Between Emptiness and Being: The Teleostability of Creation in Christian Thought
- Cyprien.L
- Nov 9
- 37 min read
Introduction : Why This Dialogue Now?
It has become almost commonplace, in the age of social networks and hybrid spiritualities, to hear that “all traditions say the same thing.” YouTube and TikTok are full of videos claiming to unveil the “hidden mystical path” supposedly concealed by the Church — as if the Desert Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, or John of the Cross had never existed. Such discourse, often sincere but simplistic, reflects less a rediscovery of mystery than a misunderstanding of the intellectual and spiritual depth of Christianity. Yet Christianity has never ceased to be mystical. What it rejects is not the inner quest, but confusion and syncretism.
This work runs counter to such simplifications. It seeks to show that a dialogue between the emptiness of Nāgārjuna, the nature of Aristotle, and the vanity of Qohelet is not a form of spiritual bricolage, but can instead become a place of theological fecundity. It is a demanding dialogue, grounded in conceptual rigor, the recognition of irreducible differences, and attentiveness to the unique language of each tradition. The goal is not to smooth out distinctions, but to understand how each of these visions — the Buddhist śūnyatā, the Greek phusis, and the biblical hevel — can shed new light on the relationship between creation, knowledge, and salvation in Christian theology.
The choice of these three figures is not arbitrary. Nāgārjuna (2nd–3rd c.) established, within Mahāyāna Buddhism, a thought of emptiness (śūnyatā), according to which nothing exists by itself but only through interdependence. Aristotle (4th c. B.C.) proposed, conversely, a structured ontology in which each being possesses a nature (phusis), an internal principle of organization oriented toward its end. As for Qohelet, the biblical author of Ecclesiastes (3rd c. B.C.), he proclaims the elusive fragility of the world: “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” — in Hebrew hevel havalim, literally “vapor of vapors.” These three languages, distant in both time and presuppositions, converge nonetheless on one point: the ontological limitation of man and the relativity of the visible world.
But whereas Nāgārjuna concludes the absence of inherent substance, and Qohelet the impermanence of all things, Christian faith professes a paradoxical truth: the world has no consistency in itself, yet it receives from Another its stability, intelligibility, and beauty. In other words, creation is empty of itself, but full of God. Far from being a mere play of semantic equivalences, this parallel requires a rigorous theological analysis: how can one speak of “emptiness” without falling into nihilism? How can one speak of “nature” without reverting to a fixed substantialism? How can one read “vanity” without sinking into despair ?
The article follows a double movement: a critical rereading of the concepts within their historical contexts (Nāgārjuna, Aristotle, Qohelet) and a Christian reinterpretation in light of creation and the Trinity. It will begin by defining the terms precisely — śūnyatā, phusis, hevel — before tracing the evolution of the word “nature” and clarifying its philosophical and theological implications. Next, it will bring into dialogue their shared intuitions: the via negativa (apophasis), the de-substantialization of the ego, and the acknowledgment of the world’s non-absolute character. It will then address the classic objections: pantheism, panentheism, confusion between traditions, or lack of epistemological grounding. Finally, it will show how the Christian mystical tradition — from Gregory of Nyssa to John of the Cross — offers a coherent framework in which “emptiness” becomes a path to fullness: kenosis, the total self-gift of Christ, revealing that the nothingness of the self is the condition for communion with God.
Our approach thus follows what Raimon Panikkar called an intra-translation: a dialogue in which each tradition speaks in its own tongue while allowing the other to resonate within it. The aim is not to prove that Nāgārjuna “had already discovered” the Trinity, nor that Aristotle “foreshadowed” Buddhism, but to show how the experience of limit, emptiness, or vanity can become the site of a revelation of plenitude.
In sum we will attempt to answer this central question: Is the emptiness of the world the absence of God, or the space where God gives Himself ?
I. Defining the Terms with Precision
Any comparative inquiry must begin with the precise definition of its terms, lest it fall into anachronism or syncretism. The words emptiness, nature, and vanity share no immediate semantic field: they belong to three distinct cosmologies and epistemologies — Buddhist, Greek, and biblical. It is therefore necessary first to restore each to its proper context before envisioning any possible dialogue.
I.1 Nāgārjuna and Śūnyatā: The Absence of Essence as a Path to Liberation
In Nāgārjuna (2nd–3rd c.), founder of the Mādhyamika school, the concept of śūnyatā (शून्यता) — literally “emptiness” — does not designate nothingness but rather the absence of intrinsic nature (svabhāva) in all things. This radical claim belongs to the Buddhist logic of dependent origination (pratītya-samutpāda), according to which no phenomenon exists by itself but only in dependence upon causes and conditions. Nāgārjuna expresses it thus:
yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṁ tāṁ pracakṣmahe / sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipat saiva madhyamā
“That which arises dependently, we declare that to be emptiness; it is a dependent designation, and it is the Middle Way.” (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, XXIV,18)
Emptiness, therefore, is not an absolute reality but a dialectical method meant to dissolve all reification: nothing possesses intrinsic essence, not even emptiness itself — śūnyatā śūnyatāyā (“emptiness is itself empty”). This paradox is designed to destroy the craving for conceptual absolutes, the root of suffering according to the Buddha.
Modern scholarship emphasizes that Nāgārjuna does not preach nihilism. As Jan Westerhoff reminds us, “the emptiness of intrinsic nature is not the same as nonexistence” (Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka, OUP, 2010, p. 72). Likewise, Jay L. Garfield notes that śūnyatā means above all “freedom from essence, not absence of existence” (Engaging Buddhism, OUP, 2015, p. 101). Emptiness is a de-substantialization of reality, not its erasure: everything exists, but nothing exists by itself.
On the soteriological level, this doctrine aims at freeing the subject from all ontological attachment: to understand that things have no fixed self (nairātmya) dissolves the illusion of ego. James D. Rooney (2025) summarizes it well: “the salvific insight of śūnyatā is not conceptual knowledge but a transformative unknowing freeing the mind from clinging” (Brit. J. Hist. Philosophy, 2025). Thus emptiness is less a theory of the world than a pedagogy of dispossession, in which awakening (bodhi) occurs when thought ceases to grasp.
While non-theistic, this approach displays formal analogies with the Christian apophatic path: here too, one reaches truth by relinquishing representations. Yet Nāgārjuna never speaks of God or of a personal transcendence. It is not a “void of God,” but a “void of self.”
I.2 Aristotle and Phusis: Nature as an Internal Principle of Order
At the apparent opposite pole, Aristotle (4th c. B.C.) develops a metaphysics of nature (phusis, φύσις) as the immanent principle of motion, growth, and rest. In Physics II, 1 (192b20), he writes:
“Phusis is the internal principle of motion and rest in those beings that possess it in themselves and not by accident.”
In other words, every natural thing possesses an internal principle of organization, a tendency to realize itself according to its form (eidos) and its end (telos). Contrary to Buddhist emptiness, Aristotle’s thought is substantial and teleologica l: every being has a stable essence that grounds its reality.
Beings are not mere flux without substrate but composites of matter (hylē) and form (morphē), according to the doctrine of hylomorphism.
However, Aristotle does not conceive this stability as fixity. Being is energeia (act-in-act), a dynamic tension toward the fullness of its form — hence his famous distinction between dunamis (potentiality) and energeia (actuality). This teleological structure gives nature a rational and purposive order. Within this logic he formulates his proof of the Unmoved Mover (Metaphysics, Λ, 1072a20), the ultimate source of motion and perfection:
“It moves as the beloved moves the lover” — it draws all things without itself being moved, pure act, thought of thought (noēsis noēseōs).
Christianity, through Thomas Aquinas, profoundly integrated this vision: God becomes the First Necessary Being, the cause and end of all nature. Thomas speaks of the natural law (lex naturalis) as the participation of the creature in the divine reason (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 91, a. 2). The Aristotelian phusis, rendered natura in Latin, thereby takes on a theological sense: the created order as divine will inscribed in creation.
“Nature” thus becomes ambivalent — both immanent (principle of beings) and referred to God (their cause and end). Where Nāgārjuna dissolves all essence, Aristotle establishes an ontology of ordered essence. Yet a link emerges: if beings, in Aristotle, derive their motion from an unmoved prime act, they are not self-sufficient. Their “nature” is not absolute but received. From this perspective, the Christian can read Aristotle as announcing the ontological contingency of creation — which paradoxically brings him closer to “emptiness”: nothing subsists without the source of being.
I.3 Qohelet and Hevel: The Breath of Vanity
In an entirely different register, the biblical book of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) opens with its famous refrain:
Hevel havalim, hakol hevel — “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Eccl 1:2).
The Hebrew word hevel (הֶבֶל) does not first mean “pride” but breath, vapor, mist. It evokes what is insubstantial, fleeting, and elusive. Qohelet contemplates the order of the world and sees in it only a vain repetition: “What has been is what will be” (Eccl 1:9). Every human endeavor seems to vanish “like a chasing after the wind.”
Yet this vision is not nihilistic. Hevel does not abolish meaning; it dismantles the illusions of mastery. Human wisdom cannot penetrate the divine plan, and man must learn the fear of God. The book concludes:
“Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole of man.” (Eccl 12:13)
Biblical vanity therefore does not deny the world’s value; it reveals its radical contingency. Everything is gift, everything fragile, nothing absolute. Hevel is the sapiential equivalent of what theology would later call creatio ex nihilo: the world subsists from God, not from itself.
The Fathers of the Church, notably Gregory of Nyssa, read Qohelet as a call to spiritual detachment. The soul that recognizes the vanity of the world opens itself to the invisible. This tension between transience and hope pervades all Christian mysticism: the acknowledgment of hevel is the first step toward the vision of the Totally Other.
Conclusion of the First Section
These three notions — śūnyatā, phusis, hevel — are at once incompatible in context and analogous in intent: each rejects the idolatry of the world in itself.
Nāgārjuna empties reality of all autonomous substance.Aristotle roots it in an ordered and received structure.Qohelet relativizes it in the light of the divine.
They thus converge in a phenomenology of dependence: no created reality is its own cause. Christian theology, without erasing these differences, may then discern in emptiness, nature, and vanity three figures of non-absolute creation: the world is — but it is by participation.
II. Mapping “Nature”: The History of a Word
The word nature is arguably one of the most polysemous in the Western lexicon. It runs through Greek philosophy, Christian theology, medieval morality, Romantic mysticism, and even contemporary eco-spiritualities, changing meaning at every stage. Defining this term is therefore essential if one wishes to avoid misunderstanding and discern what Christianity can adopt, purify, or reject. This section briefly traces the conceptual history of phusis, which became natura and then nature, to understand how it can today be reread in the light of creation and the Trinitarian mystery.
II.1. Phusis: Internal Principle of Motion and Form
In Aristotle, phusis (φύσις) literally means “growth” or “unfolding.” It is not an external entity but the internal principle of a living being by which it moves and fulfills itself. In Physics II,1, Aristotle opposes phusis to technē (art): art fabricates according to an external plan, whereas nature acts according to an internal finality.
Nature is neither chaos nor mere matter; it is intelligible, ordered, and oriented toward its proper end (telos).
Aristotelian phusis is therefore dynamic — a tendency toward fulfillment — and not a fixed state. It involves a form (eidos) informing matter (hylē), giving rise to a living composite. This immanent and teleological understanding would become one of the foundations of Western philosophy: to understand nature is to understand the “why” of a thing, its final cause.
Yet even in Aristotle, a paradox arises: nature acts through itself, and yet it depends upon an Unmoved Mover. The order of the world presupposes a transcendent cause that moves without being moved. This Unmoved Mover is not a creator god in the biblical sense but a principle of attraction, a pure perfection drawing all beings toward the fulfillment of their form.
This tension between dynamic immanence and transcendent motion would pave the way for medieval theological interpretation.
II.2. Natura: Participation and Created Order
When Christianity assimilated Greek thought, notably through the Fathers and Thomas Aquinas, phusis became natura — and changed profoundly in meaning. It was no longer an autonomous principle but the order of creatures as proceeding from God.
In De natura et gratia, Saint Augustine declares:
“Everything we call nature, God has created. Nothing that is natural escapes the will of the Creator.”
This sentence sums up the Christian revolution: nature is not a principle in itself but a received order. It does not exist independently of God.
Thus in Thomas Aquinas, natura designates the essence of things insofar as they have been created according to a determined final order. Nature possesses stable laws, but these laws participate in a higher reason — the lex aeterna of God.
“The natural law is the participation of the rational creature in the eternal law.” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q.91, a.2)
The medieval concept of natural law thus extends Aristotle while transfiguring him: finality is no longer merely internal but oriented toward God. The cosmos becomes an economy of gift — each being finds its perfection in participating in divine order.
This framework would later inspire mysticism: for the Desert Fathers, “to live according to nature” means to live according to the phusis restored by grace — that is, in inner peace and conformity with God. Cassian and Isaac the Syrian speak of the “simplicity of heart” as a return to original nature, to the state before the Fall.
II.3. The Modern Crisis : Disenchanted Nature
From the Renaissance onward, and especially in the seventeenth century, nature changes status: it is no longer created but observed. Modern physics (Galileo, Newton) separates final causes from efficient causes. Nature becomes a mechanism governed by mathematical laws. Aristotle’s living phusis is transformed into a geometric universe.
This shift has two major consequences:
Theological: Nature ceases to be a sign of God. Man, as rational subject, becomes the measure of the world.
Ethical: Natural law is reduced to moralism or disappears altogether. Nature no longer teaches virtue; it becomes an object of science.
It is in this context that the mystical Nature of German Romanticism arises in reaction. Schelling, Goethe, and Novalis restore to nature a soul, a principle of life — sometimes divinized. Naturphilosophie seeks a cosmic unity where God and the world interpenetrate: a pantheism often poetic, sometimes perilous.
This rediscovery of the cosmic sacred continues into the twentieth century in certain forms of ecological or New Age spirituality : nature is perceived as energy or consciousness rather than creation.
The danger here is again to blur the distinction between Creator and creature — the very trap the biblical prophets denounced in ancient nature cults.
II.4. Contemporary Reemergence: Ecotheology and the Cosmology of Gift
Faced with the ecological crisis, Christian thinkers (Thomas Berry, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Laudato Si’) have sought to restore to the word nature a spiritual density without lapsing into pantheism. Pope Francis speaks of our “common home” rather than of a goddess Earth :
“The world is not to be contemplated from without, but from within: we are part of it, and it calls us to ecological conversion.” (Laudato Si’, §220)
This rediscovery belongs to a sacramental vision of the cosmos : nature is a sign, a sacrament of the Creator.
Everything in it speaks of God — not by identity, but by participation. This perspective, from another angle, converges with the apophatic movement : to know God is also to recognize that the world is not God, and that its beauty is but the shadow of a higher light.
II.5. Toward an Operative Definition
From this historical survey, one can derive a rigorous and theologically sound definition of the word nature:
Nature is the created order, endowed with internal principles of development, intelligible but not autonomous, participating in divine reason and continuously sustained in being by God.
It is neither a self-sufficient substance (against naturalism), nor an illusion (against nihilism), nor a divinity (against pantheism).
It is a stable participation in the being of God — what theology will call creatio continua.
From this perspective, “nature” is not contradictory to emptiness; it is its theological interpretation. What Nāgārjuna perceives as absence of essence, the Christian understands as ontological dependence. What Qohelet names hevel, the Christian interprets as a sign of creaturely fragility. And what Aristotle calls phusis, Thomas Aquinas integrates into a vision of the created order.
At the end of this mapping, “nature” appears as the locus of a negative revelation: it teaches that nothing subsists by itself, that everything tends toward its Principle, and that the order of the world is the shadow of a creative Love.
III. Methodological Convergences: Apophasis and Anti-Reification
What makes possible a dialogue without syncretism between Nāgārjuna, Aristotle (theologically reread), and Qohelet is a shared method of stripping away conceptual idols. In different languages, each enacts a form of anti-reification (the refusal to absolutize what is only an aspect) and an apophatic movement (an advance by subtraction) that purify perception.
III.1. Madhyamaka Anti-Reification: Disarming the “Views”
In Nāgārjuna, the systematic critique of dṛṣṭi (views) aims to prevent the fixation of any essence (svabhāva). The “eight negations” (neither arising nor ceasing, neither permanent nor impermanent, etc.) function as a conceptual rake — scraping away attachment to extremes.
Function : not to destroy experience, but to detach the mind from its hypostases.Intended result: a non-appropriating gaze upon phenomena (they are dependent, thus neither “nothing” nor “absolute”).
Status: śūnyatā itself is “empty”; it is a therapeutic tool, not a hidden substrate.
In methodological terms, one may speak of an ontological epoché: a suspension of all substantialist assertions in favor of co-origination without self-ground. It is an intellectual asceticism whose ultimate aim is soteriological — the liberation from grasping.
III.2. Christian Apophasis: Knowing by Subtraction
The Christian via negativa (Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, then John of the Cross) follows a parallel logic:
Method : to deny of God all created predicates (God is neither this nor that), and then to go beyond even that denial — into the “cloud” where the intellect falls silent.Intention: to prevent created concepts from becoming mental idols of God; to safeguard transcendence.
Decisive difference: Christian apophasis culminates in the encounter with a Person (the Word), not with a neutral Absolute. The “darkness” is dazzling because it is saturated with Presence.
Methodologically, apophasis is a noetic asceticism: it purifies representations to allow what surpasses representation to appear. The analogy with anti-reification is functional (the same gesture of release), but the horizon differs (personal Theos vs. non-theism).
III.3. Qohelet: The Poetics of Hevel as Sapiential Apophasis
Hevel (“vapor”) performs an existential de-absolutization: the world offers no ultimate hold.
Gesture: to deflate the pretensions of human wisdom, achievement, pleasure, and mastery of time.Effect: to open one to the fear of God as the proper cognitive attitude — practical humility.
Qohelet does not construct a negative theology; he enacts negativity within the lived experience of contingency. It is a lived apophasis, more rhetorical than systematic, which leads humanity back to dependence.
III.4. A Common Core: Noetic Humility and the Discipline of Reality
These convergences can be summarized in three methodological rules:
Suspension of Absolutization
Madhyamaka: no svabhāva.
Christian Apophasis: no conceptual idol of God.
Qohelet: no self-assurance in works “under the sun.”⇒ Common ethos: sobriety of the intellect.
Primacy of Relation / Dependence
Co-origination (Nāgārjuna).
Creaturely participation (theology of creation).
Sapiential dependence (Qohelet).⇒ Reality is given in dependence, not in self-subsistence.
Transformative Finality
Śūnyatā: dissolution of appropriation (compassion, non-grasping).
Apophasis: poverty of spirit (beatitudes), charity.
Hevel: detachment, justice, fear of God.⇒ Truth is performative: verified through the fruits of life.
III.5. And Aristotle in All This ?
Aristotle is not apophatic; yet, reread within the theology of creation, his thought undergoes its own discipline of reification.
Phusis (form, end) provides intelligibility to creation but does not self-found being.The analogy of being (in Thomistic interpretation) prevents projection of created substance onto God: there is no univocal slide.
The Christian use of Aristotle aligns with the shared sobriety: to think nature positively without idolizing its categories.
III.6. Operational Criteria for the Rest of the Study
To avoid false parallels and to guide the analysis, three criteria will be retained:
Criterion of Non-Identification: never “śūnyatā = God,” never “phusis = God,” never “hevel = nihil.” The analogies are functional, not ontological.
Criterion of Orientation: cognitive detachment must orient — toward awakening, the encounter with the living God, or the fear and justice of Qohelet. An apophasis without orientation becomes skepticism.
Criterion of Fruitfulness: the test of truth is ethical and contemplative — its fruits are compassion/charity, humility, and peace. Without transformation, apophasis remains sterile.
Transition :
Armed with these convergences, we can now confront the irreducible tensions — the absence of creation in Nāgārjuna, non-substantialism versus hylomorphism, and the non-systematic status of Qohelet — and propose limited bridges (creaturely participation, kenosis, relational Trinity) without blurring distinctions. This will be the object of Part IV.
IV. Irreducible Tensions and Possible Bridges
After having identified the methodological convergences between emptiness, nature, and vanity, we must now acknowledge their fundamental incompatibilities. If the dialogue is to remain fruitful, it cannot be equivocal. Nāgārjuna, Aristotle, and Qohelet share a common intuition of contingency, yet they diverge radically in their understanding of the structure of reality and the ultimate goal of knowledge. It is precisely within these tensions — and not in their erasure — that a Christian synthesis may emerge: not by fusing systems, but by discovering, through their distance, the truth of a participated creation and a relational God.
IV.1. Doctrinal Irreducibilities
1) The Absence of a Creator God in Nāgārjuna
Madhyamika philosophy recognizes neither a first cause nor an absolute being. Dependent co-origination (pratītya-samutpāda) refers not to an external source but to a structure of interdependence, not hierarchical causality. Reality is “empty of itself” because it depends on no transcendent foundation. In this sense, śūnyatā is a-theological.
Even though some Western readers (notably Balthasar or Panikkar) have attempted to interpret emptiness as an “apophatic prefiguration” of the hidden God, Nāgārjuna himself would reject such a reading: any substantialization of emptiness, even theistic, is for him a mistaken view.
2) The Aristotelian God Is Not the Biblical God
The Unmoved Mover is neither creator, nor providence, nor love. It draws the world by its perfection but remains ignorant of it. Its thought is thought thinking itself (noesis noeseos). Aristotle knows nothing of grace, divine freedom, or personal relation. His theology is intellectual and self-contained. Such a god is the object of contemplation, not the subject of Covenant.
3) Qohelet Does Not Construct a Metaphysics
Ecclesiastes seeks neither to ground being nor to demonstrate its cause. It describes the creature’s unknowing: “Man cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end” (Eccl 3:11). This is an existential experience of limitation, not a theory of reality. There is neither systematic ontology nor concept of nature — only a wisdom of dependence.
IV.2. Analogical Bridges and Partial Compatibilities
Despite these distances, certain limited analogies allow for a dialogue oriented toward Christian theology. These bridges rest not on identity of content but on convergent forms of questioning: the interdependence of reality, the non-subsistence of the self, the relativity of the world to its foundation.
1) Creation as Participation
Christian theology can integrate the de-substantialization of reality, provided it is understood not as negation of being but as affirmation of dependence.
In Thomas Aquinas, ipsum esse subsistens (God) communicates being to creatures, which are not their own essence. Every creature is “empty of itself” yet “full of God.” Here śūnyatā finds an ontological resonance: the world is contingent and non-self-founded, yet this does not deny its real existence.
What Nāgārjuna expresses in terms of emptiness can be read, within Christian faith, as creatio continua — the continuous dependence of created being on its Creator. As Étienne Gilson summarizes: “Created existence is participation, not possession of being.”
2) Kenosis and the Relational Trinity
Christianity does not stop at ontology: it introduces a dynamic internal to God Himself — the Trinitarian movement of self-gift. The Father begets the Son, the Son receives Himself from the Father, and the Spirit proceeds as their mutual love: God is subsistent relation.
In this light, the kenosis of Christ (“He emptied Himself,” Phil 2:7) appears as the visible form of God’s invisible structure: emptiness becomes love.This emptiness is not absence but total gift, the openness in which divine glory is revealed through weakness. One can read here, without confusion, a “theology of emptiness”: God does not impose Himself — He withdraws so that the other may be. It is the opposite of nihilism: it is the fullness of relation.
Certain contemporary theologians, such as Jürgen Moltmann and Joseph P. Sydnor, have dared to speak of a “Trinitarian emptiness” — not as lack, but as the space of love’s circulation. The Father “empties” Himself into the Son, the Son into the Father, and the Spirit is this mutual gift. This perichoresis (mutual indwelling without confusion) mirrors, at the divine level, what Nāgārjuna glimpsed at the phenomenal level: the absence of fixed self is the condition of communion.
3) Qohelet: Vanity as the Pedagogy of Dependence
Biblical vanity far from being nihilistic, prepares the soul for Revelation. Qohelet expresses, in his own way, the same anthropological truth as Nāgārjuna: man possesses nothing by himself. Yet where the Buddha teaches liberation from all attachment, Qohelet teaches conversion of the heart: to recognize the vanity of the world leads not to emptiness but to the fear of God, source of wisdom.
Christian theology can thus integrate Qohelet as a sapiential stage on the path of faith: man learns, through vanity, to desire the gift. It is the “pedagogy of lack” that Gregory of Nyssa would later extend into a mysticism of infinite ascent: the more the soul discovers the emptiness of its knowledge, the higher it rises toward the living God.
IV.3. Christian Discernment: The Limits of Comparativism
Nevertheless, these bridges permit no erasure of differences. Three safeguards must remain:
The Creator–Creature Distinction: Christian emptiness is never absolute emptiness. Even kenosis unfolds within the fullness of divine love. God is not empty; He empties Himself out of love.
Personal Transcendence: The Trinitarian God is not an impersonal energy but a communion of persons. Buddhist emptiness has no face; Christian emptiness bears the face of the Crucified.
Realism of Being: Christian faith does not dissolve the world; it transfigures it. Creation remains real, good, and willed. Apophasis does not abolish cataphasis: God’s silence does not negate His Word.
While Nāgārjuna, Aristotle, and Qohelet each purify our understanding of reality, only Christ reveals its meaning: emptiness is not nothingness but the place of the gift.
IV bis. Teleostability: Principle of Participatory Finality and the Equilibrium of Creation
The theory of teleostability may be understood as a contemporary reformulation of the principle of finality, purified of both its Aristotelian rigidity and its mechanistic deviations. The term unites two Greek roots — telos (end, fulfillment) and stasis (steadiness, balance) — to designate the state of a world both oriented toward its end and stabilized within its order, without being autonomous. Teleostability thus describes the dynamic equilibrium of creation: a living order that endures not through any internal necessity but because it is continuously sustained by the loving finality of God.
IV bis.1. From Aristotelian Finality to Participatory Dependence
In Aristotle, phusis contains within itself its end (telos). Every being is oriented toward its own internal perfection. Yet this orientation remains immanent: finality is an inner principle of motion, not an external summons. In a Christian perspective, teleostability reclaims this orientation while de-absolutizing it: the telos of nature does not belong to nature itself — it is participated. The world is ordered toward God as its final cause; its equilibrium arises from the fact that it continuously receives its orientation from Another.
Teleostability thus stands between two extremes:
Fixism, which would see creation as a closed, static order;
Nihilistic flux, which would dissolve all form into becoming.
It establishes a metaphysics of stable movement: forms persist because they are stretched toward their transcendent end. The world is not merely a mechanically balanced system; it is a tension ordered and sustained by divine finality.
IV bis.2. Dialogue with Nāgārjuna: Stability within Interdependence
Teleostability shares with Nāgārjuna’s śūnyatā one essential trait: nothing subsists by itself. Every stability is relative, dependent, conditioned. Yet where Nāgārjuna stops at co-origination, teleostability introduces a principle of transcendent finality.
In the Christian view, the interdependence of phenomena is not a closed circle but an oriented flow: each being is linked to the others because all are oriented toward the same Principle, the same Source. What Nāgārjuna calls emptiness, theology calls participation. The world’s stability is not illusory but upheld. Reality endures only because it is willed: “In Him all things hold together” (Col 1:17).
Teleostability may therefore be described as transfigured interdependence: universal co-origination is no longer a causeless cycle but a symphony whose coherence rests in a Logos.
IV bis.3. Sapiential Reading: Hevel as Stable Oscillation
In Qohelet, hevel denotes evanescence, vapor: everything passes, everything fades. And yet the world continues to exist; it does not sink into nothingness. Teleostability illuminates this paradox: the world is fragile, yet it persists.
The “vanity of vanities” is not chaos but the very condition of a dependent order. Humanity discovers, through vanity, that the stability of existence does not come from itself. What Qohelet experiences empirically — the persistence of the world despite its apparent futility — corresponds, metaphysically, to teleostability: the gracious maintenance of the created within its contingency.
“All is vanity,” says Qohelet; but that very vanity becomes the sign of God’s stabilizing love, which keeps the ephemeral in being.
IV bis.4. Teleostability and Trinitarian Theology
In the Christian perspective, teleostability does not describe a cosmic mechanism but a relational structure inscribed in the very heart of God. The world endures in being because it responds to the intra-Trinitarian circulation of gift: the Father begets, the Son receives and returns, the Spirit unites and stabilizes.
One could say that creation is “teleostable” because it reflects the stability of Trinitarian love. It is not fixity that grounds it but fidelity. Being is stable because it is loved. The finality (telos) of the world is already inscribed within its equilibrium (stasis), as a reflection of the eternal movement from the Father to the Son and from the Son to the Father.
Thus teleostability becomes a metaphysical translation of Paul’s “All things hold together in Him” (Col 1:17): the universe coheres because it is caught up in the very movement of Trinitarian charity.
IV bis.5. Teleostability and Contemporary Science: Analogical Convergence
On a symbolic level, teleostability resonates with certain intuitions of modern physics:
the precarious equilibria of living systems;
the self-organization of the universe under finely tuned conditions;
the dynamic coherence of fundamental constants.
Without falling into concordism, one may see here a natural analogy: creation is not chaos but a supple order, ever balanced between stability and change. Far from a fixed state, cosmic stability is a dance of dependencies.
What physics observes as “metastable equilibrium,” theology may read as the trace of creative teleostability — an order that endures without self-sufficiency.
IV bis.6. Synthesis
Teleostability provides a metaphysical key for articulating emptiness, nature, and vanity:
it takes from Aristotle the world’s internal finality but directs it toward God;
it adopts from Nāgārjuna interdependence but reintroduces the creative gift;
it embraces from Qohelet fragility but interprets it as the sign of divine fidelity.
Creation in this light, is not a blind balance but a loving stability, stretched toward its fulfillment.God does not guarantee the fixity of the world but its ordered tension — a perseverance within contingency.
Teleostability, in sum, is the metaphysical name of this revealed truth: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Mt 24:35). All things pass — except the order of love that sustains them all.
V. Major Objections and Responses
Any attempt to establish a dialogue between non-theistic philosophies and Christian theology inevitably raises legitimate concerns. The rapprochement between Nāgārjuna, Aristotle, and Qohelet must not result in a dilution of dogma within an intellectual syncretism.
To be rigorous, one must confront these objections one by one — not by evading them, but by showing how a theology of teleostability precisely prevents such deviations.
V.1. First Objection: “This Is Disguised Pantheism.”
The objection is classic : if everything is in God, and if the world exists within universal interdependence, do we not end up confusing God and the world?
The Christian answer can be summarized in one sentence: participation is not identity.Teleostability does not claim that the world is God, but that the world subsists in God.This distinction — fundamental in Thomas Aquinas — between esse commune and Esse subsistens (Being Itself) prevents any pantheistic confusion.
What Nāgārjuna calls emptiness (the absence of intrinsic nature), the Christian understands as creatio ex nihilo: nothing exists by itself; everything is given.
The world is not a part of God but depends absolutely on Him.
Christ is the incarnate proof of this truth : He does not merge with the Father, yet “all that the Father has is mine” (Jn 16:15). This is the very model of participation without confusion.
By describing the world as a stable order that is not closed in on itself, teleostability thus safeguards transcendence while recognizing the coherence of creation.
V.2. Second Objection: “This Is Panentheism.”
The nuance seems subtle: panentheism, unlike pantheism, does not claim that God is the world but that the world is in God. Some consider it a mediating solution. Yet Catholic theology perceives an ambiguity here: if all is “in God” in an ontological sense, then creation ceases to be free.
Teleostability escapes this trap by reaffirming the contingency of creation.God does not need the world in order to exist — He wills it. The universe is not a necessary extension of the divine essence, but an expression of God’s free goodness.Teleostability therefore expresses an intended order, not a prolongation of divine substance.
It is not metaphysical panentheism but participatory theism: everything is sustained by God, not absorbed into Him.
V.3. Third Objection: “You Move Too Quickly from Buddhist Emptiness to the Trinity.”
This is perhaps the most delicate and fruitful critique. How can one move from Nāgārjuna’s śūnyatā — absolute emptiness of all essence — to the Trinitarian God, fullness of being and relation ?
The answer is analogical, not identical.Buddhist emptiness expresses a phenomenological negation: nothing has a nature of its own.Christian apophatic theology expresses a metaphysical negation: nothing is comparable to God. In both cases, the goal is to strip reality of any pretension to autonomy.
But teleostability introduces the decisive difference: this emptiness is not absence but receptivity.What in Nāgārjuna remains without source becomes, for the Christian, an opening for grace.Emptiness becomes a hollow of love, a readiness for the infinite — the very image of the procession of the Son and the Spirit.
Hence we do not move from emptiness to the Trinity by confusion, but by ascending analogy: emptiness is the logical condition of creation; the Trinity is its ontological foundation.
V.4. Fourth Objection: “This Vision Is Unverifiable — How Can It Be Known?”
The Christian tradition does not evade this challenge; it answers it through the unity of faith and reason (fides et ratio). Truth, in this vision, is not merely an external correspondence between propositions and facts, but a transformative participation in what is true. As Saint Augustine wrote:
“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand” (Sermon 43).
In this light, verification becomes existential rather than purely analytical: truth is known by the one who is changed by it. “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:9) — this is not an invitation to credulity but to experiential verification. One knows the light by walking in it.
Teleostability makes this intelligible : it proposes that order is not an imposed structure but a relational equilibrium, revealed only when the subject enters freely into the finality of self-gift. The believer does not “measure” divine order from the outside; he participates in it. The cosmos becomes stable to the extent that the human spirit aligns itself with its telos — the end inscribed within all things.
In other words, the verification of this vision occurs through a reciprocal coherence between the world and the soul : when the soul regains its axis, creation reflects that harmony back. What was once perceived as chaos becomes transparent to a deeper intelligibility. This is not a denial of empirical reality but its completion, for only a transformed consciousness can perceive the true unity of the real.
This is the mystical experience testified by the great contemplatives — Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Isaac the Syrian, and many others : the more the soul surrenders to divine order, the more it discovers within itself a stability that no external observation could provide. Teleostability thus describes not a speculative system, but a phenomenology of conversion — the moment when interior transfiguration reveals the coherence of creation itself.
In this sense the verifiability of the vision is not denied but redefined. Truth here is not passive data but relational manifestation: the order of being verifies itself in the being who consents to order. This is why the words of Christ remain the final epistemological key :
“He who does the will of God will know whether my teaching comes from God.” (John 7:17)
The experiment, in the Christian sense, is the life of grace itself — an experiment that stabilizes both the soul and the cosmos in the same movement toward the Telos.
V.5. Fifth Objection: “Qohelet Has No Metaphysics.”
Indeed, Qohelet does not propose a systematic ontology but an experiential observation: all is vanity, and yet all endures.The implicit metaphysics is that of a world stable in its transience.This is precisely what teleostability renders intelligible: vanity is not nihilism but spiritual pedagogy.
Qohelet shows what reason perceives but cannot explain: reality perseveres within emptiness.Theology sees here the trace of divine maintenance: “He has made everything beautiful in its time” (Eccl 3:11).It is the sapiential expression of teleostability: the world is unstable, yet it persists because it is willed.
V.6. Sixth Objection: “You Idealize Aristotle.”
This criticism is fair if one takes Aristotle in his cosmological closure.
But teleostability does not resurrect scholastic Aristotelianism: it transfigures phusis by introducing contingency.
In Aristotle, nature tends toward its internal completion. In Christianity, nature tends toward God, its transcendent Fulfillment.
The order of the world is no longer a perfect circle but a spiral of offering: each being perseveres by opening itself.
Aristotle provides the structure; Christ gives the direction.Teleostability unites the two: a dynamic yet oriented order, not closed in on itself.
V.7. Seventh Objection: “All This Is Speculative, Not Pastoral.”
Theology’s purpose is not to produce systems but to help humanity live.Yet teleostability has direct spiritual consequences:
it teaches patience (everything is in process of fulfillment);
it grounds trust (the order of the world rests in the hand of God);
it inspires ecological conversion (to preserve equilibrium is to honor divine finality).
It thus echoes Pope Francis’ call in Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum:
“Everything is connected” — not in a pantheistic sense, but in a teleostable one: all things are ordered toward the Good.
V.8. Eighth Objection : “Buddhist thought is sufficient — or even superior — in its simplicity.”
Some argue that Nāgārjuna’s reasoning surpasses metaphysical speculation by reducing reality to pure logic: if nothing can truly move or exist in itself, then the simplest explanation is that everything is empty. From this perspective, Christian metaphysics would appear needlessly complex compared to the elegant clarity of Buddhist dialectic.
Response:
What Nāgārjuna develops in his reasoning about motion — asserting that nothing moves nor can move, because motion exists neither before, nor during, nor after the act — is a logical sophism, that is, an intellectually valid construction in appearance, but false in its ontological scope.
First, Nāgārjuna employs a dialectical strategy of reductio ad absurdum: he dissolves every proposition by examining its logical implications. If motion existed before occurring, it would already be complete; if it existed afterward, it would be past; and if it existed during, it would be neither beginning nor end — therefore, he concludes, it does not exist.
This is a perfectly consistent logic within the framework of language, but it rests on a confusion between the conceptual plane and the real plane.
In other words, Nāgārjuna confuses thought movement with lived movement.
The first — the one analyzed through mental categories — always lags behind reality: when I name movement, it has already passed. But the second — the one actually in act — needs no naming to exist. By denying the reality of motion on the grounds that thought cannot grasp it without contradiction, Nāgārjuna makes language the criterion of being: it is an inverted idealism, an idolatry of logic disguised as its negation.
Secondly the sophism consists in taking a limit of reason for a property of reality.That human reason cannot conceive movement without freezing it into categories (before / during / after) does not prove that motion does not exist, but only that language is inadequate to describe it. This is the same mistake made by Zeno of Elea with his paradoxes of Achilles and the arrow: if the arrow is motionless at every instant, then it never flies.
This purely mathematical reasoning ignores that motion is a dynamic continuum, not a sum of static positions. Nāgārjuna repeats this ancient intuition, but he universalizes it to all of reality — absolutizing logical contradiction into an ontology of emptiness.
Thirdly this reasoning self-destructs, because it presupposes a hidden constancy: to affirm that motion is illusory, one must still assume a stable observer, a mind capable of contemplating this illusion. In other words, one must reintroduce, secretly, a form of permanence in order to deny all permanence. This is a performative contradiction: the thought of nothingness already presupposes a thinking being.
Finally, the Buddhist sophism lies in its misuse of the concept of infinity. Nāgārjuna transposes to reality a logical infinity — that of an endless causal regression. If nothing arises from itself or from another, then everything becomes infinitely conditioned — but an infinity of dependencies is the absence of act, hence a negation of being. It is no longer a living world but a closed equation, where all movement is absorbed by symmetry. What reason cannot close upon, it mistakenly declares non-existent.
In short Nāgārjuna’s sophism consists in turning the powerlessness of the mind into metaphysical truth.What the intellect cannot conceive without contradiction, it declares nonexistent.
But the inability to formulate a thing does not prove its absence — it merely reveals the finitude of reason.
Teleostability, by contrast, draws from this very limit a positive revelation : motion is real precisely because it proceeds from a First Act that grounds it. Where the dialectic of emptiness dissolves all beginnings, Christian metaphysics recognizes in motion itself the signature of the Creator — an infinity in act, not in regression.
Logical Buddhism closes thought within a perfect, sterile circle; teleostability opens that circle and turns it into a spiral — an ascent, not an annulment.
V.9. Synthesis
The objections raised against this vision are not obstacles but safeguards.They remind us that Christian truth is never fusion but communion:union without confusion, distinction without separation.
Teleostability thus emerges as the regulative principle of a rigorous metaphysical dialogue:it avoids the nihilism of emptiness, the fixism of closed nature, and the despair of vanity.
It restores meaning to the world as a loving order in tension toward its fulfillment.
In the end, teleostability is the contemporary name for a very ancient truth:the world stands because it is loved.
VI. The Christian Mystical Path : Emptiness as an Opening to Fullness
One of the most sublime paradoxes of the Christian faith is that the knowledge of God passes through emptiness. Where the modern world seeks to fill, Christian mysticism learns to empty.
Where philosophical systems strive to understand, it learns to consent. This pedagogy of stripping away is what the Desert Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Ávila embodied : a path where emptiness is not absence but space for Presence, a call to fullness.
Spiritually understood, teleostability expresses this same tension : the soul perseveres in its contingency not because it possesses itself, but because it is sustained by the love of God. It becomes stable insofar as it accepts not to be its own center.
VI.1. The Desert Fathers: Emptiness as Combat and Rest
The Desert Fathers — Anthony, Macarius, Evagrius Ponticus — did not seek to flee the world but to unclutter their hearts to make room for God. Their solitude was not an escape but a purification of sight.Evagrius said : “The monk is the one who is separated from all and united to all.
”This paradox already expresses interior teleostability: an equilibrium between withdrawal and communion, between silence and compassion.
In the hesychast tradition, later developed on Mount Athos, the heart becomes a place of stability — a center where all agitation ceases, not by inertia but by peace.Hesychia is not nothingness; it is perfect receptivity — an emptiness inhabited by grace.
“Make your heart a desert, and you will see God.”
This saying, attributed to the first anchorites, could be the mystical equation of teleostability: the heart stable within emptiness.
VI.2. Gregory of Nyssa: The Infinite Ascent toward the Luminous Darkness
Gregory of Nyssa, in The Life of Moses, describes the soul’s progress as an endless ascent. The believer never knows God “in full light,” but always within a fruitful darkness.This is what he calls epektasis: the infinite tension toward the Good.
“He who ascends never ceases to grow; growth itself becomes the mode of perfection.”
This dynamic is profoundly teleostable : stability comes not from stopping but from the tension sustained toward the end.The soul never fixes itself in a state; it progresses by remaining open, stretched toward God.
Emptiness is not a lack but a space of expansion: each degree of union opens toward another.The mystery of God does not exhaust the intellect — it dilates it.
VI.3. John of the Cross : The Dark Night and the Transfiguration of Emptiness
John of the Cross, in The Dark Night and The Ascent of Mount Carmel, perhaps expresses better than anyone the mystical meaning of emptiness:
“To come to taste all, desire the taste of nothing.To come to know all, desire to know nothing.”
This apophatic logic reverses the natural dynamic: one gains by losing, one is filled by emptying.The soul, purified of its sensory and intellectual supports, becomes a vessel for uncreated light.
Teleostability theologically translates this experience: the stability of the soul lies not in possession but in offering.
Like creation itself, it stands because it allows itself to be borne.John of the Cross meets Qohelet here: all passes, all fades — but it is there that God remains.
“O night more lovely than the dawn,O night that unites the Lover with his beloved,The beloved transformed in the Lover.”
The final transformation is the point of balance of spiritual teleostability: union without confusion.
VI.4. Teresa of Ávila and the Indwelling of God in the Soul
In Teresa of Ávila emptiness becomes indwelling. In The Interior Castle, she describes the soul as a crystal where God dwells at the center.But to reach this dwelling, one must pass through the chambers of purification, humility, and detachment.
Again, stability comes only after dispossession.
“Do not be afraid to be poor in all things: God is the All.”
Teleostability finds here its affective expression: the peace of the heart comes not from mastery but from trust.The soul becomes stable because it no longer leans on itself. It discovers in God the rest of its movement — an end that is not an arrest, but a living union.
VI.5. The Kenosis of Christ: Archetype of Spiritual Teleostability
All this mystical tradition culminates in the mystery of kenosis:
“Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” (Phil 2:6–7)
Christian emptiness is not a concept but an act: God emptied Himself.The equilibrium of the world — its teleostability — rests upon this self-abasement.The stability of the cosmos is the fruit of a love that stripped itself in order to give being.
Emptiness is no longer absence but crucified fullness.The soul that enters this mystery discovers that true peace comes not from closure but from the Cross.
“In Christ, emptied of all, the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily.” (Col 2:9)
Spiritual teleostability, in this sense, is participation in the mystery of Christ : the world holds together insofar as it consents to surrender itself.
VI.6. Toward a Mysticism of Creation
The Fathers, the mystics, and theology converge: the stability of the world and that of the soul proceed from the same principle — love that gives itself without possessing itself.This movement grounds both cosmic order and interior life.
Teleostability is therefore not merely a metaphysical category: it is a mystical path. It is the very movement of creation which, at every moment, reenacts the mystery of Christ — a world sustained by dispossession.
“Nothing is stable except Love.”
This sentence which might be attributed equally to John of the Cross or to Qohelet, sums up the secret of true stability:emptiness is not the opposite of life — it is its threshold.
VII. Constructive Proposal: An Apophatic and Teleostable Ontology of Creation
At this stage of the journey, the points of convergence between Aristotle, Nāgārjuna, Qohelet, and Christian mysticism crystallize around a single axis: the world exists only through relation, and this relation is neither mechanical necessity nor pantheistic fusion, but loving participation. It is this vision that the notion of teleostability makes possible to articulate coherently — an apophatic metaphysics of creation that is rigorous, dynamic, and profoundly spiritual.
VII.1. An Apophatic Ontology: Knowing Through Withdrawal
Apophatic ontology does not begin from knowledge about God but from the recognition of the impossibility of grasping Him.
As Dionysius the Areopagite writes, “The more one ascends toward God, the more one discovers that He is unknowable.”This theology of silence is not an abdication of intelligence but its purification. It means understanding that every affirmation about God must be surpassed in adoration.
Creation itself thus becomes an apophatic pedagogy : it reveals God precisely by remaining silent. The order of the world does not say what God is but that He is. Every beauty, every law, every relation is a sign, not a definition.
Here teleostability takes on its deepest meaning: the world holds together because of what it does not say. Its stability is not a property but a continuous grace, a silent “yes” to the One who calls it into being.
VII.2. Teleostability as the Key to Unity Between Faith, Reason, and Experience
Teleostability allows us to overcome the modern fracture between theology, science, and philosophy:
It agrees with science, which observes a cosmos that is ordered yet perpetually in tension — always poised between balance and chaos.
It dialogues with reason, by offering a metaphysical model of persistence without fixism: the world endures not because it is self-sufficient but because it is oriented toward its end.
It joins faith, which confesses a Creator God not only at the origin of the world but present in its ongoing sustenance.
Thomas Aquinas already expressed this: “Creation is not a past act but the present dependence of being upon God.”Teleostability is the contemporary formulation of that same truth : continuous creation is the stability of order through the gift of God.
VII.3. The World as Liturgy: The Cosmic Finality of the Gift
If the world is teleostable, it is because it is first liturgical. All creation tends toward God as toward its fulfillment. The entire universe is an offering: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:1). Yet this glorification is not mechanical repetition; it is a movement of love.
Teleostability clarifies the profound meaning of Providence: God does not govern the world from the outside, like an architect adjusting his plans, but from within — as a living source animating the river. The cosmos is not an imposed order but a harmonious response to the primal Gift.
Thus, cosmic finality is not static perfection but communion: order exists to be offered.
“From Him, through Him, and to Him are all things.” (Rom 11:36)
This is the most concise formula of teleostability: a balance of dependence and purpose, a world stable because it is ordered toward God.
VII.4. Christ, Principle and End of Teleostability
All creation finds its center and coherence in Jesus Christ.
“All things were created through Him and for Him; in Him all things hold together.” (Col 1:16–17)
Christ is the teleostable form of the world:
Through Him, all things are ordered (telos).
In Him, all things remain stable (stasis).
The Cross is the cosmic icon of this truth — the point of equilibrium between the verticality of the Gift and the horizontality of the world. The universe is held in that crucified act of love where omnipotence becomes service and stability becomes obedience.
For this reason, all Christian mysticism is Christocentric: spiritual stability is not an abstract inner peace but participation in the fidelity of Christ. The teleostability of the world is the ontological reflection of the Son’s fidelity to the Father.
VII.5. The Holy Spirit: Principle of Cohesion and Transformation
If Christ is the end toward which all things tend, the Spirit is the force that sustains and animates that movement. In its Trinitarian dimension, teleostability is the proper work of the Holy Spirit: He connects, unifies, and stabilizes.
“The Spirit blows where He wills” (Jn 3:8) — and yet He is the one who “brings order out of chaos” (cf. Gen 1:2).
The Spirit is therefore both movement and equilibrium: the principle of a living stability. He is the respiration of the cosmos, the harmonious tension between gift and reception.
He makes possible an evolving stability, a creative fidelity — precisely what teleostability describes on the metaphysical plane: constancy within change, unity within multiplicity.
VII.6. Humanity: The Microcosm of Divine Teleostability
The human being created in the image of God, is the privileged locus where teleostability is manifested. Humanity is both matter and spirit, finite yet open to the infinite. In the human person, the cosmos becomes conscious of its dependence.
But this role can be fulfilled only through conversion. As long as man sets himself as the center of the world, he introduces disorder; once he receives himself from God, he becomes a center of unification. As Maximus the Confessor said: “Man is called to unite within himself the extremes of creation.”
In spiritual life this is expressed through interior peace: when the soul is ordered toward God, all its being becomes stable. Humanity thus becomes teleostable — standing upright because it bows.
VII.7. A Teleostable Ethic: Balance, Discernment, and Charity
Teleostable ontology calls for a corresponding ethic :
Balance — not confusing zeal with agitation, nor rest with indifference.
Discernment — acting according to purpose, not reaction.
Charity — understanding that true order is the order of love.
This ethic opposes the logic of the modern world, which confuses stability with control. Teleostability invites a stability that remains open: a fidelity that accepts movement. To live as a Christian is to become a point of equilibrium between grace received and freedom given.
VII.8. Final Synthesis
Teleostability is the contemporary expression of a truth that theology and mysticism have always known:
All things hold because all things are given.
It is an ontology of relation, a metaphysics of gratitude. It restores meaning to the word creation: not a past act but a stability within gift.
In a world of instability, it reminds us that true peace is not fixity but fidelity. Creation is not mechanical equilibrium; it is the equilibrium of love.
And that love, which unites the Trinity, is both the source and the end of all stability.
“The world does not stand on pillars,” said Saint John Chrysostom, “but on the Word of God — and that Word is Love.”
Conclusion — Toward a Theology of Reality Stable in Gift
At the end of this journey, one intuition emerges with force: the truth of the world lies not in its substance, but in its relation. Everything that is, is by participation, and it is this very participation that gives it stability. The cosmos, therefore, is neither a closed machine nor an infinite chaos, but an ordered respiration — a living balance suspended upon the creative fidelity of God.
Teleostability in this sense, is not meant to be just another concept in Christian metaphysics; it is a category of coherence, a bridge between contemplation and reason. It expresses what faith perceives and what reason glimpses: a universe that endures not by necessity, but by love. Where Nāgārjuna reveals the emptiness of essences, Aristotle the order of causes, and Qohelet the vanity of time, Christian revelation discovers stability within dependence — an order founded upon gift rather than possession.
The world is stable because it is offered, not because it is completed. It endures because it is loved, not because it is solid. And it is here that the intuition of teleostability meets the heart of Christian faith: everything that perseveres in being participates in the life of Christ — the Pure Act made flesh, the incarnate Finality.
Thus, the theology of the real is not a science of knowing, but a wisdom of relation. Matter, emptiness, vanity, and light all speak the same truth in different tongues: all things are held; nothing is lost. In the tension between beginning and fulfillment, between fragility and glory, God reveals His nature — not as the unmoved being of metaphysicians, but as the Movement that makes all things stable, the I Am who sustains all in a single breath.
When the stars burn out, when light itself ceases to be measurable, one truth will remain — immobile, radiant, and alive:
All creation rests in equilibrium upon a single word —the Word that speaks it and bears it.
And that Word, theology has always called — and will always call — Love
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