Given how much time we devoted to it, I feel like we haven't given a proper sendoff to The Matter With Things, and that maybe we ought to say a few words and give it a decent burial, or at least a Celebration of Life, before moving on to the next same old thing.
There are certainly many points on which I agree with McGilchrist, even if we part ways in the upper pneumasphere, he stopping at a monistic evolutionary panentheism, I proceeding to infinitude and beyond, toward a more traditional metacosmic trinitarian creationism (minus the "-ism").
Regarding the latter, Thomas speaks for me:
An error concerning the Creation ends as false thinking about God.
Elsewhere he maintains that
an error regarding creatures reacts in a false knowledge of God.
So, one can begin at either end -- with creatures or creative Principle, with little nounlings or Big Verb, AKA creative Logos -- and rearrive at the same nobodaddy noplace.
For in the end -- of my bOʘk at any rate -- reality ultimately ascends to the same Principle from which it descends: there is (↓) and there is (↑), but these are a continuous spiral, not two discontinuous lines.
If Creation is synonymous with the world, then God is synonymous with... well, technically with nothing, but I was thinking of "source of the world."
The divine trifurcartion is a firstandlast principle, by which I mean that any thinking, to the extent that it deserves the title of Thinking, and follows itself all the way up, ends in a conception -- whether implicit or explicit -- of the Absolute.
Truth the Second: you needn't think long about this Absolute to understand that it is of necessity Infinite, i.e., unbound, and admitting of no limitation or final determination.
Where the Absolute excludes nothing, the Infinite includes everything, and yes, these are subtly different -- why, as different as LH and RH, respectively, come to think of it (LH : Absolute as RH : Infinite).
Concur with Schuon:
To say Absolute, is to say Infinite; Infinitude is an intrinsic aspect of the Absolute. It is from this “dimension” of Infinitude that the world necessarily springs forth; the world exists because the Absolute, being such, implies Infinitude.
This doesn't imply that this world is necessary, since it is obviously contingent; rather, that there is a "necessary" principle of creativity in God, and that to say necessary is to say eternal. I won't say this is a mandatory Raccoon principle, only that it sure makes a lot of sense. To me.
And while looking up the above comment by Thomas, I stumbled on some additional relevant one- and two-liners to help light the Way, for example,
Each single being is perfect in the measure in which it reaches up [↑] to its own origin [O].
The highest perfection of human life consists in the mind of man being open [o] to God [in his mode of (↓)].
Every rational being knows God implicitly in every act of knowledge [truth = Truth, so be careful what you believe].
The natural desire for knowledge cannot be satisfied in us until we know the first cause.... God, however, is the first cause. Hence, the last end of the creature endowed with a spiritual intellect is to see God in his essence.
O and ʘ:not one, but not exactly two, either.
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So, one can begin at either end -- with creatures or creative Principle, with little nounlings or Big Verb, AKA creative Logos -- and rearrive at the same nobodaddy noplace.
It's like looking at a pointillist painting, or pixels on the screen, and seeing not the image generated by that means, but rather noticing that everything is pixels or points - to the exclusion of everything else. I mean, it's not wrong but it's not even remotely complete.
Incidentally, this is one of the challenges people face with AI generated art. You can give it a prompt, but it doesn't actually understand anything, so if a creature comes out with an excess of fingers or limbs, or the features aren't in the right place, well, it's all just pixels to the machine.
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