I don't want to get too far ahead of myself in the Theo-Logic, but rather, try to post as I'm making my way through it. So many thoughts arise, but just sail by if I don't catch them in flight and reduce them to a post.
We have often written of the "in between," i.e., the mysterious space between subject and object where it all goes down. This is because subject and object are primordial complements, neither one reducible to the other. Well, Balthasar agrees:
there is an indissoluble polarity between subject and object. Subject and object comprehend each other reciprocally, in the sense that the subject is introduced into the ever vaster world of the object, while the object's appearance opens it to be surveyed and judged from the subject's more comprehensive vantage point.
This means that subject and object, as subject and object, are always in communion with one another -- that world and intellect are two poles of a single dynamic, or inspiraling process. This is not woowoo deepakery. Rather, quite literal, matter-of-fact, and experience-near.
This explains why
truth begins to unfurl its inexhaustible plenitude -- which only goes on becoming more and more inexhaustible -- in the course of long familiarity with it.
Way back in the previous post we spoke of how ideology darkens the windows and bolts the doors, enclosing one in horizontality. In reality,
truth cannot itself be enclosed within the limits of any definition.... The land of truth has no fixed frontiers of the kind to be found on maps, because its essence and its domain are as boundless as the essence and domain of being itself.
Being, while infinite, is fungible into truth: "truth can only be described as a property of being and knowing." Truth can never exhaust being, but being can never cease from communicating its truth(s).
And yet, all the truth in the world adds not one whit to being, since being already subsumes anything and everything that Is. It's analogous to God: there's never more God, since God is essentially completeness itself.
As to the nature of being, consider this:
Consciousness implies not only the abstract property of being conscious, but also, with equal immediacy, the reality of being conscious....
Again, this is not a woowoo argument to the effect that "everything is consciousness." Thus,
It is not essential to the concept of truth that all being should be self-conscious, but it is essential that all being should have a relation to some self-consciousness.
This goes back to why reductionism of any kind is such a non-starter, since it always removes the subject from the cosmos, which necessarily removes the objects-in-communion with it. To use a biological analogy, it would be like a world of men with no women, or vice versa; or, it is like a language with no ears to hear it.
We'll end with this:
Now, this two-sided relation in which, on the one hand, the object is captured and enclosed within the subject, while, on the other hand, the subject is initiated into the all-embracing world of the objective disclosure of being, suggests a fundamental point that will be decisive for all our further reflections, namely, that truth is double-sided.
In other words, the disclosure of being implies an absolute and a relative aspect.
And boy is that important, all the way up to and including God.
1 comment:
Good morning, Anon. "Reductionism" in this case is the tendency for people to reduce existence to some of its component parts and then think they have understood the whole. Analogies include reducing a painting to its brushstrokes, reducing a song to its individual notes, or reducing a cake to its ingredients. Yes, all those things are required to make the thing what it is, but on their own they are not enough.
As to creation, in a very real sense, my children aren't not me; in fact, it is apparent every day that they are also not not their family, in the sense that they have characteristics, behaviors and personality traits in common with the extended families of both their parents, passed down through generations, which are intrinsic to them and would be expressed even if somehow they were raised by a completely different family. But at the same time, they are not me, or their father, their family, or anybody else. They are purely themselves.
When God breathed life into Man, what sprang to life wasn't not God, in a sense, but also very clearly man is not God, and terrible things inevitably happen when one becomes confused on that point.
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