Man is a Perpetual Motion Soft Machine

Norris Clarke has an interesting take on the meaning of our theomorphism, making the point that it cannot be a question of our having the "positive infinite plenitude" which "is proper to God alone." 

Rather, we are more like "an image of the divine infinity in silhouette -- in reverse, so to speak," whereby we possess "an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less."

Perhaps like the image to the upper right, which, if it floats your boat, depicts God to the port and man to the starboard: infinite plenitude (or act) and infinite capacity (or potency), the latter dynamically ordered to the former, and the analogy of being taking place at their intersection. 

Better yet, since immanence is necessarily permeated by transcendence,

The natural and the supernatural are not not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads.

Which is to say the cosmic area rug woven by vertical and horizontal threads of immanence and transcendence. In the words of Pieper, the Cosmos "is interwoven and crossed by mystery," such that "the boundary between order and mystery passes through this world itself."  

In any event, the polarity between these two is literally an inexhaustible fire -- or burning bush -- as torched upon in yesterday's post. 

Speaking of which,

A thought should not expand symmetrically like a formula, but in a disordered way like a bush.

Who says there's no such thing as perpetual motion or an undying fire? Nonlocal sources inform us that this con-flagration must be perichoretically gorounded in the eternal generation of Person -- and DoorWay -- #2, if that's vine with you.

Infinitude is a queer thing. True, like us, other animals are infinitely ignorant, but they don't know they don't know, nor is their ignorance ordered to anything that transcends it. But "Our intellect in understanding is extended to infinity" (Thomas), so there's no end to understanding. Understand?

Nor can animal ignorance grow in a positive and even healthy way, whereas for man,

It is not to increasing our knowledge to which we may aspire, but to documenting our ignorance.

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempts to exclude it by stupid explanations.

Happily, the world is inexplicable. (What kind of world would it be if it could be explained by man?)

The honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery.

Except to say that man can never literally circumscribe the mystery that always circumscribes us, precisely -- as if anyone could ever circumnavelgaze the whole existentialada! Nevertheless, 

Man inflates his emptiness in order to challenge God.

But no matter how big the (•), it can never equal O, only attain to it. Orthoparadoxically,   

That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of intelligence.

Until we reach the point that we know nothing about everything, which is why, in the words of Thomas,

The least insight that one can obtain into sublime things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge of lower things.

And "This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God," for "Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite," and that's all there is to say about THAT! 

Shifting seers for a moment, just as there are folks who say Jerusalem has nothing to do with Athens -- or revelation (↓) with metaphysics (↑) -- others imagine that God has nothing to do with economics, but truth is true no matter where we find it. Any truth participates in Truth insofar as it is true:

From the one first truth there result many truths in the human mind, just as the one human face produces many images in a broken mirror (Thomas).

Which recalls the long ago words Petey:

We are Ones again back by oursoph before the beginning, before old nobodaddy committed wholly matterimany and exwholed himself into a world of sorrow and ignorance. 

Back upin a timeless with the wonderfully weird Light with which everything was made, d'light immaculate no longer dispersed and refracted through so many banged-up and thunder-sundered images of the One.

Yeah, he's a bit of a Gnostic. Nevertheless, it's queer enough to recognize that we don't know. But how many people understand that 1) we can't know it all, and that 2) this is a good thing?

Among other things, this means it is wholly unreasonable to be a mere rationalist, i.e., to imagine that reason alone is sufficient to describe reality, much less human beings. If reason doesn't recognize its own limits, tyranny is right around the coroner.

For Hayek, man's Fatal Conceit -- an economic iteration of Gen3AOA? -- is the pretense that we not only know more than we think we do, but that we can know things that in principle we cannot possibly know and can never know. For a motley bunch of contingent primates, these metaphysical Darwinians sure presume to know a lot!

The F.C. applies in particular to complex systems such as the economy, but what if I told you the cosmos itself is a complex system? And that it is a fundamental error to believe that ultimate reality is characterized by the simple systems described (and describable) by physics? What if the universe of biology is actually larger than the universe of physics, rather than a subset of it?

Is this a "paradox"? No, not at all. Not if you turn your gaze to the great Within and exhumine the mysterious interiority buried therein. Which brings us back to Clarke; recall that man is, as it were, the negative image of God's infinitude:

This negative image points unerringly toward the positive infinity of its original, and is intrinsically constituted by this relation of tendential capacity.

Again, our own negative infinitude always tends toward, and is dynamically linked, to God's positive infinitude, thus the ceaseless flow of energies. Vertical polarization between (•) and O. That's how it works, and it works alright. Again, unless your battery is dead.

Clarke continues:

It is as though -- as with the ancient myths -- 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.

This eternal coin of the realm is what you call monkey in the bank, which is why our existence takes the form of a transfinite journey, like a stately old Homo viator. Which is nice: "A man is called a wayfarer," because we are always "striving towards God, who is our last end and beatitude."

Now, hmm. Just spiritballin' here, but what if, in this launching of infinitude into the world, God also launches himself into the world? What if this kenotic circle of self-emptying is the last word, or better, the Alpha and Omega of what we can say of our total metacosmic situation? What if He expectorated a mirrorcle, and you're the spittin' image?

We're already over the 1,000 word arbitrary limit, but we'll address this possibility in the next post, because Betz addresses it in the next chapter, and it's a very complicated case -- lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you's, just a lotta strands to keep in your old Gagdad's melon.