Just Call me Quasi-modal (what Radical Orthodoxy gets right)
JB on July 1, 2010 in Axiological, Cosmological, Methods & Approaches, Practices & Experiences, Provisional Closures & Systems, the descriptive - Science, the evaluative - Culture, the interpretive - Religion, the normative - Philosophy No Comments »If we, as created co-creators, indeed participate in and are indwelled by our Creator in a dynamic Creator-creature relationship, then all dualistic conceptions of this relationship must give way to nondual approaches.
There is a great deal of value that has been revealed by and that can be realized through our cosmology via its triadic constellation of descriptive science, evaluative culture and normative philosophy. Many, indeed most, report that there is even more value to be had if one allows this constellation to then spin around the interpretive axis of religion.
If there is one thing that the great traditions and even many indigenous religions seem to have in common, then it would seem to be the notion that this Creator-creature relationship involves a Lover, a beloved and the love dynamic, itself, most often called the Spirit. Whatever else may be going on with onto-theologies and theo-ontologies and such root metaphors as being, substance, process or experience, we must recognize our creaturely autonomy as quasi (not inconsistent with the formal modal distinction of Scotus). So, too, it must be with this dynamic love triangle, wherein we recognize our otherness as also quasi. If we are not wholly autonomous in the intraobjective dimension of our experience, wherein we interact in reality’s dynamic unfolding, however that activity might be conceived, neither are we wholly other in the intersubjective dimension of our experience, wherein we interact, hopefully, as lovers do.
That we are never wholly autonomous or wholly other in any dimension of our experience is precisely due to our constitutedness as spirit in a perduring intrinsic relationship to the Spirit, a relationship that, for better and worse, is vectoral (characterized by both magnitude and direction). This is all to recognize that, like all participatory dynamics, there’s an implied range of motion whereby one can participate or not and in varying degrees. The Spirit, we might suggest, is never timid (always present) but always coy (ever unobtrusive), a gentlemanly suitor, Who’d not force His way in, but a seductive siren, Who’ll not stop Her singing from around the bend.
As in any relationship, the Creator-creature dynamic is characterized by elements of vulnerability and risk, sacrifices, even, of that which is good for that which might be better. There’s a divine kenosis, in fact, in the act of creation, itself. This self-emptying or delimitation is like a fugue playing in every dimension of our co-creative reality as we shed monotony and appropriate novelty, augmenting value-realizations through all manner of risk-amplifications, running even a risk of disintegration in the pursuit of more truth, beauty, goodness and unity.
The quasi-autonomy of creation is a “managed” risk, reminiscent of my old banking trope that profits do not come from risk-taking but from superior skills at managing risks. However one might conceive of such boundaries and limits, or laws and axioms, in a divine kenotic act of self-delimitation, the Ens Necessarium “relaxed” its boundary and limit conditions in devising the initital conditions of creatures and, then, creation thus processed forth with regularities, habits, tendencies, capacities, or an agapic Spirit, if you will, coaxing us all along in a dance of discovery toward a divine romance.
The cosmos, for its part, gave itself over to emergence dynamics as it surrendered to a state far from equilibrium, where novelty could be teased forth from the bifurcations and permutations that were compounded in the formation of each dissipative structure, structures that, in running the risk of disintegration, experienced increases in fragility that were only to be exceeded by their increases in beauty.
Animals emerged whose behavior became increasingly plastic only because their brain processes became decreasingly algorithmic, which is to say more capable of error. But the animals exploited these errors, where different parts of otherwise discrete memories became dissociated from each other only to be recombined in novel (mistaken) ways. Their brains became open-ended rather than close-ended processors as mere icons and indexes gave way to symbols (mistakes) that presented models (more and less perfect) of reality that could compete with reality, itself, for the animals’ attention and responses. This is to say that predicates could now be stripped from their subjects, properties from their objects, accidents from their essences, and combined in novel ways (even bigger mistakes) to tell stories and make myths, some which, lo and behold, evoked novel but appropriate (adaptive) responses to reality. Mistakes were being exploited by creatures as their algorithmic, rule-governed behavior became progressively de-limited, more open-ended, an imago Dei dynamic, to be sure.
Homo sapiens thus emerged as the symbolic species, modeling reality through story-telling and myth-making. This modeling abilty was very rudimentary and was, ironically, a tad too rule-governed and dualistic in its conceptions. This is to recognize that humankind’s epistemology was not modeling reality’s ontology very well.
For a participatory reality which was governed much more so by probability and much less so by necessity, which had initial, boundary and limit conditions that were much more relaxed and much less fixed, which was profoundly relational, triadic and semiotic and much less empirical, logical and dualistic — well, when it came to
1) logic, there was way too much emphasis on the deductive and inductive and not enough attention given to abduction;
2) reason, there was way too much emphasis on conceptual map-making and not nearly enough on participatory imagination;
3) aesthetics, there was way to much emphasis on art as imitation & mimesis, as essentialism and formalism, and not enough on art as expressivism and instrumentalism;
4) ethics, there was way too much emphasis on the deontological and contractarian and not enough on the teleological (consequentialistic) and aretaic (virtue);
5) paradox, there was way too much emphasis on its resolution through dialectic, dissolution through paradigm shifts and not nearly enough on the exploitation of its creative tensions and its evasion through pragmatics;
6) first principles, there was way too much emphasis on the excluded middle and noncontradiction of actualities & necessities (radical empiricism, logical positivism, naive realism) and the suspension of noncontradiction in possibilities (metaphysics run amok) and way too little emphasis on the suspension of either-or thinking (excluded middle) in probabilities;
7) causations, there was way too much emphasis on efficient causation, while material causation was taken for granted, and not nearly enough attention paid to the emergent realities of formal and final causation (essential to the study of semiotics);
and so on and so forth.The practical take-away is that a participatory ontology can gift us with an enhanced modeling power for reality. And this does not really challenge the notion that methods precede systems because a participatory ontology is not really a system but is a practice, which is to say, a method, an approach to reality, an interpretive axis, a confessional theological stance that is moreso practical and not so much speculative. It inspires a turn to community because it invites one to love and be-loved via the Spirit. It allows us to leverage up our cosmological approaches of descriptive science, evaluative culture and normative philosophy through the orthodoxic, orthopathic and orthopraxic risk amplifications known as faith, hope and love, which augment our value-realizations of truth, beauty and goodness. Think Eucharist. Do Eucharist.
Next time you encounter a mistake, an imperfection, a blemish, an uncomfortable arousal from a serene equilibrium — welcome that Cross with open arms. It’s the paschal mystery come to call and great things are about to happen — if you hold on loosely but don’t let go. That’s the divine fugue and your co-creative calling to bring an even greater harmony into a love relationship.
What does this mean in terms of esse? or the immanent trinity? Heaven if I know. And it’s increasingly hard to care less these days.
Below, I will employ a Strategic Plan paradigm to characterize and organize the emerging church conversation employing what might, at first, appear to be characteristically Catholic categories. In doing so, I hope to emphasize how this conversation proceeds more from a consideration of questions rather than answers, practices rather than conclusions, methods rather than systems.
Before laying out a Cathlimergent approach, I want to build a conceptual bridge to the approaches taken by many of our Protestant sisters and brothers. Dialogue about prescriptive realities is very much dependent on fair and accurate descriptive representations (avoiding unnecessary strawmen and ad hominems). When it comes to good scholarship and civil discourse, few have gone about it better than the author of 
The outline below is meant to be comprehensive but not exhaustive. In each category are sample strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities and sample resources. It is intended as a catalyst for constructive conversation and a guideline for dialogue, a conceptual bridge-builder or heuristic device. It is expected that you will engage this outline, perhaps even suggesting an entirely different paradigm, certainly adding different strengths, weaknesses, threats, opportunities and resources, raising new questions and concerns, breaking open new categories.
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