It’s Time to Cut Bulgakov, Hegel & Others Some Serious Slack
A necessitarian nominalism, whether merely apparent or clearly latent, notoriously thick or variously thin, has led many to wholesale reject Royce, Bulgakov, Hegel, Hartshorne, Whitehead & others.
Oversimplifying, but … sufficient remedies are available from Classical Theism [CT] & Peirce [CSP].
From CT, we know that some conception of simplicity, variously nuanced, remains indispensable. From CSP, his semiotic account of intersubjective becoming can innoculate our systems from nominalism & determinism.
For example, CT would block any inferences to any ad intra, theogonic becoming. CSP would insist on a distinction between individual & corporate agency (how they act interpretively) thus blocking any supraindividualist conceptions of communities, e.g. the Totus Tuus is rather decidedly interpersonal.
Within such heuristic constraints, Joseph Bracken’s neo-Whiteheadian metaphysic of intersubjectivity can be placed in a constructive dialogue with Hegel, Royce, Bulgakov & others.
Bracken, with recourse to Royce, sets forth an account that’s more Hegelian than Whiteheadian, as he dialogues with Moltmann, Mühlen and Jüngel.
See Process Philosophy and Trinitarian Theology by Joseph A. Bracken, S.J.
Bracken argues that what Whitehead meant by society and what Hegel meant by Spirit point toward an overall understanding of reality as inherently processive and communitarian.
See Spirit and Society: A Study of Two Concepts by Joseph A. Bracken, S.J.
Brandon Gallaher explores the resonance of a process panentheism, such as Bracken’s, with the Sophiology of the Russian theologian, philosopher and economist, Sergii Bulgakov.
See The Problem of Pantheism in the Sophiology of Sergii Bulgakov: A Panentheistic Solution in the Process Trinitarianism of Joseph A. Bracken?
In my own stance, which resonates with both the Sophiology of a Brackenized Bulgakov as well as Jordan Daniel Woods’ Maximian Christology & Cosmology, the Totus Christus would refer to the One concrete social Absolute in terms of the dynamical & epectatic interpersonal unitive doing (not supra-individual unitary being) of mutually constituted I – Thous (grounded in the differences of a loving & eternal generation of opposites).
See A Neo-Chalcedonian, Cosmotheandric Universalism