Did We Hit a Triple, or Are We Born on Third Base?

Just a very brief post because this is my short morning.

Continuing our theme of the Necessary and Possible, we suggested yesterday that these would seem to go to the age-old debate about the One and the Many, to which we might add Absolute and Infinite. 

In whatever way we wish to characterize it, we can’t help noticing the unity and diversity -- or rather, that beneath or coequal to the diversity is an intuition of the One. 

This much is obvious, nor do we need any supernatural assistance in order to see it -- except insofar as nature itself is supernatural, i.e., not self-explanatory. Just like anything else, nature requires a principle without which it cannot be.

But is the Principle One or Many? This we cannot know without a celestial hint. To be perfectly accurate, we know it can’t be the Many, because if that were the case, we could never know it, for, among other things, Truth is a unity of subject and object (or between subjects). In other words, the fact that we can know anything rests upon an implicit unity of knower and known.

At the same time, if the One is only One and nothing else, we land ourselves in a radical monism that has no room for ourselves, precisely. 

We see the fruits of such absurdity in Islam or in various sects of Christianity that posit an occasionalism or double-predestination that turns our freedom into a trivial illusion, just a deceptive side-effect of the One being the One.

They say the Trinity is supposed to be a Big Mystery we can never penetrate, nor do I want to be presumptuous, but it sure makes sense to me that this should be the Ultimate Principle. 

Of course, like anything else, it doesn’t make total sense due to that inevitable cosmic infirmity known as Finitude. Still, I don’t see it so much as unintelligible as infinitely intelligible. For example, right now I’m thinking about it, and out pops this post, for what it’s worth.

Maybe the most helpful thing about this principle is that it illuminates personhood and grounds it in the (supra)nature of things. After all, we know that man is created in the image and likeness of the Creator, so the meaning of this obviously depends on the nature of this Creator. What is It or He like? 

That contains a couple of buried assumptions, because what if the question is, “What are They like?" Of course, Scripture is sprinkled with hints, for example, Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.  Is this just the royal we, you know, the editorial we? 

Let's just say that a lot of new stuff comes to light in the New Testament, which helps unlock such mysteries.