Microcosmos, Macroperson, and Qualified Immutability

Just a short post that relates an important point or three.

Early Christian thinkers

spoke of the human as a microcosm, a small cosmos, and the cosmos as macroanthropos, a large human, and of the two as an inseparably intertwined whole (Kaldas).

And why not? I'm pretty, uh, relationally pretty cool with it, while others might not like the implications of man and God being "inseparably intertwined." 

For example, supposing I change, does this mean God changes? Leading authorities say NO WAY, GOD IS IMMUTABLE, but believe me, there are ways. 

We've posted about them before, and might even do so again this morning. The key is to preserve the principle of immutability while considering the possibility that it might be a kind of privation if not considered rightly in the total context of Macroanthropic Being. 

In this larger context, relationality is by no means a privation but a perfection -- even a Theory of Everything (T.O.E.), and I can get you a T.O.E. by end of this post. 

For example, Ratzinger writes that 

In God, person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but is the person itself. By definition, the person exists only as relation.

Can't get much clearer than that. Nor more queerer, because folks are not accustomed to thinking this way, neither pre-Christians nor post-Christians. The former had no earthly idea of a triune Godhead, while the latter have no excuse. Nevertheless, here we are, but Ratzinger wants to come back to

an understanding of created human persons in order to counter the hyper-individualism of modernity. In order to do so, [he] needs to prioritize relations..., and move them (at least) into, or alongside, substance itself (Gourlay, ibid.).

Ratzinger goes on to say that "In God, person is the pure relativity of being turned toward the other," and as far as I'm concerned, it's for the defenders of radical changelessness to to explain how the "pure relativity" of the Trinity can be squared with it. 

I get it, but maybe our whole duality of change-changeless needs to be rethought from the ground up (and down) -- as do our finite conceptions of finitude-infinitude and temporal-timeless. The macroanthropos transcends all those dualistic manmodalities.

This "dialogical reality" and "relativity toward the other" needs "to be recognized as a third specific fundamental category" (Ratzinger).

In a word, our T.O.E. must include relationality and relativity as ultimate and unsurpassable terms.  

Changing seers for a moment, Whitehead helpfully defined metaphysics as

the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. 

And I say it is impossible to interpret any experience in the absence of the category of relation. In other words, any experience is of something to which we are mysteriously related, whether objects, persons, or God. If we are the micropersonal reflection of the macroperson, well, that explains a great deal indeed.

The three-ness of God -- the relatio -- "stands beside the substance as an equally primordial form of being." 

And "therein lies concealed a revolution in man's view of the world" -- a T.O.E., or at least a vital component of one. 

There's much more to say about this, but we've had a lot of dense posts lately, and you deserve a break.