Theophany, Cosmophany, Anthrophany

In your eagerness to get on with your life, you probably -- as did I -- skimmed past that penultimate sentence yesterday: "Theophany" -- an appearance or manifestation of God -- "is given above all in freedom rather than authority." 

That's a rather remarkable claim, because it essentially means that God appears where he disappears, so to speak. In other words, freedom is an absence of coercion and constraint; it is self-initiating, self-determining, and open-ended. 

Now, as we've said many times, freedom itself comes from God and is cosmically inexplicable in the absence of God: the very existence of free will illuminates a vertical trail of transcendence that leads straight back to the Creator. One of my favorite characterizations if it comes from Stanley Jaki:

far more grippingly than one's immediate grasp of reality does one's registering of the reality of one's free will bring one face to face with that realm of metaphysical reality which hangs in mid-air unless suspended from that Ultimate Reality, best called God, the Creator. 

Note that freedom isn't just a theo-phany but a -- there's no word, so I'll have to make one up -- a cosmophany, i.e., the appearance or manifestation of a cosmos, of an ordered world, of reality. Free will is why my dog doesn't know there's a cosmos. 

At the same time, freedom is a -- here again, there is no word -- an anthrophany, which is to say, the revelation of man, of subjectivity, of inwardness, of the person. Here again, my dog is not a person, nor does she know or care. To quote Jaki again,     

in a certain sense, free will "is subjectivity itself." Thus, we are free to the extent that we are a subject rather than an object. However, freedom can only be exercised in an objective world, which is to say, on objects, including "objects" within oneself.

Therefore, it seems that both subject and objects -- cosmophany and anthrophany -- co-arise in the indeterminate space of freedom. I call this a pretty, pretty important idea. 

Leaving God to the side for a moment, consider the fact that if everything were subjective, then there couldn't be free will either. Rather, there must be some sort of "resistance" in order for subjectivity to distinguish itself from necessity and objectivity. 

If the world were a friction-free function of my will, then there would be no distinction or delay between desire and reality, between the way things are and the way we want them to be. We would all be liberals.

On the other hand, if reality were merely objective, a world of pure outwardness and blind necessity, then obviously we could never know it. Rather, truth is a function of the freedom to know it. For which reason all arguments against the existence of free will are so many proofs of it.  

But at the same time, an absolute freedom -- freedom with no constraints whatsoever -- would equate to absolute meaninglessness. We might say that freedom is intertwined with purpose. 

For example, the Judeo-Christian affirmation of man's freedom is "born out of the perspective that man was given freedom not in order to do anything he wants to but that he should be able to do what he is supposed to do" -- not automatically but freely. 

In other words, we are created free so that our actions "may have that merit which only a freely performed act can have. God therefore has to remain a subtly hidden God, lest man should find himself 'constrained' to obey Him" (Jaki). 

Creativity too is obviously bound up with freedom, which is why machines aren't artists and artists are not machines. 

This leads to an interesting and possibly heretical speculation about the necessity -- or let's say "necessity" -- of the (or a) world for God's freedom, for again, "freedom can only be exercised in an objective world."

In other words, just like any other person, how could God be meaningfully free unless there are objects (or, in our case, subjects) to act upon? 

To put it another way, perhaps God's freedom is ultimately given its highest expression in the existence of the free human subjects who can either deny or align themselves with him. Thus, denial of God is the ironyclad proof of his existence. 

All, of this, I suspect, is entailed in the metaphysics of the Trinity, in the sense that God indeed has his own Other, in and through whom he "knows himself," so to speak. Although the Son is "inevitable" in a manner of speaking, we would not say that he is a function of necessity, the way a machine produces an artifact. Rather, supposing God is freedom itself, so too is the engendering of the Son. 

The Son is God's own theophany?

I don't see why not. Moreover, the Incarnation is God's own anthrophany (and our theophany), while creation itself is his cosmophany. And God's cosmophany must be our theophany, for, as we know, the Creator's 

invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

Who's they? 

That would be the unrighteous, the ungodly, the men who suppress the truth: "professing to be wise, they became fools," i.e., two-footed beasts, tenured apes, and credentialed chimps. 

I'm looking for problems in what I've said above, but I don't see any. However, we're getting ahead of ourselves, because this is a subject I wanted to tackle after we've playgiarized with Berdyaev for all he's worth. He does, however, have a great deal to say about freedom, for example,

Freedom is not a right, but an obligation.

For which reason there can be no right to be or do wrong, even though God knows better than anyone that the potential to do wrong is a necessary entailment of freedom. In other words, if you're going to create a creature capable of truth and goodness, this creature must be capable of falsehood and badness, of lying and evil.

He was a murderer from the beginning? Not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him? And when he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies?

Yes, but who is he? This is also the subject of a future post, but let's say that man wasn't the first to fall. Rather, his was preceded by a much more consequential fall, the rebellion of Satan and his naughty minions. And his fingerprints are all over man's subsequent fall.

For Berdyaev, freedom is prior to being, and being is indeed a consequence of freedom, for 

nowhere can we find some solid element which determines freedom from within. Freedom of the spirit is a bottomless well. Our substantial nature could never be the basis of freedom. On the contrary, all nature is born of freedom. Freedom proceeds not from nature, but from... the abyss which preceded freedom. Freedom is rooted in "nothingness." 

Conversely, "the determined world, that of physical and psychical causality, is a secondary world," for "necessity is the result of freedom, the consequence of a certain directed form of freedom." 

In short, you can't squeeze freedom from necessity, but nor can freedom be exercised with no constraints whatsoever. Is the Father "free" to not engender the Son? I suspect not, but that is of course above my praygrade. But God must in a sense be "constrained" by his nature, unless he has no nature at all. 

For example, they say God's essence (or nature) is to exist. Therefore, he can't help existing, and if he didn't exist, only he could know it. On the other hand, if he does exist, then only man can not know it, because man is free -- even though freedom is inexplicable in the absence of God. Here again, denial of God is a sufficient proof of God. 

I say the existence of persons is proof of the Person. And

Personalism must recognize the primacy of freedom over being. A philosophy of the primacy of being is a philosophy of the impersonal.

In fact,

Every objectivized intellectual system is one of determinism. It derives freedom from being..., which in the last analysis means that freedom [would be] the child of necessity. 

But again, "freedom cannot be derived from being; it is rooted in nothingness, in non-being." Non-being? Does this mean God does not exist?

How so?

Well, they say that God isn't a being, rather, the act of being itself, not merely a being among other beings, but rather being itself. Now, what is the source of being? Must be non-being -- or better, beyond-being -- unless I'm missing something. Again,

Being is secondary: it is the product of objectivization.... Freedom is more primary than being.... it is bottomless, foundationless.

This being the case, the Godhead must be a kind of dialectic between being and beyond-being, which would be none other than creation from nothing? That was a question.

I don't know what else to say about that, because here we reach the limits of the sayable. Perhaps one more word, which is to say, the Word of God: "The Son of God descends into 'nothingness,' that is into  primordial freedom," which "extracts the poison from freedom without destroying freedom itself."

I don't know about you, but I'm bushed. To be continued...