Dyotheletism, divine foreknowledge & providence
This All Hallows’ Eve, let us ask Him to chase away our gnomes that we may become All Saints!
Jordan Daniel Wood offered: A thought: dyotheletism should complicate the way we construe divine foreknowledge and providence because Jesus’ intentions and actions are first-personal of the eternal God. “Not my will but yours” is not just some utterance God knows; it is something God utters. Never before did we have to think through a temporal act that is God’s own first-personal act.
If we locate the will in nature as ordered by logoi & recognize the gnomic & tropic as hypostatic, then, to the extent that one would enjoy, temporally, a deified tropos (no gnome), one might pray similarly to Christ in the Garden, i.e. at first, in full accord with, & then, beyond, the natural will!
While I eschew best possible world thinking, I conceive of the divine intentionale as affected by such as personal prayer & responding to us Providentially from a smorgasbord (Pareto front) of equipoised optimalities w/a change in aesthetic scope but not of intrinsic perfection.
When I suggested that a deified person would pray similarly to Christ in the Garden, that is successively, 1st according to one's natural will (per logoi) then tropically going beyond same (in accord w/divine will), that was to recognize that, sans gnomic will, we would always pray & real-ize what Our Father wills, on earth as it is in heaven.
Like our heavenly saints, then, with & for whom we enjoy mutual intercession, it is my belief that, while our volition will no longer be deliberative w/respect to choosing BETWEEN such as being & nonbeing (as we do when not following our natural wills), our volition will certainly continue to freely choose AMONG equipoised optimalities vis a vis eternal well being.
At least, this conception does less violence (than some others) to my sensibilities re those notions of that putative freedom to be experienced after eschatological closures of our epistemic distancing.
To wit, as per my distinction, above, re divine esse naturale & intentionale, between intrinsic perfection & aesthetic scope: A deified human person would, like God, still be AFFECTED in aesthetic scope but not aesthetic intensity, each enjoying one's unique tropic range, perichoretically, per one's allotted God-given participation in Logos.
Coming full circle, now, to Divine foreknowledge, it seems that I'm advocating both a weakened simplicity as well as a minimalist open theism, classically theistic re the nature & openly theistic re the will. And this very much suggests that there can be "real" relations (cf Norris Clarke) between divine & human wills, so yes, both experiencing personal changes beyond those of mere Cambridge properties. Such a mutability & passibility, though, is unlike that experienced by our deliberative gnomic willing, hence, immutable & impassible in that sense of only ever choosing among equipoised optimalities of eternal well being.
Like Jesus in the Garden, Who was fully in accord with both his natural human will & divine will vis a vis both His temporal & eternal well being, we can, too, in the same moment, be in full accord with both our natural will (per logoi) & deified will (per tropos sans gnome).
So, I would insist that our apophatic qualifiers allow us to put forward the notion, in an Anselmian and/or Scotistic way, that God is, rather, Supremely or Infinitely Mutable & Passible, really & truly & eternally affected by His creatures.
While I believe that we can draw fruitful distinctions between divine ousia & hypostases, naturale & intentionale, as well as essentially between divine & human wills, I also believe that sufficient nuancing can help us overcome our speculative anxieties re any inadvertent introduction of both nominalist & voluntarist attributes into our divine conceptions.
We don’t want to be overly rigorist by defining the divine in terms that are way too static. We can still maintain the distinction between divine nondeterminate necessity & divine self-determinate freedom even while insisting that Creation as Incarnation was in no degree arbitrary but truly fitting & proper, hence, inevitable - and in no way a response to some felix culpa but, rather, in the divine cards from the cosmotheandric get-go (cf Scotus & Maximus). If I may invoke Anselm, here: potuit, decuit, ergo fecit: ‘twas possible & fitting, ergo accomplished.
It’s this type of approach that I commend, one that the Subtle Doctor took over against the Angelic Doctor vis a vis the Immaculate Conception, the Theotokos, one whose fiat broke through our determinate temporality because an eternal simultaneity gifted her soteriological graces contained protologically in the Logos, sustained temporally by the Incarnation and retained eschatologically by the Body of Christ, cosmotheandrically - no vestige, image or likeness left behind!
The Hypostatic Union revealed this to us: Human & divine wills operate unconfusedly, both temporally & eternally, on earth as it is in heaven, in both humanized divine persons & divinized human persons.
The prayer in the Garden is the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer He gave us in response to our asking.
So, this All Hallows’ Eve, let us ask Him to chase away our gnomes that we may become All Saints on earth as we’ll be in heaven. And, Lord, until then, let many cups pass for us, yet Thy will be done.
If meditating with the Neochalcedonians & Maximus on Christology & theological cosmology doesn’t bring you consolations, you haven’t thought through & prayed through the practical universalist implications. That’s my prayer for you, today & always. Be not afraid.