Improvisation in God and (Therefore) Man

In any proposition about man its paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom must emerge. --Dávila 

Must? Doesn't sound very free to me. 

People who want to be spiritual and not religious are like a musician who wants to be unconstrained by any musical structure. Do you remember nothing? 

That freedom is dependent on constraint is patently evident in many spheres. In cybernetics there is a principle that states "Where a constraint exists, advantage can usually be taken of it" (Begbie). 

Like a good tax accountant, or similar to Polanyi's conception of how the boundary conditions of one level may be exploited by a higher level, e.g., words by sentences, sentences by paragraphs, paragraphs by post, etc. 

Except I have no idea where this post is going; it is "open," but there must be something to which it is open -- one hopes, anyway -- a higher level of meaning.

Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. Or perhaps the problem is on the lower level: sometimes I am not here, apparently. 

Analogously, if God is omnipresent, any lack of presence isn't his fault, rather, ours. Properly understood, O is what is always here and cannot not be here.

But if Christianity is correct, then O itself has a kind of dynamic musical structure.

This reminds me of a comment by Keith Jarrett about the encounter with music, which may or may not occur in the case of improvisation, which is simultaneously a search for and a manifestation of the search for music: the jazz musician:

goes onto the stage hoping to have a rendezvous with music. He knows the music is there (it always is), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness. It must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the listener, the first of whom is the musician himself.

Shamanic, that's what it is: a negotiation with the unseen, unheard, and unwritten. Nevertheless, there are rules!

if there were unlimited degrees of self-communication we could not advance beyond chaos. Organizations of energy become possible because stable limits are set on their possibility: "Elaborate networks of constraint, running down eventually into laws of motion, set the conditions and boundaries...." 

Human beings have developed the capacity to submit to the constraints deliberately in order to extend the possibilities of their interaction with the world.

Is this what the world is "for"? To provide the boundary conditions for our improvisation? It certainly seems so. The only alternative is a determinism that would render improvisation impossible. 

Does God himself improvise?, that's the question. In the classical view he does not and cannot, because he is timeless and immutable. But to repeat Zuckerkandl's quote from a couple of posts ago,

A God enthroned beyond time in timeless eternity would have to renounce music... Are we to suppose that we mortals, in possessing such a wonder as music, are more privileged than God?

Well? I often wonder how much Jesus improvised. To the extent that he was human, we would say "a lot." 

But are we to believe that his divine person underwent no change whatsoever? If so, what is the point? Does the revelation of the Trinity not reveal anything new about God? Is God not "constrained" by his triune structure -- a structure that is a kind of perpetual process?  

Time out for aphorisms:

Two contradictory philosophical theses complete each other, but only God knows how.

For example, the theses of change and immutability, of freedom and necessity, of time and timelessness. 

If the Father is "absolute freedom," it is nevertheless "constrained" by his eternal engendering of the Son. 

You think so, Petey? That's a bold claim. And yet, it seems that even -- especially -- the Father isn't "free" to not be the Father. Otherwise we land in ontological contradiction. At least from our end of the cosmos,

Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.

God himself doesn't know what to do with his infinite freedom but to generate the Son. Or rather, the Son is what the Father always knows via his freedom.

The Aphorist suggests that

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

Does this apply equally to the divine persons? Or more so?

I'm going with the latter: that -- so to speak -- the person of the Father is the permanent possibility of generating the Son. 

The Aphorist also says 

Authentic freedom consists in the power to adopt an authentic master. 

It would seem that this freedom of ours is grounded in the authentic freedom of the Son to do the will of the Father. Thus

The free act is either rebellion or obedience. Man establishes his godlike pride or his creaturely humility. 

Genesis 3 All Over Again. For *ironically*

Total liberation is the process that constructs the perfect prison.  

That checks out: the tyranny of relativism under which we currently live. Give me back my boundary conditions! Starting with the Constitution. 

The ultimate boundary conditions are those between the Father, Son, and Spirit.  

And ultimately,

The free act is only conceivable in a created universe. In the universe that results from a free act.

The free act of engendering the Son or Word? Petey? Little help? Nicolas? Anyone?

When we forget that to be free consists in the power to seek the master that we should serve, freedom merely becomes the very opportunity for the vilest master who commands us. 

You gotta serve somebody.

Is that true? What if I want to serve myself? Why can't it be a self-serve and self-serving cosmos?

Whoever is liberated from everything that oppresses him soon discovers that he is also liberated from what protects him.

No loopholes, no special exemptions? After all, I am a Good Man. 

Man is the the most contemptible refuge of men.

 I know, I know. Don't remind me.

"Human" is the adjective used to excuse any infamy. 

Okay, so remind me.  

If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.  

Which implies that the full mirror is the one full of God?

Man inflates his emptiness in order to challenge God.  

That's true. The biggest conceivable nothing is still nothing. Conversely,

Authentic humanism is built upon the discernment of human insufficiency.

The first baby step toward Genesis 3 not all over again.  

Let's come full circle to an aphorism about the aphorism at the top, and call it a post:

An individual is defined less by his contradictions than by the way he comes to terms with them.