The One & the Many - how they variously emerge via perichoresis

the eternal epectatic dynamic

Christologically, we are bearing witness in our lives to the emergence of the One (Christ) out of the Many (members).

Paterologically, Jesus bears witness to the emergence of the Many (Trinity) out of the One (Monarchia).

Pneumatologically, the Spirit bears witness to & urges reality's inherently processive, communitarian emergence of the One out of the Many ad extra & the Many out of the One ad intra.

What if we conceive the One & Many in terms of personal activities, which require semantic entitative references to "HOW who acts" (e.g. Damascene's mutual indwelling)?

The Many, in synergy, may exhibit an efficacious "corporate agency" without constituting a supraindividual, as each entity expresses without exhausting or being obliterated by any active totality. There's, indeed, a corporate activity that exceeds the sum of each part's acts, although it doesn’t constitute another individual.

Paterologically, Jesus bore witness to the emergence of the Many out of the One.

He bore witness to a Monarchy of the Father, Principle without principle, the sole cause & origin of both Son & Spirit, Whom the Father eternally, freely & uniquely generates as Persons, Who, like us, derive their identities from others & so are constituted by otherness.

Christologically, we are bearing witness in our lives to the emergence of the One out of the Many.

A singular pansemiotic interpretation will emerge as the pantheotic totality of many symbolic manifestations; a unitive howness of doing will emerge as the totality of many synergistic acts; an Absolutely perfect, Universal presence-ing will emerge as the totality of all relatively perfect, particular presences.

The spontaneous decisions of creatures are continually ordered and reordered into an ever-expanding totality already known in its fullness by the divine persons. ~ Joseph A. Bracken

Our conceptions of the activities of the Monarchy of the Father & Trinity would thus be equiprimordial & not abstractable from each other, same as with our references to other mutually constitutive realities: identities & differences; entities & societies; persons & communities; immanent Universals & exemplifications; Absolute & relative perfections; Universal & particular; Theophany & multiple incarnations / presences.

Identities & othernesses, entities & societies, persons & communities, are mutually constituted and not abstractable from each other. Those identities are derived from generated othernesses, which are constitutive of unity.

Pneumatologically, having properly conceived the Trinity as community, by nature being an interpersonal process, it's that very process - not the Spirit - which mediates between or bonds the Persons. Within Bracken's Peircean frame, rather, the Father proposes novel possibilities as Primal Cause, which the Son actualizes as Primal Effect, while the Spirit serves as the Primordial Condition for their interaction. In a Whiteheadian frame, these natures of the Persons, respectively, translate as primordial, consequent & superjective (the Spirit eternally urging the Father).

Beyond, then, the merely dialectical, One & Many, kenosis & theosis, transcendence & immanence, there are moments of activity or relating between them, a communitarian impetus, to be sure, but one that's inherently processive, i.e. emergence itself. The Spirit.


This is a Perichoretic & Hypostatic Version of the One & the Many, wherein perichoresis functions as an aporetic hypostatic bookmark not a speculative ontological concept.

A singular, perichoretic & hypostatic howness of activity emerges as One act out of the Many synergistic acts, where pluralities, as separate persons, are grounded in their unity as a community.

So, while there is a mereological whole exceeding the sum of its parts, it's neither a supraindividual nor other substantial entity; rather, it's the unity of an interpersonal process or communion, an emergence of the One out of the Many and Many out of the One in - not a natural, but - an entitative sense (i.e. re a whoness & howness not a whatness). We witness, then, true corporate agency.

Beyond considerations of unitary & or analogical being, naturally  (essentially) & participatorily, we inquire about unitive relationships, personally (hypostatically) & perichoretically, where identities are derived from generated othernesses, which are constitutive of unity.

We best secure this logic, as it operates in theophany, exemplarity, relationality, ecclesiology and such, in Spirit - Christology, as above. Then, "taking prayer and reflection on the Christian Scriptures as our starting point for both prayer and rational reflection (Bracken phraseology)" on the Trinity, we might suggest that the Monarchy of the Father similarly safeguards God's Oneness.

THEOSIS

In terms of manifestation, we might think of each hypostasis in terms of  WHO, the logoi - WHAT & each tropos - HOW.

How, though, are the tropoi written in the logoi?

I like to distinguish logoi in terms of realized & unrealized potencies. Respectively, these would refer to our divinely determined, static or primary natures, which remain inviolate as divine images, & to our dynamical or secondary natures, which remain co-creatively, self-determinable.

Each tropos can thus co-creatively self-determine HOW a person freely & naturally wills to particularly exemplify the divine nature.

Thru this dynamical becoming, each tropos can naturally will to develop its own peculiar bundle of sanctifying gifts, communal charisms & secondary beatitudes by reducing select theotic potencies (relative perfections) to synergistic divinizing acts (particular presences).

Protologically, the Absolutely perfect, Universal presence creatively multiplied, incarnating as relatively perfect, particular presences - as microcosmic shadows, vestiges, images, likenesses & exemplifications.

Eschatologically, an Absolutely perfect, Universal presence-ing will emerge as the synergistic totality of all relatively perfect, particular incarnate presences in a supremely unitive "howness of doing."

The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind. ~ C. S. Peirce

I appropriate Peirce, above, mostly, as an affirmation - over against nominalism - of the objective existence of form. One nonnegotiable takeaway would be that mind & matter present on a nondual continuum. But which is primordial vs emergent? Mind as primordial fits my Maximian cosmology.

Still, truth be told, for me, the Maximian cosmology would work with hylomorphism & even some nonreductive physicalisms, too. The most salient takeaways remain continuity, formal causes, moderate realism, etc

I've taken this metaphysical excursion to suggest that we can safely bracket any specifics re participatory whatnesses (panpsychic or not?). Those remain subject to analogia entis. Our perichoretic logic of relational coinherences remains emergentist & relies, rather, on pansemiotic hownesses.

What is Nothing?

The only eternal opposites are those that constitute various complementary harmonious coincidences. All others are mere ephemeral subcontraries, nonsubstantial parasitic existences.

It's theologically incoherent, protologically, to reify no-thing or nonbeing in a disjunctive binary that excludes becoming. The apophatic ex nihilo implicates the kataphatic ex Deo.

Eschatologically, all eternal Universal / particulars must be constituted only by the Absolute & relative perfections & I - Thou relations of a concrete social Absolute. Otherwise, God, Herself, must be indicted, arraigned & convicted of eternal evil.

Univocity

I defer & demur re competing historical interpretations of Scotus' univocity, gratified that those interlocutors, whom I most admire (OFM & RO), converge normatively re what it had better not entail.

To me, univocity underwrites both our natural theologies & theologies of nature with epistemic - not hubris, but - optimism. It implies that our kataphatic strategies, while yet fallible, can be far more successful than many have imagined.

Much will turn on our conceptions re the in/finite disjunction.

Spoiler alert: analogia yet obtain, participatorily & abstractly.

At the same time, perichoretically & concretely, both divine & determinate realities will manifest Christ in radically pansemiotic (including the variously entitative, hypostatic, personal, existential & particular).

Those mutually constituted Christological manifestations, in totality, will reveal an absolutely perfect universal presence while each creaturely exemplification, in part, will reveal a relatively perfect particular presence.

re Scotus' In/finite (less than formal) distinction cf footnote pg 147, Chapter - Univocity & Inference: Duns Scotus by Denys Turner in his Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 3rd in his trilogy w/Eros & Allegory and The Darkness of God.

What if "Sin Is Behovely"?

not as an indispensable instrumental necessity but as a necessary possibility for the epistemic distancing that gifts us synergistic response ability? cf Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love by Denys Turner in Modern Theology 20:3 July 2004

In Search of a Metaphysic

Cosmogonal conclusions are often more so embedded in our definitions than they are drawn from our premises. For example, there's enough ambiguity in concepts like nothing, nothingness & nonbeing to take creatio ex nihilo pretty much anywhere one chooses to go.

Whether one goes the way of ex deo, christi, profundis, chaosmos, tehom or even materia, or recognizes various types & degrees of divine constraint (essential or natural; metaphysical / logical or external; &/or kenotic or volitional) & of prevenient &/or created chaos, it's both God's character & creation's dignity - as revealed in Scripture & Tradition - that should set our theological contours.

Accordingly, the Creator & creatures must be eternally & mutually constituted, any embodied antinomies - like being & nothingness - overcome, personally & existentially, by a harmonizing complementarity - like becoming.

Any nihilating subcontraries, as parasitic existents, must vanish as mere temporal ephemeralities.

In this case, ex nihilo & ex deo are complementary apophatic & kataphatic expressions.

And over against any radical apophaticism & thick impassibility, we'd affirm an epistemic optimism & thin passibility, theologically.

This most comports with a panentheistic cosmotheandrism, which might well draw on the strengths of such diverse schools as

the Neo-platonist (Eriugena), neo-Chalcedonist (Maximus), Franciscan (Scotus, Bonaventure), German idealist (Hegel, Schelling), Russian sophiologist (Bulgakov), American pragmatist (Peirce, Royce), neo-Whiteheadian (Bracken, Gelpi), Peircean panentheist (Brier), Semiotic Trinitarian (Robinson, Southgate), Pneumatological emergentism (Yong), Neo-Thomist (Clarke, Arraj), Process (Keller, Griffin), Open (Oord), Open Panentheist (Clayton).

My pan-SEMIO-entheism (cf Sylvest & Yong 2010), as a meta-heuristic, brackets the various root metaphors, above - formism (scholastics, neoscholastics), contextualism (Peirce, Bracken, Gelpi, Yong, Bergson) & organicism (Schelling, Hegel, Royce) - and is agnostic to substance vs process vs experience, etc, approaches.

Sylvest & Yong (2010) coined pan-semio-entheism Sylvest & Yong both embrace a pneumatological emergentism, but Yong goes beyond my metaphysically agnostic, epistemic bracketing of mere phenomenological "aboutnesses" to invoke ontological superveniences.

Caveat

Even though generally sympathetic to dynamical panentheist takes, I've never completely let go of Classical Theism. Coherence demands some version of DDS in any account, istm. So, I hew neoclassically. I've even discovered an implicit neo-Báñezian praemotio physica in my take.