The Weird News Prior to the Good News

Still just flippin' away in the Voegelin Reader, and my attention is arrested by the following passage, not because it is new, but because it sounds so familiar, right down to the annoyingly orthoparadoxical nonsensibility he shares with us. 

Who writes like this? And why would they ever think their ideas could resonate in more than a handful of eccentric cosmic wonderers in the bewilderedness? 

From the Beginning, reality is the divine word speaking in succession the evolution of being from matter through plant to animal life, until it speaks man who, in the persons of patriarchs and prophets, responds by his word to the word spoken by god in history. 

So, God speaks man, who in turn speaks of God.

Note that Voegelin doesn't try to reduce this to a system -- like the infertile egghead highlighted yesterpost, the unreflective and incurious Nobel physicist -- since man is first spoken out of the infinite ground of being long before man speaks of the ground. 

Imagine being so cluelessly presumptuous as to overlook this little fact (and it is a fact). 

Say what you want about animals and vegetables, at least they aren't so presumptuous as to assume their own existence and then start telling fantastical stories about where existence came from. A little humility, please.

The reality of the cosmos, thus, becomes a story to be told by the man who participates responsively in the story told by the god.

So, it is literally a symbolism worked out in the luminous space between the noetic height and apeiriontic depth, or between O and (  ), via the spiral of (↑↓). Unless you have a better idea. 

To review, because it's both subtle and tricksy to wrap our minds around what wraps around our minds:

The word of man when he articulates his consciousness of reality emerges from the reality that is the word of god.

Voegelin cites the gospel of John as a quintessential example of a sophisticated awareness of the reality just described. In the famous preface to the gospel -- which we might call the Extraordinarily Weird News prior to the merely Good News -- 

instead of telling the story, he reflects on the divine-creative substance and its internal structure: "In the beginning was the word; and the word was with god; and the word was god." The creative tension in the Beginning is understood in terms of the paradox that the word and god are related by both difference and identity simultaneously.

Admittedly this is very weird, but is it weird enough?

The god who has the word that he is makes all things by speaking it (emphasis mine).

Later, once we are into the story, 

When the disbelieving interlocutors ask of Christ "Who are you?" he identifies the divine reality present in him as the Mosaic "I am"....  

For the god who spoke to Moses from in the Thornbush, now speaks through the mouth of man to other men; the god of a revelatory event in the past has become "the true light that illumines every man who comes into this world."

Weirder still, this "movement from the Beyond demands the countermovement toward the Beyond, out of history, into eschatological fulfillment" (emphasis mine).

This symbolic expression of the I AM in different contexts moves an Etienne Gilson "to understand all Christian metaphysics of Being as the metaphysics of Exodus," and hey now, why not? The I AM of Christ "becomes luminous, through its presence in Christ, for its participatory presence in every human being" from "the creation of the world to its end."

Sounds about right to me:

In the Beginning, the word of the hidden god creates the cosmos; when the word moves from the Beyond into man's consciousness, it reveals itself through language. And in this revelatory language, the I-am becomes a subject that acquires predicates...   

Meaning what, exactly? 

Not sure, so I'll just say what I think: that the I AM is the unsurpassable Metacosmic Subject whose ground is Beyond Being, but which necessarily assumes various qualities in being, in man, and in history, much like the colorless light refracted through a prism. 

Thus, we may speak of qualities such as the Life, the Light, the Truth, the Way; and in less abstract and more poetic terms as the Vine, the Good Shepherd, the Bread of Life, etc. 

The predicates express the movement of the word from the Beyond into everyman's existence [↓] and demand the countermovement toward the word [↑] that speaks through Christ [↓].

Something like that.

Wait, demand? Yes, because if this is the way things are, there is a way we must be in order to be in conformity to it.

I'm out of breath. And my blood sugar is low, so we'll conclude with this passage; within this I-am space of (↑↓) -- that is, between the Beyond and Beginning -- 

is the language of seeking, searching, and questioning, of ignorance and knowledge concerning the divine ground... of being moved to seek and question, of being drawn toward the ground, of turning around, of return, illumination, and rebirth.

Of Exodus and of Deliverance, only forever, and repent as necessary.