Hey Jordan, what work does analogy do in your Christology? JDW: What work does Christ do in YOUR analogical interval?

The following reflection was evoked by Tim Troutner's Crisis of a House Divided: Jordan Wood and the End of the Ressourcement Thomist Settlement

Fr Behr once asked Jordan what work does analogy do in your Christology?

Jordan seems to be asking almost everybody else what work does Christ do in your analogical interval?

It may not be totally apposite to or conversant with what these remarkably gifted academics are doing, but ... fwiw

While analogical intervals unavoidably foreclose successful quidditative definitions, ontologically, still, in principle, the logic of analogy necessarily presupposes many successful univocal references, semantically.

It is for this reason that we presuppose that necessary being can remain, at once, both utterly incomprehensible and infinitely intelligible to finite, rational creatures.

One can then advance a retortion argument that reality's thoroughgoing intelligibility cannot be refuted without performative contradictions, thus bolstering the inferences of immaterialism.

While this immaterialism doesn't logically reduce to idealism, it does reinforce the coherence of the objective idealisms of the Germans and Peirce, which can cogently lend themselves to a robustly personalist conception of the Ens Necessarium.

As a vague modal phenomenology, especially prior to either importing notions of supervenience or root metaphors of ontology, such a plain vanilla emergentism can furnish a truly supple God - World relationship architectonic. As a theo-heuristic, it can accommodate - not only classical theisms, but - Advaita, Neoplatonisms & ex Deo multiplicative monisms. It can help underwrite both Maximus & Bulgakov, Chalcedon & Gaudium et Spes 22, Aurubindo & Josiah Royce, Joseph Bracken & Donald Gelpi, Norris Clarke & Robert Jenson, even David Bentley Hart & Jordan Daniel Wood.

The logics of the analogical interval & semantical univocity coupled with their implicit, rudimentary personalist entailments provision not only a necessary but a sufficient framing for the gratuities of creation & grace (sans any concrete natura pura), for the creation's telic aim in Christ, for a robustly intersubjective protology of mutually constituted & equiprimordial persons & societies and the eminently unitive eschatological ecclesiology it necessarily presupposes.

What this theo-heuristic adequately accounts for, in my view, is the gift of humanity's substantial being per the gratuity of creation, as universally presenced by, mutually constituted intersubjectively with, and proportionately participating in the divine being in our modally distinct ways. It is in many ways profoundly pneumatological.

That's a hell of a lot of agreement, which, in many ways, refutes the logic of hell. Humanity's substantial being already entails the unalienable goodness of God's images, all consistent with a moral nature that is essentially virtuous & will that is sufficiently free.

Where this theo-heuristic begins to seriously limp is precisely Christologically. Its not that it's said anything wrong; its only that what it imagines to be a respectful silence turns out to be a rather arbitrary refusal to adhere to our foundational retortion argument, which first established reality's thoroughgoing intelligibility, generally speaking, and its radically interpersonal axiology, in particular, wherein Truth is a Person, where any nomicities of divine logoi issue - not inscrutably from an impersonal Ens Necessarium, but - explicitly from Jesus, our way, our truth and our life.

This is the Neo-Chalcedonian rub that I've gathered from Jordan Daniel Wood, as located by Troutsky in various locutions, which have addressed what might be at stake in the competing emphases of JDW & DBH. This is consistent with the Peircean insights I've gathered from both Don Gelpi, who interpreted the Christology of Maximus the Confessor believing that Maximus’s doctrine held the key to explaining the hypostatic union doctrinally, as well as Joe Bracken, whose neo-Whiteheadian approach can better contextualize Bulgakov, Jenson and others, in my view, especially JDW.

To Troutner's point, then, "humanity and divinity are concretely (or hypostatically) identical in a way 'analogy' cannot think —at least in the case of Christ; the analogical interval heuristic cannot sufficiently “retrieve either the content (the Incarnation’s structure and scope) or the (speculative) form of the Confessor’s genius;" and its "ready-at-hand model of the God-world relation proved inadequate."

Specifically and more concretely, beyond the analogical logics & distinctly Christological telic aims shared by all of the interlocutors, using theo-heuristics which, more or less, can adequately account, theoanthropologically & essentially, for our substantial being as gifted in the gratuity of creation, might we say MORE about the distinctly Christological MEANS, through which we co-self-determinedly grow our accidental being as gifted in the gratuity of grace.

This is to inquire, then, beyond the means afforded determinate beings through the universal, pneumatological divine presencing & our constitutive cosmotheandric mutual indwelling (contra any concrete natura pura), what practical differences might the hypostatic union & its multiform multiple incarnations, i.e. particular presencings, make?

What I want to urge is that in the same way that Bonaventure's emanationism sublated Aquinas' innascibility, Jordan Daniel Wood's Maximian interpretation & hypostatic logic sublates the analogical. The Son's ad extra, kenotic, positive, personal self-determination of His own equiprimordial, cosmotheandric nature - not only echoes, but - could be co-eternal with the Father’s intra-Trinitarian, ur-kenotic personal emanative act. The Son's self-determinative divine act would be wholly gratuitous precisely because it's volitionally fitting per personal logic and not metaphysically necessary per onto-logic.

What's at stake, then, in our theotic growth beyond divine images to likenesses? As we actualize & mature the morally perfect virtues of our substantial being, we integrally progressively realize the infinite perfectibility of the supererogatory virtues of our accidental being. Theosis & epektasis will everlastingly grow our interpersonal divine intimacy, subjective beatitude & objective theophany.

If in the gratuity of creation, the universal divine presence mutually constituted our radically intersubjective substantial being, in the gratuity of grace the multiply-incarnate particular Christ-presencings invite intimacy.

I'll stop here. I've already spent the better part of my seven decades fleshing it all out as an autodidact. But if I've at least intuited in part what the Retro-Neo-Chalcedonians are doing, I'd say they're just inviting us to get on with better counting & accounting for the ways that Christ is seducing us.

Sophiologically, it was always unavoidably possible (never anthropologically necessary) that our theotic growth in the intimacy & supererogatory virtue of our accidental being could jeopardize the essential friendship & parasitize the natural moral virtue of our substantial being. Soteriologically, it's precisely the manifold & multiform efficacies of the Incarnation which made the divine wager worthwhile, for no irremediable harm to others or irreparable subcontrary vicious disposition in ourselves could ever perdure everlastingly.

Analogy will get you into the theo-vestibule, pneumatologically, as we're divinely established as images in friendship, but only sublation, Christologically, can robustly account for our growth as likenesses in intimacy. Beyond a telic primacy of Christ as our End, Who's been revealed is the Absolute Primacy of Christ as also our Means!

To risk an over-simplification, analogical logic underwrites our pneumato-Christological establishment, while hypostatic logic opens us to never-ending Christo-pneumatological invitations. We're not that far apart.