The Escape from Mathematics into the Divine Economy

To repeat: either Ø or O. If the latter, then

somewhere hidden within this unlimited horizon of being there exists an actually infinite Plenitude of Being [O], in which all other beings participate yet of which they are but imperfect images (Clarke).

Or in the words of of the mystic Angelus Silesius, "The abyss in me calls out to the abyss in God." This means that the ironist Nietzsche is ironically² correct: "If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

Boo! 

Celestial Central on the line: "The existence of this Infinite Center of being"

now gives full intelligibility to the horizon of being itself, as its unifying center and source, and also confers magnificent intelligibility on the natural dynamism of my mind and the whole intellectual life arising out of it (Clarke).

Woo hoo! Who says there's no such thing as a free launch? 

This at once launches us in a new direction, no longer along merely horizontal lines at the same level of things, but a vertical ascent toward qualitatively ever-higher and richer realities.  

Very Gödelian, in that we "comprehend and leap beyond any finite or series of finites" (Clarke). Ans as Gödel said, "It was something to be expected that sooner or later my proof will be made useful for religion." Indeed, it turns out that

our minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality....

[O]ne can't do any mathematics at all, not even basic arithmetic, without referring implicitly to the infinite.... There remains something -- always -- that eludes capture in a formal system.... (Goldstein).

Well, good. We won't press the point, because either you get it or you don't. The alternative is an "existential absurdity"

ordered ineluctably toward a simply non-existent goal, magnetized, so to speak, by the abyss of nothingness, of what is not and can never be (Clarke).

But "an existing human dynamism without goal would be unintelligible" -- like having eyes in the absence of light or ears with nothing to hear. Let those with ears hear, and let those with an intellect be conformed to O,

which confers upon it [the intellect] total and magnificent meaningfulness and opens out before it a destiny filled with inexhaustible light (ibid.).

We use the symbol (¶) to stand for "human thought as oriented toward Infinite Being," or the "condition of possibility of all our thinking" (ibid.).

Nevertheless, "Man is the being who can affirm or deny his own rationality," and it says so in Genesis 3. Ultimately,   

Man is an embodied affirmation of the Infinite.

Or the denial thereof. Our choice. The bottom line is that 

Every knower knows God implicitly in anything it knows (Thomas).  

Supposing you know what knowledge is, i..e,. metaknow in the manner of Gödel: 

our minds, whatever they are, cannot be digital computers.... even in our most technical, rule-bound thinking -- that is, mathematics -- we are engaging in truth-discovering processes that can't be reduced to the mechanical procedures programmed into computers....

[O]ur minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality (Goldstein). 

Knowing extreme reality requires extreme seeking. Or at least seeking off the groomed trails in the Valley of Tenure. More like cross country seeking: 

A journey is indeed needed to find a God who appears to be absent at first in the order of explicit conceptual knowledge. But it is a journey within, into the depths of my own self, to discover the treasure always present but hidden at first from the clouded vision of my sense-bound eyes (Clarke). 

Again, there is O, and there is its inverse image, so to speak, in man -- like "an image of the divine infinity in silhouette," or

an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less.

As if 

God had broken the coin of His infinity in two, holding on to the positive side Himself and giving us the negative side, then launching us into the world of finites with the mission to search until we have matched our half-coin with His.

Mission accompliced.

That's a good point, Petey: is it possible to accomplish this divine mission without the accomplice of the Son? 

Maybe it's the Norco talking, but, extending the analogy, the Incarnation is God emptying his bank account and giving us the whole treasure through whom we can cash in our chimps to the First Bank of Eternity. Otherwise, the numbers can never add up.