Syncretistic Catholicism

another minority report

Syncretistic Catholicism where any Anglican, Episcopal, Roman & Orthodox

consensus informs core beliefs & divergences are received as valid theological
opinions

Re-situating Zizioulas (& Maximus) in Idioms that

are more amenable
Zizioulas’ musings evoke images for me that work really well, metaphorically
& theopoetically.

And any rhetorical & liturgical approach, which is that existentially persuasive
& intuitively appealing, just has to implicate some coherent ontological
account?

For example,
• 1) Leading w/hypostases rather than ousia,
• 2) recognizing, in the order of intelligibility, the essential dependencies of
individual essences,
• 3) interpreting each as personal &
• 4) trinitarian dynamics as relational –

How might we best conceive such modes of identity?

Scotus, too, eschews substantial references to hypostases (e.g. primary

substances & subsistences), recategorizing them as exemplifications! He
doesn’t altogether abandon substance-talk, but relocates primary substance
to ousia (Thomist analogue being secondary substance), thus avoiding
causal dynamics (act-potency ascriptions).

Zizioulas’ critics point out that, at some point, he must retrieve substantial
distinctions into his relational ontology to avoid conundra of the one & the
many & metaphysically differentiate un/created realities and I suspect Scotus
could gift the coherence, which some opinions hold, his account lacks!?

A Scotus Glossary

divine realities
• extreme realism
• numerically singular essence
• immanent universal
• communicability or predicability = exemplifiability
• persons = exemplification
• individuality is not nonexemplifiability but indivisibility
• communicable essence (like secondary substance)
• indivisible essence (like primary substance)
• persons = exemplifications not individuals or substances (b/c
incommunicable)

determinate realities
• moderate realism
• numerically many essence
• created universal
• divisibility = instantiability
• individuality = noninstantiability
• persons = individuals or substances (communicable)

The Scotist approach to divine syllogistics is not over against, for example,
the Thomist, but addresses divine realities on its own terms. Both Scotistic &
Thomistic trinitarian approaches well conform to our classical creedal
formulations.
There are theological contours implicit in our creeds, which, when explicated,
metaphysically, can only employ meta-ontological, semantic references, not
ontological descriptions. The Scotistic glossary makes more explicit how this
is the case, when differentiating divine & determinate realities by using
neologisms. Of course, the definition of such coinages still must make
explicit the extensive nuancing required in distinguishing divine & aristotelian
syllogistics.

For example, such nuancing as set forth in a Dionysian-type logic, where:

God is | x | is true kataphatically & trans-analogically; as a simile, analogically
& literally or metaphorically & nonliterally;
God is | not x | is true apophatically & literally; and
God is neither | x | nor | not x | is true relationally & really.

Put another way, consider DBH’s admonition from The Hidden & the Manifest:
This donation of being is so utterly beyond any species of causality we can
conceive that the very word cause has only the most remotely analogous value
in regard to it. And, whatever warrant Thomists might find in Thomas for
speaking of God as the first efficient cause of creation (which I believe to be in
principle wrong), such language is misleading unless the analogical scope of
the concept of efficiency has been extended almost to the point of apophasis.

I’m sympathetic to Zizioulas’ eschewal of substance-talk in trinitarian

logistics. However, I receive it as more of a rhetorical than substantial (double
entendre intended) critique, because, point of fact, properly parsed &
nuanced, neither Latin nor Greek Fathers, Augustinians nor Cappadocians,
Chalcedonians nor Alexandrians, Thomists nor Scotists, when speaking of the
Trinity, however much they may have implicitly relied on a univocity and/or
analogy of being, ever really employed ontological categories, such as in
terms of modes of being. Rather, properly understood, they spoke
semantically using meta-ontological categories, such as in terms of modes of
identity.

See:

godel-the-end-of-physics-and-abelard-et-al-the-end-of-trinitology

how-to-re-conceive-substance-for-divine-modes-of-identity-scotus-the-greek-
fathers

Note: I need to retrieve those 2 essays of mine & provide updated urls.

This category error should be avoided when critiquing other trinitologies or

we’ll end up caricaturizing them.
If Zizioulas wanted to advance our trinitarian conceptions, idiomatically,
perhaps he could’ve followed in Scotus’ footsteps, updating Scotus’
neologisms? And perhaps he should’ve begun his project meta-ontologically
using vague semantical references rather than ontologically with robust
metaphysical descriptions?

How might one commence such a project?

A Proposed Relational Meta-ontology Glossary

Personhood – a cluster concept including communion & otherness

Essence or ousia – primary not secondary substance for divine realities

Divine person – exemplification of relational personhood & incommunicable

Human person – individual self-consciousness, communicable or predicable

Person – cluster concept including ekstasis (moving toward communion or

unitive striving) & hypostasis (particularity or haecceity via idiomata)

The Father – not personal cause but unoriginate originator in order of

intelligibility (essential dependencies) & eternally generating (donatively &
eucharistically) communion & otherness (persons via ur-kenosis)

Essential Dependencies – donatively gift not what one is, essentially, but how
one is, economically, in the order of intelligibility not ontologically, not a
substantial subordination

Divine Other – person or hypostasis, neither an individual (i.e. not an

indivisible essence or primary substance) nor an essential nature (i.e. not a
communicable essence or secondary substance)

Human Other – person or hypostasis as self with both individual & essential
natures

The One or monas – Begetter and Emitter, of whom the others are the one
begotten and the other the emission

Necessity – refers to ousia or nature but only applies to instantiations of

secondary substances (hence not predicated of divine primary substance)

Divine Nature or Essence or Ousia – refers to primary substance as

numerically singular essence, which, as an immanent universal exhibits
communicability or predicability or exemplifiability (hence not predicated of
human primary substances, which instantiate only created universals or
secondary substances)

Necessary Being – Borrowing Hartian phraseology, this language is

misleading unless the analogical scope of the concepts of necessity & being
have both been extended almost to the point of apophasis, for divine ousia
refers to primary substances & created ousia refers to secondary substances,
where necessary or contingent ordinarily would refer to the hypostatic
instantiations of same.
Divine Necessary Being – could only refer to personal hypostatic
exemplifications of the divine ousia as the numerically singular,
communicable primary substance, which entails eternally communicating
communion (ekstasis) & otherness (hypostasis). As such, in a dynamical,
relational ontology, necessity would refer not to an essential whatness but the
economical howness of divine realities, which does not involve causal,
substantial transmissions but unitive strivings, loving relationalities or
perichoresis, which, semantically, are logically not ontologically necessary.
Hence, beyond the primally gratuitous paterological ur-kenosis, ad intra, a
pneumatological kenosis ad extra donates the gratuity of creation & a
Christological kenosis gifts the gratuity of grace. And by gratuitous, we mean
radically free.

Divine Oneness – can be expressed

• 1) essentially (singular, communicable, primary substance, whatness or
propria of esse naturale), an Augustinian conception
• 2) hypostatically (ad intra paterological ur-kenosis & Christological &
pneumatological ad intra communing and ad extra kenoses, howness or
idiomata) and
• 3) dynamically (synergeia of trinitarian will, of the esse intentionale via
energeia & oikonomia).

After Thoughts

To me, this would all still entail, it seems, only an “analogy of universals,”
which would implicate an extreme realism for the immanent divine universals
but only a moderate realism for instantiable created universals.

If, by universals, one refers to shared properties like HOW one acts & as
WHAT one acts,
Then, even unable to generically specify WHAT thus acts divinely, i.e. only
able to apophatically say what one is not & only able to analogically imagine
what one is connotatively like,
One could apophatically distinguish divine & creaturely realities by defining
the latter’s shared essences as divisible, the former’s as NOT so & the latter’s
persons (substances or individuals) as communicable, the former’s persons
(nonsubstantial exemplifications) as NOT so.
Such apophatic predications of the divine essence would guarantee more
conceptual compatibility & logical consistency than related, but still very
much distinct, kataphatic affirmations.
For example, to be more clear that I wouldn’t mean to say that the divine
essence is one per some strictly numeric determination, I’d want to say,
instead, that it includes, rather, Oneness, itself (per a verbally iconic
denomination.) And I’d emphatically not want to refer to divine being per any
strictly generic determination but, instead, refer, rather, to Being itself, again,
strictly denominatively.

Orthodox Dialogue on the Trinity

The Father is the primordial source (arch‘) & ultimate cause (aitia) of the
divine being. ~ 1992 Orthodox-Reformed dialogue

https://t.co/8rK9l8PCMf?amp=1
in ineffable ways that are beyond all time (achronos), beyond all origin
(anarchos), & beyond all cause (anaitios). Orthodox-R. Catholic dialogue 2003
https://t.co/0WqgRkqHmv?amp=1

http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/ecumenical-and-
interreligious/ecumenical/orthodox/filioque-church-dividing-issue-
english.cfm

Not everything Torrance had to say is acceptable to the Orthodox. The

disagreements are real & not trifling. But the affinities also are significant, &
the mutual respect is profound.
https://t.co/VMMmjDKDOp?amp=1

https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/orthodoxbridge/tf-torrance-and-reformed-
orthodox-dialogue/

Such language is misleading unless the analogical scope of the concept of

efficiency has been extended almost to the point of apophasis. ~ DBH, The
Hidden & the Manifest 4/

What’s instructive about the trinitarian dialogue cited above, beyond the
significant descriptive & normative agreements expressed in those joint
statements, is the manner in which it was conducted with such prayerful,
respectful, charitable dispositions of all participants. 5/5

In recent years, with much dialogue & many joint declarations among
Anglican, Roman, Orthodox & even Reformed traditions, even interpretations
of such as the MOF & Filioque present fewer conceptual stumbling blocks to
a rather BROAD creedal consensus re Trinitarian doctrine?

A Brief Defense of Common Sense

Our “participatory imagination” engages “common sense.”

Our common sense derives from events encountered, first, nondiscursively &
preconceptually, & is, next, articulated by our stories, & finally, organized by
our conceptual mapmaking.

I have chosen to interpret Aquinas, Scotus & Peirce as providing meta-

ontological heuristics that, more than almost anything else, amount to a
robust defense of common sense & insistence on the epistemic
indispensability of our participatory imagination.
Why, then, all the subtlety, nuance & neologisms? Why a Summa, for
goshsakes? How, then, do such peripatetic wanderings arrive at anything
more than a metaphysical haystack of philosophical straw, if all we’re talking
about is common sense?

That irony comes about precisely because, as we employ our common sense
& participatory imagination, we’ll often discover, nondiscursively, more than
we can say, discursively, and we’ll often know, preconceptually, more than we
can map, conceptually.

Many have variously described distinct aspects of this “knowing” such as in

terms of connaturality (Maritain), an illative sense (Cardinal Newman), a tacit
dimension (Polyani) & abduction (Peirce), all which are prior to robustly
inferential understandings, for example, of creedal & moral realities. Such a
knowing can be existential, confessional, performative & participatory, though
always certainly anticipating, albeit inchoately, sapiential, theoretical,
informative & conceptual formulations.

There’s undeniably a sensus fidei (of laity, theologians & bishops) that might
be conceived as a charism of discernment & graced via nondiscursive
instinct, intuition, empathy, heart knowledge, innate inclinations or synderesis.
And it’s going to be obscure & unsystematic before it gets discursively
appropriated with any degree of conceptual clarity. We must not forget that
this sensus, as grace, pertains to all the faithful, and that we can learn
something of God even from the ordinary, distracted, confused, ill-informed,
sinful, & ecclesially marginalized. This is also why a written tradition
presupposes an oral tradition, wherein the stories once told & prayers once
prayed will indispensably contribute to any proper theological interpretation
beyond mere texts.

So, there’s a LOT going on of a logical nature, tacitly & implicitly, in our
common sense & participatory imagination. And they’re so fearfully &
wonderfully made that it’s systematic explication does require no small effort
that yields no simple schema. Their elaboration yields such as the first
principles & the various causations, entails realism & fallibilism, eschews
nominalism & essentialism and norms practical reasoning even under
speculative uncertainty.

For a good grasp of how our participatory imagination works, think of how
one’s “hometown knowledge” works. To give a stranger directions, one needs
determinative descriptions like how many blocks (numerically), which
direction (locatively), which street signs (indexically) and, perhaps, a map. To
give a fellow inhabitant directions, one who participates in the same
imaginary, one might only require a denominative connotation: “You’re looking
for directions to the local IGA store? Ha ha, silly! That’s just Mr. Gower’s
Grocery!”

The chief problem with dismissing our concrete participatory imagination &
common sense, esteeming only conceptual map-making, is that we can
inadvertently jettison first principles, causations & realism, things we’ll want
to go beyond but never without. We’ll end up subverting science, itself, along
with our common sense, embracing epistemic dead-ends like logical
positivism, radical empiricism, metaphysical ignosticism, theological
noncognitivism & scientism.

What I personally discovered in examining the defense of common sense as

inheres in Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus, Peirce, Maritain, Newman, Polyani et al
is a type of second naiveté, a re-enchantment, the realization that, everything I
felt & believed, when making my joyous First Communion, when learning my
Latin responses as an altar boy, when baptized in the Spirit & first prayed in
tongues, is ultimately eminently defensible, philosophically, and still rationally
actionable, existentially. The proper use of my common sense & participatory
imagination in a community of earnest inquiry & value-realization very well
epistemically entitled me long before I had a more precise understanding of
how. I’ve told my loved ones that, if they trust their common sense &
participate in an earnest community of value-realizers, they don’t have to
follow my path, where I happily discovered thru various means that my
common sense was justified by that grace we experience as common sense,
itself.

The rest is — so much straw!

Note: Situating Zizioulas Systematically in Tillich per My Retreblement

I don’t interpret Zizioulas’ existentialist & personalist approaches as

developed out of classical existentialisms & personalisms, which are
individualistic philosophies, b/c Z’s personalist conception is intrinsically
relational, as difference in communion.
We’d need to distinguish aspects of Z’s philosophical anthropology, which
might be implicit & inchoate, from those of his theological anthropology.
ISTM doubtful that the former could do anything other than to establish the
reality of a person, that the “meaning” of a person must be imported from
one’s worldview. There’s no doubt where Z’s concept of person gets its
meaning & that freedom in the context of communion necessarily plays a
constitutive role in person for him (think MOF).

One might also appropriate everything that’s useful in Tillich (e.g. Biblical
personalism, pneumatology par excellence, ground of being), while correcting
his insufficiencies (e.g. Christology) in order to bolster Z’s personalist
hermeneutic. While Z pursued a similar project to Tillich, substituting neo-
Patristic for Biblical sources, his patristic interpretations have been harshly
criticized.

I don’t interpret Z’s thrust as anti-essential but as non-essential, so, retrieving

Scotistic substance-talk into his hermeneutic needn’t explode it, but could,
instead, better equip it to block unacceptable trinitological inferences. Also,
Scotus’ eschewal of secondary substance-talk, trinitologically, would give Z
an ontological idiom a tad more compatible with his preferred vocabulary vis
a vis ousia, substance, hypostasis, person, etc
So, to best advance a systematic project sympathetic to Zizioulas’ concerns,
I’d retrieve Tillich’s Christian existentialism & Biblical personalism, with the
added bonus being that their dialectical character is very reminiscent of
Panikkar’s cosmo-the-andrism. And I’d retrieve a Scotistic ontology (at least
to articulate trinitological grammatical contours).

Finally, consistent with my triadic, axiological epistemology, as developed

from Neville’s Peircean systematics, I’d turn to Peirce, Neville & Tillich for their
conceptions re impersonal accounts of the Ground of Being to systematically
situate Zizioulas’ causal-relational personalist interpretation of MOF.

Because Z asserts that the personal existence of the Father constitutes his
own existence, the F thus causes not only the Trinitarian unity but the divine
ousia, so, not only imparts His being but causes it, characteristics like divinity
derived from, because identical to, His personhood.

In my own approach, I have not adopted but have adapted conceptions of the
One & the many from Peirce, Tillich & Neville, often referred to with
impersonal terms like Ens Necessarium and Ground of Being.

I employ distinct categories like nondeterminate emptiness (analogous to

ground of Tillich & Neville, Ens Necessarium of Peirce), nondeterminate
nothingness (real but not existing) and indeterminate being (existing).

There’s a certain paradoxical feel to juxtaposing Zizioulas’ MOF personalist

approach with such impersonalist conceptions as Tillich’s Ground of Being,
Infinite Abyss & Being-Itself?
But, following the Tillichian dialectical methodology, orienting our existential
orientations to ultimate concerns, coloring our anthropology theologically, we
can theologically gift meaning to what are otherwise bare philosophical
conceptions. For me, & why not for Zizioulas, why couldn’t “freely relating”
constitute the Ground of Being, Who is the Freely Willing Loving One God, the
Father?
Hypostatic Logic

Often we can misappropriate Eastern scriptural texts through radically

logocentric & metaphysical lenses, when, instead, they’re more so about
leading one into experiential realizations, e.g. of unitary being.

In Christianity, the personal should have primacy, because it gifts us Logos-

centric experiential realizations of the epectatic & erotic unitive
consummations of persons, hypostatically, including ecstasies of & from their
primary essential natures.

If we conceive emptiness in the East as an act where the nonformal takes on

form, that conception of “emptiness as form” will map to Christianity as the
innascibility & fecundity of self-emptying persons, Who kenotically “take on
form” to generate others for perichoretic relations.

Both the Cappadocian emphasis on persons (more so than substance) as

well as the Nazianzen & Damascene conceptions of mutual coinherence
would entail, then, a Neoplatonic (emanation, exemplarity & consummation)
perichoretic metaphysic of personal goodness (more so than of participatory
being). It’s an hypostatic goodness, a Dionysian self-diffusive goodness & a
Victorine “highest good as love.”

Bonaventure could pull all this together for both Paterology & Christology, and
for the emanational – relational dynamics of both the Monarchy of the Father
as well as the Cosmic Christ, precisely because “emptiness as taking on
form” refers to – not only the absolutely free & supremely personal acts of ur-
kenosis & kenosis, but – the very generation of all hypostatic individualities
as well as all hypostatically identical opposites.

Such an emptiness, then, does not refer to the epistemic incomprehensibility

of some analogical ontological interval (which, nevertheless, remains
supremely intelligible).
Rather, it refers to ad intra & ad extra self-donations, both immanent &
economic generations of both other persons’ individualities, themselves, as
well as their genera or forms. Such persons can thus real-ize & enjoy their
hypostatic sameness, even when it’s not a natural sameness.

As for any natural differences, as the logoi of the Logos, they’re contained in
the concrete Absolute Whole, Who’s not reducible to (even though constituted
by) His “natural parts.”

And each person, as an “hypostatic part,” becomes actualized, i.e.

hypostasized, in Christ’s self as a member of the Body of Christ, eternally
manifesting Christ, but forever as an individual who’ll never exhaust nor be
obliterated by Him.

Beyond the utterly incomprehensible but supremely intelligible analogia entis,

which gifts us both intuitional & discursive intellectual knowledge ABOUT God
(e g. like your beloved’s birth certificate or genealogy on Ancestry [dot] com),
we realize a knowledge OF God via an affective connaturality gifted FROM
God (e.g. like the ineffable, reciprocal exchanges between lovers in their
bridal chambers).

Emptiness gifts nothing less than fullness. It’s personal not ontological.

Brackenized Zizioulas

Pannenberg moved away from just a “relations of origin” MOF interpretation

to include a “diversity of relations” dimension, e.g. handing over of Lordship.
Even then, some conception of the Father as “unoriginate originator” remains
intact, istm.

B/c there’s so much affinity between Pannenberg’s & Joseph Bracken’s

metaphysical approaches, appropriating such a modified MOF element in a
Bracken-like approach seems a fruitful path forward.
The reason I adapted rather than adopted the Ground of Being conceptions of
Tillich & Neville is that it’s important for my systematic consistency to remain
faithful to Peirce’s Ens Necessarium abduction.

Toward that end, the last element in my situating of Zizioulas, systematically,

involves going beyond, but not without Scotus, in a more robustly Peircean
direction that’s explicitly Trinitarian.

That is why I turn to the metaphysic of Joseph Bracken, a Peirce scholar and
neo-Whiteheadian. What makes Bracken further amenable to this project is
his
faithful retrieval of Classical Theism and his conscious Peircean avoidance of
nominalistic tendencies as in Whitehead’s process approach, or, to some
extent, adumbrations in Hartshorne’s neo-Classical theism.

My favorite Bracken book remains God: Three Who Are One, 2008, Liturgical
Press.

I also commend

1) The Divine Matrix: Creativity as Link between East and

West, 1995, Orbis Books;

2) The One in the Many: A Contemporary Reconstruction of the God-World

Relationship, 2001, Eerdmans; and

3) Does God Roll Dice? Divine Providence for a World in the Making, 2012,
Liturgical
Press.

For a great overview that shows how these approaches can be placed in
dialogue, see the dissertation of Dong-Sik Park: The God-World Relationship
Between Joseph Bracken, Philip Clayton, & Open Theism.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/43/

The above thread contextualizes how I situate Scotus, Peirce & Bracken with
a
sympathetic eye toward Zizioulas in A Neo-Chalcedonian, Cosmotheandric
Universalism.

John Sobert Sylvest June 8, 2023 Uncategorized

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