Stuck in the Middle No More

It would appear that man was and is in something of an inescapable jam prior to the Incarnation. Let's say the A.I. people are correct that the human mind functions like a computer. Well, a computer must be programmed, and the program is a formal system. In a book called Brain, Mind and Computers, Jaki writes that

Gödel's theorem amounts in fact to stating a basic, insurmountable difference between the abilities of the human mind and of formal systems.... [A] machine, being a formal system, can never produce at least one truth, which the mind can do without relying on other minds....

 Moreover,

since machines are of necessity built of physical or chemical components, it also follows that the human mind cannot be fully explained in terms of physics or chemistry. 

In another book (Means to Message), Jaki observes that "As all artifacts, computers too are a sum of atoms." But 

If one's mental processes are equivalent to the actions of atoms, one can have no reason to assume that one's beliefs are true. Those beliefs may be sound chemically, but not intellectually.

As such, it would have made no difference to us if God had incarnated as an atom, chemical, book, or computer program. Rather, in order to span all levels of creation, he had to do so as a person.

This is not to say we can accomplish nothing from our end. Rather, we can and do transcend ourselves, but only so far. For example, the ancient Greeks arrived at the 

conception of the human as common boundary between animal and divine existence, the middle of the cosmos, neither raising himself in hubris to a superhuman existence, nor debasing his life in an attitude of cynicism, but revolving in the vital spheres to which man is bound by natural law (Werner Jaeger, in Clarke).

In other words, stay in your lane: you're not an animal, and you're certainly not God! The human lane rises above the animal lane, but it nevertheless ends in a cosmic nul de slack.  

For the early Fathers, this Greek idea of "the human person as frontier being, living on the edge of time and eternity, matter and spirit, was assimilated easily enough into Christian thought." Only now the road leads all the way up, plus it's a two-way street. Ontologically speaking, how convenient is that!  

This is a totally new development and novel principle, for not only is man the microcosm, but he is now, as it were, the micro-metacosm: not just a little cosmos but a participant in the living source of the cosmos. This source is revealed to us as metacosmic trinitarian personhood, for lack of a less cumbersome term, and it encompasses everything from the first Adam right down to the last atom. 

Among other pleasant consequences, there is a

positive valuation given to the human body and to the whole material world along with it.... Now the body is no longer something to be looked down upon, to be escaped from and left behind as soon as possible (ibid.).

Compare this attitude to the the preeminent neoplatonist, Plotinus. His crony, Porphyry, wrote that he "seemed ashamed of being in the body." Perhaps today we would say he had something similar to Gender Dysphoria, except he didn't want to just transition to a difference sex, but ascend out of the body altogether (indeed, transexuals probably suffer from something similar, only they conflate it with sex). 

But for the Christian,

the human person now becomes a microcosm in a new and richer sense than in the Platonic tradition: it incorporates into itself all the levels of the universe and all its values, stretching from the lowest levels of the material universe all the way up to the highest spiritual level, the divine itself....

All come together in a new unity in a single type of being, the human person who now becomes the center or middle point, the "middle being," of the universe in a new, enhanced sense.

Not just the soul, as in neoplatonism, "but as the whole human person, body and soul together." 

To be continued...