“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.”
John 1:1,2.
Following Edith Stein in her discussion of Essential and Eternal Being we see that all “meaningful” existents are enclosed by the “divine intellect” and their “archetypal-casual ground” in the divine nature. The coherence of existents, of finite being, is incorporated within the Logos. The Logos, Dr. Stein tells us, is the divine nature as well as the “manifold” of all created things inherent in the divine intellect and “reflecting the divine nature in images and likenesses.” The Logos is the divine nature and the “manifold” of finite created “existents.”
The Incarnation, F.W.J.von Schelling writes is, “ . . . the most important and most essential” element of his project. David Walsh tells us in his magisterial “The Modern Philosophical Revolution”that “autonomy” keyed the German Idealists from Kant’s insight that autonomy signaled the “supreme dignity of all rational being,” to Hegel’s “insistence that only a living out of the tensional demands of existence is adequate to the idea of autonomy” . . . to Herr Dr. Schelling’s idea that “the exercise of divine autonomy as the deepest revelation of its possibility. It is the freedom of Christ, he constantly emphasizes, that is the key to the entire process, for Christ was under no necessity to pour himself out on behalf of fallen humanity, to empty himself of the form of divinity in order to assume the form of sinner.” So this Incarnation is the Absolute act of the restoration of creation, the self-abnegation of Infinite Being in the Ultimate act of Love, immersed in Freedom, unconditioned. A gift offered in history.
Dear God, forgive me my sins.
Merry Christmas to all.
