Why Beatific Contingency is an Oxymoron
about our divine indwelling
When an attempt is made to consistently hold together certain Thomist conceptions a universalism “problem” can be generated.
Such irreconcilable notions could include predestination, impeccability, inancaritability, efficacious grace, no character or disposition – based beatific contingencies and a double effect – cooperation with evil – like calculus.
For a rigorous account of this universalism problem, see Justin Noia’s “In the Beatific Vision, both Freedom and Necessity.”
In _God’s Final Victory_, wherein John Kronen & Eric Reitan present a comparative philosophical case for universalism, in Chapter VII, they explicitly argue for universalism from efficacious grace. See Fr Kimel’s “Kronen & Reitan: The Argument from Efficacious Grace” for a review of what’s at stake & how it’s relevant to what we’re addressing here.
I’ve danced around this issue, too. See:
The Guarantee of the Beatific Vision & Incoherence of Beatific Contingencies
Thomism works well enough with a Dogmatic Universalism
A Defense of Grace, Predestination & the Permission of Venial Sin
Permission, Predestination, Peccability, Preterition, Predilection, Purgatory & ‘Pocatastasis
What “rescues” Thomism from its apparent universalism problem, Noia has suggested, has to do with the greater good of intimacy. There are parallels in his approach with the stance set forth by Mats Wahlberg in his “The Problem of Hell: A Thomistic Critique of David Bentley Hart’s Necessitarian Universalism.“
Noia asks: “Can God unilaterally decide to take up residence ‘inside’ of a person, to ‘unite’ God’s entire being with that person’s? The answer must be ‘no.’ A union of this all–embracing, absolutely comprehensive sort—like a nuptial union—is necessarily bilateral: it requires an act of will on the part of both parties. The vision of God is not a passive affair, a mere perceptual exchange.“
Wahlberg suggests: “The greater good that this defense appeals to is not autonomy itself—a notion I will shortly explain—but a good that presupposes autonomy for its perfection, namely friendship or intimacy with God. The aim of the defense is to demonstrate that the perfect goodness of God is compatible with the possibility of damnation.”
That reminds me, in addition to predestination, impeccability, inancaritability, efficacious grace, no character or disposition – based beatific contingencies and a double effect – cooperation with evil – like calculus, we must add the possibility of damnation. I almost forgot!
That’s what many Thomists are twisting themselves up into knots over as they try to formulate logical defenses & evidential theodicies for the problem of hell.
Noia & Wahlberg have done most of the preliminary groundwork for universalists by showing how the free will defense for evil can’t be facilely extrapolated to a defense of hell. Kronen & Reitan have well articulated how efficacious grace plays into the same problem with which they’re grappling.
What I have previously rejected out of hand is Noia’s strategy of rescuing Thomism from its universalism problem by introducing the divine indwelling (ordered to intimacy) as a beatific contingency & Wahlberg’s parallel strategy of replacing its free will defense with an autonomy defense (ordered to intimacy) of hell. Otherwise, I’ve used an intimacy account similar to Noia’s & Wahlberg’s in my own defense of evil – just not hell.
While I understand and appreciate the need to preserve the gratuitous nature of God’s grace, I also reject the notion that it has to be framed in an all or nothing dichotomy between hating God & nuptial bliss, total alienation & intimate indwelling.
In my musing “An Indicative Universal Sanctification & Subjunctive Universal Intimacization,” I set forth what’s otherwise at stake is, to put it simply – not enemy vs lover, but – friend vs lover. We have an erotic love for God per our free natural inclinations which can grow, modally & synergistically, into an agapic love by grace.
Below, though, is my attempt to better locate my impasse & explicate my objection, specifically, to an indwelling-based beatific contingency.
My move is simple. I adamantly reject all or nothing and either-or conceptions of the “mutual” divine indwelling of human persons. I am not saying anything different than DBH, I don’t believe. I won’t reiterate what he’s said here but wish to incorporate it by reference.
As for grounding universalism in either God’s nature or human nature, for starters, I recognize purgation & don’t recognize perdition as a successful reference. So, I’m rejecting the premises of many arguments based on both whether or not various references are successful, e.g. perdition, as well as whether or not my interlocutors and I share the same definition, e g. God as freely, loving Goodness, Himself, and how His Will would manifest to each of us personally & all of us ecclesiologically.
Nevertheless, that we are mutually constituted I – Thous, who’ve been generatively othered as persons, and with natures, which have been emanatively ex Deo’d as divine potencies or relative perfections, implicates unitive dynamics that, inescapably, will be both ineluctably unobtrusive as well as utterly efficacious!
indwelling, albeit one that, alone, will be experienced only implicitly & quasi-experimentally. Other ways of divine presencing yet await and higher degrees will be enjoyed as each person cooperates with grace. This account, thereby, rejects indwelling-based contingencies. That will be the location, below, of my impasse with those who’d imagine they’ve “solved” Thomism’s universalism “problem” by using what’s an incoherent concrete duplex ordo to ground a putative indwelling-based beatific contingency.
The account, below, has practical implications for our Life in the Spirit, missiology, catechesis & evangelization, formative spirituality & theosis, lectio divina & liturgy, ascetical & mystical theology, corporal & spiritual works of mercy, the proleptic mystical nexus of our every historical synergistic act with our eschatological destiny and on and on and on.
Thesis:
That we shall everlastingly manifest Christ as imagoes Dei has been determined by the logoi of our primary nature.
How we shall manifest Christ, as His likenesses, we will co-determine, synergistically, by the tropoi of our secondary natures.
All creatures are divinely omnipresenced & all human persons are also divinely indwelled by – not only the created means of grace dispensed by the Holy Spirit, but – the three divine persons in an ad extra operation of the uncreated divine nature, which is ascribed in a special way to the Holy Spirit.
All persons experience the divine indwelling & manifestation of divine love as a foretaste of the beatific vision, which differs only in degree or state from that which binds the blessed to God in the eternal happiness of the beatific vision!
All persons are gifted an operative knowledge of God as they experience mediated divine presences in different ways & to various degrees.
All persons experience mediated divine presences, at least, implicitly & quasi-experimentally, if only through each person’s subjective experiences of their own essential, volitional & final divine potencies (relative perfections) as we, tropically, reduce same, respectively, by our existental, efficient & formal acts.
Potentially, all persons can also experience mediated divine presences explicitly & experimentally, which is to say, through each person’s experiences of God as also an object of both faith & of experience.
Each person’s essential, volitional & final divine potencies are gifted as the logoi of our natures, which operate in the gratuity of creation by way of the immensity of His universal & ordinary presence, ontologically as agent. All of these logoi & potencies are divine & ordered to the beatific vision as an intrinsic aspect of what we are and that, as imagoes Dei, shall everlastingly manifest per our primary natures & primary beatitude. As DBH says, re our rational appetite for the Good, for the Beautiful, for the One, for Being: “If we did not intrinsically desire immediate knowledge of God, we could not rationally desire mediated knowledge about truth in finite things.” If “God just is our Telos,” as DBH recognizes, then all are already thus teleologically ordered to the beatific vision.
Each person can express the logoi of human nature through synergistic tropic acts, which operate in the gratuity of grace by way of the intimacy of His particular & extraordinary presence, intentionally as object. We can, thereby, progressively realize ever increasing degrees of divine intimacy (expansions of theophanic breadth) as an intrinsic aspect of how we can grow, modally, per our secondary natures & secondary beatitudes.
Yes, persons will thus variously experience the beatific vision.
Yes, that’s what we, modally, co-self-determine, co-creatively, on our soul-crafting earthly sojourns.
The economy of grace is ordered to our tropoi and how we will personally & modally express, as Christ-likenesses, what, per the gratuity of creation & our natural logoi, we inalienably are & everlasting shall be, ontologically, as imagoes Dei.
Yes, we can & do freely sin and grow vicious natures, which parasitize the very theotic processes intended to grow our virtuous secondary natures. But those vicious habits can only ever situate themselves halfway between our human acts & divine potencies, tropically – hindering but never extinguishing them & naturally – obscuring but never obliterating our primary natures.
This is all to recognize, on one hand, that any vicious secondary natures will unavoidably require purgation, while, on the other hand, any notion like perdition wouldn’t even successfully refer.
Well, I’m not finished. Not sure when I’ll return to the task. I have grandchildren & baseball preoccupying me.
Update: As LSU heads to Omaha & the grandchildren to summer camp, I am now contemplating how I might put flesh on my skeletal abstractions re the various ways & degrees of divine presencing & our experiences of same by using a concrete example. I have settled on using Pip in Great Expectations as he searches for his benefactor, even his mistaking of the apparent for the real. I shall work on this while I mow the lawn this morning.
Post-weeding & Pre-mowing
For rational creatures, then, per the gratuities of both creation & grace, there is always a simultaneous divine omnipresencing & indwelling, both ontological & intentional, both universal & particular, first only mediated then eventually immediate, experienced, at least, implicity & quasi-experimentally, then growing ever more explicit & experimental, ever more gnoseological & operative, moving thru faith then experience &, finally, to vision.
What we experience implicitly, quasi-experimentally & subjectively through the universal omnipresence per the gratuity of creation roughly corresponds to those furnishings of our human epistemic suite as more fully accounted for by Maritain’s connaturality, Polanyi’s tacit dimension, Newman’s illative sense, Fries’ nonintuitive immediate knowledge and Peirce’s abductive instinct.
Both implicitly & explicitly experienced, subjectively & objectively accessed, then, the divine indwelling everlastingly abides with & to our intellects & wills as form to matter!