The Beginning of the Beginning

As I am putting down these words on an empty page, I have begun to write a sentence that, when it is finished, will be the beginning of a chapter on certain problems of Beginning.

The sentence is finished. But is it true?

The reader does not know whether it is true before he has finished reading the chapter and can judge whether it is indeed a sermon on the sentence as its text. Nor do I know at this time, for the chapter is yet unwritten; and although I have a general idea of its construction, I know from experience that new ideas have a habit of emerging while the writing is going on, compelling changes in the construction and making the beginning unsuitable. Unless we want to enjoy the delights of a Sternean stream of consciousness, the story has no beginning before it has come to its end. What then comes first: the beginning or the end?

Neither the beginning nor the end comes first. The question rather points to a whole, a thing called “chapter,” with a variety of dimensions. This whole has an extension in space as a body of letters written or printed as pages. It then has a temporal dimension in the process of being written or being read. And finally it has a dimension of meaning, neither spatial nor temporal, in the existential process of the quest for truth in which both the reader and the writer are engaged. Is then the whole, with its spatio-temporal and existential dimensions, the answer to the question: What comes first?

The whole as a literary unit called “chapter” is not the answer either. By its character of a chapter in a book, the whole points beyond itself to the intricate problems of communication between reader and writer. The book is meant to be read; it is an event in a vast social field of thought and language, of writing and reading about matters that the members of the field believe to be of concern for their existence in truth. The whole is no beginning in an absolute sense; it is no beginning of anything at all unless it has a function in a communion of existential concern; and the communion of concern as a social field depends for its existence on the communicability of the concern through language. Back we are referred, the reader and I, to the words, for they have begun before I have begun to put them down. Was the word in the beginning after all?

Well, in order to convey its meaning, the chapter must be intelligible; it must be written in a language common to reader and writer, in this case English; and this language must be written according to contemporary standards of word usage, grammar, sentence building, punctuation, paragraphing, so that the reader will not encounter improper obstacles to his effort of understanding the chapter’s meaning. But that is not enough. For the chapter is not a piece of information about familiar objects of the external world; rather, it seeks to communicate an act of participation in the quest for truth. Besides satisfying standards of intelligibility in the everyday sense of reference to objects, the language must be common in the sense of communicating the meanings in the area of the existential quest; it must be able to convey the meanings of a philosopher’s experience, meditation, and exegetic analysis.

This philosopher’s language, however, does not begin with the present chapter either, but has been structured by a millennial history of the philosophers’ quest for truth, a history that has not stopped at some point in the past but is continuing in the present effort between reader and writer. The social field constituted by the philosophers’ language, thus, is not limited to communication through the spoken and written word among contemporaries, but extends historically from a distant past, through the present, into the future.

The Paradox of Consciousness

By now the Beginning has wandered from the opening of the chapter to its end, from the end of the chapter to its whole, from the whole to the English language as the means of communication between reader and writer, and from the process of communication in English to a philosophers’ language that communicates among the participants in the millennial process of the quest for truth. And still the way of the beginning has not reached the end that would be intelligible as its true beginning; for the appearance of a “philosophers’ language” raises new questions concerning a problem that begins to look rather like a complex of problems.

There is something peculiar about the “philosophers’ language:” In order to be intelligible, it had to be spoken in one of the several ethnic, imperial, and national languages that have developed ever since antiquity, although it does not seem to be identical with any one of them; and yet, while it is not identical with any one of the considerable number of ancient and modern languages in which it has been spoken, they all have left, and are leaving, their specific traces of meaning in the language used, and expected to be understood, in the present chapter; but then again, in its millennial course the quest for truth has developed, and is still developing, a language of its own. What is the structure in reality that will induce, when experienced, this equivocal use of the term “language”?

The equivocation is induced by the paradoxical structure of consciousness and its relation to reality. On the one hand, we speak of consciousness as a something located in human beings in their bodily existence. In relation to this concretely embodied consciousness, reality assumes the position of an object intended. Moreover, by its position as an object intended by a consciousness that is bodily located, reality itself acquires a metaphorical touch of external thingness. We use this metaphor in such phrases as “being conscious of something,” “remembering or imagining something,” “thinking about something,” “studying or exploring something.” I shall, therefore, call this structure of consciousness its intentionality, and the corresponding structure of reality its thingness.

On the other hand, we know the bodily located consciousness to be also real; and this concretely located consciousness does not belong to another genus of reality, but is part of the same reality that has moved, in its relation to man’s consciousness, into the position of a thing-reality. In this second sense, then, reality is not an object of consciousness but the something in which consciousness occurs as an event of participation between partners in the community of being.

In the complex experience, presently in process of articulation, reality moves from the position of an intended object to that of a subject, while the consciousness of the human subject intending objects moves to the position of a predicative event in the subject “reality” as it becomes luminous for its truth. Consciousness, thus, has the structural aspect not only of intentionality but also of luminosity. Moreover, when consciousness is experienced as an event of participatory illumination in the reality that comprehends the partners to the event, it has to be located, not in one of the partners, but in the comprehending reality; consciousness has a structural dimension by which it belongs, not to man in his bodily existence, but to the reality in which man, the other partners to the community of being, and the participatory relations among them occur. If the spatial metaphor be still permitted, the luminosity of consciousness is located somewhere “between” human consciousness in bodily existence and reality intended in its mode of thingness.

Contemporary philosophical discourse has no conventionally accepted language for the structures just analyzed. Hence, to denote the between-status of consciousness I shall use the Greek work metaxy, developed by Plato as the technical term in his analysis of the structure. To denote the reality that comprehends the partners in being, i.e., God and the world, man and society, no technical term has been developed, as far as I know, by anybody. However, I notice that philosophers, when they run into this structure incidentally in their exploration of other subject matters, have a habit of referring to it by a neutral “it.” The It referred to is the mysterious “it” that also occurs in everyday language in such phrases as “it rains.” I shall call it therefore the It-reality, as distinguished from the thing-reality.

The equivocal use of the word “language” pointed toward an experience of reality that would have to express itself by this usage; and the quest proceeded to the structure of consciousness as the experience engendering the equivocation. But is this answer a step closer to the Beginning? At first sight it rather looks like an expansion of equivocations. There is a consciousness with two structural meanings, to be distinguished as intentionality and luminosity. There is a reality with two structural meanings, to be distinguished as the thing-reality and the It-reality. Consciousness, then, is a subject intending reality as its object, but at the same time a something in a comprehending reality; and reality is the object of consciousness, but at the same time the subject of which consciousness is to be predicated. Where in this complex of equivocations do we find a beginning?

The Complex of Consciousness-Reality-Language

There is indeed no beginning to be found in this or that part of the complex; the beginning will reveal itself only if the paradox is taken seriously as the something that constitutes the complex as a whole. This complex, however, as the expansion of equivocations shows, includes language and truth, together with consciousness and reality. There is no autonomous, nonparadoxic language, ready to be used by man as a system of signs when he wants to refer to the paradoxic structures of reality and consciousness. Words and their meanings are just as much a part of the reality to which they refer as the being things are partners in the comprehending reality; language participates in the paradox of a quest that lets reality become luminous for its truth by pursuing truth as a thing tended. This paradoxic structure of language has caused certain questions, controversies, and terminological difficulties to become constants in the philosophers’ discourse since antiquity without approaching satisfactory conclusions.

One such constant is the great question whether language is “conventional” or “natural.” The conventionalist opinion, today the more fashionable one, is moved by the intentionality of consciousness and the corresponding thing-reality to regard words as phonic signs, more or less arbitrarily chosen to refer to things. The naturalists are moved by a sense that signs must have some sort of reality in common with the things to which they refer, or they would not be intelligible as signs with certain meanings. Both of the opinions are precariously founded because their adherents were not present when language originated, while the men who were present left no record of the event but language itself.

As I understand the issue, both groups are right in their motivations, as well as in their attempts to explore the conditions incidental to the origin of language and its meaning; and yet both are wrong inasmuch as they disregard the fact that the epiphany of structures in reality—be they atoms, molecules, genes, biological species, races, human consciousness, or language — is a mystery inaccessible to explanation.

Another such constant is the distinction between “concept” and “symbol,” with the difficulty of assigning precise meanings to the terms. This problem has plagued the philosophers’ discourse ever since Plato recognized it and, in the practice of his own philosophizing, coped with it by using both conceptual analysis and mythic symbolization as complementary modes of thought in the quest for truth. In the so-called modern centuries, since the Renaissance, these difficulties have become further aggravated by the parallel growth of the natural and the historical sciences.

On the one hand, the advance of the natural sciences concentrated attention intensely on the particular problems of conceptualization they posed, so intensely indeed that the concentration has become the motivating force of a socially still-expanding movement of sectarians who want to monopolize the meaning of the terms “truth” and “science” for the results and methods of the mathematizing sciences.

On the other hand, the equally astounding advance of the historical sciences has concentrated attention on the problems of symbolization posed by the discoveries in the ancient civilizations and their mythologies, as well as by the exploration of the modes of thought to be found in contemporary tribal societies. Again the two concentrations are transparent for the experiences of intentionality and luminosity, of thing-reality and It-reality, behind them; again the representatives of both concentrations are right in their pursuit of truth as long as they confine themselves to areas of reality in which the structures of their preference predominate; and again both are wrong when they engage in magic dreams of a truth that can be reached by concentrating exclusively on either the intentionality of conceptualizing science or the luminosity of mythic and revelatory symbols.

From the analysis there emerges the complex of consciousness-reality-language as a something that receives its character as a unit through the pervasive presence of another something, called the paradox of intentionality and luminosity, of thing-ness and It-ness. In what sense, however, is this complex the beginning we, the reader and I, are pursuing without having found it yet? And what are such terms and phrases as “complex,” “paradox,” and “pervasive presence”? Are they concepts intending a thing-reality or are they symbols expressing the It-reality? or are they both? or are they perhaps no more than pieces of empty talk? Do all these things really exist anywhere as a meaningful complex except in the phantasy of the present analysis?

What is needed to calm down this class of questions is a literary document, a concrete case, which intelligibly demonstrates the co-existence of the structures in the unit of the complex, as well as the meaning of this complex as a “beginning.” For this purpose I shall present one of the classic cases where the Beginning makes its beginning with precisely the complex of structures under analysis, the case of Genesis 1.

The Beginning of Genesis 1

In Genesis 1:1, we read: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” We can hardly come closer to the real beginning of anything than in an original act of creating everything. But what is creation? and how does God proceed when he creates? Genesis 1:3 gives this information: “And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” or, in the more literal Buber-Rosenzweig translation, “God spoke: Light be! Light became.” The reality light appears in this verse when the divine command calls it forth, into its existential luminosity, by calling it by its name. The spoken word, it appears, is more than a mere sign signifying something; it is a power in reality that evokes structures in reality by naming them. This magic power of the word can be discerned even more clearly in Genesis 1:5 (Buber-Rosenzweig translation): “God called to light: Day! and to the darkness he called: Night! And there became evening and morning: A Day.”

Still, the power of the creative word is not yet the true beginning we are pursuing; for the account of the creative process is inherently incomplete. It forcefully raises such questions as: To whom are the divine commands addressed? and who is the God who addresses them? or what is that kind of reality where the spoken word evokes the structures of which it speaks? In the situation created by these questions, a recourse to theological conceptions of “revelation” would be of little help, for even a revelation must make sense as a spoken or written word, a word heard or seen, if the message the word reveals is to be intelligible.

The authors of Genesis 1, we prefer to assume, were human beings of the same kind as we are; they had to face the same kind of reality, with the same kind of consciousness, as we do; and when, in their pursuit of truth, they put down their words on whatever material, they had to raise, and to cope with, the same questions we confront when we put down our words.

In the situation created by the question What is that kind of reality where the spoken word evokes the structures of which it speaks? they had to find the language symbols that would adequately express the experience and structure of what I have called the It-reality. How did they do it? The answer is given by Genesis 1:2: “The earth was waste and void; darkness was on the face of the deep; and the spirit [breath] of God was moving over the face of the water.” Over an emptiness, over a formless waste of something there moves, perhaps like a storm, the breath or spirit, the ruach, of God, or rather of a plural divinity, elohim. 

The It-reality, thus, is symbolized as the strong movement of a spiritual consciousness, imposing form on a formless and nonforming countermovement, as the tension between a pneumatic, formative force (ruach ; in later Greek translation, pneuma) and an at least passively resistant counterforce.

Moreover, the tension in the It is definitely not the tension of a human consciousness in its struggle with reality for its truth; it is recognized as a nonhuman process, to be symbolized as divine; and yet it has to convey an aura of analogy with the human process because man experiences his own acts, such as the quest for truth, as acts of participation in the process of the It. When the authors of Genesis 1 put down the first words of their text they were conscious of beginning an act of participation in the mysterious Beginning of the It.

Digression on Conventional Misunderstandings

In the intellectual climate of our time, the experienced tensions of consciousness, their expression through symbols, and their differentiating exploration are exposed to certain misunderstandings. At this point it will be prudent to mention some of them; by warding them off it will be possible to clarify the structure of the present quest still further:

(1) One source of misunderstandings is the various psychologies of projection. The symbolism of Genesis 1 must not be misconstrued as an “anthropomorphism,” or the projection of a human into a divine consciousness; nor would the opposite misconstruction as a “theomorphism,” or a projection of divine into human consciousness, be admissible. On principle, the poles of an experienced tension must not be deformed into entities existing apart from the tension experienced; the tension itself is the structure tobe explored; it must not be fragmentized for the purpose of using one of the poles as the basis for clever psychologizing.

That is not to say that projections do not really occur; on the contrary, they occur quite frequently, but as secondary phenomena, be it the humanization of gods or the divinization of men.  One such phenomenon is the Feuerbach-Marx divinization of man for the purpose of explaining divine reality as a human projection that, if returned to man, will produce full humanity. Such charges, however, cannot be laid against a pneumatically differentiated search of the Beginning like Genesis 1, for every man is really conscious of participating in a process that does not begin with the participants but with the mysterious It that encompasses them all.

(2) The present analysis should not be misunderstood as a contribution to the great historiographic enterprises of comparative religion and comparative mythology. The historiographic results are presupposed and gratefully accepted, but in the present context they are submitted to philosophic analysis. It would not be helpful, but rather would divert attention from the characteristics of Genesis 1, if I were to indulge in an extensive account of “influences,” such as the Egyptian and Babylonian antecedents of the mythical symbols employed. The knowledge of these antecedents certainly is of the first importance for understanding the historical situation of the authors, of the cultural environment in which they moved, and of the language they had to speak in their own mythospeculative enterprise. This knowledge, however, is now submitted to categorization in terms of the philosophers’ language.

Moreover, the “philosophers’ language” appears to have a habit of multiplying languages as soon as it touches the historical materials. We had to speak of a language of the “myth,” of “mythospeculations” within a general mythic language; and now we must speak of Genesis 1 as a “pneumatically differentiated mythospeculation,” if we want to understand the differentiated use to which the language of the myth was put in Genesis, creating by this use a new language for new insights.

This manifold of languages must be accepted as a structure in the history of the quest for truth. The languages are all recognizable and intelligible as languages because, in their various modes of experiential compactness and differentiation, they all symbolize the same structures of consciousness that, in a more differentiated mode, are symbolized in the philosophers’ quest for truth. Their plurality, in the parallels and the sequences of the manifold, reveals language as an integral part of the complex consciousness-reality-language, pervaded by the paradox of intentionality and luminosity, in its historical unfolding of the truth of reality. The language symbols unfold as part of the unfolding truth of reality. This philosophers’ understanding of language must not be confused with the linguists’ conception of language as a system of signs. But that should be obvious enough not to require further elaboration.

(3) And finally, the analysis should not be misunderstood as a doctrinal exegesis in the sense of later, ecclesiastic theologies. At present we are not interested in the question whether the doctrine of a creatio ex nihilo is the most suitable interpretation of Genesis 1 or not; nor in the millennial question of why a creation that its Creator found “good” should require salvational interventions to redeem it from its evil.

Rather, we are interested in the experience of the It that was symbolized by the authors of Genesis; and they experienced the Beginning as an evocation, by the force of the pneumatic word, of form in reality from a formless, unstructured waste. This formless waste, then, must be guarded against the conventional misunderstandings of a modernist mind that is accustomed to think of It-reality in terms of thing-reality.

For this formless waste is neither nothing nor not-nothing:

(a) It is not nothing, for if it were nothing, no creative evocation of something would be necessary; the formed reality would be there already,

(b) And yet, it is nothing, if by something is meant any structure experienced as real in postcreational reality; the formless waste is not a “matter” on which the pneumatic Creator works, if by “matter” is understood anything that we call matter in everyday life or in physics.

The symbolism of this peculiar precreational stuff or material, which is not a structured, postcreational matter, will perhaps come closer to our understanding when we remember that our “matter” derives from the Latin materia, which in turn derives from mater, the originally generating maternal reality. The formless waste ( tohu ) of Genesis has preserved, probably through its relation to the Babylonian tiamat , the mythic meaning of feminine productivity in the act of generation.

But then again, this piece of historical information must not be used to misconstrue the story of Genesis as a “sublimated” version of creation through a sex act, perhaps by imposing some psychoanalytic interpretation. A reductionist construction of this type would destroy both the differentiating achievement of Genesis and the meaning of the myth. For the authors of Genesis, having differentiated the formative force in the It as the evocative power of the spirit and its word, had to differentiate a formless waste over the depth as the correlative recipient of the formative command, if they wanted to understand the It as the Beginning of their experienced struggle for spiritual order in man, society, and history. By differentiating the pneumatic struggle as the Beginning of the mysterious epiphany of all structure in reality, however, they revealed the presence of its consciousness in the compact language of earlier mythospeculations on the Beginning, such as the various cosmogonies, anthropogonies, and theogonies.

If these fundamental issues are obscured by conventional misunderstandings, we lose the understanding of Genesis as one of the great documents in the historical process of advance from compact to differentiated consciousness and the corresponding advance from compact to differentiated languages. If we lose this understanding, we furthermore lose the larger historical horizon of the differentiating advances, as for instance the equivalences between the symbolization of the Beginning in Genesis and its symbolization as the imposition of form on a formless chora in Plato’s Timaeus. And if we lose the larger historical horizon of the advances, finally, we lose the possibility of recognizing in the pneumatic differentiation of Genesis the compact presence of the noetic structure of consciousness, the presence of the complex consciousness-reality-language.

The contemporary climate of opinion has created a social field of considerable power; anybody who dares to think within the range of its pressure has to reckon with its various antagonisms to thought. The antagonisms are not thought through, or they would not exist; they derive their social force from having become habitual to the degree of an automatism. Assuming that the reader, in his effort to understand the present analysis, is laboring under the same pressures as I am in conducting it and writing it out, I have articulated in the preceding pages some of the inarticulate pressures on the quest for truth in our time. I hope the brief sketch is sufficient, not only to ward off the specific misunderstandings mentioned, but to bring the general issue to attention, so that further interruptions of the analysis for this purpose will become unnecessary. I shall now resume the analysis at the point it had reached before this digression on conventional misunderstandings.

The True Story

The authors of Genesis 1, as I said, were conscious of beginning an act of participation in the mysterious Beginning of the It, when they put down the first words of their text. As a literary document, the text is to be dated in post-Exilic times, somewhere between the middle of the sixth and the middle of the fifth centuries b.c. It opens a story of mankind from its beginning in Creation, through the history of the Patriarchs, of captivity and Exodus, of Palestinian settlement, of the Davidic-Solomonic empire, of the kingdoms and their catastrophe, of Exile and return, down to the Deutero-Isaianic dream of a world-Israel, under the guidance of God’s covenants with man.

Through Israel, the history of man continues the creational process of order in reality; it is part of the comprehending story of the It; and the point at which the story arrives in the event of Genesis derives its significance from the revelation of the truth that the epiphany of structure in reality culminates in the attunement of human history to the command of the pneumatic Word. The story and the truth it is meant to convey are clearly told, but what do the story and its truth mean in terms of experience and symbolization?

The quest for truth, it appears, does not result in a piece of information that would have been available at other times and in other situations or that, when found, would be unqualifiedly valid in its specific form for all future times in all future situations. The event of the quest is part of a story told by the It, and yet a story to be told by the human questioner, if he wants to articulate the consciousness of his quest as an act of participation in the comprehending story. The “story” thus emerges as the symbolism that will express the awareness of the divine-human movement and countermovement in the quest for truth.

One of the profoundest connoisseurs and practitioners of story-telling in the twentieth century, Thomas Mann, has symbolized the divine-human metalepsis of the story in the concluding sentence of his Joseph novel: “And thus ends the beautiful story and God-invention of Joseph and his brothers.” Telling a story in this metaleptic sense of the term is not a matter of choice. The story is the symbolic form the questioner has to adopt necessarily when he gives an account of his quest as the event of wresting, by the response of his human search to a divine movement, the truth of reality from a reality pregnant with truth yet unrevealed.

Moreover, the story remains the constant symbolism of the quest even when the tension between divine and human story is reduced to the zero of identity as in the dialectical story told by the self-identical logos of the Hegelian system. From the consciousness of the quest as an event whose story must be told as part of the story of reality becoming luminous for its truth, there result a considerable number of problems to be dealt with in later chapters of this volume. For the present we have to concentrate on the implications for the problem of the Beginning.

The great quests for truth in which the consciousness of the metaleptic story becomes differentiated—be they the priestly quest of Genesis with the prophetic quests in the background, or the Judaeo-Christian quest, or the Zoroastrian, the Hinduist and Buddhist, the Confucian and Taoist quests, or finally the noetic quests of the Hellenic philosophers—do not occur in a vacuum. They occur in social fields, constituted by older experiences of order and symbolizations of their truth, now experienced by the questioners to have fallen into disorder and decline.

The quest for truth is a movement of resistance to the prevalent disorder; it is an effort to attune the concretely disordered existence again to the truth of the It-reality, an attempt to create a new social field of existential order in competition with the fields whose claim to truth has become doubtful. If the quest succeeds in finding the symbols that will adequately express the newly differentiated experience of order, if it then finds adherents to the new truth and durable forms for their organization, it can indeed become the beginning of a new social field.

The account of these personal and social events, however, does not exhaust the story to be told; in addition, the successful establishment of a field of differentiated order creates new structures in history through its relations to other social fields. For the quest, if successful, imposes on the older fields the previously not existent characteristics of falsehood or lie; this imposition will provoke movements of resistance from the adherents to the older, more compact truth, as well as from the discoverers of verities alternative to both the old and the new truth; it will furthermore meet with the social obstacles of spiritual dullness and indifference; and it will encounter movements of skepticism aroused by the new plurality of verities.

The quest, thus, is not only its own beginning. By restructuring the social fields at large in their relation to the truth of order, it marks the beginning of a new configuration of truth in history. Since the questioner’s quest is accompanied by his consciousness of the event as a beginning in the personal, social, and historical dimensions of order, the questioner has to tell quite a story indeed. It is the story of his experience of disorder, of the resistance aroused in him by the observation of concrete cases, of his experience of being drawn into the search of true order by a command issuing from the It-reality, of his consciousness of ignorance and questioning, of his discovery of the truth, and of the consequences of disorder unrestrained by regard for the order he has experienced and articulated. The event as a beginning is the story of an attempt to impose order on a wasteland of disorder.

The story of the quest is the word that evokes order from disorder by the force of its truth. But how does the listener recognize the story to be true, so that by the recognition of its truth he is forced to reorder his existence? Why should he believe the story to be true rather than consider it somebody’s private opinion concerning the order of his preference? To questions of this class only one answer is possible: If the story is to evoke authoritatively the order of a social field, the word must be spoken with an authority recognizable as such by the men to whom the appeal is addressed; the appeal will have no authority of truth unless it speaks with an authority commonly present in everybody’s consciousness, however inarticulate, deformed, or suppressed the consciousness in the concrete case may be.

Using the Heraclitian distinction of private and public, we may say, the appeal will be no more than a private ( idios ) opinion unless the questioner finds in the course of his quest the word ( logos ) that indeed speaks what is common ( xynon ) to the order of man’s existence as a partner in the comprehending reality; only if the questioner speaks the common logos of reality can he evoke a truly public order. Or, in the language of Genesis, the story of the quest will have the authority of truth only if it is attuned to a comprehending reality that itself is a story of pneumatic evocation of order from disorder.

The character of truth, thus, attaches to the story by virtue of its paradoxic structure of being both a narrative and an event: (1) As a narrative, the story of the quest conveys insights into the order of reality by language in the mode of intentionality. The human narrative refers to reality intended in the mode of thing-ness. (2) As an event, the story emerges from the It-reality; its language articulates an experience in the metaxy of divine-human movements and countermovements. The story is an event in which the It-reality becomes luminous for its truth. Under the aspect of this second structure the language of the story is not narratively referential but luminously symbolic.

However, although these structures in the story can be distinguished, they must not be hypostatically separated. The story that opens with Genesis 1 must not be construed hypostatically as a narrative told either by a revelatory God or by an intelligently imaginative human being. It is both, because it is neither the one nor the other; and it has this paradoxic character inasmuch as it is not a plain narration of things, but at the same time a symbolism in which the human beginning of order becomes translucent for its meaning as an act of participation in the divine Beginning. The participatory structure of the event and the account given of it in the referential structure of the narrative are inseparably one in the paradoxic structure of the story.

This excerpt is from Order and History (Volume V): In Search of Order (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 18) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000)

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