Syncretistic Catholicism

another minority report

Syncretistic Catholicism where any Anglican, Episcopal, Roman & Orthodox

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

Lookin’ for hell in all the wrong places! Lookin’ for

hell in too many faces!
As I understand Catholic teaching (I never took a philosophy or theology
course, so caveat emptor), however one imagines that our free consent is
secured, whether via efficacious and/or sufficient grace, that grace will be
non-necessitating.

This means to me that –

Volitional freedom can only ever be the fruit of an intellect – will collaboration.

The will would express a freedom for excellence.

The intellect’s operations would be far more broadly conceived beyond, for
example, mere discursive reasoning. Knowledge would be both gnoseological
& operative.
Our epistemic suite would be furnished by manifold & multiform ways of
knowing (e.g. Martain’s ways & Lonergan’s imperatives).

Let me explain.

The irresistable grace of Calvinism as combined with active reprobation is

clearly distinct from the non-necessitating grace of Catholicism with its
passive reprobation. I say this to point out that my eschewal of the label
“nondeliberative” for all accounts of Catholic volition & grace, whether
variously in/compatibilist or libertarian & invoking efficacious grace or not,
means that “efficacious grace” is not synonomous with “nondeliberative,” at
least, not as I understand & approach it.

Does the following fly with anyone’s assessment of what I imagine my own
Catholicism to be requiring?

I ask because this is the more salient aspect of a point that I’ve been trying,
variously successfully, to get across:

that our consent can be efficaciously secured is an acceptable Catholic

position & THAT it is deliberatively delivered is our Catholic position.

HOW may this be the case? cf. Molinists, Congruists, Báñezians, Syncretists,
O’Neill, Brotherton, Stump and the Catholic panoply of Thomists, Scotists,
Dominicans, Jesuits, Franciscans & Analytics and all their neo-formulations.

This is all to suggest, then, that there is nothing either wholly congenial or
entirely repugnant to universalism in any truly Catholic account of nature,
grace & freedom.

This is not to say that there won’t be different conceptual tailoring chores that
can emerge for the universalist, for example, as she evaluates each different
account in order to develop its logical defense for the problem of evil.
This is all to observe that, at least for a Catholic, it is not which account of
nature, grace & freedom that one happens to prefer (and I rather like elements
of them all!) that will or not, in & of itself, algorithmically drive one to either
perditionism or universalism.

This is not to deny that certain accounts might be more or less felicitous for
devising logical defenses & arguing evidential plausibilities, but that’s only a
measure of how much explaining & adhockery they’ll require and not an
evaluation of their logical consistency as defined on THEIR own terms.

I reurge all this to suggest that, at least vis a vis Catholic theology, many may
be lookin’ for hell in all the wrong places, lookin’ for hell in too many faces.

An authentically Catholic stance will only ever be moderately libertarian,

moderately voluntarist and so forth, variously emphasizing the intellect or will
but never negating either.

So, if it’s not in our competing accounts of how nature, grace & freedom relate
that we’ll discover the presuppositions that are actually driving any of us
toward perditionalism vs universalism, where are those presuppositions
located?

I think they are located in our protological & eschatological priors. They are
located in our beliefs regarding both where we came from, primally, & where
we’re headed, ultimately. And they are grounded, even more primitively, in
what we believe about the nature & will of our primal Source – ground, origin,
being, support, order, meaning, destiny.

Because protological realities are economic, it matters greatly whether one

approaches creatio ex nihilo with a violent ontology, which conceives rational
creatures as running from nonbeing to being, or as also grounded in a
harmonizing creatio ex Deo ontology, which conceives rational creatures as
running, albeit ever finitely & everlastingly epectatically, toward Absolute
Perfection, Himself, realizing one relative perfection after another ad infinitum.

A harmonizing logic of being & becoming properly recognizes, while employing

an evil as privation thesis, that, as imagoes Dei –

per the logic of our essential being, while our evil acts can partly obscure the
divine image, they can never totally eclipse it; and

per the logic of our formal becoming, while our evil habits can transiently
hinder our growth in degrees of divine likenesses, they can never everlastingly
obliterate that potential.

That the divine will wholly determines our acts of existence, which reduce the
potencies of our primary nature, is why our essential goodness is not ever
totally eclipsable. We freely co-self-determine our synergistic formal acts of
becoming, which reduce the final potencies of our secondary natures. Each
free, co-self-determined, synergistic, formal act of becoming precisely
represents a cooperation with the non-necessitating divine grace, which
necessarily will involve the collaboration of our will & intellect, the operations
of which were gifted in our primary natures.

It’s precisely because our essential goodness is not totally eclipsable that our
every efficient – formal act will represent some degree of collaboration of the
will & intellect, ergo some inalienable degree of freedom. This is to recognize
that even errant consents to apparent goods will necessarily involve, also,
some reduction of im/material – final potencies, which is to say an
ineluctable degree of being & goodness, without which evil could not sustain
its parasitic existence. I say this to emphasize that its absurd to suggest that,
by defining freedom as for excellence or in defending the absence of mortal
sin per universalism, anyone would be denying either our peccability or fact of
sinning. We are always sufficiently free to sin, both venially & gravely, but are
also adequately determined to manifest some goodness, whether a little or a
lot. We aren’t sufficiently knowledgeable to finally & definitively reject God.
Because eschatological realities are of course economic, too, it would be a
major category error to frame up our nature, grace & freedom considerations
in terms of mere metaphysical necessities of the divine esse naturale, while
ignoring questions pertaining to the economic fittingness of the divine esse
intentionale (where I’ll invoke a thin passibility needed to block inferences
from unrelated counterarguments).

Above, theoanthropologically, we have established what I think are essential

protological & eschatological presuppositions.

It’s at this logical juncture that I would draw my inferences regarding the
divine will and what would be economically fitting regarding our divine origins
& destinies. I employ a double-effect and cooperation with evil-like calculus to
define the moral limits of “fitting” divine remedies, which is not wholly
unrelated to DBH’s game theoretic calculus and moral modal collapse of the
antecedent – consequent will distinction at the eschatological horizon.

If we take those moral arguments as foundational, then we will – up front –

jettison
a) postmortem volitional irreversibility,
b) passive reprobation &
c) everlasting perdition

and substitute in their place, respectively,

a) Tom Belt’s Maximian irrevocability thesis,

b) co-self-determined (passive) degrees of theophanic luminosity &
c) transitory purgation.

Also, implicit in the creatio ex Deo logic of the in/finite and Absolute/relative
perfection are our divine Logos/logoi & tropoi distinctions as well as an
eschewal of any concrete natura pura. A universal hylomorphism makes for a
very felicitous fit with post-mortem mutability.
Now, what happens to our competing accounts of how to relate nature, grace
& freedom? Per universalism, they can keep competing & speculating on
pretty much the same terms even after jettisoning postmortem volitional
irreversibility, passive reprobation &
everlasting perdition and, instead, embracing a Maximian irrevocability thesis,
co-self-determined (passive) degrees of theophanic luminosity & transitory
purgation.

Given the Absolute Primacy of Christ of Maximus & Scotus, we can dismiss
the absurd notion that there would be no Incarnation per universalism.

Given the consequences of sin and realities of death as well as our theotic
journeys from image to likeness, we can dismiss the absurd notion that grace
would lose both its gratuitous nature as well as its soteriological &
sophiological efficacies per universalism.

Most absurd of all would be any characterization of universalism as

Calvinism-lite just because we reject the violent ontology that introduces an
incoherent eschatology with a dichotomy between grace & no grace, which is
tantamount to dichotomies between being & nonbeing as well as evil &
goodness.

Universalism represents an harmonious ontology where we’re journeying

instead, not unaided by grace, from image to likeness, from relative perfection
to relative perfecton, purging parasitic vicious natures whose parasitism
proves the presence of goodness, the creatio continua of which proves an
abiding divine presence, an omnipresencing which, for rational creatures, is
necessarily a mutual indwelling (if one accepts that there’s always some
degree, however vestigial or small, of collaboration of intellect & will in every
human act, even in our sinful, as well as merely mistaken, choosings of
apparent goods).

The very same mysteries will perdure regarding nature, grace & freedom,
along with logical & evidential problems of evil, just not hell.
So, emphatically no to the absurd notion that the universalism of either DBH
or JDW devolve into metaphysical necessity. That doesn’t follow explicitly or
implicitly or by entailment. Neither would a Christological monophysitism or
cosmological pantheism. Universalism doesn’t follow metaphysically &
algorithmically from questions of divine freedom, determination or natural
necessity. It is rather grounded in divine volitional fittingness.

The mirror image, anthropologically, is that neither does universalism follow

metaphysically & algorithmically from questions of human freedom,
determination or natural necessity. It is rather grounded in, well, divine
volitional fittingness.

We’ve been lookin’ for hell in all the wrong places, lookin’ for hell in too many
faces!

Universalism derives from revelation and that divine-human connaturality

which gifts us our parental instincts, aesthetic sensibilities, moral intuitions,
common sense & unitive inclinations.

Otherwise, bring your own metaphysic. Bring your own account of nature,
grace & freedom. Bring your own parental instincts, aesthetic sensibilities,
moral intuitions, common sense & unitive inclinations. And as you relay the
latter, look universalists straight in the eye when you’re talking hypothetically
about your blessedly damned children & grandchildren.

Regarding Post-Mortem Purgative Graces

My insights regarding purgative graces resonate with many of the storylines

in George MacDonald’s Lilith. I believe that purgative graces would ordinarily
operate in a way that would seem to match his account of the rather
“TOLLSOME” processes of eschatological judgment. They’d mature us for
divine communion by purifying & healing us. At least this matches my
Catholic understanding of purgatory as – neither spatial nor temporal, but – a
personal divine presence that’s blessedly painful.

Per my view, under any Catholic account of non-necessitating grace, purgation

never involves either a voltional short-circuiting of the integral collaboration of
will & intellect or an evasion of soul-maturation processes, although it very
much could involve various rates of acceleration in one’s degree of volitional
illumination & one’s level of soul-crafting maturation.

I also believe there’s a superabundant scope of theophanies & range of

beatitudes that only our antemortem peccable soul-crafting can deliver, which
goes over & beyond what our impeccable post-mortem soul-crafting can
attain, although still abundantly so. It will be a loss to be mourned purgatively
in terms of missed opportunities, beginning in imperfect contrition, possibly
culminating in perfect contrition.

In my view, ultimately, through various ways & extents of divine presencing,

tailored for each imago Dei, our vicious natures will be purged with no
character-based contingencies barring the way. In this “intermediate state,” it
seems to me that even a more intense mediated (not immediate) divine
presence could effect our transformation. To the extent it would involve an
immediate presence, though, it seems to me that that presencing could be
transitory (such as in our death processes, maybe a Damascene-like vision) &
still efficacious.

I say that for several reasons:

1) That purgative state’s not the beatific vision, which is an immediate
presence.
2) I have no concrete earthly idea what the beatific vision entails
psychologically, anyway.
3) I’m, ergo, viscerally attuned to being satisfied by the “mere” thought of
enjoying ongoing mediated presencings & secondary beatitudes in an
environs of eternal well being. Faith still operating.
4) As long as our capacity for our primary beatitude’s never foreclosed on, I
don’t find it morally repugnant to imagine that, for some, it’s realization could
be stalled in some virtually interminable way.

On the whole, I’m fully on board with a syncretistic take of Catholic accounts
of grace, efficacious & sufficient, extrinsic & intrinsic. And I feel I have an
inchoate grasp of how they can work, i.e. somewhat intelligible even though
not fully comprehensible. I’m even a subjunctive universalist re the
apokatastasis of the beatific vision (although virtually indicative).

I’m only an indicative universalist re the other 2 Maximian apokatastases –

eternal life & a Maratainian apokatastenai. I just adamantly reject any notion
that our ultimate teloi can ever be permanently foreclosed on & especially at
the moment of death.

Some perditionists seem to be straining in my direction with their affirmation

of a limited array of post-mortem beatitudes to be enjoyed universally, even
by the damned.

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John Sobert Sylvest July 13, 2023 Uncategorized

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