A Tweenage Correspondence Course in Reality

Or maybe three-ality.

Let's get back to basics: "truth is a relationship of correspondence between two quite different sorts of things," on the one hand, the intellect, on the other, intelligible reality. 

But note that in reality there are always three, since relationship itself is equally primordial. That's our claim, anyway. 

For example, try saying anything without a relationship between words and things or words and other words. Can't be done. 

For me, a Christian metaphysic vaults this mysterious third to the toppermost of the poppermost. Looked at this way, we aren't just related to reality, but relationship as such is a part of the reality to which we are conformed.

I know, tricksy. But denying it is also a kind of trick, only the bad kind that results in a host of metaphysical mischief.

Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you (Eliot) 

Who is it? You know poets. They never come right out and say it. Although in the footnotes there is a counter-claim by the idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley which sketches out in precise terms what we do not believe: that

my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and... every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it.... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

If Professor Bad Example is correct, then there is no shared relationship, nor any "third" walking beside us. In fact, no real us at all, just two more or less contiguous but closed circles. 

But for us the Us is as equally real as the I and the Is , i.e., Intellect-Being-Relation. Are you with me? Or just an adjacent circle enclosed in absurcularity -- a nul de slack? 

Yada yada, truth is always a "three-way affair," is it not? Which is how we can at once know truth and share it with others. 

Having said that, many people are indeed closed circles, i.e., the existential closure alluded to in yesterday's post. In reality, a person qua person is a truth-bearing being, but how? By virtue of what principle?

I'll just quote Marshall and add my own comments as necessary:

if Jesus Christ is the truth, then truth is borne, not only chiefly by sentences or beliefs, but by a person.... in the end, truth is a person. 

That's the claim. Aphoristically speaking, that

The truth is objective but not impersonal.

Truth is a person.

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.

A person is a be-tween. 

A betweenager? And a trialogue? Sounds about right, Petey. But let us dig a little deeper into this whole. 

Look! Down there: "a single concept of truth applicable to all true sentences and beliefs."

Wait -- it's alive! Don't act so surprised:

If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago.

"In the correspondence of person to person by which the Trinity makes us Christ's icons one may hear an echo of the ancient idea that truth is a correspondence of mind to reality."

Listen! For God is the guest of silence.

we cannot be bearers of Christ's image without sharing in his correspondence to the Father, and so bearing, like him if imperfectly, the imprint of the Father himself....

Granting to creatures a participated likeness in the incarnated Son's correspondence to the Father seems to be the final goal of the act by which the Trinity brings it about that we have true beliefs. 

In other words, conformity as such -- which is always a relation -- is grounded in the conformity of Son to Father?

If correspondence to the Father is itself identity-constituting and non-contingent for the Son, then "truth" belongs... to God's own identity, in the form of the Word's perfect correspondence to the Father whose total reality he expresses. The Son would then correspond to the Father -- would be "the truth of the Father."

The Truth of truth -- of even the possibility of truth? Sounds like it: this "identity-constituting relation to the Father would thus be basic to the truth of all possible true beliefs." Turns out that "Everything corresponds to the Father in some fashion, however remote." 

In everything that is true -- that exists -- there "has to be at least a vestige of the Son's correspondence to the Father."

Short & sweet.

All truth goes from flesh to flesh.

But

Write concisely in order to finish before you become boring.