A pregnant passage from Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity:
Let us listen once again to St. Augustine: "In God there are no accidents, only substance and relation." Therein lies concealed a revolution in man's view of the world: the sole dominion of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.
Our team of vertical fact checkers has determined that this is almost entirely true. We cannot confirm the bit about "no accidents," because there is reason to believe that an absence of all contingency would negate the revolutionary insight into the supernatural rights of relativity.
We're on p. 184, by the way. I want to flip back to p.180, where Ratzinger expresses a view that is shockingly similar to mine as to the implications of elevating the category of relation to the plane of absoluteness. In short, the so-called paradox of a Godhead of three persons in or of one substance
is connected with the problem of absolute and relative and emphasizes the absoluteness of the relative, of that which is in relation.
I don't want to put words into his mouth, but this does indeed have revolutionary consequences on every plane, from metaphysics on down.
Off the top of my head, I would say that the principle of Relation is precisely where freedom is anchored: in the "space" between I and Thou, or Father and Son, or, more abstractly, between the Absolute-One and the Relative-Many.
And since freedom is not determinism, it seems to me that something like "accident"or contingency is introduced into the Godhead. Experts say this is Impermissible and even insulting to God, but he's been called worse things than related and therefore relative to his creatures. I think it's rather nice.
Conversely, if everything is necessary, then freedom reduces to determinism, and we're back to an inconceivable and unrelatable Immutable Immutability.
I'm thoroughly familiar with arguments that prove God is immutable, but they are ultimately purely deductive. Using the same sort of logic, one could deduce that there is no such thing as change, anywhere or at any time, rather, that the cosmos is just one solitary block of spacetime.
This has been a long argument. In one corner of Ancient Greek thought is Heraclitus, father of all philosophies of Becoming, right down to present day process philosophers and metaphysical evolutionists. In the other corner is Parmenides, who repudiated relativism and change by insisting "on an eternal, single Truth." He
taught a strict Monistic view of reality. Philosophical Monism is the belief that all of the sensible world is of one, basic, substance and being, un-created and indestructible....
[His] thought could not be further removed from that of Heraclitus in that Parmenides claimed nothing moved, change was an impossibility, and that human sense perception could not be relied upon for an apprehension of Truth.
The central vision of Parmenides' work is that change is an illusion -- appearances change but not essence -- which is later reflected in Plato's Theory of Forms which claims that the observable world is only a reflection of a higher, truer, reality (worldhistory.org/Parmenides).
Pre-Christian thought is locked in this endless debate between the immovable object of eternal Being and the irresistible force of pure Becoming. No it isn't. Yes it is! That's just a contradiction, not an argument! No it's not!
Time's up.
How about a compromise? Why not just say reality is both -- i.e., changing and changeless? Well, for starters, because the intellect has an innate desire for unity, which is its natural telos. We're always looking for more comprehensive ways to account for diverse phenomena. What is science, for example, but the reduction of multiplicity to unity?
Same with the supreme science of metaphysics. The least it can do is not end its search in an ugly dualism, whether it is between mind and matter, subject and object, empiricism and idealism, man and woman, whatever.
Looked at this way, we can appreciate how the trinitarian Godhead is indeed a breakthrough -- albeit from God's side into ours and not ours into his.
We might say that the Incarnation is the breakthrough of the Trinity into time and history. On the one hand, the ultimate principle of substance-in-relation cannot be arrived at via mere (lowercase) reason, but on the other, not only is it not in any way repugnant to reason, but installs a giant picture window into the realm of natural reason, allowing the higher light to stream in.
A window for the intellect and a door for the will. But first you have to turn around and open it. Don't worry, it only locks from the inside.
That's about it for today. To be continued...
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