The Divine Matrix: Creativity as Link Between East and West

The Divine Matrix represents a bold scholarly attempt to provide a framework for discussing these–and other–questions that will keep the interreligious dialogue project from grinding to a halt. In this book, philosopher and theologian Joseph Bracken first locates the Infinite as transcendent source and goal of human activity as the notion common to virtually all the major world religions. He suggests that the Infinite is prototypically experienced not as an entity but as an ongoing activity-the principle of activity for all beings. This idea is consistent with the notion of eternal and continuous motion is Aristotle, with the “act of being” (actus essendi) in the theology of Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckert, and with the ground of being of Shelling and Heidegger, as well as with Whitehead’s definition of “creativity.”

The divine Matrix proposes that the Infinite, thus identified, be understood as a nondual reality: an activity that does not exist in itself but only in the entities which it thereby empowers to exist. This, Bracken argues, becomes the key to understanding ultimate reality within the

different world religions.

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