Rather than posting Notes and thus participating in and contributing to the lamentable Twixification of Substack, I am going to follow Laeth’s lead, and periodically (sporadically?) send out shorter musings and meditations on the thoughts and feelings that are occupying my mind and heart at the moment.
This moon has me feeling a bit reflective and adventurous and optimistic about that adventure — like sitting around a campfire swapping stories after an expansive day in the mountains, looking forward to rest and another day, and enjoying the camaraderie.
Have a soundtrack.
The world is plural. All attempts to make it “one” are prima facie absurdities. It is not one. I sometimes think it must be one if only in the sense that all the many beings in relationship must be in relationship against some “ground,” and then, what is that ground? But perhaps this is an unnecessary speculation. Perhaps the terms of relationship are inherent in the many beings individually. If we go the Mormon route of positing eternal intelligences, then their relations constitute the ground. The world is countless beings making world. This idea has the singular value of being coherent with my daily experience of life, with my experience of moral responsibility, with my experience of both the reality and finitude of my own agency and that of other beings, human and nonhuman.
In short, there is nothing other than communion all the way down, all the way up — allowing for a hylozoism or panexperientialism. The word “God” then conceals two meanings. What the classical tradition means by “God” qua “ground of Being,” or “Being itself,” is the character of the eternal intelligences as manifest in their relatedness. There’s a resonance here with Wieman’s notion of God as “creative interchange,” which is perhaps something that Wieman could give Mormon theology by way of addressing what, in that theology, might fulfil the role played by God as ground-of-Being in classical theism. Wieman’s empiricism is a natural fit with the matrix of American empiricism and pragmatism that characterizes Mormon thought generally.
William James’ pluralism also seems a congenial fit here. This character of eternal intelligences is a brute fact, but the classical view is content with brute facts, obviously, as its God is for it a brute fact. There is no fact more brute than the Absolute; it is the definitive brute fact apotheosized.
The other meaning of “God” is then a more elevated being, perhaps even the “supreme being,” but, contra classical theism, definitely a being among beings. The character of this God is then an open empirical question to be settled by experience and not a priori, and we look to God’s covenantal faithfulness as the basis of our trust. Altogether a more Biblical view, I note. And likewise, as I go through the world, I need not restrict myself to the dry skepticism of a Wieman, but I can allow a more open sensitivity to the presences of many other spiritual agents in creation — empiricism without reductionsm, but also without ceding the God of perennial Christian experience. “Re-enchantment,” but without collapsing into the pagan nightmare of hostile entities to be appeased by sacrifice and superstition. (Tolkien did it with the angelology of his Valar, and I can do it too. Let’s build a shrine to Yavanna.)
This God is then the one who most faithfully instantiates the character of being-as-relation, the truthfulness of communion as the essential character of primordial “brute” reality. Perhaps among a choir of other gods and gods-to-be, including us. Orthodox Christians should not cavil at the notion of gods-to-be, which after all is simply the theosis we claim as the goal of human life.
There is scope here for the Whiteheadian view of the emergence and enrichment of beings through their evolutionary journey, and also for the fundamental Mormon optimism about embodiment as an exaltation rather than the consequence of a fall, which frankly, as I try it on and look at the world through that lens, feels like I am being released from prison or waking from a nightmare.
“Let our use of books and learning in every case mirror the ‘icon’ of the honeybee. For such does not visit every flower in the same manner, neither does the honeybee attempt to fly off bearing the burden of the entire flower. Rather, once it derives that which is needful from the flower, it leaves the rest behind and takes flight.
“So, too, if we are wise, once we derive from learning what resonates with truth, we too shall leave the rest behind and take flight. For is it not so that when we take a rose we avoid the thorns? So, too, let us approach diverse writings, harvesting the fruits that they offer for our objectives, while protecting ourselves from the damaging elements that may lie within them. In all our studies, let us take with us and take within us only what builds us up, and what leads us in the fulfillment of our mission.”
St Basil the Great
And PS — bees are pretty enthusiastic. Be the bee.
A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism by John Michael Greer, made me realize despite my own experience of the Trinity as ultimate, intellectually I can only defensibly say I practice monolatry. Greer’s point that pushed me there was his argument was yes you met something very big, very ultimate, but it could be just little you encountering something much greater than you. He is not a perennialist however
Love this so much.
Might be something present for you in 'Deseret'