Post Edited (Similitude) : 8/11/2011 6:10:30 PM (GMT-5)

“The real meaning of upekkha is equanimity, not indifference in the sense of unconcern for others. As a spiritual virtue, upekkha means equanimity in the face of the fluctuations of worldly fortune. It is evenness of mind, unshakeable freedom of mind, a state of inner equipoise that cannot be upset by gain and loss, honor and dishonor, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. Upekkha is freedom from all points of self-reference; it is indifference only to the demands of the ego-self with its craving for pleasure and position, not to the well-being of one's fellow human beings. True equanimity is the pinnacle of the four social attitudes that the Buddhist texts call the 'divine abodes': boundless loving-kindness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity. The last does not override and negate the preceding three, but perfects and consummates them.”

Post Edited (One Love) : 8/13/2011 10:34:09 AM (GMT-5)

It may be that risk was necessary to render humans epistemologically capable of intuiting that the world IS a divinely created order. Apart from final causes, we can't apprehend intelligent design. We can't know the world is divinely caused EXCEPT in terms of final causality. And yet we can not conceive of a perfectly benevolent creator voluntarily creating EXCEPT in terms of risk.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 8/13/2011 11:53:24 AM (GMT-5)

David Bentley Hart on the Trinity

Post Edited (One Love) : 8/13/2011 11:57:05 AM (GMT-5)

Jeff: So no degradation of competence in right choice-making is involved. The mystery has to do with HOW that perfect divine perspective is natural. But that is a mystery of the "brute fact" kind. To say God is unsurpassingly satisfied is to resort to a different KIND of mystery--a mystery that compels us to resort to "infinity" etc to try to resolve an apparent contradiction. But I'm not seeing how we can know that kind of route really does resolve it.

Tom: I link the irreducible intensity of aesthetic satisfaction (i.e., felt quality of experience) with the perfection of God’s natural perspective. Perspective grounds aesthetic satisfaction. If God never fails to infallibly perceive Godself (his own beauty, goodness, etc.), that would produce an equally unfailing pleasure and delight. I won’t quibble over the word “infinite” here. It’s notoriously difficult to define anyhow, especially since we’re not “counting” anything. I use “infinite” here just to say that the divine beauties which are pleasurable to perceive are such that God never gets bored with himself. They’re illimitable in their capacity to please when perceived. Thus, if the perceiving is natural and perfect, then so would the corresponding pleasure be.

This may affect how you and understand the pleasure to be gained from creation’s final perfection. For me the final pleasure God gains is a sub-species of what God eternally is in himself. He doesn’t come to discover a beauty or delight in creation that he is not already the consummate fullness of himself. In that sense creation is divine self-expression.

And this will affect too how we understand God’s suffering. I’m not able to say the felt quality of God’s experience is degraded or ruptured by the world’s evils, though those evils are known and experienced. They cannot dampen a pleasure that springs from a source which no evil can touch. To me, the pleasure that keeps God joyfully competent through enduring the world is the joy to BRINGS to creation (to answer D's last post). True, Jesus endured the cross for the joy set BEFORE him, but that’s from the perspective of the incarnate one. What is before in this instance is the bringing to the created order of that primordial joy and delight which are God’s naturally.

Tom

There is no doubt that God has joy, otherwise joy would not be a fruit of the Spirit. And divine joy, as human joy, does indeed have to do with how God is competently working all things to our good, because God's satisfaction is derived as much or more from sympathy as aesthetics. My only contention is that if we think of God's total experience at a given point of time as a finite experience of instances of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction, then every instance of a grieving of the Spirit diminishes the total satisfaction in that experience to some degree. But it clearly isn't enough to make God think, "Hmmm, this creational project isn't worth it." God's competence is such that God is always satisfied with the ultimate outcome He is bringing about. That's all we can say in terms of finitude. And that's all we NEED to say to render perfect benevolence and competence coherent and intelligible.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 8/13/2011 12:35:27 PM (GMT-5)

I'm sure there are views of it that are better than others. But I haven't read enough of them to see how coherent they are. Seems to me that once you've got to a competent, benevolent Designer of the created order, you've moved past pure process thought.