The static Nature of the Absolute combined with the process Theism of God the Father in a new ontological perspective

Chekrygin Oleg ORCID: 0009-0007-4393-1445 PhD in Philosophy Independent researcher 24 Serpukhov val str., Moscow, 115419, Russia ochek@bk.ru Other publications by this author

Nadeina Dar'ya Aleksandrovna ORCID: 0009-0006-6063-8171 Postgraduate student; Institute of Philosophy; Saint Petersburg State University 59 Orekhovy St., Moscow, 115682, Russia Bogoslovblog@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Introduction

The idea of soul and Spirit as immaterial entities residing and operating in the world of matter has deep roots in the history of philosophy, religion and culture. This concept has evolved over the millennia, reflecting human attempts to explain the nature of consciousness, life and being. Let's consider the main stages of the formation of this idea.

In ancient philosophy, the idea of soul and Spirit as immaterial entities was first systematically developed. Plato viewed the soul as an immortal, immaterial entity that exists before and after physical life. In his dialogues, for example, in Phaedo ^[1], the soul is described as a source of reason and morality connected with the world of ideas: the soul is immortal, because it participates in the world of ideas that are eternal and unchangeable. Aristotle, unlike Plato, considered the soul as a body form that organizes matter and makes it alive. He distinguished three levels of the soul: vegetative, animal and intelligent. The rational soul, according to Aristotle, is immaterial and is associated with higher intellectual abilities. "The soul is the first entelechy of the physical body, which possesses life in potency" ("About the soul" ^[2]). The idea of soul and Spirit as immaterial entities is central to many religions. In ancient Egyptian religion, the soul (ka) and Spirit (ba) were considered separate entities from the body that continue to exist after death. "Ka is the life force, and Ba is the soul that travels after death" (The Egyptian "Book of the Dead" ^[3]). In Judaism and Christianity, the soul is seen as a divine gift created by God and destined for eternal life. The spirit (pneuma) is often associated with the divine principle in man. "And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul" (Gen. 2:7). In Eastern traditions, the soul (atman) and Spirit (brahman) are associated with rebirth and karma. In Buddhism, however, the existence of a permanent soul is denied, instead it speaks of a stream of consciousness (vijnana). "Atman is Brahman" (Upanishads ^[4]), where atman is the Spirit of man, and Brahman is the universal Spirit, the great First Principle of everything. In the Middle Ages, the idea of soul and Spirit developed within the framework of Christian theology and scholasticism. Augustine viewed the soul as the image of God in man, emphasizing its immaterial nature and connection with eternity. "The soul is something more than the body, for it is able to know God" ("Confession"^[5]). Thomas Aquinas synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology, arguing that the soul is a form of the body, but at the same time it is immortal and spiritual. "The soul is an act of the body, but it is also capable of existing separately from it" (Summa Theologica ^[6]). In Modern times, the idea of soul and Spirit has been reinterpreted in the light of scientific discoveries and rationalism. Descartes divided the world into two substances: the material (body) and the spiritual (soul). He argued that the soul is a thinking substance (res cogitans) that exists independently of the body. "I think, therefore, I exist" ("Reasoning about the method" ^[7]). Kant considered the soul as a transcendental idea that cannot be known empirically, but is necessary for morality and freedom. "The soul is an idea that lies beyond experience, but is necessary for understanding the moral law" ("Critique of Pure Reason" ^[8]). In modern philosophy, the idea of soul and Spirit is often considered in the context of consciousness, psychology, and neuroscience. Schopenhauer considered the soul as a manifestation of the universal will, which underlies everything. "The soul is a manifestation of the will that strives for life and suffering" ("The world as will and representation" ^[9]). Jung introduced the concept of the collective unconscious, where the soul (psyche) is associated with archetypes and spiritual symbols. "The soul is a bridge between consciousness and the unconscious, between matter and Spirit" ("Archetypes and the collective unconscious" ^[10]).

At the same time, we note that in the world of matter, Spirit as a real entity does not directly manifest itself in any way. Moreover, if the Spirit needs matter to manifest itself in it, as a Creator (Christianity), a progenitor (Gnosticism), a source of Good (Neoplatonism), a foundation (Pantheism), a law (Judaism), a First Principle (Hinduism) of being, as well as as a manifestation of its existence, projection and reflection of itself, realization their creative impulses (Bergson), the blind will to live (Schopenhauer) and other manifestations of the Spirit, depending on the concept, matter, in which the Spirit itself, by its direct appearance, does not manifest itself in any way and never, the Spirit is not needed for anything at all, it perfectly manages the physical laws of existence. Which, of course, can be attributed to the action of the Spirit, but again indirectly through the establishment of these laws – which is not obvious – and not to the direct effect of the Spirit on matter.

If we side with those who in their concepts develop the idea of the manifestation of the Spirit in the consciousness and through the consciousness of man, through his spiritual basis, immaterial nature, then it is surprising why the mind, which is a manifestation of the Spirit and therefore itself being Spirit by nature, is unable to contemplate the phenomena of the Spirit: God and his divine manifestations in the Spirit, by direct apprehension, since like, being akin to like, must exercise its involvement in the whole primarily in contemplation and awareness of it as its originator. However, the mind perceives and realizes only the material nature of existence, mediated through sensations and feelings, and never feels its direct involvement in the Universal Spirit. Moreover, if a person is not informed about this idea in time, he will remain ignorant of the spiritual nature of his mind for the rest of his days, contemplating in his mind only the image of the world of matter surrounding him, which is provided to him by his feelings and sensations.

The authors by no means consider themselves to be supporters of materialism, and have listed all of the above with the sole purpose of presenting solid arguments for revising the attitude to higher human nervous activity as a special introduction of an alien Spirit into the world of matter. The authors propose their own concept of building a new ontological perspective, which at the same time is consonant with many of the ideas of great philosophers of both classical and non-classical metaphysics. If we try to accept transcendence, that is, the incompatibility, non-interaction, and mutual non-existence of the natures of Spirit and matter for each other, that is, their inability to any direct interaction in principle, then we will have to abandon the theological statement regarding the existence of a soul inhabiting a human body: a "spiritual" soul cannot reside in the material a body in which she is unable to stay without interacting with matter. And thus, we will have to admit, following the materialists, that there is no soul in man himself, inside or near his body, and – more broadly – in all living things, and mind and consciousness, like all other "spiritual" abilities, are the product of the body's material processes, biochemical and bioelectric reactions occurring in combination. cells of the nervous system. In further discussions, the authors will proceed from this assumption.

However, the authors do not completely abandon the concept of the soul, but suggest referring to Jesus' teaching about being born again: "3 Jesus answered and said to him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." According to the authors, the soul of a born-again person is a reflection of his human personality in the Kingdom of the Father, in eternal life, which has already begun in him for those who are honored here and now, in parallel with the continuation of the life of the body in the world of matter. And not at all in the afterlife of the body, whose death in the world of matter will not affect the soul's stay in the Kingdom of the Father in any way: the human personality will continue to exist in the world of the Spirit.

This begins the description of the author's concept, which we have called a new ontological perspective, since in it the authors present their vision of the development of the classical ontology of the divine, which includes solving long-standing problems of metaphysics: the process nature of the deity combined with the complete static nature of the Absolute, the ability of the Spirit to control the world of matter in conditions of their absolute mutual transcendence, the perfection of God in his unchanging perfection the presence of God and the divine presence of the Spirit in the transcendent world of matter, the freedom of will and choice of the human personality in the conditions of the rigid determinism of the world of matter – and all this in combination with many ideas expressed within the framework of insights of mystical intuition by great philosophers and theologians of their time.

Obviously, it is not possible to develop such a concept in detail in a general way within the framework of one publication, and we can only talk about dotted lines to outline the possibility of combining the main ideas, nothing more.

1. Purpose, methodology, subject and novelty of the research

The purpose of this publication is to offer a philosophical discussion about the author's vision of the metaphysical problem of the Absolute, as well as their own solution to this problem.

The research methodology is based on a historical, philosophical and philosophical analysis of the key concepts of the Absolute in European thought.

The subject of this research is the ontology of Neoplatonism: the application of the dialectical method developed by the authors to derive ontological levels through the principle of mutual reflection of entities and their negations ^[11] allows the authors to propose solutions to such long-standing problems of Neoplatonism as the "aporia of transcendence" and some others. The principle of double negation in the pair "being-non-being" is, according to the authors, fundamental in the "mechanism" of the formation of lower ontological levels from higher ones: each higher ontological level, through its own double negation of itself, "not-not-I = I-am-I" generates a lower level of beingness through comparison Myself with my own nothingness. This process reveals the transition from the static Absolute, the First Principle, to God the Father, who is present in the existence of the world exclusively in the human mind as the concept of God.

The authors' use of "double negation" to construct ontological levels based on the principle of reflections is, as far as we know, an original idea representing a philosophical novelty.

The authors also suggest ways to overcome fundamental theoretical difficulties inherent in both the classical model of the Absolute (based on the primacy of statics) and modern attempts to rethink it (in particular, in procedural theism, where the Original is interpreted dynamically). They also build a new ontological perspective for solving the aporia of transcendence, according to which God is generated into being and resides in it only in the mind of a believer; they propose an approach to resolving the contradiction between free will and predestination; and a new interpretation of process theism, in which God reveals Love in himself through man. These developments, according to the authors, may be of interest, also showing a certain theological and philosophical novelty.

2. The static nature of the Absolute, the creation of Personality through the rejection of the other, and God as an absolute egoist

In the ancient philosophical tradition, the Absolute was traditionally endowed with the attribute of static, which was seen as a sign of its perfection. However, this posed a fundamental problem: how can absolute static be the source of cosmic dynamics, that is, how can an unchanging principle initiate the processes of variability and movement? "In an extremely abstract form, the aporia of the transcendental principle is revealed in the 1st hypothesis of Plato's dialogue "Parmenides". It is shown here that if we consider the one in itself, regardless of everything that does not coincide with it, then any definition of existence will have to be denied with respect to such a one. In this case, we will have to say that it does not exist, including as a single one. It is “neither identical to itself or to another, nor distinct from itself or from another.” This means that one cannot say about it “the one is the one”, because it is devoid of any certainty and meaning that would distinguish it from other things and make it something that exists alongside them. It also does not differ from anything else, i.e. it does not allow anything else outside of itself. Being such and denying its other, the one cannot be the beginning" ^{[12, p. 660]}. Plotinus, developing Platonic thought, identifies the Absolute with the One, devoid of any attributes of process, thought, life or will. Within the framework of Neoplatonism, the One is understood as a principle that transcends any form of dynamics, which makes it fundamentally static. In early patristics, especially in the doctrine of the Trinity, God the Father, who takes the place of the neoplatonic One, turns out to be an eclectic combination of the unconnected: he is eternal and unchangeable, but he reveals a process in the form of the generation of the Son-Word and the outflow of the Holy Spirit. In scholasticism, especially in Thomas Aquinas, God is understood as "actus purus" — pure reality, being in its primary and full incarnation. Nicholas of Cusa connects the Absolute with the absolute maximum, where the distinction between possibility and being disappears.: "The absolute maximum is the one that is everything" ^{[13, p. 51.]} In Spinoza's philosophy, the Absolute is understood as an absolutely infinite substance consisting of infinitely many attributes. Leibniz introduces the concept of "necessitas absoluta" — absolute necessity, which is understood as the foundation of the world. In German classical philosophy, especially in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the Absolute is understood as a subject, object or their unity. Hegel considers the Absolute as a Spirit that reveals itself through a dialectical process. Kant, however, shifts the question of the Absolute to the realm of epistemology, arguing that the absolutely unconditional cannot be the subject of experimental research.

Criticism of the classical concepts of the Absolute begins with Schopenhauer, Baader, Kierkegaard and Marx. Feuerbach declares that man's own essence is his absolute essence, his God. In modern philosophy, especially in Husserl and Heidegger, the Absolute is understood through the prism of consciousness and being. Postmodernism, especially in Derrida, liberates from the power of the Absolute, turning the universe into a purely phenomenal world. Henri Bergson offers a procedural interpretation of the Absolute, arguing that time and temporal change are the most important characteristics of the Absolute. In the procedural theology developed by Whitehead and Hartshorn, God is involved in and influenced by temporal processes, which casts doubt on his absoluteness.

The historical and philosophical review given above in brief theses shows that both the classical concepts of the Absolute in the post-antique period and the transition from the middle of the 19th century to non-classical metaphysics as a whole represent attempts to solve the problems of theistic understanding within the framework of the pantheistic idea. "The only way out is to recognize God and the world as inextricably linked, but to describe their very connection as asymmetrical and irreversible: all things are immanent in God, but God is transcendent in relation to things. As Schelling explains in his famous work on human freedom, things are unthinkable outside of God, since they are derived from God, at the same time "God is the only and initially independent, self-affirming, to which everything else relates only as an affirmation, as a consequence of the foundation." <...> Thus, pantheism in the sense of "mystical pantheism" is a completely legal metaphysical model; moreover, according to Schelling, "one could hardly deny that every reasonable view should in one sense or another gravitate towards this teaching." This metaphysical model is the absolute center of the entire history of European philosophy, all original and meaningful philosophical systems in history can be understood as its creative development and refinement ^{[14, pp.17-19]}."

Procedural theism is a trend in the philosophy of religion that combines the ideas of procedural philosophy (A. N. Whitehead ^[30], C. Hartshorn ^[31]) with classical theism. In contrast to the traditional view of God as an unchangeable and omnipotent being, procedural theism emphasizes the dynamism of God, His involvement in world processes and His ability to change.

Modern concepts of procedural theism.

Dynamic concept of God: God is not absolutely unchangeable, but interacts with the world, reacting to the free actions of beings. God's influence is not coercive, but persuasive (Whitehead: "God is a great seducer"^[30]).

Rejection of omnipotence in the classical sense: God does not control everything directly, but acts through persuasion and cooperation. This allows us to solve the problem of evil: evil is the result of the freedom of creatures, and not the inaction of God.

Panentheism: The world resides in God, but God is not reduced to the world (unlike pantheism).

Tsch. Hartshorn ^[31]: God includes the world, but is transcendent to it.

Criticism and development: Some theists (for example, representatives of Neotomism) criticize procedural theism for departing from the classical understanding of God. Modern authors (J. Cobb, M. Suchok) develop it towards an interdisciplinary dialogue with science.

Thus, procedural theism remains an influential trend offering an alternative to both rigid classical theism and atheism. Its modern versions integrate the ideas of ecology, science and interfaith dialogue.

However, it should be noted that the main problems of both classical and nonclassical ontology remain unresolved in these concepts.: how God-Spirit interacts with matter if they do not mutually exist for each other (the aporia of transcendence); the issue of the "asymmetry" of God's transcendence to matter and the immanence of matter to God has not been resolved, the possible mechanism of their interaction has not been described without the mutual transformation of one into the other; one cannot simply declare the existence of the world in God without an explanation the way this stay is carried out practically reduces the statements of such concepts to the unsubstantiated declaration of unsupported statements; God, who does not possess the divine properties of omnipotence and omnipotence, ceases to be God in the classical sense and becomes something like a child who was given a useful toy to play with in order to teach him useful skills – and then the question arises as to who is the teacher of the deity. The proposed developments of postmodern concepts of man as his own god, for all their originality, return ontology to the limits of the observable universe, outside of which nothing is thought of as the reality of being.

For the reasons outlined above, the main ontological problems remain unresolved in the available models of nonclassical metaphysics, the authors prefer to return to the classical understanding of the Absolute in order to try to deduce the process nature of God from the Absolute itself, while preserving its ontological metaphysics as a Single First Principle, while paying full respect to the recognized originality and scientific authority of modern versions of Its reinterpretation.

The authors believe that the most reliable source of knowledge about the Incomprehensible may be the lifetime sermon of Jesus, in which He repeatedly emphasizes His unity with the Father. In the gospel revelation, God is presented as a Father who cares for His children with love, which contradicts the Neoplatonic idea of the Absolute as a dispassionate, weak-willed and self-aware First Principle. The authors see a solution to this apparent contradiction in the generally accepted theological recognition of God as a Person with reason and consciousness, which has been repeatedly discussed in religious and philosophical concepts. However, unlike those who limit themselves to a simple statement of the personality of God without proper justification, the authors propose to consider the possibility of developing the Absolute from the absolute Super-Nothing to the Heavenly Father revealed by Jesus.

At the beginning of the development of our argument, the authors consider it necessary to once again point out the forced "dotted line" of the presentation of the main ideas, which were developed in detail and substantiated separately in a number of previous publications ^[15-20].

In the classical understanding of absolute stasis, the Absolute is opposed as the only thing other than absolute Nothingness, which paradoxically should be immanent to the Absolute as the idea of its own negation. This initial "non-existence" represents the absolute negation, the complete absence of the One, its disappearance. Being nothing, this "other" to the One does not violate its super-essential unity, does not prevent it from still being One, and the absolute freedom of the One, declared in classical metaphysics since Plato in his dialogue "Primenides", consists in the fact that it can "be or not be", being in both at once possible positions.

An analogy to this dual "superexistence" of the One is seen by the authors in the concept of a "superposition" of quantum objects: Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead ^[21]. Determining the location of such an object in a specific state is possible only by measuring it, that is, verifying its condition by observation, which presupposes the presence of an observer – until the act of observation, the position of the object remains irretrievably ambiguous. In this sense, the One can become a Single being only by becoming one's own observer of Oneself. To accept one of the two possible positions of Oneself present in parallel in the Super-Being Itself is possible only through the discovery of oneself in a reflection from one's negation, which is a double negation: the other is the One itself, which has identified itself, distinguished Itself from its own non-existence, and become to be. There is no volitional act on the part of the One, but only the reflection of one in the other, One in the other and the other in the One, like a system of two parallel mirrors that create an endless perspective of their own mutual reflections in each other, the same world of many things that multiplies not because it wants to, but because it can ^[16]. In fact, this system of mutual reflections of the Super-Existent One and Nothing unnecessarily creates a world of many things without attracting the Neoplatonic emanation of the Good, its involuntary transfusion beyond itself, which remains unexplained from the point of view of the limits and boundaries of the boundless and boundless Absolute assumed by the "transfusion". The world revealed by the Absolute does not presuppose much and does not create any process by itself, existing alongside the Absolute in the infinity of its virtual reflections into Nothing, which are not the reality of their being, but are present in the Absolute as their possibility to be. Note that the world of many things generated in reflections in this sense reveals an infinite amount of "itself" from the Absolute, that is, it is not a multiplication of independent entities, but only a repetition of the Absolute in the perspective of its own reflections. From this we can conclude that both by itself and in its reflections, the Absolute remains alone with its own loneliness: there is One or the One is (the first two hypotheses of Plato's dialogue "Parmenides" as interpreted by Losev), but there is only itself and nothing else for it – and therefore the One remains in itself, and in his reflections in a state of complete egocentricity, isolation from himself and his self, which does not know Love because it has no one to love. If we define love as the ability to accept the other on an equal basis with oneself, then "self–love", manifested by the Absolute in self–awareness, is the antipode of love, pure egoism, that is, complete rejection of the other, since the personal deity is thus the "product" of rejection of the only other Absolute - one's own denial - and, as we see, is based on rejection of the other, his rejection. This is the nature of selfishness – it is the opposite and negation of love. So the theological statement that God is Love, and God created the world out of the abundance of his love for creation is refuted by the primordial divine egoism: one can assume that, having no one but himself, God does not know love and does not love anyone, because he simply has no one to love. We will return to this remark later, but for now we will continue our reasoning, in which the transition from the state of superposition to the reality of one of the two "virtual" states of the Absolute is possible solely through the process of Its self-realization, which is carried out through the mutual reflection of the One in the "other", that is, into Nothing, and vice versa. This reflection, which is a double negation by the Super-Being of himself (not-not-I = "I am I"), allows the Absolute to reveal itself as Something different from its own non-existence, Nothing, thereby affirming its being. Here we note a processless transition from the static First Principle (Absolute-Nothing) to the self-conscious Absolute-being, which corresponds to the Neoplatonic second ontological level (Mind): "... that which is always perfect always gives birth, and gives birth to the eternal ..." ^{[22, p. 327]} – since the birth of the Mind from the One in Neoplatonism is not It is a one-time act, but it always happens all the time.

A self–realized Absolute, along with self-awareness, acquires intelligence and personality - from this, the process of self-knowledge by the Absolute can begin in the mind of a personal God. However, unlike Neoplatonism, this newborn God does not reside in our existence, but in his own Super–Existence, which arose as the descent of the Absolute from Super-Existence to a new state accessible only to him - otherwise, if not for this, and everything would happen in the existence of the world, we could see God firsthand, face to face. It is with him and only in him that the process of self-knowledge begins, anticipated by Eriugena ^[23]: the Deity knows himself, and the infinity of the Absolute leads to the infinity of the process of his own self-knowledge. "The act of creation of the universe is at the same time an act of Divine self-knowledge. God recognizes himself in the Son-Logos, i.e., thereby in the act of creating truly existing ideas; in this act, God himself receives his being in accordance with the principle: "The knowledge of what exists is that which (itself) exists" ^{[24, p. 160]}. This endless reflexive process is a key element of the presented model, distinguishing it from static representations of the Deity. Self-knowledge becomes not an end point, but a continuous process, the driving force of which is the potential of the absolute, constantly unfolding in its own Superbeing. At the same time, along with the absence of an end, this process has no beginning, as the zero starting point of a sequence of events, having, along with the God's unknowingness of himself, his processless completeness of the possibility of self-knowledge, as the inclusiveness of the world around him in the form of the entire infinite perspective of self-reflections in the mirrors of his own non-existence. This process can be visualized by analogy with a person looking at a whole stone placer: along with the general appearance, he can take any stone in any order and bring it closer to his eyes in order to examine it separately from the others. Such a "closer" examination by God of specific reflections of Himself makes it possible for the infinite multitude of ideas hidden in him, as the Absolute, to manifest themselves, each of which is also a special case of the same Absolute surrounded by other particulars, and can be considered both separately from them and in their entirety. Thus, the Absolute sets the boundaries of each of its own reflections, assigning it a name in accordance with the totality of partial and partial manifestations of itself in this particular reflection. The appearance of the name gives rise to the idea of a "mirror-in-itself" in which the Super-Existent can examine himself and observe himself within the limits of his Super-Existence limited by his name. The process of self-knowledge and self-limitation through the names of God develops endlessly. Having defined itself by a name, the Absolute continues to expand into namelessness, appropriating new names for itself as self-perception expands. Each name represents a stage of private self-knowledge, first of the Absolute, which is Super-existent, limiting itself to a name, and then transcending its own boundaries and re-cognizing itself within new boundaries.: God appears as a process and at the same time a stasis of self–contemplation, and the world of many things as a product of a system of mirrors in which God contemplates himself.

Thus, in the second stage, we have reached the Aristotelian understanding of God as an entity focused on self-contemplation.: "Aristotle's God thinks only of Himself," and "is personally not concerned with the fate of the world or even the very fact of its eternal existence near and in connection with it" ^[25]. This corresponds to the stage of development of self-knowledge of the Absolute, where the emphasis is on self-reflection, within the framework of the development of self-limited Super-Existence. Let us note again the absence in this self-knowledge of the category of Love, which is fundamentally not inherent in the divine essence due to its complete isolation from itself and, as a result, the absence of anything other than the object of the possibility of love, and the very idea of loving someone other than oneself, since there is nothing else besides oneself.

3. God as Love

The next step on the path from the faceless Absolute, the First Principle, to his transformation into the Heavenly Father requires further consideration and explanation of the possible logic of the mechanisms of transition from pure self-contemplation to personal interaction with creation, to the manifestation of love and care for the created world.

So, we have established that the Super–Existent God, who generates worlds as mirrors in order to look into them, is full of self–satisfaction and self-sufficiency, being carried away by the process of self-knowledge, which is endless - and therefore he infinitely does not care about what happens in the worlds he generates: their Givens are responsible for them ^[15], or Providences - ideas, enclosed in the Names assigned to Super-Existences as they develop their own self-knowledge. That is, having appropriated another Name for himself in self–knowledge, as an idea of the world, and thereby creating its Reality, "by the seventh day God completed His works that He had done, and rested on the seventh day from all His works that He had done" (Gen 2:2) - he does not yet exist for the world. And the world develops according to the Providence of Reality, generated by the Name-Word (theological statement: God creates with His Word). The word generates Reality, which also, by analogy with the Absolute, the First Principle, from its static superposition with its disappearance through a double reflection of itself into itself from its non-existence generates the existence of Providence, that is, our world, as a tape of instant snapshots unfolding in time of the Reality of the existence of the observable universe in a position of complete predestination according to the minutest detailed plan of Providence about him, who was originally already enclosed by God in his own Name, assigned by him to this world. All objects and beings in this world appear as puppets acting according to a predetermined plan that excludes freedom of choice: there can be no question of any choice in the world of cause-and-effect predestination, choice has no place in a world where "everything is predetermined" ^[26].

This order is maintained until the Mind appears, which begins to search for God. Initially, God-seeking serves as a tool of protection from incomprehensible and menacing phenomena. However, later, this process becomes more complicated, inevitably leading to the formation of the idea of God as a patron.

A person's conversion to God occurs again in a way that is already familiar to us, namely through the superposition of God's existence in the human mind (God is|There is no God): until this dilemma arises in the human mind, God does not manifest in the existence of the world, which in itself does not interest him in the least. However, in his own mind, man acts as an observer of the divine superposition, and it is he who, as an observer, determines only in his mind whether there is a God or not. In this way, God, the Spirit, who is transcendent to the world, finds existence in it not just anywhere, but solely in the mind of a person for whom one has God, and for another there is no God. The human mind determines God's exit from the superposition of Super-being-non-existence into the certainty of one of two possible states of God in the existence of the world: either God exists, or there is no God. "And for those for whom He exists, God becomes a truly caring Father to those who invited Him into the existence of the world in their minds – and, according to Jesus, were mutually born again, and thus taken into the Kingdom of the Father by an immortal soul, which is the reverse reflection of the human personality from the earthly world to the Kingdom of Heaven" ^[17]. In this sense, it is paradoxical that it is not God who generates man in the existence of the world, but man – God: outside the mind of believers, God-Spirit has no place anywhere else in the world of matter. Let us emphasize once again that, given the alien nature of Spirit and matter, God-Spirit cannot directly influence matter in order to manually control the world of the observable universe. The only possibility of influencing the existence of the world remains and exists precisely (according to Hartshorn's statement: "God is a great seducer") through the "whisper" of God in the human mind.

The children of God, who were born again (John 3:5) and found immortal souls in the Father's Kingdom, represent the reverse reflection of their minds into the divine Super-Existence. They pass from the earthly world to the Kingdom of Heaven in the form of "born-Again" spirits of their minds (immortal souls do not exist in mortal bodies, but in the Kingdom of the Father, where their eternal life has already begun in parallel with the life of the body continuing in the existence of the world) and turn to the Father with requests for sympathy for those who are dear to them in the "raging world". In response to these requests, God intervenes in his own Providence, changing it – and then an ordinary miracle occurs in the world. This is how human free will is realized in a world of complete predestination of Providence and absolute determinism of existence.: not directly in the choices of reason in this world, but indirectly through God's freedom to change Providence as He pleases, by re-naming himself in his own reflection, and thereby changing the existence of the world according to the will of those who ask. It should be noted that such an impact of God on the existence of the world in order to change it according to the will of his children also solves the aporia of transcendence: God, being a Spirit alien to matter, does not directly interact with the world of matter, but changes existence through changing his Providence for it.

Another paradox of the author's concept should be emphasized here.: Love is generated by man in God, not by God in man. God, as a product of the original egoism of the One, who rejected the only other to him – his own non–existence - it is from man that he learns to fully accept (and not reject) the other on an equal basis with himself (for example, in marriage). Moreover, human love, first of all towards one's own children, then spreading to the universal human brotherhood, reaches the heights of sacrificial love as the ability not only to accept the other along with oneself, but also self-sacrifice in the form of renouncing oneself for the sake of the other, which Jesus designated as the limit of perfection.: "There is no greater love than if someone sacrifices his life for another" (Jn 15:13). Note that here, too, at the level of an individual human personality, the dialectical principle of generating ontological levels through the mutual reflection of entities and their negations, based on the law of "negation of negation," is triggered: "... Everything finite, instead of being solid and final, on the contrary, is changeable and transitory, because, being different in itself, it goes beyond what it is directly and passes into its opposite" ^[27] – the sacrificer of himself for the sake of another is reflected from the non-existence of his neighbor, voluntarily chosen by him as one's own, into true being, and for God begins to "be and not seem" ("Esse quam videri" ^[28]): finds himself in the Super-Existence of God, being in Love "faithful to death" (Phil. 2:8) and receiving as a reward the promised birth of Jesus from Above into the Kingdom of the Father "automatically," without turning to God for it. And it fulfills the Paschal hymn of Jesus, who "rose from the dead, death is fixed by death" ^[29].

In response to possible objections from theologians who claim that "God is Love," we note that the theological statement about the creation of the world by God "out of the abundance of his Love for Creation" contains an implicit contradiction, unnoticeable at first glance: if there is an "abundance of Love" in God, then this indicates the imperfection of himself. a deity who either lacks something (for example, those who glorify him) or does not have enough "place" in himself, which does not contain his "abundance" - which contradicts the theological statement about the absolute perfection of the deity.

This provision on the teaching of love to God by the authors of the concept proposed by the authors is also quite consistent with the concept of the "dynamic" Absolute: God accepts into himself the sympathy, pity and love of his other born–again children accepted by Him into his Super-existent "Kingdom of the Father" along with himself out of love for them, as their co-creation in the development of the world - and thereby Thus, by changing his Providence about the world, which is a reflection of himself, he himself is changing, enriching himself with the love created by people and improving through it. Thus, the "mechanism" of God's processability described by the authors correlates with the concept of "process theism" by Whitehead and Hardscorn ^{[30, 31]}, where God is in constant interaction with his creation, changing and developing under the influence of this interaction. God is not a static and unchangeable, but a dynamic and process-based entity that participates in the life of the world and transforms into God-Love under the influence of human love and compassion, improving in his perfection.

At the same time, we recall that we do not assume any process in the Absolute itself, this is not the process of its "development", but only a static picture of the unfolded perspective of reflections in parallel "mirrors" of the superposition of Self and No-Me. As Nicholas of Cusa wrote, "everything is wrapped up in the one God, since everything is in Him; and He unfolds everything, since He is in everything" ^{[13, p. 104]}. It can be said that God, who knows himself in the Absolute, enriching himself with the teaching gained from contemplating the worlds and communicating with the minds of those born Again, turns again to the self-known in the Absolute in order to discover in Himself what, having been known in the process of contemplating the worlds, was already in a collapsed form in the Absolute as the First Principle of everything, and it was not known by God, it was missed in his self–knowledge of Himself as the Absolute - and now it is being replenished in him through knowledge in contemplation of the worlds. This is how the Absolute replenishes itself, evolving in the process of self–knowledge - in the form of closer self-contemplation, increasing the "optical resolution" of God's self-observation in his reflections.

4. God as a Contemplative

In the thought process of human consciousness, a spoken, heard, or remembered word evokes a visual image associated with it, which appears in consciousness as on a screen in front of the mind's eye – but this screen does not exist in reality anywhere. However, an image visible in the imagination by the "inner vision" can be fixed in memory and exist as a record, which can be returned to consciousness at any time in the form of a memory image. If we apply an analogy with human consciousness to the above description of the process of divine consciousness – and a similar analogy of divine consciousness with the work of human thought and memory is found in classical Christian theology, for example, in the Augustinian correlation between the Hypostases of the Trinity and the human psyche with its triad "mind – will – memory" ^[32] – then in this In the visual model, the Personal God observes with his "inner vision" the development of Ideas contained in Words containing self-names-the names of acts of self-knowledge of the Absolute in the mind of the deity, and remembers them to their full completeness. Thus, any fleeting existential vision of the development of the divine idea, existing for us as a real existence, but in fact being only a vision of God developed from the Word of the idea, is recorded in the depths of the memory of the divine consciousness and finds in it its true existence in Eternity, which is the stay in the Kingdom of the Father, and the Eternal Life promised by Jesus in God, Who, having created an Image, remembered and will never forget it. Here it is appropriate to recall the image of a book characteristic of the biblical narrative, in which the meanings and destinies of all things are recorded ^[33]. That is, both the lifeless Absolute, the First Principle, and the process God himself, the personality generated by the self-knowledge of the Absolute, and his Word, and the Reality generated by him, and its realization, and its image reflected into Eternity, and the material Cosmos, as a reflection of the eternal Reality in the existence of our timeless world, exist in the depths of the Deity, not entering into existential contradictions with each other, but co–existing in God as different sides and manifestations of the same divine essence of the one being of God - and thus the problem of transcendence-immanence of God and matter is naturally removed. Let us emphasize that matter exists only as an image developing inside the idea generated by the Word, and does not exist in some "place" separate and separate from God, the material image is only shown to God in His own "imagination", as His reflection in the mirror of the idea generated by His Word. There is no matter and worlds outside of God, they are all God Himself, and they are in God. Let us also emphasize that God, who is in goodness and contemplation, his Word, which he generated from contemplation of himself, and the Spirit, which develops the Word-idea into an image-reflection of God, who contemplates himself in this reflection, are one and the same God and exist together, as one, as a whole. From our point of view, this author's idea completes the development of both pantheistic and panentheistic intuitions, generalizing them into a single concept.

Let us emphasize once again that the whole world of many things, as a perspective of reflections of the Absolute, is by its very nature completely static. And the process in God arises in the form of a search in God's contemplation of his reflections as separate entities. This process is accompanied by the emergence of a kind of "divine" time as a sequence of contemplation of reflections.: God examines his reflections, moving in self-knowledge from previous visions of Himself to subsequent ones. Contemplation in itself does not set any goals, it is not the fulfillment of unfulfilled desires or an expression of the fulfillment of divine incompleteness – all aspects of the violation of the perfection of the divine Absolute in the models developed in the past. This removes the problem of the purpose of creation. At the same time, the ontological time of the worlds revealed in reflections arises in the process of developing the Realities or Providences of the worlds contemplated by God.

In this context, it is necessary to highlight the issue of analogues of the concept of a contemplative God in the history of theology and philosophy, given that the phenomenon of contemplation is a key concept in our proposed theological and philosophical concept. In the context of the criticism of metaphysics, philosophy of the 20th century brought the phenomenon of contemplation to the periphery of its developments and now, for the most part, it is of historical and philosophical interest to modern scientists only.

In Plato's dialogue "Phaedrus" we read the following lines: "The thought of God is nourished by reason and pure knowledge ... by contemplation of truth and is blessed..." ^{[34, 247d]}. The phenomenon of contemplation plays an important role in Aristotle's theology.: "Aristotle's God is, as it were, an ideal, the greatest and most perfect philosopher, a pure theorist contemplating his knowledge and his thinking. His element is speculation" ^{[25, p. 26]}. The Stagirite said that God is a "mind" that "thinks for itself, if only it is superior and its thinking is thinking about thinking" ^{[35, p. 316]}. By contemplating himself, God exercises the highest (dianoetic) virtue. Such a God does not think of nature "sympathetically." God is fundamentally self-contained here, "automatically" launching the process of realizing the eternal cosmos with his divine life. In Plotinus' treatise, which is called "On Nature, Contemplation and the One", we find the statement that "all things came from contemplation" ^{[22, p. 95]}. Gerhard Terstegen (1697-1769), a representative of the New Age, writes in letter 92 about contemplation: "The soul looks only at God, and not at itself, in a contemplative way – when it pleases the Lord to reveal Himself to it more clearly inwardly (John 14:21), and to be sensibly present with it. Then the eyes of the soul are opened, and by the blissfully sweetest action of God it is attracted to This co-existent and all–satisfying Good, in order to gaze at It and cling to It, which is called the state of contemplation" ^[36]. Comparing the concepts of contemplation presented above in the context of the revelation of the divine life, one can see the differences between the scheme presented by us and its historical and philosophical analogues.

Let's return to the above-mentioned concept of the ontological (objective) time of the development of Crafts about worlds. In the observer's perception, time is represented as a continuous, uniform movement of the entire universe as a whole from the past to the future. However, as was shown by the authors in ^[20], considering time as a single act of ontological generation, as a transcendent gift of being-non-being by a Given, we get a different picture. Existence turns out to be the future, non–existence is the past, and time is a moment of transition, an instantaneous transformation in which the old world is destroyed, passing into oblivion, and a new one arises, striving for existence, only to, in turn, give way to the next. Since, according to general concepts, existence from non-existence is separated by the moment of transition from life to death, from being to non–being, a short, infinitesimal instant, it remains to assume that the boundary of being–non-being is time: being is the future, non-being is the past, and time, as the boundary, is the point of their interaction. However, the Reality itself, which manifests itself in time, remains in unchangeable Eternity in the form of the eternal Name-Word given by God to the world. We can talk about the manifestation of Reality in the existence of the world in the form of an endless sequence of instantaneous acts of being-non-being, where being and non-being are discrete in their continuity. Time acts as an instantaneous realization of a moment from Eternity, in which the Given resides: it separates being from itself, transferring the past into non-existence and directing being into the future, determined by the past. Time is an ontological act of reflecting what has not yet been recognized in itself as a Given in the known that has passed into oblivion. Time, as it were, "snatches" an instantaneous frame from Eternity and embodies it in existence, predetermining the future as a consequence of the past. In this sense, time acts as Heidegger's "last God" ^[37] ("The Last God is a unique figure in Heidegger's philosophy. He appears through Ereignis and passes by people, leaving them only a nod, a hint (Wink). He is neither a being nor the creator of being, but he manifests himself at the moment when being as Seyn comes true in the one-time nature of the event" ^{[38, p. 107]}). In this sense, Bergson's intuitive insights are confirmed. In this argument, Bergson resolutely opposes the inner world of human personalities, which has a unified integrity and lasts in real time, and the material world, which exists in the eternal "now", which has spatial extension and contains only separate unrelated and static states of moving objects. Here a completely natural question arises: does motion exist at all in the material world, motion as such?" ^{[14, p. 85]} Bergson's picture of a sequence of static states of the external world turns into a continuity of its movement in time only in the observer's mind: "... each of the so-called sequential states of the external world exists separately, and their multiplicity is real only for consciousness, which is able to first hold them and then arrange them in space externally in relation to each other. Consciousness preserves them due to the fact that these different states of the external world generate states of consciousness that interpenetrate, imperceptibly organize into a whole and, as a result of this very unification, connect the past with the present" ^{[39, p. 102]} – which confirms our idea of being as a sequential series of static pictures of the state of the universe, manifested by the development of Reality through reflection into the being of the moments of what She knows again in the previously known, fading into oblivion. As mentioned by the authors earlier in ^[20], "time, as a unidirectional stream from the past to the future that we perceive continuously flowing at a constant speed, does not exist, but represents ... a series and a set of static "snapshots" of the states of the universe, reflecting each successive level of self-knowledge of Reality reflected in being." The sequence of steps of self–knowledge of Reality creates a kind of sequence of "ontic time" of the process of self–knowledge of Reality, which is displayed as an illusion of continuity of the ontological time of the universe; the observer - both external to being and internal from the world - perceives the process of changing individual static pictures of the world as an ontological temporal continuity of the development of the universe in time. However, the reality of ontological time is a discrete succession of static "frames" of the state of the universe. Here it is appropriate to recall the hypothesis of the quantum nature of time: a specific chronon model was proposed by Piero Caldirola in 1980, in his work one chronon corresponds to 7 × 10-24 seconds ^[40]. Such a view of Reality as a Son-the-Word begotten by the Father, creating the world in the process of self-knowledge, by analogy with the "mechanism" of self-knowledge of the Absolute in the Super-Existence of a personal God, creates an idea of the world as successive acts of manifestation in existence of a self-knowing Deity, creating this world by himself and out of himself; nothing else in existence, except by steps there is no God manifesting himself in him, the universe is God himself, manifested in being, and its development is the process of his self-knowledge.

At the end of the description of the concept proposed by the authors, it is necessary to clarify the apparent contradiction of natures: on the one hand, the heterogeneity of Spirit and matter is asserted, which are not capable of direct interaction with each other due to mutual transcendence; on the other hand, the unity of the divine nature of the Absolute, which contains in itself and only in itself: and God as a rational person, both divine Providences about the worlds, as Ideas developing in God, and the worlds themselves, whose existence also resides in God and develops in Him as visions in His Mind – nothing but God and apart from Him exists, having the single divine nature of the Absolute as the First Principle of everything. As an explanation, we emphasize that, in our opinion, Spirit and matter are only different aspects of God's existence, just as, for example, vision and hearing are different in the human mind: hearing is unable to see, and sight is unable to hear, although the basis of these feelings and perceptions is the same, contained in a single higher nervous system. human activity. Moreover, in the very material nature of the world around us, there are many examples of non-interaction of natural phenomena, which can be interpreted as their transcendence, that is, mutual non-existence for each other. Such an example is lightning, in which light and sound generated by it are present and side by side, which, however, exist and manifest themselves independently of each other and have no mutual influence, being different sides of the same natural phenomenon. In this sense, the author's statement of the transcendence of Spirit and matter should be understood as manifestations of various aspects of the one being of God.

Conclusion

The principle of double negation in the pair "being-non-being" is, according to the authors, fundamental in the "mechanism" of the formation of lower ontological levels from higher ones: the super-existent-the non-existent generates divine super-existence, the super-existence-non-existence of God generates Reality, as an idea of the world, reflecting God, who looked into his own non-existence, Reality, comparing itself with its own negation generates a being predetermined by it, in which the Mind, having gone through a long path of seeking God, finds a reflection of God in itself, and seeking it through a double negation of the idea of God (there is a God or there is no God – there IS a God!) in itself, it is reflected back from existence into divine super-existence in the form of the immortal soul of man, thus closing the ontological circle from the highest to the lowest and back again. Where, having witnessed the super-existence of God, he resolves the super-existence of the deity, either by giving birth to God in his being, or by denying Him existence in his own mind, and nowhere else: man brings God into the world only in his own mind.

Thus, based on the model proposed by the authors, it can be concluded that a personal God, generated in self-awareness by the Absolute-the First Principle in his own Super-Existence, in turn generates in him a creative Word, which is His Name, Idea or Reality, representing the existence of the world provided by God, as a possible reflection of Himself, in a collapsed state. The Word, which is the Son of God, the "younger" God of his own world of being, triggers the process of creating the world by himself through self-knowledge of his Givenness, manifested in the unfolding of Givenness into being of the universe generated by Givenness. Self–knowledge of Reality occurs step by step as a reflection of the mastered reality through comparison with one's own cognized non-existence - into being; each subsequent step of self-knowledge creates a new static picture of the existence of the world. The sequence of steps of self-knowledge of a Given creates a peculiar sequence of "ontic time" of the process of self-knowledge of a Given, which is displayed as an illusion of continuity of the flow of the ontological time of the universe.

World existence, like all higher ontological levels, resides "inside" God (and not outside of him, as is customary in many philosophical systems) in the form of a picture of the development of worlds in the "imagination" of God. The worlds themselves are a kind of mirrors in which God sees Himself. These reflections of him acquire an independent eternal life in the eternal "memory" of God, which is the only existing Kingdom of Heaven, again, "inside" God, and not "outside" Him: there is no "outside", and nothing but God does not exist. In this way, the problem of transcendence-immanence is also solved: everything happens in God himself and there is no "outside of him" at all; at the same time, the development of worlds in God's "imagination" and staying in God's memory-eternity, being of the same nature as belonging to God, are two sides of a single stay in God that do not directly interact in any way. It also develops a consistent concept of the existence of the world as a reflection of God in himself, and Salvation as the eternal abiding of a mature person in the memory of God, which is the Kingdom of Heaven.

In the proposed concept, both predestination and freedom get along quite well, having each found its own place: the predestination of Providence and the strict determinacy of the law of causality prevail in the world of being, and freedom is the prerogative of God alone, having found Him in their own minds, human personalities together with Him gain the desired freedom to make a choice from the possibilities provided by God through direct God's intervention in providence at the will of his "born–again" children, who remain human personalities in the existence of the world - this is how, mediated in God's freedom, an individual's freedom to change the world for the benefit of those who are dear to them in the existence of the world is realized. God, in turn, changing the Providence of the world according to the will of his children, carries out his "process", learning from Man love, pity and compassion for all living things, and enriched by their love, changes for the better, improving in his perfection.

Our proposed ontology of the divine, from the point of view of the authors, brings together, unites into a common concept the disparate intuitions of the authors of many non-classical metaphysics and process theism, while reconciling them with the classical ontology of the One. In response to possible objections, we will point to Bergson's "impulses of the Spirit", the source of which, although not explained by the author, fits perfectly into the framework of our proposed concept; to Hardshoorn's "God as the great seducer", who did not ask the question about the nature of the interaction of God-Spirit with the world of matter; finally, we will point again to "the Last God" by Heidegger, who found a consistent explanation precisely in the author's concept of the ontological time of the universe.

In conclusion, we note once again that the concept proposed by the authors does not pretend to be evidence-based, much less evidence-based, but is only an attempt to return to classical metaphysics in order to point out its current inexhaustibility for philosophical reflection, and to propose on its basis an alternative version of the development of classical ontology with the inclusion of ideas from non-classical metaphysics, and to show that that the possibility of their consistent unification is not excluded.