God's Problem Child

I do sometimes wonder why the blog has become less popular over the years. Perhaps it's because of posts like yesterday's, which are not exactly Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. Rather, there's something to offend everyone.

And besides, who are you to invent some new religion, or even introduce major innovations to the existing ones?

Not to be defensive, but first of all, the Bible is replete with examples of change and absence of foreknowledge in God -- of offers, tests, regrets, questions, discoveries, disappointments, bargaining, threats, warnings, conditional statements, etc., none of which are compatible with changelessness or a predetermined outcome.

You may say, "You don't get it, Bob. Those are just crude anthropomorphisms as a result of God's condescension to our level, an accommodation to our weakness." So, you're telling me that God condescends and accommodates without undergoing change? 

Besides, why not just create us with the capacity to understand? Why the baby talk? And to what end? In other words, what is the "real" message of these passages? Changelessness and determinism? That makes no sense at all. Rather, it's just confusing.

More aphoristic insights from Berdyaev. Or at least I'll try to reduce the indiscriminate spray of his firehose to something more pithy.

Man is the meeting-point of two worlds.

As mentioned yesterday, I like this guy because he tells me what I already think. Obviously we are the meeting point between two worlds. But how, and why? Does it mean we are two people in two worlds? No, that way lies dualism. Rather, a person is one, as is the cosmos, and we are conformed to it, at least potentially. 

In reality, this is a vertical and hierarchically structured cosmos, so we have access to all its levels, from matter (indeed, even the "submaterial" quantum realm) to God, and everything in between, e.g., the rational, conceptual, aesthetic, psychic, interpersonal, et al. Obviously, most of reality is immaterial, but that hardly makes it any less real. 

For Schuon, this hierarchical structure is a necessary consequence of God's Infinitude, AKA All Possibility. And I say Infinitude is the "active" dimension of the Absolute. I think it's just another way of saying that transcendence implies immanence, and vice versa. It is why God is simultaneously an infinite distance from us, and yet, closer than our jugular. Dávila gets it:

God is infinitely close and infinitely distant; one should not speak of Him as if He were at some intermediate distance.

Then again, he must be in those intermediate planes as well, for Reality is in each and every appearance. But in any event,

What a strange being -- divided and of double meaning, having the form of a king and that of a slave, a being at once free and in chains, powerful and weak, uniting in one being glory and worthlessness, the eternal with the corruptible! 

Well, someone's gotta do it. 

In his essence, man is a break in the world of nature, he cannot be contained within it. 

Here again, God is infinite and so are we. Or, we are infinitude in finitude, so to speak. But we can never contain or limit our own infinitude, rather, we always transcend ourselves, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Supposing we are God's image, then we too are a play of absolute and infinite, of change and changelessness.

Our consciousness "transcends the natural world and cannot be explained by it," so stop looking there for an explanation. Nor are we peripheral to the cosmic action, but right in the middle of it: man

knows himself to be at the absolute centre -- not of a given, closed planetary system, but of the whole of being, of all planes of being, of all worlds.

And don't let some tenured ape tell you otherwise. "Man, the microcosm, belongs to a higher, royal degree in the hierarchy of nature." Sure, we are fallen, so you might say we have abdicated the throne. But this is very different from saying we are born to be cosmic peasants toiling at the periphery of being, for

fallen man remains a microcosm and contains within himself all the ranks and all the powers of the world.

Or as Joyce put it, "Phall if you but will, rise you must." Death looks like the final fall, but not so fast, for "The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay." Like a resurrection of something? 

Christology is the only true anthropology.

Interesting. Could you say a little more?

The Christological revelation is also an anthropological revelation. And the task of humanity's religious consciousness is to reveal the Christological consciousness of man.

So, a two-way revelation, of God to man and of man to man. Is it also a revelation -- so to speak -- of man to God? Did man's rejection of Christ, not to mention the Crucifixion, come as a surprise? 

Or, going back to the beginning, was God surprised by the fall? If not, why the interrogation of Adam? Where are you? Who said you were naked? Have you eaten of that tree which I told you to leave alone? We will come back to this intriguing subject after we're finished dealing with Berdyaev. 

Now, as we never tire of pointing out, the very first thing we learn about God is that he creates. It's not only on page one, it's the first sentence, and I would argue the most important sentence in all of the Bible, because it is the first principle of which everything else is an entailment. And

Human nature is creative because it is the image and likeness of God the Creator.

In case you were wondering where all the creativity comes from.

Here's a passage that actually goes to the issue raised above as to whether God is ever surprised or caught off guard:

God awaits from man a free answer to His call, awaits answering love and creative participation in the conquest of the darkness of non-being. Man must manifest... the greatest exertion of his freedom, to accomplish what God expects of him.

Wait -- God waits? Expectantly? 

God never forces man, never sets a limit to man's freedom.... God expects man's participation in the work of world-creation. 

And if we are able to say Yes, we must be able to say No. God hopes for us to say Yes, for they say he wills for all men to be saved. But they also say that some men are not saved, so what gives? Why isn't God's will carried out with machine-like necessity? That's another post for future Bob, but we'll definitely get to it. 

Let's just say that man is God's oppositional problem child:

As a being belonging to two worlds and capable of overcoming himself, man is a contradictory and paradoxical being, comprehending within himself diametric opposites.

Sometimes he "may be not a divine-human phenomenon, but a beast-human -- that is, a complete denial of humanity." For examples, see History.

Why can't you be more like that nice boy Jesus?! (God).

Must stop now. Gotta take the wife to the airport.

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!

The End of History

The order of history is the history of order. 

The sphinx?

No, Eric Voegelin. But what is the meaning of this circular...

Antimetabole?

It was on the tip of my tongue. But the point is, it's not circular, rather, more of a spiral, because it presumes our evolving relationship with a transcendent order. 

That is to say, humans live in the space between the poles of immanence and transcendence, and within this space articulate the experience of order through diverse symbols, myths, religions, philosophies, and political systems, none of which can actually map the transcendent in a fully adequate way. 

In fact, modernity is characterized by a flight from transcendence and the attempt to articulate the order within immanence alone, e.g., scientism, metaphysical Darwinism, Marxism, and other earthbound ideologies. 

But such attempts are self-refuting, because man qua man can never actually eliminate the transcendent pole. For the same reason, one cannot eliminate teleology, which is to say, our attraction to the transcendent pole. 

One might say that "progressivism" is an absurd teleology with no telos, in other words, endless "progress" with no end or goal. Which can't actually be progress, rather, just horizontal wandering. Rearranging the deck chairs on a ship lost at sea. A bridge to nowhere.

For example, yesterday we spoke of two different orders, the static and cosmo-centric Greek conception for which time is a movement away from order, and the ancient Hebrew conception that regards history as an eschatological movement ordered toward transcendence. And in the Christian conception, this eschatological telos has entered history, such that the Logos -- which is the very source of intelligible order -- dwells among us. 

For Voegelin, the ancient Hebrew conception represented one small step for the Jews but one giant leap for mankind, because it is a more adequate symbolization of man's true order. 

Notice that the secular left specializes in destroying the symbols of this order, which results in chaos and nihilism. At the same time, they try to reimpose order via the state. But this is an immanent order: the order of the anthill, not the proper order of man toward transcendence. For what is order without transcendence but an existential prison?

We quite justly criticize the theory of progress, seeing it as a false religion that is a substitute for Christianity. But we should remember that the idea of progress is of religious, even Christian origin, that it is only a secularization and distortion of the Christian messianic idea, of the Christian search for and expectation of the Kingdom of God (Berdyaev). 

Berdyaev highlights "the distinction between evolution and progress. Evolution is a naturalistic category, while progress is a spiritual category" that is "higher than the natural process of change." 

Indeed, "the very idea of progress, i.e., movement toward an absolute, supreme purpose of the historical process, became possible only thanks to Christianity,' and which could never have arisen from "the Hellenic mind." 

"History moves toward its central and absolute event," which "determines the existence... of spiritual progress in history." 

The world's history is not an external evolution, devoid of meaning, the rearrangement of elements in the world, where no absolute meanings or values are revealed.

Rather, "there is a dynamic of meaning in the world's history, the Logos, determining inner movement."

Christianity is messianic and eschatological, i.e. dynamic, progressive, in the profound spiritual sense of the word... 

Berdyaev clearly shares many features of the Raccoon perspective, for example,

The history of the world and of mankind has meaning only if it ends. Endless history would be meaningless. 

And it would be meaningless because it is not ordered to anything beyond itself. "Endless progress, an endless process, means the triumph of death." Or, in the words of the Aphorist,

History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination. 

An abominable snow job? 

Indeed, from Marx to the 1619 project. As with any con, the payoff never arrives. 

Another relevant aphorism:

If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous.

Put conversely, our manmade efforts to find an immanent meaning in history always end in absurdity. Lucky for us, the end of history has seen fit to incarnate in the middle. Berdyaev:

Any meaning which is not commensurate with the fate of personality, with my fate, and has no significance for it, is meaningless. If the universal meaning is not at the same time personal meaning as well, then it has no meaning. I cannot live in the "great whole"; the "great whole" must live in me.

In other words,

If God existed, and this meant nothing for me and for my eternal destiny, this would be just as though God did not exist at all. 

At the same time and on another level,

my life would be just as devoid of meaning if it were endless life in the objectivized world....  Meaning lies beyond the boundaries of history, beyond the limits of personal and world history.

Man is an appearance who lives in a world of appearances. If that's all there is to it, then to hell with it. In reality, we have a noumenal spark that is drawn to -- and by -- the noumenon itself. How does it work? Here's a start:

There is nothing higher than the search for, and the love of, Truth. 

If you don't love truth you cannot know truth -- or at least don't know it as intimately as you think you do. 

Another good place to start:

Truth is meaning and may not deny meaning. To deny meaning in the world means to deny truth, to recognize nothing but darkness. Truth makes us free. To deny freedom is to deny truth. 

Here again, creative freedom takes place in that vertical space between immanence and transcendence. 

Truth does not mean staying within some closed ideas, in an inescapable circle of consciousness.... Truth is not objective, but rather, trans-subjective. 

Or to be perfectly accurate, vertical and horizontal intersubjectivity is the objective truth of things. We are open, relational, and teleologically ordered to the very ground of trans-subjectivity.

"In the final depth Truth is God and God is truth." But be careful -- "Pure truth would burst the world apart." Or maybe it did burst the world apart via the resurrection, which is, as it were, a smoking crater in the river of time, or something?

Breaking Out of the Four Walls of History

What walls are these? 

I dunno, you're putting me on the spot... Let's see: matter, finitude, immanence, and causal closure? 

Whatever we call them, they reduce to horizontality without verticality, which in turn reduce to meaningless. If there is meaning or hope, it can only result from the Light breaking in from something beyond history, from another world. And where there's a break-in, there must be a break-out.  

Berdyaev writes that "The world may be considered from two viewpoints," which is to say, cosmos or history:

For the ancient Greeks, the world was cosmos: for the ancient Hebrews the world was history. Greeks and Jews lived in different times; not at, but in, different times. 

In other words, in the Jewish conception history is going somewhere because it has a telos: this view results from a "messianic-eschatological consciousness," which, of course, leads directly to the Christian view of the Logos entering history, which is the very incarnation of meaning -- or of Meaning itSelf. 

Conversely,

A philosophy of history could never have arisen among the Greeks, because of their cosmo-centric concept of the world. For them, the golden age was in the past.... They had no great hope, oriented toward the future.

This is the depressed and depressing Tony Soprano view, that I came in at the end. The best is over, in contrast to the bubbly Frank Sinatra view that The best is yet to come, and babe, won't it be fine? 

This also involves "the dispute as to whether man is to be comprehended from the cosmos, or the cosmos from man," not to mention a "quarrel between the static and dynamic world-views," or "of a world first of all in space, versus the concept of the world primarily in time."

Of course, we can also be trapped in the ceaseless movement of time, irrespective of how much "progress" takes place within it. Rather,

The history of the world and of mankind has meaning only if it ends. Endless history would be meaningless.... Meaning lies beyond the boundaries of history, beyond the limits of personal and world history.

"By itself," writes Berdyaev, "our natural, empirical world has no meaning or significance." Rather, "it receives these from another world, the world of spirit." Spirit is the crack in the cosmic egg, whereas "thought oriented totally to the closed-in-itself, natural world" is plagued by "the meaninglessness, the accidentality, the unimportance of being."

Thus, "Knowledge of Divinity is an endless movement of the spirit," which "can never be plumbed to the bottom." 

Now yesterday we -- or Berdyaev, rather -- made the bold claim that "God reveals Himself as Human-ness," and that "Human-ness is the chief quality of God, not at all omnipotence, omniscience, etc., but humanness, freedom, love, sacrifice." Well, we know that God revealed himself in human form, but does this imply that God himself shares this form?

In a sense yes, if we substitute "person" for "human." A human is a person, but this doesn't mean that all persons are human. One of the central purposes of the Incarnation was to reveal God as person. But there is no such thing as an unrelated person. Rather, person implies other persons intersubjectively related to one another. 

This is why it would be futile to try to find the "first human," because there would have to have been at least two. In fact, I suspect there would have to be three, the most important of whom being the helpless and neurologically incomplete baby. Without him or her, we could never escape the closed world of hardwired neurology and instinct. Truly truly, the infant is father to the man, and the way out of mother nature. 

Hence the importance of the infant narratives, because Christ literally could not have been human if he weren't first a baby. We all must pass through this stage, except to say that for humans, this stage never really ends. 

Rather, humans uniquely retain their neoteny, which is why we spend our entire lives being open for isness. There is no end to our growth and learning. The question is whether we are also open to another world, and it open to us. 

Which goes back to the question raised above, as to whether man is to be comprehended from the cosmos, or the cosmos from man. Are we confined to, and explained by, the cosmos? Or is the cosmos open to another world that furnishes the true explanation of why we're here? It's either one or the other, but the implications are vast: meaning vs. nihilism, hope vs. hopelessness, teleology vs. one damn thing after another.  

Now, the mystic, I suppose, lives at the vertical frontier where the break-in and break-out occur. Certainly Jesus embodied this edge, and he is our paradigm. For Berdyaev, mysticism is "both the depth and the height of spiritual life," and why not? Christ himself plunged to the depth in order to reveal the height. 

"Mystical submersion" 

means going out of oneself, a breaking-through beyond the boundaries. All mysticism teaches that the depths of man are more than human, that in them lurks a mysterious contact with God...

Or perhaps the place where God and man meet? Certainly they meet in Christ, but do they meet in us? Yes, supposing we ourselves meet in Christ, or participate in his participation in us, so to speak.  

In mystical experience, man always goes out of his closed spiritual world and comes into contact with the spiritual first principles of being, with divine actuality.

Apparently God makes the first move. Which means that he moves, at least in some sense. In the Eastern church this is the realm of God's energies, which, according to my artificial friend, are "God's operations or activities, His ways of acting and revealing Himself in the world":

They are distinct from God's essence but are not separate from Him. Through His energies, God interacts with creation, bestowing grace and enabling humans to experience Him. These energies are uncreated, just like God's essence, meaning they are truly divine. Essentially, the energies are how God is acting toward creation.

Acting? Better yet, interacting? Works for me, since I don't have an issue with change, so long as it is a perfection and does not imply some sort of lack or privation. You could say the Father "lacks" the Son, but then again, he's been engendering him from all eternity, so there never was a time that the Father actually lacked the Son. Even if he did, in a manner of speaking, hence the constant engendering. The Son is an eternal gender surprise party

It feels like this post is simultaneously going nowhere and everywhere, so we'll just end it all with a couple further passages by Berdyaev:

if we are to deny the existence of all potentiality in God the Creator, and consequently all movement in Him, we are compelled to deny that He has creative power, for the creation of something new is linked with potentiality.

I have no issue with that. In fact, I like it. Moreover, 

The doctrine of God as pure act, a being without potentiality, in reality makes the creation of the world meaningless and absurd.

Concur. I would go so far as to say that the "meaning" of the Father is the Son, and vice versa. And this dynamic meaning has broken through the closed system of being, or the four walls of history.

This post also reminds me of a song by One Cosmos poet laureate Mose Allison: meet me at no special place, and I'll be there at no particular time.

A Christian Bewilderness Adventure

My favorite kind! 

Christ went on such an adventure when he journeyed into the desert to be tempted by the devil. Likewise Abraham before him, who was called to a great mythadventure, not to mention Moses' forty years of wandering. 

Aren't these all metaphors for our own lives? Aren't we all wondering in the bewilderness, hoping for a promised landing?

Not to change subjects -- this will all tie together -- I hope -- but supposing God exists, because he cannot not exist, would you rather have a revelation that is absolutely true but unbelievable, or substantially true but believable? For it seems to me that the second will be more efficacious than the first, getting the essential points across in a way we can assimilate.

In fact, if we want to be literal about it, God can in no way convey the absolute truth to humans, since we would be instantly vaporized. Not literally, but it would be like staring directly at the sun, which radiates more light than our eyes are equipped to handle. Therefore, if he wants to be known, God must condescend to our level. He must embark upon an adventure in humanness.

Which means that the revelation will necessarily be a divine-human admixture, since the divine is expressed in human terms. But the human is already an expression of the divine, so why not? In all of creation, human beings have the closest resemblance to God, even if the differences are infinite. 

But this does help to make sense of the Incarnation, since God incarnates in the form of his most accurate reflection. Which is to say, not as a mountain, star, ocean, etc. Not to say that these can't serve as analogies to God, only that the analogies are far more distant.

Shifting gears again, I do my best to color within the lines of orthodoxy, but it's a challenge. I'm just not a joiner, nor can I stifle my own intellect, let alone conscience. Or intuitions. All of us are mysteriously drawn to some things and repulsed by others, and one man's attraction is another man's repellant. Many things have no effect one way or another, but here again, one man's shrug of indifference can be another's obsession. 

Probably most readers do not share my preoccupation with the question of God's immutability. It doesn't seem to bother my wife. She doesn't care about the details so long as God is good.    

It takes all kinds to make a world.

Yes, only literally, as each man is a reflection of what interests and attracts him. Or rather, what attracts him is a function of his particular soul configuration. One man's answer can be another man's prison. Even if truth is universal, it is refracted through our unique particularity. Which does not imply that truth is relative, rather, that we are.

But wait: ultimate truth is relative, at least if we're talking about the Trinity, which is an irreducible relationship of persons. Likewise, there is always a relationship between us and the truth, otherwise we would be the truth. But perhaps relation to truth is the Truth? 

In the orthodox view, God is described as eternal, infinite, unchangeable, omniscient, and perfectly loving. But also incomprehensible, so it seems that the previous categories must be taken with a grain of apophaticism, i.e., No One Tames the Wild Godhead. No one can enclose God in human terms. But God can enclose himself in humanness (except to say that man is by nature open, as is God).

Moreover, some of these attributes seem frankly at odds with one another, especially lov-ing, which is a verb, and if God is unchangeable then verbs need not apply. 

Also "infinite." On the one hand this can be a negative definition, as in "not finite" or "indefinite." But for Schuon, infinitude is more of a verb, or at least it certainly implies movement; if the Absolute is static, its first entailment is Infinitude, which is the "radiation" of the Absolute into all-possibility, which is in turn the principle of freedom and creation -- creation being a possibility and not a necessity. 

I just don't see how one can square immutability and creativity, which strike me as opposites. And if creation is a possibility, how do we avoid situating possibility -- which is to say contingency -- in God? I'm well aware of the arguments. I just don't buy them.

The thought occurs to me that it takes a wild man to venture into, and back out of, the wild Godhead. Berdyaev is such a man. In reading him, I keep saying to myself, This guy is wild! But he's wild in a way that resonates with me. And if God is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose, then why not listen to this queer man?

Now a bewilderness adventure into the wild Godhead isn't for everyone. Rather, this is the calling of the mystic, for example, the equally wild and wooly Meister Eckhart. Mystics don't want the watered down version, but want to drink the whole ocean. Which no one can do, but it's fun to try. Or at least fun for the mystical type.

With this in mind, let's follow Berdyaev's tracks and see where they lead. Here's one:

The achievement of final unity which will solve all the contradictions and antinomies of human thought... is possible only apophatically, as apophatic knowledge of the Absolute, or communion with God and the Kingdom of God.

In other words, start with what we don't know, and take it from there. Conversely, with a conventional cataphatic approach, "dualism remains, the conflict between two elements, contradictions," etc. Such contradictions necessarily plague exoteric religion, but most people aren't bothered by them. Certainly the atheist is troubled by them, and they may even be why he is an atheist. 

But there's a better way to cope with the contradictions, which is to say, plunge into the bewilderness, where contraries are integrated because they were never dis-integrated to begin with. In the bewilderness one is free, and

freedom cannot be derived from being: freedom is rooted in nothingness, in bottomlessness, in non-being.... Freedom is without foundations, it is not determined, it is not born of being. 

Freedom is the no-thing prior to something or anything. And "The primacy of freedom over being is also the primacy of spirit over being." Thus, truly truly, spirit is the wild card in the wild Godhead. After all, no one knows where it comes from or where it's going. Rather, it goes where it wants to go, gosh!

Being is static: spirit is dynamic.... We cannot think of spirit intellectually, as of object: spirit is subject and subjectivity: it is freedom and creative act. Dynamism, activity, creativeness -- stand over and against the intellectual understanding of being...

In short, we are off the grid -- the grid of familiar left-brain cartography, into "the dark abyss preceding the very beginning of the knowledge of being." Conversely,

Objectivization is not true realization, but only symbolization; it produces signs of reality, not reality itself. 

The noumena is phenomenalized via symbolism. The mystic takes the reverse path, from phenomena to noumena:

The prophets, the men of creative genius, come into this world from the noumenal world -- they are ambassadors of Spirit. 

And "Spirit is the truth of being." 

Spirit is of God and to God. By the Spirit man receives everything from God, and by the spirit man gives everything to God, augments the talents given to him, creates what has never been.... Spirit emanates from God, is poured in, or breathed into, man. 

Thus, "Spirit is not only divine: it is divine-human... it is freedom in God and freedom from God." 

Reminds me of Meister Eckhart: "I pray God to rid me of God." Careful there -- such talk could get a man condemned! Nevertheless,

For the intellect to be free, it must become naked and empty and by letting go to return to its prime origin (Eckhart).

Into the desert bewilderness. Back to Berdyaev,

The spirit seeks eternity: the material knows only the temporal. True achievement is to achieve eternity.

Come to think of it,  

The mystic is the only one who is seriously ambitious. 

For Berdyaev, "God is the completeness toward which man cannot avoid striving." But "there are two movements, and not one: from God toward man, and from man toward God," and let's meet in the middle.

Conversely,

an objectivized God is God alienated from man and lording it over him, and at the same time a God created by man's limitedness, and reflecting man's limitations. Man becomes the slave of his own exteriorization and objectivization. 

And "Cataphatic theology is concerned with an objectivized God." But even man can never be objectivized, or can never be exhausted or contained. Which means that, in a way, we are as wild as the wild Godhead, or at least its irreducibly mysterious reflection herebelow.

Man is the meeting-point of two worlds.... With almost equal right we may speak of man's divine origin, and of his development from the lowest forms of nature.

We span the whole vertical existentialada, so

Man is not only of this world but of another world; not only of necessity, but of freedom; not only out of nature, but from God... 

Wild!

Man's highest consciousness of himself is not explicable by the world of nature and remains a mystery to that world....

In his essence, man is a break in the world of nature, he cannot be contained within it (italics in original). 

No wonder the wild God incarnates as one of us!

There is a deep and very significant analogy between Christ's consciousness of himself and man's consciousness of his own nature. Only the revelation of Christ gives a key to solving the problem of man's consciousness of himself. 

Oh? How so?

God reveals Himself as Human-ness. Human-ness is the chief quality of God, not at all omnipotence, omniscience, etc., but humanness, freedom, love, sacrifice. 

Now, that will require some cleaning up, but we'll save it for the next installment.

No One Tames the Wild Godhead!

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 from Finnegans Wake 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).

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.