A Response to Mats Wahlberg’s Thomistic Critique of David Bentley Hart’s Necessitarian Universalism
theosis as spousal mysticism?
I rather like the distinction Wahlberg draws between Free Will & Autonomy in his Thomistic Critique of David Bentley Hart’s Necessitarian Universalism.
Indeed, I’ve used it in my own notes: Neo-Chalcedonian, Cosmotheandric Universalism. In those notes, I’ve addressed at length why I accept universalist arguments in general & also David Bentley Hart’s in particular.
No better resources to explore such arguments can be found than those on offer at Eclectic Orthodoxy, both in its articles & in its comment sections.
Beyond establishing a universalist stance as externally congruent, historically, as a viable minority position vis a vis exegetical, liturgical, patristic, conciliar & other evidence from within tradition; perfectly coherent, internally, vis a vis appeals to our ubiquitous human experiences; totally consistent, logically, vis a vis the definitions of our theological anthropology & systematic theology, e.g. rational accounts of freedom, avoidance of moral modal collapse, mutually constituted identities of I-Thou-nesses, etc; I have also accepted the stance as logically sound as grounded in my belief that our properly formed evaluative dispositions - including both our aesthetic sensibilities & moral intuitions - are grounded as logoi to Logos in an undeniable divine - human connaturality.
This is to reject mysterian appeals to such greater goods, post-mortem, as would jar with the language of the human heart! Surely, any weights of eternal glory will not be settled by equations or urged to find consolations in some facile complacency of statistics! No, any weights of eternal glory shall exceed those of our temporal existence without, at the same time, jarringly obliterating even the least of creation’s lesser goods!
Now, as regarding Free Will, in my notes I address at length how there’s nothing repugnant to same in our tradition’s best accounts of theological determinism. Compatibilist accounts thus preclude using free will as a defense of any doctrine of hell. While I stringently reject evidential theodicies, I do otherwise consider free will to be an acceptable logical defense of the unavoidable possibility of ephemeral evils.
Regarding Autonomy & Intimacy, those rather precisely refer to the means & ends of my view of theosis. While what we are as imagoes Dei remains, ultimately, wholly divinely determined, and entails the destiny of a vision beatific, how we manifest & grow as divine likenesses remains co-self-determined. Again, the distinctions between and mechanics of operative & co-operative graces are set forth extensively in my notes.
While, essentially, the depth of our eternal bliss has been fixed per our finite modes (logoi), synergistically, the breadth of our co-operations remains in infinite potency to be reduced epectatically per acts of our unique tropoi, which, per my account, allow for graded experiences of secondary beatitudes as will correspond to varying degrees of virtue in our secondary natures.
I have precisely located our growth in divine intimacy, then, in terms of aesthetic scope or beatitudinal breadth because it represents a superabundant gifting of ever more freedom vis a vis the number of ways & places that love can be experienced & expressed beyond the essential abundance of friendship & its primary beatitude.
So, call one’s defense free will and/or autonomy, but it’s got everything to do with a divine permissive will regarding the unavoidable possibility of ephemeral evils ordered toward the ends of intimacy and nothing whatsoever to do with some game theoretic capitulation that justifies hell by jarringly appealing to some insidious complacency grounded in statistics.
Do YOUR abstractions rise from heaps of ruined lives like the sweet savour of a sacrifice in the nostrils of philosophers, and of a philosophic Deity?
Excerpts, below, from Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot
Chapter 5
When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering: the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the water drops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst. Janet looked glad and tender now—but what scene of misery was coming next? She was too like the cistus flowers in the little garden before the window, that, with the shades of evening, might lie with the delicate white and glossy dark of their petals trampled in the roadside dust. When the sun had sunk, and the twilight was deepening, Janet might be sitting there, heated, maddened, sobbing out her griefs with selfish passion, and wildly wishing herself dead.
… about the lost sheep, and the joy there is in heaven over the sinner that repenteth. Surely the eternal love she believed in through all the sadness of her lot, would not leave her child to wander farther and farther into the wilderness till there was no turning—the child so lovely, so pitiful to others …
Chapter 22
It was probably a hard saying to the Pharisees, that ‘there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance.’ And certain ingenious philosophers of our own day must surely take offence at a joy so entirely out of correspondence with arithmetical proportion. But a heart that has been taught by its own sore struggles to bleed for the woes of another—that has ‘learned pity through suffering’—is likely to find very imperfect satisfaction in the ‘balance of happiness,’ ‘doctrine of compensations,’ and other short and easy methods of obtaining thorough complacency in the presence of pain; and for such a heart that saying will not be altogether dark. The emotions, I have observed, are but slightly influenced by arithmetical considerations: the mother, when her sweet lisping little ones have all been taken from her one after another, and she is hanging over her last dead babe, finds small consolation in the fact that the tiny dimpled corpse is but one of a necessary average, and that a thousand other babes brought into the world at the same time are doing well, and are likely to live; and if you stood beside that mother—if you knew her pang and shared it—it is probable you would be equally unable to see a ground of complacency in statistics.
Doubtless a complacency resting on that basis is highly rational; but emotion, I fear, is obstinately irrational: it insists on caring for individuals; it absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of human anguish, and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a set-off against twelve miserable lives, which leaves a clear balance on the side of satisfaction. This is the inherent imbecility of feeling, and one must be a great philosopher to have got quite clear of all that, and to have emerged into the serene air of pure intellect, in which it is evident that individuals really exist for no other purpose than that abstractions may be drawn from them—abstractions that may rise from heaps of ruined lives like the sweet savour of a sacrifice in the nostrils of philosophers, and of a philosophic Deity. And so it comes to pass that for the man who knows sympathy because he has known sorrow, that old, old saying about the joy of angels over the repentant sinner outweighing their joy over the ninety-nine just, has a meaning which does not jar with the language of his own heart. It only tells him, that for angels too there is a transcendent value in human pain, which refuses to be settled by equations; that the eyes of angels too are turned away from the serene happiness of the righteous to bend with yearning pity on the poor erring soul wandering in the desert where no water is: that for angels too the misery of one casts so tremendous a shadow as to eclipse the bliss of ninety-nine.
Notes on the Above Excerpts:
Clerical Life, by George Eliot
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