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."

God is Full of IT, and Vice Versa

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. 

IT reminds me of the necessary distinction between the image and likeness in man. 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.

Other ways of conceptualizing this ongoing and ingrowing tension include essence <--> existence and immanence <--> transcendence; or, if you want to be purely scientifical about IT, just call IT (↑↓), bearing in mind that the up and down movement is a continuous spiral of involution-evolution.

Fr. Ripperger writes that "the human intellect is a mirror image of the ontological order," and a mirror is relatively passive, receptive, and "empty." At least if it's a clean and functioning mirror, and not full of ideological bullshIT. 

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.

Well, good: the final goal. 

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).

And our dynamism for the infinite is ITself infinite:

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).

Therefore, "upon closer inspection," -- and we are inspecting the rug closely -- IT

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.

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.

Identity Noetics and the Tax on Existence

The Creator is Necessary Being, such that only his essence is to exist. Conversely, the problem with creaturehood -- d'oh! -- is that we are "a non-identity of essence and existence." 

It seems that all other problems are grounded in this first one, but it is unavoidable so long as we -- or anything outside the Creator -- are to exist.

Call it the tax on existence.

If God's essence is to exist, it implies that only he can be "self-identical," or at one -- at peace? -- with himself (or selves). 

Now, we've already stipulated that man is the image and likeness of the Creator, meaning we are an existential analogue of this ontological principle. 

But our reflection must be deployed in time, such that our becoming is always movement toward the "full being" known only by God, which is to say, a dynamic but harmonious union of essence and existence.

Indeed, the separation of these two seems to be what fuels the dynamism of existence herebelow, this because of the ineradicable tension between immanence and transcendence, which is analogous to, say, the polarity of a battery. The battery is dead, and so are we, when the polarity is collapsed. Or at least you'll need a jumpstart from an outside source.

It seems that God is the principle of negentropy, on which entropy is parasitic, so to speak. Which is a slightly different subject. 

At any rate, because of our queer existence amidst the Tension (between essence and existence, immanence and transcendence), "the identity of human beings does not lie in themselves but their proper identity can be found only outside and beyond themselves." 

But it turns out that this too is an analogue, in that the "identity" of the Father is found in the Son, and vice versa, for again, the Father couldn't be one without the Son, only this Son has never not been.

Why is there any dynamism at all, from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology to what you and I are doing right now? And is this dynamism nothing more than local agitation akin to existential Brownian motion, or is it growing somewhere? 

Where is the nonlocal telovator, and how did it get here? "What is at issue,"

and is logically prior to the question of human identity... is the question of the identity of the God in whom one finds one's own identity (John Betz, ibid all quotes above and below save for those of the Aphorist).

Good question: just who is this guy in whom we supposedly have our identity? Inquiring minds want to know, or at least be given a hint.

We know all about the diabolical invention of identity politics. Perhaps it is diabolical not just because it divides us from each other, but prior to this divides us from our essential identity in the God without whom there can be no such things as identity or essence. 

After all, the Devil is the scatterer, the Great Divider, and the events of Genesis 3 suggest that we can alternatively find our (non)identity in him, of all persons. The rest is history. Literally, for 

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, another who believes he is a god.

Or in other words,  

Men are divided into two camps: those who believe in original sin and those who are idiots.

Identity politics is one of those annoyingly (ontologically) impossible (existential) possibilities, because  

For God there are only individuals.

At least until he chose a people to try to undo the damage caused by people. Nevertheless,  

The two poles are the individual and God; the two antagonists are God and man.

Here again, the two poles are also immanence and transcendence, or existence and essence. To collapse the poles is to bring about the antagonism or enmity between man and his transcendent source, ground, and principle. 

For if the essence of God is to exist, then the essence of creation is precisely not to exist of itself but to exist by the grace of the one whose essence is to exist. 

"Thus, the moment we really begin to think metaphysically,"

we find ourselves "between," so to speak, essence and existence -- this being the indelible metaphysical sign of our incompleteness... 

Necessarily incomplete because try as we might, essence and existence simply cannot coincide in us. Man has attempted virtually every ønanistic wankaround in the vain attempt to found an existential loophell, each one seemingly worse than the last. 

Which is why the 20th century was worse than previous ones, to which our current crop of spiteful progressive mutants says: challenge accepted!

To put it mildly -- or better, insultainingly -- some assouls "have made daring attempts" to

suppress the mystery of creatureliness by forcibly reducing existence to essence or essence to existence.

And truth to power.

Such *daring* attempts have been made by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and existentialism in general, which either "absorbs and dissolves all contingency into its necessity," or else brings about "a decidedly brute and brutish hermeneutics... which refuses to acknowledge anything transcendent to which one might have an essential obligation" or relation.

This is a logical place to end the post, but there's more illogic to explain, so let's continue a bit longer.

"Over and against" the brutal absolutisms just mentioned is the analogy of being, which "immediately relativizes all thought and being as creaturely thought and being, disallowing every Promethean philosophical attempt to round being into thought or thought into being." 

These daring brutes always want to close what is necessarily an open cosmos, and run out of the restaurant just before the waiter arrives with the check, for  

Every "liberator" finally passes on the bill.

Put another way, to recognize the analogy of being -- and Adam's Big Mistake was in failing to do so --  

is precisely to refuse divine status and patiently to abide in the suspended analogical interval between essence and existence without trying to resolve one into the other or analytically to separate them, as though we had pure, unmediated access to essences..., or any grasp of our own existence, which is ever flowing and flowing away.

"Such illusory philosophies" -- and they are legion, just like their father -- "presume in one way or another, consciously or unconsciously, to master the interplay of being and thought, and so end in vanity."

Mere vanity if we're lucky, more progressive insanity -- and criminality -- if we're not, for their lengthy crapsheet always gets longer. 

To say Yes to God is to "ever more humbly and resignedly to get over the delusions of all seemingly self-contained systems and to recognize the creature's true vocation." 

We'll keep you in dynamic suspense regarding your true vocation -- your one job -- until the next post.

Your Inside is Out and Your Outside is In

We're talking about the analogy of being, which both elevates the dignity of man while putting him in his place. 

This is because on the one hand we can learn a great deal indeed about God from the nature of reality. On the other hand, as Augustine remarked, "If you think that you comprehend God, it is not God." 

Good nous bad nous?

Thaaat's right Petey: a bad nous would be one that is so cosmically inflated that it pretends to comprehend God, just because he's s'durn comprehensible. It reminds me of quantum physics, which, if you understand, you don't. Besides,

modern science and the whole of human knowledge rests on principles that cannot be demonstrated but are presupposed, as Gödel's theorem shows (Betz). 

That's a bingö. 

Science requires faith, but it is hardly irrational, rather, supra-rational, for 

all sciences depend at some level on faith: faith that the world is intelligible and more than the effects of blind processes, faith that the human mind is something more than a product of natural selection and is actually made to know the truth of things... (ibid).

In short, faith that intelligence and intelligibility really do mirror one another. 

Which, of course, demands a principle, which is none other than the analogy of being. Any alternative to this results in a reductio absurdum or cosmic nul de slack:

For if finite being were not some kind of analogy, there would be no possibility of making a theological inference from it: nature would be either univocally identical to God, or equivocally different from God (emphasis mine).

Which is to say, "totally different," such that "the universe bears no traces of God's workmanship that would allow one to infer that the world is, in fact, created." 

No truth for you!

Therefore, the doctrine of creation -- not once upon a time in the past, but the continuous kind, i.e., now and everynow -- is what explains all the intelligibility-to-intelligence, whether scientific or metaphysical.

Again, as Voegelin says, we are always situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence. We are always open to the latter, but

no matter how hard one may try to close up the gap between them, it refuses to be closed, since to know what something is does not answer the question of why it is. Nor does the most complete knowledge of how something came about explain why it came about. 

This goes for science no less than for metaphysics, for "Not even the profoundest understanding of the laws of physics can explain why these laws and the world that obeys them exist." 

Do not pass Gödel, because you can't.

Unless, of course, there is some direct communication to us from the other side, i.e., not an inference but a fact that is given to us. And given how queer the universe already is, who would be so bold as to a priori rule out such a queer possibility? 

A bad nous, that's who, or at least a very presumptuous one. Rather, we must humbly abide in the "interstitial space" between immanence and transcendence -- and other irreducible existential complementarities such as essence and existence, subject and object, interior and exterior, vertical and horizontal, material and spiritual, appearance and reality, potential and actual, individual and group, et al.

Therefore, "created being" only is -- attains being -- in the Great Between, between "the various poles that define it." 

Therefore, "analogy is nothing other than a unity of the things that would otherwise seem quite different or even opposed." 

In the final unalysis, "creaturely being moves between the poles of nothing and Being," so we are not Being but not not-Being either, rather, always on the way to it. Which 

undermines every notion of the closed universe of modern science, however quantitatively infinite.... For the moment we see that being cannot contain itself but points analogically beyond itself, all immanence is exploded.

A big bang indeed.   

In any event, "followed to its logical conclusion, philosophy flows like a river into the sea of theology." Metaphysics and theology mirror one another in the same way as do science and the objective world; metaphysics is ordered to what is always in and beyond it: 

not only are philosophy and theology analogically related, they are so profoundly related that they... "interpenetrate" -- not in a confused way but such that each becomes itself, as it were..., only in analogical relation to the other.  

This is jumping ahead a bit, but Betz cites a Bible passage to the effect that "I, wisdom, have poured out rivers," and likens it to the "eternal procession whereby the Son proceeds from the Father and the Holy Spirit in an ineffable manner." 

The Aeon is a child on the shore at play with colored balls. 

Not bad. Original to you?

I don't remember. There are no footnotes in heaven. Everybody just knows.

Down here we give credit where it's due, and Betz writes that

life implies movement, and being and movement are inseparable, ultimately because all being is an image of the life of the Trinity, that is, of the Father's dynamic ex-istence in the Son.

The bottom line for this morning is that "belief in God as the Creator implies some kind of likeness between Creator and creation," whereby

the horizon of being radically opens up -- when the mind comes to see that all being, as created being, is nothing but an analogy of the supereminent source that is active within it but also beyond it.

We'll leave you with an old pneumagraph of what we're talking about: 

The First & Last Conspirality Theory

The analogy of being means that the world, or creation, is an analogy of the Creator, such that there is a "similarity-in-difference," even though the differences infinitely surpass the finite similarities. 

Nevertheless, for the forensic metaphysician, divine fingerprints are everywhere, in that all of being bears traces of its transcendent source.

God is infinitely close [immanent] and infinitely distant [transcendent]; one should not speak of Him as if He were at some intermediate distance.

What's the alternative? Well, there are two, and they are equally problematic, pantheism to one side (God is completely immanent in creation) and "theopanism" to the other (God is completely transcendent, with no relation to what he created). 

But there are plenty of hints in scripture that hints of God are to be deuscovered everywhere, beginning with the rumor -- which I didn't start -- that man is made in the image and likeness of the Creator, or later with Paul's crack that "From the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator," and why not?

Indeed, the very possibility of metaphysics and natural theology is grounded in the analogy of being. I go further, and say that the very possibility of truth itself is so grounded, and why not? If truth isn't even true, then to hell with it: we are all sealed in a dreary lifetime of tenure, with no way of gradualating up and out. 

For example, the Incarnation -- the union of divine and human natures -- would be impossible if these two "were totally alien and in principle incompatible with one another." But if they were identical, then no Incarnation would be necessary.

Much of this is familiar to us thanks to Voegelin's concept of the in-between, which is to say, the dynamic space we inhabit between immanence and transcendence, for God himself 

is at once immanent (which rules out every Gnostic dualism) and transcendent (which rules out every monism and pantheism).

And we all know what Voegelin says about the essence of modernity being a kind of Gnostic revolt that immanentizes the eshcaton. God is always both in and beyond, and that's just the way it is: the possibility of analogy occurs in the space in between these two existential poles.

Is the world real? Yes and no: reality is certainly not nothing, but nor is it everything, for even our little slice of reality is an analogy of the Real: 

mutable and finite things are grounded in their ultimate essence in something immutable and infinite, which is essentially distinct from them" (Przywara, in Betz).

Likewise, for Augustine, God is

in all things but at the same time beyond all things, a God who is comprehensible in creatures who are His image, yet incomprehensible in His inmost essence (ibid).

So, metaphysics is a kind of comprehensibility that partakes of an even greater incomprehensibility, which is why in the end apophatic (negative) always surpasses cataphatic (positive) theology: we can always say more -- this blog proves it -- but the last thing we can say cannot be said. God is infinitely intelligible until he isn't intelligible at all. 

Sounds paradoxical, but ten out of ten mystical theologians say it is thoroughly orthoparadoxical. What's the big deal, so long as we bear in mind that the the divine deal is always bigger then we can imagine? 

Now, this business of the fall. I can't help thinking that it is, among other nuisances, a fall into Voegelin's Gnosticism in one form or another: "fallen reason"

tends to miss the mark [which is the literal definition of sin]: either by absorbing transcendence into immanence (pantheism) or by absorbing immanence into transcendence (theopanism). 

But in reality, we are always situated within "a dynamic transcendence within every declared immanence." 

So near and yet so far! -- and for the same reason, for "the more inwardly and intimately one with God one becomes, the more one's reverence for the Divine Majesty grows." And "Even the greatest finding is but the beginning of a new searching." 

And again, the Gnostic world is either "essentially alien and independent of God" or else "the creature is willy-nilly absorbed into God," both paths redounding to modern secularism. And here we are.

Apologies for the repetition, but the book is a bit repetitive. I'm trying my best to boil it all down to the essential point, and save readers $60 in the process. I am presently flipping from page to page, and will try to avoid belaboring a dead horse. 

The author also spends a lot of time debunking various metaphysical bunkum artists, but we needn't detain ourselves critiquing the likes of Hegel or Heidegger. Let the dead bury the tenured. 

Likewise the Protestant bigwig Karl Barth, who claimed that the analogy of being was an invention of the Anti-Christ. Which seems a tad harsh, but Luther started it. 

It comes down to whether this is an open cosmos -- still open for isness despite the fall -- or whether it is fundamentally closed at the top unless and until God reopens it from his end via the gratuitous and totally unanticipated event of the Incarnation.

I believe I see a window at the top of that image, but is there a Door and a Way through it, or am I missing the yoke? 

The Incarnation could never have been predicted from our end, but once here, it is not a fundamental contradiction, i.e., opaque or repugnant to reason. Rather, it makes a lot of sense in the Grand Scheme of things. Maybe it's not the solution I would have come up with, but maybe I'm not God.  

Yeah, I get it: this gratuitous bridge of Light is a kind of inoculation against our own presumption, but c'mon, man: Jesus is still one of us, otherwise he too is incomprehensible.  

If there weren't some kind of analogy between man and God, how could God become one, and what could it possibly mean for us that he is one of us? Surely Jesus is withus and beyondus, or what's the point? Seems to me that the Incarnation is the first & last Word in the analogy of (human) being. 

Christ is the truth. What is said about him are mere approximations to the truth.

Since that is more or less the end of the chapter, I suppose it's a neat way to end this post. There is much more to go, so we'll beginagain tomorrow, as usual.

The Beginning and End of All Knowing

In his The Philosophical Approach to God, Norris Clarke writes that 

As we reflect on the activities of our intellectual knowing power, we come to recognize it as an exhaustible dynamism of inquiry, ever searching to lay hold more deeply and widely on the universe of reality. It is impossible to restrict its horizon of inquiry to any limited area of reality, to any goal short of all there is to know about all that there is (emphasis mine).

Weirdly, nothing in this world -- no conceivable finite fact or state of affairs -- satisfies this inexhaustible dynamism of the intellect, almost as if we were not made for this world (for example, lower animals fit into their environments like a key into a lock, as do our own animal instincts). 

In short, given a strictly Darwinian worldview, it is not exactly self-evident why

He who wishes to avoid grotesque collapses should look for nothing in space or in time that will fulfill him.

For as Clarke says, "our experience of knowing reveals to us that each time we come to know some new object or aspect of reality we rest in it at first, savoring its intelligibility as far as we can." But then,

as soon as we run up against its limits and discover that it is finite, the mind at once rebounds farther, reaching beyond it to wherever else it leads, to whatever else there is to be known beyond it.

That is, until today. Today we will finally get to the Last Truth. Which has to do with the permanent and ineradicable structure of human knowing: we can only know anything because we can't know everything; or in other words, science is necessarily sponsored by the omni-science that is its transcendent ground.

Our process of knowing "continues indefinitely in ever-expanding and ever-deepening circles" -- which is to say, an in-spiralation toward O, which is an endless process of be-coming and of coming-into-being. 

The "totality of being" -- or its inexhaustible source and principle -- is what we call O: it is the ground and telos of all knowing; it is our horizon of being -- or better, it is always just over the vertical horizon. 

Our own dynamic space of knowing is ordered to Celestial Central, the latter characterized by ascending and descending energies and currents.

All of which is coonfirmed and thensome (to the tune of 600 pages) in the book Christ the Logos of Creation: An Essay in Analogical Metaphysics. 

Where to begin? Perhaps with the conclusion, after which we will spiral back down to the beginning. It highlights the complementary and dynamic relationship between metaphysics and theology, which might be symbolized as (↑) and (↓), respectively; these two sciences have the same Unlimited Object -- O -- but approach it from different vectors, as it were:  

Simply put, while approaching reality from different starting points, the two disciplines concern the same One....

Whereas classical metaphysics, commencing from a philosophical starting point, looks to this One from the vantage of the many, theological metaphysics considers all things from the vantage of God's own self-revelation. Whereas the former begins with things and searches for a Logos that might explain them, the latter commences with the reality of this Logos.... 

Whereas philosophy, following Plato and Aristotle, begins with wonder [?!] and gradually rises up [↑] to the contemplation of some Logos, theology begins with even greater wonder at the descent [↓] of this Logos (Betz).

Thus, "any philosophical metaphysics is not destroyed but stands to be perfected by theological metaphysics." It is just "a matter of seeing that the one ascending-descending Logos [↑↓] is the one subject of metaphysics and theology," such that "the Way up and the Way down are one and the same Way of the Logos."

Back to Clarke for a moment, the Divine Object or Logos "naturally attracts or draws" the dynamic intellect toward itself (i.e., it is the Mighty Strange Attractor, the vertical magnet of our innate epistemophilia to which we have alluded on many occasions). Which means that

the mind has, from its first conscious movement from emptiness toward fulfillment, a kind of implicit, pre-conceptual, anticipatory grasp or foretaste of being as the encompassing horizon and goal of all its inquiries.... This is to live mentally within the horizon of being.

Thus, 

The entire mental life of man consists in gradually filling in this at first conceptually empty and indeterminate but limitless horizon of being with increasingly determinate conceptual comprehension, as we step by step come to know one part of this totality after another.

The "conceptually empty and indeterminate but limitless horizon of being" is none other than O as experienced from the perspective of (↑), while the endlessly flowing knowledge thereof is (k). 

Our intellectual life assumes the structure of (k) or (n) --> O (the first being scientific or horizontal knowledge, the second being metaphysical or vertical knowledge of trans-temporal metaphysical principles, or of what Schuon calls the principial domain accessible from our end).

Conversely, revelation is in the direction of O --> (¶), this latter symbolizing the higher noetic intellect to which (↓) is addressed, precisely.

Now, it is possible -- or perhaps ineveateapple -- to superimpose worldly (k) over O, with the result that we are no longer in touch with reality, rather, only our little theory about it. 

Betz actually addresses this at the very end of the book, writing of how man has "followed one 'ism' after another," which just might be the diverse "faces of Anti-Christ, inasmuch as they turn upon some captivating 'idea' and not on the Logos-flesh in whom all things (heaven and earth) and all peoples are united..."

But we'll have plenty of time for transcendental insultainment when we circle back to the beginning of the book. Suffice it to say that "we are left with a choice... between the One Logos and all the world's '-isms'": 

In other words, compared to the One Logos of the Father and creation, all "isms" are so many deceptive abstractions, which abstract us from the real world as it exists in the One Logos....

It is a question of whether "we really want to live in Reality, and not be caught up in a web of lies or in some illusory world of our own making" -- AKA Gen3AOA. 

Much more to follow, but we'll end with an observation by Heraclitus at the very beginning of the book:

Although the Logos is common, the people live as if they had their own wisdom.

Ain't it the truth.