I'm not sure what to make of this post, and I hesitate to publish it. Large sections of Book III are mostly written, but here I ran into a section that consists of a lot of fragments. Some of it — more toward the bottom — seems to have been inspired by Berdayev, but there are no citations or quotation marks. I’ll do my best to sort it out, but the whole thing is of bootleg quality.
Never purchase a Chinese post on Ebay.
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In this house We Believe in Science. Except to say that for cosmotheandrism science is posterior to reality. Or in other words, science is about reality, this being possible because the Cosmos is pervaded by an Aboutness (Axiom 4) that relates one thing to another.
For the same reason, reality is the scripture prior to scripture (or revelation prior to revelation), otherwise there would be nothing with which to write it nor anyone to read it. Obviously religion presumes a Cosmos and Anthropos, each related to the other and to their own higher principle.
For both science and theology the Cosmos we see is but the outer side of the one we don’t, and the latter is more real than the former. For this reason we are always in an ambiguous situationship with O: we are all about the Cosmos and Theos, and vice versa: our bridge to reality not only flows in two directions but four: in, out, up, and down.
And this four-way innersection is first located in divinas, for the cosmotheandric Godhead may be visualized in the form of two related open spirals, one on the horizontal plane, the other vertical. For Christianity these would be conceptualized as the economic and immanent trinities, respectively. The first refers to the eternal inner life and relationality of the Godhead, whereas the latter has to do with its (vertical) prolongation into time and creation.
That was relatively clear. What follows is not.
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Here we need to dwell for a moment on exactly what the Trinity is and is not, because one of the most important things it is, is not, this being because one Person or pole of the Godhead is not the other but related to the other. Therefore, the principle of relationality is notness. Except this is not a bipolar or dualistic notness in which our parties would be forever separated, rather, one in which the three unites the two, thus reconciling Is and Is Not.
As we now know, the Cosmos is not a thing but an evolving event: it is not in time but of time, so it can never be understood outside the context of its own historicity. One might even say it is a story or narrative. Here again, the reality of this narrative is prior to the science we deploy to map the narrative, but like any good story the Cosmos is full of surprises.
A dynamic and triune Godhead is also an event and therefore a kind of story, except this story has no beginning or end. God is his own narrative and even his own theogony, i.e., a revelation of himself to himself, or an eternal self-causing, self-generating, and self-coming-to-be. God is spontaneously creative out of the dark ground of his own relational beyond-beingness.
Here is where things really start to fall apart:
God is not just a static unity, rather, “enfolds in his Logos every conceivable particularity, which are also manifest, in their pure particularity, as the creation outside of God.” (Berdayev?). Here “the unity of the unfathomable One” lies “beyond its own immanent totality” (ibid?).
All-possibility means God’s perfection includes — in a manner of speaking — imperfection, lack, and finitude, “only because his plenitude turns out to include those things also.” I am what I am and I am what I will be imply that God is simultaneously what he has become, what he is, and what he further becomes: his own story is one of relation, event, receptivity, relational connection, and reflexive self-becoming…
Everything whatsoever has to identify with something else in order to be something itself at all…. If identity is only through relational identification, then that seems to suggest that I am what I am not…
The meaning of existence is to ex-ist in the way that the Father exists in the Son and the Son exists in the Father. In short, the gospel suggests to us a completely different notion of what it means to exist, namely, to be in and for another…. The Father has no existence (no identity) except in the Son, the Son has no existence (no identity) except in the Father, and the Holy Spirit has no existence (no identity) except as the love of the Father and the Son for one another. In and of themselves, the persons of the Trinity have no identity and are nothing in themselves except by dint of that essentially existing love by which they are what they are.
The Father is the Eternal Ground of the divine essence, which neither exists nor has any form except in the Son; the Son is the Eternal Ex-istence of this ground, its Eternal Splendor; and the Spirit is the Eternal Return of God’s existence into God’s essence…. Its existence is a standing outside oneself…
The identity of the persons of the Trinity would appear to consist precisely not in themselves, but rather outside themselves in the triune form of a reciprocal, selfless ecstasy…. It is not that God is (or has) an identity before or apart from his ecstasy, but rather that he remains in himself, paradoxically, by going beyond himself.
In other words, in God, immanence is transcendence, essence is existence, and identity is ecstasy…. Like God, we are not already what we are, but must become what we are.... God shows us how and how not to exist: not statically in oneself, much less curved in upon oneself, which is the definition of sin and contradiction of being, but rather to exist as the word itself etymologically suggests, namely, ecstatically…
You-ness completes me-ness?
Secondness has the sense of difference, the idea of an over-against otherness, which, on the face of it, seems to allow only separation and not mediation. Thirdness restores a continuity…. not being merely dualistic or dyadic, but of a secondness as ontological communication beyond self-recurring mediation.... The over-full is in the origin, not only full of himself, but overfull….
Some order is restored in the following few passages:
Eckhart describes the paradox in his usual unusual way: The Word of God is always “in the beginning,” which “means that it is always in the process of being born and is always already born.”
Moreover, “God is a being beyond all being; God is a beingless being.” In other words, he is in one sense prior to being, but in another sense always related to it, as is Father to Son, or Ground to Possibility, Absolute to Infinite, Source to Manifestation, et al. For Eckhart “The final goal of being is the darkness and unknowability of the hidden divinity.” Why dark? Because pure light itself is invisible, only becoming visible as a consequence of striking the surface of something. One might say that Beyond-Being is the darkness of this invisible light before it strikes being. Thus “God is a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being,” because a being beyond-being — the ultimate something — is again the nonappearance of an invisible nothing.
This is all by way of saying there is the cataphatic God we can know, in dialectical relation with the apophatic God Beyond-Being whom we cannot know but can definitely unknow.
In the following section, I will discuss what I just put you through in a less annoying manner.
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