by cyranorox » July 22nd, 2008, 7:08 pm
Robert,
your exposition is most learned, and i cannot criticize your latin.
but i still think 'things' is vague, because it is difficult to ascribe any identity to any material object. nothing is: rock to sand, ferrous to ferric, atom to plasma; matter to energy. Man, and the fractional personhood of animals, can be, can have a persistent identity. What is man-made, containing intentionality, [for example a poem, law, or chair, favorite furniture of modern philosophers, who seek an academic one] still depends on its material basis. Mutable things, really, does not distinguish a subset of things. Yet, we are promised a material world, a city, a feast, and a body. there is no evidence for an abstract existence; there will be an environment.
Structures and processes, such as mathematics or language, must be either elements within the mind, preserved and renewed in the Resurrection, or angelic beings, ideas, whose created but immutable [not eternal] being will not be affected by it.
That's the distinction i was looking for: what is created is not eternal. I would hesitate to assert that any abstration is eternal. Universals don't fit easily with OC thinking, but to the extent we can posit their existence, they are created, of the universe. The soul, too, is created, and I don't know where you derive the idea that it is immutable.
Palamas' distinction of essence/energy may be of use. Man-made objects and ideas are of our energies, but not our essence. I don't remember all his discussion of the resurrection status of these, but as we shall be complete and more, i have no doubt that our energies, our ergoi, , will be perfected and included.