The One & the Many? A Dualism of Being & Monism of Doing
creatio ex Deo & a metaphysics of becoming
My objective idealism derives from a theological stipulation & doesn't pretend to be a metaphysical explanation.
Apropos of "nothing," I'm mostly satisfied with theology's answers to "why is there something?" and to the "problem of evil” (certain logical defenses but no evidential theodicies! God gets out of the dock for me based on the testimony of character witnesses & not based on case theories & evidential matters.)
Indeed, without a God-concept, to me, it would seem harder to overcome various atheodicy problems, e.g. accounting for reality's excess of meaning, surplus of beauty & gratuitous goodness.
Not just propositionally, but dispositionally, then, I incline toward a comedic - not tragic - ontology. This involves - not a metaphysical conviction regarding so many things unseen, but - an existential "living as if" with a confident-enough assurance in things hoped for.
In my view, the most coherent comedic ontology would be a plain vanilla "Objective Idealism," which stipulates THAT "Being includes a plurality of minds, who share radically interpersonal experiences."
It wouldn't pretend to explain HOW that can be, metaphysically, or which initial, boundary & limit conditions must necessarily obtain for WHAT primitives, ontologically.
It would employ vague modal categories & a pragmatic, semiotic realism but no specific root metaphor (substance, process, society, experience, relation, psyche, etc).
It would also employ an emergentist stance, but only in an ordinary - not technical - sense. Specifically, it would eschew distinctions like weak & strong emergence and avoid references to supervenience because, for now, those concepts remain either question begging or trivial and to no appreciable extent explanatory.
This apologia suggests a dualist analogy of being (& whatness) vis a vis the Many and a monist univocity of doing (& howness) vis a vis the One (as conceived by Bracken as a transcendent activity). So, strictly, it's neither dualist nor monist but, more aptly, non-dual. It doesn't retreat from ontology to phenomenology but goes beyond - not without - a metaphysics of "being" to one of "becoming,” not inconsistent with a creatio ex Deo. It’s not God who’s in any way becoming, beyond Christ’s eternal Incarnation, for a weak Doctrine of Divine Simplicity remains indispensable. Rather, divine manifestations remain ever on the move.
If freely, willing, loving powers can simultaneously self-determine the very natures from which they inseparably act & to which they're otherwise irreducible & indifferent, then the concept of emanative generation (positive innascibility) wouldn't implicate a proto-Father, Trinitologically, Logos asarkos, Christologically, or natura pura, cosmotheandrically.
So, beyond ontological participations & an analogia entis per logoi, grace thus operates via interpersonal perichoreses & an analogia Spiritus per tropoi.
Our doctrine of beatitude & anthropology of cognition thus together affirm the innate receptivity of our intellect to God for we are capax Dei.
Still, while finite entities are adequate intelligible objects for our active intellect, God's essential intelligibility must be freely shown us.
Epistemic distance thus happens for a reason - that we, too, can freely, willingly, self-determine to love, thereby co-creating a unique tropological novum.
Grace operates perichoretically & tropologically, not on but proportionate to participatory logoi & essential natures.
If natures are only ever personally enhypostasized & persons - naturally enessenced, then the real question becomes - not whether a nature is, so to speak, pure, but - whether God is ever absent in any aspect of creation.
The answer is no.
God remains eternally & universally present, pneumato-Christologically, and particularly present, Christo-pneumatologically, multiply incarnate in all hypostases, whether shadows, vestiges, images & likenesses of God, all which variously manifest Him per their innate capacities for His Presence, which they desire & long for, including both mediate & finite and immediate & infinite Showings.