In Star Trek the original series, “The Return of the Archons”, the crew beams down to a planet controlled by Landrew, who is an analogy of some people’s view of God. The unseen one uses telepathy and brain washing to control people through his monk-looking creatures who zap those “outside the body” with sticks to “absorb” them. After being absorbed into the body, also known as “the good”, one only knows a mindless bliss and says things like “peace, tranquility, love, paradise”. However upon encountering those outside the body who have free will, the members of the body can become hostile. Kirk’s speech at the end promotes free will and creativity as activities of the soul, and that Landrew has made his people soulless, and is thus evil.

This episode is an obvious confrontation of the creator’s idea of religion, and is justified in much of the critique the Orthodox have of the Catholic Church (see Energetic Procession which draws on St. Maximus) and subsequent Protestant Churches. If one does not understand the distinction between God’s Essence, which is Deity, and His Energies, which I understand is His Deifying love, then one’s view of union with God is one of absorption into His essence. The Council of Chalcedon decreed the nature between the divine and the human natures of Christ, which I believe can also be extended to our union with God,

“We confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division, or separation (in duabus naturis inconfuse, immutabiliter, indivise, inseparabiliter). The distinction between natures was never abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis.”

Our human nature isn’t absorbed into God, but remains distinct in its union.

The Star Trek language about becoming part of the body was a little too close for comfort, but perhaps we can make another distinction in understanding the nature of a body. If one’s idea of God is a vague, disembodied Spirit, then the members of His “body” would also loose their distinctions. If we have a more incarnational view of the many parts of creation, then the recapitulated parts still remain distinct with different functions, as St. Maximus describes.

I’m still plugging away at Homer, which is interesting and engaging, but yesterday I decided to pick up Dr. Jones’ intro to St. Dionysius again. His discussion of how the cause remains in the caused is illuminating,

[St.] Dionysius gives a striking expression of this threefold structure of divine causality in his celebration of the divine eros. For the divinity is eros

manifest of itself and through itself, a good procession of the separated unity, a simple self-moved, erotic motion – active of itself, before be-ing, in the good, flowing forth out of the good to beings, returning again into the good; in this the divine eros is excellently manifested to be without beginning and without end. The divine eros is like an everlasting circle – moving around in unerring convolution through the good, out of the good, in the good, into the good, always abiding, proceeding and returning in the same, and according to the same. (Divine Names IV.14.712C-713A) (p.41 in the Introduction to The Divine Names and Mystical Theology)

I’m getting into the part about hierarchies now and am wondering about the Platonic principle of diminishment from the cause when the caused starts to cause.