Toward a more personalist & existentialist speculative Christology

appropriating Jordan Daniel Wood's Maximian interpretations

Below, I try to interpret & appropriate Jordan Daniel Wood's Maximian interpretations. Any misinterpretations & misappropriations are my own.

Chalcedonian formulae provide the indispensable theological contours to navigate tritheism & modalism, offering us rigorous logics of  thatness, thisness & whatness?

A Neo-Chalcedonian heuristic frames the more primitive question, asking what principle is it that's necessarily both presupposed by & accounts for these concrete determinations of thatness, thisness & whatness?

Can one take recourse in analogical & participatory logics of whatness to frame such a riddle?

Might one apply pet theories of universals (instantiated vs immanent, moderate vs extreme realisms) & idiomata (unique bundles, un/shareable)?

What about hypostatic logics of thatness (brute actualities) & thisness (haecceities)?

What contractions of natures or bundles of accidents account for incommunicable hypostatic particularities & concrete existences or grounds their absolute differences?

How is it that every hypostasis is enessenced & every essence enhypostatized?

We need a heuristic, it seems, that goes beyond reality's concrete determinations of thatness, thisness & participatory whatness to frame up a perichoretic logic that sets the theological contours of Who & how of -not only logoi, but - tropoi.

The logic of such a heuristic will unavoidably pull speculative Christology in directions that are more personalist & existentialist, because we need to attend to - not only the natures of reality's determinations, but - the principles of reality's Absolute & relative self-determinators

--- determinators who exist, first, for themselves, irreducible & indifferent to their natures, although always inseparable from such natures.

A more personalist & existentialist theism will require a much more nuanced approach to our conceptions of the free, the voluntary & the necessary, certainly weakening libertarian notions & overcoming strict dichotomies between immanent & economic acts.

While God certainly doesn't essentially depend on creation, creation reveals how He immutably expresses Her nature. So, we avoid separating the divine will & intellect in any way that would implicate arbitrariness into our distinction between esse naturale & intentionale. Such an account of divine intentionality would refer to a supremely personal divine intentionality with a divine volition that’s, at once, in some sense groundless as well as grounded by a self-constituting love, beyond all of our meager voluntarist or libertarian conceptions.

What might be one principle of any "hypostasis existing for itself" as would be consistent with a robustly personalist & existentialist theological account? as might express the relationships between Absolute & relative perfections, Universals & particulars, logoi & tropoi? God & Wo/man & Cosmos?

Creativity & co-creativity, perhaps?

"Creativity would be the nature of God, pattern of existence & activity proper to God that God shares in varying degrees w/finite entities in an expression of divine empowering love." ~ Bracken

A Speculative Grammar of & Heuristic for Our Irreducibly Triadic Co-creative Acts of Divine - Human Synergy


Our super-abundant unity manifests in each mutually constituted identity as it acts existentially to reduce the essential limiting potencies of superfluous beauty per the immutable eternal logoi.

Our super-sufficient freedom acts volitionally & efficiently to reduce the personal & material limiting potencies of gratuitous goodness per the hypostatic logics of primacy, identity & natural irreducibility, indifference & inseparability.

Our super-essential being acts intelligently & formally to reduce the final limiting potencies of excess meaning & truth in the divinization of tropoi.

Beyond the participatory & analogical, the perichoretic & antinomial provide indispensable heuristics.

Nature-talk refers only to analogical intervals between essences, where no mediation obtains, participatorily.

Person-talk refers to antinomial intervals between hypostases, which include essences & idiomata.

So, perichoretically, only a Person can mediate - mutually, reciprocally & unitively - to overcome both

antinomial natural differences of essences (Absolute & relative as re immutable logoi) as well as

antinomial personal differences from others (Universal & particular "I - Thou"s as re transformable tropoi).

Monarchy of the Father

The Father’s innascibility's not only essentially distinctive but somehow also personally so, i.e. in a way that's modally ineffable, properly unintelligible & wholly nondeterminate.

re: the MOF, then, a metaphysical anarchy obstains

see below, from PLOTINUS Ennead VI.8: On the Voluntary and on the Free Will of the One, Kevin Turner Corrigan & John D. Turner

Beyond a constitutive relational conception of the Father, an emanational act plays a constitutive role. Christ's kenosis reveals a pattern, where identity & distinction are mutually implicating & so illuminates patterns of ad intra ur-kenosis as well as our own theotic kenosis.

"We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is ..."   ~ John Scotus Eriugena

I approach theological contours (creedal & dogmatic) more so from an epistemological angle. I'm more interested in whether, when & how we're able to make & how we realize meanings & values.

I glimpse some of that especially in folks like Eriugena, Bonaventure & Bulgakov, e.g. in terms of semantics & semiotics; meaning & signs; exemplification, manifestation & revelation.

So, the One & the Many has been, for me, more so a riddle to be solved regarding questions of hypostatic whoness & howness by using exploratory heuristics like hypostatic primacy, haecceity, bruteness, indifference, inseparability & irreducibility.

Those riddles seem to be perichoretic antinomies that are overcome existentially, relationally & personally. As for ontological analogies, when it comes to questions re essential natures, we don't even need to define those whatnesses to realize their meanings & values.

And we shouldn't imagine that explanatory adequacy will ever be in our grasp re Being beyond being, as if the One & the Many could be solved ontologically.

I recall trying to understand Bonaventure's exemplarity as related to the One & the Many. And his approach seemed to be so incredibly nuanced, especially when introducing distinctions re such matters as what knowledge is & how God knows.


Not just re divine essence but also in eschatological anthropology, to what exactly might essence, nature or universal even refer?

If eternally, having all realized our teloi & divinized our tropoi, every hypostasis enessenced & every essense enhypostasized, we'll exemplify logoi as immanent universals.

Only temporally & empirically would we have a need to abstract distinctions like essence & universal --- because we are becoming. But once we've become --- been REAL-ized, what meaning would such distinctions convey or add?

Tropoi, then, will only choose among optimally equipoised eternal well beings viz. aesthetic scope.

Aesthetic Scope & Secondary Beatitudes of Eternal Well Being

The complementarity between Absolute & relative perfections, I - Thou relations, Universal / particulars, etc constitute a harmonious coincidence of opposites, while parasitic existences aren't authentic opposites but mere nihilating subcontraries.

Our deliberative liberty can choose between being & nonbeing, although one's choosing nonbeing is only a necessary possibility & never a necessity. We might say there are eternal harmonious opposites or complementarities & ephemeral nihilating opposites or subcontraries.

Eschatologically, parasistic existences & subcontraries will not transist from the temporal to the eternal. Only epectatic, mutual affirming complementarities will, inexhaustibly, be in play, leading from beatitude to beatitude.

Natural Willing as Synergy

The natural will engages the divine will intrinsically, indefectibly & synergistically. The gnomic mode of willing's necessarily a possibility but never a necessity.

Our epistemic & axiological distancing enables us to co-creatively self-determine our tropoi (within the divinely determined limits of our logoic potencies), which gifts we would to receive in order to give to community (charisms), to be divinized & sanctified (gifts) and to express as eternal beatitudes.

By co-creative self-determination, I refer to a soul-crafting process that's like trying on different outfits, a "fitting" exercise where we choose among a wardrobe of resplendently divine regalia, where we try on the charisms & gifts that we'll express & enjoy as secondary beatitudes.

We can also disrobe & choose to leave this theotic fitting room naked by disregarding our natural will & ignoring the divine wardrobe.

For, you see, each garment we remove entails a surrender of being (clothed) & inclination toward not-being (clothed). Because disrobing is necessary to the process of trying on clothes, one's leaving the fitting room naked always remains a necessary possibility but never a necessity. No, we're always offered, rather, a crown of beauty, the oil of joy & a garment of praise instead of the ashes, mourning & grief of nonbeing.

Ergo, authentic freedom has never been about WHAT we become per our teloi & the immutable divine logoi. That destiny HAS been determined from all eternity. The locus of true freedom resides in our tropoi and HOW we choose to exemplify Christ.

pan-SEMIO-entheism

No Tropos Left Behind

Maximus ---> Eriugena ----> Bonaventure

panentheism ---> universalism -----> pantheosis or the divinization of every shadow, vestige, image, likeness, angel, human all tropoi will exemplify logoi

all consistent with semiotic & semantic approaches to multiple incarnations, e.g. exemplarity, theophany, etc

not a mere panentheism but a cosmotheandrism that's robustly pansemiotic & "pantheotic"?

.
Our modern emergentist cosmology was - not only anticipated, but - surpassed by Maximus, Eriugena & Bonaventure

For a very long time (or not), we may remain methodologically thwarted &/or metaphysically occulted by reality's intractable aporia.

Reality presents to us with manifold & multiform diastemic ontological gaps, which leave us unable to state its axioms, define its primitives or even discursively narrate so many of our experiences.

Yet, many of reality's signs can reasonably be interpreted as - not just agential, but - robustly intentional and apparently able to communicate across these diastemas. So, even as certain analogical intervals may resist closure, naturally, many of its embodied antinomial intervals, hypostatically, can be overcome.

We can transcend such embodied antinomies existentially, intentionally, personally, relationally & practically.

In biosemiotics, for mere agential realities, we can refer to such antinomies in terms of mutually constituted ententionals - absentials. For robustly intentional realities, those mutual complementarities constitute nothing less than I - Thou relationships, whose hypostatic hows & meanings are revealed in a reciprocity of kenotic love.

Our experiences of such loving relationships remain ineffable and cannot be reduced in terms of the essential natures to which, while always inseparably in play, they remain otherwise indifferent.

This hypostatic logic of agential / intentional primacy, irreducibility, inseparability & indifference applies across the great chain of being for "aboutnesses"  that are - not only robustly teleo-logic or intentional, but -
teleo-qualic or agential & sentient;
teleo-nomic or biopoietic;
teleo-matic or cosmopoietic; and
teleo-potent or veldopoietic (veld = fields or matrices, e.g. quantum vacuums).

This modern emergentist heuristic with its logics of entitative pansemiotics & essential dis/continuities, with its semantical references to reality's hierarchy of hows - of both its ententionals - absentials & intentional "I - Thou"s - was anticipated by the "hypostatic identity" of Maximus, "divisions of nature" of Eriugena &  "exemplarism" of Bonaventure.
In another sense, though, our modern emergentist cosmology was - not only anticipated, but - surpassed by Maximus, Eriugena & Bonaventure. This seems especially evident, for example, in the way that Josiah Royce implicitly rearticulated their meta-heuristics in his constructive engagement of Peirce. For, while our modern emergentist account might properly bracket any primal ontology, Royce (Hegel & others) aspired to - not only ultimately overcome the causal disjunctions of reality's seeming discontinuities, but also - halt any interminal regress of reality's apparently infinite semiosis, mereologically, via a concrete, social Absolute.

Such a metaphysically deft maneuver has long been advanced in many ways, whether via the whole-part divisions or divine fractures of Advaita or via the theophanic multiplications of Neoplatonic emanations, which surpass our onto-theologies of "divine self-determinations as Being" to recognize, also, the "nondeterminate One, Who's being beyond being."

Then, going further even, by surpassing both the analogia entis of the divine self-determinate being as well as the nondeterminate apophasis of the divine transcendent being, Maximus, Eriugena & Bonaventure also offer a nondeterminate kataphasis of the Absolute's immanent being, which is in many ways consistent with the accounts of Plotinus & Dionysius. In those accounts, all realities manifest the One; all realities are sacred; all realities are theotic.

Pantheotic Implications for Pansemiotic Realities

Via apokatastenai, including the purgations of all vicious secondary natures, hypostatic modal likenesses will be transformed into identities, such that each hypostasis will perfectly express a particular divine presence - without exhausting or being obliterated by - the universal, concrete Absolute of all perichoretic theophanic manifestations.

Pantheotically, with the loss of gnomic modes of choosing, with no deliberations between being & nonbeing and immersed only in an infinite plenitude of ways of eternal well being, again sans any subcontrary vicious nature, what will happen pansemiotically to our sign usage?

While such distinctions as between sacraments & sacramentals, icons, indexes & symbols and syntactics, semantics & pragmatics might perdure, it seems that each human microcosm or tropos will no longer merely signify via instantiated universals but will robustly exemplify via immanent universals or logoi.

As for sacraments, which work "ex opere operato" through deeds done directly by persons & personal presences, eschatologically, will we not most directly & most fully enjoy Presence, communion & fellowship both participatorily & asymmetrically via natural likeness as well as perichoretically & bi-directionally (very same mode of activity) via our completed hypostatic identity?

Via apokatastasis we'll epectatically pass from glory to glory, choosing eternally along a Pareto frontier of equipoised optimalities of eternal well being.

Perichoresis & Just What is a Concrete, Social Absolute?

In a metaphysic which stipulates that its notions of entity & society are equiprimordial, such concepts - as persons & community - will have no meaning in isolation & neither can be abstracted from the other.

I encountered Zizioulas, Moltmann & other social trinitarians - not on their own terms, but - as foils, which Joe Bracken engaged to illustrate his neo-Whiteheadian & Peircean approach.

Bracken critiqued their accounts as he aspired to navigate past the inadequacies of both substance & process approaches, of both Aristotelian & Whiteheadian systems. Bracken even critiqued his fellow Peircian, Josiah Royce's, approach as, in the end, too modalistic, as it conceived communities as supraindividual persons.

But Bracken's critiques of these thinkers aren't harsh but nuanced, probably because they all have much in common with German idealism & Hegelian notions.

In the final analysis, if we take perichoresis seriously - w/its existentialist, personalist, relational, antinomial & hypostatic logic - we'll embrace it as an exploratory contemplative heuristic for prayerfully leaning into the inexhaustible mystery of persons in community.

We'll resist, then, further explanatory metaphysics, reductions of irreducibilities, separations of inseparabilities, effablings of ineffabilities, gnoseological substitutions for operative knowledge, generic classifying of nonformal properties, supra-individualizing societies, etc

A Theodrama Without a Stage

While, for Balthasar, one realizes freedom in a communal dialogue wherein one accepts one's constitutive I - Thou-ness, any absolute rejection of one's very constitution seems quite impossible to me.

Such a rejection cannot be knowingly completed. That knowing would necessarily entail more than a mere gnoseological knowledge, discursively, for it would also have to include an operative knowledge, existentially.

Even in the very depths of a felt abandonment & forsakenness one can not experience nonbeing. It is impossible, therefore, for one to thus even attain to the truth of one's very existence such that one could absolutely reject it.

Not even via a descent into a putative hell would one encounter anything less than images of God, ever essentially inviolate in their logoi, however otherwise disfigured by their tropoi.

Holy Saturday - doesn't justify our hope for, but rather - reveals the truth of apokatastasis.

HuvB's script must be rewritten.

So, while a hopeful universalism can hope one's rejection of God remains incomplete, an essential universalism holds that any such absolute rejection of God is logically (because existentially & operatively) impossible.

Eschatologically, no longer deliberatively choosing between being & its subcontraries, our vicious secondary natures will have somehow been purged as each imago Dei realizes its free subjectivity per something akin to Rahner's "fulfilled fulfillment’ or Maritain's apokatastenai.

Our essential human natures (even if certain of their teloi were in any way statistically ordered, as they apparently can be), will have been reduced from their limiting potencies (even if within an established range, limited still) by our free, synergistic acts per the logoi.

Eschatologically, in choosing among various eternal well-beingnesses by tropic acts of subjectivity, perhaps our personal freedom will continue to self-determine our secondary natures? grow our virtuous dispositions? by our epectatic acts of self-possession, which own our I - Thou-ness!