Our Search for a Continuity of Meaning between our historical, protological & eschatological well beings
I believe that Who has been revealed in Jesus & Who forms us via indwelling & what’s been implanted in us connaturally, together, all warrant a significant trust in our (variously) shared common sense, moral intuitions & aesthetic sensibilities, notwithstanding our fallibility & peccability.
So, I generally resist any radical discontinuitues between our historical & eschatological – protological theo-anthropologies.
On the same grounds that I resist mysterian appeals in logical defenses of hell, because they’re nonsensical, morally unintelligible & aesthetically repugnant, I also resist theodicies that, for example, consider death as unavoidably intrinsic to an otherwise essential evolutionary process.
Maximus provides many conceptual distinctions that can assist our attempts to parse the logoi of well-being of creatures, which we can perceive, from their logoi of being & eternal well-being, which we’re yet to grasp fully.
Which aspects of creation’s good & theophanic realities:
do we experience according to tropos rather than logos?
are diachronic rather than synchronic?
simultaneous & co-extensive?
merely juvenile (but good) or alien (and not good)?
ensue from some past ontological rupture vs a teleological striving oriented toward the future?
arises from sin-caused degradation or corruption vs immaturity & incompleteness?
Which aspects of creation ensue according to God’s:
good will or thelēma eudokia?
dispensatory will or thelēma oikonomia?
concessive will or thelēma sugchōrēsis?
These are the questions explored by Andrew Jackson in
Towards an Eastern Orthodox Contemplation of Evolution: Maximus the Confessor’s Vision of the Phylogenetic logoi.
I cannot more highly recommend Jackson’s article.
Not unrelated: