Man's Perfect Incompleteness

About that hole in the center of man: again, it is unlike anything else found in all of nature. No one expects a pig to be a better pig. A pig is just a pig. It can't fall short of its piggyness, any more than a community organizer can surpass being a community organizer. It is as if there is no space in the pig -- or the dreaded C.O. -- to be anything other than what it is.

Thus, the human space is associated first and foremost with freedom and possibility: if necessity is a two-dimensional line, then freedom is a three-dimensional space (four if we add the time component).

You could say that the pig is already "perfect," because he never fails to be one. But man is never perfect: rather, perfectible. And unless I am mistaken, perfectibility is oddly superior to perfection.

Here again, this has to do with the psycho-pneumatic space we inhabit: because it is empty, it is able to be filled (but never completely). In short, if you never have a question, then you'll never have an answer. But if you have The Answer (in the static, secular sense of the term), then you have no questions and therefore no creative space or love shack.

Balthasar writes of how "man sees himself as the sum and perfect image of the cosmos"; in him there is "a kind of concentration, which makes man the synthesis of the world and raises him above it."

And yet, as with Adam, we are always aware of incompleteness, hence the complementary creation of Eve, thank you very much. Of note, Eve is a part of Adam, and yet, someone obviously separate and distinct.

This is a mythic way of expressing our irreducible intersubjectivity, whereby we are simultaneously one and two. However, the oneness must be prior, otherwise there would be no way for two to return to one. Twoness is an existential fact, oneness an "ontological memory," so to speak. It may be also bound up with memories of paradise, for all I know.

In any event, twoness is always in search of oneness, or of higher unity, integration, totality, etc. It's the arc of our lives. The part wants to know it is more than just a meaningless fragment, but rather, part of a higher unity. God's modus operandi -- and vivendi -- is always "unity in diversity" (Pursell).

So, thanks to our perfect incompleteness, "man finds his completion and his happiness only in communion with another human being" (Balthasar). But at the same time, this "gap in man's nature affects also his relationship to God." That is, our very incompleteness -- which can never complete itself -- points beyond itself toward its own possible fulfillment in relation to God.

For Balthasar, there are really only three ways to pull this off, and two of them may be reduced to one. Therefore, we're really talking about the Human way and the Christian way. This former way "consists in a soaring movement of the heart, which leaves the whole world of contradictory earthly existence beneath it in order to seek a home in the region of a superterrestrial divine power."

Underneath this is the simple premise that "all multiplicity is opposed to unity and has in some mysterious way fallen away from it; only unity can be true being." That being the case, the world is a kind of opaque barrier instead of luminous ladder; the difference between God and world is identical to the difference between true and false, or appearance and reality, or forsakenness and salvation.

As such, this "way of salvation demands an inner renunciation of worldly differences," of "seeing through them all to their identical divine ground."

Now, that idea is not completely wrong; rather, like all cosmic heresies, it is a partial truth inflated to the whole of things. Obviously the world is not God, so in that sense it is not the Truth. And yet, it is everywhere filled with truth and beauty, with intelligibility and harmony, and that's no accident. One might say that it is not Truth but not non-Truth either.

In the heresy under discussion, there is still a residue of love, but it is subtly different from the Christian version, for it involves "fidelity to the thou, not in its difference, but in its ultimate identity with the loving self." In other words, it is not like one loving the other and thereby discovering a higher unity-in-difference, but an obliteration of the twoness -- which results in a profound devaluation of our end of the bargain. We're just God playing hide-and-seek with himself.

Likewise, "compassion" still exists, but in the form of feeling sorry for those poor saps still imprisoned in individuality.

But I like my individuality, and I don't need anyone feeling sorry for it. Thanks but no thanks. I would prefer to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world than to pretend they're not really happening to someone who doesn't actually exist.

"This negation," writes Balthasar, "is directed against the very nature of man," in that it preserves its own version of truth -- its wholeness -- at the expense of "abandoning [man's] whole worldly reality." And where's the bloody sport in achieving wholeness by "draw[ing] out conclusions which ultimately cancel out man"? I can shoot myself and do that.