Yesterday’s post was written from memory in a remote location, away from my bookloined liberatoreum. Today I will cover the same subject, only properly plagiaphrased from the source.
In short, we’re taking a brief side trip from our ongoing discussion of Lonergan’s Understanding and Being, into Charles De Koninck’s The Cosmos, which I first read and blogged about it in 2009. Whatever I said back then, forget it -- I know I have -- and let’s have another stab at it.
First of all, The Cosmos is a previously unpublished work contained in volume one of The Writings of Charles De Koninck, which, if memory serves, was recommended to me by James at Just Thomism (another blogger who is still pressing words @ thomism.wordpress.com).
Unlike James or Charles, I am not a trained philosopher and even less a trained theologian, just a blender with the lid off, cf., yesterday’s post. In other words, Just Bobism.
Here are some passages that struck me, this first one on the nature of Life Itself:
the biological world shows us an always growing concentration. Its movement is centripetal, arriving at a state of high organization and immanence. Life goes against time’s dispersion. Time disperses, life gathers, tending toward structures that are more and more tight.
Didn’t we say something similar just the other day, even quoting Booker T & the MGs to the effect that Time is Tight? It was in the context of a discussion of how it is difficult to describe time without spatializing it, which is precisely what De Koninck does here.
Yes, there is a time-binding aspect of life, but ultimately in service to a freedom and Slack that surpasses it. We’ll no doubt discuss this in more detail as we proceed, but for now let’s just bear in mind how life at once concentrates in space in order to dilate in time, i.e., into the now and up into eternity. De Koninck even says as much, more or less:
Memory is obviously meta-temporal since it contains that which is no longer in time…. Thus man not only lifts himself above time like other animals with memory, but he can lift himself above memory.
Therefore,
Already in man the world is bent in on itself, and in God its extremes touch.
And
Even while touching it only from without, man, living on earth, already conceives this eternity.
Which, BTW, is why my book is and had to be circular. I wouldn’t say man “conceives” eternity, since we exist in its light, nor would I say we only touch it “from without."
Again, whatever else the Now is, it is at the crossroads of time and eternity, and follows upon its prior colonization by Life. We are “in” it, or rather, it is in us, especially since the Incarnation.
For what is the Body of Christ but biology transposed to a higher key? Only come to find out that biology is just a distant analogy of the interior life of God transposed and exteriorized into a lower key. God is the principle of Life. Unless you have a better idea.
Speaking of Just Bobism, in the book I suggested that the so-called Big Bang was followed by three additional bangs into Life, Mind, and Spirit.
But as we know, first in intention is last in execution (or something like that), so Spirit is temporally last (Omega) even though it is and must be ontologically first (Alpha). In a flagrant act of anticipatory plagiarism, De Koninck wrote in 1936 that
The simple observed facts sketch an image of a nature which advances by successive explosions in the manner of a rocket, rising to the sky and asking directly from the hands of its Creator the spiritual form of man to which nature has been destined and in which she is liberated (sic).
That seems a bit awkward, but bear in mind that De Koninck never intended for this to be published, so who knows how he may have edited it upon final consideration. I don’t think he’s presaging some superficial new-age Teilhardism, but rather, sketching a total vision, much like some blogging blender with the lid off his head.
We’re almost out of time this morning, so we’ll have to resume this tomorrow, but here’s a preview:
We will only be able to understand ourselves when we understand the universe.
And vice versa, but that's just Bob speaking. But
The more profoundly we understand the world, the better we comprehend that we touch it only with the feet, and that with our head we touch the bottom rungs of another hierarchy of which nature is only a fleeting shadow.
Yes: feet in the horizontal, head in the vertical, both happening in the temporal dilation of the exploding now.
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