The proper understanding of human personhood, as I have argued in previous issues of this journal, is highly controversial because it impacts so heavily on other key issues in contemporary society, most notably questions regarding sexual ethics (e.g., artificial contraception and abortion).Footnote 1 Likewise, the argument over the personal rights of women in this area was presumably a significant factor in the outcome of the 2016 presidential campaign here in the United States. For these and other reasons, I offer in this article a new systems-oriented approach to the issue of human (and divine) personhood as a possible way to achieve relatively neutral ground for continued discussion of this all-important issue. I have used this systems-oriented approach with some measure of success elsewhere to deal with problematic issues in systematic theology.Footnote 2 This article would represent a tentative foray into the area of moral theology, likewise using a systems-oriented model or paradigm. In brief, I argue that systems (both in the world of nature and humanly contrived) come into existence and are sustained in existence only because of some well-defined ongoing interaction between their constituent parts or members. When and if this dynamic relation between the parts or members no longer takes place, the system collapses. At the same time, the constituent parts or members of the system are themselves heavily dependent upon the continued smooth working of the system both for their individual well-being and in some cases for their very survival as individual entities.
Perhaps the clearest example of what I have in mind here is derived from Christian belief in the doctrine of the Trinity. Because the divine persons exist as “subsistent relations” vis-à-vis one another, they co-constitute a unified divine life-system or community that allows them to exist as one God.Footnote 3 If they ever reneged on their mutual commitment to one another, they would cease to exist both as divine persons and as the one God of Christian belief. Similarly, in human interpersonal relations overemphasis on one person's rights at the expense of the rights of other persons on a given issue puts stress on the proper functioning of the community and the continued well-being of everyone involved therein. Finally, even in the natural order the overall well-being of an organism depends heavily on the smooth working of all its constituent bodily parts. When this harmony in the body's normal functions is seriously disrupted for any length of time, the organism first becomes ill and, if not somehow remedied, dies.
In what follows, I set forth my argument for this systems-oriented approach to human personhood both as constitutive of personal identity and yet as inherently limited by the rights of other human beings and the pattern of community life in which they all share. First, however, I review the efforts of three other contemporary Christian theologians to interpret human personhood as a social and developmental reality as well as a permanent attribute of a human being simply as an individual. Then I set forth a systems-oriented understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity and indicate how it fits into a contemporary systems-oriented model of the God-world relationship in which networks of creatures exist within God and yet remain distinct from God in terms of their own finite mode of existence and activity. Finally, I propose that this systems-oriented understanding of physical reality can also be applied to the understanding of human personhood as a fully relational and process-oriented reality, an ongoing gift from others and to others, as well as an attribute proper to a human being simply as an individual.
Human Personhood within a Social and Evolutionary Context
In her recent book Ask the Beasts, Elizabeth Johnson dedicates a chapter to what she calls the “community of creation.”Footnote 4 Therein she argues that all life on earth forms one community: “Historically, all life results from the same biological process; genetically, living beings share elements of the same basic code; functionally, species interact without ceasing. Human beings belong to this community and need other species profoundly, in some ways more than other species need them.”Footnote 5 In even greater detail, Celia Deane-Drummond in The Wisdom of the Liminal makes clear that what were previously thought to be specifically human thought and behavior patterns are likewise found among other higher-order animal species.Footnote 6 For example, there is a continuity between human reason and animal cognition: cognition and memory in human beings “are not new powers but the same powers, more perfect than they are in other animals.”Footnote 7 Similarly, there is a continuity between human freedom and animal agency, between human morality and what Deane-Drummond calls animal virtue (cooperation as opposed to competition), human language and animal communication, human justice and animal fairness. Accordingly, like Johnson, Deane-Drummond endorses the notion of the community of all the creatures of this world with one another; likewise, she acknowledges with Johnson the historical dependence of the human species for its proper growth and development upon earlier stages of the cosmic process in which other animal species have played and still play a key role. Finally, Kathryn Tanner in her book God and Creation in Christian Theology claims that God does not overpower but instead empowers created reality to be active in its own right within the world of creation: “Created beings are the executors of the order for the world that God ordains but only as God's creative agency is at work every step of the way by which such an order is produced.”Footnote 8 Thus God acts as the Primary Cause of whatever happens; the finite entity acts as the Secondary Cause of what happens. The finite entity truly contributes to the created effect but only in accord with the antecedent will of God for the order of creation.
Johnson, Deane-Drummond, and Tanner all share the conviction that Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics is well qualified to serve as the underlying philosophical conceptuality for an evolutionary understanding of human personhood that allows for the coworkings of divine and human causality. Johnson, for example, lists various theories for the influence of God upon the workings of the cosmic process, but she herself has recourse to the distinction between primary and secondary causality in the writings of Thomas Aquinas.Footnote 9 God as Primary Cause acts in and through the agency of secondary causes. That is, God as the Power of Being gives to finite entities both existence and the power to act: “It is characteristic of the creative power of God to raise creatures who participate in divine being to such a degree that they are also creative and sustaining in their own right.”Footnote 10 God, accordingly, is not one cause among many causes at work in the evolutionary process. Rather, God as the pure Act of Being is the transcendent Cause of all finite causes operative in the world of creation. Deane-Drummond borrows from Hans Urs von Balthasar the notion of theo-drama to give her theological interpretation of the evolutionary process. That is, she presupposes the existence of God and God's active presence in the evolutionary process, above all, in and through Jesus Christ as God Incarnate.Footnote 11 Thus, in line with such a specifically Christian interpretation of the evolutionary process, Deane-Drummond makes frequent reference to the teachings of Aquinas on human nature as elevated by divine grace to a role higher than that of other animal species in the evolutionary process.Footnote 12 Tanner also endorses the Thomistic distinction between God as the Primary Cause of what happens in this world and creatures as the secondary or instrumental cause of those same events.Footnote 13
I myself am less confident that Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics is an appropriate philosophical conceptuality for setting forth an evolutionary understanding both of the God-world relationship in general and of the “community of creation” to which Johnson refers in Ask the Beasts. Admittedly, Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics guards against the danger of a purely naturalistic approach to evolution in which the existence of God and the providential activity of God within the workings of the evolutionary process are ignored or even expressly denied. But, as I see it, Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics still involves philosophical presuppositions that are difficult to reconcile with an evolutionary worldview. For example, according to Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, substance is the first category of being.Footnote 14 That is, Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics is focused on the interaction of individual entities (substances) on one another in terms of unilateral cause-and-effect relations within a relatively fixed world order. An evolutionary approach to reality focuses instead on networks or systems of entities engaged in ongoing reciprocal relations with one another that thereby indirectly make possible the emergence of still higher-order systems or more complex networks of entities within the cosmic process.Footnote 15 Likewise, the key relationship between the metaphysical principles of matter and form is different in the two worldviews. Within Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, form is active, that is, possesses agency, and matter is passive as that which is receptive of form. Within an evolutionary metaphysical scheme, however, matter is active and the form is passive; that is, the form is no longer an agent producing change but the moment-by-moment objective result of change in the ongoing dynamic interaction of material constituents within systems and between systems.Footnote 16 Finally, the term being is ambiguous. It can be a noun (e.g., God as the Supreme Being) or a verb (the activity of existing). Thus to claim that God is the Power of Being or the Pure Act of Being is ambiguous. God as the Supreme Being completely transcends all created beings. God as the Pure Act of Being, however, is in the first place not an entity but the foundational activity of existing that God in the act of creation chooses to share with creatures, thereby bringing them into existence. God is thus not only the ontological source of the power of being within creatures, but also a participant like them in that same foundational activity of existing. The power of being is then equivalently the divine nature that empowers not only creatures but also God to exist.Footnote 17
A Systems-Oriented Approach to the God-World Relationship
I begin with some introductory remarks on my use of the term system within a systems-oriented approach to reality. That is, system much like substance in Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics is an analogical term with a generic meaning that is necessarily further specified in different contexts. The term substance, for example, applies to individual entities as long as the entity in question retains the same basic identity even with various accidental changes in its appearance and mode of operation over time.Footnote 18 The term system can apply to the inner workings of an inanimate entity (e.g., a machine), of an individual organism, or of a complex network of animate and inanimate entities such as an environment or a community. In each case, the system in question is a dynamic unity-in-diversity of interrelated parts or members. Yet whereas in Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics the term substance refers only to individual entities, the term system refers equally well to individual entities and to the corporate realities (communities or environments) in which individual entities tend to aggregate. Hence, in my view system is a more comprehensive term for philosophical analysis of physical reality than substance. Likewise, a systems-oriented approach to reality provides a new understanding of human and divine personhood as both a process-oriented reality and as an ontologically fixed reality. To establish that point, I begin with Thomas Aquinas' proposal that the divine persons are subsistent relations vis-à-vis one another, and then indicate how human persons are likewise constituted by the social context in which they find themselves.
The Divine Persons as Subsistent Relations
In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas proposes that the divine persons are “subsistent relations” vis-à-vis one another.Footnote 19 But, whereas Aquinas conceived the divine persons as equivalently nouns (subsistent relations), I conceive the divine persons as equivalently verbs (subsistent ways of relating). I prefer to think of the divine persons in process-oriented terms because then there is no problem with the three divine persons being together one God, not three gods in close collaboration. For, unlike individual entities, which by definition are distinct from one another, processes can be readily combined to constitute even more complex processes. Within the physical world, for example, lower-order processes (e.g., atoms and molecules) routinely co-constitute higher-order processes (e.g., a cell or entire physical organism) as a normal result of their ongoing dynamic interrelationship. Applied analogously to the doctrine of the Trinity, this process-oriented approach to reality would mean that the three divine persons are dynamically interrelated individual life-systems that together co-constitute a corporate life-system, namely, the reality of God as an indissoluble divine community. Hence, a process-oriented belief in God as triune seems to be more rationally plausible than the classical explanation of the Trinity provided by Aquinas with his claim that the three divine persons are subsistent relations. For, within Aristotle's metaphysical scheme, relations are “accidents,” contingent attributes of substances as individual entities. They do not exist in their own right.Footnote 20 Hence, the term “subsistent relation” is at the very least paradoxical.
The God-World Relationship as a Systems-Oriented Reality
At the same time, one cannot propose a systems-oriented understanding of the divine persons in their ongoing reciprocal relation to one another without setting forth an overall understanding of the God-world relationship in system-oriented terms. Earlier I suggested that the process-oriented term system is more comprehensive than the classical notion of substance, since system can be used to explain the workings of corporate realities like physical environments and human communities as well as the normal mode of operation of individual entities. But further explanation of how systems actually work in both contexts is still needed so as to make clear the nature of human personhood as a fully relational reality or an ongoing gift from and to others. Here I appeal to the philosophical cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead in his book Process and Reality. Therein he sets forth his understanding of societies, that is, organized groups of individual entities, which by their continuous dynamic interrelation co-constitute a higher-order social reality with a “common element of form” or consistent mode of operation.Footnote 21 Hence, there is an ongoing reciprocal causal relation between the individual entities among themselves and a corresponding reciprocal relation of these individual entities with the society to which they belong. The key passage in Process and Reality runs as follows:
The causal laws which dominate a social environment are the product of the defining characteristic of that society. But the society is only efficient through its individual members. Thus in a society, the members can only exist by reason of the laws which dominate the society, and the laws only come into being by reason of the analogous characters of the members of the society.Footnote 22
A Whiteheadian society, accordingly, is a system with a governing structure that continues to evolve in tandem with the dynamic interaction of its constituent parts or members from moment to moment. To be specific, the parts or members of a Whiteheadian society are actual entities, that is, dynamically interrelated momentary self-constituting subjects of experience. Through their interaction from moment to moment they co-constitute the ever-changing “defining characteristic” or governing structure of the society to which they belong.
This, however, is the precise reversal of the understanding of matter and form in classical metaphysics. Whereas in Aristotelian metaphysics the immaterial substantial form is active in giving order and intelligibility to the material constituents of a given physical reality, in Whitehead's metaphysical scheme the actual entities as self-constituting subjects of experience are the agents of change for the society or system.Footnote 23 The form or structure of the society is the objective ongoing result of the intersubjective activity of its constituent actual entities in their dynamic interrelationship. Furthermore, the defining characteristic or governing structure of the society/system (unlike an unchanging Aristotelian-Thomistic substantial form) evolves. New sets of constituent actual entities by their dynamic interrelationship have the option either to repeat the governing form of the society produced by predecessor actual entities or to modestly change it in line with their current relationship to one another and to a changing external environment. In brief then, within a Whiteheadian society or system, causation is basically bottom-up rather than top-down as in the relationship between matter and form in Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics. Yet the governing structure or “defining characteristic” of the society/system still provides top-down causation insofar as it constrains or limits the otherwise independent activity of its ever-new constituent actual entities.
Accordingly, the relation between spirit and matter in Whitehead's metaphysics is nondual in that it expresses a “both-and” rather than an “either-or” relation. That is, spirit (i.e., self-constituting subjects of experience) cannot exist without self-expression in some material form (the governing structure of a society or system). Yet the governing structure of the society cannot come into existence and remain in existence without the dynamic intersubjective activity of its constituent actual entities. Whitehead makes this reciprocal causal relation between matter and form especially clear in the way that he contrasts his understanding of the mind-brain-body relation within human beings in comparison to Aquinas' understanding of the relation between soul and body. Whereas for Aquinas the immaterial soul unilaterally informs the physical body so as to regulate and control bodily functions, for Whitehead there is ongoing reciprocal causation between the mind, the brain, and the body. The human body is an integrated set of hierarchically ordered subsystems of actual entities that continually feeds information to the brain; the brain organizes that physical data and communicates it to the mind or what Whitehead calls the “presiding personality” at every moment within the workings of the brain. A decision vis-à-vis that physical data is then made by the mind and communicated to the lower-order systems of the body through their ongoing connection with the brain.Footnote 24
But how does this reciprocal causal relation between the mind, brain, and body within a human being apply to the proper understanding of the God-world relationship as a whole? In my judgment, such a systems-oriented approach to the God-world relationship is best expressed in what has been called panentheism, namely, the hypothesis that everything finite exists within God but still maintains its own finite mode of existence and activity.Footnote 25 Admittedly, as the Danish philosopher/theologian Neil Henrik Gregersen comments, “There may be as many panentheisms as there are ways of qualifying the world's being ‘in God.’”Footnote 26 But, by the same token, some explanations of panentheism are presumably better than others; some make more sense in the long run than others. For example, a systems-oriented approach to panentheism seems to make more sense than an appeal to the Thomistic doctrine of participation as a rational ground for the notion of creaturely participation in the divine life.Footnote 27 For, within the Thomistic approach, creaturely participation in Divine Being is the result of unilateral efficient causality on the part of God. In creating a finite entity, God gives the entity a limited share in the Act of Being. The creature thereby acquires an ontological relation to God as its necessary principle of being, but the creature is thereby not intrinsically changed in its own creaturely mode of existence and activity.Footnote 28 Likewise, God as Subsistent Being (Esse Subsistens) is not intrinsically affected by the existence and activity of the creature.Footnote 29 This is in my judgment a rather weak form of panentheism, since nothing like ongoing reciprocal causation between God and the creature is thereby established.
A systems-oriented approach to the hypothesis of panentheism, however, allows for reciprocal causation between God and creatures. For, as noted above, the divine persons when understood as individual life-systems continually interact with one another so as to co-constitute a still more complex corporate life-system representing the reality of God as a dynamic unity in diversity of constituent parts or members. Moreover, the three divine persons brought into existence and continue to sustain a finite world from within the resources of their corporate reality as a divine life-system. That is, from within the energy-field generated by the ongoing dynamic relationship of the divine persons to one another, the so-called Big Bang proper to the initial moment of creation presumably took place. This dramatic explosion of energy from within the energy-field proper to the divine persons thus placed the world of creation from its first moment of existence onward within God as the creative source of its own existence and activity.Footnote 30 Furthermore, since the world of creation thus functions as a lower-order process within the higher-order process of the divine life, the cosmic process is necessarily influenced or “constrained” in its ongoing existence and activity by the directionality and structural principles already present in the workings of the higher-order divine life-system from which it originated. In turn, the cosmic process as a lower-order system within the divine life-system limits the ways in which Divine Providence can function within the world of creation. That is, Divine Providence is itself “constrained” by the autonomy that must be granted to finite entities, above all human beings, who “live, work and have their being” (Acts 17:28) within the divine life-system and yet pursue their own goals and values here and now.Footnote 31
Confirmation for this notion of reciprocal interaction in the workings of higher-order and lower-order systems vis-à-vis one another is provided by Terrence Deacon in his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. Deacon claims that the classical understanding of the relation between form and matter is more a hindrance than a help in understanding the relationship between higher-order and lower-order levels of existence and activity within the life sciences: “The phenomena we are interested in explaining are intrinsically historical and dynamic. Being alive does not merely consist in being composed in a particular way. It consists in changing in a particular way.”Footnote 32 In Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, however, the substantial form does not change; its material constituents undergo transformation as a consequence of being informed by a relatively fixed and unchanging substantial form. Yet in evolutionary theory the reverse is true. The basic material constituents of an organism (e.g., atoms and molecules) are quite active in their ongoing interaction, but never change in their individual self-constitution. Only their customary pattern of self-organization changes as a result of unexpected changes in their internal relations to one another and in response to changes in the external environment. Thus, while there might be a superficial resemblance of the governing pattern of self-organization within an organism to an Aristotelian substantial form, upon closer examination they are quite different in their basic mode of operation.
Deacon, however, has much in common with Whitehead in terms of his basic understanding of the relationship between matter and form in physical reality. Yet they differ on one key point. Whitehead understands the material constituents of a society or system to be self-constituting subjects of experience; Deacon presumes that they are inanimate minithings (atoms or molecules). As a result, Deacon seemingly cannot further explain how inanimate atoms and molecules are capable of spontaneous self-organization into ever more complex physical systems. His explanation of evolution, in other words, lacks the reciprocal relationship between matter and spirit that is characteristic of Whiteheadian societies or systems. Yet, for both Deacon and Whitehead, the material constituents of an entity are the agents of change within that entity. The form or governing structure of the entity acts only as a constraint on the workings of the material constituents even as this governing structure itself gradually evolves in line with an ever-changing pattern of relations among the material constituents in their dealings with one another and with the external environment.Footnote 33
Deacon clarifies what he has in mind with his own understanding of formal causality as objective constraint rather than as subjective agency through reference to the notion of habit in the metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce: “Habit was Peirce's general term referring to regularities of behavior arising in both physical and organic contexts.”Footnote 34 According to Peirce, Nature is necessarily “habit-taking” in its continuous historical development from virtual chaos at the moment of the Big Bang to greater and more complicated patterns of order and intelligibility over the millennia.Footnote 35 It produces regularities of organization in inanimate matter and regularities of behavior in organisms through conscious or unconscious repetition of patterns of self-organization. But in both cases habit-taking on the part of the entity in question is strictly the result of the interrelated activity of its material constituents and not a consequence of the introduction of a new substantial form by some external agency (e.g., God as Creator and Sustainer of the evolutionary process). This is not to deny divine influence on the evolutionary process but only to deny that it happens in the way indicated by Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, that is, evolution through the introduction of new substantial forms by God at every advanced stage of the process. Divine influence is presumably more subtle than that. God operates in the universe through God's provision of mechanisms like habit-taking in the existential mode of operation of the cosmic process from the moment of the Big Bang onward or, as Whitehead proposes in Process and Reality, through God's provision of “initial aims,” feeling-level inspirations and initiatives to the constituent actual entities of a society in their dynamic relation to one another.Footnote 36
Other philosophers of science besides Deacon likewise appeal to the notion of mutual constraint among the material constituents of a life-system and of neighboring life-systems on one another. Stuart Kauffman in his book At Home in the Universe claims that “life is a natural property of complex chemical systems, that when the number of different kinds of molecules in a chemical soup passes a certain threshold, a self-sustaining network of reactions—an autocatalytic metabolism—will suddenly appear.”Footnote 37 Similarly, Jesper Hoffmeyer in his book Biosemiotics traces the way in which individual life-systems (e.g., cells) pick up signs from other living systems and from their common external environment and respond to those signs in terms of their own mode of operation. Thereby each life-system constrains the independent existence and activity of other life-systems in its environment so that together they provide the existential context for the unexpected emergence of a higher-order level of existence and activity within nature than previously existed.Footnote 38
Admittedly, still other philosophers of science who embrace the general concept of the dynamic interplay between higher-order and lower-order levels of existence and activity within nature have reservations about whether human personhood can also be explained as a purely natural phenomenon within an overall systems-oriented approach to the God-world relationship. Mirko di Bernardo at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, for example, distinguishes between structural genes and functional genes within an organism: “Besides the structural gene (genetic information resulting from the DNA sequence), there is the functional gene, which has no fixed nature; its transitory and contingent existence depends on the functional dynamics of the whole organism.”Footnote 39 Yet human beings “are not just made of genes because something emerges from them that cannot be reduced to mere matter, namely, culture, symbolic language, self-awareness, self-control and the capacity for abstraction, as well as the idea of perfection, truth, infinity (concepts that have no material referents in the reality experienced every day).”Footnote 40 Accordingly, “the human Self is promise, the need for totality, an expectation of the infinite and explains itself through acts which transcend both the second principle of thermodynamics [entropy], and the cause-effect rules that are at the root of natural phenomena.”Footnote 41 Di Bernardo's understanding of human personhood and personal agency is then fully in accord with the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of formal causality as the agency of a substantial form vis-à-vis its material constituents. As a result, he concludes that “metaphysics, and to some extent theology, are not in contradiction with science, which investigates a different level of reality.”Footnote 42
Philip Clayton in his book Mind and Emergence explains the emergence of life from nonliving components by espousing a theory of strong emergence; that is, “evolution in the cosmos produces new, ontologically distinct levels, which are characterized by their own distinct laws or regularities and causal forces.”Footnote 43 He is thus opposed to theories of weak emergence or any kind of physical reductionism in which the elemental physical entities that are governed by deterministic laws of interaction would also explain the mode of operation of systems at all levels of existence and activity within nature. But at the level of human personhood Clayton adopts a different strategy: “Personhood is therefore a level of analysis that has no complete translation into a state of the body or brain—no matter how complete our neuroscience might be. Of course, it presupposes such states; yet personhood represents an explanatory level that is distinct from explanations at the level of our ‘hardware.’”Footnote 44 Clayton, accordingly, likewise allows for “agent-causation” at the level of human personhood on the grounds that “agent-based explanations are compatible, at least in principle, with the determining influence of biological causes.”Footnote 45 There could be, however, some residual dualism (an ontological difference between spirit and matter) still present in that statement. As noted above, I myself prefer to think of the relation between spirit and matter as nondual. That is, spirit and matter are ontologically interdependent. Spirit always seeks self-expression in some objective material form: matter without an internal immaterial principle of self-organization would be not only lifeless but absolutely formless. Implicit in my thinking here, of course, is Whitehead's presupposition that an actual entity is not only an immaterial subject of experience but a “superject,” a material reality that can be “prehended” by subsequent actual entities.Footnote 46 In Mind and Emergence, Clayton contests that point: “The evidence for spontaneity in atoms is rather more spotty than it is in the case of animal behavior studies.”Footnote 47
Personhood as Gift from Others and to Others
In this third part of the article, I argue for an understanding of human personhood as a gift from others and to others both in the context of a fully relational understanding of reality that is characteristic of a systems-oriented approach to reality and as derivative from a new understanding of Christian belief in the doctrine of the Trinity as one God in three persons. That is, the unity of the triune God can be understood as the unity of a corporate life-system or community that the three divine persons sustain by their ongoing dynamic interrelationship. Thereby they achieve their personal identity as individual divine persons only in and through their relation to one another within the divine community/divine life-system. Similarly, human beings are persons in the full sense of the word only if they hold themselves responsible for maintaining interpersonal relations with other human beings so as to co-constitute functioning local communities and ultimately the all-embracing community of humankind on this earth. Human beings also exercise their personhood by holding themselves responsible for maintaining and fostering the continued well-being of the “community of creation,” as Elizabeth Johnson proposed above.Footnote 48 The reciprocal causation that governs the relations of the divine persons with one another within the divine life-system is thus reproduced in the dealings of human beings with one another, with the other creatures of this world, and with the divine persons insofar as human beings share with the divine persons responsibility for maintaining and fostering the growth of the community of creation.
Yet human personhood is not only a gift to others but a gift from others in the sense that no human being exists as a person simply in his or her own right. That is, a human being comes into this world and begins to exercise her or his personhood in the first place only in virtue of the decision of the divine persons to create the world and over time to bring into existence every finite creature within it, including oneself. But reciprocal relations between one's parents also made possible one's existence and activity as a person. They too, of course, received the gift of human existence and the exercise of personhood directly from earlier generations of human beings and indirectly from the reciprocal relations between the innumerable nonhuman creatures of this world over the millennia in sustaining and fostering the ongoing growth and development of the cosmic process.Footnote 49
As should be obvious from this quick overview of the responsibilities of what it means to be a person, human personhood is a nondual reality. That is, being a person and simultaneously becoming a person are two interdependent features of one's personal identity. For, at any given moment in one's life, one is a person with inalienable rights that other human beings cannot logically deny without implicitly calling into question their own personhood. Yet one also will spend a lifetime becoming the person that one ultimately wants to be. One is never fully satisfied with what one already has become; there is always something more to be achieved. In addition, whether one likes it or not, one has still unmet responsibilities to the divine persons by way of an appropriate response to their ongoing offer of life and love to oneself. The divine persons, in other words, presumably created each of us for a reason, that is, for a specific role in the cosmic process that only each of us (and not someone else) can best play within the divine plan for the “recapitulation of all things in Christ” (Eph 1:10). Thus at every moment of one's life, one is not simply one person among many others in some generic sense; instead, one is ever becoming a more individuated person, either for better or for worse.
Colin Gunton in his book The One, the Three, and the Many likewise claims that a return to the classical doctrine of the Trinity could be an antidote to the ills of excessive individualism in contemporary Western society. In thinking through this proposal, however, he has recourse, not to the Western church's understanding of the divine persons as subsistent relations vis-à-vis one another within the unity of one God, but to the notion of perichoresis as employed by the Greek-speaking Fathers of the Eastern church: “God is not God apart from the way in which Father, Son and Spirit in eternity give and receive from each other, what they essentially are. The three do not merely coinhere but dynamically constitute one another's being.”Footnote 50 He further claims that perichoresis is empirically verified in the way that human beings deal with one another. He cites the philosopher John Macmurray to the effect that persons mutually constitute one another, make each other to be what they are.Footnote 51 He also indicates how in the world of contemporary culture a perichoresis of past, present, and future is needed in order not to privilege unfairly one time-dimension over the others in the understanding of how human nature has evolved and in what direction it might be headed.Footnote 52 Finally, he points to the way in which physicists and other natural scientists increasingly recognize that “for an interaction to be real, the ‘nature’ of the related things must derive from these relations, while at the same time the relations must derive from the ‘nature’ of the things.”Footnote 53
Here I am completely in agreement with Gunton. His return to the notion of perichoresis within the classical Greek understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity provides a very worthwhile framework for thinking through and resolving many of the problems associated with excessive individualism in contemporary Western society. What I do not find in his presentation, however, is a sufficiently articulated metaphysical explanation of the notion of perichoresis. For example, how does one explain perichoresis so that the three divine persons by virtue of their perichoretic relation to one another are still only one entity? If divine dancing (perichoresis) involves three persons, is their unity as one God to be found in the activity of dancing, in themselves as dancers, or both in dancing as a common activity and in the dancers as individual entities at the same time? Likewise, if, as Aristotle maintained, causes necessarily exist prior to what they cause, how can one justify the claim that human beings in and through their perichoretic relations with one another simultaneously co-constitute one another? By the same token, how do past, present, and future interpenetrate so as to produce the ongoing unity of the evolutionary process? Finally, in the subatomic world of quantum physics as well as with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, it is one thing to say that everything “may be what it is and not another thing, but it is also what it uniquely is by virtue of its relation to everything else.”Footnote 54 But how is one to explain that statement? Is the relationship ontologically prior to the things related or vice versa? Or are the relationship and the things related causally interdependent, so that neither can exist without the other?
Gunton by his own admission is working with analogical rather than univocal concepts.Footnote 55 But these analogical concepts demand further metaphysical articulation if they are to be taken seriously as indicative of the way that the God-world relationship actually works. For example, if Gunton had conceived the God-world relationship along the lines of a systems-oriented Trinitarian panentheism, such as I have presented in this article, then he could have logically claimed that perichoresis governs not only the relations of the divine persons to one another within the divine life-system but also the relation of all finite entities to one another within the cosmic process. For perichoresis is in the first place the governing principle or mode of operation for the divine persons. But, insofar as the cosmic process is an active participant in the divine life-system from the moment of the Big Bang onward, it too is governed by the workings of perichoresis at every level of existence and activity. That is, in relating to one another perichoretically, individual entities everywhere within the cosmic process co-constitute systems that in turn are perichoretically related to one another. That is, lower-order systems provide the indispensable infrastructure of higher-order systems, and the higher-order systems in turn provide the superstructure or necessary boundaries for the proper workings of the lower-order processes. As Whitehead points out in Process and Reality, a “structured society” or society composed of multiple subsocieties “provides a favorable environment for the subordinate societies which it harbors within itself.”Footnote 56 The divine life-system unobtrusively provides the “favorable environment” for the independent workings of the cosmic process. The One (the divine life-system) thereby conditions but does not fully determine the dynamic relation of the Many (the multiple systems of interrelated entities within the cosmic process) to one another.Footnote 57
In conclusion, then, I propose that human personhood should be understood as a gift from and to others as well as a permanent and unchanging attribute of what it means to be a human being. For this understanding of human personhood fits better within a contemporary systems-oriented approach to reality such as I have laid out above. Likewise, for Christians it can also be seen as derivative from a more contemporary process-oriented understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity, namely, as co-constitutive members of a transcendent community or archetypal life-system. Finally, given the individualistic character of contemporary Western culture, an emphasis on the interdependence of entities on one another rather than on their independence from one another seems to be more needed at the present moment.
