Heller M, Woodin W.H. (eds.) Infinity. New research frontiers (CUP, 2011)(ISBN 1107003873)(O)(327s)_MAml_

the “christian infinite” 263of transcendence. For transcendence, so understood, must also be understood as anegation of the finite, as well as a kind of absence or positive exclusion from the scaleof nature; the One is, in some sense, there rather than here. To fly thither one must flyhence, to undertake a journey of the alone to the alone, a sweetly melancholic departurefrom the anxiety of finitude, and even from being itself, in its concrete actuality: self,world, and neighbor. For so long as one dwells in the realm of finite vision, one dwellsin untruth.8. One must keep all of this in mind when considering the metaphysical implicationof Nicene theology. For the doctrinal determinations of the fourth century, along withall of their immediate theological ramifications, rendered many of the establishedmetaphysical premises on which Christians had long relied in order to understand therelation between God and the world increasingly irreconcilable with their faith, and atthe same time, suggested the need to conceive of that relation – perhaps for the firsttime in Western intellectual history – in a properly “ontological” way. With the gradualdefeat of subordinationist theology, and with the definition of the Son and then theSpirit as coequal and coeternal with the Father, an entire metaphysical economy hadimplicitly been abandoned.9. These new theological usages – this new Christian philosophical grammar – didnot entail a rejection of the old Logos metaphysics, perhaps, but certainly did demandits revision, and at the most radical of levels. For not only is the Logos of Nicaeanot generated with a view to creation, and not a lesser manifestation of a God who issimply beyond all manifestation; it is, in fact, the eternal reality whereby God is theGod that He is. There is a perfectly proportionate convertibility of God with his ownmanifestation of himself to himself; and, in fact, this convertibility is nothing less thanGod’s own act of self-knowledge and self-love in the mystery of his transcendent life.His being, therefore, is an infinite intelligibility; his hiddenness – his transcendence –is always already manifestation; and it is this movement of infinite disclosure that ishis “essence” as God.10. Thus it is that the divine Persons can be characterized (as they are by Augustine)as “subsistent relations” – meaning not that, as certain critics of the phrase hastilyassume, the Persons are nothing but abstract correspondences floating in the infinitesimplicity of a logically prior divine essence, but that the relations of Father to Sonor Spirit, and so on, are not extrinsic relations “in addition to” other, more original“personal” identities, or “in addition to” the divine essence, but are the very reality bywhich the Persons subsist; thus, the Father is eternally and essentially Father because heeternally has his Son, and so on (Augustine, De Trinitate VII.i.2; John of Damascus, DeFide Orthodoxa I.14). God is Father, Son, and Spirit; nothing in the Father “exceeds”the Son and Spirit. In God, to know and to love, to be known and to be loved are allone act, whereby he is God and wherein nothing remains unexpressed. Furthermore,if it is correct to understand “being” as in some sense necessarily synonymous withmanifestation or intelligibility – and it is – then the God who is also always Logos isalso eternal Being: not a being, that is, but transcendent Being, beyond all finite being.11. Another way of saying this is that the dogmatic definitions of the fourth centuryultimately forced Christian thought, even if only tacitly, toward a recognition of the fullmystery – the full transcendence – of Being within beings. All at once the hierarchyof hypostases mediating between the world and its ultimate or absolute principle had