Palamas: “No being exists without natural activity. Indeed, the holy Fathers say plainly that it is impossible for any nature at all to be or to be known apart from its essential activity. And if there is no such thing as a nature to be or to be known without its essential characteristic activity.”

Just make sure you don’t posit a conscious experience that is void of all thought and feeling.

For example, is “pure uncreated consciousness” a LOVING thing? See? If you say yes, then you necessarily posit thought, feeling/desire, and will. I hope you don’t posit some pure and uncreated something that’s the GROUND of love itself. That would mean God is not love, that’s God is that something else and that love is the CONSEQUENCE of God’s being. That would be a mistake. And it looks like you’re tending in that direction.

Think of it like music. Think of music as consciousness and notation (notes, time signatures, etc.) as thought and the experience of melody as feeling. Can “music” exist apart from notes, time signatures, etc.? No. What we call “music” is just an abstract concept we apply to the experience of melodies and rhythms and its enjoyment. Likewise, “consciousness” is just a logical, abstract word we’re applying to our experience of self and the world. That’s all. Don’t make it into someTHING apart from the thoughts and feelings that constitute our conscious experience.

At the very most I’d agree that as created beings who are also conscious, there is a GROUND to our being, and that ground can’t be identified with the thoughts and feelings generated in time, contingently, by our minds. True. But it doesn’t follow that the ground of our being is itself a thought-free and feeling-free consciousness. It just means that we’re able to disassociate our truest identity with the contingent thoughts and feelings that we generate and ground that identity in the uncreated one whom we cannot disassociate from so long as we are self-reflecting beings. So some uncreated ground is assumed by our very rational and erotic (feeling) existence as self-reflective beings in a way that none of the contingent thoughts and feelings we generate with respect to the world do. All the latter can, conceivably, be other than they are and we still exist. But our being thinking and feeling self-conscious beings cannot be otherwise without our very existence as selves dissolving into nothingness.

Like Palamas says, every nature has SOME activity (dispositional activity) which MUST always be concretely instantiated and without which that nature would not be. If God’s nature is love (unsurpassable aesthetic satisfaction via interpersonal relations), then thought, feeling, and willing are necessarily active in God. They are strictly speaking ungrounded. They require nothing outside themselves and their own existence to account for their existence. I still hear you challenging this by positing something more fundamental in/to God, something that his thoughts and feelings are in asymmetrical relation to and which in turn grounds the God-defining satisfaction that we say God is.

[By the way, like Greg realized, classical theism (and EO too) understood that nature’s by definition instantiate some properties. But when they applied this to God they made the mistake of thinking that all God’s natural properties are definitional, i.e., there ALL necessary. They didn’t consider dispositions as being BOTH definitional and constitutive, both necessarily actualized while others being unrealized potencies that may or may not be actualized.]

So what I’d suggest is that we saw God’s disposition for thinking and his disposition for feeling likewise are defined by SOME necessarily concrete content of thought and feeling (the Logos as content and the shared bliss of the triune life which the Spirit mediates as feeling) and other contingent thoughts and feelings which may or may not be actualized.

One last idea. As deep as I go (and I do go deep) in letting go and disassociating my true self with all the contingent thoughts and feelings and categories of my immediate context, I cannot get past the historical Jesus and the Cross. Because the truest access to God, via the Spirit, which transforms and redeems, is made available via historical revelation, I don’t see how those of us who know this redemption in Christ can enjoy it apart from its concrete expression in the historical Jesus. This is just another way of saying we do not have unmediated access to God. God MUST make himself available. And while I do think some knowledge of God is available to the mind via the created cosmos and via self-reflection, I don’t think it’s sufficient do transform and redeem. Like the law of Moses, it’s a schoolmaster meant to deliver us to Christ when in the fullness of time he came. So for me, thus far the Christ-event forms the necessary content of my deepest self-perceiving. As deep as I go, I find a CROSS, not a sterilized, faceless, nameless life-force or consciousness. Of course, I’m saying that from within my experience of having encountered the truth of history. Having encountered it, I can’t now (and do not wish too) disassociate my deepest perceptions from the one act in history where God makes himself supremely and personally known and available. Whatever general access to God’s Spirit may be had by those who know nothing of the historical Jesus but who only think their way into the logic of consciousness and self-reflection…it is a mere groping toward the truth and must eventually lead one to a PERSONAL encounter with Christ. God is the Star Wars “Force” and Christ is not its impersonal expression formed by millions of ‘midichlorians’ (if you know what I mean). In other words, Tolle really needs Jesus to complete his journey...ANY honest journey into the conscious self does.

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 8/11/2010 1:09:12 PM (GMT-5)

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Tom:
So what I’d suggest is that we say God’s disposition for thinking and his disposition for feeling likewise are defined by SOME necessarily concrete content of thought and feeling (the Logos as content and the shared bliss of the triune life which the Spirit mediates as feeling) and other contingent thoughts and feelings which may or may not be actualized.

Basically, God as having the qualitative feeling of "I Am" cannot fail to actualize.  God as "I Am...Immanuel" (God as Creator of non-God reality) COULD HAVE failed to actualize.

Post Edited (One Love) : 8/11/2010 1:11:24 PM (GMT-5)

Does God chase his own tail? Ha!

Yep, He does. Heh...

See Ouroboros!

The human subject, pace Moore, is NOT the autobiographical memory/personality structure itself!

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Tom:
I think all Moore is saying is what Palamas said, that every nature actualizes, and it's the nature of human (and evidently divine) nature to actuzlie by thinking, feeling, and willing.

This is why Evdokimov talking about the "psychological center of integration" that is the "rudimentary person" of a human that is "a natural element of the human substance."  An RWE-expressing human animal is operating according to its nature...but it's NOT a full "person" yet.  Right?

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Tom:
Inward, we here God tell us who we truly are, grounded in God via the Spirit and unconditionally loved and sustained by God. But there's no concrete expression of this, no LIVED sonship for us, apart from then turning outward in created self-determination.

The most inward moment would be at the "meeting place" of the Holy Spirit and our spirit, right?  Well, where do you think the non-local subject is found, bro?

Post Edited (One Love) : 8/11/2010 1:39:32 PM (GMT-5)

You said this on another thread...

Perfected in love, fully grounded in Christ, compatibilistically loving...then Augustine's advice becomes truly achievable, "Love God and do as you please." That'll be 'perfect'. Perfect in the way a child immitates a parent perfectly (to the tee so to speak)--the parent isn't determining the child, but all the child's movements are chosen from a repertoire of possible actions determined by the parent, because they're the parent's way of acting. So your 'logos' is a 'repertoire of love', an infinite repertoire of love in fact, and you get to explore it and live it out creatively for ever and ever, progressing ever upward into the infinity of God (Greg of Nyssa), always full and satiated, always creatively determining yourself, but always re-presenting Christ because all the possibilities of love that you're coming up with are in fact a participation in God since they're God's possibilities. God is TRULY the "God of the Possible."

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