Process philosophy is helpful up to a point, with its emphasis on relationality. But its God is still part of the universe, is still a function within the world (to this extent, it is still back with Aristotle, despite all its differences with Aristotelian metaphysics). So it does not accommodate the radical transcendence of God (that God can be God without the world at all).
Well, it requires that there be a world. But it does not hold that God is part of the world. Rather, it holds that God is immanent as well as transcendent. However, classical theism also holds that God is immanent as well as transcendent.
The perichoresis is not a logical process because it is not driven by necessity. That’s why it also is not a neoplatonic system of emanations, or a Hegelian dialectic. There is no necessity because it is an anctivity of freely given lover. And because the perichoresis is outside the world, the universe, it is not a temporal process.
But
eternal generation and eternal procession implies some kind of process (even if it is a nontemporal one).
There is no symmetry in the perichoresis. The Father is entirely the “relating” to the Son, and the Son is the “relating” to the Father, and the Spirit is a “relating” to both the Father and Son. These “positions” are not interchangeable; the Father comes first, then the Son, then the Holy Spirit. Thus, the Son cannot “be” in the position of Father; and the Father cannot be in the position of the Son; and, again, the Holy Spirit occupies its own unique position. This “ordering” is neither logical, nor metaphysical, nor temporal.
I disagree. The “asymmetry’” and “ordering” - the designation of the Father as the Father and the Son as the Son - requires some kind of logical basis.
“Substance” and “a being or an entity” are interchangeable. But if “being” is understand as the act of esse, “substance” is not interchangeable. The problem with applying the notion of substance to God is that He is not simply one of many different kinds of beings. God is not a “kind” at all but, in Thomistic metaphysics, the pure act of esse - God has no essence apart from this. But even here, the perichoresis is not captured - the pure esse alone does not account for the perichoresis - and it is the perichoresis that illuminates the 3 persons. It’s very difficult to force 3 persons onto an Aristotelian primary substance.
Your argument seems to imply that God does not really exist.
“God is the only being whose essence is existence itself.” - St. Thomas Aquinas
God did not have to create the world. God could have continued to be God without the world - God plus the world is no greater than God without the world. So there was no necessity. Only a free decision of love. So the world does not have to be. Aristotle didn’t know this. But this does not mean that the world’s existence is due to chance.
I disagree. To reiterate: God either has compatiblist free will or libertarian free will, because those are the only logical possibilities. Compatiblism is compatible with determinism; libertarianism is not. If God has compatibilist free will, then God’s decision to create could not have been otherwise. If God has libertarian free will, then God’s decision to create could have only been otherwise due to some element of pure chance.
The economic Trinity does not refer to divine immanence if the latter implies some sort of necessary relationship between God and the world. God does not have to be in the world. But the world’s existence necessarily depends upon God’s free creative act. So it’s a one way street. But there is a divine immanence in the Incarnation.
This “radically transcendent” concept of God appears to be semi-Deistic. If God is love, then God necessarily creates because that’s what love does…creates. God cannot be a creator unless God creates. (This division of the Trinity into the ontological or immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity is
only necessary if you hold that the creation is
not necessary.)
The traditional Thomistic position is that God is one primary substance and 3 Persons. And this is where I depart from Thomas’ Aristotelianism. I don’t think the perichoresis that is God can be substantialized. Even with analogy. Substance cannot account for “person” either human or divine. A substance is the union of form and matter; but a person is neither a form or matter, but a reality that is deeper than substance
But God is not a composite of form and matter.
A person is incommunicable, not shareable, not a member of a class or kind, but totally unique. This is why the Father is not the Son, and the Son not the Father, and Holy Spirit not the Father or the Son.
But in what sense are the Father and the Son one?
I see that you want to understand “being” as dynamic.
“Being” is a dynamic unity. But there is a difference between
intrinsic unity and
extrinsic unity.
Unity as a property of real being = intrinsic unity as opposed to merely extrinsic unity, i.e., it signifies that a being has a single act of existence manifested by a single center of unified action, whereas extrinsic unity is merely a collection of several real beings, joined together by relations of order, but with no unified center of action of the whole. (source: pg. 293< “The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics” by W. Norris Clarke, S.)
