I've thought of writing a similar thing about the supposed marcionism of non-literal readings of the old testament. The gospel was encased in a figure and type and prophesy reading of the Old Testament which classed with Macron, because in many ways Macron was the one to read it to literally and reject that Christ could be found in the new testament.
Thanks, Jordan, for pointing to the recently posted recording of your sessions on Maximus. I especially appreciated your moves away from an abstract consideration of "nature," whether divine or otherwise. Indeed, aren't we in trouble the moment we use a concept like "nature" for the divine in the same sense we do for the human?
I think Maximus' (tropic) "innovation" of natures yields its best deliverance in lifting one out of a vivisecting discrimination of "whats" into, as you say, a unitary experience of "who," signaling our arrival into the apt and other ontological register that is hypostasis.
Surely it is in that register that we can disabuse ourselves of overthinking, or even thinking at all about, natures.
Bulgakov surely worked in this direction with his "sophianicity" (which crucially qualifies his use of "antinomy," I think). One example from THE LAMB OF GOD (196-7), n.b. in this excerpt, "not only hypostatically united the human nature with Himself but also united it with Himself naturally":
-----------
“From the beginning, the Logos finds Himself in a positive relation with the human nature, just as, in its depths, the human nature bears His image and awaits His coming into the world. Therefore, the fact that "the Logos was made flesh" (i.e., the fact that He had assumed the human nature) was not, so to speak, something ontologically unexpected but, on the contrary, was the fulfillment of the predestination inscribed in heaven and on earth. But in becoming a human hypostasis, the Logos not only hypostatically united the human nature with Himself but also united it with Himself naturally, bringing into this union His proper divine life, or divine nature. Uniting His proper nature with the human essence, the Logos, as Christ, includes both of these natures in His life. Therefore, not only should one understand these two natures in their inseparability, inconfusability, and unchangeability (i.e., in their autonomous being), but one should just as forcefully affirm their union, which is accomplished no less than in the unity of the life of the God-Man, in virtue of the unity of the hypostatic center of this life. Christ is one; being in two natures, He lives one life, which attests to the very possibility of their union. The two natures, which are included in the one life of one hypostasis without dividing the personality, must in some way be kindred to one another, must be capable of this living identification. In the two natures, Divine and human, uncreated and created, there must be something mediating or common that serves as the unalterable foundation for their union.
“This common principle is the sophianicity of both the Divine world (i.e., of Christ's divine nature) and of the creaturely world (i.e., of His human nature). The creaturely world is created on the basis of the protoimages of the Divine world as the creaturely image of Divine Sophia in her becoming, but this Divine Sophia is the divine nature of the Logos. Thus, in their foundation and content, the Heavenly Sophia and the earthly, creaturely, and human Sophia are identified, differing only in the mode of their being: that which in heaven is the Majesty, Glory, Wisdom, and Beauty of the images of the Divine self-revelation finds itself in a state of becoming or process in the creaturely world, on earth, and it finds itself there in the capacity of eternal seeds of creaturely being submerged in nonbeing and sprouting on the basis of creaturely freedom.”
-----------
I've found in Eriugena's Periphyseon a strategy for overcoming the distracting aporia over abstract natures that is particularly effective: in a brilliant first insight, from the tome's very start, he expands the very definition of nature to "all things which are and which are not"! And his own sophiology follows from that, and thus predicated has made Bulgakov's sophiology surprisingly more intelligible to me.
It strikes me that this is at least part of the dust up with Hart regarding your use of hypostasis and his understanding of your use. In your recorded session you repeated warned about "natures" abstractly considered. (It is tricky, of course, to issue that warning while at the same time continuing to speak of paradoxes or antinomies of these same abstract natures, as it were shopping the same store even after one has learned they don't make what one wants.) So, hypostasis is that unitary manner of subsistence in which register abstract component "natures" simply become impertinent. Now, if hypostasis here is not Hart's mere "portmanteau" but rather a manner of subsistence, then we must be able to speak, as Bulgakov, of a natural unity, in some innovated sense of the notion of nature itself, which is Eriugena's great contribution, I think.
I have always maintained that there's a potential rapprochement between Hart's approach and my own. But that will require either or both sides to acknowledge the necessary plasticity of terms and concepts employed in both approaches, as well as the motivating concerns. I've yet to see Hart acknowledge these. Rather than pretend that "nature" or "natural" univocally means "real" or "actual," such that any denial that (e.g.) we are God "by nature" is an affirmation of extrinsicism, it seems better simply to admit that the term itself is relative, and that its relative meaning shifts with context.
Eriugena is a good example. You invoke his definition of nature at the very start of the Periphyseon. There, as you rightly notice, it means something like "everything that is or is not." Notice, though, that dialectical opposites are built into the very definition of nature here: that which *is*, and that which *is not*. True, this way of speaking had a long pedigree, both Platonic and otherwise. But the Christian emphasis isn't simply that God is the source or end of dialectical opposites considered either abstractly or in process (in the middle, i.e.). It is also that one and the same *subject*, Christ the Word, bears these relatives as proper predicates. At any rate, Eriugena himself does not employ "nature" univocally. And indeed a very different use emerges in exactly the relevant context:
"In this part of (our) contemplation which concerns the intellectual and rational substances, when it comes to the question how created nature can ascend beyond itself so as to be able to adhere to the creative Nature, every inquiry of those who study the potentiality of nature fails. For there we see not a reason of nature but the ineffable and incomprehensible excellence of Divine Grace. For in no created substance does there naturally exist the power to surpass the limits of its own nature and directly attain to Very God in Himself. For this is of grace alone, not of any power of nature.” (PP II 576AB)
Maximus makes this same point in Amb 20, Opusc 1, and elsewhere. Even Eckhart will make the same point, as does Cusanus. If, then, our shifting conception of nature is supposed to render contemplating nature "impertinent," why countenance these various meanings at all? And here I think I diverge again from Hart: I insist that seeing the *moments* of nature's development in our own contemplation of it is itself essential to our grasp of the whole truth. The very judgment that in the register of hypostasis, nature becomes "impertinent," is itself still dependent upon the *moment* of contemplating natures as they first presented themselves to us--namely as contraries, opposites, predicates unable to be born by a single subject without absurdity. One can't just skip ahead to "we are naturally God" without contemplating the very process, event, and divine action wherein "nature" is innovated such that "natural union" takes on a new sense. The new sense depends on the old sense if it's to be recognized as new.
Hence Eriugna, in his homily on John's Prologue, raises the specter of the apparent absurdity of our own deification, we who are mere mortals. But he doesn't resolve the apparent antinomies merely by logical deduction. Rather he points to the actual Incarnation:
“And in case you are tempted to say that it is impossible that mortals should become immortals, that corruptible beings should become free of corruption, that simple human beings should become sons of God, and that temporal creatures should possess eternity—whichever of these doubts poses the greatest temptation for you—accept the argument that faith prepares for you what you doubt: ‘And the Word was made flesh.’ If what is greatest has undoubtedly already gone before, why should it seem incredible that what is less should be able to come after? If the Son of God is made a human being, which none of those who receive him doubt, why is it astonishing that a human being who believes in the Son of God should become a son of God? For this very purpose, indeed, the Word descended into the flesh: that in him the flesh—the human being—believing through the flesh in the Word, might ascend; that, through him who was the only begotten Son by nature, many might become sons by adoption…. He, who from God made himself a human being, makes gods from human beings [De hominibus facit deos qui de deo fecit hominem].” (Hom. 21)
The search for "conditions" for this event can blind us to the fact that the mere conditions are *not* obviously the metaphysical *causes* of the event itself, which is always inherently more determinate than any set of a priori conditions. This is the mistake Hart makes, in my view. One ought not to reason *merely*: "The Incarnation happened; what allowed it?" but also: "The Incarnation happens as the one Word; how could any condition be an *absolute* condition for this happening, which is at once more universal and more determinate than any abstraction about it?"
So while I can accommodate Hart's use of "nature" if qualified by the actual process of contemplating nature in and as Christ, I don't see that he can repay the favor.
Many thanks, Jordan, for your keen attention to my comment and for taking some of your likely scarce time to answer so thoroughly and thoughtfully.
You wrote: "One can't just skip ahead to 'we are naturally God' without contemplating the very process, event, and divine action wherein "nature" is innovated such that 'natural union' takes on a new sense. The new sense depends on the old sense if it's to be recognized as new."
Indeed! And your example from the Periphyseon is nearly a guided theoria over the *N*ature-*n*ature address/answer movement (or nature-sive-Nature leap? or rhythm?). You effectively point to the very benefit I mentioned obtaining from traveling through that work, which "benefit" is to say, no mere entertaining the logical possibility of (though re-possibilizing the space of reasonables may certainly show up temporally as an effect, or shall we say, cause late to the party--and now isn't that the way that certain cognitive therapies appear to demonstrate their effectiveness?) That said, maybe "overcoming" was misleadingly abrupt or dismissive, and perhaps I would have better said something like "subsuming" (and then going Eriugena to Bulgakov) in the one "mutuality of the life of the two natures" (LOG 249), the ICXC-ΜΡΘΥ mutual kenosis.
You wrote: "The search for 'conditions' for this event can blind us to the fact that the mere conditions are *not* obviously the metaphysical *causes* of the event itself, which is always inherently more determinate than any set of a priori conditions. This is the mistake Hart makes, in my view. One ought not to reason *merely*: "The Incarnation happened; what allowed it?" but also: "The Incarnation happens as the one Word; how could any condition be an *absolute* condition for this happening, which is at once more universal and more determinate than any abstraction about it?"
Yes--surely an "event...inherently more determinate than any set of a priori conditions" is being created in the image and likeness of God, in which subsists the "'condition...at once more universal and more determinate that any abstraction about it.'"
Finally, you wrote: "So while I can accommodate Hart's use of "nature" if qualified by the actual process of contemplating nature in and as Christ, I don't see that he can repay the favor."
And there is a similar acosmic-seeming, at-once-and-all-or-nothing *versus* cosmos-receiving-its-ultimately-self-exceeding-depth-and-foundation thing that plays out through the forms of Vedanta.
Perhaps, we continue to remark ontologically distinct natures only because we experience the mutuality of the one life of the natures, the one life of deification/reception (divine-human kenosis) so remarkably asymmetrically/asynchronously as creatures constitutively spatio-temporal (and perhaps, more acutely than those ancient East and South Asian traditions that seemed never as inclined to pull the mind out of its steeping in "nature.")
+1 for a work on the Marcionite controversy!
I've thought of writing a similar thing about the supposed marcionism of non-literal readings of the old testament. The gospel was encased in a figure and type and prophesy reading of the Old Testament which classed with Macron, because in many ways Macron was the one to read it to literally and reject that Christ could be found in the new testament.
Thanks, Jordan, for pointing to the recently posted recording of your sessions on Maximus. I especially appreciated your moves away from an abstract consideration of "nature," whether divine or otherwise. Indeed, aren't we in trouble the moment we use a concept like "nature" for the divine in the same sense we do for the human?
I think Maximus' (tropic) "innovation" of natures yields its best deliverance in lifting one out of a vivisecting discrimination of "whats" into, as you say, a unitary experience of "who," signaling our arrival into the apt and other ontological register that is hypostasis.
Surely it is in that register that we can disabuse ourselves of overthinking, or even thinking at all about, natures.
Bulgakov surely worked in this direction with his "sophianicity" (which crucially qualifies his use of "antinomy," I think). One example from THE LAMB OF GOD (196-7), n.b. in this excerpt, "not only hypostatically united the human nature with Himself but also united it with Himself naturally":
-----------
“From the beginning, the Logos finds Himself in a positive relation with the human nature, just as, in its depths, the human nature bears His image and awaits His coming into the world. Therefore, the fact that "the Logos was made flesh" (i.e., the fact that He had assumed the human nature) was not, so to speak, something ontologically unexpected but, on the contrary, was the fulfillment of the predestination inscribed in heaven and on earth. But in becoming a human hypostasis, the Logos not only hypostatically united the human nature with Himself but also united it with Himself naturally, bringing into this union His proper divine life, or divine nature. Uniting His proper nature with the human essence, the Logos, as Christ, includes both of these natures in His life. Therefore, not only should one understand these two natures in their inseparability, inconfusability, and unchangeability (i.e., in their autonomous being), but one should just as forcefully affirm their union, which is accomplished no less than in the unity of the life of the God-Man, in virtue of the unity of the hypostatic center of this life. Christ is one; being in two natures, He lives one life, which attests to the very possibility of their union. The two natures, which are included in the one life of one hypostasis without dividing the personality, must in some way be kindred to one another, must be capable of this living identification. In the two natures, Divine and human, uncreated and created, there must be something mediating or common that serves as the unalterable foundation for their union.
“This common principle is the sophianicity of both the Divine world (i.e., of Christ's divine nature) and of the creaturely world (i.e., of His human nature). The creaturely world is created on the basis of the protoimages of the Divine world as the creaturely image of Divine Sophia in her becoming, but this Divine Sophia is the divine nature of the Logos. Thus, in their foundation and content, the Heavenly Sophia and the earthly, creaturely, and human Sophia are identified, differing only in the mode of their being: that which in heaven is the Majesty, Glory, Wisdom, and Beauty of the images of the Divine self-revelation finds itself in a state of becoming or process in the creaturely world, on earth, and it finds itself there in the capacity of eternal seeds of creaturely being submerged in nonbeing and sprouting on the basis of creaturely freedom.”
-----------
I've found in Eriugena's Periphyseon a strategy for overcoming the distracting aporia over abstract natures that is particularly effective: in a brilliant first insight, from the tome's very start, he expands the very definition of nature to "all things which are and which are not"! And his own sophiology follows from that, and thus predicated has made Bulgakov's sophiology surprisingly more intelligible to me.
It strikes me that this is at least part of the dust up with Hart regarding your use of hypostasis and his understanding of your use. In your recorded session you repeated warned about "natures" abstractly considered. (It is tricky, of course, to issue that warning while at the same time continuing to speak of paradoxes or antinomies of these same abstract natures, as it were shopping the same store even after one has learned they don't make what one wants.) So, hypostasis is that unitary manner of subsistence in which register abstract component "natures" simply become impertinent. Now, if hypostasis here is not Hart's mere "portmanteau" but rather a manner of subsistence, then we must be able to speak, as Bulgakov, of a natural unity, in some innovated sense of the notion of nature itself, which is Eriugena's great contribution, I think.
Thanks for these remarks, Zhuangzi.
I have always maintained that there's a potential rapprochement between Hart's approach and my own. But that will require either or both sides to acknowledge the necessary plasticity of terms and concepts employed in both approaches, as well as the motivating concerns. I've yet to see Hart acknowledge these. Rather than pretend that "nature" or "natural" univocally means "real" or "actual," such that any denial that (e.g.) we are God "by nature" is an affirmation of extrinsicism, it seems better simply to admit that the term itself is relative, and that its relative meaning shifts with context.
Eriugena is a good example. You invoke his definition of nature at the very start of the Periphyseon. There, as you rightly notice, it means something like "everything that is or is not." Notice, though, that dialectical opposites are built into the very definition of nature here: that which *is*, and that which *is not*. True, this way of speaking had a long pedigree, both Platonic and otherwise. But the Christian emphasis isn't simply that God is the source or end of dialectical opposites considered either abstractly or in process (in the middle, i.e.). It is also that one and the same *subject*, Christ the Word, bears these relatives as proper predicates. At any rate, Eriugena himself does not employ "nature" univocally. And indeed a very different use emerges in exactly the relevant context:
"In this part of (our) contemplation which concerns the intellectual and rational substances, when it comes to the question how created nature can ascend beyond itself so as to be able to adhere to the creative Nature, every inquiry of those who study the potentiality of nature fails. For there we see not a reason of nature but the ineffable and incomprehensible excellence of Divine Grace. For in no created substance does there naturally exist the power to surpass the limits of its own nature and directly attain to Very God in Himself. For this is of grace alone, not of any power of nature.” (PP II 576AB)
Maximus makes this same point in Amb 20, Opusc 1, and elsewhere. Even Eckhart will make the same point, as does Cusanus. If, then, our shifting conception of nature is supposed to render contemplating nature "impertinent," why countenance these various meanings at all? And here I think I diverge again from Hart: I insist that seeing the *moments* of nature's development in our own contemplation of it is itself essential to our grasp of the whole truth. The very judgment that in the register of hypostasis, nature becomes "impertinent," is itself still dependent upon the *moment* of contemplating natures as they first presented themselves to us--namely as contraries, opposites, predicates unable to be born by a single subject without absurdity. One can't just skip ahead to "we are naturally God" without contemplating the very process, event, and divine action wherein "nature" is innovated such that "natural union" takes on a new sense. The new sense depends on the old sense if it's to be recognized as new.
Hence Eriugna, in his homily on John's Prologue, raises the specter of the apparent absurdity of our own deification, we who are mere mortals. But he doesn't resolve the apparent antinomies merely by logical deduction. Rather he points to the actual Incarnation:
“And in case you are tempted to say that it is impossible that mortals should become immortals, that corruptible beings should become free of corruption, that simple human beings should become sons of God, and that temporal creatures should possess eternity—whichever of these doubts poses the greatest temptation for you—accept the argument that faith prepares for you what you doubt: ‘And the Word was made flesh.’ If what is greatest has undoubtedly already gone before, why should it seem incredible that what is less should be able to come after? If the Son of God is made a human being, which none of those who receive him doubt, why is it astonishing that a human being who believes in the Son of God should become a son of God? For this very purpose, indeed, the Word descended into the flesh: that in him the flesh—the human being—believing through the flesh in the Word, might ascend; that, through him who was the only begotten Son by nature, many might become sons by adoption…. He, who from God made himself a human being, makes gods from human beings [De hominibus facit deos qui de deo fecit hominem].” (Hom. 21)
The search for "conditions" for this event can blind us to the fact that the mere conditions are *not* obviously the metaphysical *causes* of the event itself, which is always inherently more determinate than any set of a priori conditions. This is the mistake Hart makes, in my view. One ought not to reason *merely*: "The Incarnation happened; what allowed it?" but also: "The Incarnation happens as the one Word; how could any condition be an *absolute* condition for this happening, which is at once more universal and more determinate than any abstraction about it?"
So while I can accommodate Hart's use of "nature" if qualified by the actual process of contemplating nature in and as Christ, I don't see that he can repay the favor.
But more on all that in due course!
Many thanks, Jordan, for your keen attention to my comment and for taking some of your likely scarce time to answer so thoroughly and thoughtfully.
You wrote: "One can't just skip ahead to 'we are naturally God' without contemplating the very process, event, and divine action wherein "nature" is innovated such that 'natural union' takes on a new sense. The new sense depends on the old sense if it's to be recognized as new."
Indeed! And your example from the Periphyseon is nearly a guided theoria over the *N*ature-*n*ature address/answer movement (or nature-sive-Nature leap? or rhythm?). You effectively point to the very benefit I mentioned obtaining from traveling through that work, which "benefit" is to say, no mere entertaining the logical possibility of (though re-possibilizing the space of reasonables may certainly show up temporally as an effect, or shall we say, cause late to the party--and now isn't that the way that certain cognitive therapies appear to demonstrate their effectiveness?) That said, maybe "overcoming" was misleadingly abrupt or dismissive, and perhaps I would have better said something like "subsuming" (and then going Eriugena to Bulgakov) in the one "mutuality of the life of the two natures" (LOG 249), the ICXC-ΜΡΘΥ mutual kenosis.
You wrote: "The search for 'conditions' for this event can blind us to the fact that the mere conditions are *not* obviously the metaphysical *causes* of the event itself, which is always inherently more determinate than any set of a priori conditions. This is the mistake Hart makes, in my view. One ought not to reason *merely*: "The Incarnation happened; what allowed it?" but also: "The Incarnation happens as the one Word; how could any condition be an *absolute* condition for this happening, which is at once more universal and more determinate than any abstraction about it?"
Yes--surely an "event...inherently more determinate than any set of a priori conditions" is being created in the image and likeness of God, in which subsists the "'condition...at once more universal and more determinate that any abstraction about it.'"
Finally, you wrote: "So while I can accommodate Hart's use of "nature" if qualified by the actual process of contemplating nature in and as Christ, I don't see that he can repay the favor."
This and the foregoing reminds me of the subitist/gradualist controversy of ancient Ch'an Buddhism. On that surprisingly cognate affair, there is a handy little summary at https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100239440?p=emailAuZR40MAiQPG2&d=/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100239440
And there is a similar acosmic-seeming, at-once-and-all-or-nothing *versus* cosmos-receiving-its-ultimately-self-exceeding-depth-and-foundation thing that plays out through the forms of Vedanta.
Perhaps, we continue to remark ontologically distinct natures only because we experience the mutuality of the one life of the natures, the one life of deification/reception (divine-human kenosis) so remarkably asymmetrically/asynchronously as creatures constitutively spatio-temporal (and perhaps, more acutely than those ancient East and South Asian traditions that seemed never as inclined to pull the mind out of its steeping in "nature.")
Your description of premodern exegesis was the highlight of the video! Thanks so much for your contribution 🙂