Heller M, Woodin W.H. (eds.) Infinity. New research frontiers (CUP, 2011)(ISBN 1107003873)(O)(327s)_MAml_

298 a (partially) skeptical response to hart and russellGodhead, or that creatures, inserted as they are into families of “difference,” do notparticipate in the differentiated trinitarian Godhead: they do, by virtue of their owngoodness and wisdom, participate in the divine goodness, wisdom, and so forth. Whatseems misleading is to say, along the lines of Russell’s chapter, that creaturely infinitiesas such form an analogy with the divine infinity, or, as Hart does, that differenceamong creatures “corresponds precisely to the truth of the divine differentiation,” forit is not qua creaturely and finite, or even qua any creaturely, and so finite, infinitythat creatures participate in the divine attributes. As the medieval theologians used tosay, we creatures are indeed all that God is, but what we are in a created way, God isas uncreated. It is only by distinguishing, in some such way as I have done in whatprecedes, between, on the one hand, the “substantive attributes” of God (goodness,wisdom, and so forth), which we know of by “analogy” from creatures and as suchparticipate in those divine attributes, and, on the other, the “regulative properties” ofsimplicity and infinity, which we know of only by negation, that we can get the twosides of the “affirmative/negative” polarity to match up without internal incoherence.Hence, then, we can indeed say “God is infinitely good, beautiful ...” as meaning“good, beautiful as we indeed are, but incomprehensibly so.”That said, my disagreement is only with the proposition that you need a “positive”notion of God’s infinity to get going all the rest of what Hart and Russell so convincinglyargue for – the substantive doctrine of the divine transcendence as being precisely thatwhich permits the intimacy of the divine immanence to creatures, as well as theChristological necessity that requires and imposes that doctrine, the doctrine that thedivine existence is infinite not by virtue of a maximally vacuous indifference but, onthe contrary, by a maximized richness of differentiation. My argument is, rather, thatit is only as negatively policing our substantive talk about God that it can be said thatthe divine infinity allows us to affirm, without formal contradiction, all those things ofGod that the revelation of the Trinity in Christ requires us to say. For it is just insofaras the divine infinity is so utterly transcendent of all creaturely knowing and saying asto exclude all exclusion (all “difference”) from within that maximized plurality of thedivine attributes that we may defend, against the accusation of simple incoherence andplain contradictoriness, our talk of God as both utterly simple and maximally inclusive.This is because, as Thomas puts it, “what are diverse and exclusive in themselvespre-exist in God as one, without detriment to his simplicity” (Summa Theologiae, 1a,q4, a2, ad1). Hart, Russell, and I all want to say this, and I imagine for the same reason.Not one of the three of us could, on any other terms, envisage a remotely orthodoxdefense of the Christological doctrine that the human and divine natures in Christremain distinct, unconfused, but united in the one and only divine person. We seem todiffer only as to how one might say it, that is, as to what account of the divine infinityis required as a condition of Christological coherence. All three of us agree that, in theend, what for a Christian theologian must be said about the divine infinity is whatever isrequired of it to permit the Pseudo-Dionysius’s obiter dictum, namely, both “there is nokind of thing which God is,” God’s being exclusive beyond any possible inclusion, and“there is no kind of thing that God is not,” God’s being inclusive beyond all possibleexclusion (Divine Names, 817D).