The Principle of Contingent Causation: The Impossibility of Infinite Regress.

[Belacqua]

Speaking only for myself, capitol-T Totality refers to some kind of Plotinus/neo-Platonic One or “the All”. While not a cause proper, the idea is of the all-encompassing wholeness of everything that exists. The Totality is akin to Anselm’s being the greater than which cannot be conceived. And the pantheism comes from Swedenborg’s visionary insight that God did not create ex nihilo; buth rather our of Himself, which to my mind implies an act of kenosis.

Yes, I think this is absolutely the way to go. 

It's not going to work if we keep thinking of the First Cause as something outside of or in addition to the universe. People are still thinking of the old man in the sky who pushes levers. It makes way more sense to see it as the One. 

I may be reading that through later thinkers, but as I understand it the One is, as you say, all there is. The fact that it appears to us as divided is only due to our limited perception -- we must divide to understand, but division is also an illusion. 

This would make the First Cause an essential cause, not temporal, since the One has no beginning. And, as you were saying earlier, it is immanent in every place and particle. 

The parallels here with Vedantic and Buddhist thinking here lend the whole thing weight. 

Does the idea of kenosis originate in Christianity? I'm thinking that if the One or God somehow lessens himself to create the world, that's kenosis. But if the apparent lessening is in fact due to our limited perception, then it there is no real kenosis. But I'm not sure about that. 

The physical universe for certain IMHO but of course opinions vary about the reality of other categories of being such qualities, universals, and mathematical objects…and that’s not to mention (I guess I am) meaning and/or intentionality as a real part of the cosmos that cannot be hand-waved away or taken for granted.

Yes, good point. These are all metaphysical things, and not testable by science. So I think the challenges to a First Cause through science are misguided.

Not a part. I think that is the mistake being made. Perhaps there is a distinct but inalienable quality common to all beings but rather than looking down to find a particular common quality that we look “up” to see what degree a particular being partakes of the nature of the whole….which IMHO can only be known by what it is not (the Negative Way).

You're right -- it would be a mistake for me to say that the First Cause is a part of the whole, or one of the things we could add to a list of all the things that exist in the world.