Being Becomes that Becoming Might Be

To review: the analogy of being essentially maintains that the creation is analogous to the Creator, even while the Creator is not analogous to creation -- i.e., the differences infinitely surpass the similarities.

In other words, the similarities are truly endless, but must always be understood in the context of even greater dissimilarity. We might say that everything is God, but God is not everything (i.e., the mere sum of existents).

The analogy of being helps to avoid two metaphysical nonstarters, pantheism (the cosmos is God) at one end, and a monistic theopanism at the other (God is everything, in such a way that, for example, there is no space for human freedom, as in Islam). 

Not only may reality may be fruitfully approached via the analogy of being, it is indeed "the implicit metaphysics of the Christian faith," without which it would be impossible to understand the relation between God and creation.

Or in other words, it is the Way out of the perennial ideological extremes of monism vs. pantheism, or fideism vs. rationalism, or empiricism vs. idealism, or being vs. becoming, or radical transcendence vs. the purely the immanent frame. Each of these is a radical alternative to the good ol' analogy of being.

So, don't be an ideological extremist. Or, in Voegelin's terms, don't immanentize the damn eschaton. Respect the space! -- the dynamic and endlessly fruitful space between Creator and creation, or immanence and transcendence.    

That's all very abstract. But what if I told you that Christ is the concrete analogy of being? That's the claim of the next chapter of Christ, the Logos of Creation, and why not? Indeed, it may be the Whole Point of revelation. For if Christ is concretely God-in-time -- or God withus & withinus -- it seems this conclusion is forced upon us. 

Except nobody's forcing anything. Rather, it's a very appealing offer.

It reminds me of a post I've always wanted to write, The Metaphysics of Jesus -- not just the explicit and implicit metaphysics of his words and deeds, but of his concrete existence. This just may be that post, but we shall see. 

There's a lot here to ponder, so we'd better just take it page by page and hopefully sum things up and boil them down by the end of the post. We'll start with this:

the moment one confesses that Christ is the Alpha and Omega one is making a metaphysical claim, to wit, that Christ is the principium et finis [the Latin from which Alpha and Omega are translations] of all things, their beginning and end, their formal and final cause, their very reason for being.

A tall claim, but that's the claim. It "is no mere subjective affair but a true belief about the nature of things." And this belief is either true or false. Or, it either (concretely) happened or didn't happen:

the Incarnation is the actualization of a possibility that we had not previously thought possible simply because it had not happened. 

But lot's of things are that way, from great works of art to scientific revolutions. I don't even yet know if this post is possible, but that won't stop me from trying to make it concretely happen. It's not absurd to hope so, anyway.

in the final analysis neither the Word himself nor his ways can be absurd, since the Word is the Logos, whose ways are reasonable par excellence.  

Excellent!

if human reason is only an analogue of the Logos, and if by faith human reason is united with the Logos, that is, with Reason Itself, then not only is faith not irrational, it is in fact more rational than reason, its dimmer cousin, because it has found and lives from reason's actual source.

[Insert joke about dim cousin.] 

We are, of course, reminded of Gödel and of the intrinsic limits of reason. Here again, for Gödel this did not imply that we are forever confined to the immanent frame of rationalism, rather, that the human intellect always transcends mere reason. In short, he was, broadly speaking, a Platonist. 

At the moment I'm reading a somewhat tedious book called Christian Platonism. It's a rather big squirrel, so we'll try to avoid being distracted by it for the moment. One dense tome at a time.

Christ does precisely what an analogy does: he unites in his one [person] both divine and human natures. And it is in this sense, therefore, that Christ himself is an analogy.

The Analogy-- the very Principle -- of analogy? Or its fulfillment? Well,

without an analogical metaphysics we cannot adequately explain why Christ himself is not a contradiction.... [i.e.,] how Christ in his very person is the wedding of Being and becoming and, as such, the Logos of creation.

A contradiction because

if the natures were univocally identical, there could be no union because there would be nothing different to unite; and if they were equivocally different..., then there could likewise be no union (emphases mine). 

In short, Christ is "the unique mediator who holds all things together, incomparably spanning and uniting in himself the greatest of differences" -- like a bridge or a Way or something. This "allows one to think difference without sacrificing unity and to think unity without sacrificing difference."

"For in Christ, the union of natures is as great as their difference. Indeed, though the divine nature is always greater than the created, human nature," the union of natures "is just as truly human as divine."

Bearing in mind what was said above about the various philosophical and ideological extremes on offer, "all the realisms and idealisms of history turn out to be so many illusory flights from the actual state of affairs." 

You could almost say that if Christ didn't exist we'd have to invent him, because so much of the way we think about reality presupposes a kind of "Christ principle." 

Think of this principle as spanning and uniting

in himself the otherwise insuperable difference between Being and becoming.... Christ is not only the Mediator between Being and becoming but also the Savior of becoming.

Oh my. That last one is a bit of a leap. We don't want to give anyone the Jesus willies just yet. 

Nevertheless, a cosmos of pure becoming is a bit of a lost cause, holding out against entropy until the lights go out. Perhaps Being becomes becoming that becoming may attain to Being? If not, to hell with it, only this latter would be entropic heat death as opposed to a hot death.

"He alone, therefore, is the fullness of Being in becoming," and "the unique source of the power of creatures to become what they are." In other words, 

Christ is the one in whom Being and becoming are perfectly one..., whereby the otherness of divinity reaches totally into humanity and the otherness of humanity reaches totally into divinity.

I call that pretty, pretty good news. I don't think we've adequately summarized the argument, or painted the whole picture, but we're over 1,000 words, so to be continued.

Alternative picture. Always a lot of swirling oranges & yellows. We'll have to look up the spiritual meaning of these colors at a later date: