Focus on Man

That's an order!

Sometimes it helps to know what something is by knowing what it isn't. 

For example, we say that God is infinite. However, this is a wholly negative, apophatic characterization, since it simply means not finite: in other words God can't be finite, therefore he's infinite. Which we can't ever wrap our minds around, even though we know with 100% certitude that it is true.

Which is an intriguing proposition, because it means man can know with certitude things he can most certainly never understand. Call it a primordial orthoparadox if you like. 

Similar examples abound, and I've been thinking about them since March of 1985, although I don't recall if I've ever posted on the subject.

For example, man is the being who knows he will die. But what is death? We can't say. Or, we can say (similar to in-finite) that it's not-life, but what is life? Life is the transcendence of matter, so is death the transcendence of life?

There's another one: tran-scend. What's that? To climb across, surmount; to rise above or go beyond the limits of: exceed. We can scarcely be human without the word transcend or some equivalent to it. So, humans routinely travel across and rise above & beyond. Yes, but to where? To in-finity, and beyond!

Back in March of 1985 I was in grad school, where I was learning all about the unconscious. What's that? Easy: un-conscious. Oh. Like, in-animate? No, inanimate things are not conscious. Okay, like death? No, that's... we don't know what that is. See paragraph six.

Eventually I realized that conscious / unconscious isn't a dualism but a complementarity. Nor is it an antithesis, like, say, good and evil, for in that case, evil is a privation. As mentioned in a comment yesterday, it has no positive ontological reality, but is only parasitic on it.

The unconscious isn't like that. It's not a privation or negation of consciousness. Rather, it's more like the dark side of the moon: we know -- with certitude! -- it's there. We just can't see it. 

Likewise the unconscious, which, in my considered opinion, bears the same relation to consciousness as does Beyond-Being to Being, or perhaps even Father to Son, being that the latter is a kind of "specification" of the former.

Analogously speaking, of course. But again, if God goes to all the trouble of revealing his trinitarian innards to us, I think we should take it seriously as a way to deepen our understanding of what's going on down here. We need to use it as a way to bust out of our habitual approach to things, which is -- at least for pinheads -- too linear and rationalistic.

I see. So we should be ir-rational or anti-rational? No, not at all; rather, trans-rational. God is telling us what he's like, which is a good thing, because we can't get there via mere reason. Reason, limited to its own devices, leads to inevitable impasses and absurdities, if only because reason can never furnish its own premises. Theology -- at least trans-natural theology -- really comes down to reasoning about premises furnished by God.

Looked at in this manner, there is nothing irrational about trinitarian metaphysics, even though reason could never arrive at it unaided. But once it is revealed to us, we can reason about it all day long.

Focus! Yes, back to man. What can reason tell us about the nature of man? Not much, except to say that man is the rational animal, which is a tautology, unless we can track down the actual source of reason. 

Revelation, which is trans- (not anti-!) rational, tells us we are in the image of the Creator, and now we're getting somewhere. To put it conversely, we can't get anywhere with a false image of man, and any image that excludes the Creator is a false one. 

Certitude. 

Human beings are uniquely able to stand aside, above, or beyond themselves and observe their own existence, and only a fundamentally im-material being can do this. Rocks can't escape themselves. They are incapable of ec-stacy. 

Change my mind:

the Trinity is eternal, but not in the sense of being indifferent to or opposed to time. Rather, it is supratemporal and includes the reality of time, analogously, within itself. Thus, the Trinity is not merely timeless or atemporal. If it were, then eternity would be opposed to temporality as its transcendent negation (Chapp). 

Just kidding. Some things will never change, and this is one of them. I want to say Bob's mind is made up, and it is, but that's merely the effect of a deeper cause. For example, if I look out my window and see a tree, I don't say, "My mind is made up: that's a tree, and you can't talk me out of it."

True, you can't talk me out of it, but that's because no one talked me into it. Rather, the tree is just there prior to my thinking about it. You are free to argue about whether the tree is really there or not there at all, but I've accepted its ex-istence and moved on. I'm out of here.

To Be con-tinuous...