Reader Max Leyf had a great comment that really popped my brain. You can tell it popped my brain when I think about it while reading other things. In this case, an article about Hypostatic Union. In order to help process complex ideas, I turn at times to my friend Hambone. Here is a lightly edited excerpt of our conversation:
Scoot: The idea of number being meaningless the way time is meaningless across the threshold of eternity–it strikes me as grokkable but I don’t grok it right now.
Hambone: OK Try this on for size: In the material world division is more definitive. Taken as a whole it’s much easier to look at a jar of marbles and say “there are 52 marbles in there”. But in the spiritual realm it’s all very obviously subcomponents of the divine and is more like an immense orb of liquified glass. That’s what I feel like he’s trying to say.
Scoot: Ahh, I like that. Like God created the universe but he didn’t create it outside of Him, it’s a part of Him, like an idea in His head rather than a construction from His hands. But God being God, his ideas are perfectly realized and so real.
Scoot: So within the material plane, number is a quantifiable thing because the material plane follows rules perfectly realized by God. But in the Spiritual plane, you transcend materiality and see creation as a perfectly realized idea. This would explain guardian angels too. A later commenter on the same article quoted JRR Tolkein saying that we are all motes suspended on a beam of light, and the light is God’s attention, but God’s attention personalized in the form of a guardian angel.
Scoot: Makes the hypostatic union make kinda sense too if you think of Christ as God entering his own perfectly realized idea.
Hambone: Yeah it’s kind of beautiful as a lens because it’s like the answer for “how many X are there in the spiritual realm” is “it is part of the One”–which by the way is where I think neo-platonists ended up.
We all construct logic in our heads to make sense of the spiritual reality and it looks a little funny when you take it out and show it to people. For me, a key aspect of my internal logic is the idea that the reflection of perfect is still complete, and that a perfectly formed idea is real.
The visual that put the first logical piece in my head is the idea of God looking into a mirror, and humans crawling out of it. God is perfect, so his reflection would be a fully realized person, with minor flaws because it’s reflected through an imperfect medium. When we say we are created in the “image of God” it’s like we climbed out of that mirror. This logic justifies an idea of perfection as being both incomprehensible and complete.
The origin of the second logical piece is from St Anselm’s proof of God, that (to badly paraphrase) an actual gun is more deadly than the idea of a gun, so an actual God must be more perfect than the idea of a God. It hints that the perfection of an idea just is the actual thing. If I imagine a gun, I could imagine the size, the shape, how it works, the color, the texture, the weight. If I could hold all those in my head, perfectly, it would seem real–and God can take the dimensions and the construction and every smallest detail and imagine them perfectly, so perfectly that it is a gun, not just an idea of a gun.
So the idea of creation being a thought of God is that God has the idea of the universe perfectly realized, the way he can realize a gun by imagining it perfectly. God’s perfect focus and attention manifests guardian angels, because the idea is perfect. The Hypostatic Union is God participating in His own idea of creation, as a perfectly realized idea of a man and also as Himself, in the same person.
Food for thought!
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 