God Needs a Few Integrated Men?

Any shared experience ends in is a simulacrum of religion. --Dávila 

The meaning of that one is not self-evident, partly because the meaning of simulacrum is equivocal: 1) An image or representation, 2) An unreal or vague semblance, 3) A likeness; a semblance; a mock appearance; a sham; -- now usually in a derogatory sense.

Is the Aphorist knocking shared experience? Because developmentally it co-arises with "personal experience," in that the first experience is the discovery of the (m)other. At least that's the way it was with me: we are thoroughly intersubjectively entangled on the ground floor. It's how and why we're human.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm wondering about the mysterious presence of the third Person of the Trinity. Could he be a "consequence," so to speak, of the joint loving attention of the first two, bearing in mind that the Trinity does not "develop" in time (as is the case for humans), but has always been?

In the book we're looking at -- Wandering Through Darkness -- Stump writes of "joint attention," or of what is called "triadic attentional engagement," the "triadic shared attention" which joins "two people's attention upon a 'third' element or target": it

"occurs when an individual is psychologically engaged with someone else's psychological engagement with the world." Another researcher says of the two subjects engaged in joint attention directed toward some third object that "each subject is aware, in some sense of the object as an object that is present to both subjects."

It's a rather mysterious thing -- how two interior subjects can share awareness of a third in what is called "transitional space." But 

somewhere in the period between 9 and 12 months of age, most infants begin spontaneously to use a pointing gesture to call things to the attention of their care-givers and to share attention directed toward the object with the care-giver.

Remama? Probably not, but it is recapitulated in the shared experience we have with our own infants. Unfortunately, "Autistic children show significant deficits in the triadic form of joint attention," and before this, in "dyadic shared attention":

It is now apparent that triadic joint attention is a development of dyadic attention-sharing, which begins much earlier in infancy, in mutual gaze and in gaze-following.... By as early as two months of age, infants already have some sophistication with regard to dyadic attention-sharing.

I don't like the implications of being born with an attenuated ability to engage in this intersubjective mutuality, but I suppose that if it is possible for things to go right, it has to be possible for them to go wrong. And, last I checked, early intervention in autism can have a major impact on outcomes. Moreover, we're all a little autistic. But in any event, 

for mentally fully functional adult human beings, full-fledged dyadic joint attention is required for significant, as distinct from minimal, personal presence.

And God's own

direct and unmediated cognitive and causal contact with everything in creation is still insufficient for God's being omnipresent. In order for God to be omnipresent, that is, in order for God to be always and everywhere present..., it also needs to be the case that God is always and everywhere in a position to share attention with any creature able and willing to share attention with God.

God needs a few integrated men in order to be present to them? Or, some assembly is required of us?

while God has the power to produce unilaterally some kind of personal presence, for significant personal presence even God's power is not sufficient. Significant personal presence of God to a human being requires mutual love and mutual closeness, and what is mutual cannot be produced unilaterally. 

This reminds me of God's first statement to Adam after the nasty business in the garden: Where are you? In other words, where did you go? It can't be referring to.a spatial location, because that's no way to hide from God, rather, to an ontological location, in that Adam is no longer present to God, even while God is as present as ever.

Speaking of which, it is also noteworthy that Adam feels shame, about which Stump says is "another route to internal fragmentation." And again,

unless the beloved person is internally integrated, even God is kept from closeness and union with the person he loves.

And for Thomas, "the internal integration necessary for closeness, union, and love is possible only in integration around the good." Put conversely, no one can be truly integrated around evil -- there will always be cracks, fissures, hypocrisies, inconsistencies, lies, self-deception, and multiple wills at odds with each other. 

So God apparently needs a few integrated men who are integrated around the Good (leaving the True and Beautiful to the side, although they are equally central to integration, and in fact, are themselves integrated at the top, in God).