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227 Chapter Twelve The Ontological Ultimate An Act of Creation I. The Nature of the Ultimate Act as Created According to the concept of the ontological creative act, the act has no nature except that which comes to be in its creating the world. This affords the greatest intelligibility to the question of why there is a world at all. For, the concept of the ontological creative act starts within nothing, which needs no explanation. It moves through sheer making, productivity, creativity of novelty, immediately to the determinate world in which things have natures. The nature of the ontological creative act harmonizes four metaphysically distinguishable components: first, the brute facticity of its creating the world; second, the act as the ontological context of mutual relevance for the multiplicity in the world of determinate things with essential and conditional components ; third, the determinate creatures as harmonies all of which bear the transcendentals of form, components, existential location, and value-identity; fourth, the de facto particular characteristics the world has cumulatively that determine the particular kind of creator the ontological act is—the creator of this particular world. The ontological creative act is the most ultimate finite/infinite contrast that should be in a theologically acute sacred canopy (I, 1, ii).The finite side is the brute facticity of the creation of the cosmos, which in this facticity is radically contingent and arbitrary.The finite side is also elaborated in terms of how the creative act is the ontological context of mutual relevance for all the determinate things, the one for the many, the being that grounds all determinate beings. The infinite side is the absolute nothingness that would hold if it were not for the ontological creative act creating the world. The sheer arbitrariness in the ontological creative act is the guarantee of the fact that this is the most ultimate finite/infinite contrast. Absolute nothingness is not some infinite fullness that awaits a finitizing move to create the ­ determinate 228 v Ultimates world. It is just nothing. And this finite/infinite contrast is intelligible in the concept of the ontological act of creation. The complex ontological act of creation of the world, including the world in all its dimensions as its terminus and absolute nothingness as its alternative , is the most ultimate reality that can be symbolized in sacred canopies. What is determinate about that act is not the whole of the act itself, only the nature of the act which is itself the product of the creating. Therefore, no determinate symbol can be applied literally to the act itself. Determinate models of the act, such as emergence, personhood in gods, and consciousness, need to be “broken” so as to indicate that they apply in iconic senses only to the produced nature of the act, not to the act of making itself. Numerous symbol systems exist in various traditions to symbolize different aspects or emphases of this. For instance, on the emergence model in East Asian philosophical theology, the Daodejing distinguishes the Dao that can be named from the Dao that cannot be named but is the mother of the Dao that can. The Dao that can be named is the world that the East Asians understand in terms of the philosophical cosmology of yin-yang philosophy. It has a particular moral flavor that is differently accented in Daoist and Confucian writings. The Dao that can be named is radically contingent on the Dao that cannot be named. This Daoist motif was influential on Wangbi (226–249) who introduced the thesis that non-being is the most basic ground of all other things. Wangbi in turn influenced Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073), the father of Neo-Confucianism who wrote: The Ultimate of Non-Being and also the Great Ultimate (T’ai-chi)! The Great Ultimate through movement generates yang. When its activity reaches its limit, it becomes tranquil. Through tranquility the Great Ultimate generates yin.When tranquility reaches its limit, activity begins again. So movement and tranquility alternate and become the root of each other, giving rise to the distinction of yin and yang, and the two modes are thus established. By the transformation of yang and its union with yin, the Five Agents of Water, Fire, Wood, Metal, and Earth arise. When these five material forces (ch’i) are distributed in harmonious order, the four seasons run their course. The Five Agents constitute one system of yin and yang, and yin and yang constitute on Great Ultimate. The Great Ultimate...

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