Mystical Metaphysical Anthropology

That's the title of the last section of this chapter, and it sounds right up our alley, going to "the meaning of the human being as a dynamic analogy between the image and the likeness of God in Christ." 

Which implies that we are not a static analogy, rather, always moving up -- or down -- the cosmic telovator, which is to say, toward or away from our archetypal end.

Again, analogy is not sameness, rather, similarity-in-difference and difference-in-similarity. 

In this case the difference with the Creator is that he IS, full stop: his essence is to exist -- as in I AM WHO I AM -- whereas creatures "exist in a state of potential with regard to who they are, in short, between Being and becoming."

Nevertheless, I suspect that the principle of our own becoming must be gorounded in the Principle of the Father's "becoming," so to speak, in the Son -- which is like an orthoparadoxical "eternal becoming." 

When you think about it, any sort of "-ing" applied to God implies some kind of eternal movement, e.g., "engendering," "proceeding," "giving," "receiving," "creating." 

In any event, "to be a creature is precisely to be a nonidentity of essence and existence." Our essence "is given as a potentiality that is to be realized in time," and here we are, with an essence that is simultaneously "in" and "beyond" us. 

Sounds mysterious, but this is how any teleology operates, for example, the oak tree that is somehow "in" and "beyond" the acorn:

what does "essence 'in' existence" mean but that the likeness is somehow hidden away "in" the image, waiting to be "born again" in the Logos..., into the "likeness" of the Logos that it was always intended to be.

This movement forms "the metaphysical basis for the journey of time," or of finding "ourselves in finding God," the one entailing the other. 

And here again I can't help thinking that this is an analogy of how the Father "finds himself" -- in a manner of speaking and with all due dissimilarity -- in the Son, and vice versa. 

At any rate, Christ "restores the broken relationship between us and God, and so between our own existence and essence," such that "a new life has been given to us like a seed to be elaborated over time," the question being "whether the little seed will grow into its full stature."  

To bring Voegelin into the discussion, we are always situated between immanence and transcendence, and don't default to one side or the other: don't immanentize the eschaton, but don't eschaton-ize the immanent either, if you catch my drift: respect the tension! 

For there are two ways of showing one's disrespect, usurping God or rejecting him altogether. 

Secular humanism, for example, is the "essentially unconverted image living by itself in its own light" -- a purloined light for which it can never account. 

At one end there is an illicit or Promethean "grasping at the divine essence" (a la Hegel), or, at the other, an "essentializing of existence" (a la Nietzsche). Which is to say rationalism or existentialism.

Neither of these alternatives respects the Tension, which requires 

the "patience" of standing within the genuinely creaturely interval between creaturely essence and creaturely existence.

Or in other words, "within the potency of the creature to the Logos," i.e., "in the midst of becoming who we are."

That's about the size of it. The rest of the book is a little inside baseballish for me, dealing with various disputed theological questions and showing how the analogy of being might resolve them -- for example, "the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom," both of which must be respected and harmonized and not collapsed or separated. 

Let's just summarize some conclusions, for example, vis-a-vis the circular -- or in-spiraling -- movement  between creature and Creator: "as the circle is drawn upward, at its top it begins to turn downward": 

For we ourselves ascend with Christ to the extent that we descend with him.... 

"[I]f Christ is essentially the descending God" and if the ascent of our "participation in God" occurs solely through participation in God's descent, then "logically, the practical Christian life is is the living out of this descent"... 

Therefore, "to be human" is "to be an analogy of the self-emptying Logos." 

This was an abbreviated post, but we'll tie the cosmic room together in the next installment.

The Meta-Cosmic Adoption Agency for Fatherless Children

We've been speaking of the dynamism between the poles of immanence and transcendence, but at the end of the deity "the transcendent One is the same as the immanent One," which is to say, both "the Way up and the Way down" (Betz, ibid below). 

Thus, it is "the ladder that joins the heights of transcendence to the depths of immanence." (↑) and (↓) are "no longer discrete realities but aspects of a single reality. As such, to find the Logos above is to find him within, and to find him within is to find him above and without." This is the 

unique mediator, who is at once above and below, within and without, immanent and transcendent, first and last, in which (or in whom) all space and time is gathered together, as in... "the still point of the turning world."

It seems to me that this must take the form of a spiral, only one that returns to itself and thus has never really left itself. Which reminds me of both Schuon:

Fundamentally there are only three miracles: existence, life, intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite.

And of Voegelin:

"The quest, thus, has no external 'object,' but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable."

Betz continues:

"Indeed, we could say, the more it descends, the more it ascends. For here height and depth are one.... in practice this means that the soul cannot ascend to the heights (and be deified) without descending into the depths of humility..."

"Needless to say we are swimming here in mysteries where paradoxes abound, far from the clearly marked shores." 

Well, good. This is right where we like to float around, just over the subjective horizon that gives way to the unKnown, bypassing the surface of "every shallow anthropology"

into the soul's native depths, where Being and becoming, immanence and transcendence, eternity and time, mysteriously meet...

This is nothing short of "a mystery analogous to the eternal generation of the Son from the Father," the latter taking place in eternity, the former in time. Which are not-two? 

Well, now they aren't, at any rate, for "the Logos figures as the Way from and the Way back to the Father."

Sounds like the Divine Attractor, and why not? "There is a transcendent horizon to human existence" and "another, higher teleology at work in nature," such that "The phenomenal structure of consciousness"

is ordered to what is true, good, and beautiful, that is, to the transcendentals, and implicitly to God...

[T]here is a higher, supernatural teleology at work within [nature], even if it will not be fulfilled in the material universe as we now know it...

Wait what? "Is it not written in your law, 'I said, you are gods?'" Who said that?! For it seems we are by grace what the Son is by nature, so

The answer to the question of who we are is thus bound up with our end.... to fully know what something is we have to know its purpose, in short, what it is for, what it is intended to be.

We are intended to be gods by adoption? The Church is a vast adoption agency? Well, 

Can there even be such a thing as human identity prior to the end? Would it not be like identifying an acorn with an acorn and not an oak tree?

Yes, it would be a bit like that. Shed the acorn and become the tree? Like the acorn must die to itself or something?

Any "'native identity' is an identity that one may be called to leave behind," especially "a mistaken belief about oneself." We apparently must leave the false and reified identity behind & below, and respond "to the call of the Word of God in faith." Thus, "it is precisely by leaving our selves that, paradoxically, we find ourselves."

Should we stop here, or keep swimming?

The latter.

Okay, 

any attempt definitively to assert one's identity apart from  the Logos and the divine perfection of the universe is willy-nilly a rebellion of the creature against the Creator, the past against the future, indeed, one's (present) self against one's (eternal) self.  

The perennial drama of Gen3AOA? Apparently, to the extent that our true identity "exists only in God" as "an analogy of being" "between essence and existence" as opposed to "the presumptive divinity of a usurped identity." 

God or "god." Our choice? Yes, but any such attempts "to assert one's identity independently of the Logos are ultimately illusory."

To be human, accordingly, is to have a fundamentally open-ended identity, inasmuch as one's very being is a being within an analogy (emphasis mine).

And

This kind of identity is an open identity, always new, always coming, always moving toward the accomplishment of new and deeper modes of consubstantiality.

Until IT is accomplished? Well, "the Logos is the only place," "where we essentially exist (all other existence being a kind of falling away from our essence)."

Which implies that all other potential existences are number two, or lower. 

July 4th Cerebration

Why am I even bothering to post on a holiday? Well, first of all, a routine is a routine, and mine involves daily verticalesthenics & gymgnostics, even if no one is looking. Nor is this a post, rather, a repost from several years ago, only now edited and artificially illustrated. And besides,

Unless what we write seems obsolete to modern man, immature to the adult, and trivial to the serious man, we have to start over.

Starting over with an essay called Man in the Cosmogonic Projection, Schuon writes that "The question of the 'why' of creation has given rise to many speculations."

Now, we never speculate, except in the strict classical sense of the term, which doesn't refer to the impotent conjectures of the can-I-buy-some-pot-from-you midwit intellectual adventurer. 

Rather, genuine speculation involves nailing down the ultimate reasons for things. It is simultaneously the most useless (because it isn't for the sake of something else) and useful knowledge there is (because it pertains to our origins and end, or to the whole reason for being here).

You could say that practical and utilitarian knowledge deals with material and efficient causes (like science), whereas speculative knowledge is formal and final, AKA vertical. 

But for this very reason, it is actually more certain than merely scientific knowledge, which is by definition tentative, falsifiable, and preluminary, always on-the-way-to.

To what?

From what?

Yes, and yes, and let's find out how. First of all,

the cosmogonic projection [AKA creation] has as its ultimate cause the infinitude proper to the Absolute.

This sentence is true even if you would prefer that it not be, for there is no truth in the absence of Absolute Truth itself; this latter principle is either explicit or implicit, but without its vertical/ontological sponsorship, our local epistemological franchise is rendered blankrupt, and no coherent or consistent statement about anything is possible. 

Now, to say infinitude is to say All-Possibility and consequently the overflowing of the divine potentialities, in conformity with the principle that the Good wills to communicate itself.

 Thus, God freely creates the world, 

but this is only to stress that God does not act under constraint..., for it goes without saying that God is indeed "obliged" to be faithful to His Nature and for that reason cannot but manifest Himself by a quasi-eternal or co-eternal chain of creations... 

Analogously, since God's essence is love, we could say that  he "constrained" by it as well. In my view this "constraint" is precisely what distinguishes the trinitarian Christian God from less differentiated conceptions and spookulations. 

For example, normative Islam or strict Calvinism maintain that God has no constraints whatsoever, but this has certain unfortunate consequences, for it means that -- for example -- God does not say or do things because they are good; rather, things are good because he wills them. 

This makes for a morally and intellectually arbitrary, unintelligible, and impenetrable world from the human perspective, with no speculative basis for natural law or theology -- a voluntaristic God of pure will. It eliminates any human Why? for a divine Because I said so.

I think we can all agree that the

Manifestation is not the Principle, and the effect is not the cause; that which is "other than God" could not possess the perfections of God, hence in the final analysis and within the general imperfection of the created, there results that privative and subversive phenomenon we call evil (Schuon)

Taken out of context and in isolation from his many other discussions of the subject, this may appear simplistic. Nevertheless, it gets to the heart of nub of the gist of the essence of the problem in a purely demythologized way. In my view, Genesis 3 makes the same point, only clothed in mythopoetic garb. 

In a prescientific world, certain metaphysical truths and meanings are conveyed to us via narrative. As with great art, it is important not to be distracted by the what but to penetrate to the why of the story -- the theme and not just the plot, the former being the reason for the latter. 

Many aphorisms come to mind, but we'll limit ourselves to following, arranged in ascending order:

Appearance is not the veil, but the vehicle, of reality.

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance.

The bridge between nature and man is not science, but myth.

The modern aberration consists in believing that the only thing that is real is what the vulgar soul can perceive.

Whoever does not believe in myths believes in fables.

In another sharp aphorism, Dávila pointedly points out that

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment. 

I myself am not troubled by the sometimes fantastic stories of the Old Testament. If I'm truly curious about one, then the first thing I will do is consult the Rabbis and Church Fathers for guidance as to what it means. If I want to know about the flood, for example, it's not difficult to obtain any number of rich and provocative exegeses.  

Back to the existence of evil. Indeed, there is so much evil in the world, one sometimes wonders why God doesn't just end it all with a giant flood or something. Better yet, maybe leave a single righteous man to start all over -- like Noah, or maybe even a new Adam or something.

Even supposing God did allow man to be reborn and begin anew, something or someone inevitably tries to oppose and subvert the regenerating power of the baptismal flood. Schuon:

strictly speaking, evil or the devil cannot oppose the Divinity, who has no opposite; it opposes man who is the mirror of God and the movement towards the divine.

Mirror and movement. Now that is a pithy and pregnant formulation, for it goes to both our immanence and our transcendence; or to our atemporal essence and our temporal journey towards it, which in turn forms the basis of "the meaning of life."  

This meaning stretches out before us (horizontally) because it first stretches out above us (vertically). If not, then to hell with it. Bring on the flood. Or maybe it's always already here. Some days it sure feels like we are drowning in BS, which is to say, deceptive appearances and even outright journalism.

In any event,

the cosmogonic movement is not merely centrifugal, it becomes centripetal in the final analysis, which is to say that it is circular; the circle of Maya closes in the heart of the deified man.

Man completes the circle, not just via knowledge of being (AKA truth), but also the other transcendentals -- love, beauty, and unity.

Regarding the latter, to even say "cosmos" is to say unity, a unity that is anterior to the (merely) material cosmos. No one ever has, or ever will, perceive "the cosmos," for sensory perception is always of particulars.

Why us? Because in a full employment cosmos, someone has to do it:

To the question of knowing why man has been placed in the world when his fundamental vocation is to leave [i.e., transcend] it, we would reply: it is precisely in order that there be someone who returns to God (ibid).

Surprisingly enough, this is completely orthodox; one could say that the Fall represents a rupture in the Circle, while the Incarnation is its repair and completion ("it is accomplished").

Thus, sanctification, deification, and theosis are a participation in the circular movement. Christ is the necessary condition, but this does not excuse us from a voluntary participation in him, which means we -- in our vertical freedom -- are the sufficient condition. But the latter can only get so far in the absence of the former -- close but no avatar. 

Just yesterday I read a little book by Peter Kreeft called The Philosophy of Jesus. In it he writes of how the divine goodness "spills out beyond itself like sunlight." That's the descending movement.

But then, "that-which-was-from-the-beginning," the "unmanifest Source of all manifestations became manifested," and "the distance between Heaven and earth" was and is bridged. 

Well, good. Say what you want, but this must be "the most radical solution to the fundamental problem of metaphysics: how to know Being."

Ironic: note how the Incarnation divides "time in two, cutting the Gordian knot of history," only to heal the divide at a higher level. 

One might say that continuity becomes discontinuous so that the discontinuous (i.e., broken, splintered, fragmented, unintegrated) might become continuous, or at least participate in the continuity. 

For this reason, "when man crucifies truth, truth crucifies man." D'oh! God devises a way to transform man's narcissistic and self-glorifying rejection of, and attack on, the Circle in order to complete the Circle: "God's search for man is a success, and the name of that success is Jesus." 

"Jesus is Jacob's ladder..., and we see this ladder is upside down: it really rests on Heaven, not on earth like the Tower of Babel," much less the babble of tenure. "He makes it possible to escape earth's gravity." 

Another book I read over the weekend, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, discusses the same Circle in different terms, noting that "Self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are supported by bottom-up and top-down influences." The former are obvious, while the latter include such things as "the spiritual inclination to know the truth," "intellectual intuitions about good and evil," and the "movements of grace." 

Elsewhere the authors write of "personagenesis" whereby

In the spiritual realm, which is at the core of the personality, it is listening to the call and love of God. Once initiated, the process of becoming a person continues as a "vertical transcendence" in which the person gives "the self to another."

Participation the trinitarian Circle revolves around receptivity (o) to the gift (↓) and an active self-gift (↑) in response. The "theological virtues originate from God" and "lead one to God." And their practice forms the basis of our vertical metabolism, AKA raccoonagenesis?

I Was a Tweenage Blogger

Luther's three most famous solas were scriptura, fide, and gratia -- which frankly sounds a bit dim to Raccoon ears, but no less dim than all the modern and postmodern ones, e.g., sola physics, sola Darwin, sola existence, sola relativism, etc. 

Enough with the solas, since any and every sola is dynamically engaged with its complementary dance partner, which, if denied, becomes a kind of Jungian shadow -- the dark and dim kind.

Example. 

Okay, consider sola relativism. Every relativist covertly elevates relativism to a pseudo-absolute, which, on the political plane, redounds to tyrannical wokism and aggressive totolerantarianism. Just watch. Or crack a history book.  

Or, sola immanence ends with the violent repression of transcendence of fascism. Which is related to sola Darwinism, whereby we are enclosed in a violent struggle for survival, and may the most powerful prevail. Just watch.

To live in the Between means to reject solas at both ends, whether in the form of empiricism, idealism, rationalism, religionism, in fact, any ism at all; it is frankly to reject ismism in favor of the dynamic complementarities of reality -- which is always more complex than our simplistic, anti-Gödelian reductions. 

Expansionism? 

Yes, you might say that, to the extent that it is the cure for sola reductionism, without becoming its own ism, which I think the analogy of being accomplishes, for its "basic point" is

that the universe does not rest in itself or have its meaning in itself but is an analogy of being. For only then can we take the next step and see that it is meant to be a manifold explication of the One God whose Word is declared in it as beyond it (emphasis mine).

In and beyond, which is to say, between immanence and transcendence. Denial of transcendence -- sola immanence -- results in

the dark world of Nietzsche where power is the only real reality, where "might makes right"....

As a result, with no third eye (of contemplation) open to reality, our relation to the things around us is reduced to crass utility (emphasis mine).

The transcendent Real is reduced to a brute fact, and the immanent brutes take care of the rest. Just watch.

Thus, the analogy of being is not, as Karl Barth claimed, "the invention of the Anti-Christ," rather, its denial is, because it ushers in a "state of affairs in which nothing ultimately matters or means anything."

Nihilists, Donny. 

Such immanent "absolutization, to the neglect of every transcendent principle, will produce only more polarization, discord, and outbreaks of violence." Just watch. And don't forget the popcorn.

Reality -- which, first of all exists -- is "essence beyond existence," i.e., immanent existence pointing toward its own transcendent principle. Again,

we must speak of God's Being-beyond and God's Being-in.... it is not simply [sola] a matter of balancing the two aspects; it is rather because God is so transcendent that God can be so intimate.

Immanence and transcendence are complementary, but, as with all such primordial complementarities, one is ontologically prior, in this case transcendence, which transcends all the way into immanence, and here we are: in and beyond.

Which is to say above and below, rather like God himself, who is "inside and outside, Himself above and below." He "is so inside that he may become outside" (Gregory the Great, in Betz). God is "'indwelling transcendence,' where the emphasis falls on essence in existence." 

All of this -- or so we have heard from the wise --  

ultimately flows into the question of a primordial dynamic and "rhythm": from the rhythmic reciprocity, so to speak, of the persons of the Trinity.... to the rhythm of created being between a transcending immanence and an indwelling transcendence, which is reflected, in turn, in the dynamic of every living thing whose essence is in-and-beyond existence.

What a marvelous mystery!

Accordingly, nothing is univocally the same; all is more -- and infinitely more significant -- than it seems to be.

So much significance and signifyin! 

Not only is reality not meaningless, there's far more meaning than we can possibly assimilate, at least in a single post, but we're not done yet. Let's ramp up the intensity, max out the weird,  transpose the post into a higher key, and suggest that not only is "Christ the Logos"

creation's innermost "in" and its most transcendent "beyond," and thus creation's "entelechy," so to speak, [but] the eternal crossing of transcendence into immanence and of immanence into transcendence and, as such, the Way in whom all things hold together...

Can we buy some pot from this guy? 

No, this is a natural high. Or rather a supernaturally natural one, which discloses nothing less than "the crossing of Being into beings and of beings into Being," or, as in the title of a recent post, Being Becomes that Becoming Might Be.

"For obviously we exist in a state of tension between the essential and the existential, the ideal and the real." Obvious, among others, to Voegelin. 

BUT "for Christian metaphysics the end of a divine humanity has already been realized in Christ," thus the title of yesterday's post, The End Made Middle, "For the essence of humanity now exists not in the abstract only but really and concretely,"

so that life henceforth is now the realization of the life of Christ, which has been given to be, like the yeast that leavens the whole batch of dough. 

But we can take this yet deeper and higher? We'll try. 

For "to be"

admits of degrees; and "to be" in the fullest sense of the term is to be one with God who is Being... anything less would be a falling away from Reality into a land of illusions...

AKA various solas and isms, for "we cannot 'get real' unless we are rooted, so to speak, in Reality; and we cannot be rooted in Reality unless we know where to find it."

I'll bite: where is it? 

We're just about at the end of our daily 1,000. How about a picture of the post? Do your best, my artificial friend -- maybe two pictures, one before and one after reading it:

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: