Ancient Views of Space
- Plato: Described space as a receptacle, but only metaphorically. It’s the backdrop for events, a formless, passive medium. The challenge: Plato had to use spatial language to describe a realm beyond space and time.
- Aristotle: Envisioned space as a container (Physics, Book IV). He saw the Platonic realm as the “stuff” or substrate, linked to the concept of quantity. Space is a vessel, always in contact with its contents. There’s no void. Problem: Aristotle equated being in a place with a specific volume, which led to equating that volume with a spatial magnitude.
- Stoics: Space moves as a body or agent fills it. This is closer to the biblical view, but the Stoics ended up making God part of the world, the active principle. Their ideas degenerated.
- Origen: Accepted the Stoic idea that limit and comprehension go together. God’s comprehension of all things limits them. Origen began to develop a relational view of space.
- Athanasius: Rejected the Platonic and Origenic bifurcation of the world (cosmos aesthetos and cosmos noetos). The Nicene linking of incarnation and creation made this impossible. The mediator, who is homoousion, fulfills the space relations between God and man. Creatures can’t make room for God. The Father-Son relations involve “abiding” and “dwelling” where each wholly rests in the other. The Son is the “place” where the Father is. This stretches the concept of “place” and demands a topological language to express the dynamic interconnection of “place” and “place.” This requires different paradigms under divine revelation. Space is a differential, open-ended concept, like a coordinate system between space, time, and relation to God.
Modern and Reformation Conceptions
- Receptacle Mode of Thought: Thinking in terms of “x is in y.” Useful in classical physics, but problematic theologically.
- Ancient Greeks: Equated “finite,” “comprehensible,” and “limit.” An actual infinite was inconceivable. Christian revelation challenged this, as God is infinite. This means God doesn’t stand in a spatial or temporal relation to the universe. The receptacle notion was applied to the sacraments, with grace operating as if in a vessel.
- Patristic Notion of Space: The seat of relations or meeting place between God’s activity and the world. A differential, open concept, unlike the closed Aristotelian system.
- Duns Scotus: Began correcting medieval problems by focusing on God’s creative will.
Extra Calvinisticum and Luther
- Lutheran Problem with Calvinism: Stemmed from the Lutheran “container” view of space. Calvinists could describe Christ ascending or leaving heaven without abandoning governance because they saw space relationally.
- Luther’s Eternal Simultaneity: God’s presence reduces all spatial relations to a mathematical point. Luther recovered the living, active God but never escaped the receptacle notion’s dualism. This makes it impossible to discern Christ’s real presence at different times.
Newton and the Consequences
- Newton’s View: Held the receptacle view but made it infinite. Space and time are in God as a container. Since they’re infinite, they’re attributes of God. This means God can’t truly become incarnate; a box can’t become one of the objects it contains. This is why Newton was suspected of Arianism.
Incarnation, Space, and Time
- Review: Receptacle notion: finite (Aristotle) and infinite (Newton). Relational notion: Maybe Plato, Stoics, Nicene, and Reformers.
- God’s Relation to the World: An infinite differential, but the world’s relation to God is a created necessity. God is free from spatio-temporal or causal necessity.
- Einstein and Theological Geometry: If Einstein is correct, old dualisms are false. The Incarnation sets up a coordinate system between space, time, and relation to God. We must develop thought and language within this field.
- Economy: The orderly purpose and control of God, introduced by the Incarnation.
- Topology: We must connect different ways of speaking about “place” according to Christ’s human and divine natures.
- Mind and Time/Space: [The text cuts off here. Let me know if you’d like me to address this section as well.]
In short, the Patristics got it right. Space it’s not a vessel in which energy is, but the product of his will and actions (energy). Two manifolds in eternal simultaneity. E=ST which is incredibly close to Farrell’s notion of topological metaphor and resonant analogy, E=ST is symbolic representation of the generalized Aetheric hyper set.
Moving from Metaphor to Physics:
1=3
Farell’s Metaphor: an empty hyperset with two cleaved portions and the space between.
Φ = (1) Φ⁰, (2) Φ⁰, and ɑΦ₁₂
Steinmetz-Macfarlane-Correa Symbolic Operator:
E=ST
Energy (proper qua Aether) = Space and Time as mutually imbricated manifolds in a state of simultaneity (resonance), topologically interfacing to product matter, gravity, and mass-bound inertial (atomic number), mostly helium.
“Space and time are orders of things; not things.”
Leibniz
"When we speak of the Personal God, who cannot be a monad, and when, bearing in mind the celebrated Plotinian passage in the works of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, we say that the Trinity is a passage beyond the dyad and beyond its pair of opposed terms, “The monad is set in motion on account of its richness; the dyad is surpassed, because Divinity is beyond matter and form; perfection is reached in the triad, the first to surpass the composite quality of the dyad, so that the Divinity neither remains constrained nor expands to infinity.” – St. Gregory of Nazianzus,