I
The question of impassibility is tied to that of time. Particularly in the Christian circles I engage with, the exact relationship between eternity and time is fuzzier than defined. I think someone like DB Hart gets this well enough, I just think that (and perhaps he knows that) more can be said, especially when it comes to how temporality comes into play here. The chief problem someone might have with impassibility is that it looks like it forecloses any access to the God or Gods in question. If the Gods in their ineffable existences do not suffer any passions, and as such do not “respond”, then how are they Gods we pray to and engage?
Impassibility is a positive attribute, Dr Hart is right. It is the very active giving of a God. We should take the negative connotation of “IM-PASSIVE” as an apophatic way of viewing the boundless gift of the God. However, the world is complex, and the emphasis on the immediacy of the God’s causation in Christianity tends to overshadow how impassibility plays out in celestial hierarchies.
Proclus says that “All that is eternal is a simultaneous whole” (Prop 52), and further comments that “that existence is simultaneously present in its entirety; there is not one part of it which has already emerged and another which will emerge later, but as yet is not; all that it is capable of being it already possesses in entirety, without diminution and without serial extension.”
This is not the God as such, but quite simply an eternal being, a manifestation of the God. For Proclus, the Gods are even beyond eternity (which is a platonic form). When the Gods give, they give everything at once. What they give is everything they are, united by who they are, from the top of the celestial hierarchy to the bottom, even to matter. This gift of existence as such is without an intermediary. The Gods cause all things directly as the instances of the first principle that “neither is nor is one” (Parmenides 141 E), However, the gift of essence, the whatness of things, usually defined by platonic forms or ideas as colloquially understood, is mediated. This chain of mediation moves from the impassible to the passible. As Proclus says, all that is eternal has everything proper to it at once, as a whole. That it is as a “whole” is important here because it is not as divisible that something has all of itself. It is not a bundle of many things that could have emerged over time now appearing at once, still as many things. It is instead a whole. It is not partitioned. The way Proclus described his system, time and parts emerge later down the chain of mediation, and Time itself is a platonic form, it is also eternal, having everything proper to it as a whole. This is important because this is explaining the self-manifestation of the Gods, such that in the emergence of dualities such as worshipped and worshipper, both terms are manifestations of the Gods themselves. Yes, we have reached Non-duality. The gift from eternity is the whole of time, and the gift of the whole of time is the parts of time, emerging in hierarchical succession down the chain, and unfolding the terms present in the previous higher levels. Thus, the temporal manifestation of the God that one prays to and responds to us and the one who prays so that the temporal manifestation answers are both manifestations of the higher eternal manifestation of the God who is himself a manifestation of the God beyond eternity. As Thales said, all things are full of Gods, including you who pray. This is how you are “full of Gods”. The whole of temporal existence is manifest eternally before manifesting temporally in the interactions of the many temporal elements, and the God beyond being is immediately (without mediation) present to every single element as is appropriate. This is a glimpse of how impassibility plays out in our devotion. Prayer is preserved.
II
Relatedly, the idea of transcendent levels of time and eternity is one found in several places including the New Testament. One might think to help explain much NT theology in its terms. Personally, the ideas of ascent and resurrection (the same thing in certain parts of the NT) beyond even “the Ages” – which, to me is indeed the various levels of time and eternity beyond time considered as wholes – is a description of theurgy. I am not the first to notice, but I would be in the minority when I say that I agree with D. B. Hart that the eschaton refers to something else other than Jesus coming down from water vapour clouds next Tuesday.
III
Al Klein mentioned that “The 'monad' then is not a metaphysical reification and objectification, but a purely internal reality.” It is the “centre”, not the “point.” I think this is spot on. It’s why Christ the “centre” of the Jewish-Christian creation is “in you”, and why Christ could say that the “Kingdom” is “in you”, or why ascent up the “mountain” is also a movement into the temple, and the holy of holies at its centre. The top of the mountain, when looked at from above, is the centre.
IV
The ubiquity of the first principle, such that it is fully present in each and every thing lends itself to the idea that the first principle is not any particular thing at all, but each thing considered as an individual prior to all other characteristics. Each thing is then the unity of everything else. If this is so, even the principle of Being (ousia) is implicated, such that there is no one principle of Being above many, but many individuals whose “aitia” – “logical relations” that describe the “inherent logical structure of anything that exists insofar as it exists” – begin with each individual itself manifesting as the general principle of Being, before manifesting other limited determinations. The structure of all things is thus polycentric.
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I tried my best here not to cite and regurgitate a billion books and articles since this is not that kind of blog post. In any case, for everything I say here, you can consult D. B. Hart’s The Hidden and the Manifest and Roland in Moonlight, Proclus’ Elements of Theology and The Theology of Plato, E. P. Butler’s The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus¸ and A. L. Klein’s Sky-Earth System’s Science.