Thus, I approached a certain state when the Revelation given to Moses: “I AM” took on my personal character for me. I perceived these words of Scripture as a Revelation about the Personality of the Absolute. “I AM THAT I AM” — that is, the entire fullness of Being is contained in the PERSON, there is nothing further than this Beginning.
Being, understood as “Essence,” and Persona are identical.
This identity of the Absolute Being and the Absolute Person immediately led to the realization that if we, people, are in the image of God, then we are also persons... but in our present reality we are not yet actualized persons, but only created out of nothing. We will become persons only upon completion of the actualization of that potency, which, as pure potency, is created in the beginning by God. In its final realization, the human person must also become fully actualized, therefore, a “pure act.”
The Church tells us that God is a self-caused Being, having no other independent existence outside of Himself, parallel to Him. She tells us about an all-perfect, living God, possessing the absolute fullness of realized existence, i.e. such being, which is a
pure act.
But when our mind stops at the thought of this Being, then It, by virtue of Its original completeness, appears to it as a
pure fact.
In the face of this teaching of the Church, our minds become perplexed and fall silent. It does not fit into the categories of our thinking. A number of incomprehensible provisions of the Church’s confession become even more complicated when we turn to the teaching of the Church about the incarnation of one of the Three - the Son-Logos. We do not comprehend how the Beginningless One begins to be;
How does the Uncreated perceive the image of created being?
How is the one Son both perfect God and perfect man?
How in a single Hypostasis of the incarnate, two natures, Divine and human, two wills, two actions, divine and human, are unfused and inseparably combined.
We cannot comprehend the dogma of the Church, which tells us about the one nature, one will, one action of the Holy Trinity, and then teaches about two natures, two actions, two wills, combined in one of the Three.
Divine Being, taken in the “moment” of Essence, is absolutely transcendental to the creature.
Divine Being, taken in the “moment” of Energy (Act, Life), enters into real communication with the rational creature in its entirety, and in those being saved it becomes “immanent” of the creature (Cf.
Eph. 3:19).
Divine Being, as beginningless Self-Existence and as Self-Essence, is not conditioned by anything. Excluding any theogonic process, for the created minds contemplating it. It appears as a “pure given.”
Divine Being, absolutely realized — actualized, excludes the presence in it of undisclosed possibilities-potentialities and, for this reason, can be defined as “pure reality”.
As a “given”, it is incommunicable to the creature and eternally remains a
secret,
inviolable either for any prayer or for any creature. As “reality” (Act, Energy, Life)
it is communicated “in the image and likeness” of a created rational being in all its completeness and infinity.
