A Brief Word on Providence

Theological Letters

Greetings subscribers. My apologies for the delay in posting. I have been digging my way out of work that piled up over the Thanksgiving holiday.

I found myself in a vulnerable conversation with a new acquaintance, “Petey,” who recently went through a very painful divorce. More accurately, “Petey” is going through a painful divorce. The pains of such a tragedy hardly end when the ink dries on the legal papers. I know because, though I rarely speak of it publicly, I went through my own divorce nearly two years ago, and the pain of it still lingers with great regularity.

Such is the reason that “Petey” and I began to speak about such intimate things. Many of the parallels were uncanny, and I, being a bit further down the road than he, could offer a little of the perspective that comes with the passing of time. Following our in-person chat, the sharing continued over email. I decided to write to him with a brief word on providence and an offer to remain a listening ear. That word I now share with you.

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Dear “Petey,”

I appreciate your vulnerability about the pains of divorce. My heart breaks with how identifiable it all is. I went back and forth about whether to say anything more. But I have chosen to risk it. Forgive me if these thoughts are unwelcome.

First, I know all too well the sense of despair that sets in as the sun retreats and questions set in about whether it will always be this way. The demons are very active in these witching hours. They wish for you, and for me, to look only backwards at the things that cannot be changed, precisely because the immutable nature of the past has an acute power to excite despair. But know that despair is not of God. Repentance is. God excels at synergy, drawing marvelous goods that he wills out of tremendous evils that he wills not. Repentance looks to the future with faith in God’s providential commitment to our good, his power to weave even the ugliest evil into a beautiful tapestry, and assurance that, though we cannot change the past, we can and do shape the future. Speaking from experience, there is value in coming to recognize the demonic nature of despair and learning to proactively turn to God in the face of it. We are called to be Peter, not Judas — turning to Christ in the face of lament in hope of restoration, not to the noose where hope is abandoned.

Second, allow me a lengthy aside on providence in order to make an otherwise simple point. Since my divorce, I have often cried out to God, pleading for his mercy, wishing for him to break the deafening silence and palpable loneliness. Many, myself included, wish for God to “show up” in these dark moments, and we imagine that he should do so by appearing, showing up as a new actor on our painfully barren stage, as it were. But, from what I can tell, the normative mode of divine providence is that God acts in and through his creatures. Very rarely in Scripture does God (the Father) act in an unmediated fashion.¹ Only two instances come to mind, his declaration at Theophany² that Jesus is his Son and the same at the Transfiguration. Most of God’s acts are mediated, be it through the Son and the Spirit or, more often, through an angel, a Saint, an otherwise natural element, or a holy place or artifact. In short, the normative mode of providence seems to be that God acts in and through his creatures.

Admittedly, the suggestion that God rarely acts in unmediated fashion could conjure the wrong image, something very unlike my intended meaning. The risk is imagining an aloof lord who has no time for his subjects. Rather than tending to their needs directly, he sends servants to them. Such a picture may feel more like neglect than providence. And to those who are deeply hurting, it may stir only despair. After all, in my pain, I want God, not a paltry substitute. Hence, it’s important that I clarify my meaning, lest it be clouded by such images.

As you well know, we Orthodox have a doctrine of divine energies. That is to say, there is a distinction between the nature of God — what he is in himself — and the energies that express that nature, much like the way there is a distinction between the nature of fire as such and the operations of heating and lighting that express that nature or between the nature of mind as such and the articulation of that nature in speaking or reasoning.³ Just as we come to know fire through its heat and light or learn the mind of a person through his rational articulations, so we come to know God by his energies that “come down to us,” as Basil puts it, revealing to creatures the nature of God — his holiness, miracles, wisdom, providence, and so on.⁴

Importantly, these same energies are communicable to creatures, capable of taking up residence in angels, men, objects, and places. Such is central to the concept of Saints (divinely energized people), relics (divinely energized objects), and holy places (divinely energized locations). I’m sure you know all this, and I’m sure you also know the favored analogy of the Eastern fathers to illustrate such deification, namely, the analogy of fire and metal. The heating and lighting energies of fire, which articulate its nature, can be communicated to metal such that, though the metal remains metal, it displays the energies of fire, emitting heat and light. So, in the same way, God communicates his energies to creatures, producing deified people, places, and things — creatures who display in their person divine attributes.⁵

Such a vision of the relationship between God and world is exceedingly relevant to how one envisions providence. Our world is comprised of a hierarchy of beings, stretching from the least godlike to the most godlike, from rocks to man and on into the hierarchy of angels.⁶

Within this hierarchy, the higher, more godlike beings are made to minister to the lower, drinking deeply of God in order to carry their greater portion to more humble beings, lower in the chain. Pseudo-Dionysius, for example, points out that angels — “ministering spirits,” as St. Paul calls them⁷ — are named for divine attributes precisely because they are made to serve as conduits, carrying that particular energy into the world. Likewise, man is often referred to as a microcosm because, as Genesis so aptly illustrates, our peculiar nature joins the mortal things of creation — organic, earthly things — with the higher, celestial things of creation — the spiritual and intelligent realm.⁸ And this merger has a purpose, namely, to minister energies accessible to only icons of God to the irrational things of nature that lack this image.

Once glimpsed, the beauty of such a vision is breathtaking. The Holy Trinity radiating divine life and light, which flows into spiritual creatures in order that such energies may create Saints and cascade through them to the lower things of creation, raising up lesser parts of nature from their lowly estate to partake of their Maker in a degree that exceeds their innate limitations. Or as Pseudo-Dionysius explains it,

… [T]he goal of a hierarchy, then, is to enable beings to be as like as God as possible and to be at one with him…. Hierarchy causes its members to be images of God in all respects, to be clear and spotless mirrors, reflecting the glow of primordial light and indeed of God himself. It ensures that when its members have received this divine splendor they can then pass on this light generously and in accordance with God’s will to beings further down the scale.⁹

This cosmic vision informs the concept of spiritual mediation within the Eastern fathers. While we often think of a mediator as one who separates, standing in between two parties — Talk to my attorney, not to me — the fathers speak of spiritual mediators as those who bring near, bridging the gap between two things. According to Chrysostom, for example, Christ is the one mediator (μεσίτης) between God and man (1 Tim 2:5) because he unites these two natures in his person, not because he occupies a space between them. A mediator, in this sense, is more accurately a conduit.¹⁰ To draw on the fire-metal analogy, a branding iron mediates fire to the beast that it brands, bringing the fire near, carrying its energies within it, and I am sure the fire feels anything but distant to the beast.

When saying that the normative mode of providence is that God acts in and through his creatures, I do not mean that he “sends” someone to us while remaining aloof. Quite the contrary, I mean that God is present in his creatures, just as the fire is present in the metal. The branded beast truly experiences the energies of fire in the metal that carries them near. Had our world never fallen into sin, were it saturated with God as Pseudo-Dionysius describes, divine light would be everywhere present, filling all things, pervading and permeating every creature. And like Saints past whose spiritual eye has been opened to see the uncreated light, so we, too, would see the world as it was made to be, a world ablaze with divine glory. God would never feel distant nor hidden, for his energies would flow freely through every inch of his handiwork, and in seeing his creatures, we would also see God, who illumines each and every one.

I will resist a tangent on the problem of evil and the problem of divine hiddenness, except to say that I believe the point is significant to both problems. For such a picture of providence means that creatures truly have the capacity to cut off the world from God, restricting the flow of divine light to the rest of creation, darkening the cosmos by their rebellion. Beings who are made to mediate God to others are also capable of serving as blockades to him. God often feels hidden precisely because he is — by us. Not only has man blinded the eye of his soul, making us incapable of seeing the sunlight that shines upon us, but we, the conduits of God, regularly refuse him, shutting off the valves of divine light, choking their movement in our world. So often, the answer to questions about evil are not only located in the free will of creatures to do evil but also in our own refusals to serve as instruments of God, executing good and counteracting such evils.

All of this is an extremely long aside for me to say this. In the dark nights following divorce, I often pleaded with God to not abandon me, to not leave me alone in my despair. I would ask God to act. I wished for him to speak or to show himself. Perhaps God does, on rare occasions, perform such miracles, appearing and speaking to those in such darkness. But given what I’ve said on providence, the more likely answer is a mediator, an obedient servant in whom God lives, who is moved by his Spirit to be the voice or hands of God — his coworker.¹¹ And as I said, I do not mean as a substitute. Quite the contrary, I mean something synergistic, you or I hearing the voice of God in the voice of the person who is energized by God. I am sure that were I to speak with St. Paisios and his face were to glow with divine light, as some who visited him upon Mt. Athos witnessed, I would not wonder where God is. I would not think him distant nor hidden. I would know I am seeing him in the monk's face and hearing him in Paisios’ words.

Now, I am far from an Elder Paisios. I am not much of a Saint. Candidly, I am truly, not rhetorically, an unworthy and unprofitable servant of Christ, and I know you do not (yet) know me well. But despite my spiritual inadequacies, which are many, and despite being a relatively new acquaintance, know that, for what little divine light there is in me, I am here. When the demons come for you, know that I am here should you ever want to talk or cry or simply not be alone. He is in me to do that for you.¹² And know that I’m praying for you.

Sincerely,

Dr. Jacobs

—

Nathan A. Jacobs, Ph.D.
Scholar in Residence of Philosophy and Religion in the Religion in the Arts and Contemporary Culture Program (RACC)
Vanderbilt University, Divinity School
http://nathanajacobs.com
https://vanderbilt.academia.edu/NathanAJacobs

1. I am here using “God” in accord with standard New Testament usage. Both the NT and the Eastern fathers use “God” in one of two ways, referring to God the Father (when including the definite article, ὁ θεός) or as a predicate, ascribing divinity to the subject — e.g., “the Word was God” (when dropping the article, θεός). On the point, see Nathan A. Jacobs, “On ‘Not Three Gods’ — Again: Can a Primary-Secondary Substance Reading of Ousia and Hypostasis Avoid Tritheism?” Modern Theology 24:3 (2008), pp. 344, 361, and n. 103. Regarding the Latin use of “God” (deus) to refer to the “Triune God,” such a use is absent from the Eastern fathers. See John Behr, “Response to Ayers: ‘The Legacy of Nicaea, East and West’,” Harvard Theological Review 100 (2007), pp. 145-52, p. 147f.

2. “Theophany” refers to the baptism of Christ, which revealed the Holy Trinity, the Father speaking from Heaven about the Son who is being baptized while the Spirit alights upon him: Matthew 3:13–17, Mark 1:9–11, and Luke 3:21–22.

3. The definitive work on the essence-energies distinction is David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For an example of my own understanding of the distinction, see Nathan A. Jacobs, “The Metaphysical Idealism of Eastern Church Fathers,” in The Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism, eds. Joshua Farris and Benedikt Paul Göcke (Routledge, 2022), sect. IV.

4. Basil of Caesarea, Epistula, 234.1.

5. I here use “attribute” in the Eastern sense of the term. Unlike in Latin theology where attribute refers to an essential property of the divine nature, the Eastern fathers consistently identify the divine attributes as processions (πρόοδοι) or energies (ἐνέργειαι) that freely articulate what God is supersubstantially. See, e.g., Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium, in Gregor Nysenni Opera, 10 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2009), II.89, 201, 582; III.1.103-4; III.5.59-60; III.6.3; Gregory of Nazianzus, Orationes, 30.17; 38.7 (PG 36.125b-c; 317b-20a). Notice that Maximus the Confessor distinguishes God from his works (ἔργα) that did not begin in time, and amongst these “works” are God’s goodness, immortality, infinity, simplicity, and more. Maximus, Capita theologica et oeconomica, 1.54 (PG 90.1104a-b); De charitate centuria, 3.24-5 (PG 90.1032c).

6. This hierarchy is sometimes called the “Great Chain of Being.” For a standard survey of Chain of Being metaphysics, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard university Press, 2001). I discuss the medieval understanding of the chain of being in my letter, “Reflections on the Ontological Argument: Is it Nicene?”

7. Epistle to the Hebrews 1:14. I here favor tradition, which attributes this epistle to Saint Paul, though contemporary scholarship disputes Pauline authorship.

8. Such a merger of the higher and lower things of creation is the basis for the Eastern patristic doctrine that man is a microcosm of creation. See, e.g., Gregory of Nyssa, De anima et resurrectione (PG46:28b). For more on this and the relationship between the higher and lower natures in Eastern patristic thought, see my post, “The Eastern Patristic View of the Soul through the Eighth Century” (also in audio form here), and my article, “On Whether the Soul is Immortal According to the Eastern Church Fathers.”

9. Pseudo-Dionysius, Angelic Hierarchy, 2.

10. John Chrysostom, Hom. in 1 Tim. 7; also Hom. in Phil. 7. I flesh out this point further in my letter, “Why is Mary Called ‘Mediatrix’ in Eastern Orthodox Theology?”

11. My choice of the word “coworker” is rather intentional, as this is the common translation of συνεργός, a word that St. Paul uses often and which captures well my point concernig providence. The term conveys a convergence of two operations. Hence, St. Paul often speaks of God energizing an actor who, in turn, acts cooperatively, producing a synergistic act — one simultaneously of God and of the actor, much like our branding iron, whose branding is simultaneously an act of the iron and the fire. For this reason, St. Paul often employs the passive/middle voice when speaking about energetic acts, leaving the acting agent ambiguous, since the act belongs to both God and the energized creature. For an extensive treatment of this particular topic, see David Bradshaw, “The Divine Energies in the New Testament,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 50 (2006), pp. 189-223.

12. Lovers of C. S. Lewis may recognize this phrase from The Great Divorce.