The ultimate division of all that exists is made by the line between “created” and “uncreated,” the one being regarded as a cause of what has come into being, the other as coming into being thereby.
Please do not take my comments as in any way mean-spirited, i mean them as constructive (and thorough) criticism. To be perfectly upfront about my thoughts, I both think that you misread and are unfair to Hart's monistic theology, and that your arguments (and overall rhetoric) evidence the same tired pattern all prior denouncements of monistic thought (in particular those directed at Bulgakov) in modern theology have; e.g., claiming "its determinist," "its impersonal," it collapses distinctions," etc, while never engaging each of these issues enough to define where ultimate metaphysical monism fails and your supposed middle way succeeds as anything other than a way to avoid logically necessary implications.
You claim that Hart equates and collapses uncreated and created causalities. He doesn't, he affirms their infinite distinction. You quote him saying as much, "‘whole power of nature’ (as we know it, at least) cannot supply.” If you quibble that he adds a hypothetical qualifier, you shouldn't because he operates on the assumption that the hypothetical is false (though he likely has in mind ante-nicene theology in which the Holy Spirit is not distinct from our spirits, in which case this is simply another part of our tradition). His arguments about an ultimate monism are explicitly drawn from the implications of creatio ex nihilo, namely that creatio ex nihilo is creatio ex deo as it is not creation from another substance or cause. Thus, when you say:
"By contrast, God’s uncreated causality initiates existence itself, breaking the analogy that Hart draws between natural and supernatural causality."
You are misreading. It is not the case that Hart fails to distinguish divine and created causality, rather, it is his proper understanding that viewed from the divine perspective all activity is simply God's activity (because God is all being and act and potency which become act). Following from this, Hart correctly argues that divine grace is natural to nature, is the creature's proper end of all its potentials, and therefore, operating on a proper ontology (which is that of Maximus' logoi, or Dionysius' predestinations, or Eriugena's exemplars, or Origen's eschatological creation) all creatures are ultimately God, are ultimately uncreated while also being created, and therefore theosis is not an external imposition or violation of nature.
This is not "simply a form of natural assistance," which is troublesome in any way, because qua finite the creature is not uncreated. Qua Being, which is God, the creature is uncreated. But this is simply eastern Orthodox theology and metaphysical common sense.
You invoke creatio ex nihilo again to try and distinguish Hart's theology from Orthodox theology (homogenized in whichever way you wish) by saying "Creation ex nihilo establishes that the world is not an outflow of God’s essence but a unique act that exists through God's continuous sustaining presence." This is wrong. Creation being an emanation of the divine essence as being, life, intellect (as explicitly in the Areopagite), is not separable from it being the free act of the divinity and vice versa. Divine freedom is simply to be fully actualized. When you deny this and try to use words like "unique act" the only conclusion I can come to is that you hold to a voluntarist account of creation, in which God chooses to create from possibilities he might not actualize, thus God becomes a mere being subject to potency himself. This should be articulated clearly, not held back as a possible interpretation.
This same predilection for using words that sound like they are meant to convey a metaphysical view but do not is evident again when you say, "The Incarnation is not merely a bridging of two realities but a profound event that brings the created and the Uncreated into a harmonious relationship without confusion or seperation." Being charitable, this is a completely apophatic statement conveying nothing. How does the incarnation bridge two alien natures (and alien they must be if an ultimate metaphysical monism is rejected)? Calling it a "profound event" doesn't say anything, we need to be cataphatic here, able to say what a proper metaphysical theology ultimately must admit (at root there is only God and God as the becoming-God).
Your Christological comments should have been informed by Hart's own recent Stanton lectures on Christology (available online and on his substack), as well as his article "Chimaeras, Masks and Portmanteaux." Drawing on Bulgakov, Hart points out and works through a glaring issue in Neochalcedonian Christology. If humanity and divinity are completely disparate and alien, there being some dualism at the root of their being, how can a divine hypostasis unite them, be them, and manifest fully through them? It cant. The question for Christology must rather be “How is it that a full subsistence of the divine nature and a full subsistence of the human nature can be one and the same subsistence, without contradiction?” And the only answer is that an ultimate dualism does not exist, the created is fit for the divine hypostasis because it is always the divinity as finite becoming infinite (godmanhood).
It should go without saying that I do not accept your characterization of Hart's views as antithetical to Orthodox spirituality, but in all that discussion two issues jumped out at me. Firstly, you appeal to Maximus' characterization of deification as one in which human nature is passive before divine infinite activity, and contrast this to Hart's views, but then you say that in this deification we "actively cooperate," synergy remains. If, as your whole argument has seemingly been, there is this gulf between created and divine nature such that to call divine infinite activity natural to creatures is illicit, how is the human qua human still active if human "nature" is passive in deification? He wouldnt be. It is only by understanding that which is passive in deification to be nature qua finite, that we can understand deification as retaining synergy because the divine activity in its fullness is proper to nature which hypostatizes it. This is what Palamas argues, the saints hypostatize the divine energies/activity, or in other words, the divine energies/activity/nature subsist naturally in and as the hypostasis. So... you dont have deification if you dont follow the path to Hart's conclusion.
Secondly, you continually accuse Hart of implicit determinism. A metaphysical monism is not inherently determinist, what matters is how the relationship of the One/Being to the many ones/beings is parsed out. That said, In the last chapter of You are Gods, Hart agrees with and draws on Bulgakov's ontology of freedom which is, in my estimation, the only such ontology that actually escapes determinism while retaining all the tenets of Christian classical theism. Please read this chapter and the cited sections from Bulgakov.
Finally, thank you for your time and for writing. I hope my criticisms come across without being muddled, and as constructive. I also hope that people would stop feeling the need to claim the neopatristic view of creation and anti-monism is "the Orthodox view," as this is being soundly put to rest by newer patristic scholarship (e.g., Jordan Wood's research explicating the patristic acceptance of creation's necessity), and unfairly others not only different ancient voices in our tradition, but rejects the Orthodoxy of new theological thought. God bless!
«When you deny this and try to use words like "unique act" the only conclusion I can come to is that you hold to a voluntarist account of creation, in which God chooses to create from possibilities he might not actualize, thus...»
Do you think God was necessitated to create? That would seem to violate His aseity. It would make His identity/essence dependent on creation. I don't see how it follows from libertarian freedom (which may be intellectualist rather than voluntarism) that "God becomes a mere being subject to potency himself".
«How does the incarnation bridge two alien natures (and alien they must be if an ultimate metaphysical monism is rejected)?» First, the inability of someone to answer a question doesn't disprove their worldview; it only proves that they don't have an answer. Second, what's wrong with saying the Incarnation can do what it does because God has the power to do it?
«If humanity and divinity are completely disparate and alien, there being some dualism at the root of their being, how can a divine hypostasis unite them, be them, and manifest fully through them?» Not being able to explain something doesn't mean it can't happen. «It cant.» How do you know?
«Jordan Wood's research explicating the patristic acceptance of creation's necessity» Where does Wood say creation is necessary? I'm sure that Catholicism teaches that God was free to create or not-create.
Jordan Daniel Wood explaining St. Maximus the Confessor's view of God's necessary creating:
"I mentioned above that Maximus thinks creation inevitable. He could never agree with Florovsky, for example, that “the world could have not existed.” Here Maximus’s doctrine appears diametrically opposed to Florovsky’s, since the latter confuses creation’s inevitability with its self-sufficiency and then accuses such a view of “introducing the world into the intra-Trinitarian life of the Godhead as a co-determinant principle.” Maximus instead thinks that a supposed indeterminacy on God’s part toward the world would itself introduce another principle into God, a shadow side, as it were, of God’s unmoored and aleatoric will. Strange to say, but Maximus even considers this among the most flagrant results of a certain Origenism and Manichaeanism. It is the Origenist myth, Maximus notes, that imagines God having to “react” to the downward inclination of primordial souls and thereby to create something he never intended to create: a proliferation of bodies. Not only would this mean attributing to sin (as an essential condition) the beauty of the corporeal cosmos. It would imply the sudden emergence of logoi or “wills” in God that he did not intend from eternity, from the unqualified goodness of his nature. Maximus doesn’t even consider this line. To him one thing remains surest of all: “The purpose of God, who created all things, must be changeless concerning them.” Ultimately the Word’s Incarnation defines for us God’s unwavering and irrevocable disposition toward creation. The Incarnation reveals that God is “truly Creator by nature.” Thus Maximus joins those venerable voices of patristic tradition who affirm creation’s “sublime necessity,” rarely defended in contemporary theology with the exception of another great Russian theologian, Florovsky’s master, Sergius Bulgakov." - The Whole Mystery of Christ, pg 77.
1. God transcends the dialectic of necessity/freedom. My answer is both that God necessarily and freely creates, because to be God is to be fully actualized in every way proper to nature (including as creator) and this is the same thing as being free. My argument is the same as that given by Hart and Bulgakov already.
But that God would be reduced to a being by ascribing a deliberating will to him and a process of choosing between options before actualizing himself in one way and not another, is a tautology. Id again recommend Bulgakov and Hart's own writings on this, but I have also written about it on my substack (An Unconscious God, Apokatasis: Part II).
2. You are correct that inability to answer does not necessarily mean someone is wrong, though my conclusions about the wrongness of such a view are based on an assessment of the metaphysics used in the Christian tradition regarding the incarnation.
Whats wrong with it is that the theology of the Incarnation is not in Eastern Orthodox theology an event unconnected from the rest of being, it is the foundation of being and the ontology of every creature individually and as a whole. A philosophical articulation of it that reduces the incarnation to an irrational display of power is not satisfying or acceptable (also, an absolute dualism just isnt reconcilable no matter how much divinity is invoked, its absolute).
3. Same answer as above.
4. I'll be sure to bring some citations later tonight (when I will respond to the OP's comments as well) but he discusses it in his PhD thesis and the footnotes, bringing up bulgakov v florovsky specifically. Also see his interviews where he discusses tradition to see how he views RC magisterium.
Also, in saying God has options, that doesn't mean His choice isn't changeless or intended from eternity. God doesn't need time to mull over the options. He just chooses.
«God transcends the dialectic of necessity/freedom. My answer is both that God necessarily and freely creates, because to be God is to be fully actualized in every way proper to nature (including as creator) and this is the same thing as being free.»
This is sheer nonsense. Either God had to create or He didn't (i.e. could create or not-create). And if the former, He would be dependent on creation for Who He Is.
In saying God has options, one need not say He deliberates like creatures do, where the agent undergoes a change in their mind and develops an action-triggering intention to do A (or B), then does A (or B). Given divine simplicity, God is intrinsically the same regardless of what effect (if any) He freely causes. In an analogical sense we can say it was His intention to create the effect, but that doesn't mean the "intention" refers to some internal counterfactually variant state of God. (If this seems problematic, recall that even with creaturely libertarian free will, there will be effects that can vary with the agent-cause being intrinsically the same.)
«A philosophical articulation of [The Incarnation] that reduces the incarnation to an irrational display of power is not satisfying or acceptable» This misconstrues what I said. I didn't say God's goal was to (merely) manifest His power; I was picking out His power as an explanation for how He can bridge the gap.
«an absolute dualism just isnt reconcilable no matter how much divinity is invoked, its absolute» An assertion.
1. Necessity as in external imposition would be an issue. When necessity simply means that the purely actual God is by definition fully expressed in his actuality which is infinite, and thus God "necessarily" creates, then necessity when speaking of God has no externalist connotations and is the same thing as divine freedom (as freedom is the full proper realization of a nature).
You are right that to say God has options does not mean he temporally deliberates, but that is a red herring. Temporality is not the main issue (though it would be one if affirmed), unrealized potency and divine indifference are the issue. Lets say that the hypothetical your view affirms as possible was actually true, namely that God did not create. This would mean that, as we both deny temporality in God, that God is not the self-diffusive Good as He would never pour out His Goodness beyond himself. He would be all first-act and no second-act forever (though by the nature of eternal pure act first and second act arent seperable and so i deny this God's pure actuality). This hypothetical would be a rejection of God as the Good of the God of the philosophers, and at that point there is no reason to affirm any philosophical conceptions of God.
Let's then say that, as you believe, God could not have created but did. You can deny that this doesn't imply an internal counterfactual, but it does. Your view of divine freedom is based on their being this other counterfactual option of non-creation. The end result is thus the same as in the case of the counterfactual, God is not the self-diffusive Good but is rather a being with potentially unrealized potency that (ironically for you) had to be realized by a movement from potency to act (even if an eternal movement) to make him who he is. Also, as we have undermined the identification of God with the Good, we now have every reason to think that there remains some non-actualized potential in God, a dark unconscious, but once we have done that our ascription of eternity to this God is not justified as he is clearly a mere being. He must be downgraded to the angelic aevum, and a higher God must be sought.
And no, on my view (and that of Hart, Bulgakov, and St. Maximus) creation does not make God who he is in the sense of an incomplete being becoming through a further addition or development. Rather creation exists because of who God is, and even the self-definition of God in his relation to creatures by which, for example, God is eternally the Son of Mary, is not something that negatively conditions God. Every relation of God to creation is not one of passivity but of activity, it is done by God NOT suffered (else any interaction with creation would be a passivity). Objections then to eternal creation are nothing but failures to grasp the basic doctrines underlying actus purus.
2. And that explanation is an appeal to the impossible, namely that irreconcilable dualisms are reconcilable, and are so by the brute power which one has already placed on one side of the irreconcilable dualism. I go over this here in my own assessment of the argument between Hart and Wood (https://theopenark.substack.com/p/apokatastasis-part-iii).
«Necessity as in external imposition would be an issue.» It would also be an issue if it arose internally. If God has to create, then He needs creation to be perfect. As Edward Feser points out, "[If] God cannot be boundless in love without creating the world, then creation *does* add something to God – it *completes* or *perfects* his love. This entails that God *needs creation* in order to be complete, perfect, unlimited, unbounded."
«unrealized potency and divine indifference are the issue.»
God having options doesn't imply any unrealized *passive* potency. Ed Feser: "[W]e need to draw a distinction between *active potency* and *passive potency*. Passive potency is the capacity to be changed or altered in some way. It is *passive* potency or potentiality, specifically, that God utterly lacks by virtue of being pure actuality. Active potency, by contrast, is the capacity to effect a change in something else. And as Aquinas writes, *active* potency or potentiality is something that “we must assign to [God] in the highest degree”."
That God's Will is neutral/indifferent towards which effect He causes is just the nature of libertarian freedom, the nature of alternative possibilities.
«This would mean that, as we both deny temporality in God, that God is not the self-diffusive Good as He would never pour out His Goodness beyond himself.» He is not essentially or intrinsically self-diffusive (just as He is not necessarily an unmoved mover), but this isn't a problem.
«This hypothetical would be a rejection of God as the Good of the God of the philosophers, and at that point there is no reason to affirm any philosophical conceptions of God.» I disagree given what I've written/pasted.
«[God] is rather a being with potentially unrealized potency that (ironically for you) had to be realized by a movement from potency to act (even if an eternal movement) to make him who he is.»
That doesn't follow for reasons I've explained. Creation doesn't change anything in God nor does God's will to create pick out counterfactually variant intrinsic states in Him. What differs across possible worlds is extrinsic to God.
«...we have undermined the identification of God with the Good....» We haven't.
«on my view ... creation does not make God who he is in the sense of an incomplete being becoming through a further addition or development» See Feser's quote above.
«namely that irreconcilable dualisms are reconcilable» To say it's irreconcilable is begging the question.
I'm curious as to why you, Hart and other universalists (if you are one) are attracted to the view that creation is necessary. Do you think its being contingent would be bad for hard universalism? I don't see why a hard universalist couldn't affirm that God was free to create or not.
1. It is not a matter of God needing creation to complete a love he lacks in himself, rather it is because God is infinite love in himself that creation (the self-diffusiveness of the Good) necessarily follows. Your argument is just a reiteration of the tired and mistaken polemics of the neo-patristics on this point, which as ive quoted Jordan Wood explaining, do not allign with the thought of authors like St. Maximus.
2. The distinctions between active and passive potency collapse when we understand the implications of God being eternal infinite act, which is what I explained in my last comment. Quoting Feser on the theoretical distinction between these two potencies is not addressing my argument.
Yes, affirming God's will is indifferent in creating because he is choosing from multiple possibilities does result from affirming God's freedom is of the Libertarian variety. Obviously, I dont affirm that. Its nonsense. Libertarian freedom, even reduced merely to the idea of choice between options, is something that can only exist as a modality of creaturely freedom for beings moving from potency to act and operating within a web of finitely realizable goods chosen based on different approaches to transcendent ends. God does not choose nor is there any end higher than his own conditioning choices made to realize some end, he is simply self-diffusive of his goodness in infinite actualization. Furthermore, the article i already linked (an Unconscious God) deals at length with other issues of divine indifference in creation, such as its incompatibility with God creating from love.
3. Yes, God is intrinsically self-diffusive. Being an unmoved mover describes God's relation to creatures already existing, but to be self-diffusive is not a definition based on relation to creatures, it is the nature of the Good as such which is then the precondition and rationale for all created existence. This simple mistake is whats at root in your thinking God's necessarily creating must mean God is made more complete than he is in himself by creating, but this kind of argument is only possible if you dont understand that the Cause lacks nothing produced in the effect that it naturally produces (and if you say that this is emanation and not creation, no, they are the same thing explicated differently). This is a basic philosophical error you make, and as ive said, it puts you out of line with the Neoplatonic Christian tradition of God as the Good (in Maximus and Gregory Nazianzen and Dionysius).
4. See above, and see my articles linked previously.
5. Those things do follow, as i have explained, and your assertion that they do not is not an argument, its an appeal to an idea of divine activity which I argue is true but (along with certain other metaphysical necessities) logically entails God's infinite and necessary creativity.
6. You have admitted as much, so yes you have. See again the quote i provided from Wood as well.
7. See my arguments... and your own inability to respond...
8. No, it is not begging the question. That the dualism is irreconcilable is the nature of ultimate dualism (if they could be reconciled it would be in a higher ultimate monism), and ultimate dualism is what we have if an ultimate monism is denied, which denial is what I have been arguing against this entire time. Obviously.
9. Yes, Im universalist. I do not deny creation's contingency, it is contingent in that it is ontologically derivative/finite. I deny the contingency of the divine will and activity because it is metaphysical nonsense. Conflating an insertion of contingency into the divine will with creation's nature as contingent (which is another way of saying finitude) is just a glaring philosophical mistake. Obviously your view would have undesirable implications for hard universalism, but thats just because it is metaphysically wrong.
Please read the posts (my own and others) that i have already linked. I will be unable to respond further here for several days, and I also think that it wouldnt be very beneficial if you keep insisting your view upholds God's "freedom" while ours doesnt, as you just wont entertain anything but libertarian choice between options rooted in indifference (or vice versa) as freedom.
I appreciate your feedback. I was actually attempting to offer an olive branch but the question is: “How is it that a full subsistence of the divine nature and a full subsistence of the human nature can be one and the same subsistence, without contradiction?” Is one which for me which both captures loss of nuance when we use substantia in all cases and marks a mystery which is meant to leave things in tension. I appreciate Harts lectures which I’ve begun watching, and he’s not wrong to ask questions I just think it is a qualified monism or dualism—you can approach the mystery from both vantage points and it can be damaging to not account for the economic implications of pure monism.
I would need you to explain what you mean by saying Hart's formulation of the Neochalcedonian problematic (two natures in one hypostasis) "captures loss of nuance when we use substantia in all cases." Without you being clearer on what you mean there is not much I can say in response, other than that Hart's argument (and Bulgakov's) are anything but unnuanced, and that a logical and metaphysical blackhole, such as asserting a union of complete opposites by appeal to another third opposing term, is not as much nuance as it is simply a refusal to acknowledge the problem.
And Hart does not fail to account for the "economic implications of pure monism." An ultimate monism has no necessarily entailing adverse implications for how we hash out economic reality, and not only have Hart/Bulgakov hashed out issues like synergy, but in the final chapter of You are Gods Hart defends Bulgakov's own ontology of freedom of rational spirit, which to my mind is the only account of ontology in which there is no moment and so possibility of unfreedom in our being to be found.
Hypostasis is not nature and nature is not hypostasis. As Jordan Daniel Wood points out a hypostasis is not concerned about the nature it takes on, though one would say, as he does that the hypostasis of the Logos assumes human nature and unites it with Divine Nature. Jordan Daniel Wood in my mind offers a more nuanced--at least at times--evaluation of the so called new-chalcedonism. Anyway, I'm working my way through Hart's lecture's, it's quite hard as I can't play them without watching them, but it leaves me with a question. He points out the opacity of the statement, but is dogma or theology a Mystery allowing for paradox--especially as to allow the faith not to stray into something that would defeat it's efficacy to do anything or state anything? Is it on the other hand about comprehending God positively? Or is it often, the interaction between the knowable and unknowable, the veil which reveals God to us only to be lifted to grant us the sense of not even having touched the surface. I agree Hart's project is completely legitimate and often insightful and the Chiasmus is beautiful, but after much grimacing over what I take as indyosincracies to put it best, such as the Holy Spirit being the Spirit, which leaves the question open if our psycho-somatic selves are removed for theosis or deification or transcended, what principle retains us as anything but an extension and absorption into God. Gregory of Nazianzus says God is to the soul what the soul is to the body, but I don't think at that point he is locating spirit as the life principle, but rather the soul, nous, intelligence, etc...
I agree with you that theology is a play between the knowable and unknowable, but the unknowable here is not irrationality, it is "supra-rationality." Every antinomy is meant to lead the mind to higher unities which are not adequately expressible in words not, that is, because at the level of words theology asserts contradictories (see for example Palamas' denial of this idea of antinomy as contradiction), but because the transcendent divinity transcends finitude and union with it thus transcends finite expression. As the Areopagite says, this means that unities are always higher than distinctions, and so we are lead to radical expressions of monism to try and convey the divine reality (e.g., God as the maximum and minimum ala Nicholas of Cusa, God as being of beings and as supra-being ala Denys).
An assertion of two ontologically alien, other, unlike, separate and incommensurable natures, which is what one is asserting about divine and human natures if their unlikeness is defined as something other than the difference between infinite and finite being, is not a theologically acceptable view of paradox. It begins and ends in unbridgeable dualities, and since theology both in words and in divine-human union is a matter of expressing/attaining/returning to unity an ultimate dualism is simply irrationality. Put another way, with dualism theology is no longer a matter of language continually growing to try and convey the ultimate source of intelligibility which as such is supra-intelligible, instead theological language is an exercise in conveying nothing intelligible at all.
I dont know why you would grimace at the Holy Spirit being the Spirit as life principle. Biblically and into the 3rd Century this is how the Holy Spirit is most often understood, but this does not go away in later theology. God is every aspect of the creature's being. You cite Wood in this comment, but Wood also argues that every created hypostasis is really the Hypostasis of the Logos as that hypostasis/logoi. The principle that retains our distinct persons while also revealing us as God (because its both-and here in the unity of deification) is God's positing of Himself as us and our existence as this posited response (I go over the ontology of personhood as the hypostatized structure of procession and return here: https://theopenark.substack.com/p/apokatastasis-part-ii).
Yes, hypostasis and nature are distinct, however they are not separable or indifferent to one another. If you really think they are ontologically indifferent to each other I would like to know what you think this actually means not only in abstract definition but in the metaphysical unity of hypostasis and nature as subsistence and substance. Do you agree with Hart that "“hypostasis and nature [...] remain the two indissoluble sides of a single metaphysical principle: as ontic actualization and ontological axiom"?
Well, here I am still obviously working out a number of things and I'll have to think how this interpretation of the Chalcedonian model plays out, but my basic intuition and point in this post may be this: from the standpoint of eternity, it may be legitimate to follow Hart's metaphysical horizon, which eliminates all existential distance between God and man--though I believe in preserving a lingering difference in numerical identity. However, from the standpoint of now, we experience a diastema or gap or ontological gap between the uncreated and created, the infinite and finite, which is ever traversed by God ecstatically going out of himself as his energies to be present to us and in us, and us going ecstatically outside of ourselves to unite with God by co-operating with God's self-giving, self-emptying Gift of Himself to us to collapse the existential distance we experience between us and God in this life (even if it is caused simply by our blindness to and ignorance of God's presence and giving of himself, during this life, and beginning our beginning and end.
This preservation of distance which nevertheless is always crossed or crossed out, is in fact necessary, for us to properly understand the distance between us as created beings and the Uncreated which even while immanent, ever transcends us, setting the mark for perfection or deification, as out of our reach without God's condescension, or our working with him, or being open to the Grace of him giving himself to us as to expand our being and go beyond our current selves to be united to him. God of course is always here and sustaining us, but the distance is necessary to understand the gift Gid gives us at all times: Himself.
First of all as you said: “all creatures are ultimately God, are ultimately uncreated while also being created.” This is the both / and problem.” Second I affirm Harts ultimately from an eschatological vantage point, but economically there is an active co-operation between one and God until one is passively deified and we have to leave eschatology in tension with this. I’m not suggesting inadequacy in Harts logic as much as in its ability to account for a dynamic relationship with God who is both other and in me though I am me. There are tensions which hard overlooks at least economically which he collapses with theology.
And I do agree with Gods act of creation as in a sense a natural expression of himself but also it is him going out of himself to create—the logos becomes many logoi. We seek on earth hopefully to unite with God who though active inside us, doesn’t impose upon us, but asks us to participate in his activities like self-giving love. Not everyone manifesting self giving divine love in the world. This at least to me conveys that there is a dynamic relationship between our will and Gods. I don’t believe in eternal hell but I do believe that our mode of existence in this life and cooperation with God makes a difference.
Hart does not deny that God goes out of his simplicity and becomes the Logos of many logoi... I really do not understand this refrain of stating something which Hart also affirms but adding the word "but" in front to make it seem like he doesnt, or like its opposed to another of his views. Especially in this case the Logos becoming the many logoi is emanation, and so is another way of explicating creation as God's natural self expression.
Again, Hart does not have an issue dealing with divine-human synergy, please read the materials I have recommended above or any of his writings against determinism. Also I think my own series on Apokatastasis is an accurate explication of the view of freedom Hart affirms, so If you read that I would like to know if you think I fail to be thoroughly synergistic.
Freedom cannot be rooted in sin, as sin is fundamentally unfreedom as non-being and thus non-act. Are you implying, and forgive me if my question is completely mistaken, that freedom only exists prior to the eschatological deification and only exists as conditioned by evil opposing good? In my original comment I did point out that you seemed to be unable to affirm human activity/co-operation in the eschaton precisely because you would not allow divine activity to be natural to humans. Is this stance grounded in an idea of human agency as inherently conditioned by evil, and so necessarily ceasing when evil is no more?
The "both/and" isnt a problem for Hart drawing on Bulgakov, nor is synergy a problem, you have simply asserted this while misreading him. Likewise for Hart/Bulgakov there is no tension between eschatology and history as if co-operation is exclusive to history and done away in eschatology, their ontology of freedom grounds freedom within eschatology as end/beginning and formal cause. Please read the chapter and its sources I've referred to (The Chiasmus in You are Gods).
I enjoyed this. A couple of quick thoughts: Creation Ex Nihilo and the Incarnation attest to the fact that there is no nature independent of super nature - surely. Christ is the alpha and omega, the grounding of all that is, and, as far as I understand things, is never simply Divine but always (I’m not speaking of duration here) human and Divine (I’m quite sure Bulgakov makes such a move). Creation is the manifestation of this reality, no? The fall, however one wants to conceive of it, is the insistence that nature is not in fact super nature; this is not an affirmation of the truth but a privation of reality. Christ’s descent to the realm of the dead - death representing an insistence upon a closed understanding of nature - is the affirmation that God will ultimately not consent to have any of his creation locked into such an illusion. The vocation of the Christian is to live “supernaturally” which is to say live what is real, for the sake of the world around him/her. The Eucharist is the body of God, not because it has received grace ad extra, but because in the liturgical setting it is eschatological affirmed as what it truly is; the body of God. Bread incidentally is a microcosm of the entire cosmos - sunshine, vegetation, water, human action etc.
I like this manner of putting it very much. My article was trying to tease out all the holes or questions which don't seem to add up and most of all, I think by being able to place this reality as not supernatural, as fallen, though not without God's presence, is a quite difficult thing to work out and difficult if we just see the corruption and death as an illusion or Christ as not descending into hades (or dying and taking on this delusive corrupted world). I'm ok with Gregory of Nysa's or Maximus the Confessor's sort of dual creation--Gregory even takes the straying cause in a way from Plato--but there is something to be liberated from which we participate in and need to be healed from or liberated from.
I want to than everyone for engaging so much with me on this post and conversing. I am sorry for not having all the answers, but I mean all in good will and with a generous spirit. Till the end I will find a problem with every systematic presentation of anything as I have that Kierkergaurdian bit in me I'll never erase.
I think Smith begs the question in favor of a strict libertarian view of human freedom...a false dilemma where it's either determinism or strict libertarianism. He writes:
"Unlike Hart’s monistic vision, which risks reducing theosis to a deterministic unfolding...."
"His framework suggests a deterministic path where grace is not distinctly relational but an inevitable outgrowth of nature’s potential. This overlooks the personal struggle, repentance, and active cooperation required in the journey of theosis. For instance, in Hart’s view, St. Mary of Egypt’s conversion might appear as an expected actualization of her inherent divinity, rather than the dramatic and personal turning toward God that involved intense spiritual battle and the decisive rejection of her former life."
But one can say that St. Mary of Egypt's salvation was inevitable although *which* path she took was undetermined.
Smith: "Grace is not an inevitable extension of nature but a transformative and uncreated gift that invites the believer into a relationship marked by love, struggle, and mutual self-giving."
It could be both. Rather than strict libertarian free will, one could hold to a broad account of libertarian free will. We have the freedom to take the sinful or sinless path (to simplify it), and both paths are ultimately equivalent (Bulgakov), for they both end in union with God.
Hi Nicholas! This was very thought provoking, and I just wrote a response to it on my substack. I would love your thoughts if you have the time and interest in reviving a discussion you started last fall. :)
For sure. I read it and it was lucid and illuminating. Just as an immediate thought I think that Maximus provides a partial answer here, which I didn't come to understand the importance of until recently as he speaks of eternal works such as Being itself and of temporal works (my Father is still working and so am I)--along with his Logoi providing an "existential scope" and structuring principle for all creation which one's tropos (mode of existence) may align with or not align with. These works could fall into the category of energies and I think that would somewhat begin to answer some of the puzzles you draw out much more clearly than I was capable of at the time. Anyway, give me a little time and I'll provide a more articulate and comprehensive response (to the best of my ability). Oh and thanks for engaging with my post! I'm excited to dig into this discussion further!
Well yes I’d agree we all end up in the same place in the end but when is the end of infinity? As Maximus says if we don’t participate in virtue and have piety where will we be when God is all in all? Anyway, it’s a dialogue between our will and God’s and if we don’t align with his logoi,his will for us, it is our loss as we move toward ill being and we don’t fully develop in the womb of the world to encounter Mount Tabor; this will not be pleasant when we directly encounter the brilliance of the ever suffered and given love of our Lord. Free will is acquired as well as the ability to no longer deliberate but see clearly.
I think you're being obtuse, as it's implied that the union I'm talking of is a pleasant one. Your comment is just a rehash of the free will defense of hell, which is what your OP was too. It just presupposes strict libertarianism.
I don’t think hell is possible as an everlasting possibility, and I believe in a moderate libertarianism wherein unlike many here it seams isn’t enough. But it’s not just a combatilism with deterministic processes but these processes can be altered by synergistic cooperation of the human and divine will. We have more in nfluence over the state of nature depending on the fulness of our union or
Please do not take my comments as in any way mean-spirited, i mean them as constructive (and thorough) criticism. To be perfectly upfront about my thoughts, I both think that you misread and are unfair to Hart's monistic theology, and that your arguments (and overall rhetoric) evidence the same tired pattern all prior denouncements of monistic thought (in particular those directed at Bulgakov) in modern theology have; e.g., claiming "its determinist," "its impersonal," it collapses distinctions," etc, while never engaging each of these issues enough to define where ultimate metaphysical monism fails and your supposed middle way succeeds as anything other than a way to avoid logically necessary implications.
You claim that Hart equates and collapses uncreated and created causalities. He doesn't, he affirms their infinite distinction. You quote him saying as much, "‘whole power of nature’ (as we know it, at least) cannot supply.” If you quibble that he adds a hypothetical qualifier, you shouldn't because he operates on the assumption that the hypothetical is false (though he likely has in mind ante-nicene theology in which the Holy Spirit is not distinct from our spirits, in which case this is simply another part of our tradition). His arguments about an ultimate monism are explicitly drawn from the implications of creatio ex nihilo, namely that creatio ex nihilo is creatio ex deo as it is not creation from another substance or cause. Thus, when you say:
"By contrast, God’s uncreated causality initiates existence itself, breaking the analogy that Hart draws between natural and supernatural causality."
You are misreading. It is not the case that Hart fails to distinguish divine and created causality, rather, it is his proper understanding that viewed from the divine perspective all activity is simply God's activity (because God is all being and act and potency which become act). Following from this, Hart correctly argues that divine grace is natural to nature, is the creature's proper end of all its potentials, and therefore, operating on a proper ontology (which is that of Maximus' logoi, or Dionysius' predestinations, or Eriugena's exemplars, or Origen's eschatological creation) all creatures are ultimately God, are ultimately uncreated while also being created, and therefore theosis is not an external imposition or violation of nature.
This is not "simply a form of natural assistance," which is troublesome in any way, because qua finite the creature is not uncreated. Qua Being, which is God, the creature is uncreated. But this is simply eastern Orthodox theology and metaphysical common sense.
You invoke creatio ex nihilo again to try and distinguish Hart's theology from Orthodox theology (homogenized in whichever way you wish) by saying "Creation ex nihilo establishes that the world is not an outflow of God’s essence but a unique act that exists through God's continuous sustaining presence." This is wrong. Creation being an emanation of the divine essence as being, life, intellect (as explicitly in the Areopagite), is not separable from it being the free act of the divinity and vice versa. Divine freedom is simply to be fully actualized. When you deny this and try to use words like "unique act" the only conclusion I can come to is that you hold to a voluntarist account of creation, in which God chooses to create from possibilities he might not actualize, thus God becomes a mere being subject to potency himself. This should be articulated clearly, not held back as a possible interpretation.
This same predilection for using words that sound like they are meant to convey a metaphysical view but do not is evident again when you say, "The Incarnation is not merely a bridging of two realities but a profound event that brings the created and the Uncreated into a harmonious relationship without confusion or seperation." Being charitable, this is a completely apophatic statement conveying nothing. How does the incarnation bridge two alien natures (and alien they must be if an ultimate metaphysical monism is rejected)? Calling it a "profound event" doesn't say anything, we need to be cataphatic here, able to say what a proper metaphysical theology ultimately must admit (at root there is only God and God as the becoming-God).
Your Christological comments should have been informed by Hart's own recent Stanton lectures on Christology (available online and on his substack), as well as his article "Chimaeras, Masks and Portmanteaux." Drawing on Bulgakov, Hart points out and works through a glaring issue in Neochalcedonian Christology. If humanity and divinity are completely disparate and alien, there being some dualism at the root of their being, how can a divine hypostasis unite them, be them, and manifest fully through them? It cant. The question for Christology must rather be “How is it that a full subsistence of the divine nature and a full subsistence of the human nature can be one and the same subsistence, without contradiction?” And the only answer is that an ultimate dualism does not exist, the created is fit for the divine hypostasis because it is always the divinity as finite becoming infinite (godmanhood).
It should go without saying that I do not accept your characterization of Hart's views as antithetical to Orthodox spirituality, but in all that discussion two issues jumped out at me. Firstly, you appeal to Maximus' characterization of deification as one in which human nature is passive before divine infinite activity, and contrast this to Hart's views, but then you say that in this deification we "actively cooperate," synergy remains. If, as your whole argument has seemingly been, there is this gulf between created and divine nature such that to call divine infinite activity natural to creatures is illicit, how is the human qua human still active if human "nature" is passive in deification? He wouldnt be. It is only by understanding that which is passive in deification to be nature qua finite, that we can understand deification as retaining synergy because the divine activity in its fullness is proper to nature which hypostatizes it. This is what Palamas argues, the saints hypostatize the divine energies/activity, or in other words, the divine energies/activity/nature subsist naturally in and as the hypostasis. So... you dont have deification if you dont follow the path to Hart's conclusion.
Secondly, you continually accuse Hart of implicit determinism. A metaphysical monism is not inherently determinist, what matters is how the relationship of the One/Being to the many ones/beings is parsed out. That said, In the last chapter of You are Gods, Hart agrees with and draws on Bulgakov's ontology of freedom which is, in my estimation, the only such ontology that actually escapes determinism while retaining all the tenets of Christian classical theism. Please read this chapter and the cited sections from Bulgakov.
Finally, thank you for your time and for writing. I hope my criticisms come across without being muddled, and as constructive. I also hope that people would stop feeling the need to claim the neopatristic view of creation and anti-monism is "the Orthodox view," as this is being soundly put to rest by newer patristic scholarship (e.g., Jordan Wood's research explicating the patristic acceptance of creation's necessity), and unfairly others not only different ancient voices in our tradition, but rejects the Orthodoxy of new theological thought. God bless!
«When you deny this and try to use words like "unique act" the only conclusion I can come to is that you hold to a voluntarist account of creation, in which God chooses to create from possibilities he might not actualize, thus...»
Do you think God was necessitated to create? That would seem to violate His aseity. It would make His identity/essence dependent on creation. I don't see how it follows from libertarian freedom (which may be intellectualist rather than voluntarism) that "God becomes a mere being subject to potency himself".
«How does the incarnation bridge two alien natures (and alien they must be if an ultimate metaphysical monism is rejected)?» First, the inability of someone to answer a question doesn't disprove their worldview; it only proves that they don't have an answer. Second, what's wrong with saying the Incarnation can do what it does because God has the power to do it?
«If humanity and divinity are completely disparate and alien, there being some dualism at the root of their being, how can a divine hypostasis unite them, be them, and manifest fully through them?» Not being able to explain something doesn't mean it can't happen. «It cant.» How do you know?
«Jordan Wood's research explicating the patristic acceptance of creation's necessity» Where does Wood say creation is necessary? I'm sure that Catholicism teaches that God was free to create or not-create.
Jordan Daniel Wood explaining St. Maximus the Confessor's view of God's necessary creating:
"I mentioned above that Maximus thinks creation inevitable. He could never agree with Florovsky, for example, that “the world could have not existed.” Here Maximus’s doctrine appears diametrically opposed to Florovsky’s, since the latter confuses creation’s inevitability with its self-sufficiency and then accuses such a view of “introducing the world into the intra-Trinitarian life of the Godhead as a co-determinant principle.” Maximus instead thinks that a supposed indeterminacy on God’s part toward the world would itself introduce another principle into God, a shadow side, as it were, of God’s unmoored and aleatoric will. Strange to say, but Maximus even considers this among the most flagrant results of a certain Origenism and Manichaeanism. It is the Origenist myth, Maximus notes, that imagines God having to “react” to the downward inclination of primordial souls and thereby to create something he never intended to create: a proliferation of bodies. Not only would this mean attributing to sin (as an essential condition) the beauty of the corporeal cosmos. It would imply the sudden emergence of logoi or “wills” in God that he did not intend from eternity, from the unqualified goodness of his nature. Maximus doesn’t even consider this line. To him one thing remains surest of all: “The purpose of God, who created all things, must be changeless concerning them.” Ultimately the Word’s Incarnation defines for us God’s unwavering and irrevocable disposition toward creation. The Incarnation reveals that God is “truly Creator by nature.” Thus Maximus joins those venerable voices of patristic tradition who affirm creation’s “sublime necessity,” rarely defended in contemporary theology with the exception of another great Russian theologian, Florovsky’s master, Sergius Bulgakov." - The Whole Mystery of Christ, pg 77.
1. God transcends the dialectic of necessity/freedom. My answer is both that God necessarily and freely creates, because to be God is to be fully actualized in every way proper to nature (including as creator) and this is the same thing as being free. My argument is the same as that given by Hart and Bulgakov already.
But that God would be reduced to a being by ascribing a deliberating will to him and a process of choosing between options before actualizing himself in one way and not another, is a tautology. Id again recommend Bulgakov and Hart's own writings on this, but I have also written about it on my substack (An Unconscious God, Apokatasis: Part II).
2. You are correct that inability to answer does not necessarily mean someone is wrong, though my conclusions about the wrongness of such a view are based on an assessment of the metaphysics used in the Christian tradition regarding the incarnation.
Whats wrong with it is that the theology of the Incarnation is not in Eastern Orthodox theology an event unconnected from the rest of being, it is the foundation of being and the ontology of every creature individually and as a whole. A philosophical articulation of it that reduces the incarnation to an irrational display of power is not satisfying or acceptable (also, an absolute dualism just isnt reconcilable no matter how much divinity is invoked, its absolute).
3. Same answer as above.
4. I'll be sure to bring some citations later tonight (when I will respond to the OP's comments as well) but he discusses it in his PhD thesis and the footnotes, bringing up bulgakov v florovsky specifically. Also see his interviews where he discusses tradition to see how he views RC magisterium.
Also, in saying God has options, that doesn't mean His choice isn't changeless or intended from eternity. God doesn't need time to mull over the options. He just chooses.
«God transcends the dialectic of necessity/freedom. My answer is both that God necessarily and freely creates, because to be God is to be fully actualized in every way proper to nature (including as creator) and this is the same thing as being free.»
This is sheer nonsense. Either God had to create or He didn't (i.e. could create or not-create). And if the former, He would be dependent on creation for Who He Is.
In saying God has options, one need not say He deliberates like creatures do, where the agent undergoes a change in their mind and develops an action-triggering intention to do A (or B), then does A (or B). Given divine simplicity, God is intrinsically the same regardless of what effect (if any) He freely causes. In an analogical sense we can say it was His intention to create the effect, but that doesn't mean the "intention" refers to some internal counterfactually variant state of God. (If this seems problematic, recall that even with creaturely libertarian free will, there will be effects that can vary with the agent-cause being intrinsically the same.)
«A philosophical articulation of [The Incarnation] that reduces the incarnation to an irrational display of power is not satisfying or acceptable» This misconstrues what I said. I didn't say God's goal was to (merely) manifest His power; I was picking out His power as an explanation for how He can bridge the gap.
«an absolute dualism just isnt reconcilable no matter how much divinity is invoked, its absolute» An assertion.
1. Necessity as in external imposition would be an issue. When necessity simply means that the purely actual God is by definition fully expressed in his actuality which is infinite, and thus God "necessarily" creates, then necessity when speaking of God has no externalist connotations and is the same thing as divine freedom (as freedom is the full proper realization of a nature).
You are right that to say God has options does not mean he temporally deliberates, but that is a red herring. Temporality is not the main issue (though it would be one if affirmed), unrealized potency and divine indifference are the issue. Lets say that the hypothetical your view affirms as possible was actually true, namely that God did not create. This would mean that, as we both deny temporality in God, that God is not the self-diffusive Good as He would never pour out His Goodness beyond himself. He would be all first-act and no second-act forever (though by the nature of eternal pure act first and second act arent seperable and so i deny this God's pure actuality). This hypothetical would be a rejection of God as the Good of the God of the philosophers, and at that point there is no reason to affirm any philosophical conceptions of God.
Let's then say that, as you believe, God could not have created but did. You can deny that this doesn't imply an internal counterfactual, but it does. Your view of divine freedom is based on their being this other counterfactual option of non-creation. The end result is thus the same as in the case of the counterfactual, God is not the self-diffusive Good but is rather a being with potentially unrealized potency that (ironically for you) had to be realized by a movement from potency to act (even if an eternal movement) to make him who he is. Also, as we have undermined the identification of God with the Good, we now have every reason to think that there remains some non-actualized potential in God, a dark unconscious, but once we have done that our ascription of eternity to this God is not justified as he is clearly a mere being. He must be downgraded to the angelic aevum, and a higher God must be sought.
And no, on my view (and that of Hart, Bulgakov, and St. Maximus) creation does not make God who he is in the sense of an incomplete being becoming through a further addition or development. Rather creation exists because of who God is, and even the self-definition of God in his relation to creatures by which, for example, God is eternally the Son of Mary, is not something that negatively conditions God. Every relation of God to creation is not one of passivity but of activity, it is done by God NOT suffered (else any interaction with creation would be a passivity). Objections then to eternal creation are nothing but failures to grasp the basic doctrines underlying actus purus.
For more see my article here (https://theopenark.substack.com/p/an-unconscious-god), and Hart's post and comments here (https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2022/08/24/david-bentley-hart-responds-to-the-neo-neo-chalcedonians/#comments).
2. And that explanation is an appeal to the impossible, namely that irreconcilable dualisms are reconcilable, and are so by the brute power which one has already placed on one side of the irreconcilable dualism. I go over this here in my own assessment of the argument between Hart and Wood (https://theopenark.substack.com/p/apokatastasis-part-iii).
3. See above.
«Necessity as in external imposition would be an issue.» It would also be an issue if it arose internally. If God has to create, then He needs creation to be perfect. As Edward Feser points out, "[If] God cannot be boundless in love without creating the world, then creation *does* add something to God – it *completes* or *perfects* his love. This entails that God *needs creation* in order to be complete, perfect, unlimited, unbounded."
«unrealized potency and divine indifference are the issue.»
God having options doesn't imply any unrealized *passive* potency. Ed Feser: "[W]e need to draw a distinction between *active potency* and *passive potency*. Passive potency is the capacity to be changed or altered in some way. It is *passive* potency or potentiality, specifically, that God utterly lacks by virtue of being pure actuality. Active potency, by contrast, is the capacity to effect a change in something else. And as Aquinas writes, *active* potency or potentiality is something that “we must assign to [God] in the highest degree”."
That God's Will is neutral/indifferent towards which effect He causes is just the nature of libertarian freedom, the nature of alternative possibilities.
«This would mean that, as we both deny temporality in God, that God is not the self-diffusive Good as He would never pour out His Goodness beyond himself.» He is not essentially or intrinsically self-diffusive (just as He is not necessarily an unmoved mover), but this isn't a problem.
«This hypothetical would be a rejection of God as the Good of the God of the philosophers, and at that point there is no reason to affirm any philosophical conceptions of God.» I disagree given what I've written/pasted.
«[God] is rather a being with potentially unrealized potency that (ironically for you) had to be realized by a movement from potency to act (even if an eternal movement) to make him who he is.»
That doesn't follow for reasons I've explained. Creation doesn't change anything in God nor does God's will to create pick out counterfactually variant intrinsic states in Him. What differs across possible worlds is extrinsic to God.
«...we have undermined the identification of God with the Good....» We haven't.
«on my view ... creation does not make God who he is in the sense of an incomplete being becoming through a further addition or development» See Feser's quote above.
«namely that irreconcilable dualisms are reconcilable» To say it's irreconcilable is begging the question.
I'm curious as to why you, Hart and other universalists (if you are one) are attracted to the view that creation is necessary. Do you think its being contingent would be bad for hard universalism? I don't see why a hard universalist couldn't affirm that God was free to create or not.
Source: https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/10/divine-freedom-and-necessity.html
1. It is not a matter of God needing creation to complete a love he lacks in himself, rather it is because God is infinite love in himself that creation (the self-diffusiveness of the Good) necessarily follows. Your argument is just a reiteration of the tired and mistaken polemics of the neo-patristics on this point, which as ive quoted Jordan Wood explaining, do not allign with the thought of authors like St. Maximus.
2. The distinctions between active and passive potency collapse when we understand the implications of God being eternal infinite act, which is what I explained in my last comment. Quoting Feser on the theoretical distinction between these two potencies is not addressing my argument.
Yes, affirming God's will is indifferent in creating because he is choosing from multiple possibilities does result from affirming God's freedom is of the Libertarian variety. Obviously, I dont affirm that. Its nonsense. Libertarian freedom, even reduced merely to the idea of choice between options, is something that can only exist as a modality of creaturely freedom for beings moving from potency to act and operating within a web of finitely realizable goods chosen based on different approaches to transcendent ends. God does not choose nor is there any end higher than his own conditioning choices made to realize some end, he is simply self-diffusive of his goodness in infinite actualization. Furthermore, the article i already linked (an Unconscious God) deals at length with other issues of divine indifference in creation, such as its incompatibility with God creating from love.
3. Yes, God is intrinsically self-diffusive. Being an unmoved mover describes God's relation to creatures already existing, but to be self-diffusive is not a definition based on relation to creatures, it is the nature of the Good as such which is then the precondition and rationale for all created existence. This simple mistake is whats at root in your thinking God's necessarily creating must mean God is made more complete than he is in himself by creating, but this kind of argument is only possible if you dont understand that the Cause lacks nothing produced in the effect that it naturally produces (and if you say that this is emanation and not creation, no, they are the same thing explicated differently). This is a basic philosophical error you make, and as ive said, it puts you out of line with the Neoplatonic Christian tradition of God as the Good (in Maximus and Gregory Nazianzen and Dionysius).
4. See above, and see my articles linked previously.
5. Those things do follow, as i have explained, and your assertion that they do not is not an argument, its an appeal to an idea of divine activity which I argue is true but (along with certain other metaphysical necessities) logically entails God's infinite and necessary creativity.
6. You have admitted as much, so yes you have. See again the quote i provided from Wood as well.
7. See my arguments... and your own inability to respond...
8. No, it is not begging the question. That the dualism is irreconcilable is the nature of ultimate dualism (if they could be reconciled it would be in a higher ultimate monism), and ultimate dualism is what we have if an ultimate monism is denied, which denial is what I have been arguing against this entire time. Obviously.
9. Yes, Im universalist. I do not deny creation's contingency, it is contingent in that it is ontologically derivative/finite. I deny the contingency of the divine will and activity because it is metaphysical nonsense. Conflating an insertion of contingency into the divine will with creation's nature as contingent (which is another way of saying finitude) is just a glaring philosophical mistake. Obviously your view would have undesirable implications for hard universalism, but thats just because it is metaphysically wrong.
Please read the posts (my own and others) that i have already linked. I will be unable to respond further here for several days, and I also think that it wouldnt be very beneficial if you keep insisting your view upholds God's "freedom" while ours doesnt, as you just wont entertain anything but libertarian choice between options rooted in indifference (or vice versa) as freedom.
I appreciate your feedback. I was actually attempting to offer an olive branch but the question is: “How is it that a full subsistence of the divine nature and a full subsistence of the human nature can be one and the same subsistence, without contradiction?” Is one which for me which both captures loss of nuance when we use substantia in all cases and marks a mystery which is meant to leave things in tension. I appreciate Harts lectures which I’ve begun watching, and he’s not wrong to ask questions I just think it is a qualified monism or dualism—you can approach the mystery from both vantage points and it can be damaging to not account for the economic implications of pure monism.
I would need you to explain what you mean by saying Hart's formulation of the Neochalcedonian problematic (two natures in one hypostasis) "captures loss of nuance when we use substantia in all cases." Without you being clearer on what you mean there is not much I can say in response, other than that Hart's argument (and Bulgakov's) are anything but unnuanced, and that a logical and metaphysical blackhole, such as asserting a union of complete opposites by appeal to another third opposing term, is not as much nuance as it is simply a refusal to acknowledge the problem.
And Hart does not fail to account for the "economic implications of pure monism." An ultimate monism has no necessarily entailing adverse implications for how we hash out economic reality, and not only have Hart/Bulgakov hashed out issues like synergy, but in the final chapter of You are Gods Hart defends Bulgakov's own ontology of freedom of rational spirit, which to my mind is the only account of ontology in which there is no moment and so possibility of unfreedom in our being to be found.
Hypostasis is not nature and nature is not hypostasis. As Jordan Daniel Wood points out a hypostasis is not concerned about the nature it takes on, though one would say, as he does that the hypostasis of the Logos assumes human nature and unites it with Divine Nature. Jordan Daniel Wood in my mind offers a more nuanced--at least at times--evaluation of the so called new-chalcedonism. Anyway, I'm working my way through Hart's lecture's, it's quite hard as I can't play them without watching them, but it leaves me with a question. He points out the opacity of the statement, but is dogma or theology a Mystery allowing for paradox--especially as to allow the faith not to stray into something that would defeat it's efficacy to do anything or state anything? Is it on the other hand about comprehending God positively? Or is it often, the interaction between the knowable and unknowable, the veil which reveals God to us only to be lifted to grant us the sense of not even having touched the surface. I agree Hart's project is completely legitimate and often insightful and the Chiasmus is beautiful, but after much grimacing over what I take as indyosincracies to put it best, such as the Holy Spirit being the Spirit, which leaves the question open if our psycho-somatic selves are removed for theosis or deification or transcended, what principle retains us as anything but an extension and absorption into God. Gregory of Nazianzus says God is to the soul what the soul is to the body, but I don't think at that point he is locating spirit as the life principle, but rather the soul, nous, intelligence, etc...
I agree with you that theology is a play between the knowable and unknowable, but the unknowable here is not irrationality, it is "supra-rationality." Every antinomy is meant to lead the mind to higher unities which are not adequately expressible in words not, that is, because at the level of words theology asserts contradictories (see for example Palamas' denial of this idea of antinomy as contradiction), but because the transcendent divinity transcends finitude and union with it thus transcends finite expression. As the Areopagite says, this means that unities are always higher than distinctions, and so we are lead to radical expressions of monism to try and convey the divine reality (e.g., God as the maximum and minimum ala Nicholas of Cusa, God as being of beings and as supra-being ala Denys).
An assertion of two ontologically alien, other, unlike, separate and incommensurable natures, which is what one is asserting about divine and human natures if their unlikeness is defined as something other than the difference between infinite and finite being, is not a theologically acceptable view of paradox. It begins and ends in unbridgeable dualities, and since theology both in words and in divine-human union is a matter of expressing/attaining/returning to unity an ultimate dualism is simply irrationality. Put another way, with dualism theology is no longer a matter of language continually growing to try and convey the ultimate source of intelligibility which as such is supra-intelligible, instead theological language is an exercise in conveying nothing intelligible at all.
I dont know why you would grimace at the Holy Spirit being the Spirit as life principle. Biblically and into the 3rd Century this is how the Holy Spirit is most often understood, but this does not go away in later theology. God is every aspect of the creature's being. You cite Wood in this comment, but Wood also argues that every created hypostasis is really the Hypostasis of the Logos as that hypostasis/logoi. The principle that retains our distinct persons while also revealing us as God (because its both-and here in the unity of deification) is God's positing of Himself as us and our existence as this posited response (I go over the ontology of personhood as the hypostatized structure of procession and return here: https://theopenark.substack.com/p/apokatastasis-part-ii).
Yes, hypostasis and nature are distinct, however they are not separable or indifferent to one another. If you really think they are ontologically indifferent to each other I would like to know what you think this actually means not only in abstract definition but in the metaphysical unity of hypostasis and nature as subsistence and substance. Do you agree with Hart that "“hypostasis and nature [...] remain the two indissoluble sides of a single metaphysical principle: as ontic actualization and ontological axiom"?
Well, here I am still obviously working out a number of things and I'll have to think how this interpretation of the Chalcedonian model plays out, but my basic intuition and point in this post may be this: from the standpoint of eternity, it may be legitimate to follow Hart's metaphysical horizon, which eliminates all existential distance between God and man--though I believe in preserving a lingering difference in numerical identity. However, from the standpoint of now, we experience a diastema or gap or ontological gap between the uncreated and created, the infinite and finite, which is ever traversed by God ecstatically going out of himself as his energies to be present to us and in us, and us going ecstatically outside of ourselves to unite with God by co-operating with God's self-giving, self-emptying Gift of Himself to us to collapse the existential distance we experience between us and God in this life (even if it is caused simply by our blindness to and ignorance of God's presence and giving of himself, during this life, and beginning our beginning and end.
This preservation of distance which nevertheless is always crossed or crossed out, is in fact necessary, for us to properly understand the distance between us as created beings and the Uncreated which even while immanent, ever transcends us, setting the mark for perfection or deification, as out of our reach without God's condescension, or our working with him, or being open to the Grace of him giving himself to us as to expand our being and go beyond our current selves to be united to him. God of course is always here and sustaining us, but the distance is necessary to understand the gift Gid gives us at all times: Himself.
First of all as you said: “all creatures are ultimately God, are ultimately uncreated while also being created.” This is the both / and problem.” Second I affirm Harts ultimately from an eschatological vantage point, but economically there is an active co-operation between one and God until one is passively deified and we have to leave eschatology in tension with this. I’m not suggesting inadequacy in Harts logic as much as in its ability to account for a dynamic relationship with God who is both other and in me though I am me. There are tensions which hard overlooks at least economically which he collapses with theology.
And I do agree with Gods act of creation as in a sense a natural expression of himself but also it is him going out of himself to create—the logos becomes many logoi. We seek on earth hopefully to unite with God who though active inside us, doesn’t impose upon us, but asks us to participate in his activities like self-giving love. Not everyone manifesting self giving divine love in the world. This at least to me conveys that there is a dynamic relationship between our will and Gods. I don’t believe in eternal hell but I do believe that our mode of existence in this life and cooperation with God makes a difference.
Hart does not deny that God goes out of his simplicity and becomes the Logos of many logoi... I really do not understand this refrain of stating something which Hart also affirms but adding the word "but" in front to make it seem like he doesnt, or like its opposed to another of his views. Especially in this case the Logos becoming the many logoi is emanation, and so is another way of explicating creation as God's natural self expression.
Again, Hart does not have an issue dealing with divine-human synergy, please read the materials I have recommended above or any of his writings against determinism. Also I think my own series on Apokatastasis is an accurate explication of the view of freedom Hart affirms, so If you read that I would like to know if you think I fail to be thoroughly synergistic.
Freedom cannot be rooted in sin, as sin is fundamentally unfreedom as non-being and thus non-act. Are you implying, and forgive me if my question is completely mistaken, that freedom only exists prior to the eschatological deification and only exists as conditioned by evil opposing good? In my original comment I did point out that you seemed to be unable to affirm human activity/co-operation in the eschaton precisely because you would not allow divine activity to be natural to humans. Is this stance grounded in an idea of human agency as inherently conditioned by evil, and so necessarily ceasing when evil is no more?
The "both/and" isnt a problem for Hart drawing on Bulgakov, nor is synergy a problem, you have simply asserted this while misreading him. Likewise for Hart/Bulgakov there is no tension between eschatology and history as if co-operation is exclusive to history and done away in eschatology, their ontology of freedom grounds freedom within eschatology as end/beginning and formal cause. Please read the chapter and its sources I've referred to (The Chiasmus in You are Gods).
I enjoyed this. A couple of quick thoughts: Creation Ex Nihilo and the Incarnation attest to the fact that there is no nature independent of super nature - surely. Christ is the alpha and omega, the grounding of all that is, and, as far as I understand things, is never simply Divine but always (I’m not speaking of duration here) human and Divine (I’m quite sure Bulgakov makes such a move). Creation is the manifestation of this reality, no? The fall, however one wants to conceive of it, is the insistence that nature is not in fact super nature; this is not an affirmation of the truth but a privation of reality. Christ’s descent to the realm of the dead - death representing an insistence upon a closed understanding of nature - is the affirmation that God will ultimately not consent to have any of his creation locked into such an illusion. The vocation of the Christian is to live “supernaturally” which is to say live what is real, for the sake of the world around him/her. The Eucharist is the body of God, not because it has received grace ad extra, but because in the liturgical setting it is eschatological affirmed as what it truly is; the body of God. Bread incidentally is a microcosm of the entire cosmos - sunshine, vegetation, water, human action etc.
I like this manner of putting it very much. My article was trying to tease out all the holes or questions which don't seem to add up and most of all, I think by being able to place this reality as not supernatural, as fallen, though not without God's presence, is a quite difficult thing to work out and difficult if we just see the corruption and death as an illusion or Christ as not descending into hades (or dying and taking on this delusive corrupted world). I'm ok with Gregory of Nysa's or Maximus the Confessor's sort of dual creation--Gregory even takes the straying cause in a way from Plato--but there is something to be liberated from which we participate in and need to be healed from or liberated from.
I want to than everyone for engaging so much with me on this post and conversing. I am sorry for not having all the answers, but I mean all in good will and with a generous spirit. Till the end I will find a problem with every systematic presentation of anything as I have that Kierkergaurdian bit in me I'll never erase.
I think Smith begs the question in favor of a strict libertarian view of human freedom...a false dilemma where it's either determinism or strict libertarianism. He writes:
"Unlike Hart’s monistic vision, which risks reducing theosis to a deterministic unfolding...."
"His framework suggests a deterministic path where grace is not distinctly relational but an inevitable outgrowth of nature’s potential. This overlooks the personal struggle, repentance, and active cooperation required in the journey of theosis. For instance, in Hart’s view, St. Mary of Egypt’s conversion might appear as an expected actualization of her inherent divinity, rather than the dramatic and personal turning toward God that involved intense spiritual battle and the decisive rejection of her former life."
But one can say that St. Mary of Egypt's salvation was inevitable although *which* path she took was undetermined.
Smith: "Grace is not an inevitable extension of nature but a transformative and uncreated gift that invites the believer into a relationship marked by love, struggle, and mutual self-giving."
It could be both. Rather than strict libertarian free will, one could hold to a broad account of libertarian free will. We have the freedom to take the sinful or sinless path (to simplify it), and both paths are ultimately equivalent (Bulgakov), for they both end in union with God.
Hi Nicholas! This was very thought provoking, and I just wrote a response to it on my substack. I would love your thoughts if you have the time and interest in reviving a discussion you started last fall. :)
Just posted my response!
For sure. I read it and it was lucid and illuminating. Just as an immediate thought I think that Maximus provides a partial answer here, which I didn't come to understand the importance of until recently as he speaks of eternal works such as Being itself and of temporal works (my Father is still working and so am I)--along with his Logoi providing an "existential scope" and structuring principle for all creation which one's tropos (mode of existence) may align with or not align with. These works could fall into the category of energies and I think that would somewhat begin to answer some of the puzzles you draw out much more clearly than I was capable of at the time. Anyway, give me a little time and I'll provide a more articulate and comprehensive response (to the best of my ability). Oh and thanks for engaging with my post! I'm excited to dig into this discussion further!
Our spiritual state
Well yes I’d agree we all end up in the same place in the end but when is the end of infinity? As Maximus says if we don’t participate in virtue and have piety where will we be when God is all in all? Anyway, it’s a dialogue between our will and God’s and if we don’t align with his logoi,his will for us, it is our loss as we move toward ill being and we don’t fully develop in the womb of the world to encounter Mount Tabor; this will not be pleasant when we directly encounter the brilliance of the ever suffered and given love of our Lord. Free will is acquired as well as the ability to no longer deliberate but see clearly.
I think you're being obtuse, as it's implied that the union I'm talking of is a pleasant one. Your comment is just a rehash of the free will defense of hell, which is what your OP was too. It just presupposes strict libertarianism.
I don’t think hell is possible as an everlasting possibility, and I believe in a moderate libertarianism wherein unlike many here it seams isn’t enough. But it’s not just a combatilism with deterministic processes but these processes can be altered by synergistic cooperation of the human and divine will. We have more in nfluence over the state of nature depending on the fulness of our union or