If we are constitutively indwelled, then …

Formal-like causes may operate in the dynamics of grace (Stump), creation (Arraj), the divine matrix (Bracken) and beatific vision (Aquinas).

Concretely, I believe that such formal-like causes operate in our constitutive divine indwelling, by which we participate in an unalienable & mutually interpenetrative relationship with the universal pneumato-Christo-presence.

Thus united to us, the indwelling Presence is both God, our End, Whom we’ll forever increasingly understand, as well as God, the Means, whereby we’re made to thus finitely understand.

Concretely, then, I view our ineffable ways of knowing, i.e. tacit dimension (Polyani), illative sense (Newman), connaturality (Maritain) & unrestricted desire (Lonergan), to be representative aspects of that indwelling Presence, which serves as the very ground of our value-pursuits of truth, beauty & goodness and precisely because the Indwelling interminably & formally unites us, perichoretically, with the True, Beautiful & Good.

This is all to deny, then, that the beatific vision requires any novel superadditum to our essential epistemic furnishings, which were sufficient, historically & transiently, on Mts Tabor & Athos and for Moses, Paul & preeminently Mary. A beatific vision, whether experienced transiently or permanently, can abide in perfect harmony with our human nescience, having done so most preeminently in Jesus. That’s to say, too, that certain aspects of our trust, faith & hope, as well as of our deliberative choosing, may perdure eternally, while others will certainly be finally sublated by all manner of divine Showings.

This is to deny, also, that our knowledge of God is strictly mediated & theophanic, exclusive of any immediate & supratheophanic modes.

This is to affirm that epektasis & theosis operate protologically, historically & eschatologically, expanding the divine aesthetic scope infinitely & timelessly, temporally & transiently and eternally & everlastingly via the operations of the Son, Jesus & the Totus Christus, Who are constitutively identical (contra any concrete Logos asarkos & sans any obeisance to sequence).

Finally, our eventual perfection will finally consist in – not satiety, but – the perpetual stability of our strainings toward & progressions in Love’s relative perfections, i.e. Nyssen’s “stability in the good.”

For Further Thought

How would epektasis even be possible if our final potencies were natural, hence limited? That would entail never finally becoming what we are?

And how could we be in infinite potency with anything less than a tantum quantum reciprocity, without which our unitive becoming would eventually stall?

Because of the hypostatic identity, Love – will not only negate both the affirmation & negation of persons’ natures, but – also abolish any unitive obstacles that might present due to differences in persons’ hypostatic properties (haecceities, idiomata, whonesses, etc).

If, as Maximus argues, persons can abolish through Love differences among themselves such that they’re not divided among themselves any more, and

those abolished differences refer to each person’s peculiar hypostatic properties (whether as in principle unshareable idiomata

or haecceities or unique bundles of in principle shareable idiomata or what have you), and

if, since persons, both divine & human, while inseparable from, are otherwise indifferent & irreducible to their natures, then,

insofar as all are being directed toward the Λόγος, neither differences in natures nor in any hypostatic properties can stand in the way of our unity in Love!

So, the oneness, the Love, of humanity, divinity and humanity – divinity is not conceived in relation to natures, but rather as a result of the tantum quantum reciprocity of personal perichoretic mutual interpenetrations.

This is because, by definition, divine quiddity refers to an unshareable essence, which, though imitable, is otherwise nothing to be absolutely grasped after. And because divine haecceities refer to in principle unshareable hypostatic idiomata. And further, because the what’s & how’s of our finite quiddity are limited in potency, nothing tantum quantum originates thereby.

A neologism: divine “epektables” refer to in principle shareable hypostatic properties (certain nonformal positivities), which are repeatable & precisely regarded as things to be perpetually grasped after as realizable per the infinite potencies of the who’s & how’s of our hypostatic tropoi.