The Greatest Freedom of All will be to never again avert our gaze
Our libertarian – compatibilist & voluntarist – intellectualist conceptions are too weak to capture what’s going on in human volition, such as when we freely & willingly love others.
As we grow in intimacy, our growth in knowledge of one another will be far more operative than gnoseological. Further, precisely because our human depth dimensions image the divine, the interpersonal meanings to be plumbed will remain everlastingly inexhaustible.
So, in our accountings for why we love any person, whomever, divine or human, there will always be some ineluctably ineffable aspect in our stories for which only the heart will have any reasons.
How meager, then, must be our conceptions of divine intentionality!
What accounting could we give of divine necessity & freedom? of essential necessities & intentional fittingness? of both the nondeterminacy & self-determinacy of divine persons?
As with human volition, then, beyond all the distinctions considered above, the divine volition must be conceived, at once, as in some sense both groundless as well as grounded by a self-constituting love.
Beyond our logics of natures & the natural inclinations & potencies that are operative within them, we must resort to our logic of persons, who are the empowered operators.
The divine persons simply exemplify the divine nature via pure acts. Human natures otherwise signify the divine nature, reducing (divine ex Deo) potencies via self-determinate acts.
Persons, then, divine & human, are freely, willing, loving powers, who are never more free than when they are operating what’s naturally operative to them and generatively so!
Freely, willing, loving powers can simultaneously self-determine the very natures from which they inseparably act & to which they’re otherwise irreducible & indifferent. (my Woodsian condensation)
Paterological innascibility, then, positively conceived as such an emanative generation needn’t implicate a proto-Father, Trinitologically.
Christological self-determination, then, emanatively & cosmologically, in creation as Incarnation, needn’t implicate a Logos asarkos.
Cosmotheandric personal identities, then, generatively-othered, grounded in the mutually constitutive I-Thou-ness of the Totus Christus, would certainly not implicate any concrete natura pura.
Just as the natural (apophatic) logic of divine innascibility entails also a positive personal logic of the generative power named love, divine impassibility would entail a positive personal logic of a loving power, Who is supremely passible per the divine esse intentionale. While transcending our conceptions of creaturely passibility, such “real relations” would otherwise, in no way, be incompatible with the divine intrinsic perfections.
I reflected on these realities to help illuminate our understanding of how, in the beatific vision, we might better conceive how we can, at the same time, be adequately determined, naturally, and sufficiently free, personally, to experience impeccability & inancaritability.
It’s not that there would be no reasons provided the will by our knowledge, once gifted an immediate rather than mediated divine presence. Rather, those reasons would be provided, infallibly by grace & ineffably by our hearts, thereby Providentially provisioning us the greatest freedom of all, which would be the freedom to never, again, avert our gaze.
As long as divine presences remain mediated, semiosis remains in infinite interpretive potency. Analogous to Gödelian incompleteness, one’s volition would remain, in principle, susceptible to apparent reasons to fallibly will this or that, so, in some sense unavoidably peccable.
That’s why I resist probabilistic universalist accounts, which imagine God running out the purgatorial clock by eventually outwitting our intellects. It would not be fitting & just to leave a finite person indefinitely, potentially everlastingly, susceptible to the misinterpretations that necessarily inhere in mediated divine presences.
This is not to say that I believe they don’t play a salutary role on our journeys, especially vis a vis soul-crafting or that they can’t amplify our experiences of divine intimacy (per aesthetic scope) or augment the breadth of our theophanic expressions.
I, indeed, affirm different kinds & degrees of epistemic distancing both protologically (perhaps even in a sub-eschatological Eden) and eschatologically (how else could we enjoy the ecstatic novelties implicit in epectasy).
Still, in the end, the only reality that could terminate our infinite semiosis is an encounter with the Ens Necessarium, to be clear, a vision that’s beatific, a presence that’s immediate.
That’s why I insist that there simply are no beatific contingencies.
There are no contingencies that are character-based, habit-based, disposition-based. That’s, in fact, one of the things a beatific vision accomplishes as both our ultimate end & our infallible means: it immerses us in purgative graces that will burn off the impurities of our vicious secondary natures. (I have written about both passive & active purgative processes but stipulate to the latter, here).
Similarly, I reject indwelling-based beatific contingencies (as incongruous with our concrete experiences of nature & grace).
In my musing – Do you believe in heavenly freedom & impeccability? – I address my theoanthropological conceptions of both human free will & human autonomy. Those coincide with model of freedom articulated by Pinckaers, by Gaines, & by David Bentley Hart. All of those fit with Peirce’s aesthetic primacy.