Toward a Theoanthropology of Our Intuitive – Operative Knowledges of both Mediated & Immediate Divine Presences
in other words: Namaste, Y'all!
This is not an essay.
These are notes on my Divine Storyboard for future musings. I share them, here & now, hoping they can stimulate others in their approaches to nature & grace, humanity & divinity, the temporal & the eternal, the sacramental & beatific, etc
In no particular order:
Rather than refer simply to mediated versus immediate divine presences, perhaps we best refer to both in terms of degrees.
If we as imagoes Dei & the Christ are mutually constituted & indwelled, and if His universal indwelling is to our intellects – wills as form to matter, and if Christ “just is” our ultimate Telos, then, Christ “just is” our principle of universal intersubjectivity &
immediate intelligiblity.
It is, therefore, the Christ within us, Who will ever recognize (Himself!) & in-form us of both His every mediated & every immediate presence, wherever & whenever, in both His universal omnipresences & particular mutual indwellings, and as per whatever kind or degree of manifestation with which we’ll have variously been graced.
Could that account for the theoanthropological continuity between our temporal & eternal, mediated & immediate, sacramental & beatific divine showings & knowings?
Concretely, might our experiences of different pre-inferential & operative knowledges of persons, especially of noesis in its intuitive sense, of variously nuanced phenomenological conceptions –
like Fries’ nonintuitive immediate knowledge, Lonergan’s insight via sensible data, Peirce’s abductive instinct, Aristotle’s intuitive induction, Polanyi’s tacit dimension, Bohm’s implicate order, Goethe’s intuitive grasp of the Urphänomen, Maritain’s connaturality, Newman’s illative sense, inter alia –
be gifted pneumato-Christologically by Christ living within, closer to me than I am to myself?
Might our every temporal & sacramental experience of mediated divine presences, as in every shadow, vestige, image & likeness of God, whether in the aha moments of our theoretic sciences or in the numinosity of our mystical experiences, gift us proleptically, visions beatific, which we will intersubjectively enjoy, eschatologically, in eternity, by using the very same modes of operative knowledge we enjoy now, i.e. sans superadditum?
Beyond our universal – particular substance conceptions, beyond our formisms (e.g. scholastics & neoscholastics), beyond our organicisms (e.g. Schelling, Hegel, Royce), we can take a step back to a more vague phenomenology & contextualism (e.g. Peirce, Bergson, Bracken, Gelpi, Yong).
Instead of universal – particular talk, we can engage in manifestation – talk.
We can talk about semiotics, signs, revelations, interpretations, divine matrices and semantic & noetic fields.
notions of hypostatic idiomata (vaguely conceived here), which differentiate Him from the F & HS, successfully refers to the knowing, willing & loving that He exemplies ad intra & reveals ad extra (everlastingly on the move) & that we (and He!) manifest finitely, i.e. relatively & in part (everlastingly playing epectatic catch-up!).
dissimilarities in predications of ousia & exemplifications of hypostases. For determinate realities, the only mode of identity is formal & we can consider it a derivation of
divine syllogistics (rather than taking them to be an ad hoc strategy of our Aristotelian-like
syllogistics). We thus bridge the modal identities of our divine syllogistics with the modal ontology of our Aristotelian syllogistics in a semi-formal heuristic. Such a heuristic suffices to keep our categories straight in our theoanthropological musings above, as we navigate nondeterminacy, self-determinacy, in/determinacy, synergistic co-self-determinacy and such in persons, both divine & human.
the Spirit woos creation forth•
makes this way south & that way north•
invites each blade of grass to green!
horizons, boundaries, limits, origins•
perimeters, parameters, centers, margins•
we’re given freedom in between!
thus truth & beauty & goodness grow•
thus lizards leap & roosters crow•
and dawns break with each new day!
good news is ours to be believed•
love freely given if received•
the Spirit in our heart will stay!