The End Made Middle

We've been discussing the analogy of being, but yesterday's post alluded to analogical anthropology, which is the same idea only moreso, since we are the only creature said to be directly analogous to God, i.e., image and likeness. 

Why can't we just be God and be done with it? We can surely try, but we'll touch on Genesis 3 later in the post.

For starters, there is the matter of essence and existence, which are always distinct in us but not in God: his essence is to exist, while our lives are characterized by a mysterious journey from potentiality to actuality, which is to say, from implicit image toward explicit likeness. 

And of course, "With the advent of Christ..., all this suddenly changes. For with him our primary analogate" is right here right now, as opposed to way off in the vertical-teleological-eschatological future somewhere. 

I call that a pretty, pretty interesting idea, the question being whether it is more than an abstract notion but a concrete event. 

At any rate, he's the same as us only different, like any other analogy, in this case "fully God and fully human -- with the analogical difference that what he is by nature, we become by grace." 

For us the image is on the way to the likeness, whereas "in Christ the image and likeness are one and the same."

By definition, therefore, a Christian anthropology will be one in which Christ figures as the primary analogate of the analogy of the human being, who exists in a state of becoming within the span between the image and likeness of God...

Does it work? I don't know, are there saints? Is anybody better or worse than anybody else? Or is it all relative?

In any event, we need to have some idea of what a complete or finished or actualized human being looks like, otherwise "It would be like trying to know what an acorn is having never seen an oak tree, or, for that matter, any tree."

Have we seen the human tree? Well, "those who have seen Christ (even in faith) have in some sense already seen the end of the world and the essence of humanity." Like Paul on the road to Damascus.

Yes, but what about the restavus? 

All I know is that we are teleologically ordered to something -- or someOne, rather -- and it might as well be the Christ of faith. There are many alternatives on offer, but they all come up short, especially the secular ones, which posit either an absurd telos (e.g., Marxism) or no telos at all (e.g., postmodernism).  

Betz quotes Della Mirandola to the effect that it is in our power "to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life," or to "rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine." In short, we are "in the middle between the extremes of creation" (Thunberg, ibid.).

After all, it is One Cosmos -- or oughtta be, anyway -- and man is "in the position to go on and unite the world in itself and bring it into a harmonious relationship with God," so I'm trying to do my bit. 

"To speak of the human being"

is to say that the human being is by nature a "middle" with a vocation to unite creation's inherent oppositions...

Which are in fact mostly dynamic complementarities such as "the differences between man and woman, body and soul, nature and will..., community and individual, order and freedom, universal and particular, essence and existence, eternity and time, God and creation," etc.

So, One Cosmos, but Under God, with man not only as "the unifying head of the material creation" but "the actual center of the whole of creation." It's a big job, but someone has to do it. 

It seems that we are simultaneously the Center and Frontier of existence, and that's just the way IT is. 

We are at "the boundary between the sensible and intelligible worlds," the "microcosm called to mediate between the material and spiritual aspects of creation," and why not? 

In reference to yesterday's post, I find this task interesting, engrossing, absorbing, intriguing, edifying, and certainly not boring.

Having said THAT!, there's a catch, as we are once again faced with those sketchy events of Genesis 3, but the bottom line is that we are somehow

existentially alienated from our essence, which is to say, from God's intention for us in the Logos. Indeed..., the human being is now a "broken middle" who has trouble uniting even the most basic operations between... 

Between what exactly? Between all those dynamic complementarities listed above, "which are constantly being split apart." Which, don't you know, "is the essence of the diabolical: the splitting apart of what belongs together." 

Oh my. Who invited him to the celestial party? I'll try to get some answers in a subsequent post. 

In any case, this is precisely why we need that concrete analogate in whom existence and essence are not split apart but rather united in one person through whom we are "restored" to our "original integrity." 

The following passage reminds me of Voegelin:

viewed temporally, the human being is an analogy in the sense of a middle between fall and eschaton, who therefore exists in a state of tension between protology and eschatology: between the first man and the second, between what one is (or has been) and what one will be.

We're always between, that's for sure, the question being between what: what is at the ends of our existential betweenness? It's a mystery, the engrossing kind:

the human being appears as a mysterious figure, a type or foreshadowing of Christ, the true middle, who restores humanity to its original vocation...  

If this is the case, then anthropology is a kind of implicit Christology and Christology a kind of explicit anthropology. 

Might be a good place to pause, despite ending in the middle. To be continued...