Wishing You & Yours Merry Multiple Incarnations & Happy Merciful Hearts!

Season's Greetings

What is a merciful heart? It is the heart’s burning for the sake of the entire creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons and for every created thing.
    ~ Isaac the Syrian

True opposites coincide & coinhere. They are generated hypostatically. Thus all hypostatic identities are both grounded in differences & related perichoretically. And no hypostasis (haecceity-like, if a person) will either exhaust or obliterate any other.

Multiple incarnations are therefore
hypostatically - not naturally - identical. They are multiple precisely via multiplication & not by divisions (or fractures) of other entities or persons.

Parasitic existences, as only subcontraries, are mere ephemeralities. They are in no way true (eternal) opposites. And they will not perdure for eternity.

So, this is to also recognize that neither demons nor so-called damned souls would, somehow, be perversely held in an eternal existence by the Divine Merciful Heart.

For He wills to eternally & intimately manifest His Divine Presence in every diverse enfleshment, that is to say via His personal embodiment in every Divinely willed cosmic shadow, vestige, image & likeness, and in His personal exemplification of the Divine Nature, in which we, too, proportionately participate via theosis.

This logic of persons - not natures  - can well cohere to various extents with certain interpretations of Bracken & Zizioulas, Peirce & Hegel, Royce & Aurobindo, Neo-Chalcedonian Christology & Maximian Cosmology, Bonaventure & Eriugena, Maximus & Cyril.

This Christo-cosmo-logical interpretation has been nowhere explicated as well as will be found in Jordan Daniel Woods' upcoming _The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor_ (Notre Dame Press 2022).

Of course, any misinterpretations, above, are my own.

Addendum:

Neither the Capps nor Bonaventure a priori derived any of this hypostatic & perichoretic logic, metaphysically, e.g. merely Neoplatonically. They first recognized this kenotic pattern in this sign: "You will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger."

Innascibility, conceived only as the negation of any determinate nature (as merely privative) would, indeed, apply to the divine essence & equally to the divine persons.

However, the emanation account otherwise conceives innascibility as

the affirmation of an ineffable mode of - not only existence, but - acting.

So, it posits, instead, how He is distinct, how He acts peculiarly (in a sense that's proper only to the Father) as the anarchic principle. This sense positively, but nonformally, implicates the personal modes of primacy, power & passive production in the Father's essential kenosis. In this vertical structure of this ur-kenotic act, perfect differences emerge via the active generation of opposites, while, simultaneously (i.e. with no anteriority or posteriority, hence no affront to simplicity), in its passive, horizontal structure, perfect identity coincides.

In this emanation account, our references to hypostatic hownesses remain irreducible & indifferent to, even though inseperable from, essential whatnesses.

To assert, then, that the Father is uniquely innascible vis a vis His hypostatic mode of acting is not the beginning of our journey to explanatory adequacy. It is, rather, the termination of our inquiry in a radical ineffability.

Yes, this has been revealed to us by the Christmas Event. And this very perichoretic logic applies to every other Incarnational Multiplication, too.

See it manifest in the glowing faces of your children & grandchildren on this joyous Christmas Morning!

Feel it in the warm Christmas embraces of each beloved!

Receive it even in every Yuletide cybergreeting!

No words can describe and no formulas can explain the ineffable & profound depth dimensions of either any humanized Divine Person or any Divinized human person, whose identities are grounded in their very differences and whose truth, beauty & goodness are protologically contained in and eschatologically realized by the concrete, social Absolute - the Cosmic Christ.

Neo-Chalcedonian Novelties

Our creeds & dogmas block all inferences to ontological & hierarchical subordinations while happily abiding both aetiological & economic subordinations, as they pose threats to neither divine simplicity nor shared divine intrinsic  perfections.

Scripture & Tradition have blocked inferences to any type of subordinationism as would suggest that the persons are not identical in
intrinsic perfections (or we might say not identical regarding "great-making properties"?).

Hypostatic idiomata (of howness) are, in principle, both unshareable & in no way great-making. The aetiological subordination implicit in the ur-kenosis of the Father's  Monarchy & economic subordination of the Son & Spirit refer to the hypostatic idiomata of divine personal self-determinations.

Such hypostatic self-determinations of otherwise ontologically nondeterminate persons, are, at once, both actively powered, donatively & volitionally, by perfectly aligned wills, and passively powered, receptively & essentially, by their perfectly identical nature.

Thus, our creeds & dogma block inferences to - neither the aetiological nor economic  subordinations, which refer to hypostatic hownesses, but - only to any ontological subordinations, which refer to essential whatnesses.

Finally, the very structure of divine acts will necessarily preclude hierarchical subordination. That will follow per our logical descriptions of hypostatic hownesses & not via any ontological definitions of essential whatnesses.

To wit, in that structure, divine persons (w/their hypostatic idiomata) eternally manifest as irreducible & indifferent to but never inseparable from essential natures (whether primary or secondary).

By that structure, personal identities are grounded in generated differences by integrally related powers, in an eternal simultaneity of hypostatic powers that act, manifesting at once, both actively & passively, i.e. donatively & receptively, via dynamical self-determinations, whether ad intra or ad extra, e.g. volitionally essential paternal ur-kenosis (aetiologically) & essentially volitional Christo-pneumatological kenosis (economically).

Our grammatical logics for both hypostatic personal perichoreses & ontological proportional participations, in some ways & to various extents, mirror those of the phenomenological emergentisms implicit in such thinkers, for example, as would be receptive to certain Alexandrian (especially Cyrilline) intuitions & Neo-Chalcedonian novelties (enhypostasized essences & enessenced hypostases), as well as, for example, Eriugena & Maximus,  Scotus & Bonaventure, Palamas & Bulgakov, Peirce & Hegel, Royce & Aurobindo, Bracken & Jordan Daniel Wood, even Norris Clarke (via the thin passibility implicated in his Thomistic Personalism?) & Barth (whose positive conception of God's constancy seems more felecitous that the negative "immutability"?).

Neo-Chalcedonian Humility

I've often wondered if some remain reluctant to embrace Neo-Chalcedonianism b/c they think it tries to prove too much, Christologically?

When I first encountered it, it appealed to me as it seemed analogous to my own embrace of phenomenological emergentism sans supervenience.

In both cases, however, precisely because one's focus shifts to entitative, hypostatic & personal hownesses, while otherwise metaphysically bracketing ontological whatnesses, these stances, instead, mark retreats from epistemic hubris to humility, retreats from the speculatively descriptive to the commonsensically grammatical, from the robustly explanatory to the modestly heuristic.

These approaches, therefore, invite us to say LESS, ontologically, than we might otherwise aspire.

Rather than explicate the Angelus, metaphysically, Neo-Chalcedonianism explores the meanings of the Incarnation in terms of existential differences it'll make (value-realizations it'll foster) for each individual person's life, in particular, & the entire cosmos, in general.

Perhaps some, who are already preoccupied with a speculative ontological puzzle-solving regarding different natures, wrongly imagine that Neo-Chalcedonianism harbors similar metaphysical ambitions?

But it does exactly the opposite!


It urges repectful silences regarding truly ineffable hypostatic realities, while otherwise inviting our literal & commonsensical interpretations regarding certain of the different modes of howness that we may encounter.


We encounter those modes both in our more quotidian experiences of life as well as in our extraordinary experiences, e.g. from our encounters of special revelation.

What are Scripture & Tradition saying about the Son of God and what does all than mean for us?


Neo-Chalcedonianism doesn't answer "What's it like to be a bat?" much less "What types of metaphysical interactions take place between natures?".

B/c Neo-Chalcedonians aren't doing Aristotelian syllogistics & only vague Neo-Platonic heuristics, they often can & SHOULD be read literally?!