What if our society’s deepest structures are not mechanical, but participatory—rooted in relationality, not mere rules?
Most “systems change” talk still orbits material levers: institutions, incentives, power. Yet the classical Christian doctrine of the Trinity—reinterpreted through critical realism and participatory metaphysics—offers a blueprint for something radically different: a social reality where structure, agency, and ideology exist in generative communion, mutually co-creating the conditions for true flourishing.
In this speculative architecture, the Trinity becomes more than doctrine: it names the archetypal form of a “good society.”
✦ Structure = the conditioning field of possibility (material, institutional, relational, symbolic)
✦ Agency = embodied, situated subjectivity (persons, communities)
✦ Ideology = the matrix of meaning mediating between what is and what could be
Relationality is not an afterthought. It is ontological: the very ground of being. What theology called perichoresis—mutual indwelling—translates into a model where justice, solidarity, and transformation become the living grammar of social existence, not ethical extras.
This ontology does not collapse the Good into historical “norms” or reduce justice to consensus. The Good is transcendent—never exhausted by any order, always calling finite realities toward deeper participation. Progress is not linear; it is dialectical, marked by ruptures, contradictions, resurrectional breakthroughs—novel configurations that were previously unthinkable.
Transformation, then, is not managerial improvement. It is "theosis" secularized:
➤ Naming the absences, gaps, and distortions that constrain participation
➤ Exposing ideological closure
➤ Opening the possibility of genuine novum—social resurrection
➤ Reconfiguring structure, agency, and meaning in light of the transcendent Good
Power is never eliminated; it is normatively ordered. Development is not the elimination of conflict, but the recursive, always unfinished movement by which social reality analogically participates in the Good. The “gap to good” is not a technical flaw—it is the permanent mark of finite striving, the very space where grace and freedom meet.
In the end, the vocation is not to perfect systems, but to participate—truthfully, imaginatively, and courageously—in making social reality more transparent to the fullness it is called to reflect.
I. The Groundwork
In classical Christian theology, the Trinity designates the consubstantial unity of Father, Son, and Spirit as one divine ousia subsisting in three hypostases. The immanent triune life is articulated through “perichoresis”—the mutual indwelling that expresses the eternal relationality constitutive of divine being. Trinitarian metaphysics extends this as the ontological claim that relationality, self-gift, and generative communion constitute the fundamental structure of reality, rendering creation intelligible through analogical participation in the divine plenitude. Within this participatory ontology, theosis denotes the sacramental and eschatological process whereby human beings, without confusion of natures, are conformed to the filial life of God through grace, realising perfection as communion with the Triune Good. The resurrection proclaims the eschatological transformation of created existence: as Second Adam, Christ's hypostatic assumption of human nature—fallen in mortality but not in sin—effects the ontological recapitulation of Adamic humanity, such that his victory over death inaugurates a transfigured modality of embodied life and establishes Christian hope in consummated participation in divine life through incorporation into his risen body.
This classical formula provides the archetype for a speculative social ontology that transposes these theological categories into a secular framework grounded in critical realism, transcendental idealism, and participatory metaphysics. The Trinity operates not as supernatural doctrine but as archetypal form of the "good society"—an optimal configuration of generative mechanisms through which finite social systems participate in a primary Good. What theology articulates as Father, Son, and Spirit, social ontology recognizes as Structure, Agency, and Ideology: three mutually constitutive yet irreducible dimensions whose perichoretic interdependence constitutes the deep grammar of social reality itself. Each theological term that follows—sin, grace, resurrection, theosis—undergoes similar transposition: from supernatural event to social-ontological category, from ecclesiastical mystery to civilizational praxis, while preserving the formal relationality that makes Christian Social Teaching uniquely inspirational to the complexity of social becoming.
We term this constellation dialectical spiritual realism (DSR) [^1]: dialectical in adopting critical realism's stratified ontology of generative mechanisms and real absences whose contradictions drive historical transformation; spiritual in affirming the Good as transcendent intransitive reality irreducible to empirical structures or projected ideals; realist in treating structures, absences, meanings, and norms as mind-independent yet participable. Transcendental idealism functions to insist that normativity cannot be reduced to empirical regularities—that our capacity to recognize absences and judge configurations involves a priori structures of judgment irreducible to empirical generalization, thereby blocking positivist reductions of normative discourse and securing the epistemic preconditions for judgmental rationality as more than mere preference—while participatory metaphysics supplies what critical realism lacks: an ontological grounding of value in a Good that is prior to, yet historically mediated through, social forms.
This speculative framework finds profound resonance with Catholic Social Teaching's core commitments. CST defines the common good not as aggregate of individual preferences but as the conditions of social life enabling groups and persons to achieve fulfillment—precisely what our ontology terms conditions enabling participation in the Good. The common good is fundamentally relational quality: the character of interactions, distributions of power, and symbolic orders that either afford or obstruct human flourishing. Trinitarian perichoresis provides ontological grounding for CST's principles: solidarity expresses the mutual constitution of structure-agency-ideology (we are intrinsically interdependent, not accidentally related); subsidiarity honours emergent levels without collapsing to reductionism; universal destination of goods recognizes participation in the Good as birthright, not earned privilege. Where CST has sometimes lacked robust metaphysical grounding beyond theological assertion, the trinitarian social ontology supplies philosophical architecture demonstrating why relationality, participation, and justice are ontological imperatives rather than ethical preferences. This essay argues that the Trinity, reinterpreted through critical realism and participatory metaphysics, discloses both the archetypal structure of social reality and the formal grammar through which societies approximate the transcendent Good via dialectical development.
More generally, this work seeks to also address the historical antagonism yet latent convergence between CST and socialist political economy. Where socialism provides structural sophistication regarding mechanisms of exploitation and ideological reproduction, it remains yoked to thin normative foundations—explaining how oppression functions but struggling to ground why emancipation constitutes genuine good beyond contingent interests or immanent historical teleology. Conversely, CST's robust participatory metaphysics grounding justice in transcendent Good lacks adequate account of the generative mechanisms through which “structural sin” reproduces across institutional, relational, and ideational dimensions. The present framework effects genuine transposition: supplying what CR lacks meta-ethically while operationalizing CST's normative commitments through rigorous social ontology. Where one tradition offers structural analysis with limited normative depth, the other offers metaphysical depth without structural mechanism. Dialectical spiritual realism integrates both—rendering the opposition not false dichotomy but developmental dialectic.
The Trinity, reinterpreted as social ontology, designates the irreducible threefold differentiation of Structure (the objective conditioning order comprising material, institutional, relational, and ideational configurations), Agency (embodied, relationally situated subjectivity), and Ideology (symbolic-ideological configuration operating as configurational force) as mutually constitutive dimensions of a singular social reality.
Where Bhaskar articulates structure and agency as generative mechanisms in morphogenetic interdependence, and Archer productively engages their ontological distinctness across temporal cycles, both retain a largely immanentist ontology in their account of value—while affirming the intransitive dimension of material-social structures, they systematically bracket the meta-ethical grounding necessary for robust moral realism. Bhaskar's attempt to ground ethics through universalizing "freedom" and "absenting absences" provides only thin normativity—incapable of distinguishing authentic liberation from constructed desire or common good from aggregate preference. In Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, Bhaskar develops a powerful account of real absences as motor for societal evolution, yet the normative status of "freedom" as the telos of this dialectic remains under-argued. As Duindam observes, transcendental arguments for a stratified ontology do not, by themselves, ground the normativity of any particular end; they establish what is (structures, absences, powers) but not what ought to be. Our framework adopts critical realism's ontology of absence and dialectical transformation while insisting that the Good requires independent ontological grounding through participatory metaphysics. Critical realism lacks adequate account of the immaterial-yet-real: how meaning, normativity, and the Good operate as causally efficacious beyond being "cultural emergent properties" (CEPs). What remains missing is the open dialectic of universal and particular—Hegel's insight that the universal (the Good) does not exist as static abstraction but returns perpetually in ever-new particular forms. Our trinitarian framework supplies this missing dimension: Ideology operates not merely as language or socio-historical repositories of ideas, concepts or theories but as configurational force mediating between transcendent Good (universal) and concrete social formations (particular), while Structure–Agency–Ideology together constitute the generative mechanism through which finite societies participate—always imperfectly—in intransitive yet immaterial normativity.
Crucially, this triad exhibits functional asymmetry while maintaining ontological parity: Structure and Agency are objective–subjective poles, while Ideology is the mediating dynamic—the configurational force through which structure conditions agency (via interpretive frameworks) and agency transforms structure (via symbolically mediated action that sediments into institutions). Ideology is neither "third substance" nor epiphenomenal byproduct but irreducible regulatory mechanism: it operates in purposeful agency and sediments into path-dependent structures, constituting the very process of social becoming. This asymmetry mirrors classical pneumatology—in our social-ontological transposition (not in dogmatic theology where Spirit is fully hypostasis), Spirit functions analogically as the relational bond itself: in Augustinian language, the mutual love between Father and Son; in social ontology, the morphogenetic process whereby structure–agency achieve meaningful rather than mechanical relation. The three dimensions are thus asymmetrical in function but equal in ontological dignity—each exercises sui generis causal powers irreducible to the others.
Structure encompasses three irreducible yet interdependent dimensions: institutional (formal organizational–legal arrangements), relational (social positions, role structures, network configurations), and ideational (discursive-symbolic repertoires—Archer's CEPs). These are not separate domains but aspects of the semi-permanent conditioning order pre-existing individual agency. All social structures are fundamentally relational—constituted through patterns of human interdependence—yet they differ in their specific mode of operation and causal efficacy. Institutional structures formalize regularized behavioural patterns into codified laws, rules, technologies and procedures; relational structures comprise the positions, roles and networks through which agents are configured; ideational structures provide the linguistic and symbolic repertoires mediating meaning. Ideology configures all three dimensions: legitimating arrangements as functional (institutional), rendering asymmetries as natural (relational), stabilizing categories, ideas or theories as common sense (ideational).
Structure operates analogously to the Father in classical theology—arche without domination, source without hierarchy—conditioning agency without eliminating freedom, shaping possibilities without necessitating outcomes. Father as Structure names not mechanical determinism but the principial normative order: institutions, property relations, legal frameworks, language, relationships, and material configurations that pre-exist individual entry into social life and establish the field of possibility. These structures are objective (one occupies positions independent of awareness or consent) yet never self-legitimating; its authority depends on ideological mediation, its reproduction requires agential enactment, its transformation emerges through contradictions that expose incompleteness. What Bhaskar terms real absence names the non-presence of potential goods that have been rendered inaccessible yet remain ontologically possible.
Agency designates embodied, intentional, historically situated subjectivity: concrete persons and collectives who enact, contest, reproduce, or transform structural arrangements through contextualized practice. Son as Agency corresponds to the incarnation of principle in finite existence—where abstract order particularizes, where universal becomes concrete, where structure takes historical form. Yet agency is never sovereign autonomy; subjects are always already constituted within structural-symbolic horizons that provide the very categories through which selfhood becomes intelligible, desire is oriented, and action gains meaning. Agency thus possesses genuine causal power yet operates within configurational constraints that render certain choices probable while foreclosing moral imagination capable of envisioning alternatives.
Ideology operates as configurational third: the symbolic-ideological matrix mediating structure–agency relation by assigning meaning to structural positions, constituting subjects capable of specific forms of action, legitimating institutional arrangements as natural or contingent, and channeling agential energies toward particular ends. Spirit as Ideology is understood in the Hegelian sense of “Geist”—necessary mediation of all social life through symbolic forms—yet it remains subject to distortion when symbolic orders systematically conceal real absences and thereby obstruct participation in the Good. Nevertheless, an ideology Zeitgeist always carries latent emancipatory potential: through discourses naming absence as absence, symbolic ruptures delegitimating dominant common sense, transformed narratives rendering previously unthinkable alternatives suddenly imaginable.
This trinitarian ontology articulates perichoretic non-reductive relationality whereby structure, agency, and ideology mutually constitute one another without hierarchy, competition, or external mediation—what we term morphogenetic interdependence. Structure is always already ideologically mediated; agency is structurally conditioned and symbolically constituted; ideology requires material embodiment and agential enactment. This mutual constitution operates without final determination in the last instance: each dimension exercises sui generis causal powers while remaining intrinsically relational, such that the trinitarian form as totality constitutes the generative mechanism whose morphogenetic dynamics produce empirically observable social phenomena.
III. The Good Society: Dialectics, Resurrection, and the Normative Form of Social Reality
The Good operates as transcendent horizon—intransitive reality beyond social construction—while the trinitarian form functions as immanent generative mechanism: the optimal configuration through which finite systems approximate (never exhaust) infinite normativity. The Good is not identical with the Trinity (which would collapse transcendence into immanence) but remains irreducibly prior, while the Trinity provides the archetypal structure enabling participation. This resolves the Platonic multitude-of-forms problem: many social configurations participate in the one Good, but the trinitarian form—structure–agency–ideology in perichoretic harmony—constitutes the optimal pattern for such participation.
Within the metaphysical lineage from Plato through Augustine, participation in the Good is fundamentally a movement of desire: eros in the Symposium as ascent toward the Good, and caritas in Augustine as rightly ordered love aligning finite relationality with infinite plenitude. The normative core of the good society is not subjective preference or procedural equilibrium but ordered relationality: the structural-symbolic configuration that enables finite agents to participate truthfully in the Good through just, meaningful, non-instrumental relation. Power in this schema is not eliminable but normatively ordered: collective capacity structured toward participation in the Good rather than domination or privation.
The decisive metaphysical move concerns dialectics. A purely static social ontology cannot account for normative movement, historicity, contradiction, or the emergence of new forms of relational order. Hegel's great contribution—abstracted from its theological immanentism—is the insight that the universal (the Good) does not reside in a fixed form but returns in ever-new particular instantiations: the universal made concrete again and again through determinate negation, contradiction, and renewal. However, where Hegel potentially errs is in treating this return a closed teleology. Our speculative framework rejects closure while preserving the essential intuition: the Good becomes socially intelligible only through historically contingent configurations whose failure or contradiction opens the possibility for new instantiations.
It is in this sense that resurrection names the dialectical moment of normative emergence. In theology it is gratuitous novum; in social ontology it is the dialectical event through which an existing symbolic-structural order is revealed as incomplete, unable to ground itself, and therefore open to transformation. Resurrection is not merely the negation of the old nor the mechanical synthesis of contradiction; it is the disclosure of a new intelligibility not derivable from prior determination. It marks the limit of immanent rationality and the opening toward a configuration more adequate to the Good. Resurrection is thus the symbolic form of dialectical transcendence: the pattern through which the Good becomes historically re-articulated without being historically contained.
This resurrectional dialectic is not an episodic anomaly but the very condition under which the good society becomes possible. A society is "good" not because it achieves a final configuration but because its structure–agency–ideology triad is ordered such that: (1) contradictions become visible rather than ideologically concealed; (2) inadequacies can be judged in reference to an intransitive Good; and (3) new relational forms can emerge through historical rupture rather than mere incremental accommodation. Thus the good society is a dialectically open order: its normativity is anchored in the transcendent Good, its intelligibility is mediated through trinitarian form, and its transformation becomes possible through resurrectional rupture understood as non-Hegelian novum. The Good Society, therefore, is not the immanent achievement of a perfected order but the historically renewed, dialectically open configuration in which the trinitarian structure of social reality participates analogically in the one Good through ever-new forms. Resurrection is the dialectical key to this openness: it is the principle by which the universal becomes newly particular, the mechanism through which normative renewal becomes possible, and the signature by which the Good calls finite societies beyond any achieved form toward deeper participation.
IV. The Developmental Logic: Theosis as the Dialectical Movement of Social Transformation
If the good society is the historically renewed configuration of structure, agency, and ideology through which finite social reality analogically participates in the transcendent Good, then the decisive question concerns the logic by which such participation develops. The theological analogue is theosis: the transformative movement in which human beings are drawn into communion with divine life. Transposed into secular participatory metaphysics grounded in critical realism and dialectical idealism, theosis becomes the developmental grammar of social reality itself—the ongoing, recursive process through which persons, communities, and institutions confront privation, undergo rupture, and reconfigure themselves toward fuller, though never complete, participation in the Good.
Development begins with the recognition that social reality is never a neutral field but always marked by what classical theology would call sin—understood as structured real absence. Augustine's account of sin as privation (the absence of a due perfection), Bhaskar's notion of real absence (a determinate non-being with causal force), Hegel's determinate negation (the internal contradiction driving movement), and Lacan's constitutive lack (the void structuring symbolic order) converge in illuminating that human and social life unfold within patterns of incompletion that simultaneously constrain and call forth transformation. These theories, while arising from distinct ontological commitments, prove functionally complementary when transposed into social-ontological analysis because our unified framework treats them not as mere metaphors but as partially convergent articulations of a single ontological structure—absence/lack as causally efficacious mode-of-being that operates simultaneously across theological (privation of due perfection), material-structural (real non-presence), symbolic (void in order), and subjective (constitutive lack) dimensions of social reality: each illuminates how absence operates causally across different dimensions of the unified social reality we term structured real absence. Sin is not an inventory of moral transgressions but the ontological blockage woven into structural, symbolic, and agential configurations: the sedimentation of distorted institutions that foreclose participation; the ideological concealment of absence that naturalizes misalignment; the habituated dispositions of agents whose moral imagination has been limited by these closures. It is the social-ontological inversion of perichoresis: where trinitarian relationality is mutual indwelling, sin is mutual estrangement; where the Trinity is generative communion, sin is the fragmentation of relational truth.
Against this background of privation, grace appears not as supernatural infusion but as the transcendental possibility of dialectical movement itself—the enabling condition by which agents, collectives, and institutions become capable of perceiving and responding to the Good. Grace retains its double structure: a negative moment of rupture and a positive moment of reconfiguration.
Negatively, grace corresponds to the epistemic and existential break in which ideological closure is pierced, absence becomes visible as absence, and the taken-for-granted horizon of social meaning begins to dissolve. This moment is articulated within critical realism as meta-reflexivity and explanatory critique: the agent's capacity to step outside sedimented structures, interrogate generative mechanisms, recognize natural necessity, and acknowledge the contingency of what previously appeared inevitable. In our terms, these critical realist capacities—meta-reflexivity, explanatory critique, judgmental rationality—are not merely higher-order cognitive skills but finite modalities of participation in the Good: they are the ways in which agents, situated within particular structures and symbolic orders, become responsive to real absences and thus available to grace in a secular sense. Dialectically, this appears as the disintegration of an inadequate universal, and in Lacanian terms as the exposure of the non-existence of the Big Other—the collapse of symbolic guarantees that previously sustained the subject. This is Žižek's traversal of fantasy materialized: the moment when symbolic coordinates stabilizing identity collapse, when the Big Other's non-existence becomes experientially undeniable, when subjects confront the void at structure's heart. Lacan's constitutive lack operates as subjective analogue of Bhaskar's structural real absence: both are modes of non-being that nonetheless exercise causal force—structuring desire, destabilizing forms, making critique possible. A dialectical spiritual realism must be realist about lack and absence, not merely about positive entities: the void in the symbolic order and the privation in structural configurations are equally real, equally efficacious, equally demanding response. This rupture is necessary, yet insufficient, for transformation: without it, development remains static; with it alone, development risks nihilism.
The positive moment of grace therefore names the constructive reorientation that becomes possible once rupture has taken place: the awakening of moral imagination, the receptivity to unrealized potentials, the capacity for judgmental rationality to discern more adequate forms of participation in light of the Good. This positive movement is not arbitrary projection but grounded in the ontological teleology of love—agape understood in the Platonic-Augustinian sense as the self-transcending orientation toward fulfillment in the Good. Already in Plato's Symposium, eros is the soul's ascent toward Beauty itself; in Augustine, caritas is the dynamism of being drawn into divine life through the love that God is. Transposed analogically, love becomes the inner principle of social development: the normative horizon toward which structural reconfiguration, symbolic renewal, and agential transformation are ordered within communities organised by solidarity and subsidiarity. Grace in this secular register is therefore the activation of this teleological orientation, enabling finite beings to participate in relational truth in ways that exceed the constraints of inherited forms.
Within this structure, resurrection functions as the developmental principle that makes theosis possible. Resurrection is not merely a doctrinal claim but the formal pattern through which genuinely new social configurations emerge. It signifies that dialectical movement does not culminate in fatalistic repetition nor in logically deduced necessity but in contingent yet real novelty. Resurrection thus names the moment when negation gives way to unprecedented articulation: when the void disclosed within the existing symbolic-material order becomes the occasion for a new instantiation of the universal Good. This pattern governs both personal transformation and systemic renewal: the exposure of contradiction, the dissolution of inadequate forms, and the emergence of a historically non-derivable alternative that reconstitutes the triadic relation of structure, agency, and ideology. It is the social-ontological grammar of societal development itself.
Resurrection is not Hegelian Aufhebung but gratuitous novum: the emergence of genuinely new configuration establishing ontologically real (not merely symbolic) possibilities for participation previously structurally absent. Christ's death represents dialectical negation carried to absolute limit: the subject who fully identifies with normative order yet whose faithfulness exposes that order's incompleteness, its incapacity to ground itself—Žižek's insight that the cry of dereliction discloses the Big Other's non-existence, the void at structure's heart, the real absence that ideology normally conceals—theologically, the self-emptying (kenosis) whereby divine transcendence is disclosed precisely through abandonment; sociologically, the exposure of symbolic order's incapacity to ground itself. This is resurrection as pattern: systemic crisis exposing contradictions (death), emergence of alternative configuration (resurrection), communal enactment sustaining transformation (Spirit)—a morphogenetic cycle that can regress yet remains perpetually available through grace-enabled rupture.
Theosis, therefore, is the unified developmental process through which social reality becomes capable of approximating the Good. It is not a stage or outcome but the continual dynamism by which persons, institutions, and symbolic orders are drawn into deeper participation. In dialectical terms, each movement of theosis is the emergence of a new particular configuration in which the universal Good returns in a form more adequate to its normativity, without ever exhausting it. This process is intrinsically trinitarian.
Structure undergoes theosis when its sedimented arrangements are recognized as inadequate, opened to critique, and reconfigured to enable richer relationality. Agency undergoes theosis through developmental transformation from immature to mature participation: immature agency lacks meta-reflexive capacity to question structural positioning or examine ideological formation—ideology operates in such agents unconsciously, the subject is their ideological interpellation. Taylor's phenomenology of moral identity illuminates this developmental necessity: the self cannot coherently navigate moral space without strong evaluation oriented toward qualitative distinctions that transcend both instrumental reason and subjective preference. What Taylor terms "moral horizons"—frameworks of meaning providing standards by which life-choices gain significance—function analogously to what our ontology terms participation in the Good.
The collapse into weak evaluation (preferences without qualitative worth-distinctions) or procedural liberalism (right without the good) produces precisely the existential hollowness characteristic of immature agency: subjects who experience freedom as burden, choice as anxiety, unable to answer "what makes life worth living?" without invoking goods they simultaneously deny as merely constructed. Just as Kant recognized God's practical necessity as regulative ideal securing moral rationality's coherence, Taylor's phenomenology demonstrates the Good's existential necessity: identity itself disintegrates without transcendent orientation. Mature agency, therefore, is not optional ethical achievement but condition for coherent selfhood—the capacity to participate in the Good through strong evaluation is simultaneously the capacity for identity as such. Mature agency achieves critical distance through explanatory critique, exercising judgmental rationality and practical wisdom in discerning the form the Good must take in concrete circumstances.
Ideology undergoes theosis when symbolic orders are purified of distortion, rendered transparent to truth, and capable of mediating the Good without collapsing it into immanent closure. Here we refine the initial analogical mapping: where Part I identified Spirit with Ideology as the third configurational dimension, we now distinguish analytically between ideology in two registers—first, sedimented “ideology” in the colloquial sense as Archer's ideational structures (CEPs: the repository of available ideas, theories, language, concepts functioning as cultural legacy); second, Ideology as configurational force (the dynamic symbolic mediation actively shaping structure-agency relations). Spirit names Ideology in this second sense when it operates truthfully: not the sedimented cultural repertoire but the living symbolic mediation rendered transparent to the Good, capable of bearing normative weight without distortion. Where critical realism speaks of dialectical movement toward freedom, we speak of Spirit as Ideology functioning redemptively—the dialectical mediation by which absences are disclosed, judged, and reconfigured in light of the Good rather than in terms of an immanentized telos. Spirit is thus not a separate entity but Ideology as configurational force oriented toward truth—the trinitarian dynamism internal to the process of theosis.
At the level of agency, the developmental movement of theosis unfolds through the grammar of practical wisdom—not as an imported framework but as the very logic of participation in the Good, what we term contemplative praxis. To see is to recognize real absences, contradictions, and distortions in the present configuration through meta-reflexive critique; to imagine is to allow moral imagination informed by explanatory critique to discern possibilities latent in the structure of reality; to judge is to evaluate these possibilities in light of the transcendent Good using judgmental rationality; to act is to instantiate these judgments in material and symbolic form, thereby sedimenting more adequate patterns of relational life. These four movements constitute a single dialectical process: the recursive, historically situated enactment of participation. Thus the developmental logic of theosis describes the movement through which social reality deepens its participation in the Good: the unveiling of privation, the rupture of closure, the emergence of new configurations, and the ongoing refinement of structure, agency, and ideology through the dialectical work of truthfulness, imagination, discernment, and enactment. It is the intelligible form of historical transformation grounded in a participatory metaphysics of the Good, and it is the analogue, within a secular social ontology, of the classical Christian claim that creation is drawn toward its fulfillment through the dynamic, relational life of the Trinity.
The practical wisdom guiding this labor operates through perpetual attention to what may be described as "gaps to good": the measurable distances between actual configuration and potential participation, between empirical reality and transcendent norm. These gaps appear at every level: personally, as dissonance between professed values and enacted practices (requiring meta-reflexive recognition); communally, as contradictions between organizational mission and operational routines (requiring structural redesign); systemically, as the chasm between ideological promise and material consequence (requiring prophetic discourse). While the normative reality of gaps is philosophically grounded, their empirical specification requires context-specific discernment—organizational audits, participatory research, prophetic testimony—that translate transcendent criteria into historically situated judgment.
The gap to good is not deficiency to be eliminated through technique but permanent condition of finite participation: even societies approximating the Good confront new gaps as transformation discloses previously invisible absences. This perpetual incompletion is not tragic but constitutive: the gap is simultaneously wound (mark of privation requiring healing) and opening (space where grace enters, where human freedom cooperates with transcendent attraction). To discern, measure, and faithfully engage these gaps—through the recursive cycle of seeing depth beneath surfaces, imagining unrealized potentials grounded in structural understanding, judging with practical wisdom that honors complexity without collapsing into relativism, and acting with courage grounded in participatory hope despite radical uncertainty about outcomes—is what it means to participate in the Good within history's constraints.
V. Conclusion: Toward a Participatory Metaphysics of Social Flourishing
If social reality is constituted through the trinitarian form of structure, agency, and ideology; if the good society is the historically renewed configuration through which these dimensions participate analogically in the transcendent Good; and if development is the secular analogue of theosis—the dialectical movement whereby privation is named, rupture occurs, and new forms of relational life emerge—then the final task is to articulate what it means to inhabit this ontology with integrity, coherence, and hope.
The ontology articulated constitutes a dialectical spiritual realism: dialectical in adopting from Bhaskar's Dialectic the account of real absences and their contradictory movement; spiritual in refusing to treat the Good as merely projected telos, instead affirming transcendent intransitive normativity; realist in treating both structures and absences, meanings and norms, as mind-independent features of reality with which we stand in participatory relation. Where critical realism speaks of dialectical movement toward freedom, we speak of dialectical movement toward fuller participation in the Good—a shift from under-argued axiom to metaphysically grounded teleology. Transcendental idealism functions modestly as reminder that intelligibility has conditions: our capacity to name absences and judge configurations presupposes more than empirical causality. Participatory metaphysics then supplies what critical realism systematically brackets: an ontology of value grounded in the self-diffusive Good that is prior to, yet mediated through, the trinitarian structure of social reality. Dialectical spiritual realism may thus be read as a normatively thickened extension of critical realism rather than rejection of its ontological claims: it retains the account of real absences and contradiction-driven change while subjecting the implicit teleology of freedom to participatory-metaphysical critique.[^2]
To affirm that the Good remains transcendent is to insist that no historical configuration, however refined, can exhaust its normativity or claim finality. This is not a pessimistic limitation but an ontological safeguard: participation is always partial, asymptotic, and open-ended. The trinitarian form, as archetypal structure, functions not as blueprint but as regulative horizon—an intelligible pattern enabling societies to discern the alignment or distortion of their structure–agency–ideology configurations. The Good is the measure, the criterion against which all historical formations are judged; the trinitarian form is the modality of participation; development is the ongoing drama in which social reality draws nearer to or falls further from the possibility of flourishing.
Within this frame, the good society is not a static equilibrium or utopian ideal but a dynamic ordering of relational life in which structure enables rather than constrains, agency exercises freedom within mutual intelligibility, and ideology mediates the meaning of social existence truthfully rather than mystifyingly. Such a society is marked by relational depth, normative openness, and practical wisdom: a social existence capable of recognizing its absences, imagining unrealized potentials, judging in light of transcendent criteria, and acting with courage in conditions of uncertainty. This is the secular grammar of caritas, the analogical transposition of agape into social-ontological terms: not sentiment, nor mere distributive fairness, but the ordering of social energies toward the Good understood as the flourishing of persons-in-relation. Justice is thus not external constraint but the architectural articulation of a society's orientation toward the Good: the structuring of social arrangements such that each person receives what is due in relation to the whole—the operationalization of love at systemic scale.
The developmental model elaborated through the secularization of theosis is not supplementary ethics but the very logic of social transformation. It describes how societies move from distorted configurations toward fuller participation: through the unveiling of absences, through dialectical rupture, through the emergence of new instantiations of the Good, and through the recursive refinement of practices, institutions, and symbolic orders. It also clarifies the fragility of this movement: development can falter at any moment, as structure becomes rigid, agency becomes complacent, or ideology becomes opaque. Theosis is thus not inevitable progress but the ever-precarious labor of aligning finite realities with transcendent normativity.
In the end, the speculative social ontology constructed offers not a theological metaphor masquerading as sociology, nor a sociological reduction of theological insight, nor a positivist empiricism denying normative depth, nor a constructivist relativism collapsing the Good into social projection, nor simply critical realism supplemented with theological language, but a genuine transposition: the retrieval of the Trinity as an archetypal form illuminating the deep relational grammar of social existence; the reinterpretation of the Good as transcendent normativity grounding moral realism; the recognition of development as the secularized form of theosis; and the affirmation of resurrection as the intelligible possibility of historical novelty. For those willing to see the absences that structure our world, to imagine what might yet be, to judge in light of enduring truth, and to act in fidelity to the Good, participation becomes not merely a conceptual category but a lived vocation: the ongoing work of making reality more transparent to the fullness it is called to reflect.
[^1]: This use of "dialectical spiritual realism" is distinct from "theological critical realism" as developed in natural theology (Polkinghorne, Torrance) and from Norrie's "ethical naturalism" within critical realist legal theory. Where theological CR seeks consonance between scientific realism and Christian doctrine, and Norrie grounds ethics in embodied human nature, our framework explicitly adopts participatory metaphysics to ground normativity in a transcendent Good mediated through trinitarian social form. It shares with Norrie the rejection of thin normative universalism but differs in its metaphysical commitments and explicitly theological (though secularized) architectonic
[^2]: Bhaskar's later metaReality writings move toward spiritual/cosmic consciousness; our framework differs by maintaining stronger transcendence-immanence distinction via participatory metaphysics rather than monistic ground-state. We adopt the ontology of absence and dialectical transformation from Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom while diverging on normative grounding
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Indicative Reference List
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Archer, M.S. (1995) Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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