In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
– Hamlet, Act II, Scene II, by William Shakespeare.

Introduction.

In a previous essay entitled: The Seamless Garment: The Being of God and Ground of Creation as a Communion in Love, I sought to provide a rudimentary groundwork for an Eastern Orthodox Christian process theology, informed by the philosophy of speculative empiricism. Also, provided that the terminology, ideas, and concepts elaborated in this work are rather complex, I would advise reading the aforementioned text before commencing this one.

The focus of this discussion is directed towards examining the human hypostasis as an embodied being and existential subject in the image and likeness of God. This theological doctrine is derived from Genesis 1:26–27 and implies that human beings are reflective of God as an absolute subject.

The Nature and Function of the Hypostasis within the System of Eastern Orthodox Process Theology.

In The Seamless Garment: The being of God and Ground of Creation as a Communion in Love, it was asserted that what are phenomenological registered as being and entities with the spatial and temporal medium of Creation are hypostases. Ranging from the microscopic to the macroscopic, these are assemblages of finite and infinitesimal modes of experience, known as tropoi, which interpret and actualise the logoi of God’s providential intentions. These logoi exist as part of God’s divine energies which sustain and inform the created universe with pure potentials, driving it onto greater feats of creativity and expression.

Mediating between the logoi and tropoi are the hypostases. Varying in grades of consistency and levels of complexity, they provide a relational network and structure for the constituent tropoi, facilitating the moment-to-moment transmission of content and information, and ensuring a consistent passage from past to future. Thus, Creation as spatial and temporal hypostasis, is nothing but a mosaic universe of various interacting, interconnected, and overlapping hypostases.

Furthermore, this cosmic hypostasis is contained within the infinite and eternal hypostasis of God. This is because God Himself is a hypostasis of three mutual in-dwelling hypostases: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all of whom share a singular and unqualified experiential actuality as a communion in love. As such, Creation is a spatial and temporal extension of this communion in love as a formative experiential medium. Hence, the being of God is the ground of Creation.

The Human Hypostasis as a Symphonic Being.

There two fundamental types of hypostases: active and passive. The former has little implication and consistency between its constituent members, and is therefore tenuous in its existence, dissolving with its parts. An example of this could be empty space. Meanwhile, the latter is characterised by the mutual presupposition of its members, facilitating the historical transmission of content and information, and reproducing the assemblage generationally in time and space.

Active hypostases can be further divided into inorganic and organic. The former is what would be registered phenomenologically as inanimate objects, such as stones, crystals, planets, etc. Despite their complexity and consistency, these multiplicities are defined by an overwhelming monotony and repetition in their reproduction, being characterized by harmony (agape). Conversely, the latter are defined by an intensive nature (eros) of adaptability, dynamism, and responsiveness that permits the creation of functional and perceptual relations of meaning and significance with a lived environment. In other words, organic hypostases are living creatures such as bacteria, fungus, cells, plants, animals, and humans, etc.

Such hypostatic structuring of nature and the cosmos wasn’t foreign to the Church Fathers, for in his Inscription of the Psalms, St. Gregory of Nyssa applies a musical analogy to describe the organisation of the universe. In a chapter explicating the human being as a microcosm of Creation, the Cappadocian Father states the following:

The first true archetype is music, for harmony and concord adapts all things with respect to each other through an order, arrangement and system. The Maker of the universe works skillfully through his ineffable word of wisdom by those things which were always rooted in wisdom. If the entire world order is a kind of musical harmony whose artisan and creator is God as the Apostle says (Heb 11.10), then man is a microcosm, an imitator of him who made the world. The divine plan for the world at large sees this image in what is small, for the part is indeed the same as the whole. Similarly, a piece of small, transparent stone reflects like a mirror the entire sun in the same way a small object reflects God’s light. (OIP, Ch.3)

This does much to anticipate the compositional theory of nature proffered by the Baltic German biologist, Jacob von Uexkull in his Theory of Meaning. In that work, the pioneering biosemioticist used terms such as chimes, rhythms, melodies, symphonies, harmonies, etc., to describe the biological levels of organisation, transcending upwards from tonal cells, melodic organ systems, symphonic organisms, harmonious communities, and finally to compositional ecosystems and biospheres (FWAH-TM, p139–200).

To summarise, within the speculative empiricist presentation of Eastern Orthodox process theology, the hypostasis functions as both a provider of structure and facilitator of continuity. Thus, in categorising the human being, the following statements can be made:

1. It is active and hierarchically structured hypostasis with its existence and welfare determined and sustained by the interaction and communication of its constituent components operating at various anatomic levels of organisation. These include the atomic, molecular, cellular, tissular, and organ systems which produce and maintain the viability of the human being as a temporal and spatial entity.
2. It is intensively orientated, engaging adaptively, dynamically, and responsively with its lived environment to secure its material and existential needs, wants, and desires. It is through this structural interaction with the lived environment that the human being produces functional and perceptual relationships of meaning, reference, and significance.

To summarise, using the musical metaphor deployed by St. Gregory of Nyssa and Jacob von Uexkull, the human hypostasis can be described as a symphonic being composed from various interacting levels of anatomic organisation. Furthermore, the human hypostasis is active within the grander composition of nature, which is orchestrated by God as its singular creator and sustainer.

Hans Jonas and Needful Freedom.

In The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology, Hans Jonas proposed that a physical organism affirms its internal identity by differentiating itself from its lived environment and therefore demands perspectival autonomy. Here, internal identity should be distinguished from personal identity, as the latter pertains to existential development exclusive to human beings.

Internal identity denotes a state of autonomy in which an organism exists as a product of the world with its being validated by its process of living, of its immersion and compliance with the environment. This is what Jonas terms alludes to when he states that “the organic form stands in a dialectical relation of needful freedom to matter” (PL, p80).

In a dialectical relation of needful freedom to matter the organism cannot exist outside its environment from which it appropriates resources, with both the organism and environment evolving consequentially from their interaction. However, needful freedom is merely one facet of the dialectic. As a material being, the actuality of an organism correlates entirely with its material composition, but its individuality is not founded upon enduring matter as its materiality is perpetually regenerated through metabolism. For Jonas, the metabolic life-sustaining chemical transformations within the cells of an organism is a guarantee of freedom.

Freedom according to Jonas is “a certain independence of form with respect to its own matter” (PL, p81) that is attained though metabolic processes. As an inanimate object is incapable of metabolism “its duration is mere remaining, not reaffirmation” (PL, p81). Deprived of metabolism there can be no continuity in development of an organism through material reconstruction. An organism’s individuality is not limited by its material composition, which is in the process of perpetual renewal, but affirmed dynamically by its morphology. As Jonas summarises, this is the “antinomy of freedom at the roots of life and in its most elementary form, that of metabolism” (PL, p84).

Jonas holds that metabolism is teleologically immanent, as an organism must constantly reconstruct itself as a form amidst the incessant flow of environmental energy and matter. It must perpetuate its identity, regulate its form, and control its interactions in accordance with its metabolic system that determines what is beneficial or detrimental to the organism its preservation. Life is a self-positing process that forges its own identity and interprets the world from the perspective of this individuality. Jonas sees an organism’s natural purpose as the constant reaffirmation of itself in the face of non-being. Jonas relates natural purpose to the self-transcendence of the organism, stating that by “the ‘transcendence’ of life we mean it’s entertaining a horizon, or horizons, beyond its point-identity” (PL, p85). For an organism to maintain its identity through metabolism it must aim beyond itself and its present condition. This is a radical extension of the possibility for self-transcendence all the way down the great chain of being, of which human existence differs by degree, not in kind.

From a perspective of both biological evolution and psychological development, Jonas provides a means by which material self-transcendence and internal identity can progressively transmogrify into spiritual self-transcendence and existential personal identity as life travels up the great chain of being (scala natura).

The Honour and Dignity of the Human Being within Creation.

When the Church Fathers esteem human beings as the pinnacle of Creation with honour and dignity above both angels and animals, they do so by recognising three distinguishing facets:

1. The vivifying power of the soul.
2. The expression of self-governance or individual autonomy.
3. The faculty of sense perception.

While angels share intellectual and rational faculties with human beings, they lack vivifying powers due to the lack of a physical body. Animals, meanwhile, are deficient in intellectual and rational faculties, despite possessing vivifying powers. In short, the former has transcendence without immanence and the latter has immanence without transcendence. Humans, meanwhile, express both in equal measure. Indeed, as Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake explain in The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realms where Science and Spirit Meet, given their association with light, fire, and photons (PA, p185–6), angels are ethereal and have no experience of being in its concrete depth. Meanwhile, as Heidegger observes in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, compared to “world-forming” humans, animals are “poor in the world, mired in “self-like behaviour” which is not a “doing or acting” but a “driven performing” (FCM, p192&237, his emphasis).

Furthermore, humanity is granted with passion and volition under the guidance of the intellect. Fallenness and sin occurs when the appetites of passion and exercise of volition become sundered from the counselling of the intellect, which is divinely gifted and inspired.

Viewed from a process theological perspective, where the prima materia is neither matter nor spirit, but experience. Thus, human beings can be said to function in alignment with the process of divine productivity. As hypostatic unions of mind and body, reason and intuition, transcendence and immanence; they suture the subjectivity and becoming of the spirit with the objectivity and being of matter in a singular life experience. While angels have no experience of material being in its concrete depth, neither do animals perceive the full potential of spiritual becoming.

What constitutes a vivifying power for the Holy Fathers, is the immaterial soul’s immersion in a sensate lifeworld. Other than serious disease, trauma, or inevitable death, the spiritual soul will not part with the material body unless coerced to so under extreme duress. For them, there is something noble and honourable in this fidelity. Hence, the sin of suicide or body self-destruction.

To summarise, the human hypostasis can be said to possess honour and dignity above angels and animals for two reasons:

1. Unlike angels, it possesses an internal identity by the fact of its embeddedness and dependence in concrete being.
2. Unlike animals, it is capable of self-transcendence through its existential personal identity.

In short, needful freedom within Creation is the very means by which conscious life comes to know and move towards God. Through an autonomous dependence upon its lived environment for sustenance and fruition, the human being is equal part product and producer of its world, bootstrapping itself beyond mere instinctual existence into a conscious form of living that permits a relationship with the transcendental divine.

William James and the Reflex Action Model.

In a chapter called Reflex Action and Theism, featured in The Will to Believe (p41–52/p111–145), William James presented the self as composed of three departments: perception, conception, and volition.

1. Perception is how the subject encounters the “facts of nature” and is a receptive process whose function is to glean impressions from the beings and entities it confronts.
2. Conception includes the processes of conception, reflection, theorising, and thinking. It is responsible for defining sensed beings and entities presented by perception.
3. Volition is characterised by the “definite subjective purposes, preferences, fondnesses for certain effects, forms, orders” of the self. As a reactive function motivated by needs, wants, and desires, its objective is to deliberate what measures should be enacted in the presence of beings and entities in their otherness.

What is crucial in this triadic model of the self is the particular relation among the three departments, as “sensory impression exists only for the sake of awakening the central processes of reflection, and the central processes of reflection exists only for the sake of calling forth the final act.” Such an emphasis on the volitional department through which the world is transformed in accordance with the needs, wants, and desires of the self signifies the reflex action model as a “teleological mechanism.” As he explains:

All action is thus re-action upon the outer world; and the middle stage of consideration or contemplation or thinking is only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, both whose ends have their point of application in the outer world. If it should ever have no roots in the outer world, if it should ever happen that it led to no active measures, it would fail of its essential function, and would have to be considered either pathological or abortive. (WB, p42/p114–114)

Conception occupies a mediative place between perception and volition. It is dependent upon perceptual impressions for content and its prescriptions are not complete unless they manifest as volitional discharges capable of real and substantial effects within the lived environment in which the self is embedded.

The Reflex Action Model of the Image and Likeness of God in the Human Being.

Bringing together the threads of the above discussion, a reflex action model of the image and likeness of God in the human being can now be presented:

1. Manifesting the Son is the perceptual department of the self, representing qualities of pure feeling, immediacy, direct awareness, and sensory output.
2. Realising the Holy Spirit is the conceptual department through its selective, discriminating, and associating activity with the brute facts presented by perceptual experience.
3. Epitomising the Father is the volitional department, actively pursuing and enacting needs, wants, and desires as a transformative presence in the world by forming habits and fostering norms, meanings, and values.

A Jamesian Presentation of the Self.

In the tenth chapter of The Principles of Psychology, William James discussed the consciousness of self and parsed it into four constituents: the material, social, spiritual selves, and the pure ego (PP1, P292).

James describes the material self as beginning with the body and radiating out to the things it can aggregate onto itself and draw associations. This includes one’s personal possessions and family. The social self is “the recognition which he gets from his mates” (PP1, p293). What is crucial here is that “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him and carry images of him in their mind” (PP1, p294, his emphasis). The spiritual self is a “man’s inner or subjective being, his psychic faculties or dispositions, taken concretely” (PP1, p296). These are what constitute the Empirical Self or Me. The empirical selves are contained under the umbrella of pure Ego or soul, “the sense of our own personal identity” (PP1, p334, his emphasis), the human being as the Thinker.

James also offers a chart to explain the empirical life of the Self (PP1, p329), which explains how the material, social, and spiritual selves relate to self-seeking and self-estimation. These latter terms explain the nature impetus of the human being to express and extend itself into the lived environment. Like Jonas with his concept of needful freedom, James also recognises to certain extent the human being is dependent upon the outside world from which it appropriates its resources, with both the organism and environment evolving consequentially from their interaction.

Materially, humans seek to preserve and augment their being by acquiring food, building homes, starting families, making friends, manufacturing tools etc. Socially they seek recognition and acceptance among their peers, and spiritually they seek intellectual, moral, psychical progress. What unities all three of these selves is a motivation towards the future. In short, they are self-transcending creatures. Compared to unhistorical animals, humans feel the weight of both past and future upon their being. Indeed, in On the Uses and Abuses of History, feature in his Untimely Meditations, Friedrich Nietzsche observed:

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness — what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal. (UM, p60)

In speaking of the empirical life of the Self, James acknowledges how human beings bring significance into world, create norms, meanings, values; but also, falling prey to dissipation, debauchery, and decadence.

1. Material self-seeking includes bodily appetites and instincts, foppery, and acquisitiveness. While in self-estimation it there is the spectre of poverty, vanity and iniquity of excessive wealth, or contentment in simple living.
2. Social self-seeking includes the fawning and recognition, but also envy, love, honour, and ambition. In self-estimation pride, vainglory, snobbery, humility, and shame are present.
3. Spiritual self-seeking includes intellectual, moral, and religious aspiration and conscientiousness. But it can also induce a sense of moral or mental superiority and purity on the one hand, or a complex of guilt and inferiority on the other.

The Jamesian Self as a Model for the Image and Likeness of God in the Human Being.

Taking the pure Ego or The Thinker as the umbrella of the soul, the empirical selves can then be ascribed as facets of the image and likeness of the Holy Trinity within the human being.

1. The spiritual Self reflects the Father through its potential for self-improvement, desire to enhance quality of life, facilitate knowledges, and aspirations towards truth, goodness, and beauty.
2. The material Self manifests the Son through its experiential and relational existence as embodied subject in need of sustenance, tempted by appetites, struggling against basic instincts, and vulnerable to inequality and suffering.
3. The social Self mirrors the Holy Spirit through its high degree of social interaction and linguistic communication, for it is through these means that information and knowledge can be transferred; norms, meanings, and values are created; and communities established.

In The Principles of Psychology, James states that the three empirical selves exist in a “hierarchical scale, with the bodily Self at the bottom, the spiritual Self at top, and the extracorporeal material selves and various social selves between” (PP1, p313, his emphasis). It is interesting here, that just as the Holy Spirit is the mediating potency between the Father and Son with the divine life of God, so do the social Self mediate between the spiritual Self and bodily Self within the human being.

The Perceptual Body as Both Subject and Object.

In his Essays in Radical Empiricism, William James states that “consciousness…is the name of a nonentity, and has no name of right among first principles…but insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function” (ERE, p4–5). What he means by this is that consciousness is not some primordial or transcendent property standing outside and above experience and governing it but is operative within lived experience. Consciousness is not durable substance, but a dynamic process through which perceptual subjects engage the world and is active within a holistic network of brain, body and environment. This is why James acknowledged the human body as both a “storm centre, the origin of co-ordinates” (ERE, p64), as well as “the palmary instance of the ambiguous” (ERE, p52).

For him, the body composes a sensorimotor locus of perspective for an embodied subject to engage and interact with its lived environment. The body is a storm centre around which the chaos of the world is organized into a meaningful arrangement for the self. As a focus of action and interest, the body’s interaction with the environment permits a systematization of things and structures the immanent field of consciousness in a meaningful manner pregnant with potentiality. For James, the body exceeds its physiological restrictions by integrating external aspects of its environment as part of its being.

Furthermore, as a palmary instance of the ambiguous, the body is presented to itself through the sensorimotor pathways as both subject and object, permitting the transcendence of the epidermis and the extension of the self into the world. In turn, this allows the incorporation of aspects of the lived environment into selfhood of an embodied subject. The genius of selfhood is the ability to integrate these contradictory modes of being in a complimentary manner.

As such, the sensorimotor motor interactions of an embodied subject within its environment precede the conceptual activity of consciousness. In short, somatic activity determines cognitive activity. Consciousness arises and is effective within the immanent sensorimotor interaction of the body with its environment, advancing and determining experience of the world.

A Speculative Empiricist Model of the Human Being as the Image and Likeness of God.

Drawing the threads of the discussion together, a radical empiricist model of the human being in the image and likeness of God can be presented:

1. At the base is the body as the storm centre, embedding the subject in the sensate world of experience and acting as a vessel for the soul.
2. Above are the reflex action departments of the self, containing the faculties of perception, conception, and volition.
3. Next come the material, social, and spiritual constituents of the empirical self.
4. And finally, the pure ego of the soul as the highest representation of the personality, containing the reflex action and empirical selves within its umbrella.

While there is a hierarchy and structure of ordering here, these facets of the image and likeness of God in the human being interact in a complex and multifaceted manner, producing the individual as a person imbued with a unique living character.

The structure of the image and likeness of God in the human hypostasis is reflected as follows:

1. As a perceptual and material being embedded with brute actuality, the human reflects the Son as the creative and actualising cause within the divine life with an openness towards possibility. As the Son was Incarnate as Christ, He was able to experience existence as an embodied human hypostasis and comprehend the necessity of material sustenance, inequality, and suffering.
2. As a conceptual and social being capable of symbolic expression, the human reflects the Holy Spirit as the perfecting cause within the Holy Trinity, eliciting and sustaining the conversion of potentiality into actuality. Through its high degree of social interaction and linguistic communication, for it is through these means that information and knowledge can be transferred, and testimony interpreted and verified.
3. As a volitional and personal being capable of idealisation, the human hypostasis reflects the Father as the primordial cause of possibility seeking actuality. Stimulated by perceptual impressions and mediated by conceptual contemplation and consideration, the human mind is blooming buzzing confusion of beliefs, thoughts, desires, and feelings with its preferences and fondness for certain effects, forms, and orders in reaction to the demands of concrete experiential reality.

As a living character, the human hypostasis is not restricted to interacting with the world through sensation and qualities of feeling, and neither is it determined by the impelled reactions of resistance and error. Instead, the human hypostasis displays a form of consciousness defined by intentional dynamism, purpose, and adaptability that is equipped to project, express, and identify itself within Creation.

Appendix One: Theosis and the Cultivation of Affective Style.

When Christ issued the Great Commandment (Matthew 22:35–40, Mark 12:28–34, and Luke 10:27), He was highlighting that ascent upon the vertical axis of the Cross to God is predicated upon extension along the horizonal axis of Creation. His demand was for humanity to be perceptively and affectivity attentive to the suffering and inequality present in Creation as a formative medium of becoming. True wisdom (Sophia) in this case, is the cultivation of concerned attentiveness, or an affective style, which is both authentic and pragmatic in its compassion and empathy.

Concerned attentiveness as an affective style can be defined by the following behaviours:

1. A rejection of morally transcendent duties or imperatives superimposed on the volatile and changeable topography of life in favour of pragmatic guidelines for practical action.
2. The positing of a can do, rather than a should do, attitude. As the potentiality of the human being is disclosed in advance, morality should not be directed towards obligation and conduct but aptitude and potential. Therefore, the virtuous person is defined by their ability to act, while the sinner is retarded by prevarication.
3. The adoption of an expansive and inclusive mindset that is defined by an active imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety and embrace of diversity, intellectual curiosity, and scepticism of authority.

The primordial message of Christianity is one of forgiveness and redemption. It is not a prescriptive religion directed towards forging a new order of values or constructing a utopian society but is a movement seeking to undermine inherited customs and societal structures in favour of concrete interpersonal relations with the intention of liberating arrested potentials for the creation of value, exercise of purpose, and intensification of experience. By embracing poverty, sin, illness, shame, and death, in preference to wealth, purity, health, and honour, Christ was able to transcend and devalue moral valuation by seeking to reveal of image and likeness of God present in every individual despite their personal failings, life travails, and social standing.

Regardless of how earnestly an individual demonstrates fidelity to moral statutes and obligations, they are mired in a narrow and unsympathetic cycle of bad infinity that only arrests the potential for projection, expression, and identification. Instead, an affective style of concerned attentiveness is predicated upon two contrasting but mutually complimentary movements permitting an expansive and inclusive relation to Creation:

1. An ascendent gesture of liberation from inherited norms, meanings, and values.
2. An expansive gesture of relationality through intersubjective compassion and empathy.

It is in this way that a human hypostasis can come to reflect the likeness of God as a communion in love by overcoming the sins of ressentiment, habituation, and objectification through the cultivation of an affective style permitting the creation of value, exercise of purpose, and intensification of experience within Creation.

Sources and References.

~(OIP) On the Inscription of the Psalms by St. Greogry of Nyssa (Hellenic Press, online PDF).

~(FWAH-TM) A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning (University of Chicago behalf of Minnesota University Press, 2010) by Jacob von Uexkull.

~(PL) The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (NUP, 2000) by Hans Jonas.

~(PA) The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realms where Science and Spirit Meet by Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake (Monkfish, 2014).

~(FCM) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger (IUP, 1995).

~ (WB) The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James (CreateSpace, 2014).

~(PP1) The Principles of Psychology: Volume One by William James (Dover, 2000).

~(UT) Untimely mediations by Friedrich Nietzsche (CUP, 1997).

~(ERE) Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James (CreateSpace 2017).