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.

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Hans Boersma is the Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Professor in Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary.

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