TheoAnthropology per the Woodsian Entitative, Scotistic Hylomorphic & Maximian Modal Ontological Heuristics

of Angels Dancing, People Dying & such

Our speculative explorations regarding angels dancing on heads of pins can shed a lot of theoanthropological light. For example, once one accepts that "all finite causes must be together, spatially, to produce an effect,"  many of our other understadings about entities, persons, hypostases & even cosmology can better cohere.

The same is true of our speculative explorations regarding the intermediate state. Christologically, even, they can shed a lot of light on the perichoretic dynamics of both the hypostatic union as well as the cosmotheandric macro- & microcosms.

Combining three sets of heuristics, which I've described in other contexts, we can better relate how divine & finite persons can synergically inter-act with noncompetitive wills. Those distinct forms of willing would include those of divine persons per both nondeterminate & self-determinate natures and also of finite personal beings (angels & humans) per both determinate & self-determinate natures.

The three sets of heuristics include what I call the Woodsian Entitative, Scotistic Hylomorphic & Maximian Modal Ontological heuristics.

I'm not going to put them to work, here, for illustrative & explicative purposes, but I’ve followed their rubrics & employed their grammars as I’ve traversed back & forth between the idioms of different systems like Scotism, Neoplatonism, Palamism, Thomism & even NeoWhiteheadian Process approaches. They are at work throughout my Neo-Chalcedonian, Cosmotheandric Universalism. I just plucked them out of their contexts, there, and gathered them together in one place here to continue to use as an intersystematic cheatsheet for my Theological Anthropology. If there's a remote chance that it will interest or be of use to any others, then that would be great.

Here are the three heuristics with their rubrics:


The Woodsian Entitative Heuristic

Persons & entities are indifferent & irreducible to but inseparable from natures & essences.

The Scotistic Hylomorphic Heuristic

1) in/communicable essence? all essences, divine & creaturely are communicable

2) dis/embodied? all creaturely entities are naturally embodied (communicatability & spatial extendability) composites of forms & matter, the latter which, as a part & principle of composite being, is an entity in act

3) in/animate? some entities are animate & some animate entities are agential

4) in/corporeal agents? angels & contingently dis/carnate souls are incorporeal

5) im/material? agential formal causes are immaterial

6) presence spatially located? operationally (Aquinas) or per se (Scotus)?


Modal Ontological Grammar of a Maximian Cosmology

Essentially, our primary nature's not only not wounded but not woundable. Grace, then, operates tropically & inescapably, as purgative grace can annihilate vicious secondary natures without violating free will.

How I eisegetically appropriate JDW's Maximian Entitative Heuristic using my modal ontological grammar.

What's going on, temporally & transiently, when one asserts that
a) persons & entities are indifferent & irreducible to but inseparable from natures & essences?
b) generated - not by dividing essences, but - by multiplying entities (I - Thous)?
And when we say that
c) all hypostases are enessenced;
d) all essences are enhypostasized
e) no energies are hypostasized?; and
f) essences, entities & energeia, as experiences & expressions, are irreducibly triadic in their manifestations?

Each novel multiplicative entity will be enessenced with a nature as manifested by how select essential potencies reduce to existential acts.

This enessencing follows a logic of possibilities, wherein noncontradiction folds (coincidence of opposites obtains) but excluded middle holds. Some logoi-effected teloi may be enhypostasized, some not, based on varying ontological densities of shadows, vestiges & images ex Deo, including the nuanced differentiations between angels & humans as personal beings as well as those, even, of contingently incorporeal human persons.

The recursive enhypostasization follows a logic of actualities, wherein both noncontradiction &
excluded middle hold as an enhypostasized original nature (essential) will be manifested by HOW select im/material potencies reduce to efficient acts.

Microcosmic entities, i.e. persons, reflect a reduction of all essential & im/material potencies to irreducibly dyadic & contemporaneous existential & efficient acts.

Microcosmic entities manifest & express via energeia in an irreducibly triadic way as they also, contemporaneously, follow a logic of probabilities, wherein noncontradiction holds but excluded middle folds as select final potencies are reduced to formal acts (per tropoi encoded in an entity's essential teloi as effected by logoi). This is the theotic logic of growth in likeness.

The practical upshot of this grammar is that personal hypostases (dyad of essence + entity) are essentially inviolable as imagoes Dei.

Further, their tropic reduction of final potencies to formal acts can be hindered but never obliterated by vicious natures, as those reductive acts remain eternally fostered by virtuous natures and graces, both created & uncreated (even monergically), as always on offer.

Hereinabove references to essences, energeia, entities (personal & social) & effects map pretty much to Damascene's distinctions between, respectively, the operative, operating, operator & operated. See

https://theologoumenon.substack.com/p/is-reconciling-the-impassibility