Taking a Chance on the Ultimate Adventure

Because the spiritual soul can grasp universal essences, it possesses a potential unto infinity..., [and] the light that makes any individual object intelligible is the same light that permeates the universe.

Woo Woo!  

Our cognitive power is so imperfect that not even the nature of one single gnat was ever entirely understood by any philosopher.

D'oh! 

So, we are condemned to endless progress, I guess: "any cognitive advance will indeed always be a positive advance, but only like a step on a longer journey.... it will always and ever anew remain preliminary, incomplete, proclaiming 'not yet.'"

It's always ALREADY! and NOT YET! Every moment is more than enough and never enough. Stupid complementarity.

First, I wonder if there's a loophole in here? Or at at least a special exemption for me? 

"In any cognitive act, our mind stretches into infinity" without ever reaching it. "The limit of knowledge is never attained, neither in objective fullness nor in subjective satisfaction," but what if it were? How boring would that be? No adventure for you!

So, our minds are at once proportioned to the Absolute without ever reaching it. Which I suppose goes back to Genesis 3 All Over Again. The essence of fallenness is a declaration of independence from the Absolute, and the presumption that we can reach it -- or "who needs God, and besides, I am one." 

The only other option is the absurcular nihilism of "it is absolutely the case that there is no absolute." 

So, some version of open theism, enclosed secular humanism, or the teenage wasteland of nihilism / existentialism.  

Now, I don't entirely blame folks for descending into a smaller world that has the proportions of their terrestrial desires. It's tempting to be a normotic infracoon, both for its own sake and as a distraction from our proper concerns. A lesser, horizontalized adventure displaces the Big One. But it 

insults the dignity of man's spirit to lead a life so much confined and imprisoned within the narrow considerations of immediate usefulness that his own small environment utterly ceases to be a window on a larger "world." To be thus totally absorbed in a mere fragment of reality, to "function" rather than live, is not human; yet to be so tempted is all too human.

The cosmos isn't flat, but most people are, and understandably so. And supposing one makes it through primary education with the third dimension intact, there's always the threat of college, the purpose of which is to extinguish the vertical entirely, and create an elite class of soulless perverticaloids.  

But you can't actually flatten reality, rather, only the humans who inhabit it. Say what you want about the Absolute, it always returns. 

After all, it is, among other things, necessary being. Conversely, it is we who are unnecessary, but only if we choose to render ourselves so. We -- which is to say, unique and unrepeatable persons -- are only necessary to God. 

Pieper's bottom line in The Truth of All Things -- literally, as it's the last paragraph -- is that

the world of existing things "is placed between two knowing minds," the mind of God and the mind of man. And precisely there, as classical Western metaphysics has always known, springs the truth of all things. 

Or, in our dodgy scheme, something along the lines of

O

(↑ → ↓)

(  )

We are always the monkey in the middle, at least until we cash in our chimps and leave the table. But middle does not necessarily imply middling, mediocre, or mid-wit, so deal me in!

Truly truly, this is where all the action is, for it is the very basis of the bewilderness adventure we call life in this grand casino. 

Come to think of it, Clarke has another book called The Universe as Journey, and I'll bet if we take a peek inside, we'll find just what we need to tuck in this loose shirt and turn into an actual post.

Actually, it's a book of essays, only one of which is by Clarke. But the introduction describes the overall contours of the journey, in which all being proceeds from the One and returns to it (which is a neoplatonic image endowed with further richness and differentiation in a trinitarian metaphysic). 

Sharing His infinite reality with a community of finite agents through continuous creative action, God directs this community of agents back to Himself as the final cause of their own activity (ibid).

This vision centers on two poles we call O and (¶), and again, there is infinitude at both ends: there is "the personal subject and the Being beyond finite beings," linked by the unrestricted dynamism of the inquiring mind, the drive to know the whole existentialada, AKA the Absolute.   

I guess we could say that the journey to the One is the one journey, and that only a person can take the trip, because a person is the trip, precisely. 

Or at least I am. But it turns out that I AM is always intersubjective. Among the clues we encounter along the Way, this is perhaps the biggest.

For this metacosmic intersubjectivity goes at once to the "absolutely fundamental mutual correlation of mind and being," which is "a natural marriage made in heaven, so to speak, where each partner completes the other." How sweet. For

the human mind is analogously like the female, the mother; reality is like the father. To know truly a reality that it has not itself made, the mind must make itself open [o] to receive this reality [↓], to be informed by it.

And baby makes three:

The mind, fecundated, informed, by reality, then actively responds, pours its own spiritual life into what it receives, gestates, then gives birth to the mental "word" or concept, which in turn flows over into the verbal word expressed to others.

What shall we name it? How about Truth?

And as we've been saying, Truth is a Person, a person on an interpersonal adventure in, of, and toward truth.

Christianity is the adventure of an incarnate god who essentially assumes the history he created and creates. The Author of History enters history -- or timelessness becomes time that time might become timeless. The ultimate bewilderness adventure.