Saturday, June 29, 2024

Mission Accompliced in the Pattern of Eternity

If yesterday's post is on the right track, then God too is a kind of moving image of eternity, the difference being that herebelow we have to accomplish IT while thereabove IT is always already accomplished. 

For God, IT is also accompliced, so to speak, being that the Son is the Father's eternal accomplice in the co-mission of our climb -- the Incarnation being a climb down, making possible our own climb back up, i.e., deification, theosis, and sanctification.

However, it seems that our climb is blocked by some sort of crime that took place in a garden of some sort. Details are sketchy, but it seems our sketchy first parents... the whole thing is vague, or rather almost too rich with symbolism: bearing in mind that Finnegan represents Here Comes Everybody,

Finnegan's fall from the ladder is hugely symbolic: it is Lucifer's fall, Adam's fall, the setting of the sun that will rise again, the fall of Rome, a Wall Street crash. It is Humpty Dumpty's fall, and the fall of Newton's apple.... And it is every man's daily recurring fall from grace (Campbell & Robinson).

It is indeed Brandon's farcical Fall on his face the other night, but can he get back up? He will surely try, but the jury is out.

What jury?

Human existence is permeated by a kind of free-floating guilt, with everybody pointing fingers at everybody else, save for a few mature ones who start by giving themselves the finger and trying to do something productive about it. 

Adam blames the woman, the woman blames the snake, the snake implicates God, Cain blames Abel, etc., and here we are. How original! 

In Finnegans Wake the shifting jury consists at once of "twelve stately citizens" who "sit in a formal though tipsy session," or "four slobberishly senile judges" who "sit in judgment over the living present" in "a continual intermelting of the accused and his accusers." Like I said, everybody thinks someone else is the guilty party. 

For example, one of the two candidates is The Worst President Ever, Brandon even citing 159 tipsy and slobberishly progressive historians to back up his demented claim, not to mention 16 shifty Nobel econmen who insist the economy is great, and besides, it's Trump's fault. Moreover, he's a Convicted Felon, convicted by 12 of his finger-pointing peers.

It's all mixed up! Who is to blame for Brandon's fall, senile Brandon or the state-media managerial complex who insisted until yesterday he isn't? For the same gaslighters who spent the last four years propping him up now want to take him out and thereby hide their own guilt. 

That's all we're going to say about that, except to say that current events always reflect eternal ones. A Raccoon always looks at the news with one jaundiced eye on the eternal return of the same old same old, only painted a different color. 

Back to our main feature -- Christ the Logos of Creation: An Essay in Analogical Metaphysics. Betz talks about the role of the Holy Spirit in accomplishing IT, IT being the "dynamic and fruitful love" through which the Father and Son "are eternally one," and where "the identity of potentiality and actuality, infinity and formality, is perfectly accomplished," emphasis mine, because there's that resonant word again.

Betz's description is more or less what I attempted to convey above in the first two paragraphs. 

Suffice it to say, "an ecstasy of love would not be perfect unless it were returned," and "it is through the Spirit that the eternal exitus of the divine essence into filial existence is eternally returned to the divine essence," i.e., a re-union and re-turn "to the unity and enjoyment of their common essence," and why not? 

This being the case, it seems that the Incarnation is the sufficient condition for our own participation in this exitus and returnivus. This is the Eternal Pattern of which we are the image and potential likeness. 

Now, thereabove,

God in his eternal ecstasy in the Son and the eucharistic return in the Spirit is truly complete [i.e., accomplished / accompliced] in himself -- a perfect identity of essence and existence...

Whereas herebelow,

creation is freely created as a nonidentity of essence and existence in order that by the same Spirit it might freely come to participate in this same perfection.

Well, good: "the human image becomes the divine likeness it was intended to be," and the human being "becomes one with its divinely human essence in the Logos." 

Moreover, this "allows us to see the Eucharistic liturgy as a moving image of eternity and a way of entering into it." Like our participation in the Eternal Return of Son to Father in the love of the Holy Spirit or something.

Which also, btw, "bears some analogy to the ecstasy in which great art is produced," or even halfway decent posts, but that's another rabbit hole.

In conclusion -- of the present chapter -- it seems there is indeed a Pattern of Eternity, or an Eternal Pattern, and it looks samething like this: the Holy Spirit is

the Spirit of the Father's Eternal Gift and the Son's Eternal Thanksgiving -- and thus God himself, as Spirit, as the paternal gift and filial return of love.

And herebelow,

Christ is the incarnation of the Father's eternal "I AM," the extension into time, as it were, of the Father's very existence. 

We are the moving image of the moving image of eternity, as it were? 

Suffice it to say, "the Spirit is the principle of the return of filial existence to the paternal ground," through which "in the Spirit's joy it [AKA IT!] is eternally accomplished." 

Of course, that's not the end of it. We're not even halfway through the book, so there's much more to accomplish. As for the "the moving image of the moving image of eternity," this is the best Gemini can do. Then again, it has no access to "the ecstasy in which great art is produced."

3 comments:

julie said...

Details are sketchy, but it seems our sketchy parents... the whole thing is vague,

Funny, I think everyone's parents must be sketchy and a little vague. When there are people you think almost solely in terms of "Mom" and "Dad," it's hard to imagine them having any other role or life before we existed or outside their interactions with ourselves.

Gagdad Bob said...

Ripped from the headlines: "Finger-pointing among White House officials over who is to blame for how President Joe Biden’s inner circle conducted his debate prep has begun."

With no one pointing to dementia.

ted said...

The left always points the finger away from Truth. You just have to do the George Constanza "The Opposite" thing with them: consider the opposite of what is usually said or done by them to find Truth.

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