Pip: Shakespeare's Hamlet looked at a human being and saw the paragon of animals — then immediately wondered if we're just very organised dust. Columba John Hawthorne has apparently decided to find out.

Mara: This episode draws on his work at The Beginning of Terror, covering two substantial essays: one building a groundwork for an Eastern Orthodox process theology, and one examining what it means for human beings to bear the image and likeness of God. Let's start with that second question — what kind of thing a human being actually is.

The Human Hypostasis and the Image of God

Pip: The central tension here is one philosophy has circled for centuries — are human beings special, and if so, why? This essay tries to answer that theologically and philosophically at once, placing the human person within a layered cosmos of experience and asking what it means to reflect God as an absolute subject.

Mara: The essay frames the human being as a symphonic being, and reaches for St. Gregory of Nyssa to make the point. The quote runs: "If the entire world order is a kind of musical harmony whose artisan and creator is God as the Apostle says, 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."

Pip: So the human being is not just in the cosmos — it recapitulates the cosmos. The structure of the whole is legible in the part.

Mara: That's the upshot. The essay builds on this through Hans Jonas's concept of needful freedom — the idea that an organism affirms its identity precisely through its dependence on and differentiation from its environment. Metabolism, for Jonas, is freedom: "a certain independence of form with respect to its own matter." This is what distinguishes living creatures from inanimate objects, whose duration is, as Jonas puts it, "mere remaining, not reaffirmation."

Pip: Which sets up the hierarchy — humans sit above animals and angels not by having more of one thing, but by holding together what each lacks. Angels have transcendence without immanence; animals have immanence without transcendence.

Mara: Exactly. The essay draws on William James at length — his reflex action model maps perception, conception, and volition onto Son, Holy Spirit, and Father respectively. And his account of the empirical self — material, social, and spiritual — mirrors the same trinitarian structure. The social self mediates between the spiritual and bodily, just as the Holy Spirit mediates within the divine life.

Pip: It is a remarkably tidy fit — suspiciously tidy, you might say, but that's rather the point of a systematic theology.

Mara: The essay closes with an appendix on theosis, arguing that the cultivation of what it calls an affective style — concerned attentiveness, expansive relationality — is the practical means by which a human being comes to reflect the likeness of God as a communion in love.

Mara: The framework underpinning all of this — the hypostases, the logoi, the tropoi — is laid out in the companion essay. That's where we turn next.

Groundwork for an Eastern Orthodox Process Theology

Pip: If the human essay is the portrait, this one is the canvas — an attempt to build a coherent theological metaphysics from the ground up, fusing Eastern Orthodox tradition with the process philosophy of William James and Whitehead.

Mara: The essay announces its governing claim early and directly: "While God is eternal, He is never still. The truth of being is becoming." The whole project follows from that.

Pip: A God who is dynamic rather than static — that's the hinge everything else turns on.

Mara: The essay draws a striking parallel between Orthodox thinking and James's radical empiricism, quoting Saint Nikolai Velimirovich: "Our religion is founded on spiritual experience, seen and heard as surely as any physical fact in this world. Not theory, not philosophy, not human emotions, but experience." What this means in practice is that both traditions resist reducing reality to fixed categories — both insist that lived experience exceeds any conceptual map we draw of it.

Pip: James put the same point more tartly: reality "overflows and surrounds" logic. The essay is essentially arguing that Orthodoxy and pragmatism were always saying the same thing, just in different vestments.

Mara: The theological architecture rests on three terms — logoi as God's providential intentions, tropoi as the activities that incarnate those intentions, and hypostases as the enduring entities that structure and transmit experience across time. Creation, on this account, is a mosaic of overlapping hypostases, contained within the infinite hypostasis of God.

Mara: The essay also addresses the God-world relationship directly: God does not act coercively but persuasively. The Annunciation is the paradigm case — God waited for Mary's consent. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." She is, the essay argues, the supreme example of cooperation between God and Creation.

Pip: There are also three appendices — on eternal life, on the Sophiological tradition in Russian Orthodoxy, and on the Incarnation and theosis — each extending the framework into further territory. The Sophiology aside is handled carefully, positioning Sophia not as a fourth hypostasis but as the relational ground enabling dialogue between potentiality and actuality.

Mara: And all of it serves the three providential intentions the essay identifies for Creation: the creation of value, the exercise of purpose, and the intensification of experience.

Pip: Dust that reflects God, a cosmos that exceeds its own logic — there's a coherent vision across both essays.

Mara: One that insists becoming is prior to being, and that the human person is most itself when most open to what exceeds it. More to explore from The Beginning of Terror next time.