Abiding, procession, and return

How Christ fulfils the Neoplatonic hope of return to the One

About three years ago, on the day before the Feast of the Ascension, Rev. Dr. Thomas Plant posted a video for the celebration of the feast. In the video, he lays out how central this feast is, and why it is important to celebrate it. He notes that the point of the ascension is not that God just popped down for a visit to leave us about 33 years later. No, Christ’s life is rather an archetype of our lives and our ultimate goal, to return to God.

Today, which happens to be the constitutional day of Norway, 17th May, is also the day before the feast. Tomorrow, (Western) Christians all over the world will be celebrating, while many Eastern Christians will celebrate the feast in a week. In Norway it is still a public holiday. But for some reason, it has been forgotten by many. Many churches here does not celebrate Mass on the day, and many churches, if they do have a service, will have a confirmation service (often without communion and perhaps with no mention of the ascension at all).¹ People have often asked me why we celebrate the ascension. They say that they understand why we celebrate Christmas and Easter, in commemoration of the incarnation, birth, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, but they don’t see the point of the ascension. What is so special about it? Is it not just that God came to us, as one of us, but that he has now returned? Inspired by Fr. Plant’s video, I will try to explain why this is not the case, and why the ascension of Christ is so central. For as I have already noted, the ascension, rather than being the disappearance of Christ, point us to our goal, to return to God. The life of Christ is the archetype, both of our lives and of this our ultimate goal. For when the only begotten Son, who is God, returned, He did not return as God alone, but precisely as Jesus, as true God and true man. In in Him, humanity has been lifted up to God. As St. Paul writes in Ephesians 2:6-7,² God has “raised us up with [Christ] and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.”

The point of Jesus’s life on earth, which began with God becoming a human being in wom of the Virgin Mary and which concluded with His ascension, was not that God just wanted to take a trip down, then run away after some thirty years. No, the point was that through Him, we might become “participants in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). The ultimate goal is communion with God. And to understand that, and to understand how important the ascension is to our faith, it is important to reflect a little on the Christian idea of creation.

The central relationship we have with God is that He is creator, while we are creatures. But God is not a creator in the same way as humana are. He does not merely take something that is there and shapes it, but He creates from nothing. As St. Paul puts it in Romans 4:17, God is the One who “calls into existence the things that do not exist.” And as God, He sustains all of creation. We do not exist in ourselves. We only exist because we participate in God, or rather, that we participate in a likeness of God.³ God sustains everything at all times.

God is the centre, the only true God, as Jesus says in John 17. All things, including us, proceed from God. But we are also created to return to Him and become one with Him, in His peace. As the Church Father Augustine put it, in a prayer to God: “You move us to delight in praising You; for You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”⁴ Yes, the meaning of life is to have fellowship with God. And that is exactly where salvation comes in. Because we have failed in our calling. When Adam ate of the fruit, he fell (and the entire creation with him). We can no longer return to God and seek oneness with Him by our own power, but we are dependent on help, on grace. As fallen human beings, who nevertheless have a calling to seek oneness with God, we are thus completely dependent on help. And it is precisely this help that we find in Jesus, the only fully righteous man, the God-man. He went forth from God, lived as a man, in love and obedience, and returned to God the Father, precisely as true God and true man.

Jesus’s life is a manifestation of this principle of creation. But how do we articulate it? According to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, we find the solution in St. Paul’s insistence that “from him [God] and through him and to him are all things” (Romans 11:36).⁵ The Areopagite puts it this way, in the Divine Names: “All things existing are from the Beautiful and Good, and in the Beautiful and Good, and turn themselves to the Beautiful and Good.”⁶ While this follows St. Paul, it also paraphrases Proclus: “Every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it, and reverts upon it.”⁷ This is a, if not the, central metaphysical doctrine of creation in Neoplatonism. We have the (divine) source or cause (Gk. monos or monḗ), the emanation of all things from this source (Gk. prodos or prohodos), and the return of all things to this source (Gk. epistrophḗ). For Proclus, the return of creation to its source, the One, is at the centre of theology and philosophy.⁸ And for Proclus, this return is only possible by divine help.

Now, it seems to me that if this principle, of abiding, procession, and return is correct, we find its fulfilment in Christ, and particularly in His earthly life, culminating in the ascension. He went through everything we go through, but without sin. He went forth from God by becoming human in the womb of Virgin Mary and He returned to God at the ascension. But between these two events, He also had to go through the consequences that came from the fall, including death, so that He could remake it from the inside. In Philippians 2:5-11, St. Paul writes about this, about Jesus:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Jesus became one of us, by becoming a human being, a creature, proceeding from God. And He proceeded as far down as possible, all the way to Hades, before returning both through the resurrection and ascension. And by being incorporated into Him, we get to participate in this return, this epistrophḗ. Christ took into Himself all that is human, so that all that is human could be saved.⁹ The divine Word, who saves us by becoming man, saves us by taking upon Himself all that is human, including death. And if we follow the principle of creation that I have just laid out, Jesus’s work of salvation, then, is a manifestation of our goal. We don’t just go out from God, as creatures, but we also have a goal to return to Him, as His children (together with the entire creation). But this is only possible because of Christ, who had to reconcile us to God. In order to reconcile man with God, Jesus had to go out from God and return to Him, as man, living the perfect life. He did what we are called to, but cannot, do.

In a way, we can say that this happened through the incarnation alone. By becoming man, and living as man, without sin, the divine Word went forth from God the Father and could return to Him, for He is true God. He lacks nothing to make this happen. But even if it is true, in a purely ontological or metaphysical sense, the point of Jesus’s work is not just to reconcile us to God objectively, but to reveal and proclaim this to us and invite us to take part in it, by to become one with Him. Because in the New Testament of the Bible we find an important distinction. On the one hand, we find the objective fact that Jesus offered Himself, “once for all” (Hebrews 7:27) and that He is, therefore “the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). But on the other side we find our subjective participation in this.¹⁰ St. Paul writes that Jesus “was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25). But this only becomes ours, subjectively speaking, by faith, as it says in the previous verses, Romans 4:23-24: “Now the words, ‘it was reckoned to him’, were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.”

The earthly and historical life of Christ, therefore, manifests the central goal for us as created human beings: that we who have gone forth from God should also return to Him and become one with Him. And at the same time He shows us that the only way we can achieve this is through participation in Him. And this is given to us, not in the abstract, but in concrete means, through the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments. Through baptism we were lifted up and now we can say, with Paul, that God has “raised us up with [Christ] and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6). And this is so because we, as creatures, cannot have direct contact with God, as the infinite creator who is beyond all the categories we have. We can only meet God in mediated ways, because we are created, physical beings and because God is Existence Itself, the One who holds everything up without Himself being a part of it.¹¹

In Ephesians 4:7-10, St. Paul writes about this, and about the ascension, that it is precisely about us being united with God, in Jesus, who has given us His gifts. He writes:

But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it is said, ‘When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.’

When it says, ‘He ascended’, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.

Yes, He has given us gifts – especially the Word, Baptism, and the Eucharist – so that we can achieve what is the goal of our life; to be filled by Him who fills all things, who fills all in all. The point, then, of the ascension is not that God has now gone back to His heaven and left us, but that Jesus has taken the work of creation back to God, and that our goal is to share in it through Him. Through His gifts, we are identified with Christ and become one with Him. And therefore we can also one day return to God. And even if we do not have this in all its fullness yet, we already participate in it because we are oriented towards Him, because we have become children of God in baptism.

The story of Jesus Christ, true God and true man, who came to us from God and returned to Him, is thus the story of our call. Fr. Plant says that while there is a physical law of nature saying that what goes up must come down, the spiritual law of nature is the opposite: What goes down must go up. But we can only achieve this through Jesus, the One who “descended into the lower parts of the earth” but who also “ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things” (Ephesians 4:9-10). Let us pray:

Grant, we pray, almighty God, that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens, so we in heart and mind may also ascend and with him continually dwell; who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.¹²

Notes:

1. In Norway, confirmation is very important culturally. So important, in fact, that secular humanists have their own alternatives to ecclesial confirmation. See here, here, here, here, here, and here. Also see this, this, and this.

2. If not otherwise noted, all quotations from Scripture follow The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Edition, Catholic Edition, Anglicized (Nashville, TN: Catholic Bible Press, 1995).

3. See Kjetil Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation: On Theurgic Participation in God, PhD dissertation (Durham University, 2021), 31-32.

4. Augustine, Confessions, book 1, 1:1.

5. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names (De Divinis Nominibus), IV, 10 (708A). For critical editions of the Greek text of the Areopagite, see Corpus Dionysiacum I, ed. Beate Regina Suchla (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990) and Corpus Dionysiacum II, 2nd ed., eds. Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). There are two complete translations in English, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, in collaboration with Paul Rorem (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987) and The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, 2 vols., trans. John Parker (London: James Parker and Co., 1897, 1899). If not otherwise noted, I use Parker’s translation, though if I find it necessary, I will alter the translation. For why, see Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation, 4, n2.

6. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, IV, 10 (705D).

7. Proclus, The Elements of Theology, 2nd ed., reprint, Greek and English, ed., trans., intro., and comm. E.R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), prop. 35, cf. props. 1-13, 23-39 (esp. 25-39).

8. See R. M. van den Berg, Proclus’ Hymns: Essays, Translations, Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 18-22; Radek Chlup, Proclus: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 62-82; Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 64; Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation, 13, 28-29, 33; Brendan Thomas Sammon, “Redeeming Chenu? A Reconsideration of the Neoplatonic Influence on Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae,” The Heythrop Journal 62 (2021): 971-987; Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, 2nd ed. (Kettering: Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2014), 121-133.

9. As St. Gregory of Nazianzus phrased it: “What has not been assumed has not been healed.” See Brian E. Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus (London: Routledge, 2006), 14.

10. See John 1:29; 6:51-58; 11:50-52; 15:1-8; Romans 3:21-25; 4:24-25; 5:18; 6:1-11; 10:14-17; Colossians 1:15-20; 1 John 2:2.

11. Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation, 165-198 (esp. 176-188).

12. Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England (London: Church House, 2000), 404.