As someone following but not really understanding the current Christological debate, thank you, this helped a bit to at least somewhat understand what the deal is with analogy
Excellent, I look forward to the continuation. However, when you say " I’m not an instance of the hypostatic union" and "We aren’t the hypostatic union," doesn't the idea of creation as incarnation, the argument that the logic and reality of Christ's single subsistence as two natures being the logic and reality of creation, entail that the subsistence of every creature is the Logos as uniting divinity and creation, and so every creature is the hypostatic union?
1. Those statements must be contextualized a bit in the context of the dialogue. Dialektike is using the position of Metaxu (who certainly thinks we aren't the hypostatic union) against him. It is not a full expression of Dialektike's own views.
2. We are not yet fully what we are (we have not yet been created, have not fully passed through the hypostatic union), so there's a sense in which it's quite true to say we are not yet Christ, even if Christ will be all in all.
3. We are not "instances" of the hypostatic union, which is what I meant here. I don't think it's the case that there are as many hypostatic unions as there are blessed. We are sons in the Son, which still retains a distinction (though not one well described as "analogical"). Not in "degree" of deification, but that our deification is through and in him. There is one hypostatic union, and we come to find ourselves within it. Our relation to Christ is not that we merely "participate" in the hypostatic union, but neither is that we are other instances in it or the metaphysics of our deification is merely an additional copy of Christ's being. The relation between ourselves is one of perichoresis, and its shape is given by the totality of relations in the communion of saints, which includes a relation between head and members. But again, head and members cannot be understand through analogy or participation.
Fascinating dialogue. I look forward to seeing where you take this. I’ve read a lot of Radical Orthodoxy folks and Przywara, and still find them helpful in many ways, though I think Balthasar’s questioning of the latter retains its force.
I have a few questions. If I follow your suggestions here, I would agree that the Creation from our point of view is still “Not yet,” even if Christ can properly say “it is finished.” If one posits that the eschaton is the state of identity in which all the names are fully realized in Christ, I’d still like to know if perichoresis squares with Nyssa’s sense of epektasis.
I would posit that it can, and that part of the attachment to something like Przywara’s analogia entis is not simply fear of blurring the line between God and creature, which ultimately may disappear when Christ is all in all, but implicitly a desire to maintain openness to drama and surprise within eschatological flourishing. The “ever greater” could then assert not so much a distance from divinity, but the immediacy of discovery within Triune bliss.
At least, I surmise one could read Balthasar’s Theodrama and Bulgakov’s sophianic speculations as compatible with such a view.
So I agree with your fundamental impulse, namely to say that we can and should retain a sense of the "ever greater" in the sense of surprise and drama. I would just think that the best category for thinking this is the relationship between persons. In which someone retains the capacity to surprise not because we don't really know or encounter them in their acts, but because they are free. They are not an essence which is reserved or beyond our grasp.
My fear is that Gregory's epektasis if often interpreted in a postmodern fashion as the idea of endless deferral or asymptotic approach, which can be Kantian or Derridean (what Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness). I honestly don't know how to interpret Gregory himself on this question, because some passages sound like that postmodern interpretation and some seem to clearly exclude it.
I agree with my proximity to Bulgakov, and to a slightly lesser degree with Balthasar. I think he was wrong to think Rahner et al. lost that dramatic quality, in the true sense.
Hello, I really enjoyed the article, despite not being extremely familiar with the ensuing debates and issues. Do you have any recommendations for resources to get better acquainted with this topic and debates? Obviously I want to read Jordan Wood’s book on Maximus, but do you have any other suggestions?
I'm attaching a link to my reading guide at the bottom of this note.
The main primary sources would be Cyril (so you can see what a unitive Christology looked like before Chalcedon) and Severus of Antioch, probably the best critical voice after Chalcedon. There was the Third Council of Ephesus in 475 which rejected Chalcedon (continues to be rejected by the Oriental Orthodox, the miaphysites). The Neochalcedonians themselves, who seek to constructively reinterpret Chalcedon in light of Cyril, would be Leontius of Byzantium, Leontius of Jerusalem, John Maxentius, and Maximus.
The best secondary sources would be McGuckin's The Path of Christianity (539-569, 616-618, and 623-631), Aaron Riches On the Unity of Christ, and Zachhuber's The Rise of Christian Theology (that order of accessibility).
I'm referring to section 17 ("The Problem of Analogous Talk About God") in God as the Mystery of the World. Specifically, he argues that neither analogy of attribution, nor analogy of proper proportionality, nor their combination in any way allow for an attenuation of God's total unknowability (as is further underlined by their use by Kant). Neither succeeds in allowing talk about God to add anything knowable beyond God as unknown cause.
"The analogy of attribution defines so precisely the unknownness of God that it vastly increases that unknownness into God's total inaccessibility. That fact is not softened, but rather hardened by the formulation of concepts 'on the analogy of proportionality,' based on the presupposition of the so-called 'analogy of attribution.' For when God, along the lines of the analogy of the human intellect and will which plans and executes within the world, is thought and then named as "intellect" and "will," he by no means becomes better known to us in his unknownness. Such names are always accompanied by the insight that they are inappropriate as anthropomorphic terms, and thus they increase the distance between such talk and God, and thereby emphasize the uncanny strangeness of God so understood.
Kant, then, maintains that we express the unknownness of God only when we use the analogy of relation. What is made known in such language really applies only to language, and not to the "object." God and man do agree in terms of language that they can be named "intellect" and "will"--but the difference is that God and man each have a very different relation to what "intellect" and "will" are." (278)
This is good stuff! The dialogue form is perfect for opening all the little black boxes and critiquing the contents. I'm not persuaded that analogy--borrowed from logic and repurposed for metaphysics--can't do the work we need it to do. The hypostatic union is something besides a substantive conglomerate of two distinct natures precisely because one of those natures is divine and infinite and the other is its imago. Gregory of Naz got that ball rolling in a pretty straight line and Cyril and Maximus scooped it up. There's a lot I admire about Jordan's book, but --as I've said before--the univocal "is" of his thesis doesn't hold much theological water. Or wine. Whatever kind of liquid people like us try to hold. Creation is [the manifold non-eternal ontologically rich analogy of the simple eternal] Christ. The brackets are the key.
Sure. But then it wouldn’t be a complete sentence. :>}
Yes, though, I assume youre saying X as human isn’t just another human, but the fullness of created multiplicity? So the analogy is “true” or complete for Mary’s boy in a way that exceeds infinitely the way it’s true for me or you? Still though, if the incarnate X is a particularity, he’s “not” immediately the simple Logos. That we can see him as the simple Logos means we have attained the deifying grace to see the arrows pointing across the analogical interval. This is how I read Greg Nyssa’s late anti-apollinarian christo logs
An incredible piece. Really love the dialogue format.
I’m now curious about the historical data surrounding Chalcedon. Can you point me to the notable voices that expressed a confusion and dislike towards the Chalcedonian formulation?
I'm attaching a link to my reading guide at the bottom of this note.
The main primary sources would be Cyril (so you can see what a unitive Christology looked like before Chalcedon) and Severus of Antioch, probably the best critical voice after Chalcedon. There was the Third Council of Ephesus in 475 which rejected Chalcedon (continues to be rejected by the Oriental Orthodox, the miaphysites). The Neochalcedonians themselves, who seek to constructively reinterpret Chalcedon in light of Cyril, would be Leontius of Byzantium, Leontius of Jerusalem, John Maxentius, and Maximus.
The best secondary sources would be McGuckin's The Path of Christianity (539-569, 616-618, and 623-631), Aaron Riches On the Unity of Christ, and Zachhuber's The Rise of Christian Theology (that order of accessibility).
I have decided to hold my peace. As I am generally heavily medicated at night, for quite legitimate issues of health, I should avoid chiming in after hours. My apologies, but that is the current chemical state of my health.
Tim, a blessing on your head. I hope someday you take the time actually to figure out the errors I contend you keep repeating, but I realize it will be no time soon. I can only say that this opposition between metaxy (as it ought to be Englished) and dialectic is a category error, especially in the realm of Christology. Without the maior dissimilitudinis, you cannot have identity, and dialectic becomes the name of an alliance rather than an ontology.
David, as you well know, I am neither a scholar nor do I have any theological education to speak of. But this can’t possibly be the constructive engagement we need. Tim (and Jordan Wood and Taylor Ross and David Armstrong) have all learned so much from you and are in a very real sense continuing so many aspects of your project. I know you are at least a partial fan of the Reform Catholicism project. Isn’t it far more important that we salvage a socialist Christian humanism out of the wreckage of orthobro and rad trad North American Orthodoxy and Catholicism than it is to berate a promising mind with a truly staggering amount of vituperation? Tim does not see you as an enemy. I want a popular front, who also cares about theological metaphysics, against the right wing theological fundamentalists—this response of yours truly grieves me and is disproportionate.
Well, I was on painkillers and THC last night when I wrote that. It may have made me angry. I’m afraid I have a somewhat chemical diet these days, for medical reasons. My apologies. I am protective of friends whom Tim keeps trying to correct, clearly without listening to them. This constant oversimplification of the ontological options behind analogical talk, and then the false opposition between analogy and dialectic in, of all places, Christology is a polemical fiction that simply creates category errors.
As someone following but not really understanding the current Christological debate, thank you, this helped a bit to at least somewhat understand what the deal is with analogy
Excellent, I look forward to the continuation. However, when you say " I’m not an instance of the hypostatic union" and "We aren’t the hypostatic union," doesn't the idea of creation as incarnation, the argument that the logic and reality of Christ's single subsistence as two natures being the logic and reality of creation, entail that the subsistence of every creature is the Logos as uniting divinity and creation, and so every creature is the hypostatic union?
Thanks for reading! I'd answer in three ways.
1. Those statements must be contextualized a bit in the context of the dialogue. Dialektike is using the position of Metaxu (who certainly thinks we aren't the hypostatic union) against him. It is not a full expression of Dialektike's own views.
2. We are not yet fully what we are (we have not yet been created, have not fully passed through the hypostatic union), so there's a sense in which it's quite true to say we are not yet Christ, even if Christ will be all in all.
3. We are not "instances" of the hypostatic union, which is what I meant here. I don't think it's the case that there are as many hypostatic unions as there are blessed. We are sons in the Son, which still retains a distinction (though not one well described as "analogical"). Not in "degree" of deification, but that our deification is through and in him. There is one hypostatic union, and we come to find ourselves within it. Our relation to Christ is not that we merely "participate" in the hypostatic union, but neither is that we are other instances in it or the metaphysics of our deification is merely an additional copy of Christ's being. The relation between ourselves is one of perichoresis, and its shape is given by the totality of relations in the communion of saints, which includes a relation between head and members. But again, head and members cannot be understand through analogy or participation.
Fascinating dialogue. I look forward to seeing where you take this. I’ve read a lot of Radical Orthodoxy folks and Przywara, and still find them helpful in many ways, though I think Balthasar’s questioning of the latter retains its force.
I have a few questions. If I follow your suggestions here, I would agree that the Creation from our point of view is still “Not yet,” even if Christ can properly say “it is finished.” If one posits that the eschaton is the state of identity in which all the names are fully realized in Christ, I’d still like to know if perichoresis squares with Nyssa’s sense of epektasis.
I would posit that it can, and that part of the attachment to something like Przywara’s analogia entis is not simply fear of blurring the line between God and creature, which ultimately may disappear when Christ is all in all, but implicitly a desire to maintain openness to drama and surprise within eschatological flourishing. The “ever greater” could then assert not so much a distance from divinity, but the immediacy of discovery within Triune bliss.
At least, I surmise one could read Balthasar’s Theodrama and Bulgakov’s sophianic speculations as compatible with such a view.
So I agree with your fundamental impulse, namely to say that we can and should retain a sense of the "ever greater" in the sense of surprise and drama. I would just think that the best category for thinking this is the relationship between persons. In which someone retains the capacity to surprise not because we don't really know or encounter them in their acts, but because they are free. They are not an essence which is reserved or beyond our grasp.
My fear is that Gregory's epektasis if often interpreted in a postmodern fashion as the idea of endless deferral or asymptotic approach, which can be Kantian or Derridean (what Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness). I honestly don't know how to interpret Gregory himself on this question, because some passages sound like that postmodern interpretation and some seem to clearly exclude it.
I agree with my proximity to Bulgakov, and to a slightly lesser degree with Balthasar. I think he was wrong to think Rahner et al. lost that dramatic quality, in the true sense.
Hello, I really enjoyed the article, despite not being extremely familiar with the ensuing debates and issues. Do you have any recommendations for resources to get better acquainted with this topic and debates? Obviously I want to read Jordan Wood’s book on Maximus, but do you have any other suggestions?
I'm attaching a link to my reading guide at the bottom of this note.
The main primary sources would be Cyril (so you can see what a unitive Christology looked like before Chalcedon) and Severus of Antioch, probably the best critical voice after Chalcedon. There was the Third Council of Ephesus in 475 which rejected Chalcedon (continues to be rejected by the Oriental Orthodox, the miaphysites). The Neochalcedonians themselves, who seek to constructively reinterpret Chalcedon in light of Cyril, would be Leontius of Byzantium, Leontius of Jerusalem, John Maxentius, and Maximus.
The best secondary sources would be McGuckin's The Path of Christianity (539-569, 616-618, and 623-631), Aaron Riches On the Unity of Christ, and Zachhuber's The Rise of Christian Theology (that order of accessibility).
https://www.academia.edu/109208834/Neochalcedonianism_Today_A_Bibliography_and_Reading_Guide
Really enjoyed this dialogue format!
Thanks for this. Just curious: which of Jüngel’s criticisms do you have in mind?
I'm referring to section 17 ("The Problem of Analogous Talk About God") in God as the Mystery of the World. Specifically, he argues that neither analogy of attribution, nor analogy of proper proportionality, nor their combination in any way allow for an attenuation of God's total unknowability (as is further underlined by their use by Kant). Neither succeeds in allowing talk about God to add anything knowable beyond God as unknown cause.
"The analogy of attribution defines so precisely the unknownness of God that it vastly increases that unknownness into God's total inaccessibility. That fact is not softened, but rather hardened by the formulation of concepts 'on the analogy of proportionality,' based on the presupposition of the so-called 'analogy of attribution.' For when God, along the lines of the analogy of the human intellect and will which plans and executes within the world, is thought and then named as "intellect" and "will," he by no means becomes better known to us in his unknownness. Such names are always accompanied by the insight that they are inappropriate as anthropomorphic terms, and thus they increase the distance between such talk and God, and thereby emphasize the uncanny strangeness of God so understood.
Kant, then, maintains that we express the unknownness of God only when we use the analogy of relation. What is made known in such language really applies only to language, and not to the "object." God and man do agree in terms of language that they can be named "intellect" and "will"--but the difference is that God and man each have a very different relation to what "intellect" and "will" are." (278)
This is really helpful, thank you.
This is good stuff! The dialogue form is perfect for opening all the little black boxes and critiquing the contents. I'm not persuaded that analogy--borrowed from logic and repurposed for metaphysics--can't do the work we need it to do. The hypostatic union is something besides a substantive conglomerate of two distinct natures precisely because one of those natures is divine and infinite and the other is its imago. Gregory of Naz got that ball rolling in a pretty straight line and Cyril and Maximus scooped it up. There's a lot I admire about Jordan's book, but --as I've said before--the univocal "is" of his thesis doesn't hold much theological water. Or wine. Whatever kind of liquid people like us try to hold. Creation is [the manifold non-eternal ontologically rich analogy of the simple eternal] Christ. The brackets are the key.
Why is Christ outside the brackets?
Creation is Christ, but only if what’s inside the brackets is true
Since he’s human, isn’t Christ also the truth inside the brackets? Doesn’t his very identity include the brackets?
Sure. But then it wouldn’t be a complete sentence. :>}
Yes, though, I assume youre saying X as human isn’t just another human, but the fullness of created multiplicity? So the analogy is “true” or complete for Mary’s boy in a way that exceeds infinitely the way it’s true for me or you? Still though, if the incarnate X is a particularity, he’s “not” immediately the simple Logos. That we can see him as the simple Logos means we have attained the deifying grace to see the arrows pointing across the analogical interval. This is how I read Greg Nyssa’s late anti-apollinarian christo logs
The simple Logos is also Many. The "arrows" point to Him are also Him. He "became a symbol of himself," as say Maximus and Rahner.
An incredible piece. Really love the dialogue format.
I’m now curious about the historical data surrounding Chalcedon. Can you point me to the notable voices that expressed a confusion and dislike towards the Chalcedonian formulation?
Thanks!
I'm attaching a link to my reading guide at the bottom of this note.
The main primary sources would be Cyril (so you can see what a unitive Christology looked like before Chalcedon) and Severus of Antioch, probably the best critical voice after Chalcedon. There was the Third Council of Ephesus in 475 which rejected Chalcedon (continues to be rejected by the Oriental Orthodox, the miaphysites). The Neochalcedonians themselves, who seek to constructively reinterpret Chalcedon in light of Cyril, would be Leontius of Byzantium, Leontius of Jerusalem, John Maxentius, and Maximus.
The best secondary sources would be McGuckin's The Path of Christianity (539-569, 616-618, and 623-631), Aaron Riches On the Unity of Christ, and Zachhuber's The Rise of Christian Theology (that order of accessibility).
https://www.academia.edu/109208834/Neochalcedonianism_Today_A_Bibliography_and_Reading_Guide
Beautiful. Thank you for taking the time to give such an in depth response. Excited to dig into some of this.
Thanks for reading!
I have decided to hold my peace. As I am generally heavily medicated at night, for quite legitimate issues of health, I should avoid chiming in after hours. My apologies, but that is the current chemical state of my health.
Tim, a blessing on your head. I hope someday you take the time actually to figure out the errors I contend you keep repeating, but I realize it will be no time soon. I can only say that this opposition between metaxy (as it ought to be Englished) and dialectic is a category error, especially in the realm of Christology. Without the maior dissimilitudinis, you cannot have identity, and dialectic becomes the name of an alliance rather than an ontology.
David, as you well know, I am neither a scholar nor do I have any theological education to speak of. But this can’t possibly be the constructive engagement we need. Tim (and Jordan Wood and Taylor Ross and David Armstrong) have all learned so much from you and are in a very real sense continuing so many aspects of your project. I know you are at least a partial fan of the Reform Catholicism project. Isn’t it far more important that we salvage a socialist Christian humanism out of the wreckage of orthobro and rad trad North American Orthodoxy and Catholicism than it is to berate a promising mind with a truly staggering amount of vituperation? Tim does not see you as an enemy. I want a popular front, who also cares about theological metaphysics, against the right wing theological fundamentalists—this response of yours truly grieves me and is disproportionate.
Well, I was on painkillers and THC last night when I wrote that. It may have made me angry. I’m afraid I have a somewhat chemical diet these days, for medical reasons. My apologies. I am protective of friends whom Tim keeps trying to correct, clearly without listening to them. This constant oversimplification of the ontological options behind analogical talk, and then the false opposition between analogy and dialectic in, of all places, Christology is a polemical fiction that simply creates category errors.