Why God could never love you more & will never love you less
My Damascene Cipher not only relates Scotist, Palamite & Thomist concepts, it helped elucidate for me how divine simplicity & im/passibility might map across classical, process & open theist conceptions.
IF one buys into such distinctions as between:
the divine esse naturale & intentionale;
impassibility & supreme passibility (or thin passibility of weakened DDS);
great-making intrinsic perfections (divinely absolute & creaturely relative) of aesthetic intensities & glory-making manifestations of aesthetic scopes;
essential divine apatheia & divine consciousness affected by relations of knowledge & mutual love;
faithful love and ongoing sensitive adaptation;
participatory & theonomic realities of whatness, quiddity & natural propria and perichoretic & theophanic realities of whoness, howness, idiomata, logoi & tropoi of concrete expressions;
THEN
the cipher can refer analogously to both uncreated & created persons and, in neither case would it refer to the reduction of constitutive great-making perfections, which for divine persons are pure acts of absolute perfection & for created persons are divinely-determined existential acts that reduce the original potencies (relative perfections) of imagoes Dei.
The theoanthropological upshot of this perspective is that, intrinsically, in God’s eyes, participatorily, you are as ontologically great as you are ever going to be and, further, can no more decrease this unalienable greatness than enhance it. Greatness, by the way, = Lovability.
This has been a very nerdish way of arguing that God could never love you more & will never love you less.
For our part, too, as Fr Clarke said: “Just as all knowers implicitly know God in all that they know, so too all actors, desirers, lovers implicitly love God in all that they love or desire.” According to Clarke, there is no other criterion for the distinction of natures other than how the essences of beings are manifested by their actions.
As Damascene’s operators (Clarke’s actors, desirers & lovers), then, divine & human persons are synergistically reducing theophanic & beatific potencies per the divine aesthetic scope’s glory-making potencies. Created persons as imagoes Dei, theotically, do thus grow in divine likeness, while everlastingly remaining in an infinite divine potency.
We are, therefore, to always & everywhere aspire to see Him more clearly, follow Her more nearly & love them more dearly, as always before, so now & ever more. Amen.
We are lovable glory-makers, who grow the glory of God by being ever more loving, attentive, reasonable, intelligent & responsible.
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, ergo, advances everlastingly & epectatically as we grow in right belonging, right desiring, right believing, right behaving & right becoming.
For context, a repost:
On the Loss, and the Recovery of Persons as Perichoretic Operators; Theophanies as Operated Divine Potencies; Grace as Operating Synergies; and Essence as Operative Theonomic Participations
Concretely Graced as always before, so now and evermore!
Below is a Damascene Cipher to Relate Scotist, Palamite & Thomist Concepts while avoiding the hypostatization of energies, reification of essences, misplaced concreteness of nonentities and artificial extrinsicism of a natura pura vis a vis divine effects.
The Damascene Cipher – Bare Rubrics
Entitative operators finally reduce the operated effects of divine potencies by acts which are always & integrally both efficiently & synergistically operating as well as formally & essentially operative.
The Damascene Cipher with Explications
Entitative operators (persons, nonformal positivities, perichoretic, both constitutively social individuals & agents as well as individual societies per organic models w/collective agency)
finally reduce the operated effects (theophanic & beatific finalities) of divine potencies by acts which are always & integrally both
efficiently & synergistically operating (grace, energeia are formally – not really – distinct) as well as
formally & essentially operative (theonomic & participatory).
The Damascene Cipher with Associated Fallacies
Entitative operators (persons, nonformal positivities, perichoretic, both constitutively social individuals & agents as well as individual societies per organic models w/collective agency, ***so will avoid misplaced concreteness***)
finally reduce the operated effects (theophanic & beatific finalities, real external unitive relations ***so will avoid reification***) of divine potencies by acts which are always & integrally both
efficiently & synergistically operating (grace, energeia are formally – not really – distinct, neither an entity nor substance, ***so one mustn’t hypostatize***) as well as
formally & essentially (internal relations, ***so one mustn’t reify***) operative (theonomic & participatory).
An Hypothesis of Epektatic Satiation for Formative Spirituality
“God is not only the ultimate reality that the intellect and the will seek, but is also the primordial reality with which all of us are always engaged in every moment of existence and consciousness, apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever” ~DBH
This evokes for me notions like the upper blade of Lonergan’s epistemic scissors & his accounts of meaning, understanding & unrestricted desire; also of Maritain’s connaturality, Polanyi’s tacit dimension, Newman’s illative sense, Hegel’s self-positing & intellectual intuition, Fries’ nonintuitive immediate knowledge & even Peirce’s abduction.
While I don’t suggest we could easily map these concepts, I want to lean into some intuitions, which they’ve collectively evoked for me.
When Lonergan distinguishes between horizontal & vertical finalities, when Boersma & Gaine distinguish theophanic & supra-theophanic knowledges of God, when Hjort distinguishes Nyssen’s visions via energies & Aquinas’ via noetic identity, when theologians distinguish the lights of experience, faith & glory, those distinctions refer to modally distinct ways of knowing as have been primordially gifted us per the divine gratuities of creation & grace, which are a single gift.
That’s all to say that we are always already knowing God via both immediate & mediated modes (Love being a many splendored thing). That’s an oversimplified account, I know, but it’s less inadequate (thanks GNaz) than would be its simple denial.
The divine illuminations enjoyed per our various modes of knowing (not only what’s true, beautiful & good, but Truth, Beauty & Goodness, Godself) progress seamlessly through the divine protological, historical & eschatological continuum with ever greater degrees of divine luminosity.
Allow me to riff on DBH’s account of divine apatheia:
I suggest, therefore, that — to become wholly satiated in a truly holy way is to become at peace with the infinite longings of one’s infinitely growing desires, which will invite ever novel fulfillments, to become at peace with becoming, itself, to become at peace knowing that, constitutively, one will everlastingly remain in infinite potency to God.
The above reflections are not mere idle speculations but have practical implications for formative spirituality.
For example, they underwrite the 1st Step of 12 Step programs: There IS a higher power and it’s NOT me!
They inspired my own realization that the journey IS our destination and the quest IS our grail.
More poetically, I’ll offer with Gerald May’s beautiful insights:
“Love is present in any desire … in all feelings of attraction, in all caring and connectedness. It embraces us in precious moments of immediate presence. It is also present when we experience loneliness, loss, grief and rejection. We may say such feelings come from the absence of love, but in fact they are signs of our loving; they express how much we care. We grieve according to how much of ourselves we have already given; we yearn according to how much we would give, if only we could.”
“The only way to own and claim love as our identity is: to fall in love with love itself, to feel affection for our longing, to value our yearning, treasure our wanting, embrace our incompleteness, be overwhelmed by the beauty of our need.”
And, finally, Maximus:
“who is by nature limitless & honourable & naturally stretches to infinity the appetite of those who enjoy him thru participation”
~ Maximus Amb Io 7 (PG 91.1089B)