On Fridays we often like to pull out all the stops, disable the brakes of the bus, disinhibit ourselves like a xanax-addled bartard, and generally go for it, whatever IT is.
What is IT, and why? The perennial question (?!).
Alan Watts published a book called This is It, but there's always room for more of IT, since -- as discussed yesterday -- IT is infinite at bothends, and we are the monkey in the middle.
Can a human mirror reflect mere darkness?
Have you been to college? Do you ever watch the news? Does the name Karine Jean Pierre ring a bell or clang a cymbal?
Ripperger affirms that the intellect at first "lacks all conceptual knowledge," but nevertheless has "a certain infinite power in the sense that it is in potency with respect to all forms" -- what we might call a pre-conceptual readiness to register IT in its diverse forms, both horizontal and vertical.
A footnote to this passage specifies that "By 'infinite' is not implied that it is actually infinite like the intellect of God, but that there is no limit to what it can know regarding that which is in its natural capacity to know."
The point is, God's actual infinitude is mirrored in our infinite potential -- a potential that can never be fully actualized.
Back to Norris Clarke, who writes that every finite is
by its very nature a pointer [↑] toward the Infinite. It is an image, a road marker, that necessarily carries the dynamism of the mind beyond itself in a search for intelligibility that can end only with an actual Infinite, from which [↓] all finite degrees of participation ultimately proceed.
There IT is again: the open spiral of infinite-to-finite and back-to-infinitude. In which, as human beings, we may knowingly participate.
We have reached, therefore, the unique, ultimate, infinite Source of all being, the ultimate mystery of Plenitude that is also the magnet and final goal of the entire dynamism of the human spirit, both intellect and will.
Does this mean we're done?
Yes and no, because as the Poet says, in my end is my beginning, and
our dynamism for the infinite turns out to be a remarkably eloquent reverse image and pointer toward God as He is in Himself, beyond all possible finites (Clarke).
this movement of the mind from from the many to the One reflects what seems to be the most basic structure of the human mind's constant quest for intelligibility in all fields.
To understand is to unify: it means first to discern the parts of anything clearly, but finally to unify them into a meaningful whole in itself and then with all else that we know. He who does not understand something as one, St. Thomas says, understands nothing (Clarke).
One Cosmos, yada yada.
But I want to get back to what I just said about the dynamism for the infinite being itself infinite. I suspect that the principle of this infinite dynamism is gorounded in the Trinity, which is none other than a kind of infinite pouring out -- or pouring out of infinitude -- and return via the Holy Spirit, more on which in a subsequent post.
They say there is no "motion" in God, which is to say, change. Rather, he is pure act, or a union of existence and essence, so there is no potential to actualize.
Having said that, I suspect that what we experience herebelow as change nevertheless has it analogue thereabove, only IT is a perfection (of essence) rather than a privation of it. We are always moving toward our essence, while God is, so to speak, always moving in it. Or IT rather.
IT moves, and is that wrong? Is that frowned upon here?
I AM.
I know, I know. I am too. Or two, rather. Which is to say,
the basic point of the analogy of being is that God IS who God IS, whereas creatures "are," or more precisely, are becoming what they are (Betz).
But the question is how God IS, or rather, how is IT with him?
Glad you asked. For while in him essence and existence are one -- one substance -- nevertheless, they can and indeed must be distinguished, otherwise we could not speak of Father and Son. I want to say that God is not so much a union of essence and existence as beyond both. The Father
eternally ex-ists or "stands out" in the Son. In other words, the Son is the ex-istence of the divine (paternal) essence, apart from whom the Father would not appear because he would not stand out from his hiddenness (Betz).
is something more profound than an eternally static "is-ness" or fixed point of the turning world.
Rather, the isness of IT
is an eternally dynamic identity-in-distinction of essence and existence such that the Father is always already manifest in the Son, who is his image, his radiance, and his glory, who is the very ex-istence of the Father's form, apart from whom the infinity of the Father's essence would be undefined and unknown.
Here we find the very principle of movement (from essence to existence and backagain via the Holy Spirit), although transposed to a higher -- the highest -- key, through whom "the identity of potentiality and actuality, infinity and formality, is perfectly accomplished."
Where, you might say, IT is always already accomplished.
5 comments:
The image is our divine potential -- just an existential drop in the ontological bucket -- while the likeness is our ongoing actualization of this potential, from the riverrun to the sea of being.
Picturing a lenticular mirror capable of focusing, say, a reflection of the sun into a particular point in space. At that point, the sun is in essence recreated in miniature (and at a mercifully lower amount of power than the real thing, or it wouldn't only work to start fires). Even though the image, recreated in something close to 3D, becomes essentially its own being, it is still only an image of the original, imbued with some of its power. However, if the lens turns away from the source, the image disappears as though it never existed at all.
Some decent aphorisms from a Mormon.
It would be hard to be an ironical Mormon.
I get a sense of Mormon Raccoonism.
Joseph Smith is funnier than Bob Dobbs.
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