Human nature's already as graced & "super" as it ever was
and as it ever will be
Human nature's already as graced & "super" as it ever was, protologically, and as it ever will be, eschatologically.
Neither as persons nor a people are our temporal sojourns ordered toward either "perfecting what we are" or "identifying who we are," because, eternally, our mutually constituted identities (WHO) proportionately participate in perfections relative to - not nonbeing, but - Absolute being (WHAT).
There's never been a shadow, vestige or image of God in creation not indwelled by the universal pneumato-Christo-logical presence & not invariably destined to manifest a particular Christo-pneumato-logical presence.
Each thus sojourns with an aim toward co-creatively & synergetically self-determining HOW she will manifest Christ, Who's thereby multiply incarnated.
For human persons, this partially self-determinative volition necessarily integrates intellect & will, which reduce divinely gifted potencies to acts, and divine synergies are realized - not only by assents, but - even by absences of refusal to cooperate with the Spirit!
Human persons, as each of us knows, can choose - not only how, but - WHETHER to manifest Christ, whether to manifest human nature. Vicious secondary natures can thereby mask our authentic nature & disguise our identity, parasitically existing as nonbeing-ness-es, which take the forms of sin, evil & excessive suffering.
Vicious natures do not transist into eternity but are purged, somehow. In my view, I believe such refusals to manifest Christ are intrinsically self-nihilating. Our virtuous natures, however, variously grand or humble, are intrinsically eternalized.
Who otherwise believes that, on the 7th Day, God rested, but, realizing reality was in no way Manichean, was disappointed, so decided to gift eternal life to nonbeing via an otherwise parasitic existence, finally declaring: It is good! Well, infernalists do.
We're free enough to choose HOW we shall manifest Christ, deciding amongst various eternal well beings. We're not, in the end, free enough to choose WHETHER we shall manifest Christ. I know many will be disappointed.
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Indeed, we are SO good, essentially, that - not only our assents, but - even our absences of refusal, volitionally, to synergetically cooperate with the Spirit toward those transformative ends of our life journeys leave us available to grace!
Now, about our refusals ...
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Our logoi are wholly determined per an essential nature ordered toward eternal well being. Our tropoi only freely self-determine how we co-creatively (synergetically) manifest that nature. No one's sufficiently free to will total nonbeing absolutely or partial nonbeing eternally.
Those 3 anthropological notions, above, express my Christologically anchored universalist precis. Many implications flow from those axiomatic notions.
They implicate, for example, the apokatastenai (restorations) of every creature's essential beatitudes.
For, you see, the original beatitudes of our essential logoi can indeed have become masked, temporally, by the many non-synergetic self-determinations, which we have tropically dis- ordered (although only ever partially) to nonbeing.
An inordinate appetite (Juandelacruz) or disordered desire (Ignatius), habitus, can situate between tropic acts & potencies to cripple, but never to kill, our theotic trajectories. We have - not only vicious, but - also virtuous secondary natures, which help facilitate theosis.
Beyond restorations of original beatitude (Maritain's apokatastenai), then, we'll apokatastatically realize the secondary beatitudes of our theotic journeys, as we co-creatively self-determine them, along w/our unique charisms & spiritualities, in our epectatic eternal wellbeing.
Clearly, our non-synergetic self-determinations & tropic dis-orders, which can vary from venial to grave, can gift a parasitic existence to sin, evil & excessive pain. No such events, as ordered to nonbeing, play any indispensably instrumental role in our theotic journeys.
While theodicy issues are a separate, not wholly unrelated, concern from this universalist precis & mystery to be variously addressed -
epistemic distancing will otherwise remain integral to our co-creative self-determinations, even as we freely choose among eternal wellbeings.
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Eventually, I came to believe that Gelpi's project was constructive of & extended the best of transcendental Thomists, especially Lonergan, who was, imo, sufficiently holistic. Gelpi had (wrongly) caricatured them (more than a tad) as too aprioristic. Gelpi & parts of Radical Orthodoxy fit too.
Gelpi roundly inventories & soundly critiques the inadequacies of the idioms available to the Fathers, citing a half dozen forms of dualism that rendered Christologies unintelligible. He credits Maximus & the Damascene w/seminal post-Chalcedonian insights re GNaz's perichoresis. He would certainly endorse (insist on) how Maximus "fixed" (inverted) Origen, e.g. genesis, kinesis, stasis and how that implicates an emanational multiplicity rather than divisibility, cosmotheandrically, vis a vis how the Many are becoming One, unitively.
Yes.
Even in an appropriation of Peirce, one (Royce, for example) might still be tempted to conceive the Many as journeying toward the One as a supraindividual unitary being rather than as an interpersonal unitive doing (of a concrete social Absolute). Yet we stan neo-Platonism's Classical Theism strands!
This all implicates a profusely pneumatological account of history & culture and opens room for meaningful dialogue between diverse approaches incl, for example, Peirce, Gelpi, Lonergan, Bergson, Hegel & Radical Orthodoxy!
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Hypostatic logic must refer, existentially & essentially, to both idiomata & ousia, haecceities & essences, tropoi & logoi, persons & natures, perichoreses & participations, the enessenced & enhypostasized, etc integrally relating both without unduly emphasizing either.
Beyond nondeterminate essential natures, divine persons wholly self-determine secondary natures.
Beyond a wholly determined essential nature, created persons partly (synergetically) self-determine secondary natures.
Due to their immutability, essential natures, both divine & human, can be accounted for - systematically, monologically & dialectically - via an a priori participatory logic of being or an essentialist, naturalist constitutive whatness per ousia & attributes.
Due to their passibility, secondary natures, both divine & human, can be accounted for - dynamically, dialogically & analogically - via an a posteriori perichoretic logic of becoming, i.e. an existentialist, personalist, revelatory howness per haecceities & idiomata.
Is there a majority consensus Neo-Chalcedonianism as might be had via extensions of Chalcedon per, more or less, predominant interpretations of Cyril, Maximus & the Damascene? Notwithstanding the fact that it may have been widely caricatured? If so, any recommended secondary sources? Including scholastic Lutherans?
Beyond said consensus, did Jenson radicalize the communicatio idiomatum, taking the properties of divinity & humanity to be not merely communicated to the one person, but to be also shared, at least in some respect, between the natures? Was he just following Luther? Including 19th Century Lutherans?
While DBH may have been surprised that Jenson denied being influenced by German idealism, e.g. Schelling, clearly, the whole lot of them, Hegel & Jenson included, were influenced by Luther?
The communication of idioms refers, like Scotus' univocity, only semantically & grammatically, following exegetical & liturgical contours, to the meta-noetic hownesses of personal manifestations. References to howness require predications in quale that help us identify who is acting, who is manifesting, including even synergetic acts, implicitly affirming even our perichoretic, mutually constituted identities as grounded in our differences. This is a logic or grammar, then, of hypostatic IDIOMata.
It would be a simple category error to imagine that this must somehow necessarily inform us regarding
hypostatic ousia or meta-ontic participations, such that we could thereby employ predications in quid. After all, the divine nature remains occulted in principle. Hence, the unavoidable analogy of being.
That’s not to say, however, that one couldn’t or shouldn’t speculatively go beyond the Cyrillian - Maximian - Damascene neo-Chalcedonian exegetical & liturgical grammar / heuristic to advance a meta-ontic metaphysic. That's ok! Especially when animated by Scripture & worship, too! But such an account would no longer be just a neo-Chalcedonian theological heuristic because it will have been ontologized into a metaphysic, which must then compete with all other such accounts, e.g. substance, process, social - relational, etc
At that point, we can ask: Does that new idiom (e.g. of Luther, Jenson) work to well express our Scriptural & liturgical insights or does it collapse into incoherence from various infelicitous implications?
There's not one perichoresis? There are many analogous perichoreses? That's to recognize that the trinitological differs in kind from the hypostatic union which differs from the cosmotheandric, etc?
So, even if we stipulate to a perichoretic symmetry between Jesus’ essential & assumed natures, it would still be incoherent to suggest a symmetry between divine & created persons? For, while the "hownesses" of our synergetic opera are noncompetitive, even bilateral, they remain, undeniably, asymmetric. e.g. Jesus ascended; Mary was assumed.
Beyond the ontological, participative, emanative or analogical,
neither our perichoretic logic nor our graced experience of same will gift us a
conceptual understanding, e.g. such as via a triadic inferential cycling that maps ousia & energies to hypostases, logoi to tropoi, or universals to particulars.
Rather, our perichoretic logic & graced experiences of perichoresis will gift us a
configurational understanding, e.g. such as via a storytelling that reveals a narrative of events that relates hypostases to hypostases, tropoi to tropoi, particulars to particulars, a personal universale to a cosmotheandric universum.
Our perichoretic logic thus otherwise will address what are embodied antinomies, e.g. such as mutually constituted I - Thous, whose identities are grounded in their differences, and who share a destiny of - not unitary being, but - unitive relationality.
That unitive relationality will be soteriologically ordered toward the redeemed tropic hownesses - not logoic whatnesses - of the concrete, social Absolute and ecclesiologically ordered toward the reality of the totus Christus.
Which cosmic, exegetical & liturgical narratives and/or metaphysical idioms might best mirror the revealed universale will have to be authenticated by metrics that are - not just orthodoxic, but - orthopathic, orthopraxic, orthotheotic & orthocommunal, per a normative science wherein aesthetics will precede ethics which will precede logic.
This is to suggest, then, that any systematic theology of perichoresis will be far more an exercise of prayer & mystical contemplation & far less one of analytic theology & metaphysical speculation, that is, it will more so engage a science of - not ontology, but - love.
That's why I feel that the overall thrust of a "Creation is Incarnation" story is apt, fitting, beautiful, existentially actionable & transformative.
But what about ontology? What about the analogical interval? What about true opposities?
No one - would deny the reality of such opposing differences as we refer to them in our categories, forms & determinations. It's only that we so often forget the constitutive mutuality & inseparability of same.
It's only that we must finally see through our (unavoidable) abstractions to properly interrelate with & discern the realities of concrete particulars, which is to recognize that we only ever truly interact with enhypostasized essences & enessenced hypostases.
So, we should guard against our tendencies to reify essences (natures aren’t 'existing things,' whether divine or created) and to hypostasize the energeia of logoi.
Neither should we ontologize either the divine or created esse intentionale, imagining that we could define its "what"ness, determinatively. Our perichoretic logic reveals, rather, the identity of such willing agents, denominatively, allowing us to discern, instead, "who" is acting by properly attending "how" each, peculiarly, acts.
Attending strictly to our hypostatic, perichoretic logic of tropoi, then, not at all denying the participatory distinctions regarding the essences & energeia of logoi, we need fear neither a pantheism nor theopanism, nor any other eschaton that might be, in any way, personally &/or cosmically obliterative.
The hypostatic identity between the divine & created, which implicates a bidirectional humanization - divinization dynamic, remains ineffable and resolves, existentially & intimately, as an embodied antinomy, wherein each "I" discovers each "Thou." Proleptically, this particular antinomy will not otherwise resolve, conceptually & inferentially, to overcome the paradox metaphysically, although we may reasonably expect that resolution will be on offer eschatologically, for those who, even once given so many other beatitudes, may still find same interesting.
Because the Word enhypostasizes the world, cosmotheandrically, we can be confident that those same logoi - as enessenced by every created hypostatic shadow, vestige, image & likeness of God - have also been assumed, essentially, by the Son of God.
Every particular, finite shadow, vestige, image & likeness has been created to hypostatically interrelate to and to express - even though not to exhaust - the universal, Absolute divine, Who has decided to be realized in them - not by modal declension, not by essential or natural identity, but - by grace or eternal well being. A person's participatory knowledge of these graced experiences will transcend discursive understanding & theoretical concepts, expressing without exhausting the totus Christus, exemplifying the essentially human & signifying the essentially divine.
The graced realization of both the human & divine in each creature is communicated idiomatically, which is to say, by Christ's gifting to each precisely what is proper to each in terms of each creature's own peculiar hypostatic mode (howness) of manifesting the Christ, i.e. personal modes that distinguish how each expresses the relative perfections of their own specially given logoi (whatnesses of their essences & energeia).