God's Providence as Playfulness in the Church Fathers and Karl Barth
Once upon a time, the world seemed like a
mirror reflecting God. St. Bonaventure,
to take an example more or less at random, could write that “the whole world is
a shadow, a way, the trace of a footprint, and is a book that is written from
the outside” (In Hexameron, collatio
13, n.14). God was not just believed in,
but appeared everywhere. To put it
anachronistically (and much less poetically), God is condition of the possibility
of anything whatsoever. As such, “All
knowers know God implicitly in all they know,” said Thomas Aquinas [Omnia cognoscentia cognoscunt implicite Deum
in quodlibet cognito. De Veritate q.22a.2.ad.1]. All truth, all beauty, all goodness, all
unity, in what philosophers and theologians have called “the transcendentals”
find their source in God—who, in His Trinitarian life as Father, Son, and
Spirit, is truth, goodness, beauty,
and unity.[1]
God is reflected in the sweetness of bread, the beautiful smile of a woman, the laughter of friends, the rhapsody of birds in flight; God flickers in the free-play of joyous faces, in the breeze of the world that walks between them. “Every human act, whether it is an act of knowledge or an act of the will,” writes the French Jesuit, Henri de Lubac, “rests secretly upon God [who] attributes meaning and solidity to the real.”[2] Or as Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart puts it, “God gives particularity to difference, gives form, radiance, and gravity; all things that differ are the weight of glory … Creation is only a splendor that hangs on [God’s Trinitarian] life of love … [creation is] a shining fabric of glory, whose inmost truth is its aesthetic correspondence to the beauty of divine love.”[3] As such, “if a person is full of love,” asks Augustine rhetorically, “what are they full of, but God?” (De Trinitate, VIII.5.12). Even in sinful moments, we are in a sense looking for God. As a famous example goes (often misattributed to G.K. Chesterton) “the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God.”[4] For what else is sin but “disordered love”?
God is reflected in the sweetness of bread, the beautiful smile of a woman, the laughter of friends, the rhapsody of birds in flight; God flickers in the free-play of joyous faces, in the breeze of the world that walks between them. “Every human act, whether it is an act of knowledge or an act of the will,” writes the French Jesuit, Henri de Lubac, “rests secretly upon God [who] attributes meaning and solidity to the real.”[2] Or as Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart puts it, “God gives particularity to difference, gives form, radiance, and gravity; all things that differ are the weight of glory … Creation is only a splendor that hangs on [God’s Trinitarian] life of love … [creation is] a shining fabric of glory, whose inmost truth is its aesthetic correspondence to the beauty of divine love.”[3] As such, “if a person is full of love,” asks Augustine rhetorically, “what are they full of, but God?” (De Trinitate, VIII.5.12). Even in sinful moments, we are in a sense looking for God. As a famous example goes (often misattributed to G.K. Chesterton) “the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God.”[4] For what else is sin but “disordered love”?
Though this view of things stemmed
from many sources—the incarnation, for example (as Hans Urs Von Balthasar put
it, the whole mystery of the relation of God and world “appears concentrated,”
and tantalizingly “flickers through the relationship of Christ’s two natures”)[5]—for
our purposes at the moment, first and foremost this view of God and the world
sallied forth from the idea of God as creator.
For, when God has declared the world “good,” in the book of Genesis,
what standard was there other than God’s own life? Creation as such reflected God precisely as it
participated in His existence, “what we would term ‘religious experience’ was
understood in the pre-modern cosmos to be already implied in and intrinsic to
ordinary cognition,”[6]
because creation was, in a sense, God’s self-expression. With one joyful sigh of spirit, God spoke;
and his words lanced over the chaos waters, to latch themselves in the nothing,
and spark.
To switch metaphors, like a good Cook
mixing his broth the Spirit of God hung over the waves (try, if you can, to
feel the visceral nature of this act, for “spirit” in Hebrew can plausibly be
translated here “storm” or “breath”); He roiled the ageless ocean, casting it
to and fro like a saucepan—though this God, unlike others in the pantheons of
old, is not out to eat us or our offerings. And unlike many ancient cosmogonies
(that is, stories of the birth of the world),[7]
there is no battle here to overcome a malevolent opposing force, like Marduk
slaying the dragon Tiamat in the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish (though there are images of this here and there in the
Old Testament); no struggle for a craftsman-god (demiurgos) to mold stubborn and recalcitrant material as in Plato’s
Timaeus; better still—there is no
rape to produce the world as a bastard child; nor is the world like a mother’s
miscarriage, born from Sophia or Achamoth, themselves already the lowest and
most distant emanation from the unknowable High-God Bythos (Profundity).[8]
No.
In an act with virtually no precedent in the texts of the ancient world
(with the possible exception of Egyptian Memphite theology, but that need not
concern us here), God’s act is met with neither friction, nor resistance. God
simply speaks. It is this immediacy that
also grounds the way creation echoes its creator. In the same act, the God of the Bible divides
heavens from the earth, planting his garden, forming fish, and birds, and
everything else. And what of His
voice? One imagines it to be deep, like
many waters roaring (Rev. 14:2), or thunder rolling (John 12:29), or to pull an
analogy from contemporary science, a Big-bang booming.
But in this song-speech, The Ancient of
Days sings to be sung to, and as the heavens opened their fire-filled eyes for
the first time, they began themselves to sing, to pour forth speech day after
day (Ps. 19:2). Overjoyed at this, the angels—already they mysteriously exist,
and of whom no creation account is given—in turn surrender up loud voices of
praise (Job 38:7). Creation is a hymnal erupting. Many will no doubt recognize J.R.R. Tolkien’s
elaboration on this motif in his own wonderful creation myth, the Silmarillion, which he entitles Ainulindalê or the music of the Ainur, sung by the high God Eru (“the One”). However, the scriptural account of creation
(or, we should more properly say, accounts, plural)[9]
also makes creation out to be a playground.
Through Christ, God’s Wisdom, God’s Word (1 Cor. 1:24; John 1:1) the
world was created (Col. 1:16-17): “YHWH founded the earth by wisdom, by
understanding he established the heavens.
By his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down dew”
(Prov. 3:19-20). But Wisdom is no mere
instrument; she “plays before the LORD” in this act (Prov. 8:22-31), “playing with Him every
moment, playing with His inhabited world, delighting in the offspring of Adam.”
Nazianzus, perhaps himself playing with this reference, calls the transitory things of this world “like toy pebbles in child’s play,” [w¡sper e˙n paidi÷a yh÷fwn][12] not in the sense that he wants to denigrate the created order, but to say that the things of this life are “short lived” and “cannot be relied on.” That is why “it seems we are being played with [pai÷zesqai].” The point of utilizing this idea, says Blowers, is to emphasize “that for all its finitude and vulnerability, the sensible creation—the realm of embodiment and physical flux—is dignified as God’s medium to intervene and resourcefully interact with his creatures.”[13] Far from the changeable world being distant from the eternal God—as is caricatured on occasion—the mutability of the world is precisely the grounds and condition for the Logos to “play” with it.
While this can be seen as a statement of
the general nature of God’s providence, its force is meant to direct our
attention to God’s incarnation in Christ; as God creatively repeats not just
the life of humanity, but also more specifically Israel, salvation is seen as a
poetic or artistic “play,” recuperating humanity by initiating a new,
historically contingent mode of existence in relation to God’s providence. This is certain how Maximus the Confessor
understood Gregory. In Ambiguum 10, Maximus describes how the
Logos moved across the gulf separating God and man, taking flesh as “the seed
of Abraham,” diversifying His presence, yet maintaining his perfect unity
“scattering himself indivisibly” [a˙merw¨ß
e˙auto«n e˙pimeri÷zonta]. Play
in this sense, says Blowers, “becomes a metaphor for the spiritual pedagogy of
the Logos.”[14]
In other words, God has renewed our relationship to Himself, not by imparting timeless truths, but precisely by taking up the flux of material existence into Himself in the person of Christ, allowing for discipleship to be a sort of extemporaneous gathering of historical chaos into a Christ-like pattern that is associated with an extensive vocabulary in Greek Patristic thought, but is often summarized as theosis (deification) or Athanasius’ preferred term, theopoeisis (making God-like).[15] In other words “play” is a commentary on what has traditionally been called “recapitulation,” (typically associated with, though obviously not limited to, the second-century theologian, Irenaeus).[16]
In other words, God has renewed our relationship to Himself, not by imparting timeless truths, but precisely by taking up the flux of material existence into Himself in the person of Christ, allowing for discipleship to be a sort of extemporaneous gathering of historical chaos into a Christ-like pattern that is associated with an extensive vocabulary in Greek Patristic thought, but is often summarized as theosis (deification) or Athanasius’ preferred term, theopoeisis (making God-like).[15] In other words “play” is a commentary on what has traditionally been called “recapitulation,” (typically associated with, though obviously not limited to, the second-century theologian, Irenaeus).[16]
As Gregory of Nyssa—Nazianzus’ friend and
fellow Cappadocian—writes, when our life is shaped in a movement of conformity
with the mind of Christ, “there is a harmony of the hidden man with the manifest”
[sumfwni÷an e•inai tou¨ kruptou¨
a˙nqrw÷pou pro«ß to«n faino÷menon]. This is no mere static “mirroring,”[17]
but repairing the image of God means we are being polished into a truly
“God-like thing” [to« qeoei÷kelon
crhma],
meaning the “play” of the
Logos repairing our existence produces a dynamic historical movement with a
two-fold precedent.
Not only is the world, as finite, continually “stretching-out” toward the infinite God [e˙pekta÷siß] so the world in its very dynamism can be seen as a theater not just expressing God, but a vital panoply of movements striving after God. On the other hand, the movement of the world (which for Gregory, is already nothing else but the direct expression of the will of God—“the divine will is the matter and substance of created things,” [u¢lh kai« ou˙si÷a tw†n demiourghma÷twn]) is now a reflection of the very dynamism of God’s own inner life, which recognizes itself as beautiful and as such strives to possess itself (though, as infinite, this striving is identical to the act of possessing):
Not only is the world, as finite, continually “stretching-out” toward the infinite God [e˙pekta÷siß] so the world in its very dynamism can be seen as a theater not just expressing God, but a vital panoply of movements striving after God. On the other hand, the movement of the world (which for Gregory, is already nothing else but the direct expression of the will of God—“the divine will is the matter and substance of created things,” [u¢lh kai« ou˙si÷a tw†n demiourghma÷twn]) is now a reflection of the very dynamism of God’s own inner life, which recognizes itself as beautiful and as such strives to possess itself (though, as infinite, this striving is identical to the act of possessing):
The divine nature exceeds each [finite] good, and the good is wholly beloved by the good, and thus it follows that when it looks upon itself, desiring what it possesses, and possessing what it desires, and receives nothing outside of itself … the life of that transcendent nature [is therefore] love in that the beautiful is entirely loveable to those who recognize it (and God does recognize it), and so this recognition becomes love, because the object of his recognition is in its nature beautiful.
[Έπεί δε οΰν παντός αγαθού έπέκεινα ή θεία φύσις, το δε αγαθόν άγαθω φίλον πάντως, δια τούτο έαυτήν βλέπουσα κάί ο έχει, θέλει, καΐ ο θέλει, έχει, ουδέν των έξωθεν εις έαυτήν δεχόμενη. ή τε γαρ ζωή της άνω φύσεως αγάπη εστίν, επειδή το καλόν άγαπητον πάντως εστί τοις γινώσκουσι (γινώσκει δε εαυτό το θείον), ή δέ γνωσις αγάπη γίνεται, διότι καλόν έστι φύσει το γινωσκόμενοn].[18]
Augustine expresses a very similar idea to Gregory in his de Trinitate, extolling the inner life of the trinity as the perfection of the eternal drama of love:
… The Son is from the Father, so as both to be and to be coeternal with the Father. For if the image perfectly fills the measure of him whose image it is, then it is coequal to its source. As regards the image, I suppose he [Hilary of Poitiers] mentioned form on account of the beauty involved in such harmony, in that primordial equality and primordial likeness, where there is no discord and no inequality and no kind of unlikeness, but identical correspondence with that of which it is the image where there is supreme and primordial life, such that it is not one thing to live and another to be, but being and living are the same … being as it were one perfect Word to which nothing is lacking, which is like the art of the almighty and wise God, full of all the living and unchanging ideas, which are all one in it, as it is one from the one with whom it is one. In this art God knows all things that he has made through it, and so when times come and go, nothing comes and goes for God’s knowledge.
[Imago enirn si perfecte implet ülud cuius imago est, ipsa coaequatur ei, non illud imagini suae. In qua imagine speciem nominavit, credo, propter pulchritudinem, ubi iam est tanta congruentia, et prima aequalitas, et prima similitudo, nulla in re dissidens, et nullo modo inaequalis, et nulla ex parte dissimilis, sed ad identidem respondens ei cuius imago est. ...Ule igitur ineffabilis quidam complexus patris et imaginis non est sine perfruitione, sine charitate, sine gaudio. Illa ergo dilectio, delectatio felicitas vel beatitudo, si tarnen aliqua humana voce digne dicitur, usus ab ilio appellatus est breviter, et est in trinitate spiritus sanctus, non genitus, sedgenitor is genitique suavitas, ingenti largitale atque ubertateperfundens omnes creaturas pro captu earum].[19]
In
other words, God’s incarnation and non-identical repetition of human life to
“bring it up into himself” (Eph. 1:10), the “play” of wisdom through Her
creation, is also the act reweaving all divergent and sinful historical lines
of existence back into God’s own intra-Trinitarian life. As Maximus writes:
Perhaps ‘play’ is also the liability to change the material things in which we put our trust, things that fluctuate and mutate, and that have no secure foundation except for the primary principles [lo÷goß] according to which they bear up [fe÷rousi] and are born along [fe÷rontai] wisely and providentially. We think we have control of them, but rather than being ruled us, they elude us, and put up with being seized by our desire for them; or rather, they shake us off, as it were, completely incapable of controlling or being controlled, since the only sure definition of their own nature is flux and instability [to« aporrei®n kai« mh« i¢stasqai]. Most likely our teacher [Gregory] has termed God’s ‘play’ as if to suggest that God conducts us through these very things to that which truly is, and that endures ever unshakeable.[20]
Toward the end his Ethics, Karl Barth takes up a discussion very similar to this one, only he turns the discussion toward regarding the Christian ethos of living in this world in light of Providence as “play.” In doing so he adds an eschatological element to this “playful” view of God’s relation to creation. “Art must be considered in an eschatological context,” he says, “because it is the specific external form of human action in which this cannot be made intelligible to us except as play [emphasis added].” He makes the startling claim that with humor, art “is an activity which only the children of God are capable,” as both are “sustained by an ultimate and very profound pain … born of sorrow.”[21]
Art and humor are the creation of
children who play away in a world “whose corruptibility they cannot overlook or
ignore,” but who yet see behind this far line, and “have knowledge of the
future resurrection.” It is only those
who have this knowledge who “know what it means that we have to die” because
here death is robbed of any “naturalness.”
Death is simultaneously made horrific, and yet overcome by the
serendipity of God. As such, the artists
work “is homeless in the deepest sense,” he says, “it is precisely their
strange and rootless isolation from all the works of present reality [that works
of art] live so totally only by the
truth of the promise” of God. It is by
the means of art that we learn “not to take present reality with final
seriousness in its created being or in its nature as the world of the fall and
reconciliation.” As Barth puts it, “true
aesthetics is the experience of real and future reality,” and in this way much
like Nazianzus described the providence of God as play, “art plays with reality,” by refusing to let
the present be the last word:
[Art] transcends human words with the eschatological possibility of poetry, in which speech becomes, in unheard-of fashion, an end in itself, then to a higher degree—although we are still dealing only with the sound and tone of the human voice—with the eschatological possibility of song, and then—still with the intention of penetrating to what is true and ultimate, of proclaiming the new heaven and new earth, but now using the voices of the rest of creation—with the eschatological possibility of instrumental music.[22]
He beings to wrap up his point by noting
that in Christian action, “we must not try to view our work as a solemnly
serious cooperation with God … [instead] we forever play in the peace of the
father’s house that is waiting for us.”
In fact, in his characteristically dialectical manner, as he puts it:
“we cannot be more grimly in earnest about life than when we resign ourselves
to the fact that we can only play.”[23]
[1] Cf. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetic of Christian Truth (Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2003), 249-395.
[2] Henri De Lubac, The
Discovery of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1996), 36.
[3] Hart, Beauty of
the Infinite, 252.
[4] A little digging seems to indicate that this quote
actually originates in Bruce Marshall, The
World, The Flesh, and Father Smith (New York: Houghton Miffton Company,
1945), 108.
[5] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor
trans. by Brian Daley (New York:
Valdimir Seminary Press, 2003), 209.
[6] Oliver Davies, The
Creativity of God: World, Eucharist, Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 5.
[7] John Walton, Ancient
Near-Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of
the Hebrew Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), esp. 179-203.
[8] For the doctrine of creation in Basilidean and
Valentinian Gnosticism, cf. Gerhard May, Creation
Ex Nihilo (New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 62-118.
[9] No work of late has done more to point how we must
take seriously the multiple images of creation contained in scripture than the
beautiful monograph by William P. Brown, The
Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
[10] Gregory Nazianzus, Poemata
Theologica (Moralia) (PG 37:624A-625A).
[11] Plotinus, Enneads,
III.6.7. Cf. Paul Blowers, “On the
‘Play’ of Divine Providence in Gregory of Nazianzus and Maximus the Confessor,”
in Christopher Beeley, ed., Re-Thinking
Gregory of Nazianzus (New York: Catholic University of America, 2012),
199-218.
[12] Gregory Nazianzus, Or.
14.20 (PG 35:884A-B).
[13] Blowers, “The Play of Providence,” 207.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Norman Russell, The
Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004); For a contemporary look at this theme, cf. Myk Habets,
Theosis in the Theology of T.F. Torrance (Vermont:
Ashgate, 2009).
[16] The best introduction to Irenaeus currently available
is probably John Behr, Irenaeus of Lyon:
Identifying Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
[17] For the concept of “mirroring” in Nyssa, cf. David
Bentley Hart, “The Mirror of the Infinite: Gregory of Nyssa and the Vestigia Trinitatis,” in Modern Theology 18:4 (2002): 541-561.
[18] Gregory of Nyssa, De
Anima et Resurrectione (PG 46:93-96).
[19] Augustine, De
Trinitate VI.10.11.
[20] Maximus, Ambiguum
71 (PG 91:1416A-B).
[21] Karl Barth, Ethics
trans. Geoffery W. Bromiley (New York: Seabury, 1981), 506-507.
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