Bridging various majority & minority eschatological stances regarding post-mortem anthropology

We have only ever desired to define the whatnesses of natures, thatnesses of existence, thisnesses of haecceity, whens & wheres of temporality & transiency, hows of forms and whys of teloi because the Holy Spirit gifted all of humanity that primordial desire to know & name Who is the Gifter of all these gifts, givens & gifteds.

It is from our sorting through these gifts that we've come up with heuristics like the analogy of being, a participatory ontology, logics of natures, grammars of predication and even our Chalcedonian Christology. Such heuristics help make our references to creatures & the Creator more successful. They help us navigate various aporias, antinomies, paradoxes and conceptual contraries via our cognitive map-making.

Beyond such objects FROM reasoning, primordially we desire to know THE Object OF reason, Himself. And that requires logics of hypostases, perichoretic logics of personal modes & activities and our participatory imaginations.

In such personalist approaches, the most interesting

antinomies are embodied;

negations are personal positivities;

dialectics are personal;

acts of understanding are operative;

objects are manifestations of reason, Himself;

differences are particular;

identities are universal;

aspects of personhood are nonformal;

idiomata are ineffable;

ineffabilities are expressible actively;

coincidences of opposites are personal acts;

contraries are harmonizing; and

power is love.


Hewing closely to certain (not all) Thomistic approaches to post-mortem anthropology, especially regarding notions like inancaritability, impeccability, efficacious grace, predestination and related, and considering the personalist approach, above, I want to suggest that, regarding any given person's knowledge of God, while there are no character-based, disposition-based or indwelling-based epistemic contingencies that could interfere with reductions of either our creaturely or obedential potencies to know God, it would be precisely such contingencies that would ordinarily determine which modally distinct ways each person would know the Gifter. I say "ordinarily" because, extraordinarily, per divine predilection, predestination or efficacious gracing, one's formal ways of knowing could be divinely determined, all epistemic contingencies aside.

Because those modally distinct ways would be both manifold & multiform (think epecstatic), all could be uniquely situated post-mortem vis a vis both the extent of our expressions of glory and our degrees of beatitude.

I offer this as a conceptual bridge between various majority & minority eschatological stances regarding post-mortem anthropology, suggesting that all of either suasion, who reject realities like eternal conscious torment, may have more in common, creedally even, than we might otherwise too facilely suspect. While I would reject the label of infernalist, I'm not unwilling to count myself an inferiorist.

The above reflection is a follow to:

Basic Contours of a Catholic (as can be) Universalism

The Risks & Rewards of Pursuing a Romance with a Friend – my eschatological reverie