“Know to what extent the Creator has honored you above all the rest of Creation: the sky is not an image of God, nor is the moon, nor the sun, nor the beauty of the stars, nor anything of what can be seen in Creation. You alone have been made the image of the Reality that transcends all understanding, the likeness of Imperishable Beauty, the imprint of True Divinity, the recipient of Beatitude, the seal of the True Light. When you turn to Him you become that which He is Himself. Nothing in Creation can be compared with your greatness. God is able to measure the whole heaven with His span. The earth and the sea are enclosed in the hollow of His hand. And although He is so great and holds all Creation in the palm of His hand, you are able to hold Him. He dwells in you and moves within you without constraint, for He has said, ‘I will live and move among them.’”
—Gregory of Nyssa (335-394), from a homily on the Song of Songs
The creation (the cosmos) is not made in the image of God, only humanity is made in the image of God, and God does not become anything in creation but human.
God loves all that God makes and sustains in life, everything breathing creature, and the constellations in all their fiery elements are the work of his fingers, but in all of creation God only becomes human.
As Christians when we say that God becomes what God loves, we are saying that in Jesus Christ God takes on the one human nature common to the whole race of humans.
God does not wed the divine nature to anything else in the cosmos but human nature.
Thank you for this. I understand that the impulse to sacralize creation arises from an appropriate sense of wonder at the complexity and intricacy of God’s work in it, and even from an appropriate desire to protect creation from the violation that we often perpetrate against it. But this can quickly slide into a deism or even a pantheism that ends up diminishing the gravity of God’s Incarnation. This thereby (ironically) opens nature and humanity itself up to yet more brutal violations (as in the thought of Peter Singer), and opens humans up to false theologies (as in Hegel). The Incarnation will forever remain a scandal, but it gives life precisely as that stumbling block.
Acts 17:28:
For in him we live and move and have our being.
Paul seems to recognize, in a poem about Zeus by the way, a recognition that Christ is apparent even in the mythologies of Zeus, and also recognizes that Christ is that in which we live and move and have our being.
Panantheism is not denying that there is something unique about the relationship of humanity with God, it simply recognizes that all things are God breathed into creation, that all things are connected to one another through this creationality (And quantum physics seems to prove this), and that all things are capable of reflecting the beauty and goodness of God.
Can you deny this when viewing the sunset? Or seeing the milky way at night?
It seems you’re setting up a strawman that isn’t really at the heart of panantheism. Sure, I get this criticism if you’re pushing against pantheism which says that the tree is equally God as anything else, but that’s not the heart of the idea behind panantheism is it?
I agree with Gregory but your follow up comments are in opposition to Maximus the confessor where man is the archetype of Creation and in uniting himself perichoretically to Man he draws in man and with man the cosmos and is united to all without division or confusion becoming all in all. God is united with all the cosmos only by means of being united to his Image.
Thus Genesis 1 describes the creation as a temple building text and man is portrayed in Genesis one and two as the cultic idol within said Temple. When the idol is inhabited by the deity the temple itself is deified but if the idol is abandoned the temple is subjected to futility.
To say that God is united with man and NOT with Creation is a misunderstanding of man’s role in The Cosmos. Thus the Cosmos Groans and travails awaiting the unveiling of the Sons of God for they are it’s Salvation.