The Society of God

Let's review: because ultimate reality is personal substance-in-relation, it is also the "absolute relative." 

This latter appears to be a contradiction, because the Absolute is precisely what is not relative. How then can relativity be absolute? In response to which we say: how could it not be?  

In the Bible, the first clue of this absolute relativity is in Genesis 1, where God creates man "in Our image, according to Our likeness." Some say this is a misreading of the passage, but I say, if the clue fits, wear it. 

This is followed immediately by "male and female He created them," which implies (in my opinion) that the intrinsic relationality of God is at once mirrored in the irreducible relationality of male and female. 

Just as God is not a solitary monad, nor are human beings exteriorly related, atomistic units. Rather, like God, we are a deeper and dynamic unity of interpersonal intersubjectivity.

Alternatively, we could begin at our end, in that we know that a solitary and isolated human being could never attain to humanness. Supposing then that we are in the image of the ultimate principle, then the latter must share this primordial and irreducible characteristic.

I'm just flipping through a book by Charles Hartshorne called The Divine Relativity, and while I have problems with his theology as a whole, on this we agree, for example, that 

A personal God is one who has social relations, really has them, and thus is constituted by relationships and hence is relative -- in a sense not provided for by the traditional doctrine of a divine Substance wholly nonrelative toward the world, though allegedly containing loving relations between the "persons" of the Trinity.

As we've said on many occasions, I don't see why God would go to all the trouble of revealing the Trinity to us unless it truly revolutionizes our default metaphysical setting of God as absolute and unrelated Oneness, and instead reveals something totally unexpected and counter-intuitive about the nature of ultimate reality.

Just my hunch. 

What is a person if not a being qualified and conditioned by social relations, relations to other persons? And what is God if not the supreme case of personality? 

What if "sociality" becomes more intense as we ascend the vertical hierarchy? Then "God, if social, is eminently and supremely so," the last (and first) word in social relations. If this be the case, then God's immutability is transposed to a different and higher key, to the immutable mutability (so to speak) of eternal substance-in-relation. Which again seems paradoxical, but let's try anyway.

For Hartshorne, the Absolute is not something more than God, rather, something less. This is in contrast to, say, Schuon's view that the Absolute is prior, and that the diverse revelations symbolically express this Absoluteness a posteriori. But for Harshorne,

The Absolute is God with something left out of account. God is more than his absolute character.... I am arguing that the absolute is, rather, an abstract feature of the inclusive and supreme reality which is precisely the personal God.

Here again, Schuon would say that the personal God is but the "confessional face" of what is ultimately impersonal and "beyond-being." It is a way for us to relate to God, even though, in the ultimate sense, it is more for our convenience than going to God's ultimate nature, which is supra-personal.

Eh, I don't buy it. What if we turn things around and see the relative as inclusive of the absolute, rather than vice versa? Is this possible? Harthorne thinks so: "Maximizing relativity as well as absoluteness in God enables us to conceive him as supreme person." Conversely, 

If God be 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. This is precisely not to be personal in any sense relevant to religion or ethics (emphasis mine).

Here again, "it is the divine Person that contains the Absolute, not vice versa," for "God merely as absolute is nonactual; God as personal is at least actual." 

A wholly absolute God is power divorced from responsiveness or sensitivity.... A wholly absolute God is totally beyond human tragedy, and his power operates uninfluenced by human freedom...

"A wholly absolute supreme being is a contradiction in terms," since it would imply that "relativity is as truly good as nonrelativity," but we say relativity and responsiveness are perfections, and eminently so in God. Likewise, a closed and unrelated human being is as inconceivable as a closed and unrelated God, and for the same reason. 

Again, just my opinion. But you will notice a comment by Robert Barron in the sidebar:

No, the perfect, unchanging God of whom Thomas speaks must be a gyroscope of energy and activity and at the same time a stable rock.

A fine example of orthoparadox.