A Brief Sketch of my Emanationist PanSEMIOentheism
a Neo-Chalcedonian, Cosmotheandric Universalism
Emanationism
Why refer to the principium of F as primum unless we need to distinguish Him from others, S & HS, with Whom He shares "being a principle" i.e. as personal powers Who concretely express ousia via simultaneous vertical generations of opposites & horizontal realizations of identity?
To Wit: "In a way both creative and unexpected, the Holy Spirit generates diversity, for in every age he causes new and varied charisms to blossom. Then he brings about unity: he joins together, gathers and restores harmony".
~ Francis on Pentecost 2017
So, none of this emanational account departs from simplicity or implies subordination, in large part, because it doesn't refer naturally. It's more about perichorectic realities, personal coinherences & peculiar concrete expressions of ousia, less about analogia & participation.
Neither is it over against Aquinas & relations but moreso a development beyond same.
Below, I process aloud insights mostly gleaned from JDW's treatments of Bonaventure & Maximus, but in a succinct (so jargonistic) formula, as I understand them.
While a person's thatness, thisness and whoness (or howness) all remain inseparable from & indifferent to one's nature(s), none of those reduce, naturally. There's a bruteness to these nonformal aspects of personhood, an ineffability to idiomata, haecceities & distinct concrete acts (peculiar personal expressions of power).
This hypostatic logic applies to both personal exemplifications of immanent universals as well as instantiations of determinate natures.
Those personal expressions of power that are generative will all originate opposites that, being differences thus mutually constituted, will realize their teloi unitively in or as as a communal identity.
Ad intra, the F as primum principium generates via a simultaneous act that causes the persons, as they unitively realize the Trinitarian oppositions of relation.
Ad extra, the S as Eternal Logos generates via a concrete expression of creative power that eternally causes multiple hypostatic incarnations, the microcosmic forms of which cause different persons, who manifest the logoi & unitively realize the concrete, communal Absolute, the Cosmic Christ.
Ad extra, the HS generates diverse communal charisms, spiritual gifts & secondary beatitudes, all which, as realities of grace, transform persons' tropoi, restore persons' wounded expressions of logoi and gather all persons into community, synergetically helping each person's co-creative unitive acts to fruition, midwifing the concrete, communal Absolute.
re: "less about analogia & participation." or other natural references
Apart fr affronts to simplicity & subordinationism, it should relieve theo-neuralgia re creation's gratuity & divine freedom, b/c generation refers to free acts (not natures). Not to mention that God's nondeterminate being!
PanSEMIOentheism
Some of my favorite references to reality include words like exemplify, signify, vestige, image, likeness, manifest, hidden, reveal, magnify, incarnate, beatitude, intelligence, to see, in/visible, word, logoi, tropoi, express, exhaust, obliterate, mask, icon, index & symbol.
Not all of those words would necessarily implicate anything beyond mere syntax & semantics. For example, they wouldn't imply anything robustly contextual, constitutive, relational or actionable. They could be used by materialists or idealists of subjective & objective stripes.
I most think about this family of words each day during my several mile nature walk, as I quietly mouth the lyrics to Brother Sun, Sister Moon & am periodically redirected by nearby church bells to recite the Angelus & Magnificat!
Now, any heart that soars w/anything that's Marian, in our dogma, liturgies, antiphons, hymns, divine office, rosary, novenas, devotions, iconography, troparia, litanies, pilgrimages, purported apparitions, shrines & grottos, especially in a context re incarnation & nature will more readily & with the least hindrance discover reality's deepest Truths as they come flying in on the wings of its Beauty & Goodness!
That original family of references, above, will have become robustly semiotic, as the Marian context takes them beyond mere semantics to suggest that reality indeed has some broad meta-noetic & meta-ontic contours within which we best infer how it simply must be integrally constituted and how it clearly can be pervasively relational, all with an eminently actionable impetus, normatively & pragmatically.
So, introspectively, my faith's journey, as infused with Marian, Franciscan & Charismatic sensibilities, most attuned to the realities of signs, semiotically, & wonders, pneumatologically, led me, via the Theotokos, to Maximus & Eriugena, Scotus & Bonaventure & further inclined me to accept the idioms of the objective idealists & Peirce as the most felicitous for me in order to - not only better grasp all that's True & Good, but - first, be grasped by all that's Beautiful.
Semiotician's Prayer
Lady of the Sign, ora pro nobis.
footnote:
HT to Schelling, for it was in a novice & casual reading of him that a light went off for me, illuminating paths I'd already taken.
Journeying to Holiness
Quiddities, natures & logoi - not idiomata, exemplifications & modal tropoi - are great-making (vis a vis intrinsic perfection). The latter are, rather, glory-making manifestations. (e.g. Being primum principium wouldn't subordinate other divine persons).
In peculiarly manifesting, revealing & expressing the Divine Nature, each person exemplifies the divine beatitude of God's love of, enjoyment of & delight in God, Himself!
When we synergetically cooperate with grace, helped by the Holy Spirit, each of us can participate in that identical divine beatitude, thereby signifying the Divine Nature for the greater glory of God.
Sanctification, theosis & growth in holiness don't increase one's intrinsic dignity, which, for each imago Dei, per our logoi, remains absolute & inviolable. Instead, grace operates, donatively & freely, to restore & transform our tropoi that we may, growing in likeness, better give God the glory, enjoying both primary & secondary beatitudes!
Oremus.
"That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it."
See, then