Another (Peircean) Musing about The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessorby Jordan Daniel Wood

Below is another musing about The Whole Mystery of Christ
Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor
by Jordan Daniel Wood

Does JDW’s Maximian “hypostatic identity of all things in the incarnate Word,” avoid:

1) an apparent pantheism & determinism as in Bulgakov’s Sophiology?
2) subsuming individuals by the whole as in Royce’s Absolute?
3) theogony & nominalism as in other dynamical accounts, e.g. Whitehead & Hartshorne?

While it goes beyond the ontological & participatory w/its logics of persons & perichoreses, still, what work’s being done in his account by the analogia?

Might the Maximian Logos – logoi doctrine refer to – neither static substantialist nor even dynamical process accounts of “being,” but – theophanic accounts of manifestations, revelations & signs (e.g. Eriugena, even Bulgakov).

Might it more so refer, then, to an account of synergistic “doing” in a “metaphysic of communication” as unitively ordered toward inter-personal communion?

In exploring Jordan’s “Maximian Woods” (St Meinrad’s alumni affectionately recall their late, great Maximus scholar, Polycarp Sherwood & his lectures aka “Sherwood’s Forest“), I think more so about how it might relate to the Trinitarianisms of Eriugena & Peirce, semiotically & phenomenologically.

I appropriate the Woodsian account of a concrete social Absolute as an intersubjective architectonic of the inter-personal activities of freely knowing, willing & loving, i.e. as an inter-personal unitive doing of intimacy (in Bracken’s Divine Matrix).

James Bradley, in “Beyond Hermeneutics: Peirce’s Semiology as a Trinitarian Metaphysics of Communication,” writes:
“Peirce’s semiology can be divorced from its speculative-metaphysical context of Trinitarianism. In one sense, this is obviously so: the triune semiological process can be treated as a naturalist cosmology of communication, or merely as a useful interpretive tool.”

Later, Bradley continues: “This is a theory of evolutionary process in which the cosmos is understood as a sign that awaits its realization as a community by the activity of interpretation. The ultimate telos is not the all-containing self-completeness of transparent mind, but the mutuality of shared and perfect community.”

It is thus that Peirce provides solutions to various problems, merely apparent or clearly latent, in the systems of Bulgakov, Royce, Whitehead, Hartshorne & others.

I contend that it is similarly thus that “creation is Incarnation” and “Christology is cosmology.” It’s about signs in the heavens above & wonders on the earth below, about communications & communions!