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...

An Interesting Answer to the Most Interesting Questions

Not being a properly enculturated man, I don't know anything else about Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Hernan Diaz except for an (interesting?) comment that “God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.” 

Presumably he has a more interesting answer, but my interest in pretentious postmodern Argentinian novelists is admittedly undeveloped. 

What would constitute the most interesting answer to these Most Interesting Questions (?!) -- all other answers being number two, or lower?

Let's start with the dictionary, because interesting is an interesting word, and leads to the question of why anything is interesting -- which is to say, anything beyond the immediate interests of our instincts, drives, selfish genes, and worldly ambitions. 

First of all, I notice that there are about ten dense pages of words with the prefix inter-, and even a separate entry for it:

between, among, in the midst; mutual, reciprocal; between or among parts of; carried on between; occurring between; shared by or derived from two or more; between the limits of: within.

What is the Principle of this great reciprocal Between of dynamic mutuality in the midst of two or more? Sounds interesting! Which is something

capable of arousing interest, curiosity, or emotion: ENGROSSING, ABSORBING, INTRIGUING, prompting a desire to understand, etc.  

Now, this absorbing desire to understand implies something to be understood, or to hell with it. 

Alternatively, it implies a reality or principle beneath the shifting sands of appearance, and we're back to Plato. 

As we said a few posts ago, philosophy as such is either Platonic or it isn't philosophy, rather, something less, e.g., mechanism, reductionism, naturalism, determinism, relativism, scientism, et al, each of which is not only anti-philosophical but the a priori denial of its very possibility. 

Let's quickly glance at this big book of Christian Platonism I'm slogging through so you don't have to. One author says that Socrates-Plato argues that "such naturalistic pseudoexplanations are not merely incomplete but rather radically different from what a real explanation should do."

Should. Which is to say, not just kick the can down the road, but rather, up the vertical road to what would constitute an ultimate explanation or first principle from which everything else is an entailment: "at the apex of the intelligible world is the superordinate Idea of the Good, the unhypothetical first principle of all."

Naturally -- or trans-naturally rather -- it presupposes an intelligible world which is the subject -- or object -- of philosophy, precisely. Why all the intelligibility, not to mention our abiding interest in it? After all, if it weren't intelligible it would be as interesting as a blank wall.

"Platonism" is just a label for the view that there is a distinct, hierarchically arrayed subject matter irreducible to the material or physical world.

And here we are, nor can we not be here, supposing we are to be at all, for our being is a participation in Being as such. 

I find that... interesting. 

Now back to our main text, Christ, the Logos of Creation. He represents 

not just a union of natures but a thoroughgoing and therefore utterly marvelous exchange whereby the one nature enters completely into the actual condition of the other...

Which goes to the whole "intra-" thingy referenced above, i.e., mutual, reciprocal, between, within, and derived from two or more.

At the end of this chapter Betz describes "a Platonic metaphysics" whereby the transfinite apophatic Nothing "becomes Nothing, in order that Nothing might Be." Or, as in the title of yesterday's post, Being becomes that becoming might Be.

The next chapter -- called From Image to Likeness: An Essay in Analogical Anthropology, is dense with highlights, so it will be slow-going. It begins with a confession by Maximus the Confessor to the effect that

God in his supreme goodness [recalling Plato's principle of the Good] brought into existence a rational and intelligent nature... in order that what He is by essence the creature might become by participation.  

The difference with Plato is that he sees our existence as a kind of automatic emanation from the first principle, whereas Christianity would regard it as a free act -- a gift -- from this same principle -- which is personal, not just an impersonal emanation. Strokes and folks, Greeks and freaks.

The chapter itself starts with this Bold Claim: that 

metaphysically speaking, to be a creature is to be a nonidentity of essence and existence vis-à-vis God, whose essence is to exist, and that this, in the most general sense, is what constitutes the analogy of being.

Indeed, we needn't even bring God into the deuscussion just yet, rather, just posit a first principle of Necessary Being. The restavus are strictly unnecessary or contingent accidents waiting to happen, and boy do they. 

To be perfectly accurate, we would be accidental entailments if the first principle were impersonal. If it is personal, then our own personhood participates in this necessary Person, or in the very principle of Personhood. 

Or just say in Our image, according to Our likeness. Looked at this way, there is -intra all over the place. Which is interesting.

For it is only in this way, by entering into reality, and to the extent that we are one with reality, that we can become who we are....

Alternatively, it may befall us "that the gap between one's essence and one's existence, which somehow [recalling the sketchy events of Genesis 3] fell apart, is closed."

Vertical closure. Bad! But because of this ontological closure, "we fail to become likenesses of God. For we think that what we are at any given moment is simply what we are, that our existence is our essence."

Now, bear in mind that only God's essence is to exist, so failure to be open to this makes us either little essential godlings -- or, more likely, big existential devils, and the rest is history.

The real situation is far more... intriguing, 

that what we are is not fixed from the start but given in the form of a potency to be realized over time.... 

Human beings are by nature beings with a vocation [a calling, supposing we take the call] to become what they are, with the corollary that human beings can also, for a number of [sketchy] reasons, tragically fail to do so... 

Now, I don't judge, but are any of us really intended to be postmodern atheistic storytellers? It's an interesting question. 

In any event, there is a "mysterious teleology at work within [there's that word again] material nature," a kind of 

telos calling from within... to realize some higher rational-spiritual nature that is mysteriously hidden within its psycho-somatic nature like the seed of some higher life but whose full realization depends on any number of [admittedly sketchy] internal and external factors.

I like mysteries. They're... engrossing. Put conversely, what could be less interesting and more gross than a complete absence of mystery? 

"In sum, the human being is uniquely in nature but more than nature." Within but not thereof. 

Wow, we've already surpassed our daily dose of 1,000 words, nor do I want readers to overdose and thereby lose even more interest. To be continued...

Being Becomes that Becoming Might Be

To review: the analogy of being essentially maintains that the creation is analogous to the Creator, even while the Creator is not analogous to creation -- i.e., the differences infinitely surpass the similarities.

In other words, the similarities are truly endless, but must always be understood in the context of even greater dissimilarity. We might say that everything is God, but God is not everything (i.e., the mere sum of existents).

The analogy of being helps to avoid two metaphysical nonstarters, pantheism (the cosmos is God) at one end, and a monistic theopanism at the other (God is everything, in such a way that, for example, there is no space for human freedom, as in Islam). 

Not only may reality may be fruitfully approached via the analogy of being, it is indeed "the implicit metaphysics of the Christian faith," without which it would be impossible to understand the relation between God and creation.

Or in other words, it is the Way out of the perennial ideological extremes of monism vs. pantheism, or fideism vs. rationalism, or empiricism vs. idealism, or being vs. becoming, or radical transcendence vs. the purely the immanent frame. Each of these is a radical alternative to the good ol' analogy of being.

So, don't be an ideological extremist. Or, in Voegelin's terms, don't immanentize the damn eschaton. Respect the space! -- the dynamic and endlessly fruitful space between Creator and creation, or immanence and transcendence.    

That's all very abstract. But what if I told you that Christ is the concrete analogy of being? That's the claim of the next chapter of Christ, the Logos of Creation, and why not? Indeed, it may be the Whole Point of revelation. For if Christ is concretely God-in-time -- or God withus & withinus -- it seems this conclusion is forced upon us. 

Except nobody's forcing anything. Rather, it's a very appealing offer.

It reminds me of a post I've always wanted to write, The Metaphysics of Jesus -- not just the explicit and implicit metaphysics of his words and deeds, but of his concrete existence. This just may be that post, but we shall see. 

There's a lot here to ponder, so we'd better just take it page by page and hopefully sum things up and boil them down by the end of the post. We'll start with this:

the moment one confesses that Christ is the Alpha and Omega one is making a metaphysical claim, to wit, that Christ is the principium et finis [the Latin from which Alpha and Omega are translations] of all things, their beginning and end, their formal and final cause, their very reason for being.

A tall claim, but that's the claim. It "is no mere subjective affair but a true belief about the nature of things." And this belief is either true or false. Or, it either (concretely) happened or didn't happen:

the Incarnation is the actualization of a possibility that we had not previously thought possible simply because it had not happened. 

But lot's of things are that way, from great works of art to scientific revolutions. I don't even yet know if this post is possible, but that won't stop me from trying to make it concretely happen. It's not absurd to hope so, anyway.

in the final analysis neither the Word himself nor his ways can be absurd, since the Word is the Logos, whose ways are reasonable par excellence.  

Excellent!

if human reason is only an analogue of the Logos, and if by faith human reason is united with the Logos, that is, with Reason Itself, then not only is faith not irrational, it is in fact more rational than reason, its dimmer cousin, because it has found and lives from reason's actual source.

[Insert joke about dim cousin.] 

We are, of course, reminded of Gödel and of the intrinsic limits of reason. Here again, for Gödel this did not imply that we are forever confined to the immanent frame of rationalism, rather, that the human intellect always transcends mere reason. In short, he was, broadly speaking, a Platonist. 

At the moment I'm reading a somewhat tedious book called Christian Platonism. It's a rather big squirrel, so we'll try to avoid being distracted by it for the moment. One dense tome at a time.

Christ does precisely what an analogy does: he unites in his one [person] both divine and human natures. And it is in this sense, therefore, that Christ himself is an analogy.

The Analogy-- the very Principle -- of analogy? Or its fulfillment? Well,

without an analogical metaphysics we cannot adequately explain why Christ himself is not a contradiction.... [i.e.,] how Christ in his very person is the wedding of Being and becoming and, as such, the Logos of creation.

A contradiction because

if the natures were univocally identical, there could be no union because there would be nothing different to unite; and if they were equivocally different..., then there could likewise be no union (emphases mine). 

In short, Christ is "the unique mediator who holds all things together, incomparably spanning and uniting in himself the greatest of differences" -- like a bridge or a Way or something. This "allows one to think difference without sacrificing unity and to think unity without sacrificing difference."

"For in Christ, the union of natures is as great as their difference. Indeed, though the divine nature is always greater than the created, human nature," the union of natures "is just as truly human as divine."

Bearing in mind what was said above about the various philosophical and ideological extremes on offer, "all the realisms and idealisms of history turn out to be so many illusory flights from the actual state of affairs." 

You could almost say that if Christ didn't exist we'd have to invent him, because so much of the way we think about reality presupposes a kind of "Christ principle." 

Think of this principle as spanning and uniting

in himself the otherwise insuperable difference between Being and becoming.... Christ is not only the Mediator between Being and becoming but also the Savior of becoming.

Oh my. That last one is a bit of a leap. We don't want to give anyone the Jesus willies just yet. 

Nevertheless, a cosmos of pure becoming is a bit of a lost cause, holding out against entropy until the lights go out. Perhaps Being becomes becoming that becoming may attain to Being? If not, to hell with it, only this latter would be entropic heat death as opposed to a hot death.

"He alone, therefore, is the fullness of Being in becoming," and "the unique source of the power of creatures to become what they are." In other words, 

Christ is the one in whom Being and becoming are perfectly one..., whereby the otherness of divinity reaches totally into humanity and the otherness of humanity reaches totally into divinity.

I call that pretty, pretty good news. I don't think we've adequately summarized the argument, or painted the whole picture, but we're over 1,000 words, so to be continued.

Alternative picture. Always a lot of swirling oranges & yellows. We'll have to look up the spiritual meaning of these colors at a later date: