Human persons can be divinized in a perfectly symmetric way to how Christ self-determined to be humanized

In suggesting that human persons can be divinized in a perfectly symmetric way to how Christ self-determined to be humanized, am I also saying in all ways symmetrically and not just in one way symmetrically? Well, let’s see.

All persons will have ontogenetically recaptitulated our phylogenetic ancestry during each one’s embryonic development.

We each progressively instantiate our ancestral natures – to first become shadows & vestiges – before we act as images, then likenesses, of God.

As microcosms, we’ll continue to embody or enact each of our ancestral natures even as we’ll continue to increasingly transcend them by growing ever more humanly authentic.

Metaphysically, an emergentist paradigm could describe a dynamic dialectic – whether generically, as merely interrelational (ententional acts – nomic pushes), or specifically, as robustly intersubjective (intentional acts – telic pulls), in terms of constitutive absences.

Such a descriptive account, as an exploratory heuristic, invites competing interpretive accounts, as plausible explanatory attempts.

One might analogically refer to emergent ontological levels with their various bidirectional causes & a/symmetric effects in terms of supervenience, but no new information will have really been added when one invokes further distinctions like strongly emergent & weakly supervenient or weakly emergent & strongly supervenient. The former distinction remains question begging, the latter – trivial.

Both how our inherent natures – as shadowy & vestigial ontic pushes and semiotic, pragmatic telic pulls – interact within us, as well as how we – as variously natured entities & persons – interact with each other, can be described using an emergentist paradigm. (Two types of perichoreses for those anticipating where I’m going.)

An emergentist paradigm only ever refers to reality’s emergent ontological levels in order to bookmark – not explain – their novelties, e.g. life, sentience & symbolic language.

Those whose work-products tout consciousness as explained & nature as inherently incomplete are using, wittingly or not, an Aristotelian participatory ontology, which, unavoidably, makes implicit use of formal acts as ordered by constitutive absences (structural constitutive lacks). Not to worry, though, for nature can provide the missing nomic &, arguably, telic goods (as weakly & wimpily conceived). Or can it?

The dialectic opposites, then, are not presenced vs unpresenced but, rather, determinedly presenced vs synergistically (co-determinedly) presenced. That synergistic dynamic entails our potential to eternally, epectatically & asymptotically become, more and more, an exemplification, and, less and less, a mere signification of the divine immanent universal. I resist employing an excluded middle on this distinction between signification & exemplification vis a vis instantiable vs immanent universals because we’re talking about dynamical secondary natures not static primary natures. If pressed to conceptual rigor, even if I might concede that, essentially, we would only ever signify & instantiate divine relative perfections, I would insist that, for all practical purposes, theophanically & beatitudinally, we’ll progressively, at least, come to virtually exemplify the divine nature.

Arguably, even our journey to human authenticity entails a growth process where we progressively exemplify – not just signify – our humanity. So intertwined are our soul maturation conversions of authenticity and our soul crafting theotic dynamics, what the latter rather precisely gift us is nothing less than sustained authenticity, which means to be the gods we really are ex Deo and the intimate lovers we are eternally invited to become through all manner (qualitatively) & degrees (quantitatively) of Presencing.

If creation is Incarnation, then (determinate) human persons can be co-self-determinedly divinized in a perfectly symmetric way to how the (non-determinate) divine Christ self-determined to be humanized. Intersubjectively, we have to go beyond mere ontological participation to a hypostatic perichoresis to recognize – not only that human persons (as divine microcosms) are constitutively presenced by the divine, but – that Christ (as divine macrocosm) is eternally co-constituted cosmotheandrically.

While none of this denies

a) the analogia entis;

b) that human persons remain forever finite;

c) that the beatific vision might be variously enjoyed in terms of degrees of intensity or

d) that our human beatific vision is gifted by grace rather than nature,

it is meant to emphasize that, at least in my family’s gatherings & celebrations, what never comes up or even crosses our minds is either the fact that so many of us were adopted or any designation regarding who was or not.

Even as we add an hypostatic perichoretic account to our account of ontological participation and even as we substitute a metaphysic of constitutive presence in place of one of constitutive absence, in neither case do we ambition or pretend to provide new information, much less explanatory adequacy, in terms of metaphysical howness. We are, rather, conceptually bookmarking theoanthropological novelties that remain irreducible, epistemically & ontologically. But this doesn’t mean they aren’t, at the same time, supremely intelligible. That, indeed, is quite the point. One practical upshot is – not that God is utterly incomprehensible, although He’ll remain that even in our visions beatific, but – that God is supremely intelligible,
hence not disproportionate to human nature in that noetic
sense. We are intrinsically receptive, precisely via our divine constitutive presence, to being gifted that novel disposition of noetic identity, which will be adequate
to a beatific vision.

In Joe Bracken’s article, Is Terrence Deacon’s Metaphysics of Incompleteness Still
Incomplete?, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 38 (2-3):138-151 (2017), Fr. Bracken probes:

For, as Deacon makes clear in Incomplete Nature,“being alive does not merely consist in being composed in a particular way. It consists in changing in a particular way” (175). An Aristotelian substantial form is basically fixed in its mode of operation. It is thus ill suited to be the governing principle in an evolving life system in which the mode of operation of the
system keeps evolving in the direction of greater order and complexity. But is it enough to claim that the “constitutive absence” of a substantial form to govern its mode of operation suffices to explain from a philosophical perspective how the life-system continues to evolve in an orderly manner?
Deacon’s appeal to the notion of mutual constraint as the way that the components of a given system dynamically interrelate is simply a description of what happens, not of why it happens.

When we thus aspire to describe our perichoretic Christology & Cosmotheandrism, we aren’t attempting to explain, philosophically, how those interrelations operate. Rather, we are supplementing those descriptions agreed upon at Chalcedon with additional interpretations (not uncontroversial) of patristic theologoumena that are, arguably, creedally defensible.

I hesitate to over-identify my account with that of Jordan Daniel Wood’s because, as an autodidact, I tend to interpret most theologians eisegetically. I do thank him for being so kind & deferential toward me over the years.

Summary

Christ became human in all ways but sin. We’re eternally becoming divine in no way but love.

Historically & proleptically, already, we actively & passively spirate, respectively & reciprocally, sanctifying grace & charity, which are both created.

Eschatologically, the lumen gloriae of the beatific vision, whether conceived as the expressions of divine energeia (Nyssen) and/or noetic identity (Aquinas), gifts us a quidditative understanding – though not comprehension – of the divine.

Constitutively, as human creatures, we will finally be gifted the divine eschatological operations of our divine protological identities, both of which are uncreated, both of which are love. We speak here, then, of our acts & relations beyond our natures, the former which refer to accidents of our secondary essence.

What could this even mean?

… the reason why lovers in their raptures don’t bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. ~ C.S. Lewis

Sorry, that’s all I’ve got.

After note:

Our theory of truth appears to be that truth refers to the TriPersonal God?

Our theory of knowledge is that knowledge entails being in right relationship to God, that relationship being personal?

So, our theory of knowledge gives operative knowledge a primacy over mere gnoseological knowledge, which would mean that noetic identity mostly refers both to being receptive to love as well as kenotic in giving love.

This certainly refers to mediated divine presences like grace & sacraments as well as an immediate presence, i.e. meeting the person, Jesus, whether historically &/or eschatologically?

Limit cases can be illuminative: We must sufficiently include, then, such as a putative beatific vision, which as a nonmediated or transmediated presence would require a noetic identity (Aquinas) or enjoyment of expressions of divine energeia or both.

This stance remains inconsistent with subjective materialism (materialist monism), objective materialism (pantheism), occasionalism (Malebranche et al) and subjective idealism (Berkeley et al). It’s otherwise prima facie & broadly consistent with objective idealism (Germans, Pragmatists et al), Aristotelian substantial forms (Arraj’s deep, dynamical formal fields) and theistic NeoPlatonism (Nathan Jacobs’ Augustinian model, qualified nondualisms, etc), so compatible w/classical theism & some panentheisms.