Of Square Circles and Determined Freedom

I want to try to finish our excursion into Berdyaev, because I'm still trying to catch up with my reading, and we're several books behind. In other words, I'm blogging about what happened in my head two or three weeks ago.

What's the hurry?

I don't know. I guess it's just better if reading is synchronized with writing, so it's more fresh. Since this is the Vertical Church of What's Happening Now, I prefer not to write about what was happening a week or two ago. No one cares about yesterday's nous.

I suppose the main thing I like about Berdyaev is that he tells me what I want to hear. It's not that his ideas are new, but that they agree with mine, and it's always nice to have some venerable back-up when you think you're out there all alone. If you're abiding on the fringes of the cosmos and disagree with everyone else, there's a good chance that it's because you're just wrong, or eccentric at best. 

Perhaps my theological preferences are just characterological -- in other words, a function of being built this way. But it's a relief to discover other people who are built this way, so I'm not the only fringe character. Nor do I agree with everything Berdyaev says -- and neither does he -- but at least we're living in the same cosmos. 

And in this cosmos change is king, albeit with certain qualifications, for where there's a king there's a queen, and even a prince.

That is, change needs to be reconciled with changelessness, which goes back to Hartshorne's bipolar theology, in which seeming opposites are reconciled in God, for example, absolute/relative, time/eternity, cause/effect, necessary/contingent, immutable/creative, determined/free, etc. Why pick sides, when it's always both/and? 

For example, regarding the concept of God's absoluteness, Berdyaev writes that 

The God of revelation, the God of the Bible is not the Absolute: in Him there is dramatic movement and life, relationship to another, to man and the world. It was by applying Aristotelian philosophy that men transformed the God of the Bible into pure act, and deprived him of all inner movement.  

Now, Aristotle says God is immutable, so this must override anything in the Bible that suggests otherwise. Likewise, God is pure act, and therefore devoid of potential. 

To which I say baloney, because creation is not determinism, nor is freedom necessity. Again, if all of this is just an inevitable entailment of God, then to hell with it, because we're just passive witnesses to our predetermined lives, like watching our own slow motion funeral.

Or at least that is not my preference, because of the way I'm built. Call it the argument from Bob.

The Absolute cannot move out of itself and create a world; we cannot ascribe to him movement or change.

Well, I can, because 

If we define reality as a closed and completed being, in which there is no further possibility of change or movement, then we must inevitably deny the possibility of creative act. 

Forced to choose between eternal immutability and boundless creativity, I'm going with the latter. But we needn't choose, because God reconciles and even transcends both. You may have noticed the quote by Bishop Barron toward the bottom of 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. 

Dávila:

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

For example, how does he reconcile three persons and one nature, or one person with two natures? I don't know, but perhaps it's analogous to how we reconcile two natures in one person. After all, we have an animal nature and a human nature, and where's the line? 

One cheap (but expensive) solution is a dualism that separates mind and body. But the whole point is that they're not separate. We just don't understand how they are one. But maybe they're one in the same way God is. And only God ultimately knows how this can be the case.

Likewise,

The possibility of performing a creative act, to manifest change and novelty is linked with imperfection. This is a paradox. 

This paradox can only be resolved with reference to a higher orthoparadox:

To avoid any misunderstanding, we must say that if we admit the possibility of creativeness in God, and hence the possibility of movement, then we must admit that this creativeness and this movement do not take place in time, as we understand the word. 

Rather, as God understands the word. And how does he understand time? The classical view is that he doesn't, because he sees everything all at once. Time for us is just the illusion of the serial unfolding of the inevitable.

Which I do not believe for one second, because I'm built this way. I say there is something analogous to time in divinas; or that what we experience as time has an eminent analogue in God. Is God not having a good time? Of course he is. For example, engendering the Son must be a blast, otherwise why bother?

Creativity presupposes movement and dynamic within divine life.

And why not? If it's good enough for us it ought to be good enough for God. Why should we have a power that God lacks? It's really the other way around: we have it because God cannot not have it, and we're his image & likeness herebelow. Our creativity too comes out of "nothing," in the sense that it is undetermined and no one sees it coming. 

Which raises an interesting question that I'm investigating at the moment: does God know ahead of time each and every entailment of his own creation? Or is there something that in principle is impossible to predict in detail because God creates creatures that are truly free? And who are thereby co-creators.  

God has laid upon man the duty of being free.

Damn right he has, but some folks don't like it that way, for there are secular and religious determinists who want to make the freedom go away. 

"Unenlightened by faith, reason naturally inclines toward monism or dualism," but duality is perfected in a higher threeness, so to speak: "The relation of God to the Other is made perfect in a Third," "in whom the drama is finished, the circle closed." Or rather, always finished and perpetually getting under way. Opening and closing, like a divine metabolism or something.

The life of man and of the world is an inner movement of the mystery of the Trinity.

One reason I like Berdyaev is that he draws out the metaphysical implications of the Trinity, instead of conflating it with the immutable. The latter is just an abstraction, when the concrete reality is eternal movement. And "eternal movement" is another kind of immutability, of changeless change or changing changelessness. 

Both God and man are open; and we are open because God is:

Man existing as a closed-off individual would have no means of knowing the universe. Such a being would not be of a higher order than other separate things in the world, would not overcome this separate condition.  

Likewise God, who is anything but a "closed-off individual." And God surely has a means of knowing the universe, even if he cannot know what is unknowable in principle, for example, the outcome of truly free actions. He no doubt has a pretty good idea, but nevertheless, freedom means freedom; it cannot be another name for necessity, nor can God do something illogical or absurd, such as creating a square circle.  

Oh my. We're already well over a thousand words, so, to be continued... At this rate I'll never catch up to future Bob!