Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy

Cold opening:

the Bible, never, for even a single clause, teaches a strict, monadic monotheism. The Bible never teaches that God is simply one, without simultaneously hinting at, however teasingly, plurality within the divine life (Leithart).

Oh?  

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

Recall that there is natural theology (↗O) and supernatural revelation (O↘), and the complementary relationship between them (↔). 

But perhaps there is also an (↔) between revelation and its subsequent development? Certainly we need to revisit Genesis 1 with our later revelation of the Trinity, but Leihart maintains that it was there implicitly from the start.

He's not wrong. But is he right? 

The sequence of revelation is not from monotheism to trinitarian monotheism because Genesis 1 is already nascently trinitarianism. 

There are some obvious clues, for example, Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness. Some people say that's just the royal we, even though that convention didn't exist for another millennium or so. Others say God is talking to the angels, even though we are not made in the image of angels.

Later, with the events of Genesis 3, "the Lord warns that Adam has 'become like one of Us.'" Or pretends to have, anyway. Big. Mistake. There's also Babel, when God says "Come, let Us go down" and check this thing out.  

Genesis does not depict a "frozen... block of absolute essence," because such a being "would be 'impotent to create,' incapable of communicating himself because he is enclosed within himself." 

Say what you want, but this Creator "is supremely self-diffusive." He can scarcely contain himself. Full of en-thusiasm you might say, which means literally entheos, veritably brimming with the spirit of God. 

The Spirit is the passion, the source and center of the emotional life of the Creator.

Emotion? Isn't that a human -- even neurobiological -- thing? Yes, but what is its principle? "The Creator's yearning is not like our yearning. He does not long for what he lacks." Well, that's a relief. What is it, then?

One doesn't want to put words in his mouth or emotions in his heart, but -- perhaps? --

His longing is the longing of infinite fullness, undiluted joy, sheer bliss, not the longing to have what is absent but longing to share what is superabundantly present.

Unlike our yearning for what we lack, the Father yearns for what he always already has in the Son? And vice versa?

The One and the Many. Problem solved:

Trinitarian Christianity disturbs the simple contrast of one and many by redefining unity as a harmony of difference and difference as the dynamic of unity. Unity is only manifest and realized in multiplicity.

I'll buy that. We've said before that music mimics the form of reality, and is maybe even why man loves music:

The "harmony of the Trinity is... not the harmony of a finished totality but a 'musical' harmony of infinity."

Infinite harmony. I'll buy that too. Time out for some heavenly harmonies: 

Elsewhere in Scripture, the Spirit is the source of sound, including the sound of music.

Example?

'Elohim the Creator, creating by and through his Spirit, is God most musical... he joyfully sings a creation that can, and will, join to harmonize on his eternal song. 

Too fruity, or not fruity enough? It reminds me of something I wrote in the book about "the polyphonic score that surrounds and abides within us," and how we may "harmonize existence in our own beautiful way, and thereby hear the vespered strains of the song supreme." Nah, too fruity.

The time of Genesis is the layered, multiply rhythmic, multi-melody time of polyphony.

Recall what we were saying -- if you could tolerate the pedantry -- about the complementary categories of abstract and concrete. In all Primordial Complementarities, one must be prior, and in this case -- somewhat surprisingly -- it is the Concrete. 

Which led us to the coonclusion that the abstract has no independent existence outside the concrete: "it is the divine Person that contains the Absolute, not vice versa." In Hartshorne's words, "Any concrete case contains the entire unlimited form," therefore "God as merely absolute is nonactual, whereas God-as-relative is concrete person."

Which is why we agree wholeheadedly with the Aphorist that

Truth is a person.

And this person is a musician? Well, let's say that music is the concrete expression of time. This being the case, it is more real than any purely abstract notion of time.

Creation has no immutable dance floor. It is nothing but [concrete] dancing, all the way down and all the way up (Leithart).

Again, "We are tempted to think technical measures of time are more basic, fundamental, and true than everyday natural or cultural rhythms," but nah, "Time is, most fundamentally, personal time," which is "composed by the Word of a tryhypostatic person." 

If this is the case, then we have to rethink our metaphysic, because Eternity would an utterly unthinkable abstraction from concrete time. This is for both Petey and Pascal, 

Not the God of the philosophers, not the God of the scholars! (p. 261).

Cards on the table: I've suggested before that time is a distant reflection of the "time" it takes for the Father to generate the Son. This, of course, is a quintessentially timeless *process* that takes place in eternity, because there was never a time when the Son did not exist.

To which we say: oh?

Leithart alludes to what he calls the "metaphysical temptation," which for me connotes a flight into the pure abstraction alluded to above. But if the real is the Concrete, then we have to resist this temptation, for "of a non-Creator's relation to time we know nothing because there is literally nothing to know." 

For again: the (concrete) Creator creates (concretely). Ultimately,

Time's order is determined by persons, above all by the ordered life of the triune persons. Hence, the movement of time through past, present, and future mirrors the eternal, and eternally realized, becoming and unfolding of the triune Source, Radiance, and Diffusion.

Hey, that's what I think! But it sure is nice to find someone else who thinks it.

I try not to burden readers with more than 1,000 words a day, so, to be continued. Sun Ra, play us out, whatever that means.