The Open Cosmos Society

So, the essence of both man and God is substance-in-relation; although supernaturally revealed, once revealed, it is very much susceptible to rational understanding -- or at least transrational understanding, for it goes to the reason why man cannot be enclosed in reason, and why reason always surpasses itself. 

Let's be reasonable!

Reason itself is already a revelation, especially once we we see its insufficiency, because the latter can only be seen from a position of transcendence. Gödel was a logician, not a magician. Nevertheless, he deployed logic to slip out of logic like Houdini. 

We left off yesterday with the axiomatic truth that we do not necessarily exist -- we are contingent, duh -- but supposing we do exist, then we necessarily exist as substance-in-relation. 

Nevertheless, I am always looking for the thinker who takes this idea as seriously as I do, but have yet to find him. Which makes me look like some kind of extremist on the edge of the Cosmos, even though from my vantage point I'm right here in the middle.  

Way back in the day, I made the joke that I searched and researched for my book, but couldn't find it, so I had to write it myself. And even though I found it, I'm still researching, and on a good day I refind it. 

To put it another way, I do occasionally find a fellow vertical traveler, but even the best one is somewhat on the periphery of what I am trying to say, or see rather. The book we're currently flipping through -- Theological Anthropology -- is full of such examples. So let's keep flipping and I'll explain what I mean.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I think the problem lies in the fact that similar thinkers have come up through a deeply religious context, whereas I did so from outside that context -- from one of pure metaphysics, or even just pure thought itself, whatever that is. It can't help sounding more than a bit pretentious, but it's the opposite -- postentious? 

Pretentious comes from pretend, i.e., to stretch forth or spread before; thus to post-tend would follow from God's stretching forth to us in the event of the Incarnation. I like to call it the Incarnotion, because the notion of trinitarian being is not only a heckuva notion, but the ultimate notion. Let's flip:  

being-as-relation is equally strong as being-as-substance. Hence, the absolute essence and the relational substance are equally important in both God and creatures (Wayte).

That's all I'm saying and everything I'm saying. "However, in creatures the relational subsistence is dependent on God as its transcendent origin." 

Even -- especially -- Jesus-as-fellow-man never stops revealing this dependence by praying to his Father, and we could do worse than imitating this attitude of pure receptivity, of Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. 

For it is through the infused contemplation of prayer that we enter the benevolent meta-Cosmic spiral of substance-in-relation, which we can only pretend to leave, e.g., back down in Eden. We are concretely in God, but abstractly outside. Your choice. My advoice? Just say Yes. 

"In the concrete, the person retains the integrity of substance or nature," meaning that we are "primordially constituted through relation with the creator" (emphasis mine).

Which implies that the Incarnotion is at once a radical novelty but a restoration and recapitulation of Adam, AKA primordial man. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen for a child's job, that's the crux of the Master! 

Etc. 

One of our top five theologians is Norris Clarke, and he shows up here in this essay, right on timeless:

Clarke demonstrates that substance is active and self-communicating. Being is not just static presence but active presence.... beings "necessarily generate relations." So being in its fullness can be described as "substance-in-relation" and this is the case for both God and creatures (emphasis mine).

Active Relational Presence. Which is how we may arrive there via the postentious Pure Thought referenced above, because all thought is already a relation and a presence, or rather, the presence of relation and relation of presence. If I'm not mistaken.

The mistaken view would involve the notion "of substance as something self-enclosed and cut off from any relational dimension" (ibid). Here is where postmodernism has a teeny tiny point, but in the absence of a trinitarian metaphysic promptly becomes pretentious nonsense, for it rightly sees things (and humans) as "mere bundles of relations" while throwing out that to which they are related. 

Now, I would say that God's Big Reveal comes down to the notion of relativity in divinas, which implies that relation (or relativity) is not a privation but a perfection of being.

The human person is unique, because the human person is constituted by a unique relation to God and carries a unique set of relations with all other persons. No other person can be or have my unique set of relationships. This constitutes my unique subjectivity in relation to others (ibid.).

That's good, and I'll say more about it in the next installment -- it goes pretty far, but still not quite far enough for my monkey. Here's another stab at it: "Christ is the eternal mediator with whom the human person in their relational core is united." 

This is not merely an epistemological or moral union but "an ontological union through the relational dimension of existence," through which 

human persons in their relational core are taken up to share in the divine perichoretic unity that has definitively broken into the world... 

Again, more to follow. Our re-search is from over...