As an introduction to today's column, Univ.-Prof.-em. Dr. Dr. C.-J. Athanasios N. Bailey of the Technische Universitaet Berlin asks the following questions:

"In all of the ins and outs of this "creationist" controversy, does anyone ever realize:

"1. Built into the Greek language is an energetic ontology; words for energy, energize, and energetic appear in the Epistles of the NT at least 27 times. (Greeks thought in paris: a dynamis or capacity/potential and the energy that actualizes i tor makes it real. This is the Orthodox view.) They are mistranslated in Western languages, as are many other key words. (The Western translations often fail to understand Greek formational principles and have "new creature" for "new creating" and "likeness of God" for "Assimilating to God.")

"2. The Greek Fathers, exp. SS. Vasil and Gregory of Nyssa had an energetic-developmental view of creation (an "OT" day could be an aeon) as well as of Salvation.

"3. Do other believe that if the Creator-LOGOS ("Reason of God" or "God the Son"; John 1:1,3) were not re-creating the creation (ever slightly different) at every moment, it would fall into the abyss of nothingness?

"4. Do they believe that the Incarnation of the LOGOS renewed time and matter to serve religious purposes? I believe that some of them (Calvin's view of the body as the soul's prison, the NIV Bible's translation of sarx "flesh" as "our sinful nature" in some places) thing the creation is evil--an ancient Gnostic view."

Thus, according to Bailey, it "will be obvious that those who have been Orthodox for two millenniums have no trouble with an energetic cosmos." For more information on this subject, please go to <
http://orlapubs.org/mainR.html>.

Enjoy!

-- Stacey E. Ake

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Subject: Energy and Emptiness from an Orthodox Perspective From: C.-J. N. Athanasios Bailey Email: <orlapubs@orlapubs.org>

Energy

The reason I say this [the above statements] is that few non-Orthodox get it right (and even many Orthodox don't). A signal (though ultimately superficial) reason for this has been the use by English-speaking Orthodox leaders (who in the past were not native-speakers of English) of Latin and Protestant terminology--even though the baggage entailed by such terminology is quite at odds with Orthodoxy. But this merely gives life to or masks the real, deeper bases for Christian differences.

The differences of the three established forms of Christianity in the middle of the last millennium lie in their different paradigms--the different axioms and definitions concerned with reality and the Christian religion that mould what they can and cannot say/believe/do. You will see that Orthodox Christianity has an energy ontology--something spoken of, if I remember correctly, in other Eastern religions.

Many apologetics against Orthodoxy--and many apologetic writings by Orthodox addressed to Western Christians--end up being wholly ineffective because they fail to address that coherent but different set of axioms that each side sets out from. One cannot effectively address or "attack"--or even properly describe--a teaching in another paradigm than one's own unless one addresses the axioms that those teachings flow from. When Western Christians attempt to describe or confute Orthodox teachings that they do not accept, it all falls on Orthodox deaf ears because they are arguing from their own axioms--not ours. If one sets out from Orthodox ideas, one cannot be convincing to one who embraces Latin or Protestant axioms and definitions (invented in the later Middle Ages and derived from thinkers in Islamic Cordova and their Islamic predecessors--translated into Latin in the 12th and 13th centuries).

I have recently received an Orthodox apologetic that tries to argue against Western teachings without really showing that and how they flow from Western axioms; it could never (at least in my imagination) succeed in its aim with that or with any other approach than by dealing with the axioms themselves. The rest stands or falls on the basic axioms and definitions, which are often unconscious.

I should point out that I first became aware of paradigms (in Christianity) when I had extensive and friendly exchanges with one who is perhaps the chief Latin apologist in North American--certainly among those on the internet. At some point, it became clear that we were, despite friendly intent, speaking at cross-purposes. I realized that our worldviews are too different to speak across, at least unless each side is willing to provisionally (for the sake of the argument) consider the axiomatic basis and context of the other side's teachings. This is why the Orthodox never get their ideas across at ecumenical meetings--they are always framed in a Western framework.

Of course one cannot converse with those Christians that are non-credal but simply state slogans and mantras in place of reasoned discourse. Since we believe that Christ is the Reason (LOGOS) and Wisdom (SOPHIA) of God, as the New Testament says and the Fathers have taught, we cannot deal with non-reasoning. For all of that, we greatly restrict reason--much more than the Latins--for we believe that uncreated Being-beyond-being is unknowable except in such glimmerings as His Energizations afford to reason and reason's ability to see which ideas are inconsistent with those already established (the apophatic approach--saying what uncreated Being is not).

I should add that the going Bible translations fail to reflect the Greek of the New Testament as native speakers of Greek understood it (e.g. dynamis :
energeia). This is because of their paradigms. They call the creator a "Word," Assimilation to God a "likeness" (which is the result of assimilating--not what the Greek says), new creatings in Christ "new creatures," and one (the popular NIV) renders sarx "flesh" in many places as "our sinful nature"--an idea silly in itself and rejected in the early centuries as Gnostic or Manichaean. Some would-be literalists will read the verse in the Bible that says that no Scripture is of private interpretation in such a way that it means the very opposite; their axioms force them to that contradictory position.

Emptiness

The opening verses of Genesis in Hebrew say that the newly created cosmos was to`hu` and vo`hu`, both of which are nouns meaning "emptiness"; the translation would be "void and empty" or "utterly and completely empty." The canonical Greek LXX says "invisible and unformed, unfurnished." Verse 2 goes on to say that darkness (lack of light-or energy) was on the face of the empty deep (teho`m) or abyss. Then it says that God's Spirit was moving gently on the face of hamma`yi`m "the waters"-perhaps interpretable as "waves [of energy]." Verse 3 next speaks of the creation of light. Verse 7 tells of God's dividing light and dark as day and night. The sun and moon were not created, in this account, until the fourth "day."

Since light is the purest form of energy and was the first thing formed out of energy, it is not unreasonable to say that the Spirit was hovering over creative waves of (dark?) energy: Light abolished the "darkness" that overlay the "abyss" of nothingness when there was as yet no Heaven or earth and no sun or moon. Verses 5 and 7 tell us that God made a non-aqueous solidity in the "waters," a firmament that divided them the upper and lower waters or energies. And this "firmament" or "solidity" He called Heaven. Finally, the waters below were divided into dry land and seas. It is in accord with science to say that life began in the waters.

St. Vasil the Great and his brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, assumed a developing universe, in which the "days" of the Genesis account were or are eons of an unknown duration. We do not have to ascribe contemporary scientific ideas to the author of the first chapter of Genesis in interpreting the words that appear there. The Holy Spirit has been guiding (John 16:13) the Church to understandings that an inspired writer was ignorant of. Who can say how it was all planned?

When Adam (Hebrew for "humanity, the human race") was created, he was made according to God's Image and according to the Assimilation. There are two distinct prepositional phrases in the Greek LXX and in the Hebrew (though Hebrew lacks the word for "and" between them, it has different prepositions): It is not a matter of one preposition with paired, synonymous objects. The Image and the Assimilation are different things, as various Fathers from St. Eirenaios on indicated. The Image refers to human nature with its God-reflecting capacities for reasoning and freely choosing (and its doqxa "Glory"). The Assimilation to God ('omoiosis Theozg, with a Greek verbal noun cognate with a verb form semantically equivalent to English verbs ending in _ize). The Assimilation to God was, like LOGOS, a familiar idea in the Hellenistic thought world at the time of the Apostles. It is interpretable as the Energy that got got lost when Adam sinned, making the capacities of the Icon impotent to please God, and as what is regained in Baptism and the Holy Communion, what is the the beginning of theqo`sis.

The Western failure to distinguish the Icon and Assimilation (paralleling the failure to distinguish essence from energy) leads to a fuzzy concept of the Icon's being "marred" (or in Protestantism, even lost) at the fall. This idea is hardly worthy of being adopted by the Orthodox.

An idea of what the cosmos's emptiness was can be inferred from today's astrophysics. There have been recent discoveries "of energy fluctuations that were at work when the universe was just a tiny fraction of a second old and smaller than a human fist." Light was generated at the beginning of the "Big Bang," which then faded into "a formless sea of dark matter" for a period of 300,000 to 500,000,000 "years" after the Big Bang. (This period provides no evidence to astronomers of how the modern cosmos emerged out of this chaotic "void" before light came on again. It is the "most important unsolved problem in astronomy.") The following comes from the last column of a very interesting article by the distinguished Astrophysicist M. S. Turner in a recent edition of The Sciences (published by the New York Academy of Sciences). We read on p. 37: "Dark matter and dark energy are the yin and yang of the universe. . . . Dark matter, like all matter, draws mass towards itself . . . Dark energy, in contrast, is repulsive, and it is distributed smoothly throughout the cosmos." Mention is made of "mysteries," and of course creation is the issue. "If [the studies] are correct, dark matter and dark energy account for the vast preponderance of the cosmos: about 95 percent . . ."

Experts are able to explain some mistranslations of Hebrew in the LXX; cf. phyle5 or pyqle` in Ruth 3:11. See SVTQ 42 (1999), no. 42, p. 351, unless one should wish to claim that the Hebrew cannot be used to help interpret the canonical LXX. To make sense of an inconsistent chronology that one assumes is there for future generations to interpret in harmony with the energy of Orthodox ontology and the different but not conflicting sense of energy in modern science, what can the word for "waters" mean in verse 3? (Note that water in many languages naturally designates other fluids or liquids besides its basic reference to H2O-even a mist, as may be probable in verse 7.) What was the Spirit "hovering, moving" over when there was no water yet created in the cosmos? No doubt many interpretations-including the most far-fetched metaphors-can be imposed on the text, but waves of energy seems as reasonable as any other. For the Greek-Bible view of being is that energy is not some thing but rather something that which makes some dynamis or potential (the author's "mist"?) into some actuality or reality--e.g. the cosmos, heaven and earth. Other interpretations that makes sense of the passage are possible, but I prefer the one that jibes with Orthodox ontology, esp. when it does not blatantly conflict with modern science-whose idea of creation is that of an explosion of energy that (by millions of years-St. Vasil's eons) preceded visible, tangible entities.

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Published   2002.04.16