The Risks & Rewards of Pursuing a Romance with a Friend
my eschatological reverie
With a significant bit of nuancing, the following is inspired by, even if not fully consistent with, Maritain’s poetic eschatological reverie.
See Jacques Maritain, Untrammeled Approaches, University of Notre Dame Press, Jul 31, 2017, Ch 1: Beginning with a Reverie, pp 19-20
Not Totally but Somewhat Random Musings
In my imagination – the story of the Incarnation is that of One Who’s ever willing to place good friendships in jeopardy by vulnerably pursuing romances. She doesn’t want to be “just” friends with us! He passionately wants to become our Lovers!
In other words, on our journeys from image to likeness, the former is, unavoidably, placed at-risk as it can be parasitized by sin.
While grave sin can largely obscure, it can never fully eclipse the light of any person’s image of God. That’s also to say that, while sinful habits can hinder, they can never obliterate any person’s final divine potencies.
So, even if a divine romantic adventure has gone awry, it can never cause an alienation of affection, breach of friendship or everlasting estrangement.
I believe there’s a post-mortem hierarchy of divine glory.
All rational creatures will be restored to their original beatitude as divine images.
Rational creatures may also manifest in increasing degrees of divine likeness, progressively reflecting God’s glory & growingly experiencing manifold & multiform divine beatitudes (final personal potencies).
By manifold & multiform divine beatitudes, I generally refer to classical distinctions like primary vs secondary objects of beatitude, original vs final beatitude, Nyssen’s divine energies & Aquinas’ noetic identities, heavenly hierarchies and such. But I don’t mean to facilely map them, conceptually, or to rigorously apply them, systematically. Rather, I’m engaging in the same poetic license described by Maritain in his Reverie. The take-away is that, beyond an essential beatitude, not all need be similarly situated or equally gifted, everlastingly.
What I do want to systematically invoke in my post-mortem eschatological imagination is a great deal of continuity between our historical & eschatological experiences as would be consistent with well known formative spiritualities (especially Lonergan’s conversions), traditional ascetical & mystical theologies (for me, especially Teresian, Sanjuanist, Ignation & such) as well as with sacramental ontologies (especially Roman Catholic but also Orthodox & Protestant).
One’s degree of divine likeness will variously have been merited and/or otherwise predestined.
None will experience any form of everlasting dissatisfaction with their destiny in the divine plan, which is to say with their experience of divine justice, mercy & love per their unique place in the Kingdom, whether it’s been largely self-determined (as is ordinarily so) or extensively predestined (as extraordinarily ordained).
While I recognize a distinction between nature & grace per the super/natural, I believe that all rational creatures are constitutively indwelled, i.e. always concretely graced.
Rational creatures will otherwise differ in how aware they are of the divine presencing and how much they cooperate with the Spirit, so will thereby enjoy different degrees of divine mutuality & intimacy.
No rational creatures are ever reduced to that mere divine omnipresencing, which universally influences all divine shadows & vestiges, i.e. cosmotheandrically.
We might explore to what extent there may be a conceptual overlap between Nyssen’s & Maritain’s accounts vis a vis original beatitudes?
Might their accounts describe essential & original beatitudes (and secondary objects), while noetic identity accounts refer to accidental & final beatitudes (and primary objects)?
Beyond such essential beatitudes of our divinely abundant substantial being, why would we necessarily consider anyone’s failures to realize all potential final beatitudes of our divinely superabundant accidental being as incidents of unjust or disproportionate privations, especially if one’s not even consciously aware of being so deprived? Further, especially since, for finite rational creatures, our ongoing realization of those final beatitudes constitutes the part & parcel of our everlasting epecstasis?
Why would every divine invitation necessarily be conceived in morally fraught terms? e.g. We’re friends but let’s become lovers!
*** Rough Mapping of Original & Final Beatitudes
Our initial state would be marked by an original beatitude, wherein we're gifted a mediated experience of God via divine lights of experience & faith and we see, though not perfectly, secondary objects (people, pets, plants & pipes and the mysteries of faith) in God in as far as God is their cause (causaliter). e.g. We'd see the validity & reasonableness of various proofs of God.
Post-mortem purgative graces would restore our initial state & original beatitude and also gift us a transient immediate experience of God via divine light of glory, wherein we'd also see secondary objects in God directly (formaliter). We'd thereafter enjoy an eternal well being, which includes impeccability. e.g. We'd thereafter perfectly see secondary objects in God in as far as God is their cause (causaliter). e.g. We'd see the soundness & truth of various proofs of God & encounter divine energies (as per Nyssen). Such mediated perceptions of God (causaliter) in the mirror of creation, while not immediate, would still gift a very perfect knowledge which will really satisfy the heart.
Beyond these abundant graces, superabundantly, we may also be gifted an everlasting immediate experience of God (in an experience of noetic identity as per Aquinas). Also, we would see secondary objects in God both directly (formaliter) and in as far as God is their cause (causaliter).
It would be quite the challenge to systematically map my eschatological intuitions with any rigor. This is partly because they’ve been largely inspired by Rahner & Maritain, each who didn’t treat certain notions systematically, e.g. respectively, supernatural existential & apokatastenai. While I lean heavily into Boersma’s descriptions of Thomist & Palamite accounts, not unsympathetic to Gaines’ defense of Aquinas, I believe it is Lonergan’s theoanthropology that will hold the most promise as we aspire to reconcile various competing accounts of post-mortem eschatology.
In my cosmotheandrism, I idiosyncratically invoke the super|natural distinction to differentiate – not uncreated vs created, but – Bonaventure’s created shadows & vestiges versus created images & likenesses. For human persons, then, as microcosms, we have both natural & supernatural potencies and the latter refer, constitutively, to our intellectual & volitional rationality, which is radically social.
Consider, now, Anh Q. Tran, SJ’s interpretation of Rahner regarding grace.
Grace is constitutive of the human person; it is the self-gift of God in human life. Grace as the capacity to open ourselves to God invites us to respond to God’s inner call to orient our life to him.
the human being is constitutively graced by God
Rahner holds that the human person is not totally corruptible (or evil); indeed, he believes that there is still the divine spark (initial goodness) within the human
Being-in-Relationship: A Dialogue between Karl Rahner and Confucian Views on the Human Person, Anh Q. Tran, SJ, Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, Berkeley, CA, USA
Because I see human persons as constitutively graced, I don’t believe the concept of natura pura successfully refers to any concrete personal realities. When the Thomists (existential, transcendental & personalist) apply the descriptor “natural,” that invokes for me, instead, a notion of nature that refers to our original essence or primary nature. With that in mind, consider Blackwood’s Lonerganian distinctions, below. For me, the distinction between natural and obediential potencies is best restated as between creaturely and obediential potencies. With that nuance, I feel that the Thomist & Palamite accounts as per Gaine & Boersma, broadly, could be well accommodated by Lonergan’s distinctions, as per Blackwood:
Lonergan’s argument here seeks to differentiate the different capacities of things in terms of different types of potency. The distinction between active and passive potency is the distinction between the ability to act and the ability to be acted upon. The distinction between accidental and essential potency is a distinction between, on the one hand, receiving an act that makes something what it is, and on the other hand, receiving an act that is secondary to what that thing is, such as the distinction between a woman receiving the formal quality of “human being” versus her receiving the formal quality of “university professor.” The distinction between natural and obediential potency rests on the created or uncreated status of the agent needed to bring the potency to actuality.
Finally, the distinction between proximate and remote potency regards the ontological proximity of the potential to the actual; the closer the potency is to the actuality, the less any further concrete events must occur in order for the potency to be actualized.
However, when vertical finality is admitted in addition to horizontal finality, one allows for the Lonerganian reply that we have one natural desire fulfilled in a twofold manner: knowledge of God as Creator corresponding to our natural potency, and knowledge of God as Trinity corresponding to our obediential potency. ‘God as Creator’ and ‘God in God’s full Trinitarian life’ are not two materially different objects of knowledge; they are two modally or formally distinct ways of knowing one material object in which one of the formally distinct objects sublates the other. Further, each formal way of knowing the one material object reaches its own sort of ‘rest.’
Lonergan and Rahner on the Natural Desire to See God, Jeremy Blackwood, M.A., Doctoral Student, Marquette University
The gratuity of Grace, to me, even if idiosyncratically, refers to all manners & degrees of particular interpersonal (mutual in degrees) divine presencings.
The gratuity of Creation refers to all manners & degrees of universal divine presencings or the divine omnipresence.
Imagine all of Creation as if it consisted only of balloons of various colors, shapes & sizes. These balloons would manifest as divine shadows & vestiges. Withdraw this omnipresencing and any given balloon would cease to exist.
Imagine some of these balloons with air in them. Those balloons would manifest as divine images & likenesses. Those creatures would be rational. All rational creatures would be indwelled & could be distinguished from irrational creatures by virtue of both being inflated (indwelled) by the Holy Breath, Christo-pneumatologically, and heated by the Divine Spark, pneumato-Christologically.
Concretely, there would never be moments when rational creatures would not be indwelled, when, as hot air balloons, they’d lose the Divine Spark & be wholly evacuated (deflated) by the Holy Breath. That would amount to no longer being what they were originally intended to be, constitutively (the Thou or who of an I-Thou or we in a relational ontology),, as well as how they were to originally manifest God’s glory. This would all represent our original state & essential end, even if only of a terrestrial sort or, let’s say, a horizontal finality.
Think of humanity’s original beatitude, perhaps, as very much like an evening balloon glow at the end of the day of a balloon festival. There would be an essential sufficiency & certain satisfaction to thus manifesting God’s glory & enjoying such beatitudes as would attend to what, who & how we would be, even though unaware of a potential vertical finality.
Such a vertical potency would refer to a possible journey skyward to the heavens & to vistas of lands beyond. That journey could be realized by those who would cooperate with the Indwelling & who’d thus invite the Divine Flame-throwing Spirit to quicken (heat up) the Breath’s Presence (the air already within), thereby launching one’s beautiful balloon up, up & away, further manifesting God’s glory & enjoying novel beatitudes.
Unavoidably, this process would permit, but in no way require, sinful refusals to cooperate with our graced indwelling. Not only would these refusals obscure (though never extinguish) the ever-abiding divine flame, but cumulatively, as if by ropes & sandbags, our sins could weigh us down, thus – not only dimming the illuminative beauty of our collective evening glow, but – keeping our balloons, more or less, earthbound.
Sufficient & efficacious graces fuel our individual flamethrowers, grow the heat intensity within us to thereby expand & lighten our balloons. Our free cooperation with these graces allows us to rise as we break free of our sinful anchors. These divine synergies cut the ropes of our sin & jettison the sandbags of our vices to allow us to glow ever brighter & soar ever higher.
In the divine economy, justice & mercy as revealed would mean (in my view) that, post mortem, no one would everlastingly be deprived of their original beatitude or be deprived of their essential end or horizontal finality. Think restoration or apokatastenai (Maritain, maybe Nyssen?). In other words, there’s no going backwards everlastingly, only ephemerally. I’m thinking in terms of creaturely potencies & mediated presences akin to the sacramental economy, mystical theophanies, etc Those finalities WILL BE REAL-ized, purgatively, whether via sufficient or efficacious graces.
While never going backwards, not all would necessarily go forward to the same extent. That’s to say that, regarding obediential potencies & immediate presences, I’m agnostic as to whether those vertical finalities are necessarily realized, post-mortem, especially in some efficacious & precipitous way. However, at the same time, I’m adamant that those potencies are never wholly foreclosed on either.
That’s not to deny that, unavoidably, there could occur some narrowing of one’s everlasting aesthetic scope of
experience. That’s because various temporal refusals to cooperate with grace could have resulted in forever lost soul-crafting opportunities, at least, such as would have
been peculiar to irrepeatable historical circumstances, so permanently forfeited. That’s not to say that there may not be phantasmic dynamics at work & purgative life-review do-overs. JDW’s got some interesting ideas in that regard.
To the extent such everlasting consequences might also include a diminished capacity for aesthetic intensity, affectively, such a loss might not be felt, eternally, either because purgative graces (divine mercy) will have imparted requisite healing & consolations, which will have removed any perduring sting of remorse, or because, in some cases, one could simply not miss or grieve the loss of such a kind and/or degree of beatitude, which one has never theretofore experienced or operatively fully known?
Not all finitely caused infinite consequences shall everlastingly be experienced as punishments. Some everlasting consequences could be self-determined diminishments (in aesthetic scope & or intensity) that have been affectively mitigated by divine mercies?
I leave some of the above-listed possibilities open because, when applying my analogous double-effect moral analysis of divine justice, I’m not aspiring to eliminate all everlasting “consequences” but only what one might experience as an everlasting, hence disproportionate, “punishment.”
We must also have an answer to why, given various qualities & quantities of divine manifestation & beatitude and epecstatic dynamics, we weren’t created impeccable in the first place. And the significance of this question might stand out in even starker relief by asking what would have been the case had all proceeded sinlessly on their journeys of both horizontal & vertical finality. I believe that what was at stake is an even richer experience of freedom, which includes that of our soul-crafting autonomy, which can yield superabundant degrees of divine intimacy. Ultimately, though, here we can - in a way that, while being neither ad hoc nor morally unintelligible nor aesthetically repugnant nor parentally abhorrent - invoke a valid mysterian appeal. That’s an epistemic luxury not available to perditionist accounts.
I think this is consonant with human nature being originally (Pre-fall) ordered towards God as its “natural” (I prefer “original” & horizontal) end.
The fall ruptures (I prefer “wounds”) this and darkens the intellect, weakens the will, and makes our affections disordered (without wholly destroying them).
What grace seems to do is not necessarily ADD anything to human nature, but sets it free to follow after God as its final end, (which includes by horizontal & vertical modes).
So, grace simply allows human nature to do what is does when set free from the bondage of sin.
Finally, I’d reiterate, regarding the post-mortem immutability question, that we should reject a theoanthropology analogous to that medieval angelology of immutability & accept, rather, the mutability that’s supported by a universal hylomorphism.
One shouldn’t consider those finite acts of ours that represent sinful refusals to cooperate with grace to be on par, morally & ontologically, with those synergistic finite acts of ours that represent our cooperation with grace, e.g. including the graces of the sacraments. Just because our graced finite acts might have everlasting consequences doesn’t mean that our sinful acts necessarily should.
Disproportionate consequences to the upside, which reflect God’s gratuitous mercy & superabundance, cannot reasonably be used to justify disproportionate punishments to the downside, which would reflect a gratuitous divine injustice (per double effect moral reasoning).
Consider, too, the distinct asymmetry between a divine predestination to certain beatific visions & any putative divine predestination to eternal conscious torment. Over against a Calvinistic double predestination, we affirm all divinely gratuitous moves to the everlasting upside & adamantly repudiate any such reality to the downside.
This is part of an ongoing project with Brayden Dantin & Caleb Sylvest to fashion a post-mortem anthropology with a universalist trajectory, while remaining faithful to manifold Roman Catholic understandings.