Chalce-DONE

Ye Are Gods?

Those theology of nature approaches, which remain the most accommodating to nondual interpretations - including the more literal & even commonsensical, will avoid the old dualisms, which present as obverse sides of the same bankrupt metaphysical coinage by turning – not to various pantheisms & monisms, but – irreducibly triadic approaches.

For my part, I’ve only invested in the semantic grammars of a triadic, modal ontology, which sets some vague credal contours within which to map competing idioms. I called it a panSEMIOentheism (2010).

Til now, I haven’t taken my project beyond that exploratory heuristic to advance any putative, fallibilistic speculative explanations. But, by my reading, there are some thinkers who have speculated in a manner consistent with my heuristic, even if they otherwise diverge in different explanatory directions. To them I defer & demur.

To wit:

Don Gelpi, SJ, approached his synoptic narrative Christology through a Peircean lens:

"When one interprets the Christology of Maximus the Confessor in the light of a realistic, social, triadic metaphysics of experience, Maximus’s doctrine holds the key to explaining the hypostatic union doctrinally."

In the _The Firstborn of Many : A Christology for Converting Christians_, Gelpi formulates an experiential construct of the hypostatic union by invoking a metaphysics of experience.

Gelpi’s metaphysics of *experience* defines it as a process made up of three generic kinds of *relational* elements (feelings): evaluations, decisions & tendencies. These correspond modally to Peirce’s categories of firstness [1ns] or possibilities, secondness [2ns] or actualities & thirdness [3ns] or probabilities (including necessities, habits, tendencies, etc).

In my panSEMIOentheism:

Gelpi’s evaluations & CSP’s 1ns map to Maximian logoi, which, as essential, eschatological limiting potencies, are reduced by each imago Dei’s act of existence (becoming an inviolate WHAT).

Gelpi’s decisions & CSP’s 2ns map to Maximian hypostases, which, as volitional limiting potencies, are reduced by our efficient acts (my Scotistic move) in potency to personhood (haecceity, bruteness, a sheer thisness becoming a unique WHO).

Gelpi’s tendencies & CSP’s 3ns map to Maximian tropoi, which, as the normative limiting potencies of similitudines Dei, are reduced by our formal acts (intentional, of intellect) in potency to the final causes of synergetic energeia (our acts becoming identical to HOW Christ acts).

Below are key Maximian concepts which, in my estimation, map to Gelpi’s Maximian Christology. They are mostly excerpted or paraphrased from Steven Pustay’s dissertation: "Becoming God, Becoming the Buddha: The Relation of Identity and Praxis in the Thought of Maximus the Confessor and Kūkai" 2015, Temple University

The logos = what, tropos = how and hypostasis ~ who.

The imago is inviolate (logoi) & similitudo (tropoi) are dynamical.

It’s the tropoi that require apokatastenai (restoration to original beatitude) & realize apokatastasis (epectatic beatitude).

Logoi are eschatological.

Transformed tropoi act as God would act.

Gelpi, CSP & Maximus all employ an irreducibly triadic relational ontology, which thereby overcomes both pantheism-theopanism & deism.

It’s plausible to me that Royce’s Absolute pragmatism & Hegel’s Absolute idealism and especially Joe Bracken’s *divine matrix* field approach, could roughly map, as concrete & social conceptions of the Absolute, to these *relational* ontologies of Gelpi, Peirce & Maximus.

Even Aurobindo’s cosmology, perhaps due to Western influences like Bergson, may map conceptually to these ontologies.

Upcoming publications of Jordan Daniel Wood & David Bentley Hart seem poised to pull other Maximian interpretations back from the ledges of speculative metaphysics, where they’ve been pushed, to ground them in, well, common sense. Who, then, are the real hyperbolists? Peirce’s pragmatic, semiotic realism defends, above all else, common sense.

Deification therefore transforms - not the whatnesses of our cosmic & anthropic ontological logoic participations, but - the hownesses of our perichoretic tropoi, thereby effecting hypostatic communion.

We become by grace what God is by nature - not at the level of logos, but - per tropoi.

The similitudo resides in tropoi & imago in logoi, although the tropoi are written in the logoi.

It’s via an exercise of the will that we become similitudines Dei tropically.

We become logoic manifestations virtuously.

Another heuristic that I apply to this triadic modal ontology comes from Scotus, who conceives the divine essence as a primary substance & immanent universal and the persons as – not individuals, but – exemplifications, which is rather felicitous to those who embrace folks like Bonaventure & Bulgakov, even Eriugena. It’s thoroughly theophanic. This seems to me to be a defensible extreme realism.

For determinate reality, the Aristotelian-like heuristic can still obtain, where our modal categories require acts – existential, efficient (volitional) & formal as limited by essential (logoic - what) material/personal (hypostatic - who) & final (tropic - how) potencies.

We navigate our temporal reality via this moderate realism, as epistemologies model ontologies.

HERE comes the turn – and it’s a most eminent *turn to community* with no loss of subjective integrity, no dissolution into an undifferentiated unitive reality, not a single *I* who is not constitutively & intimately related to every *Thou*.

What happens to the modal ontology of our moderate realism, when every logoic, hypostatic & tropic potency has been reduced by acts of existence, volition & becoming?

In neither our dynamical substance account nor relational ontology do our primary substances or hypostases disappear. As for the realized logoi, with every hypostasis wholly enessenced & every essence wholly enhypostasized, the epistemology modeling such a new ontology must adapt to account for universals no longer in potency, all having been reduced for every composite hypostasis. Only our extreme realist approach can best model this eschatological reality, where there are only immanent universals.

With all logoi enhypostasized as realized Logos & all hypostases enessenced, determinate being now requires our divine grammar, wherein logoi are eternally better modeled as primary substances & immanent universals and hypostases as – no longer mere semiotic significations, but – existential exemplifications!

Because of Stump’s eternal – temporal simultaneity, it seems to me that it’s the Scotistic extreme realism that best models both divine & determinate realities, both protologically & eschatologically.

We default to our moderate realist approach only provisionally & methodologically because we navigate temporal reality only as our empirical & practical but not authentic selves, which we become.

The crux, semiotically & temporally, we do only signify, cosmotheandrically, as vestiges, images & likenesses, because those logoi haven’t been wholly enhypostasized and every person remains only partly enessenced. Such an ontologically vague & general reality imposes a moderate realism as epistemology.

But persons, divine & human, who realize authenticity, essentially, per an extreme realism, are more properly said to exemplify the logoi. And Eriugena, Maximus, Scotus & Bonaventure can tell you what that means – WE, cosmotheandrically, are Christ.