Night Time In the Switching Yard

In an essay by Norris Clarke called A New Look at the Immutability of God, he writes that in the traditional view mutability “necessarily involves imperfection.” However, “what if change is a perfection? In other words, what if it can be construed in such a way that there is something analogous to perfect change in God?”

Recall that the analogy of being means that our similarities to God are always dwarfed by the dissimilarities, since he is infinite and we’re not. So we can say that everything and anything is a more or less distant reflection of the Creator, but we cannot turn this around and say that God is limited by these analogies, for this would merely be a projection of our own finite categories.

As per Axiom 12 of cosmotheandrism, the deeper point is that since the Theos is not only a person but a relationship of persons — and therefore dynamically interpersonal — this cannot imply “the unqualified immutability in all domains which seems to have been the ideal of the classical Greek mind” — as if God is analogous to a static object. Rather,

the immutability which must be affirmed of God is the unchanging, indefectible steadfastness of an infinite plenitude of goodness and loving benevolence, but a benevolence which also expresses itself in a process, a progressive unfolding of mutual interpersonal relationships, spread out in real temporal succession at our receiving end... in terms of which he is truly related to us....

Similarly, in The Philosophical Approach to God Clarke writes that our Theos Principle is at once “surpassed by no other,” and “yet constantly surpassing Himself, as He both gives and receives” -- both to and from the world. This divine receptivity “is not at all an imperfection, but precisely a dimension of the perfection of personal being” — not from the imperfect to perfect, but rather, from perfection to perfection, and why not?

The Wild Godhead & Prime Matter

Below us is a quantum field of pure potency — the sheer, formless capacity to receive form. It is the absolute bottom, or last stop, of manifestation, or rather, where the bottom shades off into nothingness, or being to nonbeing. Beyond this lower limit of the Cosmos “we are unable to probe, for there we are at the very edge of being where it is bounded by non-being or nothing” (Torrance). This is the liminal boundary at which the Ray of Creation goes dark, but, looked at in the other direction, where it must be “coordinated with the level or levels ‘above’ it, for it needs to be completed beyond itself.” In other words, this is the junction between Being, Non-Being, and Beyond-Being.

Night time in the switching yard.

Correct: where The midnight train runs both ways (Warren Zevon). Which is also why Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance (Paul Simon), because who knows where it’s headed? All I know is that if they freed me from this prison of finitude — if that railroad track were mine — I reckon I’d ride it all the way up to Celestial Central and let it blow my blues away.

Now, this uncanny lower horizon is the way it is because it is a distant echo of the uncannier way God is, not vice versa.

Above us, at the transcendent pole, is the Wild Godhead, which too is susceptible to receiving form, for example, in the metaphysics of Vedanta, wherein there is Nirguna Brahman (God beyond form) and Saguna Brahman (with form). However, in our cosmotheandric framework, the beyond-being pole of the Godhead is the very principle of eternal creativity — i.e., Infinitude. This latter is the source and ground of all formal manifestation: it never stops creating, but can never be contained by any of its formal manifestations. One might say that the northern switching yard is where Beyond Being becomes Being, whereas at the southern end it switches from Being to Non-Being.

As we know, in the beginning is the formless chaos and darkness over which the Spirit of God hovers. That right there — “Spirit of God” — tells us that there must be more to God than an absolute monadic oneness, to say nothing of the fact that there’s a lot of speaking going on in Genesis 1, and speaking is always from and to.

Later we are told that In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and that this same word is with & even withinus, implying that the tracks of this relational With go all the way up and down. This being the case, we should find traces of relationality everywhere and in every thing — and this is indeed exactly what we do find.

Now, some will say that this is no longer natural theology at all, since it has become contaminated by supernatural revelation. To which we would reiterate that nature is already supernatural, unless you’re just not paying attention: natural and supernatural always and everywhere constitute a benign complementarity, not a vicious dualism.

Again, hints are everywhere, and revelation provides the reason why the hints are here to begin with. Through purely natural theology we are indeed able to reason our way up to the Absolute, but revelation, among other things, tells us why the ascent is even possible.

The most merely natural form of ascent is described by Plotinus (or Buddha or Shankara in the East), who ascends to the point of total absorption into, and union with, the One. Thus Plotinus can ascend to O, but in so doing must leave Plotinus behind and below: “To approach the origin, we must abandon discursive thought, which means that philosophy comes to an end just at the moment it attains its end” (Leithart).

D’oh!

It seems that once Plotinus ascended to the One, he no longer had skin in the existential game. And as it so happens, Plotinus detested his own skin, and quite literally. His crony Porphyry said that he appeared “ashamed to have a body,” and “So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or his birthplace.” Nor did he even want “to sit for a painter or a sculptor, and when Amelius persisted in urging him to allow of a portrait being made he asked him, ‘Is it not enough to carry about this image in which nature has enclosed us?’”

Probably the most unlikely and even repellant concept Plotinus could imagine would be the idea of the One embarking on the midnight train in the opposite direction and willingly enclosing himself in an anthropoid matter balloon. How could God himself miss the whole point of existence, which is to escape it?

Above we alluded to the contamination of pure metaphysics by Christianity, but what if, somewhere along the line, pure Christianity has been contaminated by the metaphysics of Greece? Plotinus’ One is radically simple, meaning it can have no parts or distinctions whatsoever: it is timeless, immutable, immobile, unrelated, utterly self-sufficient, and certainly doesn’t give a fig about anything outside itself.

Canards off the table: of course God changes, except we again have to stop thinking of change as a privation, rather, as an eminent perfection. For cosmotheandrism this would be the whole point of the revelation of the Trinity, and once revealed to us, we must take it back to the metaphysics lab and rethink our existential situation from the ground up.

For in the words of Bishop Robert Barron: “the perfect, unchanging God of whom Thomas speaks must be a gyroscope of energy and activity and at the same time a stable rock” — which is to say, a dynamic activity of interpersonal substance-in-relation (Axiom 11).

Which comes close but may not be quite radical enough for what we are proposing. Leithart writes that “To say there are processions is to say that there is something analogous to ‘movement’ within the Godhead, a ‘whither’ and a ‘whence.’” Movement is movement, and besides, who decided that the ultimate Principle must be Big Noun instead of Big Verb? Why not both, or both/and? Maybe we’re a bit naïve, but in the Bible there is a whole lotta doing on the part of God, and one need hardly be a biblical literalist to see that any such actions cannot easily be reconciled with a simple, static, timeless, immutable, and unrelated God. Why assume all of these characteristics, especially after the revelation of the triune Godhead?

Note that such a trinitarian perspective reconciles what is otherwise an insoluble mystery, for God must be something like perfect change, while we are imperfect change. God is the “ever-actual event,” and this lively eventfulness is the foundation of “the possibility of all creaturely becoming.” Thus “There is a source in God’s own life for the created distinction between potency and actuality, between action and contemplation, between male and female…” (Leithart).

Eno… inawa… shyo.

Correct: roughly translated, this means that for cosmotheandrsim, This immutable God… This is not my kinda God.

But we have company on the train, because Balthasar, for example, “argues that the becoming which is intrinsic to temporality points to an analogous becoming intrinsic to eternity.” As alluded to above with respect to the endless cranking out of masterpieces, there is a divine movement “from act to act, from fullness to fullness.” So perhaps one may even “speak of a supra-time and space within God in a way which makes accessible the notion of an ‘ever-greater’ God who, within his immutability, can ‘become’ eternally” (O’Hanlon).

I don’t care what others say, and besides, they don’t listen anyway. But time has come today!

Yes — straight into the heart chambers of the Theos, for “the fullness of eternity is not that of an immobile full stop,” rather, “the ‘ever-now’ refers to the ‘ever-more’ or ‘ever-greater’ within the divine eternity,” recalling what we have already said about Being as Beyond Being and God’s capacity for surprise, which is simply “the lively, ever-new, eventful aspect of eternity.” This is far from a privation, rather, it means that if God is missing out on these ever new surprises, then, well, let’s just say He’s missing out on a damn good thing.

Word and Number: Quantitative Absurcularity and Logospheric Revolt

When He established the heavens, I was there. —Proverbs

Who was there?

Some gal named Wisdom helping God draw a circle on the face of the deep.

In the beginning is the Word, or so we have heard from the wise — and perhaps even from Wisdom herself. Elsewhere we have heard rumors that God is a mathematician of a very high order, but which came first, word or number?

Math, of course, is a kind of highly abstract language, except, unlike everyday language, it doesn’t require reference to an empirical reality outside itself. We can know with absolute certainty that 2 + 2 = 4 without needing to count our fingers or toes. Nor can math as such enclose reality, for reasons of Gödel. Thanks to his discoveries we know that math is inherently incomplete, and can only be complete with reference to a higher order beyond itself — one that cannot be derived from within its own resources. Math itself, like formal logic, is ultimately self-referential unless dynamically open to something outside or beyond itself.

You’ve already belabored this point in the previous two volumes.

Yes, but here we want to belabor it in a new way, with reference to our Theos principle. This is actually a brief continuation of the previous two posts on Thomas Torrance. Yesterday’s post ended with a statement that may sound downright snarky or polemical without some additional, higher order snark:

We ought to avoid the temptation to think of our Cosmos “as a self-existing, self-containing, self-ordering, and self-explaining system,” for “such an objectification is no more than a mythological projection of fantasies arising out of man’s inner schizoid condition…”

People don’t typically think of science as a mythic fantasy conjured from a warped personality. Rather, that’s the job of the humanities.

Perhaps its your own childish math envy on display.

No, I am actually quite pleased that mathematicians are doing the math. In the words of Bo Diddley — albeit in a different context — I don’t need to do it, because I got them doin’ it for me. Torrance’s point is that “when number is cut off from its empirical ground, mathematics collapses into a meaningless tautological system.” In other words — or in words, rather — math is devoid of meaning in the absence of a referent outside or beyond itself, whether below, in the material world, or above, in the immaterial and trans-mathematical world.

If in the beginning were the number, then there could be no beginning, because where does a circle actually begin? Any arbitrary point within the circle is the beginning or end, unless the circle itself began from something outside the circle.

Unless someone drew the circle?

Yes: only a very credulous person could believe that this drawing actually drew itself:

Torrance speaks of “the disorderly break between word and number that has opened up in our understanding of the universe and its contingent order,” which redounds to the two irreconcilable cultures famously discussed by C. P. Snow: in cosmotheandric terms we have left-hemispheric scientists to one side, right-hemispheric literary intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals to the other. The divide between the sciences and humanities is a kind of needless divorce between Mother Word and Father Number, if you like.

I don’t like it. You’re perpetuating the stereotype that girls aren’t good at math, and even implying that there is something suspiciously unmanly about poetry.

Our point is merely this, that cosmotheandrism heals “the disorderly break in the semantic reference of the universe beyond itself and thereby restores the universe its lost meaning” (Torrance). The Cosmos means something because all the numerical words of science are grounded in, and refer to, something beyond science: O.

Hence as the orderly structures and laws of nature become more and more disclosed to our scientific inquiry, far from proving to be meaningless, they are found to be replete with significance in that through their connection with word they are enabled to witness to God, the creative source of their rationality (ibid.).

So yeah, above the quantitative circle of science is the qualitative sphere of language, AKA the logosphere.

By the way, one reason we needn’t fear AI — or fear that it can replace a real man or woman — is that it is a closed system that can never be open to the transcendent object or ground of intelligence. Like the Cosmos itself, its circle will continuously expand without ever ceasing to be a circle. Unless the circle is open to the hyperdimensional sphere, so to speak.

So, God is mathmagician?

Well, something must account for the magic of math, since it surely can’t account for itself.

Something from outside the Silo, in the Before Times?

Yes, we can know this with certitude, even without having to let the genie out of the Bible. For on a purely scientific basis, Polanyi spoke of a future in which we may once again “acknowledge higher entities, intangible and yet more real than matter.” Then “We shall recognize a hierarchy of being in which man recovers his proper place. He may then feel at home again in the universe.”

That cosmotheandric future begins now. Or rather, the cosmic bus ride into this future began 80 posts ago, and we have Polanyi on board to help guide the way:

A universe constructed as an ascending hierarchy of meaning and excellence is very different from the picture of a chance collocation of atoms to which the examination of the universe by explicit modes of inference leads us. The vision of such a hierarchy inevitably sweeps on to envisage the meaning of the universe as a whole. Thus natural knowing expands continuously into knowledge of the supernatural. The very act of scientific discovery offers a paradigm of this transition.

As we stipulated somewhere back there, being is always beyond being, and nature is already supernatural. No need to rub it in. I’m not trying to sell you a bridge to reality, because you — the Anthropos — are that bridge.

This concludes our side trip into the world of Thomas Torrance, although he will no doubt later pop into our world from time to timeless. Next up is a ginormous section called Second Look at the Immutability of God?, which we will leave for tomorrow. 

Closing the Case for Openness

Before resuming our side trip into the world of philosopher-theologian Thomas Torrance, I want to briefly address something that came up — or into — my mailbox yesterday, a new essay by David Bentley Hart which seems to go to our final Axiom of cosmotheandrism — that ultimate reality is irreducibly personal and therefore interpersonal. I’m not exactly sure, but this is how he puts it: personhood

is the original power from which substance is born, the expressive taxis of the paternal depth becoming filial and spiritual fulfilment. The Concept (Hegel again) does not await its actualization as subjectivity here below. Rather, the ontological structure of methexis comes to its fullest expression in the realm of the finite as personhood because that structure is personal all the way up to its divine source, and so is always the primary act of all being. To treat subjectivity as existentially prior or posterior to this general ontology, or somehow something distinct from nature in its power of actualization, is a phantom doubling caused by an incoherent subordination of that ontology to an already secretly dialectical metaphysics. Better to say that finite subjectivity, in its psychological particularity or individuation, is a modal overflow of the eternal dynamic unity of spirit and being, a unique expression and contraction of that original actus into a dynamic play between mind and being. Each person is a finite but infinitely related, infinitely open expression of the infinite Logos, speaking itself in all the words of creation.

It goes on and on in that vein. Granted, I am only an amateur, but I’m not sure I would put it that way even if I could put it that way. It is also amusing, but not in the same way I endeavor to be amusing, which is to say, intentionally.

Shots fired!

Not at all, in that our target audiences are completely different, being that he has one and I have not. I am also more of a blue collar pinhead, so I prefer to express myself in such a way that my pool guy could understand where I’m coming from. This follows Dávila’s advice for wannabe writers, such as

Among a few words it is as difficult to hide as among a few trees.

Only ideas save us from adjectives.

Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas.

Prolixity is usually the defensive mechanism of insignificant ideas.

Clarity is the virtue of a man who does not lack confidence in what he says.

The idea is the true syntax of style.

The ordinary writer does not express his idea; he dresses it up.

For example, I find Torrance to be exceptionally clear and concise, but one of the things that makes him a challenging read is that there is practically an idea in every sentence as opposed to a dissertation for every idea — more like a needle than a firehose. One must focus on each sentence instead of just skimming through adjectives for the naked idea.

Like the difference between prog rock and punk.

Yes, 50 years ago (!) the latter was the antidote to the former.

To pick up where we left off yesterday, Torrance correctly regards the Cosmos as a multi-leveled rational order in which each level is open upward but not reducible downward. Therefore, the contingent universe itself is only completed beyond itself, in what we call O. Herebelow, the Cosmos “is what it becomes and becomes what it is,” but this is not a closed absurcularity but an open spiral. Lower levels “are left indeterminate or open for control by those ‘higher’ levels of more open and flexible order” — for example, as body is to mind, or neurobiology to psychology.

Torrance contrasts this with existentialism, in particular Sartre, for whom life is also contingent, except not ordered to any transcendent, necessary, or Absolute pole. In other words, he makes the rookie error of absolutizing contingence, when contingence and necessity form one of our primordial complementarities (Axiom 2). Thus existentialism plunges us into a “‘perpetual contingence’ cut off from any reference beyond itself.” This absurd and unintelligible contingence in turn “collapses in upon itself like a meaningless black hole,” much like a black steer’s tuchus on a moonless night.

You could say this is a postmodern version of G3AOA, because

through this utterly contingent existence of man for himself, cut off from God, there is posited at the very heart of immanence a ‘transcendent nothing’ [Ø] to replace the transcendent God [O] as the ultimate ground of being and its intelligibility.

But this is a perverse and unintelligible intelligibility that ultimately “falls back into sheer nothingness and meaninglessness,” so the whole Area Rug falls apart “into disorder and pointlessness,” and here we are.

In reality, contingence can only be meaningful if it is relative and not absolute, which is to say, both related and inter-related to and with “the continual creative source of its contingent intelligibility and of its astonishing freedom and variety”:

It is precisely in virtue of the contingent freedom thus given to it that the creation constantly manifests a capacity for change and development through novel variations that surprise and astonish us. As such the universe is to be regarded as a created reflection of the unlimited freedom of the Creator.

Or at the very least the creative Principle of O. Note that there can be no merely logical bridge between either Theos and Anthropos (theology) or Anthropos and Cosmos (science), otherwise we would be essentially closed in both directions, instead of both Cosmos and Theos disclosing themselves to us in surprising, creative, and novel ways. To say “open” is to say uncontainable by logic or abstraction.

One might say that the Cosmos is bisected by the vertical axis of a “higher-level order” that pervades it, this being the Logos. If O is the apophatic or negative symbol for total reality, the Logos provides its endlessly positive content. Should this axis or arc be broken, well, that’s just G3AOA, such that the reference of our contingent order is obscured, busted, bent, spindled, or mutilated.

Having said that, in order for there to be the possibility of an ascending order, there must be the possibility of disorder, otherwise the Cosmos could not be host to dynamic, living, and open process structures that gain order by dissipating entropy. This is a somewhat peripheral point that we won’t develop here, but the whole advancing cosmic order must likewise be an open system, open to something beyond it, for only then do we have a principle “of order and development against the persistent downward drag of entropy.” I guess you could say that O is the principle of negentropy.

And man is at the center of this negentropic enterprise, “the focal point in the interrelations between God and the universe,” for “All lines of rationality and order, of purpose and fulfillment in the creation converge on him as a [RH] man of God and a [LH] man of science and depend on his destiny.” We know from Book II that “There is a profound harmony between the rationality of the human understanding and the rationality of the universe,” which makes us the Crown of Creation.

Or Clown of Creation.

Yes, the choice is nevertheless ours, for “we have to reckon with a deep split in man himself when he breaks loose from a proper interaction with his Creator and therefore from the ultimate ordering of his rationality from above.” This split appears as a gap “between what he is and what he ought to be.”

Why I oughtta!

Correct. We ought to avoid the temptation to think of our Cosmos “as a self-existing, self-containing, self-ordering, and self-explaining system,” for “such an objectification is no more than a mythological projection of fantasies arising out of man’s inner schizoid condition…”

In other words, properly understood, “Each person is a finite but infinitely related, infinitely open expression of the infinite Logos, speaking itself in all the words of creation” (Hart).

New Writ Has Come to Light

Today we interrupt our regularly scheduled rollout of Book III of the Cosmotheandric Trilogy, because I need to work some new material into the act.

New writ has come to light?

Correct. I’ve been trying to slip it in here and there over the course of the previous 84 posts, but here I want to devote an entire post to the author in question, Thomas Torrance, whom I wish I had discovered before writing the durn Trilogy. I won't say he got there before I did, but he would have helped get me there.

Actually, records indicate that I did cross paths with him back in 2007, when I purchased his book Space, Time & Incarnation. I definitely remember the purchase, but I also remember thinking “nothing new here,” so much so that I never even blogged about it. But earlier this year I read another of his books and found it so relevant to cosmotheandrism that I raced through another ten or so of his books, including such enticing titles as Theological Science, God and Rationality, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, Theological and Natural Science, and Explorations in the Interrelations of Scientific and Theological Enterprise. Suffice it to say that he and I are very much in the same attractor, at least up to a point.

You may have noticed that the Trilogy has a lot of citations but actually relies upon a smallish headful of unwitting supporters of the cosmotheandric project, including Norris Clarke, Frithjof Schuon, Charles Hartshorne, Eric Voegelin, Michael Polanyi, Kurt Gödel, A.N. Whitehead, Robert Rosen, Iain McGilchrist, Josef Pieper, Nicolas’s Berdyadev and Dávila, and Coens Joel and Ethan. Probably none of them would endorse my abuse of them, and Schuon might even file a restraining order—

Oh please! I’ve got news for him: the Supreme Court has roundly rejected—

Petey, this isn’t a First Amendment thing. Besides, we can’t worry about that. Life goes on.

It is not easy for me to summarize and rewordgitate so many books in a single post, but last night I read an essay called Theological and Scientific World-Views from the book Divine and Contingent Order, in which Torrance wraps ‘er all up pretty nice, touching upon many of his main themes.

Actually, this is from the foreword of another book called Reality and Scientific Theology. In it Torrance speaks of “a vast shift in in the perspective of knowledge” leading to “a unified view of the one created world,” or what we call the Cosmic Area Rug. This approach avoids those left hemispheric dualisms and ideological abstractions we have previously ridicured, and instead greets us with “a dynamic, open-structured universe, in which the human spirit is being liberated from its [LH] captivity in closed deterministic systems of cause and effect, and a correspondingly free and open-structured society” — the latter described, for example, by Friedrich Hayek.

As per our Axiom 8,

The universe that is steadily being disclosed to our various sciences is found to be characterised throughout time and space by an ascending gradient of meaning in richer and higher forms of order. Instead of levels of existence and reality being explained reductionistically from below in materialistic and mechanistic terms, the lower levels are found to be explained in terms of the higher, invisible, intangible levels of reality (emphasis mine).

This is not a new idea for us, as we previously stole it from Polanyi, not to mention Gödel, who were likewise major influences on Torrance. In this new and improved vision of the world,

instead of being closed from above down, the universe is to be regarded as open from below upward. The finite universe certainly has its frontiers, but they are not frontiers at which it is turned back to be imprisoned in itself so much as frontiers where it is open indefinitely to what is beyond. Hence the finite universe cannot be what it actually is even as finite without being relativized by what transcends it.

In our formulation this is why being is always beyond-being, which is to say, ordered to O — the Absolute to which we are always relative. Because of the necessary Infinitude of O (Axiom 2), reality

continues to manifest from moment to moment in a dynamic present new patterns of events which could not have been anticipated from what has already happened in the past or have been predicted through any logico-deductive reasoning from abstract [LH] ideas.

Rather, the Cosmos reveals an irreducible combination of lawful structure and unpredictable novelty, to which — in my opinion — our left and right hemispheres are ordered. Reality can never be enclosed in the abstract rationalistic conceptions of the LH, rather, these refer to a reality beyond them revealing an ever-deepening vector of meaning. Supposing science arrived at its own a logico-deductive area rug, this would actually close the very door science entered when it began its project of open engagement with the natural world. In other words, there can be no end to science without ending science, this because of the openness between and within Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos — or man, world, and O.

∞

In the following passage Torrance echoes Axiom 4, Relational Interiority, for nature

is dynamically continuous in space and time, in such a way that all things are what they are through unbroken internal relations with other things, while those inter-relations help to make them what they are or become.

Nor can space or time — which is to say space-time — “be split apart from one another or regarded as divisible into discrete localities and intervals.” Rather,

This four-dimensional continuous indivisible field of space-time relations is far from being merely a scientific ‘thought-symbol’, for it constitutes the fundamental continuum of the universe in which energy and matter, field and particle, form and being, are fully integrated, and as such provides the objective dynamic structure ordering all things and events in the universe.

No exceptions:

classical causal relations are replaced by a dynamic inherent relatedness in the universe, in which space and time are included within the internal connections of all empirical realities and processes and are inseparable from them as space-time.

∞

As touched on above, the Cosmos “appears as a multi-levelled and multi-variable complex of rational order in which the the different levels are hierarchically coordinated with one another,” this going to Axioms 3 and 5, Openness and Verticality. Each level is subject to “dual control,” such that

the organizational principles of one level govern those of a ‘lower’ level through its boundary conditions where it is left open or indeterminate, but it is itself controlled [I would say conditioned] in a similar way from the level ‘above’ it.

Note that this dual control helps to overcome the problem of dualism, the latter resulting from flattening the hierarchy that is open to higher levels but not reducible to lower ones. Everything is completed beyond itself, not excluding the Cosmos, which is contingent upon its own higher principle, which we call O. To think that O can be enclosed in, or reduced to, our own lower level abstractions reflects what Torrance calls a strange craving for necessity.

Scientistic control freaks.

To be sure, necessity necessarily exists — AKA the Absolute — but it absolutely cannot be reduced to the relativity, finitude, and contingency of our own concepts. These concepts reach ever more deeply into O without ever reaching their final deustination, for all of them '‘are incomplete and have reference beyond themselves,” apart from which they “would lose their contingence and could only decompose and disappear within a circle of necessitarian and meaningless self-reference,” this being the bad absurcularity of Ø.

∞

This is taking longer than I thought. We’ll try to put a ribbon on it tomorrow.

God and All That Jazz

Yesterday’s post pushed the bipolar architecture of Cosmos and Anthropos into the Theos and made the case for openness, relationality, and movement as divine perfections rather than privations. Thus, it is beginning to look like there is tripolarity between Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos. If so, then we may be on the verge of locating the Cosmic Area Rug that ties the whole existentialada together while leaving nothing out. The dynamic Structure of Being, as it were.

I don’t see how that’s possible.

Why not?

Because you have 300 pages to go.

That’s true. As I said, I haven’t examined the file for Book III in a few months, so there must be a lot of remaining ins & outs to this cosmotheandrism business. The following section may contain a recycled passage from Book II, but who can remember that many words ago?

∞

In a Thomistic treatise on the nature of God, T.J. Walsh rightly states that on the one hand “absurd ideas such as that of a ‘square circle’ have no relation to being,” so it is not so much that God cannot make one as that such a thing simply does not and cannot exist. But in the next breath he says that “God can infallibly move the human will to come to a free decision” (emphasis mine).

No offense to our competitors, because I never knock the other fellow’s merchandise, but I can do just as well for you. I have a very attractive theory here, and it wouldn’t take me two minutes to put it in front of you.

Go ahead. Make your telovator pitch.

Okay, a truly free decision that is infallibly determined by someone else is no longer free, and can no more exist than a square circle. Influence our decisions? No problemo. But infallibly determine our free decisions? Un problemo grande, because then God is determining even, say, our defiance of, or hostility to, him.

That makes God the author of atheism.

Let’s take another example of a theological blunder that is not only a turnoff to the intellect but even a heavy bummer to common decency. Suppose you see a child running into a busy street. You are not some uptight moralist, so you decide not to intervene based upon the lofty principle that you want to respect the child’s freedom and autonomy. Besides, supposing the child is run over, you’ll find a way to pull some good out of it.

This is, of course, deficient moral reasoning, for no one is permitted to allow an easily prevented evil from occurring. And yet it is routinely attributed to the omnipotent God who has the power to stop both retail and industrial scale evils — say, the Holocaust — but refrains from doing so.

Perhaps he has his reasons.

Charles Manson had his reasons too, but that’s not an excuse, it’s an indictment. The White Album is not the recipe for a race war, rather, just the sound of a band breaking up. A human being is not permitted to treat another human being as a means to an end, because there is no higher moral end than human life. But if God allows evil because he’s going to pull something better out of it, isn’t he using us as a means to his inscrutable ends?

This is not to say that God doesn’t pull chestnuts of good from the fires of evil, only saying that he is in no way implicated in the original evil, because he doesn’t have that kind of power. In short, instead of having all the power, He is the most powerful, but even the most powerful cannot do the impossible, for example, knowing ahead of time what a genuinely free creature will do, or creating something or someone separate from oneself while still exerting total control over it.

Insert Jewish mother joke here?

Our free choices are not predetermined but nor do they happen in a void. Rather, they are shaped by, and ultimately ordered to, what we have called the Great Attractor in a vertical and hyperdimensional phase space.

Well, that’s a fancy way of saying nothing.

Only if there is no such thing as teleology, which — you will pardon the double negative — is simply another of the things that Cannot Not Be, both in the Cosmos and Anthropos. For again, science in no way disproves teleology, and as a matter of fact, cannot avoid it. Absent a teleological element it would be impossible to even identify a cause of any kind. The attempt to completely eliminate teleology in favor of blind mechanical necessity is an expedient scientific piety, for the moment a scientist attempts to examine such a system, he has already performed a highly selective, purposeful act. On the one hand, this involves the imposition of a top-down, meaning-seeking framework onto nature, but then turning around and claiming the system proves that no such top-down meaning exists.

However, if a cause has a reliable effect, this means that the present is ordered to the future, as in Robert Rosen’s anticipatory systems discussed in Book II. There must already exist an overarching, continuous field of intelligibility that bridges the “now” and the “not yet,” without which science is inconceivable. Which implies that the relational Aboutness of things isn’t just present in space but time. Or spacetime rather. In other words, the Area Rug is held together by a nonlocal relationality, i.e., a substance-in-relation in both space and time.

Perhaps scientists have their reasons for ignoring teleology?

Experienced from our side, teleology is the asymptotic arrow pointing toward the transcendent pole of being. In its absence, then nothing can make sense, including science. For again, science can only pretend to eliminate two of the four causes required to explain anything, in particular, the Why?

For purely methodological purposes — note the word — it is fine to look at things in terms of material and efficient causes only, in the same way your orthopedic surgeon doesn’t need to concern himself with your dreams and aspirations in order to repair a broken bone in your coccyx. Once the bone heals then you can do anything you wanna do, from hunting for wolverines in Alaska to throwing a football over them mountains, from drawing your favorite animal to making yourself a dang quesadilla.

To cultivate some skills that girls might like?

Sure — cage fighting, nunchuck skills, bo hunting skills, computer hacking skills, catching a delicious bass, whatever.

Clarke says something similar vis-à-vis the workings of providence, which operate “by persuasion, by luring to the good — not by coercion.” Thus,

God determines the general set of goals He wishes to achieve, the goals at which He aims the universe and knows that in general He will be able to achieve by His suasive power, but does not determine ahead of time in detail just whether or how each particular creature will achieve its share or not in this overall goal.

Like the Wright Brothers, just because they invented human flight, you can’t blame them for airplane crashes, much less flight delays. Likewise, God provides the space for, and the ultimate destination of, our vertical flight, but we are the ones in the cockpit, for better or worse.

This is not a deist God, because God is still quite active, only more in the sense of a final rather than efficient causes, operating more from the top-down or future-to-present rather than the past-forward or bottom-up: “Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous ‘improvisation’ of the divine mind and will — from his always contemporaneous eternal now — precisely to fit the actual ongoing activities, especially the free ones, of the creaturely players in the world drama” (ibid.).

This simultaneously acknowledges and reconciles our real freedom with God’s power, for

God does not “foresee,” from his point of view, anything: He only sees what is going on, and acts accordingly. In a word, predestination does not and could not imply total predetermination. It leaves a large dose of indetermination, to be made determinate — not ahead of time, independently, but only contemporaneous with the actual ongoing development of the world (ibid.).

Could the principle of this dynamism be grounded in an open and relational Godhead? Yes, because the triune Godhead of cosmotheandrism (expressed in Christian terms) “illustrates how God’s own inner life is already rich in infinite self-expression by the Father’s total gift of His own being to the Son” (ibid.). And if creation is patterned after this dynamic archetype, then it is “purely out of the joy of giving that this divine inner life can pour over to share itself with creatures.”

Consider just this single example, wherein John tells us that the Word became flesh. But he also says that this Word is God. Therefore it ineluctably follows that God became.

QED.

Yes, the case for openness is closed, for it means that God cannot be immutable, full stop, rather, is capable of becoming.

Moreover, Clarke adds that “in some real and genuine way God is affected positively by what we do,” even though he “does not become a more or less perfect being because of the love we return to Him” (ibid.). Certainly he must have been affected by becoming one of us. If not, then that is one rigid personality.

The point is, relation is not an imperfection in God, any more than it is for human beings. Rather it is “precisely a dimension of the perfection of personal being as lovingly responsive.” Clarke compares God to “the Great Jazz Player, improvising creatively as history unfolds.” Thus, “The complete script of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out together in our actual ongoing now’s.” That is cosmotheandrism in a notshall, because we are free not to do what we shall — such as shall not murder, lie, steal, et al. Why even issue commandments for what we shall or shan’t inevitably do anyway?

In another essay, Clarke bottom-lines it for us in describing how “God as the ultimate One now appears as both the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, at once the Source and the Goal of the restless dynamism of all of nature, of all finite beings.” The structure of this “total journey” is “in the form of a circle,” the Great Circle of Cosmotheandrism whereby “In the emergence of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circular movement, in which all things return, as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin in the first place” (Thomas, in Clarke).

So, it seems we’re always already in the place toward which we are striving, only now finally knowing it for the first time.

And Yet It Moves

The previous post concluded with the strictly orthoparadoxical image of an immutably mutable ground of being that is simultaneously Big Noun and Big Verb. As a result, there can be no boredom in Celestial Central, because there’s always more where that came from.

If we think about how and why this is the case, it is because our cosmotheandric axioms of openness, complementarity (e.g. Absolute and Infinite), and substance-in-relation are irreducible to anything less, both within and beyond the Cosmos and Anthropos.

Ultimate reality is not so much self-subsistent as it is self-and-other-subsistent, which accounts for the contingent otherness of creation itself, which is other than, but not separate from, our ultimate Principle. The freedom in and of the Cosmos is “grounded in the freedom of God,” such that the “open character and endless spontaneity and surprise” herebelow are “ultimately explicable only from beyond,” in the “divine rationality and its inexhaustible source of possibility” (Torrance).

Thus, for cosmotheandrism the possibilities — of novel actualities — are endless.

You seem to have all the answers.

Cosmotheandrism is indeed the ultimate answer to the eternal question we can never finally answer. Which is simply another way of saying Axiom 6, the dynamic complementarity of Ultimacy and Ultimate.

∞

Like the Cosmos and Anthropos, the Theos is either open or closed. But the Cosmos is of course open, this being because the Theos is first and always already open.

Again, cosmotheandrism is by definition open for isness, because a principle of openness is woven into the Cosmic Area Rug, or rather, the warp and weft of everything is Absolute and Infinite. Because of the latter, the Theos couldn’t be enclosed if it wanted to be, for “God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop,” whether it is a scientific or religious dam. “Where there is isness, there God is” (Eckhart), and isness leaks out all over the place.

Speaking only of Christianity, there is again an irreducible principle of openness and relationality in the triune Godhead. It is always possible to go too far in taking things too far, but we’re just taking this principle one step further in suggesting that the Cosmos is open to God, and vice versa. The Cosmos isn’t “adjacent” to God but pervaded by God.

This does not equate to pantheism — as if God is the Cosmos — rather, affirms that God is both transcendent and immanent, the latter because of the former. In other words, by its nature transcendence escapes its own bounds and spills over into everything. Sayeth the Meister, Where there is isness, there God is. Creation is the giving of isness from God.

So God is MIA?

Correct: a Master of Isness Administration: “If you were able to deprive God of isness, a stone would be more noble than God, for a stone has isness” (Eckhart). Such a material object is a reflection of isness, but not a particularly edifying one. Rather, anthropic isness is the most adequate analogue of divine isness, bearing in mind the limits of the analogy, for every analogy is a likeness of things that are fundamentally unalike — for example, an attractive woman and a summer’s day, both of course being hot but in different ways.

Or try these Meisteries on for size: Earth cannot escape heaven. Flee it by going up or flee it by going down, heaven still invades the earth, so stop fleeing and just turn yourself in peacefully because you’ll never get away from God. Or Wherever I am, there is God. Might as well try to outrun your shadow. My father said Jackie Robinson could do that, but he’s the exception.

For Eckhart God is everywhere in general but in some places more intensively than others, and he is “nowhere as much as he is in the soul.” All of this goes to Axiom 7 (theomorphism), in that there’s something extra-special about human beings. Compared to anything else in the Cosmos, we are all above average.

Or, put it this way: in every case of being on the Wrong Side of History, the tyrants who have insisted there is nothing special or sacred about human beings have been the worst examples of them. To quote Dávila, Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute significance. However, Modern man denies himself every metaphysical dimension and considers himself a mere object of science. But he screams when they exterminate him as such.

Of course he screams. But then it’s too late to make an appeal to Axiom 7. You can try, but Ha ha now go to gulag.

∞

Which takes us to the controverted subject of open theology, which is not at all controversial for cosmotheandrism, since no other form of theology is consistent with it, beginning with the heretical idea that God is not immutable but changes. Say what you want, but–

Eppur. Si. Muove.

And yet it moves — as muttered under his breath by the passive-aggressive Galileo in a different context. However, if one thinks about this context, there is a profound theological parallel, because the Church’s defense of geocentrism wasn’t just a stubborn attachment to a literal reading of scripture; rather, it was one piece of an interlocking metaphysical and theological architecture. Under the influence of a Greek philosophy that regarded immutability as a perfection, the physical creation was required to mirror the absolute stillness of the Good One. For the Greeks change was bad, so this latter had to be identified with perfect changelessness and impassivity. And because of this conception, the creation mirrored this stability.

So now, instead of a cozy geocentric world with an immovable God reliably located just to the north of us in his empyrean home, we suddenly found ourselves situated on a flying rock in a boundless, evolving Cosmos, so how does God figure into this? The idea of the earth moving was probably as mind-blowing as the idea of God moving, which is not supposed to happen in an essentially static Cosmos.

And yet they move.

Correct — except to say that the movement of both Cosmos and Anthropos is grounded in a principle of movement situated in divinas. God moves, or rather, there is movement in the triune Godhead, and this movement is full of cosmotheandric implications, beginning with God’s purported omnipotence, because supposing one believes this doctrine, it is simply impossible to get God off the hook for the evils of this world. Even Jackie Chiles himself couldn’t exonerate God, for the evils of this world are both real and spectacular — or outrageous, egregious, and preposterous.

I used to work in the med-legal field, so I know an incoherent and self-serving argument when I see one, and the arguments spun by our competitors to try to reconcile God’s absolute goodness and unqualified omnipotence are utterly unconvincing — which surely contributes to the contemporary rejection of religion and flight into secularism.

For if we are forced to choose between absurdity and common sense, a properly functioning intellect will always choose the latter, bearing in mind also that intelligence is the most precious gift of the Anthropos. Supposing this gift originates from beyond the Cosmos, does the Theos really want us to use it to understand everything except the most important thing? No: God does not ask for the submission of the intelligence, but rather an intelligent submission, in the same way we submit to math and science. We submit to them because doing so makes more sense than rejecting them. Likewise, supposing we submit to God, it should be because it makes more sense than the submission to — let alone imposition of — atheistic alternatives.

The Possibilities are Endless

To review: God is not impossible, and therefore necessary. While we cannot necessarily say what he is like, we deploy subtractive knowledge affirm what he cannot possibly be like, one of these impossibilities being boring.

Or bored.

Correct: as they say, if you are bored, it’s probably just because you’re boring. If God is the very principle of creativity, how could he possibly be bored?

Now, creativity is another word for surprise!, and our Cosmos is likewise full of them. This is only possible because the Cosmos is not necessary or self-sufficient, rather, contingent upon, and open to, its own vertical source. As explained in the prequel, one of the surprising properties of reality is its boundless capacity for surprise. If this were not the case, then science would not have to investigate nature empirically, rather, could simply deduce its contingent properties from necessary truths, as imagined by the ancient Greeks. For example, they deduced that the stars move in perfect circles from a priori beliefs about the nature of heavenly perfection. Unlike the messy terrestrial world herebelow, the celestial world was simple, elegant, and orderly: no surprises!

Only with the scientific revolution did we begin actually interrogating nature on its own terms, since which time the surprises have never stopped. Again, we cannot deduce from existing knowledge what is in store for science, rather, must continue to explore its objectively intelligible structures — not just on a single level, e.g. physics, but on multiple levels, each of which open to a higher level but not reducible to the lower.

For example, in no way did Einstein deduce relativity from Newtonian physics, rather, saw into a deeper structure of which the latter is but a limiting case. For Newton, the Cosmos is contained by space and time, but Einstein discovered — surprise! — that the very fabric of the Cosmos is constituted of space-time. No one saw that coming, because it could not possibly come from the existing paradigm. Among other things, this meant that Kant could not be more wrong about space and time being human categories with no objective basis, since they are woven into the Cosmic Area Rug.

Nor is time in any way analogous to mechanical clock time, otherwise there would again be no surprises.

They say God created time when he created the Cosmos.

That is metaphysically impossible, since creation takes time, no matter how much our competitors object. In a way, they are a mirror image of the Greeks referenced above, deducing what God must be like based upon their own celestial policy preferences, for example, that God is perfect, and perfect means timeless and immutable. But who died and left man in charge of the heavens?

Jesus?

ISWYDT, but that means human nature is taken into the divine nature — a participant in celestial activity, not its CEO.

Let’s get back to the subject at hand, which is to say, why reality is so full of creative surprises: while the Cosmos has an intelligible order, this order

is intrinsically open towards God, and not closed in upon itself. If it were closed in upon itself and possessed of an intrinsic necessity, science would proceed solely through a priori reasoning…. As contingent, however, the universe is open to a transcendent ground beyond itself — it points mutely to God the Creator and his transcendent rationality (Torrance).

The Cosmos is pervaded by a unifying Logos, and this latter is always beyond the limits of our own finite reason; just as the Cosmos is finite but unbound, so too is the Anthropos, and for the same Reason — that this is “a relational type of order which is at once dynamic and open,” for which reason “the universe as it discloses itself to us constantly takes us by surprise” (ibid.). The world is full of unactualized potential, and one can never deduce the potential from the actual. Rather, the Cosmos is “continuously open to quite new and unpredictable variations,” and dis-closes itself “in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations.” Its current state depends upon past states but cannot be reduced to them, otherwise no surprises for you! For the Anthropos is again open at both ends, and indeed,

it is man himself with his inquiring rationality who constitutes in the structure of the space-time universe the boundary point where it is open beyond itself, and where the mystery of its meaning becomes disclosed… (ibid.).

If this were not the case, there would be no Cosmic Area Rug and no certainly possibly of locating its whereabouts.

∞

You may be surprised to learn that the Godhead is one endless surprise party, and that the most surprised party is God. Here, as with any other attribute of God, we must see this capacity for surprise as a perfection and not a privation.

God is omniscient. Wouldn’t that make him incapable of being caught off guard? How could he ever be surprised?

I will tell you how. Of course, there are hundreds of instances in the Old Testament in particular in which God expresses surprise, disappointment, regret, etc., but we do not consider these dispositive, since they could be just anthropomorphisms.

Let us take an obvious example: it is said that God wills for everyone to be saved. And yet, this apparently does not happen. Can it be that God himself fails to achieve the modest charge with which he has tasked himself? Or does he just not care one way or the other? If God were omnipotent full stop, then what he wills happens inevitably. But not only is there a principle of freedom in God, he is this principle, and what is freedom if not indeterminate? This latter goes to God’s Infinite pole, which assures that the creative surprises never stop, whether in Vertical Headquarters above or herebelow in our local cosmic franchise.

As to freedom itself, O’Hanlon writes that in the Godhead “each person allows the other two to be,” which implies a “kind of freedom of space.” Just so, our freedom to reach God implies the possibility of failure to do so.

So, the principle of Slack, or ontological elbow room, is built into the Godhead?

It must be, for how could anything so precious to us not have its analogue in God? It would mean that we get to enjoy something that is denied to God, and that makes no sense. In reality, freedom and surprise entail one another, because if everything is known ahead of time, then neither can exist. A fully determined cosmotheandric plot would be one big spoiler that eliminates any interesting twists and surprises.

For cosmotheandrism, the ultimate Principle is eternally creative, such that all the aesthetic creations of man are but a poor shadow of this — reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ comment about wanting to see the place where all this useless beauty comes from. To which we might add truth and creativity.

Is there a workaround, such that our first Principle can somehow reconcile change and changelessness, freedom and constraint, routine and surprise, creativity and tedium? Process theologians dismiss the notion of immutability and welcome the idea of a God of endless becoming, but let’s not be rash. This goes too far in the opposite direction into panthesism, whereas cosmotheandrism demands the full complementarity of Absolute changelessness and Infinite novelty and variety. But how to reconcile these seeming opposites?

I don’t see, um -- what exactly is the problem?

You don’t know, Petey? You seem to know the answer to everything else. First of all, a triune Godhead that is capable of genuine giving and receiving — or rather, incapable of not doing so — implies that our ultimate principle is an event combining Big Verb and Big Noun. Not an event like the ones that occur down here, which have their beginning, middle, and end, but rather, an unending “eternal event,” so to speak. And this event “admits of creativity, wonder, surprise, receptivity and increase, even within the fullness of being that is God” (O’Hanlon).

Hold it right there: if God is the fullness of being, how could he surpass himself, much less improve?

That’s just it: he doesn’t. Rather, imagine an endlessly creative artist whose every creation is an unsurpassable eleven out of ten. This doesn’t happen with the best terrestrial artists — even Dylan nods, sometimes for decades at a time — but that is not to say it couldn’t happen with the best conceivable artist. “This ever-greater, ever-new quality of the divine life” is not like “the needy ‘becoming’ which is characteristic of created beings,” rather, an endlessly perfect becoming that does not surpass itself, “an ever-greater God who, within his immutability, can ‘become’ eternally.” Which is why, as O’Hanlon states, “There is no boredom in heaven.”

Supposing there is such a place.

We’ll deal with that question later. But O’Hanlon (borrowing an analogy from Gregory of Nyssa) compares the Godhead to a fountain at which “the onlooker is amazed” because of “its infinite streaming forth from within so that the whole is never seen and there are always new outpourings in and from the same depths,” for “the fullness is maintained precisely through the passing on of the overflow” — much like a far-from-equilibrium process structure in this world, which maintains itself via a continuous flow, like Life Itself.