A Precis for My Neo-Chalcedonian, Franciscan, Cosmotheandric, Universal Apokatastenai
I only accept the natural & supernatural distinction in the qualified sense that it “might” refer to a distinction between rational & nonrational beings.
Otherwise, because I believe that rational creatures are constitutively supernatural & intrinsically graced, I also reckon that epektatic – theotic potencies inhere in our human being.
This is all to say that human beings will remain, everlastingly, in infinite potency to epektatic – theotic unitive realizations. It would then follow that, constitutively, all of our ways of knowing and desiring are necessarily ordered toward God.
From each human perspective & in every sphere of our human concerns, our very being – substantially, relatively & accidentally – is ordered toward loving & desiring Beauty, Goodness & Truth, personally, as Godself.
In my view, none of this need be interpreted as being inconsistent with theoanthropological categories & distinctions such as Lonergan’s transcendental precepts, horizontal – vertical modes of knowledge and sublationary conversion dynamics, which is to further recognize that different modes of knowledge, perspectives & spheres of concern can each attain it’s own sort of rest, what Nyssen might call “stability in the good” or Lonergan – “sustained authenticity.”
This is all precisely because each form of self-transcendence can be its own reward & so totally satisfying, psychologically, in each sphere of concern per its own perspective, each which, of course, stands to be sublated, should one cross the next successive epektatic horizon. How could it be otherwise without epektasis becoming, rather, totally frustrating? The theophanic would refer to general & special revelations with their various sublationary dynamics, which the supratheophanic could, in turn, then sublate.
That there’s never a two-tiered concrete natura pura (as we’re constitutively presenced) is not inconsistent with there being multi-tiered transcendent horizons of concern, each with its novel & sublating perspectives & satisfactions, i.e. sorts of rest, stabilities in the good, self-transcendences, sustained authenticities, corresponding to, for example, the spiritual (including positivist & philosophic), theistic, luminously theotic & gloriously theotic spheres. These enhanced perspectives don’t require intrinsic epistemic superadditums, only the efficacious gracing of progressively revealing & increasingly intense manifestations, which invite ever deepening intimacies, operatively.
While I do believe that, eschatologically, God owes it to His goodness to restore us all to our essential felicity & abundance, still it wouldn’t necessarily follow that God would owe it to His goodness to gift identical degrees of superabundance to all. Superabundant, novel, sublating perspectives could not be experienced as a deprivation or punishment since each successive horizon, by definition, will initiate one into things one’s eyes haven’t yet seen, ears haven’t yet heard, heart hasn’t yet conceived. For such are the things that cannot frustrate the uninitiated.
This is why I refer to Maritain’s apokatastenai in terms of – not a “natural,” but – supernatural felicity and why that particular universal restoration refers to – not hell’s attic, but – heaven’s basement. It’s why I thus subscribe to an indicative apokatastenai but take a subjunctive stance to a universal visio beatifica.
The above is a precis for my
Neo-Chalcedonian, Franciscan Cosmotheandric Universal Apokatastenai