Religion lives on a God who can be related to: one who loves, hears prayer, and draws near. The classical safeguard is the "mixed relation": creatures are really related to God, but God is related to creatures only in our way of speaking, with nothing added on the divine side. The trouble is that a relation real on only one end is not, in the ordinary sense, a relation, and the believer's "God loves me" reports exactly the two-sided structure the doctrine removes.

*What the tradition holds.* The classical doctrine of divine relation assembles several reinforcing claims. God loves creation (1 John 4; Romans 8 NRSVUE); God is present to the believer (Psalm 139; Matthew 28:20); God hears prayer (Psalm 65; Matthew 7); God grieves and rejoices over creaturely action (Genesis 6; Luke 15). At the same time, God is immutable (Malachi 3:6; James 1:17), impassible ([§6.3.4](<6.3.4 Impassibility.md>); Aquinas, *ST* I.9), aseitous ([§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>), Q4; *ST* I.4), and simple (*ST* I.3): lacking parts, dependencies, or any feature whose obtaining requires anything outside God. Aquinas's resolution: the relations between God and creatures are not mutual. The creature has a *real* relation to God, grounded in the creature's actual ontological dependence; God has only a *relation of reason* to the creature, a relation that obtains only from the creature's side and adds nothing to the divine being *ST* I.13.7; cf. *ST* I.28; for contemporary defenses, (Stump, Eleonore, 2003); (Dolezal, James E., 2017). On the most developed contemporary refinements, divine simplicity entails that God's loving the creature, knowing the creature, and creating the creature are all identical with God's being and add nothing relational to it (Alexander R. Pruss, 2008); (Michael Bergmann and Jeffrey E. Brower, 2006); (Dolezal, James E., 2011). Open theism, process theology, and panentheism take the reverse turn and grant God real relations at the cost of immutability and aseity (Charles Hartshorne, 1948); (Nicholas Wolterstorff, 1975); (William Hasker, 1989); (Clark H. Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger, 1994); (Mullins, R. T., 2016). Each move tries to keep the believer's experienced relation to God from collapsing. Pressed to its limit, the position holds a relation in which the creature's real dependence on God is meant to preserve the believer's experiential reports while the divine end remains untouched by what the creature is or does.

*What cannot be answered.* Six questions ask of the relational predicates what the doctrine, in the form structural reasoning can examine, cannot answer. What presses here is structural — local to the relational predicates and explicit in the tradition's own concession. Two things stand in a relation when something obtains *between* them: the cup is on the table; the child loves the parent; the planet orbits the star. In each case the relation has two relata and a structural connection that holds them in the configuration named, and to be related is to be jointly determined by the connection: a change at one end registers, in the appropriate way, at the other. The classical tradition reaches for a relation between God and creation that exceeds any creaturely relation in depth and intimacy, and reaches, simultaneously, for a doctrine of divine immutability and aseity on which the deeper end of that relation contributes nothing to the divine being. The two reaches pull against each other, and the doctrine of *mixed relation* (Aquinas, *ST* I.13.7) is one of the most explicit concessions in the history of metaphysics: the classical tradition resolving the tension by sacrificing one of the two reaches. On the analyses [§2.6](<2.6 Triconditionality of Nature.md>) develops, a relation is a structural connection between relata that share the conditions of relation: minimally, the conditions for one relatum's state to make a difference at the other. The classical God is defined as standing in no condition the creature shares. The six pressures run two at the level of the relational predicates themselves, four at the level of the conditions relation-talk runs on.

**Q1.** *Can a relation of reason do the structural work?* Aquinas's *mixed relation* (*ST* I.13.7) is the central resource: the creature is really related to God, but God is related to the creature only by *relation of reason*, a relation that obtains in our concepts and predicates rather than in the divine being. Stump -(Stump, Eleonore, 2003), Dolezal -(Dolezal, James E., 2017), and Bergmann and Brower -(Michael Bergmann and Jeffrey E. Brower, 2006) defend the doctrine carefully. The concern here is what the relation of reason is positioned to do. The believer who reports being loved by God is not reporting a relation that holds only in the believer's concepts of God; the believer is reporting a relation in which God is the lover and the believer the beloved, with the loving running from God to the believer. The doctrine of mixed relation preserves divine immutability by relocating the divine end of the relation from the divine being to the creature's concepts of the divine being. What this preserves is the term *love*; what it surrenders is the structure on which the believer's report depends: the running-from. The Thomistic doctrine is honest about the cost in a way the contemporary refinements often are not: Aquinas does not pretend the doctrine leaves the believer's experiential reports unchanged. The present analysis registers the candor and presses the cost.

**Q2.** *Does God love the world, and can the unaffected love?* The believer's confession that God loves the world (1 John 4:8) is among the most central claims of the tradition, and the relational reports that surround it (of being loved, heard, attended to, grieved over, rejoiced over) are reports of an affecting relation: God's state is held to be partly determined by the believer's state. For loving to be the relation the confession reports, the lover must respond to the beloved: the loving must take its character, in some structural sense, from what the beloved is and what the beloved does. Two classical commitments foreclose this together. On love, the reply is that God's love is wholly active rather than responsive; it bestows rather than receives; it is identical with God's being and is therefore eternal, immutable, and unaffected by what the beloved does (Aquinas, *ST* I.20), the position Nygren -(Anders Nygren (trans. A. G. Hebert), 1932) gives its sharpest classical form in the *agape*-vs-*eros* contrast. On affection, impassibility holds that God cannot be acted upon by anything outside God ([§6.3.4](<6.3.4 Impassibility.md>); *ST* I.9), and the *real-but-not-mutual* doctrine has God affect the creature without the creature affecting God (Lewis -(C. S. Lewis, 1940); Stump -(Stump, Eleonore, 2003); -(Stump, Eleonore, 2010); Helm -(Helm, Paul, 2010)). The concern is whether love-without-response, or asymmetric affection, is the relation the believer's reports name. A love that does not respond to the beloved is not, in the structural sense, a relation between two relata; it is a one-sided pouring whose target's state makes no difference to the pouring. An affecting relation that runs from one relatum to the other but not back is, in the structural sense, half of a relation: the half on the divine pole is what the doctrine preserves, and the half on the creature's side is what the believer's reports require but the doctrine does not give. The doctrine preserves divine immutability by relocating the responsive structure from God to creation; the believer who reports having been heard in a moment of distress is reporting a responsive structure factored out at the divine pole. The mystical literature (Eckhart, *Sermons*; Teresa, *Interior Castle*) is full of reports the present analysis is not positioned to dismiss; the question is what the reports presuppose about the structural conditions of encounter. Stump -(Stump, Eleonore, 2010); -(Eleonore Stump, 2018) and Wolterstorff -(Nicholas Wolterstorff, 2015) develop the most serious attempts to preserve the responsive structure within the classical frame, and each does so by reintroducing structural conditions divine immutability had removed. The dipolar account is the principled terminus of those attempts. Hartshorne's *The Divine Relativity* -(Charles Hartshorne, 1948) proposes that divine love is genuinely bipolar: the abstract pole's love is the invariant, bestowing, formal commitment to the creature's good and is strictly impassible, the creature's state making no difference to it; the concrete pole's love is constitutively responsive and fully receptive, growing with the beloved's joys and sufferings. The two sides of love (bestowing and responsive) and the two sides of affection (impassible and receptive) are assigned to two poles of a single subject, supplying the bidirectionality the reports require while the abstract pole keeps the aseity the classical doctrine demands. The concern here is the one [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) presses: the abstract pole and the concrete pole are one subject only through the relation that unites them, and [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) shows that relation is a directed crossing obtaining within T, S, and Φ. The unity of the loving agent is purchased by installing the structural conditions between its poles, and the half-relation the classical doctrine was accused of offering reappears as the abstract-pole half of the dipolar composite's own pole-relation.

**Q3.** *Where do the relata meet?* Two relata stand in a structural connection only if they share enough conditions for the connection to obtain. The cup and the table share spatial position; the child and the parent share temporal extension and embodied presence; the planet and the star share the gravitational structure of the solar system. The classical God shares none of T, S, or Φ with the creature. The relation between God and creature must therefore obtain across a difference at every structural level. The classical reply is that divine relation is *sui generis*: a relation of a kind no creaturely relation matches, holding between God and creature in a way no creaturely framework can capture (Pseudo-Dionysius, *Mystical Theology*; Aquinas, *ST* I.13). The apophatic non-relation strategy originates with Plotinus: in *Enneads* VI.9 the One is related to nothing and to no one, since relation presupposes a dyad and the One precedes all dyadic structure; Pseudo-Dionysius transmits the Plotinian strategy to Aquinas via the Neoplatonic inheritance. [§6.8.3](<6.8.3 Describability.md>), Q5 and [§6.2.2](<6.2.2 Unity.md>), Q1 trace the apophatic ancestry more fully. The reply is honest. The concern here is what makes the *sui generis* relation a relation in the structural sense the relational predicates trade on. Whatever connects God and creature, on the doctrine fully stated, lacks the shared conditions that make creaturely relations relations. The term *relation* is doing work the doctrine has not specified.

**Q4.** *Can the believer be heard?* Petitionary prayer presupposes that the believer's request reaches God and that God responds. For the request to reach God, there must be a structural channel (a configuration of T, S, and Φ) along which the request travels. For God to respond, there must be a difference between God's not-yet-having-responded and God's having-responded; that difference is a transition; transitions require T. The classical reply is that God's response is eternally complete in a single act, and what unfolds in time is the temporal expression of that eternal act Aquinas, *ST* I.23; (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981). [§6.7.2](<6.7.2 Causality.md>), Q6 presses the concern with the relation between an eternal act and a particular temporal *when*; the present concern is closer in. The believer in distress at 3:14 PM on a Tuesday is asking for a difference between the world before 3:14 and the world after; ET-simultaneity preserves the divine end of the answering by setting aside the temporal asymmetry that, on the structural analysis, is constitutive of an act's being a response to anything in particular.

**Q5.** *Can the Trinity be a relational solution?* The doctrine of the Trinity gives the classical tradition a resource: God is internally relational (the Father loves the Son in the Spirit) without depending on anything outside God. Trinitarianism preserves divine relationality without compromising aseity Augustine, *De Trinitate*; Boethius, *De Trinitate*; Aquinas, *ST* I.27–43; for the contemporary social-vs-Latin debate, (Cornelius Plantinga Jr., 1989); (Richard Swinburne, 1994); (Richard Cross, 2002). The concern here is what the divine processions are, on the doctrine fully stated. If the relations within God are real relations (each Person's being depending on the relations to the others) the Persons are individuated by relational properties, and those properties require structural conditions for relation. The Latin tradition since Augustine has worked to give the relations content without giving the Persons separable being; the Cappadocian tradition has worked the converse problem. Both run on relational structure that, on the present analysis, requires the conditions T, S, and Φ supply. The doctrine of immanent Trinity buys internal relationality at the cost of locating relational structure within the simple, atemporal divine being, which is precisely the structural difficulty divine simplicity was intended to foreclose.

**Q6.** *What does *immanence* relate?* The contemporary panentheist and process traditions, with Hartshorne -(Charles Hartshorne, 1948) the systematic process progenitor, developed by Cobb and Griffin -(John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin, 1976), Clayton -(Clayton, Philip, and Arthur Peacocke, eds., 2004), and Peacocke -(Arthur Peacocke, 2007), attempt to preserve the relational depth the believer's experiential reports require by placing creation *within* God or treating God and creation as mutually constitutive. This panentheist *creation-within-God* must be distinguished from Plotinian emanation: in emanation the One's procession reaches even matter without the One being *within* what proceeds from it ([§5.3.2](<5.3.2 Neoplatonism.md>)), so the source keeps its non-relational transcendence, whereas panentheism surrenders exactly that transcendence to secure mutual constitution. The move responds to the concern. The cost is symmetrical to the open-theist cost [§6.7.2](<6.7.2 Causality.md>) names: a being whose relations to creation share creation's structural conditions is a being who instantiates those conditions. Panentheism preserves relationality by relocating God within the modal structure the classical doctrine had defined God against. The two positions (mixed relation and panentheism) are best read as the doctrine splitting along a structural incompatibility. One preserves the predicate by relocating its referent; the other preserves the structure by surrendering the referent.

*What is required.* Taken in sum, the six pressures show what *related* depends on once the term is held to the conditions of its application. Two things stand in a relation when their states are jointly determined by a structural connection between them, and the relation of reason preserves the term while surrendering the running-from on which the believer's report of being loved depends. Love runs through responsive structure: love-without-response is a one-sided pouring whose target's state makes no difference to the pouring, and the doctrine of divine immutability factors that responsive structure out at the divine pole. Relata meet by sharing structural conditions; the *sui generis* relation lacks what creaturely relations have, and the term *relation* is doing work the doctrine has not specified. Prayer reaches God along a temporal channel: ET-simultaneity preserves the divine end of the answering by setting aside the temporal asymmetry constitutive of being a response to anything in particular. Affecting relations are bidirectional: asymmetric affection is half of a relation, and the half the believer's reports require is precisely what the doctrine does not give. Internal relationality cannot be bought in simplicity-incompatible coin: the Trinitarian resource buys internal relations at the cost of locating relational structure within the simple, atemporal divine being, which is the structural difficulty simplicity was intended to foreclose. And the panentheist preservation of structure pays for itself by surrendering the referent the classical doctrine was defining God against. Each option splits the doctrine along the same structural incompatibility rather than holding it together. T, S, and Φ are the conditions of bilateral connection; relation is the structural shape Nature takes when it carries one relatum's state back to another within itself.

*What is inverted.* Relation belongs to Nature. The English *relation* descends through Latin *relatio*, *a carrying back, a referring*. A relation carries back: the obtaining of one relatum's state to the other, and the other's to the first. The carrying back requires Nature. To be related is to share Nature with another relatum, in the structural sense that lets the obtaining of one's state make a difference at the other. The classical God is defined as standing outside the conditions T, S, and Φ the creature shares. The classical doctrine of *mixed relation* is honest about the consequence: the divine end of any relation between God and creature obtains only from the creature's side. The present analysis agrees that the doctrine is honest and presses what it costs. What is jointly carried back, between any creature and any other element of Nature, is what Nature *is*: T held in common, S held in common, Φ held in common. Nature is what makes carrying-back possible. The classical tradition reaches for a deeper relation than any creaturely relation to anything within Nature, and names a relation across a difference at every structural level. What love, presence, hearing, and being-heard *are*, on the classical predicates weighed against what their application takes, are the structural ways Nature carries one relatum's state back to another within itself. The doctrine of divine relation, however formulated, locates those carryings-back in a relatum beyond Nature rather than in Nature itself.


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← [6.8.1 Presence](<6.8.1 Presence.md>) | [6.8.3 Describability](<6.8.3 Describability.md>) →
