Syncretistic Catholicism

another minority report

Syncretistic Catholicism where any Anglican, Episcopal, Roman &

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

Grace Refers to Persons as they

intersubjectively communicate in various
ways & to different extents

Below is my attempt to over-answer Tom Belt’s inquiry at Fr

Kimel’s Eclectic Orthodoxy, by apologizing for the un/created
grace distinction introduced by my co-religionists. There’s nothing
in it over against Tom’s characterization of the dynamism.

I haven’t studied what was going on historically so can’t address

what motivated the un/created distinction. I think some may have
been distinguishing between sanctifying grace & charity with
Scotus suggesting, contra mostly Thomists but consistent
perhaps with Thomas the Belt, that it’s all charity. People argue to
this day, even, what Aquinas really meant (but don’t they always?).

I do suspect they were grappling with real questions having to do

with a question like:
How is it that a divine indwelling wouldn’t cause a beatific vision in
everyone or even a hypostatic union?

In some sense, that would seem to be asking: What keeps grace

from being, respectively, both entirely monergistic & efficacious as
well as causally monistic?

These questions involve, in my assessment, our proper

understanding of a third type of perichoresis, which involves the
mutual coinherence of differently natured persons.

My analogical perichoreses include the trinitological re: same

nature, different persons; hypostatic re: same person, different
natures; cosmotheandric re: differently natured creatures, e.g.
shadows & vestiges, same universal omnipresence; and theotic re:
differently natured persons, both images & likenesses, same
eternal personal relation of love or mutual indwelling.

So, istm that the un/created distinction had to be motivated, in

part, by the same questions that gave rise to Palamite-distinctions.
If so, then, what’s under consideration are divine-human
intersubjective mutual communications.

Generally, it suffices, dogmatically, re: any of these analogous

perichoreses, to merely assert THAT there are such
communications & coinherences and to include some apophatic
guardrails as inference blockers to avoid such extremes as
modalism, tritheism, monophysitism and pantheism.

It’s only when we speculatively attempt to further explain HOW

those intersubjective mutual communications occur, using this or
that metaphysical idiom, that theologoumenal distinctions like
un/created grace get introduced, some more idiomatically
felicitous, rhetorically persuasive & evidentially plausible than
others.

Regarding intersubjective mutual communications, then, some

will inquire:

What causes are acting efficiently or formally or even quasi-

formally (something like a formal cause).

Which causes might affect or even effect our primary nature &
being (constitutive whatness) or, instead, our secondary nature &
becoming (expressive howness)?

Which gracings act habitually or actually, sufficiently or

efficaciously, in justification, sanctification or glorification, in
spiritual or charismatic gifts or in acquired or infused
contemplation?

If we stipulate that all grace is non-neccessitating, then we’re

insisting that our theotic journeys are inescapably synergistic. If
we further stipulate that all communications are mutual &
intersubjective, then we’re insisting that grace refers to persons
as acting subjects and not to any created objects.

We would also stipulate that we as subjects progressively mature

in actualizing our essential potencies as Christ-images,
intrasubjectively, and we also grow in realizing our theotic-
potencies as Christ-likenesses, intersubjectively.

If we finally stipulate that, like our intrasubjective & intersubjective

growth processes, which are mutually reinforcing & transmuting
(in that our every intersubjective advance will foster further
intrasubjective maturation and vice versa), so, too, are the divine
indwelling & sanctifying grace mutually reinforcing, then we can
say that –

per the gratuity of creation, divine communications ever effect us

(via efficient-like causes), sustaining us via creatio continua,
gifting us miracles, signs & wonders, and also say that –

per the gratuity of grace, divine communications (via formal-like

causes) can invite & assist us in becoming ever more Christ-like.

Grace thus ever meets us where we are in both our personal &
interpersonal development.

So, there’s nothing monistic going on & we’re not headed toward
any hypostatic union. That’s because we remain finite creatures
who are ever-becoming and in no sense, ergo, infinite &
noncomposite. So, there’s no Christological monophysitism or
cosmological pantheism in play. And since no grace given to
rational creatures is monergistic & not every grace is given
efficaciously, a divine indwelling won’t necessarily effect a beatific
vision.

What we have, rather, theoanthropologically, is an intersubjective

mutual self-communication.

This synergistic dynamism refers — never to objects, but only — to

inter-acting persons or, in Damascene terms, to operating
operators (entities in act via energeia), whose essences are
analogously operative, all of them working together toward the
end of identical operated effects, which will be nothing less than
the intersubjective unitive doings of the mutually constituted
Totus Christus.

The un/created distinction, then, refers to the above-described

synergistic mirror images, where variously in/finite persons act
together, our every synergistic theotic act co-constituted
pneumato-Christologically by each particular indwelling by the
Holy Spirit.

Even our very act of ongoing existence is co-constituted Christo-

pneumatologically by the universally omnipresencing by the
multiply-incarnate Christ. (That’s just my formulation. The
un/created distinction also had implications for parsing out the ad
extra divine missions.)

The takeaway is that it’s ALL gratuitous.

So, I’m suggesting that however infelicitous, unpersuasive or

implausible the un/created grace distinction may seem, properly
appropriated, it’s not as problematic as it might first appear.

As has so often been the case, it’s not the original scholastic
distinction that’s problematic, it’s some neo-scholastic
misappropriation or popularized misconception that can lead to
some rather repugnant implications.

To wit: Rahner & Lonergan both saw how some treated sanctifying
grace as the primary basis — rather than the initial & ongoing
effect — of the prior indwelling. It’s easy to see how such an
inverted misreading could arise out of how the indwelling &
sanctifying graces both ratchet up in a mutually reinforcing &
reciprocally transmuting way (analogous to how we grow
commensurately & in a reciprocally reinforcing way in our
intrasubjective authenticity via conversions & in our intersubjective
unity via theosis). But this is truly a mistake grounded in ignoring
that it’s the Divine Indwelling Chicken, Who intially lays the
sanctified eggs of our maturing authenticity & ever-deepening
unity. It often also appears to be a rather ad hoc maneuver in
defense of a concrete natura pura. That nature sans grace
conception often appears to be, itself, further motivated by an
additional ad hoc appeal to an indwelling-based beatific
contingency, as it can be indispensable to certain defenses of
perditionism, e.g. Thomistic Autonomy Defense.

The other rather prominent infelicity of the un/created grace

bifurcation is that it has fostered too much objectivizing of the
divine presence. Grace refers to persons and not creaturely
things. Created grace can only truly refer to our personal act of
returning as gift – the very person one’s received of oneself as
was/is divinely gifted. We kenotically surrender our fully authentic
self, i.e. as per soul- maturation, along with the person we’ve
become as divinely gifted, i.e. as our epectatically unitive theotic
self.

I refer, indirectly & analogously, to this Chicken & egg dynamism in

my Recruiting Norris Clarke for My Cosmotheandric Universalism:

“This is to say that our personal maturation as individual subjects is

inextricably intertwined with & mutually conditioned by our
interpersonal growth in intersubjective unity. Ours is a freedom
for unitive excellence.”

So, too, does the indwelling first gift sanctifying grace, prior to
their ongoing synergistic, mutually reinforcing cycling, which then
continues to ratchet them up together.

Grace to me thus refers, ever intersubjectively, to different kinds &

degrees of a divine presence, hence, to a person, the Holy Spirit,
Whose gratuitous communications serve co-constitutively &
synergistically, in a manner that’s somewhat like a formal cause
(Palamite energeia works for me), as indispensable elements of
our every act of becoming Christ-like, as ordered to our
communion in our final cause, the Totus Christus, in Whom we’ll
eternally & epectatically journey on our way to Our Father.

Created grace refers to the virtuous aspects of our secondary

natures, all divinely Authored & gratuitously gifted. It refers to
each rational creature’s holy habits in action, which are essentially
each person’s loving dispositions to be present to God & others. It
refers to each person in the act of communicating in a synergistic
dynamism, where the Holy Spirit co-constitutively gifts
indispensable elements of our every personal act of becoming
Christ, etc

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John Sobert Sylvest July 18, 2023 Uncategorized

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