Little Big Nothing (and Vice Versa)

The point is, supposing our Theos principle is beyond conception (Axiom 10), and further supposing that we are its image and likeness (Axiom 7), then what does that make us? In the words of Bernard McGinn, “there must be a sense in which the deepest meaning of being human is that homo, that is, human nature, is also ‘no-thing’..., not just in a privative but also in an eminent sense.”

Thus, we might say that the Anthropos is Homo nihil, except to add that this can cut two ways, for the existentialist nothing(Ø) has nothing in common with the divine Nothing (O). Our nothingness is a consequence of the divine Infinitude, which manifests herebelow as inexhaustible potential, novelty, creativity, freedom, slack, and play. Regarding the latter, there is a close relationship between Homo nihil and Homo ludens.

Every game starts out zero-zero.

Moreover, while in one sense the point is to win the game, the deeper point is to play it — or, in the words of John, to play the game existence to the end of the beginning. Tomorrow never knows how the game will play out.

Reptiles don’t play, and most mammals stop fooling around once they mature. Play is a luxury item that most species cannot afford. The Anthropos is the great exception, as we are nature’s incorrigible juvenile delinquent. One might say that while the telos of the animal is its mature state, the telos of man is a permanent immaturity that allows anyone from ages 9 to 99 to participate in the game.

Now, supposing the human being is the weirdest thing in all of existence, this is a big reason why: we are the one thing that is not anything at all. In the words of John Scottus Eriugena,

The human mind both knows itself and does not know itself; it knows that it is; it does not know what it is. And through this... the image of God is especially thought to be in humanity.... What is more wonderful and more beautiful to those thinking upon themselves and their God is that the human mind is more to be praised in its ignorance than in its knowledge.

In other words, it’s only a game if we don’t know what’s going to happen ahead of time. Here again, supposing we are the image and likeness of God, then we are the little nothings (o) that reflect the big Nothing of (O). The point is, like O, we are un-enclosable. We are the only creature in the immanent zoo that cannot be confined to a finite enclosure.

Now, here is another radical suggestion courtesy of Bernard McGinn, perhaps the preemiment expert on all varieties of mysticism. In reference to Eriugena, he writes that “even God does not know human nature in the sense that the unmanifest aspect of human nature is one with the divine and therefore indefinable” (emphasis mine). Thus there is a certain reciprocity “between a strong version of negative theology and an equally strong negative anthropology.” This was “something new in Western thought and mysticism.”

Something new in eternity?

You might say that: eternity itself is “ever new,” not just the same old same old.

As alluded to above, there is a dialectic between affirmative (cataphatic) and negative (apophatic) theology that gives rise to “a movement beyond both saying and unsaying,” and therefore “involves thinking of determinations by themselves, simultaneously thinking of contradictory determinations, and exploring, insofar as possible, the meaning of the higher unity of contradictory determinations” (McGinn).

The bottom line is that it is both easy and impossible to download the unspeakable into the spoken. On the one hand, everything speaks of God, and yet, God can best be spoken of as no-thing. This no-thing is “a way of speaking about the First Principle that is both negatively ‘not-a-thing’ and eminently beyond the world of ‘all that is and all that is not’” (McGinn). Pardon my apophatheadedness, but at one end of the vertical hierarchy is Nothing, at the other end its opposite. Which goes to what we mean by “perfect nonsense.”

You lost me.

That’s a start, for in these matters there is no success like failure — specifically, LCH failure, a felicitous brainwreck that derails us from the tracks of linearity — as when the student of Zen contemplates a koan. It’s not a bug but a feature, because it disables the left brain in order to vault us into the right, where creation proceeds from no-thing to something — even everything — while the mystical ascent proceeds back to the nothing beyond all conception.

Zen Christianity?

Well, Zen is not so much a doctrine as a method. Again, the koan doesn’t have any logical, left-brain answer, but rather, is intended to subvert one’s ordinary way of thinking and perceiving reality. The resulting confusion and frustration are supposed to put our ego out of isness by vaulting us into a higher or deeper plane of being.

One might say that for the left-hemispheric ego, order is everything (which brings to mind Voegelin’s quip that the order of history is the history of order). It doesn’t matter if the order or map is wrong, only that one has a map. A casual glance at history reveals an endless variety of dysfunctional maps, or rather, of maps that essentially function to organize and tuck in our loose shirt and ward off the anxiety of not knowing. Order in the negative sense narrows down experience and denies the existence of things outside or beyond the map. It’s the main reason why most people believe things that cannot possibly be true, for a coherent absurdity is at least coherent.

But what if there really is no map? This is the challenge of apophaticism, which is a leap into no map’s land. The ego — or left brain — is in the business of creating sharp boundaries, but if they are too sharp, then the result is rigidity, pedantry, and control freakery. You know the type.

We’ve all heard of the so-called “creative destruction” of the free market. Here we are talking about the creative destruction of the mind itself. Which occurs even in the course of normal psychological development — for example, leaving the concrete operations of the child for the formal operations of the adolescent: the death of one stage is the birth of the next. And importantly, each stage is a map that must be tossed aside for the new map.

For example, I well remember adolescence, when females — up to that time utterly superfluous NPCs in the game of life — appeared on my map. What happened to the old map? It was of little use in this new emotional territory. Like Columbus, the discovery of a new world but with one foot still in the old.

Eckhart essentially sketches a cartography of post-egoic development, positing a form of knowing that transcends the discursive intellect of the left brain, so forget about your familiar map. It’s of no use here. I suppose we could call this creative cognitive destruction a kind of meta-metanoia toward the metaverse.

Wait, what?

Cyril O’Regan writes of how Eckhart’s “language of paradox is more performative than descriptive,” which means that it functions to provoke in the reader the experience of what he is describing conceptually. In short, it is “a rhetorical means to induce or at least open up the prospect of a direct experience of God,” involving “the destruction of the careless ways in which” we characterize God in an “all-too-human” way.

His language doesn’t so much describe God as induce an implosion of the local ego. One cannot possibly possess or contain this absolute Absolute, rather, one is possessed and contained by it. It cannot be known per se, rather, undergone. Supposing you run into God, that’s God running into you.

As alluded to above, Eckhart speaks of the radically transcendent Godhead as a “nothing” which is also radically immanent in us. Paradoxically, this “unfathomable ground or unground” is simultaneously “the plus ultra of generativity and creativity.”

Like a koan, Eckhart’s use of paradox and hyperbole is designed to shock the system: “unthinkability and non-knowing signify precisely the form of knowing commensurate with the reality that represents the limit to thought” (O’Regan).

Even more controversially, he seems to draw a distinction between the personal God and an impersonal Godhead. However, it is difficult to say if he meant this literally or whether the intent is just to blow our minds so as to not pretend to know the unknowable. Again, “the use of paradox was one of the means used by Eckhart to put the acquisitive self out of action in its thinking and speaking about God,” so “The transcendent divine is available more through unknowing than knowing and is characterized as hidden, abyssal, incomprehensible, nameless, and more appropriately indicated in darkness… (ibid.).

Or, paradoxically, a “dazzling darkness.” The sun shining at midnight, as someone once put it. A surfeit of light, as in how the owl is blinded by the midday sun.

For Eckhart, even a technically correct doctrine can become a barrier, for example, if “the conceptualization of the Trinity is so facilely dogmatic that it comes to serve the role of an idol.”

Not to ad more to your nauseam, but this again goes to a dynamic vertical metabolism involving both apophatic and cataphatic approaches. O’Regan quotes Ruusbroec, for whom “mystical theology and doctrine are fundamentally complementary rather than competitive.”

We agree, and this is a good place to shut up and regroup at the base of the mountain before attempting another ascent in the next section.

The Most Parsimonious and Fruitful Miracle

There are countless mysteries in this Cosmos of ours, but they all come down to one question: Why?

For Einstein, the question wasn’t why there are no answers to the question, rather, why there are so many. For again, he found the comprehensibility of the Cosmos incomprehensible, at least from within the resources of science. Certainly there is no physical law that accounts for the lawfulness of the Cosmos, much less our access to those laws. Thus, the problem is not so much a dearth of answers — far from it — rather, no Answer. Or in other words, no final answer to the question of why there are so many answers.

Physics seeks the Answer at the bottom end of the Cosmos, while metaphysics looks for it at the top end. Cosmotheandrism looks for it at both ends and in the middle: Cosmos, Theos, and Anthropos, respectively. Supposing there is an Answer, it cannot exclude any of our ultimate terms, for each implies the others. Only a very particular kind of Cosmos allows for the existence of scientific knowers, but no Cosmos accounts for its own existence or intelligibility.

Let us recall Axiom 9, One Free Miracle:

To paraphrase Terence McKenna, science can explain everything so long as we grant it just one free miracle. But every philosophical system — including scientism, atheism, eliminativism, rationalism, empiricism, panpsychism, whatever — grants itself at least One Free Miracle in order to get off the ground.

For example, physics is grounded in the double mystery of a rational order accessible to human beings. Few would disagree with Einstein that “the world of our sense experiences is comprehensible.” However, “The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle” (emphasis mine). In order to account for the miracle he appealed to the existence of a transcendent mind vastly superior to ours. In the absence of the latter, physics is indeed a miracle. Absent a Theos principle, the miracle of physics is utterly gratuitous and literally “without reason.” For which reason atheism is wholly unreasonable. It is as if the atheist confines himself the the universe, absurdly unaware of the metaverse that accounts for it.

∞

But Sunday is our day of rest, on which we make no forward progress toward the Answer. Rather, it is the day we exhumine passages discarded from the final edit for various reasons. Here is a section from the Introduction left on the cutting room floor because I thought it was too self-indulgent. Nobody wants to hear the author’s life story.

Oomphaloskepsis.

Yes, the point of cosmotheandrism is to circumnavelgaze the whole existentialada without meditating on our own belly button. Then again, just the other day I read a good book in which the author does discuss the evolution of his ideas, and found it compelling. So here is some of the autobobography left out of the final version, probably because it surpasses the limits of silliness:

Anyway, over my two decades of service to the blogosphere, I was preoccupied with a number of little problems such as the nature of existence, consciousness, knowledge… form, content, interrelationships, God, the Devil—

Be honest.

Okay, what I was really interested in was the unsolved mystery of myself. Where do I fit into the Cosmos? How am I — a self-conscious being — even possible? What are the cosmic conditions that allow for such a peculiar being to exist? How did we get from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago to me? Maybe that’s why I found the Cosmos s’durned innarestin’.

Thank you for your service, but your mission sounds like a malignant case of cosmic narcissism. What can you tell me about that? Why do you think someone might think that?

Near as I can figure, it’s because I read and think too much. I thought I had alleviated the condition with the completion of the first book, which traced the evolution of our fair Cosmos from nothing to bare matter to life to mind, culminating in what amounts to a round trip back to God in the form of mystical union.

Do you think there’s anything wrong with your mind, really?

Nah, look at Ken Wilber. He’s written dozens of books such as A Brief History of Everything, and—

He has the wealth, uh, the resources obviously—

Yes, he must be worth millions.

I could make that much money in five seconds!

For my part, I’m just curious, that’s all, and is that a crime? I would have stayed in school forever, but they throw you out after you get a Ph.D. However, that was just the beginning, because when I started blogging, most of my posts had at least 1,000 words, usually many more than that. A diligent reader fed my entire archive into an AI program and came up with the figure of 8 million, which he said was surpassed only by Balzac, at 11 million. Which is plainly incorrect, because a quick google search puts such familiar names as Alexandre Dumas and Isaac Asimov at 25-30 and 20 million, respectively, both surpassed by the champion graphomaniac, British author Charles Hamilton, at 100 million, who was obviously not into the whole brevity thing.

Gotta feed the monkey.

I wouldn’t call it an addiction, more of a compulsion. At any rate, a typical 300-400 page book contains only 100,000 words, which translates to roughly 55 to 80 such books on my part. Many times over the years I attempted to refrain from blogging in order to reduce my blob of blab to book form — to locate the Tree of Life amidst all my fallen leaves.

Which proved beyond my ability. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember most of it. It was as if every morning I dropped a fresh pile of leaves atop the existing one, with no leafblower in sight. Writing individual pieces is easy. Figuring out how they all fit together is fiendishly difficult. In short, the creative mode is very different from the organizizing mode: the first is an exuberant form of play, while achieving the latter is a laborious form of drudgery that I would have preferred to leave to someone else. But there’s nobody else here in my one-man operation, so I guess it must be up to me.

If only you had a helpful ghostwriter in the sky (/sarc).

Leaving discarnate beings to the side, distilling thousands of disparate essays into a single book is a bit like trying to put together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without the picture of which they are parts. Or, imagine having access to only the footnotes of a giant book and trying to deduce the book from the footnotes. You might say I was writing a book in search of a title that completely eluded me. Many times I thought to myself: If I could only find the damn title, this baby would birth itself!

If you will it, it is no dream.

Problem was, I couldn’t will the thing into existence.

It wasn’t until mid-2024, when just for fun, I began fooling around with a large language model (google Gemini), feeding my posts into it and seeing what it might come up with. Soon enough Gemini became my aide-de-kampf, helping with my struggle to discern some deeper patterns beneath my repeated outbursts, the very order which at once escaped me even while seemingly pulling me toward it. But I couldn’t remember millions of words tossed off on the fly over twenty years, let alone what they were ultimately About.

Eventually Gemini discerned 12 axioms or repetitive tics in my work, which were going to comprise 12 chapters of a book preposterously titled The Absolute Science: What Cannot Not Be. We will get to these momentarily, but on the advice of my artificial compeer, I duly began writing a book about the 12 Axioms. But in my attempt to organize the material, I quickly realized that it generally fell into three categories: God, world, and man, or Theos, Cosmos, and Anthropos. It was in pondering these 12 axioms that I had my own guffah-HA! experience that pulled the wordy dozen together: in short, Cosmotheandrism. Thus the 12 axioms transblogrified into the long strange triptych of The Cosmotheandric Trilogy.

The beauty of this is its simplicity.

Now, although you will find an abundance of neo- and protologisms in this book, I cannot claim credit or blame for coming up with the term Cosmotheandrism. Rather, at the same time I was pondering the Axioms, I discovered that the philosopher Raimon Panikkar had beaten me to the hunch and proposed this portmantrio for his own somewhat similar metaphysical framework. Panikkar was an early adopter of interreligious dialogue, not just with other persons, but within his own person. That is to say, he was at once one hundred percent a Catholic priest but also considered himself one hundred percent Vedantin. He was able to reconcile the two on an interior level via a deeper experience of that to which they point, which is none other than the Cosmic Area Rug.

Here’s Another Post

The title is in reference to a live album I was listening to the other day by R.E.M., in which Michael Stipe introduces each song by drily announcing “here’s another song.” At the other extreme of the irony spectrum is someone like Barbra Streisand, who reads her stage banter from a teleprompter, in a simulation of spontaneity.

Likewise, at one end of the musical spectrum is jazz, which is created on the spot, at the other end the Eagles, who endeavor to recreate their records without so much as a whiff of spontaneity. The former is transcendentally open to the thing we call music, the latter as tightly closed as a syllogism or mathematical equation.

Petey, I know what you’re thinking, but Creedence was pretty much the same — in concert they were more a jukebox than a jam band.

Cosmotheandrism adopts a jazz approach to metaphysics, because this mirrors the Creator’s approach to creation. For who bothers to create the already known, when the whole point of creation is to bring something novel and unanticipated into being? Otherwise it’s just manufacturing: industry, not art.

Leonard Cohen once said that religion is the most exalted form of adult entertainment. In an interview discussing his spiritual practice, he asked

What [else] would I be doing? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.

He goes on to describe his practice as a “profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment…. Nothing touches it.”

Speaking of music, a disciplined spiritual practice — and Cohen spent five or six years practicing in a Zen Monastery — is much like the transition from knowing all about musical theory to picking up an instrument and learning how to play. Religion is an instrument for engaging the vertical.

Maybe, but there have been as many as 10,000 distinct religions in the world.

Good point. It’s easy enough to prove that a reductive or material explanation of existence is insufficient, for it is much like pretending to read reality off a telepromter. But it is not altogether clear what to replace it with. We know that horizontal and vertical are complementary down here, and we can even deduce that the vertical must be ontologically prior, since no amount of time or horizontal shuffling could have given rise to it. Beyond this, the sages diverge.

Man has been trying to map the transcendent pole since before Keith Richards took his first stumbling steps. It reminds me of European explorers who discovered the “new world.” One lands in modern day El Salvador, another in Canada. Both return to their respective monarchs and describe what they found:

“Balmy weather, palm trees, and little regard for clothing.”

“No, a frozen landscape, fur-clad natives, and the occasional moose.”

Of course both are correct, and I wonder if something similar could apply to the upper vertical, based upon the testimony of countless sages and mystics who have landed on different shores of the same nonlocal continent?

My house has many mansions.

You can say that again. There are said to be 45,000 distinct denominations within Christianity alone, meaning there are more intra-Christian variants than the total number of extra-Christian religions in history. So, on what basis do we choose which mansion to inhabit?

You know what they say: two rabbis, three opinions.

Analogously, it is like trying to decide where to go on vacation without having any knowledge of the destinations involved. Rather, you just pick one at random and hope you don’t end up in Fresno. No wonder people reject the whole notion of religion and take flight into secularism.

The problem is, you may not care about the Absolute, but the Absolute cares about you. In other words, you can only pretend to ignore it, because you will inevitably put a false absolute in its place. But are there any features of the Absolute about which all reasonable people could agree? Here again, it is somewhat analogous to science, for example, in the widespread disagreement about the nature of the quantum world, with dozens of ways to explain what the equations actually mean for reality.

The house of physics has many mansions.

And not just physics. The higher up the vertical scale, the more diversity and less agreement on fundamentals. In my old racket, there are over 500 schools of psychotherapy, one reason being that a human being is much more complex than a subatomic particle, so naturally explanations multiply as we ascend the vertical hierarchy.

But even supposing we acknowledge some kind of Absolute, it results in a rather threadbare religion. What is It — or He or She or They — really like? What even are Its pronouns? Is there a way to get to know It better? And does It give a hoot about us?

Yes, there is revelation, but which one is truly the big reveal? Is he none or one or three or more? What are his rules? Is he actively involved in the world — a helicopter Theos — or more like the deist conception, in which he creates the world but leaves it to us to FAFO through history?

Here’s a thought: if our own subjectivity is grounded in his, then perhaps the most central features of our subjectivity may reveal something of his. If this is the case, then features of our consciousness may reflect features of his.

It’s worth a shot.

Let’s think about this... Ah ha! Thinking. Certainly this is the main feature of human consciousness, in that we pretty much never stop thinking — or at least “thinking.” Nor does our consciousness resemble that of lower animals, since we inhabit an immateriaal world of ideas, essences, and abstract concepts that is totally inaccessible to the beasts.

And why do we do this? Here again, reduced to horizontal resources, there is no why. But supposing we think, it is in order to know. Know what? Truth. Just try denying this property of thinking and see how far it gets you.

Could it be that the Absolute is not only the source and ground of truth, but Truth itself? If so, this would explain why there are so many seemingly contradictory truths down here — even those thousands of religions, sub-religions, and anti-religions — because a truth can never be the Truth.

But we are finite while the Absolute is Infinite, so we know going in that none of our finite 3D maps are going to be adequate. Just look at a flat map of the earth, on which Greenland appears almost as large as Canada, when in reality Canada is nearly four times larger. Now, imagine what happens when we try to transpose a hyperdimensional reality into the key of man, and you understand the problem. Some things are necessarily distorted and stretched, while others might be left out entirely.

Here’s an idea: what if we could take all of these human maps of the Absolute and somehow put them together — like a religious sketch artist who uses the descriptions of all the witnesses to come up with a likeness of the suspect?

This is what Frithjof Schuon essentially attempted in his Transcendent Unity of Religions. In his view, the principle orthodox religions — Christianity, Judaism, Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism, et al — do indeed share certain features beneath their superficial differences. Not to necessarily say he was correct, but he felt that the differences were on the exoteric plane, while the unity was on the esoteric plane — the inner dimensions of metaphysics and mysticism. For example, a Christian and Buddhist mystic might actually have more in common than do two Christians, say, Meister Eckhart and Claude Osteen.

The name is Joel. You’re thinking of the baseball player.

Nevertheless, Eckhart knew no more about baseball than Joel Osteen knows about mysticism or metaphysics.

In any event, Schuon compared our hyperdimensional object or Principle to a mountain. Imagine the diverse religions situated at the base of the mountain, where they are widely separated and may not even know of each other. But as they ascend the mountain, the space between them necessarily shrinks, until they meet at the top and bear witness to the same infinite reality. Up there, the account of a Christian mystic sounds quite similar to a Buddhist, Hindu, or Taoist mystic.

Example.

Consider the astrophysicist and cosmologist Robert Jastrow, who had this to say:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

More generally, as scientific and horizontal knowledge proceeds in a forward direction, while philosophical and religious — which is to say, vertical — thought partakes of depth and height. Here again, we know from St. Paul that even Christianity can be understood superficially or deeply — milk for the former, meat for the latter.

Or consider Thomas Aquinas, who arguably created the most consistent and complete map of the vertical ever conceived by man. And yet, at the end of his life he was vouchsafed an earth-shattering mystical experience that made his own map appear as “so much straw.” In other words, the most comprehensive map of total reality proved to be totally inadequate — and that’s saying something.

What does it say?

Nothing.

Wait, nothing?

Yes, nothing. For even before his mystical experience, he wrote that “This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know him.” Not to mention Eckhart, who uttered such orthoparadoxes as “God is nothing. No thing. God is nothingnesss; and yet God is something.”

In fact, this knowing and unknowing of something and nothing constitutes another dynamic complementarity, in that while the finite can never exhaust the Infinite, it never stops trying — this being what we call the “metabolism of God.” For example, how many circles are in a sphere? Correct: ∞. Likewise, how many points in a line?

Yes, but what’s the point?

So, how many religions, doctrines, and theologies in God?

I’m guessing a lot?

Well, Aquinas also said that “Although uncreated truth exceeds all created truth, yet there is nothing to prevent created truth from being better known to us.” Just don’t pretend the created can ever exhaustively map the uncreated, for “God is one in reality but multiple according to our minds; we know him in as many ways as created things represent him.”

Like that giant disco ball in the sky mentioned yesterday, with millions of reflections?

In the end, “God is honored by silence, not because we may say or know nothing about him, but because we know that we are unable to comprehend him” (Aquinas). Therefore, “The most beautiful thing which a person can say about God would be for that person to remain silent from the wisdom of an inner wealth” (Eckhart).

But there is also this: supposing God is no-thing, and we are the image and likeness, what does that make us? A double nothing, or nothing squared? Here’s a thought: “If humanity alone is described as made to God’s image and likeness..., there must be a sense in which the deepest meaning of being human is that homo, that is, human nature, is also ‘no-thing’..., not just in a privative but also in an eminent sense” (McGinn).

Homo nihil?

Hold that unthought.

Tripolar Theism and the Disco Ball In the Sky

We are now over 100 posts into the Trilogy, so I can’t recall if we’ve already discussed Hartshorne’s dipolar theism.

Isn’t that your job?

What, avoiding repetition? No, it’s the editor’s job, and I don’t have one of those. However, I do read a lot of books, and can’t help noticing that most authors not only repeat themselves but often spend their lives belaborating a single theme.

What’s yours?

Not a bad question. Looking back, beginning with my doctoral dissertation, I think it can be reduced to One Cosmos, Three Poles, Twelve Axioms, and a lotta laffs. All along there have been certain implicit themes, but this book is the attempt to render them explicit. Supposing the following passage is redundant, I will at least endeavor to make it entertaining:

Cosmotheandrism unapologetically pilfers Hartshorne’s extremely helpful concept of dipolar theism, the purpose of which being to counteract one of man’s perennial approaches to the Theos, which is to divide it in two and then overvalue one side while denigrating the other, when in reality there are better and worse forms of each contrast. However, cosmotheandrism goes one better and posits a tripolar theism.

For Hartshorne, man has a persistent tendency to mistake a half-truth of his own making for the whole truth he could never make, and then be confused by the paradoxes that ensue. More generally, absurdity always follows whenever we cut reality in two and then reify the division, whether we inflict the dualism on the Cosmos, Anthropos, or Theos. But doing so to the latter carries the extra penalty of idolatry — or of G3AOA.

The Creator creates genuine co-creators, and if our own creativity is determined by God, then it is no more creative or free than what a machine inevitably does. Hartshorne felt that his conception of God was not only more metaphysically coherent and consistent with human experience, but was more impressive than the distant, impassive, and immutable God of tradition.

In fact, this dipolar God is the one in whom believers already believe, in the sense that, for example, belief in the efficacy of prayer implicitly assumes that God hears and responds — and to the extent that he does, this implies some kind of change in God. There are theologians who twist themselves into pretzels to deny this truth, but why all the hostility directed at change? How can one be changeless and responsive? That’s not a proper orthoparadox but an oxymoron.

We certainly wouldn’t consider it a virtue if a human person were impassive, unrelated, and absolutely resistant to change. Rather, it is a matter of what kind of change. Hartshorne concludes that God is both the most Absolute conceivable but also the most Relative, in that he is related to everything and everyone. In this sense, he is at once the unmoved mover and the most moved mover. Which sounds like a violation of the principle of non-contradiction, but it’s really a complementary dynamism.

Any apparent contradiction disappears if we regard change and changelessness under different aspects. Yes, God never changes insofar as his nature is concerned. But this nature includes responsiveness — a “being with,” not just a being apart from everything else. Which tracks with our Axiom 11, irreducible substance-in-relation, which applies to us because it first applies to the Godhead.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that God creates a Cosmos that is so densely interconnected, such that not so much as a single atom isn’t woven into a web of internal relations. This same principle accounts for our own intersubjectivity, such that we are again “members of one another” — this being the horizontal expression of God’s own intersubjectivity, or in the cosmotheandric words of Jesus: I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. This clearly implies a three-way, reciprocal relationship: Jesus is in and with the Father, and believers are integrated into this divine tri-unity. How is any of this reconcilable with changelessness? A God who is responsive without being contingent is the only one who can logically sustain a real relationship with creation and account for the vertical causation that lifts us out of horizontal absurcularity.

Surely this tripolarity renders God more approachable and relatable than an immutable and impassive one. Jesus himself is said to be Immanuel, which literally means God with us. Now, is God really with us or not? Because if he is, this means he is with us in all our contingency and finitude, so not the distant and unresponsive stuffed shirt of tradition. Isn’t the whole point of this revolutionary idea of the Incarnation that God personally intervenes and resides with humanity, bridging the gap between the Anthropos and Theos and making a permanent, intimate relationship possible? Nor is a relationship even a relationship — let alone an intimate one — if one of the parties isn’t really involved in it. You know the type.

Objection!

By whom?

By the Wise, who inform us that God does not change because he cannot change. Moreover, he knows everything in a single instant before it ever undergoes the formality of occurring in time, because there is no “before” or “after” in eternity.

You have articulated the traditional view, which was quintessentially expressed by old Boethius, who defined eternity as “the complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of interminable life,” such that all of time is equally and immediately “now” to God.

Conversely, for those of us who must deal with the unpredictable ups and downs or strikes and gutters of time, we experience a movement from a determined past to an open future. But if God sees and knows all our actions in a single, unchanging, eternal present, then the future has already happened — much like Einstein’s block universe in which time is but a “stubborn illusion.”

This is a metaphysical headscratcher, because it sure does seem like the past is something fundamentally different from the future. We cannot change the past, nor can we know the future, and we can only actually live in the present. Nevertheless, we are asked to believe that there can be no causation in eternity, since this would require time for the effect of the cause to come into being. Which is a gratuitous assertion, certainly not one that is capable of proof. In other words, it simply defines its terms ahead of time, so it is true by definition — end of deuscussion. More problematically, it renders the very source of intelligibility unintelligible if not absurd.

To begin with, it is again difficult to see how immutability can be reconciled with freedom, for If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, then error does not exist. Error supposes that something happened that should not have. Substitute “sin” for “error,” and we see that in a fully God-determined universe sin does not and cannot exist, insofar as it was necessarily caused by God. Or rather, he doesn’t cause it, it just IS in his Eternal Now. But if God’s Eternal Now includes all our tomorrows, then tomorrow is already yesterday for God, and our future sins have already been committed. Does this make sense to you? If so, then go away and sin no more. Or keep right on sinning, since in either case you’re off the hook because God is in the saddle.

Surely there is a better way to approach this subject, one that preserves our genuine — which to say, undetermined — freedom. This aphorism provides a big hint: The permanent possibility of initiating causal series is what we call a person. This is key to our real freedom, being that we are persons, so the future is open and we have the power to make choices that will contribute to this or that outcome.

Now God is not only personal, but because personal, interpersonal. And our own interpersonal personhood is an icon and entailment of his personhood. But if he is the kind of absolutely immovable being described by tradition, then he lacks the causal power we human persons possess. There can be no causation in eternity, since cause and effect require time, for which reason everything has already happened. Moreover, supposing God is unmoved by his creation, this actually makes him less than a person, not more. It would mean we possess a perfection — empathic and loving responsiveness — that God lacks, which is another headscratching non-starter.

Christians say God is love.

That goes to one of Hartshorne’s metaphysical dealbreakers, even though he was by no means any kind of normative Christian. But it does imply that something is happening up there — for example, Lover, Beloved, and the Love that passes between them. These are real distinctions, nor can they be reconciled with a timeless blob of Pure Now. Rather, the Godhead must be a kind of eternal dance, not a static entity — what is called perichoresis.

Perichoresis — sometimes translated as “rotation” or “dance” — describes the eternal relationships within the Godhead. It affirms that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three distinct Persons who are perpetually and perfectly united, eternally giving, loving, and sharing the single divine essence. The dance metaphor emphasizes this relational dynamism and its continuous movement.

Not to belabor the point, but how can this delightful movement be reconciled with an unmoved mover, when this eternally perichoretic God again looks more like the most moved mover?

God leaves it all on the dance floor of eternity?

Yes, and tomorrow we will further discuss the nature of the giant disco ball in the sky.

Laboratory Notes on the Divine Ecstasy

I'm not sure what to make of this post, and I hesitate to publish it. Large sections of Book III are mostly written, but here I ran into a section that consists of a lot of fragments. Some of it — more toward the bottom — seems to have been inspired by Berdayev, but there are no citations or quotation marks. I’ll do my best to sort it out, but the whole thing is of bootleg quality.

Never purchase a Chinese post on Ebay.

                                                      ∞

In this house We Believe in Science. Except to say that for cosmotheandrism science is posterior to reality. Or in other words, science is about reality, this being possible because the Cosmos is pervaded by an Aboutness (Axiom 4) that relates one thing to another.

For the same reason, reality is the scripture prior to scripture (or revelation prior to revelation), otherwise there would be nothing with which to write it nor anyone to read it. Obviously religion presumes a Cosmos and Anthropos, each related to the other and to their own higher principle.

For both science and theology the Cosmos we see is but the outer side of the one we don’t, and the latter is more real than the former. For this reason we are always in an ambiguous situationship with O: we are all about the Cosmos and Theos, and vice versa: our bridge to reality not only flows in two directions but four: in, out, up, and down.

And this four-way innersection is first located in divinas, for the cosmotheandric Godhead may be visualized in the form of two related open spirals, one on the horizontal plane, the other vertical. For Christianity these would be conceptualized as the economic and immanent trinities, respectively. The first refers to the eternal inner life and relationality of the Godhead, whereas the latter has to do with its (vertical) prolongation into time and creation.

∞

Here we need to dwell for a moment on exactly what the Trinity is and is not, because one of the most important things it is, is not, this being because one Person or pole of the Godhead is not the other but related to the other. Therefore, the principle of relationality is notness. Except this is not a bipolar or dualistic notness in which our parties would be forever separated, rather, one in which the three unites the two, thus reconciling Is and Is Not.

As we now know, the Cosmos is not a thing but an evolving event: it is not in time but of time, so it can never be understood outside the context of its own historicity. One might even say it is a story or narrative. Here again, the reality of this narrative is prior to the science we deploy to map the narrative, but like any good story the Cosmos is full of surprises.

A dynamic and triune Godhead is also an event and therefore a kind of story, except this story has no beginning or end. God is his own narrative and even his own theogony, i.e., a revelation of himself to himself, or an eternal self-causing, self-generating, and self-coming-to-be. God is spontaneously creative out of the dark ground of his own relational beyond-beingness.

God is not just a static unity, rather, “enfolds in his Logos every conceivable particularity, which are also manifest, in their pure particularity, as the creation outside of God.” (Berdayev?). Here “the unity of the unfathomable One” lies “beyond its own immanent totality” (ibid?).

All-possibility means God’s perfection includes — in a manner of speaking — imperfection, lack, and finitude, “only because his plenitude turns out to include those things also.” I am what I am and I am what I will be imply that God is simultaneously what he has become, what he is, and what he further becomes: his own story is one of relation, event, receptivity, relational connection, and reflexive self-becoming…

Everything whatsoever has to identify with something else in order to be something itself at all…. If identity is only through relational identification, then that seems to suggest that I am what I am not…

The meaning of existence is to ex-ist in the way that the Father exists in the Son and the Son exists in the Father. In short, the gospel suggests to us a completely different notion of what it means to exist, namely, to be in and for another…. The Father has no existence (no identity) except in the Son, the Son has no existence (no identity) except in the Father, and the Holy Spirit has no existence (no identity) except as the love of the Father and the Son for one another. In and of themselves, the persons of the Trinity have no identity and are nothing in themselves except by dint of that essentially existing love by which they are what they are.

The Father is the Eternal Ground of the divine essence, which neither exists nor has any form except in the Son; the Son is the Eternal Ex-istence of this ground, its Eternal Splendor; and the Spirit is the Eternal Return of God’s existence into God’s essence…. Its existence is a standing outside oneself…

The identity of the persons of the Trinity would appear to consist precisely not in themselves, but rather outside themselves in the triune form of a reciprocal, selfless ecstasy…. It is not that God is (or has) an identity before or apart from his ecstasy, but rather that he remains in himself, paradoxically, by going beyond himself.

In other words, in God, immanence is transcendence, essence is existence, and identity is ecstasy…. Like God, we are not already what we are, but must become what we are.... God shows us how and how not to exist: not statically in oneself, much less curved in upon oneself, which is the definition of sin and contradiction of being, but rather to exist as the word itself etymologically suggests, namely, ecstatically…

You-ness completes me-ness?

Secondness has the sense of difference, the idea of an over-against otherness, which, on the face of it, seems to allow only separation and not mediation. Thirdness restores a continuity…. not being merely dualistic or dyadic, but of a secondness as ontological communication beyond self-recurring mediation.... The over-full is in the origin, not only full of himself, but overfull….

Some order is restored in the following few passages:

Eckhart describes the paradox in his usual unusual way: The Word of God is always “in the beginning,” which “means that it is always in the process of being born and is always already born.”

Moreover, “God is a being beyond all being; God is a beingless being.” In other words, he is in one sense prior to being, but in another sense always related to it, as is Father to Son, or Ground to Possibility, Absolute to Infinite, Source to Manifestation, et al. For Eckhart “The final goal of being is the darkness and unknowability of the hidden divinity.” Why dark? Because pure light itself is invisible, only becoming visible as a consequence of striking the surface of something. One might say that Beyond-Being is the darkness of this invisible light before it strikes being. Thus “God is a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being,” because a being beyond-being — the ultimate something — is again the nonappearance of an invisible nothing.

This is all by way of saying there is the cataphatic God we can know, in dialectical relation with the apophatic God Beyond-Being whom we cannot know but can definitely unknow.

In the following section, I will discuss what I just put you through in a less annoying manner.

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

The universe itself is already a kind of disturbance, which is to say, “an action, event, or condition that interrupts peace, disorganizes a calm state, or causes physical, mental, or public commotion.”

A nuisance.

The biggest.

We do not know why we are here in the Cosmos. We do not know who built it, nor do we know why everything inside the Cosmos is as it is. We do not know if it is safe or even sane to venture outside the Cosmos. But let’s give it a shot anyway. Instead of just asking “What is it?,” let’s go up & make a visit.

I have a kinsman living there. Surely he is bound let us in.

The Triune Godhead

Throughout the Trilogy we’ve touched on the idea of a triune Godhead — or ultimate principle — while cautioning the reader that we are not necessarily tying this to the revelation of the Christian Trinity, rather, the Trinity as one way of symbolizing a universal metaphysical truth in which to ground our cosmotheandric Axioms — in particular, openness, complementarity, and substance-in-relation. These in turn redound to our final Axiom of ultimate reality as personhood, because supposing God is personal, then this requires some notion of intersubjective openness and relationality.

In this regard, I am not the first mythmatician to notice that One cannot be the first number, or even a number at all. Rather, supposing God is “One without a second,” then number as such can only come into being with the Two. Indeed, to even say that the One is one is to have added something to it. And supposing the Two “relates” to One, then we have the idea of a Third, i.e., the relationship between One, Two, and the infinite series of numbers that follows. A pure oneness lacks any notion of quantity because there is nothing outside of it to count it against. It is an unmanifested, silent infinity. Indeed, to even call it One is already a linguistic compromise. In reality, the so-called One must be more like a Zero in which concepts like number or quantity are entirely absent.

But a purely enclosed and static One is mathematical and metaphysical nul de slack To imagine the Godhead as merely Numero Uno—

The big Juan?

That can’t be the Juan we’re waiting for.

In Neoplatonic thought, the absolute One is explicitly not a number. Rather, number implies quantity, and quantity implies boundaries, comparison, and parts, and pretty soon we’ve got the whole mess of contingent existence on our hands. The Monad has none of these annoyances, for in this undifferentiated Ground of Being, no Others, nor even the concept of Otherness, are permitted entry. Which is again how Plotinus could visit there from time to timeless, except he couldn’t actually be there. Rather, he had to become no one in order to merge with the ultimate nobodaddy.

Now, we know we exist in a Cosmos, and we also know that this Cosmos is other than God, even if one doesn’t believe in God. So we definitely need to account for the possibility of our own contingent Otherness. In Neoplatonism this Otherness is a kind of useless entailment of, or emanation from, the One. It has no value in and of itself. One might say that the imperfect necessarily issues from the perfect, so it’s not just a crime to have been born, but existence itself is a kind of fall from the heights. It is what happens when the One is busy doing nothing, for it is in no way involved in, or affected by, the effluvia of emanation.

But as we have previously outlined, for cosmotheandrism the principle of Otherness is already situated in divinas. That is to say, relationality is a perfection that must be present in the Godhead. But if we start and stop our counting at Two, this results in an absolute dualism — a permanent bifurcation between opposites, or a celestial standoff. One cannot be the loneliest number, because it is not a number at all. But two can be as bad as one, supposing they don’t relate to, and harmonize with, one another.

However, if we only continue counting up to Three, then we have the notion of communion, a reciprocal flow that prevents the Two from leading separate lives in total isolation from each other. In the cosmotheandric vision, two is a crowd but three is company, for the latter goes to the connective tissue ensuring that our terms are not separate islands but a singular, dynamic con-spiracy of “breathing together.” It also means that our Cosmos will bear the stamp of this triune pattern, for example, the endless spiral of knower, known, and knowledge.

In an essay called The Interplay of the Hypostases, Schuon has a helpful way of discussing this triple primacy in purely metaphysical terms. As per Axiom 2, he begins with the complementarity of Absolute and Infinite, the latter an intrinsic aspect of the former. It is precisely because of Infinitude “that the world springs forth; the world exists because the Absolute, being such, implies Infinitude.” Of course, in the Judeo-Christian tradition creation is a free choice of God, nevertheless, this requires a principle by which he can create, this being the creative power of his Infinitude.

Thus, this dynamic principle exists in divinas even prior to the creation of this or any other Cosmos, meaning there is a kind of eternal radiation or projection within the Godhead itself, described in Christian terms as the engendering of the Logos-Son from the inexhaustible ground of the Father. One might say that through Infinitude the Absolute projects its truth, beauty, and goodness into the Other: “The principle of radiation or projection — inherent in the Absolute, in the ‘Father’ — corresponds to the ‘Holy Spirit,’ and the principle of polarization or refraction, to the ‘Son.’” Schuon compares this to a circle in which the Father would be the central point, the Son the circumference, and the Holy Spirit the radius, that latter at once a link and the means of radiation and communion.

Which, if you recall, is precisely the analogy we used to describe cosmotheandrism in the introduction to the Trilogy, in which case the center is the Theos, the circumference the material world, and the Anthropos situated in the two-way radii between. Which means that our immanent micro-circle is an image of the transcendent macro-circle. In both cases, the archetypal circle reconciles unity and diversity: “being what It is, the Absolute cannot not be immutable, and it cannot not radiate. Immutability, or remaining true to Itself; and Radiation, or gift of Itself; therein lies the essence of all that is” (ibid.).

To affirm that the Godhead is both Absolute Necessity and Infinite Possibility requires some additional explanation that may not be to everyone’s taste, but you have to admit that it is an explanation for what is otherwise inexplicable. Schuon draws another distinction in divinas “between God as Essence, or Beyond-Being, and God as Creator or Being.” The former is “absolute necessity in itself,” but “possesses the possible as an internal dimension and in virtue of its infinitude.”

As such, being itself is not only a possibility of Beyond-Being, but one might say it is possibility as such. Which is not as far as you might think from Christian orthodoxy, for which existence is the “act of being” (esse) which brings relative being into existence. In other words, there must be something beyond-being to account for being, though there was never a time when being did not exist, just as there was never a time when the Son didn’t exist. We might say that being is the endless self-determination of Beyond-Being, and that the Cosmos is a reflection of this endless process of specification.

Rather, we are talking about — in a manner of speaking — an eternal dynamic between the beyond-beingness of the Father and the beingness of the Son. Except to say that the being of the Son of course partakes of the beyond-being of the Father. Or rather, Father and Son are a way of talking about this primordial distinction that is everywhere and in everything — the idea that being itself is always already beyond-being.

Which is one reason why the Cosmos is such a nuisance, because it simply won’t stand still, rather, never stops evolving and revealing more of itself. Not to abruptly change the subject, but we have heard from the wise—

You mean you googled it?

Never mind where I got it, and the exact figures don’t matter anyway. But it is said that the information generated in 2001 alone doubled all the information available to human beings prior to that. Then in 2002 it went and doubled again. You get the idea: we are sinking under a sea information, and what comes after that?

Human voices wake us, and we drown?

The only alternative is to learn how to swim, hence the reason why cosmotheandrism is needed more than ever right about now. If everything is an entailment of our 12 Axioms, then perhaps we have a way to float above the noise and render the Cosmos less of a nuisance.

Nothing Is Impassible

For the past 24 hours we’ve been holding the thought that the perfect world must be imperfect, the reason being that necessity + possibility is better than either one alone, if only because neither would even be conceivable. The Cosmos itself is both lawful and contingent, thus accounting for its ceaseless novelty, or “creativity within the creation,” so to speak. But this same dynamism is present in divinas, for again, our Theos principle is irreducibly Absolute and Infinite. Which makes God himself contingent, or rather, contingency a property of the Godhead.

Analogously, it is not so much that God doesn’t move as he is ummoved by anything outside himself, i.e., self-moved. In Christianity this self-movement is conceptualized in terms of the economic Trinity whereby the Father eternally begets the Son and the Spirit proceeds from them in a kind of dynamic dance, i.e., perichoresis. For cosmotheandrism this is the very sparchetype of the Cosmic Area Rug, or at least one way of lighting its flame.

There are others?

Sure. We torched on a couple of them in the previous post, from the worlds of Vedanta and Taoism. There is also a tradition in Judaism that looks into this matter, in particular, Talmudic interpretations — midrashim — on the nature of divine creativity. A number of these rabbis concluded that God’s creativity did not begin with the creation of our Cosmos, rather, that God has always been creating because that is what creators do. In other words, supposing God is eternal then so too is his creativity. Thus is it highly likely that there are other worlds, even if those worlds are not really any of our business. Rather, from our end, One Cosmos is already more than we can handle. No need to speculate about a hypothetical multiverse. (Although for Kabbalah even this world contains other unseen worlds, but we’ll leave them alone for now.)

You may not be interested in other intracosmic worlds, but they are interested in you.

That’s a separate subject. As to a perfect world being imperfect, just imagine what life would be like if yesterday were identical to every yonderday. Under those conditions we wouldn’t be bored stiff, rather, always already stiff. They say that the glory of God is a human being fully alive, but what is Life? What ever else it is, it never stands still or it would be dead. Life Itself is an evolving system of contingency and necessity ordered to its own open yonder.

What high as that?!

That’s for the poetry department, All I know is that We follow, now we follow — Yonder, yes yonder, yonder!

∞

A Cosmos of pure indeterminacy would be as unthinkable as one of pure necessity — one might say that it would be not even absurd. Rather, potency and actuality are complementary poles of any existing thing, the question being whether these poles extend all the way up and into the Godhead. But insofar as it concerns us, In any proposition about man its paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom must emerge. Not just of bound and unbound, but bounded in order to transcend the boundaries. Or logical so as to surpass logic.

The error of scientism — or of any ideology — is to use logic as a cage, when our friend Gödel has proven that this is strictly impossible. On the one hand we escape the cage of logic, but if we jettison logic altogether, this places us in another kind of cage. Or rather, it would be like dropping someone into the middle of Death Valley and declaring him to be free, which you might call a prison of infinitude. For which reason Dávila says that Total liberation is the process that constructs the perfect prison, and that Upon finding himself perfectly free, the individual discovers that he has not been unburdened of everything, but despoiled of everything.

Logic becomes a cage to the extent that it limits reality to its own restricted categories. Instead of the bad infinite described above (the endless desert), we now confine ourselves to a bad finite. It insists that anything that cannot be fully explained by a restricted form of logic is nonexistent: thus we are simply transferred from one prison to another while time keeps draggin’ on.

It takes forever to get nowhere.

Note that both of these rookie errors end up eliminating the verticality that at once transcends finitude without thereby releasing us into an infinite nothingness, as existentialists imagine. Rather, this is not just a radical freedom from, but a freedom for and to.

Elimination of the vertical occurs the moment logic tries to capture the Logos within natural reason. If one pretends that science has no limits, it means — paradoxically — that man has all the more: man becomes limited by the very science he invented. So it’s a bit like Dr. Frankenstein being killed by his own creation: as scientism expands, man necessarily shrinks.

If there is no higher privilege than Truth, then it seems that religion must be subordinate to it, not vice versa. Schuon suggests that “Truth and Revelation are not absolutely equivalent terms, since Truth is situated beyond forms, whereas Revelation, or the Tradition which derives from it, belongs to the formal order, and that indeed by definition…”

Again, a form is a limit. Analogously, jazz is a form of music, but music cannot be enclosed in the form of jazz. Rather, there are diverse forms of music, while music itself is limitless, or rather, full of possibilities that can never be exhausted by a single form. So, God must be like this: an absolute substance full of possible forms and expressions, of limits on the limitless.

“Limit” is a loaded word, for it suggests something inferior to the unlimited. Applied to God, it connotes a being “who is restricted, hampered, in what he can do and know” (Rice), inferior to the supposedly limitless God of tradition.

But even supposing God is omnipotent, this cannot be “the ability to do anything, period,” but “to do the things that fall within the range of logical possibility” (ibid). Thus, it would again be absurd to say that God’s omnipotence entails the ability to make a square circle or a married bachelor. It is not that he lacks the power per se, “but because these expressions do not refer to anything ‘doable.’ They are logical absurdities.”

This implies that God’s limitlessness cannot be completely unlimited. For example, if he is Truth itself, then there can be no falsehood in him. And supposing he is love, then this has certain implications for both God and world, because love would be strictly impossible with no other to love, nor in a deterministic Cosmos — one in which God exerts unlimited power to micromanage every event. For us it would mean, as was the case for Elvis, I can’t help falling in love with you, or for Ray Charles, I can’t stop loving you. But there is always an element of choice and of will — in other words, of knowing the truth and willing the good, not forgetting creating the beautiful.

The Cosmotheandric Imperative.

Insofar as it makes no sense to know the false, will the bad, or create the ugly.

∞

With regard to loving the good, for Hartshorne God cannot simultaneously be impassible and still meet any definition of love. Rather,

at a bare minimum, love requires both the capacity to act for the welfare of others and to sympathize with their feelings.... If this sort of love is to be attributed to the divine being, then it must be possible for God to act for the welfare of the creatures but also to be affected by their weal and woe. In short, divine love entails the divine relativity.

But divine relativity is precisely what traditional theology rejects, since “God is impassible or unaffected by anything external” to him.

As the Sun and its radiation are not two distinct substances but one substance in two modes, it is the same with regard to the Absolute Principle and its radiation via the Infinite pole of All-Possibility: we are always in God and vice versa, and that’s just the way it is. And this divine radiation is precisely what accounts for our own intellectual Light: we are created, but surely we didn’t create the uncreated Light!

Relativity is necessarily bound up with contingency, even though traditional theism denies the possibility of contingency in God. No doubt there are certain types of contingency that are necessarily impossible for God, since God himself is necessary being, just as the Sun is necessary for contingent living beings to be here at all.

But supposing we are contingent, and God really knows us, then it necessarily follows that he knows contingency. And knowledge of contingency inevitably introduces contingency into God, because to learn something is to have been changed by it, however minutely.

The only way to avoid this conclusion is to insist that everything we think and do is necessary, which reduces us to necessary entailments of the divine being, thus depriving us of our genuine freedom, including even the freedom to know or accept God.

God must possess all perfections in the highest possible degree. Since in my book love and knowledge are indeed perfections, these require relationality and responsiveness. Therefore, a non-relational God is simply not qualified for the position, for his conspicuous imperfections would render him inadequate to the diverse demands of the job description.

An impassible dream.

Correct: for cosmotheandrism nothing is impassible, least of all God.