Johnny one note...
John: And after this there follows the union without distinction.
Tom: Union without distinction? I’m not encouraged to read any farther!
John: For you must apprehend the Love of God not only as an outpouring with all good, and as drawing back again into the Unity…
Tom: This ‘drawing back into unity’ is what Hart rails against. The unity he claims we ought to hope for is a unity that’s found in the permanent releasing of creation with no Hegelian ‘return’ into/unto God.
John: This beatitude is so onefold and so wayless that in it every essential gazing, tendency, and creaturely distinction cease and pass away.
Tom: Creaturely distinctions cease and pass away? I wouldn’t want to call this “Christian.”
John: For by this fruition, all uplifted spirits are melted and noughted in the Essence of God…
Tom: All uplifted spirits are neither affirmed nor denied “in the essence of God.” There’s no question os creaturely relations entering into that equation. To suggest that creaturely distinctions are “melted” in the essence of God is to misunderstand creation AND the divine essence.
John: …there [in the divine essence] the three Persons give place to the Essential Unity, and abide without distinction in fruition of essential blessedness.
Tom: This is horrible Trinitarian theology, in my view. Maybe Catholics would like it. But in my view, the three persons don’t “give place” to a [more fundamental] essential unity where they abide “without distinction”? There’s no such abiding of the Persons.
John: This blessedness is essential to God, and superessential to all creatures; for no created essence can become one with God's Essence and pass away from its own substance. For so the creature would become God, which is impossible…
Tom: So what happens to his claim that “all creaturely distinction ceases and passes away”?
John: …for the Divine Essence can neither wax nor wane, nor can anything be added to It or taken from It. Yet all loving spirits are one fruition and one blessedness with God without distinction; for that beatific state, which is the fruition of God and of all His beloved, is so simple and onefold that therein neither Father, nor Son, nor Holy Ghost, is distinct according to the Persons, neither is any creature.
Tom: I can’t even call it Christian. If this is essential Christianity 101, the
John: But all enlightened spirits are here lifted up above themselves into a wayless fruition, which is an abundance beyond all the fulness that any creature has ever received or shall ever receive. For there all uplifted spirits are, in their superessence, one fruition and one beatitude with God without distinction; and there this beatitude is so onefold that no distinction can enter into it. And this was prayed for by Christ when He besought His Father in heaven that all His beloved might be made perfect in one, even as He is one with the Father…
Tom: Unfortunately the Son and the Father are not one “without distinction” in anything like the sense he seems to be claiming. And just what Christ had in mind when he prayed isn’t obviously the sort of erasing of personal distinctions that he here promotes.
I would never claim that mystics don’t have the ‘white light’ experience and other mystical encounters and blessed visions. But it’s entirely another question whether they properly understand or express the theology behind it, whether the experience MEANS theologically. And given that these experiences are had in THIS WORLD by finite creatures not yet glorified, we cannot say such experiences guarantee their own proper theological understanding. We may all repent and receive forgiveness and yet differ in the theological explanation of atonement, for example.
T |