Metaphysics and Mattering to God

As we go about our Lenten penances, probably the last thing we inquire about is the state of our metaphysics.

About a decade ago, I read an excellent post on despair on Catholic Kung Fu, written by Anne Carpenter, who is Assistant Professor of Theology at St. Mary’s College, and who has written an important text on Hans Urs van Balthasar’s linking of the poetic and the philosophical. I also had the pleasure of meeting her a couple of times in my visits to America.

Her blog post is important lenten reading, I think, because it prompts a reader to think about what the economy of salvation actually involves, and our particular place in that economy.

Many a Church-goer would be familiar about that most basic Scriptural narrative, God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son (John 3:16) and in his Son the whole universe obtains salvation.

“Maybe for the world and the cosmos”, some might quietly reply. “But what about me? Where is the evidence of this cosmic transformation in the grains of my own experience? Or is this concern for salvation in the particularities of my own life a narcissistic concern for things that do not really matter in the greater scheme of things?”

Some might even ask, “Do I only matter to God when I am dead? Will I only begin to be of significance when my earthly existence ends?”

It is easy to think of oneself as the recipient of God’s transformative power when times are good or when such power is demonstrated in extraordinary circumstances. Such times however, are rare, and the experience of disappointment or even trauma can feel to be more basic fact of life. When we encounter this data, we might wonder if we can ever be the specific recipient of anything except the Cross, and whether any specific consolation is the reserve for anyone in particular. The author and podcaster Hope Johnson framed this sense in a more biblical mode, invoking Malachi 1:2, in which we can find ourselves in the position of those who hear God saying “I have loved you”, with the accusatory question “how have you loved us”?

We can be tempted to think that God’s salvation and mercy is the special reserve of more “universal”, and thus more important, things like “creation” or “humankind”, and not any human in particular (let alone myself in particular). After all, Isaiah did write that “all mankind is grass…the grass withers and the flower wilts” (Isa 40:8). Therefore, when it comes to the operations of God, it almost seems that one’s own life is secondary to the seemingly greater good of all of creation, as if the particularities of one’s own existence stands in the way of the universal impact of God’s grace.

What we sense is a deep metaphysical question, where we wonder if there necessarily has to be a dichotomy between one’s particular circumstances and the transformation of creation in its entirety. To put it in more metaphysical terms, is the particular necessarily separate from and subordinate to the universal?

A response could be glimpsed from an interview with Adrian Pabst on the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Speaking on Platonist metaphysics, Pabst sought to point out that the supposedly Platonic dichotomy between the universal (or “forms”) and the particular (“appearances”), is more the result of caricature than actual analysis. Pabst argues that an analysis of Plato’s metaphysics should reveal a deep and complex connection between universals and particulars.

On the one hand, the universals are hierarchically prior to particulars. However, for Plato, these universals are so fertile and rich that they will (and must) spill over ecstatically into the particular, so that the particular becomes a real manifestation of the universal.

The earliest expressions of the Christian faith grows out of this Platonic foundation. It is what underpins our understanding of the sacramental life, and that life is also what undergirds the Christian view of the world and God’s relationship to it. The economy of divine love is not confined to some abstract universal, but will spill over and seep into every fibre of the particular. The key difference between the Christian and the Platonic is that while the latter says that the universal must spill over into the particular, the former says that God is perfectly free and so does not have to express his love in the particular. However, from the Church Father’s onwards, it has always been the Christian claim that God wants to manifest the divine economy in particular things.

The first creation account in the book of Genesis was meant to show that the God of the Hebrews transcended the particular. And still, the patriarchs, the prophets and the psalms show time and time again that it was through one particular life that the universality of God’s operations unfolds (God lifted up Abraham out of obscurity, a nation out of slavery, a poor man from the dungheap).

A similar picture appears in the Gospels. The seemingly abstract gloss of God “saving each and every one of us” cannot ignore the fact that the particulars of “each” and “one” is bound up in the meaning of the sentence. In announcing the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus not only announced a schema of commandments called for by the new universal sovereign. The universal sovereign’s version of salvation involved stooping down to pick mud up to smear on the eyes of a blind man, lifting a girl out of death, healing a hemorrhage through the hem of his cloak. Even in the passion, one must not forget that it is through the particularity of a wooden cross and a body of a 33-year-old Hebrew that salvation of the whole cosmos came about. This logic continues in our sacramental life, especially in the Eucharist, when the universal Lord is fully manifest in a particular piece of bread which is then consumed by a particular body, entering through the gates of an individual’s mouth.

This means that, in the operations of salvation, particulars do matter, and as such, we matter in particular. A God who has an account for “every hair on your head” will not leave the beneficiaries of his grace to something as abstract as a universal, since the universal unfolds itself in the particulars of our existence. Thus, while creation “groans in waiting for manifestations of the Son of God” (Rom 8:19), while we rightfully wait for the salvation of the world, each one also rightfully makes this expectant claim “restore me again to health and give me life” (Isaiah 38:16).

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