Mystery Dream Theatre

I wanted to say theotre, but it would look like a typo. 

Picking up where we left off, Thomas says that

The act of the believer is not terminated at the enunciable statement but at the thing, at the revealed mystery itself. 

Or in other words, as the object of the intellect is intelligible being, the object of faith is the Mystery? Or something?

after descending from faith to theology to know its details and its various treatises, the theologian will experience the need to ascend from theology to faith, to ascend to the divine source of this science (Garrigou-Lagrange) 

That theologian being Thomas himself, alluding to the well-known mystical experience in light of which everything he had written was a pile of horse... food. They call his philosophy "precritical," but that's a pretty harsh criticism. 

I suppose this means that the object of theology is on the one hand God and/or revelation, but it also has its object in the teleological sense of the word, in that its ultimate end is the sort of infused contemplation experienced by St. Thomas, which is "a kind of beginning of eternal life" -- or of eternity while you wait. 

Note also that faith is an ascent to ultimate reality, whereas theology is a descent from it. 

Theology is all well and good, "provided that it is inspired not by natural curiosity but by the love of God," which again goes to its proper end or telos. 

Speaking of which, that's the end of the book. But here's an aphorism: 

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

Elsewhere in the book G-L makes the point that in the end, our choice is quite literally between God and radical absurdity. Interestingly, if the latter is the case, then anything and everything we write is likewise so much straw, but what a difference!  

Come to think of it, all non-Raccoon philosophies end in a reductio ad absurdum if rigorously pursued to their (il)logical end. Frankly, most philosophies are soph-beclowning with their very first step out of the box. I know this in hindsight because I once believed a number of them but now understand them to be so much horse... food.

If I were going to sketch a cosmic flowchart in which to situate ourselves, at the top would be intelligible being in contradistinction to unintelligible being or intelligible non-being, which is to say, an absurdity or a dream, respectively. 

Now, is it possible that reality is a dream -- i.e., something we simply dream up, both collectively and individually?

Yes and no. Either way, humans have always suspected that dreaming has some significance, and I agree. I'm not referring to such-and-such a dream, but rather, dreaming as such, or the dream-mode of cognition. 

It reminds me our lengthy review earlier this year of McGilchrist's The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, but it also reminds me of Matte Blanco's Bi-Logic, especially as applied to God and religion in Bomford's The Symmetry of God. And of course it reminds me of Finnegan's Wake, which presents all of human history as one long and crazy dream.

Is he wrong?!

Let's stipulate that the world is a dream that takes place between immanence and transcendence, or between (¶) and O respectively; these two symbols (or pneumaticons) are empty placeholders, much like algebraic variables, until we fill them with dream content.  

Does this plunge us into relativism and subjectivism? Yes! and No! Details to follow.