Personal Jazz and Jazzical Persons

Having thought about it for a good five minutes, we could never deduce from any first principle why Trump and not Comperatore. Rather, the best we can do is listen to an overall vision in which such disparities are rendered intelligible -- or at least not radically unintelligible and off-key. 

Let's tune up with a little Schuon, taken from various sources: 

The distant and indirect cause of what we rightly call evil -- namely privation of the good -- is the mystery of All-Possibility.... the latter, being infinite, necessarily embraces the possibility of its own negation, thus the “possibility of the impossible” or the “being of nothingness.”

Manifestation is not the Principle, the effect is not the cause; that which is “other than God” could not possess the perfections of God, hence in the final analysis and within the general imperfection of the created, there results that privative and subversive phenomenon which we call evil. 

Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility -- and necessity -- of evil.

The nature of evil, and not its inevitability, constitutes its condemnation; its inevitability must be accepted, for tragedy enters perforce into the divine play, if only because the world is not God; one must not accept error, but one must be resigned to its existence. 

Evil cannot be absolute, it always depends upon some good which it misuses or perverts; the quality of Absoluteness can belong to good alone. To say “good” is therefore to say “absolute,” and conversely: for good results from Being itself, which it reflects and whose potentialities it unfolds 

So, basically, evil is here because here is not heaven, i.e., God, the Principle, the Absolute, the Good. Which at least provides a framework in which to understand the existence of evil as such, if not such and such an evil. 

Now, it seems to me that Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven implies that God's will is not done on earth, hence, that there is some sort of limit to his absolute omnipotence, as per yesterday's post, not to mention a number of previous posts over the years. We've been hmm-ing this tune for a long time.

In fact, rather than starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel of karma, what follows is re-edited material from an auto-google:

Clarke suggests that God really and truly gives us "a share in his own power" -- the mysterious power of free will -- such that we "determine the use to which this power is put, even to use it against the express conditional will of God (= sin)."

This "free self-limitation of God's exercise of His own unlimited power" solves at least two big problems, 1) the otherwise inexplicable but self-evident existence of free will, and 2) of God's responsibility for literally everything, including evil. We want to get him off the hook for the latter.

Now, there are Christians who will say that anything that happens is a result of God's Plan, but -- no offense -- some plan. Why blame him for our own stupid dreams and schemes, for our own dissonant and tone-deaf choices?  

The point is that God can still have a plan, but that he has given man the power to mess up the plan, this latter being a final cause, not an efficient one. 

The following extended passage is another example of my thoughts in Clarke's words: all that the Christian must believe with regard to causality  

is that God determines the general set of goals He wishes to achieve, the goals at which He aims the universe, and knows that in general He will be able to achieve by his suasive power, but does not determine ahead of time in detail whether or how each particular creature will achieve its share or not in this overall goal.

Again, his Plan is in the order of finality or entelechy. We might even say that the Cosmos is not a pre-written classical composition, rather, jazz, baby:

Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous "improvisation" of the divine mind and will -- from His always contemporaneous eternal now -- precisely to fit the actual ongoing activities, especially the free ones, of the creaturely players in the world drama.

Couldn't have said it better. As we've suggested in the past, the immanent Trinity is indeed much like a jazz trio, and why not? If the Father knows exactly what the Son and Spirit will play, what's the point of the playing? I myself am not a fan of formally arranged jazz, only the spontaneous kind. Likewise, God

sees what is going on, and acts accordingly. In a word, predestination does not and should not imply total predetermination. It leaves a large dose of indetermination, to be made determinate -- not ahead of time, independently, but only contemporaneous with the actual ongoing development of the world.

Otherwise it's not jazz, it's a cosmic muzak that could be produced by a machine. But God is no more a machine than is man, and for the same reason, i.e., the principle of personhood. 

Seems to me that a trinitarian metaphysic has certain extremely important, even revolutionary, entailments, otherwise -- truly truly -- why bother? If it's just a radical monism in disguise, then revelation has revealed nothing fundamentally new to our understanding of the nature of divinity.

As discussed in yesterday's post, Clarke also critiques the radical immutability of God, without going too far in the opposite direction into a pantheistic process philosophy a la Whitehead, the latter essentially equating God with pure change. So, how to reconcile change and changelessness?

[O]ur metaphysics of God must certainly allow us to say that in some real and genuine way God is affected positively by what we do.

Clarke suggests that

God's "receiving" from us, being delighted at our response to His love, is really His original delight in sharing with us in His eternal Now His own original power of loving and infinite goodness which has come back to him in return.

Is it going too far to say that "God is not only the universe's great Giver, but also thereby its great Appreciator, its great Receiver"? 

This is essentially Hartshorne's position -- that God is both ultimate cause and ultimate effect. Curiously, he doesn't ground this in the Trinity, but the first thing that occurs to me is that the Son is a kind of eternal and ultimate effect of, and relation to, the Father. 

Is this wrong? Is this sort of thing frowned upon here? Because I have another book by Clarke called The One and the Many, and it says that God is indeed "the Great Jazz Player, improvising creatively as history unfolds." Thus

The complete script of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out together in our actual ongoing now's.

In another essay, he writes the following, which is pretty much my favorite meta-idea:

God as the ultimate One now appears as both the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, at once the Source and the Goal of the restless dynamism of all of nature, of all finite beings.

The structure of this "total journey" is "in the form of a circle," the Great Circle of Being, whereby

In the emergence of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circular movement, in which all things return, as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin in the first place (Thomas, in Clarke).  

Having said this, the completion of the Great circle still "needs a mediator that can take it up into itself and somehow carry it back Home with itself," one who will even go to hell and back in order to complete the circle, and who could this be?

We're nearing the end of the tune, but I think we can agree that "person" and "immutable" are antithetical. Let's whistle past the grooveyard with a few final licks by Clarke:

To say that God is "all powerful" does not mean that He alone holds and exercises all power, but only that He is the ultimate source of all power.... 

The fact that all creatures are totally dependent on God both in their being and in their actions does not therefore mean that God determines their actions from without....  

[T]hat God is the creator of all things does not mean that He directly creates all the acts of creatures. God creates agents, beings with active natures -- or, if you wish, beings acting, not acts.