The problem with retirement is that the reading gets ahead of the blogging -- or input ahead of output -- so thoughts can get backed up. Congested. Lately I feel like I need a dump truck to unload my head, in that posts begin forming before I'm even fully awake, forcing me to get out of bed and take dictation before the thoughts vanish over the subjective horizon.
Nicolai Berdyaev must have felt like this all the time. He comes up in Harshorne's Philosophers Speak of God as an example of a precursor to the diplolar theology discussed in the previous post -- the idea that God includes both sides of various complementarities in an eminent way, while humans herebelow usually describe God with only one of the terms while denigrating the other.
For example, classical theologians describe God as immutable just because some smartass Gricks and Troysirs thought change was an imperfection or privation. But who says change can't be a perfection?
You just said who, in reference to a passage in Finnegans Wake that reads Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall (there being two sights for ever a picture) for in the byways of high improvidence that’s what makes lifework leaving, implying some sort of dynamic complementarity.
Good catch. I was just using a silly pun in reference to the Greek emphasis on God's immutability, but in fact, the whole book is about various dynamic complementarities:
Stripping away its accidental features, the book may be said to be a compact of mutually supplementary antagonisms: male-and-female, age-and-youth, life-and-death, love-and-hate; these, by their attraction, conflicts, and repulsions, supply polar energies that spin the universe....
Under the seeming aspect of diversity -- in the individual, the family, the state, the atom, or the cosmos -- these constants remain unchanged (Campbell & Robinson).
Ultimately the world is "nothing more than the eternal dynamic implicit in birth, conflict, death, and resurrection."
Now, we wouldn't say antagonisms or conflicts exist in God. While there is a Father and a Son, there is no rivalry between them. Problems arise with creation, where we see how complementarities can become dualisms, contraries, and antagonisms -- between God and man, male and female, woman and serpent, brother and brother, order and chaos, urban and rural, shepherds and farmers... And that's just in the first few pages of Genesis.
In essence, Genesis lays the groundwork for many of the conflicts that have plagued humanity throughout history, exploring themes of sin, redemption, power, and relationships (Gemini).
But let's not get sidetracked. Hartshorne also approves of Berdyaev's theodicy, which is
on a more sublime level than the usual cold-blooded justifications of evil. Evil springs from the indeterminacy which providence itself cannot banish; indeed, providential action on God's part presupposes indeterminacy in God himself..., and it must allow such indeterminacy in the creatures if they are to exist as real or active.
But if we are to take the dipolar approach, God must always be maximally determined and undetermined, the latter (in my opinion) going to his freedom, because "determined freedom" makes no sense. It would be like "compulsory play."
In any event, Hartshorne calls this a true "metaphysics of love," and why not? You cant't force yourself to love someone, nor can someone force you to love them.
What about love thy neighbor and forgive thine enemies, and all those other impossible directives?
Fair point, but it says here that
Forgiveness is not only difficult but practically impossible without grace. Only God’s grace makes us capable of Christian forgiveness, to be merciful as our heavenly Father is merciful. Indeed, we can be merciful as He is only because we have Him as our Heavenly Father.
In short, "when He gives a command He also gives the grace to fulfill it." Which preserves our free will -- the indeterminacy noted above -- because no one is compelled to cooperate with grace. Except theological determinists, of whom we are not one.
Yesterday I was reading Seneca's letters on the advice of the erstwhile Ricky Raccoon. In them Seneca makes a striking point about the nature of time, that "the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands." The past is dead and the future is unborn, so all we really have is this fleeting but living now.
Similarly, Berdyaev writes of how each moment "murders" the preceding one: once determined it joins the realm of the dead, so to speak. However, if we're going to be dipolar about it, then determinacy and indeterminacy must be complementary, constituting the living freedom and spontaneous creativity of the present moment. Actually, that was a question. Perhaps this post will find the answer.
It seems to me that Berdyaev's theology is very much in and of the now. Indeed, he seems like an indiscriminate firehose with no off button. I pulled out my volume of Christian Existentialism: A Berdyaev Synthesis, in which Lowrie (the editor) endeavors to impose some order on his wild and wooly corpus, something which Berdyaev himself never bothered with. Rather, he was too busy with the firehose. Thus, "His thought leaps from one idea to another," and "mutually contradictory dicta are not infrequent."
Was he a member of any orthodox (or Orthodox) denomination? Not exactly, for although a member of the Orthodox church,
it must be said that he was an independent and somewhat a "liberal" kind. He criticized the Russian Orthodox Church and described his views as anticlerical.... "I never severed my link with the Orthodox Church, although confessional self-satisfaction and exclusiveness are alien to me."
A firehose with no firehouse, as it were. Perhaps similar to God, who is "a beginningless process of divine actualization" (Hartshorne), and who can pretend to reduce him to some manageable monopolar human category?
Let no man presume to tame the wild Godhead!
Hear hear. "It is extraordinary how limited is the human conception of God":
The static conception of God as [pure act] having no potentiality and completely self-sufficient is a philosophical, Aristotelian, and not a biblical conception (Berdyaev, ibid. all subsequent quotes).
"Self-satisfaction," "self-sufficiency," and "the demand for continual submission" are "qualities which the Christian religion considers vicious and sinful, though it calmly ascribes them to God.... That which in God is regarded as a sign of perfection, in man is considered an imperfection, a sin." But in reality, God
is not something but no-thing, and none of our determinations are applicable to Him.... it is utterly unthinkable to ascribe to God the Creator self-sufficiency, self-satisfaction and despotism as characteristics of His inner life.
"People are afraid to ascribe movement to God, because movement indicates the lack of something." If that's the case, what's the bloody point of the Trinity -- and indeed the bloodier point of the Incarnation?
it may equally well be said that immobility is an imperfection, for it implies a lack of the dynamic quality of life.
I am the way and the truth and the life sounds pretty dynamic to me.
To deny tragedy in the Divine life is only possible at the cost of denying Christ.... This is the theology of abstract monotheism....
Abstract monarchic monotheism... refuses to recognize the inner dynamism of the Divine life...
Likewise,
Creation of the world cannot be deduced from the Absolute which is perfectly self-sufficient. Creation of the world implies movement in God, it is a dramatic event in the Divine life....
The very concept of creature
has meaning and dignity only if the creation of the world be understood as the realization of the Divine Trinity within the inner life of the Absolute, as a mystery of love and freedom.
Moreover, God made man "a creator too, calling him to free spontaneous activity and not to formal obedience to His power." In fact, "Man's creative work is the fulfillment of the Creator's secret will" (emphasis mine). Thus we are co-creators, although God is of course first among equals, so to speak: "God the Creator has absolute power over being, but not over freedom," which would be a self-contradiction.
God the Creator has done everything to bring light into that freedom, in harmony with His great conception of creation. But without destroying freedom He could not conquer the potency of evil contained in it. This is why there is tragedy and evil in the world; all tragedy is connected with freedom.
"Creation means transition from non-being to being through a free act."
It must be admitted that in the antinomies of the Creator and the creature freedom appears as a paradox which cannot subsumed under any category.... Man is not free if he is merely a manifestation of God, a part of the Deity....
Through creation there always arises something perfectly new that has never existed before, i.e., the "nothing" becomes "something."
This is grounded in the otherness of the Trinity: "Personality from its very nature presupposes another -- the 'not self.'"
It is impossible to conceive of a personal God in an abstract and monotheistic way. A person cannot exist as a self-contained and self-sufficient Absolute.
We are "the image of the Divine Tri-unity, reversed and reflected in the world," and why not? "A person presupposes the existence of other persons and communion between them."
Personality is the highest hierarchical value and never is merely a means. But it does not exist as a value apart from its relation to God, to other persons, and to human society.
Thus, two rules, the first vertical, the second horizontal: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Number two, Love your neighbor as you love yourself.
That it?
Yeah, pretty much. We'll leave off with some more aphoristic passages, even though I am still very much backed up in the head and have much more to say, because potential misunderstandings abound:
Personality is prior to being.
Personalism must recognize the primacy of freedom over being. The philosophy of the primacy of being is a person-less philosophy.
God is the Lover, and he cannot and does not wish to exist without the loved one.
The absolute perfection of Divinity unites within itself the absolute maximum of rest with the absolute maximum of movement.
"I am the truth, the way, and the life." This means that truth is concrete personality, its way and its life; truth is dynamic in the highest degree: it is not given in a final and solidified form.
Man's fall away from God brought with it the fall of the cosmos away from man. This is the fallen state of the objectivized world.
The world is not finished -- its completion is left to man. And man must bring into everything his creative freedom, and in his knowing continue the world's creation.
My freedom and my creativeness are my obedience to the mysterious will of God.
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