its physics and its dependence, even in its very real created independence of the _nature_ of God, upon the Almighty Creator for its _nature_. Would then we not be the more free to explore with confidence and dignity the actual space-time, matter-energy, fields where we have been given our lives by the Holy One or the Old One, as Einstein liked to name Him?[50]

With Philoponus, we want to argue that we cannot divorce the one from other, however imperative that it is to separate and distinguish them, if we are to take hole of with our minds and bodies the real contingency and contingent freedom and order that is His Creation, both with the invisible and the visible worlds of the Cosmos or Universe. Fortunately, we can read today both a full translation of _The Arbiter_ and _de Opificio Mundi_ in English. We ought now to be able to penetrate more deeply into concept of _nature_ in the thought of John Philoponus. By hearing the resonance of the two works with one another, we can hope to learn more about the way Philoponus' concept of _nature_ in both his theology and science were bound up with one another.[51]

_The Arbiter_ was written for the Emperor Justinian in preparation for the 5th Ecumenical Council of the Church called to Constantinople. The Emperor needed some resolution between the two parties of the Church that could debate the _nature_ of the Incarnation in such a way that deep splits between them were fostered. Philoponus thought a resolution was possible if only all concerned would be willing to consider the problems afresh, in the light of the discipline the Truth itself brings to bear upon us both in the Church and in the world. The crux of the arguments flared around those who would confess the 'one composite nature' of Christ and those who confessed 'two natures' of Him, even after the union that He was in the Incarnation. Philoponus thought that a careful and cool analysis of the problems, in the light of the way that science understood things in the Cosmos, that a fresh understanding could be achieved and the parties certainly reconciled. History would show him to have been wrong, at least up to the present time. The Anathema has been on his work formally and officially since 680 AD.[52]

The reason Philoponus thought that he could be successful was bound up with his understanding of 1) the _homoousion_ of Nicea (325 AD) as foundational for apprehending the _nature_ of who the Word and Son of God is with His Father in the Spirit of God (the _consubstantiality of the Son with the Father in the Spirit of God_ 2) the _hypostatic union_ , as formulated by the fathers of the Church at Chalcedon (450 AD), which denied any change or divorce in the 'union' of the _natures_ , divine and human, as the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, against any form of adoptionism or representationalism, Arian or Nestorian. The _hypostatic union_ together with the _homoousion_ guarded against every docetic or Ebionite form of thinking about the Incarnation and the Godhead of the Father, Son, and Spirit 3) it was not impossible to grasp in all of its depths the relational and dynamical logic of the Person of God in such a way that, when piously employed, would give all parties in the debates an agreement about the 'Unity' into which the Church had been called in the Name of Christ. To articulate the logic of this 'Unity' was certainly the goal and purpose of _The Arbiter_.

We investigate first the terms of this logic in _The Arbiter_.[53] Then we will focus our attention on chapter seven of _The Arbiter_ , the chapter used to condemn its author.[54]

Philoponus had to integrate the significance of the terms we translate as Logos ( _logos_ ), Being ( _ousia)_ , Hypostasis ( _hupostasis_ ), Nature ( _phusis_ ), and Person ( _prosopon_ ). Their integration as the One Being and Three Persons of the Godhead was the challenge that the Grammarian had to face in the controversies that flamed around the Church's thinking about the Incarnation. Philoponus warns his readers that it takes an eye of a purified soul to see the Unity that results from a scientific consideration of these terms common in the debates of his day.[55] The debates about the 'two _natures_ ' confessed at Chalcedon and the 'one _nature_ ' confessed by the same council meant to refer the Church the same reality of God in Christ, but obviously how the two confessions might be thought to signify the same Christ in God was, historically, a real problem that the Grammarian would seek to resolve. How may the confession of the 'two _natures_ ' be understood to agree with the _one incarnate of God the Word or Son_ that belonged to Cyril of Alexandria at Chalcedon? Philoponus assumed that Cyril's confession meant that there existed 'one composite _nature_ ' that Christ is, after the union, to be understood, in line with Chalcedon, to be a union of the 'two _natures_ ' without confusing or changing them and without dividing or separating them. That is, the two _natures_ were to be understood as one _nature_ in such a way that their integration pointed us to the One Christ who was the Word and Son of the Father in the Spirit of God. It was not impossible, thought John Philoponus, to achieve an understanding of their Unity.[56] That is what he set out to accomplish with his argument in _The Arbiter_.

In Chapter Seven, the chapter used to condemn the Grammarian, Philoponus is ready to define for his argument the term _nature_. He writes:

F. H. Chase's translation:" Now, _nature_ is considered to be the common basis of those things which share in the same essence."

U. Lang's translation: "Thus it holds (the Church) that _nature_ is the intelligible content of being common to participants in the same substance."

J.E. McKenna's translation: " _Nature_ is understood to be the common basis ( _logos_ ) upon which exist those things that participate in the same being ( _ousia_ ).[57]

Philoponus is interacting with the class-exclusion logic of the Neo-Platonic way of carving up reality into genus and species of various categories of existences. Each of the species of a kind or class will belong to the same genus. The illustration given in the argument is the class of Man, whose being is a genus possessing rational, mortal, life which all men have in common with one another. Yet it is only experienced and knows as species whose individual _natures_ are understood as a Peter or Paul, or John and so forth. Thus, the term _nature_ refers to what Man holds in common as well as to what he is an individual being. The dynamic of this definition assumes a resolution of the problem of the whole and the parts of the class. The _nature_ of the whole obviously exists in our thought, but is only experienced by our senses as particular individuals. _Nature_ exists at once as the common basis ( _logos_ ) of Man apprehended on an abstract level of reality, which allows us to distinguish Man from Horse and Tree, and so forth, but it exists as such differently among the particular individuals of the species on the level our sense experiences of one another, as Peter and Paul and so forth. _Nature exists in one way as the Logos of Man in distinction from Horse, and so forth, and in another way as those individuals we know in our daily experience of one another_. Theory and experience together are dynamically implicated in this resolution of the whole and the parts. Explanation of the _nature_ of any being (essence, substance) in its class inherently is bound up with this dynamic definition of things.

With this sort of resolution in mind, Philoponus can write:

F.H. Chases's translation: "Consequently, each _nature_ may be taken as an essence not in one way along, but in two. (P. xxx)

U. Lang's translation: "Therefore, each _nature_ is called, what it is, not in a single, but in a twofold manner." (p. 191)

J.E. McKenna's: "Consequently, each _nature_ is not thought to exist singly (as one thing merely) but doubly (on two levels of existence at once—the common and the particular, cf. www.quodlibet.net, Volume 1 Number 33, June, 1999, p. 3)

W.Böhm's translation: "'Natur von dem, was ist,' besagt also nicht immer dasselbe, sondern hat eine doppelte Bedeutung.' (p. 417)

The comment I made in my article, along with my attempts to translate his thought, sought to highlight the vital significance of this dynamical character in Philoponus' thought. The context in which the sentence was written provides us with insight both into the Church's employment of the term and his scientific culture's use of it.[58] _Nature_ must be able to refer its readers in the Church appropriately now to the _ousia or being_ (essence, substance) of the reality of God and then to His _hypostasis or persons_ that we meet in Christ. The One in the Three are both revealed as the Triunity of God, Father, Son, and Spirit, in a dynamic unity that belongs to the actuality of His Revelation as the Creator. One does find an analogous manner speaking among the Schoolmen, who talk about the Essence ( _ousia_ ) of Individuals ( _atomo_ ) as the genus and species of a certain substantiated class of existence. This way of carving up reality, where the whole is integrated dynamically in some way with its parts and the parts are made to participate differentially with the whole in any class of genus and species allows Philoponus to employ both his scientific knowledge as well as his knowledge of God in some appropriate analogy with one another.[59] I tried to make this point in a presentation on the concept of _nature_ in the thought of John Philoponus at the Pascal International Conference on Science & Belief, August 11-15, 1992. I find myself trying here once again to makes the same point.

The importance of apprehending this point is immense. It is deeply rooted in the real Knowledge of God that the Alexandrian believed he possessed. It is a dynamical point that allows him to employ as a scientist and as a theologian a way to understand God in His relations with the Creation. Here is the ground upon which the conversion of our thought occurs in the Light of the Revelation of God.[60] This concept of _nature_ is rooted in the Freedom of His Holy Love as the Word of God to create and occupy this ground, and here in such a way that the Church is made to participate with the Great I-AM He is as the Revelation of the Lord God in Christ He actually is. It is on this ground we may come to appreciate that the individual Christ is with us is also the One who indeed is none other than Very God, the True God (the _homoousion_ of Nicea).

Based upon this concept, Philoponus can seek to analyze the concept in relationship to that _nature_ which is referred to the genus and species of class exclusion categories we read according to the Porphyrian Tree or Aristotelian logic. The _nature_ that exists in all men as Mankind, where no one differs from another (All men are created equal!), also is found to exist in each particular or individual man, where individuality is an acquired property differentiated from the common basis or 'logos' of the class. In the first case, _nature_ exists with the _ousia_ (being, essence, substance, logos) of the class and secondly as _hypostases or prosopon_ of the class. I believe that there is no sense trying to understand the argument of _The Arbiter_ without this point. To my mind, the dynamic mediatory function of this concept in the debates between those of the 'two _natures_ ' parties and those of the 'one _nature_ ' parties is definitive. It is this dynamical _nature_ that allows us to think of the way both poles of the relationship are constituted with a reciprocity that is both asymmetrical and symmetrical at the same time. No resolution is possible without this mediatory function of the concept of _nature_ in the thought of Philoponus.

It is with the dynamics of this concept that we may, indeed, relate the concepts of _energies and properties between the common and individual_[61] _natures of any class_. But we must understand that the great scientist's discussion of this dynamical _nature_ is made ultimately in the Light of his belief in the Triunity of God. Reconciliation of the parties must be based upon the Love of this One and not on meta-metaphysical speculations. Without the Life and Love of Him who is our Reconciler, any attempt at reconciliation is hopelessly conventional, because it is not in actuality the Unity the Lord prayed to His Father for those who would believe in Him (John 17).

As for the _nature of Christ_ , then, it refers at once both to the _ousia_ of the _hypostasis_ of Christ, at once differentiated and integrated with _the ousia of the Godhead, Father, Son, and Spirit_ both at once differentiated and integrated from and with one another. Christ's divine _nature_ exists as an _ousia_ that belongs to the _One Ousia_ the Father, Son, and Spirit is even as Three _hypostases_ or _persons_. When the One refers to the Godhead, it signifies a common _nature_. When the One refers to a particular person, it signifies an individual _nature_ , with properties acquired as differentiated energies defining in particular the One Will of God for His Creation. Neither the Father nor the Spirit has ever existed as the Incarnate One. But they exist with and through the Son or Incarnate Word as the One the Lord God is. Only the Son, as the _Person_ of the Lord Jesus Christ, became Incarnate and not the _persons_ of the Father and the Spirit. Yet each and all participate in the Incarnation with their _natures and Nature_. Without grasping the dynamical functions of the concept of _nature_ in the Church's explication of the Triunity of God in this way, Philoponus' Christology will not become free from the condemnation of the Anathema.[62]

Let's look more closely at the interaction of the dynamics of this _nature_. We need to apprehend the significance of the concept of the _anhypostasis of the hypostatic union_. This intends to signify that the Word did not leave His Heaven somewhere and go into a flesh that already existed outside of Himself. Verbs used in this action ranged with such meanings as 'assumed', 'snatched', 'took', 'got', and so forth. But no matter what verb we may employ, the vital thing to understand is that the personal and divine power of the whole Trinity is to be thought and understood as involved in the wholeness of the action of sending the Son of God into the world. The flesh of the Word of God is from beginning to end His Flesh, a man as no man before Him or no man after Him. As such, he belongs to a class by Himself, a unique being not found on the Porphyrian Tree or the Logic of the Greek Philosophers. His class or kind belongs to and is defined by the Trinity of the I-AM that the Lord God is, who does not exist beside others of his kind or class as a species of a genus. His is an _ousia_ that exists absolutely off the map. His _nature_ is both Divine Nature and human nature as this One Nature, something absolutely new in the history of the world. It is this _ousia_ whose _nature_ is defined now with the _hypostatic union_ of the divine and human _natures_ of the Eternal Son become the Incarnate Word and known as the Person of Jesus Christ in the world.

God the Son in His action as this man among men in a world thus discloses the actual being of the Creator of this one Creation. There exists outside of this action, outside of this 'assuming', 'snatching', 'taking', 'getting', no _hypostasis of any flesh into which the Son has_ gone. The Word assumes a flesh that did not exist before He assumed it. We say that He assumed it out of nothing. It is this action that is in tune with His action in the Beginning. We say that the New Beginning He has made with His Incarnation resonates with the beginning that He made out of nothing in the Beginning. The two beginnings confirm and affirm one another, each in their very own way bearing significance, for the purpose that belongs to the fact that God wills to be known for who He truly is as the Redeemer-Creator of His Creation.[63]

In this light, we ask about the significance of the _anhypostasis of the hypostatic union_. There exists no _hypostasis_ or _person_ into which the Word went in His Incarnation. There is, however, a divinely created and creative activity of deliverance when the Word 'assumed' His Flesh. This concept keeps us from forming any notion of 'adoptionism' with our understanding of His _Person_. The Incarnation is a created reality bound up with the uncreated reality of God Himself as an absolutely unique event in the history of His Creation. We must learn to grasp it according to His _Nature_. We must not begin with anything that man thinks he knows prior to the Incarnation. In order to grasp what has happened with this man that is God's Incarnation, we must seek to understand on His own terms, according to His own _Nature_.

This 'assuming' or 'snatching up' is then an act of the Grace, the Divine _Nature_ of which at once means our deliverance in the Light of the One the Creator is. It is an action that we say only the 'Pantocrator' can take. The mystery of the Incarnation is in this way to be understood as even more profound than the mystery of God's act in the Beginning of the Creation. Here is more deeply hidden among the secrets of His Being that which belongs to who the Great I-AM He has disclosed Himself to be with us. Delivered in this way for Him, it is not impossible for us to know Him as the One Being He truly is. It is not impossible for us to be given to know Him as the incomprehensible One He truly is, in theory and in experience. We should not consider merely as potential our knowledge of God. His Revelation is both actual in theory and direct in sensible experience. What God in fact has done and does with Himself in the history of a world that is His Creation, with the history of a Mankind that is His Image in His Creation, must be considered as solid knowledge, the facts of which are bound up with the true mystery of His Being and majestic _Nature_. All who think that it is impossible will need to reconsider their assumptions about the _nature_ of the Universe, the _nature_ of Man, and the _nature of this Divine Being with the being of this Divine Nature_. (' **I am who I am**!) For with the Divine Freedom of His uncreated _nature and being_ He has united Himself to our human freedom in the form of Christ. He has in this way provided forgiveness even for those who would employ their created freedom to oppose Him, and then to give us to know Him as the One Redeemer-Creator that He truly is for us, Father, Son, and Spirit of God.

Most often the thought experiments in Philoponus' science have this thrust about them—' _it is not impossible_ that such and such is'—as he challenges his contemporaries to think anew throughout the volumes of his commentaries on Aristotelian physics and Christian doctrines. 'The Arbiter', chapter 26, where ' _no-kenoma_ ' translates _anhypostasis_ , in the context of an argument that intends to show that we see the humanity of Christ right before our eyes, when our eyes are given to see as they ought to see—the Union of this particular man with His Being and Nature in the Being and Nature of God Himself. Thus, _nature_ is a term that exists to signify at once the whole and the parts of the Unity the Blessed Trinity is. The Syriac verb employed for the action is from the root { _nsb_ }, a Semitic term used prominently to signify the way the Lord God delivered Israel from Egypt in the tradition of the Exodus read in the Old Testament. The internal action with the Incarnation bears the significance of this kind of free action and interaction. Christ come as a man among men, with his own _hypostasis_ and _nature_ , different from all other men, comes with a freedom rooted in the freedom of God to act in this way for our sakes. In this way, it is not impossible that the singularity He is, marked off from all other men with His own _hypostasis or nature_ , also possesses a participation in the Becoming of the One _ousia_ or Being of God, Father, Son, and Spirit as the Creator and Redeemer of the world.

Thus, some kind of complimentary must exist between the concept of the _anhypostasis_ in the _hypostatic union_ and the _enhypostasis_ of the humanity of the Word or Son that Christ is in the Union. Even though the _hypostasis of the Word_ did not exist as a man and it is in Him that we are to conceive of the _hypostasis of His humanity_ , yet _the hypostasis of His humanity_ is no less real that He is in His Eternity. It is only that the _hypostasis_ of His flesh exists in some kind of complementary in composition with the _hypostasis_ of His Word. The _enhypostasis_ of the _hypostatic union_ would in this way keep us from thinking that Christ is anything less than fully Man as a man among men. His _person_ is as real as the Word of God is. His humanity is as true as the Word and Son of God is. His existence as a man is thus the Word and Son of God. His is a true _hypostasis_ or _individual existence_ as this individual man of this One Word of God. The concept guards us against forming any docetic or Gnostic notion about Jesus Christ. He is as real a man as any man is real, even then more so. In any case, He is no phantom, no ghost, no mere appearance, no passing image among the flood of images we might conceive of the Logos or Word of God. He is not even a prophet, as in the Old Testament, upon whom the Word has come. He is the Word of God Himself. He is this one and only Word that there is of God as this Lord, more human than any of us, because the _nature_ of _His Being with His Father in the very Spirit is of this God Himself_ become this one particular, individual, rational, mortal, living creature among us. Thus, the existence of the Savior is unique among us and He is not to be thought of as a genus among genera or then a species among the species of men, Peter, Paul, and John and so forth, as an individual man without the Word or Logos of God.

Together, the concepts of the _anhypostasis_ and the _enhypostasis_ composed the _hypostatic union_ whose _nature_ is the _Incarnation_. The divine _nature and hypostasis_ of the Word united with the human _nature and hypostasis_ of this particular flesh, without transforming the one into the other and without at the same time divorcing them in any way, shape the New Reality of the New Man Christ is with His New Creation. With this New Beginning, the Incarnation is the confirmation and affirmation of the First Reality of the First Man. He is the justification and sanctification of the Beginning of the Old Creation. It is in the Light of this New Man that the Church is has been conceived and commanded to proclaim this New Creation of God, this coming Kingdom of God for Mankind and His Creation. It was with the dynamics of this 'not-impossible' thought that Philoponus learned to perform his many thought experiments and to question afresh the _nature_ of the world as God's Creation and the _nature_ of Man within it as God's Image. The Incarnation meant for the Alexandrian a whole new concept of God, of the Cosmos, and of Man.[64]

The actuality of the Incarnation in the history of the world called for a new physics and a new concept of its _nature_ , one that would allow human thought to seek by faith to find real correspondence between its experience in the world and the world's profound and mysterious _nature_. In times when we seek for new mathematics, for new physics, for a new window onto the _nature_ of the world, it seems to me that we would be greatly helped by the kind of thought experiments Philoponus utilized to bring theory and experience together in his Alexandria. We should not allow them to escape our attention today. Such experiments are as necessary as the LIGO and LISA experiments of our 'post-modern' world, when scientists hope to detect the evidence of Gravitational Waves from a Big-Bang Beginning passing by our space on and above the earth. It is not impossible that they have something to offer us even now.

I believe the failure to understand Philoponus at this point and his significance for theology and science lies behind the struggles we have experienced across the centuries between the Church and our cosmologies and physics. A few bad marriages can lead people to think they are enemies. Yet one good one can persuade us that they are more than allies. It is not impossible that Philoponus' commitment to grasping the Cosmos of the Creation made out of nothing in the Beginning, a Creation with which God is free to act even to the extend of His Becoming the Incarnate God, can help us find the new mathematics and physics we need in our time. For the Alexandrian, _nature_ signified both the abstract existence of an invisible world that is to be apprehended only with a freedom of thought and imagination while grasping with our sensibilities the solid facts of our experience. He did this with a very dynamical mode of rationality that belongs both to our senses in the visible world and to our apprehension of the invisible world, where darkness and light participate in a motion that is intrinsic to what the time and space of the Cosmos is. They are all bound up in a created commonality and in created differences with the one _nature_ the created world where Mankind, male and female, has been given His place in the Cosmos. Without the dynamics of this way of thinking under God, the Greeks would be right—nothing can come out of nothing!

But for the Christian, it is not impossible that species and genus, the individual and the common essences or substances of Man even with the fundamental particles and the vast continuum of space and time should participate in an harmony whose dynamics form by integration and differentiation a symphony of music, when the invisible and visible worlds are heard to be bound up together with one another in the Being of the Creator. Thus, the basis of the contingency of all created reality finds its meaning beyond itself in its dependence upon the Lord of all space and time. They are, after all, the work of His Hands, His Word. For Philoponus, it is this personal power that makes created reality what it is, space, time, light, motion, energy, matter what they are. His uncreated Being and _Nature_ possesses the secret their origins. His _Nature_ ultimately defines theirs, a definition given by the actuality of the Risen Lord, the Person of Jesus Christ. It is this principle or Logos that makes Philoponus seek to correct and go beyond Aristotle. All truth and beauty and goodness and purpose that we sense in this world does not come from Aristotle's 'logos', but from Philoponus' Logos of God. Without such dynamical ways of thinking, we would all still be thinking that we lived necessarily in an Eternity World that was absolutely Divine. We would prefer an Idol to who He truly is in His Eternity

Once Philoponus laid down this understanding of the _nature_ of _nature_ and its function with the integrations and differentiations appropriate for consistency with Christ in the Triunity of God, he has little trouble sorting things as to their belonging at once both to the ' _ousia_ ' or essence (substance) that any class holds in common with itself and to the ' _hypostasis_ ' or ' _person_ ' as an individual species of its genus, which in the case of Man we know as Peter, Paul, or John and so forth, each in possession differently of the common genus of their class as rational, mortal, living creatures. _Nature_ means then at once both the abstract entity we apprehend with our thought belonging to the common essence or substance of the class of Man, grasped not only as a common genus but as that genus with each of the species in the class, our minds and our senses may be satisfied with a Truth that exists outside of our knowing of it. When the invisible world and the visible world are thought together in this way, we may know we have laid hold of a reality that has to do with God's Truth. We may in this way of thinking suppose to be able to integrate the individual human _nature_ of Christ with the _nature_ He alone possesses in common with His Father and the Spirit of God from God's Eternity.

Thus, for Philoponus, the definition of the 'one composite _nature_ ' is in no way at odds with his definition as 'two _natures_ ' confessed at Chalcedon. That the two phrases intend to point to the same reality that Christ is in His existence ought to be evident to everyone who can think rightly and honestly about the Creator. It should appear self-evident that the mystery of His Reality and the solid concrete character of His Being or _Nature_ cannot tear apart from one another. In fact, the 'one composite _nature_ ' of Cyril's confession is, for Philoponus, following Cyril of Alexandria before him, the most positive grasp of the 'two _natures_ ' posited by the fathers at Chalcedon, where it was firmly understood that the _natures_ formed a unity in fact that did not transform or confuse the one with other nor divide and separate them. The 'composite' _nature_ , according to the arguments, is no mere illumination in analogy with the Old Testament prophets. It is not a third thing beside the one _nature_ of the two _natures_. No dualistic grasp of it can understand its real _nature_. But without dividing or confusing the _natures_ , divine and human, the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ is the one 'composite' or 'incarnate' nature posited as the Word of God in a world that is His Creation.

Cyril's one 'incarnate' _nature_ and Philoponus' one 'composite' _nature_ intend to refer to the one and the same Christ and Son and Word of God. But Philoponus' positive apprehending with the dynamics of his thought had to learn to articulate a signification the reality of which was utterly new in the world, with truly new dimensions posited between God and His Creation. It is perhaps these new dimensions that made it so difficult for many of his contemporaries to grasp was he was after in the way of to resolve the problem of the Incarnation and its relation to His Creation. Perhaps it is fair to say that, in the face of these new dimensions on the new ground of His interactions with us, it was so hard, indeed impossible, for the Aristotelians to give up their timeless and tested and habits of mind the necessities of which had point them touch with the beauty and truth of the Eternal Passion embedded within the Creation. Perhaps it is fair to say that we have found, with the contradictions between necessary logical relations and contingent logical relations, the reason that Philoponus argued for a different kind of correspondence than ever posited by the Neo-Platonism of his times. His effort to integrate reason and experience with one another in this world was of another class or kind utterly than had ever been fundamentally place upon the Tree by Aristotle and his followers. This is perhaps most important reason why the great Alexandrian Scientist and Christian, John Philoponus, was so roundly condemned in his time and ultimately anathematized.[66]

In any case, it is this concept of the 'one composite _nature_ ' employed throughout the Alexandrian's analysis of the Incarnation in 'The Arbiter' is to be found resonating throughout his commentary on Moses' confession if the Book of Genesis. L.S.B. MacCoull is thoroughly aware of this resonance in her translation of _de Opificio Mundi_. She understands that the economy with which the one 'composite' _nature_ has to do stretch from the dusts of which mankind is made to his Salvation as the Creator of the Universe. The uniqueness of this _nature_ must not escape our attention, if we are to free ourselves from Philoponus' Anathema.[67] It is clear to this author that the 'doubly' significant concept of _nature_ in the thought of the Grammarian points us at once both to the Revelation of God and to real apprehending of both human and created _nature_. If our reach is anything less or more, then one would be forced to think that the Alexandrian was indeed a heretical Monophysite, which he was not, and a heretical Tritheist, which he was not.[68]

Philoponus' comments about the Creation as a contingent reality then, on some levels of understanding, remain satisfying. I like very much his grasp of the motion of the sun, for instance, as the source for what 'night' and 'day' are in their differences and in their participation with the sun's _nature_ , a wholeness that includes light, heat, and motion around the earth. The darkness has been by light turned into night and day, when the un-illuminated part of the Cosmos and the motion of the sun is known to belong to time before created light God has been spoken into existence out of the nothingness in the Beginning, when God rendered the 'void and without-limit' of this Beginning with His Voice to be objectified with created light. It is this light that, for Philoponus, the created light of the uncreated Light of God's Word, that forms the basic ground for the resolution to the problems of the whole and the particulars the Grammarian faces with his comments on the Creation. God's Word is thus the origin that makes in this light the order of all other created things, such as the sun and the moon and the stars that we come to experience upon the earth. Just as the sun's motion is the one thing out of which night and day are made to occur, light formed from after the Beginning out of nothing provides the basis for sun, moon, and stars to appears, with their various and different existences in participate with the _nature_ of created light and its origin in the speaking of the Creator. The _nature_ of light is then not the same as the _natures_ the sun and moon and stars, but their _natures_ form a whole which belongs to the _nature_ of the Creator's light. In this dynamic way they are thought to belong to one another. This dynamic way of thinking about the problem of the whole and the parts runs throughout much of the Alexandrian's analyses of the Creation out of nothing in the Light of the Incarnation, so fundamental to Philoponus' efforts in _de Opificio Mundi_.[69]

It is this dynamical character of his thought that we read in his analysis of the 4 fundamental elements of the Cosmos, when at their boundaries occur compositions of what each are in and of themselves. Water and Fire can be found composed of one another to form Air out of the two. Heavens and Earth can be found in compositions that form a diversity of particulars even as one created reality, and so forth.[70] Philoponus' replacing of Aristotle's '5th Substance' or 'Aether' with his concept of a 3-dimensional structure to the invisible reality that belongs without a body to the body of the visible world is a concept whose significance we ought not to miss. It provides a dynamical relation between the structure of space and the structure of matter in motion in space we cannot allow escape our attention even today. Space and the places of matter in motion are dynamically one, even though two with very different _natures_.[71]

In this way, John Philoponus ought to be given credit for being in the early Church the first Christian theologian to take seriously for the physics of the Cosmos the doctrines of the fathers, specifically the doctrines of Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and Severus of Antioch. Because of his belief in the Creator, revealed in the Person of Jesus Christ, the Word of God become incarnate as a man among men in the Creation out of nothing in the Beginning, Philoponus has argued for new theories with the physics of the space and time, energy and matter, and motion in the cosmos of the world with a freedom we need to respect. Many of the most fundamental concepts found among the Greek Philosophers, the Masters Aristotle and Plato, about the _nature_ of this world are attacked by this forerunner in the ancient world to our scientific advance. The dynamical character of his thought is at the heart of what Torrance has called 'the relational view of space and time' that belonged to the early Christian Fathers of the Church and their rejection of the container notion found commonly among the Aristotelians, and so forth.[72]

Without the contingent _nature_ of this relational dynamics, found throughout the analyses, we soon enough join Simplicius in our estimation of Philoponus. But with the substantial rationality and intelligibility of created realty, sustained and enlightened by the free will of the free Creator's Wisdom, we are with the Alexandrian, even when he seems most quaint in his belief in the Ptolemaic Cosmology where the heavens are made up 5 or 55 spheres of celestial motions, with mankind upon an earth that it at the center of things, bound to be free to seek by faith the real _nature_ of God's Creation. The Grammarian's grasp of motion and matter and space and time made out of nothing with their beginnings and endings, their perish-ability and their ability to acquire properties with their _nature_ , possesses a freedom to which we are bound even today. I find today's Big-Bang Cosmology and the deep problems we have thinking together its continuum with its particulars in time demanding such freedom still. It seems to me that theologian, philosopher, and scientist would benefit from understanding the Alexandrian, without his condemnation.

In Book III. 17 of his commentary, Philoponus considers that the whole of the heavens, formed with their firmament, are given to entail waters above and below. In his discussion, he points out that simple things must exist before composite things, but that composite things exist in the _hypostases_ of simple things. He admits that he only speaks of such things as best he can, and others may very well come to be able to speak of them better or more truly. But he insists that the origin of things has been provided a substrate in which diverse things are found to exist. MacCoull rightly points out that his discussion of the waters and the firmament is made with the problem of the whole and the parts he faced in his analysis of the Incarnation. She writes: ' _There is a Christological dimension to this language as well: writing about the union as a Monophysite, Philoponus was acutely aware of the Nestorian manipulation of the term σύνθετον (composite) and its derivatives_.'[73]

It is precisely the _nature_ of this kind of resonance that allows us to consider the interface between Philoponus' science and his theology. Just as the heavens and the earth form a whole as parts, the divine and the human form a whole as parts. Just as the heavens and the earth are a whole whose _nature_ is independent of the _nature_ of the Creator, and yet are utterly dependent upon His Will for their existence and subsistence and purpose, the soul and body of as the man He is dependent upon the Word He is for its existence and subsistence and purpose. Yes, the analogies are not of a necessity and a logic of being and _nature_ that exists before the Word of God. But, yes, even as broken analogies, they help to shape a form and content of a rationality that belongs, indeed, whole and parts, to the One God is. It is in this way that Philoponus can replace Cyril's 'one incarnate _nature_ ' with his 'one composite _nature_ ' and attempt to give us an understanding of the Incarnation that allows us to see all the better God's Creation out of nothing in the Beginning.[74]

In Books VI and VII of _de Opificio Mundi_ , Philponus has a thorough discussion about the _nature_ the Image of God in the Beginning of the Creation.[75] Genesis 1:26 is read in the Light of John 1:14. The Image and Likeness that God made Mankind in the Beginning belongs to the Divine Freedom of His Will to be the Creator with His Creation in this way. His Will is particularly bound up with the 'Good' that God has called or named His Creation, in relation to which His Sabbath Rest is constituted. This 'Good' is understood as the 'Beauty' of the world of His Mankind and His Cosmos as a home for His Image and Likeness in the 'Very Good' world. Philoponus can speak of their harmony with their Creator. We cannot understand the wholeness of Man as body of soul and soul of body except as this Man as His Image, and therefore we cannot understand the 'Beauty' and 'Good' of the confession except in the Light of the Resurrection of Christ, the Man who has justified the Beginning. Here we see the Divine Freedom of God as free to move outside of Himself and become this particular Man for the sake of the entire Creation, and in this way restore Mankind to his place in the whole of a Universe that is his home. Thus, we understand Christ as the Image and Likeness of God in an affirmation and confirmation of the Beginning. The 'composite' _nature_ of Man with the Creation with all of its various species are made to possess their existences in a wholeness that belongs to a harmony created by the Divine freedom of the Will of the Word of God Himself.

We cannot be content with understanding Philoponus through the lenses of Greek eyes. We cannot assign to God a _nature_ we are able to define with their eyes.[76] We are called rather to enter into that positive grasp of God and the World that the Alexandrian labored so strongly to articulate in the Love of God, both in his theology and his science. From the concerns of a Grammarian in the Academy at Alexandria to the passions of the _Philoponoi_ ¸[77] after whom John took his name, we understand what is not impossible for us. It is not impossible that much of what he had to say, from his impetus theory and his kinetic theory of light as a force field in the Cosmos of the Creation, with his three-dimensional concept of space, a theory that allowed Philoponus to integrate the invisible and the visible worlds as one created reality, should prove useful for our efforts today. I believe his thought could indeed be of great help to both theologian and scientist in our time.

I began this essay with reference to Professor Thomas F. Torrance's concerns to understand John Philoponus along the lines that we can trace in science from Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, to Maxwell and Einstein and so forth. Torrance believes that the 'field' theory implicated with the thought of Philoponus keeps us in touch with the kind of epistemological poise we must possess if we are to remain rightly open to the actual way that God sustains and gives purpose to the Universe. This is inherent in what we mean when we affirm that the Universe possess a Beginning and therefore and ending as God's Creation. When I first began working with Torrance's books and papers, and I tried to pass on what I found to read in them, a friend once tried to soothe my pain because of all the resistance I was meeting. He said that it would be a hundred years before we would be able to grasp what Torrance was after. I recalled that, in the early part of the 20th century, it was repeated _ad nausea_ that simple people could never understand Einstein's physics.

I do not really believe that there are any simple people, however, but only 'composite' ones, whose complexities and simplicities must learn to think relationally in their times in an open relationship with the Only One who does in fact transcend them and their universes. Yes, we are free to be successful without Him. Yes, we can enjoy the riches of our world without knowing Him. Yet we are made, soul of body and body of soul as a wholeness that must breath the air He has ordered for us upon the earth. The independence of the wholeness of our being in the world ultimately belongs to the Wholeness of our Lord and God as revealed with His Incarnation in His Creation. Thus, our understanding of the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ is so vital. We are free, but we are bound to Him. To conclude this essay then, let me quote Professor Torrance again: ' _John Philoponus did not intrude his theology upon his science or his science upon his theology. However, his theological grasp of divine truth opened his eyes to a more realistic understanding of the contingent_ _nature_ _(underlining mine) and its distinctive rational order and exercised a regulative role in his choice and formation of scientific concepts and theories and their explanatory development._ ' [78] I hope it will not take a hundred years to make the thought experiment that can find along these lines the movement of trajectories which shall come to know that it is not impossible they way things ought to be in time. I hope we can give up invoking His Name in vain.

My reference to the semantics of the term Israel in the beginning of this essay, as parallel to the semantics of the term _nature_ , may have appeared somewhat specious then. But given the wholeness argument for the parts of the created world as bound up contingently with the Lord God, does it seem too specious now?

I wish to thank Professor Richard Sorabji of King's College, London, and Wolfson College, Oxford, for reading my essay and offering helpful suggestions for my argument. I also want to thank Dr. Thomas Spear Torrance of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, for his generous help and encouragement.

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## Endnotes

[1] W.S. LaSor, _Israel_ (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1976)

[2] P.A.M. Dirac, _Directions of Physics_ (John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1978.) "The argument of the variation of the gravitational constant comes from a study of the constants of _Nature_. _Nature_ provides us with the various constants: the velocity of light, the charge of the electron, the mass of the electron, and quantities like that." (p. 72)

[3] R. Penrose, _The Road to Reality_ (A. Knopf: New York, 2005), p. 1027

[4] A. Mercier, _God_ , _World_ , _and Time_ (Peter Lang: Berne, 1996). His index lists no less than 65 references to the term _nature_. He quotes Pascal for the general idea: "Man isn't but a reed, the weakest, one in the whole of _Nature_ ; yet a thinking reed." (p. 2-3) Also see, D.C. Lindberg and R. Numbers, _God & Nature_ (University of California Press: 1986), especially pp. 38-39 for Philoponus.

[5] R. Penrose, op. cit., p. ix, where he writes 'Wave functions have a strongly non-local character; in this sense they are completely holistic entities.' The problem of 'instantaneous communication' is wondrous in the relationship between the holistic wave and the particle in the theory (pp. 512ff).

[6] Roger Penrose, 'The Modern Physicist View of Nature', in John Torrance, ed., _The Concept of Nature_ , Clarendon Press: 1992). Chapter 5, pp. 117-166.

[7] Ibid, p. 363, 'Mathematical elegance alone is not enough to determine correspondence with physical laws.'

[8] See R. Sorabji, _Time_ , _Creation & The Continuum_, Cornell University Press: Ithaca: Yew York, 1983) for Philoponus on the _nature_ time, infinity, and creation out of nothing in the Beginning (especially pp. 194-231). Sorabji sides with Philoponus against his contemporaries, but up against modern developments of of concepts of infinity he is not so compelling.

[9] See T.F. Torrance, _Theological and Natural Science_ (Wipf & Stock: Eugene, Oregon, 2002), Chapter Six, where a full discussion of the important terms in the debates that include the concept of _nature_ in Greek Science and Christian Theology with Philoponus. Also, throughout the translation given us by L.S.B. MacCoull of _de Opificio Mundi_ (1995), a work the author was kind enough to make available to me, we read the resonance of the language in the Alexandrian's science and theology. I hope it will be published, as it throws much light onto the relationship of the Incarnation and the Creation for the Grammarian.

[10] See Stanley Jaki, _The Road of Science and the Ways of God_ (University of Chicago Press, 1978) pp. 203, 207, 239-41, 436 for the history of the problem among scientists and theologians. See also Richard Sorabji, _John Philoponus_ (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1987) for the problem in the ancient world and the early church, especially the contribution of the Alexandrian schools, and its resolution. For the problem with modern physicists, see for instance Henning Genz, _Nothingness_ (Perseus Publishing: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999), who openly acknowledges the some deep resonance between ancient and modern powers to conceive the fundamentals of the problem. Henning sees the Biblical image of the world as a universe of mankind as merely one among the many static images of this world, produced likewise across the history of the Ancient Near East. I believe he confuses the modern 'Quantum Vacuum' with _Das Nichtige_ of Christian Theology. He is utterly unaware of Philoponus and the Grammarian's concern for the rational contingency and _creatio ex nihilo_ of the world, with its kinetics and dynamical _nature_. Consequently, his science appears to suffer from a reductionism that suffocates us rather than allows us freely to breathe the transcendent air associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition.

[11] Again and again, throughout _The Arbiter_ and _de Opificio Mundi_ , Philoponus seeks to penetrate into the objectivity of the Truth, the intelligibility of which that exists outside anyone's particular knowing of it. It is this Truth that belongs to the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ as the Revealer of the Trinity of God and the Creator of 'All', the whole of created reality. It is this faith that allows Philoponus to conceive of relationships between the Uncreated Reality of God and the created reality of the Universe. He can remain ever humble in his seeking for this Truth, but he can be quite adamant about what it is of this Truth that we have been given to know. "Well then, I have talked about these things so far as I could," he writes, and then steadily makes us aware of what he has been given to understand against all idol-makings and astrologers and unorthodox views of the world and Christ. His may not be the last word on this Truth, but it is a good word just the same, learned at the interface between his science and his theology.

[12] I like to remember that, when Einstein applied for his first job as a university professor, he left blank initially the question asking him to designate his religion. The official sent the application back saying they could not hire atheists. The great legend filled in the blank row with, 'The Religion of Moses'. He was perhaps more serious than he could at the time. But one of his 'logia' is often quoted, 'Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.' It was said at Princeton Theological Seminary. No one has argued more forcefully at this interface for the necessity of the Transcendent in our knowing and being than Michael Polanyi. See any one of his books, _Knowing and Being_ or _The Tacit Dimension_ or _Study of Man_. See also T.F. Torrance, 'Einstein and God' in his _Theological and Natural Science_ , op. cit., pp. 12-28.

[13] Epistemological experience must possess a dynamic _nature_ open to learning correspondences with the Wisdom of the Word of God's Self-Revelation. The freedom of Man in the Universe as God's Creation is meant to grasp such harmonies between the various _natures_ involved so that our experience in space and time and our thought about the objectivity of this space-time are brought into correspondence with one another. Our efforts to apprehend God, the World, and Man can hardly be possessed without appreciating the value of this kind of epistemic poise in our ways of knowing and being. What the Incarnation does is gives us forgiveness for the primordial sin of the human race against God, the World, and Man. It provides us with the opportunity to relate our knowing and being truly to that that transcends our knowing and being. This point is vital for Philoponus' thought. In the Light of the Incarnation, see the Creation. Einstein's assertions about epistemology and objectivity in the physical _nature_ of the Universe remain solid ones, fundamental to science, in spite of the perplexing problems that have been raised between the world of the quantum and the world of gravity. If the concept of 'Universe' as made out of nothing has meaning, we need to appreciate the concerns of Philoponus rather than to condemn him.

[14] I have reviewed this book for the Metanexus Institute, Metanexus Sophia, 2004.05.13.

[15] See _Theological and Natural Science_ , op. cit., pp. 4-7.

[16] For a short summary of this interaction see A. E. McGrath, _Nature_ , A Scientific Theology, Volume 1 (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2001) pp. 95-98. For Philoponus, _Nature_ , it is important to note, is bound up with the Eternal Logos of God's Being and not any 'logos' embedded in the Cosmos. The Greek definition was concerned with what _nature_ does in an imperishable Cosmos, with its divine principle, and not with the Being of Life revealed in the Incarnation.

[17] It is a conceded that Philoponus had behind him as his mentors the works of Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Cyril of Alexandria, Severus of Antioch in his anticipation of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein.

[18] 'But neither God nor _nature_ act without purpose.' (C. Wildberg, _Philoponus Against Aristotle on the Eternity of the World_ (CUP: NY, 1987), p. 121. New Creation is entailed by the Logos of Being.

[19] Ibid, pp. 39-40.

20] See also my article on John Philoponus at [www.Quodlibet.net, Volume 5, Number 1, January 2003.

[21] J. McKenna, _The Setting in Life of 'The Arbiter' by John Philoponus_ (Wipf and Stock: 1999)

[22] Ibid, pp. 9-33.

[23] I am happy to report that a Korean edition of Torrance's _Preaching Christ Today_ , has been translated into Korean and the Korean peoples will for the first time be able to read his concerns for the Gospel and its relationship to our science today.

[24] We understand that Torrance has pursued this direction with the blessing of his mentor, Karl Barth (cf. _Space, Time, and Resurrection_ , Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1976, pp. ix-xiii). I have always found Torrance's suggestion that a helpful analogy is to be found between the way that Einstein took Euclidean Geometry and transformed into its 4-dimensional Riemannian Geometry as a part of the physics of the Universe and the way theologians need to take the old 'natural theology' they may think to possess as an antecedent conceptual system and transform it in the heart of Revelation into a real servant of the Creator. Barth's _Nein_ is even more compelling, when heard with Torrance's _Yes_ than the great Swiss theologian could imagine, just as it was difficult for Einstein to imagine the singularities that appeared in his gravitational equation as 'Black Holes', actual physical objects, when the space-time of such infinities or singularities turned out to exist as some pure form of gravity bound up with the beginning of our cosmology today. I feel sure that Barth would be pleased to affirm the direction in which Torrance has taken the great Swiss theologian.

[25] It is important to observe that Philoponus read Genesis in the Light of the Incarnation.

[26] Henry Chadwick, in Sorabji's _John Philoponus_ , op. cit., chapter two, remains skeptical about the Alexandrian's Christology. His concept of _nature_ and his _one composite nature_ formula seems to want to make too concrete the mystery of Christ. He writes, 'When the logician (Philoponus) is confronted, however, with Chalcedon's formula, one _hypostasis_ and two _natures_ , he shudders to a standstill, wondering what the terms could mean." (p. 46) Chadwick seems unable to understand the _syntheton_ (composition) as a real _nature_ bound up the mystery and space-time. He thinks that the Grammarian by created things attempted to explain divine realities (p. 54), when I believe the opposite is the case. The contingency of the _nature_ of space and time and its role in the Incarnation of the Trinity of God implies that the two poles of the relationship must be thought at once together. A resonance between Philoponus' concept of _nature_ and the _nature_ of space and time as contemplated by our scientists today out to be appreciated (cf. _The Nature of Space and Time_ (Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 1996, where Penrose is said to play the role of Einstein and Hawking the role of Bohr in the debate that was begun the 1930's about the _nature_ of quantum events in relationship with Einstein's 4-dimensional space-time. Philoponus' 3-dimensional may not correspond identically with Einstein's 4-dimensional world.

[27]Op. cit., MacCoull dates _de Opficio Mundi_ after _The Arbiter_ , pp. xxvi-xxx.

[28] The bad blood spilt by Simplicius against Philoponus against Aristotle and his new physics of the world's forever and God's eternality is still spilt among us (See again C. Wildberg, _Philoponus, Against Aristotle on the Eternity of the World_ , Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1987, account of it. Continuity and diversity in a contingent world that is God's Creation out of nothing possess a different _nature_ than otherwise determined.

[29] MacCoull points out again and again in _de Opficio Mundi_ how Philoponus opposes steadily Kosmas Indicopleustes and Nestorian Christianity.

[30] _The Setting in Life_ , Op. cit., pp.16-19.

31] Ibid, Chapter Three, 'John Philoponus and the Scientific Culture of Alexandria.' Stoyan Tanev, a physicist and theologian, has prepared an excellent comparison of my understanding of the term _nature_ in the Seventh Chapter of 'The Arbiter' with F.H. Chase's and U. Lang's for his Master's Degree in Orthodox Theology at the University of Sherbrooke, Quebec. He writes, 'It seems to us, however, that looking at John Philoponus' work with the filter of the philosopher's eyes will not help in the understanding the true nature and value of his contributions.' (p. 24 of his essay entitled 'The Theology of John Philoponus'.) His e-mail address is [stoyan@rogers.com.

[32] See T.F. Torrance, _Divine and Contingent Order_ (T&T Clark: Edinburgh, 1998) for an argument that seeks to assert our grasp of the positive dimensions in these relationships as vital for the development of the physics of the Universe. We bow with our understanding to the _nature_ of a world that cries out for explanation from beyond itself. In this regard, Stanley Jaki has argued that a great physicist like Niels Bohr could be inconsistent with his use of the term _nature_ , when his quantum physics could not pretend to grasp _nature_ as a whole (Ibid, p. 203). The struggle to understand the relationship between the gravitational field of General Relativity Theory and the gravity of the Quantum World marks our effort today. We need to take into consideration here the work of Professor Robert Griffiths at Carnegie Mellon University ( _Consistent Quantum Theory_ , Cambridge University Press, 2002). He has argued that the measurement problem and the wave collapse associated with the uncertainty principle are not fundamental for understanding quantum physics. Although his consistent quantum theory overcomes the measurement and wave collapse problems, making fundamental the indeterminism of the reality of the quantum world, the objectivity fundamental to the implications of Einstein's Legacy yet obtains. Reality possesses an objectivity that exists outside of our knowing of it, as with the unstable particles decaying at the center of the earth or in intergalactic space (p. xiii). Professor Griffiths has not begun¸ however, to publish on the relationship of his theory to General Relativity, but I find it hard to believe he will not in the future make some attempts. The Black Holes of our modern Big Bang Cosmology demand an integration of the quantum world with the relativistic fields of gravity. So far as I am able to understand the problem, it seems that we need to find some way of getting beyond this dualism and the dialectical paradoxes inherent in the determinate-indeterminate debates and to find something more subtle, as Einstein desired, going on in our physics, theoretical and empirical, so that a new concept will be opened up to us onto the actual _nature_ of the Universe. ((cf. K. Thorne, _Black Holes and Time Warps, Einstein's Outrageous Legacy_ (W.W. Norton: New York, 1994), where the author gives us a magisterial look at the epistemological and historical significance of Einstein's contribution to the creative development of our scientific culture.)) As with Penrose and Thorne, Griffiths does not list the term _nature_ in the indexes of his book. T. F. Torrance champions the rational intelligibility of contingent reality as that which would move us beyond the dialectic. It seems to me that we must find space-time in which discrete particles act lawfully within the new physics.

[33] H.G. Liddell-R. Scott, _Lexicon_ (Clarendon Press, 1966) pp. 1964-1965, 1) of origin 2) of forms 3) of order 4) of originating power 5) of concrete creatures 6) of species 7) of sex.

[34] P.H. Wicksteed and F.M. Concord, translators, _Aristotle, Physics,_ Books I-IV (Harvard University Press, 1993), p. xv.

[35] T.F. Torrance has championed this concept of the contingent order of the Creation in our time with many books and essays. He would trace the epistemology of this struggle of human consciousness from the early fathers of the Church down through the Middles Ages into our own times with reference to John Philoponus and James Clerk Maxwell and then to Albert Einstein. He can contrast this with developments associated with Augustine, Boethius, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Newtonians in our time. There exists no necessity in the relationship between God and the World. There is no arbitrariness in this relationship. If there is a relationship between them, it is a freely created and creative one that the Church understands as belonging to the Grace of her Creator-Redeemer, the Word of God. See for instance, "Time, Creation, And World-Order," ed. Mogens Wegner, Acta Jutlandica LXXIV: 1, Humanities Series 72, pp. 206-236.

[36] T.F. Torrance, _Theological and Natural Science_ , op. cit., p. 4.

[37] C.J.F. Williams, _Philoponus_ , on Aristotle 1.1-1.5 and on Aristotle 1.6-2.9 (Cornell University Press, 1999) translates the word for contingency as something 'possible' or 'capable of happening', as do all of the translations. If it is not necessary, it is accidental. If it is accidental, it is not rational and only temporary. It is only potential and never actual. See R. Sorabji, _John Philoponus_ , pp. 164-178, where Philoponus is thought to have got the best of the ancients about these things, but perhaps his arguments cannot best our modern concepts of infinity, infinities, and finiteness.

[38] Ibid, 99, 32; 100, 4; 108, 9. _Nature_ as a cause cannot cause its own destruction. Change belongs to the Eternal in various ways, but the substantial rationality of contingency is not apprehended. It belongs to the possible, what can happen, not to what actually is, which belongs to the Eternal. The author does admit, however, that Philoponus was after a new definition of _nature_ and prime matters.

[39] See W. Charlton, _Philoponus On Aristotle's 'On The Soul 3.9-13'_ (Cornell University Press, New York, 2000), pp. 175-185.

[40] See T.F. Torrance, _Divine Meaning_ (T&T Clark: Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 205-212, and the way that this contingency of _nature_ resonates with the work of Athanasius of Alexandria.

[41] C. Wildberg, _Philoponus_ , _against Aristotle on the Eternity of the World_ (Cornell University Press, 1987) Sorabji has provided some excellent historical data in this edition, when it is very clear that the God who 'overrides' the temporal is the Creator who created out of nothing in the Beginning. Professor Sorabji has laid out very clearly the way that Philoponus' employed his infinity arguments against the Greek notions about infinity and its relationship with the finite in a number of his works.

[42] See D. Furley and C. Wildberg, _Place, Void, and Eternity_ , Cornell University Press: Ithaca, New York, 1991,) pp. 114-118.

[43] John Archibald Wheeler, _A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime_ (Scientific American Library: New York, 1999), p. 1, "In a single simple sentence: Spacetime grips mass, Telling it how to move; And mass grips spacetime, telling it how to curve," and also pp. 67-107.

[44] Wildberg, _Philoponus,_ op. cit., pp. 39-40.

[45] T.F. Torrance, _Theological and Natural Science_ , op. cit., p. 7.

[46] Wildberg, op. cit., pp. 24-31.

[47] D. Sobel, _Galileo's Daughter_ (Walker & Company: New York, 1999), pp. 144-147, where it is Simplico who has become known as 'a pompous Aristotelian philosopher'.

[48] Again, see my _Setting in Life_ , op. cit., Chapter Three, p. 105.

[49] We may keep in mind here Francis Bacon's phantoms seen as idols and idol-making in society. Idols of the mind are perhaps more insidious than idols of silver and gold, or stone and wood, and we can heartily sin against the Truth in our time with them.

[50] One of the first questions that I asked Tom Torrance when I heard him teaching at Fuller Seminary was about the Holiness of the Creator and the Holy Ground upon which theologians must stand to do their work and the willingness of scientists to listen to such fundamental grounds. He assured me that many great mathematicians and scientists have now come to know that upon such ground they have also to stand if real scientific progress is to be made, mathematical and physical.

[51] We have already indicated that _de Opificio Mundi_ was written after _The Arbiter_ , and that Genesis is read in the Light of the Incarnation and not the other way around. The analysis of K. Verrycken, 'The development of Philoponus' thought and its chronology', in R. Sorabji, ed., _Aristotle Transformed_ (Cornell University Press, 1990) pp. 233-274) strains to find two people with Philoponus, John 1 and John 2, the pagan and the Christian. I believe the problem here is bound up with how we conceive the relationship between Eternity and Time. I would suggest that 'forever' ought to be understood as caused and a contingent reality, while Eternity is not caused and non-contingent. Philoponus' thought develops in time in relationship with Christ, who was born again around 33 AD. Certainly, Al-Farabi's argument that Philoponus was a Christian only under the political pressures of the times is to be rejected.

[52] We are informed that the condemnation is presently in the process of being removed from the Indexes of both Eastern and Western Orthodoxies.

[53] T.F. Torrance, _Divine Meaning_ , pp. 206-213, where the terms in the analysis with their particular _natures_ are defined in the Trinity of the One Being of God in His Acts with His Word or Logos in the Light of the _one nature_ that is the Lord Jesus Christ. See also Th. Hermann, _Johannes Philoponus als Monophysit_ , _ZNTW_ 29, pp. 209-64, where the argument of _The Arbiter_ is rehearsed. The particular that exists as an individual and common _nature_ is thought to be bound up with, not a species of a particular genus, but in a unity with God Himself, when theory and experience may not split apart in any dualistic manner. In this case, only in the Light of the Word of God can we see to define the _nature of the natures_ of Christ in God. The two are not another one beside themselves, but the one and belong to a unity that is God Himself. Perhaps we may refer to the Gospel of John, chapter 17, for the Biblical basis for this unity. John 1:14 certainly is the text that is being explicated here.

[54] The Seventh Chapter of _The Arbiter_ was preserved in Greek because it was the text use against the Grammarian. I have read U.M. Lang, _John Philoponus and the Controversies over Chalcedon in the Sixth Century_ (Leuven: Peters, 2001), along with its Syriac text, with some real reservations about Lang's understanding of _phusis_ (Greek) or _khuyana_ (Syriac) or _nature_ (English) in the mind of the Alexandrian. I hope to make clear my reservations with this essay, especially as these terms are found employed in L.S.B. MacCoull's _de Opificio Mundi_ , where we can find a host of decisions about the whole and the parts problem.

[55] See _The Arbiter_ , chapter one.

[56] Ibid, chapter two.

[57] Stoyan Tanev, op. cit., p. 11. I must emphasize at this point that the concept of _logos_ in this definition allows Philoponus to understand it in Christology and in other realities according to _nature_. It is not to be understood as a 'common basis' outside of the actual nature of the _Logos_ of God. The _Logos_ of the human _nature_ of Christ acquires the Divine _Nature_ of God Himself in the way the Incarnation has been posited in the Cosmos. Without this point, one will judge this subject by some other 'logos' and fail to understand.

[58] Chapters 21 and 22 refer together to chapter 4, where Philoponus gives us his understanding of the various ways the whole and the parts may be conceived as composed with one another. If this dynamical way of thinking is properly appreciated, then the reader will readily grasp the reason the _Ousia_ or Being of the Nature of God cannot be mapped onto the Porphyrian Tree or Aristotelian logical analyses common among Neo-Platonists at the time.

[59] Stoyan Tanev, op. cit., p. 14. This involves a dynamical transformation of definition of any class.

[60] See my 'Setting in Life', op. cit., chapter three, especially pages 17-19, for my analysis of the Anathema and the misunderstanding very possible at this interface. I referred to Ebied, R.Y., VanRoey, A., & Wickham, L.R., _Peter of Callinicum_ (Department Orientalisitck, Leuven, 1981) and a debate between Peter and Damian of Alexandria, both of whom condemned Philoponus as a Tritheist but became enemies about the _persons_ or _hypostases_ of the Trinity and the Incarnation in any case. The problem involves the properties or individuals of the hypostases in consubstantial being with God.

[61] Ian Torrance in his _Christology After Chalcedon_ (The Canterbury Press, 1988) has shown how the concept of 'individuals' is a property belonging to the 'hypostasis' or 'atomo' of a species in the Alexandrian science of Philoponus' time.

[62] See K. Barth, CD I.1, pp. 348-383 for an analysis of the Triunity of the 'persons' as one 'being' or _nature_.

[63] I think Walter Böhm has it right: "So kann man die physikalischen Theorien, die er vorträgt, nicht isoliert betrachten, sondern muß sie im Zusammenhung gesamten philosophischen Weltbilder und seiner christlichen Weltanschauung sehen." Op. cit., p. 31.

[64] Actually, the analogical relation of Man as body of soul and soul of body is commonly employed to help Philoponus speak about the divine and human _natures_ of Christ as one 'composite' _nature._ The triangulated proportions of Man:body:soul as one whole being helps the Grammarian speak about the _anhypostasis_ and the _enhypostasis_ in the _nature_ of the _hypostatic union_ as the God-Man Christ is. The wholeness of the Man belongs to the Wholeness of the Godhead. Here we have to respect the movement from image through imageless knowing to reality, where the asymmetrical reciprocity implicated with the symmetry in the Union are both vital for understanding its wholeness and its parts.

[65] See Karl Barth's _Man in His Time_ in _CD_ III.2, pp. 437-640, where it is understood that God's possesses 'uncreated time' in His eternity. We understand this 'eternal time' as the source of 'created time', time as it exists in the universe where we have been our creaturely being in a created world. Will we be able to turn into physics Barth's concepts of pre-temporal, supra-temporal, and post-temporal Eternity in relationship with time, times past, times present, and times future?

[66] I have often thought that I hear a real resonance in the epistemological problems in Christology with the problems we have today while attempting to resolve the meaning of the General Relativity Theory with the Quantum Mechanical or Quantum Gravity Theories. Is the Incarnation of the Word significant for the physics of the macrocosm as well as the microcosm of the Universe as Creation or not?

[67] MacCoull, op. cit., pp. xxiii-xxvii. ' _The point of Philoponus' producing a Monophysite <not heretical> Genesis commentary was above all to demonstrate that only this correct understanding of Christ would provide the key to understanding the created universe_.' The understanding that _de Opificio Mundi_ is written after _The Arbiter_ is important for understanding his concept of _nature_.

[68] MacCoull refers to R.F. Hassing, 'John Philoponus on Aristotle's definition of _nature_ ', _Ancient Philosophy,_ 8 (1988) 73-100. I attempted to address the confusion that leads to calling Philoponus a 'tritheist' and heretical 'monophysite' in my "Setting in Life of 'The Arbiter'", op. cit., chapter one. The Grammarian appears thus to those who view him while looking through the lens of the necessary and _a priori_ logic laid down by the Aristotelians.

[69] _De Opificio Mundi_ , Books One and Two. _Nature_ is on the one hand a given created reality that comes into existence out of nothing first as 'void and unlimited' and then as 'light' lighting up with solid magnitude (finite extension) the deep darkness of the 'nothingness' of the Creation.

[70] MacCoull points out again and again in her translation how these 'composite' unities reflect the 'composite' _nature_ Philoponus employed to discuss the Incarnation. (cf. Book 1.6, p. 14) All the while he is doing this, we should observe, Philoponus discusses the angels and demons of the invisible dimensions of the created world which are mentioned only 'tongue in cheek' by moderns scientists (cf. Maxwell's demon, etc.) For Philoponus, the invisible part of the visible world possesses dimensionality that definitely belongs to the mystery of the world as God's Creation.

[71] Ibid, p. 16. Thus, the way we are to think about the soul of the body and the body of soul as mankind in the form and content of individual men.

[72] T.F. Torrance, _Divine Meaning_ , op. cit., Chapter 9.

[73] _De Opificio Mundi_ , op. cit., Book III. 17, p. 133.

[74] Cf. Lindsay Judson, chapter 10, in R. Sorabji, _Philoponus_ , op. cit, for an analysis of the logic in the substantial rationality of contingency with regard to generability, perishability, and imperishability in the Beginning. I would argue that the logic for Philoponus is none other than the Incarnate One Himself, and this gives him a freedom not found in Plato and Aristotle and Proclus.

[75] MacCoull, op. cit. pp. 199-276, where common and particular _natures_ , with all their differentiated properties are dynamically thought to participate in the _divine nature_.

[76] See Karl Barth, _Church Dogmatics_ , IV. 1, where the new _nature_ of Christ, divine and human, is the Word of God that we must learn to hear in our time. Only with this _nature_ can we understand man's _nature_ , the _nature_ of the world, and that which belongs to God for us with his secrets (Deuteronomy 29:29).

[77] See E.Watts, Winning the Intracommunal Dialogues: Zacharias Scholasticus's _Life of Severus_ , JECS, Winter, 2005, Vol. 13, Num. 4, pp. 437-64, where Watts refers to P.J. Sijpesteijn, "New Light on the _Philoponoi", Aeg_ 69 (1989): 95-99 and understand them as socially high-ranking laymen serving as liaisons between bishops and congregations.

[78] _Theological and Natural Science,_ op. cit., p. 77. Surely, we need fresh insights into Creation, Incarnation, and the Physics of the Universe in our time.

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## The Interface Between Theology and Science  
in the Thought of John Philoponus, Sixth Century Alexandrian

Abstract

The interaction between Christian theology and scientific culture in the ancient Graeco-Roman worlds occurred with a more profound impact than is generally understood. We will seek to penetrate as far as we may into this interaction and see if we may grasp afresh the fruitfulness it portends for our own time.

John Philoponus inherited a theological science from Athanasius and the Church's Nicene Confession, from Cyril of Alexandria, and then from Severus of Antioch. At the great academy in Alexandria, Philoponus sought to relate his theology to the physics and cosmology of the world as God's good creation.

We may say that the church in 6th-century Alexandria sought to answer Tertullian's famous question, 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?' It was his positive response to the rhetoric of the question that earned Philoponus his condemnation in the ancient world. But Philoponus sought to confront and convert the Neoplatonism of his time into the service of orthodoxy. Thus, the Christian dogma of creation out of nothing in the beginning, along with the Incarnation of the Word of God and the revelation of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, provided the ground upon which he built up his theological and his scientific thought about the world and God.

We will pay special attention to his Christology, which was condemned soon after he wrote his treatise on the Incarnation around A.D. 551 or 552 for the Fifth Ecumenical Council of the Church, held at Constantinople in 553 by decree of the Emperor Justinian.

We shall seek to make clear why the Anathema ought to be lifted from Philoponus' _Arbiter_ and why its argument could provide a fruitful basis upon which we may seek to understand the vital importance of the relationship between Christian theology and natural science even in our own time.

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In my Ph.D. dissertation, I noted the need for a fresh translation of _The Arbiter_. Uwe Michael Lang has given us that translation in _John Philoponus and the Controversies over Chalcedon in the Sixth Century_ (Leuven: Peeters, 2001). However, because Lang did not interact with T.F. Torrance's assessments of the thought of John Philoponus or with my work, I believe he reduces the intention of the significance of the _Arbiter_ down to where the Alexandrian's grasp of the transcendent freedom of the Creator-Redeemer is not brought sufficiently to bear upon our understanding of his argument. A much more positive grasp of Philoponus' intention is gained, I believe, when it is seen as rooted in seeking after the majestic truth of God himself. This is fundamental to the epistemology found in the works of Philoponus. The contrast between Lang and Torrance is well worth understanding.

My dissertation was published as John Emory McKenna, _The Setting in Life of "The Arbiter" by John Philoponus_ (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 1999). I finished writing this work in 1987. Since then, my understanding of the Alexandrian's Christology has only deepened with appreciation. I was most happy to read Tom Torrance's last essays on Philoponus, with their very positive apprehending of his contribution to the developments we have experienced within our modern scientific culture. I believe that the nature of _freedom_ , found both by implication and by explication of the orders in the progress of the _Arbiter_ ' _s_ argument, calls for both an evangelical and ecumenical appreciation of our task and a revitalization of the relationship between theological and scientific truth today.

Another important resource is Thomas F. Torrance, _Theological and Natural Science_ (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2001). These are some of Professor Torrance's last essays on John Philoponus. They are written by a master theologian's ultimate concerns for the relationship between theology and science. They are brought together in this book by Thomas Spear Torrance, the youngest son of the great churchman of Scotland. Here are Professor Torrance's deepest and clearest understandings of that unique necessity which makes imperative our apprehending of the relationship between theology and science in our time. Both evangelical and theological concerns of the church rest upon our understanding of this relationship. Torrance traces the fecundity of its fundamental cogency. The church's doctrines on creation and Incarnation is its real ground. He shows how they have influenced our thought from John Philoponus through Isaac Newton to James Clerk Maxwell and even to Albert Einstein and beyond. I hope many will want to understand these essays.

### An introduction to John Philoponus

In 1982, I was working on a Ph.D. dissertation in Isaiah at Fuller Theological Seminary, when Professor Thomas F. Torrance came from Edinburgh to deliver the annual Payton Lectures. During that lecture period, in an intensive course for graduate students, Professor Torrance spoke of the Alexandrian grammarian John Philoponus. After we met and talked together, my life was changed. I did not write a dissertation on Isaiah. I wrote on John Philoponus. Professor Torrance became my dissertation's outside reader, my theological mentor, and my friend. I have ever since sought to understand the thought of the Alexandrian.

In a _Watani International News_ (a newspaper for Coptic Christians) article May 2003, I rehearsed the background and scope of Philoponus' theology and its impact upon the science of his day. I argued that it was Philoponos's integration of the church's doctrines of the Incarnation and creation-out-ofnothing that shaped both his Christology and his cosmology. It was in the light of the integration of these doctrines that he labored to understand the relationship between theology and science.

### The lifting of the anathema from 'The Arbiter'

In that article, I referred to my Ph.D. dissertation completed at Fuller in 1987 and published in 1999. I had argued for the lifting of the anathema from _The Arbiter_. The treatise had been formally condemned in A.D. 680. Its condemnation accounts for the relative obscurity of Philoponus today. John Philoponus was no heretical monophysite or tritheist. He was a preeminent scientist and Christian theologian appointed by the Emperor Justinian seeking to reconcile diophysites and monophysites involved in the Christological debates in the church. An agreement about the nature of the Incarnation of God the Word become a man in the world would greatly benefit the Empire. In a recent doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford, U. M. Lang has now given us this translation of _The Arbiter_ 's ten chapters. Let me quote from this translation the conclusion of the argument:

#### Now we ask those who read this to stand up dispassionately and without favouritism so that they may give an answer to truth itself in accordance with our defense of it. And if they find anything said by us agreeable to it, they should embrace it with welcome understanding, ungrudgingly, as if it were their own offspring. For I consider truth a common benefit in whomsoever it is found. But if anything has slipped from our judgment or examination, may they grant us forgiveness for our slips, but heal what they have forgiven by themselves through clearly proven rebuttals, judging, as we do, that our own private good lies in dissociation from ignorance and in making him who has liberated us from it our true helper.

Here we read of Philoponos's commitment to searching for an understanding of the Incarnation's truth which, he believes, comes to all of us from God himself. It is in this mood and with this intent that his argument ought to be evaluated. Today, we are seeing the lifting of the anathema from _The Arbiter_ , to a large degree because of the efforts of Professor Torrance and Richard Sorabji at King's College, London, to give Philoponus the kind of credit he deserves for his work in science and theology in ancient Alexandria.

### A new definition of nature

Subsequent to my dissertation, I published two articles with _Quodlibet_ _,_ an online journal of Christian theology and philosophy. In the first of these articles, in 1999, I offered my own translation of the seventh chapter of _The Arbiter,_ the chapter that was employed in Philoponos's condemnation. I saw that we needed to appreciate the fact that his argument sought to establish a whole new concept for a definition of nature.

Nature's definition in the thought of John Philoponus was bound with his belief in the nature of the creation-out-of-nothing and the nature of the Incarnation. The Word of God, come as a man within the created reality of the cosmos, was to be heard and understood on his own terms and not in terms given definition by the Greek philosophers. It was with this new concept of nature that Philoponus argued against the Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic cosmology of his time. This new concept of nature lies behind his epoch-making contributions to the development of our Western scientific culture.

### Freedom with God in John Philoponus

In my second article, in 2003, I investigated the way that Philoponus established his newly founded concept. It was with a certain freedom that the Grammarian was able to think through the impasses of the older conceptual systems and to shape a new interpretive framework for understanding, not only of the nature of the cosmos, but also the nature of God's Incarnation within his creation. The significance of this freedom is apprehended as it participates in the actual nature of God's own divine freedom. Just as divine and contingent orders are to be understood as integrated in the Lord Jesus Christ, so divine and contingent freedoms are to be apprehended as integrated in him. The church is given to participate with him in his freedom. This is the freedom with which the Word of God became flesh.

The effect of these two articles was to make me face the way that, in Christ, we are to know the real meaning of our freedom, a human and created freedom found in God himself. The secret of human and divine freedom lies with this humanity of God. It is in his light that the church in God's good creation is to know and to serve this person of the Lord. It is with this freedom that I hope to consider with you today the thought of John Philoponus.

### Professor Thomas F. Torrance

I have already mentioned Professor Torrance, but let me now offer a salute to my mentor in the theology and science of John Philoponus since 1982. He is now 90 years old, recovering from a stroke in a nursing home in Edinburgh, where I visited him in June. You will appreciate that he is for me like a father in the Christian faith. During that visit, Tom gave me a copy of his latest essays on Philoponus. In a book entitled _Theological and Natural Science,_ Professor Torrance argues that the thought of John Philoponus resonates with the science of James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. Einstein's vision to develop a unified field theory of the nature of the physical universe, so compelling now, was also on the mind of John Philoponus. I hope many of you will want to read this book. I believe it contains some vital progress in our efforts to grasp the relationship between science and theology.

Torrance's argument goes something like this: Created out of nothing in the beginning, the creation is a contingent reality that is both independent of the nature of God as well as absolutely dependent upon his will and power for being what it is, for its nature. It is this interlocking of independence and dependence that is the reason it is often so difficult to grasp the significance of the contingency of created realities. There is a deep and abiding necessity to distinguish the nature of created realities from the nature of uncreated realities. But this necessity does not mean that God is not free to cross the chasm or abyss between these absolutely different natures, between the creation and God himself. God is free to become present with and within his creation in his own uniqueness, simplicity, and majestic unity. With this freedom, he relates his uncreated nature to the created nature of his creation. The nature of the creation's orders and the nature of the creation's freedoms depend on this Creator's freedom. That God is free to become the Creator that he is, as well as a man among us, is vital in the thought of John Philoponus.

The way that the creation is both dependent and independent of this Creator has been made clear by the sending of his Son, the eternal Word. With this sending, the Incarnation is the revelation of both the Father and the Spirit of God. The unique necessity of their persons in God's uncreated being is to be understood with the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. As this man, humanity has been made free to participate in the majestic truth of God himself. In this way, any created necessity we may conceive is bound up with the nature of God's own uniqueness, simplicity, and unity. It is bound up with God as he is within himself even before he became the Creator, even within the freedom he possesses in his own eternity.

Human freedom with Christ is given to possess a union and communion with the Father that joins all created freedom to the eternal life and love of God himself. It is with this freedom that the Spirit was sent at Pentecost to establish the church. It is with this same freedom that the church exists and subsists today, and it is with this freedom that the believer is adopted with the church to participate in the divine nature of the eternal life of our Lord and our God.

It is with this same freedom that the church learns to confess throughout her history the Blessed Trinity of the Lord Jesus Christ, Father, Son, and Spirit. With this same freedom, he is with us today as true God of true God and Light of Light, the Light of the world. With this certain freedom, we are to understand our own freedom. We are free and yet bound to God. Professor Torrance has championed this concept of freedom throughout his books, and especially in his work on the thought of John Philoponus.

### Freedom in Alexandria's science

It was with this same freedom that John Philoponus was able to develop the dynamic character of his thought, both theological and scientific. He sought to penetrate into the contingent rationality and substantial nature of the creation in the light of its Creator, revealed in the Lord Jesus Christ. From within the created realities of the world, he learned to speak of that which belongs to God's eternity and the uncreated reality of the Lord.

In this way, the Alexandrian developed theories about infinity, actual and potential, about the kinetic motion of matter, the impetus theory embraced by Galileo, and a relational view of space and time. He also developed a dynamic view of energy and matter that we know today as field-particle theory. With these views, he posited his three-dimensional concept, by which he thought together the structure of the invisible world as dynamically bound up with the structures of the visible world.

He offered a theory of light and its optics, against Aristotle's more static understanding of the light of the cosmos. He argued against Aristotle's concept of the eternity of the world, and the Ptolemaic split between the divine nature of the heavens and the temporal nature of the earth and its sub-lunar realm. His concept of the nature of created light as bound up with the nature of the uncreated Light of God was vital for the way Philoponus sought to relate his Christology to the creation. The physics of light in the heavens and on the earth was to be understood as a whole created reality whose nature served not only as the substrate of all of its parts but also as the substance of the eternal will and power of God's Word.

My physics professor at Princeton University was John Archibald Wheeler, the physicist who named the singularities of the Big-Bang Universe "black holes." I like to think that the dynamics of Philoponus' thought resonates with Professor Wheeler's ready saying about Einstein's gravitational theory—"Space tells matter how to be; matter tells space how to curve!"

I like to think that the invisibility of space-time and the visibility of the energy-matter of the physical universe resonate with what Philoponus was after with his theories of light, three-dimensionality, and his relational view of space and time. The freedom to overcome the absolute space and time of Newton's Mechanical Universe and to re-grasp this relational view of space and time is vital for our sciences today.

It was in this way that Philoponus also sought to understand, beyond the controversies over the Incarnation in the church, how to reconcile the various parties. By apprehending anew the nature of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, the church could apprehend afresh the whole of humanity's meaning in God's good creation. This is the mood in which the Grammarian hoped to serve, with the writing of _The Arbiter_ , both his emperor and his God. He sought an orthodoxy that was at once true to the revelation of God as well as to the real nature of the contingent world that God had created in the beginning. We see that the same freedom of thought that went into Philoponos's contribution to science also went into his contribution to his Christology and theology. The Word become flesh, for the Alexandrian, provided a light whose freedom was at the very heart of the interface between theological and natural science.

### Freedom in Alexandria's theology

The analogical thinking that is inherent in the freedom of Philoponos's thought holds the key for understanding his concept of the divine and human freedom that is found in the face of the Word of God. It is this that must belong to the Word's willingness to act, not only in the beginning of the creation, but also in crossing the chasm to become a man within the world's reality. To assume his flesh and to enter into existence as a man within the heavens and upon the earth fulfills a purpose that we must hear as the Word of God. It is this Word with his Father that the church must know.

It is in the light of this revelation of God that Philoponus discusses, in analogy with the wholeness of humans as soul of body or body of soul, his understanding of the nature of the Incarnation. It is in the light of this Lord and God as Father of the Son and Son of the Father, even from before the beginning of the world, that the wholeness of the divine and human natures of Christ is to be explained. Just as the wholeness of humans is one reality, made of soul and body, the wholeness of Christ is one reality, made of divine and human.

But with the use of this analogy, we must not think that Philoponus merely intends to compare and identify man's nature with God's. His dynamic use of his analogical reflections is deeply involved with the actuality of the transcendence, imminence, and economy of God's freedom to interact, from his eternity with his uniqueness, simplicity, and majestic unity. This use of analogy breaks off from reading back up into God any created reality. Rather, it uses analogy to serve the uncreated reality of the divine nature.

This kind of analogical reflection, between uncreated and created realities, is sometimes called by scholars "asymmetrical reciprocity." I like to call its use the "broken analogies" of biblical faith. It is not an analogy of being that is contemplated, but an analogy of faith, a faith in which real knowledge of God co-inheres with God himself.

When Philoponus sought to explain the Incarnation with this use of his man-body-soul analogy, and others such as light-radiance-heat, he knows full well that the source for his ratios must lie with God's eternity, when time and eternity are given union from that which lies outside of all space and time, with the Lord God himself. The Incarnation in no way can be thought of as associated with space or time travel. It is divine creativity at once at work over and with and within the world.

Again and again, Philoponus refers to the wholeness of God, Father, Son, and Spirit, as the origin and source of what humanity has been made to be in Jesus Christ. In the Incarnation, his humanity does not define the divinity of Christ, but the divinity of Christ as the Word of God defines the wholeness of this one man that is among us. In the wholeness of this Christ, then, the wholeness of mankind is informed and enlightened by the life of its Creator and Redeemer. Humanity is what it is in the light of who he is, over and with and within the world. This kind of analogical reflection assumes an asymmetrical reciprocity inherent in its ratios that as 'broken analogies' refer away from themselves to God himself.

It is important, therefore, not to reduce the Alexandrian's use of analogy down to points of mere comparison and identification. No merely symmetrical arrangement of one thing with another can grasp the nature of the Incarnation. I think many tend to make this mistake when they go to evaluate Philoponus' thought. We must find here in our thinking space and time for the transcendent, imminent, and economic dimensions of God's actual freedom. The church cannot allow Christ to be turned into some wordless anthropology, psychology, or mere sociology. Any science without his Word will miss the vital significance of the dynamic wholeness and freedom that we find in the thought of the Alexandrian. The Christology and theology of _The Arbiter_ cannot properly be understood without apprehending this actual freedom, his freedom to become flesh and his freedom to speak for us within the space-time structures of our world that is fundamental to what the creation is. The task before us as the church of Jesus Christ today is very much like the one Philoponus faced in his own time. I believe that John Philoponus, if he were alive today, would be one of our foremost scientists and theologians.

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## Transformations in the History of Cosmology

**Abstract:** The argument of this essay would help us to see the need to overcome the dualistic tendencies of our thought that, in the past, have produced the fragmentation and alienation evident in our cultures today. We survey syntheses constructed between Christian theology and scientific cultures in the development of the history of thought and show how the breakup of these would lead us to a better understanding of the actual way God is free to be present in the history of the world, even while maintaining his sovereignty over it. It is argued that a real appreciation for the development of science in our time would help theologians teach the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is hoped that in this way a better scope might be provided our pastors for their interpretation of the Bible and their proclamation of its witness to the world where they labor.

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We mark ancient cultures by their polytheism. Primitive superstition about the world among the city-states and temples abounded. The bondage of the human race to the caprice of the gods, the magic regularly employed in these cultures, is read easily in the records of their struggles. Ancient peoples and civilizations fought to understand their fates in the world, with a pathos we can recognize in ourselves today. Primitive rituals seeking to appease the deities may yet be found among us. The struggle to escape from death's word on life and the need to achieve some sort of immortality was evident then and now. The ghosts of their efforts to secure some sort of destiny with the divine, found throughout the ruins of their temples and tombs, seem still to visit us. We know too well the desire for myth-making, the need to penetrate into the deep secret of the nature of our world.

What we can read so readily in the records of their ancient civilizations, we can easily find among ourselves. The terror they felt in the midst of the calamities they experienced, even in the service of the spirits of the gods, we also can find in the modern world. Caught in the grip of cycle after cycle of some arbitrary design composed by ill-defined deities, at times seemingly and terribly indifferent to their struggle, we can see the ancient peoples tormented upon the wheel of the immortality of their gods and superstitions about the order and the beauty and the meaning life would display in the universes of their visions.

In their city-states, kings and priests sought for their reigns to develop across the ancient world, from Mesopotamia to Egypt, as much power as possible over the forces of their enemies and over those of the natural world. By the wit and whim of their might and incantations, they struggled to control the warp and woof of time among the spirits of the gods in the world. Their armies proved with their supremacy the right of their gods, and those kings whose armies conquered most knew best for the peoples the mystery of the presence and wisdom of the divine powers across the lands they occupied. Might, magic ritual, fertility cult, and the diviner's rod marked the significance of their triumphs. Society's culture was devoted to an invisible maze of spirits in a bewildering array of myths and legends animating the world's nature. Their history is told with the stories of wars, heroes, and rituals. Everywhere we read their efforts to overcome their fate among the gods in the world. We cannot fail to hear the primal screams of their existences. Thus, the history of ancient cultures records in their own words and deepest needs their call for pity, from which the modern world with its own thought and might cannot think itself utterly free.1

The longing and mourning in the warp and woof of their calls can readily be illustrated. From Egypt we may read:

Thus all the gods were formed and his Ennead was completed. Indeed, all the divine order really came into being through what the heart thought and the tongue commanded. Thus the _ka-_ spirits were made and the _hemsut_ -spirits were appointed, they who make all provisions and all nourishment, by this speech. Thus justice was given to him who does what is liked and injustice to him who does what is disliked. Thus life was given to him who has peace and death was given to him who has sin. Thus were made all work and all crafts, the action of the arms, the movement of the legs, and the activity of every member, in conformance with this command which the heart thought, which came forth through the tongue, and which gives value to everything.2

From Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon we may read:

#### Without thee, Lord, what hath existence:  
For the king thou lovest, whose name thou didst call,  
who pleaseth thee, thou advancest his fame,  
thou assignest him a straightforward path.  
I am a prince thou favorest, a creature of thine hands,  
thou madest me, entrusted to me the kingship over all people,  
of thy grace, O Lord, who providest for all of them,  
cause me to love thy exalted rule.  
Let fear of they godhead be in my heart,  
grant me what seemeth good to thee;  
Thou wilt do, verily, what profiteth me.3

To Mesopotamia's Ishtar comes this prayer:

#### I have cried to thee, I thy suffering servant, wearied, distressed servant.  
See me, O my lady, accept my prayers!  
Faithfully look upon me and hear my supplication!  
Say "A pity" about my wretched body that is full of disorders and troubles,  
"A pity" about my sore throat that is full of tears and sobbings,  
"A pity" about my wretched, disordered, and troubled portents,  
"A pity" about my house, kept sleepless, which mourns bitterly,  
"A pity" about my moods, which are steadily of tears and sobbings.4

A modern sympathy with these longings, their mournful petitions and ritualistic desires, their agony and hope, is readily found among us. We understand the uncertainty that plagued this ancient world, the desperate need that sounds throughout their cries. In our modern existence, our minds do not escape the enigmas of old deities. Blessings can come as unsurely today as with the ancient kings and peoples and armies. Time does seem in some respects to stand still, or only go round and round, when it comes to the deepest need or most profound longings in the human race.

This struggle in the ancient world eventually led, with a constant desire for some kind of rational unity to things, into the development and acceptance of the cosmology of Ptolemy's world. This was a world-view that contained a very satisfying blend of the nature of the cosmos with the divine nature of the One Creator God.5 It ultimately provided the basis for a great synthesis between Christian theology and western science. For the primitive cultures of the Ancient Near East, the drive to this oneness sought to grasp a philosophy of the world that could comprehend together both the divinity of God as the Creator of the world and the nature of the world as it comes from this One. The rational existence of the human race upon the earth was profoundly bound up with the synthesis such a philosophy could achieve.

It is difficult for us to appreciate the power of this development upon the human imagination. From Thales of Miletus (b.c. 580) to John Calvin (A.D. 1564), whose embrace of the Ptolemaic cosmology is perhaps behind his problems with the doctrine of the predestination of humanity, world civilization struggled to bring to bear upon its thought the reality of a world-view bound up with the real oneness of our God. We may characterize this grip on the human imagination by reference to the development of the culture of Christian Europe from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas.6 In this development, the world was thought to come with some logical necessity from the hand of the Creator. We could believe that we might think the thoughts of God right after Him, if only we were clever enough to "save the appearances" in a rational manner. Thus, we would explain everything in a manner that was inextricably and necessarily bound up with the eternality and divine nature of the celestial mechanics of the heavens.

Though we know today that this was a dead end for real science to occur, Ptolemy's _Almagest_ served up the background data for an understanding of the motions of the lights in the night sky above the earth, the center of the Cosmos of God, from which the heavens, with their many spheres and epicycles, provided the intelligibility that allowed humanity to grasp the rationality of the divine nature in the world. It was the secret of this nature that contained the secret of the One who was the Creator of the All. At this point, cosmology and theology become utterly confused with one another. A real empirical science was made impossible.7

In this cosmos, paradoxically, the earth was both the center of all things as well as the seat of a temporal morass from which the race must learn to escape. Immortality lay with the Pantocrator, the Creator of the All in the heavens. Even though the confusion of cosmology with theology in this view was evident, the split between its celestial motions and its terrestrial mechanics allowed us to overlook its inconsistencies. The Ptolemaic Cosmos did command the imagination of the Christian world throughout the Middle Ages. Even though the Church taught that the one world coming out of nothing from the hand of Creator was not God or divine in nature, the synthesis of this cosmos with Greek philosophy and Christian theology marks the development of thought in this period with a formal and logical beauty whose fragility would inevitably be felt. The so-called Sacramental Universe of this time provided the theater for life whose elegance was celebrated in A.D. 1300 by the best of the Christian poets:

#### The nature of the universe which stilleth the centre  
and moveth all the rest around, hence doth begin  
as from its starting point.  
And this heaven hath no other where than the divine mind  
wherein is kindled the love which rolleth it  
and the power which it sheddeth.8

Here the mind of God and the human imagination are fully wed in a synthesis the beauty of which was undeniable, embracing that knowledge of God which was necessary for a full appropriation of God's love and the divine love's light where humanity could bathe in the realization of its salvation in the world.

It was a synthesis broken up with great pain. But for all its truth and beauty, apart it must be torn. Copernicus, Galileo, and Sir Isaac Newton saw its shattering each in his own way. With the development of their science, theology and cosmology could never be the same. Once their work had been completed, the great synthesis was gone. The chasm between the nature of the heavens and the earth would vanish forever. The center of the world was now nowhere to be found, but the earthly and the heavenly was to be understood as one system of mechanical law. Their science had produced a notion of gravitational law by which we might explain as one the motions in the sky above us and the motions of the earth together, where we had to understand our lives. If we may characterize the Greek essentialism in Ptolemaic cosmology as a "reductionism upwards" of human imagination and thought, perhaps we can appreciate the loss in its reach.9 A new framework of knowledge had to be achieved. Theology and science as conceived for millennia had to be abandoned. It was an earthshaking demand upon a beautiful edifice the ruins of which could be much bemoaned. Listen to the poet John Donne on its catastrophic character:

#### And new philosophy calls all in doubt,  
The element of fire is quite put out;  
The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit  
Can well direct him where to looke for it.  
And freely men confesse that this world's spent,  
When in the Planets, and the Firmament  
They seek so many new: then see that this  
Is crumbled out againe to his atomies.  
Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;  
All just supply, and all Relation;  
Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,  
For every man alone thinkes he hath got  
To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee  
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hae.10

The transition from the Ptolemaic cosmos to the Newtonian "system of the world" brought down the abstraction of its world mechanics from its empirical reality. The attention of science now demanded a new way of looking at things. Its mind was compelled to change about these things, and conceive afresh what we meant by calling God the Creator of all things. The modern industrial revolution is bound up with this attention. Professor Thomas F. Torrance has characterized this transformation as one from the "reductionism upwards" of the earlier period of the thought of Greek essentialism to one of a "reductionism downwards" into modern instrumentalism and positivism.11

A synthesis between science and theology now comes forth that denies any authority from above. The heavens and the earth are made all of the same created stuff. This stuff obeys one law, the law of gravity. A new kind of determinism is introduced into the science of this mechanics. The mechanical universe possesses a causality the character of which will allow us to imagine for all time the progress of the world in the sight of its Maker. God simply watches the world tick away now lawfully, absolutely independent of the divine nature. Man need but come of age and grasp the law and see its effects in the creation and learn to master its forces. We can read off the patterns of our data, straight away the logical connections throughout all the world. Pragmatism, utopian constructions, and new industry abound in a new world order that excited its possibilities and potential. In contrast to the Greek essentialism of the Ptolemaic cosmology, we may characterize this development as a new belief in our ability to comprehend the universe where we have been given our being. The world had become the play thing of those who could master the mathematics of its mechanics, a theater in which our heroes could play the conquerors of whole new industry in the world.

The problem here is bound up with the more or less mythological relationship that Newton finally posited between God and the world. Although the great scientist himself did not understand that the causality he found within the universal law of gravity could explain the beginning of God's creation, he did believe in a container notion of an absolute space and an absolute time as a "sensorium" that could provide the basis for the actions of the divine power of God, upon which his "system of the world" might ultimately depend.12 For Newtonians, this supplied the ground upon which both the determinism inherent in world causality and the deism developed in relation to the mechanics of the world could isolate our science from our theology. La Place's famous dictum to Napoleon is to be quoted again and again over the exaggerated belief of this age.13 To guard against reading divine causes into the laws, science would come to understand its methodology as possessing no need for any metaphysics or occult causes. The world ticked away to a mechanical beat whose causality effected from beginning to end the fate of its motions. Mankind had become the prisoner of this mechanical universe and the servant of its deterministic destiny.

To the poetic imagination, such a view of the world was worth despising.14 The sleepwalking of Newton's reason was for William Blake the way of death:

#### You dont believe I wont attempt to make ye  
You are asleep I wont attempt to wake ye  
Sleep on Sleep on while in your pleasent dreams  
Of Reason you may drink of Lifes clear streams  
Reason and Newton they are quite two things  
For so the Swallow & the Sparrow sings  
Reason say miracle. Newton says Doubt  
Aye that the way to make all Nature out  
Doubt Doubt & dont believe without experiment  
That is the very thing that Jesus meant  
When he said Only Believe Believe & try  
Try Try & never mind the Reason why.15

Lost in the deism and the determinism of the Newtonians, the new science reduced down to an instrument the will and imagination of humanity's freedom. In this instrumentalism, the human imagination was made nothing. Reason was all. In the eyes of the poet, mankind had been denigrated and rendered meaningless. Newton was sleepwalking like a ghost of a man in a machine the world was not. Science had made insignificant the true dignity of the race. The split between the rational or reasonable person and the passions of the artistic imagination is evident here.

Two cultures, the Technological and the Humanitarian, are evidently alienated from one another in this development. Here was created the deep rift between the sciences and the humanities that still prevails in our universities. Here is the root of a chasm that would tear apart the fabric of our modern society, an abyss in which many a scream has been heard. I believe that we may trace from this development the subcultures that flourished in the '60s of the United States. Against the established lifestyles of our industrial success, a generation of the flower-children fled their homes, and their escape into drugs made tragically vivid the consequences of this dualistic notion of the relationship between the reasonable and the imaginative. The fruit of this abyss is still prevalent in our culture today.

The struggle between rationality and the poetic genius of the race has created a schizoid tendency in our society. This tendency contains the seed of a self-destructive character now well known in our culture. When human meaning and purpose become divorced from the ways we are taught to function in this world, the being and acts of humanity are alienated from one another. The chasm we saw developed between the heavens and the earth in the Ptolemaic cosmos is echoed in this abyss between reason and human freedom in the mechanical system of the world embraced so tightly by the Newtonians. The lesson to be learned here is, I believe, that neither a "reductionism upwards" or a "reductionism downwards" of thought is to be embraced. Neither is an appropriate mode for the human context in the nature of the universe as God's creation. We are to learn to articulate the real relationship we are given to know between God, humanity, and the world in some way that does not allow either of these "reductionisms" to occur.

The beauty of the revolutionary work of Albert Einstein lies with this lesson. In his science, we face the beginning of another great transformation of world-view in the history of the development of human thought. Working from the basis in our grasp of the nature of light bound up with Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, Einstein sought afresh to understand the physics of the world, with light and its constant speed given special place. He re-envisioned the nature of space and time and the energy and matter of the universe in the light of this light. With Special and General Relativity Theory, he brought our scientific understanding into more objective relations with the reality of the nature of the universe than ever before in the history of science.

The real beauty of this development is realized when we appreciate its way of knowing the world as we experience it on the ordinary level of our lives. Our particular experiences of the nature of the world can be set into objective relations with the actual existence of the universe's space and time through the miracle of our mind's ability to grasp reality in all of its depths. Theory and experience are wed inherently in the real nature of the universe of light. Einstein gave us an understanding of the world the beauty of which has captured the imagination of many today. For those who have been able to follow the significance of his theory, the present progress of our scientific culture is an exciting and very meaningful time.16

Sometimes a lonely figure among those who sought to develop 20th-century science, Einstein always insisted that the nature of God and His interaction with the world could not be divorced from our understanding of science and our scientific methodology. His famous sayings about the "Old One" are well recorded.17 Torrance has been for the past few decades attempting to argue that the achievement of Einstein in science may be viewed as parallel to what the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth had accomplished in theology.18 Both of these creative contributions give us a fresh understanding of the foundations of the knowledge we claim to possess about the nature of God and the universe. They signify a revolution in the way we must daily take in order to build up the widest possible comprehension of the intelligibility of that objectivity with which science and theology have to do — the physical universe in the case of our scientific culture and God in the case of our theological enterprises.

But this struggle has been met in our time with considerable bewilderment. Early on accounts of Einstein's universe were thought to be beyond the grasp of ordinary citizens. Barth's work has been considered neo-orthodox by most of American theology and is not found fundamental to the way we must learn to experience and think of the Divine Being. The world generally has been feeling a great shaking at the foundations of our knowledge again, an earthquake in the orders of our experience in the world. We seem to drift in tides whose seas we do not understand, and we may find ourselves disposed to considerable giddiness whenever we try to gaze into our future in the world in this way. In this sense, perhaps, we may read the Irish poet William Butler Yeats as we have read John Donne:

#### Turning and turning in the widening gyre  
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;  
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;  
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,  
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.  
The best lack all conviction while the worst  
Are full of passionate intensity.19

With Yeats, a winner of the Nobel Prize for his poetry, who knew well Blake's animosity against the "rational man," the toppled foundations of the orders of humanity's experience in the world is once again bemoaned. The loss of the creature from its owner, the center hidden from the world's complexities, and the significant question of humanity's definition in the midst of the violent shaking of a chaotic society confront us once more in our time with a force that causes a primeval dismay. The poet wrote his melancholy lines in 1925, some ten years after Einstein had published his General Relativity Theory. The isolation of the scientist from the poet is evident here. One field is lost from the other. Humanity lives schizophrenically in the abyss of this chasm. The relationship between things that have escaped our attention spells fragmentation and alienation throughout the fabric of our lives. The fabric of life itself has been torn apart.

But Einstein's science is not a call to relativism. It is not a call for a time when it is right for every man to do what is right in his own eyes. It is, in fact, a call to a new wholeness in our commitment to grasp the objectivity of the world's intelligibility. It is a call that would seek to unify our theory and experience in the world. It would point us to discover a new way of integrating things in a relational wholeness that is vital for our existence. It is a call not to the violent upheavals of world wars and their holocausts but to an integrity of being and knowing and doing that could condition the race to priest, as well as God's sacraments, the world as the creation of the "Old One." It is really a call to follow the Lord as the mystery of His speaking makes known afresh in our time and in its real space the true nature our world. It is a call gone unheard by many. It is a call ignored by many. But it is a witness to the call of the Ancient One in the midst of the continued alienation and fragmentation that marks the history of the peoples of the 20th century.

In this call, freedom and order are bound up together with one another not as some logical contradiction but with the fact that the world in its created freedom and order belongs to rationality of the divine freedom and order of the being and nature of its God. Wonder and the power of a divine simplicity together must characterize the development of our understanding. We must learn afresh to grasp this reality in all its depths. Freedom and order beyond their paradoxical appearances compel us to hear this call and to face the glory of this Maker of the world with us. Real progress belongs to the miracle of this kind of understanding.20

Though the nature of the universe is quite different from God's, still it is our humanity that studies both, and as such must be able to speak about the relationship between the two in real ways. This means that, while distinguishing between their natures absolutely, we cannot hold them utterly apart. Einstein referred often to the Lord of his Jewish background when pointing to the relationship between his physics and that grandeur of reason that was incarnate in existence. With this kind of metaphysics in mind, he could do his physics with a kind of clarity about the scientific conscience that has made him the legend he has become. The complexity of the world possessed a simplicity that was the goal of all real science. A unified reality of its freedom and orders ought to be found that had to do with the "Old One." For Einstein, without this metaphysics science was impossible without this integration of things.

In this way, Einstein brought back to science's domain the question about why things are the way they are rather some other. He put back on the map of the scientific enterprise the vitality of a "Cosmological Science" that would give back to our race the kind of transcendent air human personality needs to breathe besides the air about our planet. To unify in this kind of simplicity would mean much for us, and the great scientist devoted his years to pursuing a unified field that possessed an openness to these profound questions in our lives. To split apart the rational from the imaginative was impossible at the very foundations of his belief and understanding.21

In a similar way, Barth attempted to take seriously for the theology of the church the science of these foundations. His _Church Dogmatics_ sought to argue for a definition of humanity that was rooted in the actual light of the self-revelation of God with us in a world that must be understood as the Lord's creation. God's Word provided that framework of knowledge by which the race might know the saving work of God as the Creator in his creation. His effort sought to grasp, as far as we may, the possibility of human experience and the potential for human thought together in a light that God provides for us in the world.

Though unfinished, Barth's _Church Dogmatics_ represents a huge effort to confront as a science of God the theology of the church of Jesus Christ. Foundations of knowledge belong to the Word of God, who is the revealer of the Father Almighty by the Spirit as the Creator and Redeemer of the world. Although there is no evidence that Barth read Einstein or that Einstein read Barth, study indicates the parallel character of their individual accomplishments in their respective fields. Neither sought to hold off against one another the fields of theology and science. Both sought for a better understanding of how they might be found in a real relational wholeness together. They belong to the same revolution in the progress of humanity's knowledge in the world.22

We have here a call to a new way of thinking. Here we may take seriously both the freedom of God to be present with and over His world and with the meaningful freedom of humanity to develop its life within it. Objective relationships between the two freedoms obtain in the depths of the profound reality that must exist between them, the simplicity of which is to be explained from beyond the reductionisms in thought, whether from above or below, in the way we are to conceive our theories and our experience.

We must hear this call's power to transform even the beginning of our thinking about the world. Just as we have looked at the great transformations of world-views in this essay, from the Ptolemaic cosmos, through Newton's "system of the world," to the cosmological revolution brought on by the legacy of Einstein's relativity theory, we are faced today with an exciting and wonderful challenge to grasp reality in the depths of being where we are unable to cut God out of the picture. It is a challenge that will surely determine the future of the human race in the world. We are called to discover true correspondences between our will and imagination, our knowing and being in the world, and the real divine-human freedom of God with us. Though we may not confuse them, we may no longer hold over against one another our concepts of freedom and order, human will, imagination, and reason, and the light of the Word of God in the world.

For many, this is an earthshaking call, when the foundations of our thought are being tested as perhaps never before in the history of our development. For many, it is the latter days of the biblical world, the end-times of the Apocalypse, when our relationship with God is being judged in some ultimate sense. For many others, it is an end of a epoch and the beginning of a new world in which God and man and the creation shall be understood with a renewed commitment to the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, reason that cannot fail to belong to the Word and Light and Life of God Himself with us in the universe. But who can successfully deny that we are being called in this way?23

In any case, I believe our survey teaches us that we must learn from these great transformations of cosmological thought and its relational wholeness with the divine nature of God that He is One who would be known for who He truly is in the world with us. As such, he is active in history and the lessons history would teach us.

In an age when people are prone to seek in the mystical the rationale for the reality of our experience, in a time when the significance and meaning of our existence in the world has become profoundly questionable, it is vital for both scientist and theologian to provide an objective basis upon which both the freedom of our reason for being and the freedom of our human imagination are appreciated for what they actually are in the development of our thought. We need the power to move on beyond the abyss and the alienation we have experienced in our past into a new integration of our theory and our experience, where our communities will be free to overcome their deep isolation in their particular prisons from one another. We need to right our pasts and heal our wounds and self-destructive passions.

Torrance has repeatedly argued throughout his works that the science of the classical Greek fathers of Alexandria, Athanasius and Cyril for instance, are pertinent for the challenges we face today. He would show us that we need desperately to clothe ourselves in the Light for which we were meant of God, in the real Light that God is for us in the world.24

In this way, we may meet the need to overcome our tendencies to reduce either upwards or downwards the significance of our thought and experience in the world, and we may indeed learn to grasp, perhaps as never before in our history, the profound grace of this Light with us, facing our futures together with new hope and passion the new creation of God demands of us.

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## Endnotes

1 The standard text on this world is still Frankfort, H., et. al., _Before Philosophy,_ Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1949.

2 "Egyptian Myths, Tales, and Mortuary Texts," trans. J.A. Wilson, in J.B. Pritchard, ed., _Ancient Near Eastern Texts,_ Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1969, p. 5.

3 Vorderasiatische Bibliothek, Leipzig, 1907-16, IV. pp. 122-23, lines 57-72.

4 L.W. King, _The Seven Tablets of_ Creation, pls. 75-84, lines 42-50 quoted in T. Jacobsen, _The Treasures of Darkness,_ Yale University Press, New Haven, 1976, p. 149.

5 Plato and Aristotle may be dated around 300 b.c., Ptolemy of Alexandria about A.D. 140. It is remarkable to conceive that the view of the world they helped create would capture the imagination of the West through the struggles of Copernicus (A.D. 1543), Galileo (1642), and Newton (1727).

6 See T.F. Torrance, _The Hermeneutics of John Calvin,_ Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh, 1988, for an analysis of the problems of knowing and being in Calvin's humanism and knowledge of God. See page 85 for reference to the Ptolemaic world-view and the Augustinian split between the heavens and the earth rejected by Calvin.

7 S.L. Jaki, _The Road of Science and the Ways to God,_ University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978, pp. 3-33, and M. Clagett, _Greek Science in Antiquity,_ Collier Books, New York, 1955, pp. 118-125.

8 Dante Alighieri, _The Divine Comedy,_ The Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed Translation, Vintage Books, New York, 1950, Canto XXVII, p. 570, where love and light and the divine mind meet in the Paradise of the salvation of mankind.

9 For this characterization of Greek thought see T.F. Torrance, _Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge,_ Christian Journals Limited, Belfast, Dublin, Ottawa, 1984, pp. 61-106.

10 John Donne's "An Anatomie of the World" in H.J.C. Grierson, ed., _Donne's Poetical Works,_ Vol I. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1912, lines 205-217, pp. 237-8. The editor says of these lines (Vol II, p. xxviii) that the new astronomy was bewildering to the poet just as Tennyson is bothered by the new geology of the period.

11 T.F. Torrance, _Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge,_ Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1984, chapter two.

12 E.L. Mascall, _Christian Theology and Natural Science,_ Archon Books, Longman, London, 1965, pp. 27-32.

13 "We have no need then of this hypothesis." That is, the world could function without the Creator. Ibid., p. 138.

14 I see this point as the source of the deep split between art and science in the history of our culture.

15 D.V. Erdman, ed., _The Poetry and Prose of William Blake,_ Doubleday & Company, New York, 1965, p. 492.

16 I have in mind here the works of people like John Archibald Wheeler, Kip Thorne, and Stephen Hawking. The inspiration for seeking to understand "Black Hole" physics is rooted in the beauty of Einstein's General Relativity Theory (see Kip S. Thorne, "Gravitational Waves: A New Window Onto the Universe," in _Critical Problems in Physics,_ Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 199, where excitement and wonder is invoked for the drive to discover an understanding of the science that shall come from Einstein's revolution in scientific thought.)

17 These logia include such assertions as: "God does not play dice." "God does not wear his heart on his sleeve." "God is subtle, but not malicious." All these assertions belong to the belief of the great scientist's understanding of the miracle of understanding the reality of the world in all its depths.

18 See for instance his _Reality and Scientific Theology,_ Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh, 1985. The argument runs that, just as relativity theory requires the transformation of Euclidean geometry into an appropriate four-dimensional form of the real space-time invariance of the universe of light, so natural theology conceived as an antecedent conceptual system, outside of the space-time of the place of God has chosen for Himself in Christ in the world, must be brought into the heart of God's revelation and there transformed into a science appropriate for the world as God's creation. I have tried to argue for the cogency of this point in my "Natural Theology," _Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith,_ June 1997.

19 See A.N. Jeffares, _The Poems of W.B. Yeats,_ Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1984, pp. 201-5 for an analysis of this poem that appreciates the cosmos of the Irish poet's world.

20 "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." _Out of My Later Years,_ The Citadel Press, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1956, p. 26.

21 I have argued in this paragraph from quite a few sources Einstein has provided us. See his _Ideas and Opinions,_ Laurel Edition, 1981, p. 55 for the saying about religion and science. Everything for which I have argued here can be found in the various essays of this book, but for his argument with Neils Bohr, see A.P. French and P.J. Kennedy, eds., _Neils Bohr,_ Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1985.

22 In his _The Christian Doctrine of God,_ T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1996, Torrance has argued that this way of knowing is rooted in the deep secret of the holy love of the One Triune God in his relational freedom to be present with and for us in a world that is his creation, pp. 13-31.

23 For an attempt at taking seriously the challenges of the transformation inherent in this epistemological revolution, see J.E. Loder and W.J. Neidhardt, _The Knight's Move,_ Helmers & Howards, Colorado Springs, 1992.

24 T.F. Torrance, _The Ground and Grammar of Theology,_ University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1980. Here is the scope of an argument that would show us to take seriously the Incarnation of the Light of the Word as a man in the creation of God.

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## About the Author

John McKenna is an adjunct adjunct instructor at Grace Communion Seminary. He studied under Thomas F. Torrance at the University of Edinburgh and received his Ph.D. from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author of:

_The Setting in Life for_ The Arbiter _of John Philoponus, 6th Century Alexandrian Scientist_

The Great AMEN of the Great I-AM: God in Covenant With His People in His Creation.

A Gracious God, in the Old Testament and the New: Interviews With John McKenna

Hosea: The Great Reversal of the Great I-AM, and Other Essays

(The latter two are available as free e-books in the same place as you obtained this one.)

He has also published articles in _Quodlibet_ journal.

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## About the Publisher...

Grace Communion International is a Christian denomination with about 50,000 members, worshiping in about 900 congregations in almost 100 nations and territories. We began in 1934 and our main office is in North Carolina. In the United States, we are members of the National Association of Evangelicals and similar organizations in other nations. We welcome you to visit our website at www.gci.org.

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### You're Included...

We talk with leading Trinitarian theologians about the good news that God loves you, wants you, and includes you in Jesus Christ. Most programs are about 28 minutes long. Our guests have included:

Ray Anderson, Fuller Theological Seminary

Douglas A. Campbell, Duke Divinity School

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Gordon Fee, Regent College

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George Hunsinger, Princeton Theological Seminary

Jeff McSwain, Reality Ministries

Paul Louis Metzger, Multnomah University

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Cherith Fee Nordling, Antioch Leadership Network

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Programs are available free for viewing and downloading at www.youreincluded.org.

### Speaking of Life...

Dr. Joseph Tkach, president of Grace Communion International, comments each week, giving a biblical perspective on how we live in the light of God's love. Most programs are about three minutes long – available in video, audio, and text. Go to www.speakingoflife.org.

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Grace Communion Seminary

Ministry based on the life and love of the Father, Son, and Spirit.

Grace Communion Seminary serves the needs of people engaged in Christian service who want to grow deeper in relationship with our Triune God and to be able to more effectively serve in the church.

Why study at Grace Communion Seminary?

 Worship: to love God with all your mind.

 Service: to help others apply truth to life.

 Practical: a balanced range of useful topics for ministry.

 Trinitarian theology: a survey of theology with the merits of a Trinitarian perspective. We begin with the question, "Who is God?" Then, "Who are we in relationship to God?" In this context, "How then do we serve?"

 Part-time study: designed to help people who are already serving in local congregations. There is no need to leave your current ministry. Full-time students are also welcome.

 Flexibility: your choice of master's level continuing education courses or pursuit of a degree: Master of Pastoral Studies or Master of Theological Studies.

 Affordable, accredited study: Everything can be done online.

For more information, go to www.gcs.edu. Grace Communion Seminary is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission, www.deac.org. The Accrediting Commission is listed by the U.S. Department of Education as a nationally recognized accrediting agency.

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## Ambassador College of Christian Ministry

Want to better understand God's Word? Want to know the Triune God more deeply? Want to share more joyously in the life of the Father, Son and Spirit? Want to be better equipped to serve others?

Among the many resources that Grace Communion International offers are the training and learning opportunities provided by ACCM. This quality, well-structured Christian Ministry curriculum has the advantage of being very practical and flexible. Students may study at their own pace, without having to leave home to undertake full-time study.

This denominationally recognized program is available for both credit and audit study. At minimum cost, this online Diploma program will help students gain important insights and training in effective ministry service. Students will also enjoy a rich resource for personal study that will enhance their understanding and relationship with the Triune God.

Diploma of Christian Ministry classes provide an excellent introductory course for new and lay pastors. Pastor General Dr. Joseph Tkach said, "We believe we have achieved the goal of designing Christian ministry training that is practical, accessible, interesting, and doctrinally and theologically mature and sound. This program provides an ideal foundation for effective Christian ministry."

For more information, go to www.ambascol.org

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