Paschal Reflections on Creation

In Greek antiquity there was a form of applied and philosophical mathematics that was used to manage large concepts, breaking them down into smaller units of information to help understand and classify. This mathematical form is called counting by division, the Greek word being διαίρεσις (diairesis).

What is fascinating to me is that this counting by division, or partitioning, is a revealed system of metaphysics shown forth on the Second Day of Creation. Not only that, but God creates the very division that is revealed in all things, be it in philosophy, mathematics, or even biological cell division.

The patterning began on the first day as we see that God creates the heavens and the earth, then the Light separates the Day from the Night of the darkness. The second day continues the counting by division with the introduction of the firmament, partitioning the waters above and the waters below.

In other translations the God names the firmament, “sky” illustrating a more grounded portrait of this firmament being the expanse of blue outside the window. It is the atmosphere, divided into two, that which is above and that which is below.

Furthermore, in relation to cellular division where a parent cell divides into two daughter cells (While this is not a proper way of understanding the Trinity), we do see a type of division in the sense that the Father eternally begets the Son and is eternal source from which the Spirit processes.

If we continue understanding the work of God analogous to gardening, where the Spirit tills the soil, and the Word of God is the seed that takes root in the nourished, baptized soul then we can identify the liturgical patterning unfolding throughout the first week of Creation.

The Paschal mystery is revealed on the first day with the earth passing from darkness to the glory of God’s Light being spoken by His Word. We are brought out of the land of Egypt, the dissolution of our personhood in the emptiness of the void.

We are brought out and up into the spiritual Jerusalem, which is Christ’s Church, entering into the firm foundation by the firmament separating the waters from the waters. This the boundary of the New Ark, partitioning God’s chosen people from the Tohu wa-bohu of the world of the deep.

The firmament is spoken into being by the Word of God and is God’s very Word, and it is upon this firmament that “that gate of hades will not prevail” (Matthew 16:18), which is the power of death.

As previously discussed, the Hebrew word for faith, enumah, is a verb and it means actionable conviction. Additionally, it means steadfastness and firmness. So, it is the furnishing of the foundation of the earth. It is the relationship between the heavens and the earth, God and man, becoming steadfast by the mooring rope that is the Word of God.

As such, the firmament represents the division of God’s chosen from the chaos of the world therefore it is the glory of God. It is Wisdom and Wisdom is movement, it is experience, it is a continual revitalization of one’s knowledge of God, moving glory to glory, through Sacramental living.

The division within the Church begins with taking steps in Wisdom to the Chalice, to the Body and Blood that is our unified, singular font dividing through those who participate and replicating within them. This is the light that is generating the works done by and in the Spirit of Christ.

The firmament’s creation therefore is a revelation of God’s kenotic love, emptying Himself and becoming actualized Presence via the Eucharist and energizing man by man’s participation in the uncreated glory of God via the Eucharist.

It is not simply partitioning to keep us from God, but to draw us to God.

The name of things is important and a product of division by counting, as it is a means of classifying and categorizing, however God shows us that it the classification of such things does not inherently separate them into distinct categories. This system of classification is demonstrably Aristotelian and a result of the Medieval approach to rote learning, which paved the way to compartmentalization inherent to the natural sciences.

This is not what God is showing us, though, it is a revelation of the Trinitarian God: the heavens, heaven, and the earth.

The Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

This Triune mirroring is like Jacob’s Ladder, angels ascending and descending, the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father and the eternal procession of the Spirit from the Father. The Spirit goes before the Son and makes straight the Way of the Lord and Christ’s Incarnation proceeding the work of the Spirit reveals that the kingdom of heaven is immanent. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17).

And because of the Incarnation’s death and Resurrection, the procession of the Spirit, “The kingdom of God is within [us]” (Luke 17:21).

What we can take from either of these declarative remarks revealing the nature of heaven is that Christ is heaven, He is the Way to heaven, He is Life itself. Therefore, the firmament is the royal road to eternal life. It is taking the faith that was established and glorified on the first day and grounding it in time and space, grounding the Truth in the reality of the burgeoning world.

“All wisdom is from the Lord, and it is with him for eternity,

Who will count the sands of the seas and the drops of rain and the days of eternity?

Who will search out the height of heaven and the breadth of the earth, and the abyss and wisdom?

Wisdom was created before everything, and prudent understanding from eternity” (Wisdom of Sirach 1:1-4).

The height of heaven and the breadth of the earth, and the abyss established by the Word of God on the Second Day. Thereby, the Word of God reveals Himself to be Wisdom and from the very beginning Wisdom is God, is in the heavens, is in the earth, and is the firmament.

Practically speaking, wisdom is the combined knowledge of experience; wisdom is the parameters that surround us keeping us oriented toward the goal, which is eternal Life. Taken literally, orientation means facing East, toward the direction of the glory of God that passes over the waters of the earth, interpenetrating our being with His glory.

The interpenetrative relationship of God and man mirrors the replication of cells with the Father—the Monarch—the First Cause dividing into what are Biblical “sons” instead of daughter cells by the distribution of His uncreated glory by the Eucharist being realized in the faithful.

These cells have a part in the Father and the Father has a part in them.

However, because we are not the Second Person of the Trinity, we are little s, sons of God, little c, children of God who are made in His image yet are moving in likeness toward re-imaging ourselves in conformity with Him by Wisdom.

God stands on the firmament, typified by the elders of Israel and the prophet Moses eating with God in Exodus, chapter twenty-four, where they met Him on the Holy Mountain. This is an example of Biblical (and ancient) metaphysics referring to the place where God (and gods) is, where man meets God, such as Sinai and Tabor.

“And they saw the place where the God of Israel stood and what was under his feet was like brickwork of lapis lazuli, and like the appearance of the firmament of the heavens in purity… And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Come up to me into the mountain and be there, and I will give you the stone tablets, the law, and the commandments that I wrote to instruct them’” (Exodus 24:10-12).  

The mountain, while being explicitly likened to it above, is a type of firmament in the early days of Israel’s emergence. But we also see that the firmament is the partition that one must walk, the parameters of the firmament set in love by God and followed in faith by His chosen people, likening their image to His by holding steadfast to His instruction.

That is Wisdom.

To walk with God on the firmament is to hold the tensions between the corporal and the heavenly, eternal realms. Leaning too far to the corporal is living in the flesh, such as we see with paganism using sexual rites and literal cannibalism while leaning too far in the spiritual opens the door for a Gnostic Christian lens, where the material world is seen as an illusion and flesh is evil. The narrow, royal way is the firmament and by walking this path one is walking with God.

It is being in the world but not of it (John 17:16), holding the tensions between the corporal and eternal, and allowing God’s Word to instruct, inform, and rear us—generating His image and likeness in the world, not conformed to it, but to His Word. This is proper counting by division.

“I do not pray only for these, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be in one; even as you, Father are in me, and I in you. May they be one in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me. The glory which you have given me, I have given them, so that they may be one even as we are one; I in them, and you in me. May they be perfected into one, so that the world may know that you sent me, and that you have loved them, even as you have loved me” (John 17:20-23).

The second day.

And we shall see the Paschal mystery continue as dry land is revealed just as the seeds of His Word take root…

Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ