Panopticon Control

Hans Boersma on Our Creaturely Rejection of a Theophanizing God

The great seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor famously insisted that the world is the embodiment of God. I agree, though I’d like to replace the noun embodiment with the verb embodying. Verbs are action words, and God is constantly embodying himself, continuously making himself present in a created mode. Embodying is what God does all the time.

I have a particular liking for the verbal form because it makes clear that the created world—including us human beings—exists in a dependent mode, ever relying upon God’s creative and providential activity. God’s merciful gaze brings the world into being, and should he remove his watchful eye for just a moment, creation would return to nothingness. Apart from God, nihil est—nothing exists— without God, and apart from him, we can do nothing (John 15:5).

To be sure, the metaphor of God casting his eye upon the world has its drawbacks. it may seem to imply distance between God and the world—the very thing we try to avoid by talking of God embodying himself. Vision, for us moderns, implies a gap between subject and object. But it wasn’t always so. For the ancient world, and for much of the Christian tradition, vision implied unity. it was thought that a subject unites himself with an object by means of vision. Vision allows the object’s nature or form to enter the subject. As a result, when I merely look at my wife, she already becomes part of me. The ancients recognized, better than we do, both the beauty of a relational, ocular world and the dangers of looking at the world in a haphazard or unseemly manner. To them, God gazing at the world implied that the world is part of him.

It is not without reason that, for us moderns, vision has come to imply distance. We like it that way. Insisting on a gap between two separate substances (subject and object, or God and world) is a way for us to assert control over the world around us. Back in the eighteenth century, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a glass prison, circular in shape, so that the jailers, from the center of the building, would be able to observe each and every cell around them at all times. The prison was meant to serve as a panopticon, an all-seeing eye. The same architectural control could be exercised in other settings, mused Bentham—workplaces, hospitals, asylums, and so on. Bentham’s dystopian plan for society was grounded in the notion that vision separates and enables managerial control. He appears to have forgotten that reality is relational in its very nature and that the jailer’s all-seeing eye would end up incarcerating jailer and prisoner alike.

Thankfully, most of us get nervous when we think about the panopticon’s imperious reach and would like to avoid panoptic social structures. Still, the way we think about reality—our metaphysics—operates on the same assumption as Bentham’s prison: moderns assume a gap between God and world, between subject and object. For our day-to-day affairs, the panopticon approach yields the mastery we crave.

Things Seen & Unseen

Christian Platonists—which is to say, the large majority of Christian philosophers and theologians until the rise of modernity in the late Middle Ages—have always implacably opposed any kind of gap between God and the world. Turning to Plato, they think of invisible realities (Plato’s world of forms or ideas) as the “really real” and of visible things as the shimmering forth or mirroring of these “really real” forms in a dependent, created mode.

St. Paul insists that “we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18). The contrast is between visible and invisible things; the former being temporal, the latter eternal. The reason Paul suggests that we look to invisible, eternal things is, no doubt, that they are more real than visible, temporal things. The former are, in Platonic terms, the “really real.”

The same kind of Christian Platonism shines through in the Letter to the Hebrews. Moses had seen the very dwelling-place of God on top of Mount Sinai, and the Lord instructed him to make the earthly tabernacle like his own, heavenly dwelling place (Ex. 25:40). The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the relationship between the two in markedly Platonic terms, insisting that God’s heavenly sanctuary is “the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man” (Heb. 8:2). By contrast, earthly priests serve at “the example and shadow (hypodeigmati kai skiai) of heavenly things” (8:5). Christ the High Priest came, therefore, “by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building” (9:11). God’s heavenly dwelling is the really real tabernacle, serving as the pattern for the shadowy tabernacle on earth.

Contrast, but Not Separation

The contrast may seem to imply a dualism: heaven and earth, truth and shadow, invisible and visible, eternal and temporal. And indeed, a kind of contrast is definitely in play.

In each of these pairs, the first is more real and greater than the second. This should not surprise us since—on a Christian under- standing—the really real archetypes of created things have their place within the eternal Logos of God. God is utterly transcendent. Many Christian Platonists speak of God, therefore, as beyond being (hyperousios)—indicating that God infinitely outstrips created categories, such that the human intellect cannot possibly comprehend him, whether now or in the hereafter.

But the contrast between the really real and its shadowy reflection does not imply a separation of two entities or substances. We dare not think of the Creator-creature relationship as marked by a spatial gap. Yes, God is transcendent, but because he is outside every human category whatsoever, he is also capable of becoming immanent by shimmering forth, embodying himself in a dependent, created mode.

Second Corinthians does not mean to suggest that invisible, eternal things are in a different geographical location than visible, temporal things. Likewise, though in Hebrews the earthly tabernacle is infinitely less real than God’s own heaven of heaven (Ps. 115:16), we cannot move from the one to the other by mapping the two on Google maps: God’s transcendent dwelling place is beyond whatever panopticon we may set up. The dualism that marks our panoptic world is very different from the Creator-creature contrast.

Creation is Theophany

Nowhere do we see the combination of transcendence and immanence as clearly as in the incarnation of the eternal Word in Jesus Christ. When God embodies himself in the human flesh of Jesus Christ, he does not become any less divine: he remains the beyond-being (hyperousios) God. It is, nonetheless, our human nature that the Word assumes. The Council of Chalcedon (451) famously insisted, therefore, that in Christ, the two natures are neither monistically confused or changed, nor divided or separated in dualist fashion.

Indeed, Maximus thought of this union between the two natures in Christ as the paradigmatic or archetypal embodiment of the eternal Logos. Other embodiments of the Word—such as creation, Scripture, or human virtue— are patterned upon his incarnation in Christ, and they have the fullness of Christ as their end or telos. Creation’s really real identity—and ours as human beings—is something we experience only in the eschaton, when the fullness of Christ will be revealed.

The embodiment language taken from Maximus counters any and all spatial dualism between God and the world. For Maximus, creation is God appearing in a lower, dependent mode. In other words, creation is theophany— the appearing of God. Again, I would prefer the verbal form: creation is God theophanizing, for he shimmers forth in embodied form.

We may use other terminology as well. Christian tradition often speaks of participatory metaphysics, meaning an understanding of reality (metaphysics) that views visible things (creation) as participating in invisible reality (the eternal Logos)—the language of participation (methexis) going back to Plato and Plotinus. With equal justification, we may use the language of sacramental ontology, thereby highlighting that the nature of being (ontos) is sacramental: sensible objects are sacraments (sacramenta) that make present the truth or reality (res) of God. God is really present in this world, taking the embodied form of created things.

Living as Creatures Again

To some, this may reek of pantheism, an utter confusion of God and world. And I agree that such a confusion would be deeply problematic, for we need not just divine immanence but equally divine transcendence. Creatures, so the Eastern fathers rightly teach us, participate only ever in God’s energies—not his essence. God remains transcendent.

But in my experience, the fear of pantheism often bespeaks modern dualism: a desire to keep Creator and creature separate as two distinct substances or beings. The reason for our fear is typically that we have subconsciously bought into a modern metaphysic that has rejected participation, sacramentality, theophanizing, and divine embodying. The panopticon has separated us from God, and we lust after the autonomous control we think it provides for us. We need to learn to live as creatures once again—embodying God’s life on earth.

Appears in Touchstone March/April 2025 issue found here: https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/issue.php?id=249