Creation | Adrienne von Speyr | From "The Boundless God" | IgnatiusInsight.com
Creation | Adrienne von Speyr | From The
Boundless God
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2007/avs_creationtbg_apr07.asp
From all eternity, the Father is together with the Son and with the Holy
Spirit. He reveals himself to them in a way that is completely divine and
receives from them a divine answer. Nonetheless, when the Father created the
world, he opened wide the sphere of the eternal in order to include within
existence the sphere of the transient as well. He set forth something from his
eternity, though not in order to leave what he had created without a connection
to eternity, as a unity left to its own devices. God also received what he had
created and, therefore, preserved a permanent relationship with his work. His
will as Creator remained unchanged with respect to the world, and, in the act
of creation, the Creator's being was disclosed to the world. He neither
withdrew nor became indifferent, but rather he waited for an answer from the
created.
His creation's first answer was to let itself be created, to let itself become
a reality, one whose ultimate meaning was meant to rest in God but that also
possessed meaning in its creaturely essence. God separated the water from the
dry land, and, in this separation, the earth became an important symbol. The
earth is the sure ground on which men can stand. For everything was planned for
man, whom God created last of all. He handed over everything to him so that it
would belong to him. This handing over was meant with the utmost sincerity and
was never revoked. It placed man in a permanent relationship with the surrounding
world, which was God's gift to him. In God's eyes, occupying man in this way
was meant already to be like a prayer, for man was meant to see in created
things what God had given him. He was to be able to do this by virtue of his
senses and reason, in what he saw, heard, felt, and experienced. He was
furnished with a sensory nature and with knowledge, and, through these, he can
echo and adjust to the things over which he has dominion. However, God stands
behind each and every perception and adjustment. This means, not that God
allows himself to be restricted or tied down to the measure of things and
experiences, but rather that his voice remains always audible. The more simple
things are, the more conceivable God appears. It is not that he allows things to
contain him; rather, they are signs of his presence, which can be neither
diminished by the finitude of the world nor consigned to a particular space; it
nonetheless remains true presence. This presence is something neither vague nor
questionable: it is the presence of the Creator toward whom points the meaning
that resides in created things. It is not that God's meaning is made finite in
elements, in plants, and in animals, like something exhaustible; but things can
be either quiet or loud reminders that the invisible Creator lives, has created
them, and, far from abandoning them, has them permanently in his care. The
human spirit, which experiences and contemplates these things, is reminded by
their presence of God's existence.
The first beginnings of man's relationship with God lie in his relationship to
things and to the hidden powers and secrets with which God has invested them
for man's sake. Man is appointed as the lord of creation. He is to be
permanently concerned with the things of this world in order to make them bend
to his will and so to remain faithful to God's command and adjust to what God
expects of him. But, through his growing knowledge of, and dominion over,
things, he experiences that an infinite divine knowledge must stand hidden behind
them; for the things themselves neither contain God nor betray his ultimate
mysteries. They are scattered testimonies and hints that function as such
because they are ordered to the searching and questioning of the human spirit.
They are created for man to such an extent that they need him in order for
their meaning to be revealed. It is therefore understandable that, throughout
the millennia, man has never reached the point of being done with the earth and
is shown, in ever new forms of work, things and laws that were always in
existence in the world but that, having been revealed, lent a related
historical meaning to subsequent generations of men. Man, who is created for
the honor of God, also honors the Creator through his growing insight into the
meaning that God has placed in things, a meaning that is unveiled slowly
through the ages. This is the process that one tends to call progress,
providing it is not divorced from the intentions of the Creator. Man should
work and explore, not for the sake of mere domination and the power that comes
with it, but rather in order to remain within the sphere of tasks assigned to
him by God.
In addition to creating the earth, God created the sea, which he separated from
the dry land and which remains a particularly eloquent symbol for the strength,
mystery, and perpetual unfathomableness of God. Man will want to understand
more and more about the sea as well and will probably be able to do so. And
yet, the sea remains a special object of contemplation: its relative boundlessness
and sameness in all its waves and change provides an allegory for God. When a
human being surveys the sea, he looks into something unpredictable, something
no longer finite; he experiences that behind everything he sees and intuits
there is something "ever farther"; and when he alters his vantage
point, this "farther" proves to be essentially the "same"
as what he already knows. Whereas God created the earth to be hard and sandy,
rocky and lush, fertile and covered in age-old ice, he gave to the sea, in all
its raging depths, a quality of uniformity: sea water is the same everywhere,
arid though no wave is ever identical to another, all waves are nonetheless
similar and emerge from and into one another. But it is not just in
contemplation of, but also in the struggle against, the sea that human beings
are reminded urgently of God. Even if man manages to overcome the sea, he never
feels he has mastered the element. Man is conscious of his mastery of
terrestrial things: he can plough his fields as he sees best, just as his
predecessors did; he can increase or impede the fertility of the land. Of
course, man remains a mere servant of God even in this, since God either sends
or denies the harvest. But God's predominance emerges more clearly in the image
of the sea. Man can navigate it and catch its fish but cannot direct or
cultivate it. Each wave tells him this; storm and stillness proclaim it to him,
and both are allegories and reminders that provoke more profound reflection and
enable him to be detached from himself, his own might, and his boundaries. In
surveying the sea, a person who is accustomed to praying can recognize how much
of himself God betrays through the sensory world, how loudly he calls and
exhorts men, and how clearly he reveals his love of creation, which is as alive
today as it was on the first day.
All that has been created should be experienced as a communication from God,
above all of his greatness and his infinity. The one who creates is greater
than his work. Should we try, in faith, to consider this work as the Father
does but not get very far with the help of reason, we can try to do so with the
help of love. Our own love, however, is not sufficient: what we, as believers,
call love is at the most a poor likeness of that which God calls love. For this
reason, God has disclosed to us his own love, and faith teaches us, not just to
see this love, but to live in it. The more firmly we believe, the more
profoundly we learn how to live out of love, not out of our love, but out of God's
love, which can overwhelm us again and again because it is his. Even faith
itself, through which we gain access to this love, is a gift of the triune God
for us; and through faith we acquire a meaning for the Father's love hidden in
things. In order to encounter this love, we must not limit our reflections to
the divine proofs of love that we find in the Old and New Testaments; rather,
we may dare to wonder at God's love in the creation that lies spread out before
us.
The Father's action--which creation obviously seems to be--can be understood as
the fruit of his eternal contemplation. He has divided his work into
"days", thereby conforming himself to transient time, which he will
give to us as our habitat, in order therein to separate and bring forth. This
is already a sign of his love. He takes what be creates as his very own and
fills it with what is his; his love moved him to make days that could be
counted, and he places an infinite hope in them, for he does not find them good
in some remote way; rather, he fills them with his own goods. If today we have
doubts about the worth of our temporal, fleeting lives, we should look back to
the magnificence of the first days, to each of which God gave its own mark, a
unique content, up to and including the Sabbath, the day of the great
contemplation of everything that had been done, a contemplation that God wanted
to give to us as well. When Christ says, "You, therefore, must be perfect,
as your heavenly Father is perfect", the possibility of this imitation rests
on the perfection of the days of the world that God has created, days so good
that they can become days divinely fulfilled through his love.
Not only the perfection of the created days but also the readiness of eternal
life to support creaturely life in love are shown in the fact that God can make
immediate use of those days. There is already a prelude in the first phase of
the plan to what the Son of God will do for men when he, having become man,
makes our days his own. The outline is already visible of the bridge that the
Son will build from eternal life into transient time.
God uses the "days" in order further to create: he brings forth
plants, animals, and, finally, man. These all proceed from his creating hand in
a completeness that he himself begets by acknowledging everything to be very
good. His contemplation now appears twofold: it is a reflection and judgment of
creation; and he gives both forms of contemplation to us because they both
convey something of God's essence. As Creator, he can only create good and does
not let it run away from him; rather, he keeps it within his sight and
judgment--that is, in a loving relationship to him.
Although these things are so very good, God gives them to man. He does not,
however, talk to things: his first word is intended for man. Since we know that
the Son is the Word who dwells with the Father, we also understand that, in
addressing man, the Father establishes an initial relationship between the Son
and man. Christians will experience through John that the word in Genesis was
already a gift to them from the Father: a promise of the Son, who will some day
become one among us, to the world. We can therefore understand ourselves as
having come into being from the hand of the Father and into the Son's Spirit.
Our sinful life, however, seems like a sad interlude belonging to us alone, an
interlude the Father did not want and for which the Son makes amends. Anything
that we do not live in faith and obedience to the Father, Son, and Spirit
shrivels into an episode that is bracketed between the love of the Creator and
that of the Redeemer. From the outset, therefore, we can say that God's mercy
towers above our existence--above everything to which we can imagine this
existence amounts--and that this mercy is given to the created world as its
own.
The rest for contemplation on the seventh day is the Father's rest in the Son
and in the Holy Spirit. Just as the Son possesses the vision of the Father
during his life on earth, so too does the Father possess the presence of the
Son and Spirit during his creation and his rest. His triune life is neither
altered nor interrupted by the creation. The Father shows, through the words he
directs at men and through his confirmatory judgment, just how close the Son
and Spirit already are to man and how greatly they share in the Father's work;
so much so that the Incarnation of the Son and the sending forth of the Spirit
are already contained and decreed invisibly in the visible work of creation.
This is, therefore, the work of the one triune God, begun by the Father, who
marks out, so to speak, the tasks whose execution will meantime not be fully
transparent to us. The Son will use this divine communion as a model when he
establishes the communion of saints. He will make of the Church a house into
which he will invite the Father and the Spirit and into which he will send the
Spirit, who lives in eternity with him and with the Father.
God stands in a threefold relationship with the first man: he is his Creator;
he is his Father; he has made him into his image and likeness. As Creator, he
has erected a great work, which in no way exhausts his power but rather leaves
him free to take further measures as he sees best. But even his first work of
creation imparts some idea of his superior grandeur, and thus the first time
that man has someone whom he can address as "you", it is the Creator,
a God who cares for him and who emerges as his Father by establishing this
first primordial relationship. This is a relationship between the sublime and
the negligible, between the mighty and the lowly. The relationship contains
man's likeness to God, and man knows this. He is aware of embodying things that
are the Creator's and the Father's. Man embodies an idea of the Father, and,
when God appoints him to be lord over all created things, he initiates man into
the mysteries of his fatherhood, sharing a power with him that originates from
his own and furnishing him with these created things just as the Father has
furnished himself with man. He has created things for men just as he created
man for himself.
But it is not as something hopelessly finite that man, the image and likeness
of God, confronts the infinite archetype, almost as if he were the last finite
being at the end of a chain of finite beings. And even though man renounces the
heavenly archetype when he sins, the Son of God will raise the end of the chain
to heaven, for he will be both God and man on earth, will show to us a no less
perfect image and likeness of the Father than he was in heaven from eternity.
Though man will cloud his own image and likeness through sin and will distance
himself increasingly from God, the Son will restore the image to its proper
place--the place originally indicated to him by the Father--through his perfect
accord and consubstantiality with the Father. Through his Incarnation, he will
point to the Father and to his own divine being, not from a sublime height far
above us, but in his life among us and in his staying with us permanently in
the Eucharist, just as he stays and abides with the Father in heaven. He does
not merely once and for all put the image back into its correct place in
relation to its archetype, the Father; rather, he remains permanently
efficacious among us even after his return to the Father: he is the living
leaven who makes us rise up to the archetype. He may well bring creation more
or less to a close upon his return to heaven, for on earth he has shown the
Father the perfect human being. But, at the same time, he remains in his
brothers, the children of the Father, in order to care for them and, in them,
to show to the Father what he himself is. Though man may still feel greatly
overwhelmed by the distance of guilt separating him from God, he now
knows--almost against his will and ability--that he has to be the image of God,
at least in his gift of self to the Son and lack of resistance to him who can
recreate the image within him. However, when the Son proves himself capable of
this, he makes it clear that he has also created together with the Father, that
the character of creation is equally and originally his, and that, in assuming
fallen man unto himself, he enters into a territory he has forever known and
ruled. For the first Adam, the Son remained hidden in the Father, yet the Son
knew that he was meant to become the second Adam. Therefore, the fact that he
hid himself in the Father was already proper to the mystery of his Incarnation.
Since the Father can only be seen in heaven, and no one has seen the Father
except the Son, the Son revealed and showed himself so that man might become
newly attentive to the Father's divinity through what was divine in him--though
without attempting to separate Father and Son along this path of mediation: the
Son wants to be the door and the entrance through whom the open vision of the
Father is unveiled.
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Related IgnatiusInsight.com Links/Articles:
• Doctor, Convert, and Mystic: The Life
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• Creation, Salvation, and the Mass | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Father, Son, and Spirit | Deborah Belonick
• The Point of It All | Peter Kreeft
Adrienne von Speyr was a 20th century Swiss convert, mystic, wife, doctor
and author of numerous books on spirituality. She entered the Church under
the direction of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Her writings, recognized as a major
contribution to the great mystical writings of the Church, are being translated
by Ignatius Press. Read about her life and work on her IgnatiusInsight.com author page.
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