The Eternal Complementarity of Thing and Thingy

Here is a whole section left out of Book I: Cosmos due to redundancy, banality, pretentiousness, forced humor, etc. But since there may be a new reader out there, the redundancy won’t pose a problem. And supposing this reader is not burdened by rudimentary literary standards, then nor will the banality be an issue. By way of context, it contains some further discussion of celebrity atheist Carl Sagan’s ultimate humblebrag that The cosmos is all there ever is, was, or will be. If this is true it is false, since it fails to take into consideration the primate who knows this to be the case.

What Sort of Monkey Is This?

I certainly don’t mean to pick on Carl Sagan, for man is forever trying to contain infinitude within finitude — or absolute within relative, subject within object, vertical within horizontal — but it would be easier to drink the ocean or jump over the moon, since these at least involve a finite volume or distance. Our best map is never the territory, which is why Dávila reminds us that Reality cannot be represented in a philosophical system. Whatever else the Cosmos is, it cannot be reduced to our abstract conceptions of it.

Ours is the same as Sagan’s shrunken post-Enlightenment Cosmos, only looked at in a very different way: one that emphasizes process and development; telos, purpose, and intrinsic meaning; organicism and interior relations; the creative advance into novelty; and an implicate transcendent ground of which the physical Cosmos is but the explicate expression.

For again, man’s perceptions are not restricted to some evolutionary niche, rather, to the totality of being: this alone is man’s proper “environment,” which Sagan himself presumes. For was Sagan free to articulate his vision of the Cosmos? If so, then his vision does not account for his freedom to understand and express it. We too are of course free to accept or reject this vision, and whence this freedom? For any argument for or against free will presumes its existence, since it proves the reality of the subject who is free to either accept or reject it. Conversely, to affirm that free will doesn’t exist is to void one’s argument at the outset, since the argument can appeal to neither truth nor to the subject who may know it. As Poincaré commented, “no determinist argues deterministically,” so “all arguments against free will are so many proofs of it” (Jaki)

Freedom is indeed key to our Cosmos, but does this freedom have a telos? Is it ordered to anything beyond itself? Dávila suggests that Freedom is not the goal of history but the material that it works with.

To accomplish what, exactly?

Among other things, to accomplish this book. Otherwise I could just sit here and wait for it to be written.

∞

Here we may propose another binary: Either the Theos exists, or it does not exist. And: If the Theos exists, then the Cosmos is intelligible; if it does not exist, then it is unintelligible. But the Cosmos is intelligible. Therefore the Theos not only exists but is the very Principle of both intelligence and intelligibility in dynamic relation herebelow. Lonergan expresses a similar syllogism: If the totality of reality is completely intelligible, then God exists. But the totality of reality is completely intelligible. Therefore God exists.

I don’t think that’s going to convince anyone who wants to believe otherwise.

That is true. When is the last time you changed someone’s mind using facts and logic? People have all sorts of unconscious reasons for believing what they believe, and one of my tasks as a psychologist was to bring these willful darklings to the fore and interrogate them in the light of day.

The above syllogisms bridge the gap between the subjective mind and the objective world by proving that the Cosmic Area Rug is composed of a single rational and relational fabric known as the Logos through which we might propose a marriage of Thought and Thing. Which implies that the grammar of our minds matches the grammar of the Cosmos because both are in-scribed by the same source.

Among other reasons, theories are often judged by their fruitfulness, and just look at the fruitfulness of this one, for all knowledge is a product of the prior union of logocentric mind and logospheric world, without which there could be no genuine knowledge at all. In other words, the ontological proof is in the existential pudding: since we do perform science, we do understand math, and we do navigate reality, we have already implicitly chosen our intelligible spouse. To cheat on our spouse by fooling around with reductive scientism means our cosmic house is a broken home where the Anthropos is no longer welcome.

Here we might use the analogy of the suspiciously male and female key and lock to illuminate the relationship between knowing and being, respectively. Now, any halfway decent locksmith presumably makes not just a lock but a key to open it, since neither alone is of much use. Thus, not only does our intellectual key fit into and open the lock of nature, but the very existence of this clever mankey is an important factsimian in its own right, because it is an echo of the unity of being. The Anthropos, we might say, is this unity in silhouette.

As above, so below, meta-Cosmos to micro-Cosmos.

Correct. This single fact must be the most important one in all of existence, since in its absence the world would be a locked door with no key. Which makes no sense, because who creates a lock with no key, a safe with no combination, a joke with no punchline?

All other animals are bereft of these keys, but somehow the Anthropos got ahold of the very skeleton key that opens all locks. What gives? Darwin explained a lot, but what explains Darwin? And what not only made him so curious about nature, but made his key insights so fruitful? He certainly explained how we evolved, but not now how we understand how we evolved.

To be perfectly accurate, animals do possess their own limited set of keys, but not the skeleton key that opens every lock. My dog, for example, knows how to unlock a treat from me, without knowing how she knows how to do this. I know: it’s because she’s so damn cute, and the cuteness unlocks any reservations on my part.

This subject goes to the very mission of the Anthropos, which, in addition to loving dogs, is to discover its own nature — its telos — via objects, relationships, and spontaneous attractions in the environment. Although we come into the world with something like a soul — or better yet, in the words of Bertie Wooster, “I mean to say, there’s a sort of soul-thingy that — well, you know what I mean. It’s a sort of... well, it’s a soul-thingy.”

This thingy is the form of our individuality, but we don’t come into the world with explicit knowledge of its content. Rather, this form harbors implicit knowledge of what will come to be recognized as its content. In other words, our spontaneous attraction to this or that endeavor, or person, or discipline, or dog, will reveal our self to ourselves. I have no idea why some people are attracted to Chihuahuas. But it is very much as if our Anthropic soul thingy is the lock for which the Cosmos will furnish keys to open it.

Think of, say, Mozart, who was obviously born with a musical soul. Lucky for him (and for us) he was given a means of discovery and expression of what was implicit in his soul thingy. In other words, thanks to his father, a clavier was right there waiting for him to find himself — his musical potential — through it. By the age of five he was already composing, which is to say, exteriorizing his interior or explicating the implicit. True, he was a genius, but that’s beside the point, which is that the clavier was a lock Mozart seemingly picked with preternatural ease, even while his own soul was a lock the keyboard opened for him, in an in-spiraling and ex-spiraling two-way movement.

Perhaps a more subtle point is that he also opened this musical lock for the restavus, in that we are all able to enjoy the sounds of Mozart unlocking the piano, the piano unlocking Mozart to himself, and his music unlocking our appreciation of it.

Which reminds me of something my son once asked me: is everyone born with a gift? The question caused me to hesitate, because one doesn’t want to sound like some new-age happy-talk woke oil salesman: Of course! Anyone can be Mozart or Einstein! Your world is as big as your smallest—

Theodore Herzel. State of Israel. If you will it, it is no dream!

Of course we can’t all be geniuses, but that hardly means we can’t enjoy geniuses. Indeed, more often than not we can enjoy the genius more than the genius himself enjoys being one. Biographies of the Great Ones often reveal a disconnect between the greatness of the gift and the rest of their lives. For example, I enjoy the famously grumpy Van Morrison much more than he seems to enjoy being himself. The point is, you don’t have to be an accomplished locksmith to benefit from the unlocking, whether of truth or beauty.

All of this is meant literally, because this is literally how we experience the world. Things grab us, do they not? And different things grab different people. I realize this book won’t grab everyone. What is indeed so surprising is how specific our soul-attractors can be. It is by no means obvious why being should be this way, but it is impossible to understand this vital phenomenon within the standard scientific paradigm. Even in science, the most hardboiled egghead wouldn’t know what to investigate in the absence of an intuition or feeling that reduces the infinite field of phenomena to something “interesting,” something that attracts his or her attention.

In a certain sense we are what intrigues us, whether persons, subjects, objects, or activities. For example, according to psychiatrist Anthony Storr,

Hobbies and interests are often aspects of a human being which most clearly define his individuality, and make him the person he is. To discover what really interests a person is to be well on the way to understanding them.

More often than not these interests “reflect what the individual does when he is alone, or when communication and interaction are at a minimum.” One might say the soul is like a concavity in search of the convexity that will fill it, so to speak; or again, a lock in search of the key(s) that will open a man to himself.

Two words: vertical recollection.

Yes, when we grab something that grabs us, it is a case of discovering what is already within us — much in the manner of Jungian archetypes, which are inborn patterns actualized upon contact with the environment. These latent preconceptions are filled with conceptual content depending upon our particular experiences of the world. Some of these blueprints are universal, e.g., anima, great mother, shadow, hero, and trickster, while others are quite specific clueprints into our personal identities, again luring us in a top-down manner toward our own destiny, as it were. Which implies that our existential future is ontologically behind us, which is true of any anticipatory biological system wherein its present state anticipates and changes based upon a future state. In short, in a purely linear system the cause precedes the effect, but in a complex, nonlinear, anticipatory system the cause of a current statr may be predicated on a future one. Thus the cosmotheandric imperative to fully become who we already are in potential, more on which in Book II.

Me? I am interested in tonight’s Dodgers-Brewers game. Did you know that in all of playoff history there is a less than 1% chance of a matchup between the first and second best pitchers in the game?

Who cares.

That’s the point: different strokes for indifferent folks.

One Two Many

To say Relative is of course to say Absolute, and vice versa — and it is the second proposition that traditionalists reject: that to say absolute Creator necessarily implies a relative creation. But there it is and here we are, and you can’t argue with the facts. So let’s start with the way things concretely are rather than an abstract idea of how they ought to be.

In Book I we already described how the doctrine of creation does not so much imply an efficient cause in the past; rather, it implies an ongoing vertical dependence of the Cosmos on the Theos, even if the former were eternal (which of course it is not).

Which naturally leads to the question of how it would be metaphysically possible for an absolutely immutable and self-enclosed God to create at all? For no amount of nouns adds up to a verb. Even the creation of time would take time, albeit of a different nature: supra-temporal as opposed to atemporal. Moreover, supposing the creation of time, then the Creator has really stepped in it. You can’t just run away from your progeny like some deadbeat deity.

Besides, there is no reason to slander time, as if it is too déclassé for the likes of an aloof and aristocratic God who is above such vulgarities, or as if time is somehow not kosher. To the contrary, in inventing the Sabbath, for example, God sanctifies time for the purposes of reluxation and rejewvenation, giving it his eternal seal of approval.

Balthasar speaks of a “transformed temporality” which “is intrinsic to eternity itself” (O’Hanlon). Instead of having mere horizontal extension, as does our time, it is more as if it has vertical intension (or intensity), which we have reasons to believe is why we experience the same thing in this world. For have you never had an intense time? Of course you have. Now just imagine it could always be that intense.

That would be exhausting.

Not necessarily, because the relaxation — or Celestial Slack — would be equally intense — like removing your boots after a long day of skiing.

That’s the only reason why I ski. The rest is a bit repetitive.

In Balthasar’s view, eternity would not be the absence of time; rather, a mysterious “supra-time” which is quite different from the nunc stans of antiquity, in which nothing happens in eternity because there is no time for it to happen. Supra-time would have all the benefits of temporality without any of the privations or nuisances, like death and taxes.

For Leithart, the timeless and abstract Absolute “is no more than a conventional placeholder,” much like our symbol O. But the absolutely relative God is the only God who could be, and certainly the only one we know about or could know about.

For Leithart, our knowledge of the nature of God “inevitably follows from the fact that he created.” And the very first sentence of the Bible tells us that this is precisely what the Creator did do. Now, did he only become the Creator when he created this world? No — any more than there was a time when he wasn’t Father. Rather, just as Father and Son define one another, so too do Creator and creation.

For cosmotheandrism this another eternal and primordial complementarity, for — at least in the Judeo-Christian stream — we find “nothing at all about a God who might-or-might-not create.” Rather, we know only of a Creator “who has in fact created.” Therefore, “A non-Creator is, in the strictest possible sense, a nonentity. God-without creation is an idol. No such God exists, because the only God who is is the God who created…”

Note that it is the same with regard to Taoism or Vedanta: in the former, the Tao is inexhaustible and “gives birth to infinite worlds,” while in the latter “The whole universe came forth from Brahman” — although it should be pointed out that in Christianity the motivations for the creation are different. But that’s — that’s just nitpicking, isn’t it, the point here being that Creators gonna create.

Genesis begins with God creating a Cosmos and thereby establishing a relationship to something other than himself, but there is already something other than God in God, because the second Person isn’t the First.

Thus, for Christianity, “‘Creator’ is an inherently relative term. If ‘Creator’ is the first name of God, then our theology must be, from top to bottom, a theology of the related God” (ibid.). Jews, of course frown on the Trinity, equating it to polytheism, but there are nevertheless some kind of relational goings-on going on up there. For example, when God says Let there be light, to whom is he speaking?

Nobody. Just thinking out loud.

Okay, but to whom is he referring when he says Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, hmm?

The royal we?

Can’t be. The Jews didn’t yet have royalty, let alone the majestic plural. Kings Saul, David, and Solomon come later, but even they refer to themselves in the first person.

And of course, as we have seen, the book of Proverbs provides abundant witness to an eternal Withness, with Wisdom herself saying such things as “I [note the personal pronoun] have been established from everlasting” and “from the beginning.” Even when God was otherwise preoccupied drawing a circle on the face of the deep and marking out the blueprints of the world, I was there getting coffee and sharpening His pencil.

Perhaps this would be a good place to remind the reader that we are not proposing cosmotheandrism because of the Christian revelation of a triune Godhead, rather, that this revelation makes total sense in a cosmotheandric framework. In other words, it fits the requirements of all our Axioms, in this case substance-in-relation, for the Creator himself “is internally related,” and “This internal relationality is the condition of the possibility for creation.... this God is always already related to what is other than himself” (ibid.).

Perhaps it is enough for Christians to believe that God has revealed his triune nature, but for us the deeper point is that this just so happens to be in perfect accord with cosmotheandrism.

∞

Henri Le Saux was a French Catholic monk who was fascinated by Vedanta, for which reason he spent his life as a renunciate in a Hindu ashram. He never renounced his Christianity, rather, endeavored to harmonize it with the experiences and insights he gained from Vedanta. Here is his attempt to square Christian trinitarian thought with his own experience of ultimate reality — Satchitānanda — in Vedanta: “Now that the Christian jñāni has penetrated to the heart of Satchitānanda and experiences his ‘connaturality’ with God, the Spirit of Wisdom makes known to him his last secrets,” among which are “that Being, sat, opens itself at its very source to give birth eternally to the Son”; that “being is essentially being-with, communion, koinonia, the free gift of self”; and “that self-awareness, cit, only comes to be when there is mutual giving and receiving, for the I only awakes to itself in a Thou.”

As for the third term, ānanda, “There cannot be a solitary bliss, any more than there can be solitary being or solitary self-awareness. There is no joy, as there is no being, except in communication, in giving and receiving.”

No doubt both Christians and Hindus will have their objections, but not the cosmotheandriac. Rather, we call that a metaphysical bingo:

In the depth of this total void, of which only Being and nothingness are capable, and indeed only in the “silence” of being, there can be heard the Thou which eternally calls the Son into being. In the utterance of that Word which fills eternity, Being awakes to itself in its own Source, which is the Father.

The concept of revelation does not exclude the previous existence of notions similar or identical to the notions revealed. The revelation does not consist so much in teaching a new idea as in authenticating an existing one.

In Hinduism the “word that fills eternity” is OM. Is it absolutely identical to the Christian Logos? No, but it does a lot of the same work. For Abhishiktananda it is the primal sound that emerges from “that silence from which all words have come,” so let’s not quibble, for it is the Word that is spoken from the wordless ground, and that’s good enough for me.

In the spirit of superficial religious syncretism, now do Taoism.

There are not as many serious books on the intersection of Christianity and Taoism as there are Vedanta, one of which being Christ the Eternal Tao by Hieromonk Damascene. In it he reworks the Tao Te Ching to produce a “Gospel according to Lao Tzu,” noting first of all “that the ancient Chinese placed great significance on the number Three, seeing in it the first principle of order,” thus foreshadowing its later articulation in Christianity. For example

The triangle is the first full form,

The Three is the Principle of Order.

The Order that must exist before the multiplicity of things.

Therefore the Ancient Sage said:

“The Three produces all things.”

The Three acting as One,

One not acting without the Others.

This primordial Triad “is beyond the distinction of the one and the many,” for “Two is the power that separates” while “Three is the number that transcends all separation,” so “the Triad, being many, is also a Unity.” Three surpasses two, because “exclusive love between two persons, like self-love can be self-absorbed,” whereas “Perfect Love must pass on to a Third, whose existence represents the transcendence of self-absorbed duality.” This is identical to how Gregory Nazianzen characterized it: “The Triad contains itself a perfection, for it is the first which surpasses the composition of the dyad.”

Damascene reproduces an ancient Chinese seal that prefigures this “Triadic mystery” in depicting three terms: “Shang Ti corresponds to the Father/Mind (the Originating Principle of the Godhead); Tao corresponds to the Son/Word (the Operating Cause of the creation); and Ling corresponds to the Spirit/Breath (the Perfecting Cause).”

Another book, The Tao of Christ, by Marshall Davis, says that “When I came to know Christ, I recognized Him as the One celebrated in the Tao Te Ching,” and why not? For “God has revealed his divine nature to all peoples at all times and places. Therefore it is not strange to find evidence of God’s general revelation in the spiritual literature of the world’s peoples.”

“Tao,” of course, means “way,” the question being whether this is in any way analogous to Jesus’ self-identification as “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Interestingly, the earliest Chinese translation of the Gospel of John reads “In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God.” If Socrates and Plato, in the words of Justin Martyr, could be “Christians before Christ,” why not Lao Tse? St. Augustine famously said that “The very thing which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients also,” so “the true religion, which already existed” only later “began to be called Christian.”

Marshall proceeds to translate the entire Tao Te Ching in Christian terms. We could cite numerous passages from the text, but for the purposes of cosmotheandrism it is enough to know that it can be easily done without distorting either Christianity or Taoism. Whether one calls this creative principle Logos, Tao, Wisdom, or Shabda Brahman, one would have to be rather uptight and even un-Dude to not appreciate the parallels.

Judaism represents a special case, being rigorously monotheistic. However, as Chesterton suggested, it was vital for human beings to first discover monotheism, otherwise the idea of the Trinity would have been interpreted as polytheism. Nevertheless, there are hints, for example, that time in the Bible (Genesis 18) when the Lord appears to Abraham in the form of three men to whom he bows and addresses as one. In Jewish thought, of course, God does not take human form, so the three might be seen as angelic messengers.

Nevertheless, Judaism is fully compatible with cosmotheandrism and vice versa. For example, rabbi Adin Steinsaltz describes the Theos-Anthropos relation as follows: “In its profoundest being, the soul of man is a part of the Divine and, in this respect, is a manifestation of God in the world.”

Moreover, Judaism has its own way of talking about the Logos, for example, that the essence of Torah “is the manifestation of the divine wisdom.” Steinsaltz suggests that before creation, even God himself consulted the Torah, “By which it is implied that the Torah is the original pattern, or inner plan, of the world: Torah and world are, inseparably, a pair.” Of course, this may be just “in as manner of speaking,” but nevertheless it is speaking of a relationship between God and his Wisdom. And theomorphic man is already a kind of revelation (Axiom 7), in the sense that he is “a symbol or model of the divine essence” who “manifests different aspects existing in that supreme essence.”

There is another implicit cosmotheandric principle in Judaism whereby “One who is immersed in Torah becomes a partner of God,” such that both parties participate in “the common dream of the existence of the world.”

Full or junior?

The latter no doubt, but when a fellow “broods over himself so too does God yearn for him and look for him,” so it is a cosmotheandric case “of man seeking himself and of God seeking man. Together they can approach a solution of the problem of man’s existence.” Moreover, the practice of tikkun olam, so central to Judaism, involves assisting God in the reparation of a broken world. Here God waits upon the choices of the Anthropos, so he obviously has a lot of patience for our habitual failure to achieve.

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.