A Sophiology of Ignorance – why essential logics must entail concrete personal acts
We don’t employ a personal logic to evade, or even worse, eschew, an essential logic.
Insisting that persons are indifferent & irreducible to but inseparable from essences (Jordan Daniel Wood) is not an attempt to reconcile natures in an hypostasis.
In other words, a personal logic is not about overcoming lingering aporetic, antinomial or paradoxical Chalcedonian “problems” with reconciling natural incompatibilities. Those have already been suitably bracketed or bookmarked w/analogical placeholders. We certainly recognize our finite modes & ex Deo natures.
Those personal logics address questions regarding – not only our natures, but – the nonformal aspects of our personhood, what Peirce called brute actualities, Scotus – haecceities, trinitarians – ineffable idiomata, etc
See
Beyond the Sophianic to the Neo-Chalcedonian – actually, it’s good
Evil, disharmony, falsehood & nonbeing are subcontraries (parasites) not opposites (real potencies) of goodness, beauty, truth & being [GBT&B]. They’re only opposites in violent ontologies & pseudo-dialectics. The Gospel dialectic juxtaposes persons in an ontology of peace.
If, then, Arche, Coincidentia Oppositorum, GBT&B, name, rather, Persons in Act, any Generation of Opposites, per our harmonious dialectic, could only refer to a multiplication of persons, who are relatively perfect, free & loving and destined for even more.
Amore!
As extra-divine beings, we differ ontologically from God by a finite mode that determines us as partly constituted by personal absences. Such constitutive absences refer to an I – Thou dynamic.
In that I – Thou dynamic, we’re separated by various kinds & degrees of epistemic distances (not ontological deficits), which are all ordered to our creaturely freedom to & autonomy in love.
Beyond discursive antinomies that can resolve dialectically, dissolve paradigmatically or be evaded pragmatically, the opposites generated by divine personal dialectics constitute an embodied antinomy, wherein constitutive absences are overcome by becoming I-Thou-nesses.
If the Incarnation wasn’t contingent on some felix culpa & our epistemic distancing (ordered to freedom) was ever our means of perfection, then, protologically, creation’s deification was to become full in Christ’s humanization only via a concrete divine act of self-blinding.
Other concrete incarnational acts would – not only cover our epistemic distance from the divine, but – conquer all consequences (false incarnations) that might follow from any misuses of our freedom (sin), so beyond a Sophiology of Ignorance to even a Sophiology of Death.
If we’re ontologically other than God only in a modal sense, then we can only ever be separated from God in an epistemic sense.
So, if theosis does end in the noetic identity of the beatific vision, then ignorance – not falsity – would be contrary to noetic truth and every epistemic closure would dehypostasize some false incarnation.
“for us, unlike Cajetan, it is not the absence of any desire that is the reason for ignorance: rather it is the depth of our desire.”
~ de Lubac
Purgations as Do-Overs?
Often, imaginative speculations, even if not literally true, can be the least inadequate way (cf GNaz) to evoke appropriate (ortho -pathic & -praxic) responses to ultimate reality, where truth (-doxic) can come flying in on the wings of beauty & goodness!
Parhypostases are phantasmic, i.e. it’s not just that they’re temporal but that they can’t also be eternal as they’re devoid of arche & telos.
Our practices, disciplines & liturgies of anamnesis are every bit as much about remembering the future as they are about memorializing the past.
Anamnesis foregrounds the tetelestai dynamic (“it is finished” dynamic) that’s ever present in all temporal unfoldings.
The tetelestai dynamic has an intrinsic alreadyness aspect to it b/c it refers to that which has been eternally pre-determined by the divine arche & telos.
The only unfinished aspects of our temporal unfoldings, which are relatively in/determinate, are our co-creative soul-crafting & theotic self-determinations of how – not whether – we shall manifest as particular theophanies.
Parhypostases, which are impotently phantasmic, parasitize our co-creative self-determinations (theophanic hows of our tropoi) and not our divine pre-determinations (theophanic thats of our logoi), which are inviolably tetelestatic. They’re annihilated by our purgative do-overs, which may be variously conceived.
Intersubjectivity
This is all consistent w/a metaphysics of intersubjectivity (I like Bracken & Bulgakov) wherein persons & societies are mutually constituted – not only equiprimordially via relations, oppositionally, but – co-eternally via personal acts, ad intra & extra.
Per an emanation approach, like Jordan Daniel Wood’s interpretation of Bonaventure’s positive innascibility, we can see more clearly why the Father’s Monarchy wouldn’t entail a proto-Father. Analogously, emanatively, creation as Incarnation needn’t implicate a Logos Asarkos?
In my view, this all means that the Son’s ad extra kenosis would be co-eternal w/the Father’s intra-Trinitarian, ur-kenotic personal emanative act, while still being wholly gratuitous; that’s b/c it’s volitionally fitting per personal logic & not necessary per onto-logic.
Contra Perditionism
There’s a Gödel-like incompleteness to any logically consistent ex nihilo theology.
Some use skeptical theism to defend perditionism by invoking a greater good.
Others defend universalism, rejecting overly facile conceptions of divine freedom & necessity (human, too).
All retreat, at some point, apophatically &/or analogically.
Both perditionists & universalists can be logically consistent & internally coherent per their own definitions. They don’t, however, stipulate to the same definitions of freedom, necessity & greater goods.
While all apply their apophatic sensibilities to concede a general divine incomprehensibility, all will preserve, via analogy, various degrees of divine intelligibility regarding specific realities.
Regarding those specific realities, competing accounts will often charge each other with an inordinate anthropomorphism – basically suggesting that the other’s claiming too much divine intelligibility by over-projecting certain human traits onto God.
For example, universalists appeal to our shared moral intuitions in rejecting the prima facie disproportionality of punishing finite creatures using infinite consequences. They reject the perditionists’ skeptical theistic greater good defense as radically apophatic.
Universalists retort: God’s not THAT unintelligible, morally!
While universalists can remain deeply sympathetic to such a general greater good defense of temporal evil, logically, and similarly appeal to a skeptical theistic anti-theodicy, evidentially, they claim to ground what is divinely FITTING in – not some facile anthropomorphic projection, but – Abba’s character per Jesus’ special revelation.
Universalists ask: How can perditionists defend such a theological ignosticism, especially one which seriously undermines our belief in any meaningful measure of human-divine connatural moral knowledge?
Universalists will thus reject some perditionists’ conceptions of the divine as too radically voluntarist – if not in theory, still – for all practical purposes.
Universalists, defending against perditionsists’ charges of a pantheistic determinism, reject what they see as facile anthropomorphic projections of various aspects of creaturely freedom & necessity onto the divine will & nature.
Universalists also reject some perditionists’ conceptions of human freedom as too radically libertarian – if not in theory, still – for all practical purposes.
The use of skeptical theism to defend perditionism by invoking a greater good devolves into a practical theological voluntarism and de facto human moral ignosticism. Universalists, ergo, rightly refuse to stipulate to the perditionists’ definitions of freedom & necessity, definitions which devolve, for all practical purposes, into an indefensible voluntarism, theologically, & vulgar libertarianism, humanly.
It’s not that perditionists don’t suitably qualify their definitions of freedom & necessity to avoid any unsavory voluntarist & libertarian claims, it’s just that, from a practical perspective in concrete contexts, those assertions become laughably implausible.
It’s not that perditionists’ skeptical theistic greater good defense is not generally apt for the problem of temporal evil, it’s just that it’s totally inapt (prima facie disproportionate) for the problem of everlasting perdition.
Even the fullest expression of the most radical evil is merely a nihilating SUBcontrary. Any such privation is a mere parasitic existent, which shall vanish as a mere temporal ephemerality. Otherwise, the act of creation would devolve into a divinely willed Manichean dualism.
Ephemeral subcontraries will only ever exist parasitically &
temporally, hence are not finally constitutive of any ultimately realizable aspect of eternal being & becoming, and never ultimately actualizable, only ever appearing & disappearing, impotently & ultimately.