For the past 24 hours we’ve been holding the thought that the perfect world must be imperfect, the reason being that necessity + possibility is better than either one alone, if only because neither would even be conceivable. The Cosmos itself is both lawful and contingent, thus accounting for its ceaseless novelty, or “creativity within the creation,” so to speak. But this same dynamism is present in divinas, for again, our Theos principle is irreducibly Absolute and Infinite. Which makes God himself contingent, or rather, contingency a property of the Godhead.
Analogously, it is not so much that God doesn’t move as he is ummoved by anything outside himself, i.e., self-moved. In Christianity this self-movement is conceptualized in terms of the economic Trinity whereby the Father eternally begets the Son and the Spirit proceeds from them in a kind of dynamic dance, i.e., perichoresis. For cosmotheandrism this is the very sparchetype of the Cosmic Area Rug, or at least one way of lighting its flame.
There are others?
Sure. We torched on a couple of them in the previous post, from the worlds of Vedanta and Taoism. There is also a tradition in Judaism that looks into this matter, in particular, Talmudic interpretations — midrashim — on the nature of divine creativity. A number of these rabbis concluded that God’s creativity did not begin with the creation of our Cosmos, rather, that God has always been creating because that is what creators do. In other words, supposing God is eternal then so too is his creativity. Thus is it highly likely that there are other worlds, even if those worlds are not really any of our business. Rather, from our end, One Cosmos is already more than we can handle. No need to speculate about a hypothetical multiverse. (Although for Kabbalah even this world contains other unseen worlds, but we’ll leave them alone for now.)
You may not be interested in other intracosmic worlds, but they are interested in you.
That’s a separate subject. As to a perfect world being imperfect, just imagine what life would be like if yesterday were identical to every yonderday. Under those conditions we wouldn’t be bored stiff, rather, always already stiff. They say that the glory of God is a human being fully alive, but what is Life? What ever else it is, it never stands still or it would be dead. Life Itself is an evolving system of contingency and necessity ordered to its own open yonder.
What high as that?!
That’s for the poetry department, All I know is that We follow, now we follow — Yonder, yes yonder, yonder!
∞
A Cosmos of pure indeterminacy would be as unthinkable as one of pure necessity — one might say that it would be not even absurd. Rather, potency and actuality are complementary poles of any existing thing, the question being whether these poles extend all the way up and into the Godhead. But insofar as it concerns us, In any proposition about man its paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom must emerge. Not just of bound and unbound, but bounded in order to transcend the boundaries. Or logical so as to surpass logic.
The error of scientism — or of any ideology — is to use logic as a cage, when our friend Gödel has proven that this is strictly impossible. On the one hand we escape the cage of logic, but if we jettison logic altogether, this places us in another kind of cage. Or rather, it would be like dropping someone into the middle of Death Valley and declaring him to be free, which you might call a prison of infinitude. For which reason Dávila says that Total liberation is the process that constructs the perfect prison, and that Upon finding himself perfectly free, the individual discovers that he has not been unburdened of everything, but despoiled of everything.
Logic becomes a cage to the extent that it limits reality to its own restricted categories. Instead of the bad infinite described above (the endless desert), we now confine ourselves to a bad finite. It insists that anything that cannot be fully explained by a restricted form of logic is nonexistent: thus we are simply transferred from one prison to another while time keeps draggin’ on.
It takes forever to get nowhere.
Note that both of these rookie errors end up eliminating the verticality that at once transcends finitude without thereby releasing us into an infinite nothingness, as existentialists imagine. Rather, this is not just a radical freedom from, but a freedom for and to.
Elimination of the vertical occurs the moment logic tries to capture the Logos within natural reason. If one pretends that science has no limits, it means — paradoxically — that man has all the more: man becomes limited by the very science he invented. So it’s a bit like Dr. Frankenstein being killed by his own creation: as scientism expands, man necessarily shrinks.
If there is no higher privilege than Truth, then it seems that religion must be subordinate to it, not vice versa. Schuon suggests that “Truth and Revelation are not absolutely equivalent terms, since Truth is situated beyond forms, whereas Revelation, or the Tradition which derives from it, belongs to the formal order, and that indeed by definition…”
Again, a form is a limit. Analogously, jazz is a form of music, but music cannot be enclosed in the form of jazz. Rather, there are diverse forms of music, while music itself is limitless, or rather, full of possibilities that can never be exhausted by a single form. So, God must be like this: an absolute substance full of possible forms and expressions, of limits on the limitless.
“Limit” is a loaded word, for it suggests something inferior to the unlimited. Applied to God, it connotes a being “who is restricted, hampered, in what he can do and know” (Rice), inferior to the supposedly limitless God of tradition.
But even supposing God is omnipotent, this cannot be “the ability to do anything, period,” but “to do the things that fall within the range of logical possibility” (ibid). Thus, it would again be absurd to say that God’s omnipotence entails the ability to make a square circle or a married bachelor. It is not that he lacks the power per se, “but because these expressions do not refer to anything ‘doable.’ They are logical absurdities.”
This implies that God’s limitlessness cannot be completely unlimited. For example, if he is Truth itself, then there can be no falsehood in him. And supposing he is love, then this has certain implications for both God and world, because love would be strictly impossible with no other to love, nor in a deterministic Cosmos — one in which God exerts unlimited power to micromanage every event. For us it would mean, as was the case for Elvis, I can’t help falling in love with you, or for Ray Charles, I can’t stop loving you. But there is always an element of choice and of will — in other words, of knowing the truth and willing the good, not forgetting creating the beautiful.
The Cosmotheandric Imperative.
Insofar as it makes no sense to know the false, will the bad, or create the ugly.
∞
With regard to loving the good, for Hartshorne God cannot simultaneously be impassible and still meet any definition of love. Rather,
at a bare minimum, love requires both the capacity to act for the welfare of others and to sympathize with their feelings.... If this sort of love is to be attributed to the divine being, then it must be possible for God to act for the welfare of the creatures but also to be affected by their weal and woe. In short, divine love entails the divine relativity.
But divine relativity is precisely what traditional theology rejects, since “God is impassible or unaffected by anything external” to him.
As the Sun and its radiation are not two distinct substances but one substance in two modes, it is the same with regard to the Absolute Principle and its radiation via the Infinite pole of All-Possibility: we are always in God and vice versa, and that’s just the way it is. And this divine radiation is precisely what accounts for our own intellectual Light: we are created, but surely we didn’t create the uncreated Light!
Relativity is necessarily bound up with contingency, even though traditional theism denies the possibility of contingency in God. No doubt there are certain types of contingency that are necessarily impossible for God, since God himself is necessary being, just as the Sun is necessary for contingent living beings to be here at all.
But supposing we are contingent, and God really knows us, then it necessarily follows that he knows contingency. And knowledge of contingency inevitably introduces contingency into God, because to learn something is to have been changed by it, however minutely.
The only way to avoid this conclusion is to insist that everything we think and do is necessary, which reduces us to necessary entailments of the divine being, thus depriving us of our genuine freedom, including even the freedom to know or accept God.
God must possess all perfections in the highest possible degree. Since in my book love and knowledge are indeed perfections, these require relationality and responsiveness. Therefore, a non-relational God is simply not qualified for the position, for his conspicuous imperfections would render him inadequate to the diverse demands of the job description.
An impassible dream.
Correct: for cosmotheandrism nothing is impassible, least of all God.
