The Absolute Relative and the Merely Absolute

If God is the Absolute Relative, does this make man the relative absolute? Maybe -- especially post-Incarnation -- but even the world isn't the relative relative, because that would reduce to the absolute nihilism of the left, AKA the tyranny of relativism. Creation is only possible because 

The Creator is internally related, a speaking communion capable of internal address, a God who says "us" (Leithart).

Emphasis mine: "This internal relationship is the condition of possibility for creation."

I've been saying this for twenty years, so it is a relief to find someone else saying it so clearly. 

Insofar as the principle of creation is concerned, it is grounded in the God who "is always already related to what is other than himself."

Granted, I believe we can take this doctrine too far and make the Creator dependent upon the creation. This is what Whitehead, Hartshorne, and other process philosophers do: too much (→) contaminating the (O↘), ultimately reducing to pantheism. Ask a process philosopher if God exists and the answer is Yes, but not yet. 

Oops. Next sentence: "Creator and creation are joined in mutual relation, a relation we must finally describe as mutually dependent." Given that the first principle is (in Norris Clarke's formulation and now mine) substance-in-relation, it is not a wholly unreasonable assertion. So how do we tweak it, and what do we put in its place? 

More problematically, are we defying our own statement from yesterday about the principle of noncontradiction? Bob wondered to himself. 

We will put that in the cosmic hopper and hope for an answer by the end of the post. 

Leithart qualifies the mutual dependence, calling it "radically asymmetrical," being that "Creation need not have existed." However, once creation exists, God -- it would seem -- places himself in a position of "dependence." He is related to his cosmos. He cares about it. 

Analogously, I didn't have to create a dependent. But once I did... Am I dependent on my dependent? Yes, very much so, but again, not only is there asymmetry, but as any parent can tell you, I'll bet I care about him more than he cares about me. 

Not to say that he doesn't care, but back when he was a little guy, we would tell him that he won't know how much we love him until he has a little guy of his own.

Does this analogy tell us anything about God? Create your own cosmos, then you'll know how much I love this one!

As alluded to above, I can't agree with everything Hartshorne says, but I do agree with him that God is omnipathos: here is something from an old post, and let's see how it holds up:

One thing that Hartshorne highlights is the "omnipathos" of God. This is a very useful word, because it means that, in addition to being all-knowing and all-powerful, he is all-feeling. 

Right there we see an interesting Trinity consisting of truth, love, and power, each conditioned by the other. More to the point, if we deny God's omnipathos, there is no way for him to meaningfully relate to us -- to put himself in our shoes. But isn't this what the Incarnation is all about?

Hartshorne makes the intriguing point that God is not only the cause of all effects (the First Cause), but also the effect of all causes: the First Effect. This would be the metaphysical basis of his all-feeling omnipathos, as it means that he is supremely receptive to his own creation (or better, perpetual creativity).

This leads to one of Hartshorne's most controversial ideas, that God "changes." Quite simply, he changes because he is truly receptive to his creation -- hence also the "suffering with." Hartshorne believes that the overemphasis on the notion of Unchanging Absolute -- as we've discussed in the past -- is a Greek import, not truly biblical (not to mention incoherent and ultimately absurd). 

In the Greek conception, time is completely devalued in favor of eternity. Time is change, and change is bad because it cannot disclose unchanging truth.

But there is change and there is change. For example, there is decadence, deterioration, corruption, degradation, dissolution, decline -- you know, Obama style change.

But there is also growth, development, maturation, perfection, etc. These are very different things. For Hartshorne, God possesses super-eminent relativity, meaning that his omnipathos is to our empathy as his omniscience is to our knowing. But it is certainly not to be thought of as a deficit. Rather, it is a kind of perfect attunement.

Like the perfect parent. 

On a purely logical basis, how could God even have knowledge unless that knowledge is related to a known? No, we don't want to simply anthropomorphize him, but nor should we say that God has knowledge if we mean something totally different by the word. As Hartshorne writes, if

the divine knowledge is purely absolute, hence involves no relation to things known, what analogy can it have to what is commonly meant by knowledge, which seems to be nothing without such a relation?

Yes, he is the cause of this world, but here again, what is a cause without an effect? To say that in God cause and effect are absolutely one is to simply deny cause and effect, and to enclose him in a static monad.

The same applies to free will. If being omnipotent -- all-powerful -- means that we humans have no power, then that ends the discussion. But if omnipotence is bound up with omniscience (bearing in mind that to know is to relate) and omnipathos, then this changes the equation.

As Hartshorne writes, "Power to cause someone to perform by his own choice an act precisely defined by the cause is meaningless." Again, if God's omnipotence excludes our limited potency, then he is as pointlessly enclosed in his own circuitous locution as any deconstructionist.

If we consider the creation, we see that it is woven of chance and necessity, of freedom and constraint, of boundary conditions and emergent phenomena, of order and surprise. Perhaps this tells us something about its creator. Too much order equates to absolute omnipotence in the traditional sense, but a world of pure chance is inconceivable.

Even leaving all the specifics to the side, life makes no sense without this oddly "perfect" cosmic complementarity of design and freedom (which I would say is the very essence of creativity). Furthermore, "the reality of chance is the very thing that makes providence significant," because otherwise any intervention by God is just necessity in deusguise.

Running out of time here, but perhaps "maximizing relativity as well as absoluteness in God enables us to conceive him as supreme person." Unless by "personhood" we mean something totally alien to us.

For if God is "in all aspects absolute, then literally it is 'all the same' to him, a matter of utter indifference, whether we do this or do that, whether we live or die, whether we joy or suffer." In short, if this is "personal," then we aren't.

End of excerpt. I see that I dealt with objections in the next post, and let me extract any useful nuggets. It gets a little technical, but here goes:

For Hartshorne, God is both absolute and relative: absolute in the abstract but relative in the concrete. In short, absolute/relative is an irreducible complementarity, something which I believe is a fundamental lesson of the Trinity.

The Trinity cannot be further reduced to something less (or more) than itself (i.e., an impersonal monad) without thereby losing its identifying features of love, relationship, knowledge, creation, etc. Behind or before the Father is not an ontological bachelor; we might even say that the Trinity is just as much an effect as a cause of eternal love-in-relation. Certainly it is a way to conceptualize, frame, and think about this eternal love.

For me, one of Hartshorne's most helpful ideas -- and it can be used in many contexts -- is that when faced with a complementarity, the more concrete of the two complements is the more fundamental. 

Thus, for example, the unchanging God is the abstract form of "the supreme personality as such." It is like saying Joe is Joe. Without ever actually meeting him in the flesh, we can affirm that Joe is Joe, has always been Joe, and will always be Joe. In that sense, Joe is unchanging, for Joe = Joe.

But there is also the concrete state of "God as person caring for the creatures he has created." This is the real Joe, not just the idea of Joe. For Hartshorne, "The abstract does not act, only the concrete acts or is a person." Furthermore -- and this is the (for me) revolutionary part -- "it is the divine Person that contains the Absolute, not vice versa" -- just as "the man contains his character, not the character the man." 

"Any concrete case," writes Hartshorne, "contains the entire unlimited form." For example, consistent with Aristotle, there is no abstract realm of disembodied ideas.

Rather, the idea is in its concrete expression: any man is an instance of man-as-such. Thus, the abstract form appears "unlimited, not because it has all possible cases in actualized form, but because it has no actual case within it, being the common form of all actuality, and no actuality whatever."

In short, abstract possibility "is unlimited because it is not actualized at all. It is everything in the form of possibility, nothing whatever in the form of actuality."

Therefore -- and I realize this is a Big Leap for many people, "God as merely absolute is nonactual," whereas God-as-relative is concrete person.

I love that merely absolute. For example, if someone were to try to sell me on Islam, the first thing I might say is: "Allah? He is merely absolute. He can't be the real thing. He can't even be actual. He's just an abstraction, not a concrete person."

Perhaps this is why the only way to relate to the abstract Father is through the concrete Son, always and forever. God is our eternal relative, and we his.

[A]s absolute, God is 'simple,' has no constituents. But this only shows once more that it is God as relative that is the inclusive conception.... A wholly absolute God is power divorced from responsiveness or sensitivity... --Hartshorne 

And here we are. Back to Leithart:

"Once we have baked in this asymmetrical reciprocity, we can say without hesitation or qualm that God is responsive to creation." We just need a bigger -- and more omnipathos -- God, AKA the Absolute Relative. 

The only God who is is the related God, the God who has created a world that is other than himself and who, in that very act, has related himself to a world other than himself. The quest for an unrelated non-Creator is quixotic, for an unrelated God has nothing to do with us.

"God is actualized as Creator"; and "We have to do only with the Absolute-relative, never with the Absolute" (Leithart).

I guess that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.