Jeff: I can [A] enjoy the simple pleasure of sociality with another. I can also [B] enjoy it aesthetically by attending to the harmony of the several relations of that sociality. [My A and B]

Tom: Does “aesthetically” apply to BOTH A and B or just to B?

Jeff: I would say just to B. I think there are pleasures which can be enjoyed independent of their aesthetic qualities. When someone gives you recognition for a good job, I think you can enjoy that on a purely ego level. But you can also enjoy it in terms of the beauty of the harmony entailed in the whole set of personal relations involved. Loving people tend to do the latter, ALSO.

E.g., I can hear a trumpet play a middle C. If I'm concentrating on something else (=different perspective) that sound is just a sound. But if I hear a melody played by a trumpet, and I'm listening to it with attention to the aesthetic quality of the melody, THEN I have an aesthetic experience.  The several separate notes are part of what makes the aesthetic experience. But they don't CONSTITUTE, by themselves, independent of an aesthetic perspective, beauty.

Tom: It sounds like you’re saying God has the choice between the sorts of perspectives through which he relates to creation. Is that it? Can you clarify these TWO perspectives for me. I’m not following. I seems like the two perspectives are:

A = “enjoying the simple pleasure of sociality with another”

B = “enjoying the same sociality but aesthetically by attending to the harmony of the several relations of that sociality”

So aesthetics is part of B but not of A. I’m having trouble picturing just what these distinctions are if both of them amount to “enjoying relationality.”

Jeff: See my example above for clarification. But God doesn't choose between perspectives. He experiences them all simultaneously. He enjoys gratitude PER SE. But He also enjoys the beauty of the harmony and symmetry entailed in the RIGHT RELATIONS of all parties involved in the gratitude in an aesthetic sense ALSO. The former is what He experiences simply in His own ego. The latter is what He experiences because of apprehending a greater set of social RELATIONS. Both at the same time. The former is a subset and condition of the latter.

Tom: What do you think of the infinite set analogy, Jeff? There is real diminishment IN A SENSE if you remove SOME integers from the set of all positive integers. But in spite of this, the number of integers constituting the set are STILL INFINITE and UNDEMINISHED.

Jeff: I'm fine with it. But I think the reason why we might not need it is because creation exists FOR Christ. If Christ has his real or potential sentient satisfaction diminished by created beings, I think it's OK to see God's satisfaction as meaningfully diminished. Because that means that intra bliss is involved by what occurs in creation. If it's only potential satisfaction that is involved, then your analogy makes more sense. But we have, at least, real suffering by Christ. So I'm not sure it's only potential diminishing of satisfaction. I really believe the pre-Fall plan was the preferred plan that would have involved no suffering for the Father or the Son.

Tom: I’d feel much more comfortable if you would commit to some clear definition of what aseity amounts to. What is that about God which constitutes the necessarily divine experience?

Jeff: Define aseity exactly, and I'll try. I'm just positing divine attributes as I need to to account for my experience. I don't see how saying God's intensity of satisfaction can't be diminished helps us explain anything. Indeed, it seems to imply that God is utterly indifferent to suffering. Since it would seem to mean He doesn't even have empathy. OR it seems to imply that His love is not grounded in sentient motivation. This latter seems problematic to me.

Tom: I also think we’ve got different understandings of ad intra and ad extra going on. That’s gonna hurt the convo if we don’t agree on what we’re talking about. Do we want to reserve AD INTRA for that about God which is necessarily instantiated and which we cannot penetrate? If not, what?

Jeff: I clearly don't know what you mean then. Define your terms and I'll try to stay on track. I'm call ad intra that relating which is between those within the godhead to those without it.

Jeff: This, to me, is how to salvage perfect love. God is CONSTRAINED for the sake of Christ's inheritance of that which he was intended to get from creation. God loves us as much as is possible within that constraint.

Tom: This may be a more fundamental difference, because loving as much as is possible within the sort of constraints you’re describing (or perhaps ANY constraints at all) completely undermines love in my mind. It seems to entail God’s saying “Well, I’m loving you as much as I can given the circumstances; I could love you more were the constraints different, but hey, I didn’t create THAT kind of world.”

Jeff: It does undermine it in the sense of CONDITIONING it. But I don't see how this is even deniable. The experience of God's love is conditional. No amount of hand-waving is going to change that. The only thing that is unconditional about God's love is His loving INTEREST in our well-being.

We, like Zach and I, disagree about what love is. Love, to me, is the intentional increasing of another's sentient satisfaction. Given that definition, I'm limited to my view for now. Because it is obvious to me that God has the sheer POWER to increase our sentient satisfaction. But He doesn't. So something must be constraining Him. I say that is the means necessary or fitted to render Christ the beneficiary of creation per the original intent. Apart from this, I can't see perfect love at ALL. This is why I could never understand you guys when I first got on the forum. Now I think I do, but I still can't see it apart from what I'm saying.

Tom: I think we agree that God’s embracing us into theosis is a final and eschatological event. And we agree that LFW constraints the achieving of this end. But we disagree over the nature of the constaint. You limit LFW’s role to providing some pleasure Christ gets on a continuum of loving relationality (creaturely love of God via no libertarian becoming is less pleasing to Christ than creaturely love of God via libertarian becoming).

Let’s start backwards. Theosis is the goal, right? God wants, within his experience, created beings who experience his love, love him back, love one another, and reflect it all through the created order. THAT’S why God creates. OK. If we’re agreed on this much,...

Jeff: We're not agreed on that much. I'm saying the only way I can account for perfect love is to suppose that God creates for CHRIST. He creates for Himself ONLY insomuch as He receives pleasure from pleasuring THE SON. Apart from THAT ONE MOTIVATION, I have no explanation for creation at all that accounts for the Father's perfect love.

However, once God creates, He can't help but be motivated in the way you describe because HE IS LOVE. It's just that that motivation is not the motivation TO CREATE. See the difference? That's why I can say that once the temporal end and its side-effects are complete (i.e., Christ has become the beneficiary of creation he was meant to be), God will assimilate us. HE IS LOVE. He needs nothing from us whatsoever to explain our creation.

Tom: then the question then becomes, What are the metaphysical constraints that must direct how contingent, creaturely, sentient beings can come to stand in such a relation to God? And it’s on THIS that I think you (Jeff) and I disagree, for I claim that it is metaphysically impossible for God to create (from the get-go) compatibilistically loving creatures; that is, creatures who love compatibilistically without having to BECOME so. That’s out of the question to my mind. Contingent creatures can only come to stand in such a compatibilistically loving theotic relationship to God by BECOMING into that position, and THAT means LFW. There’s no other way God could get what he wanted.

Jeff: My explanation above explains how I disagree about what it is that God wanted primarily from creation. All else is secondary and grounded in the primary until the end is attained.

Tom: So for me, yes, creation is FOR Christ, but it’s for Christ’s experience of creaturely love and worship and glory. But that makes it for us as well.

Jeff: We differ on how we think of final cause metaphysics. Just because we benefit by being created doesn't mean we exist FOR ourselves. That's the distinction I'm making. We benefit as a SIDE-EFFECT of the Father's love for the Son. But I don't see why this is problematic.

Tom: And in my mind this HELPS with theodicy. It better grounds the risk God takes in metaphysical demands rather than the contingent pleasure of Christ. Why would a perfectly happy and contended being take risks FOR HIMSELF? See? But if the risks are taken (in some significant sense at least) FOR US, then it makes sense for a perfectly contended being to create.

Jeff: He doesn't take risks ONLY for Himself. He does nothing ONLY for Himself. This what I mean when I say He is essentially relational. He takes them for CHRIST. But there is never a risk as to whether the end will be attained. The risk is how much suffering will it take. If God risks suffering for His own Son, this explains why theodicy can't require that we're too good to suffer. SEE? God IS this kind of being. He risks SUFFERING for His own Son. But He does it knowing that ALL WILL BE WORTHWHILE regardless. For EVERYONE. In that sense, there never was a risk. There was only a risk that the goal might not be attained without an unnecessary cost. But a worthwhile cost, nonetheless.

Post Edited (jefscott) : 2/5/2007 5:47:55 PM (GMT-6)

Jeff: We're not agreed on that much. I'm saying the only way I can account for perfect love is to suppose that God creates for CHRIST. He creates for Himself ONLY insomuch as He receives pleasure from pleasuring THE SON. Apart from THAT ONE MOTIVATION, I have no explanation for creation at all that accounts for the Father's perfect love.

Exousia: There is no other motivation that you can think of? Not one?

Tom: Yeah, Jeff. Not one? No other motivation? After all we’ve said? Uuuuuse the force, Luuuke.

Yo Jeff. I got to responding and was gonna reply more, but it just dawned on me that so long as we disagree on the metaphysics of creaturely love we’re gonna come out on different ends of this. And I can’t see that we misunderstand each other either, so we might be stale-matted. We might be just asserting different intuitions, in which case we’re stuck. But I’ll go ahead an post what I had written up…

Jeff: I agree. None of it has ANYTHING to do with the amount of love God HAS for any particular being. But God is CONSTRAINED as to how much of God's love for us can be experienced by us.

Tom: But then the constraints are OURS. I mean, God’s not constrained in that case. We are. God just has to live with what constrains US. That’s all you mean, right?

Jeff: Since God experiences unsurpassable intensity of sentient satisfaction from compatibilistic love, I need an explanation as to why all this suffering and conditionality buys Him anything.

Tom: I don’t know about Exousia, but I’ve made it as clear as I know how. I could be wrong, but nothing seems as clearly the case to me as does the fact that there’s no way to get compatibilistically loving creatures except via LFW becoming.

So God experiences unsurpassable intensity of sentient satisfaction from compatibilistic love because God is necessary self-sustaining love, yes. No problem. And someday we’ll GET there. But we can’t START there (because we’re not necessary and self-sustaining persons). So what creating a free and risky world buys God is a world that becomes loving and one with him. There’s NO OTHER WAY to get such a unity. It’s that, or no sentient loving world at all.

Hence, suffering doesn’t itself buy God anything. But the RISK of suffering, that’s different. You risk for something.

---------------------------------

Jeff: I've explained in previous posts how I think the creational project was about providing Christ the sentient satisfaction occasioned by the volitional adoration of loving subordinates. This is what the Son occasions for the Father.

Tom: Why can’t creation just be an act of grace wherein God (not JUST Christ) creates to experience his own loving self through the free conformity of creation to his loving self? That way creation is FOR God (and freely graceful) but it’s also FOR us because what in the end is FOR God is our experiencing and responding to his love. Both/and.

--------------------------------

Jeff: That's my distinction. It's how I get around trying to explain why God needs or wants FOR HIMSELF something other than compatibilistic bliss.

Tom: But I don’t see how this doesn’t apply to your view that creation is for Christ’s pleasure. If that’s what it fundamentally is, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot. I mean, as I asked before, why would Father, unsurpassably satisfied, risk the suffering of creation for the Son who is unsurpassably satisfied as well? While this explain perfect love to you, it completely leaves me wondering if there’s anything loving about this at all. I don’t see it.

In a sense, God DOESN’T want anything for himself or out of creation other than compatibilistic bliss (creation’s, unified with his own). God doesn’t WANT libertarian free will for something GOD gets from it. He wants us ONE with him, in loving compatibilistic bliss. LFW is just the ONLY WAY God can get us that. So yes, LFW runs out (so far as our loving or not loving is concerned), and yes it runs out because we will be one with God. But not because there’s some pleasure Christ gets from our having possessed it. It runs out because WE have sufficiently become. It’s OUR becoming that LFW is FOR, not FOR Christ. OUR BECOMING is more fundamentally FOR Christ.

-------------------------------------

Jeff: I can [A] enjoy the simple pleasure of sociality with another. I can also [B] enjoy it aesthetically by attending to the harmony of the several relations of that sociality. [My A and B]

Tom: Does “aesthetically” apply to BOTH A and B or just to B?

Jeff: I would say just to B. I think there are pleasures which can be enjoyed independent of their aesthetic qualities.

Tom: I understand your examples, here, but I don’t think they really establish an “enjoyment” or “pleasure” that is not aesthetic. To me, to enjoy is an irreducibly aesthetic behavior.

It’s interesting how all this didn’t come out before now!

----------------------------------

Jeff: He enjoys gratitude PER SE. But He also enjoys the beauty of the harmony and symmetry entailed in the RIGHT RELATIONS of all parties involved in the gratitude in an aesthetic sense ALSO. The former is what He experiences simply in His own ego. The latter is what He experiences because of apprehending a greater set of social RELATIONS.

Tom: I have no idea of what enjoying gratitude per se is which is not an aesthetic apprehension of beauty.

There’s an important metaphysical point here that might explain why you think God can enjoy gratitude per se on the one hand and then also enjoy the right relations of all parties involved in the gratitude (aesthetically). When you say the latter is what God experiences “by apprehending a greater set of social relations,” you miss a crucial process-ontological commitment, and that is—there ARE NO per se realities which are not sets of social relations. In the case of gratitude, Jeff, the social relations DEFINE gratitude. They are what constitute the perspective which makes appreciating what you’re calling “gratitude per se” possible. There are no per se individual realities floating around out there. All is social and relational—essentially.

--------------------------------

Tom: I also think we’ve got different understandings of ad intra and ad extra going on. That’s gonna hurt the convo if we don’t agree on what we’re talking about. Do we want to reserve AD INTRA for that about God which is necessarily instantiated and which we cannot penetrate? If not, what?

Jeff: I clearly don't know what you mean then. Define your terms and I'll try to stay on track. I'm call ad intra that relating which is between those within the godhead to those without it.

Tom: This might be confusing us too, because AD INTRA is usually intended to refer to the INNER trinitarian relations excluding all relations to those outside the Trinity. It’s God related to Godself, period. AD EXTRA is intended to refer to God’s relations to creation.

-------------------------------------

Jeff: We, like Zach and I, disagree about what love is. Love, to me, is the intentional increasing of another's sentient satisfaction. Given that definition, I'm limited to my view for now. Because it is obvious to me that God has the sheer POWER to increase our sentient satisfaction. But He doesn't. So something must be constraining Him.

Tom: Then this is a difference too. Golly, we keep finding real deep differences. How did we not find these before? I’d disagree that God has the sheer power to increase our sentient satisfaction in all and any respects. God has the sheer power to feed Elijah with a Raven. I’m sure that was pleasing to Elijah. God has the sheer power to, say, heal our bodies. Surely that brings us sentient satisfaction. I’m sure there are other ways his presence manifests itself in ways that satisfy us. But what God cannot do by sheer power is satisfy us in the MOST meaningful sense, that of loving relationality. For us to experience that we have to freely choose. God can’t dump it on us without our exercising our own freedom.

Tom

Jeff: I agree. None of it has ANYTHING to do with the amount of love God HAS for any particular being. But God is CONSTRAINED as to how much of God's love for us can be experienced by us.

Tom: But then the constraints are OURS. I mean, God’s not constrained in that case. We are. God just has to live with what constrains US. That’s all you mean, right?

Jeff: We can't constrain God because God CAN do compatibilism. He doesn't though because the end of creation entails what LFW conditions for the Son's sentient satisfaction. So yeah, God IS constrained by the end of creation.

Jeff: Since God experiences unsurpassable intensity of sentient satisfaction from compatibilistic love, I need an explanation as to why all this suffering and conditionality buys Him anything.

Tom: I don’t know about Exousia, but I’ve made it as clear as I know how. I could be wrong, but nothing seems as clearly the case to me as does the fact that there’s no way to get compatibilistically loving creatures except via LFW becoming.

Jeff: Again, I see no reason to assume that God creates for what HE gets out of LFW. It seems contrary to perfect love if it costs us to pleasure Him. It is also an unnecessary assumption. So I let Occam do his thing. I say that God's pleasure from creation IS the pleasure He derives by pleasuring others. Nothing more. Nothing less.

But the end of creation starts with who exists--Christ. Then as more beings come into existence, God wants to pleasure them. But He can only pleasure them to the extent that they act in accordance with how God intended for them to pleasure Christ. Final cause metaphysics constrains God til the creational goal and its side effects have come to pass.

Tom: So what creating a free and risky world buys God is a world that becomes loving and one with him. There’s NO OTHER WAY to get such a unity. It’s that, or no sentient loving world at all.

Jeff: I think I've just described another "way" that requires less assumptions.

Jeff: I've explained in previous posts how I think the creational project was about providing Christ the sentient satisfaction occasioned by the volitional adoration of loving subordinates. This is what the Son occasions for the Father.

Tom: Why can’t creation just be an act of grace wherein God (not JUST Christ) creates to experience his own loving self through the free conformity of creation to his loving self? That way creation is FOR God (and freely graceful) but it’s also FOR us because what in the end is FOR God is our experiencing and responding to his love. Both/and.

Jeff: Because it's unnecessary to posit that if we agree that my assumption is true. It makes suffering more difficult to explain. With my one assumption, all seems explicable with no fuss. Perfect love constrained by means necessary to attain a temporal end followed by unconstrained love (i.e., UR).

Jeff: That's my distinction. It's how I get around trying to explain why God needs or wants FOR HIMSELF something other than compatibilistic bliss.

Tom: But I don’t see how this doesn’t apply to your view that creation is for Christ’s pleasure. If that’s what it fundamentally is, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot. I mean, as I asked before, why would Father, unsurpassably satisfied, risk the suffering of creation for the Son who is unsurpassably satisfied as well? While this explain perfect love to you, it completely leaves me wondering if there’s anything loving about this at all. I don’t see it.

Jeff: I'm saying the suffering is worth it. Cause creation adds a KIND of pleasure (adoration of loving subordinates) to the Son that he could not experience otherwise. And it does so to a degree that justifies the cost. This pleasures the Father.

Tom: In a sense, God DOESN’T want anything for himself or out of creation other than compatibilistic bliss (creation’s, unified with his own).

Jeff: I'm not saying that. I'm saying God wants to pleasure Christ in a way that he can not experience otherwise. THEN, because we exist for that end, God LOVES US. Just because HE is love and WE exist. We benefit from God's love as a SIDE-EFFECT of God's love for the Son.

Tom: God doesn’t WANT libertarian free will for something GOD gets from it. He wants us ONE with him, in loving compatibilistic bliss.

Jeff: Read what I just read. It seems to suffice for me. And then I don't have to posit that God was willing for us to suffer FOR HIMSELF. God always acts in behalf of others and derives pleasure, therefrom. Our suffering was necessitated because He couldn't fully love (in the creational-gift-mode) Christ otherwise (and this because of the Fall). It's never about God alone.

Tom:  LFW is just the ONLY WAY God can get us that. So yes, LFW runs out (so far as our loving or not loving is concerned), and yes it runs out because we will be one with God. But not because there’s some pleasure Christ gets from our having possessed it.

Jeff: Whoa! God gets pleasure "from our having possessed it" but Christ doesn't? How do you know that?

Tom: It runs out because WE have sufficiently become. It’s OUR becoming that LFW is FOR, not FOR Christ. OUR BECOMING is more fundamentally FOR Christ.

Jeff: That's the same thing as saying Christ gets pleasure "from our having possessed it." One entails the other. 

Tom: I understand your examples, here, but I don’t think they really establish an “enjoyment” or “pleasure” that is not aesthetic. To me, to enjoy is an irreducibly aesthetic behavior.

Jeff: Can an animal enjoy? I think it can. But I don't think it can aesthetically.

Tom: I have no idea of what enjoying gratitude per se is which is not an aesthetic apprehension of beauty.

Jeff: That's probably because you always experience both simultaneously like God.

Tom: There’s an important metaphysical point here that might explain why you think God can enjoy gratitude per se on the one hand and then also enjoy the right relations of all parties involved in the gratitude (aesthetically). When you say the latter is what God experiences “by apprehending a greater set of social relations,” you miss a crucial process-ontological commitment, and that is—there ARE NO per se realities which are not sets of social relations. In the case of gratitude, Jeff, the social relations DEFINE gratitude.

Jeff: There is a difference between gratitude and the feeling that one feels from another's gratitude, though. This latter is experienced as one piece of what constitutes the aesthetic whole. I'll try to quote some Noah Porter on this weekend to clarify a bit.

Tom: This might be confusing us too, because AD INTRA is usually intended to refer to the INNER trinitarian relations excluding all relations to those outside the Trinity. It’s God related to Godself, period. AD EXTRA is intended to refer to God’s relations to creation.

Jeff: I've been way off, then!! 

Tom: Then this is a difference too. Golly, we keep finding real deep differences. How did we not find these before? I’d disagree that God has the sheer power to increase our sentient satisfaction in all and any respects. God has the sheer power to feed Elijah with a Raven. I’m sure that was pleasing to Elijah. God has the sheer power to, say, heal our bodies. Surely that brings us sentient satisfaction. I’m sure there are other ways his presence manifests itself in ways that satisfy us. But what God cannot do by sheer power is satisfy us in the MOST meaningful sense, that of loving relationality. For us to experience that we have to freely choose. God can’t dump it on us without our exercising our own freedom.

Jeff: So we will experience greater sentient satisfaction than God and Christ because of having had LFW? This is what you are saying isn't it? This means that if God gave us the divine nature and erased our memories of all past LFW life, we would have less sentient satisfaction than if we could remember all that life in our future compatibilism. I don't know how we could know that since we can't experience both to do the test. Isn't that an empirical question that will never be tested? I think so. Which means it is just an assumption that is no better justified than the alternative one.

Post Edited (jefscott) : 2/5/2007 9:30:10 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Exousia) : 2/7/2007 9:35:27 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (TGB) : 2/7/2007 10:30:05 AM (GMT-6)