In this review article of The Oxford Handbook of Deification, I argue that our understanding of deification is determined, ultimately, not by empirical markers but by divine revelation: The question is whether or not a particular theology offers a faithful and true rendering of our final end. By offering some of my own thoughts on deification in dialogue with the authors of the Handbook, I make clear why a proper understanding of what deification is requires the essence-energies distinction. Only by accepting this traditional, patristic distinction can deification be properly participatory in character.

Deification As Participation Mth 2026

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Yesterday, November 30, was the Feast of St. Andrew, Jesus’s first apostle. Why did Jesus call on Andrew to become his first disciple? Matthew’s Gospel gives us a hint.

Peter and Andrew were “casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen” (Matt. 4:18). So, Jesus makes him (along with Simon Peter) a fisher of men. From catching fish, Andrew will go on to catch disciples.

There is a similarity, to be sure, and the play on words is clear. Andrew’s new fishing job is clarified. But does any of this explain: Why Andrew? Jesus isn’t really suggesting that casting your net into the Sea of Galilee is good preparation for becoming a missionary, is he? Andrew’s “natural job” hardly seems to prepare him for the “supernatural job” Jesus calls him to do. Surely, spending a few years at seminary would better prepare him for the task at hand.

Here is how, in Romans 10, St. Paul quotes Psalm 19: “Their sound has gone out into all lands, and their message to the ends of the world” (Ps. 19:4). Who is “their”? Their sound, their message? It is the heavens and the firmament: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork” (19:1). David is talking about “natural” speech: The sound of the heavens has gone out into all lands; the message of the firmament to the ends of the world.

Paul takes this “natural speech” of creation that calls out the glory of God and claims it is actually about the “supernatural speech” of preaching the gospel. We might almost think that the apostle would’ve been better off quoting something from the second part of Psalm 19, for that is all about the “supernatural,” about the commandments of the law. But as it is, Paul says that the “natural” speech of creation is actually about the “supernatural” speech of the gospel.

The apostle is not making a mistake. He recognizes how David has structured his psalm. And he is also familiar with God’s natural speech of the heavens and the firmament. The same is true with Jesus. He is not making a mistake. He knows the world from which he calls his first disciple. And he is also familiar with the natural job of catching fish.

Nature, God’s first book, really does speak to us. Heavens declare and firmament shows. One day tells its tale to another; one night imparts knowledge to another. What language do they speak? Paul knows: Their natural words already contain the gospel of Christ.

Why Andrew? Why did Jesus call him? Perhaps Andrew’s “natural” job was not just natural. Perhaps the Spirit guided his hands from day to day as he loaded his nets full of fish. Perhaps God meant for Andrew every day to toss his nets into the lake as his seminary training, equipping him to become a fisher of men.

Within a few years’ time, Andrew started fishing north of the Black Sea, in Romania, Ukraine, and Russia. Where his brother Simon Peter became the first bishop of Rome, Andrew became the first bishop of Byzantium—the first patriarch of Constantinople, we might say. One huge catch in one large net: East and West united in Andrew and Peter.

May the God of all grace—for whom the language of nature spreads the gospel abroad and for whom nets full of fish are a parable for the gathering of the nations—turn every word that we speak and every work that we do into a sign of supernatural grace. St. Andrew, pray for us.

First published in First Things.

How can we express thanks for an inexpressible gift? If someone brings a turkey to Thanksgiving dinner, we easily find words to describe the gift and convey our gratitude: “Thank you for bringing this large, ground-feeding bird of the Meleagris family, of which the colorful males have a prominent snood hanging from the beak.” Because the gift of a turkey is very describable, we can thank the person who brings it to our dinner party.

But an inexpressible gift, an indescribable gift, is one that, by definition, cannot be put into words. It exceeds the boundaries of our understanding. So, how would you give due and proper thanks for such a gift? Such is the thanksgiving conundrum we face in 2 Corinthians 9. “Thanks be to God,” says St. Paul, “for his inexpressible gift!” (2 Cor. 9:15)

Lack of thanksgiving is, sadly, the norm. When the Israelites come into the promised land, they are stunned at what they see: brooks and fountains in valleys and hills, wheat and barley, vines, fig trees and pomegranates, olives and honey, bread without scarcity, stones of iron, hills with copper (Deut. 8:7–9). Moses knows the proper response: “Thanks be to God!” God is the one who brought you through the desert. God is the one who gave you these gifts. Don’t you make the mistake of pridefully boasting of gifts you received: “Take heed lest you forget the Lord your God” (8:11). “Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth’” (8:17). Pride stands in the way of thanksgiving.

When Jesus heals ten lepers of their sickness, only one turns back, “praising God with a loud voice,” falling on his face at Jesus’s feet, “giving him thanks” (Luke 17:16). He was not what one might call a regular churchgoer. “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” (17:17–18) The Samaritan gives thanks, while the others’ presumption stands in the way of their thanksgiving.

Both Deuteronomy 8 and Luke 17 tell of gifts for which to give thanks: the promised land and healing from sickness. The two gifts seem quite different, but some of our thanksgiving lectionaries pair the two readings together. The promised land is the gift the Israelites received after undertaking a long, miserable journey. Health is what the ten lepers received after enduring a chronic, infectious disease.

The Church aims to show us that desert hardship and leprosy are akin to each other. Both speak to the evil and hardship that at times make our lives unbearable. The promised land’s abundance and newfound health from sickness are also akin to each other. Both picture our new life in Christ through the Spirit of God. Both Deuteronomy 8 and Luke 17 depict the same trajectory, the same story: from sin to salvation.

Moses uses many words to unpack God’s gift of the promised land. Luke, too, tells an entire story, unpacking Jesus’s gift of bodily healing. Both use a great number of words, for both of these gifts are describable. And because both are describable, the Israelites and lepers could, in principle, thank God for their gifts. If only all of them had.

The gift we receive is not just a promised land. Nor is it merely bodily health. The gift that God gives us in Christ is greater by far.

St. Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, asks them to contribute to a collection for the Jerusalem church. How to convince them to part with their money? Paul knows that the only way is to remind them of who their God is. God is Generosity itself. God, Paul says, is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything. God supplies seed to the sower and bread for food; he supplies and multiplies our resources; he increases the harvest of our righteousness. He enriches us in every way (2 Cor. 9:8–11).

If the Corinthians give to the Jerusalem poor, they too will be generous. Their gift is a gift we can put into words, for we can count the money. We can put it in bags and ship it to others in need. All of that can be put into words.

God’s generosity is different. God’s generosity is not like ours. God’s generosity is greater than that of the Corinthians or ours. God’s generosity is beyond telling, beyond words. True, God’s generosity is a promised land; God’s generosity is a new body. But land and body are words that can only hint at a reality that itself is greater—the Generosity that is God’s very own self.

As Paul puts it, “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (8:9). This is how generous God is. He becomes poor that we might become rich. He becomes man that we might become God.

How ought we to give thanks? With the best words we can find!

Today is Thanksgiving. Today, we obey the apostle; we join him in saying, “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift.” We know that our words fall far short, for the Generosity that is God himself is far beyond words.

God’s gift is the gift that always keeps giving. We too pass on the gift that is God to others around us. When in heavenly glory we see our generous God, we’ll stop using words, for then we will know more than words ever can tell: the reality of the inexpressible gift.

First appeared in First Things

In this episode, I join R. R. Reno on The Editor’s Desk to talk about my recent essay, “Modernity and God-Talk,” from the November 2025 issue of First Things.

Henri de Lubac, S.J. (1896-1991)

Tradition measures changes in centuries. It is much too soon, therefore, to measure the impact that the mid-twentieth-century movement of nouvelle théologie had, either within or beyond the Catholic Church. Many will argue that the movement has been markedly successful in transforming the Catholic Church by means of the liturgical and theological developments in the wake of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. For my part, I’d rather be cautious, and instead of focusing on nouvelle théologie’s success (or lack thereof), I think it more prudent, for now, to make a case for where and why I think the movement should be successful.

One way to explain nouvelle théologie is by describing it as a two-pronged attempt at renewal in the church. The first is that of ressourcement or retrieval, which took a variety of forms. The retrieval often focused on Thomas Aquinas, as in the work of Pierre Rousselot, Henri Bouillard, and Marie-Dominique Chenu. They all tried to rescue the Angelic Doctor from what they considered an ossified kind of Neo-Thomism that ruled the day. The church fathers were the other main source of inspiration, probably even more so than Aquinas. Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, and Hans Urs von Balthasar all delved deeply into the fathers. Despite occasional differences among each other, they all looked to the early church for a reintegration of nature and the supernatural, which they believed Neo-Thomist theology had unduly separated.

The second prong is that of aggiornamento or updating of the church. For the church to have something to say to the world, the church had to speak to “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age,” as Gaudium et spes, one of Vatican II’s key documents, puts it. This meant that liturgically, culturally, and ecumenically, it was time for the church to let go of its perceived isolation. Aggiornamento served to join the supernatural realities of the church to the natural desires and longings of the world. To be sure, it is fair to say that Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar were much more on board with the aggiornamento agenda than were the Jesuits de Lubac, Daniélou, Bouillard, and Balthasar.

In light of the post-conciliar developments in the Catholic Church, we may perhaps conclude that the ressourcement project has had less success than the attempt at aggiornamento—although both elements have shaped the Catholic Church in a variety of ways through the decades that followed the Council. From my perspective, we could do with a whole lot less aggiornamento than we have had. It is hard to read Gaudium et spes today and not be taken aback by the naïve cultural optimism that it exudes. The social teaching of the Catholic Church has increasingly emphasized human rights, has virtually banned just war, has kept advocating for a world government, and, most recently, has substantially weakened its stance on homosexuality. When aggiornamento takes the “signs of the times” as its starting point, it runs the danger of rank accommodation to the surrounding culture.

Ressourcement, on the other hand—and in particular patristic retrieval—continues to hold great promise. The underlying drive here is the patristic conviction that nature is always already geared toward a supernatural end. It is this conviction that drove de Lubac’s controversial Surnaturel of 1946. Here and in many of his other publications, de Lubac argued for a sacramental ontology, maintaining that natural or visible things serve as sacraments (sacramenta) that render present supernatural or invisible realities (res).

In line with his sacramental ontology, de Lubac insisted that human beings have a natural desire (desiderium naturale) for the beatific vision. In other words, the supernatural final end was from the outset in some way inscribed in human beings. De Lubac may or may not have been correct in arguing that he had Thomas Aquinas on his side. But it is beyond doubt that he was in line with many of the church fathers, especially those of the East. They had all considered man as naturally good, so that that the beatific vision was in line with how God had created human beings. De Lubac, therefore, insisted that when divine grace assists in the process of justification, God acts on us not in a purely extrinsic manner but in line with human capacities that are already present.

We need de Lubac’s insights on the nature-supernatural relationship also today. Modernity has long assumed a gap between the two, so that we treat nature as strictly autonomous, as having its own natural ends, and as operating according to its own immanent natural laws. The result has been a truncated view of science, which ever since Francis Bacon has explicitly operated without regard for final (supernatural) ends. Thoroughly at home in the natural world and at liberty to pursue this-worldly enjoyments as ultimate, we have ignored and often simply denied that the happiness of God ought to be our final end. Still today, we need patristic theology’s asceticism and anagogical (upward-leading) focus.

The reintegration of nature and the supernatural—desperately needed in our empty, often nihilist world—implies a return to Christian Platonism. Platonism is often accused of metaphysical dualism—separating sensible things from otherworldly forms. The response to this objection is at least twofold. First, it ignores the significant fact that at the heart of the Platonic tradition (and especially of Plotinus’s philosophy) lies the notion of methexis or participation. Sensible realities exist inasmuch as they participate in intelligible realities. The Neoplatonic notion of participation is indispensable precisely to counter metaphysical dualism.

Second, we witness such dualism primarily not in Platonism but in modernity. We have replaced metaphysical realism (which is to say, the real existence of eternal forms or ideas) with metaphysical nominalism (where our naming of things is based not on their eternal nature or form but is the result of subjective constructs). In other words, by denying the real existence of species and genera, we now inhabit a world in which sensible things are the only things to which we have access—by way of empirical observation—while we think of intelligible things as beyond our reach, and therefore probably not worth investigating in great depth. It is modernity, therefore, rather than the Platonic tradition that is truly dualistic in its metaphysic. If we mean it when we claim that we want to get rid of dualism, we should back away from our modern understanding of reality and return to Platonic metaphysics.

De Lubac’s hermeneutical insights—based on his Platonic sacramental ontology—looked to the Old Testament as a sacrament containing the mystery of the reality of Christ. Following patristic and medieval theologians as his guides, de Lubac explained that the surface of the text contains infinite depths, which the reader is meant to uncover by means of spiritual exegesis. When the fathers allegorized Scripture, therefore, they did not arbitrarily impose an ill-fitting, alien meaning upon the text. According to de Lubac, allegorizing was a practice called for by the newness of the Christ event. Now that Christ is here, we are able to recognize the sacramental depth of the divine Scriptures, so de Lubac thought.

Biblical scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, have largely failed to follow de Lubac’s lead. It is not that they have examined his sacramental hermeneutic and found it wanting. Rather, de Lubac was a man far ahead of his time. The post-conciliar Catholic Church was much more interested in catching up with Protestant historical-critical exegesis than in retrieving patristic sources. And within Protestantism, evangelicals went through a phase in which they were keen to prove their exegetical prowess and academic qualifications, which led to a decades-long focus on authorial intent and historical reconstruction. It is only with the turn of the twenty-first century that theological exegesis has taken off and that de Lubac has received the fair hearing that he always deserved.

I have only scratched the surface. Retrieving nouvelle théologie is a worthwhile endeavor for many other, related reasons. De Lubac thought of the Eucharist as a sacramental meal that makes the church into the body of Christ. Congar treated tradition as sacramental time, which enables various, chronologically distinct moments in history to become contemporaneous within the one reality of Christ. De Lubac, Daniélou, and Bouilard all held to a notion of truth as sacramental reality—a sharing in the mystery of the eternal Word of God—an approach that necessitates a humble epistemology while also acknowledging the grounding of knowledge in the mystery of divine truth itself. Finally, Chenu recovered theology as a sacramental discipline, insisting that its purpose is initiation into divinizing union with God. I cannot unpack these developments here, but I sketch each one in greater detail in my book Heavenly Participation.

The sacramental mindset of nouvelle théologie is what makes it stand out, still today, as a unique source of inspiration. Nouvelle théologie’s sacramental ontology led not only to sacramental interpretation (patristic exegesis), but also to a sacramental meal (Eucharist), sacramental time (tradition), sacramental reality (truth), and sacramental discipline (theology). Every one of these lies anchored within a sacramental ontology—an understanding of reality that reintegrates nature and the supernatural. Nature and the supernatural are not two separate orders or levels, bridged perhaps by some kind of external link. Nature always already participates in the supernatural life of God; and God’s supernatural life is always already sacramentally present in the natural world.

The great temptation of the modern world is to live as if God did not exist—etsi Deus non daretur, in the oft-repeated Latin phrase. Henri de Lubac was convinced that the reason fascism took control of French Catholic hearts and minds in the years leading up to the Second World War was that people had become accustomed to living etsi Deus non daretur. Philip Sherrard accused the modern scientific mindset of The Rape of Man and Nature—again, the outcome of a prideful insistence on living etsi Deus non daretur. The title of his recently-published book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, suggests that Paul Kingsnorth is animated by a similar concern. Secular modernity operates on the assumption that we are answerable only to ourselves. The urge to dismiss God upstairs is deeply engrained in the mindset of the contemporary West.

Many factors help explain why modern man lives as if God did not exist. Some are techno logical: The acceleration of mastery over nature during the modern era can create the illusion that we are the ones in charge, not God. Some factors are cultural: Many took the eighteenth-century ideal of “enlightenment” as justification to cast off religious authority. But there are theological reasons that have led, paradoxically, to the eclipse of theology. One key cause of our penchant for living etsi Deus non daretur is the simplicity of God—or the way we have come to view it. Our theological traditions in the West have made God so remote and inaccessible that belief in him and worship of him feel incongruous: We may affirm doctrine, but experiential life through fellowship with God is lacking.

Let me state upfront that I do believe that God is simple. Any Christian theology true to biblical revelation must refuse the notion of God as the sum total of many parts. A god made up of multiple parts is akin to the mythological divinities of the Greek and Roman pantheons or the idols worshiped by the nations surrounding ancient Israel. These celestial beings were devised after the image of man. Their worshipers could pin them down and make them part of their conceptions of reality because these gods had strengths, foibles, and adventures in time and in space—much like us. The many and various deities were infinitely superior beings perhaps, but beings all the same. Made up of parts, they lacked transcendence and were subject to the grasp and gaze of human comprehension.

To say that God is simple is to acknowledge that he is beyond our ken. God does not have parts that we can describe or analyze. We cannot say that God is part this and part that. He is not even the sum of all qualities, powers, and attributes that we might deem worthy of honor. True, God is every one of those qualities, but he is also utterly beyond them. The simplicity of God forces us, therefore, to turn our eyes away from him: “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Exod. 33:20). We must confess that God is simple, for this confession is an acknowledgement of the otherness of God.

Modernity’s problems are nonetheless tied up with the simplicity of God. Again, don’t get me wrong: We need simplicity, and we need transcendence. But in a certain understanding of God as simple, we end up with a God who is not just simple and transcendent, but also beyond all human contact: Transcendence without immanence. If God is only purely simple, how can we relate to him? How can we see and know him? Does prayer make sense with such a conception of simplicity? A purely simple God would seem forever far away. It is because God stoops down and takes on shape and form and multiplicity that transcendence and immanence go hand in hand. Simplicity, wrongly viewed, does little to promote the life of Christian piety and may tempt us, instead, to live etsi Deus non daretur.

Andrew Radde-Gallwitz pinpoints the theological problem in his book Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity. He refers to what he calls the “identity thesis”: the claim that all of God’s attributes are identical to each other and to the divine essence. From our human point of view, so the thesis goes, we may distinguish numerous characteristics or attributes in God—wisdom, justice, kindness, and so on. But that is merely our perspective; in God himself, they are one, as demanded by the notion of divine simplicity. Hence, the identity thesis claims that all of these attributes are identical both to each other and to God’s essence: God is his wisdom, justice, kindness, and so on—in his very essence. St. Augustine understood divine simplicity through the lens of the identity thesis, and most Western theologians, including Thomas Aquinas, adopted his perspective.

The upshot is a gap between the simplicity of God and the multiplicity of creation, and that gap is hard to bridge. The identity thesis separates a purely simple God from the multiplicity of created things, the one from the many. Such separation does pay dividends: We won’t be tempted to confuse the creator with the creature; we won’t lapse into idolatry or pantheism. But the cost outweighs the benefits. The modern conception of reality excludes God from everyday concerns, and we end up living etsi Deus non daretur.

Ironically, this same perspective yields a view of the eschaton, the final consummation of all things, that threatens to collapse the difference between creator and creature. This view holds that we will one day see the face of God, interpreted as his very essence. Aquinas’s insistence that, in the hereafter, we will see the essence of God—his understanding of the beatific vision—is remarkable for its boldness. Aquinas comes close to suggesting that creatures will comprehend the creator. To be sure, he tempers this claim by acknowledging that we will comprehend God only in the sense of “attaining” to him—Aquinas using the Latin term attingere (ST I, q. 12, a. 7). Whereas God seems remote, transcendent, and perhaps unreachable in this vale of tears, God in the hereafter overcomes the gap in a way that has made many question whether Aquinas still properly distinguishes the creator from the creature.

Perhaps this criticism is unduly harsh. After all, Aquinas suggested that it is by means of a created habit—the so-called light of glory—that we will see God’s essence. In his own way, Aquinas attempts to keep creator and creature distinct, even when we attain to the promised happiness of God. We may perhaps suggest, therefore, that Eastern and Western theologians have different theological toolkits for one and the same purpose: to articulate the divinizing union with God without collapsing the divine and human natures into one. An irenic reading of Aquinas is by no means without warrant.

The Angelic Doctor nonetheless runs into problems, it seems to me. To begin with, it is not clear that distinguishing attaining from comprehending really works. With the identity thesis, God’s essence and his attributes are one and the same. So, we either attain to and comprehend this simple essence, or we do neither, for God’s essence is not spatially mapped out. Traveling south from America, we may at some point say that we have arrived at or attained to Mexico without comprehending it, but we cannot say the same regarding God conceived of in terms of absolute simplicity.

There is a further problem: Aquinas’s commitment to the identity thesis renders his theology of the beatific vision insufficiently Christological, for in his view it is not Christ but the essence of God we will see in the hereafter. True, Aquinas maintained that by virtue of our union with Christ, we will, as it were, be in him as the place from which we gaze upon the essence of God. But it remains the case for Aquinas that it is the undivided essence of God—rather than the theophany of God in Jesus Christ—that will be the object of the beatific vision. This account unfortunately implies a separation between the triune persons and the divine essence. It seems that a too-rigorous monotheism, guarded by the identity thesis, threatens to overwhelm our creedal commitment to a triune God.

What is the solution? We should think of simplicity not as identity of essence and attributes but as a matter of degree. The identity thesis ends up separating a simple, transcendent God from our everyday world of multiplicity. Simplicity in degrees allows all that exists within the hierarchy of being to participate in God’s simplicity, angels much more marvelously than kingfishers or glasswing butterflies, but all to some degree, in accord with their capacity. In this view, everything has a place within the divine hierarchy and thus participates in God’s simplicity in its own unique and limited way. We need hierarchy, therefore, to make sense of divine simplicity and its graded shape.

The third-century Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus made the case for a hierarchy of being that proceeds downward from the One (to hen), by way of Intellect (nous), to Soul (psychē), and so to the sensible world of matter. His Enneads describe the One as utterly aloof from each of the levels of the hierarchy—absolutely simple—while at the same time the One reaches out to Intellect and makes itself wholly present to it. Plotinus, in this way, acknowledged divine transcendence and immanence at the same time.

Plotinus’s hierarchy was a major amplification of Plato’s philosophy of the forms. Plato’s approach had understood particular realities that win our aesthetic admiration as instances or embodiments of the eternal idea or form of beauty, and geometrical proof as an instance or embodiment of truth itself. In this way, Plato allowed that something perfect and thus simple—truth containing only itself, and never error—lends its perfection to complex and imperfect particular things, which in turn participate in a simple and perfect form.

Though Plato had spoken of the Good or the One as, say, a “super-form,” he had not yet sys tematically developed the hierarchal structuring we encounter in Plotinus. Plotinus thought of the One as “beyond being” (hyperousios), which remains forever out of reach. The second level, that of Intellect or being, is where Plato would have located his ideas or forms. For the ancients, being meant intelligibility and vice versa, and thus it is here, at the level of Intellect, that the human mind grasps the forms or essences (ousiai) of things.

The distinction between the One and Intellect—between beyond being and being—is, in one sense, absolute. Human language cannot in any way describe the One. Its simplicity and transcendence are complete and uncompromising. Neither positive (kataphatic) nor negative (apophatic) discourse can grasp or comprehend the One. Plotinus, so it would seem, was stuck with the same sharp separation between simplicity and multiplicity that bedeviled the identity thesis of the West.

Plotinus, however, relied on Plato’s notion of participation. He insisted that the One—despite being utterly simple and transcendent—nonetheless makes itself wholly present within the various levels of the hierarchy. Plotinus explained this perhaps counterintuitive proposal by means of his famous doctrine of double activity. The One’s internal activity or energy (energeia) is its very essence, completely simple, out of reach and therefore beyond being. However, the One also possesses an external energy by which the One reaches out to Intellect. This external energy of the One becomes, in turn, Intellect’s internal energy. And Intellect, too, has an external energy, with which it reaches out below itself to Soul, and so on, down the ladder. The doctrine of double activity allowed Plotinus to claim that each level of the hierarchy of being transcends that which is below, while at the same time being present or immanent within it.

Eastern theology has generally adopted Plotinus’s hierarchical scheme. In this theological tradition, the divine essence (ousia) is out of reach, radically simple, incomprehensible. Creatures can participate, however, to varying degrees, in God’s being, life, and wisdom, which are denominated as divine “energies.” Without too much difficulty, we can map this essence–energies distinction onto Plotinus’s distinction between the One and Intellect. Essence and energies do not divide God into parts, for the energies are still God himself, just as in Plotinus the One makes itself present as Intellect by way of its external energies.

Those of us trained in the theological traditions of Western Christianity are unfamiliar with the essence–energies distinction. We may find it perplexing, even suspicious. Are we to suppose that God has two parts, one characterized by essence, and the other by energies? But questions of this sort merely presuppose the identity thesis as the only way to affirm the metaphysical concept of simplicity, rather than engaging the very different metaphysical concepts that operate in the theological traditions of Eastern Christianity. And note well: If Plotinus’s double activity doctrine seems suspect, think for a moment of the Trinity. Just as God can be both one and three at the same time, so the essence–energies distinction need not contradict the oneness of God—divine simplicity.

In short, for the West, God’s essence and attributes (or, in Plotinian terms, the One and Intellect) are one and the same, so that God’s essence is his attributes, and each of his attributes is identical to every other one. The East, while not rejecting divine simplicity, views it as manifesting degrees. The multiplicity of created being participates in the simplicity of God. As a result, God makes himself wholly present to kingfishers and to glasswing butterflies—though the peculiar multiplicity of their creaturely being limits their capacity to receive the divine energies of God. They share in God’s being and life, though as non-rational beings they lack creaturely wisdom.

I have struggled with the question of how to conceive of God’s transcendence. In my 2018 book Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition, I discussed the beatific vision without recourse to the essence–energies distinction. I expressed sympathy with what the East tries to do with this distinction, but I worried (unduly perhaps) that such a distinction could not maintain the simplicity of God. Trying to steer between the Scylla of the Eastern essence–energies distinction and the Charybdis of the Western identification of essence and attributes, I advocated a theophanic understanding of the beatific vision in which Christ is the essence of God. Jesus, after all, said to Philip, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). My solution took from the East the conviction that our beatific vision will be a Christological theophany and from the West the notion that we will see the divine essence.

I am no longer convinced that my Christological interpretation of the divine essence will do. Steering between the Eastern and Western viewpoints may seem like an attractive option, but it won’t work. I have come to accept that we need the essence–energies distinction. In other words, we should pattern our theology according to the Eastern appropriation of Plotinus rather than follow the Western revision of his hierarchical scheme.

It is easy to think that I am preoccupied with technical issues, the ethereal matters of speculative theology. After all, my thinking on the matter itself has not changed all that much. I still hold that when we participate in God’s energies, we participate in God himself. And I still believe that when we see Christ, we also see the Father. (I surely should make the latter claim, since its wording is straight from John’s Gospel!) But it is less than helpful to use the language of divine essence when we speak of Jesus Christ.

Why? To begin with, talking about Christ as the essence of God overlooks the fact that the incarnate Christ is a sacrament of God (the Ursakrament, to be sure, the ground of all sacramentality). A sacrament effects that which it signifies, which is to say that it “makes real,” here and now, that toward which it points. As sacrament of God, Christ is truly God. But this is not the same as saying that once we have seen him, we have seen and know the essence of God. After all, even as we participate in Christ’s divinized humanity, paradigmatically by receiving his body and blood in the Eucharist, God remains infinitely beyond us. Maximus the Confessor reminds us, “As much as He became comprehensible through the fact of His birth, by so much more do we now know Him to be incomprehensible precisely because of that birth” ( Ambigua 5.5). When we identify Christ with the divine essence, we run the danger of reducing the nature of God to the observable facts of the historical Jesus.

Moreover, essence language is hard-edged. It does not allow for more or less. In the past, I have identified Christ with the divine essence in my theological writing, going on to say that we participate in varying degrees of intensity in the divine essence, just as we may share more or less in Christ’s humility (or some other of Christ’s virtues). But this is to use the language of essence in a highly unusual way. For Aristotle, the essence underlies (to hypokeimenon) an object’s accidental attributes; it is what remains once we have stripped away every one of its attributes. Plotinus held to a similar view: The One’s essence is precisely what distinguishes its transcendent nature from each of the hierarchical levels below it. Only by using the term essence in an idiosyncratic manner can we say that we make progress in it or learn to participate in it more deeply. Only when the transcendent God reveals himself by way of his energies can we reasonably speak of creaturely participation: Only when God manifests himself can we participate in him.

Think of it this way: Either we see God in his essence, or we don’t. There is no conceptual room for greater or lesser. But we can easily speak (and we often do) of gaining deeper insight into God’s revelation, or of growing in discipleship. What conception of the divine allows us to speak of drawing “closer” to God, of growing in holiness as God himself is holy? I have become convinced that we cannot give a satisfactory answer to this question without something akin to the Eastern concept of divine energies.

Casting one’s lot with the essence–energies distinction is a major theological step. After all, this distinction lies at the root of most other differences between East and West. It is precisely the lack of a distinction between essence and energies that made Aquinas shy away from speaking of participation in God: While acknowledging participation in creaturely common being (esse commune), Aquinas was afraid to use the language of participation in God himself (esse ipsum subsistens), because it would mean participation in the divine essence, which in turn would erase the difference between creator and creature. Aquinas rightly recognized that his adoption of the identity thesis required him to avoid the traditional language of participation in God. Aquinas’s view of divine simplicity, the standard view for much of the Western theological tradition, thus seriously attenuated the participatory link between creator and creature.

Absolute divine simplicity, along the lines of the identity thesis, has encouraged the perception of a radical separation between God and the cosmos. Modernity was the inevitable corollary. I fear that we have all become very modern, even if we are baptized believers, for when we think of what creation is, we are inclined to keep any thought of God at bay. By contrast, patristic theologians—Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor—unapologetically assert that creation is not just “out of nothing” (ek tou mē) but also “out of God” (ek theou). Created things, Dionysius says, are “in a sense, projected out from him.” The Logos, suggests St. Maximus, “thickens,” “expands,” or “embodies” himself in creation. Such articulations are possible because these theologians believe that the utterly simple God paradoxically renders himself present in creation.

We may well be startled, perhaps troubled, by such language. The reason is probably that we fear pantheism. This same fear is what animated Western theologians since the High Middle Ages, when they articulated the identity thesis and began to separate nature from the supernatural ever more sharply. But fear is a poor counselor. Pantheism is by no means the inevitable result of letting go of the simplicity of God as understood by the identity thesis. None of the Eastern Fathers I have mentioned held to such a view of divine simplicity; yet none of them lapsed into pantheism. Instead, they typically distinguished between God’s essence and his energies. Creation is “out of God” only with respect to his energies. God’s essence remains completely simple and unambiguously transcendent.

The danger in the modern West is not pantheism but practical atheism. Craig Gay rightly diagnosed the trouble with modernity in the title of his 1998 book The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It Is Tempting to Live As If God Doesn’t Exist. Our impediment to a deeper and fuller faith is our disenchanted world, which has emerged in part because we have removed our utterly simple God—whose substance is identical to his attributes—from the material world of multiplicity. The everyday is merely everyday. We pursue social, political, and economic aspirations without regard for God. Is this surprising? It is hard to imagine that the purely simple God of the identity thesis could in any way be present in or concern himself with the world in which we live.

We need to retrieve the Eastern notion of participation in the divine energies. This theological concept allows us to echo the traditional Christian Platonist vision of God’s theophanic manifestation of himself in a created mode and embodiment of himself in creation—a vision, therefore, of creaturely participation in God. To counter the modern, Western creator–creature divide, we must rethink the metaphysical discourse we use in speaking about God and return to the Christian Platonist understanding in which all things are in God and God is in all things.

Christian panentheism, disciplined by a subtle appropriation of the hierarchical scheme developed by Plotinus, was common among the Eastern Fathers. It was their way of avoiding a sharp and unbridgeable separation of nature from the supernatural, of heaven from earth. When we think of creation as God’s making himself present by means of his energies, living etsi Deus non daretur begins to seem a most peculiar undertaking.

Originally published at First Things.

“Many of us worry that the liquidity of the late modern waters will swallow us up. The one miracle we need more than any other is that of being able to walk on water.”

Texts: Isaiah 45:21-25; John 12:31-36a.

Please forgive me for some shameless advertising. Nashotah House is offering some stellar courses. (As you will see below, I am offering a course on preaching in January.)

Registration is now open for our winter term, and we have a fantastic lineup of courses!

🔗 nashotah.edu/winter-2026

• Introduction to Biblical Interpretation with Dr. Garwood Anderson & the Rev. Dr. Travis Bott

• Moral Theology with the Rev. Dr. Stewart Clem

• Anglican and Episcopal Church History with the Rev. Dr. Calvin Lane

• The Prayer Book Tradition with the Rev. Gavin Dunbar, the Rev. Jonathan Jameson, and Dr. Drew Keane (Hosted by St. John’s Church in Savannah)

• Sacramental Preaching with the Rev. Dr. Hans Boersma

• The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor with Dr. Christina Bieber Lake

We welcome Visiting Students (individuals who are not enrolled in an academic program) to attend one-week class sessions on our campus in January. Whether you are a pastor desiring continuing education, a student from another institution interested in the unique electives Nashotah offers, or a layperson seeking deeper engagement with theological studies, you are invited to take a class at Nashotah House this winter.

Winter 2026 Courses & Registration: nashotah.edu/winter-2026

Learn about our Visiting Student program: www.nashotah.edu/visiting-student

Can non-Thomists use analogy discourse? This is the question that arises from reading to Nicholas Smith’s “Becoming God: A Response to Hans Boersma’s Participatory Metaphysics.” Smith’s article is a response to my recent webinar on “Participatory Metaphysics and Creation out of God.” For the most part, Smith is in agreement with the participatory approach that I outlined in my talk. We both have an Eastern view of deification, inspired by Maximus the Confessor. I am grateful for his kind review, delighted that, for most part, we are on the same page.

On one point, however, Smith expresses disagreement with me. I suggested in the webinar that in divinization, we participate in the divine energies “in an infinitely inferior created mode.” Smith discerns here the problematic specter of Thomistic analogy doctrine, presumably along the following lines: We will be made gods, perhaps, but we will receive this grace of divinization only in an analogous, inferior manner.

Smith elaborates on a variety of additional differences between Maximus and Aquinas, and I should make clear that these additional issues did not, in any way, feature in my webinar. I would not want Smith’s reader to think that I am Thomistic on all of the points where Smith highlights differences between these two theologians. I am not. I suppose I should take comfort from the fact that once my book Theophanizing Love will be out, no one will suspect me ever again of being Thomistic—to put the matter in a rather understated fashion. So, while Smith’s discussion on the differences between Maximus and Aquinas is interesting, most of it does not pertain to what I said in the webinar. My webinar makes clear that I am thoroughly Maximian (not Thomistic) in my thinking.

That said, my webinar did mention analogy, and the question is whether it turns me into a Thomist rather than a follower of Maximus. Now, analogy is prominent both in Dionysius and in Maximus. Vladimir Lossky makes clear that Dionysius uses the adverb ἀναλόγως (“analogously”) over seventy times, and he declares it to be the “pivot” of Dionysius’s understanding of hierarchy.[1] Lossky’s entire article is illuminating.

According to Dionysius, one’s perception of God is always dependent upon his creaturely capacity. Those higher on the hierarchical scale of being have greater capacity for the vision of God than those lower; and among human beings, purity affects one’s capacity either positively or negatively. One’s analogous or proportionate relationship to God determines his capacity for God. Dionysius explains, therefore, in The Celestial Hierarchy, that in a hierarchy, “the first passes on what he has received to the one who follows, with providence spreading the divine light to all in an analogous manner (ἀναλόγως).” (CH 3.3).[2]

The degree of one’s illumination always depends, for Dionysius, upon one’s analogous participation in God. As a result, the highest angels have the greatest capacity for God, and they are supposed to draw those below them into God’s light, in a manner that is consistent with the capacity of that lower rank of angels. “It is common,” writes Dionysius, “to all the deiform intelligibles [i.e., angels] to have, in general, a participation in wisdom and knowledge; either in an immediate and primary way or in a secondary and inferior way—this is no longer common, but it is determined for each according to its suitable proportionality (ἀναλογίας)” (12.2).[3] Dionysius here claims that a creaturely proportionality or analogy determines one’s relation to God, since it determines the degree of illumination that each is able to handle.

In The Divine Names, Dionysius offers his definition of the eternal causes or logoi of created things (a notion similar to Platonic ideas or forms), and he then states that we are meant “to be led up through analogous (ἀναλογικῆς) knowledge of these things to the Cause of all things, so far as possible (ὡς οἷοὶ)” (DN 5.9).[4] The degree of deification, for Dionysius, appears to be proportionate or analogous to one’s capacity for illumination.

Turning now to Maximus, both the concepts of “likeness” and of “analogy” are key to his theology. Smith’s blogpost speaks critically of the notions of “imitation” and “analogy.” I share his apprehension in principle, since these notions often function in unhelpful ways, separating the creator from the creature. I would agree, for instance, that in Thomas Aquinas’s use of these terms, we witness an incipient rupture between nature and the supernatural.

However, the mere use of imitation and analogy discourse does not yet imply a modern, nominalist distancing of creator and creature. Luke Steven, in his fine book Imitation, Knowledge, and the Task of Christology in Maximus the Confessor, discusses in detail what he calls the patristic “likeness epistemology,” which he explains is Platonic in origin: “Like knows like,” we might say. Or, “the pure in heart shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). Steven shows that both “likeness” (ὁμοιότης) and analogy (ἀναλογία) pervade Maximus’s writings.[5]

What is more, deification too, for Maximus, is according to likeness. He comments, for example, “The mystery transforms those who partake in a worthy manner into itself and, by grace and participation (χάριν καὶ μέθεξιν), renders them similar (ὁμοίους) to the one who is good as the cause of everything that is good” (myst. 21 [CCSG 69.48).[6] This is “likeness epistemology” applied straightforwardly to deification itself (cf. also 24 [69.58]). Likeness to God means that, through participation, those who are deified have the identically same energy that God has (qu. Thal. 59.8; [CCSG 69, 58])—though in a fitting and proportionate manner, in line with the particular creaturely nature and in line with the worth of one’s progress in virtue.[7] Likeness itself is not problematic. It is problematic only when it is removed from a participatory context. In Christian Platonism, imitation and likeness were, traditionally, participatory concepts.

I haven’t been able to find in Maximus the precise language of becoming God “in all but essence” (though I agree it expresses a Maximian sentiment). Jordan Wood uses the exact same expression in his recent book The Whole Mystery of Christ,[8] with an appeal to Ambiguum 41.5, which speaks of man “becoming everything that God is, without, however, identity in essence, and receiving the whole of God instead of himself.”[9] The “identity” (ταὐτότης) that we receive in divinization is an identity between God’s energies and ours (rather than an identity in essence).

The question is: What does Maximus mean when he speaks of an identity of human and divine energies? It is certainly a striking term, but we have to be careful not to jump to conclusions, for we do have to reconcile it somehow with Maximus’s obvious analogy discourse. Maximus states explicitly that in deification, God grants “the gift of divinization proportionately (ἀναλόγως) to created beings” (qu. Thal. 22.7).[10] Luke Steven summarizes, “When creatures achieve identity with God, it is not an unqualified meeting, but unfolds in a way that suits. It unfolds ‘in proportion’ (κατὰ τὴν ἀναλογίαν), as Maximus often puts it.”[11]

It is possible that Maximus is deliberately paradoxical, both affirming strict identity and putting limits on this identity. Or perhaps he simply means that the virtues of divinized human beings are the same ones as God’s virtues and in that sense identical. For example, our humility is a participation in Christ’s humility; our wisdom a sharing in Christ’s wisdom; and so forth. This would not preclude that, even when divinized, we will have our perfected virtues in an analogous, proportionate manner. Regardless of how we resolve the apparent tension in Maximus’s language, one need not be a Thomist to speak of divinization as taking place proportionately or by analogy.

The centrality of the notions of likeness and analogy in Maximus—and his use of them even in connection with deification—is a matter of some importance. The question concerns the uniqueness of Christ, which is to say, the question of how the divinization of his human nature relates to ours. Jordan Wood does not accept that the incarnation of Christ was unique, but I am quite sure that Maximus did. As I hope to make clear in my forthcoming book, on his understanding, Christ’s divinization is archetypal and perfect, whereas ours is (and always remains!) merely a participation in his; ours is always analogously patterned upon his.

Alexis Torrance has recently shown that the difference between Christ and other human beings was important also to Gregory Palamas.[12] Palamas appealed to John 1:16, “Of his fulness (ἐκ τοῦ πληρώματος) have all we received.” The glory of God—as well as every other one of the divine energies—comes to us via the hypostatic union. Torrance then makes the following noteworthy observation:

Palamas offers a distinction between the state of the deified and the state of Christ on the basis of this text in combination with Colossians 2:9 (‘in him dwelleth all the fullness [πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα] of the Godhead bodily’). While Christ is himself the fullness of God in the flesh, even the deified remain distinct insofar as their deification is utterly and forever contingent upon the person of Christ: they receive ‘of his fullness’ and never become ‘the fullness’ itself.

The uniqueness of Christ and of his divinization is important. Without an analogous difference between Christ’s divinization and ours, we cannot have the eternal progress (epektasis) that Smith acknowledges we may look forward to. Only if Christ’s divinization remains infinitely greater than ours can we infinitely progress. More importantly, only if his divinization is eternally and infinitely greater than ours can we recognize his uniqueness and adore him forever in the new Jerusalem: “Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever” (Rev. 5:12–13).

Analogy is not a Thomistic specialty; it belongs to the Great Tradition of the church.

[1] Vladimir Lossky, “La Notion des ‘analogies’ chez Denys le Pseudo-Aréopagite,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 5 (1930): 279–309, at 279, 292.

[2] My translation, HB. Cf. Lossky, “La Notion,” 298.

[3] My translation, HB. Cf. Lossky, “La Notion,” 299.

[4] My translation, HB. Cf. Lossky, “La Notion,” 303.

[5] Luke Steven, Imitation, Knowledge, and the Task of Christology in Maximus the Confessor (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2020).

[6] I quote from Maximus the Confessor, On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, ed. and trans. Jonathan J. Armstrong, with Shawn Fowler and Tim Wellings, SVPPS 59 (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019).

[7] I use Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Maximos Constas, FC 136 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018).

[8] Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 92.

[9] I quote from Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. Nicholas Constas, 2 vols., Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 28–29 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

[10] Cf. Steven, Imitation, 85.

[11] Steven, Imitation, 84.

[12] Alexis Torrance, Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology: Attaining the Fullness of Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 188

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Lectionary Texts: Isaiah 6:1-7; Psalm 29; Revelation 4:1-11; John 16:12-15.

Related

My friend Fr. Mark Bleakley—worldclass artist and Lead Designer for Willet Stained Glass Studios—personally designed and made it for me. He explains to me that he used Polish and German mouthblown glass. He painted, etched, and then kiln-fired the depictions, glazed each of the pieces, soldered lead strips between them, and framed the whole thing in woodstock. The process is unbelievable.

Mark gave my wife Linda and me a tour of the Willet Studios some years ago. Both the high artistic quality of the windows that he showed us and the intricacy of the technical process of making them are truly astounding. Look up his work on Facebook (Bleakley Stained Glass) or Instagram (@mystic.lamb.studio).

Believe it or not, Mark gave this window to me as a gift. I hardly need to add that the gift was entirely undeserved, which makes me all the more grateful for it.

On the picture, Mark poses with his handiwork in his home. I took the picture when Linda and I visited him and his wife Michelle in Winona, MN in October of last year.

Mark explained that the window is inspired by the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, which is currently housed in the Catholic Basilica of Our Lady of Walsingham, also known as the Slipper Chapel, in Norfolk, England.

The window depicts the Virgin as sedes sapientiae (“seat of Wisdom”), with the Word or Wisdom himself holding the cosmic orb—the T-O orb representing the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe. Seated on her heavenly throne, our Lady holds the Lily Rod, representing purity and sovereignty. She herself is Jesse’s rod (Isa. 11:1), which issues in the blossoming white fleur-de-lis (“lily flower”) of our Lord, upon whom, as the prophet says, rests the seven-fold Spirit of wisdom and understanding (Isa. 11:2). In line with a Christological reading of the Song of Songs, we are meant to see Christ in this flower—“the lily of the valleys” (Song 2:1).

The amber back of Mary’s throne reminds us that the seat is made of wood, while the amber backdrop also reveals the glow of the Spirit’s overshadowing. The throne serves also as an altar, covered by a baldacchino that is supported by two pillars with a total of seven rings (though the bottom one on the viewer’s right is not visible in Mark’s version), representing the sevenfold spirit of Isaiah 11 and alluding, at the same time, to the seven sacraments. Mark included amber flames for the tip of the two pillars, suggestive of divine wisdom.

Traditional iconography treats Mary as the Ark of the Covenant: Just as the Ark contained the Ten Commandments, so the Mother of God holds the eternal Wisdom of God—she is sedes sapientiae. Her altar/throne, therefore, is surrounded by the Cherubim of the Ark of the Covenant—the four living creatures (Ezek. 1:4–28; Rev. 4:6–8) of eagle, man, ox, and lion, traditionally associated with the four Gospels. Atop the baldacchino, the Spirit himself descends as the giver of all salvific gifts.

This depiction of salvation through the Virgin Mary has a broader, cosmic framework: The arch of Mary’s seat represents the rainbow—a sacrament of God’s faithfulness to all creation. The starry heavens surround the seat of wisdom, while the pillars of the earth on both sides of the window give stability to the cosmos and also shape the framework of the eternal kingdom of God.

Mary decisively tramples the Dragon underfoot, in fulfilment of the protevangelium of Genesis 3:15, “She shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel” (in the Douay-Rheims version). When the enemy is caught by a ray of sunlight, you can see its bright-yellow eye darting its furious look at you and its fiery tongue ready to inject you with its poison. But the Dragon’s defeat is unmistakable. His head is crushed, thanks be to God!

At my request, Mark placed one of the most famous sayings of the second-century bishop Saint Irenaeus in the banner at the lower end of the window: Vita hominis visio Dei (“The life of man is the vision of God”). This saying has been important to me for many years, and I am so grateful that I now get to read it every day.

I was rather nervous about driving this window all the way from Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Wisconsin (where I teach) to Langley, British Columbia (where we live). But we managed, and thankfully the window arrived in one piece. As you can see here, it now hangs prominently in one of our backyard windows.

I walk past it numerous times each day, reminded every time of God’s victory over the Serpent, of God’s astounding work of redemption, and of his faithful servant Fr. Mark Bleakley.

The purpose of the blood is clear: It unites man with God. The word atonement means at-one-ment. Blood atones for sin. “I have given [the blood] to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul” (Lev. 17:11). Blood unites the world with God.

The phrase “blood of the covenant” takes us back to Exodus. God gives the Ten Commandments. He gives, as well, a list of other laws. And then the ceremony starts (Exod. 24). The people stand around Mount Sinai, watching a devouring fire at the top. There, God’s glory dwells. They may not go up, for if they do and see the Lord, they will surely die (19:21). Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, with seventy of the elders, may go up. But they see God only from below, “under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness” (24:10). Moses and Joshua may go higher yet, “up into the mount of God” (24:13). Finally, Moses alone reaches the highest peak. He enters the midst of the cloud and stays there forty days and forty nights.

But before anyone climbs up, Moses arranges God’s covenant with Israel. Animals are piled upon the altar as burnt offerings and peace offerings. Moses tosses half their blood against the altar, to make it pure; then he throws the rest upon the people, so they too are pure. He then proclaims, “Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you” (24:8). “The blood of the covenant.” Here we have it—the phrase of the Epistle (Heb. 9) and the Gospel (Luke 22). It is the phrase also of the words of consecration in the Eucharist. The blood makes the covenant. The blood unites. The blood makes atonement, at-one-ment.

“Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Exod. 33:20). This is what God told Moses, and this is why Mount Sinai is divided into levels. People at the bottom; Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy elders up a way; Joshua higher yet; and only Moses entering the cloud. Sinai’s levels are levels of purity, levels of blessedness. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). Moses must be pure in heart, for he sees God inside the glory of the cloud.

The modern mind does not conceive of reality as mountainous. All it sees is flat, horizontal, wide-open fields because it perceives only the surface level—superficies in Latin. But Scripture opens our eyes to the mountains around us, and mountains denote hierarchy. Because we do not think of hierarchy, we also do not think of purity. You need purity to get to God; you need purity to climb the mountain. Hierarchy is about purity, and purity is about hierarchy. The two go hand in hand.

Note what the blood does: It gives purity. It purifies both altar and people. The blood unites man with God. The blood lets God come down and dwell among us. But “the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: Or what is the place of my rest?” (Acts 7:48–49). The tabernacle or temple is nothing but a copy or “shadow of heavenly things” (Heb. 8:5). God showed Moses the tabernacle’s blueprint by taking him inside the glory-cloud: God’s real, transcendent dwelling place became the tabernacle’s pattern (Exod. 25:40).

The glory-cloud—the heavenly tabernacle, God’s own transcendent home—is the place we long for. We want to be where Moses was. But only the pure in heart will see God. Only the pure in heart will reach the mountaintop. So, here is the goodness of the Lord. He takes the road to Golgotha. He offers up his life as sacrifice. And then he takes his blood up to the tabernacle at the top (Heb. 9). “It was therefore necessary,” says this chapter, “that the symbols (or copies) of things in the heavens should be purified with these rites” (Heb. 9:23). That is, the earthly tabernacle here below, as a copy of the heavenly dwelling, is purified with blood. We know about this also apart from Hebrews, for Moses had done exactly this with covenant blood before he climbed the mountain. He made the symbol pure. But note how the Hebrews passage continues: “But the heavenly things themselves [are purified] with better sacrifices.”

This is a puzzling statement. It makes sense for the earthly tabernacle to have blood splashed all over it, but “heavenly things”? Are they not super-pure already? Why do they need purifying? Think back to what St. Paul writes. He asks, in Ephesians, that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith (Eph. 3:17). We are temples of God; the Spirit of God dwells in us (1 Cor. 3:16). Heavenly things are not only at the top of Mount Sinai, where Moses peered into the heavenly realm. Heavenly things are also in our hearts. Our life goal is for the heart to become a mountaintop, a place for God himself to dwell. Does God dwell inside my heart? Does my heart have the purity of Moses’s heart? Am I prepared to see the glory of the Most High God?

Today we celebrate Good Friday. Sacrificial blood flows. Jesus, not just victim but priest as well, will use the blood to purify “heavenly things”—the temples of our hearts. It is sometimes hard to think of our hearts as akin to the temple blueprint. We have made a mess of it; we have turned it into a den of robbers. But look at the priest and see him sprinkling his own blood upon our hearts.

So, take heed of the apostolic teaching from Hebrews: “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience” (Heb. 10:22). Once our hearts are sprinkled with covenant blood, they become the top of Mount Sinai—a place to meet the Lord in purity.

Appears in First Things

We need both the notion of creation ex deo and Cappadocian immaterialism to sustain a genuinely participatory metaphysic. The Augustinian-Thomist approach relies unduly upon an Aristotelian-Plotinian view of matter. We should resist using creation ex nihilo to shore up the modern notion of nature as independent from God. The Christian teaching of creation ex nihilo opposes primarily the Greek—and especially Aristotelian—belief in the eternity of matter.

Participatory Metaphysics And Creation Out Of God Heyj 2025

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