Alternatively, I Have a Point & I'll Never Get To It

Either way, the point is the unending tension between two knowable unknowns: immanence and transcendence. No one in principle can ever "know himself," any more than the eye could ever see itself. Nor can God ever be known. Rather, both the immanent self and transcendent God are known in the knowing.

Which also means that certain "arrows" or vectors are built into the nature of things, which I believe goes to the mystery of time.

For what is time but a direction? Yes, it is also a flow, but it never flows backward. Just as spatial immanence points to transcendence, the temporal present points to a future that is also a knowable unknown. Freedom, in the fullest sense, is a combination of the two movements. Put conversely, neither temporal (horizontal) history nor present (vertical) illumination are inevitable or complete.

In both cases -- space and time -- we should focus on the knowable links, or fruitful relations, between the two unknowables: what Voegelin calls the metaxy is to space as the present is to time. History is unknowable in part because there exists freedom in the luminous space between man and the transcendent ground. We might say that mere duration intertwines with human choice, resulting in history (since bare time isn't history at all, just change).

Compare this to, say, dialectical materialism, in which what happens must happen. Although this sophistry is a form of "historicism," it fundamentally removes history from time, and should be called "dehistoricism."

This has practical considerations, because it explains why leftism is always and everywhere so ahistorical. It's not that they're ahistorical because they're leftists; rather, they're leftists because they're ahistorical. Not only do they immanentize the eschaton, they horizontalize the vertical and then wonder where all the fun went.

Moreover, cosmically speaking this is the literal opposite of "progress," because it reverts to a con-fusion of realities that history has differentiated (de-fused). You'll even hear certain tenured yahoos say they prefer paganism to Christianity, and then wonder why it results in tribalism, oppression, sacrifice, uniformity, loss of individuality, in short, a barbarous world of identity politics unfit for human habitation, like an armed college campus:

The tensional movement in consciousness develops as a striving for attunement: we seek attunement with truth as far as we can. If we do not attain it with some degree of satisfaction, then there is discord and misery in our own being. We become what is variously represented as evil, unjust, and unhappy men. The higher capacities do not master the lower. Such men may be a walking civil war... (Webb).

And talking civil war, or maybe you don't pay attention to the MSM. In any event, "Man's existence is not primarily an external or phenomenal reality but rather the In-Between existence of participation" (ibid.).

This In-Between existence is our permanent condition: "Somehow we participate and must participate in both the temporal and the spiritual, if we are to live lives esteemed to be fit for human beings" (ibid.).

The choice is ours, even though there's really no choice, any more than we can choose to ignore gravity. We can, but not really, for the person who denies reality is nevertheless subject to it -- as is true of the atheist vis-a-vis God, a subject to which we will eventually circle back.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's try to actually clear it up. I'll start with Pieper, because he's the clearest and most concise of the various authors I'm attempting to juggle here.

Recall the title of the book: Hope and History. History isn't only "in" time, but it is the form of human temporality; there is no such thing as a human without history, as the two come into existence simultaneously. But hope can only occur in the present. While it reaches forward, it is first a "reaching upward" toward the transcendent. Again, it is fundamentally a link between two great knowable unknowns.

This is about as clear as it can be said:

The one who hopes, and he alone, anticipates nothing; he holds himself open for an as yet unrealized future fulfillment while at the same time remaining aware that he knows as little about its scope as about its time of arrival.

Again, hope flourishes in a space of vertical openness (o) toward the transcendent (O). You've no doubt noesissed that history conceals its own meaning from us, and can never never be comprehended from within. Which calls to mind a cryptic aphorism by Señor D:

If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous.

I hate to end this discussion right in the middle, but then, where else could it possibly end? But there are errands to run and nuisances to check off the list, so we'll try to clear things up in the next post.