Is This Really Necessary?

The necessity of possibility and the possibility of evil. I thought that was a pretty snappy way of putting it, because it still preserves divine omnipotence except insofar as even God doesn't have the power to not be God. God is not a deconstructionist. 

As we've said before, God somehow has the perfections of both freedom and necessity, and to an eminent degree. Herebelow we live in a world of contingency, a world that did not have to exist. But as Schoun says, "Contingency is always relative, but relativity is not always contingent." 

We know this for reasons touched on in yesterday's post, i.e., the irreducible "Absolute Relativity" in God, for it seems acceptable to say (for example) that the Son is relative to the Father (and vice versa), but it would be incorrect to conclude that the Son is contingent -- as if he might or might not have been, depending upon the whims of the Father. 

This latter error would also imply a principle prior to the Father (or Trinity), which is a nonstarter.

Contingency on the one hand and the presence of the Absolute on the other; these are the two poles of our existence (Schuon).

Oh by the way. 

Except -- or so we have heard from the wise -- the Absolute has furnished a way for us to transform mere contingency by plugging into, or hitching a ride upon, the Divine Relativity, which is the "good news" of Christianity. Everything about it is ordered to the possibility of this transformation and this movement between the two poles mentioned by Schuon.

I suppose we could say that "fallenness" is appropriately situated on that same bi-directional vertical line. It means that there really is a down and an up in the cosmos, and a bare acquaintance with History suggests -- or certainly is consistent with the idea -- that

man has radically turned away from his human vocation by plunging into the world of contingency and by identifying himself with it, whence the profane ego with its tyranny and vices (ibid.).

I suppose that's the bad news which the good news is designed to remedy.  

I found some unexpected confirmation of this view in a book I'm reading called Human Nature, by David Berlinski, despite the fact that he is a secular Jew. He is also a highly insultaining debunker of atheistic pieties, scientistic faith, and primitive progressive religiosity, and seems happy to dwell in the uncertainty and mystery of it all.

It was in discussing the "cause" of World War I that he made an intriguing point:

None of the Great Powers were compelled to go to war. They could have walked away. If these considerations are admitted, the causal chain that was designed to explain the outbreak of war is less a chain than a series of unconnected links.

This is because of the freedom and therefore contingency located in every human actor in the "causal chain." It very much reminds me of one of my favorite aphorisms, that

The permanent possibility of initiating a causal series is what we call a person.   

There's more to this than one might suspect, especially with reference to the words "permanent," "possibility," and "causal." 

First of all, permanent implies a kind of absoluteness, or necessity, or even eternity. For example, to say that 2+2 necessarily = 4 is to partake of an eternal truth. It may be a trivial truth, but it is the shadow of an Absolute that is the opposite of trivial.

Now, supposing we want to trace the causes of World War I to a single one, say, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. But this is wholly arbitrary, because we could then trace the causes of Franz Ferdinand to the beginning of time -- either to a First Cause or to an intrinsically absurd infinite series, neither answer satisfying our desire to understand what's going on down here.

It is true that God is, among other things, First Cause. He is quite literally brother Nicolás' Permanent Possibility of Initiating a Causal Series, for which reason he is a Person (and vice versa.)

But hey, we're persons too! Of this we are absolutely certain. It's not one of those things that can be disproved, because who is disproving it? 

But still, what is it, and how have we come by this strange privilege of being persons amidst contingency while knowing the Absolute (or absolute certainty)?

the foundation of metaphysical certitude is the coincidence between truth and being; a coincidence that no ratiocination could invalidate. 

And 

We are situated in contingency, but we live by the reflection of the Absolute, otherwise we could not exist (Schuon).

I'm going to go out on a limb and say we do exist. Furthermore, we exist as persons capable of initiating causal series from a mysterious center that can only be a reflection of a Celestial Central to which we are linked in each moment. 

Speaking of limits on omnipotence due to the reality of Possibility, yesterday I was thinking to myself that the petition Thy will be done obviously implies that his will is not necessarily done, and can even be opposed or undone by our own power to initiate a causal series, beginning, I suppose, with Genesis 3, which circles back to The necessity of possibility and the possibility of evil.