My native language is geometry. Until I see the shape of a thought, I don’t truly know it.

This morning, reading Inventing the Individual, I realized Borges might have given me the shape of my theology 25 years ago. When I went back to the source, “Pascal’s Sphere” it was even better than I recalled.

In one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trismegistus, the twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered this formula which future generations would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

The miracle of humanity is that each of us is one unique center of God’s intelligible sphere, one instance of everything, which overlaps all others, sometimes harmoniously, sometime jarringly.

The recollection happened as Seidentop described the 14th Century debate between William of Ockham and the allegedly essentialist followers of Thomas Aquinas as “[turning] on the question of God’s rationality versus God’s freedom.” I realized that I side against Ockham’s opponents, but that I would prefer debate the question in terms of God’s  total monistic rationality versus God’s distributed pluralistic reason. Whatever of God we can understand objectively or subjectively participate in, it is at best from one center in relation to other centers. The circumscribing totality is not for us, and is not only none of our business, it forbidden.

I’m pretty sure I’m just restating Process Theology.