Hegel’s Philosophy of Universal Reconciliation: Logic as Form of the World [1 ed.] 144384909X, 9781443849098

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Hegel’s Philosophy of Universal Reconciliation

Hegel’s Philosophy of Universal Reconciliation: Logic as Form of the World

By

Stephen Theron

Hegel’s Philosophy of Universal Reconciliation: Logic as Form of the World, by Stephen Theron This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Theron All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4909-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4909-8

CONTENTS

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Begotten not Made Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 20 Faith, Philosophy and the Form of Affirmation Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 51 Faith and Reason; Reason and Faith Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 58 God is What Matters: So Why Does God Matter as Well? Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 75 God, Being, Love Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 81 What is God? What is Man? Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 106 Chesterton as Subject Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 122 Evolution and Subjectivity Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 141 Nature, Evolution, Philosophy Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 150 Beyond Thinking Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 167 Self and World Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 182 Spirit

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Contents

Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 206 Beyond Common Sense: Anthropology as Christology Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 225 Persons and Relations: Ethics Redeemed Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 246 The System Which is Philosophy Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 251 Being qua Being Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 269 Oxymoron Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 287 Logic and the World Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 307 Love, Idea, Being, Categories Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 338 On the Quantitative Indeterminacy of Self Chapter Twenty One................................................................................ 341 Beyond Man Chapter Twenty Two ............................................................................... 348 Love, Reason, Perception Chapter Twenty Three ............................................................................. 353 Man the Sacrament of Unity: Is Man a Species? Chapter Twenty Four ............................................................................... 355 What Was at Stake in Medieval Philosophy? A Historical View Chapter Twenty Five ............................................................................... 371 Reflections on the Teaching of Philosophy in Clerical Seminaries Chapter Twenty Six ................................................................................. 382 A Note on Marxism

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Chapter Twenty Seven............................................................................. 387 On Not Shrinking the World Bibliography ............................................................................................ 397

CHAPTER ONE BEGOTTEN NOT MADE

To question the reality of time, a move no more and no less esoteric than is philosophy generally, is to imply something richer, measuring more fully up to experience, not something poorer, a pace less petty, neither forward nor backward, but still a pace, as of music or dance. Only thus does timelessness signify an absence of time, as dynamic. We could not, for example, accept a view representing us vibrant human beings as immobile statues. That would not be perfection in the end perfected, not “realised end”. In this way, as Hegel expounds it, the End transcends the notion of a final cause.1 One reason for our confidence in saying this is that, contrary to popular assumption, the doctrine of God was never one of immobility, even where it was one of immutability. In Western and Christian thought God is necessarily a Trinity, a universe of relations. Here God speaks “the Word”, God and “with God”, from whom God, “Spirit”, proceeds2. Such uttering, equated with begetting or generating, is what the Father is. He was not, is not, anything prior to this generating. Therefore any event that we experience, be it our own perception of something, or any event at all, is so to say undercut and supported by, as having at its heart, this eternal utterance or generation of the Word in which all things are contained. The very newness of things reflects eternal 1

Cf. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, hereafter Enc., Part One, “Logic”, §204. Hereafter this reference will be EL for “Logic”, as EN for “The Philosophy of Nature”, EG for “The Philosophy of Spirit” (Geist). Hegel does not write here, in parity, “the philosophy of Logic”. For him philosophy is firstly logic, no longer therefore divisible into logica docens and logica utens. Thus Logic as such transcends previous metaphysics. 2 Hegel suggests, in an early work explicitly, implicitly throughout, that Spirit proceeds from the Father as Son or Word (the Father as his own Other), thus transcending the ancient filioque quarrel while superseding the language, without contradicting it, of hypostasis and nature. “I and my father are one” in our differentiation, that is the thought.

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novelty and freshness, and thus time is eternal reality’s image and cipher, not its negation merely. If therefore anyone would replace this religious view with, as in absolute idealism, a universe of immortal spirits, ourselves, in perpetual mutual relation, then should he or she not say, as preserving the insight of theology, that we in some way generate one another perpetually? We do not just find ourselves passively there. How could we? But nor is the individual alone responsible for all or everyone else. Rather, we must be as necessary to the whole community as the community is necessary to us. It could not exist without me, or you, and nor could I without it. We are “begotten” from one another, yet each has his own energy which is yet one with that of the whole. In a way this is symbolised by the two births, of nature and spirit (baptism), which in reality, however, are not successive, or births at all. We are in ourselves and we are in all the others, as a whole. We are necessary, not born, not dying. Yet we appear to come out and return, ceaselessly, so ceaselessly that our coming out is one with our returning and vice versa. Our life is the world’s life, is life itself. To be alienated is, typically, to feel oneself contingent, from another exclusively. Lucifer or Satan knew or felt this. Yet this figure disappears when we understand, as in the realisation that God is himself the atman, my deepest self, “closer to me than I am to myself” (Augustine). So the eternal perceiving of McTaggart’s spirits is more profoundly their eternal begetting and breathing forth (of one another). More perfectly than in a still hierarchical if egalitarian Trinitarianism, their begetting is their breathing forth. There is just one, unitary action to each one’s being. So there is no multiplicity of disparate processions, begetting, “spirating”, being begotten and “spirated”, seemingly at odds with the divine simplicity. If there is plurality then it is only of the persons who “proceed”, each in the same way and with no first or Adamic person. Each of us is passively active and actively passive, begetting (all) the others in the very act of being begotten by them. Each and all, that is, are equally necessary to the whole and to one another. Each one is “the man” as, conversely, to speak within religious representation, “Christ was made sin for us”, is every and each man. What about the Trinity then? Well, either it foreshadowed this as a historical conception, our first guess in time at such a reality, heralding the overcoming of religious alienation, or there is in truth an antecedent or divine Trinity (as in Paul’s “In him we live and move and have our being”), which we should now be seen as somehow explicating. Perhaps

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we need not choose, may affirm both. Trinity is the act or life of the Idea itself, “in each of its constituent functions”.3 Our own birth, our newness, on our first day, this defines the character of each and every day, of each and every moment indeed, as eternal, ever new, not ageing in temporal process, each contained in all and all in each (the principle of music). So there is no first day. Birth, which causes time, is eternity’s deepest symbol, symbol of a world without decay. So also death, death as required for every particular seen on its own, not seen in the All, where each is “as having nothing yet possessing all things”. Non moriar sed vivam, I shall not die but live, and yet, media vitae in morte sumus, in the midst of life we are in death. There, sung in Gregorian, we have the speculative in artistic and religious form, “the true reasonworld”.4 Life is an imperfect and still contradictory category, in other words. “Oh life that is no life at all”, exclaimed the mystic of Avila, high up upon the dialectical ladder. To find our selves simply being there, passively, this would be a constraint, unfree, less than infinite. Rather, the Whole, and so we, wills to be. Even the most abject suicide wills this as the End, sought as it is in all actions. There is a primordial will, spirit moving on the face of the waters as foundation for the formation of things, necessity within their necessity, whole in each part. Here, in the end, necessity is freedom and freedom is necessity. Satan as protest-figure is produced by religious alienation. In a true philosophy of identity in difference he has no place. The centre is everywhere, in each. Catholicism expressed this by seeing the local church as the whole Church, even the total universe of spirits. This is the positive rationale for the much decried “private” Mass able to be celebrated by a solitary person. So all is eternally accomplished, not as in some primordial past, but as ceaselessly or in each moment definitively accomplishing itself beyond all movement or change. Movement after all is defined in philosophy as imperfect act merely, i.e. as long as the movement is still going on and is hence incomplete. It is incomplete for as long as it still exists as movement. Time itself, as cyclic, or as viewed whole, is beyond such motion, itself supratemporal, a flaming wheel. It does not “return”. Rather, an eternal return is the unbroken sempiternity of each and all. 3

EL160. From Hegel’s idealist standpoint such conceptions are self-validating, not requiring witness or empirical confirmation (the mistake of the Crusaders in seeking the empty grave at Jerusalem). But suppose the conceptions too admit continuous improvement or development…. 4 EL82 add.

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* So birth and beginning, all that we seem to remember, simply is our forgetting our eternal begetting and being begotten. When we love we fragmentarily remember our eternal partners. The time-series upon which we are launched, precisely at birth, is the signum formale we have simply to see through (as we see past the image on our retina). It is thus the symbolic mode of perception proper to us as finite-in-infinite, as parts one with the whole, the universal in the particular and, which is more easily forgotten perhaps, vice versa. Obviously we cannot without contradiction proceed beyond or after time itself. We have rather to “go out of” time, and that daily or continually. This is happens through awareness. It can be helped by symbolic or even sacramental presentation, by art or participation in some religious or dramatic action. This continual “going out of time” is life’s acknowledgement, again, of its own categorial finitude, due to which it is accordingly bounded by death, its end. This end, death, is present in every fibre of life’s essence, upon which actual physical death, always beyond our experience however (since it is as unreal and finite as life), sets the seal. We acknowledge where we have always been as we return to what we never left, and so do not return, do not “go away” (where to?). No birth no death, say the Buddhists. The contradiction we mentioned, eternity after time, reappears in creation-narrative. Human beings are not really given earth, sky, gardens, any more than they are given their own being as if existing before it. Our necessary milieu is not external to us, except by the metaphor of sensation. Man is nothing without earth, sky, air and so on, which he projects in symbol as outside of him, or as if he were formed from a pre-existent dust. The outside is the inside. These are also defective categories of thinking. There is no such duality in concreto. We should see that it is our symbolic form of representation merely. Yet more intimately, we individuals do not exist before or independently of one another. As I am nothing without air, a milieu, so that milieu is pre-eminently the Whole composed of spirits, i.e. a spiritual whole which is more essentially a whole than are the precarious organic wholes of sense-experience. Each and every individual is, like the milieu (since they are this), essential to my being and to my being me, just as I am essential to this milieu. For if some are essential then all must be so. The difference would otherwise be too great and definite.

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I cannot be given, as an extra, as a gift, what is already essential to my being. Nor can I be given my being as if being there already to receive it. The basic insight here was the replacing of perception with begetting or even a yet more dynamic conception as better approximating to the relation between the persons making up absolute reality. If we posit begetting exclusively of the individual subject, myself, we get solipsism. Solipsism, however, in so far as proposed, had always entailed a web of inter-related solipsisms, thus appearing to cancel itself out by internal contradiction. Its genuine attraction and merit, though, was practical. One should live as if begetter and lord of fate and of the universe. This though is the contradiction within, the impotence of the Kantian practical philosophy. Living “as if” is pretence and unbelief. * So, we conclude, we do indeed beget, as affirming and willing, our environment, our companions, as they us, in full reciprocity. This is the ultimate ground of the exhortation to accept in gratitude life and its gifts, as if from a purely yet infinitely other, though this is contradiction since otherness by itself is a finite category as bounded by the non-other, ourselves. Hence we are further exhorted, in the tradition, to be free, to be master of one’s destiny in eternal terms at least. This freedom is itself then explained as grace and ordination (“fore”-ordination is mere figure, the temporal within the timeless). This, however, is the familiar coincidence of opposites, making even or especially of Augustinian man a cryptoabsolute, the atman. But now, if all and each beget in this way then has not begetting itself collapsed back into mere perception again? One should rather say that we have uncovered perception’s own truth, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder precisely because beauty is in the power and will of the beholder. Yet if all others are not more in my power than I am in theirs as we spring forth eternally together, by free but by no means contingent choice, then power is so to say reduced to perception just as much as perception is promoted to power. Will, that is to say, volition, is saved from its (practical) separateness, is assimilated to cognition precisely as in the Hegelian dialectic. This then is the meaning, the import, of our begetting one another. It is the truth of perception, and insofar as we are what we behold we beget ourselves too in one another. There is no limit to the identity in difference. This goes no further than, was implicit in, the position that each of the divine ideas, according to which all things were made, is identical with the

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divine essence. Two things identical with a third thing are identical with one another. The truth of identity in difference does not abrogate the basic logical law of syllogism. Otherwise discourse would have come to an end, if it could ever have begun. * The physicists are now coming round to thinking space and matter as one, made up indifferently of quanta, as has already been mooted with light, for example. Space is as granulated as matter at the micro-level, the continuous mere appearance, as with moving film. The structures of quanta (ribbons, strings, membranes, webs) are not in space. They are space.5 In the same way we have found that man, spirit, is not to be thought of in separation from nature. He is within nature, rather, since he is not thinkable apart from nature. His body, the primary symbol of his spirit, of himself, is continuous with it, the outside is inside and so the inside is found projected outside. Clearly the assimilation of space to matter, or vice versa indifferently, removes all reason for treating time in isolation. Space has now finally lost its absoluteness for the scientists, an event presaged in Kant’s analysis, and time must follow suit. For Kant, held back by the Newtonians, space and time had retained a reduced autonomy as a priori forms of understanding. Nobody, except the absolute idealists, knew what to do with this result, least of all the physicists and astronomers in the field. Now, however, the trajectory, of central importance for contemporary man’s self-awareness, of the history of modern philosophy comes into full and clear view. Space and time are matter, it now appears. Yet matter is no longer herself as we knew her. She is never perceived in herself, that much may be retained from quantum physics, with the clear conclusion to be drawn that there is no in-herself. Hegel drew this conclusion long ago, however, making use of Kant’s results. It is, at least, one view of the recently enunciated “anthropic principle” in (some) cosmology and physics. The common-sense objectivities must at this final level be discarded as misperception or, less harshly, as a symbolic view of things, like our artproducts. They are forms of spirit’s self-consciousness, of self in other, or other in self indifferently. This is the super-organic unity signified in

5

Lee Smolin, Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada, as reported in Focus, Nr. 21, 23 May 2005, p.79, by Michael Odenwald.

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religion but here demonstrated, or at least proposed as demonstrable hypothesis. There is a similar coming together of disparate strands in anthropology and related sciences. After Aristotle had left us with the dualism of soul and body (“The intellect comes from outside” he tells us in On the Parts of Animals), we seesawed between materialism and spiritualism for a long time. With the advent of a monist evolutionary theory theologians tried to maintain an archaic notion of an “infused” soul (from outside?) in total divorce from the system into which it should be infused. This has gradually given way, helped along by such insiders as Teilhard de Chardin, on all sides to a notion of the world becoming conscious of its self. Nothing more radical can be thought so long as temporality is retained as objective determinant. This notion has now received strong encouragement from palaeontological discoveries showing that the (it was assumed) unsouled homo erectus laid the foundations, of course through intelligence and associated virtue, for man’s domination of the globe and of the world’s life when he pursued the larger prehistoric mammals into less than temperate regions and successfully hunted them, a million years or more before homo sapiens is recorded as appearing. An idealist philosopher would of course relate this insight, as coming at the right time, to the progress in dialectical thinking already going on, as here too in our becoming historically aware of it. Man, in this way, can begin to be seen as taking his place as the embodiment, the realisation and incarnation, of the whole, with the outside as his inside, his inside fully at home with the supposed outside, as it should be once these categories begin to be cast aside. I mentioned the history of modern philosophy. We should now understand better what was at stake in the period from Descartes on to Kant and up to Hegel. It is superficial and worse to speak here of German philosophy, as if discrediting by this particularising what is no less than the human advance. It is equally dishonourable to fasten upon Descartes’ supposed vanities and failings in the neoscholastic manner, and to throw scorn upon the very concept of reform (Maritain). Scientific method was here born, and with it the power to penetrate beyond appearance. One should say reborn, in view of the Greek achievement. Yet here, more aware, after centuries of theological seriousness, of the need not to believe lightly, it gave birth simultaneously, to increased self-consciousness, the seed of idealism. This, and not the simplistic dualism, is the mark and merit of Descartes. There is no question but that the doctrine of creation, however open in itself to constant reinterpretation, has served as a bar at times to progress in knowledge of reality.

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* In a sense the primacy of consciousness is obvious, once thought. This was the advance of philosophers in the early modern era, to bring this into the open, whence it might be read back into Aristotelian and other earlier texts. This is why we find the physicist Smolin, who feels as it were professionally bound (he need not) to be a realist about time and matter, raising the question about the observer of the whole, the universe, as himself within this whole. His solution is to try to devise a theory that would be manifestly observer-neutral or the same for all possible observers. This though opens the way for coincidence with the view he would oppose, a universe of pure consciousnesses operating with a common cypher or, more harshly, illusion, viz. matter, time and change. Smolin speaks of studying “a system that by definition contains everything that exists.” But this, quite plainly, would be the system, reality as a whole. We ask, in virtue of what would it be a system. Answer, nothing! This means, plausibly at least, that ultimate reality cannot be a system, must be simple, as Aquinas long ago so trenchantly argued. Aquinas went on, however, in apparent contradiction of simplicity, to claim that this reality formed a Trinity of “persons” who were one with their relationships with one another. In similar vein Smolin quickly deduces that there can be no “absolute properties” of the parts of his ultimate system. Rather, all properties will and can only be relational, such as to “define and describe any part of the universe only through its relationships to the rest.” This is precisely the situation of Trinitarian theology. The Father simply is the eternal begetting of the Son, the Word, which he perpetually and self-constitutively utters. The Holy Spirit is perpetual procession, in “spiration”, from Father and Son, so that Aquinas says that he is Gift, donum, as giving his name. Aquinas is able at least to indicate the compatibility of this Trinity with the necessary simplicity, beyond system, of the First Principle. He argues that the more perfectly a thing proceeds from its origin, the more it is to be identified with it, backing this up by what is more than an analogy with human cognitive processes. The case is similar, if different, in McTaggart. The most perfect unity of all, that between spirits, who are persons, is that where the unity “has no reality distinct from” the individuals it unites but is somehow in each of them wholly. This follows once we grant, analytically, that “it is the eternal nature of spirit to be differentiated into finite spirits”, though this view differs in some respects from Christian Trinitarianism. As overcoming hierarchic differentiation more perfectly it might seem less at prima facie odds with the necessary simplicity, even

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though the persons are maybe so many more than three (they might be just one in the end though). There is a real identity in difference here. Just as the Father begets the Son, so, we claimed, must these persons beget one another, ceaselessly, in the truly mutual co-inherence of the absolutely autonomous, neither determining nor determined. In the illusory temporal series this is reflected by the ceaseless self-begetting of the human race. Like God the Father, it is plain that we would beget ceaselessly, given the requisite opportunity and physique. For the female such begetting includes the childbirth cycle, as genuinely erotic, therefore. Here we have the true reason for the centrality of sex, the urge of libido, beyond any doctrine of a deformed or “sinful” concupiscence. The urge is to do it again and again, as aping eternity, each satisfactory erotic act embodying in intention the whole, as if each time wanting to be the last or final act before dying. And each offspring too is the same, is the whole world begotten by itself, an individual person who is one with the unity, the Whole, which he or she has constitutively within himself, as his biological and mental development, death apart, will witness. * The view might seem bizarre. Consider, though, the alternative, contingency in time and a contingency apart from the other contingency of the created world. In an earlier paper I argued for a divine fiat as only possible explanation of one’s experienced contingency.6 Now I rather question the experience as misperception, calling out to be resolved but not in that way. What it shows, the perplexity at one’s self-being, is that one cannot be contingent. The postulation of a quasi-extrinsic divine and everlasting love or even “election” is a historic attempt at an explanation, not indeed to be rejected but to be itself more perspicuously presented, as mystics or people in mystical mood have indicated. We thus have Augustine’s insight, that “there is one closer to me than I am to myself”. Whatever is thus closer, one may claim, is I and not another. The empirical, seemingly contingent self is not the true or real self that we are urged to know, a truth which believers in reincarnation also can find strong indications for embracing. In the paper I had suggested that the ancient belief in an eternal, nonevolutionary world, implying at least on some premises an infinite multitude of individuals, in fact prevented appreciation of the self as person, unique, subject. I was forced to admit the paradox, the greater 6 S. Theron, “Other Problems about the Self”, Sophia, Australia, 24,1, April 1985, pp.11-21.

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difficulty, in admitting a finite number of men coming late in time and yet aspiring to understand the whole, as if by right. “All nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything” (Meno). Conditioned to an evolutionary perspective Plato might well not have come so far, so far, that is, as the presupposition of all science, viz. that nature is intelligible in terms of our human intelligence. Intelligence, that is, is human. In fact Plato already overcame the conditioning, not of evolution but of similar materialist views. This brings us, all the same, to this question of the differentiation of infinity, should we deny now the contingency of this finite number of men of which we are used to think we form part by a certain creative election. The three of Trinitarian philosophy can be made to wear a certain necessity in relation to the infinite One. This will hardly apply to McTaggart’s finite but timelessly necessary spirits, whatever number we might assign. So shall we make them infinite in number? There seems no reason not to from the side of science, since the absoluteness of the finite temporal perspective has been rejected. This will apply even though the number of micro-particles be finite and unchanging, since the ban on infinite divisibility does not apply to spirit and the world seen in a grain of sand can itself be the world of this infinite number of spirits. Alternatively we might replace three with one, analogously at least to the Pauline “You are all one person in Jesus Christ”. In the 1985 paper I referred to the evasiveness of “monopsychism”, thinking mainly of some medieval Aristotelians but also of Hegel. That is, we might still think of the finite number of consciousnesses as making up this One, as they do the Christian Church, sacrament of the human race as a whole for its supporters or members. However, it is possible to dispense with the individual self, as Hume had thought. Notions of collective and indeed “egoless” consciousness are common currency in many cultures, and awareness of this can embody the term or outcome of experiences typically classed as mystical.7 Be this as it may, the point is that we need not be saddled with the surd of an absolutely finite number where necessity and freedom meet. If, for example, we admit with McTaggart the possibility of reincarnation within an illusory time-series, then this way of viewing ourselves might just as well, it seems to me, be extended over the equally illusory extensions of space. That is, my (or “my”) consciousness might here and now be extending to what might seem to be other persons,

7

Axel Randrup, CIRIP, “Idealist Philosophy: What is Real?” http://cogprints.org/3373/01/evolutioncognition.html.

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some or all of them, though this be as unbeknown to me as my “previous” incarnations. Then, it might seem, the universe “has no grain”. This, however, was precisely the objection felt by the early quantum physicists as they were forced, for reasons later codified by Bell’s theorem, to admit a universe no longer consisting of separate parts locally joined. Measurement of one particle “will instantly determine the direction of the other particle’s spin, thousands of miles away.” This has nothing to do with physical signals, unable to travel faster than light. Rather, we deal at any moment with an indivisible whole.8 The connections are non-local since in fact the particles (and why just they?) are the connections, the relationships, from which, since they are practically endless, we can in a sense choose which ones to highlight for this or that purpose. The world is not lawless, but it is fundamentally one, as perfect a unity, it seems, as McTaggart’s community of persons. Yet he thought that only persons, spirits, could be united in this way and in fact one can see the opening to idealism offered by the stress upon the observer in the new formulations, as Niels Bohr and others were well aware. Some scientists are scandalized by this readiness to abandon the physical, as they see it, as unscientific. Yet many of them, like perhaps David Deutsch, then go on to reinterpret the physical in a way that is indistinguishable from an idealist approach, like Hegel before them, e.g. if one affirms that whatever one can envisage or think is “somewhere” real (the “multiverse”). Idealism, that is, as Wittgenstein said of philosophy as a whole, leaves everything just as it is. It is only that we now see how to think it. Any scientific development whatever is and was compatible with an idealist framework. If I suppose with Paul Davies that aliens have inserted messages in my DNA, if I admit the reality of evolution, yet all this reposes within a conception precisely of reality, which is interpretable according to the parameters of absolute idealism. Thus Findlay, it seems to me, misinterprets Hegel’s cautiously negative reaction to the first discoveries of fossil bones understood for what they were.9 Empirical phenomena are not as such absolute, since they are conditioned by the nature of the observer, as Quine, a philosopher certainly friendly to physics, has acknowledged. What Hegel would not have admitted would be the causal evolution of a power, spirit, thus dependent upon our present evolutionary state, which might without further ado give a scientific explanation of that very state, or maybe of anything else. 8

Cf. F. Capra, The Turning Point, Fontana, London 1983, II,3, “The New Physics”. 9 J.N. Findlay, The Philosophy of Hegel, Collier, New York, 1966, pp. 274-5.

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So did we or did we not descend from the apes, i.e. from earlier now extinct primates? We should note first that any concept of development, such as we have, entails such intermediary creatures, and the very term “creatures” is significant, whether they be creatures of our own or some other mind or minds. In either case they are in some sense ideal, they proceed from or as an idea. Development, indeed, for one such as McTaggart, is cipher for a certain order within the supra-temporal Cseries, while the concept of dialectic similarly frees development from temporality. So primates and dinosaurs will be as much or as little creatures of our consciousness as are any of our surroundings here and now. Alternatively, they are part of us and, as such, may be persons (which alone exist, it is claimed), Hegel’s “articulated spirits and shapes of eternity”. Here though we may recall our starting-point, that it must be that we beget one another. Similarly, I create the beings from which I come or descend, since this is just my symbolic way of thinking. In reality I have no beginning, am eternally necessary to an eternal reality. But since we beget one another we have a collective consciousness, which may be seen as more important, the domain of science. It is here that our common public past is generated. Is not this though just a way of speaking, collapsing the concept of truth into that of warranted assertibility merely, as MacIntyre diagnoses the forms of “internal realism”?10 We answer no. There are those who would reduce or collapse truth in this way, not noticing or ignoring the fact that it leads them to self-contradiction “in performance”. Yet the avoidance of such contradiction, e.g. in relation to a supposed evolution of our cognitive powers, motivates adoption of idealism in the first place. Absolute idealism, anyhow, is not recognisable under MacIntyre’s description here. He comes close to admitting this when he stresses that “we” is “a keyword in the formulation of this kind of internalism in respect to truth and reality”. Yet he misses the essential in his analysis of this when he sees it as confining philosophy to a particular “community of enquiry”, instead of enhancing the role of the subject universally. What is essential is that absolute idealism absolutizes the subject. That is, it is seen as true, in the time-honoured old way, and not just “internally”, that the subject is theoretically normative, that the self, the conscious subject, is the first and fundamental reality. This is the reason for Hegel’s identification of the person with the universal, making of the thinking subject the antithesis of the particular individual. This situation leads to the discovery of the principle of identity in difference. As MacIntyre says, “it is only insofar as 10

A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, 1988, p.169.

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we understand what follows from those premises that we understand the premises themselves.” It is not, anyhow, that truth is reduced, to warrantable assertibility or to anything else, though Putnam might be interpreted in that way. Rather, truth is expanded to fuller stature by a soto-say material inclusion in it of the thinking consciousness as fundamental. Thus Aquinas himself says that the first reality to fall into the mind is being, i.e. mind is prior and being should not therefore be played off against it. Hence it is mind, nous, that provides “the terminus for all understanding” and which crowns Hegel’s dialectic as the Absolute Idea, thought thinking itself. This is the absolute category or, rather, the final transcendence of categorial limits by something that “necessarily… is whatever it is” (MacIntyre), which is itself, rather, necessity, though use of this term casts us back into a phase of the dialectic now overcome. God, any God, such as MacIntyre is referring to here, must be beyond necessity as he is beyond cause. The sense in act is the sensible in act. The intellect in act is the intelligible in act (in actu), and vice versa in each case. These Aristotelian and scholastic realist tags will also bear an idealist interpretation. Indeed they call out for this. For how will the sensible become the sense, the knowable the knower, unless the reality (cognitio sensus est de re) is in essence a function of those who sense and know (sensus est quaedam ratio)? Also the scholastic doctrine was that omne ens est verum, understanding by verum a quality in mente. This was understood realistically (in accordance with a certain type of correspondence theory). Thus understood, however, it is incompatible with our evolutionary paradigms and to that extent, as evoking an “infused” soul or similar dualisms incompatible with a scientific view, archaic. One can, however, preserve the correspondence theory intact and simply claim that we do not know what we thought we did, viz. “common-sense” objects, as in fact Aquinas would agree. For Hegel too common-sense knowledge belongs within the sphere of essence, antithetical to being, with which it is not yet synthesised in the final and true sphere of the notion, which transcends common sense. A really evolving cognitive power, anyhow, would have no claim on true knowledge of any sort (the Lewis-argument against “naturalism”). Both realists and idealists admit that we know. What we know, however, we also generate, it is argued here, as Aquinas said exclusively of the divine knowledge as causing its object. Now divine knowledge must be knowledge absolutely speaking or archetypally. Doubts may arise about the integrity of the self as subject of such consciousness, for instance, as compared with accounts of collective or “egoless” experience. All the same, however, we need not commit

14

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ourselves to mutual generation, but simply say, with McTaggart (and science), that in many cases of apparent perception we misperceive. What we rightly perceive, according to him, is a spiritual world of persons only. What is at stake in both cases, viz. self and world, is the identification of ens, of that which, as object or subject, is verum. For idealists the world consists of mind or minds. This is the normal form of being, of a being, one which can be exchanged for the other as other while remaining itself, where the part can be one with the whole, where there is an identity in difference. Also Thomist thinkers will point out that spiritual reality, God, angels, souls, preponderates massively over the material, temporal and changeable. This they reduce to a vanishing point as far as their principles will allow, to the point of paradox indeed. If we grant that evolution, taken as part of a realist or physicalistmaterialist scheme, is in contradiction with any claim of knowledge, even knowledge of evolution, then the idealist solution, which leaves science as it is (even within science people claim now to find support for it) appears practically mandatory. A version of idealism was rejected by Aquinas at Question 85, article 2, of the First Part of his Summa theologica. This was often hailed by neo-Thomists as having ruled out in advance the later idealist development in philosophy in toto. Yet what Aquinas rules out there, as it were analytically, is simply the endless regress of saying that the idea or image of some entity is what the subject apprehends (id quod) and never that entity itself by means of this “intentional species” (id quo). For absolute idealism, however, ideas are simply not intentional at all and there is no doctrine of representative perception (of a Ding an sich). Again, for Aquinas, this is the situation absolutely or in regard to God who, he claims, has no knowledge of us “in ourselves”. For him we are not, since he has no relation to us (as we, by contrast, have to him), and so he “only” has knowledge of us in his ideas of us. The clear conclusion is that the “we” should drop out of the picture, though this conclusion is by no means clearly drawn and is even denied. McTaggart, accordingly, will say that we make no judgements, but only appear to do so under the illusions of time and change. A judgement, as mental act, would be intentional of what is judged (second logical operation). Under such conditions the collective activity of investigative science can be pursued at least as well as, though we claim better than. within realism. The sceptical questions about collective consciousness are if anything better guarded against in absolute idealism, where each is somehow identical with the whole, thus rendering perspicacious the Aristotelian insight that anima est quodammodo omnia. This confirmed Plato’s dictum that “the soul has learned everything”, including the root

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knowledge that “all nature is akin” (Meno). This though is only explicable if nature comes from soul, is ensouled, whether we see it as “petrified intelligence” (Schelling) or, with the philosopher-poet, as “the workings of one mind…. Types and shadows of eternity.” The oneness of this mind is also best explained by the coincidence of all persons in the whole, which they somehow have within them in a more than organic unity such as is reached at the end of the dialectic in Hegel’s Logic, the absolute idea beyond the categories. Nature, on this view, is under a certain mode (quodammodo) what the soul is. Aquinas reached this conclusion in regard to angels, who can only be such as having the species of all things (but not of course all things themselves) concreated within each of them. This innateness reappears with Descartes in the human case, inspiring Maritain to dismiss his philosophy as a displaced angelism. Angels, however, more likely represent a displaced idealism within a realistic scheme. Do we, on the other hand, identify the soul, souls, human persons rather, with God, with “the absolute source” in Merleau-Ponty’s words? Hegel, in the tradition of Nicholas of Cusa, asserts an identity in difference here, presenting to that extent a philosophy of prima facie contradiction, a feature he himself found in Leibniz’s thought. Nothing other than this, however, can lie behind Eckhart’s statement that “The eye with which God sees me, is the eye with which I see Him, my eye and His eye are one,” quoted by Hegel.11 Behind this, in turn, is the Augustinian “There is one closer to me than I am to myself”, mentioned above, recalling the atman or true self of Indian philosophy. The religious tradition, indeed, seems the most likely source for the doctrine of identity in difference. * Religion, indeed, would typically make the difference greater, infinitely greater, than any closeness of identity. “My thoughts are not your thoughts”, we read in Isaiah, while the Fourth Lateran Council specifies the primacy of unlikeness over likeness in any doctrine of analogy between God and creatures. This, however, is merely consistent, bearing in mind our own remarks above concerning divine knowledge of anything other than what is identical with himself or itself (the ideae divinae). He, who is this knowledge, has no relation to it; and the only possible reason for this seeming lack is that there is nothing with which he could be related.

11

Hegel, Phil. of Religion, I.

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Chapter One

A great deal of religious effort, typical of those burdened with what Hegel has called an “unhappy consciousness”, though he takes great pains to show that this is not a sufficient or even correct reflection of Christianity as the religion of freedom, has been expended upon the search for union with the absolutely Other. The plain fact is though that insofar as union is achieved this can no longer be other, which suggests, if that is the normative end-state, that it never was so. Thus St. Paul told the faithful that they sit with Christ in the heavenly places, here and now. McTaggart’s philosophy perfectly replicates this. If we were fully conscious we would know that we were in eternity, each of us one with the whole system in an all-embracing relation of love, succeeding to knowledge just as St. Paul described. Knowledge is in itself imperfect, which is why we only seem to make judgements. This is McTaggart’s conclusion after a long and rigorous chain of argumentation. My concern here is simply to illustrate the general appositeness of idealism. There is a fear that without the transcendence identified with Otherness the reality of God, of the Absolute, will be lost. “Shall We Lose God in Outer Space?” was the title of a pamphlet by C.S. Lewis. One understands why he feared that, though one may not perhaps share the fear. Lewis, as popular but learned apologist, stressed transcendence above all else, and in apparent tension with his romanticism, one might think. God was not an idea, a figure in a type of discourse, but a real other, real because other. There is a kind of pathology, a “gut reaction”, in this, sometimes called the sense of sin. The transcendent is approached, if at all, by grace and faith, both gifts, like one’s creation itself and indeed the whole world. One needs someone to say thank you to, Chesterton asserted, and who could object to that? All the same, there is now increasing awareness, in Western religious circles, prompted by psychoanalysis maybe, though present in preFreudian sources, e.g. Dostoyevsky, even the Gospels, that one needs to forgive oneself! One would be stretching religious language in the same immanentist direction merely if one went on to speak of thanking oneself. There the verb would more strongly oppose reflexivity, so that one who spoke so would automatically be understood as posing a duality within the self, typically of the trans-empirical and true self or atman, who is also God or the All. At the end of the process, again, “all things are yours”, and of course the ascesis is as much a purification of knowledge as of will. A valid cognition comprises both. Thus Aquinas defined will, mutatis mutandis, as nothing other than the natural inclination of consciousness to its object. Just as idealism leaves science untouched, though it modifies the philosophy of science, so here the wonder and sheen of being is not lost

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because we are freed of our eternal alienation from it, in accordance indeed with religious and mystical promises. “You would not seek me if you had not already found me.” Being is indeed the first idea. Concerning grace, it was always the prime function of grace, as indeed of a postulated created freedom, to make a man’s actions his own, as the lumen gloriae of the beatific vision shall make God’s own sight of himself a man’s own. “I live yet not I”. This not-I, in fact, never was I. The empirical world, although it is our necessary starting-point, is yet itself misperception, as analysis will show. It is the ladder one must kick away, along with empty time and space, as Kant already saw and Einstein and later physicists increasingly confirm, and along also with that unreflective notion of matter which was never Aristotelian and which was denied by Plato and Parmenides. One of the Psalms of David (104, Vulg.103) refers to creation as a veil with which God covers or hides himself. Grace, today’s theologians will stress, is everywhere. Do yourself a favour, we say. For McTaggart each person is as necessary to the being of the whole as the whole is to each person, a doctrine already in Eckhart: “If God were not, I should not be, and if I were not, He too would not be.” One might indeed say that here the dilemma between theism and atheism is blown away with the wind, the wind, we might wish to add, which can “blow where it will”. The Christian incarnation-doctrine was already interpretable in this sense, as in its very uniqueness bearing upon each and all in identity of dignity, subject here in germ already replacing notions of substance. “Who sees me sees the Father…. I and the Father are one”. Aquinas argues over many articles that any number of individuals, why not all, could be God incarnate, even though he did not consider that this was so. In contrast to McTaggart Hegel can be read as retaining this exclusivity, where the one lifted up (on the Cross, but “as Moses lifted up the serpent”!) has drawn all to him and lives in them. But still, in the sources themselves we read “You are all member one of another” or, again, “I in you and you in me”. This argues a perfect reciprocity which the speaker has first glimpsed, as the Buddha once preached that he was present from the beginning and would be so until the end, caring for and teaching and helping those who suffer. The Catholic saints in their particularity do no less. One might argue, a trifle ad hominem, that if the mystical body or Church is not inessential to, makes up the “whole” Christ and is indeed “predestined” to do so, then McTaggart’s and Eckhart’s doctrine is confirmed. If what this leaves us with should no longer be called God, as McTaggart prefers against Hegel, well, this is a merely nominal preference.

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In theology one worked with “foreseen” merits, all grace coming from Christ. Although one focussed here upon the eternal Mind and its effects in time, yet what one in fact launched was a concept of causality in reverse direction, future to past, which there is no reason not to generalise if it is valid at all. The idea, as encapsulated in the anthropic principle, is proving useful in physics and cosmology particularly, though not without conservative resistance. Generally applied, however, it means that all the past is generated in this instant and, I have argued, all other persons in one and the same act with their generation of me. The future, on this scheme, however, appears more than ever dark, since no causal lines stretch forward from the present. This very present, on the other hand, testifies to a future now causally operative, the “realised end” (Hegel EL212 add.). This, in fact, converges with McTaggart’s finalised C-series, finalised not temporarily but in fully operative perception, not forgetting our interpretation of this series as ceaseless mutual generation rather than some type of “static time”. It is beyond all illusion of time. Backward causality, that is, does not give us reversed time but eliminates time altogether. To a certain extent it remains a way of speaking in bondage to an imperfect or finite and to that extent untrue category, if we accept the Hegelian dialectic whereby causality at a certain point eliminates itself in self-contradiction, in favour of the Absolute Idea. For we have to realise that our true existence is one with the C-series viewed as a whole or all at once. Ultimately we are that series, Randrup’s work with collective and egoless consciousness, with an impressive array of evidence from other thought-cultures, might seem to suggest. This is allowed for in McTaggart’s thought by the identity in difference of the part with the whole, with the whole “system”. “I live yet not I”, as St. Paul put it, supplies the cultural ancestry here. Randrup’s endorsement of the Now as alone real might seem to exclude as an opposite vision an existence including (but transcending) all times. His endorsement, however, of Rubin’s research into the nature of the Now, psychologically viewed, opens a window upon convergence for these two idealist schemata. For there need be no empirical limit to a psychological “now”. For us it is, at “present”, three or four ticks of a clock, maybe, but for the Lord, or ourselves in some more perceptive state, “one day is as a thousand”. Thus St. Peter consoled the early Christians for the unexpected delay in the Second Coming of Christ. Yet on the scheme we are considering any departure and return are simultaneous, as, again, the old

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resurrection crucifixes collapsed passion and exaltation together.12 Aquinas, indeed, conceives his whole theological system of creation and “redemption” as exitus and reditus of the eternal and immutable, in a processio beyond that of “process theology”, where this applies time to the Absolute. The ultimate being itself is seen in terms of (Trinitarian) processions. It is this vision, I have suggested, which Hegel raised to a kind of crisis as between theism and atheism, a crisis, however, which one might claim was inherent in Israelite religion, or non-religion, from the beginning. Thus the Psalmist records that the heathen cry reproachfully to him all the day long, “Where is thy God?” Where indeed?

12 At the Catholic mass believers without effort conceive themselves as present at the event of two thousand years ago there commemorated, when the God-man saw each and every one of them individually, since he was dying for each of them personally. By the same token, he saw without effort all persons past or future or contemporary as equally present to himself. The tradition itself encourages generalisation of this situation, be it imaginary or real, and philosophy has taken the hint, however theologians may drag their feet.

CHAPTER TWO FAITH, PHILOSOPHY AND THE FORM OF AFFIRMATION

Evangelical faith is represented in the Gospel as a removal of a mountain, i.e. as an action both powerful and self-chosen (we need not call it arbitrary, since moving a mountain might on occasion have its point). Here I plead for faith to move itself, a mountainous task indeed. Such selftranscendence, however, is a theological constant. As knowledge shall vanish away, it is said, in what has still to be a higher wisdom, so faith too passes insensibly to the same goal, a theme to which the second century Alexandrian Church Fathers in particular were alert. What for them, however, belonged to individual askesis, has now, and indeed, as I contend, for some time, become imperative for all. While this development, it is important to see, leaves the natural sciences unaffected it yet provides a more unitary holistic way of thinking about science at just the time when science is inclining towards its own form of holism. * Before passing to the specific topic adumbrated above I want here to give the metaphysical setting for the study of the following contemporary problem. The view is personally styled only in the sense that is proper to a liberal “art”. That is, it is not private or, again, arbitrary but to the best of my ability rationally grounded. So then, it is customary to begin with being. Being, though, is an intractable problem for thought, as Heidegger has noted. “Why is there anything?” Postulating a necessary being, as “pure” act, viz. act qua act, seems to do no more than posit the problem anew. Nothing is solved thereby. Act, in fact, in our thought, is prior to being. For pure act, act qua act, may or not be an existent. As necessity it is more likely a formality, as use of “is” here, which seems to signify being over again, cannot be assumed to be more than a formality of our Indo-European predication system.

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Thus any thought, once thought, or even just thinkable, is indestructible, that is, necessary. And thought, taken just per se (and forgetting how we ever came to know about it), thinks first, or above all, itself. What else should it think? Hence all else, if it is or is thought at all, is included in that “absolute idea”. There is no “ontological discontinuity”. God as creator of being just cannot mean that, and all the mystics in chorus insist upon it. So this absolute idea, in turn, is the ground of any thought or phenomenon whatever. Ground is a nearer relation than cause. A thing’s ground is what it ultimately is. Ultimately, I and you are each the divine absolute idea, and so, thus related, identical with each other too. These truths ecclesiology (whole church in the local church, I in you etc.) reaches at the end of its study. It does so because they are there from the beginning in the eternal designs, beyond either compulsion or contingency. Once the primacy of act over being is seen then logic stands at the centre. Logicus non considerat existentiam rei, said Aquinas, meaning to put the logician second to the metaphysician, but if existence is a finite category merely then the logician, who has seen this, is himself the true metaphysician. Thus for Hegel, and he is our first name here, metaphysics meant the dogmatic systems of the early modern period which just his logic would replace. Aristotle too opposed substance to logic but Hegel posited substance as a category to be overcome within logic, within the doctrine (and category!) of essence more specifically: The truth of substance is the Notion, - an independence which, though selfrepulsive into distinct independent elements, yet in that repulsion is selfidentical, and in the movement of reciprocity still at home and conversant only with itself (Encyclopaedia 158).

“This also is thou, neither is this thou.” Hegel adds a little later: The Notion is the principle of freedom, the power of substance selfrealised. It is a systematic whole, in which each of its constituent functions is the very total which the notion is, and is put as indissolubly one with it (Ibid. 160).

The notion, unlike being, waits upon no act of arbitrary creation. This would merely remove the problem a step further from us. The necessity, which the notion inherently is, itself renders it beyond all dilemma of being or non-being. It is quite other than being. In line with this, Hegel speaks of “spiritualisation, whereby Substance becomes Subject” (The Phenomenology of Mind, Harper Torchbooks, New York 1967, p.782).

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If esse were “the act of acts” (Aquinas) then there would be no actus purus. Pure act, as necessary, cannot other than be. But it cannot be either, since it acts rather as thought. It is thinking, a verb which as verb is not substance. Being is substance. Esse could indeed be an act, but not act of acts, not unless an act has to have esse before it can be an act. But that is what is in question, nor may thought unthinkingly enslave itself to our system of predication in this way and call it metaphysics. Sartre’s view, in which nothingness as freedom triumphs over being, might be thought to preserve the prejudice in favour of being, the density of the chestnut tree’s roots, when he puts things in that way. Yet he might also be seen as overcoming the prejudice against negativity, essential for Hegel’s liberating doctrine of self in other, identity in difference (when he puts things in that way). As Hegel himself says, “The Nothing which the Buddhists make the universal principle, as well as the final aim and goal of everything, is the same abstraction” (Enc.87). The “definition” of God as being is “not a whit better than that of the Buddhists.” The conclusion would seem to be a synthesis of being and nothing which is not therefore nothing as mere negation (ouk on) but as other than being (me on), to use an ancient distinction. This McTaggart regrets that Hegel called Becoming (Werden), as if setting forth a process-philosophy merely. It is well known that the names of his categories, though taken from ordinary discourse, receive their own precise, often different meaning in the dialectic and so it is with Becoming, since this must be compatible with the transcending of common-sense temporality. It stands rather for the “utter restlessness” of dialectic. Like Being and Nothing, which “vanish” into it (“and that is the very notion of Becoming”), so Becoming “must vanish also” (Enc. 89). In fact “Becoming”, as appearing with Being and Nothing at the very beginning of the dialectic, is destined, along with these common-sense notions, to vanish from serious thought. Thus thought thinks in the end only itself, as Infinity. This, however, is necessarily differentiated, not into those elements of our finite thinking, which the dialectic successfully surmounts, but into ourselves as persons. This differentiation too, however, remains logical and not ontological, inasmuch as each persons is mutually identical with each of the others, thus constituting one person over again. This indeed is why “person” cannot have an exact reference in Hegel, any more than “self”, with which it becomes interchangeable. For the principle of personality, says Hegel, however persons be particularised, is universality, ultimately the ego as “universal of universals”. Ultimately this requires revision of the notion of thinking itself, as Hegel revises Becoming. For the notion of thinking too is taken from

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common life merely. For Hegel it is rather assimilated to the general form of consciousness. Hence McTaggart will postulate beyond it, as more fully reciprocal than knowledge, as the systematic transcendence of the subjective-objective dilemma requires, what he finds is best called Love. Knowledge if absolute must pass over, “vanish into”, love, thus, mutatis mutandis, it may be, strikingly confirming the Christian revelation that “God is love”, albeit from this avowedly atheist standpoint (where McTaggart at least is concerned).1 In retaining a subject the cogito of Descartes continued in reduced form the limitation set by Aquinas’s “It is evident that it is this man that thinks”, asserted against those maintaining a common intellect, as it was called (we might call it collective or, ultimately, egoless consciousness). What though is self-evident is not the cogito but that thinking is going on. There is thinking. No subject is evident here (Cf. Frege’s Der Gedanke or Geach’s roulette wheel in his God and the Soul2, determining the occurrence of thoughts). Aquinas himself says that what falls (cadit) first into the mind is being (ens), not the subject, though he appears to miss the import of his own formulation, viz. the primacy of thought even over being, so that, in Aristotle’s words, thought thinks itself. What else should it think?3 This primal awareness (“we” or “our” are posterior constructs) requires as first task that thought, as known to us in interplay with experience, be allowed to unfold itself for itself, so to say. Thus is reached the clear and justified or demystified vision of thought thinking itself as the absolute idea by and in which all, the whole, is known, and known again as a knowing or as Spirit knowing us. What is thinking? This is a genuine question, the main question, pace Heidegger. The situation is echoed in religion. Thus symbolic views of reincarnations filling up the whole apparently temporal series or, which is more in line with our evolution-paradigm, of ourselves as present within a 1

J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge University Press, 1901, final chapter. See also, on Becoming, the same author’s A Commentary on Hegel’s Logic, Cambridge University Press, 1910. Some find this interpretation of Hegel misleading, as happens too with Aquinas’s Aristotle. But the later thinker may still be preferred in either case, though one need not concede the criticism of the respective intepretations. 2 RKP, London 1969. 3 Hegel calls this act the notion’s self-particularisation. This is like the unclosing of a plant from within exclusively, as the same plant’s own “judgement”. Judgement means the particularisation of the notion. Thus viewed the judgement is the notion’s “native act” and not something contingent upon it. Enc.166 add.

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common parent, find their rationale under absolute idealism. The original sin doctrine could never justify the imputation of culpability, that “in Adam all die”. The priority of Adam (and the name simply means “man”) is rather that of the Idea, ultimately of Spirit, the first or infinite. Infinitude is an abstract idea of ours. Real infinity is necessarily differentiated into individuals, as idea is realised in nature and synthesised in spiritual relations of perfect community, the prototype of which in our thought is the Trinity. The idea is metaphysically prior and time is subjective or illusory. We are born, and hence die, in our idea. The “sin” of Adam is the awakening or “self-sundering” of spirit, as temporally represented in narrative. Each of us is identical with this “ancestral” idea. We are as necessary to it as it is to us, this being the anatomy of the perfect unity which thought requires, as monotheistic religion bears witness. Such religion, however, contradicts itself, superficially, in a doctrine of creation as it most often is presented. “Let us make man in our image.” Later, this image will be re-identified with the Absolute in the Incarnation. Man, that is, or, rather, Dasein, is ultimate, as consciousness. “We know not what we shall be, but we know that when he shall appear we shall be like Him.” This, in fact, is to know what we are. There is no need for likeness, however, when identity is to hand. Thus the duplication which is Adam’s emanation as likeness and our reduplication as Adam’s progeny must give way to that New Man, in seeing whom we see “the Father”, and in whom all are “members one of another”. But just as this religious teaching is narrative representation of timeless Spirit as thinking itself, so at the summit of the dialectic, the Idea, earlier representations fall away or are only seen in its light, the “true light”. Dialectic here re-evokes the medieval question as to why the new and perfect “law” was not rather given from the beginning. The answer is that the dialectic is necessary for self- or reflexive knowledge, for the transparency without which consciousness cannot be itself. For this reason too the doctrine of angels as beings created, out of time, with the species of all things innately given to them, is incoherent. One cannot represent eternity as bounded by the temporal. Thus the angels are we ourselves. We have here an indication of the truth of temporality as necessary representation of the eternal, real and spiritual. Here too the negative or other must be presupposed as moment of the Whole, since this whole is in essence the reconciliation of all otherness. In positing man as absolute, as Spirit, we do not become atheists. There is more kinship with Spinoza’s “acosmism”. Rather, the dilemma of theism or atheism, as seen by today’s religious militants, for example, is

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transcended, and this is presented as the meaning of our historical experience, itself in reality a dialectic, wrapped in the bosom of thought thinking itself. If it comes to that, we are not claiming man as man either, but as Spirit ever blowing where it will. We know not what we are, since spirit transcends, in fact “sublates”, substance. Substance as imagined is not and never was. It is a question of how much reality humankind can let in. * Forty years ago now Pope Paul VI brought out a document called “The Credo of the People of God”. He prefaced it, somewhat jarringly, with an assertion of the necessity of believing (though not as part of the ensuing Credo) that the human mind is natively capable of attaining truth. It is indeed, but it is increasingly evident that this confidence is in contradiction with the facts of evolution taken absolutely and cum praecisione. An infused soul is therefore postulated as divorced from and unaffected by the evolutionary paradigm, thus making out of our intellectuality something unnatural and miraculous within nature’s own field. Much unnecessary perplexity is thus engendered, stemming from obstinate adherence to the Moderate Realist theory of our knowledge as permitting continued belief in a universe of material substances wrongly identified as necessary object of the dogma of divine creation. Idealism, however, as sketched above is clearly the more natural pendant to any assertion of the primacy, the all-sufficiency, of Spirit. This is indeed the truth we must believe Spirit capable of knowing. Spirit thinks itself, purely, while each of us, its differentiations, are one with this indivisible because necessarily perfect Whole in an identity in difference. This is the truth Mind can attain, as the history of philosophy demonstrates, though there may be doubt or hesitation over this or that point. Mind as containing all is remains within itself, Hegel’s self-unclosing plant mentioned above. Yet there is no bounding finitude here. The inside is the outside and vice versa. * The document of the Church leadership referred to here indicates a wish to draw back from modern or post-medieval philosophical perspectives, which undoubtedly treat “moderate realism” as a form of naivete. Attempts have been made since the nineteenth century to portray this perspective itself as a form of naivete on the part of the Idealist thinkers of

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the Enlightenment. One thinks of books such as E.Gilson’s On Being and Some Philosophers or the treatment of Descartes in Maritain’s Three Reformers. These attempts might have offered synthetic reintegration of philosophy’s history on the Hegelian model, were it not that the idealist antithesis of the Enlightenment period is merely there rejected in toto, a “pilgrim’s regress” indeed. But there can be no such regress, no refuting of Berkeley, say, in a mocking paragraph merely. The nature of both time and experience forbid it. Hegel, in his day engaged, as much as any thirteenth century (moderate) realist, engaged with Christian doctrine with all the resources he had to hand4, as of course, a little later, did J.H. Newman with his. Newman wrote of The Development of Christian Doctrine. So too did Hegel and both were free of the narrowness of many of their followers, orthodox or “liberal”. But Newman’s treatment was more historical than philosophically systematic. Had this not been so then he would have been compelled in logic also to treat of a possible development of his own doctrine of development. His conclusion was that development had led doctrine up to the point then reached by the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. Newman’s own later difficulties with that leadership ought though at least to make us modify such a judgement, even if we are not going to end by seeing him as a crypto-Hegelian exactly. This perspective of the “open” Church, however, as much on pilgrimage in the sphere of doctrine, that is to say in the sphere of the optimal expression of the substance of faith, as it is in all other spheres, is one more suited to emerge later. Here we merely indicate, our subject being Hegel and not Newman. Nonetheless, we find that the same pattern of opposition within a more fundamental unity, as even between these two writing on development, is repeated among Hegel’s interpreters (one might ask if this is so with Newman’s, or even with Aquinas’s), as we shall now see. In itself this is evidence that Hegel might be right in making his overarching conception one of reconciliation. So we take two interpretations, that of Georges Van Riet (1965)5 and that of McTaggart (1901), theistic and atheistic respectively. We aim to 4

He speaks of “that vulgar conception of actuality which mistakes for it was is palpable and directly obvious to the senses”. For Aristotle, rather, it was the Idea which was actual and active, having energeia and not a mere dynamis as in Plato’s thought (EL147 add.). 5 Georges Van Riet, “The Problem of God in Hegel”, Philosophy Today, especially Parts II-III, Vol. XI, No. 2/4, Summer 1967, pp. 75-106 (Part I in the Spring 1967 issue of this journal). Translated from the original French version in Revue Philosophique de Louvain, Tome 63, August 1965, pp. 353-418.

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declare what they are before determining whether and how far they may be compatible. Since one interpretation is professedly theistic while the other is avowedly atheistic we already make a statement in raising this question. We admit, that is, to a possibility that the understanding of the Christian message, the substance of it, might be indifferent to a choice to express oneself in theistic or atheistic terms. At the very least we admit to an initial openness to the question once raised. * McTaggart’s view of Hegel seems on the whole the simpler of the two. He points out that God in Hegel is no more and no less than the ultimate reality, whatever this might be. He adds that what Hegel finds to be this ultimate reality differs too much from the general notion of God to retain the name without causing confusion. For reality, Hegel claims, is, as pure Spirit, a whole consisting of all finite-infinite spirits or persons, each one of whom is in some way identical with this whole and therefore indispensable to it, without beginning or end. It is not therefore created and there is even, ultimately, no world (“acosmism”). Regarding Jesus and incarnation, if we should now consider Hegel’s specifically Christian credentials, McTaggart finds that, for Hegel, Jesus is simply conveniently fastened on in popular religion as God-man because of the “immediate” way he himself understood and taught the reality of this identity, the absoluteness, that is to say, of rational personality, which he of course had no hesitation in identifying with the observably human, whatever the final truth might be. Incarnation thus understood is true of us all, since we are all manifestations in the misperceived milieu of space, matter and time, of “extension”. We are not truly incarnate because matter is unreal, but we all appear to one another. McTaggart adds that he cannot finally judge whether or not this might prove compatible with something one can call Christian. Thirdly, McTaggart finds Hegel’s Trinitarian thought totally incompatible with orthodox teaching. This is because for Hegel, he rather convincingly shows, Spirit, dwelling in the community, is understood as the synthesis between the thesis which is the Father and the antithesis which is the Son. Both of these latter are therefore imperfect conceptions absolutely requiring synthesis in the absolute notion of Spirit. To this, however, we must object that it is not clear that this is not compatible with orthodox Trinitarianism. There, too, the Father has no reality without the Son, nor both without the Spirit uniting them. Further, even if divine revelation should take a historical form, this does not of itself entail a realist

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philosophy of history. Tus what is gradually disclosed at the end may all be the sole and complete reality, in which the rest is contained. So Hegel concludes that God is (his) revelation. McTaggart includes a section claiming to show systematically that Hegel’s moral teaching is virtually the antithesis of Christian ethical attitudes. This, however, might be seen as merely urging that antithesis between Jesus’s proclaimed freedom and Church legalism highlighted by Dostoyevsky or by “liberation theology”. * We pass to the study.by Professor Georges Van Riet of Louvain. It is more detailed and differently nuanced. We begin with some comparisons of his treatment of the points from McTaggart just mentioned, noting that Van Riet answers McTaggart’s query about compatibility with Christianity with a cautious affirmative. He thus asks, like McTaggart, if Hegel’s God is “personal”, and the quotation marks are his own, as if, unlike McTaggart, he might be ready to find this a false dilemma. Personality, he remarks, “is not a major category” for Hegel. As for God, he is conscious and free; under this heading, if you wish, he is “personal” (95).

In saying this he does not, as one might think, contradict McTaggart’s apparent atheism, where the latter makes the community of all persons the absolute. For Van Riet adds that God “is the society of men” (McTaggart is somewhat more cautious about who or what the spirits are; so here Van Riet’s Christianity paradoxically makes his Hegel more humanist). To this he further adds, showing more theological awareness than McTaggart, that “this whole question is full of ambiguity”, and for the reason that “for Hegel as for Christian teaching, God is not personal but tri-personal in his unity.”6 The “personal” character of the “Spirit animating the community” is perhaps not more and not less difficult to conceive than the personal character of the Holy Spirit abstractly considered. In the end, Hegel’s 6

P.T. Geach makes much of McTaggart’s ignoring of the divine tri-personality in Christianity (Truth, Love and Immortality, Hutchinson, London 1970. But he adverts to it frequently in his Hegelian studies, if not in The Nature of Existence. Since the three persons are not taught in Christianity as acting separately (tritheism) his objection to an all-inclusive person is not fully met by Trinitarian considerations.

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atheism would not be bound up with this question. Not more and not less! Van Riet is saying here that “subjectivity as such” (Hegel), the Spirit in the community where each has the whole within him, that whole which is thus not separable from human beings (“if God and man are distinct, they are also bound together”7), is as much or as little like a person as is the Holy Spirit of tradition, indwelling and independent. This would mean, if he would accept McTaggart’s assessment that the whole is “for” the parts but not vice versa, that Van Riet’s move from personal to tri-personal, in God, as much modifies this attribute “personal” beyond the normal as McTaggart, say, thinks that Hegel modifies the term “God”, i.e. beyond due proportion.8 This consideration, though, and it is important to stress this, would not as such rule out a future more conscious development of general Christian doctrine in this direction. It is anyhow quite clear that this is what Van Riet is pleading for. Even McTaggart refers obliquely to this eventuality when he explains the obscurities of Hegel’s philosophy of (the Christian) religion by pointing out that at one and the same time Hegel treats of other religions in the full positivity of their concrete reality while he explains Christianity, for him “the absolute religion”, in terms of what he thinks it ought to be, rather. Well, it would not be “absolute” otherwise. Thus Hegel simply writes off the medieval phenomenon he calls the “the unhappy consciousness”, along with the mistake of the Crusaders, as stemming from their and their contemporaries’ naive (or “moderate”) realism, in seeking after earthly relics of Christian beginnings as a means of closer unity with their source. Epistemological realism and its naivete, not Christianity, was the “unhappy” problem. Many interpreters have failed or not wished to see this, due to an antecedent hostility to “religion” patently not shared by Hegel. So what is at issue with “the unhappy consciousness”? Essentially this: in it Hegel wants to show the failure of a realist consciousness (Van Riet, p.94). * After the doctrine of God here we come to Jesus and the incarnation. Surely McTaggart’s forthright attitude as described above must diverge from any “Christian” interpretation of Hegel. As Van Riet puts it (p.82), “Jesus is the God-man… He is the other of the Father, reconciled with him

7 8

Van Riet, p.95. Cp. The Pauline “You are all one person in Jesus Christ.”

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in the Spirit. For the unbeliever he is only a wise man, a new Socrates… For religious consciousness… He is God incarnate….” Perhaps the phrase “religious consciousness” supplies a key to reconciliation. So McTaggart points out that in calling Christianity the absolute religion, for whatever reason, Hegel does not depart from his essential subordination of religion to philosophy. The religious consciousness deals in symbols and thus far falls short of direct or philosophical encounter with reality. It was necessary, Hegel claims, in the9 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, that one man should present himself, in all “immediacy”, as divine. In the Sermon on the Mount he teaches our own divinity, that the pure in heart shall see God (Hegel’s example), the peacemakers be the children of God, the kingdom of heaven be ours (we are then kings, even if we should receive it as might a child) and so on. But here Hegel insists that the “incarnation” shows what man is, essentially, and not what he shall contingently become. Van Riet seems to agree, saying “Man is God’s image, God’s son, reconciliation” (p. 82). Man is God’s son, and not only Jesus. Not only the history of Jesus, but also that of “all of humanity”, grasped in all its depth of meaning, is the manifestation of the eternal history of the Trinitarian God. Here there seems to be a bit of backtracking. It would be more consistent to say, to add, that he knows that not just the Trinitarian life of God, but also the life of his own spirit, were it to be fully grasped, manifests, is one with, the absolute. This, indeed, or the inner lives of all person whatever, just is “the eternal history of the Trinitarian God”, according to Hegel. What is Trinitarian is the triadic form it takes in each, not an over-arching system of necessary persons, since these finite-infinite persons, our own subjective consciousnesses, are themselves necessary and timeless, without beginning therefore. We have already found McTaggart pointing to the dialectical character of Hegel’s Trinitarianism, whereby the persons are not equal so much as that the Holy Spirit synthesises the thesis of the Father and his antithetical negation in the Son, with which Nature is at least analogous. But in orthodoxy too Father and Spirit are nothing apart from their mutual relation. Ipsae relationes sunt personae, this thesis, may contain depths not yet plumbed. Dialectic, for example, might help us overcome the brute either/or of economic and metaphysical Trinity as we have them now. For the relativisation of time rids us, we noted above, not only of those angels and their aevum, but also 9

Later Al Hallaj and others, deranged or not, did the same while even Buddha implicitly claims a corresponding universality in his promise never to forsake his followers.

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of the mirage of a pre-existent Christ.10 All is eternal. Therefore the angels cannot be made eternal over against a real temporality somehow bounding eternity. Similarly, the incarnation in one or several chosen individual natures entails a regime, a class of real beings over against or excluded from as bounding the sphere of the infinite, among which God would choose or prepare candidates for union. Even the most jejune doctrine of an analogy of being(s) would exclude this scenario, where God is not God, a situation not saved by inventing the phrase “ontological discontinuity”, which names rather the scandal. Instead, every finite thing is God incarnate, as everything affects everything else. Sound philosophy forces this conclusion and the corresponding interpretation of the Biblical data, namely that the Son of Man stands in this way for all men. They are all and each one with the Whole. This, of course, is totally against Jewish exclusivism (as it is incompatible with any realist doctrine of sin, not however to be remembered in eternity, the prophet intimates), in terms of which St. Paul expounds an exclusivist Church (Romans 9-11, balancing the first two chapters of that document). St. Peter, however, learned in a vision to let the Spirit blow over Cornelius the pagan centurion and where it will. He did not have to be “grafted in” as Paul suggests, a complicated operation at best. * It will be fruitful to make an additional comparison of the more specific treatments by the two thinkers of Hegel’s view of the relation between religion and philosophy, in order finally to pronounce upon this.11 We have already sketched McTaggart’s view, and Hegel’s own approach can indeed be read off in the closing pages and layout of The Phenomenology of Mind, culminating in the section on absolute knowledge, which comes after as perfecting religion. We might call it an Alexandrine, though not thereby narrowly Hermetic, view. 10

Cf. Herbert McCabe on this topic, in criticism of Raymond Brown, in his book God Matters (titled on analogy with Peter Geach’s Logic Matters. 11 On Hegel and “religion” see also Msgr. André Léonard’s “Fé cristiana y reflexion filosofica”, Spanish version accessible on the Internet. The Bishop refers to Van Riet’s “amiable” criticism of theologians (in his Philosophie et réligion, Louvain 1970) from his philosophical viewpoint. Elsewhere in his text though he complains of “human” solutions being substituted for “the rule of faith” when he might have treated these rather as interpretations, even of the “form” of faith, precisely Van Riet’s point (see below).

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Van Riet, for his part, refers several times to what Hegel “wants”, and it seems to me that this is the operative word. Men and women desire to think what they practice or believe, since this is quite naturally an irritant to their minds. Nothing less, in fact, is the project of theology. But, as Van Riet points out, theology today takes to itself, as it must in order to be itself, all the freedom of philosophy. Wherein then can there be a difference? For Aristotle his metaphysics was theologia. So to claim that there is a “sacred” theology in the same breath as we acknowledge and allow for doctrinal development is scarcely meaningful. There was merely a theology more or less monopolised by people “in holy orders”. Hegel too develops his philosophy from Christian doctrine, in part, and all development is in part in this sense.12 Thus some of the Thomistic development too comes from pagan sources brought into contact with the Christian ones. Besides this, we must allow for lateral development, where we take insights not only from earlier experience but from present insights evolved beyond the pale of orthodoxy, as Catholicism learns from Protestantism or from modern science. To put this in another way, we have found that Van Riet’s “Catholic” interpretation of Hegel, which he as it were pleads be taken over by the Church and her teachers, coincides in large part with the “atheist” account of Hegel given by McTaggart. Atheist or not, McTaggart leaves open the possibility of its being reconcilable with Christian teaching. There is a larger question here. What is at stake, namely, is a possible rethinking of the nature of (religious) faith. It is this question that our investigation of Hegel’s thought and its interpretation is meant to help clarify, insofar as it is quite clear that this is the question Hegel himself faced. Our method, that is, is philosophical and not historical. We do not seek to know what “really” happened, Newman’s “realist” mistake insofar as he was ready to take such putative happenings (this is comparable to a naive interpretation of exceptional occurrences or miranda as “miracles”) as normative. We seek to understand what finds itself in our consciousness, having come there by whatever route. Philosophy is reflection on experience. And Hegel knows very well that the notion of a Trinitarian God is born of the experience of Christianity (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, tr. Speirs and Burton Sanderson, London 1895, III, p.99). But for him the experience is not contingent. As 12

See, as an example of the continual openness of Newman’s doctrine of development itself, necessarily, to further development, Dom Wulstan Peterburs “Newman’s Essay on Development as a Basis for Considering Liturgical Change”, The Downside Review, January 2008, pp.21-39.

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with reflection, it is the work of Reason, the manifestation of Spirit in history. Each philosophy, as each religion, comes in its time… Also, in his eyes, the affirmation of the Trinitarian God is neither a “theological” affirmation (in the sense of Saint Thomas), nor a thesis of “Christian philosophy” (improperly rational, because inspired by faith), but it stems directly from the philosophical order, and the task of showing the truth of it belongs to philosophy. (Van Riet, p.81)

As we saw, in McTaggart’s view the truth Hegel finds here does not correspond to orthodox teaching. Van Riet scarcely considers this possibility or, rather, we can take him as meaning that Hegel’s Trinitarian thought, as it surely is, has as much claim not to be rejected out of hand as does anyone else’s. It is now accepted that doctrine develops. We have here a development of a doctrine otherwise worked out more or less fourteen centuries earlier. What in fact was soon to be somewhat idiotically called “modernism” by its detractors, who went to the hysterical lengths of imposing an “anti-modernist” oath upon certain classes of the faithful, was simply a working out of Newman’s principle, by which each new generation should develop the substance of tradition according to its inherently superior lights. The principle of progress, after all, has been conceded by those charged with guarding orthodoxy, at least since Paul VI’s Populorum progressio of 1967. We cannot say with certainty that human philosophy at any time whatever was capable of reaching precisely this Trinitarian conception. A particular experience maybe needed to be supplied first. But after this Christian religion, which Hegel calls the absolute religion, at least as properly interpreted by philosophy, has reached maturity then philosophers are bound, indeed compelled, to “reflect on human experience in its totality”(Van Riet). To pretend that this is only to be done as if receiving from a superior other, an authority, what one does not experience oneself is all too easily in fact to make a kind of inauthentic division in the self which prevents one being any kind of philosopher whatever, even if one acquire the skill of expounding Aristotle backwards, let us say. This was in fact the scholastic error, an error of form, which, in the scholastic period itself, only the genius of an Aquinas might hope in part to overcome.13 So much for “the rule of faith”, one might think. What we believe is what each of us, like St. Paul, “received of the Lord”, i.e. from within and out of ourselves, of course in union with all others, since

13 Cf. Our “Faith as Thinking with Assent”, New Blackfriars, January 2005, pp. 101-114.

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this is what it is to be a self at all. As Hegel says, further to this, the truth is never a mystery, for What is directed towards rationality is not a mystery for it; it is a mystery only for the senses and their way of looking at things (Ibid. III, 17).

Here we touch precisely the problem of the understanding of faith, not of things believed but of faith as a form of apprehension. A prophetic intuition of the error involved is given in the Fourth Gospel where the Samaritans, after going out to see Jesus at the well, say that now they believe in him and his claim, not because of what the woman he spoke with has told them but because they have seen for themselves, just as she once did. We may need to start off relying on someone else, but we certainly don’t want to stop there and it seems dishonest or perverse to continue to take one’s stand upon the witness, however exalted, once one is seeing for oneself, Joan of Arc’s problem, one might say. There is, all the same, a certain ecstasy of faith in which people emphasise such perversities, precisely because for them at that moment they seem to promise a contact with the transcendent, as when Newman states in effect that the basic doctrine of Catholicism is the infallibility of the teaching Church, which might seem a strange view of things. At the same time it is continuous with Hegel’s view that “the factual”, in this case what all the world believes, “is normative”. It is because “the whole world has gone after Christ” that we believe him, one might at least almost say. Yet such a putative privilege, infallibility, must rest upon something greater, more specific, in the very nature of things. There is indeed argument for blind belief being on occasion rational, and Naaman the leper had this argument supplied to him by the servant-girl before he went and washed in the scruffy little Palestinian river to which the prophet had scornfully directed him. But that is not what we are talking about here. We are discussing the making of such belief into the form of all sure knowledge necessary for salvation, as they used to say, in the way that one “believes in” God.14 Our thesis is that they started to say this in a bad moment, a somewhat “inquisitional” moment indeed. One starts to believe in a doctrine, rather, when one starts to see its agreement with the goodness of things as generally understood. 14

Yet according to classical theology, one is supposed to take this “doctrine” too, of God, after conversion, rather on the word of the Church alone, taking distance from one’s “private” theological musings. What is private is matter for the confessional merely. Whatever truth lies hidden here lies, indeed, pretty deeply hidden!

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What Hegel declares by his philosophy, and declares, be it noted, precisely for Christians, is an end to viewing the religious and symbolical form of apprehension of ultimate and “saving” realities as absolute. Christianity, ideally interpreted, may be the absolute religion, but precisely because it is still religion it cannot be absolute absolutely, so to say. Absolute knowledge belongs to philosophy and the philosophical mode of “mediation”. McTaggart in fact will question Hegel’s right to maintain the absoluteness of Christianity, even taken thus absolutely, since, he says, whether it is to be succeeded by a superior religion (as it always can be since the religious mode as such is imperfect) is an empirical matter only knowable when it might occur. Another approach, perhaps not envisaged by McTaggart, is closer to Hegel’s mind, it would seem. It is possible to interpret Christianity, as did the Pharisees or the ancient Roman persecutors, as hostile to the religious principle as such. In saying that whoever sees him sees “the Father” the man Jesus promulgates an absolute humanism, whereby man is God incarnate precisely because man is himself absolute spirit (see Christianity without God, by Lloyd Geering). On this view Christianity has been misunderstood as long as it has been seen as a religion, and not simply as The Way, a philosophy simply, though first presented in the prophetic and religious terms alone available to the Semites, as was later the case with Islam. From the outset every Christian soul feels the shift there is between Hegelian discourse and the language of the Bible along with traditional theology… Hegel is perfectly aware of this… In his eyes, it is the divergence which fatally separates speculative thought and religious representation. In a word… according to him man is divine rather than divinized, or more precisely, he is only divinized because in himself and for himself he is divine. His concrete essence or his concept… is to be and know himself as a “moment” of God, whereas according to the Christian tradition man’s essence is to be a contingent creature, set in being by a free decree of God and, in relation to this essence, his condition as sinner and his divinization are accidental. The first befalls him by the fault of the first man, the second is added by virtue of God’s gracious decisions (elevation to the supernatural order, redemption by Christ, real sanctification by the gift of the Holy Spirit). Hegel understands man’s divine filiation as essential rather than accidental, seeks an intelligible meaning for what is realised in fact… raises religious “content” to the “form” of speculative thought. Must all this be the same as radically contesting God’s transcendence, offending his sovereign freedom or completely distorting the Christian message? (Van Riet, p.96).

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Whether “all this” must be thus the same or not, Van Riet considers, there is a way of presenting such transcendence that is no longer acceptable as Good News. One wonders if indeed transcendence can be separated from such presentation. Can we so state this Good News without betraying it, asks Van Riet, writing as a Christian, and goes on immediately to ask if we entitled or obliged to make reason the criterion of everything in this way. For it comes to this, that any and all self-transcendence is and can only be transcendence of self by self. Alienation, accepting things externally, is incompatible with the infinity of what naturally seeks and grasps the universal, in that immaterialitas that is radix cognitionis, we might say. Immateriality is in fact spirit, and not merely the absence of matter. For spirit transcends matter in its notion. Matter in this sense is part of the dualist illusion. But it is dualist also to make of God the other of the self. God, as Augustine understood, is closer to self than is self to itself. This is transcendence. In the same way it is crude anthropomorphism to think of revelation as God speaking within history as a man might. This would be no infinite “lordship” of history. Spirit rather assumes its new forms, shows more of itself, at the right time and place in accordance with a logic, a rationality, in principle able to be descried by the human spirit seeking to understand. Mystery, that is to say, is not a surd and in transcending the analytical understanding (Verstand) faith directs us to the employment of speculative reason (Vernünft). Such reason, however, is Spirit at work in the world, as it worked in those who composed the Biblical texts. One has to notice though that here one in some sense flogs a very dead horse. Theology today, that is to say, is not distinguishable from Hegel’s philosophy of religion. One understands that one has to “surpass the thought of the biblical author”. There are no principles to be fixed by positive theology independently of reason itself, since one cannot prevent these from being revisable dialectically, this being contained in all that we mean by “paradigm shifts”. The Wittgensteinian image of kicking away or as it were dissolving the ladder (to mix metaphors) by which one has ascended is appropriate here too, just as I do not have perpetually to recall the long transcended accidents whereby I fell in love with whom or what I now love. The intentions of contemporary theology and of Hegel’s religious philosophy are one and the same. We touch here, it would seem, upon politics, even though the issue is a transcendent and spiritual one, a fact which in itself raises politics above the way it is more usually conceived. It is often said that the Church is not a democracy. By this is meant that there are those who teach, with an infallibility that the notion of teaching taken absolutely, but only so, must require and there are those who learn, again with an exceptionless

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obedience only proper to learners taken absolutely. But there has always been question as to whether or how, in what sense, “one man can teach another” (Aquinas), just as it is not clear whether it is the doctor (teacher) or the sick man’s own nature that heals him. There is, rather, a time to listen and a time to speak, though I listen in saying that, in teaching that, to the method of The Preacher. Thus, or nonetheless, there were in the first times of the Church, as if on an equal dignity of standing with one another, both teachers and prophets. In our culture, however, it is the philosopher who plays the role of prophet. The philosopher does not proclaim that “Thus saith the Lord” because he knows now that this is a crude anthropomorphism, though in earlier Semitic milieus the crudeness of concept may have been open to refining interpretation of its nature. One does not so much deny the truth of “God speaks” as ask how it is to be understood. Spirit, all the same, issues in philosophy without loss to or of religion, as philosophy issues in Sophia of which the thinking human being remains the scribe. Israelite Old Testament prophecy, all the same, was conducted under the sign of alienation, from which Christ came to liberate us, as foretold by Jeremiah when he said that no one will tell others to know the Lord, because all will know him, which returns us to politics. Those “in charge”, as being themselves charged, often warned against this opening, now taking shape, as laicism or modernism or liberalism, as putting themsleves themselves on the wrong or closed side We have analogies from academically established philosophy itself, where such “inner rings” are ever forming. Here such active freedom of thinking, where all proceed as if they “knew the Lord” or have direct access to and understanding of all things, whether or not they are or have been in universities, is typically dismissed as “rebellion of the masses”. But “masses”, like “mass”, is an abstraction. The term does not refer to man as thinking, but as ideologised, which is thinking’s opposite and its denial, as a people is the opposite and denial, conversely, of a “mass”. A condition of ideologisation is a deformation of the individual’s nature as a thinking person15 as it is of the political state itself. This is why we should not have a laity, even a laos, in this sense and he who once had compassion on the multitude expressed it by meeting men, and women especially, individually, i.e. really, whenever this was possible for him. It is however no longer the pharisees or even the popes, unless as servants of the servants of God, who “sit in the seat of Moses”16. That 15

Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.New York, 1951 (reprinted by Meridian, Cleveland, 1958, with two new chapters). 16 Matthew 23.

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piece of furniture is presumably no more sacrosanct than the torn up old veil of the Temple. Thus too great fondness for speaking of a cathedra suggests forgetfulness of what, like all our temples, is now metaphor. This is why devotion to the reserved sacrament, legitimate enough may be, cannot be more than a moment or metaphor in the dialectical history of Christian speculation in faith. Metaphor, of course, has always differed from simile as a (similar) figure of speech, one saying that x is y and not just like y. Metaphor, that is, is itself a name for identity in difference, inasmuch as figure manifests the thing and “thing” is itself name and (hence) figure for the whole, for, that is, the Idea which is the Absolute as “that which is not”, being identical, Hegel says, with its manifestation. For if I am the manifestation of myself then I am not. The Object “is vanished”. That is, the form (of the cathedra) is changed to what is ideal as, generally, Subject, I, as “universal of universals”, must say “my kingdom is not of this world” It is important to see how a correct understanding of the relation between faith and reason is interwoven with this political and social but simultaneously philosophical and anthropological question concerning subject and object, the latter predicated in falsity of judgement. “All judgements are false” is Hegel’s ultimate teaching, from which he excludes the Judgement of the Concept itself, its own intrinsic self-development towards differentiation in syllogism. The three Aristotelian acts of reason set forth in his On Interpretation are thus one, the system of the Concept and not contingently or without explanation related to it.17 It is in fact the same with faith as with logic. There, in order to take part in the life of reasoning, one has to see for oneself that the various logical laws one employs hold, either immediately or mediately. It is not possible to think according to externally imposed rules and believe in what one is doing, believe that one is thinking. One might be dutifully performing some other procedure, but one is not thinking. Similarly, in order to take part in the life of faith, one has both to understand the truths proposed to one and see that they are true. Usually people don’t see that they are true (they may profess them nonetheless) just because they don’t understand them. It is not possible to profess what one does not understand and draw any kind of life from it whatever. You must at least have confidence that you will understand because of your confidence in the, it may be, wonderworking proposer. One’s mystification, that is, will be cleared up. Such theology, or philosophical scholasticism by proxy, does not express faith. So what is faith? It is something that philosophy perfects or “accomplishes” 17

Cp. EL166, add.

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since it exists in order to that. As proper to man in via, subject to temporal process, faith is the reverse of sitting still and is rather a movement that can only be dialectical, not losing truth already won, perhaps taught by another initially, but only initially, but continually refining and perfecting it and in the process seeing it more and more for oneself. In this sense one may approve the saying that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. What the fear of the Lord will mean in a Christian or Jewish milieu will correspond in more secular milieus to a readiness to “prove all things” and to “hold fast that which is good”, starting, that is, from a listening to tradition, the child’s position in life, itself an instance, Hegel says, of speculative reason, listening to tradition, going to school. In this way it is quite clear that, whether or not the statement that “the Church is not a democracy” says anything to the point, the members of the Church, at least like everyone else but hopefully better, have to behave democratically, as free human beings serving the freedom of one another, that is to say. No one is to be told that he or she is not to try to understand or “judge” initial beliefs imposed by the social and family milieu. All judgement worthy of the name is private and personal anyway, so the phrase “private judgement”, an in its time Orwellian “newspeak”, was never anything but invidious. In fact, by this philosophy, no individual is thus abstractly private. In him the community, the Idea, speaks. General Councils should not therefore be seen as declarations as to what is to be believed but statements as to what the promulgators, say rather publishers, of these declarations, in effect the whole people, believe, or, in the case of a Pope, more than just “standing for” all (“you are all members one of another”), declares what he believes, infallibly or not, on behalf of as in identity with all. In full achievement of his transcendent office he himself as abstract particular, vanishes. His own infallibility is the infallibility of “the Church”, of the one body. The general basis of this more specific doctrine is thus found in Hegel among the Lutherans amd still more generally in true philosophy as its ultimate basis. Doctrinal development thus means uncovering this basis, in an apparent reverse action, which is the essence of going forth as returning. If then a Pope is speaking as a teacher and magister then he will be teaching and not, impossibly, telling people what they must believe. He can at most say “Believe me when I tell you…”, which is not a declaration as to what is to be believed. There is no law or rule in it in other words and in any case different people believe the same thing in different ways, as the internal heterogeneity even of the canonical Gospels illustrates. Someone denying the reality of matter will understand Christ’s resurrection differently from a materialist like St. Augustine at the time when, he tells us, he could not conceive of a spiritual

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substance. It is in fact almost Hegel’s main point that a realist philosophical epistemological outlook, as we find in “common sense”, disqualifies us from understanding the religious mysteries. It creates, in fact, the celebrated “unhappy consciousness” of the realist form of Christianity, in Hegel’s view. Idealism is the form of Spirit as such. “This ideality of the finite is the chief maxim of philosophy; and for that reason every genuine philosophy is idealism” (EL95). So one would have needed to be yet more radical, in the beginning of Christianity, to escape the medieval nemesis. It was not at that time possible, but had to be learned in its emergence. One said, this is what we believe. Believe the same if you want to be with us, otherwise you are cursed. In fact the first so-called Council of Jerusalem (actually it does not really belong in that series imposed from the tormented future) said nothing as to belief, giving practical directives only, a tradition rejoined in part by the “pastoral” intent of Vatican II. All the same, this was the line taken in the first preaching and it is important to see that, given certain politico-religious conditions bound eventually to occur for some while, this approach leads quite naturally, like, say, nationalism, to the crimes and persecutions of later times in the name of this “faith”. What this means is not that the content of faith is false but that its form of presentation was defective. Truth itself, for that matter (since faith is truth’s apprehension), is not something that just some group gets possession of so as to exclude those thinking differently. Sumit unus sumunt mille, what one takes a thousand (i.e. all) take in that same taking. In communion, in fact, we take and receive one another. This is the implicit Eucharistic prescription for an open Church. There was, that is to say, a dose of “sociomorphism”, to use Berdyaev’s immediately intelligible neologism, from the beginning, the rule of faith corresponding to a universalising law in other fields. It is permitted though, and indeed mandatory, to rectify this defect of form, a process actually begun among Catholics, and thus encouraged in the world at large, by the original Vatican II Declaration on Ecumenism, of fifty years ago now, but unhappily soften called a decree. The illusion that one can impose democracy dies hard. To see that the medieval crimes necessarily follow from the earlier stance, of the regula fidei, is to understand the duty of enacting this process of purifying the form of believing, going over to what can only be a philosophical form, in freedom, that is to say. Realisation of this form coincides with the democratic movement, according to which all are called upon to become literate and thus philosophical, to prepare a civilisation of philosophers in accordance with Porphyry’s rather optimistic assessment

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of the ancient Jews as a nation of philosophers, because, precisely, of the form of their believing. Here Porphyry already undercut or modified Hegel’s contrast of esoteric philosophy with exoteric religion. Here too “the child is father to the man” and philosophy is the birthright and destiny of all. So it is not a question of “proving” the mysteries of faith, for Hegel, but of showing their meaning in so far as they accord with a true philosophy. In the process people come to accept them because they are reasonable. This is why supposed divine interventions in history, as contingently imagined by the half-magical Semitic mentality (but not only Semitic) of ancient times, cannot be left uninterpretedly in the form in which they are reported to us. Neither divine action nor divine freedom can be contingent. Therefore, to show the necessity and rationality of faith and its truths is not to change their content but to present them in a more perfect form, and this was ever the task of theology, whether in the time of Aristotle or in the developed Christian time in which Hegel found himself. Again, “the spiritual man judges all things”, as “understanding spiritual things spiritually”, in St. Paul’s words to his readers at Corinth. * These considerations might strike some as not particularly novel. Liberal Catholicism goes back to the days of Hegel himself, after all, and Gregory XVI appears to have perceived, already in 1832, the depth of the challenge, when, in the Encyclical letter Mirari vos he wrote that what was being called liberalism “overthrows the nature of an opinion”. This was of course a biased and alarmist way of saying that our way of viewing the phenomenon of opinion becomes here the matter of the discourse. This too, however is, as it ought to be, as old at least as Plato, when he suggested in The Republic that the things concerning which we hold opinion, doxa, “both are and are not”. That is to say, the dialectic of thesis and antithesis which Hans Küng and others today find essential to theological method, as the post-modernists (or Nicholas of Cusa) find it in philosophy, is dictated pro parte objecti, from the side of the object, of experience, that is to say. The process of putting together in a judgement the elements our abstractions separate extends right up to the final vision, the “last” judgement, which is the absolute idea. Ecumenism, one has long suspected, is not compatible with finding the “separated” partner absolutely mistaken. It is a question of bringing his or her and also our truth to light, where they will be seen not as identical but as complementary

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or even, and typically, forming a contradiction for the understanding which is resolvable for speculative reason in synthesis. This might seem to afford no firm ground for beginners, no startingpoints. One can indeed suspect that the dogmas and rules of history have functioned as easier substitutes, or at least as shorthand, for faith properly so-called. Whatever the function of the so-called Apostles’ Creed the Creed proper was elaborated at Nicaea, like all subsequent definitions, as a way of taming the endless mental life that faith, faith proper, evoked. What else but this kind of faith, and not a mere subscribing to documents, could have been called the principle overcoming the world? It overcomes the world precisely because it never rests content with the finite but ceaselessly proceeds towards that which is absolute and perfect, in philosophy, in social life, in prayer and all over. “Greater things than I shall you do.” This is not a mere basic trust, though that may be a great part of it, enabling the main activity it names. It is a pressing on, in the confidence that a wall of separation has been broken down, that precisely the transcendent acts in our own actions and free decisions. Here we see the fundamental importance of the Thomistic doctrine of praemotio physica and how through it alone a future was guaranteed to Christian thought such as the Molinist alternative would have closed off, despite the superficial association of the Jesuits of that time with humanism and despite, for that matter, their preventing the Pope of the day from courageously affirming this grand Thomistic principle (Congregatio de auxiliis, c.1607). Such was the price for keeping Venice Catholic, threatened as it seemed to be by the Protestant preaching of one Paolo Sarpi, otherwise forgotten. Thus we got deism and Kant. But the future of Thomism lay with Hegel, against whom, as pushed by the Ontologists, Neo-Thomism would nervously react (Leo XIII, 1879), according to the policy outlined by Kleutgen and other Jesuits in their journal, Civiltà cattolica. Hegel’s thought, coming after all from the Lutheran Prussian world, was too alarming for the guardians of orthodoxy at a time when the Dominican and classical Augustinian spirit was in virtual eclipse (though of course everyone fancied himself as Augustinian). And so, especially when faced with a creative application of Hegel’s thought even in Italy, this same Ontologism, the papacy and its advisers hit upon the ingenious expedient of reviving the thirteenth century intellectual world in toto, rejecting ontologism and related movements or schools as lacking proper theological method. Aquinas’s writings, Kleutgen asserted, contained all the philosophy a Catholic needed to know to understand his faith. Justinian’s mistrust of thirteen centuries earlier in closing the Platonic

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academy at Athens remained in force, though this stand against Greek culture was just what Thomas tried to reverse, in his insistence on a virtue ethics in the Summa, for example. This has become clearer to scholarship since the late twentieth century, with new appreciation, in addition, not merely of praemotio physica but also of the truth, highlighted by Thomas, that God can have no real relation with the finite world or, in other words, that the finite world is untruth.18 In praemotio physica the later Absolute Idealism lay coiled, though not yet ripe for proclamation, a situation continuing in those days when condemnations of liberalism, “modernism”, “laicism” and God knows what else followed one another. Here then, today, we have in contrast the beginnings of the demystification of faith, so that it can indeed overcome the world. The process we have outlined is part of its continually doing so. The dialectic proceeds, like evolution, that time-bound symbol of itself that it has in the fullness of time invented. Briefly, God, the absolute, initiates all my initiations. So I am not I. My freedom is freedom itself. God has no relation to me, just for that reason. I am that one, the All, though I be part. The world exists entire in my knowledge of it. Each one, each part is as necessary to this perfect unity as I am myself, as necessary that is, though differently, as it is to us. This alone is why, or how, there can be one closer to me that I am to myself (Augustine), or how one can dwell in me in whom I dwell. “There is a time when God dwells in the soul and a time when the soul dwells in God” (De Caussade). The tradition is constant. “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him” (Eckhart). Knowledge, finally, of subject and object, “will vanish away”. * One watches a TV-series where the plot turns upon plates of a brain scan showing, it is claimed, that a patient cannot now have the memory-loss he has been professing. Peter Geach, in his book on McTaggart, Truth, Love and Immortality, calls such brain-mind claims “bluff”. They are comparable to the Pythagorean assertion that justice is the number four, where we cannot understand what is being said. There is no point of contact, namely, between such brain-references and “my sudden recollection that I must go to the bank”. One might suspect equal bluff in what Geach is saying, however. The whole presumption, after all, behind our common understanding of the widespread Alzheimer’s disease is that there is measurable correlation 18

See the essays in Contemplating Aquinas, cited above.

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between such ability to recollect and the observable state of the brain. This correlation can always be further filled in, in confirmation of the original presumption, going back at least to Aristotle, which was always more than a mere well-founded guess. For him, indeed, any knowledge at all requires the reality known to be present and not merely remembered, i.e. both object and subject must have a material base. Endocrinology too, like neurology, encompasses personal affective life in a quite natural, so to say internal aspiration. To add “to some degree”, as disclaimer, is like falling back on a “god of the gaps” in religious apologetic. Here God becomes just the name for these gaps, or for the “implicit” on the far side of finite understanding. Yet hormonal research continues to explain more and more, narrowing the gaps. “Hormones rule, O.K.” is one reaction to this. But do we want merely to replace one restrictive explanation with another? We cannot, I suggest. To rule, hormones must be more, or less, than themselves. They must be a language, a way of “naming” experience as given in our knowledge, in consciousness, as God (in Adam) named the creatures, whether one by one or in groups indifferently for our purposes here. So if one says “the brain” determines, as source, all conscious life (either from itself or from what it “makes” of sense-experience indifferently) then one cannot retain the common-sense apprehension of the brain as part of the human or animal body. For this too is a pure deliverance of the brain in that case, while if I cannot know that the body exists then I cannot know that the brain exists either. Here materialism and idealism in “critical” form coincide. In place of existence we have now, in this situation, to speak of conscious act, since this is unmediated. It corresponds immediately to “the living brain”, as existence does not. This act, activity, might be our own or no one’s. Brain activity cannot guarantee or support, cannot reach through to knowledge of, substance, its own or any at all. In speaking like this, therefore, in assuming entitlement to make judgements, even as to an alldetermining brain’s situation, we reject the same thesis implicitly, in intimate self-contradiction. Together with substance, nature falls away as intrinsic object of investigation. This, though, quantum physics might seem to confirm. We investigate ourselves in inseparable correlation with “the object”. The outside is inside and vice versa, indifferently since there is no longer either outside or inside. It becomes a figure of speech, as does speech itself, if we would hand all over to the brain. Yet for our consciousness it is plainly natural to construct such a correlate object, to “objectify”, independently of verification. So predication is, as such, untruth, says Hegel, using self-contradiction to expose itself, speaking at

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the point, which is the Concept, of ceasing to speak. Speech as such, as judgement, is false, he in effect both says and indicates. The Concept as first act of mind, in logic, is not yet speech act. So it is itself only named in judgement (second act). But it is realised or achieved in itself. Thus it alienates itself first into Nature and not into speech, which rather comes into play, is actualised, in Spirit’s subsequent recapitulation of the Idea into itself (EL445, 459f.). Such speech, however, language, is mere phenomenal representation of what is earlier, or under “Revealed Religion” in The Phenomenology of Mind, spoken of as the Word, as the intrinsic self-manifestation that the Absolute is. It is not a choice between flesh and spirit, as on the old scheme. They coincide. The brain paradigm, that is, was just that; nothing more. We do not reduce spirit to flesh, to “our” mode of apprehension. Nor is flesh reduced to spirit, as in some idealist scheme. It is its textual expression, rather, this very computer-scheme upon which language, as thought, is manifesting itself and its self-manifestation. There is a background to this in the history of dogma, where the manhood (of the incarnate God) is “taken into” the Absolute so that the latter is not “converted into” the flesh, as if into a restricting medium (Athanasian Creed). Flesh is not a restriction but a manifestation standing for itself, as, in eucharistic theology again, a sign can be what it signifies. So what the all-determining brain would give us would be something like “the world as will and idea”, purely. To say that the brain determines me to think the brain need not be inadvertent contradiction but the signal, rather, that something else is aimed at, obliquely. So when one asserts the purest voluntarism one might just as well be denying the assertion one seems to be making. This was Aristotle’s reason for safeguarding predication by affirming the law of non-contradiction, and of bivalence as between true or untrue. It was also, this voluntarism, the premise from which Hegel overturned this philosophy of substance within a world of change. Today though, in view of what we have said above, it becomes possible to view materialism as a stage on the road to idealism. In idealism the self spins the world from itself as much as would an all-determining brain. I, any I, am universal on both systems. Predication is mere vehicle and finite categorial condition, as is language itself, for infinite creativity. It thus gropes its way to the Hegelian notion and beyond, where all predication is nullified. The old balance is gone, irreparably, as it had to go. Matter, for its part, is non-thinkable and with this materialism agrees, since it makes matter prior to thought. The materialist thinks materialism all the same. He

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knows, that is, that materialism is a text, a way of speaking, ideology ultimately. One cannot, though, be subject without being essentially related, correlated. This correlation, what makes subject to be subject, is world, its contrary, however we construct it. We make the others and they make us, without beginning or end. Each is necessary, therefore, as each is all in his or her all-determining brain or consciousness indifferently. This necessity we merely call his or her being in memory of the lost balance. Being is necessity linguistically viewed. We have no real need of it. We are or are not, indifferently, as we are spirits or brains. Spirit, that is, is the overcoming of ontology and not, therefore, some “soul-thing”. Aquinas said rightly that the being we know is the changeable being of nature. Any other being is extrapolated analogy, and now we see that we do not know the being even that he thought we knew. We know, rather, that it is not. Similarly, the necessary cannot be, have being, since then we could ask, self-defeatingly, why it is necessary or why any proof of necessity should hold. Asking why seeks the “reason of being”. Without being there is no such reason, as indeed there was not, by definition, for God. We thus find ourselves to be “absolute source”. This leads in Hegel to an apparent preeminence of faith, certainty and “witness” over truth and knowledge abstractly considered. “The Spirit bears witness to itself” (Cf.Enc. 554, 555). The project here, necessarily implicit, is to subvert language, its rigidity, as stultifying dialectic. Dialectic first ascends through language. At some point though, perhaps the penultimate, perhaps in its earliest stage, it must call language in question, exposing its insufficiency, which is the insufficiency of knowledge, from the absolute or only true viewpoint. This critique of knowledge, of saying something about something, focuses on the illegitimate construction of objects, which is constitutive of knowledge and which, in W. Benjamin’s terms, goes beyond the “naming of the animals”, meaning by naming something transcending the linguistic or objectifying as constitutive of other-reality, as creation. Knowledge, therefore, is not reciprocal. It is a finite category, hindering the exchanges of reciprocal love, where there is no place for speech and where any appearance of predication, such as “I love you”, is necessarily illusory. “I love you” is an expression of a caress; but my caress is not the pre-linguistic expression of the truth that I love you. It is post-linguistic. Thought of course is not destroyed. Only a certain thought or conception of thought is destroyed. We come to see that thought, consciousness, is closer to the reciprocities we call love, harmony. As

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when we say that to think of God, of the Absolute, is to be in relation with it, even to bring it about. This though would mean that we have always been thinking (if this is what brings God about), each one of us who thinks at all. Any thinker is thus a necessary being (or non-being) as mutually brought about in this way. To be posited is to be, at this level. A possible thinker is a real thinker. A real thinker is an ideality nonetheless. Hence Hegel says that the truths of Christianity have only to be “imagined” or postulated to take effect and so we find Blake writing that the imaginations of today are the realities of tomorrow. This in turn, though, shows how time, its idea, functions, in ordering purpose or possibility (they are the same) to deed, themselves too the same or merely one. For time is species, appearance, of eternity. We must see, with Traherne, or St.Paul, that we sit there now, in “the heavenly places”. In this non-reductive but rather ampliative sense it is right to contemn an “after-life”. “The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?” Indeed, or make the pulp so sweet and the question remains the same in structure, while which is pulp and which is rind is indifferent again, depending upon whether we wish to pass from time to eternity or, in creation, go the other way. It is a circle and so “there is a time when God dwells in the soul and there is a time when the soul dwells in God.”19 As pulp anyhow, the poet perhaps inadvertently indicates, we are now at the centre and not merely or abstractly in via. This is the point, or should and could be, of Nietzsche’s circle. It transcends repetition because it is an eternal return, like the exitus and reditus of theology. I do not live my life again, as I get up each morning again. My life, rather, seen as circular, is eternal. In absolute terms, I was neither born nor do I die. To say it ever comes back is to say, in a figure (the circle), that it, the moment, never went away. Again, what “comes back” is the moment itself, not its repetition or simulacrum. For unless it is the same there is no return of the same, as Nietzsche surely saw. In just this way is the death or resurrection of Christ represented in Scripture and the liturgy, as the same. “Now is the Son of Man glorified” (my stress). In just this way is each and every moment the uttering of the undivided Word. The Father is this uttering, the Son this returning, the Spirit their inspiration or, as well, ex-spiration, as world or church or body (qahal). All is within while, to paraphrase Eckhart, how this thinks me is how I think this and vice versa. “I and the Father are one”, said the man. A woman might prefer to say that she and the Spirit are one, though we must conceive a father’s motherhood and a mother’s fatherhood. In seeing me you see everything or, again, being has no parts. Conversely, where the 19

Cp. J.-P. de Caussade S.J., Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence.

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parts are of infinite number, as in perceptions of perceptions, the whole is in each of them. Only thus is it infinite. One might ask, is this really the way to go, this self-dismantling of thought of which such as Chesterton or Pope Paul VI complained? Surely, one must answer, if this is produced necessarily out of and by thought itself. Just this was the point of the Carmelite mystic’s distinction between silver (dogma) and gold (a “dark” knowledge) and we do here enter into an “unknowing”, having suggested, but actually within the dialectic, that there is a final category beyond absolute knowledge, or that such knowledge is best called something else. Mysticism and epistemology coincide in one search, equally practical and theoretical, existential rather. Such self-consciousness, knowing oneself in knowing another, is of the essence of thinking, the identity in difference. Deliberately to ward it off is falsity, bluff indeed. Actually it is upon this self-interrogation that freedom and democracy rest, the periodic “Have it your way”, recognition of truth as in the subject. Veritas est in mente, yet mind is not a universal. There are styles of thinking. Hence we suggested a freedom from restraint, a creativeness, as absolute source, not to be reduced to a “voluntarism” still staying within the old essentialist paradigm. What can happen at some time does happen, it was said, even within an absolute subservience to the temporal mode. Every musical combination possible is destined to fall upon the ear, every disharmony, as seeking resolution. The drama of sonata-form, for example, is nothing else, a finite infinite, an infinite finite, each new face launching every ship that ever was or could be, as every pair of eyes, every mutual looking, is an absorption, to recall the song, into the essence and nectar of a Jovian absolute. That too is liberalism, the affirmation of each by all, of all by each. This is what acceptance of the ecumenical principle takes on, qualify it as one will. Woman, perhaps, is most apt for this, as feeling herself one with Spirit, since spirit especially is an all in each, in its very concept, though this be true too of a principle of common origin (Father) or manifestation and self-return (Son). The wish to be everything for someone is especially strong in woman, easily leading to a sense that she could be everything for whomever she chose. Bitter indeed then is a final casting off. She easily sees it as an inability to love in the man who should rather have died than deny her. And indeed the lover too, the male especially, desires to die then, in love’s moment, if he might but die without losing his life finally. In her arms he wants to die, never go somewhere else, as his body’s action, which is passion, or passion in the action of making love, expresses. For here he returns to the womb, which, it is a simple fact, he

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and anyone never wished to leave. For the woman though this is life replenished, a circle. It is then a circle for both, life and death, we noted above, being surprisingly the same, fulfilled in one another, as are woman and man, ying and yang as principles. The woman died already, ex voto, in giving her heart. This is what men call the mystery in woman or, in bitterness or incomprehension, pseudo-mystery and pretence. It is though a natural consciousness and cause of being woman, when it is especially strong. For the difference between the sexes is mirror-like or reversible. This Jung has surely taught us. Men have their mystery too, and women their infidelity, which, however, is but a name, apart from its own specific context, for the wider view. Each knows that he or she bears all as being necessary to this all. She would bear the all, for her part, even if she were indeed but “fair creature of an hour”, impossibly. So in these rounded contours, which a Picasso might draw as an arrangement of circles, an apotheosis of circularity, Spirit finds its definitive shape and unique text, sought and brought forth by the creative arrow and sufferingly triumphant cross-bow, one with his works, which is man. Yet man is woman, woman is man, in double and relational identity, each within the other. In loving woman we, if men, enter the cave which brought us forth, adoring with the Magi, while she, again, brings forth each beloved as her firstborn. What we adore then, in her, is ourself, absolute. We have only to look or gaze at each reflected in each other’s, one another’s, eyes, infinitely. This is the cause of eyes, to be only had, eventually, for each other, for “you” as Cole Porter’s song says. To reject “eye-contact” in principle is to prefer the empty security of blindness. Eyes are the doors to love’s hidden kingdom, when or, after, as we say, knowledge has vanished away. Only in that sense is it hidden, as by the insufficiency, the finitude and falsity, of knowledge of the objectual non-world and its unmatured subject. When I have become what I am I will no longer be what I was, no longer, because I was never other than that which I am. It is hate which feels most the pain of love approaching. “Why then, oh hating love, oh loving hate, oh anything of nothing first create.” Love, that is, is blind, muffled, but only as seen from the standpoint of knowledge. It finds the pathways to its and our desire, with “eyes wide shut”. In another’s eyes we drown to the cold, comfortable illusion, are buried and immersed away from it, as one finding newness of life, in reflection upon reflection forever. Hence we must not wither before the look of another. This then was the mystery as shown above all in man and woman together. But by mystery here we mean truth and the absolute, implicit as unconceptualisable

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in its infinitude of positivity, comprehensible though to itself and in this sense comprehended, tasted, absorbed by and absorbing each person. Here we rejoin, we take up and do not shun, the poetry of the ages. It was Solomon the wise man who had a thousand and one wives. His wisdom issued in that and each one of them is she, his wisdom. The three wise men, too, are one, adoring this that they are, all in each. Love, in the end, can only love love, itself, than which, therefore, a person is nothing other. Love “speaks”, in Herbert’s poem, love bids welcome, love sits and eats. The most foolish little dog is and brings the love that he is and the weight of the whole world, vehicle of spirit. The text though, any text, can in no sense intend itself, as if in suppositio materialis (possible only for just one word, as, supremely, for the Concept). We must see through the veil, which is thus as if ever being rent asunder, while in all that one says the whole is said over, and over again, revolving in time’s mimicry of eternity returning.

CHAPTER THREE FAITH AND REASON; REASON AND FAITH

The harmony of faith and reason is often one-sidedly viewed as a restriction upon reason, such that where reason is shown to contradict faith then the reasoning at issue is ipso facto erroneous. Of course this is a matter of reasoning rather than of reason, though the fallibility of reason itself is sometimes proclaimed. All the same we do feel uneasy with this situation. It resembles all too much an ideological directive, telling us that when we come up against such a contradiction with faith we are to find an error in our reasoning by hook or by crook, i.e. whether there is one or not. We feel that faith is preventing us from being “open-minded”. Is that really faith’s function, its result? Many would say yes. Faith, after all, is a virtue and to virtues, it is argued or at least assumed, correspond precepts. This entails that at least practical reasoning cannot be open, cannot admit trangression of these precepts. Thus to faith there corresponds precepts such as, at least, not to deny credal propositions, not to blaspheme, to fulfil, perhaps, certain religious acts and so on. There are then, it is clear, certain theoretical or speculative options the asserting or practice of which is not open. But still we feel, as we think history shows us, that anything not open might one day be questioned, as to whether it belongs to the class of forbidden assertions we had thought, all too hastily, that it belonged to. Well, those upholding this restrictive view of faith and reason might well allow this. By and large they do, under the rubric of development (of doctrine). So why do we feel uneasy? I answer that on this interpretation reason is not being treated fairly. It is not even being given credit for the role it plays and has played in, say, the formulation of credal statements, in the interpretation of what has been called “the deposit of faith”. It is because taking this phrase to refer to an assemblage of propositions (in which language?) is a form of crass materialism, unconsciously seeking to enslave the mind, that interpretation is needed, at every stage of the way. Thus even this phrase, “deposit of

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faith”, requires interpretation, an interpretation, though, which nothing forbids might lead to a new and better formulation of what is intended. Interpretation, however, is always a work of reason. Hence, since there is no stage at which interpretation is not operative, the harmony of faith and reason, in virtue of what faith itself is and is not, must be reciprocal. Faith too, that is, may not contradict reason. Thus it is our responsibility to have a faith that does not contradict reason. Otherwise we will not be reasonable in our behaviour. That is, we will be dominated by ideology, by a jumble of jargon and of rallying cries serving a system we have not thought through. It would be wrong to think that this is an attitude fit only for professors. It is the right and duty of every believer and there is in concrete reality no “common man”. At a minimum it entails distinguishing paradox from contradiction. Faith believes, understands rather, that what seems, for the moment, contradictory is in reality consistent, as it is the task of thought, in theology as much as in philosophy to show. Anyone is able to see and admit when he has not thought about something sufficiently. He has perhaps not had time or, even, finds it too difficult and wearisome. We are all able to know our weaknesses and determine our attitudes and opinions accordingly. There are of course possibilities of shock and scandal, such as when it was first suggested to conventional Jews that there might be three persons in God, or that a man might be God, though these are the basic doctrines of Christian faith. They were not always so, explicitly, not for centuries. It was precisely reasoning about earlier experiences, of what had been heard and seen, which led to their indeed shocking formulation. Once admit so much, however, and we have to grant that earlier formulations can in principle be badly formulated, since they are later improved upon. That Mary is the mother of God, theotokos (Ephesus, 431), does not prevent her equally being the mother of a man, as was “defined” twenty years later. Bad formulation, however, is not in principle distinguishable, finally, from at least material falsity. Yet only this admission will protect us from dishonest misinterpretations. Thus we might pretend and urge that a truly new or modern interpretation is not new, not “modernist” (sic), but was actually in the minds of those putting forward the formulation now found objectionable, e.g. extra ecclesiam nulla salus, defined in council in the fifteenth century. A growth in understanding cannot take place without rejection, though this may be urged as fulfilling rather than destroying the measure of insight to be found in the earlier, superseded positions. These considerations, however, constitute development of the doctrine of development itself, as it is only logical to expect will occur, once the principle is admitted.

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Admitting as much, however, opens the way, should it be found requisite, to unfettered reinterpretation. It is thus fitting that the modern Roman Church, precisely through or by means of its seemingly conservative absolutism, arrived at a position whereby its leader and supreme representative, more than the part for the whole (l’église c’est moi), can “change the face of the Church”. Progressives were enthusiastically demanding just such a transfiguration in the days of Pope John XXIII, as do many today. The transfigured church, however, will be found upholding communion with, i.e. communing with, Moses and Elijah. This is its faith, i.e. the position is not Marcionite, however much we might insist that Marcion had a point. Who does not (have a point)? It is up to philosophy to think this through and so justify (or “accomplish”) this faith before reason universally. What is still called theology does precisely this. That is, theology and the philosophy of religion have become, have been found to be, indistinguishable. For just as elucidating tradition has developed into interpretation of it, so enlightened reason has developed into this same interpretation, interpreting the history of philosophy, for example. Even the old proverb “All roads lead to Rome” had a secular before it got a religious interpretation. Similarly, the dialectic, which leads us to posit the thought that thinks itself as sole and infinite reality, is a road which all necessarily follow whatever their starting-point, whatever highways or byways they follow. The conception of “sacred theology” cannot therefore ignore the historical transformation and simultaneous transcendence of the category of the sacred, symbolised in kerygmatic narrative by the ripping asunder of a “temple veil”, thus admitting and transforming the profane as such. “What God has cleansed call not thou common”. Insistence on a sacred theology, however, is the same insistence as that upon the “clerical” privileges of a sacred order whose members alone may practice it, as they alone may judge, instruct and correct the rest, the laos or people. Yet their claim and special dignity, whatever we may want to say about the historical “apostles”, was always based upon a claim to interpret the faith of just that people. Therefore it gives way by immanent necessity to the fuller view of believers, ultimately the human race in general, as a kingdom of priests and prophets where the last are first, the first last. There are ultimately no laymen, since there are no professional Christians. Paul’s only profession, for example, was that of tent-maker. Nor could he have been so sarcastic about spurious claimants to wisdom from among his following at Corinth (II Cor.) if he had not foreseen their eventual maturity in the Spirit, calling no man father (Matthew 23), whatever his apprehensions about a time when they “will not endure sound

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doctrine”. Christianity has to be a total life for everyone concerned, equally. Thus the faith and commitment of the one preached to must be as great or greater than the one first proclaiming it. All these notions, if it comes to that, were first evolved in societies for whom anything other than an absolute or uninterpreted hierarchy, with slaves at the bottom, was unthinkable. We should expect therefore that the categories to hand at first for the new wine would get progressively discarded. * If we survey the history of theology we see that it has indeed been devoted to showing the reasonableness of faith, thereby interpreting or thinking the tradition in ways that are reasonable. This is the deeper meaning of credo ut intelligam. If you believe something, you think about it. You have no rest until you understand it. More controversially, what we have come to understand, in a Christian culture, we have attained to precisely through an initial commitment to the belief. Thus if humanism is not in continuity with the preaching of the incarnation then why has it appeared and flowered precisely within a Christian culture, one might ask? In ethics too the abolition of slavery, what many are calling the rights of man, occurs where there is first respect for the human person as such, in its universality, and consequently for universal freedom. There is here an equality of dignity, while notions of civic friendship are now replaceable by those of universal brotherhood, the united nations, hardly known in antiquity or, for that matter, outside of the ancient Christian area or wherever those descended from it have founded societies. But once it is presented this notion is hard for anyone to refuse with conviction, though many wish to do so, being naturally attached to their own often selfaggrandising traditions. Self-aggrandisement is found everywhere, however, and is largely responsible for failures of creative development within the Christian body itself, adhering obstinately to plainly outmoded views and traditions, often inhumanely, like the pharisees of two millennia ago. Like the poor this is always with us. Hence, as with the poor, we must preserve care for those thus “hung up”, even be ready to listen to and talk with them. Theirs, in Hegel’s words, is an unhappy consciousness, after all. Thus felt St. Paul about his countrymen, the unbelieving Jews. But it is part of my claim here that it is not at the surface that anyone can discriminate who is or who is not a believer. We have already alluded to a possible ideological corruption of faith, something once also identifiable in the Action francaise movement. On the other hand, but

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often from this ideological viewpoint, justified interpretations of tradition were often for long vilified as corruptions. Into this situation Newman introduced the idea of opportuneness (though only of “definition”) but here, surely, he did not speak as a philosopher but pastorally rather. There is no escaping a true idea, however, once it has been conceived. All the same, “everything finite is false” and so all conceptions have their day, their limit. The truth, the “all in all”, is one, simple and unutterable, at least in any predicative system. This motivates both constant freshness of interpretation and a modesty concerning the whole enterprise, which can lead us to add, in seeming paradox, that “all philosophies are true.” Let us now see how admitting that faith has to be reasonable even as reason has to follow faith can more suitably open up the field of interpretation than has been the case in traditional Thomism, for example. * Where he treats of the incarnation of God as man in Part III of his Summa of theology St. Thomas raises a host of hypothetical questions as to what is possible for God. He can assume a created nature as individual or as universal and “abstract”, he might assume a non-rational nature but a rational one, as capax Dei, is more suitable. He might assume more than one individual human nature and, it follows, every individual human nature that might ever exist, though those he assumed would all be one divine if multi-locating person. Some of these variants he considers “unfitting”, though his reasons for this are all somewhat defeasible. What he does not ask is whether God might assume an individual feminine human nature, no doubt because that follows from what has already been conceded. As to the person assuming, any one of the three divine persons might assume any or all of these variant natures. All of these options then are reasonable, i.e. they can be thought. So the third or any person of the Trinity might assume the individual nature of Mary the mother of God, from the moment of her conception (or later). This might be the case without its ever being proclaimed or known in just these explicit terms, even by her. We might want to say that if it might be the case then it is the case, for all the difference it makes. To that we might add that if she is thus divine, one being with God, then why not all we others? All that stands in the way is a traditional legal, originally ritual notion of sin as absolute offence, from which just these two, mother and son, are declared free, though the one by the merits of the other. But sin, it turns out, is not identifiable, has no definite being. Not only so but further analysis will cast doubt upon

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notions we have of self and person as belonging in the category of substance. Thus what in the Trinity, the prototype after all, we call persons are identified with relations (of origin), though relations belong in the category of accident, not that of substance. Basing ourselves upon that, we can also wonder about the defining limits of a self or person, remembering how Jesus says that what is done to the least one is done to him, not by moralistic substitution but in reality, it is plain. He speaks of being in one another, even being members one of another, St. Paul will add, saying we are “all one person in Jesus Christ”. So how can incarnation be so restricted as our realist consciousness has been taught to restrict it? Might it not be time to overhaul and restructure here, as suitable for a deeper penetration into what is under consideration? Let us return to our first move, saying that if it might be so then it is so. We can, that is, reasonably conceive these eventualities, just as we have conceived the world as usually seen with Christian eyes, the caesura of divine revelation or epiphany breaking it up into before and after the unique incarnation. But this religious understanding of “revelation” is uninterpreted, unthematised, magical even. For God, for reason as divine or infinite principle, nothing is contingent. This belongs with created, finite freedom. In absolute terms freedom and necessity coincide, since the notion of freedom loses all connection with uncertainty as that of necessity transcends all compulsion (as is already the case, for example, with our notion of moral obligation as a necessity). So we have to pass from the contingent narrative form of religious tradition to the rational necessity there symbolised, recognising that revelation has been communicated in an imperfect form and that this circumstance also demands further interpretation and situating of revelation itself as a category of our thought. Thus the form and the content of affirmation here are not the same. Can the same content be expressed not only in different languages, but also in literary genres, schemas, categories of thought, different philosophies? if one has recourse to a sacred history, understood as a succession of God’s interventions which would only have God’s unfathomable wisdom and absolute freedom as its sole reason, and consequently could only be manifested to man as contingent data, is this by virtue of the very “content” of revelation or of the “form” which it actually has? Is it the essence of the Christian message or only a mode of expression?1 1

G. Van Riet, “The Problem of God in Hegel” (Part III, “What of the Hegelian Concept of Religion?”), Philosophy Today, Vol. XI, 2/4, Summer 1967, p.102, French original in Revue philosophique de Louvain, Tome 63, August 1965, pp. 353-418.

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Modern theology in its praxis implicitly accepts this, and with it a need to surpass the thought at least of the Biblical author, recognising all the same that one could not have done this without his or her original inspiration. Such revelation, however, was bound to happen, happens necessarily to man who is in himself self-transcendent, who negates or interprets his particularity in the universal, i.e. he is incarnate reason. This is why we said that what might be must be. Thus it was wrong, in the doctrine of the divine ideas, anthropomorphically to distinguish ideas of the merely possible from the actually chosen and created. God as infinite does not deliberate. Thus being is simply that which God thinks or wills indifferently. Thus we affirm that God does not know evil, except as he knows it as a human and finite conception (in what McTaggart called the D-series). Or, as Aquinas says elsewhere (via tertia), what can happen at some time does happen. Hence we said that if divine assumption of all human natures might be the case then it is the case. This is what is in fact portrayed in religious symbolism as man’s progressive deification through the sacraments and other means or, we might say, portrayed as a progressive becoming within the whole a priori temporal mode, itself illusory. It is also the ultimate meaning of revelation itself, an epiphany indistinguishable from a real union and identification.

CHAPTER FOUR GOD IS WHAT MATTERS: SO WHY DOES GOD MATTER AS WELL?

God is often now, we have noted, equated with final explanation. This seems better than asserting that God is “self-explanatory”, needed for the validity of explanations everywhere. Also, qua final explanation or ultimate reality God is not something to be proved. He is just the name for this ultimate, whatever it is. The question then becomes not “Is God?” but “What is God?” This, anyhow, was Hegel’s view, which McTaggart, as professed atheist, faulted. He thought it caused confusion to use the same name for the Absolute and for the God of religion. Well, there he ignored the long witness of neo-Platonism for which religion and philosophy were the same, as famously illustrated in the “theurgy” of Iamblichus and the emperor Julian, but witnessed to also by Christians such as Boethius and Eriugena. Also Augustine considered that the Platonists could have well included the divine self-humiliation of the incarnation in their philosophising, as was done later by Nicholas of Cusa and Hegel above all. Religion, that is, can revoke its choice of retiral to the preserve of “sacred theology”, while philosophy can never be enslaved so as to follow advance instructions. Thus McTaggart has the right to profess atheism though he himself indicates here that this momentous debate might not involve more than linguistic choice at bottom. He and Hegel both effectively deny the principle that “each thing is itself and not another thing”, preferring “identity in difference”. Whatever is conceivable is possible, Hume had said, merely developing the old Scotist postulate of a distinctio formalis a parte rei causing any legitimate nuance in thinking. One should not confuse this with “the picture theory of meaning”, since the distinction in re is a different one from that in mente, even granted that like causes like. Everything is alike at some point, after all. But this particular correspondence is structural, not pictorial, as we often find we remember the structure of a film, or an event in our past, but not the images. Aristotle, nonetheless, seems to require that there be some image

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(phantasma) present to any act of thinking. So, for Scotus and his successors, to every formal abstraction, if valid, there corresponds a structural formal difference in the thing thought or object. This will apply to Hegelian identity in difference, of which the supreme exemplar is the (Augustinian) Trinity. One may well claim that the Christian movement, as monotheist, and even the older Jewish tradition, possessed a developing quality of which atheism is a true variant. Jews and Christians have both been seen by others as atheists, asking daily “Where is thy God?”. The Christian movement brings this tendency to a head, as prelude to completion, it might be thought, when God becomes man, whether by assumption or descent. “Not by conversion of the godhead into flesh but by taking of the manhood into God…” The “Athanasian Creed”, in a hieratic age1, here tried to head off the fancied danger. Yet if God is man then man is God, given that no such conversions have ever or ever will take place. The “becoming” is of a different order, as in Hegel’s Logic. The potential for atheism is clear. This is the significance of the Death of God, in Christianity, somewhat paralleling that of “Mother of God” (theotokos). If Jesus were God he should not have died, Understanding protests. Yet he did, and his followers went on proclaiming his godhead, and that all the more. God died and God had a mother, like people everywhere. God himself promotes atheism, which is thus not atheism. “I will be in you” as you are in me. It is significant that “people” in English is both singular (populus, the “people of God”) and plural, as personae, each one being universal and, as free, infinite, Hegel claims. We can compare, in the opposite direction, Latin omnis, singular, for “each”, omnes, plural, for “all”. It is always omnis that is used in the syllogistic or logical forms. For the logical relation is identity, which thus dominates Absolute Idealism as completing Platonic realism (of universals or “forms”). One can multiply examples from the Pauline writings, from the doctrine of the mystical body (“Christ lives in you”, “members one of another”) to the final and hence eternally actual state of God being “all in all”. “All things are yours.” Here St. John of the Cross, orthodox as he is, speaks by preference (and like Spinoza or any philosopher) not of God but of the All, beside whom is nothing. This and not some Puritan Jansenism or whatever is why the “creatures” are treated as tiresome distractions merely in typical monastic mystical writings. Well-meaning pietism then of course gets it all

1

It may have been composed at Rome around the ninth century, so not by Athanasius.

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wrong. We do not “please” God by lives spent in such dreary behaviour, though it may please us for a time, fools that we are. From Augustine we can take the insight of the “one closer to me than I am to myself”, which cannot but dovetail with the doctrine of the true self or atman. Yet “closer than self” can suggest removal of this the very last differentiation, viz. self, the principle of personality being indeed universality, in Hegel’s often misunderstood words. Thus one is freed of the burden of self, when “all things are yours”, “casting all my (or your) cares away” and so on. The parallel is with that potential identification of monotheism and atheism mentioned above. “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him…” declared Eckhart, adding that “If God were not, I should not be, and if I were not, He too would not be.” A fortiori, I along with all others, others and myself, are reciprocally dependent too for their being. Hence the rquirement to love your “neighbour” if you claim to love God is not merely ethical but one of meaning. Such selves, therefore, cannot but be eternal and thus necessary, known from all eternity as religion has it. So it might seem necessary too that they replace the Trinity as the differentiated Absolute, an Absolute that is then for each part but not vice versa. McTaggart asserts this to avoid slavery to an impersonal Absolute, which he would find irrational. Yet would not Trinitarians feel a corresponding need to say the divine nature is for the Trinitarian persons without reciprocity in this relation either, since the nature is only I (subsists) only in the persons, the relations. The truth would then equally seem to be that the Absolute only exists in this or that person, or in the relation of two or more persons.2 The persons are anyhow relations (McTaggart´s “determining correspondence”), as in the Trinity, and there is no one privileged relation of everybody loving everybody, say. If the persons are not for this (for the corpus mysticum as an as it were quantitative totality) then this is ipso facto not the Absolute. Why should it be? Thus in religion the whole Church is present in the smallest congregation, or even a “private” Mass, and there is no other or over-arching mystical body, whatever the “juridical” realities. Just this is what is mystical. The Pope, we might say, is a misperception, humanly or contingently “necessary” as he may be, along with potatoes, propositions and so on. In heaven we make no judgements, says McTaggart. The spiritual man judges all things, says St. Paul. 2

Cf. the Gospel “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I…” What though is “in my name”? Not, surely, that the two or three sit in a parish pew simply. It is incidentally not without interest here that it is only with the Western introduction of the filioque that we have in the Trinity too a relation univocally between more than two (“two or three”).

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On Hegel’s account of the Trinity the Holy Spirit lives essentially in the community, and we are saying that the community is present in each one of us, as in each assembly. Under this aspect of containing the whole I am this Spirit (reason). The threeness then can be in me wholly who am one of its many differentiations (i.e. of the Absolute, which threeness, Trinity, as a term, is intended to exhaust). Yet it is just in my knowing myself as other, projecting myself, speaking my Word, as in a mirror, that the other(s) come to be at all, as do I through them or him or her. We have not to decide as between the Trinity and the McTaggartian differentiations. They are two ways of representing the same reality of which Eckhart and all tradition speaks. Nor has tradition stopped at some point (or place). It is essential to all spirit to be same in other. So as in the tradition we have two categories of persons, viz. created and uncreated, so here we would have two senses of uncreated persons (if we retained the Trinity), coinciding in their denotation. Each one contains the unity of all, so that many Absolutes or infinities are one Absolute. The principle of number is suspended (as it is in classical Trinitarianism). But we should not insist on “uncreated”. The spirits beget one another and this, like theological creation, takes place outside time. The term, after all, is a metaphor, which the phrase “creation out of nothing” tries to offset. Thomas Aquinas explicitly envisages created being, however, as “God’s proper effect”. Thus in the older theology creatures are begotten in the Word’s begetting. If the creatures proceed freely yet no one surely will say that God is somehow submitted to the strictly divine processions, natural though we may have been content to call them. Hegel will conclude that the Trinity, like all other ideas, including Nature, is the free issue of thinking, the proof of all puddings being in the eating. Being as thus proceeding from God, the Absolute which is itself Absolute Idea (EL213), in a precision that is not reduction, is thus Non-Being in free negativity, Idea. Thus Aquinas’s demonstration of the absolute simplicity of God can be equated with demonstrating this of ultimate and so to say inclusive reality. This ought not to surprise anyone. What do they not see who see God, Gregory the Great had asked, and one might recall Aquinas’s identifying of intellect with forma corporis for a similarly apparent transcendence of common sense. In Hegelian terms philosophy deals with the “doctrine of the notion”, which overcomes the “doctrine of essence” where common sense belongs. For Aquinas, in any case, such absolute simplicity is (as it has to be) compatible with the Trinitarian differentiations, which are also, he makes plain, absolutely real and not entia rationis in the restrictive sense.

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It follows that this simplicity can just as well or without more difficulty, since no less counter-intuitively, be compatible with the necessary differentiation of the Absolute as charted by McTaggart or in yet other systems. As the Word spoken is one with the Father, without composition, so the mutually begetting spirits are one with one another, in simplicity, at the same time as they make up a universe of real relations. Sunt processiones in Deo. We should remember that for Plotinus the One, this term, did not stand univocally for bare unity. This would be beyond being as lacking it. Rather, “the One” is the closest we can come to a differentiated whole which transcends differentiation in that such differentiations, real enough, yet serve to render the Absolute a more perfect unity, beyond all notion of composition, than could the mere citation of the first numeral understood univocally. D.T. Suzuki makes a related point about divine omniscience. Although of all things this knowledge can and must be simple, as must the divine omnipresence or ubiquity (i.e. he would not “know” all things as we know them, but in a more perfect and hence simpler way): God knows all when he knows what he is, as he is, in himself. In him, knowledge and being are one… The same thing can be said for his omnipresence. He does not divide himself.3

That is to say, we do not understand this divine or absolute simplicity which we “try to mean” when speaking of ultimate reality. It is as unknown and, as term, as “analogical” as anything else we might say here, and significant in just this analogical way.4 We saw above how also the concept of a person, still after all a finite concept (as all concepts are) as being of this or that person, can be applied in at least two ways when discussing divinity. We can apply it to those personal relations that are themselves persons within or as making up the Absolute in Trinitarian theology. We can also apply it to this possibly tripersonal Absolute itself as necessarily, in its whole nature, differentiated into persons of indefinite number who again, though differently, are within or make up the Absolute, each one both part and whole, though 3

D.T. Suzuki, The Field of Zen, New York 1970, p.63. On trying to mean, cf. Herbert McCabe, Appendix 6, “Analogy”, in Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Volume 1, “The Existence of God” (English translation), General Editor Thomas Gilby, O.P., Image Books, New York, 1969, pp.293-4. See also McCabe’s “The Logic of Mysticism - I” in Religion and Philosophy, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 31, ed. Martin Warner, Cambridge University Press 1992, pp.45-49.

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differently. Each one would then have the Trinity within himself, as in the doctrine of grace. Christian belief combines exactly this divine Trinitarian indwelling with the mutual indwelling in one another, “members one of another”. We will not then be parts of God (McTaggart’s objection to a “personal” God), any more than we are parts of one another. In fact no one is a part at all. All are in all, even as God shall be, and therefore is, “all in all”. From what we have said though it should be clear that there is a question as to whether we are not duplicating reality here. It is not primarily a matter of analogy in the use of a word, though, as with “unity”, we do incidentally have to use the same word for similar realities in an at least quasi-causal relation. There is possibly, too, a real indeterminacy of personality as such, already suggested by McTaggart’s system of “determining correspondence” (we exist in each other’s perception but also, necessarily, in our perceptions of one’s another’s perceptions ad infinitum) just as it is by the Pauline “members one of another”. One may question, therefore, whether the limiting concept of personality is truly preserved in such thinking, just as one may question the content of our concept of the divine unity (analogy versus plain equivocation, of which analogy is after all said to be a species) and as McTaggart questioned Hegel’s concept of God. The Trinity, then, seems contingent, as a set of ideas. We believe, if we do, that it is not. The assemblage of human spirits, like the thousands upon thousands of scriptural angels, seems contingent. We may claim that it is not, that it, like the thinking self, cannot be other than necessary. Also we may claim, against how things seem, that both visions are of something ultimately simple, if we accept Aquinas’s argument against an absolute compositeness. There is then, it seems, no final limit upon our choice of mode for representing ultimate reality. Much has been made of a “personal” God, yet this not straightforwardly signifying. There is a “beyond personality”. It has been claimed that the real God of religion is distinguished from “non-existential” theory by being a real “thou”, with which an “I” can be in personal relation. This though is merely to absolutise a feature of human life univocally, which can even be questioned on its own level, as by the ancient quip, nunquam minus solus quam cum solus. Augustine and the whole tradition render questionable this fashionable attempt (M. Buber) to undermine philosophy “under the influence of religious sentiment” (Hegel, Enc. 5) and Aquinas forthrightly states that God has no real relation with his creatures which, it is plain, do not exist in the same way as does God.

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Augustine’s assertion of the “one closer to me than I am to myself” shows how the I-thou relation, intended to liberate the solitary ego, as indeed in finite (and hence illusory) life it thus functions, in the end transcends itself by returning us yet more deeply into our subjectivity. Anything else is alienation, division, conflict. Aquinas argues cogently that one is totally fulfilled in union with this intra-subjective divinity. Other friends, however appropriate, are not necessary.5 The distinction we often wish to make between union and unity cannot be applied here, any more than within the Trinity. “I and the Father are one.” In fact we see here how union of the soul with God, so that “all things” are yours, functions just like the later absolute idealism. For McTaggart too “heaven” (visio beatifica) is having the all, the unity, within oneself. This is the striving of all lovers, of eros, here on earth, the wound that only death can heal, and it can indeed be treated as a figure of the death on the Cross (or conversely) of man’s lover, who wished to live within us as we in him. This was perfectly understood by many English medieval lyricists of love, for example, long before Coventry Patmore’s “mixing amorousness with religion” which so alarmed Newman. This is why the tradition speaks of “the peace of God which passes all understanding” or why acknowledged masters of the “spiritual life” concur in saying that those contemplatives reaching a certain point are “meant to cease all thinking”. This is not, as is sometimes imagined, technical advice for some specialised “venture of prayer” within ecclesial institutions only, as if the hotline to God, to the All, were to be found just there. It implies a view of reality as identity in difference, i.e. as union of just what analytical understanding (Verstand) constitutively keeps apart. For the understanding “Each thing is itself and not another thing”. No, “I in them and they in me” or I am with you always and everywhere. This that is a part is yet the whole, the saving cup of tea (in Zen), a movement of a symphony, a face, a touch, simple fireside warmth or the smell of snow, the hearty laugh or, why not, the tear or blackest night. If I show you “fear in a handful of dust” or if you “see the world in a grain of sand”, it is the same. “Have we received good at the Lord’s hand and shall we not also receive evil?” What is being said then? That all is well, merely, as it is proper to consciousness to know. Become what you are and, as part of this, age quod agis, do what you are doing. Again, those who seek shall find or, they say, you would not seek if you had not found or, again, to those who have shall be given. These as it were playful utterances of religion get their authenticity from

5

Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol., Ia-IIae, treatise on the finis ultimus humanae vitae.

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the original pure play that is philosophy, “the notion”, contemplation, thinking. Ut omnes unum sint, as also omnia are one. This, in Roman Catholic terms, is the significance of the promulgation of a decree on ecumenism at the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (1962-4). Here, after two thousand years, Council defines and becomes itself in its entire idea. It might seem the inevitable synthesis after the extreme separation, no doubt valid on its own terms, between dogmatism and “relativism” of the papal letter Mirari vos of the 1840s. So-called modernism was an earlier if at times clumsy version, not yet knowing itself, of ecumenism. The great ecumenist was Hegel, who said that all philosophies “worthy of the name” were true, and he emphatically did not mean that only his own was thus worthy. Greater things than I shall you do, said another, reckoned greatest, and so should we all say and think. All religions, similarly, are open to endless restatement or doctrinal development as, it follows, is this very doctrine of development itself. This in fact is the reconciliation which is God and why God, the infinite, matters. It is also what is wrong with identifying God as the selfexplanatory. God is rather the overcoming of all need for final explanation, which seeks to control and dispose of life and even love, of which life is the analogue merely. “I live, yet not I.” “Oh life that is no life at all.” “This is eternal life, to know…” It is a knowing, however, which context shows is not propositional or as if content of an explanation. If to understand is to forgive, it is more absolutely true that to forgive supersedes understanding as the act of one already knowing, seeing and having. The one forgiving no longer needs to know. A bit more of evil is always possible, after all. Again, do fish understand the water they swim in? We who live in and are of the spirit must have a yet more harmonious and immediate relation, even an identity, with what is no longer medium merely, as water for fish, but our own self-production, our inside outside and, in boundless sympathy, vice versa, our differentiation in identity. * We are speaking then of reconciliation, mutual acceptance, of the silent and mystic gold which is a currency, a standard of living, beyond the silver of dogma. All the great religions, the religious philosophies, acknowledge or in practice allow for this, namely for a constant dialectical sifting of their tenets to the point where opposites are affirmed and held in tension. This perhaps was the core of Newman’s insight, and not his alone,

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that orthodoxy stands or falls with the mystical interpretation of Scripture6, where things can even happen “as in a figure”.7 One might expect the opposite, a use of such interpretation to prove just one way of seeing the mystery believed. But what is declared, rather, is that orthodoxy is itself many-faceted, paradoxical and mystical. Otherwise why would it depend upon just mystical interpretation? Of course someone might think that Newman merely means that one can’t believe the individual dogma of the inspiration of Scripture without taking much of it mystically or allegorically (which is not the same), but then the general term “orthodoxy” would be inappropriate. Is there then a difference, at this point we have reached, between saying that God and the self are one, i.e. the self is self-transcendent, and saying that God transcends the self? Is it perhaps a mere choice, as of mood? “There is a time when God dwells in the soul and a time when the soul dwells in God.”8 We might ask, what does it mean that a man is made in God’s image? Must it not also mean that God is made, conceived, in man’s image? “Myself and God”, wrote Newman again, unconscious maybe of the Eckhartian echo, of, here too, standing or falling together, this being the mystery, the centrality rather, of subjectivity in all its necessity, while subjectivity, of course, is the last thing to be objectivised, though we have to try, are trying, to “thematise” it. The difference is that we feel, indeed we think that we know, that any man began a finite time ago, i.e. he began, from nothing, dependently upon some cause. Yet this cause is surely like him, a likeness of him in whose likeness he is himself then postulated, if only because any other type of cause, viz. an alien cause, would be unbearable, like the nightmare of “gods” (or genes) who created men to be their slaves. Such an imaging or imaged cause would be infinite and omnipotent, all the same, qualities not impossible to find in man himself. Here one wants, maybe, to speak of the world becoming conscious of itself. It would surely only do that, however, if it were there for just that reason, if reason were anterior or, let us rather say, logically prior. But if it is only there at all on such a condition we have the idea of nature as itself alienated reason, a “petrified intelligence” (Schelling). What is important here, however, is that we ourselves, our phenomenal selves, are part of that 6

J.H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845, Chapter VI, I, 1, “Scripture and its Mystical Interpretation” (Pelican Classics, ed. J.M. Cameron, 1974, pp. 336-342). 7 See Galatians 4, 24. 8 J.-P. De Caussade, Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence, cp. the remark of Eckhart’s cited above.

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nature, appearing with it, indubitably. Therefore, on such premises, our phenomenal selves are alienated, are not our selves as we really, that is, eternally are, “unsundered spirits transparent to themselves”.9 The world, that is, would not become conscious of itself unless it were itself reason, a mode at least of the Absolute, identical in difference. And it only becomes thus conscious in me or you or another, as concrete universals, indifferently but subjectively, since that is what consciousness is. All the laws of logic only hold good insofar as the subject sees them and this is a truth anterior to any doctrine of the substantial self. We speak for convenience of the subject when we might rather propose a transcendent subjectivity, of substances, relations or the whole indifferently. Similarly, though not entirely just by the way, the term “incarnation” is anterior to any doctrine of the dualistic reality of flesh. What is proposed more essentially is a becoming like us in all things, the antithesis of Docetism. So it is this role of the subject, of subject, that must engage us at this point. No reason can be given why I, this subject, am part of the finite scene. Yet it belongs to subject, to all subjects, to be this subject. Even if they be created out of nothing it is beyond all probability that I would find just myself so created. I would have to have existed, been there, before, either as an idea identical, like all divine ideas, with the divine essence or as God himself. This, once called by K. Rahner Hegel’s “mad and secret dream”, is just fearless investigation of subjectivity, and incidentally, or just thereby, of the Gottesidee. Nothing is “made” out of nothing. “Created”, on the other hand, simply means “out of nothing” or, rather, out of self, as in “begotten not made”. Self, that is, projected into another while remaining self. This state of alienation, of self from self, is a stage, dialectical rather than temporal, a part of what it is to be self-conscious or self-possessed, possessed of self as only thereby, therein, being self. It is thus that outside is inside and vice versa, an ecological insight also. You may say that when God created he ceased to exist or, indifferently, he began to exist. For Boehme he is before or “without” creation a kind of blind or suspended will, but this, taken literally, would only be because Boehme would here seem not to think timelessness, where there is no “before”. This, however, is required if time is created, and thus we already have the dialectic in our hands, long before Hegel, as religion and mystical philosophy showed themselves aware. Boehme’s insight is that God is a relation to reality, like the “God of Israel” of the prophets. Aquinas urges 9

G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Dover, New York 1967, p.452.

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that God has no real relation to a creation outside himself. There though he need not have included “the rational creature”, a phrase we are suggesting is contradictory or at least part of a self-alienation itself a prelude to returning to itself in spiritual self-realisation, represented in religion as regeneration or redemption, two originally highly figurative terms. The question must arise, how far does this difference of presentation between the theologica germanica and the letter of Greco-Latin orthodoxy continue from the “original” Arian controversy? We know little of the first Arians, history’s losers, but one only needs to remove the assumption of a common realism as to the material world and things wear a different face. Thus if there are no human creatures anyhow then making Jesus the first of creatures and not a divinity above them is no longer denying his divinity. What is then meant is that we all share it. “I have called you friends”, and what is presented in religion as a promotion within the narrative of “salvation history” becomes rather, from the standpoint of wisdom, dialectical advance “from shadows to reality” (Newman’s motto, as it happens). Again, in saying that God is a relation to reality one means that “reality” is a prism of God and not a second or “ontologically discontinuous” alternative to God, the All. God as appearing to us is just God, and we with him (cf. Eckhart again). We, ipsae personae, are this relation to one another, but each time as being one with the all, as having the unity of the whole in each of us (McTaggart), so that we too have no real relation with the others, as God, for Aquinas, has no real relation with us. What this means, though, is that all the others are known in and only in our own limitless subjectivity, as united to the all within us which is still, as in Augustine, closer than close. In knowing ourselves we know, love and possess all. The oracle spoke true there. The more massive the mountains, mighty the sea, vast the sidereal distances, the more they challenge thought to be, to think itself. The whole story, again, of being “thrown” into existence is not merely improbable. It is beyond all probability. Why should just I be there to be thrown? How could I be, if I was not or am not anteriorly? Rather, I have an incoherent illusion of a beginning, as of a coming end, as I seem to observe in the case of others, though each one of them fails to observe it in his or her own case, which is the only authentic case. No story of such thrown beings can include the self, or any selfhood at all. Selves are not in stories, in narratives, since they are, just qua selves, necessities, as what is prior. I cannot be contingent, nor can any other I, any other subjects, that there might be, indeed need to be, since I am

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known in the other as is the other in me.10 Yet all are in me. I have the unity within myself. I am the universal of universals, so it is a false step to want to abstract the “I”, the ego, here. The coincidence of solipsisms is the first identity in difference and entails perfect reciprocity, this alone permitting the absolute exclusivity of I. I possess the unity of all those who possess me and possess one another. It is unity of self, since this is in fact self-in-other, or negation of negation. Further negation as entailed in the very concept of negation is not mere retreat to the previous position (double negation) but genuine reditus, first giving being to the original posit. This is why all is self or selves. To exist is, as self or subject, to be necessary, divine, uncreated. Such divinity, as real, is necessarily differentiated. This is less a logical truth than the truth that there is a differentiation into necessities, necessary spirits, though the details of their individuation may not be clear to us. In each of them nonetheless, each consciousness, the whole is present, so that the more they differ the more they are the same, showing forth the same principle or that which we call a face, cara, Gesicht. A face is not a substance. In the face of the other I find my own confirmation in being, which none can withhold forever since he or she is essentially that begetting relation with the others. There is a coinherence of all in all. If we have come so far then we have to consider again some more of our presuppositions. Thus in the famous article of his Summa11 where St. Thomas assumes a mediating representation or intentional species which he then argues is not that which (id quod) is perceived but that by which (id quo) the thing or res, any reality, is perceived he seems to be assuming the inside-outside metaphor or at least not to be free from it. Two things suggest this. Firstly, the argument is applied with small modification to both intellect and sense indifferently, the background premise here being that even sensation is quaedam ratio, a kind of cognition, let us say. Secondly, the picture he gives us leaves us with an infinite regress, in that whenever we think about anything we have to form a concept of it through which we know the object, e.g. on reflecting back upon our own thought we must form a thought (concept) of that and so on for ever. This is reflected in the later theory of types, for example. The ground of this second phenomenon is that intellect is essentially dualist or non-reciprocal in that it has to make everything it bears upon into an object for the cognising subject. Such “objectification”, however, is clear systematic falsification, even though the intellect itself, as I here 10

Compare Stephen Theron, The Recovery of Purpose, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1993, for a critique of the idea of a merely possible person. 11 Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 85, 2.

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exemplify, can become conscious of and allow for this. The point is though that allowing for it ought to carry us beyond this particular paradigm. In McTaggart’s philosophy this is done by arguing to the final category-transcending reality of love, as in much Christian thought, while in Buddhism one appeals to prajna intuition (a Sanskrit term for a deeper intuition than that of intellect itself as itself making possible intellect) along with karuna, a form of love again. In these perspectives the instruments (organa) of reason identified in Aristotle’s De interpretatione, say, and considered under logica docens, get their explanation. One always wonders, that is, why there should be such instruments. God does not have them, after all, though here a reconsideration of the divine ideas doctrine is called for, as even of a too literal taking over of logos into Trinitarian speculation. The first such instrument is the concept, apprehensio simplex, and this is all too clearly what we are calling objectification, a sign of which is the opaqueness of the concrete or differentiated universal (into individuals) for intellect. We need to see how each thing thinks and knows itself and all else in itself more truly than we can know it, unless indeed we know it as we are known, unless we might have it within ourselves as much as without us, so that in knowing it we love it, we are it. This though is to pass beyond, to overcome knowledge. In the field of sense we are anxious to distinguish perceiving from seeming to perceive, in dreams or hallucinations. But this was always a side issue. Such things are not typical and dreaming has its specific explanation. What is sensed is not outside of the self in any meaningful sense, as Kant’s discovery of space as an a priori form of sensation more than suggests and as ecological awareness has made us more aware. We with our environment are one reality, as in sociology the individual is not divorcible from society. We have tried to show how this does not reduce individuality but rather raises it to a higher power, so to say. Instead of explaining the logical organa in terms of “abstraction” consequent upon a dual constitution of soul and body (substantiae incompletae), which is incomprehensible, we should rather see nature as itself the work of the objectifying intellect (Schelling’s “petrified intelligence”). This is misread if taken as absolute. Such intelligence is rather creative and representational, making nature itself rather an id quo through which the reality may be perceived or intuited. In this way intellect too, Verstand, can understand itself, its place. Just as I am object for you, so then you are object for me. So then neither of us are objects and this is why true thinking is “letting being be”, in Heidegger’s phrase. Each thing rather understands itself and all infinity

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within itself and whatever does not so understand is no thing at all. The centre is everywhere, that is nowhere, since there is no “where”, just as there is no outside and inside absolutely speaking and one is the path one treads. Esse est percipi is after all a profound intuition. So, to return to the earlier discussion, when God said “Let us make man in our own image” the sacred writer was not describing a mere step within evolutionary development (if we were to imagine him with our own scientific background). He would rather have been developing that development itself beyond its original notion, though this is itself in accordance with that notion. With the appearance of the incarnation, however, as new creation, we should not think of development as taking a further such step of the same kind only as this latter, from beast to man. Rather, the one necessary step of nature’s transcendence is here completed or made fully manifest. Man is himself fully shown, the “figure” deciphered, as grace perfecting nature as taking it out of its own contradictions as an intermediate and finite notion merely. Extensionalist accounts of thought, of science or knowledge, are “contradictions in performance”. Thought can only come before experience, as for Aquinas being (ens) is what “first falls” into the mind (in mentem), so that indeed the latter is prior. Whether or not we call this God is, in view of what we have said above, almost without interest. Mind is, however, as ultimate, subject and the effort of science, as of religion, is to unite with that subject, to know the whole, the universe. If this empirical self we are conscious of does not do that then we find it is a false self and to be left behind, at least in our thinking, as when W. Sellars and others contrast the manifest and the real or scientific image of man.12 Am I, was I, brought into existence by another? I do not think so. I do not think I could be. Hume told Boswell he no more regretted ceasing at death than beginning at birth and there is a great truth here. Once here, transcendentally, we cannot think that we began, as from something alien (whereas if it is not alien then it is not other), and death too, however viewed, is change more than it is annihilation, though there may be a measure of oblivion involved nonetheless. In fact nothing is annihilated; even the misperceptions we call appearances lie within the reach of memory13, like the timbre of the voice of Julius Caesar or some legionary or other. Else he never spoke and there are no voices. In fact the ideas of

12

W. Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality, RKP London 1963. Yet God shall have said, “I will not remember their sins any more.” This however merely confirms the Hegelian-Thomist insight that evil is a “shambeing”. 13

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all and each thing are one with the divine essence14 and that essence is a fortiori one with my subjectivity. Religion has a doctrine of guardian angels. We are warned in the Gospel against harming children because “their angels behold the face of my Father in heaven” (what face is that?), eternally quite obviously. The guardian angel is both an other and not an other, since he too is close to the self as having no other function or being but to guard it. He, or she, is like the face of a flower in children’s illustrations that is not the flower, and yet it is. His guardianship is not accidental to him; he is more identified with it than is the prophet with his mission, or he is himself the deep self of the child. For on the McTaggartian philosophy or the Hegelian intuition of the blessed shapes (“articulated groups”) of eternity15 these angels would indeed be our true eternal selves. We are in fact more like the angels of tradition than we are like the animals we represent ourselves as being or coming from, though animals too, as archetypal projections, may bear angelic traces (in so far as they be our self-representations), seen as it were inwardly and as our artists and fabulists would capture them. Angels, however, are fluctuating and uncertain in regard to their contours of self. In many accounts (e.g. in Genesis) the one sending and the one sent (angelus) appear to fuse together, as indeed in incarnation above all. The Buddha, it is taught, is not a self. Self is non-self, the burden of intentionality. Borges felt that Shakespeare was no one in particular but a mirror of all. As Hegel puts it, the principle of personality is universality. Self-in-other has, as self, no limit. Infinity is realised in limitless subjectivity. A world without subject, without reason, is an absurd notion. Subject comes first. But I cannot just happen to be subject, not even by another’s will and choice. From where would he choose me? Or by his choice he is I and I am he, so it is still my choice, a choice that cannot but equal necessity. I was never born and I will never die, as the angel which is I 14

Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia, 15 esp. 1 ad 3: idea in Deo nihil est aliud quam Dei essentia. Aquinas is here at one with the philosophical tradition we have been exploring. Far from compromising divine transcendence, as those seeking to save orthodoxy (it does not need “saving”) are wont to assert, the only transcendence that is infinite and hence transcendent indeed is the transcendence which transcends nothing, since there is nothing outside itself to transcend. I.e. only that is transcendent being. Transcendence, that is, transcends “immanence” in its very concept, or dialectically. “I am that.” All other concepts of God fail at the bar of analysis, which means that belief in God is inseparable from God’s worship, is nothing if not practical, like a shout from a “psalm of David”. 15 Note 8.

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looked on, like the Psalmist, while “my mother conceived me”, if I remember it or not. In religion we are told not to grieve our guardian angels, as Thomistic ethics urge us to “Become what you are”, by the grace of self-transcendence. There is a question: shall I, can I, abase myself before myself? What have I that I have not received? Nothing? Everything? Something? Humility, it is said, is the virtue of truth. Does this mean the lowliness is incidental, to a certain view of things here superseded, that humilitas is in essence veritas or veracitas, rather, or a species thereof, as are both of justitia? Or is it rather that the one whom we have worshipped first as other appears more and more as deep self? One can worship, adore and be humble before oneself. Why not? The lover feels his beloved is his true self and just therefore adores her. * “What is man?” asked K. Wojtyla once while Pope, without answering. What, even, is woman? According to a tradition implicit in Aquinas and still carried on and even refined by Boehme she was originally meant to stay within man (Adam) as making up the complete human being (as we find in Plato too), thus bypassing the (it was felt) unseemly burning of the sexes for one another, the pitching of love’s tent “in the place of excrement” (W.B. Yeats). This burning in turn derives from woman’s being taken from man’s body as in Genesis, after Adam’s sleep as Boehme mysteriously comments: With sleep, time became manifest in man. He fell asleep in the angelic world, and awoke relatively to the external world (Mysterium, xix, 4)… The terrestrial world had conquered him and ruled over him. (Menschwerdung, i. 5). 16

This tradition seems to attempt more than the simple ying-yang postulate, though maybe seen through the eyes of an existing patriarchal system. 16

Quote in Jacob Boehme, Personal Christianity (ed. F. Hartmann), Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., New York (undated), LCCC 57-12318, p.164f. It is interesting to see how Augustine’s sober estimate of marriage as remedium concupiscentiae becomes in Boehme a mystical estimate of woman as being as such a remedy to man’s more generalised lust for the terrestrial: “Therefore woman… is and will always be the saviour of man” (p.165). He even suggests she was made out of the more refined and spiritual essences of man, before the ribbone had hardened on its descent from the previously angelic or heavenly state! It is the parallels with absolute idealism that are of interest here.

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The momentous-seeming question whether man is created or uncreated, is God or not, is relative to the intrinsic indeterminacy of self which we have identified. Still, the search for knowledge does seem to become a kind of chasing one’s own tail if all, as spirit’s self-alienation, is not after all a human projection, but a projection and partial misrepresentation therefore of whatever self, subjecthood, eternally is. This is the basis for the claim that knowledge must be superseded, by love or something similarly reciprocal, as “the nature of existence”, overcoming “objectification”, the tragedy of knowledge17 as killing or “subjecting” the other in the act of apprehending it, as does the cat’s patent curiosity its prey. The lack of reciprocity in knowledge comes from this projectedness, which represents what is to be known as object out there, projected, thrown. This again, however, shows the inappositeness of the relative term “subject” for what is absolute, which we define and hence limit in the very act of trying to understand it, I, ego, universal of universals and hence infinite. There can be no objective I, no the I, any more than there can be a nonexistent person, but only myself, yourself, himself, herself, each of whom are for themselves I and hence one (in all). I am in Adam and Adam is in me, not by physical seed merely but by deepest sympathy, which is identity, or two in one, of which the logical “relation” of identity is a mere shadow.

17

N. Berdyaev’s phrase in his Spirit and Reality.

CHAPTER FIVE GOD, BEING, LOVE

In the thought of Thomas Aquinas and the whole tradition in which he stands being is taken as the master category, so to say, under which the Absolute or infinite, God, is considered. God is the necessary being and even ipsum esse subsistens. For Hegel, by contrast, his system, which is a dialectic of concepts, starts with being as the poorest or simplest category, coming to rest at that of the absolute Idea, the idea as idea, or thought thinking itself. As a later variant on this McTaggart argues that this category, one of cognition, is not yet perfect or ultimate since not truly reciprocal, as the final category, or rather the reality, has to be. He suggests love as a suitable name for this category, recalling the Johannine “God is love”. Of course he also says God is light, but love seems to be what is ultimately meant. The Hegelian development might lead one to take this Scriptural speech more seriously than is usual among at least Catholic theologians. One might come to think that it is wrong to base love on being. One might rather think that love elicits being, even in God himself. This is by no means a new thought. It is suggested in Jakob Boehme. The idea there is that God is only being when considered in relation to creation, to nature, and this would seem also to be Eckhart’s standpoint when he says that unless I existed God would not exist. It is not until Question Twenty of the First Part of the Summa theologica that Thomas Aquinas is ready to ask if there is love in God. First he had to consider if God had will, of which, he says, love is the first motion. Will, in turn, depended on divine intellect, of which it is the inclination. God has intellect as being free from matter in the highest degree and hence unlimited by any one form. Knowledge, after all, means one’s having the form of the other as other. The divine immateriality and limitlessness is thus the basis for the divine love. Is it at all possible to reverse this way of thinking? There are, to start with, other ways of thinking of love. If we think of universal love, without limit, we think of unshakeable harmony, something indestructible, a kind of still centre of radiant energy. Good

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will, which the Thomist analysis, or our own far poorer notions, might suggest, does not capture universal love. It suggests rather a universal inoffensiveness, though it need not. One might think of the suggestion of Jesus that we should do, energetically it seems, whatever we would like to have done for us, for all others and without limit. This is more, much more, than just abstaining from what we would not like to have done to us. But now we seem to have blundered into the restricted field of ethics, simply, and out of that of metaphysics. Love, we said, suggests harmony, yet it is surely more like fire, the ultimate energy in other words, something never still and yet remaining the same or, as we say of fire, not going out. Again, can one be love without having anything to love, except that love which one is, as our predication system compels us to say. If God though is love and not being, as Berdyaev says he is freedom and not being, then he is a not-being, an other than being, Greek me on and not simply ouk on or nothing, and that is clearly to stretch the “is” too far. One shall not take it at face value then. Perhaps love, as we said, at once elicits being or beings. Love, that is, generates a lover. But God is not that lover. God is love. Or is love itself a lover? We have the philosophy of act, of “pure” act, beyond substance. Love, then, would generate even act. It would be prior in reality and not the highest example of a more general reality such as act or energy. Nonetheless, since in our thinking we see that love has to be act (if it is prior it generates the very possibility of act) we can see, almost, how love, just qua love, generates or differentiates. Love, is not one and not many (these notions have in no way arisen as yet), like fire will be here, there and everywhere in all its heat. Centrality is a spatial concept. We overcome it by saying that the centre is everywhere, that anywhere or anything is the centre. So, in this differentiation love is fully present as a passing over and between any number, i.e. an infinity of subjects all having the totality of love, and hence of its differentiations, within them. If, to change tack slightly, one considers what Hegel writes about life in his logical works (they are that) one finds that he seems to assert that we are not alive, there is no life. When he writes that “Life runs away” he means it never is. It is an imperfect because finite and therefore, after a certain point, self-contradictory notion. That is why “all that lives must die.” Eternal life is an analogy only. What abides is not life but consciousness, or rather thought, which is in nature “subjective”, absolute subjectivity, in which each subject partakes in absolute plenitude. The reality, Anaxagoras saw long ago, is nous. To be real one must be nous. And thus the principle of personality is universality, Hegel says, not in the sense of abstracting universals but as having the all within itself and thus

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being it, in some way (quodammodo, as a Latin Aristotle shall have said). “I in them and they in me.” And here it is love that is envisaged. Ut omnes unum sint. Love one another, to the uttermost, as I have loved you. Be love. Love love. Our difficulty with predication, with the copula, itself seems to thrust us back into ethics. It reveals love, though, as trans-ethical. Ethics, rather, transcends itself in the manner of the transcendental predicate, the Good, an ens rationis according to Aquinas (QD De pot. 7). How shall we take this?1 There is a clue in St. Paul’s saying that knowledge, but not love, shall vanish away. Perhaps, as McTaggart seems to suggest, knowledge is itself an imperfect and therefore non-actual echo of love as we found life is of knowledge or consciousness. We must not be bound to our predicationsystem merely, so marked as it is by our finitude. We know that other languages predicate differently, or not at all. We think, for example, of colour as among the first abstractions a child makes, in the category of colour, but is it not rather that first he knows colour, as a prime reality, and is then taught linguistically to see it as an abstraction from substance in the category of quality? Might he not just as well, in another community, say and think white now snows here, or black now cars or nights? In fact white is not separable from snow or other whites. There is no snow without its colour, as we say. So there might be no knowledge without love, as ultimate specific difference, as, for Thomas, intellect gives all of its being to that which has it, down to my five toes, as love, again, gives all of virtue to whatever is virtuous, as its form, all coming down from the highest perfection without which the reality is not attained. This is how things are really or physikoos, i.e. one is not merely seeing them logikoos.2 But here we are at one with the dialectic, for which also the last perfect concept alone is transcategorial, giving us the real and infinite. Thus, for Hegel, “everything finite is false”. This is the point also of the distinction between speaking either cum or sine praecisione,3 making being either the poorest of predicates or perfectio perfectionum. The most perfect thing of all is to exist, for everything else is potential compared to existence… the act of existing is therefore the ultimate actuality of everything, and even of every form. So it is that things acquire

1

On all this, cf. our Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt, 2002, p. 203 f. 2 I double the vowel to represent the omega. 3 Cf. Aquinas, De ente et essentia.

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Chapter Five existence and not existence things (esse… non comparatur ad alia sicut recipiens ad receptum, sed magis sicut receptum ad recipiens).4

What though is meant by things acquiring or, rather, receiving existence? We say, indeed, that they come to be, but this is idiom, metaphor, if not sheer distortion. Before they are they are not so as to come to be! Things do not acquire existence. Existence, Thomas might rather say, if anything, as ipsum esse subsistens, creates things. But is existence after all the worthiest name for the ultimate, highest principle? Must it not rather choose to be? It cannot lie under some necessity of existing. Its choice, however, as infinitely free, might coincide with all that we mean by necessity, even as its ultimate cause. Thus it is that in Hegel’s dialectic the two become identified. “This truth of necessity, therefore, is Freedom…”5 In this way indeed the laws of logic, including the primary one, as in Descartes’ intuition, their very necessity, results from the divine freedom. Further, by this knowledge the motivation for trying to deny personality to the Absolute out of fear of the arbitrary is undercut. The latter rather is defined as failing to measure up to both absolute and the personal, “principle of universality”, indifferently. It is reason itself, as being ad opposita (where nature is dweterminatum ad unum), which enables freedom. Freedom is not arbitrary; choice, election, is finite, an appearance or figure. In this way the concept of “the fullness of time”, which Hegel uses to account for incarnation, applies equally to the election of Abraham or the Jews. They are themselves the particularisation rather than those picked out. In Christ, Christianity teaches, in accordance with philosophical principles, they will themselves be further and finally particularised into one person or universal principle. “Thou art my son, this day I have begotten thee” is thus rightly applied, traditionally, to Israel and Christ indifferently. This is the true background to Hegel’s thought and his expression of it. Again, we found Boehme and Eckart saying or implying that being comes in with creation without their thereby identifying God and creation. The divine freedom was called a pure will. We should rather identify as love, the ultimate or specific difference from which all will in reality arises. Love is thus also pure act (and no static object). Further, it freely and so necessarily differentiates or specifies itself as love. We may call this creation and yet maintain here too an identity in difference, as does Augustine, after all, when he speaks of the one closer to me (or him) than

4 5

Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia, 4, 1 ad 3. G.W.F. Hegel, Encycl. Logic §158.

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myself. I have suggested above that a consequent result of this consideration is to find that we beget one another.6 Of course a certain consequence, that there is no God, might boldly be drawn if one says that God is beyond being, or “both is and is not” (Nicholas of Cusa). Atheism and theism might here coincide, the great dispute be sidelined. This may even be the main significance of Christianity7. We might still have a universe of pure spirits, ourselves, as absolute differentiations, each having the whole in self, the unity, so that (as McTaggart did not quite seem to see) the distinction between part and whole is transcended, superseded, as indeed it is in the Hegelian logic. We speak of parts of the mind, says Hegel, only by analogy with organic life.8 “I in them they in me”, “members one of another”, the sense of the religious tradition is very clear to view. But we ourselves would then not exist either, so would not have the advantage over God as in the more aggressive atheism. We would rather be ideae divinae ourselves and, just as such, one with the divine essence, as Aquinas saw.9 It might seem easier to relapse to the realist position of a world so suited to man that God puts man into it, as into a garden. But then what is man before he is so put? Are not the world, the environment or the four elements part of him, his inside which is outside, his outside inside? Evolution teaches as much. Latterly, in cosmology, it is suggested by “the anthropic principle”. But with evolution comes the big circle, that its truth is judged of by a mind which is developed under its auspices, for which indeed it shall be the total explanation. “Intelligent design” is now supposed in some quarters to overcome this. The question then becomes, and there are really a host of them, why do we need such a world at all? Why not just start and end with man? No doubt it is all intelligently designed. The question then becomes, who is the designer, the thinker? And what, again, will be the meaning of its being “outside” such a thinker? None at all, be it God or man. That is, mind has to find itself only in its object. In other words, mind, the Idea, denies, leaps above the object (EL50).

6

“Begotten not Made”, The Downside Review, January 2006 (chapter 1, above). See our “Christianity without (or within) God?” at Open Theology, online journal, reprinted with some changes as final chapter of our Reason’s Developing Self-Revelation (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, 2013. 8 Cf. Hegel, op. cit. 135. 9 Cf. Aquinas, op. cit. Ia 15, 1 ad 3. idea in Deo nihil est aliud quam Dei essentia. Cf. our “Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas”, The Downside Review, October 2004. 7

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Freedom is the mark of intellect. The animals, lacking it, are determined in their perceptions by finite environment. But reason and judgement are ad opposita. The field is open for us to “make up our mind”, as we say. We want of course to be determined by “the facts”, as animals cannot be. It has been contended here, however, that reason does not stop there. Reason is, and wants to be, creative. This is often called voluntarism in the (theological) sense of preferring will above reason. The authentic and, incidentally, Thomistic view, however, is that will is itself reason’s own inclination to Being perceived as good. Reason determines the facts. Commonly, this is put down to the divine reason, exclusively, by which human reason is measured. But we are now finding that these two are not really so separate. Spirit is spirit, the one spirit, wherever it is found, and nature is spirit’s self-alienation, though only in abstraction from its reintegration, negating the negation. So reason is ultimately will. They are one. The non-rational will, therefore, is a chimera. It is then the community of spirits, as many or as one, who posit or posits nature. “It is useless to count.” So “Nature” has no existence apart from such Spirit (Geist, nous), which is Mind. Nature is Spirit´s means of self-perception as revelation of self to self, exclusively. “The outside is the inside”. Looking out I see in, to Mind, “universal of universals”. The Idea as visibility, definiteness, is thus the Idea self-alienated. In itself rather, as itself the negative, it negates negation. This Hegel calls blessedness and even, by implication, the “peace passing understanding”. This is the peace of Reason itself (EL159).

CHAPTER SIX WHAT IS GOD? WHAT IS MAN?

What is God? This, our title question, is the first question St. Thomas Aquinas is on record as asking. We might take the later quaestiones (of the Summa) as the working out of a lifetime’s answer to his leading question. He did not first ask, for example, if God exists. It is and remained a question of what to call God, of identifying God. This more basic enquiry, in fact, is included in his formulation, utrum Deus sit, as “signifying the truth of a proposition”. The existent and the real, being as we might say, are related as species and genus. The truth of just this proposition, however, where sit is both copula and predicate, would be an absolute actus essendi, a Wahrheit der Dinge (Joseph Pieper). Some people dislike the idea of God as implying, they think, lordship or domination. We don’t however know if that is implied, particular traditions apart. What is surely implied though is an infinity, than which nothing greater can be thought, as the “ontological argument” has it. Not everyone agrees as to the necessary actuality of an infinite. For some it is an impossible idea merely. A restricted infinity is itself only a finite, Hegel declares, and the point seems analytic. The thinking self, the “I”, is for him infinite, since thinking is unrestricted. I can think anything and be “at home” with it. Nothing external restricts me. A related consideration is that the infinite, as unrestricted, has to be differentiated. An undifferentiated or “simple” infinite is an abstract idea and, as such, finite, which is contradictory. Not only so but the infinite cannot be merely finitely differentiated. That is, the infinite is infinitely differentiated. This means, however, in our terms here, that God is infinitely differentiated. This, we shall find, does not necessarily contradict the Christian differentiation of God into three persons. We may also find that that too has a basis in reason, once the religious tradition has proposed it to us. It will be claimed here that to the infinite differentiations of infinity, which we are calling God, corresponds the human race plus any other race

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of rational creatures so far unknown to us. These rational creatures are spirits and not in reality extended as bodies in a material universe. There is no such universe. Not only so, however, but we have no certain knowledge as to an absolute quality pertaining to the finite concept of self. The self is in all probability indefinite to the point of being subject to an indefinite number of combinations in, again, infinite differentiation. Other-than-self is within self as, in Trinitarianism, otherness is in God and there overcome. This overcoming is knowledge, a having of the other as other, but finally it is love. Since time is not absolute or objective this indefiniteness of combination has as at least one of its functions the replacing of the religious doctrine of reincarnation, which indeed is to be carried to the point where all are in each and each is in all. This is the only perfect or infinite or non-abstract unity and simplicity. The threeness of Trinity is therefore to be found within each spirit itself, as Augustine almost divined, adding to his “psychological” comparison the insight that infinity, God, is “closer to me than I am to myself”. He is therefore myself in the highest possible way. Therefore the Trinity is to be found in me or as constitutive of any self. Each self is in the end identical with all putatively other selves. This was implicit from the beginning of Christian experience, where one spoke of the Word manifesting, and of mutual Love proceeding, from the self, the ego, the “I”, thought thinking itself. Each self, and hence there is just one, has the unity of all within itself in a unity transcending the finite scheme or categorisation of part and whole. * In this way the divisions of philosophy, as into metaphysics and rational psychology, for example, are seen to be finite categorisations of the understanding (Verstand) which reason, as infinite (Vernünft), transcends. In psychology differentiation is discovered, within what we are accustomed to see as the self. The Trinity, as declared by “the absolute religion”, is there in the self revealed and accomplished. McTaggart, for that matter, will point out that Hegel is not entitled to identify Christianity as the absolute religion. As to that, it may indeed be more true that all religions contain one another, that we all “anonymously” profess all other religions besides our own, in so far as each of these, as also Christianity, are patent of ever more profound presentation and understanding. Here too the last might be first or vice versa. Psychology, then, would be a mode of metaphysics, as we have elsewhere found to be the case with ethics. We found, namely, that in

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reality virtues are individuals, just as in any case many virtues more or less capable of reduction to abstract universal notions (like men with red hair) all the same have no name in this or that language. More importantly, one person’s kindness or love or courage is not another person’s. One might add that this identification, with metaphysics or “first philosophy”, is exactly what Hegel discovered in the case of logic and which anyhow had been implicit in the earlier scholastic notion of logica docens as a more profound reflection back upon logica utens. Nobody can or should treat these categories of logic, namely, as externally specified or given. He has to see them for himself for his argumentation to be either honest or valid. Yet in saying this we again rescue psychology from a merely finite subjectivity, from “psychologism” in a word, from which there is therefore no further need to flee. * “Christianity without God?” Say, rather, a more analysed answer to the original question as to what God is. Is God a person? We question rather personality as such, not though as looking at an impersonal alternative. What is questioned is the division into, the expression of personality by, selves at once finite and absolute. The finite self is not infinitely close to itself. It is therefore a false self in the perspective of a rational being or nature. We find then that what we call God is in fact self, but without making a reduction. Instead we distinguish the true self or atman from the empirical self, as we imagine it to be. The individual, we might say, is the universal. This “concrete universal” is the real and the actual, not abstract or prescinding from anything. But equally there is no abstract individual either. By abstract individual we do not refer merely to abstract individuality, the notion, which we are here elucidating, i.e. saying what it really is. We mean there is nothing and no one that is just an individual, as if again prescinding from his or her universality. The principle of personality is universality. Hegel claims it was historical Christianity that revealed or unveiled this and he equates this, the value of man as man, with freedom of the spirit, that freedom which is spirit. In support he points to the failure of slavery to survive in Christian lands. We might also say, there can be no infinite transcendence that is not at the same time infinite immanence. Just so Hegel points out that the infinite cannot exclude the finite without ceasing to be infinite or without limits. *

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Not only psychology and logic but also ethics may be found to coincide with metaphysics as to its object, if we permit reason to question our finite categories, whether as found at the base of university curricular divisions or anywhere at all. This we have noted above. We reached the point, also elsewhere, of suggesting a person might be a virtue, a virtue a person. The divine persons are relations, these relations are persons, as we have noted in connection with psychology. Now persons belong with a substanceontology, unjustifiably implied in all our speech, where the subject (of which we speak) is always presented as a “thing”, even where we know it is not (a thing), e.g. happiness, charity, someone’s lack of foresight, etc. To this thing attributes are then added, one after another. Not only may any person’s virtue differ from anyone else’s. Your kindness is not my kindness or, as an Eskimo might say, this snow is not that snow. And he has two names for the two disparates, as he sees them. D.H. Lawrence, who pointed out that not all virtues have names, also claimed that all persons are equal in their total difference from one another (in Women in Love). Aristotle makes clear that speech is mere makeshift communication, since the things themselves in their infinite number (always concrete and individual) cannot pass through our minds. So we have one term for things that are like but essentially different at the core. Since one cannot manipulate the things themselves in discourse about them but uses names in place of them we often think that the relations between the names are the same as those between the things. But there is no similarity: for names (words) are finite in number, things infinite. So it is necessary that the same sentence, or one name, should signify several things. Therefore in arguments those not experienced in the power of words are often deceived by paralogisms.1

The whole battle, as Wittgenstein said, is not to be bewitched by language in this way. But what is the discourse Aristotle had in mind that consists in “manipulating the things themselves”? It is perhaps thinking, though this is where we let things be (Heidegger defines thinking as “letting being be”). But when we come to assert, then we manipulate, though we would like the things themselves (which we “cannot” manipulate, since then they are no longer “things themselves”) to agree with us. Speech, that is, is a subjective commitment. * 1

Aristotle, De soph. el. c.1, 165a 7-16; cf. Cajetan, De analogia nominum.

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Of course ethics can only be taken up into metaphysics in this way if we leave the substance-ontology behind, as the finite approximation to the Absolute that it was, merely. But then old doctrines of suppositio and reference, for which we found Aristotle supplying the rationale, will be profoundly modified. Language remains, but as pointing to the Idea, thought thinking itself, in identities in difference, reconciliations of contraries. If we retained substances we would be back with mere allegory, with Dame Prudence or the Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby of Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies. In proportion as these figures became loveable, human or even, in the latter case, romantically attractive, however, they beg to be delivered from such a substance-ontology. This would not be achieved, though, by merely passing from substanceontology to a world of reified relations, as when one tries to understand the Augustinian-Thomist Trinity within a realist scheme. Where there are only relations there are no longer relations, since these have as such always to be taken as attributes of substance. Similarly self is seen as substance, even when recast as relation. This is the paradox of three persons, a definite number, in one individual “nature”. More fundamentally, self becomes an equivocal concept. What we now have is not, impossibly, reified relations but a sober adaptation to the discovery that every notion, every mental content of ours, is finite, has its limits. This means that it is discovered to be in contradiction with itself except in so far as it is balanced with, related to, other ideas. They are related in such a way that they form, when thought in their complete truth without prescinding from any of them, a zigzagging progression towards what Hegel called the absolute or “pure” Idea, Aristotle’s “thought (nous) thinking itself”. This Idea, pure as reasoned to in logic, which for Hegel is, again, one with metaphysics, is, as actual, Spirit. Here, again, we have answers to our question: what is God? The situation is verified, again up to a point merely, in the old doctrine of the divine ideas, each one of which is identical with the divine essence and therefore identical in its very difference with every other such idea. Since it is shown, both in Aquinas and in Hegel, that the Absolute can have no real relation with anything finite, even though, with apparent paradox, the converse denial does not hold, these ideas must lack the negative connotation of human ideas. What God knows is the creature’s idea, its notion, as one with his own essence, which is in fact precisely thinking and not some abstract “being”. Only thus is God actus purus as thinking is its activity. Gilson’s “God is not a thinker; God is a knower”

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simply points to the finitude of human thinking which we are here and now excluding. As one with the Absolute the ideas in fact each think one another. This appears clearly once we rid ourselves of the sheer abstractions of essence and being as such. In fact where essence is being and being is essence both are cancelled out and this is the truth of St. Thomas’s claim that they are identical in God. As Hegel puts it, we have no assurance that existence, a notion simply taken from common life in pre-Kantian metaphysics, is a predicate worthy of divinity, which must in any case transcend all predicates. As for analogy, the sensus eminentior, “it was an expedient which really destroyed the property and left a mere name.”2 The Fourth Lateran Council of the Church admitted as much in teaching that divine properties are more unlike than like any that we know. But as far as this unknown is concerned, that the ideas thinking, i.e. conceive, one another has as consequence that any of us, as known by God and thus in our unique and proper reality, conceives and indeed begets, though surely not at some point in time, any of the others. We form a system of coincident solipsisms, which is precisely the divine or absolute situation. Such coincidence, however, modifies all notion of system to the point where the categories of part and whole no longer apply. The centre is everywhere. As Eckhart put it, “the eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me.” This also explains why Aquinas could claim that the company of friends is not necessary for absolute bliss. It is not necessary for the Absolute as such, which is a unity of which society, a mere “unity of order”, is a pale because finite copy. The friend, where finitude is put by or absorbed, is self of myself, as I of him or her. Such bliss is thus equally egolessness or self, I, as “universal of universals”. It is thought as thinking (Trinitarian) process of the Concept’s selfactualisation. * To focus further, it is not so much simplicity as a perfect unity that is ultimate, including the finite, the composite, as transcending it. A simple unity is less perfect, therefore less real. It is abstract, the pure concept (of simplicity) cum praecisione. In truth, as we say, there is no such separate conceptum, that would itself prescind, as if absolutising a mere moment of the Understanding. We prescind, of course, and more often than we

2

Hegel, Enc. 36.

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should, and such misperceiving is perceived for what it is, viz. misperception, in eternity. So there is no pure being, except in finite idea. Making God to be being depends upon separating it from essence in the first place. But equally, essence is never separable from being. Such a separation belongs to finite thought alone. Being, in fact, is the concept of an essence that is not an essence (a conceptio but not a concept, as Gilson would put it), like that of matter apart from form, since its essence (we cannot avoid applying the category), unlike matter in this, is act. Yet if we think act as such, “in second intention”, it becomes in turn an essence. It is not notionally identical with essence, but act as thought is essence. That is why God is not to be thought, not even as existence, and this, to reverse things, is the meaning of the claim that his essence, his idea, is existence.3 So he is not being. He is freedom, free of being anything. Augustine’s non aliquo modo est sed est, est… resolves into just this. He is, alternatively, “what he makes himself and nothing else” (Sartre’s affirmation, which cannot be called a definition, of man, his infinity). He makes himself a unity of persons, be they three or innumerable, be persons fixed or variable in their identity. So too, “You are all members one of another”, in one another. The conception, then, as an often unanswered invitation, to further thought or to “Become what you are” indifferently, is traditional. So, similarly, if God is a Trinity then he is necessarily a Trinity. There is no contradiction here, since this cannot be a necessity of coercion from outside. That is a purely finite conception. Freedom and necessity, rather, and precisely as notions, are perfected, lose their finitude, in one another, as dialectic shows. Consciousness, we might feel pushed to say, is necessarily that of the spirits thus differentiated, each of which is the centre of all. In wishing to deny that the Absolute, the whole, is conscious, however, McTaggart might seem to have fallen away from his own vision. Each is the Absolute. It is not, as he agrees elsewhere, an aggregate. “He that has seen me has seen the Father”, has seen the whole and Absolute. In our thought, our 3

When one considers the highly abstract manipulations and relatings of “essence” and “(participated) being”, coupled with a refusal to ever consider letting go of these categories, as one finds this in neo-scholastics such as Geiger or Cornelius Fabro, one feels oneself inescapably in the presence of ideological calculation rather than philosophy, albeit unconscious, as if serving some other end of which philosophy, in search of the living God, knows nothing. See the excellent review article (as one must surely call it) of Rudi A. te Velde’s Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas (Brill, Leyden 1995) by Stephen L. Brock in Acta Philosophica, Rome, vol. 8 (1999), fasc. 1, pp. 178-184.

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sensations, even in our sleep if it is indeed ours, the whole as more than composite totality, beyond aggregate but rather the unitary necessity without which I am not myself (as it is not itself without me), remains. The dreaming poet, the sleeping child, the pair of lovers still more (or why not the three?), are each in their time and place the centre. Neither is a centre, since this is contradictory. Any one of them, rather, is the centre of absolute reality or, we may after all say, being. This is the same as to say that time and space, and hence birth and death, play no role at all. We need not dogmatically deny their existence, as if something else existed rather. Rather, to have been born negates birth and beginnings, since one is. This is the ultimate truth of the scholastic subsistentia as applied to being a person. One cannot, strictly, imagine a person. Do not say there was a time was when you were not but, rather, “I am, so there is no time.” On this then depends present immortality. This is no other than that argument presented in the Gospel that if God is “the God of Abraham and Isaac” then these two are living, and everyone else, in so far as they live or ever lived, along with them. So we have to say either that Hamlet was never a person or that he somehow lives, as tribute to what we were misreading as the poet’s imaginative faculty merely. Who imagined us? Again, we beget one another.4 In composing Hamlet Shakespeare, universal man or “little bit of cold” (Borges), invents himself. But this is no more, again, than the Hegelian “cunning of reason”, the Thomistic determinative knowledge: There is a destiny which shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.

But where the “we” and the destiny are finally identified, as they have to be, we can no longer be seen as “our own worst enemies”. Man muss sein Schicksal tragen and that is what one slowly, cunningly, learns to do, passing through that evil of which Hegel, in true Thomistic vein, while granting its opposition to Good, says that The error arises when we take Evil as a permanent positive, instead of what it really is - a negative which, though it would fain assert itself, has no real persistence, and is, in fact, only the absolute sham-existence of negativity itself.5

4

See our “Begotten not made”, The Downside Review, January 2006, also Chapter One of the present work. 5 Hegel, Enc. 35 (subtext). I quote from William Wallace’s translation of 1873 (2nd edn. 1892, reprinted O.U.P. 1965).

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This indeed is what having a God means, since God can only be the God of the living. God, we might even say, is the cipher for our immortality, as in “If God is for us, who is against us.” That is, simply, nothing, neither death nor grave, is against us. Know thyself. If I do wrong then it is not I who do it, as Hamlet again, the putatively non-existent, said to Laertes, and therefore forgive me. Here the true self, atman, speaks, closer than close. God, that is, is absolute subject, as sacred writings read properly attest the world over. And so the journey outwards is the journey inwards and “The kingdom of heaven is within you” as it is among you. Nothing new here, it might seem, which is after all just as well. Old silver (speech is silver) needs a polish now and then, merely; it is not so old as to crumble at the touch. Ecce omnia nova facio or, as the hymn says, “New every morning is the light.” The Word, again, is pristinely uttered eternally and not in the finitude of pastness. This uttering, this act, is all, absolute, preceding, and therefore answering, our question “What is God?” Yet, for G. Rinaldi, One must not forget that the critique of dualism is one of the essential finalities of Hegelian dialectic itself. In fact, for the latter, the very thought-determination of “opposition” (Gegensatz) is possible only as a sort of internal relation between opposites, whose immediate mutual exclusion thus presupposes and implies also a more original and ultimate identification of them in the “speculative” unity of the “concrete”. The most significant dualisms… are… Kierkegaard’s opposition of religion and philosophy, the abstractly “spiritualist” (or rather, Cartesian) one of mind and body, nature and spirit, the aesthetic one of imitation and creation, and finally the theological one of God and man, which is certainly the deepest and most decisive of all: …6

By this, the intent of our dual question for this chapter becomes that of eliciting a unitary answer, viz. Spirit. By this, however, man himself as something separate, even abstract, is absorbed into what thus ceases to be “God” as finitely transcendent or presupposing a dualism and first becomes itself Spirit as proceeding. We may compare Augustine’s musings upon whether the essential man is the (spiritual) soul, taking anima as spiritus, uncluding however its manifestation or “appearing” as face and/or “body”. There are not two “incomplete substances”. *

6

G. Rinaldi, Absolute Idealism and Contemporary Philosophy, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 2012, p. 215.

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The reason God has a body is because I do and God is subjectivity. The rational nature is capax Dei. It is, that is to say, a (or the) divine capacity, infinite therefore. The world is known entirely and only in subjectivity, known as known by me or by you or him, who are other I’s, other subjects. And I am nothing apart from my world, in which I live and move and have my being. This is the premise of ecology, after all. Yet I know as, and just as, I am known. We knowers beget one another, in perfect mutuality. Here, however, appears the shortcoming, the finitude, of our notion of knowledge, of cognition. For either we cast ourselves down before the known as before the other not yet within ourselves or, in willing, the alternative cognitional category, we seek to dominate it. This is why one spoke of knowledge “made perfect” in love, which names or can name a more perfect, an utterly perfect, mutuality. There neither finds the other as a given, even if it is thus that it begins, but this fragmentary past is then taken up into the eternal begetting of one another. In this sense God does not merely change the past but stands as the annihilation of pastness as anything fixed or absolute. What is God? God is love and love, therefore, properly understood and fulfilled, is God. Whence came this love? It is, simply, or, rather, it loves and don’t ask why. Love generates the search for explanation that terminates in its own rediscovery of itself, the harmony negating any idea of a periphery. Only therefore is no one “on the periphery”. A virtue is needed to take this truth to oneself. This virtue will eliminate all discontent and, in a (Scriptural) word, cast out all fear. Metaphysics and ethics here rejoin again, as was said. It might be feared that such a position exposes one to a psychoanalytic rejoinder, merely, to deconstruction, that is to say, from which academic Sachlichkeit has always protected its practitioners. But the academy too, or especially, can and should reflect upon itself. Nor can it be removed from the dialectical process it has identified and which it studies. As orthodoxy transcended itself into mysticism, classicism into romanticism, so such objectivity, as Heidegger was not afraid to indicate, finds at length its own poetic truth, as Hegel claimed that the destiny of philosophy was to fulfil religion, as being itself religious. So indeed, as we began this paragraph, there is a fear, but it is precisely fear that this position defines itself (previous paragraph) as casting out such fear. Ergo cadit objectio. * What is man? With the same wonder that one asks what God is, so one can ask what man is. And if one has answered, in a way, that God is man, so, uniting the two questions in one answer, one can say that man is God,

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absolute. Only, it must be remembered, again, by man here is meant the subject, subjectivity itself, and not some species in nature. We speak of man as not being as sure, for example, that we are embodied, or have hands and feet, as he is certain, or can be, of “myself and God” (Newman, merely following Descartes). In Aristotle’s terms, it is the form, the ultimate form, viz. intellect or consciousness, that is essential, and not some composite. All flows from that in the mode of thought as, ultimately, self-consciousness. This consciousness, subjectivity, possesses all things, even objectivity. Objectivity is a subjective concept, one we have made. This is why “the outside is the inside” (EL139), the strange is the familiar, as our idea. This is why God cannot be alien. This is why the notion of revelation must be rethought. It has been understood as a message from outside, essentially, something opaque to reason, a mystery. But reason recognises nothing as outside, since even in forming that notion it takes it inside. Therefore one must strive to understand fully what faith proposes, such as the Trinity. Such knowledge will flow or leap (salientis) from its recipient into eternal life, as “living water”7. So it need not be “objective” intellectual knowledge. Rather one will, under whatever mode, have made it one’s own. What then is revelation? It has to be the fullness of insight, as this has to be divine manifestation or glory. Thus Jesus, as revealer, turned his disciples into friends and they progressed from seeing him as teacher to his being intimate life within them, as they in him. Man, in this perspective, is he, or she, who exists. “All things are yours”; that is, you are all things. “My God and all things”, Deus meus et omnia, declared Francis. I am that. Anima est omnia (we may follow Heidegger in omitting the quodammodo). * Some commentators find it absurd, mystification, that Hegel posits nature as initial self-alienation, to be made ideal, immanent. Yet such a posture is familiar to every religious person as end-position, so to say. “My God and all things.” “In God we live and move and have our being.” From which it is no further step to say, with Hegel, everything finite is untruth, not real, ideal merely except in so far as, like any such “idea”, it is identical with the divine essence (the position of Aquinas in his Summa at Ia 15). This is the same as Wordsworth’s view of nature as “the workings of one mind”, and that in “types and symbols”, ideas, in short, but “of the great Apocalypse”, not of themselves. The moon, for example, is a sign for man 7

See John 4,14.

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in the heavens. As sign it has no being, other than that divinity, that infinity it refracts. Should we arrive on the moon and wander amongst the dust and the rocks, then it has a different reality, but these, dust and rocks, are signs again, like the spaces, distances and changes (time) on earth. Duration is itself a figure of eternity, purely. Eternal beatitude is our native centre and not, except in religious figure, by adoption merely. Known adoption, after all, is also alienation. So this figure, employed by St. Paul at Romans, chapter nine and following, for the incorporation of “the nations” into the body of the new or elect humanity, is not adequate to the reality. It is rather the natural generation of the first Israel that is a figure in the dream of history, a type and shadow merely of the eternal system wisdom is ever unveiling, the true distinct from the false. True, we have portrayed the Absolute, which is also the system of spirits, as made up of relations, on the model of Trinitarianism or of McTaggart’s philosophy. These are not relations between finitely phenomenal beings. Rather, each I, precisely as such, has no real relation to any other. This in fact is what Aquinas shows must be true of God. Only the others, who are not real, have, stemming from their unreality, a real relation to the subject who begets them. They are not real in their otherness but only in their subjectivity. That is why we have to speak of persons as begetting one another, mutually. Each is therefore as necessary to the whole as the whole is necessary to each. For this reason Hegel says that the personal is the universal or, which is the same, is free. We are not entitled, however, merely to stop at this unanalysed notion of person as quasi-substantive. The Scriptural phrase “members one of another”, like our mutual begetting, actually destroys membership in its notion. The same applies to relation, where there are no antecedent entities to be related. Ipsae relationes sunt personae. The relations are the persons. But they are not. In universal relatedness relations disappear. What remains, as Aristotle saw, is Thought, nous, as act, not substance, non-intentional or thinking itself. In thinking (cogitans) itself, ipsum, it amounts to just thinking or thought (cogitatio) itself, ipsa. If the ideas are one with the essence, then such essence is no longer essence. This is one reason why it can be identified with existence merely. God, we might say, is a formality. But if so, then form has a relation to reality or actuality closer than have existing or living things. One thinks, maybe, of Aquinas’s angels, depicted, as in Aristotle, as (separate) “substances” but explained, all the same, as pure forms, each one a species unto himself, therefore, and not an individual. “It is useless to count”, writes Hegel in the Phenomenology, discussing divine persons and angels

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in one. In divinis numeri non ponuntur, Aquinas had written, in the midst of his account of the divine three (De Deo trino), three-in-one, namely, following on his account of the divine one (De Deo uno), one-in-three, namely. Being closer than self, the phrase signals a leap beyond language, a pointer to the unsayable, “what cannot be said”. Such pointing though is part of speech, as situating silence, the “implicit” (Gendlin). Thus Augustine speaks of God as the one closer than self, as for Hegel God is subjectivity itself, constituting my or your subjectivity in identity, the deepest intimacy. Nature, says St. Paul, groans and travails. What is this but its alienation, as something seeming to be outside of us that must be taken into us, into “the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed” (Aquinas)? This is prefigured in such music as the Pastoral Symphony, where a storm out in the fresh air takes place profoundly within the spirit, as theophany. The outside is the inside. I hang on the tree, as fruit maybe, in nature’s forest, which “speaks by silences”, so as to be within you. The “poor step-dame” (Francis Thompson), nature, is step-dame just as having no abiding or ideal truth, as external, as object. This though is natura materialiter spectata, with the materialism here in the Understanding of the beholder. True nature mirrors, yields to, Spirit. Our eyes “miss the many-splendoured thing”. According to Marx Hegel confounds objectivisation, normal to knowledge, with alienation. Marx, we may say, has no metaphysical window through which to look beyond the immediate. He does not conceive that knowledge as such could be tragic, pushing away as ob-ject, Gegenstand, just what it seeks to unite with, in Sisyphean contradiction. Yet for Hegel, as for religious consciousness, this is axiomatic. The finite is false, until I “know as I am known”. But this is best called love, as a transcendence of everyday knowing (I Cor. 13). Man is alienated until he has all that is other within him, as negation of negation. This though takes place only in identification with the Idea, where “thought thinks itself” (Aristotle). Alienation is overcome in the perfect unity of each with all and all with each. There is something of communism in this, but it transcends it as looking to the infinite and eternal. This is what Marx calls mystification. Behind this lies also a certain contempt, or misapprehension rather, of theory. Hegel is regarded as offering something that could not be put into practice, of keeping philosophy at the “academic” or professorial level. Here one forgets Aristotle’s dictum that “contemplation is the highest praxis”, or the teaching of Thomas Aquinas that the forces shaking the mountains, rocks and oceans are divine intellect and will purely, not some

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greater force of the same “physical” kind but something much mightier. Praxis is not to be distinguished against theoria so much as against inaction simply. * The tendency is to feel that Heidegger, say, has gone beyond, brushed away, absolute idealism. This is not though the impression given by his lecture “Hegel and the Greeks”. Also, when Heidegger speaks of being as of something forever “implicit” (E. Gendlin’s term), saying that “being withdraws itself as it reveals itself in beings” (Holzwege, Klostermann. 1957, p.310), so that “hiddenness lies in the essence of being” (Einführung in die Metaphysik, Niemeyer 1953, p.87), constitutes its disclosure as transcendence, then we are surely meant to feel in the presence of something which is real as nothing else is. There is a coincidence with those urging the unreality of the finite as such, a key thesis of Hegel’s logic. Nor is absolute idealism, even the apparent reduction of nature to idea, as mystificatory and barren as Marx, say, would make out. It is a staple thesis of the mystics, Christian and other, that only God is, that, again, as in the common Bible, “in God we live and move and have our being”. Evolutionary theory, as dependent qua theory, upon man’s evolving reason, can be made to point in the same direction. The mystics, of course, far from being mystifiers, were transcendentalist philosophers trying to exist under the dominance, even political, of an orthodoxy routinely expressed in realist terms, such as those of the theory of the analogy of being when applied to reality. But now, what is God? Such idealism is not committed to a mere picture taken from unanalysed discourse, from religion. What is real is the Idea, thought thinking itself. This might be my thought, your thought, everyone’s thought or thoughts own thought. One might be led to conclude that the unity of the Infinite in three persons, each perfectly and mutually requiring the other two for its notion, gives a preliminary picture, whether real or not in itself, of the union of human persons or selves. This again is said without pre-judgement as to what persons or selves might be. “You are all one person in Jesus Christ”, runs one text. “I and the Father are one”, runs another; what you did to anyone else you did to me, runs a third in effect, and it is clearly susceptible of further generalisation, inasmuch as anyone might say it and many have. It is even the basis for our uniquely poignant hatred of cruelty to children or even to sentient animals (sensus est quaedam intellectus). As not constrained from without

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so any thinking subject is infinite, by Hegel’s usage, and in the end subject and subjectivity, like God and godhead, are one. The Heideggerian being might seem to have no place in this. The pure presence he speaks of, does it not all the same require a theatre, a situation, and will that not be prior? I mean, is not his being an abstraction from the concrete beings merely? Is not that why it is essentially hidden, forever implicit? It is more like the being of Scotus, which is a concept, than that of Aquinas, which is act as such and not conceived as a concept over again. For Hegel this act is precisely the Concept as final truth of a being originally posited as mere beginning, but necessarily, of thinking. Heidegger cannot know, that is to say, that there is being or presence of such a kind as to make no difference to anything, like a theorem of mathematics. Yet the presence is real enough. This presence can be nothing other than the necessity implied in any consciousness, in subjectivity. As necessity, of thought, it takes away the question, posed by thought, as to why is there something rather than nothing. But “God is not being, God is freedom” (N. Berdyaev). Being is just one of God’s ideas, or at least an idea he has of us thinking it, standing at the beginning of the dialectic, and the same would go for “presence”. We find in Jakob Boehme the idea that God, prior to or apart from creation, is a pure freedom. His rocklike choice of the persons we are, just like his selforganisation into a Trinity, constitutes necessity and the one is as free as the other. He is necessarily a Trinity and this means, can only mean, by his own choice or whatever it is of which finite choice is the analogue. Coiled within this choice, however, is the Trinitarian structure we call man, the rational creature, Reason, repeated or self-thought again and again, or in infinite inward extension, which, as infinite, is intension, rather. Since, though, this is the infinite differentiation of infinity there cannot be or have been a definite number of men. This, in turn, requires that self or subject itself be indefinite, with possibly all coinciding with all, since an discretely extended infinite multitude is indeed impossible. By this route we may just as well in the end be the one hundred and forty four thousand of The Apocalypse endorsed by the “Jehovah’s witnesses” or, why not, the “all one person” of New Testament thought generally. * The history of the earth, of climate, of pre-history, what has idealism to say about that? We cannot perhaps think it without the presence of spirit, though some think that they can, think millennia upon millennia of air, winds, scuttlings, brutish cries, aeons of empty space, collapsing stars,

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with no observer. Was the heat with or without light? What is light, where no eye sees? In what sense potential, photo-potential where no eye has developed or, more importantly, been thought of? But if Spirit had been there, brooding upon the waters? To what end? Why brood? One is infinitely powerful. These things, these distances, ages, live in our minds. Our minds, mind, is the place, the “place of forms”, and there is none other. Nous is uniquely noumenal, the noumenal as such, the Idea. Evolutionary theory was not, as far as one can tell, begotten of the earlier idealism, but it confirms it. The soul “infused” at a given evolutionary point, as the cook adds the next ingredient, does not stand at all, as a notion. Man, rather, is all soul, all spirit, that which makes the body what it is, as even the old theory states, correctly understood. Spirit represents itself to itself as nature. With the advent of evolutionism it represents thus its own self-representing. Spirit cannot henceforth be other than immanent, but as containing, not as contained. Anima est quodammodo omnia, is all beings, as Heidegger inspiredly mistranslates. It is spirit that determines its content, which is therefore and only in that way necessary, like the Trinitarian nature of God. It is my ideal self, God might say, in effect, my atman, that established freely this Trinity within which I now necessarily, or “without shadow of turning”, posit myself. Otherwise how explain it, if God is passive to nothing? But what do we say about God himself, his existence? Did he not determine that as well? One cannot say he is existence, we have learned, as if he could not choose otherwise. Existence is a finite category in Hegel’s Logic, it is not the Idea as such, not the final Concept, that is. Could one say God is choice? Yes, but not as determined, since one cannot be determined to be undetermined. He is that act of acts, to act or not to act, which is freedom, infinite, or bound by nothing, as is not true, incidentally, of nothingness itself, which is not, is not even non-existence as option, but rather “sham-being”, as Hegel says of evil specifically, since for him this is not specific. Anyhow, “the distinction from Nothing is a mere intention or meaning”, an opinion, so to say, but it is that (EL87). Conversely, non-existence is either reducible or expandable, indifferently, to Inexistenz, to use a term from a later philosophy. Our scheme even of the basics is ever susceptible of inversion, topsy-turviness indeed. And so, for Hegel, even evil can become a moment of the good, whether in angelology or in human development by “Fall” from innocence specifically. This ought to silence those who interpret Hegel as unfree in his yet manifest choice of the order of dialectical development, to the point of offering two versions of it opposed in detail. True, the Method is the same, not subject to variation. But just

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for that reason Hegel identifies it with the Absolute as Absolute Idea, necessarily. This God though, thus far, could be anything and quite unlike the usual conception. The Absolute might be McTaggart’s perfect unity of spirit(s), indeterminate as between one and many or as to how many, like nothing so much as the oriental, and much decried, drops of water in an ocean or bucket indifferently. “You are all members of one another.” * There is a choice at this point. We might give up all claim of mind to “objectivity”, to truth. As itself evolved mind’s “explanation” of evolution cannot be other than a variant upon the survival motive. So its truth or falsity is irrelevant. But then so is anything we “know” about evolution itself, survival and so on. Or we can give up on the other wing of our speculative flight. Evolution, we can say, or any other paradigm of nature we care to advance, are models, ways mind produces of representing itself (not some object) to itself. Truth will then be a property of that mind, in mente indeed, but no longer as correspondence with something else. Mind, that is, is greater than nature and contains it. This after all is no more than theists say of God vis à vis nature. He knows it as his idea, as ordered in divine thinking. Every subject is itself subject as such, infinite, every mind is mind as such, since infinity is necessarily differentiated. It has no parts, but it is necessarily differentiated and thus far not simple, to begin with. Simplicity is achieved at the end, as dialectical result. And so the dense one hundred and seventy million years of the dinosaurs, their raucous cries amid the crashing undergrowth under a burning bright sun that no rational being perceived, any more than it might have admired the acute auditory sense (researchers say) of tyrannosaurus rex, all this is a construction of thought. Again, all creation is this. That is, this is what we have to say, as is proper to truth. We are simply taking the divine point of view, which is the absolute or true one. The redemption of groaning and travailing nature is one with its return to Absolute Mind, where it in truth eternally belongs, such that God is understood as “all in all”, thought thinking itself, which is pure act, not substance and so not really being as we initially represent it. Being is like God, a “picturethought” still, but of what if not of simplicitas achieved as result. Take away the abstract category of finite or pure possibility unactualised and what remains, as thought’s necessity, is pure or absolute plenitude, the pleroma. This, however, can as well be denoted as the true face of

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nothingness. It is but one more picture, as of a vessel filled. It is the empty vessel rather that is fully or absolutely a vessel. Thus God, the Idea, in self-constitutive self-emptying, is realised, eternally. As mind includes all of space, so all time too, as a priori. “All times are his”, liturgy declares. Both time and space are forms of representation merely and our solipsisms coincide as we beget one another. Thus each is necessary to all and all to each. The model begins to fit mutual love better than knowledge. Those wedded to common-sense urge us to “come off it”. But we are not on it! Reason rather urges us to conclude thus, beyond the senses. The conclusion corresponds to the stock-in-trade meditation of anyone taking an infinite being seriously, in meditation, more naive or less naive, or in philosophy. The turn-around is total. One could not argue against it from fossil bones, for examples. That they should be there “physically”, should be thought as being there (this “as” is a concession; the thinking makes them so to be, i.e. to be thought in truth), equally falls under the idealist explanation, uniquely not in itself a model but the soil for the very idea of a model, as founding it. As Hegel says: That the truth is only realised in the form of system, that substance is essentially subject, is expressed in the idea which represents the Absolute as Spirit (Geist) - the grandest conception of all, and one which is due to modern times and its religion. Spirit is alone Reality. It is the inner being of the world, that which essentially is, and is per se8.

* We have often referred to the place in Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of the resurrection of the body where he appears to distinguish it from any resurrection of “all flesh”. Answering the question whether animals and plants rise again into eternal life in the negative, he responds to the objection of so much lost beauty that it will be contained and indeed far surpassed in the “bodies of the redeemed”. It is hard to resist seeing that here too, as Hegel says, the religion with which we in our time are familiar, Christianity, is preparing the way for the idealist “turn” which orthodoxy has found such difficulty in accommodating, e.g. when dealing with the thought of Eriugena or Eckhart. Yet these drew their inspiration from Augustine who, though wishing to define himself as a pillar of

8 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Harper Torchbooks, New York 1966, pp. 85-86.

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orthodoxy9, anticipated all that is said here in his notion of God as closer than self to self, i.e. as one’s final identity. Newman echoes this, saying he is more certain of God than that he has hands and feet. He though remains with the all-encompassing dualism, “myself and God”, as required for the language and situation of piety. So for Aquinas all that is outside goes inside, is included in “the bodies of the redeemed” which is to say, surely, within the redeemed as unitary realities or spirits, subjects. A commitment to Hebraic realism, in his understanding of resurrection, however, precludes him from saying this. We can no more than guess at the reach of his personal vision, words being always “the film on dark water” (Wittgenstein). St. Thomas, after all, saw himself as writing for the community, seeking as teacher to build up or “edify” it. Such medieval modesty cannot be paraded, however, where, in true modern spirit, one strives prophetically to push vision to the utmost, conscious today of the need rather to find ever new and better bottles for the ever-new wine. We have learned that to stand still is to go backwards. Men like St. Thomas, indeed his whole epoch, laid solid foundations, rather, for such advances. The prophet, anyhow, has his own humility, is “meek and humble of heart” as he begs us to learn of him. “Here stand I and can no other”, “I was no prophet; neither was I a prophet’s son”, the Son can do nothing without the Father. For Hegel, as for McTaggart, and as already shown in Kant’s Kritik, whatever its faults, time and space, along with matter, are self-cancelling finite notions lifted uncritically from common life, as so often God is thus lifted from common religion, with or without the white beard. Neither creation nor resurrection depends upon such notions. The body, therefore, abstraction as it already is, is nothing other than a view, a filtered refraction, of the subject. The subject, in turn, as individual self, will similarly show itself to be self-cancelling, as in Trinitarian theology it became identified with its relations to the other two Persons. This step will be repeated in the analysis of human unity generally. “You are all one person in Jesus Christ”, Paul had long before prophetically uttered. Aristotle also looks towards such a truth in his metaphysics, where instead of man as composite (of form and matter) the pure or ultimate form of the 9 St. Paul, we remember, had wished to see Peter and James and John as such “pillars” (styloi, columnae), though he deviated far more from their external presentation, at least, as we might say also John did from the other two (in so far as we might be sure of the identity of the author of “John’s” Gospel). Yet their approval, their “right hand”, was important to him, though what he would have done if they had not given it we do not know for sure. His dilemma would have been Joan of Arc’s, since voices are voices.

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body, one with intellect or with which intellect is one, becomes the whole reality of (intellectual) substance or person (hypostasis in later language), subject, that is to say. Between pure potentiality and intelleci or absolute form no intermediary forms survive. So intellect belongs to “this man” as superseding this man in its identity with the Concept. But if there is no time, no matter, so no body even, from the divine viewpoint we seek to unite with, then what after all is man? “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” was already the Psalmist’s question. For McTaggart our seemingly temporal and bodily existence, though not in reality having those illusory qualities, is all the same to be conceived as a (dialectical) series. This is the “C-series”, of which the last member or result is actually the only reality, which yet has intrinsically to be seen as result in this manner. And this is no more than Hegel says in the Preface (actually a transition to his Logic) to his book, The Phenomenology of Mind, which indeed McTaggart is exactly replicating. We should then consider this notion of series, of seriality. * When McTaggart substitutes eternity for time as our real milieu the common factor relating the two is seriality. Both time (A or B series) and eternity (C series) are serial. In terms of this common factor he explains the mistaking of the one for the other, and some common factor there would need to be. The idea that time is a symbolic representation of eternity rather than its antithesis is an old one, found, for example, in Plato, and characteristic more of Eastern Christian thought than of early Western or Carolingian. A common factor of this seriality is the importance of the last member. Regarding time, the A series at least, it is simply the case that the present moment functions as a last inclusive member, we might say term, which so to say captures all the others. They have no reality save as leading up to it. One reconstructs the past with the help of memory. As for memory itself, the memory qua memory is present, though what is remembered is past. However, this pastness cannot be proved and one might argue that memories can and even ought to actualise what is remembered. This is the link with the C series, how we might in the course of our life or lives pass over insensibly from the one to the other. Traumatic memories are experienced as present. This is a main distinguishing feature indeed, though an engaged response to narrative, or music, equally actualises or “detemporalises” it.

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The present does not similarly include the future. “Future” means not thus included, or not as yet (!) included. “Yet” cannot be used to explain what it is itself part of, viz. the future and time in general. So we have an inclusive series not moving physically but in logical progression to its last term, to terms, that is to say, not otherwise (I avoid “previously”) included. We do not know in advance that there has to be a last term. This is a key puzzle in the case of the C series. Regarding time, why could not we choose to see it as progressing backwards rather? We would then arrive at a beginning, though only if, again, there is a final member. On McTaggart’s hypothesis there might seem every reason to see time thus. For what one finally arrives at is where one has been all the time, eternity. Inexplicably, it belongs to this eternity that one misperceives things now in such a way that one eternally perceives oneself misperceiving them.10 What it comes down to is that backward or forward are concepts taken from the temporal and material world the reality of which McTaggart claims to disprove. Therefore we can see time either way, remembering, to vary Henry Vaughan’s line in “The Retreat”, that “some men a backward motion love”. In physics the situation is different, up to a point. It is not easy to fix this point, however, since backward causality, for example, would on McTaggartian premises never literally be backward. Indeed in so far as this temporal reference is thought essential to causality, as by McTaggart himself, then causality itself reduces to a provisional because finite category in the dialectical series, which we have yet to consider as forming the basis for series as such. If we compare temporal or eternal series to the number-series we find again this feature of one-way inclusiveness only. The later or larger numbers include the smaller or earlier. This is what being larger means. And we only speak of later and earlier in deference to the fact that our notion of a series is formed from analogy with or in abstraction from our experience of temporality, which we here attempt to get behind. In what sense then can five include four, but not the reverse? The assertion at once opposes us to a Pythagorean view of absolute numbers, where each has its qualitative character on its own, as is more plausible for smaller numbers. Where there are five things, four or three things are included. We may say there are not four but five apples on the table but

10

Not quite inexplicably. The question as to why the perfect law was not given from the beginning has been treated both by theologians and, more generally, in relation to the need for a dialectical result, by Hegel. Explanations, that is, have been offered. See below.

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this is “idiomatic” for there being more, and just one more, than four there. So four are there. This is the sense of “more than”. This means that number is tied to a milieu of enumerables, not surprisingly. Whether it also transcends this milieu we may leave open. For Aquinas number when applied to divine things does not denote quantity, whether we speak of unity or trinity. The point here is that the series is one-way and that the ultimate infinity includes all numbers, or will do if or in so far as infinity is real. To the layman it seems one would never reach it. A suitably robust machine would go on counting forever, as children try to do. These two factors, a world of enumerables and a possibility of seemingly endless (the “bad infinite”) enumeration, suggest that number belongs with the illusory world of time and matter we attempt to transcend, in view of its inherent contradictions. So the larger number includes smaller number as the present includes a hypothetical past. The analogy does not go further, since there is no larger number which is relatively more present than smaller numbers. It is rather to unity, one, as first number, that we should look for analogies and even identifications between the two or more series. We have not considered the possibility of circularity, a conception seemingly closer to simple unity than that of a line. Thus Parmenides saw his One, saw being, as a sphere. Along these lines, or in this circular way, rather, we can even see a hint of how the temporal series, like causality, may have to be seen as provisional and to be discarded as misperception. If time, as physics suggests now, has to return upon itself then what we get is not necessarily eternal repetition. That is keeping the linear way of thinking in the very act of renouncing it. An “eternal return”, rather, should mean that the linear motion in terms of which common-sense time is perceived is exchanged for a motion, not of repetition of events, but of the same event ever coming back. It is not like getting up afresh each morning but like forever living through some getting up or other which never goes away (except to come back again). This is clearly a mythical way of representing the eternal presence of all reality (and here I have nothing to do with Nietzschean exegesis). If, anyhow, it is in this way that infinity has to be reached, as it cannot in linear progression, then we have further support for the thesis of the necessarily concrete differentiation of any real infinity. Thus the series of abstract numbers leading to but not reaching an abstract infinity cannot be anything but linear. It cannot be thought circular, as can space and time. The circularity of space and time, however, would seem to imply the elimination of both, our results here tend to suggest.

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In a similar way the last member of McTaggart’s C series includes, is indeed the inclusion of, all the rest. As such it is ever-present or, rather, actual. It alone is concrete, not abstract or broken off (fragmentary). Any reality we have now is our inclusion in that, where reality is seen, as it exists, all at once. Here, therefore, we have to consider whether or how this very notion of series is constitutive of absolute reality. It seems to me it is not, but is, rather, extrapolated from our fragmentary experience as we find it in consciousness. In a similar way the C series is not a third reality but the only reality. The same would or should apply to the Fregean Drittes Reich or the Popperian third world (freed from the author’s commitment to quasi-naïve realism). There is an analogy with the process of argument here, typical of course of dialectical thinking. In any case the last member is the only member, i.e. not in reality a member at all, just as there is no series in reality at all, but in our thinking merely. In eternity it will be perceived, if at all, as misperception on the part of those conditioned to a temporal framework. For this last member is in fact truth, in concreto, to which any abstract concept of truth is to be referred. Truth, however, cannot be seen as part of a larger world consisting of both the true and the false. That would indeed be “logical Manichaeism”. Only the true is actual, wirklich, since “true” names the actual precisely in its entirety and beyond all partiality, as proceeding Spirit as we might say. The model, we have made clear, for all series is the series constituting the Hegelian dialectic, whereby the mind ascends to reality as it is in itself and not in our idea of it. This, paradoxically perhaps, is called in the Logic the “absolute idea”, though what is absolute is the Absolute or, simply, Spirit (sc. Mind). As Spirit it is itself idea, the notion, with which our idea now, if we reached it, would coincide. But in coinciding with the absolute idea we actually pass out of the realm of ideas, our own limited and necessarily dialectical ideas (in the sense that each has the seed of its own contradiction within itself), and into eternal reality, inclusive of all that was at first represented serially, as a way for us to get at it, though we understand now that series, any series, was a finite illusion. Probably thinking and knowledge are part of this illusion, the ultimate state being more reciprocal and without the objectification knowledge essentially entails. McTaggart calls this state love, as in religion. In both case the content of this term is somewhat variable, but for the philosopher it is intended to name whatever finally transcends knowledge, as he considers something must do. The relation of such dialectical philosophy to mysticism is very close, as is that of the mystical ascent or purification to the dialectical series. Examples such as that of Boehme show how the process is substantially

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the same for the learned and the unlearned, for those who write and those who do not or cannot (but who first, some of these, invented writing). The sciences are only separated out for the sake of their own progress, i.e. with a view to their reintegration within the whole. But all thinking, and that means all consciousness, is in principle ec-static. Human life in itself is a consciousness. The principle of critique is intrinsic to this, though only later thematised. Thus no thinking, nor conscious life, is pre-critical without qualification. The self-critical moment, in simple self-awareness, accompanies all thinking, implicitly or explicitly. Awareness of this fundamental unity, harbinger of democracy, between learned and unlearned, first and last, in speculative awareness, is characteristic of Christianity, with its faith-principle. It is in this sense alone that one should understand the apparent denigration of philosophy characteristic of preaching and proclamation. When Newman speaks of the self-indulgent philosopher we should not forget that self-indulgence is a principle hostile to philosophy, which is fulfilled in self-forgetfulness as discovery of the true self or atman. All philosophy is true as recognising that truth lies beyond philosophy, or as knowledge is made perfect in love, in Pauline or McTaggartian terms So it turns out that the reason that the society or company of friends is not needed for eternal happiness (the view of Aquinas), the visio beatifica, is that this beatitude already consists in a perfect community, members one of another. All are known in knowledge of the Idea. This is something closer than friends, more like many persons in one nature or “one person in Jesus Christ” or however it is seen. One has gone beyond the extrinsic idea of a friend to something more erotic, one might almost say, from union to unity. In this spiritual unity man and God coalesce and find their explanation. Nor should it escape anyone that this Hegelian structure, of a dialectic of which only the last member or result is real and perfect, exactly reproduces the structure of revelation as we have been taught to understand it. Finally, he says, it is itself revelation. It accomplishes Christianity. For there too, in the Bible as record, we have dialectic. The full and perfect “law” comes at the end and recapitulates all else, which henceforth may be seen as mystically foreshadowing and “typifying” the realities of which the stories, and even the very events themselves, scruffy and crime-filled enough, are shadows, things “happening in a figure”. It is as if God writes himself out as a story or narrative of which the progressive sections are not words but the histories words recount. History itself, e.g. of Jonah or Jonah’s encounter with a large fish, becomes marginalised, transcended rather. Facts are hat is determinant. But this is

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just what we have been saying; it is all within us. “Orthodoxy,” declared J.H. Newman, in the Essay on Development, “stands or falls with the mystical interpretation (of Scripture).” Here we have ventured to develop Newman’s doctrine of development in accordance with his own seminal principles and as our own time, the Now or actual, requires.

CHAPTER SEVEN CHESTERTON AS SUBJECT

The first three chapters of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, brilliant as they are, merit critical study even today. They make up Chesterton’s “rough review of recent thought”1, before in the rest of the book he attempts “to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy, for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.” This is what he calls orthodoxy. The parallel with Hegel, I would like to point out here, is exact, but generally unnoticed. Both identify their own thinking with thinking itself, with spirit, with God and humanity. Like Hegel too Chesterton states that what seems to him to be the main problem of philosophy is “How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?” Hegel speaks of thinking as being at home with the other as other, i.e. everywhere. It is just in the other that one finds oneself. This, Hegel thinks, is the secret of the Trinity, of Trinitarianism, specifically, as it is the meaning of love, self in other, identity in difference. What we do not find much in Chesterton is advertence to the mystery of subjectivity. How is it that just I…? We might try to remedy the deficiency by ourselves asking, how is it that just he…? The spirit of the age would certainly have produced someone like him, but, why, or how, just he? Who was he? I might answer, surely he was “God from heaven to earth come down”, like all and each of us, i.e. he was and is necessary, not born and not dead. That is to say, the astonishment, here too, is relative to the necessity. It is not the final category. Astonishment marks that pheonomenal point, wherever it may occur, where the subject takes leave of the immediate in favour of the speculative moment. The mystery of the subject is extremely difficult to focus. It is like an intuition that is dropped, that drops itself even, in the moment that we begin to be aware of it. This is what happens in Descartes’ Meditations. 1 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), Doubleday Image, New York, 1959, p.43. References are to this text when it is not stated otherwise.

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With indecent haste he passes from the dreamlike perplexity of the beginning and returns to the solution we now find simplistic. In demanding corroboration of the immediate, though such doubt has already transcended it, the Cartesian I ceases to be “universal of universals” and returns to the abstract ego, his or another´s indifferently, whom the true, abstractly other ego, like a big brother merely, “will not allow to be deceived”. His or Locke’s doctrine of representative perception, therefore, externally guaranteed realist, remains itself under the cover of realism, moderate or not, and so is not itself idealist, though miscalled “subjective idealism”. What is your name? N.M. Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? He made me to know him and love him in this world and to be happy with him forever in heaven. The catechism, which I am quoting, adds to this that God made me to his image and likeness, asking if this quality is to be found in my “soul” or in my “body”. It is to be found in my soul, and here we have religion’s reference to the absoluteness of reason, not to be questioned. “In so far as religion is gone, reason is going,” states Chesterton, and one can suspect that it is Cartesian horror merely disguised as contempt when he speaks of “decadent ages” where such as H.G. Wells can “question the brain itself”. Empiricist representative perception, in fact, confirming what immediately seems, is the nemesis of a Thomist-Aristotelianism imperfectly understood. To locate this historical problem in Thomas Aquinas himself is to identify it with that of the perceived or, rather, dictated relations of theology and philosophy, which can never be the handmaid (ancilla) of or, in a word, ancillary to the former, which it rather completes and “sublates”. Yet Chesterton avers that the creeds and persecutions “were not organised, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organised for the difficult defence of reason”.2 This might seem a nonpoint, making of reason something, like a dogmatic faith, to be externally defended only. Reason is not itself without the reflexivity that constitutes it, however, which is why Aristotle, one of Chesterton’s heroes, struggled to vindicate the principle of contradiction in Metaphysics IV, demonstrating in the process that “the examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge, so that to examine this so-called instrument is the same thing as to know it. But to seek to know before we

2

Ibid., p.33.

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know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim.”3 It is hard to forgive Chesterton how he goes on to write with nearpersonal animus of the tragic and so recent death (1900) of “poor Nietzsche”, that the “softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident… Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.”4 There is certainly a measure of ignorance here, whatever else, and Chesterton would surely with time have revised his estimate, as we have all learned to do. Nietzsche too, that is to say, is in the tradition Chesterton would defend, a tradition of prophecy and of a Jerusalem that slays and stones the prophets, thereby witnessing, it was said with bitter sarcasm, that she is their child. For just so do the prophets on occasion prepare to stone one another, as Paul the Christians, and Nietzsche too used in the end to sign his notes “the crucified”. For Descartes, anyhow, the truth of God would guarantee physical or rather finite reality. Thus we find Newman writing that he is more certain of God’s existence than that he has hands and feet. This though leaves these extremities in a kind of limbo. They are shored up by God’s truth, as it were causally, and this is all Newman might mean. What the truth of God ought to mean, however, is that nothing else is true in the same sense, not merely that the truth, like the being, of anything else depends causally on the first truth. Everything finite is untruth, declares Hegel, at one here with the prophetic and mystical tradition. Else we have contradiction between St. Catherine’s hearing God say “You are she who is not” and the catechism’s “God made me”. The philosophy Chesterton calls orthodoxy has in fact to be God’s own truth, possessed in man’s tradition and this is why, or how, man is God’s image and likeness. For Hegel it is the work of spirit and the subject, in thinking, becomes just subject, subjectivity itself, or “one closer to me than I am to myself”, in Augustine’s immortal phrase. Thus far the two later thinkers coincide, and it is indeed not that man becomes God but the other way round, as the Athanasian Creed states. The thinker is absorbed into God by such an ultimately dialectical becoming.5 That is what 3

G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §10. I quote from The Logic of Hegel, the so-called “little logic”, translated William Wallace, Oxford University Press (1873) 1965, p.17. 4 Ibid. p.42. Latest research indeed suggests that his physical sufferings were due to a tumour in the brain. 5 Aquinas resists this dialectical necessity, later affirmed of the incarnation by Scotus, when he affirms its causl dependence upon human contingent sin. This contingency too, however, Hegel rejects in his interpretation of the Mosaic

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thinking, nous, is. It “has set all in order” (Anaxagoras). “The principle of personality is the universal”, Hegel states. It is what we have in common that is important. This is Hegel’s philosophy of reconciliation as it is Chesterton’s “democracy” (pp.46-47). “I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion”, Chesterton tells us (p.12). Here they might seem to differ, since Hegel considers that religious knowledge is in form inferior to philosophical. Nonetheless Hegel does not intend to invent a heresy, as Chesterton tells us he for his part wanted to do. Chesterton goes on to claim the self-evidence of the fact of sin, “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved” (p.15). Sin here, however, remains undefined, as to whether it connotes an infinite offence, for example, which is the religious view of wrongful behaviour. And this is not self-evident, as is the mere self-evidence of something’s being “wrong”. In art, for example, the wrong stroke can be the stroke of genius and not an offence at all. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat then the religious philosopher… must either deny the existence of God… or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. (p.15)

Well, I deny the point about happiness, except in the sense that people at times, but always unsuccessfully, seek it in this way. The new theologian, says Chesterton, denies the cat. He gets a laugh here, but new theologians are not just there to be ridiculed. The seeing of present evil as part of a dialectic, an incomplete or self-contradictory thought marking our ascent to eternal truth, the “notion”, beatitude, where we really sit eternally, is deeply mystical and not unknown in the tradition, present or past. Things are not what they seem. Sins will not be remembered in this ideal future, we read in the Old Testament. So “deny the present union”, yes, but what do we know about this present? For the Lord one day is as a thousand and time, as an a priori form of sense-cognition (Kant) involving selfcontradiction, even though we may see it as “common sense”, is not a proven reality at all. “If you forgive one another your sins then your heavenly Father will forgive you,” we read in the Gospel. The straight equivalence here narrative of “the Fall” into sin, at EL24 add. Aquinas himself, we might note, cannot be interpreted here as in total opposition, if we recall his account of divine “pre-motion” of all human acts, relativising our responsibility or, rather, choice in its very notion, willy-nilly.

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suggests coincidence, identity even. It either reduces sin’s infinity or raises man to an infinite height. Why not say it does both? We are growing up together and every child offends and learns through his mistakes, his sins, his “missing the mark” (hamartia). For our super-ego, psychology has taught us, this is hard to accept. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die” and, as is most clear in the case of murder, the impulse not merely to vengeance but to just punishment is very strong. But justice is perfected in mercy and forgiveness, as it is in epieicheia or equity. They are not alternatives to it. Shylock was not just, simply because he was merciless. Wilfrid Owen shows us the way in his poem about the two dead soldiers, without even mentioning forgiveness by name. “Let us sleep now” says the dead victim merely, thus concluding his reproaches. Experience of murderous hate (“you looked so fierce… yesterday”) is a trouble and burden, whether in ourselves or in others. “Forgive them, they know not what they do.” That was clearly not an appeal to some particular contingent ignorance, such as afflicted Oedipus, but to the truth that the happiness necessarily sought in any action is yet found only through love and, again, forgiveness. So if you seek it in skinning cats you don’t know what you are doing. You are more to be pitied than the cat or any victim, as Socrates taught long ago. Chesterton makes a valid point about “the democracy of the dead”. A first principle of democracy, which as an ideal he rightly identifies with liberalism, is “that the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men,” even to the Son of Man, I would want to add. This is the mystic significance of Pilate’s ecce homo. Chesterton anyhow points out that on this principle immemorial tradition is immediately validated. The basic things are the most miraculous or wonderful, beginning with “man on two legs” or, for that matter, “being”, or, if it be found anterior, consciousness. “It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time.” (p.47) This principle has often been used to justify the brutish conservatism of the sort that killed Jesus Christ and many other revolutionaries. In fact revolution belongs to tradition, as Chesterton himself makes plain (p.41). “For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms and the Jacobin has more tradition than the Jacobite” (p.50). The tradition is of life and discrimination. It is not “the traditions of the elders” where they themselves fell back from an earlier tradition. One might come to feel, therefore, that the principle of tradition is quite useless. It is rather that it is of too great value to be used for this or that limited and maybe fraudulent purpose. It enshrines rather the philosophia perennis which a Hegel claims to bring to a fuller consciousness of itself and which a Huxley or a Gilson feel called to interpret. Gilson, Chesterton and some others inexplicably

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want to stop at Thomas Aquinas or thereabouts, not seeing that what they call the “modern” development is integral to tradition’s unfolding, on pain of reducing it to a particular conservative, even archaic philosophy. On the other hand it is not true, as is often said, that Hegel saw himself, absurdly, as bringing the development to a close for all time to come. “Greater things than I have done shall you do” said Jesus to his pupils (discipuli) and Hegel would have echoed that. What is peculiar to Chesterton is his diagnosis of where we stand today, or in his day. Of the rebellion called, or which led to, the Reformation he will have nothing, though the tendency becomes more and more in our day one of seeing it as a necessary step within the historic life of Christianity, a differentiation now being slowly reintegrated as, I would claim, is even the case with “modern” atheism. Chesterton speaks, however, of a “religious scheme” (p.30) that is “shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation)”. Well, here he seems either to identify Christianity with its specifically medieval form or to dub the Reformation itself anti-Christian, anti-Christ even. Even as enlightened a theologian as the late Herbert McCabe O.P., however, once spoke of the “shattering” of the Christian movement at the Reformation. These judgements, however, seem too absolute. Thus the conservative Maritain, though presenting us with a totally negative, indeed slanderous verdict on Luther and his movement, along with Descartes and Rousseau, in his Three Reformers, will yet argue forcefully that the French Revolution of 1789 resulted from the ferment of the Gospel and itself incarnates Christian ideals, rather as the abolition of slavery was a slow, very slow, result of the apostolic preaching. Yet it is quite clear that the French Revolution, in part inspired by the earlier and clearly Protestant American one, somehow grew out of the latter, as their parallel documents illustrate so well. More remotely, therefore, it grew out of the Protestant Reformation itself. Chesterton’s position therefore might seem special in the sense of a special pleading. He speaks of the destruction in modern thinking of the idea of divine authority. But there are many ways to approach this theme; one might well claim that an axe was laid to the root of this idea by Jesus Christ himself (the relevant Scriptural passages are abundant), this idea that Nicholas Berdyaev often characterised as sociomorphic, on analogy with “anthropomorphic”. The medieval religious scheme was, among other things, realist. Its symbol is the Crusades, glorified by Chesterton, but which Hegel charges with seeking Christ, mistakenly, at the sepulchre in Jerusalem. “He is not here.” This realist ontology and epistemology is the root of “the unhappy

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consciousness” in religion. Not only Chesterton but also the Hegelinterpreter J.N. Findlay will retort that the Middle Ages, whatever they were exactly, were joyous, in a measure, the measure of Carmina Burana, say: Much of what Hegel here says (in The Phenomenology of Mind) would assort better with Kierkegaard’s morbid Protestant Christianity than with the positive, often joyous attitude of Medieval Christendom… Surely a strange characterization of the age that produced Aquinas.6

But Hegel wants to show, again, the failure, the insufficiency, of a realist (in the epistemological sense) interpretation of the Gospel, and this surely is what today’s theology and even the documents of the latest (orthodox) ecumenical council are telling us too. One might even hazard that Christianity inaugurated, within or away from Judaism, an “idealist” era, where “the kingdom of heaven” is not only among but even within you, after all (i.e. after all the dust has settled on that particular quarrel about textual interpretation). Georges van Riet, for example, writes that “For Hegel realist consciousness (the “natural attitude”) fails to recognize itself, it only attaches importance to the object… For it, only the object is, it is absolutely, it is transcendent.”7 The “unhappy consciousness” is thus not so much a medieval as a realist consciousness in religion. Christian realists “want to show that conscience is satisfied, that man is free, in face of an Other and even thanks to him.” Yet we have seen how also within the tradition of Christian realism one speaks of an Other yet more immanent than self to self. Anyhow, “what is at stake in this debate (between and atheists) is not the nature of Christianity, but the value of realism. Both sides refuse to re-examine the realist presupposition and transcend it in the Hegelian manner.” This one could certainly say of Chesterton. All the same, as we have already seen, his notion of “the suicide of thought”8 closely parallels Hegel’s own critique of Kant (rather as, even more surprisingly, his critique of the reasonings of natural scientists in the chapter “The Ethics of Elfland” might have been penned by a devotee of Hume!). 6

J.N. Findlay, Hegel: a Re-examination, Collier Books, New York, 1966, pp.9899. 7 Georges Van Riet, “The Problem of God in Hegel, Parts II-III”, Philosophy Today, Vol. XI, Number 2/4, Summer 1967, pp.75-105 (p.94), French original, Revue philosophique de Louvain, Tome 63, August 1965, pp.353-418. 8 In Chapter III of Orthodoxy.

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“The human intellect is free to destroy itself,” writes Chesterton (p.33), conducting the discussion, however, in total divorce from the ancient and endemic option of scepticism, as if this had appeared for the first time with modernity, as a special form of decadence. Rather like Hans Küng he says that “Reason is itself a matter of faith”, as if wanting to forbid that reflexive enquiry or critique with which not only modern philosophy has been occupied. Indeed it almost defines philosophy and Hegel and others were right to class that type of metaphysics which ignored epistemology as thus far dogmatic or, as is sometimes said, naive. Now Plato and Aristotle were certainly not naive and hatred or mistrust of reason, misologia, was a peril identified by name in the Socratic death-cell as described in Phaedo. The idea that religious authority was aimed at stopping the thought that stops thought (p.33), exclusively, is clearly disingenuous. Quietism, as a supposed corruption of mysticism, suffered under this authority, it is true, but one does not stop thought by questioning its bases, the bases for example of our predication system as explored in logica docens, or by getting to grips with the famous and undoubted paradoxes and “the antinomies”, and any authority interfering here would be merely obscurantist or darkening intelligence. Questioning the brain, again9, is just the way to combat materialism. Aristotle argued long ago that a material organ of thought was selfcontradictory as it would get in the way of knowledge, which is becoming the other as other, an activity of which just immateriality is the root (as even Sartre saw after his negative fashion). Chesterton misses this point (pp.33-34), speaking uncritically of the brain, and in general performs rather badly here, talking of things being “wildly questioned”. The wild are those who do not question. “In so far as religion is gone, reason is going”. This is a point often made, e.g. by Joseph Pieper in his writings on tradition or on the Platonic myths and their function in the dialogues. Reason, all the same, offers a more perfect form of knowledge than does religion, which refers us to faith. That is why it is mischievous to speak of reason as a faith, while the justification for religion would rest on the claim that in the areas concerned nothing better than faith is to be had. Reason, however, does not depend upon religion fideistically and in many cases can bring religion’s gropings into the full light of day, though this may well be with the help of a sound religious tradition, as Hegel, for example, does not hesitate to acknowledge. He regards it as the philosopher’s duty to think the Trinity, now that we have it. 9

Chesterton refers to H.G. Wells’ “Doubts of the Instrument”.

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Hegelian philosophy plays practically the same role in relation to the faith of believers that Christian tradition assigns to theology…. Philosophy accomplishes Christianity according to Hegel. It does not replace it or make it useless. From the fact that the Christian religion has true reality as its content, it is already rooted in the speculative sphere and is infinitely close to philosophy.10

As Chesterton himself says, religion and reason “are both of the same primary and authoritative kind”. But the authority of reason is not external to it, otherwise we could not argue towards an Absolute as its source without reasoning in a circle. This means, however, that the notion of authority is itself not apposite here, except by analogy. Thus there is no authority within logic. One has to see for oneself that the logical principles apply since it is impossible to reason honestly by external prescription. Thinking, that is, as simply being reflection of self in other, simply cannot require guarantee from anything other than self, itself. All that it thinks becomes itself, where it is “at home”. It is, one might say, the other as presence. * There follows a curious passage in which Chesterton claims that modern liberal man, let us say, cannot act, cannot even revolt against anything, that there is not only a pragmatic necessity to believe what is necessary for life but that “one of those necessities is precisely a belief in objective truth” and this men in the West have lost long since (pp.36-37). Suicidal mania therefore is characteristic of “current philosophies” and “wild scepticism… has run its course”. “You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world.” Well, it has never been so much a question of doubting if there is a world as it is one of wondering what or how the world is and, for that matter, what God is. On this question Chesterton simply substitutes religion, a realist religious consciousness, for philosophy and this was not the way of Augustine and Aquinas. They are rather in the same line both with Plato and Aristotle and with Kant and Hegel and their successors. At least that is what Chesterton seemed to do when he wrote Orthodoxy (1908). The later book on Aquinas therefore will have to present him as almost the only right-thinking man of learning, clean contrary to St. Thomas’s own approach, one might think.

10

Van Riet, p.85.

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There is perhaps a sociological aspect here. The democracy Chesterton extolled was just in this time having the effect of a spilling over of higher culture into the consciousness of the wider society, of “the man in the street”. This is the phenomenon Ortega y Gasset objected to so incisively in his La rebelion de las masas of 1930. In a sense it was a repeat of the scenario produced by the advent of printing just prior to the Reformation although, as always, a repeat with a difference. Then it was a question of all, or many more, having access to the Bible primarily. Now, instead of just printing, what had arrived was compulsory education for all and consequent near-universal literacy, producing the culture of the daily newspaper and of journals. Thus Chesterton himself worked as a Fleet Street journalist and those he argued with were often journalists or literary men taking their ideas from the give and take of journalistic debate, like Shaw and Wells and others whose names we mainly know only from Chesterton’s own pages, such as Robert Blatchford or G.S. Street. The immediate origin of the ideas canvassed, however, naturally lay in more “modern” science and philosophy, the pragmatism of William James, evolutionism, of Darwin or Spencer, materialism from Comte and others or its dialectical variant in Marx and, over all, the enormous influence of Kant already remarked on in the introduction to Hegel’s Science of Logic more than eighty years earlier. Whoever, all the same, inspects the form of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica can see that even there, equally, the author engages himself in frank debate with those putting forward any and every type of opinion and the same is true a fortiori of his other Summa, styled contra gentes. It follows that these opinions and such so to say “wild” questioning or speculation was as rife then as it was in Chesterton’s time, the difference being that it came to expression, I mean as recorded, only among the professional clerks. There is no reason to doubt, however, that it was not still wilder among the illiterate, as the vile urge to burn “witches” and the like testifies. For that matter there is as much radical testimony in Shakespeare’s dramas to the mentality called by Belloc, with Chesterton’s approval, “the modern mind”, as we find later. We have only think of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy. There is then a certain error of perspective in Chesterton, instancing the general error of finiteness or limitedness which makes all our thought dialectical or “on the move”. Regarding the burning of witches, Chesterton clearly sees this and associated behaviour as a less radical evil, one of reason’s “dark defences”, and Torquemada’s torture he reduces to a variant upon Zola’s appeal to people’s moral sense (p.31). Here there is surely a lack of

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realism, a kind of historical romanticism leading one to countenance or begin to countenance great injustices and, certainly, unkindnesses. I come back to the notion of the modern rebel losing the right to rebel because lacking all convictions of his own (unlike the Jacobins). Chesterton is here merely singling out those individuals without conviction or principles such as one can find in any age as, again, Shakespeare’s villains or moral weaklings such as Macbeth testify. To assert that they predominate more in our time is merely gratuitous. Agnosticism, after all, is or can well be at least as honest a stance as that of those who, often, will to believe. Faith is indeed reckoned a virtue but the will to hang on to truth once glimpsed can be distinguished from the desire to have an ideology, which can indeed be a will to power over others. It is surely though that same virtue of faith which gives so much life and distinction to Chesterton’s literary production, as it gives vigour and infectious conviction to the arguments of Orthodoxy. Faith, however, is easily confused with “the Faith”, an expression covering, for many Roman Catholics, any number of excrescences. An obvious expression of faith is the dogmatic formula, to which one holds through thick and thin and, what is worse, in the strength of which one proclaims those dissenting or even demurring to be anathema or accursed. With the realisation, however, of the difference between the gold of the dogma and the silver words expressing it, to borrow John of the Cross’s language, or of the dialectical character of reason itself this menacing aspect of “right belief” (sc. orthodoxy) is getting into better perspective. The whole question had already been launched, and even then not for the first time, by Newman’s elaboration of the thesis of “the development of Christian doctrine” (in his 1845 book of that title). He omitted there to treat of the development of the doctrine of development, clearly entailed if this was indeed a Christian doctrine, as for him it certainly needed to be. This meta-theme was taken up by the philosophers of dialectic and many theologians today, such as Hans Küng, show clear awareness of the dialectical character of our thinking, never standing still, whatever the dogmatic formulas. Thomas Aquinas observed that the sinner can always become more evil, more sinful, and similarly one can always penetrate more deeply into the mysteries of salvation. Theology, as a life of contemplation, does not come to a stop. The guardians of orthodoxy, however, sitting in the seat, the cathedra, of Moses, fear to be found asking one generation to believe what contradicts or even seems to contradict what their predecessors imposed in earlier times. For this, it has been variously remarked, is as impudent as it is ridiculous. Not so, however, if one consider the Hegelian thesis that

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eventual contradiction, at least an appearance thereof, is a natural consequence of the finite character of any proposition whatever, for, in the last analysis, “everything finite is false”. “I am he who is; you are she who is not.” Catherine of Siena, doctor of the Church, shows the way here. Or, as Newman more moderately put it, certain forms of expression are opportune at one time but not at another. This, however, seems to open the way to viewing credal statements ideologically in the sense of a praxis for the sake of an end. * Faith is indeed a kind of victory. Nonetheless Aquinas raises the question of the quality of belief, one can withhold belief too long but one can also believe too lightly, leviter, as, he claims, did those who believed Mohammed.11 Once introduce this notion, however, and one cannot forbid applying this test to the various things believed in one’s own religion on a basis of passive adherence to a tradition. We have in fact no doubt at all that many of the orthodox of previous generations believed lightly any amount of “tall stories” and so on as, we probably think, do many today. So in the end everyone is responsible for his own interpretation of what is handed down (traditum) to him. I mentioned above how literary inspiration can be born from possession of a faith, a conviction, whatever it is. This, in fact, is a truism of historiography, that a readable historian must have a point of view. It is even true of music, as part of what we mean by having a form, that the piece is going somewhere, as the subject of a painting gives it unity, makes it something we can look at. This is, in a way, an extension of a prior need for a frame, a marking off from the surroundings. Mere paintsmears haphazardly daubed around the gallery’s wall’s and floors, or on the grass outside, would not be recognised as art, not even as rebellious or nonsensical art. They are just nonsensical. Thus Chesterton’s own literary inspiration blossomed in proportion as he reached his characteristic convictions, even if at the same time there is generally thought to have been a degree of falling-off in so far as he then declined to “move on”, so to say, enamoured as he was of the dogmatic principle. Orthodoxy seems to many more incisive than The Everlasting Man, which however had such a decisive influence upon C.S. Lewis’s coming to Christian belief, he tells us in his Surprised by Joy. Similarly, Chesterton surely never equalled in his novels and stories the narrative 11

Cf. Aquinas, Summa contra gentes I, 6.

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power of The Man who was Thursday (1900), for example in the later Manalive where he is still exploring the same idea of the apparently new and strange turning out to be, in all its wonder, identical with the normal and everyday, as we find mutatis mutandis in the figure of Sunday in the earlier book. Dominated by this fixed idea, so that, he tells us even in Orthodoxy, he had wanted to write of a man, himself, who discovered England thinking it was a Utopic realm in the South Seas (as answer, clearly, to Butler’s Erewhon), he was yet unable later to let his characters develop freely. One could not ask of Chesterton, as a music critic asked in wonder of the nothing if not orthodox composer Bruckner, discussing the sketches for his last music, “Where was Bruckner going?” He was, it might seem, simply not moving, not developing. This criticism one might make also of the poet Wordsworth, great as he was, though not of William Blake, who, like Nietzsche, passed on into madness (as it seems at least to us others). This however need not be viewed as negatively as we found Chesterton viewing it and Heidegger and others have found much to ponder in Nietzsche’s last jottings, his Nachlass. In some Old Testament prophets, Hosea, Ezekiel, there is a definite fusion of notions of divine inspiration and of madness, as there is in Plato’s Phaedrus discussing the divine madness of love and Socrates’ general position that the lover is to be respected above the non-lover. Aquinas, we noted, introduced the idea of believing lightly. There is, in short, an enthusiasm of faith that departs from the corresponding virtue, as, for example, foolhardiness departs by excess from courage or, on the traditional scheme, presumption from hope. This was the point of Ronald Knox’s study, Enthusiasm, a phenomenon he treated negatively (to the amusement of Continentals who mistook his attitude for phlegmatic Britishness merely). He had a point. One might recall the Victorian convert who longed to hear of a miracle every day before breakfast. This is what enraged humanists such as Kathleen Knott, in her The Emperor’s Clothes, when considering the then contemporary post-war coterie of literary converts to or enthusiasts for Christianity, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers or, by association, Chesterton. They seemed to the critics to have a “light” attitude to truth, when they dallied with medieval traditions of fairies, armed men in the sky, or individual miracles, the more gratuitous the better. One might here recall Newman’s apparently sober judgement that it would be better if modern men were not vastly more superstitious or ready to believe the miraculous or, presumably, fear walking under ladders. There is a certain poetic wistfulness here for a bygone time when, it is imagined, God walked more closely with men and women. God or the gods? In the

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Romantic period it was often the old Greek scheme, with the gods of nature, which was longed for, and medievalism seems in some ways of a piece with that, in danger of being only accidentally Christian, in other words. The attitude, the vision, in any case, was productive of great literary inspiration. Thus C.S. Lewis in his conversion-narrative tells how he arrived for a time at the maxim “The Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.” This soon became for him an argument to the effect that all the others are bores so the Christians are right, and this is really the soul of Chesterton’s argumentation too. It is really, though Lewis does not acknowledge this, the key element in Hegel’s position in regard to Christianity in particular, which he calls the absolute religion, the point, in other words, at which religion as it were supersedes itself toward something better or more interesting. So Hegel claims that it is the strength and beauty of the Idea (of Christianity) that is its own argument. This is his point against realism. “He is not here”, he quotes, and this for him is one with “He is risen”. Faith and revelation, as we can read in The Phenomenology of Mind and not only in his later lectures on religion, are all a matter of first conceiving a way, the best way, of thinking. It is in this sense that revelation comes “at the appointed time” which is also “the fullness of time”. The final conviction of Christianity, one might say, is in this way ethical. Even the practical postulates of Kant, thus viewed, can lose their sceptical edge, particularly if there is no “thing-in-itself” or final unknowable which, in Kant at least, they choose to ignore. The tradition culminating in the Christian triumph as it is celebrated on Easter night, at the vigil, begins with the deliverance of Israel at the Red Sea, after the seven plagues of Egypt. Those events, it is accepted among the most “conservative” believers today, whether Christians or Jews (or both together), easily find a natural or non-miraculous explanation. Yet, as Newman again remarked, it is easier to believe in many miracles than in just one or two. If, that is, the great and so to say normative or tone-setting deliverance of his people by God, Yahweh, is at one and the same time a great act of Spirit, of providence, and a natural event, just as, we hear suggested on all sides, is the birth of Jesus, then the case for an idealist interpretation of Christianity, rather than relying on the brute force of miracle, becomes rather strong. “He is not here.” The miraculous, like the symbolic, would remain with that in religion which is, for Hegel, a defect in the form of religious knowledge as such, which philosophy therefore has a duty to “think”, not as producing a “Christian philosophy” defining itself as passive and subservient to the pronouncements of hierarchs but as

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striving to bring out the true sense and meaning of these magical and mysterious things. For Chesterton the world loses if we banish the magical and mysterious. This though is not the intention. It is rather to overcome the state of finding the magical and mysterious outside of and indeed alien to us, that final inescapable misery of the realist consciousness. We have ourselves to become, or discover ourselves as, magical and mysterious, as any number of Christian sayings and writings, generally reckoned “mystical”, proclaim. Certain doctrines of grace, of the lumen gloriae, often seem to attempt to have the cake and eat it here, projecting a divine transcendence with which the creation is “ontologically discontinuous”, a phrase finally denying all possibility of analogy, if indeed it means anything at all. To speak then of the being of creatures really means they have no being at all in the sense that the Absolute, the last trans-category of the dialectic, is the ultimate reality. That they have being analogously, i.e. in the way we speak (and from out of which we speak analogously of the divine being), just means that they are not discontinuous with the Infinite, since this would be the very denial of infinity. In its setting a limit to them they would be setting a limit to it. In him, rather, we “live and move and have our being”. One might here, speaking of analogy, wish to explore a likeness between this production of brilliant and even enchanting writing in postwar “post-Christian” England, yet another abortive “second spring”, and the original cluster of writings from which the New Testament was later made up. For these too were based upon a vision, the original vision of a man who convinced the community from which these writers came, and himself, that he was, let us say, extra-terrestrial. Bishop B.C. Butler claimed that this literary excellence furnishes strong argument for the truth of the Christian claims as the writers conceived them12. They were possessed by an ecstatic consciousness of fulfilled Messianic expectation. “This is he.” If one considers, incidentally, one can scarcely miss, in the exchange between Peter and Jesus about who Jesus is, who Peter says he is, a kind of two-way pressure, as if the questioner reaches his final certitude in the answer of the one questioned, whom he then blesses profusely. Later, of course, he has to go it alone, “as it is written” adds the Evangelist, citing an old and sacred text. Text inspires text, in other words. For this is his inspiration, viz. his will to see the scriptures of his people fulfilled. His contemporary, Paul, sets out to win the whole human race to the new Christ in order to shame his own people into final submission, 12

B.C. Butler, Why Christ?

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thus bringing on the end.13 That is his inspiration, his will, moving his pen, rather as Augustine later will advocate wholesale celibacy as a means of hastening the end of the present order. In Anglo-Saxon England this attitude merely brought defeat at the hands of the Vikings, for better or worse, Chesterton’s “Ballad of the White Horse” notwithstanding. Conviction, anyhow, produces literary excellence. I have not read Mein Kampf in its entirety, but no doubt the author’s dark but strong convictions lent that work its persuasive power. This is not to slur the extraordinary beauty and power of so much in the Gospels and associated writings. But there is “question of the relation between the form and the content of our religious affirmations.” Perfection and beauty or power of content elicits inspired literary forms, but such forms are particular, not of the essence: …if one has recourse to a sacred history, understood as a succession of God’s interventions which would only have God’s unfathomable wisdom and absolute freedom as its sole reason, and consequently could only be manifested to man as contingent data, is this by virtue of the very “content” of revelation or of the “form” which it actually has? Is it the essence of the Christian message or only a mode of expression? Thus, Hegelianism, taken seriously, is an invitation to rethink anew the very delicate relations of reason and faith, natural and supernatural, freedom and truth, meaning and positivity of history, philosophy of religion and theology.14

13 14

Romans 9-11. Georges Van Riet, op. cit. p.102.

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One needs to focus upon the transcendence of the biological in man. One may indeed treat man biologically, as is done in Aristotle’s On the Soul or Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape. Seeing ourselves collectively, however, as one of nature’s species is not “the natural attitude” we easily slip into pretending it to be. Aristotle’s definition of man as the rational or talking animal is reached by an effort of abstractive thinking. This effort knocks out, for him, other definitional candidates, such as featherless biped, in his search for the essential feature. This has to be one feature and not a heterogeneous group of features, since his account of definition is ordered. There has to be one ultimate difference which limits (defines) the broader category first begun with. This category is itself not given merely. Thus animal, as a genus, is nonetheless a species of a broader category, living being (zoon), and so on. Although one might think that we talk of man as we talk of the elephant or the daffodil we only do this by a definite, somewhat hard-nosed decision. It is mediated, as Hegel would say. Many cultures preserve more consistently a strong awareness of the gulf between “us” and nature or the animals, whether or not this leads to a lack of respect for “life”. In compensation, maybe, we have a strong awareness of the individual, of subjectivity, as other or prior. Such self-consciousness is not credibly reducible to a unique case, among finite beings, of knowing “from the inside” the same law that rules all other species externally. This representation often forms the background support to an account of conscience as inward response to law, especially as ruling particular situations. Implicit, therefore, is a priority in morals of the biological constitution as first instance of the natural. Murder, indeed, is clearly a case of bringing such life to a stop, de-struction as we say. Yet we do not find, in even in the classical formulation of Aquinas, that “natural law” is defined thus. It is, rather, a reflection of the divine light of reason in us. This, however, is the rationality of which Hegel remarks, in dialectical correction, that “the outside is the inside” and vice versa. There is no

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external or objective set against the inward or subjective, such as forms, for example, the realist account, in Christian thought, of marriage as having as major end procreation, as minor end, mutual comfort of the two spirits thus joined. This must apply a fortiori to the end of sexuality itself, as itself inward, from which it follows that conception and birth of a child, of you or me, is inward as much as outward, is in fact neither but, rather, ideal. From this it further follows that any such conception is identical with non-conception, that children, we ourselves and their or our “angels” fall together in an identity dependent upon a priori necessity. My birth is a picture or representation of this, not strictly needed for my subjective reality. In that sense the Creed truly represents the Son as “begotten of his Father before all worlds”. Now the Father is Reason or Absolute Idea or, as present to speculative reason at any stage indifferently, God. Such presence is not per se “prepositional”, neither is it “direct intuition”. It is present as reason’s self-guaranteeing truth, such as reason knows in knowing itself merely. It is nothing other or, rather, it is exclusively my own, self-constituting other, closer than self, as the Concept of all possible finite or determinate concepts, of any of which one may, so to say, judge without judging, “This also is thou, neither is this thou.” God and the finite self do not fall together here; the finite self, rather, falls away as untruth. Morris concedes that he makes his examination of the naked, if rational, ape qua zoologist, i.e. not as Desmond Morris the man in his entirety.1 Aristotle, in contrast, arrives at a more final estimate of man (and of much else) in his Metaphysics, when endeavouring to think reality as a whole without discriminative attention, to think being as being, in his words.2 Noting that such biological definitions are pre-patterned to give one a composite he concludes that this composite is determined by some one 1

This, by the way, is a good illustration of Aristotle’s thesis that it is the essential form that defines the substance and not some ordered grouping of forms, soul, body (forma corporealis) and so on. “Desmond Morris the man in his entirety” actually refers here, if counter-intuitively, to the “Morrisian” intellect (to say “Morris’s intellect” would perpetuate the error), his unitive consciousness. On this view, if I say that I have hurt my finger I refer to myself as subject, as intellect, as I do not if I say, as I might, “My finger is hurt”. In universal subjectivity the latter itself, as an abstracted idea, disappears. 2 This formula excludes any view of being as equivocal, e.g. as between predicative, existential being or “is” of identity. Rather, these senses are all subsumed under the last-named, a relationship of identity in act, be it in logic or reality (cf. Note 3). Even veritas propositionis is to be thought metaphysically as act, something Aquinas too brings out in his commentary on Peri hermeneias, explaining predication as identity. The whole endeavour is the very opposite of basing metaphysics upon forms of predication merely.

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element or “part”, since any being is one, which will therefore be more essentially the being, viz. its “form”, than is the composite of everyday. This part is more the whole than the whole composed of parts! In other words the schema of part and whole is here superseded as inapplicable and Aristotle has in fact passed to the less abstract but more metaphysical schema of act and potency. The form (“soul”) is the act, the actuality, of a man or woman. The organised body, made up of matter, is potential to this act, which makes it entirely what it is, such that its final organisation is one with the form, but as viewed potentially. This is only understandable, in my view, under the format of idealism, taken absolutely. Substance as sub-ject (hypokeimenon) of properties or accidents, including an organised body (having life potentially), becomes, as nous, absolute or self-bearing subject and ipso facto activity, ultimately one with the first substance of all. This is the case, regarding this point at least, in the later Augustinian noetic (“In thy light shall we see light”). Of course there is question still as to what this finally means. But since this form in man is in fact intellect it is arbitrary to continue to posit man as living being in only a biological sense. Biology is not the final science, does not give the final knowledge, especially not of man. Here we have a basis for the subjectivity referred to above. In Aristotle this takes the form of a lack of clear distinction between nous, intellect, as creator and thinker of all the world (as in Anaxagoras) and nous as the intellect and form of any man which, he says, perhaps misleadingly, “comes from outside”. He could as well have said it comes from inside. The world, abstractions apart, is, in every case where it is spoken of, the world as known by the speaker. In an immediate sense the world as including one subject as projecting it is not identical with the world as including another subject projecting it. It can only be this if every subject, or these two at least, is or are all the same, though two identical or one with one another. But nor is this impossible or unthinkable. It forms the basis of both the classical account of knowledge and the religio-mystical conception of the community of love, “members one of another”. This move of Aristotle’s is in fact connected with the justification of logic (logica docens) and of the principle of contradiction (Metaphysics IV), of being able to talk about anything. That is why it is still a schema and so one might adopt a Humean attitude in virtue of which the final reality could remain implicit only and self, whether as composite or form, still merely a construct. This would at least reconcile us with all the paradoxes the notion of self gives rise to, leading eventually perhaps to a Buddhistic or “oriental” position.

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However, if we return to our previous paragraph, it also leads to a conception of each subject as absolutely other3, not essentially one individual member of a common biological species. One might want to ask here why this does not apply, or how it applies, to the true reality of, say, rabbits, answering in terms of intellect as subject, final subject. This, further, is the basis for the insight into human equality as based upon fraternal love in freedom. Not “each to count for one and none for more than one”, an ancient principle of civic justice and not revolutionary at all, but each to count for all and none for less than all. Each, that is, is end, not means, subject not needing further subject (hypokeimenon), in the sense in which “I am the captain of my soul”. This means that I, any I, is not to be restricted or imprisoned within the category of a common humanity. The subject might say, for example, “I am from above, you are from below”, where the “you” refers precisely to an “objective” view of “the others”. Thus “Christology” yields a possible philosophical concept deriving from historical religious thought yet able to situate our anthropology metaphysically. At the same time we vindicate or “accomplish” Christology. It is thus that in the “fairy stories” of immediate imagination all things are prepresented as talking and not only man, but first the animals, as Siegfried learns to understand the speech of birds, then even flowers and trees, as “ents” or dryads, then (why not?) artefacts and even coins and suchlike, as in Andersen’s tales. To this extent the difference between a man and, say, a bird is relativised. As in African tradition, all things have their spirits within them and are thus made one in this very emphasis upon their individual difference transcending finite species membership. We might compare Wordsworth’s “drizzling crags” that “spake as if a voice were in them”. By the same reasoning, concerning finite categories in general, no individual act is finally or, as we now see, “abstractly”, an act of any given or defined “virtue” seen as a “particular universal”. Some acts, rather, or some individual virtues even, and perhaps all of them, “have” no name at all. Thus does philosophy itself issue in negation, as the wisdom speaking but one word, which is its self. Mind thinks itself. This too is eternal “play”, movement, exitus itself becoming reditus to self. In this sense too when we have done “all”, in Scripture’s phrase, we have but done our duty, the necessary, in freedom. Such is rationality. Our attention in present consciousness is invariably selective from actual experience, itself without limit or, indeed, universal whether or not 3 Only thus can they be in some way identical, rather than as in the Trinitarian relations as classically viewed.

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involving actualised awareness of this or that individual, just as we are not then remembering every detail of our past life or lives. Yet every real moment and all that went into that moment’s consciousness contributes to how we are now. In that sense each one is a whole world and so quite other than anyone else, with each of whom nonetheless, and just therefore, he is identical. It is the subjectivity that is condition for the universality. The world is nothing other than the minds containing it, nothing other than each of those minds. This, too, is why God is personal. Intellect is differentiated actuality, which is infinity, quite obviously, since only something over again actual could limit it. But it is an unlimitedness of reflection, of which our multiplication is the shadow, unity heaped upon unity in unity. Aristotle argues for the impossibility of a world without substance, and even without several substances. This is not to say that he claims to have identified substances wherever they may be found. He can allow a stone to be considered a substance, or even a metal, say gold, individualised so to say at second level, and so one speaks of primary or secondary substances, this gold or gold (this metal), this piece of rock or rock. At the same time the argument of the Metaphysics progresses towards the identification of a unique because infinite Pure Act as the first or most real substance, the most real Being or Being as such. A coincidence with Spinozism seems preparing. Accidents do not exist. There is not properly accidental being (as in the doctrine of being’s univocity). In so far as accidents have being it is identical with that of the substance concerned, as the form of predication indeed expresses. Socrates is white (but not what white is). That Aristotle links his metaphysical argument to defence of the principle of non-contradiction is proof that the rationalist metaphysicians such as those of the early modern period were after all in a continuity with him. He treats together the principles of argumentation, of logic, and those of substance (Bk. III) and this all-inclusive science of principles is resolved, in what he calls God or substance, as act.4 He is not following but resisting forms of speech here, as Hegel will later say that predication is unsuited for knowledge of truth, that “all judgements are false”. In seeming contradiction with this one substance is Aristotle’s claim that there must be several substances for speech to be possible at all. The seeds of the later solution lie in Aristotle’s own philosophy however. The form or essential act of the substance most known to us, that of man, is a form possessing all other forms, the place of forms, forma formarum, to 4

995b 5-10. Cf. our “First Principles” in New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics (ed. Campbell Campbell-Jack, Gavin J. McGrath), Inter-Varsity Press, Leicester, UK & Downers Grove, Illinois, USA, 2006, pp.268-271.

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which the material body is merely passive, mutable and therefore not actually anything. Thus it is in its final development identical with that act which is intellect, i.e. it is nothing else or, as we have elsewhere suggested, it is its cipher. It is never clear in Aristotle, we noted, when this nous is the nous of the universe and when it is that of an individual as it were created person. The unclarity, however, reflects real identity of what we have still to discern. Not precisely the Anaxagorean all in all that he would avoid but an all in each and an each in all, nevertheless, is the conclusion to which later philosophy, along with theology and mysticism, will arrive. Substance is not “thing”, as we materialistically imagine, but that act at which thinking (thing-ing?) arrives. Acts can be mutual and yet one, as in the union of love or an act of murder or of tango, which therefore “takes two”, or of an army. Nor, finally, is such act of anything. All participate, not as material parts in a composite whole but as endless facets of one unitary jewel or star. Each “view” of such a thing is a view of the whole. So there is both one substance and many. The unity is closer than organic, thus the many are not parts of some corpus mysticum. Just as mystical it is no longer corpus, though we may say so, the whole being everywhere, as the universal community is at local level, the “two or three gathered together”. “Where the body lies, there will the eagles be gathered together” and not this body, the “body of this death”, that is to say. So the idea that by this account God must be reduced to the impersonality of “the systems view” as encompassing a collective reality misses the perfection of the unity in identity to which reason leads in whatever material version of the dialectic is followed to its summit. Thus Hegel would have been mistaken if he thought that his own version of dialectic had to be free from error at every step to lead to the conclusion. What he discovered, rather, and more modestly, was the principle of dialectic itself, whereby every solution short of the perfect one negates itself in a higher synthesis or reconciliation. Eckhart saw this steadily, saying that the eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him, when I do, we might add. “Myself and God”, said Newman, are the only two realities. Stopping at this dualism, however, illustrates the intermediate and temporary or finite character of his system (ever a via media after all) as, mutatis mutandis, of that of Thomas Aquinas. This impression is reinforced by Newman’s appearing to stop at the concept of “the development of Christian doctrine”, failing to allow explicitly that this notion entails development of such a doctrine of development. So today a more perfect form of the

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content of faith5 is called for by cultured and thinking people, such as Hegel and Newman had both, if differently, attempted to supply. Hegel’s thesis was that philosophy supplied the properly perfect form for the insight offered to faith but which faith and religion had historically offered to philosophy, which therefore, in humbly receiving the divine message and thinking it through, “accomplishes” it. This is not theology, in the sense of “sacred theology”, a mystifying term in today’s context, mainly used to exclude the work of those not in “holy orders” or professionally identified with the religion. It is, rather, philosophy of religion. Such theology proposes a dual source of truth, viz. nature and grace, a proposal only partially overcome by Aquinas’s thesis that grace perfects nature. For it perfects it in the sense that nature is only first revealed as anything at all, as form and system, under the action of grace or of absolute Spirit. All is grace, grace is everywhere, and in this way the stock theological term (as we find it in Karl Rahner, say) should finally supersede itself, theology giving up its claim to treat philosophy and reason itself as faith’s handmaid. Faith and reason are “two wings” indeed and there is no subordinative hierarchy of wings or, in so far as there is, then it is the other way round. The “vain philosophy” of the Pauline writings is thus invited to give way to a more serious philosophy or wisdom, one that is “from above” or “from outside” (Aristotle’s phrase) indeed. Faith, therefore, is not idle complacency but that urgent beating upon the “cloud of unknowing” which Augustine or Hegel (or Nietzsche or Wittgenstein6) exemplify, seeking and even finding understanding, intellectum, in a measure. Theology is in a sense the creation of the thirteenth century, a reaction to the rediscovery of philosophy within an essentially sacral civilisation. In the early Patristic period Christian thinkers referred to their faith as a higher wisdom, one which existing philosophy therefore should naturally 5

See the citation from Van Riet above (main text and note 81). These last tend to find themselves ranked by the faithful on the side of the deniers. Yet one might assert that there is no other way of understanding the statement that blasphemy against the Son of Man (but not against the Spirit) will be forgiven than the reconciliatory one exemplified here. After all, the great text does not say I should be your way, truth and life but I am (anyone’s who seeks) way, truth and life. Pace Newman again one can be “all in one way” also in this positive sense. This very textual greatness, however, contributes to our grasp of Christianity as “the perfect religion” (Hegel), imperfect, all the same, precisely as religion itself is, beside philosophy, imperfect in form. We find, however, H. de Lubac saying “Catholicism is not a religion”, to which he adds “it is religion itself”, which may be taken as a way, if oblique, of superseding (aufheben) whatever was once meant or striven after by “religion”.

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incorporate into itself or, rather, incorporate itself into this wisdom. So we find it in Justin or the Cappadocians, or even St. Paul when he set out to explain this new wisdom. The Christ-event was not essentially event in the finite sense but the appearing of something not seen, not realised, before. The Christians were those who realised it. What caused scandal was their opening their ranks on equal footing, something implicitly denied by the later clericalism, to the uneducated and illiterate. Yet such had been implicit in philosophy as practised by Socrates, for example, who, incidentally, and contrary to the accusation brought against him, had every respect for religion and its traditions. Agnosce o christiane dignitatem tuam, cries Augustine therefore, and it is by the most natural transition that incarnation is seen, comes to be seen, as the revelation of the absoluteness of divinity and of spirit in man. Later philosophy will rediscover Aristotle’s insight that it is not man the composite but this unitary intellectual form and “form of forms” which is the immediate reality of which we are conscious, which we bear. It is in this light that the dogmatic formulations can best be interpreted, rather than in the uncritical categories of an ad hoc philosophy, of a “naive realism” indeed, since some philosophy, some cultural ambience, was always and always will be present, the treasure in earthen vessels. Philosophy, therefore, has no quarrel with the authority of, say, Scripture. It is precisely such Scripture that it will want to think and follow through to its hidden meaning, though not necessarily with the presuppositions of an Origen or a Philo. This was the method of Augustine, of fides quaerens intellectum, not stopping there as if faith were of another order entirely, relegating philosophy forever to the status of some pagan survival of which one had to take note merely. The approach of the new movement to the particular Jewish culture in which it arose, that of fulfilling a promise, extends, mutatis mutandis, to all philosophy everywhere since, it has ultimately to be acknowledged, all religions are true. This follows, in fact, from any claim that the principles of ecumenism, e.g. as elaborated, in maybe preliminary fashion, in a recent “conciliar” decree, are true. Thus the philosophical claim reinforces the religious devotional claim and vice versa. Long ago Porphyry referred to the Jews as a nation of philosophers, and this was indeed a distinction. What tends to be overlooked is that this evaluation is strictly and literally true. The Jewish “law” stands or falls by the same criteria as any earlier philosophical system. Thus it was subverted, and simultaneously fulfilled, from within as are all finite philosophies and as, for example, Hegel, contrary to a prevalent impression, expected also of his own system as he himself had materially elaborated it.

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It is of course true that Christianity sharply distinguishes deeds from words, theory from praxis, but this is a bringing to the light a characteristic of theoria itself, which Aristotle accordingly called “the highest praxis”. Ascetic practices, monasticism, “social” programmes or almsgiving, even an explicit element of “theurgia”, are not definitionally excluded from philosophy just as, contrariwise, salvation by an act of belief, on the other hand, will always have in it a “gnostic” element. Thus martyrdom, the highest Christian act when informed by charity, is essentially witnessing and holding fast to truth under stress, the very essence also of philosophy, of “getting it right” in general. * Thinkers, from C.S. Lewis to the Danish psychiatrist and philosopher Axel Randrup, point out the contradiction in supposing a chance or unguided evolution of a human power, intelligence, which then itself proceeds to establish the truth of evolution. This chance or hazard, the theorists declare, is how we who now argue for evolution came to be as thinking, scientific beings. Thought, symbolic representation, abstraction all emerged in this way. One finds it argued that philosophical idealism is false because we now know that intellect thus materially evolved, as we now know that the earth is round and hanging in space because we have gone around it and seen it thus hanging. But this “knowing” and the associated journeyings is just what arguing for space as an a priori form of representation seeks to relativise. If one were to concede the point, though, then one would have to say that the theory of evolution too, along with our whole style of thinking, even thinking as such, was a chance result or means of survival. Notions of truth would have no proportion with it, unless we drastically redefined them. Our theories would be, so to say, symbolic representations, without further guarantee or “justification”, ways of “getting on” such as any animal might have stumbled upon in a struggle to survive. So they would be subjective, pragmatic, or at any rate it would thus emerge as pragmatic to view them as pragmatic! This though might be harmonised with our stressing above the lack of necessity or reality to our birth and death. The evolution of such “mortals” could thus indeed be explained as “vanity of vanities”, as the presently phenomenal view of the phenomenal within the latter. Here too “philosophy leaves everything as it is”. The paradox is suggestive. Conceding the point concedes, not merely in paradox but in intimate self-contradiction, the impossibility, in logic, of

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logic, i.e. of any such concession in regard to a supposed truth. This is where Hegel’s Cartesian point, as we might call it, comes in. Philosophy, that is to say knowing and thinking, is necessarily idealist. There is then, it will later more clearly emerge, no thing-in-itself or thing apart from a relation to thought. Even thought ultimately thinks its self only (Aristotle). It is here, therefore, that any element of correspondence in a now deepened conception of truth, to which one might “bear witness”, must find application. The notion, says Hegel, as we have just noted, is play (Enc. 161). Here we find, after all, a certain coincidence of the two views, a selfcontradictory materialism and, as it may seem, a mystic idealism. The materialists must plump for a certain “internal realism” or, which is the same, pragmatism. This is the “way of life” view of things. This is what we “do”, simply, they say, with our signs and symbols, our discourse, our now deconstructed constructions. It is all a matter of what we have to say, while foundations, ultimate validities, are not so much puritanically eschewed as paradigmatically deconstructed in their notion. The idealist version of things may indeed yield a similar result. For example, the Absolute of Hegel is necessarily differentiated, in order to be at all. An undifferentiated absolute is a merely abstract concept of ours. Now these differentiations of infinite spirit can only be persons, McTaggart will later argue. Only so can the (finite?) part be one with the infinite whole in the perfect unity that is reality. Matter and time are selfcontradictory illusions. These persons are related in accordance with the final category, love, which as final is the reality to which dialectic attains as being the sole reality. McTaggart differs from Hegel (as he thinks) in placing love after cognition, the “absolute idea”, finding the whole knowledge-relation as such to be lacking in the perfect reciprocity required by the reasoning. They are related in love, in a loving perception of one another transcending all propositional judgments. This does not however of itself entail that all are thus related with all, but rather each with some at least, though much speaks for a universalism. This, anyhow, is the final reality of thought. Thought transcends cognition, even itself, one might say. Yet what is Hegel’s being at home with the other as other if it is not love? The system, naturally or commonsensewise misperceived (in the category of essence) as nature, is thus delivered over to voluntarism, to play. The spirits, for which even the category of substance, along with cause, is superseded, exposed as untruth, may think what they like, if they think at all. Truth itself, though only in

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the sense of finite “correctness”,7 is superseded as an abstract stage of the dialectic. So, therefore, are these very sentences. This is the Humean element in Hegel and also perhaps his reason for apparently stopping short of a final category transcending philosophy, that “whereof one cannot speak”. In our time Zen has popularised the situation, as we, more justly said, have popularised Zen. If we invent evolution, we noted earlier, then we must invent the fossils in the (misperceived) ground (“ground” is a non-ultimate category in the dialectic!), as, if we invent space, we must invent space-travel. For we will then have also invented the useless evolutionary survival, in apparent contradiction, of the inflamed appendix, of which so many have died. But, no birth no death. So for the idealists, as for the materialists, truth disappears, and this is the truth. Truth is one of the penultimate abstractions of the dialectical ascent to love. This is expressed in the ancient insight, “God is love”, i.e. love is the final reality. This, consistently taken, means that there is no reality to be contemplated, not even that of love, beyond the exercise of love, mutual and unqualified by time or matter. This indeed is the source of the fire of concupiscence, so far as it goes, misconceived as a “wound of original sin” (Bede). For Desmond Morris indeed an original prerational copulatory impulse became personalised in the course of evolution, but we can rather see the more primitive as constructed, in cipher again, from the ideal. This much, after all, is implicit in any idea of divine creation as self-imitation. The important thing is not to separate the two. Men know and have always known this relation, love, in the depths of spiritual awareness, which is why Hegel would see truth in all philosophies “worthy of the name”, as he somewhat lamely qualifies his assertion. The ecumenical movement will have, can have, no other outcome. It, this outcome, is in our own hands, free immortal spirits, and so it is play. No one judges us and we do not judge ourselves, constitutive as we are. Heaven does not then rest upon a right vision of things, or any vision, save that of self-perception in one another, this being not so much the precondition as the very exercise of love. Beyond all intellectual and other effort here in time, in time’s unreality, this truth beyond truth abides, is enjoyed, plays. The spirit of play, like the spirits at play, is immortal, without beginning or end, before or after. “This day have I begotten thee,” be the speaker whom we will.8 7

Cf. Hegel, Enc. Logic 172. Cf. our “Begotten not made”, The Downside Review, January 2006, pp.1-21, from which Chapter One here is derived.

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To be consistent (and that is an internal requirement for writing anything at all, even if in deep love consistency cannot categorially apply but is aufgehoben) we must say that it is fundamentally indifferent whether we are immortal or not. This is what puzzled McTaggart about Hegel. For both materialist and idealist it is a matter of freely choosing the schema which best serves. In having love we have everything; “materialists” are inconsistent maybe, we are consistent, maybe. Heaven is now; that is, our “now” participates in transcendent timelessness, in the light of which it is as past while actually being experienced, as its very structure, instant within instant, proclaims. Again, the main thrust is for monism against dualism on the broadest of fronts. Thus Freud (Scientific Project, 1895) created an ingenious if materialist theory of the mind, able to serve for much self-understanding. So the truth of immortality is not an independent reality limiting or contradicting love’s infinity and sole reign. The same, however, applies to the truth of death. Death too is nothing. Love reigns. But if there is no death then everything, just as love’s exercise, is free of death, and that and not some other positive quality, apart from just love, that freedom from death, is just what immortality is as a norm. We have it now, and so forever, since just now is forever. And so we play, though others may think we die. That is the witness, “everlasting joy upon their faces”. No birth, no death. We do not love because we are beautiful, or for any reason. We are beautiful because we love, constitutively. Boehme’s insight into the pure as it were thin will prior to or apart from creation is thus far correct. Love is not born of intellect, as its inclination (Thomas Aquinas). Love is not born at all. It is eternal play, as we see it in young animals or children. It is born, that is to say, of Mind as such, its infinity, as one with it. * There is a tendency to think, once more, that the discovery of evolution, as explaining nature, has rendered absolute idealism that much less probable or available even as a view of things open to the inherent playfulness of speculation. Subjectivity itself, consciousness, comes to be viewed as a product of evolution, of the elements and processes of the spatio-temporal world from which subjects have emerged. Two centuries of research in the physical sciences have led to the conclusion that the physical universe is a process of cosmological and biological evolution which stretches back for billions of

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Shalom’s topic here is being, which he admits transcends conceptually “the spatio-temporal process”. He infers from this, however, via a Kantian premise about our categories referring to “the physical world”, that elucidation of the word “being” (sic) requires a reciprocal analysis of how such signifying can occur… how significant discourse became possible at all: the problem of the concept of being is correlative to that of the being of concepts… an activity characteristic of an entity which has emerged.

One might reply that this is not required at all, such reciprocity involving an endless circle merely, asking how we can signify signifying and so on. It is a question for biology, not for logic and metaphysics. Within these one might rather ask what concepts and judgements are and even whether we talk and make judgements at all. One might also ask “How Language Refers”10 at all. Yet the virtual subsuming of epistemology and even metaphysics under biology is widespread. One begins, typically, by replacing epistemology with “cognitive theory”, where it is assumed that everyone simply knows what cognition is or one has simply forgotten, rather, that one does not thus know. It is similar to the way that those venerating a sacred book may assume, or assert, that all truth is therein contained. Thus for Konrad Lorenz too, as for Popper, adaptation, of organisms to environment, just is the process of knowledge in its essence. The organism takes up “information” into its system. Lorenz enlists Goethe’s support for saying that the eye images the sun and the properties of light as being independent of the eyes now seeing them. Similarly animal and human behaviour mirror the environment to which they are adapted.11 9

Albert Shalom, “Temporality and the Concept of Being”, The Review of Metaphysics, Volume 44 No.2, Issue No. 174, December 1990, pp.307-316. Konrad Lorenz takes the same view in Die Rückseite des Spiegels (accordingly sub-titled “Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens”), Verlag Piper, Munich 1973. 10 Cf. John Deely, “How Language Refers”, in Studi Internazionali di Filosofia, 1972. 11 Cf. Lorenz, op. cit. p.15.

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He reasons as follows. When a primitive creature such as the paramaecium (“Pantoffeltierchen”) comes to something placed in its way or against it (Gegenstand, objectum) it changes direction. Well, it would have to or else stop altogether, but Lorenz interprets this necessity as a knowing of something “literally objective” about the world. He does not say the animal literally knows it, yet asserts that what it “knows” (his scare-quotes) is completely right (durchaus richtig), viz. one cannot continue forward. Effectively he brings this tautology, based on a truth “about things generally”12, that when blocked we cannot go forward, under the Thomistic quod quid est. Any perception, according to Thomas Aquinas, apprehends a real nature (apprehensio simplex), though the agent might simultaneously judge falsely (compositio) about it. Well, “what is the world without reason?”13 Even sensation is quaedam ratio. Reason is in the world. Indeed if consciousness were not essential to knowledge then this animal’s behaviour, simply as such, might be thus represented (i.e. whatever its mode of consciousness) as knowledge. It is therefore a good illustration of why consciousness (of a definite sort) is needed for any nonvacuous conception of knowledge. To know one must know that one knows, as for Aristotelians to sense one must sense that one senses. Otherwise one is no different from the rock the sun shines on, plants or fur the wind rustles, and if that is sensation then we have elucidated nothing. Lorenz adds to this that all knowledge of nature, “the real world in which we live”, is due to an “information apparatus” built and complexified on the same principles that govern the primitive behaviour considered above. It does not occur to him to say “So much for nature”, that “petrified intelligence” as the idealists called it. Instead he concludes that we now, in view of our knowledge of evolution, judge the human knowing power differently than was done before. For one thing, he says, though this in no way seems to follow, we are utterly convinced that real data correspond to the messages from the knowledge-apparatus. This is because the apparatus is itself a thing in reality, part of what it experiences. This is significantly different from just being part of experience, yet Lorenz does not mention that this is precisely why Aristotle held that there could be no material apparatus of thought or knowledge. It would, namely, as a paremphainomenon (“that which appears beside”), get in the way of that identity with the object (thus 12

Cf. Henry B. Veatch, “Logical Truth and Logic”, Journal of Philosophy, 1956, pp.671-679. 13 G. Frege’s rhetorical question in The Foundations of Arithmetic.

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become subject) in which knowledge consists. But Lorenz has not, again, thus far considered the question as to what knowledge might be. In adaptation to this reality the apparatus has gained its present form. This already suggests, and he ought to concede it, that knowledge is in that case not guaranteed. A future knower might see our knowing as we see that of the dinosaurs, or Lorenz’s Pantoffeltierchen, which, whatever he says, quite obviously knows nothing. That something real, etwas wirkliches, corresponds to our “knowing” is patently not good enough. This is not knowledge. In “knowing” that John was born in London I know he was born in England and this remains true if he was born in Leeds, as he was. Yet I will have failed to know the fact I claimed to know, the town John was born in, as the Ptolemaic astronomers failed to know what they claimed to explain. They knew other things, however, while the little animal, like wind diverted from a wall, knows nothing. Lorenz next proceeds to endorse the Kantian categories, causality, substance, space, time, as functions in the service of survival. So here he abandons his defence of knowledge, even of practical knowledge. We are adapted simply, in the way we need to be as organisms. The “assumption” of the “transcendental idealists” (he means Kantians in the first instance) that these categories hide from us an unknowable thing-in-itself is false, since as functions of a “neuro-sensory organisation” they are in the service of species or (latterly) gene-survival. Lorenz does not mention the option, the imperative, pointed to by Hegel, of examining these so natural categories logically, not taking them for granted but bringing “reason” to bear upon our common and unreflecting “understanding”. Then we might find that “the real world in which we live”, along with such living itself, is not so ultimate as he has been assuming. The same dogmatism, feet of clay indeed, supports Popper’s intellectual edifice. * The theory of evolution should be seen as more favourable to absolute idealism than previous views, not less so. This is the unguessed force of Lorenz’s and of Popper’s point about “problem-solving”. Where there is such problem-solving there is thinking, intelligence. Previously this was seen as the intelligence of an outside agent who worked upon the world. Now intelligence, reason, is in the world, as its constitutive law almost. Nature is itself intelligence, petrified or not. In so far as intelligence is in nature it is that much more ideal. It is no longer brute material manipulated extrinsically, and teleologically, by an ideal being.

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Evolution is a theory of development, though not necessarily from less good to better. What is developed rather is greater complexification, which nevertheless ever supplies the basis for new abilities. In this it differs slightly from Hegelian dialectic, where the ideas are definitely succeeded constantly by more complete and hence better ones. As we have already remarked, however, in view of this fact, intelligence as we know it (if we do, this is the point), since it has developed or evolved at and to a certain finite point in evolution’s history, cannot reasonably be judged capable of comprehending evolution as it actually is. This would be self-identification with the finite and composite whole, which is nature materially viewed, by what is a mere and very likely transient part or power within it, viz. developing intelligence. The contradiction is plain. Neither Popper nor Lorenz nor Shalom show proper awareness of this contradiction, “an unavoidable consequence of the philosophy of materialist realism”.14 Traditionally the contradiction was avoided by postulating that intellect was a spiritual “power of the soul”, infused from outside of nature, from a world of ideas in fact or, simply, by God as the absolute spirit. “Intellect comes from outside,” Aristotle claims. Later Hegel will argue that “the outside is the inside” and vice versa, a situation entailing the supersession (Aufhebung) of both these categories as “human, all too human”. We might go back to Eckhart, as Lorenz goes back to Goethe, when talking about the eye. “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him.” Here Eckhard enunciates a truth not so much about God, even a negative one, as about the percipient knower as subject. Its validity, therefore, would extend beyond Eckhart’s particular perspective. The allseeing eye of God, like the world organised by evolutionary processes, is first and foremost my conception, the conception of whoever conceives it. One used to talk, in late scholasticism for example, of the subjective and objective concept, not quite knowing how far to identify them, as one has to. There is only the subjective concept and therefore there is no longer mere subjectivity, as if picked out of a larger objective realm. As subject and object coincide these categories disappear. This is what will not go into the heads of such as Lorenz or Popper, it seems. In investigating the boundless riches of nature one uncovers one’s own greatness as well as the greatness of “spirit” as such. The precise nuance here will depend upon

14 Axel Randrup, “Cognition and Biological Evolution”, http://cogprints.org/3373/01/evolutioncognition.html

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one’s view of the self, of selfhood. “There is one closer to me than I am to myself,” said Augustine, conveniently opening this topic. Now as Hegel says, The imagination of ordinary men feels a vehement reluctance to surrender its dearest conviction, that this aggregate of finitude, which it calls a world, has actual reality; and to hold that there is no world is a way of thinking they are fain to believe impossible…15

To believe that the sun, say, is in the power of the subject, is a construct and not finally a reality seems to many a fictitious or extravagant posture, and this is thus the way that Descartes’ methodic doubt of all phenomena often gets represented. Yet that Descartes puts this doubt under the control of the will has no tendency, we will see, to render the doubting fictitious. In religious systems all divine knowing is thus free, of will. The knowledge determines the being, is causal, Aquinas claims. In fact religion is perfectly familiar with these positions. It is merely that there they are presented under an imperfect form of knowing, the religious and symbolic.16 Any doctrine that God made the world subjects the sun to God’s power and maintenance. In so far as it stands in the heavens just as long as God wills this it inevitably takes on something of the character of an appearance. As it is part of the divine subjectivity so it can hardly be denied to be part of ours, we too, however, being part or identical with that same subjectivity. It is a question of the primacy of spirit. This positing of primacy, however, is soon lost sight of or discarded inasmuch as recognition of spirit eliminates all alternatives. There is no primacy of the unity of all, which is the sole reality, over itself. But the great error is to restrict our notions of the nature of thought to its form in understanding alone. To think the phenomenal world rather means to re-cast its form, and transmute it into a universal. And thus the action of thought has also a negative effect upon its basis: and the matter of sensation, when it receives the stamp of universality, at once loses its first and phenomenal shape… And it is because they do not… express the negative features implied in the exaltation of the mind from the world to God, that the metaphysical proofs of the being of a God are defective interpretations and descriptions of the process… That upward spring of the mind signifies, that the being which the world has is only a semblance, no real being, no absolute truth;… The process of transition might thus appear 15 16

Cf. Hegel, op. cit. 50. See Chapter III, above.

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to be transition… but… every trace of transition and means is absorbed; since the world, which might have seemed to be the means of reaching God, is explained to be a nullity… the genuine nature of essential thought… cancels the mediation in the very act of mediating…17

“God”, wrote Nijinsky in his diary, “is fire in the head.” The fire may be lit in the head, but it is essential to it to consume this place of origin, seeing it as merely apparent, or kicked away like Wittgenstein’s ladder. Spirit and reality are the same. This is in fact the essential insight of religion everywhere, even though creation, on the analogy of making, is often misinterpreted in a dualist sense. One speaks then of “ontological discontinuity”, actually a senseless phrase masking a mere refusal to think. “Matter is the principle of individuation.” This, as a thesis, has the appearance of characterising matter. But what it actually means is that what we have unreflectively been calling matter is in fact individuation, individuation as such or its principle. The individual, says Hegel, is the same as the actual. “Individual and actual are the same thing…”18 For Aristotle the actual in a thing, its essential form, is its ultimate difference, which subsumes all previous specification and as act is what the thing essentially or, rather, actually, is. The matter, materia, as ultimately organised in its final state, Aristotle says, is the thing’s possibility, not its actuality.19 This is what Aquinas calls the unicitas formae. This form “of the body”, however, is rather the whole reality, the timeless original which is merely reflected in time. So matter, as possibility of the actual, is individual, since, again, “individual and actual are the same.” For the actual to be such, to act, to be in act, it must be individual, as it must be material. Indeed the infinite, to be real and not merely abstract, must be differentiated into material individuals, as we call them. In fact, again, their materiality just is their individuality. There is no separate third factor, this being rather a myth or cultural posit. “Matter”, McTaggart will conclude, “is in the same position as the harpies.” Only thus is a substance both timeless and in time, though time itself is no more than a limited “form of understanding”. What we call matter just is this possibility, which is individuation. So it is not the principle of individuation. It is itself individuation, i.e. there is no matter. The term is our symbol of individuality, and thus its possibility. It is not in itself the actual, nor is the organised life it “substrates”, as death shows. 17

Hegel, eodem loco. Cf. Hegel, op. cit. 163, q.v. 19 Aristotle, Metaphysics VII. 18

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Again, the differentiations of infinity are themselves infinite, each of them and not their imagined aggregate. For as absolute individuals they cannot be counted together, as if members of a species. Hence Aristotle places the ultimate form (“soul”) above man as what actually is or what he calls “substance”: We are all different and unequal in spirit… spiritually, there is pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts… I myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality with any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as one star is from another, as different in quality and quantity… One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison.20

One only has to add that this otherness is founded upon each one as being the whole, after its own unique and unrepeatable manner. Probably the idea of matter arises by comparison with thought, as not material, or again, of the seen with the unseen and even hypothetical. Scientists, however, are busy trying to explain thoughts as material. The important issue, again, is that of monism versus dualism. It does not hurt science to be obliged to deny matter, to resolve it into the individuality of everything actual. Here is the origin of the “parts outside parts”, and hence of space and time. Yet, mind requires, the outside is the inside. These two categories are themselves spatial. Hence, taken as as pair in reciprocal exclusion, they are self-refuting. One individual can, conceivably, therefore merge, identify with, live in another and the final truth will show itself to be that we are all mutually “in” one another, this preposition standing for an identity. The non-signifyingness of matter and time is well expressed by Nietzsche’s “eternal return” theory. Time that returns upon itself never goes away. There is no time, that is to say, but something fuller. How far though this might correspond or not to Nietzsche’s own conception is not the issue here.

20 D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Penguin edn. Pp.106-107. The character Birkin speaks.

CHAPTER NINE NATURE, EVOLUTION, PHILOSOPHY

I am concerned about a rational view of reality, which, as I have been outlining here, ultimately means self-understanding in particular. This was the sense of the oracular “Know thyself cited by the Platonic Socrates. That is, it was not an injunction to forget about philosophy but to achieve even its seemingly remotest aims in understanding self-consciousness, rather. Since it is reason that judges and names the animals reason cannot be just one, albeit the “highest”, development out of the animal, plant or material spheres of perception, except on certain conditions. “I am from above; you are from below”, this has to be reason’s as it were ungrateful attitude, ungrateful if we concede (with Hegel or Aristotle) that the material for concept-formation is all the same taken from experience. The metaphor means that reason, as reason, “cancels the mediation in the very act of mediating” (EL50)The Hegelian dialectic leads us, that is, to the Absolute Idea. It is from this logischen Idee, Hegel remarks in a noteworthy turn of phrase, that Philosophie muss daher den Geist als eine notwendige Entwicklung der ewigen Idee begreifen (Die Philosophie des Geistes, §379, Encyclopaedie, Heidelberg 1817). That is, spirit and therefore nature beforehand come from the Idea as a development of it, ultimately from God, though Hegel finds that this name is best avoided in philosophy as not being transparent (Cf. The Phenomenologyof Spirit, Harper Torchbook, tr. Baillie, p.84). As for God’s existence, absolute idealism refers back rather to absolute ideality, as befits “pure” reason. This is not to deny God’s existence but to sublate existence as a concept since, as limited (it is set over against essence, for example, while Hegel treats it as a finite category of Essence in the course of his Logic), it is not self-evidently worthy of God, of the Infinite or Absolute. There is question, all the same, as to whether Hegel can be simply assumed to have fully understood the dialectic he discovered. For example he writes at times as if the truth of the final category depends upon every link in the chain of categorial deduction followed by just himself being

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valid, an achievement which might be felt to highly unlikely, and, yet more seriously, not finally demonstrable. The truth of the matter, rather, and fortunately, appears to be that wherever we start and however we proceed, provided only that we are resolved never to rest in a finite and insufficient category, we will arrive at the absolute idea. This is what Hegel found, in his own particular way, as is shown by his leaving us more than one account of the system of the categories. The same system, that of Mind, is, within limits, variously presentable. We may not be clear as to these limits. Could, for instance, the dialectic be presented, and argued, backwards. Would this also “cancel the mediation” or, rather, reinstate it and might not this be the sense of the Logic’s first movement, that being and non-being are the same? This would present the Absolute Idea as final negativity which, anyhow, as Concept but of itself only, it plainly is, in final “unknowing”, as the tradition’s recognised mystics, “The Cloud of Unknowing” (fourteenth century English author), John of the Cross and others, had taught, stressing a peculiar inner freedom resulting therefrom as Hegel states that thinking is “blessedness” (EL159). So it might be questioned whether Hegel was justified in starting the process from being, something he hardly discusses. Hegel’s defence here (see “With What Must Science Begin?”, prefacing The Science of Logic) is to say that the dialectic must start from immediacy, from what is immediate, not mediated by anything else, and that is simply what we call being, first or immediate as such rather than something that is thus first. This though would be open to discussion. However, if the previous point is granted, that the dialectic might start from anywhere, then the uncertainty, if any, might not finally be fatal or weighty at all. Another important point to consider, particularly when we come to discuss the “Philosophy of Nature”, concerns Hegel’s names for the categories. He takes them from our common speech and we have therefore to be careful to remember that they do not, or at least need not, mean the same when used here for the categories. One thinks of Mechanism, Chemism and suchlike, but one might equally consider Becoming (meaning what?), Nothing (meaning non-being), Cognition or even, we have just seen, that Being we start with as the name, his name, for general immediacy (not always what is meant by “being”). This means that the dialectical process is indeed wholly a priori, as indeed Hegel declares it to be, and this is the answer to critics such as Trendelenburg who pointed to the categories as bred, necessarily, out of experience. This is Hegel’s point about reason’s ingratitude. Once one has described or defined one’s category one may be wholly indifferent to how the word chosen is used in common life. It is as if Hegel gives the most

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complete rationale for the later “symbolic logic” (reason’s a priori autonomy, sc. Ingratitude) without himself choosing to employ or devise it. Thus reason discovers the Absolute Idea, which it essentially is, wholly from within itself. This remains important when we come to consider the philosophy of nature, as also that of spirit. Both, we found him saying earlier, are necessary developments out of the eternal or, better, absolute Idea. That is, they are not developed as thoughts or idealities in the restrictive sense, but in all their full-blown reality. At the same time our concept of existence is in this way relativised, existence, that is, as it is found in the dialectic, just as being, there, meant neither more nor less than immediacy. For existence derives from thought, the eternal Idea, thought, nous, thinking itself, as Aristotle had it. Jakob Boehme too had stated that God “before” creating was a pure or absolute freedom transcending existence or being, which he as it were acquired or took on through creating it in self-differentiation, its Concept, which it, God, is as the Idea, being nothing other than the possibility, necessary to it, of all possible or conceivable concepts. Hegel would have been familiar with this view, as he was with the Neo-Platonic notions with which it is in continuity. This is the true background to the Scholastic tag, forma dat esse. The Absolute is pure form, that is, finally, not essence abstractly taken but the Concept. It is beyond existence Consideration of it, its self-consideration, sublates (aufhebt) existence. It gives being as superior to it and it is in this sense, again, that nemo (nihil) dat quod non habet. It has actuality in a higher mode, as not subject to ex-istence. This is the concept’s synthetic unity of freedom and necessity. The alternative, therefore, does not lie between making of Hegel an inconsistent eclecticist, taking an idealist stand here, a realist stand there, or else seeing him as an idealist in the Berkeleyan sense merely. He says himself that we have to proceed from esse est percipi to esse est intelligi, i.e. esse has either way to be “reduced” or taken up. This is the sense to be given to Aquinas’s immaterialitas as radix cognitionis, that cognition is rooted in a or the negative, in spirit’s formal freedom from form as itself the final form of freedom. Hegel is rather an absolute and thoroughgoing idealist in the sense that he sees all in and in relation to the whole (the paradigm of modern physics, as it happens), an infinite totality transcending completely any finite notion of a collection. “Everything finite is false” he will say, or did we forget it? He is thus in perfect continuity with the Pauline dictum that “In God we live and move and have our being.” That, however, is religious discourse, which Hegel

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declares imperfect as to form though not to content, so that it is for philosophy to perfect or “accomplish” it. We find that people are anxious to rebut the Heideggerian charge that Hegel knew from the beginning of the dialectic that he wanted to come, at the end, to the Absolute Idea, as if he had presumed idealism without rationally justifying it. But there is nothing in this charge. Hegel wrote enough in justification of such idealism elsewhere, e.g. in the opening chapters of the Ecyclopaedia or the Preface to The Phenomenology of Mind. Thus Hegel would not deny that without an experience of Christianity one might well not have come upon certain quasi-Trinitarian, say rather triadic, notions in one’s philosophy. Similarly, without a preaching of the Incarnation, in one male human being1, one might well never have discovered the freedom of human being, of reason. This, as he says, he “accomplishes”, as this religion accomplished earlier presages of it in the making of statues of the gods. He makes no secret of this, which in no way prevents him from claiming to offer a philosophy of religion distinct from dogmatic theology. In the same way the dialectic could never have got going without a fund of ordinary notions and indeed words to draw upon, though not by taking them over non-critically (the complaint against earlier metaphysics or, more profoundly, against metaphysics as such). Such terms receive rather their sui generis and well-defined sense when they are used in working out Hegel’s logic, the dialectic. The same applies to his philosophy of nature. Hegel did not abruptly alter his general method of rational analysis, dubbed a priori, after declaring, still within the Logic, that the Idea as absolute and unconditioned is now ready to “go forth freely as Nature”. It is from within itself that the Idea, as absolute, i.e. as no longer susceptible of dialectical development, since this is proof of an idea’s limitation or finitude, reviews the whole method of its discovery. Indeed it fully incorporates as completing the series. It is here that thought, absolute thought, will transcend that finite thought which is always contradistinguished against the realities which thought, human thought, intends. No doubt Hegel learned much here too from the religious tradition, where what are seen as actual events, e.g. in the Old Testament, are yet signs and figures of what is to come. So now absolute thought returns back over the series, the method (of the Logic), so as to derive, by inner necessity of its infinitude, corresponding finite realities or “moments” freed from all taint 1

It had to be of one or the other sex. However, an inclusive extension is here already implied or, more truly, an intension of our extended plurality of persons.

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of the abstract. What is important to see is that it does not do this by leaving behind the ideal but that in so doing it brings out the absoluteness of such idealism, namely, that it stops and can stop at nothing short of the final fulfilment. What seems here though to be a self-alienation of thought’s own essence is then corrected, re-absorbed in the philosophy of spirit, giving thought its final form as reality or, again, spirit, shedding abstractionism as mere adaptation to finite and hence false appearance. Hegel, that is, takes always the absolute point of view, what theologically might be called the divine point of view.2 He is thus fully in line with the dictum of Aquinas that God can have no real relation with anything outside himself. Each manifestation is one with the whole idea. This is why the whole thus envisaged is a perfect and absolute whole, more perfect even than are organic wholes. Each part of being here is one with the whole. Thus “being has no parts” (Parmenides). Without this proviso the whole itself cannot be conceived, since, reciprocally, the Whole is necessarily differentiated into just these “parts”. They are therefore not parts as we normally conceive them. “I am that”, say the Indians. In general, Hegel’s inspiration moves from above downwards, if that is what Heidegger meant. Why should it not? So he will develop concepts of space, time, matter and motion, as necessary. It is not, therefore, guaranteed that they will duplicate empirical or “common-sense” realities, which we know by these names (commonsense itself is a category within his Doctrine of Essence merely). On the other hand he is naturally guided to their discovery precisely by common human experience. Yet he would not propose what he calls space as a foundation to nature if he did not think he had shown how it holds up rationally or a priori, as we find also in the Kantian analysis. What he does here, then, in the philosophy of nature is show how the development of thought, of mind, as absolute is not merely ideal in a restrictive sense. It is superior to as transcending existence and phenomenal reality. This is precisely his interpretation of the “ontological argument” for God’s existence, in the Logic. Existence, the money in Kant’s pocket, is aufgehoben. Now God, again, the Absolute or unconditioned, is everything if it or he or she is anything. In this sense Hegel never finally parts company with Spinoza’s acosmism, as he calls it. Therefore when he comes to the philosophy of spirit the same considerations will apply, which is why one can never know for sure when the Spirit spoken of is that of an isolated individual or is absolute. There 2

From this might be derived also the absoluteness, the divinity, of forgiveness or pardon from which he leads into exposition of divine or absolute revelation in his earlier book.

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are in fact no isolated individuals, but each can say, with Augustine, “There is one (the same one) closer to me than I am to myself”. Grace is one with, as including though transcending, active consciousness of that closeness, as Augustine in his own way makes clear. Hegel, however, here treads an Aristotelian path. Implicit is the judgement that this approach is by no means caused by lack of an empirical science. It is simply the method of “the concept”. Thus Aristotle derives his concept of matter from considerations of act and potency and not from sense-observation as such. Rather, the observed, felt mass and matter occurs in logical posteriority to the pure potentiality postulated by reason as necessary. In similar ways Hegel derives notions of space and time, signalised by Kant as a priori modes of apprehension. Reason, that is, remains ungrateful, eclipsing or exalting itself above sense-experience. But, one might ask, do not the established empirical sciences make a difference? They do not, at this level, since it is more fundamental than they. Thus the sciences themselves speak of models for explanation, and this is precisely such a model, not an arbitrary one, however, but one based on rational analysis. Thus it is not surprising that empirical space, time and matter approximate closely to the concepts here devised. It is a model, so to say, for any possible science of nature. Thus space and matter appear not as special inventions, of the deity say, but as the “natural” outreach of actuality, in or as free reason, along a scale down towards pure possibility. Inevitably this conception of things issues, as it might seem, in a total subjectivism, in the sense, however, not of some particular finite ego doing the thinking or creating. Rather the thinking going on here is, or has to be claimed to be, that of subjectivity as such, of the Idea itself. In other words, self, what we call self, is a kind of echo of Spirit, as Hegel emphasises, with Biblical reference, at the beginning of his Die Philosophie des Geistes.3 This in fact falls together with notions of explanatory models and even with Putnam’s theory of “internal realism”. We ask how things have to be to appear as they are. Evolutionary theory might very well be caught in this net, along with complication after complication as science develops. It will not be invalidated but rather resituated as a whole. In fact, though, science is called upon to become philosophy. It was a false estimation of the empiricist attitude that provoked the schism between these two. This falling together of other and self, of creative infinity and ego, appears as a version of theories of atman as true, supra-empirical self. “I .

3

Cf. the Einleitung to the 1817 version of this third part of the Encyclopaedie, §377, Zusatz (Hegel Studienausgabe 3, Fischer Bucherei, Frankfurt 1968, p.203).

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am that.” It is also implicit in Augustinianism, however, as we quoted Augustine saying “There is one closer to me than I am to myself,” meaning God, the Absolute. But what is closer than self is self par excellence. * Difficulties with evolutionary theory do not only arise within difficulties in understanding Hegel’s thought. Besides considerations as to how any organism or part of an organism, e.g. the eye or a cell, develop always in mutual independence of parts again, like cell-wall and nucleus, there is the sheer impossibility, we learn, of the process taking place in the time cosmologists allow, viz. four billion years. The fact remains, in any case, that there is the same difficulty in explaining a beginning as explaining the being of the process as a whole. That is why one cannot other than regard the temporal process as circular, for even if a linear development could be conceived as proceeding without term it would still have to have a first member to exist at all. This though is a matter of making time itself circular and not merely the putative events within time, a Sysiphean fantasy, it might at first seem, without rhyme or reason. Making time itself circular, however, excludes repetitions. That is to say, the “again” of time as such coming round is neither a temporal nor any other kind (what would that be?) of repetition. In other words, circular temporality is simply a figure for time’s negation. Motion itself does not move, Aristotlöe said. Time, in absolute terms, is impossible. This is Hegel’s view. Time is a finite category, not, this time, of logic but of nature. As such, and in the same way as the logical categories, it is, as finite, false and will not hold up when further examined. It is in going over to spirit that (the “moment” of) nature is fulfilled. The only way to view this is as in McTaggart’s explication of Hegel’s thought, namely, that all our perceptions of things finite are “fragmentary” or are straight misperceptions. It is as such that they themselves are perceived or known absolutely or eternally. The only finite existents are our own selves as persons, the proviso being that this brand of finitude is at the same time infinite. The relation of part to whole is superseded (aufgehoben) in that intelligible unity superior to the unity of supposed organic bodies, the Concept. Here each is necessary to the whole as the whole is necessary to each. This holds quite apart from any determination of the final identity and nature of each person. The principle of number itself may well be inapplicable here. McTaggart also suggests that the final category according to which each knows all and all each cannot be

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cognition, the Idea, as we know it, though Hegel still calls it that. It has to be something more perfectly reciprocal, overcoming the dual alternativeness of dominion of subject by object in cognition proper or of object by subject in volition. He suggests the name “love” for this, a love, clearly, that would perfect knowledge rather than stand in for it, the “knowing as one is known” envisaged by some apostolic writers or Indian thinkers, maybe. The study of nature, therefore, as science not completed and interpreted by philosophy, the whole realist model, has to be seen as a moment in the whole dialectic through logic and nature to spirit, the triad of triads. The specific difficulty of evolution can now be seen as lying in the fact that it gives a realist account of the development of cognition which, as itself circular or contradictory, entails an idealism which invalidates the whole argumentative procedure. In this way it could be taken as an inverted image, or even an actual instance, of the ontological argument for the reality of the Absolute, where reason with “sovereign ingratitude” renders null and void the steps whereby it ascends to its conclusion. Acceptance of evolution leads us to its denial as we ascend “from shadows to reality”. * This progress from shadows to reality has also to occur, however, within the philosophy of nature itself, differently from the logic. For our perceptions of nature, of nature’s “moments”, change with the ages. Though events within one particle may be “perceived” within another instantaneously this does not change the correctness of saying that nothing travels faster than light. It rather negates our own intuitive grasp of space on its own level, rather as Copernicanism inverted perception of the sun’s trajectory. Space is seen to be hologrammatic. The material model of whole and parts itself disintegrates as we pass beyond it. Here too the concept, the notion, is active. Not even the parts of academic culture can be held distinct from the ideal of a universal knowledge, corresponding to our connecting all with all in the natural functioning of memory. Not that philosophers must be kings but that all must and shall be philosophers is the truth, foreshadowed in the rough sketches of mass ideology, newspapers and broadcasting, the general hegemony of jargon, which modern times has brought forth as thesis demanding antithesis. There can be no going back, no restoration. The ladder, like the diatonic scale, has been “kicked away”, in Hegelian or Wittgensteinian ingratitude, the music of a new actuality reverberates unforgettably. It is for us to make sense of, to order it while it itself in the meantime begins to pass away. This, in turn,

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shows that “our citizenship is in heaven”, that, as by a leap, the concept ascends to the throne it never left. Liturgy, in the end, will have a central role to play and to maintain forever, but as being finally done with in its own “accomplishment” or finishing. Tetelestai, put as the final “word from the Cross”. It is accomplished or it has been, here, finished. That liturgy, as it became in commemoration, rends temple veils, though still celebrated, paradoxically, or in a certain concession, which may thus be withdrawn, within temples.

CHAPTER TEN BEYOND THINKING

Thinking is signifying. It is only with this proviso that we can say with Heidegger that it is “letting being be”. We find indication of this in that being for thinking never gets beyond being object for the thinker. There is a relation but it is not reciprocal. Either the thinker is, in voto, absorbed in the object, which is yet his object, his world, which he or she is, or, as in willing, he draws it into himself. The insufficiency of this comes to a head in the meeting between thinkers, which are spirits or persons. For perfect reciprocity to occur thinking must pass over into such reciprocity, best called love. This is the absolute, transcending or superseding all idea. Here each subject is simultaneously or identically all, the whole, and the whole itself is only real, and not abstract, if it is itself this perfect mutual inter-relation and reciprocity, where all beget one another without change in what is the foundation in re of all that we call necessity. Nor shall one deny that this complex and perfect unity, unity in complexity and complexity in unity, is itself that perfect self-manifestation we call freedom. There was no prior freedom to become this whole, to emerge into being as if not yet free, as if potential to it. It is itself just the free and the necessary. We pass now to Love. It is because love supersedes thinking that thinking is essentially and inescapably signifying. Knowing too, apart from love or “knowing as I am known”, is significatory, whereas knowing as I am known defines love by sublating or taking away knowledge, its essential inequality. There are now two moments of speculative thought in which the signrelation transcends itself. The one is the sacramental relation (so-called because in our culture it was developed most fully in terms of eucharistic theology) and the other is the signum formale as taken over in some logics from the physics of sensation, of the unperceivable retinal image. What is worked out in relation to the elements of the eucharist would actually apply, left to itself, to any finite reality whatever, Aquinas

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concedes in his classical treatment of the matter (see his Summa theologiae III, 60, 5). “This also is thou; neither is this thou.” Substance is ultimately or really one, the whole. For dualism we are not pure spirits, but for monism, which is belief in God or an Absolute, only spirit is actual. What we call our bodies then are signs of themselves. They are what they signify and this is all that they are, just like the Eucharistic bread after consecration in Catholic belief, itself a simple response to the this-is-me (and I-am-that) doctrine already accepted. This indeed is the only way of explaining how there can be accidents without substance, as, all the same, realist epistemology has obscured. As food’s taste is sign and presence of that in which we “live and move”, as music in the ear is glory in the mind, so the simplest touch of love is sign and presence of absolute communion and felicity. The body then is sign and shape of the integrally personal or spiritual that it actually is, not what is put together or destroyed by the mechanics of analysis. So Aquinas asserts that “in the resurrection” there are no plants or animals (a fortiori no earth, air, fire or water). This, however, is more than compensated for, he asserts, by “the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed”. Here, in pictorial or symbolic manner, are the outlines of idealism. For since our bodies are sacramental signs, without substance that is to say, they do not die and are not materially resurrected. Resurrection is metaphor for sitting eternally with Christ in the heavenly places, which is metaphor, again, for that absolute perfection which is reality in its proper formality. This remains so whatever “miracles” are posited or dreamed of under a realist scheme of thought. The absence of animals and plants, of a material life-world, indicates that all phenomena are symbolic representations of our own subjective reality as lovers (the apogee of consciousness, where we have the other as other and he, she or they us, thus overcoming finite identity). Such representation is inseparable from any thinking. Thus, for thought, the outside is the inside, or proper to the subject, as is man’s environment (nature) to man, and the inside is the outside or, under this mode, necessarily represented (since thus only is it presented at all). Here then the sign is absorbed into the signified. Outside of this it has no reality. In this it is one with, or, rather, at one with, the signum formale. Just as, to see anything, I must have a representation in my eye (the species) which I never see, so, to think anything I must have a conception which, this conception, I do not conceive since through it I conceive what it intends. It is thus verbum since, as verbum cordis, it exactly parallels the spoken words of language in this respect, of “standing for” another. To consider the word itself we need another word (the original word

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materially cited), while to conceive our conception is a new concept, in “second intention”. The same applies to the other two acts of the understanding in traditional logic, viz. judgement and syllogism (reasoning). I think a real situation, an act of being or being something, through an interior “word” which, precisely as interior, I do not think of. To make an object of that very judgement I would need a new concept (first act of understanding) of “this judgement”, while taking the judgement itself in second intention would most likely be judging that that judgement is true. And so it is, mutatis mutandis, with reasoning (syllogism) or identifying two things identical with a third thing. This signum formale, common characteristic of the three quasiinstruments of thinking, is really a characterisation of the same feature of any possible knowledge, viz. its finitude, from a different starting-point. * Finitude, now, is what has to be overcome, since it is quite literally untruth, as Hegel says. This is shown or appears in many ways. We have envisaged here the sublation, the transcendence of knowledge in and by love, after discovering an essential, a clinging finitude in the knowledge relation, its subject-object structure. Our conclusion here will be that love, the absolute that emerges from beyond Hegel´s last dialectical category, i.e. absolved from finitude, is ultimate unity of all and each with all and each beyond all privation. In this respect the insight of Aquinas is vindicated that the society of others (friends) is not of the esse, not essential to heaven, to eternity as blessedness. The moving premise is that infinity, the truth, is necessarily differentiated, since as undifferentiated it is abstract idea merely. This is the necessity of creation from which our idea of freedom derives, since we see it there in exercise. One, anyone and everyone, is of necessity free. The necessity is what makes it a value. It is at this point that the question was first raised as to the number of the elect, and the same question underlies current neuroses as to population dynamics. Intuitive grasp of, again, the untruth of finitude yields the insight that “there can never be enough”, the one hundred and forty four thousand of Scripture. It is quite obviously wrong to see this as standing for merely a very much larger number, since obviously there would be no reason for the symbolic function not to be still and equally

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operant, were this number itself, or the one it in turn symbolised, to be stated. One passes beyond the old puzzle concerning an actually infinite multitude here. For such a multitude, taken absolutely, is not temporally and spatially extended, since these are forms of finite understanding merely. In love selves, usually but not by any inherent necessity two at a time, find themselves in each other or, as it develops into family and beyond, in one another. The principle of family very soon disappears, within our individual life and, possibly, within the temporal unfolding of human society. In the present though it heralds eternal universal love, the “kingdom of the spirit”. The finding of self in other is the going beyond self, identity in difference, which not merely transcends but takes away finite number, ipso facto surmounting quantity as a category. Eternity is thus ego-less at the same time as it is absolute subjectivity, the position of Aquinas. This is thou, we say, by the principle of universal incarnation, which, as subjectivity, becomes I am that, the one “closer to me than I am to myself”. Absolute reality might thus be pictured as an infinite hall of mirrors, all different as distinct from one another (Leibniz’s principle) but in each of which the subject sees him- or herself. Yet the subject too is equally one such mirror. The mirrors, therefore, would have to stand such that each one, and, again, there is no end to them, no number, reflects each one of the others, and this without end, since each one reflected is itself reflecting ad infinitum. Yet, as we said above, space, with time, belongs with the finite, as of course do mirrors. We however can only think under this ultimately false, because merely symbolic form of time. Time, to which it is impossible to think an end, is just thereby the Absolute’s symbol, as is space and, latterly, space-time. It is proto-incarnation, setting the stage for structured differentiation, the universal as essential manifestation in particularity. In time we experience, and forecast, population growth, supplying the scenarios needed, other worlds, other spaces. The idea of an eternal return was bound to finitude, a certain number, and to that extent inappropriate. It can be raised, however, in the light of cosmology, to the idea of a perpetual new beginning, with new (not returning) people, in time after entropic rundowns succeeded by cosmic explosion, though this result by no means explains itself. Rather, it might seem the latest device of thinking for accommodating our more ample grasp of the temporal, as of cosmic and natural history.

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Reincarnation, again, is put forward as permitting the self to be co-aeval with all time, finite or infinite in duration. By the same principle one should be spread out through all space, even into those reaches of it with no apparent conscious or rational presence. This shows at once how thought itself supplies for what reincarnation-theory attempts, continuous and extended presence. Our contemplation of history, our awareness of a future, our vision and actual visiting of distant spaces is our reincarnation. If, all the same, reincarnation forms already part of our self-understanding, then of those who reincarnate there is likewise an infinity. They will have have done this from the beginning, though invisibly to us or to current science, or even without beginning. The process, in view of the finitude of temporal and spatial categories as such, would be not real as represented. This too, however, leads to an absolute subjectivity transcending a finite society of friends. The scholar notoriously, and by a certain compliment or gallantry to otherness, lives more intensely in other times and places than there where, and when, we see him. Such is the superior power of spirit, for which we confer dignities upon him, as upon the saint. We transcend here the notion, noble in itself but fraught with contradiction, of gratitude for a contingent creation, of self or other. Indeed any possible milieu is proper and not external to self and so not “outside”. Equally, we transcend the idea of being “thrown” into existence by whatever agency. Each of us is this pre-primordial hall of mirrors, standing without end of any sort as the very substance of eternity, “full of eyes”. Equally, it is the ultimate formality, the necessity beyond but grounding all laws of number and, hence, of logic. As formality it is neither existent nor non-existent, it is the I for whom existence is but an option, since it is utterly actual under any and all ways of thinking it. * We mentioned knowledge-representation, called by Aquinas the intentional species. Something is needed through which to have knowledge of what it “represents”, not of it. For that a new species would be needed. Today Butchvarov1 and others open the possibility of direct knowledge without such mediation. This might seem similar to McTaggart, where knowledge disappears, as dialectically unthinkable without contradiction, in final reality and there is instead direct perception 1 P. Butchvarov, “Knowledge and Representation”, Dictionary of Metaphysics and Ontology (ed. Burkhardt & Smith), Philosophia, München 1991, pp. 431-2.

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by each of all, including infinite perception of one another’s perceptions of perceptions of perceptions. For all knowledge must be at once inside (the species through which) and outside. Here is the point of the inside being the outside and vice versa. In place of Aristotelian distinction between, say, noesis and dianoia (though preserved by Husserl) modern philosophy has the cogito for all forms of awareness, of which it is of course itself the awareness. It is the same with Hegel’s cognition, Erkenntnis, or Heidegger’s Denken, understood as “letting being be”, something which may or may not be embodied in sense-perception, imagination or emotion, say, while Aquinas himself spoke of cognitio sensus, intentional sensation, as quaedam ratio. In McTaggart consciousness is finally disclosed as what is best called love, he finds, as a reciprocity more perfect than either knowledge or will, being love or loving perception of others, all or some and, equally and as if given together, of their loving perceiving of oneself or yet others indifferently. Perception seems here to be a kind of metaphor for mutual generation and maintenance in being, final truth of the outside’s being the inside and vice versa. The self is coterminous or co-extensive with all selves he perceives perceiving him. Here, clearly, there is no further need for intentional species, since we have arrived at perfect reciprocity. But if there is no representation, even of non-existent objects of thought, then, for example, a great claim is made for imagination and its fiction. Fictive worlds are no longer to be seen as mental representations. They merely do not exist, real though they be. They are realised as thought, i.e. it is precisely as thought, Denken, that they are realised, “thinged” we might almost say. Viewing knowledge thus as a direct identification of its object, and not via a representation or species immanent in the knower, is a first step to viewing knowing subjects as spirits, not situated in space or time but rather taking these as modes of their own cognition. Where knowledge is universally perfect each becomes all and all is in each. The representation or species becomes necessary if we imagine the knowing as tied to or “working through” a body. But if the body is not itself more than appearance, sign, itself indeed a representation (of spirit), then the requirement falls away. A representation is not needed within a representation. This will be the final truth, whatever the current state of scientific explanation. Such explanation will always be relational to current perception and hence not definitive. For example, how we perceive an object, say an animal, depends on the form of receiving light typical of the human retina, with its finite number of retinal rods. Even though newspaper and

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television pictures are rated in comparison with this retinal image it is itself no more absolute theoretically. So it may itself be compared with Xray vision, a different receptivity to colours or dimensions, and so on again, or in reverse direction of comparison. One can, further, one should even, relativise the animal, any animal, and the light itself in a similar way, as one should even the notion of an object (as we do in finally rejecting or transcending knowledge as a category or, rather, in passing within knowledge from the Object to the Idea). This relativity, that is, characterises any science whatever that is dependent upon observation and its attendant interpretation, e.g. in a substance philosophy as compared to a process philosophy. We now know that the subject plays a role also in measurement. But if any extended or material object of knowledge is thus variable, so that the knowledge-relation (having the outside inside as it is outside) thus negates itself, then the only proper object of knowledge, if any, can be another spirit like ourselves, and one moreover directly perceived. This in turn though implies that I cannot be other than my perception of myself. The idea of a hidden substance, behind what is then seen as prima facie appearance, itself comes from the materialistic imagining we just thought our way out of. This further implies though that perception is free. The directness mentioned is directness of will or choice and, in so far as we perceive at all, it is affirmation. A perception in hate makes no sense, since with the departure of substance it is the ethical, love in fact, that is constitutive. One cannot stop here though. Such perception in fact brings the other into being. Where else might he come from? By parity of reasoning we may be sure that we ourselves result from, are, that is to say, perceptions internal to the others, of all of them or of those who are in turn perceived thus constitutively by others or, eventually, by ourselves returned upon. The body then, which is to say the external world, is a unitary semiotic system. “External” is mere metaphor for “semiotic”. There is no outside and inside since both are one. This is what it comes to. As a differentiation of the absolute I am myself the absolute thus differentiated, in view of the nature of this supra-organic whole which is in fact beyond all or any this or abstract particular, since it has no beyond. There is not even a nothing beyond it, since itself it creates space, position and all “beyond” within itself. I am thus superior even to those angels postulated by Aquinas. For he says that they are created with the species of all things innate within them and this is the only way not to identify them with the absolute, with God, if one understands that as spirits they know all things. For they have no way, he claims, of coming at knowledge they might not yet possess.

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Here we have the ancestor of Descartes’ innate ideas dismissed by the empiricists. But by the reasoning outlined above they reflect the truth, though in the distorted mirror of a received and in a measure misconceived contingency of creation. The actuality of such beings, of pure spirits in any form, however, makes a by-product of the logical relations, those “instruments of reason” not in the last analysis separable from doctrines of knowledge-representation, which the logicians would dismiss in toto as “psychologism”. Instead of innate ideas, anyhow, we should rather conceive of mind, spirit, as that universal possibility found identical with necessity in Hegel’s Logic. Any spirit, to be spirit, has or is this and so spirit, whether one or many or even, as Plato said of “the universal”, neither one nor many, is thus differentiated identity with any other in its own self-being. Our abstract notion of identity itself derives from this the true and thus far individual universe. Angels or “separated substances” (Aristotle) stand for what we are, stand for self-consciousness, freed from phenomena of birth, life and death. The ultimate attempt to overcome this temptation, this condemnation rather, to subjectivism, expresses itself in the signum formale as taught by John of St. Thomas, one Jean Poinsot, contemporary with Descartes, a doctrine we have found related to that of transubstantiation of the eucharistic species. This signum, as concept, judgement or syllogism, is constitutive of the act of knowing without itself being knowable in that same act, as we saw, but only in a second reflection or intention. Such a “pure” or formal sign actually should not be called a sign at all, however. It is not a mediating reality but a pure relation exercised in and by the intellect. One tried here as against the Scotists to avoid attributing objective and mediating reality to the species, i.e. to the represented appearance, in order to save knowledge from all paremphainomenon or that which would “appear beside”, as Aristotle wished to do when arguing for freedom of any possible knowing from dependence upon anything material, such as the brain. We go one further than he does here in claiming that in this dialectical process knowledge itself does not remain what we originally thought it was, viz. knowledge with its essential subject-object (and even, mutatis mutandis, subject-predicate!) structure. Knowledge is, certainly, a relation and once reality is seen as wholly spiritual the need for such mechanisms disappears. In fact, again, the creation of species within finite spirits or angels is an incoherent doctrine. The angels, as spirits, would have to be in immediate contact with what they know. That is, they would all perceive and be perceived by one another as constitutive of just that, of what they are. They could not be abstract subjects thus made objects.

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The only question then is whether such a perfect reciprocity should still be called knowledge. McTaggart claims that it should not, that in this final trans-categorial instance which is reality knowledge “shall vanish away”, be seen as itself an imperfect concept. We do not know things, we do not make judgements, we do not argue. The belief that we do is a mere fragmentary perception of a reality ultimately different. The perfect or true concept, says Hegel, is I myself, “universal of universals”. This Concept is the self as universal possibility in necessity, again. It thus “keeps to itself”, as only spirit knows spirit. See here the addenda to EL161 and 166: concept and even judgement develop, he says, as does a plant, from within themselves, but truly or freely so. Here the duality of intention and intended is left behind. One might argue though that this leaves knowledge and logic just as (but not where) they always have been. It does and it does not, since it situates them. * In fact there cannot be ultimately this thing, this person, that perceives, knows. The persons are the relations. Perceptions perceive one another. The “system”, the absolute, is not a bundle of relations, like some piece of kinetic art, since it is the whole. Declaring reality fundamentally relational means that there just is no “objective” view of it, as if from outside. The outside is the inside, deep inside, each of us at the centre, as reflecting all the other centres, differently maybe. This again means that we are free in regard to our perception, since no qualities whatever are non-relationally fixed. Perception slides into, merges with, creativeness, as the narrator elaborates, inserts a fiction, the beholder wishes to sketch, the sketcher adds, alters, distorts, we mimic what we hear but there is no mimicry without exaggeration, alteration. The law-courts have no chance in all this, necessary though they may be. We might say, the whole truth is never a “nothing but”, never qualified, since the positive is itself the negative and vice versa. * This pen that I hold, for example, is not an independent object, though we speak so. It is a part of my life. I look through it (signum formale) to that, to my cognitive self-expression, in which, again, I behold all others; the absolute is here incarnate. I need this symbol or sacrament to apprehend, to carry it, or so I represent it to myself. The pen is thus really and truly nothing.

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Consider light, shapes, eyes. If light is the object of the eyes, as it is the medium of sight, then the eyes are the subject of light, this medium. No doubt light or some essential quality of it can be perceived by a blind man, or registered on a machine. But light means what we perceive. Or there are photons we could not see. But then we have merely shifted ground to something else just as essentially correlated to some other instance of our perception, our taking a “reading”, for instance. Both eyes and light are abstracted from the relation of sight. This relation is not seen. It is one of the filters through which we do not indeed perceive the whole but in which this is incarnated or represents itself, as whole in each part since we are here in and one with it. We say we see a dog. But there are no dogs. Seeing is a species of sight and sight is an essentially fragmentary perception or, therefore, misperception. Yet a dog, thus seen, if we should see through, may be a person and immortal spirit and shape of eternity. In that way the things of sense “both are and are not”. For this reason cognitio (iudicium) sensus is not de re, ultimately. It is de re in the sense that the real sensory realm cannot be other than what is sensed. It lies open to view. Its appearance is its reality, yet as mere appearance this is not reality tout court. What we sense, again, and therefore, is within our freedom. This is our world, our milieu, but it is not the world, absolutely. Realists say it is because they think we have a universal knowledge of absolute reality or of nature as a creation, this being what distinguishes from animals, viz. our freedom from deterministic restriction to a limited cognitional environment. But the universal thinking, we have been finding, negates nature and returns us to spirit in a wholly relational world of mutual perception within perception, transcending substance. We think, on common-sense-lines, that we have a superior sensory apparatus to animals who are one and all only known through this putative apparatus of ours, if indeed they are knowable at all. Sexuality is the expression of this situation. The sex relation, which, like sight, is an action, is essentially pleasure, not the procurement of pleasure but pleasure. Pleasure, on the Aristotelian analysis, is desire to continue or perpetuate present experience. Yet inasmuch as the subject totally focuses this desire, such focus being the extremity of pleasure, it vanishes, in the paradox of orgasm, more or less diffuse. Nothing illustrates better the incompatibility of time and reality. That it is uniquely revealed in sex, however, shows that sex is privileged, like love in McTaggart’s philosophy, of which indeed it is the most obvious instance. In love, as in sex, we escape from illusion and touch eternal reality. That we have in our bodies this potentiality for extreme delight precisely in one

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another is further evidence that “bodies” do not make up an independent and abstract realm. But then neither does “nature”. They both are ciphers or filters of spirit, and just in sex we forget and overcome them precisely through them. That new human life and spiritual presence arises, when it so wills, from just this is confirmation of this view rather than motivation for reducing sex to the exigencies of animal reproduction. All thought and perception in idealism is such experience and not a standing back from it. It is not thought of something else, not “intentional”. One thinks rather the thing, at one with the thought, therefore. Correspondence truth theory, it now appears, enslaves thought if once it is absolutised. For we then have to speak as if it were a true account, for example when presenting this present idealist theory of reality, or whenever speaking, for that matter, of “theory of reality”, of res. If, though, we ourselves “cannot say what anything is” (Henry Veatch’s reproach against modern logic) then this is because, in strict reality, nothing is anything else with which it might be identical. Language, that is to say, at least in its predicative mode, has to give way, like all the other finite categories of the dialectic, beyond a certain pragmatic point. We “show” what we cannot say, but since we can say that this is in fact the situation we cannot then prohibit development of what we thus open up. See De anima III 10, 433a27. So the sexual touch is not touch of something, but finding of self, of subject, more surely in the other, no longer objectivised in the predicate relation. Once interpret this latter in terms of identity, indeed, then one has to take this further step of identification, which eliminates the otherness, absolutely viewed. In this sense Adam “knew” his wife, an ancient language tells us. This is why spirit proposes for itself two sexes perpetually striving to be “oned”, though some say there are or should be more than two. Here, anyhow, to touch is to be touched and touch, like sight, is relation, not subsisting relation because the subsistence is the relation. So here too, when this point is reached the categories are already transcended. Thus Aquinas’s theology of the Trinity has to be thoroughly analogical. Thought that is not of something is free. Correspondence truth theory, except when merely tolerated as our natural mode of representation, enslaves thought. “Look at it this way,” we say, as if challenging the will of an unhappy or confused other. We say this because it is the way we ourselves think, each one, freely finding pathways in a freedom without limit, beyond light, darkness and sight itself. Anything less wears itself out, i.e. contradicts itself, beyond a certain point. Aristotle does not deny Plato here but supplements him, rather:

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In that vulgar conception of actuality which mistakes for it what is palpable and directly obvious to the senses, we must seek the ground of a widespread prejudice about the relation of the philosophy of Aristotle to that of Plato. Popular opinion makes the difference to be as follows. While Plato recognises the idea and only the idea as the truth, Aristotle, rejecting the idea, keeps to what is actual, and is on that account to be considered the founder and chief of empiricism. On this it may be remarked: that although actuality certainly is the principle of the Aristotelian philosophy, it is not the vulgar actuality of what is immediately at hand, but the idea as actuality. Where then lies the controversy of Aristotle against Plato? It lies in this. Aristotle call the Platonic idea a mere dynamis, and establishes in opposition to Plato that the idea, which both equally recognise to be the only truth, is essentially to be viewed as an energeia, in other words, as the inward which is quite to the fore, or as the unity of inner and outer, or as actuality, in the emphatic sense here given to the word.2

The idea, then, is “what both recognise to be the only truth”, as emerges more clearly from Aristotle’s Metaphysics than his book On the Soul, where he by and large takes nature as given as we experience it, as does Hegel at times too, or any human being. Through this, though, the contradiction embedded in common-sense observation only emerges more clearly, pushing us on from “essence” to “the notion”. At the summit of plant and animal life, goes the story, we have human intelligence, reflecting back with confidence upon all phenomena, of self and other indifferently. This accounts for our apparent power to “know the natures of all bodies” by simple appeal to an immateriality permitting identity of knower and known. For Teilhard de Chardin this is the universe “becoming conscious of itself”. For Aristotle, in contrast, nous “comes from outside”. In fact though there is no inside to which it should be outside, which is why St. Thomas asserts that animals and plants do not form part of the resurrection, of eternal reality. They are rather ciphers, at most disguised or projected spirits, our own or others’. We are after all nothing without our environment, the outside that is inside. In positing the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed as making up for the absence of plants and animals Aquinas touches a mystery. Our bodies are the index, the proto-text, which nature imitates and upon which she is built. Better, in positing the human form as index or cipher of spirit (Blakes’s “human form divine”) we posit nature along with it. In our own time, as latest “cultural posit”, we have evolved the doctrine of evolution which, as it stands, is contradiction, paralleling J.H. Newman’s 2

G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, EL 142, Zusatz. Cf. F. Inciarte, “Die Einheit der aristotelischen Metaphysik”, Philsophisches Jahrbuch 1994, 1 Halbband, pp. 1-22.

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contemporaneous doctrine of The Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Such a doctrine, as it is, cannot exclude development of this doctrine of development itself, as proper to thought, which “cancels the mediation in the very act of mediating”.3 “Even if we have known Christ after the flesh we know him so no more” (the Apostle Paul). Thus philosophy accomplishes or perfects religion. Its system, therefore, is that of the so-called mysticism, the ascetic theology, of believers. This truth gives the ultimate significance of attempts, e.g. in later Rabbinical Judaism, to forbid use of the divine name, the tetragrammaton, balanced by an Islamic positing of a myriad of such names. Hence, also, we have the title of Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names or even the later On the Analogy of Names of Cajetan. That we cannot speak unequivocally of God, Hegel will later show, make explicit rather, means that we cannot utter truth at all. It remains inward, eliciting only one Word, one manifestation as not separable from itself. But time, we have found, is an illusion. So in saying here that evolutionary doctrine has evolved in our own time we relate more deeply still to this illusion, thus necessitating idealism so as to preserve consistency. This is the Achilles heel of “physicalism”, the problem which C.S. Lewis focused on4 and which G.E.M. Anscombe’s critique of his presentation (1947) did little more than obscure. Lewis’s picture, though, of a mechanical and fortuitous chaos apart from direction by reason from without, inserted at some point in the evolutionary process in flagrant disharmony with it, would be, if it were indeed his picture, an example of just that “vulgar empiricism” of which Hegel complained. “What is the world without the reason?” asked Frege, not such a “realist” after all, maybe. There never was nor could be a nature thus alone into which reason is merely inserted. To imagine this is “to wash the fur without washing it”.5 What seems to come last in time’s false optic is realised eternally, history, natural or human, being ultimately a dialectical presentation, of ourselves to ourselves by ourselves, ultimately cancelling the appearance of movement it first calls forth. History is not here reduced; it is what it is in its own being and nature, though we are not to cease speaking of it in the normal way for everyday purposes, as day succeeds day indeed. Like the dialectic, history is determined, whatever direction in indirection it may take, by the end as realised. Thus history transcends its temporal format. 3

Hegel, EL 50. In his book Miracles and elsewhere. For Anscombe, see her Collected Papers. 5 G. Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic (tr. J.L. Austin), 1953, p.36e. 4

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* We seem to have in Aristotle that nous, or active intellect, is one in all (humans). One cannot easily see an implication of the individual “intellectual soul” as developed by the Thomists and usually claimed as confirmed, in advance, by Aristotle. There is not, that is to say, a symmetrical progression from an assumption of the vegetative functions into the sensitive soul (where both “souls” are forms or life-principles of plants or animals respectively) to an assumption of the sensitive functions into the intellectual soul. Man, that is, is a rational animal although an animal is not properly a sensitive plant. The division of life sp ecificallyis more dual than threefold. This can seem to clash with many of Aristotle’s discussions of conscious functioning in the area where what is loosely called mind and body interact. He holds fast, however, to his assertion that intellect comes from outside. This view though is not easily interpretable in the later theological way as the infusion of each individual intellect (soul) into the fetus or, more transcendentally, as simply the direct creation of each person somehow in parallel with any genuine natural conception, whatever the difficulties of identifying the latter with clarity. If this is so one can wonder what, or which, Aristotle means by “form” at Metaphysics 7.3 where he inclines to say, or does say, that it is the form which is substance and not the composite, i.e. if there is no individual intellectual soul. He is obviously struggling and our aim here is more to have his help in enquiring how things really are than in helping him to convenient consistency. He is usually presented as teaching that there is an active and a passive intellect. The active intellect, we have seen, is as a light from outside. The passive intellect is “the place of forms”. However, scrutiny of the texts might rather indicate that there is no such place. Rather, what some call “knowledge forms”, universal concepts, the accumulation of them, is all that the “passive intellect”, also called potential, is. This is the rationality of the rational animal. So we are considering the possibility, not as relying on the authority of Aristotle, but with the help of his system, that there is no specifically intellectual soul informing a material body. We have after all indicated earlier on a rejection of matter from an idealist standpoint and the tendency here is partly to find implicit harmony between Aristotle and this standpoint. Those scholastics arguing for individual souls posit them as a necessary being in the Aristotelian sense in which the “separated substances” or unmoved movers were necessary beings. There is a huge

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dualism here, even if it falls short of the Cartesian divorce or Leibnizian pre-established harmony of two parts. It falls short since the body, in scholastic or at any rate Thomistic thought is not actually anything apart from this soul and this is so whether we reduce it to prime matter directly subject to this ultimate form or posit some intermediate matter lacking independent actuality. This more moderate huge dualism, however, might be seen as resolvable on a Hegelian or similar scheme. At Posterior Analytics II 19 Aristotle, considering the process of concept-formation by induction and/or abstraction from matter (epagoge) speaks of the universal “coming to rest in the soul”. This might seem to contradict the thesis that there is no intellectual soul in Aristotle (unless analogously perhaps). Alternatively though we can postulate that the first universal founds the intellectual soul, while still keeping the idea of the active intellect as one, divine and “from outside”. Subsequent ideas, as they would be, would take their place as grounded within this first universal as including them. Being is said in many ways, as Aristotle says, and it is precisely being which is in question here. For there is general agreement that what falls first into the intellect, as Aquinas puts it, is being, ens, to on. Only, it does not fall into it, it is it, we might now say. This, however, is precisely what we find in the Hegelian dialectic. Nor need this mean any absolute doctrine of the primacy of being. One might still begin with some other concept and might still arrive at the absolute idea identified by Hegel with Aristotle’s thought thinking itself. This will mean that the dialectic, this process, just is the mind or anima intellectualis. I do not think. Thinking thinks. This in turn leads to that conception Aristotle as realist naturalist, if he was that, was not able to form, of a whole more perfect and harmonious than the organic. Here the individual, in thinking, is one with all thinking. Ultimately this means that he is one with all other thinkers since these thinkers form the whole of reality as the necessary differentiations of spirit by which alone spirit is more than an abstraction merely. He is as necessary to the whole as the whole is necessary to him, and this formality of thought will hold, whether or not being is correctly taken as the first concept, and not rather, say, freedom or thought itself. If one, interpreting thus, would take up Aristotle’s stopping-place in Met. 7.3 where the form is taken as substance then one can build on this so as to make animals and plants and material nature misperception or “fragmentary” perception (as in McTaggart), along with all that lies under the form(s) of space and time. This is implicitly the position of Aquinas when he denies, again, that plants and animals can have part in the resurrection. His finding this implied by, as itself implying the presence of

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such misperception, clashes with his account of a creation at once finite and real, as when he says God’s proper effect is being. That is, he here presents external nature as absorbed (aufgehoben) into “the bodies of the redeemed” without presenting these bodies, these “redeemed” individuals, as themselves absorbed into the infinite and absolute Idea, wherein the notion of production of an object can have no place since it entails the finitude of the producer. The denial, that is, does not limit infinite power in the freedom of necessity. Creation, that is, proceeds unhindered by finite thought-forms or, rather, the other that the Idea, as act, projects, is in its very conception, viz. in and by the Concept, the Idea’s own self, though this identification is in religion deferred by us, in finite self-contradiction, to a future eternity. This, that appears as the “pure play” of the Concept, is actually the exit in return and contrariwise of the Idea’s Other or Word, in religion, as found in life, its death which is its resurrection or the procession of Spirit which is its proceeding. Logic, that is, contains the reality of external Nature and Proceeding Spirit as being what they illuminate or manifest, the “method” called also thought’s self-thinking. Hegel thus allows Aristotle’s thought to reveal itself as absolute idealism. For this is development as self-revelation, or vice versa. It must therefore modulate into something yet more comprehensive which is yet the same. This, therefore, is the essence of interpretation. In interpreting their predecessors philosophers, philosophy or Wisdom (Sophia) itself, actively designs or re-designs the world, or nature and spirit, as the Word of logic or thinking. For, viewed ideally or “eternally”, design and re-design are the same. This is important for, among other things, understanding the later, but also earlier, doctrine of the Eternal Return, which thus itself returns eternally. Logic contains Nature and Spirit as itself exhausted in their proceeding, where, in Hegel’s own Christian terms, transmuting theology, Nature or Word is generated and Spirit proceeds from just this Word as revealing Logic. Already, however, we have the conceptual position that “the outside is the inside”. In general, if nature and history just are a dialectic then Scholastic attempts to explain Aristotle’s total disharmony with Thomism, say, at Metaphysics 7 and other places, by distinguishing between “logical” and “physical” treatment of concepts (nature in itself and not as thought, abstractively, by us) are not fully warranted. They do not consider or admit the possibility that thought might itself be the ultimate reality, rather than essentially intentional of things “physical”. Consistent consideration of infinite spirit seems however to entail this, as when Aquinas himself claims that God has no real relation with creatures, the

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obvious reason being that they are not real in the same way (analogy of being) as spirit.

CHAPTER ELEVEN SELF AND WORLD

Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of societies which have an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us. Popper does not say, though he might have done, that our very existence itself is the direct result of a social act performed by two other people whom we are powerless to choose or prevent, and whose genetic legacy is built into our body and personality. We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being.1

Yes, my existence is the result of that social act. This prompts one to ask, to the extent that one knows one is free – am I my existence? We say, after all, “I exist”, with all appearance of predication. I, like God in some systems, might be then beyond being. The soul proceeding from God, this has been one way of shoring up this conscious freedom against parental despotism or “traducianism”. Others find that consciousness itself gives the necessary independence. “The principle of personality is universality”, said Hegel, making no reference to a soul. Putting such a subsistent form against an otherwise “material” world gratuitously devalues the latter. One might say: dogs produce dogs; free beings produce free beings. The social act in question is no more “material” than the writing of a poem. Life, however, is the project of imitation of reality, of the whole surrounding one, viewed as infinite or absolute. So life indicates the ubiquity of a full infinity transcending space and time, as we find it in Cusanus, Leibniz, Hegel and others. Anima est quodammodo omnia. 1

Bryan Magee, Popper, Fontana Modern Masters, London 1973, 1977, p.69.

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With life Mind (Anaxagoras), Being (Parmenides), applies itself at a given point, making itself more present there, the point or part in consequence asking itself or studying how to maintain itself as a system in imitation of the infinite’s permanence. This is “cunningly” concealed, all happening as if by chance or, at higher levels, at the wish of the living being.2 Life thus emerges as a kind of world over against its containing world, which in fact is rather contained in consciousness and which the latter, or living being, seeks to devour. Finally, as term of this process, by the principle of incarnation the rational creature arises from whom all creation, as indeed all logic, has come forth. It is as if the ergo in cogito ergo sum were to be taken causally. This is in fact the concealed thrust of the axiom. We have the saying, “I will put my spirit into them.” To maintain itself the would-be organism must replenish its forces from what surrounds it, perpetually, for it is in this interchange that it takes over, replaces indeed the environing world, by an identity in difference. It tries various solutions, analogous to the theories we produce when trying to understand, Popper points out, developing mouths or other organs, which it, or the phylum to which it belongs (or some “selfish” individual gene) retains as long as they serve, along with organs or processes for expelling used material and so on. It also begins to modify the environment with external structures, webs, dams, nests, houses and whole cities, fuelled by a correspondingly developed intentional language. These last resemble theories or knowledge more closely still as being conscious solutions to problems. Knowledge though has always been accorded an ontic structure, thinking or knowing being a “having the form of the other as other” (i.e. not just one’s own form making one to be what and who one is, determinatum ad unum). Any problem-solving, anyhow, is a pursuit of happiness, an elimination of its contrary, whether in action or thought, contemplation being merely “the highest praxis” (Aristotle). Consciousness is thus summoned in its very essence to become absolute, not merely a collective universality (social being) but absolute and so free. Nihil humanum me alienum puto. The ancient poet understood this, while everything is human as object for the rational creature. “Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird”, Keats assures his nightingale. This, again, is not pathetic or poetic fallacy, uttered in vain, but the insight that this nightingale, like our household pets, finds its true self in us as we spirits find ourselves in one another and all find 2 This cunning of reason is a Hegelian notion (Encycl. Logic 209). But cp. Popper, Unended Quest, Fontana, Collins, London 1976, p. 179.

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themselves in the One or in the bond of love which is “the bond of being”, its analogy, the whole with which the parts identify in their very difference, univocally, and which thus alone is, the Idea. “And this we call God”, some say, by linguistic decision seeming already to make “God” secondary to “this”, a first cause, forma formarum or whatever it might be. They thus transcend the option for or against religious language while retaining the substance, as we find so strongly in McTaggart’s formally atheist philosophy. All roads lead to Rome, some say. So in uttering this sentence, “and this we call God”, Aquinas declared an end to religious slavery, though he was by no means the first. “I and the Father are one”, said another. We are fathers of our world, fathers of the Father or Logic, in fact, by the free, non-programmed necessity of our thinking, thinking that has to “see for itself”, not subject to but identical with, and this maybe but for a “moment”, the logical “laws”. In seeing that life is a project of duplicating the whole we confirm the philosophies of coincident monads, of coincidence of opposites, of identity in difference. Any consciousness is the whole as self-knowing, to the extent that it is consciousness. A finite consciousness is ipso facto a false consciousness (“How can the gods see us face to face until we have faces?”3) and atman, the true self, is simply Self. Susan Sontag wrote of Hegel’s “intellectual failure”, though where he failed she failed to say4. It is rather that his thought has laid bare the failure of intellect at the level of (absolute) intellect itself. This is an achievement, not a failure. Dialectical thinking opens the way to that universal affirmation which is love, and to a reality beyond the prejudice of existence, as in sistology. All forms of objective representation are provisional, in flux, like the evolutionary process itself. This, and not some other thing, is the true unity of philosophical experience. It is a strange anomaly that we simultaneously postulate the emergence of life from non-life at some past time and reprobate theories of spontaneous generation from “matter” as obscurantist. Life, we say, is always a re-production, the laying of eggs or splitting of cells. Yet once, at least, it was not, as follows from the reality, as science now affirms, of a linear natural history. This is so, irrespective of whether we prefer the view, championed by one of the discoverers of DNA, of an extraterrestrial origin to life (in view of the improbability of evolutionary timescales otherwise entailed) or whether we incline to explanations of a self-cancelling opening to the development of life from non-life through 3

The question asked by the main character in C.S. Lewis’s retelling of the myth of Psyche and Eros, Till we have Faces. 4 In her record of a visit to what was then North Vietnam.

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atmospheric change induced by the first organisms (algae) themselves as presented in, say, D. Attenborough’s Life on Earth. Viewed philosophically, however, and more specifically from an absolute idealist standpoint, neither the anomaly nor its solution signify unless aesthetically merely. If the explanation of life shall involve more than the earth and one star, the sun, this is as such more fitting for the view that life is the universe, the whole, become conscious of itself in the part, so that the part then is the whole. In any case though science requires that the process be explained holistically. Even so, final understanding must transpose the evolutionary development to a dialectical process of thought corresponding to a non-temporal series, even a necessity, imposed by freedom, in infinite intelligence, with which the true self, of each and all, eternally corresponds. It is an explanation, according to our modes of perception, within which we dig up the fossils, journey in space and so on, with more or less virtuality, of what I, as anyone, am. Finally, thought itself is transposed from thought’s purely intentional and thus, at face-value at least, partial mode to a form of reality overcoming all limitation of parts over against a supra-organic whole, at once infinitely simple and infinitely complex (union of opposites). This is best called love, thus far, it might seem, vindicating the Franciscan vision over the Dominican. Love thus includes mind in a higher mode, as we said earlier that the divine ideas are not intentional. * By idealism Popper understands one or more versions of sense data or other theories of representative perception. He finds it unscientific; it is almost as if he feels that a scientist has to be a naive realist like Winston Churchill. For Churchill’s argument he cites does not go to the ground of things at all. Absolute idealism leaves science and everything else just as it is. It draws the consequences of a real infinity, inadequately approached in the analogy-of-being theory of some theologians. Popper is quite right that Hegel’s background is theological. So what? What absolute idealism says is that all these things, all the investigations of science, are thought by the absolute spirit, pure act, unchanged necessity. Mind, to be true, has to think absolutely, the only way to transcend contradiction. This is not determinism. Augustine and Aquinas had already grounded created freedom in divine omniscience. The free act is the one known and caused by Spirit itself without other causal intermediary. Thus quantum

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mechanics, the supposed randomness, confirms the Leibnizian vision. That the particles move randomly, if they do, means they are free, divinely moved without intermediary, being thus microcosms of the rational creature. Rationality is freedom, poised in judgment between alternatives, not confined to any behaviour or corresponding environment. Absolute idealism would add, however, that these particles are in the mode of our perception of things, like all things studied or broached in science, since this is true of matter as such. There can be no matter and all finite forms fall short of truth in themselves. The infinite is, beyond and without matter. Matter is our mode of perceiving finitude, negativity. Popper’s remark about idealism betraying people in poverty is a total non sequitur, only comparable to his saying that theology seems to him as such a lack of faith, as if Plato and Aristotle have no theology, or Aquinas and Augustine or Aquinas write nonsense, in consequence of lacking this presumably Popperian faith. * One of the great cleavages in experience is that between thought and being. We need not say it is the greatest. There are also those between life and death, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil, truth and falsity, male and female, finite and infinite and so on. So we say, you only thought you did that, we call thoughts entia rationis merely, and so on. Yet Aristotle described the first principle as Mind and as the thought that thinks itself, i.e. not a brain or a substance in being or being as such, producing thoughts as accidents. Each or any thought (idea divina), for Augustine or Aquinas later, is identical with the essentia divina or what absolute Mind is. For it no longer matters here who thinks the thoughts while now, in any thought whatever, thought’s selfthinking is verified. This is the foundation of the joke, or of humour and horror generally. Yet why should such a being have an essence, apart from a prior assumption of essentialism? Aquinas affirms, with Aristotle, that God is actus purus; this act is what God is. Why though speak of God as having an essence, under which this act, actus essendi, act of being, is brought, thus demanding the identification of essence and existence which one might say retains essentialist language while abandoning essentialism? He who IS here takes the step to him who will be what he will be, an alternative reading of the Exodus text. It might seem safer to say God both is and is not (Neoplatonism, Nicholas of Cusa et al.) than to treat being as a quasi-essence. There is no essence or common nature of the things that are, said Aristotle. Being,

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“existing”, is a separate principle as the insight that it is an act merely emphasises. This move though makes it less inevitable to go on to say, with Aquinas, that being is God’s proper effect, whereby he is a creator, properly if not essentially. An inner necessity to create, as proper to him, is yet irresistibly suggested, the view for which Hegel is often reproached, though Hegel brings out that such a necessity does not negate or restrict freedom. If, though, thought is primal then being and death are overcome at one stroke. Being is a divine thought like any other. Indeed God himself, the actually infinite, is first his own thought, thus negating this “is”. Such thought is not intentional of some being outside of it and the formal and the actual are here the same. This in fact is the true reading of the identity of essence and existence. So there is nothing “proper” about being and we ourselves are primarily divine thoughts and, as such, one with the divine “essence”, though in dispensing with Thomistic language we do not need to say that. We are one with the first, sole and all-embracing thought in its sovereign liberty. It thinks us as we think it. We know as we are known, since this knowledge is in fact making us what we will be, though in an eternal perspective beyond all future. This gives us a certain necessity and security, besides demanding a revision of logic such as Hegel undertook. It gives us a certain formality, suggested in Aquinas’s comparison of the angelic hierarchy with the number series. It would be in this sense that the Fregean postulate of “the thought”, in a third kingdom beyond empirical being and our subjective impressions and thinkings, finds application. Our very being is thus given a formal or timeless character reminiscent of the passage from death to life in religion. Account can be taken, too, of the differentiation of spirit, as tackled by McTaggart, into will and even emotion, recalling us to ideas seen as conscious contents. One can stress that the ancient tradition did not see thinking as an empirical process. This denial is, anyhow, the only alternative to a crass psychologism. We should rather see that timeless ideas might well be personal beings like ourselves, and vice versa. Thus angels were reckoned to be highly personal though without personal history. Time’s formally a priori character manifests history as Mind’s dialectic, closer to it, to the categories, than mere illustration. Only this conviction could have supported the labour of writing The Phenomenology of Mind. The question of salvation hinges very much, though, upon the dichotomy of thought and being. How shall I be or become what I am thought, absolutely, as being, what I should or ought to be in other words?

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But we are what we are and each one of us is his idea, as prison is the proper place for the criminal (Hegel’s example) as what he in a sense desires. Of course, like God, we will be what we will be. That is to say, the picture is not final, not finally revealed, either in time or within whatever series time represents. This is our freedom, again, not to be viewed as exclusively linked to time, as if the eternal were not free. Thus as a man sows so shall he reap indeed, but we are reaping already, timelessly; the sowing is the reaping and thus to them that have shall be given since they have it already, and the same with the negation. Similarly, the opposition between theory and praxis disappears as one approaches the ground of things. The Absolute Idea is, in the first place, the unity of the theoretical and practical idea, and thus at the same time the unity of the idea of life with the idea of cognition. (EL236 add.)

There is relief in this realisation, corresponding to the saying, “Whether we live or die we are the Lord’s”. Nor of course should such truths, or the veneration accorded to the contemplative life in medieval times, undermine the normal processes of education, of activating youngsters to virtuous or even purgative praxis. Still, in the temple of the mind one must learn to see that all is well and as it should be, this being the only way to mean that God is God, the Idea. Any “process theology” must therefore begin after this. If though there was ever a need for mysticism then philosophy thus does away with it since it is what mysticism, cramped by social and dogmatic pressures, was beginning to be, as the example of Plato and other thinkers showed in advance. The transposition, the leap (EL50) of thought mentioned above is relevant here. But thus it is that even Aquinas’s system can seem to have a certain “impurity” as a philosophy, corresponding to an epoch where an authoritarian theology and not metaphysics (equated by Aristotle with theologia), was judged “queen of the sciences”. This, though a necessary stage to our own position (we depend in part upon what was worked out then), was not then seen as a stage. People may say, when they wake up in the morning, it is good to be alive, as if there were some other negative state with which they are comparing it. But a state, a standing, status, just is a being in life, though it can be something more too, such as a conscious knowing and finally the Idea in which all is comprehended and ipso facto identical, as nothing temporal or extended or finite can be. The oppressiveness of the dreamstate from which we maybe wake cannot be extrapolated to a conception of an inferior, alternative shadow-life, as mankind has often imagined,

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because it is essentially that from which one awakes since one is not one’s own shadow merely and so can never become it. He is, we say, a shadow of his former self, as Edmund Blunden’s poor soldier cries “I am blown to bits”. But his companions exhort.... think of your father, of home, and so his experience is to take its place with the rest. He is alive or he is not he, and this alternative holds ceaselessly, for all, even where in the eyes of many they may seem to have died. That is why life is a form of thinking (“This is eternal life, to know etc.”), for which being, its sheen, is just one of the ideas, taking its place in a larger whole, as in the discipline called sistology. To this corresponds the saying, “In the midst of life we are in death” (media vitae in morte sumus), sung by the monks at their Lenten compline, not however as evoking gloomy resignation (though their monody might suggest this) but as the most liberating of all thoughts, spes unica as they say. * Marxism and Catholicism both are committed to realism, the public experienced world. Popper here follows the Marxist line he otherwise deprecates. One betrays the poor, he says, if one espouses idealism, the “treason of the learned”. Hegel on the other hand argues that idealism is the philosophical attitude. It is the attidtude of both Aristotle and Plato. One can find it in Aquinas but somehow obscured by so-called moderate realism, an emphasis on created reality as a separate but analogous being. This remains a contradiction also when renamed “ontological discontinuity”. The attraction of being for being brooks no division and what appears finite to the beholder, since the finite just is (false) appearance, is nothing but a window on the infinite itself. Thus it is that this beholder, monadic in the original sence, has no window on other such beholders in abstracto. All, rather, are absorbed in his view of the whole, the Idea. So, at the communion, writes Aquinas the poet, Sumit unus sumunt mille. For short, the individual is the universal as having himself discovered that the universal is the individual or that subjectivity is subject, is himself. The example of Marxism leads one to look back on Catholic realism specifically as also, it too, having a practical aim, i.e. an aim not subsumable under philosophy (thus rendering such realism impure qua philosophy). The aim might be that of managing populations mentally, turning them away (as under Pope Nicholas I according to Rudolph Steiner) from mystical religion, where one unites with the absolute reason.

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* In regard to the question of ultimate reality, what it might be, we try to identify something about which no further question can be asked, something, that is, which explains itself. The self-explanatory is at times takes simply as a name for, even as the kind of core-description of, God. In a similar way St. Thomas Aquinas rounds off his five proofs in each case with the phrase, “and this we call God”. Here the self-explanatory takes the form of first cause, of what changes all else without itself changing, of what is necessary in itself, of superlative being causing all other being or, fifthly, of intelligence setting all else in order. People sometimes ask, what caused God, as if apologists had missed this loophole in the arguments. These though are structured precisely to show that there is something to which this question, or a corresponding why-question, is not applicable, since it is the background theatre first causing the possibility of such questioning or, equally, bringing out what a question is. One can perhaps ask what causes one to think causally, Kant’s question though Hegel, for one, saw that this was already contradictory. To ask though what causes there to be a cause of causality simply brings the contradiction out into full light. If though all that is meant is to ask if there is a cause to causality then we can ask where or how the speaker rejects the above arguments and the discussion can continue from there. We can indeed ask why God is self-explanatory, even if we have stipulated God as this, since the concept is more general than that of God. The answer is that God is self-explanatory as postulated, since he is postulated as originator and sustainer of all else. So there is no independent reality in terms of which questions as to his cause or explanation might be answered. This is why he is self-explanatory or (a weaker thesis) not open to explanation. It follows that the exclusion of the why-question applies not only to God. It applies, more generally, to anything postulated as ultimate reality. It applies to the universe where this is treated as the whole of reality. Conversely, if it is this whole then nothing in or about it is finally inexplicable. It intrinsically elicits mediation. Forbidding the why-question about the universe does not give it the aspect of being self-explanatory, as God, again, is claimed to be on this understanding of necessary being. As changing and extended the universe is marked by finitude and so we are pointed ever beyond it. Alternatively, explanation must situate these as appearance or misperception. In fact, when we ask a perpetual whyquestion here, corresponding to the number-series, we are judging that the universe is not all, that it is limited. Those who refuse this question

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commonly do not so judge. A kind of idealism arises, as occurs in connection with relativity-theory, quantum physics and even biological evolutionary theory. Much indeed depends upon whether we can sustain the objective or independent reality of space and time. They would then be absolute, i.e. infinite in extension and duration but not infinite absolutely or from all points of view, as we understand God to be. Hence the problems, for example, about his power ever seeming to be limited, e.g. by human freedom or by an unknown future. A partial infinity does not so much explain itself as beg a question, rather (such as that about being in relation to time). Hence God is postulated, as he whose thoughts we are. In the Trinitarian relations, their theology, we have the schema for God’s selfexplanation. Each one of us, it will follow, as rational beings, are then identified with that and in that with one another. All are in God, should God be indeed God, as his ideas or whatever analogously corresponds to ideas, since outside of him there is nothing. Such ideas then will not be intentional as ours are, since God, Aquinas points out, can have no relation to some outside being. Yet the outside being Aquinas takes for granted has a real relation to God! Yet to say that God is in all things as their cause is only a weaker alternative if one has lapsed into a self-contradictory deism. What one means rather is their total cause, explanation and sustainer at all times and in all parts. So Aquinas ought to have been and perhaps was an absolute idealist. He had already made the move from the “dust thou art” stance of Genesis, funerals and papal elections, seeing the creation as penitus nihil, like the Psalmist’s veil perhaps.5 As in God’s thought, though, all things form a unity and identity with one another. If this is not what we see then we see falsely. It is as perfect a whole as the Trinity itself. Some put his whole, in fact, in the place of God. We can either say of this “and this we call God” or we can say that here God is denied. Similarly, Hegel either first presents the doctrine of creation without incoherence or he transcends and denies it. God is love, Christians say, and it is often urged that this does not licence saying that love is God, or absolutely first. But why exactly, unless it is felt that God must be being, as he/she/it is not in Plotinian or even Renaissance Christian mysticism? As union of opposites he is beyond being. For McTaggart the state of love in heaven transcends both knowledge and will in overcoming opposition of subject and object. “I in them and they in me.” It is also very Pauline. “Then shall I know even as I 5

AV Psalm 104, Vulgate 103.

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am known.” For how is that? “Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.” Love is the bond of the blessed spirits, who are all that exist. It is the whole they form, supreme reality as genus transcending though maybe “containing” existence as species (of reality). Again though, of this whole one cannot ask why. Ipso facto then it is not contingent, nor are its parts, we ourselves. We are not liable to vanish away since for us too, even now, being is just one of our ideas. In us space and time, the finite, is transcended, while in passing over to heavenly love we take up our essential infinity, as one in idea with the divine essence, as Aquinas puts it. This is the sense in which faith can move mountains, where “I and my father are one”. Not that “faith” is the issue here, but the seeing that each idea is one with the divine essence. Corresponding to the Leibnizian-Hegelian perfect whole, where the opposition of part and whole is overcome in identity, we have the old processio ad intra, as of verbum and of the spirit. Verbum, however, as interior word, is used, by Aquinas, to explain divine generation precisely as, or on the analogy of, mental conception of ideas by us. So if creation is actual divine thinking, a determinate knowing within God, then this is not separable from that processio ad intra. In the Word, itself not separate from the speaking of it as eternally proceeding (i.e. eternally “begotten” or, rather, being begotten), all things are spoken or thought. The union, the identity, is so close that each spirit is that whole. Hence its true consciousness and self is divine or infinite (which is why our present consciousness is often called false). Hence the being or existing of one or all of us is itself one of the ideas and so in each and all is identical with the self-explanatory and so not contingent. Hence any other or lesser things, giraffes, fossils, the starry heavens, class struggle, are thought as in us and as thoughts of ours. That is to say, we spirits with our characteristic modes of perception are reality, the sole and wholly integrated reality, beyond simplicity and composition as conceived by “the understanding” (as opposed to the reason). We do not then come to the idea of God (our own idea) as from outside. This gives cause to some to urge that we no longer speak of God, who both is and is not. Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology is thus compatible with the AristotelianHegelian idea of nous, absolute reason, as thought thinking itself. Where then he speaks of the identity of divine essence and existence he actually concurs in the overcoming of the opposition between thought and being. The indestructibility of spirit, necessary being, means just this and hence the inclusion, by Aquinas, of matter (materia) among necessary beings is effectively a denial of matter, of a “material” world, as commonly conceived of as being in opposition to the spiritual, as body and soul are

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then irreconcilably opposed in man. In religion, the absolute religion, this is overcome, negated and denied by the literal resurrection of Christ, which is not literal if there is literally no earth, no tomb, in absolute terms, from which to rise up. In the identity of divine nature and history with our own true substance and destiny as faces of love all is reconciled. This may or may not entail reincarnations, where time is unreal and we are now, eternally, identical with and in one another, each in all and all in each. In the time-series consciousness and insight wax and wane. Intermittently, as seen from that series, we pass over to where all is accomplished, as from before the foundations of the world at time’s end. In my beginning is my end, it was said, alpha and omega. * We thus see how in the modern period the mystical stream rejoins the rational, as it was in Plato. Mysticism, as outgrowth upon a socially entrenched orthodoxy, was philosophy in exile. The contemporary dogmatic theology, therefore, largely a product of the understanding merely and not of reason, was also largely “rationalist”, in another terminology, as was the Scholastic derivation of an associated philosophy from a few surviving or from newly discovered Greek texts. Attempts to determine or delimit that of which we may or may not speak continue this unphilosophical exclusion of the “mystical”, an attitude traced by Rudolph Steiner to the reign and policy of Pope Nicholas the First in the ninth century. But the mystics, in fact, were always articulate and the two greatest dogmatic thinkers, Augustine and Aquinas, are both acknowledged as mystical, also in what they wrote. It is merely that Hegelian contradiction is disguised as paradox, as saying what one cannot say, this however being itself a contradiction demanding to be overcome like any other. Thus the concept of paradox specifically means that it is overcome in its very apprehension as a judgment, transcending the formulated parts. Thus religious authority and worship, while and in reconciling oppositions, pointed the way to the further perfection and enrichment of philosophy. * The old doctrine of the infusion of the (human) soul effectively separated man from nature, leaving us with a dualism only “saved” by a doctrine of creation. How though would pure infinite spirit create matter as generally understood, something which is nothing more than our understanding of

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reality before we begin to be spiritual? In fact the upholding of spirit has to be denial of matter thus understood. Matter is a misperception. We are spirits, the soul that is infused. The soul is the man.6 But since with matter time too falls away the spirits do not begin to be. In this way the latest constructions of biology or, still more, physics can be seen as last-ditch defences against philosophical idealism, i.e. where they are put forward as an alternative, as they should not be. Evolutionists would explain how the world becomes conscious of itself. In fact consciousness simply emerges, as it seems to us, and is the consciousness of itself, outside or inside, not of “the world”, which is then taken up as an earlier or prior approximation to a now more perfect relation of whole and parts, including all else. This is a kind of macroexample of how the knower changes what he knows. Viewed dialectically the world is needed merely as counterpart, as the cumulative series recapitulatable in this self-consciousness that is itself spirit, for, given the infinite reason we call God, all is spirit. McTaggart finds love prior to, more final than, knowledge, but he seems to refer there to the final absoluteness of knowledge itself, thus mediating and not mediated. In physics we move to ultimate particles or charges that, in their random behaviour, subject only to statistical tabulation, mirror the freedom of spirit and of human action. They are the nearest we get to the infinite idea and it is mere arbitrary choice to go on specifying them as “material”. Physics, just as much as logic, becomes an unrestricted ontology. * Our historical emergence from nature, this belief absolutely taken, clashes in an especially acute way with the idealist denial of absolute time. For McTaggart both the A-series (from past to present to future) and the Bseries (from earlier to late) are fulfilled in the timeless inclusions of the Cseries7, progressively grasped or let go in the perceptions constituting a Dseries. The self is timeless, hence both pre- and post-natal, as with Plato. Selves are all that exist, the universe being their aggregate. To this, on a realist model, only the “infused” soul can answer. But we have already expatiated on the difficulties of this, even could we overcome (as Aquinas does many of them) the Hegelian objections to “the common conceptions of God, the Soul, the World”8, either viewing the soul as a 6

This was F.Inciarte’s final interpretation of Aristotle as against Aquinas. J.E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, II, 724. 8 G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic 31. 7

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thing duplicating the body or as an abstract simplicity on which immortality “is supposed to depend” but which “as little corresponds to the nature of the soul as that of compositeness”. There was always in fact an oddity about how thought was supposed to account for its own emergence in this way. Truth has no proportion to this deterministic finitude (as Augustine saw long ago, or Aristotle in saying that nous “comes from outside”). Only the infinite is true; rather, the infinite is all truth, truth being one. If thought is no more than a product of preferred neural “pathways” and habits then evolution is just the preferred model. But neither is this relativism absolute; the regress is infinite and hence no support is given for this basic Popperian realism either. To speak with Teilhard de Chardin of the universe becoming conscious of itself begs this particular question, forcing reversion to the soul-infusion thesis with its inherent difficulties, such as the difficulty of the corresponding concept of matter as a receptacle for this infusion. This is in fact a falling away from the grasp of matter as pure potentiality at the extreme of a monistic scale of graded actuality, implicit in Aristotle, which leaves it open to see matter as pure finitude and, despite Hegelian qualifications, ultimately as untruth and misperception (because simple parts and infinite division are both impossible, runs McTaggart’s argument). Hence in physics the more ultimate the particle the more it loses materiality in the “common” sense, while Popper and others already complain that physics has gone over to idealism. It is part of the Hegelian claim that idealism is the proper stance of philosophy as such, just as it is the characteristically defining stance of religious mysticism. The mystic comes to see that created reality is penitus nihil (Aquinas), deeply nothing, under metaphors such as that of dust and ashes, actually very “material” as every housewife knows. This opens a way to a dialectical understanding of philosophy’s history, Cartesian and post-Cartesian in particular. When we come to grips with the idea of infinity we will find it undercuts the notion of creation as in “ontological discontinuity” (with the creator) in particular. Even if we insist on saying that God makes things outside himself this making outside itself then becomes something inside, in virtue of the infinity. Nothing, but nothing, is discontinuous with infinity, with God. We must therefore overcome the finite limitation inherent in our own notion of infinity when we thus oppose or limit it with the finite, with any finite truth. But the only way of freeing infinity from being limited to the role of a dialectical opposite to the world, as in much religious thought, is to deny the truth of the finite flux.

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For this reason the fight has to be extended into the whole area of language as predication, which is an attribution of categories, be they Kantian, Aristotelian or other. Applying a category or predicate to nous, thought, is “suggesting another canon than the nature of thought”, saying that God is such as against its opposite. Here we have the deeper meaning of Quine’s “to be is the value of a variable”. The propositional form is just not suited (and here Hegel synthesises Nicholas of Cusa with Kant) to the truths that all philosophers have wished to express within their categorial limits. But what had ultimately to be done was to let thought expound (“freely and spontaneously”) itself, free of ready-made categories. This is the dialectic, which Hegel tried to chart, feeling, paradoxically, that here he rejoined the most primitive Greek thinkers where thought was free and “at home with itself”, in a grand reintegration after the intervening theological differentiation. For this being at home with itself is specific to thought alone, hence to God, the infinite, never needing to go outside itself, necessarily not doing so indeed. Here all is in each part. By contrast, “every judgment is by its form one-sided and, to that extent, false.” 9 Evolutionary theory, as it becomes more open, progresses ineluctably to saying things had to be like that, i.e. there is no other way to think them. Similarly, in physics, there have to be simples, ultimates, as in Leibniz. Thought imposes itself as prior willy-nilly, since philosophy, of which idealism is the proper form, is not some esoteric pursuit but the distillation of our most central preoccupations.

9

Ibid. 32.

CHAPTER TWELVE SPIRIT

One can raise the question whether people ever change their minds. To begin on a personal note, it seems to me, in my sixty-eighth or seventyfourth year, that a lifetime of enquiry, experience, activity and speculation, inclusive of religious commitments, creative encounters with traditions, decisions, returns me to my earliest and even childish speculations. One should rather call them insights, such as everyone has, though maybe differently. One may return as far as memory goes or indeed suppose backward continuity beyond that point. If present thinking fulfils earliest intuition then one has been passing through a continuous chain of such fulfilments, it follows. Such fulfilments must be partial, however, as allowing further development, now from this side now from that as endeavouring to approximate ever more closely, though necessarily in zigzag fashion, to the central and adequate. The lurching leads more and more to stable, ever more rapid flight. This flight itself, as a form of perception, is destined to lead to a more perfectly reciprocal encounter with what will then no longer be limited to the role of object (of knowledge). At stake, here and now, is a vision of immortality, of a life or a consciousness beyond immediate life as we know it. Not beyond as in a future. One might just as well say it is behind life. Thus, in adolescent days, I felt bound to conclude, from my experienced of things, that every passing phenomenon stands for or signifies something eternal, abiding or timeless. The particular speaks, bespeaks, eternity, an absolute infinite or beauty in particular, as I put it, though not then knowing Plato. One had after all taken in beauty through eye and ear, organs it did not then occur to one to reflect upon. My own transition and adherence to “organised” religion at that time was only cemented therefore after accepting the suggestion, stressed by C.S. Lewis, that the sense of immortal beatitude as one’s destiny found in Christianity its natural, indeed mandatory caterer. This conviction was then focussed, in a five-year development, towards Roman Catholicism

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and was the reason, the only reason, for a long engagement with monasticism as “short cut”. Nor have I (the first person seems appropriate) abandoned such religion. It fulfilled adolescent insight as one’s present vision fulfils or “develops” the religion. A deal of Thomistic philosophy went and goes with it and this has developed, for its part, into a form of Hegelianism become post-Hegelianism as demanded by this philosophy itself, taken seriously. Yet philosophy must yield to wisdom, love, the “mystical”. This is Christianity, wisdom per se or, as one should rather say in today’s ecumenical context, this is absolute religion though, as we shall see, religious discourse, itself imperfect in comparison to rational or philosophical discourse, places a limit upon the absolute it would descry. So we are returned to a perception beyond discourse, a direct reciprocity where no one will say to another “Know the Lord” and where there will be no temple. In the dialectic this would be a category best called love, McTaggart suggests, which would supersede (aufheben) Hegel’s absolute knowledge, though one may well doubt that there is a difference of sense between the two1. We may note that Henri de Lubac, in pre-conciliar days, stated that “Catholicism is not a religion”, adding though that it is “religion itself”. Here he concurred with Hegel merely in treating it, or Christianity, as the absolute religion.2 The adolescent insight therefore, with which one had wanted to start, must itself be rooted in the first or ground-awareness, whatever this may be. “Thou wast not born for death” is the adolescent’s “gut-feeling”, one might hazard. Yet the reality of death is only denied if we deny also the reality of a life set towards death. Waiting at my primary school by a window facing on darkness to be picked up by my father in his car, while the others, the “boarders”, sat at supper-table further into the room, it came over me how strange it was that I, just I, should be one of the people, the spirits, making up that world of 1944. The finite interpretations I have offered of this insight over the years3 do not conflict with its absolute character of self-intuition or discovery. From this absoluteness it follows that the situation itself is not strange. Finding it strange only signifies unfamiliarity with the insight. But since the insight is precisely that everyday consciousness of time, change or matter is mere cipher for

1

Cp. EL159. H. de Lubac, Catholicism and, later, The Drama of Atheistic Humanism. 3 S. Theron, “Other Problems about the Self”, Sophia 1983; “Self and World”, New Blackfriars, November 2006. 2

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something4 else it is not strange that this insight is strange or alien just for everyday consciousness. This, however, was beyond the ken of a five-year-old, longing for and needing acceptance in that everyday world. Those with less of that longing, that need, may have developed more quickly dialectically, so to say5, like Thérèse of Lisieux thinking (and it is indeed thinking itself that “overcomes the world”, “comes from outside”) for hours alone about God or like Newman, for whom as a child reality as it were boiled down to “myself and God”. Henry Vaughan, in “The Retreat”, judges the first days the happy ones, when he “shined in my angel infancy”. This though was “before I understood this place”, a place “appointed for my second race”. It is no accident, that is, that we are here where we are. Vaughan speaks of nonunderstanding; Newman implicitly judges, like Plato, that the “passing show” is intrinsically unintelligible, not something, not real as object. For myself, emotionally “disturbed” maybe, the thinking, the self-awareness, issued in the child’s thought, as possibility, that all around me was a plot to get me put into prison, of which I had heard or been threatened with.6 Thus one objectifies fancied rejection or fear of it, needing to learn still the confidence in one’s “intimation of immortality”. This was the strange knowledge one could not fit into the everyday where one vainly tried to belong. Confidence in it is called in religion faith. “You’ve got too much faith,” said someone when I later joined the churchgoers, a kind way of suggesting posturing perhaps. Saying anyhow that faith can move mountains is saying that it is true judgement to choose to see the world in this way, to voluntarily turn one’s back, and we will return to this unavoidable link with the voluntary in thinking which has in some ways reappeared even in natural science. This also is what lies behind Spinoza’s observation, chosen as epitaph by McTaggart, that there is nothing a free man thinks less about than death. Or life, for that matter, we might add. “Nothing must bind me to life” wrote Beethoven, seeing in this the strength of self-conquest needed for artistic achievement. No birth, no death!7

4

Cp. the role of the signum formale in renaissance Scholastic noetic. One does not want to say “mystically”. Hegel’s philosophy is more mystical than Hegel realised, McTaggart remarked. 6 Some reason I had for this mistake in that my grandmother, when I misbehaved, used to pretend to phone the police. In my mother’s version the prison I risked was a place where “little men with pitchforks” would punish me without end. 7 A Buddhist tag. 5

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No birth. The child is not conscious of being a new arrival, in the sense of ever having been nothing. This, and not mere prudery, is the wisdom of telling him or her that they were found under a cabbage-leaf, or on a water-lily, or even in an ark among reeds. Somewhere he was, neither Egyptian nor Israelite, there where he sits eternally, “in the heavenly places”. He will never believe his elders’ story of a time before he was even thought of. He or she? We must surely say “he and she”. This division between us, fruitful and wondrous though it is, cannot be absolute, if each is destined to be and must be seen as one with all. What though is this self? Is it not also self’s negation? We find self in other, other in self. Otherness within self is the Trinitarian teaching. We are pushed to Hegel’s position that the personal is the universal, not of course the abstract universal that straightforwardly contradicts (and not merely negates) it. What we discover here rather is the concrete universal, the all as personally apprehended. If this is the uniquely valid way in which the all (universum) is apprehended then there exist no less personal or more impersonal systems over against it. We have not a “veil of perception” but perception is an essential part of the perceived nonetheless. “The eye with which God perceives me is the eye with which I perceive him” (Eckhart). The society, the aggregate, that is, is not greater or more extensive than the I. It is the I, simply, as one speaks of “the whole Christ”, making however there a concession to the extensional language of whole and parts, which dialectic in due course leaves behind asjudged finitely conceived. * We mentioned a voluntary element in thinking, the “highest praxis” (Aristotle). It is highest, because here knowledge transcends itself on the dialectical scale. Failure or disinclination to take this last step (to perfect reciprocity, for which, I repeat, McTaggart suggests the name love) made it difficult or impossible for Hegel to see that what he had discovered or nailed fast was not a particular dialectic but the principle of dialectical movement as such, whereby even our thought, within time’s illusion, is marked, along with all our consciousness, by that same illusion. He had not to claim to have discovered the one and only valid embodiment of dialectic. In that case his philosophy would fall with the first unjustifiable step in his ladder to the Absolute, and there are several. Rather, one must pass finally beyond “cognition”, on account of its merely imperfect reciprocity, signalled by division into the two powers of intellect and will, defined almost as in opposition to one another and thus provoking the

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debate as to which has the primacy. Aquinas, placing intellect first, recognised the difficulty, of a duality constitutive even of much or all of Trinitarian theology as we have it. In amelioration he pointed out that will as it were naturally flows from intellect as being its own inclination (something to be taken note of in AI studies surely). Will is thus not other than intellect inclining naturally towards what it apprehends. Goethe was thus far right to carry Faust beyond theoria to great enterprises, puzzling though his choice among these may seem. We recapture here the truth, the value, of the figure of the magician, not a falling away from contemplation in unworthy exploitation of knowledge if contemplation itself, as love, “can do all things”.8 Knowledge is power indeed, and not all power is perversion. Wonder-workers more normally “went about doing good” and will continue to do so. This is the truth, that “God is love”, superseding all finite truth (abstract theory), as the ecumenical movement, launched in the bosom of communities defending finite interpretations of the infinite, is destined to realise if it does not already. So even in this affirmation “God is love” there is a defect of form. One works against its truth by thus verbally affirming it, as the human rights rhetoric is proving destructive of human rights. We may say, we know there are no human (or other) rights, not because though we are to go on to say that “only love counts” (love presupposes a right thing to do) but because we are about to do something. This passage to praxis is not meant destructively, as when made into a new philosophy old-style, like “existentialism”, but as fulfilling an intimation. It is why people write music they disdain to explain (seeing music itself as “a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy”9) and we should not stop at music either, or it will one day fail us. In reality, beyond time, we make no judgements, McTaggart argued, and there are no objects. We perceive others perceiving us ad infinitum. That is what we are doing, even in writing something like this. Scotus felt bound to take the opposite line to Aquinas, associating will with love and so according it the primacy over intellect. But it is a mistake to attribute his dissent to a mere kowtowing to a positivist theology, to the incomprehensible letter of acknowledged revelation. For that matter, and as a preliminary, the principle of following a tradition in trust that it will “lead into all truth” is not a bad one. It only becomes fideism if one refuses to be illumined by the light one acknowledges. 8

Cf. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, “On the Wonderful Effects of Divine Love”. 9 L. Van Beethoven.

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The move towards “voluntarism” in modern culture is a genuine dialectical development, i.e. it is a further appropriation of absolute religion, which we in the West have been accustomed to call Christian truth, though not wishing thereby to deny that truth belongs to all and is possessed by no one. Theological voluntarism signals a first apprehension of how knowledge, “cognition”, is ineluctably finite. This intuition lies behind the massive paradox of Kant’s endeavour; it is what Berdyaev called “the tragedy of knowledge”10, its inbuilt necessity to “objectify”, that what I know becomes object for me as I am not for it. Aquinas himself remarks11 that God does not know moral principles because they are true but that they are true because God so knows them. This transcends the principle defended by Plato in his Euthyphro concerning the divine wisdom (concurred in in many places by this same Aquinas) and is not a mere relapse into theological positivism presaging later medieval theologies, passing into Protestantism, of the potentia absoluta Dei. In these theologies men projected on to an imperfectly conceived transcendence their growing awareness of “the freedom of a Christian man” (Luther) or woman. It was though an awareness of an awareness they had long had, as when centuries before Peter Damian has insisted that God, to be God, can change the past (or the laws of logic, Descartes was later to claim). Hence Lutheranism gets dismissed as “gnosis”, by, for example, Eric Voegelin and others in the “moderate realist” camp. Luther insists on belief, faith, as a virtue that one exercises. See things this way, believe Christ has saved you and you are then in fact saved. The Calvinist corrective returned the initiative to the imperfectly conceived transcendence. This reappears with Freud as an alienated super-ego within the very bosom of the unwilling and potentially schizophrenic “believer”. He here echoes Kant’s ethical theory, whereby the law, the imperative rather, categorically constrains the subject as something he cannot will to negate, though he may will to will this ad infinitum. It is curious that Hegel retains much of this “metaphysic of morals”, flagrantly at odds with the true direction of his overall vision. The Nietzschean corrective was not long in coming. The theologians, however, for the most part excuse themselves from such correction, taking shelter behind a finite and hence untrue divide between theism (a divine legislator) and atheism. Thus we find Hans Küng fussing about defending morality by inter-cultural charter 10 11

N. Berdyaev, Spirit and Reality. In his commentary on Romans.

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in a way that would totally negate the ecumenism he would promote and, he claims, allow to develop. If freedom is the heart and motor of intellect, as it is the sine qua non of rational judgement, reason being by ancient definition placed ad opposita, as empirical nature is not, then “values” and the spontaneous behaviour they generate have to be just that, spontaneous and renewed constantly. The inside is the outside and the heart, inner cherishing, takes its cue from the sun rising daily, the face of one’s child or the “tone” around one. “As a man is, so does the end seem to him” (Aristotle). Hence a philosophy teaching the absoluteness of spirit (only basis for the divinity of man) will entrench for him the noblest of ends, where alone, just by the way, happiness can then be rooted, since it is the end alone that might ever specify precept, should precept be considered still a worthy category at this ultimate level. I would want to say that, as heteronomous, it is not thus worthy, as neither, finally, is a heteronomous “reason”. Knowledge is still finite and must “vanish away” in favour of something absolutely comprehensive and reciprocal. The mystics, however, were ahead of the theologians, conceiving transcendence without alienation, as the theologies of grace have always striven to promise, though the concept of grace as often propounded might seem the very name of such alienation. This objection has been met traditionally by identifying it with the revolt of the Evil One, Satan. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” This Miltonic utterance, as Blake saw, was actually a critique of a traditional picture of “heaven”, making Milton “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. The ground here has been well trodden, but we still need better to situate that ground. Grace, properly understood, makes a man’s or woman’s actions all the more his or her own. So we love the graced person; anyone we love must be graced, even if in the worst (or best?) case our love itself were to be his or her first grace.12 The early modern philosophers were heir to late Renaissance mysticism as they were to Nicholas of Cusa and the Thomist commentators. The most articulate mystics, Eckhart or John of the Cross, were Thomists to the bone, as Augustine was Augustinian, in his mysticism, one might say. With Hegel too mystical insight is not held away. He is, says McTaggart, a mystical philosopher. The attempt to treat philosophy as “handmaid” to a theology abjuring vision, a theology of idiom, of what it is lawful to say, 12 On McTaggart’s system, where all the spirits are co-eternal and as it were beget one another, this would be impossible, however, unless conceived as in utter mutuality. The parallel with Trinitarian thought is then very close; there is no moment at all when we are not each bringing about one another, the whole world, that is to say.

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was never successful or mentally healthy. Mysticism itself loses its mysterious name in being thus taken up. One speaks rather of a reason (Vernünft) transcending the analytic understanding (Verstand), as one earlier contrasted intuitus and sapientia with ratio, making them indeed necessary for virtue and justice (epieicheia, prudentia), in view of virtue’s unity. This development helps to account for the Nietzschean reintegration of philosophy into prophetic discourse, as found also among poets such as Blake and Wordsworth. It was reintegration after separation and analysis, schooling after tutelage and purgation. The wisdom of the prophets is not a disdaining of logic, nor is it a voluntarism in any pejorative sense. It is a listening for what speaks itself in the world’s breathing, a man’s own mind. This was historically therefore called inspiration. One can inspire others; equally one can be inspired as having breathed in. In breathing in one is breathed into. “I opened my mouth and drew in my breath and praised the Lord,” runs an old poem (itself reckoned as “inspired”). This activity is proper to the wise person, whose ear the Lord “has opened”. Stress on the unfathomed movements of spirit leads, in the stories, to periodic stress on the prophet’s foolishness apart from or before the spirit’s falling upon him or her, as if one’s own spirit did not awaken. This is, again, transcendence imperfectly conceived. It is also an early form of “separation”, the abstraction yielding untruth. God, the absolute and infinite, does not thus abstract universals. He is the absolute and allinclusive universal of pure subjectivity or, rather, subjecthood, I. Yet “the eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him” (Eckhart). Making each thing, person or event a window on or mirror of the absolute (the idea with which we or I began) means that no thing, person or event can disappear. There is no time. Rather, time as event cannot disappear, is an ever-present treasure of the Absolute. “All times are his”, first and last, equally and together. Events are equally what we might call eternal substance. This shines forth in story-telling. He who has heard and understood a story, a Gospel, keeps it forever and sees all things in its light, as he does known and experienced history. So we may have, may conceive, an “event ontology” and this means we give priority to falling into the mind (cadit in mente) over what falls into it (ens myriadly expressed, all in each, again). The mind itself becomes process, happening, as in Trinitarianism process itself becomes “procession” (processio), a conception recalling Wordsworth’s “stationary blasts of waterfalls”. The Father speaks, begets, himself only (in begetting another) and is himself that relation which reflexively creates further relation, beyond any limitability of enumeration. When we speak of an event-

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ontology we have already transcended the restrictive enquiry into “what there is” as a principle of discrimination. Yet we are still speaking, more correctly said, of ontic process (we have rejected ontology as ultimate) when we should be treating of process simpliciter. Occam’s razor, we might say, reveals that nothing is, that being nothing are the same. Subjectivity, the subject, is not subject to existence, whether as something one might lose or as something one inexplicably or necessarily possesses eternally. The Eternal Return mythically presents the non-passing, the eternal perceivedness, of events. It is not that we have to repeat them. Nietzsche may seem a bit fundamentalist here in regard to his own inspiration because of his defence of it as a theory in physics, natural science, where time’s arrow is taken literally and might indeed “circulate”. This though would miss the kernel of serious metaphysics. In the now, looking at trees, maybe, or at a revolver (“What has he got against a gun?” wonders Pasternak’s Zhivago when someone would disenchant it), all shines forth and hence, necessarily, every other now and, equally, everyone else’s now. This is the inner truth of abstraction, of universals, that looking at any sunrise we know it as just that (“neither one nor many” in Plato’s phrase). We say “This is sunrise”, first, eternal or last and only. Sunrise, begetting, liturgical action or music falling on the ear, preserved in passing, nothing to preserve indeed if it does not pass, time’s apotheosis, heard “all at once” (Mozart’s description of musical conception) beyond need for recapitulation. If predication is an identity it overcomes itself just in its use. This, all this, is why there is no conflict between “freedom and reason” (the problem R.M. Hare’s ethics strove to overcome). Such a conflict is a nightmare of Verstand unassisted by Vernünft, i.e. it is precisely abstract, separate from reality, from the concrete universal. This is why we intimated that one may well think as one wishes, since knowing, truth, is just what one wishes and lives by. It was natural but not necessary to begin the dialectic with being. One arrives anyhow at the Absolute where all concepts have proved self-negating, i.e. to where all self-negation is negated, yielding all in all. A reflection of this lies in how we nowadays conceive or should conceive evolution. The fittest emerges as by definition survivor. “By definition means he, just he, and she, emerges whatever direction or chance byways the development shall have taken. The development anyhow is within us, within our thinking, as we are without, outside, the environment, be it biosphere or, we come to see, noosphere, without which, nonetheless, we could not survive, be or be thought at all. We have the saying, brutal as helping to focus, “There are

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many ways to kill a cat.” “All roads lead to Rome.” In the end I am the way, the road. They are myself, extensionally filtered truth. The dialectic is no more than an example of itself. In asserting this I am seeing, who write here, that really I never wanted to be or become a philosopher. I had lived eighteen years, or as good as an eternity, before I heard about it. One can as well become a musician, a painter, a builder or football player. “Become” is the word, and it signals anyhow nothing more absolute than a finite category within dialectic (though McTaggart deprecated this name for it, as implying a real movement which the dialectic denies, he thinks. Nothing becomes). The last example focuses the point. One plays football for just a few years, for a short time not every day, and so for any other fictive becoming. One remains what one is, a being asleep as far as our consciousness goes, who awakes each day to phenomenal life and this too just for a season. One becomes nothing. One is oneself. This is what I meant by denying that our mind changes. Mutatis mutandis this is Aristotle’s theory of substance, one is oneself per se, any other thing per accidens or not truly. Thus philosophy doesn’t change either, since it is anyhow the same - as oneself. But then so is football, or the boy standing on the dank sports field, waiting, as if suspended, to put the boot in or, in summer, to strike to the boundary. In that suspension everything is contained, personalised, lived, known, loved, while in the team, the “team spirit”, we have it again, that each is all. It follows that prior to this identity no content is claimed for self in saying, negatively, that one is oneself and does not become this or that. And so we have presented a philosophy for schools, not a dissection but an illumination of earliest memory, ever returning. The essential claim though is that we have not done anything (action and even actuality are finite categories only). This too is a mere example of itself, or what shines in and through anything whatever, life, events, sleep. A suspension in which… It is like an invitation, proffered though in accepting the invitation of which it is an example merely, both seen and seeing, up to a point, this point, at least. But you are just being clever… This suspicion, often expressed, of course distresses. But I think that, as Americans say, this is “where we are at”. “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” The beginning of time though is not itself temporal. This is an analytical truth. A very first event cannot then be temporally first. The Big Bang, if really Urknall, or mother of all bangs and not just big, has to be more of the order of our “stationary blast” if it is anything, finding its analogue in the Trinitarian begetting of theology. But even physicists have now to take account of this, if they are to be credited, or at least try to explain why they should not do so.

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Hence one should not see absolute idealism as simple denial of creation, any more than human freedom denies divine omnipotence, The defenders of omnipotence developed theories of praemotio physica (God moves our first motions) and of analogous freedoms, created and uncreated. They were not confined to a simple mechanistic fatalism or determinism, but showed yet better how freedom is only possible as a result of a cause from without the system of nature. Similarly, we have to ask what creation might possibly be. Part of the answer, we have seen, is that creation is itself the creating, the unfolding, which again, as process, is one with the subject, thought thinking itself (Aristotle). And so we have to ask too what God might possibly be, as did Augustine or Aquinas. Much of their answer is as scandalous to those not reflecting upon the traditional symbols as might be ours here or as was Christianity in its first appearance and representative founder, to the traditionalists of that time. Regarding idealism, one should ever keep before one that it is not in any sense a reduction of the external but rather a taking of the latter into one’s subjectivity, overcoming the mere spatial metaphors of outside and inside as alternatives. A move in the opposite direction, once such monism is broached, amounts to the same insight, as calling one’s “realism” internal acknowledges. Ecologists have taught us that we form one system with what we see around us and this relativises the boundary some thinkers, such as Merleau-Ponty, have wished to draw between the body’s surface and what lies beyond, or seems to. The facts of sex, love and reproducing should have taught us this. Not “It is all in the mind” but mind is in all and is all. As with the Big Bang, so a Founder of a religion, to the degree he founds it upon himself, as in Christianity, cannot either be left behind as first merely within the series he founded. He must be first and last, subject. Absolute subjectivity must anyhow be focused and spirit wills and has willed to focus it just here, in this person as concrete universal. Yet the ego, I, am first and concrete universal. “I in them and they in me… that all may be one.” This “one”, as the sublimity of the speaker, of the occasion and of the language used demands, cannot be restricted to a purely moral unity, needed as means to the success of the movement. We have much more a mystical, which is to say more and not less than erotic, union of all with all, otherness within self and self in other, sought and consummated in ecstatically sacrificial death, the “hour” of the Son of Man’s glorification, as it is called, ut omnes unum sint. But what religious narrative presents as contingently accomplished Hegel interprets as man’s essential divine filiation, raising religious content to the form of speculative thought. “Must all this be the same as radically contesting

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God’s transcendence, offending his sovereign freedom or completely distorting the Christian message?”13 The very structure of everyday cognition, “having the form of the other as other” (Aquinas), underwrites this hermeneutic venture. “Become what you are,” say the Thomists (in the context of natural law discussions). Such “having”, furthermore, a crudity of hylomorphic language, cannot be other than being, identity, though Aquinas tries not to take this step, fatal perhaps to the “moderate realist” position and opening the way to a mystical form of religion very difficult for anyone to control or “shepherd”. But here lies the blueprint for the ecumenical future and it was, after all, always first the sheep who knew the shepherd’s voice, who distinguished it. Sheep and shepherd, that is, even they, are no more than a relation to one another as a way of organising the one reality where last are first. Future, anyhow, means nothing other than fuller apprehension of the actual, in that what is coming “now is”. So too prophetic wisdom belongs to philosophy and teaches philosophy to assume it into itself. Contrariwise, prophecy issues naturally from philosophy, as in the life of Socrates or Nietzsche. This is a further case of how knowledge in essence aspires to the infinite, which sublates knowledge. * Alternatively, some will see here a “confusion of the orders”.14 This obstructive pedantry, or is it mere orderliness, seems related to the conception not merely of a tiered universe but of a tiered inner life, beginning with the dualism of natural and supernatural where this (it need not) as it were ontologises and stiffens an original contrast between old and new man. A more fundamental difference, however, is the separation of the natural/supernatural separation itself from any connection with sinfulness or a “fall of man”. The divisions of the sciences, that is, are transferred as method to a mapping of human subjectivity, effectively suppressing or marginalizing the latter. Against this, Kant set up his two spheres of nature and freedom. Anciently, nature was determinata ad unum, reason, and hence thinking, ad opposita. Man, that is, is naturally self-transcendent.

13

Georges Van Riet, “The Problem of God in Hegel”, Parts II-III, Philosophy Today, Vol. XI, No. 2/4, Summer 1967, pp. 75-106, p.96 (Part I in the Spring 1967 issue). 14 J. Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, Bles, London, 1944.

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This division is even projected on to the angels, who are offered supernatural life, i.e. a share in divine living at the cost (it might have seemed) of deep modification of, even a kind of alienation from, their natural or intrinsic powers. Grace (like reason in Aristotle) “comes from outside”, this being part of the meaning of gift, donum. Yet outside and inside pass into one another in the later ecology and this theologically rational structure starts to topple when one claims that all is grace (K. Rahner). Correspondingly, one sees philosophy either as a science or as a life, the “lady philosophy” and consolatrix of Boethius. Philosophy could never be the handmaid of theology or of anything else, and talk of “sacred theology” has no power to hold the two apart, once the principle of development within theology is admitted, involving as it does also a development of (notions of) development. In Latin culture, however, even theology itself is held apart from, for example, mysticism, which is then studied in “ascetic theology”. This is of course legitimate as far as it goes, the “thematizing” of living processes for the sake of study. Music elicits musicology. In history God, the divine, absolute subject, has been progressively discerned as beyond science, more music than musicology so to say, not a topic for thematization, except insofar as we cannot but thematize even non-thematizability. This realisation is included in Aquinas’s understanding of God’s power to create, to create causes especially, without thereby becoming univocally a causa intramundana. Still, in Augustine’s noetic, God is as it were on a level with all the other actors in the epistemic process, the light enlightening man and we would misunderstood his method if we took him as merely deriving his idea from the ancient fourth Davidic psalm (signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui) in terms of which he prefers to expound his view. Aquinas, correcting, amplifying, taught that man has his own light, but took here a big step towards desacralisation and Maritain’s “orders” as the divine light seemed to get put at a distance or reserved to the theologians or a wilful faith-ideology on the part of “the people”.15 Modern philosophy from Descartes and Malebranche up to ontologism would have none of this and “ontological discontinuity” (of God and world) had to be reimposed with papal sponsorship (1879).16 15

Caricatured in Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion. Yet as the two spheres of mind and body met for Descartes uniquely at the tiny pineal gland, so for orthodoxy God and world are reconciled in just one man, “through whom, with whom and in whom…” Nor is our interpretation a departure from this if we subsume the “work of salvation” under necessary epiphany (of man to man).

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It is similar with the idea of a direct divine action at work in natural human reproduction, uniquely at work, however. Here though, and here alone, Aquinas and modern orthodoxy remains with Augustinian sacrality, so that religious ethics becomes identified in the public mind exclusively with absolutist views on contraception and abortion. One needs though a whole and harmonious view of the relation of God and the world, and if God is God this can only be a monistic or even an “acosmic” view (Hegel on Spinoza). For there are not two players on one level ground and appeal to analogy (of being) only obscures this. The analogy is rather between symbol and reality and, since it is a logical doctrine (analogy is a species of equivocation), it is only applicable to the visible world if this is seen as a kind of speech, thinking or logos and not, therefore, as being. So the idea of a confusion of orders might rather be applied to these conceptions. God is not an actor within the world if the world adds nothing to him, is plura entia sed non plus entis, though this is contradictory as it stands (appeal to paradox is no defence in philosophy). Absolute idealism is the end-development of this crucial insight, which talk of “ontological discontinuity” is as powerless to hold away as is talk of “sacred theology”. Where all is made sacred nothing is profane, least of all philosophy, science or any kind of wisdom. Augustine thought that the Platonists should have recognised a divine self-lowering in incarnation, the incarnation, along with the idea (thematization) of the same, which becomes that of a coincidentia oppositorum in Nicholas of Cusa’s thought. It was only later that this reproach crystallised, as a kind of defeatism, into the idea of two orders of thinking, re-dividing the psyche as into Sunday and weekdays. There was and is no reason why the “wisdom of this world”, as one chose to call it, should not naturally unite with the wisdom coming from above, as perfecting it. The idea that it must first die or be thrust back into barbarism, must “submit”, has limited, less than absolute applicability, as does obedience among the virtues. It belongs, this idea to the representation of timeless truth, eternity, in historical narrative form, as if it were contingent. We are accustomed now to concede this defect of form, as a kind of obliquity or indirectness (of presentation) in our thinking about the tale of the Fall of Man, and so we cannot avoid extending the principle generally. So have we confused the orders, or does philosophy naturally issue in mysticism, as we find in Augustine’s Confessions or in Plato or Hegel (or Wittgenstein, implicitly), as musicology never issues in music17 Academic 17

Well it does, as the notion of Études (pieces of music) witnesses.

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philosophy studies the philosophers as musicology studies the musicians. The philosophers though are those who seek God, wisdom, and so the academic philosophers, cherishing the same name, are similarly engaged, though the fact of their getting paid for it, as they think, makes them shy to admit it. Actually, on pre-egalitarian social theory they receive an honorarium so that they can continue to deliver what is beyond price. Such tension of avocation leads at times, however, to denial of philosophy’s, of their profession’s, transcendent essence. This is the background to talk of confusion of the orders, or part of it. It can be felt wherever one set of people imposes laws or principles upon another set, where theoria dictates to praxis as if it were not itself one with it as “the highest praxis” (Aristotle). “The highest cannot stand without the lowest” (Imitatio Christi). When I think I act God acts, spirit acts. In this sense Augustinian divine illumination in thinking is the right idea, though seen as it were backwards, in a mirror. The inhabiting spirit is and can only be one with what it inhabits, since this in turn is nothing as it were alongside spirit, non plus entis. * “Contemplation is the highest praxis.” Aristotle in fact spoke of theorein, and his judgement here is offered quite properly in his Ethics, not in “first philosophy”. Theorein is often translated as study, but context shows the term to mean, to “stand for”, contemplation in the sense of a consciousness or what we call, metaphorically, an “inner” state (of mind), arising typically out of study or thinking. It is only the presence of a large number of books that might tempt us to divorce study, what it is, from thinking. Of this contemplation, of thinking, thought, consciousness, subjective, i.e. of a subject, an I, but not necessarily thereby psychological, Aristotle says that a little of it is worth any amount of other “activity”. Augustine, seven centuries later, makes this more precise, still thinking ethically. He says of contemplatio, arising now typically out of perusing a sacred text, “Only this is desirable for itself”, all else, that is to say, being a means to this. In medieval culture these insights are reflected in the contrast of the active and the contemplative lives, the latter being given the primacy as continuing straightforwardly into eternity. In efforts to overcome or correct their tendency to concretise or objectify these two lives institutionally in society the medievals came to speak of the vita mixta or “mixed life”, where contemplation “overflows” into action “in the world”. It is all the same itself an activity and the “highest” one.

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It is clear though that this is the normal human situation, which only a long habituation of the earlier world to a numerous class of slaves (labor servilis remained a common conception) can have obscured for the medievals. Under Christianity, the “religion of free men”, the social scene was gradually changing, through the long transitional state of serfdom where the serf, somewhat fictitiously, voluntarily tied himself to his lord. This was the story they told themselves, and it was reflected in the quasicontractual situation of binding oneself by vow in monastic institutions. The mutual contract of marriage was also seen in these terms, and remains so seen today. One might indeed want to say that a large class of women passed thus from slavery to serfdom, as transitional to “the freedom of a Christian woman” or of a woman simpliciter. Here indeed we exemplify the passage often taken as that from sacred to secular, in that nothing is any longer “set apart”. But it can as well be seen as the taking of all that is secular or profane into an all-embracing divine, that is infinite and eternal reality, spirit or mind in the idealist conception. It is plain that baptism and ordination are similarly contractual situations, sacramental though they be, in some sense partaking of the vita activa. In the heavenly Jerusalem, the seer records, he saw no temple (and no sun either, “God is their sun”), though he saw eyes from which tears, every tear had been wiped away. But does one ever see an eye? What happens when we look at a face? The world, the “active” world, is in process, always, of leaving itself behind, as we pass from biosphere to noosphere. This passage though cannot finally and literally be one of historical evolution. Evolution is itself the figure. It was in sign of this that Aristotle and Augustine assigned to contemplation a worth out of all proportion to the historical and mutable. We are there where we have always been, since the path is ourselves, is we. It is in this sense that “to them that have shall be given”. Who has not, we might ask, but need not answer. Having is a matter of seeing that one has, of deciding to be happy, to live, to take up one’s cross daily, it matters not which. Media vitae in morte sumus… Non moriar sed vivam. The rich texts of tradition bear the individual along, ut omnes unum sint. We have only to take care of one another. So it is not that all the different historical situations were right in their day, a complacency with which Hegel’s political philosophy is too often reproached. Again, this is mirrored in Newman’s view of Church history in particular. Rather, they are defective as is our own or any other time but one had to live within them. The life that I live now, says the Apostle, is not mine. I live, yet not I. “Oh life that is no life at all,” concurs the

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Spanish Teresa. Everything finite is false; this is Hegel’s view rather. Life itself is passing away, in proof that it never was. It is in view of considerations such as these that Hegel considers idealism, absolute idealism, as the foundational philosophical attitude. It is, we might also say, the religious attitude, its meaning, and this interpretation of Newman’s thesis of development presses itself upon us, viz. that development is a passing over from the symbolical narrative mode of positive, contingent belief into a philosophic vision uncovering absolute necessity and immutability in the dogmas of faith. “Where is death’s sting? Where grave thy victory?” In this exclamation the Apostle is shown as already intuiting a deeper, ever-present reality to which resurrection doctrines point, so that he tells the faithful that they “sit” (present tense) “with Christ in the heavenly places” and in fact religious praxis is shot all through with this ultimately philosophical awareness, brought about by prophetic religion culminating in the one who sends coming himself. At every Mass the faithful participate, for so they see it, in the one sacrifice of an earlier time. Hegel would uncover this, lay this bare, and he maintains that the religious experience is necessary for the subsequent philosophical development. Thus he thinks the tradition and does not merely think with it. He does not, therefore, support a total break with medieval pietas, a break sometimes seen as characteristic of the Enlightenment but which Hegel mocks. Maritain too sees the most genuine values and ideals of the Enlightenment and French Revolution as deriving from the Christian religion.18 But it has to make a difference, the religious man will protest. The difference though resides primarily just in seeing things in this way, in worship, which is a recollection of the divine sophia. “If I go to the uttermost ends of the earth… thou art there” (Psalm 138). “Whom have I in heaven and earth but thee… God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever” (Psalm 73). “Oh Israel, how lovely are thy tents!”19 The rest, the difference, follows from this worship. Ama et fac quod vis (Augustine). We recall the McTaggartian additive to Hegel stressed here, that love perfects knowledge. If love is sovereign, we have noted, it will steer and even choose knowledge, theory, emerging from all finitude of categories into a perfect reciprocity of subject and object (no longer therefore such). “I in them and they in me.” 18

Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, 1944. Thus the prophet Balaam, sent to curse the invaders. Here too God and man stand or fall together, as the “scandal of particularity” repeats itself in one individual or group after another “until all are gathered in”. 19

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One might be accused of preaching a sermon. Some people’s thought, like Eckhart’s, has been handed down in sermons and all speech is anyhow sermo etymologically. In writing down things one already in a sense proclaims or, in the jargon, “shares” or, more modestly but truly, offers. In some languages, etymologically again, this very word “offer”, its cognate, translates “sacrifice”, which returns us to liturgy (service) and worship. The task is to gather together so as to weave the strands into one garment that one, anyone, can wear. * So one argues from the disproportion in value and permanent actuality of thinking, study or contemplation with all other praxis or activity that dualism was only a first, reflexive recognition of spirit in man at the symbolical level, corresponding to religious praxis as a mediated, symbolical form of cognition. One might think, after all, of John of the Cross contrasting the silver of dogma with the gold of immediate divine knowledge. It is a fact that Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, appears to conclude that the soul-form, or rather intellect, is the man, just as much as did Plato. Aquinas, understanding this, identifies intellect with forma corporis.20 Good hylomorphism, that is, abolishes itself, is shown to be a mere clumsy or indirect (symbolical) way of speaking, once we leave the biological or zoological level of the De Anima. Thus Descartes, open to himself as conscious subject in typically Christian fashion, as conscience, can ask “Do I have a body?” For reflexion such awareness is not immediate, though in answering in the affirmative because God would not deceive him he reverts to his natural or non-reflexive awareness of extended nature, which God, spirit, had been inviting him to transcend. So, anyhow, we might read the situation if we look behind the text of his Meditations. He never really emerges from the 20 All the same F.Inciarte, in the article cited above, stressing Aristotle’s monism here, points the contrast with Aquinas (…anders als Thomas von Aquin etwa), who was concerned to stress the reality of flesh (forma corporeitatis as it became in Scotus) against the Manichees. Matter, however, as pure potentiality, is nothing actual, while any form (in man) is subsumed into the unicity of the highest form, intellect, as Aquinas himself shows he understands. What though is form if not an idea, or dialectical? To call it a “principle of being” is not to shake or modify this identity but illustrates the primacy of thought, of which being, in logic, is the beginning (cf. Hegel’s “With What Must Science Begin?” as introducing his The Science of Logic).

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abyss, mistaken for scepticism, into which he had dared to look, and this is the history of philosophy from him up to Hegel, as eliciting the vision towards which Kant had seemed to grope. Of course the Kierkegaardian demur (clothed as protest) was not long in coming, along with further developments up to contemporary “post-modernism”. But in the judgement, representative enough, of Derrida, “Hegel is always right” and one might say the same of Aquinas or Aristotle. Aquinas, of course, sets a distance between himself and philosophy at least in the letter of his texts. His writing is not loosed from active involvement in the teaching of nations (“Go teach all nations”). Nor, we said earlier, is any writing, but there is a question about “whether one man can teach another” (Aquinas), or heal another for that matter. This insight, rather than the clairvoyance toward the future it might facilitate, founds Jeremiah’s utterance quote earlier, that an elite teaching class of those who know is not of the ultimate essence of the situation we call faith. Faith has proved historically to be a condition for knowledge as naturally begetting it. Monism, then, and not dualism, is the final response to the total disproportion between contemplation and any other praxis. It is therefore an ethical result, a result within ethics, where the ultimate end, the final essence, governs thinking or any other activity as that path towards beatitude that we actually are, as the Christian “beatitudes” are a charter for living. Liturgy is an expression of this, which one may or not envisage as in process of being superseded (the desperate “liturgical movements” and “restorations”) but which cannot be merely dropped. We brought social classes, states and contractual situations into our equation, as they say, as wishing to pinpoint the progressive impatience with these phenomena of stasis in human development. Conservatives warn of a disintegration of society, of social bonds. What is actually happening, things suggest, is that the temporal is ever in process of rolling itself up, in the person of man the naturally self-transcendent or walking paradox. Man, that is, is not man. He only thinks he is, for now. He is not even “the rational creature” (the Kantian phrase capturing Cartesian selfdoubt). He is not even himself but is one with his or her begetting of all the others as they are with him as begetting him.21 One can see things this way and then it is so, a ground base to be refined by further and superior insight. One thinks of Luther’s “Tell them that Dr. Martin Luther will have it so.” In scripture we find “But I say unto you” or again “Not I but the Lord”. 21

See our “Begotten not Made”, The Downside Review, also Chapter One above.

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Camus, in disillusion, opined that all that one will one day say of modern man is that he “fornicated and read the papers”. Thomas Merton asked if we will soon “lose history”. The transference of more and more information exclusively to electronic media raises similar fears. Camus’ witticism, seemingly a form of “doing dirt on life” (F.R. Leavis, discussing Lawrence Durrell), means to imply that life has become a sea of shifting relationships and opinions with no fixed landing-points. An absence of contemplation, rather, is pointed to. As navigators we have now to see the situation of the whole sea, the whole temporal-spatial frame, even. It is not so much that each man lives in his own universe, as is feared, as that each man, in his identity with the whole, is thus identified with all others thus identical, the principle of syllogism (two things identical with a third thing are identical with one another), and syllogism is an old name for reason tout court. We might thus seem to discover in absolute idealism the real ground of reason as phenomenon, as absolute religion reaches at the end what founds the beginning, though then there will have been, it will show itself, no beginning. A hymn in the Roman breviary speaks of the anterior face of Christ as blueprint for the face and form of Adam. Indeed there must be something spiritual, something necessary, that makes us be and see things the way we are and do. This, after all, is the presumption behind seeking explanation, evolutionary or other, while creation as principle can never be fully separated from selfmanifestation and hence emanation. We value freedom too little when we make it an objection to this, confusing it with contingency. Here, rather, absolute freedom manifests its own self as, for example, in the absolute adaptability of the human hand. These perspectives throw a new light upon the received dogma of the incarnation, forcing us to see that the presupposition of dualism, which once made it acceptable to the Greek world, is not of its essence. “The Word was made flesh” does not include or imply a positive ontology of flesh, any more than belief in a creation implies any kind of view in natural science. If flesh is as such an appearance only, a finite category, “as grass”, and not merely a finite entity, then the Word appeared thus, “took on” this appearance and so remains “in all things like us”. This is not Docetism, which taught rather that the Word merely appeared among real men and so did not become as they. Allowing such a way of seeing things opens up a future for Christian preaching to “all nations”, be they Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim, which appears otherwise blocked forever. A strand of speculation in Islam identifies Mohammed with the Comforter, the Spirit, promised in the Fourth Gospel particularly. A first reaction may be to ridicule this, but it would provide a frame, a way for thinking of one

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who came after and who also captured the hearts of a large portion of humanity. Thinking, exchange, can then at least begin, including common discussion and comparison of the historical sources. Similarly not only Jesus, but also the Buddha, in a sermon, declared that he would be with his followers, with humanity, until the end of the world, suffering in and with them. Our intention here, incidentally, is not to reduce the uniqueness of Christianity, the “This is he”, but to relate it to all else and all else to it, to forerunners and successors. Christ himself shall have said “Greater things than I ve done shall you do”, adding “For I will be in you”. The Islamic idea I mentioned is not out of harmony with that, any more than is the continuing presence and manifestation of the Spirit that was in the Buddha and once “moved upon the face of the waters”. * As regards this central and unique place of Christianity, the Christian movement or phenomenon in its first appearance, it may seem doubtful if philosophy alone can support it. Our defence of a voluntarism, no longer purely theological (potentia absoluta Dei), however, serves to blunt the very notion of an exclusive centre or, rather, to raise it to the notion of an inclusive centre which is everywhere. Indeed we see here how such voluntarism itself arises necessarily out of the position according to which the “system” of spirits is for the individual while the individual is not for the system. “All things are yours,” it was said. It is belief in such promises that absolute idealism, surely not coincidentally merely, underwrites as it does the validity of the religious symbolism generally. It is rather the form than the content of such symbolism, as a form of knowledge, which is imperfect. Thus can be seen in the doctrines of original sin and of redemption from it, presented as narrative. “As in Adam all die… even so in Christ are all made alive”. The very phraseology might have suggested the dialectic between death and life, already reflected in traditional liturgical hymns and sequences. Examples are Media vitae in morte sumus, sung for centuries at the office of Compline during Lent, or the Easter sequence celebrating the Magdalen’s visit to Christ’s tomb and meeting him himself on the way. This is mentioned in what is already interpretation, of the liturgy actually going on when this is sung, of the “immolation” where life and death fight, or here “fought” (in the narrative) together, conflixere duello mirando, in the agony and final vindication of “the paschal victim… my hope” (spes mea). Now there is also a philosophy of hope, as necessary to life.

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A deeper meaning to the saying concerning Adam, a more direct meaning rather, might appears on the hypothesis of reincarnation, of a life, that is, co-extensive with that of the universe. This hypothesis of course is itself voluntarist, as advanced here at least, like indeed to the posits of natural science, choosing the simplest hypothesis, since, it must be remembered, all extension and even the category of life is in the dialectic found to be self-contradictory beyond certain point and thus unable to support itself as a reality outside of our thinking, should our thinking indeed have had limits an outside). In fact the absolute idea, once reached, issues, just inasmuch as blocked by the phenomenal sphere of nature, in absolute spirit as final, eternal, ever-present total reality. So reincarnation, extending equally over space as over time, limits and modifies the distinctness of the individual. Thus we can really die in Adam and “original sin” is quite naturally transmitted, freeing theology from artificial schemata which fail to explain, as they need to, how this original sin can justly be made into original guilt, such that the unbaptized must perish everlastingly unless and until baptism is itself mystically extended to something no longer recognisable as the sacrament, though this in itself is an enlightened step. Membership of the church does indeed signify membership of the human race and as such one is alive forever. Any one of us really was and is in Adam, was Adam, the supposed first man or men within a historical optic, as we are eternally within one another and mutually beget one another by the will that is within us. Our spirit, the atman, multiplies itself in individuals according to individual perception. We can see them as alien, other, as we can equally pass to alienation from self and back again. The situation demands that otherness be within the self and contrariwise, as in the Trinity, and this is love, where alone one fully “has the other as other” and so knowledge “reaches right up to the reality”, as qua knowledge it must. So the moral unity of state or Church, ut omnes unum sint, “that all may be one”, when thought through, restores our aboriginal and ever-abiding contact, of which we are forgetful, with a real oneness of spirit. There is but one. That is, unity is unbroken, though there can be unity in trinity and trinity in unity since spirit breathes and begets. This Trinity though cannot be seen as exclusively a containing system, if it is, as it must be, personal. Each mode of unity contains all the others and so none is merely contained. It is contained in containing, thus over-stretching this metaphor. McTaggart, again, has insisted that no person can contain another. The continual New Testament “in” is every time metaphor for an identity only able to be understood “spiritually”, not immediately.

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There is the difficulty of an interval between incarnations, where one would not be or exist at all, given that dualism is excluded. Freed from the illusion of matter, furthermore, there would be no need to “return”. This is the improbability of some oriental religious representation, explicable only as part of the illusion of time. The same applies to early Patristic accounts of resurrection where the individual is quite simply dead, shattered like Pharaoh’s silver trumpet, between death and resurrection, a circumstance which Aquinas argued would make a resurrected identity impossible, since the same abiding soul-form would be lacking. But we are now rather modifying the “mathematical” notion of identity, in favour of an identity in difference, a unity of opposites (not to be confused with an admission of logical contradictions, inadmissible in any system as thought and “predicated”). Actually self too is a relative or finite concept, only serviceable for a finite penetration into absolute reality. The validity of identity in difference suggests that self as immediately taken is misperception. As essentially relation to other selves (and hence to other relations merely) it is indeterminate and hence indeterminable as regards any essence. Love, rather, a quality, in religion “the whole Christ”, is the whole reality. Creation, the “body” of persons delivered to “the Father” so that “God shall be all in all” is the final word there. Absolute idealism, we said, leaves everything as it is, inclusive of the fields investigated by natural science. Thus if some people should see global warming and attendant disasters as sign of an approaching end to the world, and not merely to the planet, as in the prophecies of our tradition, then this is quite to be expected on the absolute idealist scheme. An end or collapse will always threaten what contains contradictions in its conception, but similarly there will be an end to the finite pains we then endure. It is thus that the world ends for each one of us and yet does not, since we cannot experience the end of experience. Really, we have been arguing, we cannot think it either. “For God all men are alive”. The proposal of a passage from biosphere to noosphere already dehistoricises this approaching end, dehistoricises the historical, relativises it we should rather say, as we have relativised identity. Nothing is merely “itself and not another thing”. We are passing to where we have always been, as the liturgy daily represents under the imperfect forms of particularist religious conceptions (this is however acknowledged within religion itself). That the centre is everywhere is prerequisite for ecumenism, itself heralding a superseding of religion as we have known it, both foreshadowed and elicited, however, in basic Christian, Jewish and doubtless other writings from time immemorial, constantly, that is to say. This centre is I, self, consciousness, as primordial universal. If, however, it

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is a Christian civilization as particular which has carried this seed capable of overcoming particularity, of a centre and distance from it, then we should, instead of using this to objectify Christian exclusivism, rather search for a corresponding capacity in other religious systems as, equally, in modern democratic “secularism”. Nothing suggests we will not find it, and this last example is of special interest as itself interpretable as Christian development in its idea. Indeed, if the centre is everywhere it must be so. Christianity, it is true, offers us a person, but here we have opened again the very idea of person to that of same in other, to avatars, “hidden” Imams, as Jesus let himself be identified with a returning Elijah, or one acts “in the power of” another and so on. “This also is thou, neither is this thou.” By Hegel’s Doctrine of the Concept, in which Logic terminates, there is nothing to which this does not apply. This insight continues reflected in Wittgenstein’s “The world is everything that is the case”. There is no other clear sense, though we may strive to “mean” that. Whatever is the case is one with the world, which, in turn, cannot be conceived without it. This is why “The world is the totality of facts, not of things”, why, also, “the totality of facts determines what is the case”, as just one “fact”, namely, positive or negative (“and also whatever is not the case”). The “space” of the world is “logical” (Tractatus 1.13). That Wittgenstein immediately seems to deny the above, at 1.2 and 1.21, is at once rectified at 2: “What is the case – a fact – is the existence of states of affairs”, leading on to a discussion of possibility as “non-accidental” or “written into the thing itself” (2.012), as ideal necessity, Hegel, here following Leibniz, would say. Our “form of independence” is “a form of dependence” (2.0122).

CHAPTER THIRTEEN BEYOND COMMON SENSE: ANTHROPOLOGY AS CHRISTOLOGY

A distinction, whatever else it is, is a holding apart. So it is a divorce, a dichotomy, whether in the conceptual realm alone or in things themselves. Many philosophers have indeed denied that there can ever be any valid distinction in reason that is not also in reality and contariwise. The formalities of thought, they want to say, reflect a yet deeper formality on the part of “things”. So to the subtlest modality of thought there will necessarily correspond a distinctio formalis a parte rei, in the words of Duns Scotus, here, one might so misinterpret, taking the fundamental step away from the near-total medieval reliance upon Aristotle towards the idealism later judged essential, as if it were not implicit in Aristotle read whole. In medieval thought and life this separation was especially instanced in the cleavage between the “active” life of praxis and the “contemplative” life of theoria. The active life belonged to our existence “in time”, the contemplative life already participated in eternity. So the active life, to which most men and women are assigned, did not participate in eternity, in “heaven”. For them it was a mere condition for heaven’s attainment. The moral virtues, that is, Aristotelian habits though supernaturalised by grace, by charity in particular, were needed for the conduct of practical life and for reaching man’s Last End, finis ultimus, natural or supernatural. The series in reality terminated or, in practical reasoning, commenced by this end was not, all the same, in essence temporal. The end is one’s aim or purpose and participation in eternity is not properly a “fore”-taste. There is no absolute before and after. We find Aristotle saying that contemplation, theoria, is itself the highest praxis. The schema, that is, has its limits, is finite, not absolute. The category of “performative” utterances might thus be extended into any utterance whatever. Utterance is an action, praxis, and we can extend this idea to thinking itself, the thought, Gedanke, which elicits the words, the utterance. Aristotle there denies the separation, expressing a monism.

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Action and contemplation become interchangeable names, should we speak for example of love or study. I can either see my work, my loving, my artistic creativeness, as prolonged contemplation, as thinking, or I can see my thinking, my listening to music, my “letting being be”, as the place, the occasion, where I am most active, most alive, most practically “engaged”. * The Hegelian philosophy, or that of Nicholas of Cusa, and its dialectic has “thematised” this feature of reversal consequent upon the finitude of our concepts. This reversibility itself discloses the core of what we call mind or even, as spirit, existence. Yet this disclosure, in overcoming truth’s hiddenness, revolutionises truth itself, answers Pilate’s question anew. It answers it, however, by recalling us to the original answer, to an absolute subjectivity. Hence it reveals the essential in the “ecumenical movement”. It summons us, namely, to the summit of the dialectic, where whatever path taken leads. Thus the reciprocal substitutibility of theory and practice as finite opposites is further instanced as between materialism and spiritualism. This comes out once a certain step has been taken, common to both parties, that, namely, of consigning everyday experience to a realm of “misperception”. For many philosophers, as for physicists, time is an illusion of immediate consciousness merely and the same applies to matter conceived as extended stuff, for example. For Descartes matter was already not the stuff itself, but pure extension. Now, however, the extension, space, has been relativised along with time. So we may find a world of timeless spirits postulated as alone absolute. All true perception, could we but overcome time’s illusion, is of one another, of other spirits or, we might say, is of consciousness (“mind” is too abstract a term), singular or plural, of self or other but in ultimate identity. The self is admitted to be out and out paradoxical. Even knowledge or thought itself is argued misperceived insofar as taken as final reality. This is, rather, something more perfectly reciprocal, such as we best apprehend in our notion and experience of love. This is McTaggart’s philosophy, his System. Unlike Hegel he distinguishes it from its, the content’s “method” (EL 237, where Hegel, however, qualifies the assertion with “at this stage”). Or we have a world, charted by “materialist” psychoanalytic theory, where the infant attains to the possession of mind as a kind of neurotic defence against the external and hostile (Freud, Klein), where what is

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taken into self, as nipple into mouth, gets misrepresented as affirmation, as negation converts what is spat out. Mind is a kind of dream we weave for ourselves. But here we must notice that matter itself, the surrounding “viscosity” thus interpreted, is woven by, into and with precisely this mind. Mind, at an earlier period, wanted to define mind against or within its own undefined operation. Now it reintegrates and indeed absorbs matter. It no longer “matters”, therefore, if one is materialist or spiritualist, for one monism is as good as another if we are simply dealing with schemata, a set of symbols with which to represent ourselves to ourselves. For every set of symbols is not just a consciousness but consciousness itself, an “intentional system”. This is the mutual cancelling or “identity in difference”. So if the animals have consciousness in this sense they have symbols and signs. Yet they may well themselves be but signs of our own devising, unless they are disguised others. Animal consciousness though, taken as such, is merely analogical to ours, if we should speak of it (as only “we” do) a relation to a partial environment as is ours to reality as a whole. Thus Kant, in wishing to “animalise” man, only succeeded in “animalising” himself. So we typically, and “neurotically”, scale down this rational reality to an environment, when we adopt a finitely exclusive intellectual stripe. Ecumenism requires of us such an admission, to which, we claim, the zigzag dialectic of the ages has brought us. This is in fact what makes our thought, in the concrete, speculative, as the opposition of the infinite to the finite. The Concept itself finds no other expression. Its expression, therefore, is essentially our “bewitchment by language” (Wittgenstein) against which we must “battle”, in linguistic self-deconstruction, the speculative. Hegel’s language here, his Logic, is the language of philosophy itself, is Logic. The monism of self in other, other in self, lay coiled, along with the paradox, in the Greco-Thomist account of knowledge as requiring that we “have” the other as other. The verb is here replaceable by “be” while the qualification “intentionally” disappears as we penetrate into the logic, the mind and heart, of love as term of knowledge, its final sapientia. Just as the spiritualists deny matter, so we can also say that matter, as irrational, that is to say perishable and potential, denies itself. What is perishable has perished or, rather, never was, is not. Dualism is a psychic device for holding reality at a distance, preserving an illusory autonomy, which one yet disguises under an inauthentic submission to law. Everything here gets subverted, freedom confused with indifference. It was though very hard to abandon dualism, its clinging vestiges, to cast all one’s cares away, become what one was not, go through what one

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is not, find self in other. The case is similar, psychologically at least, with the infantile desire to be loved, perpetuated in the “neurotic” family. The teaching of St. Francis, that “it is in loving that we are loved” is, however, a literal truth. It requires that we no longer dance to the tune of others. There is a time when one needs to do that, as others, too, will no doubt follow us, for a time. But we must say to them, “Greater things shall you do than I have done.” Everything, in short, has to be generalised. Only by daring to do this do we confirm the original wisdom “from above”, thus ourselves becoming man. Agnosce, o christiane, dignitatem tuam, urged Augustine, and this commission rings down the ages as we, other sheep in another fold, continue to fulfil it. * The point is this, that reason itself represents reason as emerging out of the irrational, called material. This position though is untenable, contradictory. The rational cannot emerge out of the irrational without being one among that mass of imagined processes from which it imagines itself to emerge. That is, nothing that is not irrational can emerge from the irrational. For nothing emerges from it and that is what the irrational means. The irrational cannot rationally be thought, since if I am thinking then the rational is there, of which we have said that it cannot thus emerge. It is a simple necessity. And if the irrational should be there with no connection to some supposedly emergent rationalism then there is no need to think or attempt to think it at all. That, rather, would be arbitrary and so doubly irrational. This means again that the hypothesis, within a dominant materialism, of emergent rationality is no more than a picture or model, an inconsistent one indeed. The hypothesis of evolution, that is, elicits idealism as a frame, within which and within which alone evolution can be postulated without contradiction, since idealism leaves science just as it is, even if it situates scientific knowledge as a whole somewhat differently. To affirm an ordered material creation, on the other hand, is to be committed to a dualism of finite and infinite, which is equally contradictory, as if the finite, in order to exist, must limit the infinite or unlimited. Talk of “ontological discontinuity”, as a way out of this, merely returns one to idealism without saying so. The being that is not continuous with divine being is then not distinguishable from a divine idea, in self-negation, of being or of anything “else” indifferently. In fact all the ideas are finally beings, as these, the “beings of reason”, are the final beings. Reason is prior, as even being, the first thing (primum) falls (cadit) and falls into the

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mind (in mentem). So being is in fact the first idea, or beginning of Thought, nous, entirely, as God, as absolute, lacks nothing. To call God producer is finite representation. Or, if one cannot conceive of ideas without intentionality, then speak of dreams, veils, “categories” even. So Hegel calls existence a poor “category”. For McTaggart it is a species of the real, merely. Thus, while for Aquinas viventibus esse est vivere, for Hegel life is not the ultimate category, as is shown, quite simply, by its outcome in death. Death does not come to life from outside or contingently. It is the index merely of the finitude of the conception of an organic unity of parts within a whole. For us then as the subjects of life it is itself resurrection from it, to situate the religious representation spiritually, into our untrammelled subjectivity. It can seem, however, that it makes no difference whether we call created realities things or ideas. Of course we call them things. Where else is language born? That is, one is at liberty to use the language of realism. But such realism should be open to the development that in fact occurs as philosophy passes over to the divine point of view. This is the point of view the so-called mystics have ever tried to hold in focus and not lose. It is implied in the ideal and canon of reason, as is also an absolute subjectivity, and hence an “inter-subjectivity” which enhances and does not cut down this absoluteness. It is rather a coincidence in identity of as many “solipsisms” as there are subjects. But still then there is just one subjectivity, represented before our eyes and ears as language speaking itself, beside which the abstractly individual subject can only “mean”, Hegel says, making a most pertinent pun upon the German meinen as cognate, so to say, with the adjective mein, my, in what then becomes “private language”.1 We beget one another. The casualty in this line of thinking is that of an analogy of being seen as anything other than a rule of speech. In the end there are as many ways of being as there are things. That is, being is said in many ways. That is, being is just nothing, the emptiest and widest of predicates, totally variable. It is the pre-condition, the beginning, of our system of language or predication and it merely gets in the way if it is treated as anything else. We can only say something of something first falsely differentiated from it because all things are identical with being or are Identity, “pure principle of reflection” (EL114, 115). Thus I cannot ask if I exist, unless I already exist. I am necessary, as existence is not, and the same applies to God. God’s existence is swallowed up in, as identified with, essence. 1 See Hegel, EL 20: “But language expresses nothing but universality…” Cf. 24 Zusatz (1). There can be no private language, Wittgenstein will later demonstrate.

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If though one insists that the rational cannot come from the irrational then the way is also open to, as it seems, camouflaging one’s idealism by speaking of the spirituality, the rationality of matter, which science dutifully uncovers. This is the way of Teilhard de Chardin. Gottlob Frege too spoke, in Foundations of Arithmetic, of “the reason that is in the world”. “What is the world without the reason?” “What are things independent of reason?” To speak of it so would be equivalent to “washing the fur without wetting it”. Nor is this really different from our position outlined above. The common factor is the need to situate the finite with respect to the infinite. An acute facet of that, however, is the need to situate oneself with respect to absolute subjectivity, of which one is, traditionally, “image and likeness”. That thought is screwed tighter, within religion, when one speaks of the being, person or spirit “within”, destroying even this “within” by specifying it as true or closer self than self. So we arrive willy-nilly at the philosophical systems described. We might say the Freudian hypothesis, of material mind, is confirmed by the consequent successful interpretation of dreams. It can confirm, for example, how dream ideas become telescoped or condensed, one word being formed to cover two quite diverse situations or wishes, say, insofar as both emerge from a present (material) flow of energy, of neurons, of a sheer or indifferent quantity. Yet this account fails completely to account for Freudian science itself, for intellect and truth. One flow of neurons is as good as another and advancing a pragmatic theory of truth involves one in an endless regress therefore explaining nothing. Any predication, even of pragmatism, asserts that something IS so. But how, we might ask, is a “spiritualist” account of mind any better off? The answer, surely, is that spirit has to be understood in the Hegelian way, namely, of the superiority of the notion to being (and essence). Spirit is thought, which never just happens to be so, since it is not so at all. Thought thinks itself. Aquinas approached this Aristotelian-Hegelian conception, but was held back under the influence of the Exodus text, that God is he who is. God is the name for ultimate truth, transcending existence. We can, if we like, express this on a material model, just as every term in the language is metaphorical and taken from material nature. Consider, for example, the manifold uses of the preposition “in”, for which we can find no basic equivalent, that is the point, but which does not therefore univocally constrain us. To illustrate or, rather, to concretise… Childhood is often represented as an awakening to presence in a palace of novelties and delights, in short, a place. This though is taken from a mere part of later experience. The child does not know inside and outside, spirit and matter. Again,

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subjectivity is primal, not the subject but this subject, I indeed. Any participation in a public world is under my control, as I invented the very idea of such a thing. True I seemed to lack power, to be thrown from one situation to the other, subject to joy and grief. But if the I is paramount this merely shows the falsity, the finitude, of the I which feels itself thus put upon. This is the meaning of affirming the actual. The attempt is often made to reduce this puzzle to linguistic confusion about the first personal pronoun. This is obscurantist merely. Freud sees children as puzzling about where they come from and, secondly, why or how there can be also an opposed sex to his (or presumably her) own. A variant upon this, as I have described it, is to wonder at the total improbability of one’s being numbered among the definite number, as I then supposed, of those who are (others). I had of course no idea of an infinite relationality, of self to other in reciprocal identity cancelling or absorbing (Hegel’s word) the reciprocity. I do not recall completely what answer I found, if any, at that time, aged five or six. I do recall though that the solution tended to reduce the others rather than myself. The question, after all, calls for a reduction, of which Sartre’s view that one must either reduce oneself in favour of God or God in favour of oneself is merely one form. As touching God one is invited later, or comes to it oneself, to think of oneself as “contingent” as freely called by God into existence, a kind of being chosen prior to the more definite election (or not) of “redemption” theories. Of course this idea of “chosen”, as if from among independently (of God) existing possibilities is even theologically second-rate when not seen as a metaphor or analogy. C.S. Lewis suggested (The Problem of Pain, final chapter, “Heaven”) one is created to adore a particular part of the divine substance. This was a not very happy rescripting of the text of Revelations (Apocalypse) where God says he will give every man a white stone on which a name is written known to that man (or presumably woman) alone. But these attempts to remove final subjectivity to an external being demand, unless deeply “rescripted” in some more adequate way, a putting away of childish things indeed. The child, especially one not too happily convinced of being loved, will take another path. He may, for example, start to wonder, if he does not become entirely gripped by the idea, if the whole world, or society rather, is not brought about, put there, created, for the sole purpose of getting him put into prison. This no doubt comes in part from his grandmother’s pretending to telephone the police when she cannot get him to behave, prison being a corresponding concept. Later he may labour under a dreary certainty of being set, destined, to be hanged one day. His dreams will be correspondingly drear, only entailing a wish,

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as Freud would require, in that they contained, often, an element of those he respected or loved encouraging him to face the fact that he must thus be hanged, with their quasi-benediction, because one is, after all, “bad”, not one of the community, that is to say. What does this prove? Nothing. It shows though that being subject (subject, not “a” subject: that is a later rationalisation) is not a matter of pronouns in the public world. There cannot, maybe, be a private language but there can be and certainly is privacy. This, as Descartes understood, is not the same as private being. I think, first of all. More radically, thought, along with consciousness, occurs. Are they the same? The infant surely has no notion of “I”. Consciousness, all the same, is subjective. That is, it is not primarily object for its own or some other consciousness. Thought requires us to rise to a notion of non-empirical consciousness, inasmuch as thought is self-validating. The knower knows that he knows. Really that is all that he knows, since Idea sublates the very notion of object. The knower in knowing is all, infinity. For Aquinas the damned are outside the bond of charity, no longer to be loved, that is to say. But every consciousness, he too in himself, is in that position. It is not only the outsider in, say, Colin Wilson’s sense2, who has to make an effort to become an insider. Everyone gets socialised, with more or less violence, of which infant baptism is merely the archetype, whatever else it is. This is reckoned natural, whether by tribal Xhosas or by the Greek idea, as against contractualism, that it is natural to man to be born into a state, at once political and moral. Contractualism thus represents an advance towards recognition of the primal reality of the subject, expressed by J.H. Newman in saying that he knew the only realities were “myself and God”. The duality is already enough to raise the suspicion, as indeed with contractualism, that we have here an intermediate position, and that is the strength, the power for reaction, of the more innocent or integral Greek position which the medievals, themselves intermediate in their very name, wished to take over whole but in the end could not do so. Newman indeed, as Wilson remarked, is a type of an original outsider who strove to become an insider. Once an outsider always an outsider, though, one wants to say, and those who pretend differently must sooner or later acknowledge their pretence. For Newman, as standing for the contemporary Roman Catholic predicament, we might say, the acknowledgement takes the form of revolutionary ecumenism, concerning which the document on this theme as “decreed” by the Second Vatican 2

Cp. Colin Wilson, The Outsider, Gollancz, London 1960.

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Council is, again, clearly intermediate. Yet the fact of history, as of dialectic, shows that everything, from understandings of the Creed of Nicaea to green vegetation, is intermediate. It is, properly, the relative degree of intermediacy that must concern us. I am the captain of my soul. There too we have still a duality. * It is just the opposite, just the contrary, Hermione. We are all different and unequal in spirit - it is only the social differences that are based on accidental material conditions. We are all abstractly or mathematically equal, if you like. Every man has hunger and thirst, two eyes, one nose and two legs. We’re all the same in point of number. But spiritually there is pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts… But I, myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality with any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as one star is from another, as different in quality and quantity. Establish a state on that. One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison…3

Pure difference! Suppose there is a connection with idealism here, or, rather, a connecting of idealism with the primacy of love, that is to say, identity. Equality is here based not upon similarity but upon total dissimilarity, in virtue of either of which one might be equal. The dissimilarity can convey, explain or ground our terror or disgust, our rejection, of “other people”, this being the thrust of the very word “other” (as it translates into “alien”, the pure other). We can also relate it to an uncertainty about our humanity, such as Descartes expressed in his Meditations, a basic document of modernity. I am myself, “a thinking thing”, before I know if I have hands or feet. Newman will repeat that he is more certain of God’s truth than of these appendages. This subjectivity is real, psychic and not purely formal or transcendent in that sense. Rather, each in this way is all, the universe. He does not merely or at all “inhabit” it. What I know I am, as anima est omnia. Suppose again, entertain the suggestion, that idealism distils the original thrust of Christianity, like a “rainbow after long storms”. The phrase is Nietzsche’s, as standing for forgiveness, which, it is often not noticed, characterises his Übermensch, just as it plays the pivotal role leading into religion as manifestation in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind. Forgiveness, reconciliation, equally, is the essence of Christianity. The 3

The character Birkin, in D.H. Lawrence’s novel, Women in Love (1920), Ch. VIII, “Breadalby”.

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Feuerbachian phrase might serve for wisdom’s replacing or perfecting faith and theology as a more perfect form of knowledge, as the Alexandrian Fathers had already envisaged. Theology, after all, was born in a Church at first without it, so it can also die or be aufgehoben within that same “church”. Nietzsche points out that forgiveness is what occurs in families. So a universal forgiveness gathers all spirits into a universal human family, the Body of Christ. But why is forgiveness thus found in families, to begin with? In families, the reply might run, the members exist mutually in one another’s subjectivity. The totally other Birkin sees himself as a being carrying within himself his mother, as she may carry him, his father, siblings maybe. Any idea of civic friendship would be useless. And so, the French Revolution, alle Menschen Brüder, the bond of equality with fraternity, is deeply Christian. This was Maritain’s argument, in his Christianity and Democracy (1944), for seeing the Enlightenment as a fruit of the Gospel, realising the priesthood of those called laity, we might say. A negative attitude to the Enlightenment is not Christian. In line with this otherness, not being literally member of a species, we have Aristotle’s doctrine of the specific and ultimate difference of intellect containing all that makes up the being, not being a part of it merely. Then we find that love corresponds to this identification of part with whole, since this intellect also contains all things, is quodammodo omnia. We have to postulate a mutual solipsism, where each “I” says “I in them and they in me” or where all are “members one of another”. Those who reject this seem often not interested to know God, how God must be, but only to keep God as major piece in a bullying and metaphysically obtuse ideology. When Aquinas says that friends are not of the esse of eternity, but of its bene esse all the same, this is not finally satisfactory. How could it be? It betrays something unresolved, contradiction. The other is other, yet it is better (bene esse) that he were within me, but merely because he is thus within me, like the mother, child or sibling as we noted above. So I am he or she just as he or she is I. In this way friends, all, are necessary, but as negation (other) negated again. I use the Hegelian terms because it would be perverse not to. They are to hand and, our analysis shows, are not jargon. In fact the concept of God fuses with that of the self, the true self. Psychology’s attempt to restrain the unconscious, discovered or engendered, within the parameters of materialism has failed. It is and always was the source of prophecy, guiding us out of the prison-house, out of any slavery whatever. The self, we might say, is ultimately ego-less. “I am that”, again, is a formula to hand and so not jargon. Every soul gets

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what it expects, said the “saint” of Lisieux, herself prophet. Again, you would not seek me if you had not already found me, a variant upon the Pauline sitting in the heavenly places, present tense. Our Christian filter does not fall short of any other. Nor do we “debase our coinage” in noting this. God, the absolute, is, necessarily, absolutely simple, for Aquinas his first attribute. The absolute is simple, is simplicity, that is, thought negated or, in a word, aufgehoben. Knowledge vanishes, love, interpenetration, essence of the dynamic body, remains, corpus but corpus mysticum, Corpus Christi, members one of another. All memory is here transcended, as in the “second childhood” of the very elderly. They become all that they have been and were and are and who will become this, strength made perfect in weakness or vice versa. Living we die, but it is in dying that we live, in loving that we are loved, literally. It was always literal but we didn’t see it, making a jargon out of jargon’s denial, which was worse than ever. That is why we are all meant, eventually, “to cease all thinking”, to know in unknowing. We may give thus the final word where we like. Fac quod vis. This though might be merely the beginning of poetry, of psalmody. In the novel Hermione reacts by attempting to murder Birkin, since he has effectively stated here that in his soul he does not need her. A Hallaj, Jesus Christ or a Joan of Arc can and have provoked similar reactions from those wanting spiritually to be needed. But regarding idealism, suppose it makes no difference whether we call things created realities or ideas. That is the point, really. One rejoins the tradition * “Myself and God” was Newman’s watchword. Why the duality? Why not? Whatever is limited is limited by something. Therefore the first truth or final ground is unlimited. It is not even limited by being, as if it had to be. Being is taken from our language, and so nothing can be without being something. This applies even to being something unlimited. So to be unlimited is not just to be, i.e. it is necessarily differentiated (one could not explain its simplicity as a “potential” differentiatedness. The simplicity would transcend being and thought too). The differentiations, we may want to say, are the differentiated bodily histories, themselves signs of a more ample serial individuality or reality. The bodily is this. It is not, except as sign. It is formally or purely sign, not something that happens to be a sign. Abstractly, in its immediacy, it is not. The real infinity is to be found, therefore, exclusively in this individual, over and over, as part containing the whole, this being what characterises subjecthood or self as

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such, that it truly has the other as other. Thus, to one searching for God, ultimate happiness, greatest conceivable or first truth, the Oracle declares “Know thyself”. This is the ancient confirmation of absolute idealism, where “I” is the absolute universal, atman. Again, if we hold to being according to St. Thomas’s distinguishing of being as common to and being as containing all things, yet being would only do this by actual differentiation, since nothing potential is admissible (in God). Here one might appeal to the finite essence (ideal) or form (real) as limiting otherwise infinite (but surely not formless) being, but such forms too regularly know or possess other and even all other forms, in knowledge actual or, temporally viewed, potential. In short, our not knowing what God is extends to our not knowing, in some cases at least, what he is not, e.g. is God my true self or another. For if we always knew what he was not, we would effectively know what he is, which is ex hypothesi excluded. Or he is the other who is myself, the self who is yet other. We might therefore be permitted to prefer not to speak of or in terms of God. Essence is the idea, of anything, of any thing. Form is its actually being, viz. its being what it is (and not some other thing). Yet being, says Aquinas, is the actuality of any and every form (actualitas omnis formae). This esse in the second sense is not of course the divine being, esse divinum, which is unique and typically gives such actuality, esse, to all else, to every finite thing or form, in what is called creation, an act (of intellect and will) accomplished in eternity. Thus the angels are at once pure form and potential. They are, like numbers, nothing other than their what, their notion. Thomistic angels, we might say, witness to God’s power, often denied, to create, and so create differently, the laws of logic or mathematics. Power to create a different logic surely includes a power to change the past, to see, that is, that there is or will be no past. The model of infinite being as causally behind all finite beings, including angels, seems doubtful. The angel has to be created united with the forms of all things, innately. He has all others as other. What he does not have is knowledge of the first principle, the Idea, as this alone knows itself, remaining therefore essentially hidden, not out of a holy coyness but as simple consequence of being in no way passive to any “other” mind in its abstract finitude. This is the “absolute knowledge” with which The Phenomenology of Mind concludes, self-knowledge in the sense of knowledge itself knowing itself. The oracular “Know yourself”, again, is just this, the call to die to or “forget” particularity in the Idea. If the angel shall know God it will only be by God’s empowering or giving this knowledge, as he gave the original forms innately, but now, theologians

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have to say, by a grace beyond nature, which the angel may either accept or reject, and this is the origin of heaven and hell both. Instead of this we may conceive of infinity as necessarily differentiated, as we even find in theology (the Trinity), though not in Thomistic “natural theology”, which is thus not properly philosophy of religion. For this cannot co-exist with some other treatment of the matter. Since though infinity does not differentiate itself as if actualising a prior or “abstract” potentiality the differentiations must be as necessary as are the persons of the Trinity in theology. God, the Idea absolute, is as necessarily differentiated in concept, in the Concept, as it is necessarily simple. Once admit such differentiation, however, and one might as well admit differentiation (of infinity), while affirming its necessarily absolute unity and simplicity (for the same reasons as the Trinity does not contradict this), into any number or, rather, an infinity of persons, each being necessary to all, to the whole, as the whole is necessary to each. Infinity, that is, transcends number in its, infinity’s, idea. “I am you”. The being that God gives will not be the divine being, since this is in its very conception given by none. One speaks, therefore, of an analogous being, i.e. confessedly not being in the same sense. This at once though makes of God something “abstract” or “unreal” for the common-sense consciousness. In reality, though, what is implied is that everything finite or other than God is unreal or, in Hegel’s preferred use, untrue. One ascends from mere likeness, shadows, to reality. Whether or not, that is, there can be a being other than divine being is a matter of linguistic preference merely. Language cannot but raise some of its equivocations, deriving from the finite number of words available, to the status of analogy. It is like asking whether creation takes place inside (divine ideas) or outside God, a clear spatial metaphor. Here the outside is inside, the inside outside and, again, “there is one closer to me than I am to myself”. This “one” is the unity, the centre, which is everywhere, the subject. I am that. Subjectivity, that is, cannot be created, still less contingent. Aquinas indeed speaks of created necessities, such as angels and human souls. But here we envisage subjecthood as essentially uncreated. Thus we find in the Old Testament that angels and divinity easily merge and God’s sending his angel at length becomes his coming himself. We shall not deny God, unless in denying him we affirm him, which is not unthinkable. “I and my father are one.” *

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A main aspect of the monism argued for here is the denial of time and change. Rather than add directly to the obsessive literature on a famous argument of McTaggart’s for the unreality of time, contrasting strangely with an ignoring or a disdaining of his system in general, it is time, so to say, to consider other pointers to time’s unreality. This was always necessary on the religious view of things, though the realist consciousness did not, simply could not, reach further than saying that “with the Lord” a thousand years is as a day. But even here, when we are told that someone, the speaker in the narrative, saw Satan falling from heaven or had glory with the Father “before the world was” we are not required or obliged to think that that speaker remembered these states and situations along with his consciousness of the everyday. We ourselves have arrived at the conviction of sitting essentially in eternity without thinking that this is something that we have to remember or recall. The command to love God not merely above all things but with all one’s heart, mind and soul, in triple emphasis upon what seems to try to be an exclusive totality, is not compatible with an alternative and finite reality. Thus the supplementary love of neighbour, as of self, gets finally presented as love and service of one presenting himself, in the narrative, as again as it were exclusively divine. We have seen, however, how philosophy overcomes this exclusivity by means of an identity not foreign to religion either, where, though, it remains at the level of the mystical or impenetrable, of “I in them and they in me”, “members one of another”. “Who are you, Lord?” asks Paul, in response to the question “Why are you persecuting me?” What is your identity? So the poet urges us “to see the world in a grain of sand”, echoing the mystic “This also is thou”, for it is not “the world” as finite reality that he means, not at all. This finite world must also disappear from consciousness, as in religion it will be finally rolled up like a scroll. What is timed to die might just as well die now, says Lawrence’s Birkin again, that is, be risen above, be wiped out of our thought. Misperception, McTaggart roundly judges. We have the analogue of this view of things in how we treat language, words. Words try to be thoughts, though they are held back from this by their phonetic materiality. But just as (in the realist, late-scholastic tradition) thoughts, as concepts, are seen as formal signs, without other reality in themselves, that is, of what they are thoughts of, and ultimately a mere relating of the thinker to that object, even called “the objective concept”, so words can be seen as in aspiration formal signs of their significata. We do not attend to the word’s own material reality, except by

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that reflexive movement which puts the word into suppositio materialis, as the theory has it, a state of “standing for itself”. This, in the religious consciousness, has always been the principle of “transfiguration”, and it is indeed the whole attraction of this feast of the Church, the principle whereby some one object, on some privileged occasion, bears the whole “weight of glory”. One cannot doubt, for example, that this is the principle of especially the symphony among musical compositions, a fact of which symphonists themselves became increasingly aware, each symphony corresponding to “the birth of music itself” and not merely music. This is also the explanation, the rationale, of the state of “being in love”, captured in “the figure of Beatrice”, in whose eyes the poet sees, as in a glass though not darkly, the reflected verbum Dei, of course “incarnate”. Art, that is to say, overcomes time and matter. In the case of music it does this in the apparent medium of time itself. However, the same is true of common or garden narrative. We tell a story so that, once told, its substance shall be seen “all at once”. The end of a good story is in its beginning. Beginnings and ends are annihilated, seen through, that is to say. This is a matter of “knowing the story”, pervaded all through by the essentially happy ending. It may not be happy for the wolves or witches but they never aspired to happiness anyway, being simply monstrous, like cannibals, we think. Yet a human cannibal might eventually or eternally be happy, we have to allow. On this view art or telling stories, these leisure activities, correspond to a periodic exercising of a more true consciousness than we generally manage and are thus far primary, like the periodic ritual worship of the religious person. Philosophy does not, says Hegel, “suppress” faith. It rather “accomplishes” religion and Christianity, for him, in particular, since he sees Christianity as “the perfect religion”. We might, more ecumenically, think that any religion has an ideal or perfect aspect (as Christianity in experience is most often far from perfect). Philosophy though does not make religion useless, but quite the contrary, both having “true reality” for content. Do we not though confuse the redemption of time and change with their annihilation? They are indeed figures of eternity. But this is the point. They are not on one level with it. Analogy concedes and at once obscures this. All things are in God and this is no restriction. The end-state of religion, visio beatifica, is how things eternally are and as it is the aim of dialectic to reveal, to plot not an alternative history on the historical level but history’s key, how it is not one thing after another. Already in Scripture it is said, of an earlier stage, in an unusually felicitous translation,

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“these things happened in a figure”.4 But our very own lives are figures, since life is a finite category, which just therefore “runs away” and creates the illusion of time, bounded by death, which, Scripture says again, “God did not make”. It is not real as we think it, therefore, and death’s entering into the world, as is there said, is a figure for the finitude of perception. * We find that we progressively rejoin the infinity we projected on to the divine, in confirmation of that part of Feuerbach’s thesis, whether or not he envisaged what we now envisage, deathless spirit, for example. As subjects, we find, we are not essentially men, though we take that form. We are abiding act, intellect, of which the body, and hence the humanity, is merely the possibility. It is not something else as joined to this form, which is rather its (own) reality and not merely an organic body’s unifying principle. In that sense we are not a thing, some object, but pure subject. So when we love we are indeed like sons of God come down from heaven as attracted by beauty, of the daughters of men. The patriarchal myth can as well be inverted, daughters of God coming down to the sons of men. The pessimism of the legend consists in its implication that the one loved becomes object merely, is hence “of men”, not from heaven, as is the one loving. One could in remedy imagine a son of God attracted thus outwards (rather than downwards) who then, from the loved appearance or species as locus, attracts into operation the spirit that is the lovely girl’s true and eternal self or atman, her reality making her to be all she is. This atman in turn is finally identical with the “act of acts”, self of selves and unity of the whole. It is, again, in so far as love is identity with the other that love is generically between opposed sexes, as it is in its final particularity between opposed individuals (of any or no sex), i.e. opposed as individuals. In the universe of actual love, therefore, these individuals are simultaneously relations. This makes the form of predication constitutively false, distortional, since there are no subjects distinct from subjectivity, as God is his godhead. Inter-subjectivity therefore posits a plurality, polytheism, at variance with the final harmony, which is no longer made up or “composed”, komponiert, but rather gedichtet. The interchanges are not finally between otherwise separate “entities”. My or your “act”,

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Letter to the Galatians, where the author writes of Abraham and his two sons, one by nature (of Hagar the “bondwoman”) and one “of promise” (by Sarah, in old age, preternaturally, his wife), Ishmael and Isaac, as figuring the two “covenants”, old and new.

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actuality, is one with the act of acts. We called it in jest a universe of coincident solipsisms, but it is rather a matter of coinherence. We find firstly, then, that we appropriate in aspiration at least that love for all which was maybe first imagined of just one Son of Man, of whom indeed we were told to learn. There, in that story, questions of jealousy were brushed aside, without compromising the absoluteness of love in any and every instance, of all in each. Jealousy does not finally belong in actuality; nor though does “the flesh” in general. This was a motive for the ancient preference of amicitia over amor, in apparent contradiction of our stress above, although one may indicate that amor can find a straighter path to that depth of eros which unites them both forever. Amor actually participates in the perfect eternal compenetration which amicitia, in this phenomenal world, merely reflects, but without tearing aside the veil. The distortions of the former, therefore, may appear more terrible, although Dante was surely not wrong to place betrayal of friends in uttermost condemnation. Secondly, we have found that our world, our milieu and surroundings, depends upon our cognition, understood as including will, in refraction of final insight and as leading up to it dialectically. In this way too God is said to imitate himself, in creation. We have found too that we ourselves, I myself, cannot be contingent or from a totally other, but rather self from self, or from the self of selves. I am that. That is I. So, thirdly, we are in reality changeless and eternal, infinite therefore in the sense of not being limited from without. Where we fall short of this we are not our true selves, not as we really are. It is a detached moment rather of the final yet eternal harmony, appearance merely, as God knows all possibles and as, insight represents him as saying, he remembers not evil eternally. This is the ground, again, of forgiveness, of wiping out what never truly was or is. The drama of the voluntarily assumed Cross, in “the absolute religion”, of death and life, we might perhaps say, shows this wiping out. It is as real as anything in this changeable and temporal world, itself though, we find, a world of appearance and misperception. The crucial reality, the crux of the Gospel, of the glorified wounds of Revelations, also called the Apocalypse, is something quite different, as it were enclosed in divine procession. Thus it was represented in Trinitarian philosophy, pure coinherence and interchange again, beyond the ego as subjectivity transcends the subject. You cannot have matter without dualism. In identifying matter with pure potentiality Aristotle got clear of matter as stuff. It is the potentiality precisely of the final actuality and ultimate difference. This includes all the actuality of whatever is considered, substances in Aristotle’s own system,

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for example. When we speak of the body, of embodiment, we speak of the possibility of exercising our actuality. That is why we said above it is no great matter that Freud presents his theory of the mind in materialist terms. For him the actual acts in this way. What is important is to avoid the dichotomy of dualism, to pass over from soul to spirit. For in saying that we are not essentially men we are not putting part for whole. This perhaps is what Plato and Augustine could not see their way clearly to saying, on the right track though they were. The relation of act to potentiality is other than that of part to whole.5 Sometimes this appears in Thomas’s Aquinas’s writings, e.g. where he stresses the unicity of the substantial form, of the ultimate difference, intellect in the case of man, that is to say. More often it does not. He has, for example, in accordance with the theological ideas of the time, to say that the godhead was united to the dead body of Christ in the tomb at the same time as it was united to his “separated” soul somewhere else. So we find him speaking of essentially “incomplete” substances, viz. body and soul, though both of these are mere logical constructs. To overcome the problem he would have had to generally deny the reality of space and time. There is no Docetism, again, where this is generally denied. Docetism is only thinkable in a realist context, where the reality of specifically Christ’s humanity (as in monophysitism) might be denied. Monophysitism denies the community of Christ with the rest of humanity. If though one rejects the vulgar notion of humanity as a composite then Christ is equal or at one with all other spirits, or “human beings”, in being totally unique or other as is each of them, according to the view defended here. Each contains the whole universe of spirits within himself, as in the “high priestly” prayer of Christ, “I in them and they in me”, of course not merely collectively but mutual to each one as each one is mutual to all the others. Indeed we find Aquinas saying that “the body” is not necessary for the happiness of heaven, the visio beatifica specifically, and this is both right and wrong. We need to add that “the body” is a logical construct and not a part of Christ or of any human being, even though we commonly speak of human beings as thus differentiated from “pure spirits” or from God. As a 5

“besteht der entscheidende Schritt in der Tat nicht so sehr im Übergang vom Wesen zur Wesensform, sondern darin dass diese als Akt verstanden wird. Das geschieht in den Büchern VIII und IX. Nur als Akt kann ein Formbestimmung alle ihr nur in der rein logischen Analyse (ratione) vorgeordneten Formen in einer einzigen (in sich selbst) vereinigen. Als Akt ist aber die Wesensform (letzte Differenz) ebenfalls nicht das Vereinigende neben den vereinigten wesentlichen oder akzidentellen Forbestimmungen…” F. Inciarte, “Die Einheit der Aristotelischen Metaphysik”, Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 1994, pp. 1-21 (14-15).

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pure potentiality the body may well not appear in our picture of the fully actualised spirit, intellect or consciousness. We might say even, with Aristotle: the proximate matter and the shape (morphe) are one and the same; the one existing potentially and the other actually. Therefore to ask the cause of their unity is like asking the cause of unity in general… the potential and the actual are in a sense one.6

So, once more, Freud’s materialistic model of the mind merits serious consideration, not as materialist but as not being dualistic. For Aristotle these insights serve a philosophy of abiding substance. This again might seem correct, indeed corrective. Yet the discussion prepares the way for consideration of the first substance of all as what really is, explains Inciarte.7 This first substance of all, in our system, is subjectivity, of individual or of the whole virtually indifferently. Yet also for Aristotle the first substance of all is finally characterised as “pure act”, in accordance with Hegel’s thought more than with Spinoza’s, for example, who “intuitively accepted” a notion of substance which Hegel finds defective.8 The Christian event was initially presented as comprising a series of miracles within a realist scheme. Miracles are not common sense. They are hardly sense at all. At first, all the same, it was thought that our commonsense or unreflected view of the world as presented to our senses and analysed by our empirical understanding (Verstand) need only be dispensed with at these favoured points called miracles, of which “the incarnation” was chief. With time, however, the whole common-sense world was overturned. The “things that are” have been brought to nought as Paul foresaw, and we have been given, as fruit of the Christian event, an absolute idealism which is nothing other than a seeing of the world, in aspiration, from the divine point of view. This, indeed, was none other than the project of those called mystics, as if they hardly belonged to the human race. The fulfilment of this project was placed in a transcendent future by the official doctrine of the visio beatifica or seeing with divine or absolute vision, the light of glory bestowed by grace alone. This may well be true, but grace was still understood magically, by most people at least. The time has come to put this behind us, if we do not wish to lapse into pretence through mistaken loyalty to a superseded or antique model. 6

Aristotle, Met. VIII, 1045b 18f. “Akt und Potenz… welche zugleich die Erörterung der allerersten Substanz als die eigentlichen Seienden als eines solchen vorbereitet.” Inciarte, Ibid. 15. 8 Hegel, Enc. 151 (subtext). 7

CHAPTER FOURTEEN PERSONS AND RELATIONS: ETHICS REDEEMED

Immortality, a life beyond, is often felt as correlate with personality. Loved ones cannot be annihilated. They “go away”. Those with no such hope are dead already, Goethe remarks. Personality, though particular, embraces everything and universal love is not a universal network merely. Hegel speaks of a concrete universal, Kant of an unconditional “end”. A person cannot be “unconditionally” an end unless somehow universal, infinite even. Disgust with any mechanics of immortality, any re-constitution, has made itself felt, in Nietzsche for example. Life is never consummated in some future, as if it were not fully as we have it now. It might in that case rather unravel into oblivion, Lethean or not. But in rejecting the popular fancies of those who think only or chiefly in “parables” one should not miss the traditions of those who from the beginning sought after the meaning of such parables and of the imperfect forms of religion and of its praxis in general. Religion is a praxis and according to both Hegel and Plato, plus of course the Old Testament “wisdom” literature, philosophy, theoria, as highest praxis, alone “desirable for itself” (Augustine), is founded upon it. It is thus necessary and good. This being founded upon religion should not be confused either with being subject to it or with being a complementary approach merely, like the second wing on a bird! What we are encouraged to call the magisterium (of “the teaching Church”) likes to talk in this way. The fact remains that faith itself is a principle of reason. As often as items are proposed for our faith we find that these proposals are developed, refined or even first discovered under the influence and impulse of reason. A patent example, the undoubted fact of evolution, established by rational investigation, had modified and made more precise (well, one might rather say less needlessly precise) the doctrine, as an item of faith, of creation. Again, the teaching, ambiguous enough, of a fourteenth century Council that the soul is the form of the body is there for the first time put forward

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as by teachers taught by Aristotle. It is not then so much a matter of two wings as, more justly, of philosophy “accomplishing” the Christian proclamation. This extends down to its seeing and making its own, in more perfect form, the very first principles of this “absolute religion”. Thus when the Creed states, in mythical form, that the Son is begotten of the Father “before all worlds” philosophy discloses the literal meaning, that the Son, absolute logos, is eternally begotten. It is never the case that he was or has been begotten, not even before all worlds. What is called obedience here is rather the desire to see deeper. Since one cannot think by external specification there cannot be obediential thinking. For this reason philosophy never finds occasion to have anyone burned to death or otherwise “liquidated”, stoned or bloodily sacrificed. Such “zeal” is foreign to it and anyone so acting becomes thereby a mere ideologist. Swords, two-edged or otherwise, are no more than metaphors for “the word of God”, sharper than sharp, as sacrifice, offering, is ultimately musical, joy. It is a false praxis that proclaims a need to oppose theory which, again, it should rather accomplish, with zeal indeed. The other zeal is part of the mirage we call evil, the wandering about in darkness, as prior dialectical condition (e.g. the “fall” of man) for eternal reconciliation. These things, says the Apostle, happened in a figure. Questions as to their facticity are anyhow irrelevant, since it is as material for stories and romance that they are preserved in memory and retold indeed, facts becoming metaphor indistinguishably as the paradigms shift or rather move forward in continual Aufhebung. The alternative, the remedy, for the disgust mentioned earlier is to reject life as we have it “now” in its very idea, this being needed for the more perfect living of it. “Oh life that is no life at all” (Teresa of Avila). “I live yet not I”… “You are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God” (St. Paul). This though is a programme for a more philosophic life upon earth, denied the more it is affirmed, as an “identity in difference”. “This also is thou; neither is this thou.” One is thus not “here”. Here is nowhere. One is, with Paul’s Ephesians, “sitting with Christ in the heavenly places”. These, again, in spiritual understanding, are not places. Place depends upon space as an a priori form of intuition inherently self-contradictory, as are all finite forms and/or concepts indifferently. No birth no death. Places are nowhere. Life, in the Hegelian dialectic, is shown to be just such a finite and hence untrue concept or category, a mere practical postulate as a Kantian might say. Such an extension of this notion of a practical postulate, incidentally, helps to remove what many feel as its sting when said of God and immortality. God, after all though, has always been the unutterable.

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Similarly, if we are not really alive our reality, as a kind of infinite expanse, remains, even should it be, Buddhistically (but not un-Christian for that), best equated with nothing. We are invited, after all, at the commencement of the dialectic, to supersede in our thinking the ideas of being and of nothing, since the one is “not a whit better” (Hegel) than the other. The ending of life, therefore, is but the manifestation of its internal contradiction and not literally a curse upon it. It “runs away” of itself. This development may be related to the Aristotelian diagnosis of matter, hyle, as pure possibility. In the Metaphysics he transcends his own notion of hypokeimenon, substrate, to which the Scholastics so often regressed. Form, and hence soul, is the fully actual (Book VII). So when matter is defined as “the principle of individuation” this is only consistent with seeing matter exclusively as name for this concrete differentiation itself, its possibility, and otherwise “not anything at all”.1 In this sense a world of individuals just is a material world and so St. Thomas was thus far consistent in making his angels not individuals but species, forms. What is actual is form, the notion, of person, plant, atom or electron, nothing however being truly conceivable except as a relation to all other things. This will mean, ultimately, that full or pure act can only be personal (or something more) and hence infinite, unbound, free, “at home with its other”. A name for this actuality is reconciliation as perfection of oneness or unity. Reconciliation, however, is essentially relation of what is otherwise opposed. For the next thing to notice is that the concept of person as anything more than a mere stage-mask has hardly appeared in history before it is subsumed in a more complete notion. Personality is “revealed” as relational. One is only a person by persons, say the Africans, thinking in terms of a network perhaps. Person and relation are correlate concepts and thus Trinitarian thought develops by defining persons as relations and even the converse. Ipsae relationes sunt personae. This is implicit in saying that God is love. It is not merely a contingent matter that “there cannot be a solitary person”. Not merely person but substance, ousia, hypostasis, is here transcended in its notion. This means, however, that relation too is no longer relation understood as essentially an affection of substance. There is no relational network, where we have identity, a “being of reason” only or the logical relation, without points or synapses to which, as generalised, it might be antecedent. The Anaxagorean total identity, which Aristotle strove to avoid, reappears, but more correctly conceived, where the 1 That Aquinas shares this view can be seen, for example, in the opusculum, De principiis naturae.

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Absolute is “all in all” since here again the notion of part, along with whole, is superseded. It was superseded, however, already in Aristotle’s own philosophy where accidents, such as a thing’s colour, unlike the paint “stuck” on to it, were judged identical with “substances”. Aquinas reflects this when he states, in De ente et essentia, that only wholes can be predicated of wholes. S is truly P and vice versa, whatever the state of our actual language. This is merely to say that there are no wholes as abstracted parts of a composite conception made up of wholes and parts. We would never have formed the notion of a whole if we had not first been caught in a web of abstractions. Idealist philosophy generalises religion’s insight, overturning the idea of individual life. We beget one another reciprocally, each begets all and so each is all. We are “members one of another… I in them and they in me.” But there is no stopping short at this impossibly reciprocal “in”. It means that I am not I and you are not you, exclusively. There is no need for reincarnation; we have anyhow excluded time and in so far as we can be identical with those seen as contemporaries in space (other places) too the notion of reincarnation appears clearly mythical.2 The centre is everywhere and always. If the divine persons are relations, in short, then so are we. Indeed if they are closer than close (Augustine) then we are they, in an “identity in difference”. It is not merely then that the divine persons indwell in each of us individually. We live in one another, not though as forming a new community alongside the Trinity. That would be absurd. We are rather the deeper or fuller (and not extended merely) meaning of the unity. For Trinity, we should not forget, was not departure from unity but explication rather of what full, perfect, concrete and not merely abstract unity must be, ut omnes unum sint. That the text has omnes and not omnia confirms the McTaggartian insight that only persons exist, that all that exist are personal. Otherwise ut omnia unum sint is a part of the sense and not excluded. 2

McTaggart, arguing for reincarnation, saw the history or time of the individual as one with that of the universe. Yet he denied the reality of time! If one did accept the idea, however, one would clearly have to see death as gradual or temporally indeterminate to a degree, while having as its reverse side the gradual coming to birth “again”. This, though, would have to be squared with population growth and we would be returned to the notion of not only being “in” one another, in Adam, for example, but even in animals or plants or some invisibles or other in the time before that. The idea, therefore, seems inconsistent with McTaggart’s general philosophy, as at best a suggestion that others might develop. But how might they do this?

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This convergence of Hegel and Aristotle is extremely significant. Aristotle expressly says that he (only?) conducts the discussion in terms of material substances because it is generally agreed that there are substances of this kind.3 He ends though with pure form, the notion (as forma formarum). “Only in the act of abstraction (ratione) does a specific difference come to supervene on a genus which remains conscious across all of a species,”4 to say nothing of a still more general hypokeimenon or substrate (materia prima). These are logical but not metaphysical constructions. Hegel’s dialectic is expressly parallelled, where only the final category, the trans-categorial indeed, is not merely logical but real. Hence when Bambrough remarks that There is clearly no place in Aristotle’s scheme for the creation of the world by God, although the world depends on him as the ultimate cause of all that happens within it…5

he shows the opposite of what he intends. Where God is not merely thought “about” God himself but thought actually “thinking itself” there can be no question of being “aware of anything outside himself”, simply because there is no such outside since, in the Apostle’s language, “in Him we live and move and have our being.” The doctrine of the analogy of being aims at the same result, not denying creation but giving the conditions under which it must be thought. In this sense separate personality too must be subsumed, aufgehoben. We must speak of a “beyond personality”. As life progresses, indeed, our actuality expands more and more beyond the limited point of extension we have learned to call the present into a fuller actuality wrongly viewed as living in our memory or as retreating simply from what is considered real or actual. This is not a process of decay, unless we go on to transmute the notion of decay itself. Mors est janua vitae. Even where we put less stress upon and even set aside our capacity to distinguish past and present or, for that matter, present and future, yet this is on a par with the hardening of a child’s bones or a boy’s loss of his higher singing register or first teeth. Finally, death itself is the laying of the seed in the ground, as Christianity teaches and supremely exemplifies. Death belongs to and crowns life. If it

3 Met. 1029a 30f. Confitentur autem substantiae esse sensibilium quaedam: quae quaerendum in his prius. 4 Fernando Inciarte, First Principles, Substance and Action, Olms 2005. 5 Renford Bambrough (selector and commentator), The Philosophy of Aristotle, Mentor, New York, 1963, p.39.

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denies life it does so in raising it beyond itself and not as returning it to zero. Memory indeed is treated anciently, e.g. in St. Augustine, as the “place” (he hardly thinks of a “faculty”) where we find God, the Absolute. As repository of “ideas” specifically it transcends place, however, and it is, as Anselm taught, as Idea that absolute actuality is revealed. This supplies the reason why life in the memory is the reverse of a retreat from actuality. What we call actual sense experience, is the starting-point or entrance merely and as such it is of course foundational. Experience in its very idea, however, is bound to dispense with an object outside itself. As the Absolute, actus purus, not merely thinks itself but is that activity, i.e. it is not, strictly speaking, so what experience experiences is experience over again. Talk of subjective and objective concept was a clumsy admission of this. What then of ideas as faint copies of “impressions”? Of those who have died we say we would love to see them again. Seeing is believing, we say, not noticing the ambiguity, that seeing is caught up into believing, knowing, thinking, as into something more universal and absolute. So memory too, memoria, is not ultimately some kind of a storehouse. It is act, activity, even if often reduced to “second” act beyond actual thinking. Really it is essential to all thinking as is sense-experience itself and not merely “re-membered” sense-experience. This is Aristotle’s teaching in the De anima. In effect it implies that memory and sense experience are one, even in the (for us) retroactive sense that sense experience is not itself a privileged temporal moment, the memory is the experience. The poet Wordsworth at once denies and affirms this. Very many factors of “experience” are in fact part of our language primarily, though this is no reduction. This sign-system itself is to be thought of as a signifying of signs. What is meant by everything finite being false is that finite things are not things but, as signs, dialectical moments. In the divine mind they are one and all ideas, not as intentional of something else but as relations of identity “within” this mind. They in fact constitute Mind just in each such element’s being identical with it. Spirit as universal is the individual. Hegel will show that only persons can support this. What else could be meant by “sacred history” but these signs, with its typology and so on? In this way all language is built on metaphor, on the first-order system of signs we call nature. A full etymology of the word “word” (logos) might well reveal the crudest metaphor of all, as Aquinas taught that the crude metaphors of Scripture were more serviceable to a knowledge of God than more refined theologies since message and medium are less likely to be confused. Again though, as we

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are learning, the medium is in any case ideally taken up into the message, since they are not two but one, content and style. Style is the possibility of content, as matter is the possibility of form, though on a deeper notion of style in particular this notion would be reversible. In this sense any content would do. In this sense too one may think as one wants, ultimately, taking part in the divine privilege, or, as a modern “saint” expressed it, “Every soul gets what it expects.”6 To what end these signs, of word or world? As an ascent, one might answer, a circling round, a getting there by negations, as in music, not static but cyclic, returning, as in Old and New Testament and the mystical interpretation of Scripture, upon which, according to J.H. Newman, orthodoxy depends. Here Origen and Marcion both played their part in what is, at bottom and beyond all the quarrels, the uninterruptedly dialectical development of philosophy. This implies that philosophy even for a time itself negates (negated) itself into a superior and even absolute religion, before negating this again in returning to a more perfect form of understanding of this initial leap beyond itself into symbols and images, a process begun, dualistically, in “dogmatic” theology. Thought thinking itself is not just an act, alongside others, but act, activity itself, its principle and possibility. It is thus both matter and form since actually there is only form. It is rather ground. Relations too are nothing if not active relatings, as is memory. Memory is not in essence time-bound, or even retrospective. It is the first liberation, the activity of liberating, from the time-illusion, as it moves back and forth amid the aches and pains of age. Death works in us, life in you, said the Apostle, i.e. death gives life. Everything has a reverse face, negations are negated, last is first. There is much to be said still about matter. One might remark, perhaps thinking of the abortion debate, upon the absurdity of supposing form to be applied straight or neat to just prime matter. This though is to conceive of prime matter as if in its very primeness it were a proto-second matter. The expression rather signifies the total superseding of matter as immediately or unreflectingly conceived. In the end what we call the body is its organisation and the expression “organised body” is pleonastic. This anyhow follows from making the ultimate difference formally (and hence ontically) constitutive. Forma dat esse. In saying “ontically”, however, I revert to our daily analogy. For we have shown here and elsewhere that ascent to the Absolute Idea, where subject and object are reconciled, is a permanent beginning, from which no descent or return to less perfect 6

Thérèse of Lisieux, on the need for confidence in, desire for, grace, mercy etc.

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conceptions is allowable. Since the means of expression remain imperfect, however, generating paradox always to some degree, no definite division can be made here in our language, where also, and not only in ethics, Aristotle’s “Lesbian rule” may find application. Thus, as Aquinas teaches, the term “body” signifies differently in logic (abstracted concept) from how it signifies in metaphysics (being qua being). Regarding ethics, however, and “practical truth”, we should note that Aristotle’s teaching that the conclusion of the practical syllogism is literally an action chimes in perfectly with the absolute idealist view of reality, where even our free actions are divine cognitions (premotio physica). Action, the external, the material, none of these can limit or “escape from” the illimitable. This embraces outside and inside up to otherness itself as Word, which though uttered and ever uttered remains verbum cordis. “Individual and actual are the same thing”, says Hegel where he begins to treat of “the notion”,7 adding that “the individual or subject is the notion expressly put as totality”. There is no real or concrete universal apart from this, certainly not “what is merely held in common” (abstract universal). Thus he concludes that the principle of personality is universality, discovered or laid bare in Christianity, he thinks. “Only in Christianity is man respected as man, in his infinitude and universality.” In a similar way the principle of individuality is matter. Saying this, again, should be viewed as positing an alternative to matter, telling us not to think matter, to think individual, rather. Individual, however, is correlated with personality as concrete universal or all “things”, omnia. Hegel has, after all, shown earlier that matter without this transformation is a contradictory notion, more or less on a par with Kant’s featureless “thing in itself”. Matter, “matter itself… is all a product of the reflective understanding (Verstand, not Vernünft) which, while it observes and professes to record only what it observes, is rather creating a metaphysic, bristling with contradictions of which it is unconscious.”8 Nothing, in fact, can be perfectly conceived apart from its relation to everything else. This is what McTaggart calls the personal although, as we have shown, persons “go up” into one another, i.e. the personal transcends itself or, as Nietzsche put it, there is no ownership to thinking.9 Thoughts come and go beyond our control and so the necessity of the particular subject is a myth.10 This 7

Hegel, Enc. 163. Ibid. 130. 9 F. Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Schlechta, Vol. III, 501. 10 Aquinas remarks, in De unitate intellectus (opusc.), as it were from within this myth, that “it is evident that it is this man that thinks.” Here though he merely relies on “common sense”. Normally he does not do this but allows reason the 8

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though is no reduction but shows, rather, that all subjectivity is “subjectivity as such”, which is Hegel’s definition of his third “kingdom of the spirit” in his (lectures on) philosophy of religion. Put differently, nihilism might seem the precondition for happiness, where the subversion and the subsumption of thought are the same. As McTaggart has it, we make no judgements in heaven, which for him means that ultimately we never make them, judgement is an impossibility, which means that speech is flawed in self-referential paradox, an ancient insight after all. He thus proposes what is best called love as the final “trans-category” beyond cognition, taken as inclusive of intellect and will, since cognition, this division itself shows, is never perfectly reciprocal. For there we either seek to control an object or allow the object to determine us. With love, by contrast, as final harmony, the object finally disappears or is reconciled in “subjectivity as such”. Such a positive reference to nihilism might cause anxiety, if one recalls the excesses, crimes rather, of Bolsheviks and other groups. However the idea can occur, as here, in the context of an enthronement of love as form of all the virtues, of virtue rather, which is the very nerve of Christian revelation. Only love shall not vanish away “in the evening of life”, both Paul and John of the Cross affirm. At some stage thinking, as preparatory to “contemplation”, is indeed meant to cease. In this sense God, nous, does not think. Man too, Gilson once percipiently said, is not a thinker but a knower. One might rather, if equivalently, say he is a lover. If everything finite is indeed false then one cannot hope more for this text here than that the reader might cast it away, once having by its means ascended to some higher or more comprehensive vantage point not so far clear to the writer of it. * But to continue… In a succinct Preface to The Drama of Atheistic Humanism11 Henri de Lubac writes that the chief result of the movement he thus characterises, exemplified in the work of Comte, Feuerbach and Nietzsche, is “the annihilation of the human person”. One would be tempted to think that he here makes a cheap or purely apologetic point, freedom proper to it. Nietzsche, by contrast, anticipating Wittgenstein’s (but recalling Plato) saying that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language”, is prepared to suspect that “The modes of expression given in language are useless.” 11 De Lubac, The Drama of Atheistic Humanism, London 1950 (reissued Meridian, New York, 1963).

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were it not for the emphasis in his book upon the adventures, as we might call them, of just Auguste Comte, a fellow Frenchman. We have after all cited the positive Hegelian view of “the principle of personality” and Hegel forms a foundational part of the future Cardinal’s vision of a destructive anti-Christianism, even though Hegel’s estimate of, and adherence to, Christianity is quite the opposite of Comte’s. He glorifies the sublime personal egoism that Comte attacks. A certain transcendence of personality was, however, endemic to Christianity from the first. “We know not what we are”, we read in the apostle John’s first Epistle (we are not here principally concerned with questions of authorship, but rather with literature ultimately received by the community as foundational). The text adds in mitigation of this ignorance that we do know that “when he shall appear we shall be like him”. This text was greatly admired by McTaggart, who might otherwise be thought, in his earlier writings at least, to naively absolutise personality as we commonly conceive it after having been willing, by contrast, to overturn almost every other everyday assumption, such as time or matter. Persons and relations are identified in Trinitarianism. A person is a person through persons. This African proverb approaches the insight of revelation, for those first persons are, again then, persons through persons and so ad infinitum. Substance or hypostasis has to give way in this perspective. It cannot be hygienically contained within the Trinity. There too in fact it really had no business insofar as vestiges of hierarchical subordinationism were overcome. The Father is not Father, is not simpliciter, without the Son, and so with the Spirit. The religious myths of reincarnation use an impossibly dualistic notion of repeated births to arrive at the real truth that there is no birth (or death). We have pointed out that this same manoeuvre can be applied across space with equal justification or lack of it. The magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden.

This in fact is done in the New Testament, via prolific use of the preposition “in”. “I in them and they in me… in one another.” Of course one man is contrasted with all others as vine and branches but this too seems, even then, to have been an elastic conception. “Greater works than I have done shall you do.” Other hints are the role of the “good thief” on his own Cross, sayings such as that “the last shall be first”, references to Christ (by himself) as the needy beggar, even as “made sin for us” and so on. Mystically, which means really, the mind is led a little beyond the pious but not very merciful reflection “There but for the grace of God go

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I.” There go I indeed, but in a different incarnation, be it in space or time or both. Upon this even forgiveness is founded. The Thérèsian doctrine that I, any I, am no better than any one else, have no virtues even, heralds a fuller understanding of such grace. It was the teaching of de Caussade already in the eighteenth century that everyone is abandoned, should abandon himself in love to his appointed role in past or future, and see others thus too, not judging. It is a matter of moving up a level, of situating the doctrine of virtue, real enough, at an intermediate level of understanding and discourse, that of Hegel’s “doctrine of essence” in fact. The traditional veneration of humility especially, although it too is a virtue (of which though one may not even logically boast) and indeed called the virtue of truth12, approaches this insight of what might be called a mystical philosophy.13 All is God’s work. This doctrine, not to be confused with theologically rationalistic predestinarianism, or with “quietism”, reappears in Hegel’s notion of the cunning of reason (the “reason that is in the world”), which lets us think that we ourselves are exclusively determining things.14 Of course this returns us to the paradox of self, empirical or “true” (I am that). There is anyhow a transcendent unity in the whole ascetic or “practical” tradition, from the Psalter through St. Augustine or Catherine of Siena’s stress upon patience up to Dom John Chapman’s unrelenting focus upon an indeed absolute idea and beyond. There is thus a certain kinship between Comte and de Lubac in that both refuse to “give in” to these mystical perspectives. These must be, again, hygienically reserved for the canonised Patristic texts cited back and forth in de Lubac’s earlier book, Catholicism. Thus one hopes to preserve or restore an arthritic system from the shelter of which one looks forth in admiring condescension upon the (for all we know) pure-hearted struggles of those such as Nietzsche, who, at the end of his life, quite accurately called himself “the crucified”. 12 For St. Thomas it is the most desirable (potissima) of the virtues post virtutes theologicas et virtutes intellectuales, quae respiciunt ipsam rationem, et post justitiam, praesertim legalem… (Summa theol. Iia-IIae 161, 5). Legal justice, for him, includes the obligation to virtue as a whole, even this virtue of seeing all as “God’s work”, corresponding, we may interpret, to the final step of the Benedictine ladder of humility discussed in his article following. 13 McTaggart remarked that Hegel’s philosophy was more mystical than he himself realised. It was as it were mystical by accident, since built upon the intrinsic development of philosophy historically. It thus witnesses to religious truth (as even the Marxist deflection of it witnessed to Messianism in its view of the proletariat). 14 Cf. Hegel, Enc., Logic, 209: “Divine Providence may be said to stand to the world and its process in the capacity of absolute cunning.”

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De Lubac, speaking of Dostoyevsky’s orthodoxy as “doubly in question”, nonetheless praises him as human and Christian. Why does he withhold this honour from Nietzsche or Hegel, or “our great modern idealists”? We know that there is an alternative and more benign interpretation of them than the usual neo-scholastic “refutation”. Hegel, wrote Fernando Inciarte in his last book15, rediscovered Aristotle, the first to do so since at least Thomas Aquinas, it is implied. The doctrine of God, central to Hegel’s thought, is not immune to that development and reinterpretation acknowledged increasingly since Newman as applicable to dogmatic theological thinking in general. De Lubac, of course, wrote under the shadow of much recent bloodshed and murder. These, however, let us be unsentimentally clear, have been the constant epiphenomena of philosophical and religious shake-ups, from the murderous monk-mobs of Alexandria to the Inquisition (Dostoyevsky’s bête noire), certain “crusades”, Serbian nationalism and so on. The relative material scales are, so to say, immaterial. Neither Nietzsche nor Wagner should be made responsible for Nazi atrocities. They had even less to do with inciting “the secular power” to murder than the great St. Augustine himself (or St. Paul in his earlier years, change his name how he will). The doctrine of God… What is God? That was the question of the young St. Thomas Aquinas, otherwise a “dumb ox”. He was not afraid to pursue it beyond the pious clichés of contemporaries either, as did those whom de Lubac considers, Feuerbach principally. Today, too, we are more aware of Indian thought, of the true self or atman. It is a possible work of theology to show that there is no contradiction between this and the Jewish-Christian development, a work already attempted by Raymond Panikkar, Dom Bede Griffiths (both in theory and action) and others. We may add our own small voice to that movement the modern or “globalised” age, not really the age of Antichrist but of a certain differentiation merely. * De Lubac concludes his essay by citing the dialogue with which Dostoyevsky concludes The Brothers Karamazov: … “Karamazov,” exclaimed Kolia, “is it true, as religion says, that we shall rise from the dead, that we shall see each other again, all of us, Ilyusha too?” “… To be sure, we shall rise again, we shall see one another again, and we shall joyfully recount all that has happened to us,” replied 15

See note 4 above.

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Alyosha, half laughing, half eager. “Oh, how lovely that will be!” said Kolia.

The speakers are as children, manipulable. We shall all be changed, “in the twinkling (ictu) of an eye”, says a Pauline text. There are of course conditions to be fulfilled, yet the fulfilling of them is also gift, ultimately. This is without prejudice to “created” or human freedom, for which we are not logically bound to affirm a possibility of final or eternal refusal since this exists neither for the angels, as confirmed in “grace”, nor for God himself. A fortiori we are not bound to claim that anyone has made or will make that refusal. It is not, for example, synonymous with suicide in any form of the latter. Eternity cannot without contradiction be put as after time, after time itself, or even as succeeding to it. We have to “go out of” time. This is in fact the Swedish euphemism corresponding to the English “passing away”. Such a death though confronts us, calls upon us, at every moment or beat (ictus) of time. We might call it thinking, prayer even. It is what Herbert McCabe had in mind in his God Matters where he objects to Raymond Brown’s retention of the expression “the pre-existent Christ”. It would be ridiculous to see Fr. McCabe as putting in a plea for Arianism. There is no “pre”, simply, if the Word is not in time. The “beginning”, of Genesis or of the Fourth Gospel, is with us continually. Thus spiritual (geistliches) life is a matter of transcending time (and space), as we appear to be doing, on the positive side, with our endemic technical revolutions. St. Paul touches this when he tells his friends that they “sit with Christ in the heavenly places”, something more than “cyber-space” all the same. More often, as practical pastor, he will say that “if Christ be not raised your faith is vain.” We can, anyhow, turn that on its head and say that since our faith is not vain then Christ is somehow “raised”, we know not how, adding, maybe, maybe not, that so is everyone else. Here the theology of “salvation” as having an “efficient cause” might require a paradigmatic overhaul, if it has not got it already. Flogged horses are generally dead in some respects at least, or soon will be if one flogs them hard enough. So the being changed in the twinkling of an eye may indeed be retained. Twinkling, in the old translation, already suggests something other than temporal, as the eyes of the wise may twinkle all the time, even eternally. Thus, “no birth, no death”. We die daily. Dying we live. Media vitae in morte sumus. “In the midst of life we are in death.” Mystical truth is literal truth. Truth is mystical. The hope of faith opens out upon the certainty of philosophy., a certainty, however, having no other object than the quality of one’s thought in general consciousness (EL159) now. Read thus, therefore, speculatively, the saying “To them that have shall be given”

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intends an absorption, Aufhebung or retaining in putting by, of anything future or “to come”. It is not only “under the sun” that there is “nothing new”. * After idealism’s heyday philosophers often tried to distance their profession from what had come, in the course of reflection, disturbingly near. One thinks of Russell’s Mysticism and Logic or Wittgenstein’s “clamming up” at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, otherwise quite a mystical work. What else is the fascination of logic, after all? One would like to suggest that the Church’s alliance with a realist philosophy, falsely identified with Aristotelianism, has been but a moment in her history. The Albigensian denial of creation, as it was interpreted (actually they rather denied matter) provided a spur for grasping at what might otherwise have been seen as Arab materialism. Christian spiritualism was bound to reassert itself in some form, culminating perhaps in the largely Italian ontologist movement. The clerical reaction was to reaffirm, resurrect rather, the thirteenth century synthesis as nineteenth century norm, in itself as strange a move as the following condemnation of “modernism”. What were they afraid of? One takes a walk one sunny September morning after rain, dew glistening on the trees. Why is everything so beautiful? Why, rather, is beauty so common? It is “in the eye of the beholder”, the poet answers, the only eye he has. Maybe not in everyone’s eye. “A fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees,” says another. The ecological movement, if nothing else, should teach us that we are part of what we behold. Yet it does not go so far as to see that the mind rather contains than is contained in its object, this beauty now, continens magis quam contenta, as de Lubac will gleefully cite though it is far from being “a paradox borrowed from one of our great modern idealists”. Being now… We want to live upon the analogy of being, interpreted ontologically, so to say. There is an analogy between created and uncreated being, we say.16 The denial of true being to anything but the Absolute is treated either as pious mouthing, in the case of saints and mystics, or fancifulness, in the case of Plato, say. All is in the soul, the soul has “learned everything”, the soul itself is not itself, is a divine 16

Ralph McInerny has recently argued, and convinced a great many in the field, that this is not part of St. Thomas’s (or Aristotle’s) doctrine of analogy, which is logical only, not metaphysical.

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thought, an “image” of God. Being, we might say, is after all wholly equivocal as between creation and God. Being is simply one of the divine ideas. What else could it be? Existence is essence, like each of the divine ideas, is St. Thomas’s teaching. Thus being, Hegel will say, is altogether too poor a predicate to apply absolutely to God, infinity, the Absolute. There is neo-Platonist precedent of course. In God idea and being are the same. This is the purport of “the ontological argument”, the one of deepest interest in modern times. Is it rather that being is swallowed up, goes up into, Idea, thought, nous, as “virtual” reality is a dispensing with “reality”. Thus it is that many see the sheer beauty of the Christian idea, rightly grasped, as transcending the question “Can you prove it?”17 One dies for it rather, should one have that grace. * We mentioned humility, a virtue falling under temperance, St. Thomas thinks, but yet in some sense it belongs, on a religious scheme, to the virtue of truth, veritas, which falls under justice. Whether we compare ourselves to God as transcendent or as self closer than self we as phenomenal selves have nothing that we have not received. Thus in the act of acknowledging our dignity we humble ourselves. Further, St. Thomas includes legal justice, iustitia legalis, with the theological and intellectual virtues as more desirable, potissima, than humility, supreme as it otherwise is. This is because under legal justice all virtue, including humility, is subsumed under the aspect of obedience to precept, as debita. We might reflect, further, that it is just here that the character of the system, its ultimate identity with the otherwise presupposed “system”, the perfect unity, of absolute personal actuality, beyond all opposition of whole and part, stands forth. It stands forth, namely, in that iustitia legalis, itself the fusion of the “command”, the debitum, to be happy, to love God absolutely, with a setting forth of that very happiness, that very love, is itself subsumed, sublated and as it were delivered up to the final reality of love or God (“God is love”) which “fulfils” and so in a really benign sense at least does “destroy” the law. Ama et fac quod vis. “Love and do as you wish.” And this unsayable thing is first envisaged in the parable of the talents, which harmonises perfectly with what I say here, that no man’s virtue is the same virtue as another’s. This is indicated in that parable by one of the praiseworthy men earning two talents, the other five or, equally,

17

“He is not here,” Hegel repeats, referring to the Jerusalem sepulchre.

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by their being given different amounts to start with. Here, however, we only accidentally ground that parable philosophically. St. Thomas never deals in mere heterogeneous “lists”, either here or in the famous derivation of the precepts of natural law at question 94, article two, of the Prima Secunda of his great Summa. So he clearly rates the intellectual virtues, prudence, understanding, science, wisdom, art and possibly synderesis above all the moral virtues but below faith, hope and love. Moralists of a more practical stamp, i.e. mere moralists, cannot take him seriously. We all know surely, they say, that the intellectual virtues are not really “virtues” as we understand these. Some people can’t even stomach faith and love. We want justice, they cry, give us our rights, that’s all we ask, then maybe we will give you yours as well. But what if there were no such rights, outside of human law? Of course one need not insist that St. Thomas has infallibly laid bare a or the right order of the virtues, anymore than Hegel’s identification of the steps of the dialectic is infallibly correct. What is shown is that there is such dialectic, there is such an order of the virtues. There may well be more than one way of veridically ordering either dialectic or virtue. Thus Dom David Knowles spoke of intellectual chastity, in place of humble truthfulness, reining oneself in as it were. This helps to illustrate the intertwining of all and each of the virtues with all the others, while it remains that order them how we will we yet come in the end to love. This will exactly parallel the relations we have been urging as existing between persons, to the extent that persons are these relations as, it now appears, virtue is harmonious relation with all other virtues, i.e. with relation over again. But what then are virtues and how are they different from persons? All virtues, to begin with, as giving strength, power, nobility, are needed and not merely helpful, in view of this interrelation, for the attainment, for the presence of the finis ultimus, happiness. They participate in it. This is obscured when Gilson pits Christian eudemonism against classical honestas morum. In fact honestas is never an end absolutely speaking.18 It is simply as near to absolute felicity as we often feel most likely to get. In itself however “the notion is pure play” (Hegel). “He’s a hedonist at heart,” complained C.S. Lewis’s infamous Screwtape. If this is true of God it must be true of us too, as duties are forgotten in the bliss of worship and adoration, such forgetfulness being the highest of duties as contemplation is the highest praxis. There is thus a puzzle regarding the ontological distinctness of each virtue if they so clearly form a perfect unity such that you cannot have one 18

Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. IIa-IIae 145, 1 ad 1um, ad 2um.

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without having all the others. We may simply discount “empirical” objections to this thesis of the unity of virtue.19 Thus once we recognise a person as virtuous we feel bound to see his apparent lack of some particular virtue as appearance only. Thus we regard any surprising behaviour of Jesus Christ, for example, such as his apparent anger, wielding of a whip indeed, in the Temple, apparent failures of observantia or of temperance in language towards his opponents. Even if (a possibility some are insisting we should consider) his relations with Mary Magdalene or anyone else were to be shown to be somehow not “correct” by our notions then it would be those notions that we would revise or, better, develop, rather than abandon him. Such indeed is our tendency with parents and mentors generally. Virtues and vices, in fact, are not directly identifiable as are, say, material transgressions of law. Yet we here remain at the level of the logical. For we forget that we have merely picked out a few general names for identifying virtues. As Eskimos may have, say, thirty-six words for varieties of snow, so virtues may be differently named, just as they may be given just the one name of love. This would not be love without content, as is often objected, but identifying all content, all (ethical) reality, as love. Love is God, bidding us “sit and eat” in George Herbert’s words. What then is non-ethical reality? Alternatively, is “being” a prejudice merely? Furthermore, and more massively still, we are forgetting not merely the virtues without name but the fact that any concrete virtue is the virtue of one concrete individual only. There cannot be more than likeness, not identity, between your affability, say, and mine. This is quite a different issue from our identifying a given individual person’s behaviour as affability, as we say. For this is shorthand for his (her) affability. We may still speak of an affable crowd. But this may be analogous with our speaking of an artistic crowd. No one thinks that each member of such a crowd therefore practices just the same art in just the same way. This analogy holds, even if, as Aristotle puts it, one may laudably break a law in artistic praxis or work as one may not do in moral action. Yet we, and he, identify a virtue of breaking the law when this is needed (epieicheia). Nor is it normal or usual to break laws in art. But if each person has his own style or version, necessarily, of virtue, and hence of those virtues we understand well enough to have named, then the unity of the virtues cannot be wholly other than the unity of persons, in exactly the way we have described it. Each person goes up into the others. 19

Cf. our Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2002, Chapter 2, “The Unity of Virtue as Grounded upon the Honourable Good”.

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They beget or reciprocally imply all the others, as we are saying of the virtues. This in fact is just what is pointed to in Aristotle’s account of language and of what became the medieval doctrine of suppositio as a particular interpretation of how we refer. Briefly, there are an infinite number of individual entities. Since therefore we cannot “bring” such an infinite number into our consciousness and communication we use a finite system of signs to do this, which means that any one sign will refer both in more than one way (the varieties of suppositio) and to more than one thing. Not to realise this will lead to just such errors as we here point to, “bewitchment” by words, in a word.20 Being is substance, Aristotle, again, declared. Accordingly, he shows in his Metaphysics how accidents, any reality they may have, are identical with substance. Socrates is white. The table is white. Consistently with this we have discussion of “this white”, this individual white (he does not want to say “whiteness” here), individual as identical with the individual substance. The table is white. It does not “have” white as it has the white paint (this again is white) on its surface, stuck on like chewing-gum (as Putnam remarked). Even a white pigment or dye in which a thing has been soaked through is not then “white”, the accident, whether of table or of pigment indifferently. White though is not the idea of whiteness. Use of citation marks here, denoting suppositio materialis, would prejudge the issue. The term signifies the whole subject, under this idea, whereas whiteness signifies something quite unlike any table, such as the primal colour or the opposite of blackness. The real table does not possess whiteness, whatever our “reificatory” usage, but is white. In this sense “only wholes are predicated of wholes”.21 We will not accuse Aristotle of merely passively following the S-is-P form of predication, which nonetheless verifies his thesis, if we notice his draconian way of dealing with language, predicating, in regard to its necessary abstractness. Here he explicitly would go behind language, seeking, as he says, to disclose notions in themselves rather than just notions as they appear to us. This is Hegel’s explicit programme. Here we find, ultimately, that the “of” in “the idea of” does not signify identification, as immediately assumed, but rather refraction. The idea is as such absolute or of itself, and there alone we have identity in absolute self-knowing of knowing by knowing. This is also Aristotle’s conclusion, the sense in which he means that Mind has no knowledge of particulars, as limiting not knowledge (still less “providence”: 20 21

Cf. Aristotle, De soph. el. c.1, 165a 7-16. Aquinas, De ente et essentia.

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that is mere misunderstanding) but particulars, as finite or untrue. Hegel follows him exactly here, interpreting the Christian precept of self-denial in this light. So if we return to the point about this white and that white we see that we are called upon to transcend or see through language in our thought, even if this will ever be language over again. Ever? We make no judgements in heaven, says the atheist McTaggart, which for him means that we make no judgements simply, though he is forced to make that look like a judgement, a vox. But, no matter (matter is on a par with “the harpies”, he claims) no vox. Where we use the same name for a plurality (of phenomena) we depend upon a likeness, an analogy, such as that this colour is to Socrates as that colour is to Plato or to that table. This is equally true of the attributing of substantial nature or species in our language. No dog is a dog in a way merely common to all thus called dogs. Nor do I here refer merely to the different races of dog; the same applies among wolves or look-alike Maltese poodles. This nature is to Fido as that nature is to Bonzo. It is this likeness in “being to” that first gives us concept, word, meaning, within the ambit of finite and temporal living. We might just say, finally, that this dog is Fido and that dog is Bonzo, or that Fido is not Bonzo despite the common ascription. We all know that and indeed there is no labour greater or nobler than labouring the obvious. The fact, of course, that dogs can mate and reproduce, as dog and cat cannot, as horse and donkey can but not their offspring, has nothing to do with, gets no grip upon, this discussion. All reality is individual yet still characterised (the “concrete universal”). My affability will not be your affability. They are not participating univocally in some ideal “form”. Yet there is sufficient likeness between them for the same name to be used, while “truth” will be a convention here. Is snow white after all, I ask an eskimo. So while “each thing is itself” indeed, yet each thing just as such goes up into everything else, is a microcosm, even to the extent that anything that doesn’t or won’t do this is not “thing” but mirage, maya. One might see thinking a thing as a form of “thinging” it, as in absolute idealism (or the ontological argument). This is the situation, we have claimed, of persons, begetting one another, but now too, it appears, of the virtues. Of virtues there is, nonetheless, an objective sense, including consideration of the nature of habitus, hexis, and some final tabulation, such as we don’t have with persons, unless of such persons as we think we know. But the tabulation too is only of virtues we think we know, or have named. Still we can, as in Christian understanding, place love as form of them all, just as we here give a kind of infinity to any loving person. He or she has the unity of all within himself as he is held

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within all others of this community of the spirit and of spirits (Hegel’s third “kingdom”). But nor are questions of natural and supernatural of the essence here. Where we speak of perfection we ipso facto speak of the absolute, speak absolutely. “Everything finite is false.” So as it is with the virtues so it is with us, with self and selves. Each is or goes up into all and all into each, I in them and they in me, members one of another. These are our watchwords, but not words merely. “Words are like the film on deep water”, said Wittgenstein. Go deep then and you even disturb or destroy the film. This is the speculative. Do we have two parallel systems of interchange, then, in selves and the virtues, using the latter to illustrate the former? That would be something unexplained. We should rather say that in studying the virtues we discover what we are, “the truth about you and me”, namely, “that it is not you and me.” McTaggart was set on avoiding this conclusion, yet Hegel, whom he followed, envisages discovering that we are “articulated groups… unsundered spirits transcendent to themselves… shapes of heaven.”22 “Articulated” suggests joined together, mechanist metaphor or metonymy for “members one of another” (unsundered?), though this too is metaphor, oxymoron indeed. Don’t ask “Am I then a virtue?” as if asking if I am to be robbed of my individuality. We have seen that virtues are in reality individuals, like this white, not reified qualities (this whiteness) but “attributes” identical with those to whom they are attributed. An identity in difference, we might wish to say, as all infinity, all unity, is necessarily differentiated. The virtues are themselves personal. I am my affability, again, my affability is I. But I am you too, when I know and love you, and so my affability is your affability (in its very difference) as my affability is my love (if I have it, thus incarnated) and my love is your love. We speak of the love that is “between” us. I am that. The question is different with vices. A vice, in not being the virtue, can be anything whatever. Thus the predicates of negative judgements alone are “distributed”. This might make vice seem more interesting as being more varied, though we have just stressed that no one’s virtue is the same as anyone else’s, while mere likeness has by definition to come to a stop in unlikeness, if it is not to collapse into identity. Hence analogy is ultimately equivocation, characterising all speech, which it thus transcends. We use language to surmount it, constantly. That is our defining posture. Vice anyhow has to be supported by virtue every step of the way if it is ever to come to anything. An absolute acedia would be extinction. 22

G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Harper, New York, 1966, p.452.

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The root sense of virtue is as a power, and thus angels are spoken of in Scripture as virtues, thrones, dominations and powers. The Word as life proposes himself as the virtue of each one of us. This is indeed the necessary understanding of virtue, an “I”, necessary for our end, for happiness and emergence from the dialectical ladder. I am the life of the other, begetting and containing him in whom I and all others are contained. So I am necessary for him and vice versa, even though in another sense, as absolute consciousness, I am sufficient in myself as having all others within myself.23 Between you and me and the gatepost, we say. What is “between” is a wisdom, sapientia (an intellectual virtue), active when we venture with entitlement to say anything, at play at the eternal and present founding of the universe, binding all things together in the diversity which keeps them apart and distinct. Wisdom too is all, the All. In this sense, again, question as to the cosmos, cosmology, is ultimately ethical.24 Ethics, however, is happiness, “pure play” (the notion) and not some other thing. The virtue that I am, we may now say, is the virtue my name names and not some other thing, since it is otherwise unknown. This, and not just the fact that I, any I, “functions” just like a virtue merely, is our suggestion here. It was always necessary to get beyond a mere metaphysics of ethics to an ethic which is a metaphysics and so not a limitation, a metaphysics showing itself as ultimately or in its most typically metaphysical reach to be ethics and not just an ontology of ethics, the old dualism. We have superseded ontology; this was after all the import of the classic “ontological” argument, reconciling object and idea, subject and object, idea and actuality.

23

Thus, mutatis mutandis, Aquinas can say, we have noted, that others, qua others (amici) are not necessary for eternal happiness. See his Summa theol. Ia-IIae 4, 8. 24 Cp. J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge 1901, Introduction. Cosmology, for him, is “the application to subject-matter empirically known of a priori conclusions derived from the investigations of the nature of pure thought,” from Hegel’s Logic in particular in his case.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE SYSTEM WHICH IS PHILOSOPHY

In the introductory chapters to the first part of the Encyclopaedia, Logic, as part of his criticism of Kant (“Second Attitude to Objectivity”), Hegel states that Man is essentially a thinker; and therefore sound Common-Sense, as well as Philosophy, will not yield up their right of rising to God from and out of the empirical view of the world.1

By thought, however, Hegel shows, as in a way against Kant, that he means “the rise of thought beyond the world of sense, its passage from the finite to the infinite, the leap into the super-sensible which it takes when it snaps asunder the chain of sense.” He stresses that this is a passage, a transition. He contrasts this real and adventurous thinking with the proofs of God offered by “the merely syllogistic thinker”, who starts from what he deems “a solid basis”, viz. the world as “an aggregate either of contingent facts or of final cause and relations involving design.” Hegel’s point is that the passage and leap of intellect to God destroys irretrievably this “solid basis”, like the ladder one “ungratefully” kicks away. We are not only “reasoning from one thing which is and continues to be, to another thing which in like manner is.” To think the phenomenal world rather means to re-cast its form, and transmute it into a universal. And thus the action of thought has also a negative effect upon its basis.

Here Hegel refers to “the negative features implied in the exaltation of the mind from the world to God” which the “metaphysical” or a posteriori proofs of God (from experience) neglect. They are therefore defective representations of this exaltation, this “process”, which is a passage. 1 The Logic of Hegel, translated by William Wallace, Oxford University Press, 1873, 1965, §50.

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That upward spring of the mind signifies that the being which the world has is only a semblance, no real being, no absolute truth; it signifies that beyond and above that appearance truth abides in God, so that true being is another name for God… the world, which might have seemed to be the means of reaching God, is explained to be a nullity. Unless the being of the world is nullified, the point d’appui for the exaltation is lost… the process of derivation is cancelled in the very act by which it proceeds.2

Thought “cancels the mediation in the very act of mediating.” This that he calls here “the negative factor in thought” is explained by reference to Spinoza, often charged with pantheism and atheism. Hegel implicitly rebuts these charges against his great predecessor, as he sees him, and whose “absolute substance” he himself re-defines as “absolute spirit”. He rejects any idea that Spinoza should be said to “identify the world with God” or “confound God with nature”, as if “the finite world possesses a genuine actuality and affirmative reality”, which Hegel here is clearly denying. So he says, thus far approving it, that “the system of Spinoza was not Atheism but Acosmism, defining the world to be an appearance lacking in true reality.” The term a-cosmism is the application of the Greek negative prefix, “a”, to the cosmos or world, which it is clear from the previous that Hegel is himself endorsing and putting forward. “A philosophy which affirms that God and God alone is, should not be stigmatised as atheistic.” Hegel speaks here of ordinary man’s or human nature’s “vehement reluctance”, “not much to its credit”, to surrender the conviction that “this aggregate of finitude, which it calls a world, has actual reality.” Human nature “is more ready to believe that a system denies God, than that it denies the world,” and we can apply this, as he clearly means us to, to Hegelianism itself, a clear acosmism thus far. From here Hegel goes on to show that “the Ontological proof”, deriving from Anselm and criticised by Kant, though endorsed by Descartes, “the noble Malebranche” (Hegel’s epithet) and Leibniz, corresponds most to what he has in mind. God’s “notion involves being.”3 He adds, though, that “If this were all, we should have only a formal expression of the divine nature.” Rather than pursue this further here, however, we can note how Hegel connects it with his central reflexive thesis about his own philosophy and 2

This is in substance the same reasoning used by Thomas Aquinas to show that God has and can have no real relation to created beings as if outside of himself. Cf. Summa theologica, Ia 13, 7. 3 EL 51.

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about philosophy as a whole, which, strikingly, he identifies with its actual history. So, in explaining “the negative factor in thought… implied in the exaltation of the mind from the world to God”, he refers us back to his general introduction to this encyclopaedic presentation of his system4 at paragraph 13, where philosophy is identified with “this negation of the shell” whereby “the kernel within the sense-percept is brought to light.” It is in regard to this exaltation also, its negating function, that Hegel says later, introducing a category, that The truth of the finite is rather in its Ideality… This ideality of the finite is the chief maxim of philosophy; and for that reason every genuine philosophy is idealism. (§95)

Context shows he has Leibniz here chiefly in mind, who claimed a priori that if there are composites then there must be simples, a truth that Hegel thinks “Modern Atomism” in physics, “still in principle atomistic”, has lost sight of, coming “closer to sensuous perception”. (§98) We come back though to paragraph 13 and Hegel’s general view of philosophy. Discussion of the mind’s exaltation to God (in 50) recalls this to him. So there, after explaining the rise of philosophy as in essence dialectical, ever negating itself in “conscious loss of its (sc. thought’s) native rest”, he there states that “the philosophical Idea is found” in each of the “parts of philosophy”, viewed historically (15). The History of Philosophy, however, only “gives us the same process from an historical and external point of view.” Really we have “a circle rounded and completed in itself” and what merely seems phenomenally to be history is really “the System of Philosophy itself”. “The same evolution of thought which is exhibited in the history of philosophy is presented in the System of Philosophy itself.” (14) This is in fact an exemplification of Hegel’s non-abstract view of the relation of the Universal to the Particular. The necessity for defining this, he says, is suggested by “the spectacle of so many and various systems of philosophy.” This is why it is the reverse of Hegelianism to hold other philosophies in contempt or to be wilfully ignorant of them. This is the theme, what he seeks to overcome, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, ultimately identified with philosophy itself. The whole procedure is an instance of his general theory (a generalised and yet of 4

That it is such a general introduction to the three-part Encyclopaedia is obscured in the Oxford Wallace translation (1967), where it is presented as Chapter I of The Science of Logic. This however really begins with what is called Chapter II there, “Preliminary Notion” (i.e. of logic).

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course aufgehoben Laplaceianism) that contingency is mere phenomenal appearance, that everything is really necessary as accomplished eternally by “the cunning of Reason”. The stages in the evolution of the Idea there seem to follow each other by accident… But it is not so. For these thousands of years the same Architect has directed the work and that Architect is the one living Mind whose nature is to think, to bring to self-consciousness what it is… The different systems which the history of philosophy presents are therefore not irreconcilable with unity. We may… say, that it is one philosophy at different degrees of maturity… one and the same universe of thought. (EL13)

This may recall to us his view that we have here, and everywhere, the same content as in figurative religion (or, mutatis mutandis, in art) but here presented in the more perfect form which is philosophy. He adds, In philosophy the latest birth of time is the result of all the systems that have preceded it, and must(!!) include their principles; and so if, on other grounds, it deserves the title of philosophy, it will be the fullest, most comprehensive, and most adequate system of all.

The “must” hovers between “ought to” and “cannot other than”, in the proper Hegelian way, i.e. they must, be conformed to their idea, as a matter merely of being (becoming) what they are. The doctrine is identical with that of Thomist natural law, of the divine pre-motion of all finite motion, more generally, of all things working together for good. The significance of what is stated, moreover, is general, a statement of principle. It means that Hegelianism, the latest (at that time) and fullest system, must itself be developed further as time passes. This philosophy of development, become conscious of itself under just that rubric, must itself be developed, as the dogmatic Marxist variant of it so typically failed to see. The point is virtually a logical one. A doctrine of development (of doctrine, of philosophy) entails, as a detail, a development of this very doctrine of development. Hegel did not see his system, absurdly, as the end of philosophy for all time. That would be to deny historical consciousness in the very act of attaining to it. This is not to deny that after him, maybe, philosophy can never be the same again. “Greater things than I have done shall you do” and not just bury the talent. This has to be our attitude to our preceptors, as they teach us themselves that it should be, rather than mere passive veneration, an embalming rather, of the revolutionaries of yesterday.

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We cannot of course carry out this ideal without full comprehension, again ever ongoing, of the earlier achievement, itself inspiring us to this creativeness, the essence of living tradition. This is not to deny that there occur sometimes and not always classical periods in which one man or woman can more easily or appropriately sum up and embody all that has gone before and achieve a “paradigm shift” in the course of this. One recalls Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and, here, Hegel. We may not be living in such a period at the moment. Yet the non-classical period results from the classical period and that must mean something, like a differentiation or antithesis crying out for reintegration or synthesis maybe.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN BEING QUA BEING

Things “are changeable, that is, they are, but it is equally true that they are not.”1 Thus, in affirming time or change we deny its reality, it both is and is not. Here, otherwise than in “the theory of (logical) types”, what applies to the part applies to the whole. There is no time. There is no world of illusion. Maya is itself maya, naturally enough. Simple identity holds, though infinite contradiction follows, and this is the deliverance from maya. It has no being. That is why there is one closer to me than I am to myself, in Augustine’s words, or why I myself am not.2 Immortality, then, is not my immortality; for then I would not enjoy it. This is why thought, in its inmost, is a matter of becoming the other, of “intentionality”. But it is just therefore that thought thinks itself, always, since its self is its other. Thus “it has an object which is at the same time no object.”3 Thought as thought “involves no limits”, transcends finite categories. The finite “subsists in reference to its other” but thought “is always in its own sphere”, at home with itself and therefore infinite. The “I” is infinite, as always “in relation to an object which is itself.” Otherness, we may say, is and has to be found first in God. This otherness though is ever within and beyond otherness as first conceived, since this is precisely what it is, in endless projection. So here the other of the other is not self-cancelling. There is a linear intensification rather. This alternative recalls Wittgenstein’s insight into two or more possible understandings of a “grammatical double negation”.4 Even in this otherness without limit thought simultaneously refers to itself. This, called love in religion, is “the cement of the universe”, whereby also, regarding grammar still, “being is said in many ways.” The many, that is, are one, since the one is diversified, is, in its inmost, 1

G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic, 32 (subtext). “I am he who is; you are she who is not.” St. Catherine hands down a philosophical insight in the form of an interior communication, and why not? 3 Hegel, Ibid. 28. 4 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 556f. 2

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diversification without limit. There are no “simple (undiversified) parts”, no parts at all, therefore.5 Whole and part is a form of finite thinking only, and “everything finite is false” (Hegel). This is why Aristotle refers us to being qua being as the subject of metaphysics (which he also says is God, theos), not some this or that. No de-fining predication is applied. “But surely Aristotle has shown the sense in which changeable being can be real, the ens mobile of the Scholastics?” Can be, maybe, in some sense, but is it, finally (absolutely, in the sense of “is” qua “is”), real? Is, for that matter, the Aristotle of the Physics at one with him of the Metaphysics? The subject of physics is not being qua being. Regarding this, in the Metaphysics, especially Book VII, Aristotle showed that accidents, qualities or properties are not parts of the substance. They are, rather, identical with it, subsumed into a formal unicity and actuality from which “matter” is excluded, as being merely its possibility, and not a part at all. Matter and form are possibility and actuality (“spirit” in Hegel). This is why “prime matter” is “not actually anything”. That is, it is not, self-contradictorily, something that is nothing, as some criticism has crassly supposed. So being can indeed be said in many ways, but for being qua being, its science, these are indeed no more than ways of saying, of grammar. “Essence as grammar”, Wittgenstein wonders. Aristotle’s theory of predication, his logic, is fully in harmony with this his metaphysical account of, for example, accidental being. Aquinas, in De ente et essentia, follows his lead, saying that “only wholes can be predicated of wholes”. “Red”, that is, is not said cum praecisione (like “redness”) in “The rose is red” and such redness, this red, is no more a part of the actual rose than my humanity (or my accidentally being or having been a postman) is a part of me or like something “stuck on”. This is why the copula “is”, signifying identity, typically connects subject and predicate, why being coloured, for example, is more than the applied paint. Wittgenstein is fully in harmony with this view, of the many ways of speaking which fall short of “philosophy”, let’s say, in his theory of “language-games”. For him, however, it follows that this “game-theory”, philosophy of language (as it now becomes), is itself a game, the “game of games” perhaps, self-critical reason. This would be what we call reality or being qua being, a way of life or what we do. The notion, Hegel had said, is “pure play”. Nor does Aristotle deny that being qua being is one of the ways in which being is said, as, analogously, it is but one law among 5

This was the core of McTaggart’s argument against the reality of matter in his The Nature of Existence.

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others that we should obey law and argument-forms only get their validity through being themselves arguments. One might therefore quarrel with Wittgenstein when he says that in the sentence “Twice two is four” the word “is” has a different meaning from “is” in “The rose is red”, since “the sign of equality” can be substituted for it alone.6 Well it could, of course, since language is free. On the view cited here, however, the logical form of “Twice two is four” is that (the quantity) twice two is a quantity equal to four. Aquinas is explicit that predications of identity are sui generis only as the limiting case, on all fours with “Twice two is a simple calculation” “or twice two is two by two”, of the identification which predication in general is. Being equal to four is just one of the things, which are thus all one “thing” (the Concept) as far as logic is concerned, with which “twice two”, the logical subject here, is identical, a logical relation (in this sentence, therefore) transcending that of arithmetical equality. Thus “Twice two is four times one” would be false if taken as predicating identity (though all predication just is identity) rather than equality merely, elliptically identifying the product of these two disparate operations. But only the logician treats of identity, between numbers, elephants or phoenixes; the mathematician “oversees” it. There is no “mathematical logic”, only the logic of mathematics. It is therefore quite wrong to see Aristotle’s system as based upon mere conventional predication or “common-sense”. This error separates this type of neo-scholasticism entirely from Thomas Aquinas, for example, or from the late-medieval theorists of suppositio, who started from a remark of Aristotle’s to the effect that there are more things than there are names to name or “stand for” (supponere pro) them. There are several ways, therefore, in which we refer, in which things are “in” the mind. This mind, anima, is yet said to be quodammodo omnia. It contains all but, as it seems to us, in the mode of language, verba. Essence becomes grammar indeed (Wittgenstein’s quip, though a serious one). Yet in Hegel’s account essence, this “grammar”, has to give way to the notion, to the Idea as idea, thinking itself. This suggests that, so to say, language does not have the last word! This would be precisely because it depends upon an abstraction of concepts, upon essence. As “red”, in our sentence, stands for the whole rose (in the manner of supposition of the predicate) so, in reality, everything stands for and is the whole, the “absolute”. There are no parts. On one variant of this, McTaggart’s, anything really existing is a person. In this way the Absolute is as it were one sentence or predication, one 6

Wittgenstein, Ibid. 558.

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Word in Christian terms, this Word being identical or “one being with” the absolute subject (Father), though itself variously reflected in any particular whatever. Thus, again, the copula “is” participates in “is” taken absolutely (for being) and is not different from it.7 To be then is identity, self-identity through an infinite number of variables. “This also is thou, neither is this thou.” We see here a claim of logic to transcend linguistic usage or even its possibilities. It applies equally for speakers of a language without a copula, e.g. Russian. The same identity is asserted there by simple juxtaposition. But how can logic transcend language? We have, for example, the idea or category of negation, consequent upon otherness as occurring to consciousness, in Aquinas’s view, at the fourth transcendental concept, “something” (Hegel’s “determinate Being”, etwas), aliquid or, etymologically perhaps, aliud quid. Thus negation is not “an abstract nothing”. It is a move in the dialectic, rather, as all thinkers thus concur in implying. It is “the foundation of all determinateness” (Cf. Spinoza’s Omnis determinatio est negatio; for Aquinas, equally, form limits being). This metaphysics of negation clearly transcends language. But so does ordinary speech, the use of “not”, say: How can the word “not” negate?… It is as if the negation-sign occasioned our doing something. But what? That is not said. It is as if it only needed to be hinted at; as if we already knew.8

In the previous entry Wittgenstein had said that “not”, the sign, “is like a clumsy expedient. We think that in thought it is arranged differently… possibly something very complicated.” Earlier, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had treated negation at length as a strictly logical operator. Wittgenstein’s “as if we already knew” recalls, perhaps, Socrates in the Meno. Yet Wittgenstein is sceptical of this ideal reason, as it would have to be: Negation: a “mental activity”. Negate something and observe what you are doing. - Do you perhaps inwardly shake your head? And if you do - is this process more deserving of our interest than, say, that of writing a sign of negation in a sentence? Do you now know the essence of negation?9

7

Aquinas, In I Peri Herm., lect. 5, no.22. Wittgenstein, Ibid. 549. 9 Ibid. 547. 8

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Context shows him to mean that the two processes are the same, one and inseparable. Essence though, in either case, is not to be thought of apart from what we do, of which negating is a part, founding determinateness indeed. We cannot define or give the essence of determinateness, since that would be a determination. Logic, anyhow, “is the work of thought itself, and not a fact which it finds and must submit to.”10 Analogously, we never accept a rule of logic except in the sense of seeing its validity for ourselves. We never argue by external specification. The same, however, applies to language, which implies, though Wittgenstein might not agree, that style and content, medium and message, are one. Logic is content, the content, as present in thought. This was Leibniz’s meaning in designating the world as necessarily the best possible. All times and spaces are here and now, any here and any now. So time and space negate themselves. Logic, ontology that is, remains. Logic thus leads us on, as does Aristotle’s metaphysics, to the absolute idea thinking itself alone. This “exaltation of the mind”, however, “has also a negative effect upon its basis.” Sensation “loses its first and phenomenal shape,” in a way to which “the metaphysical proofs” of God’s being are blind. There is an “upward spring of the mind”, after which “the being which the world has is only a semblance… no absolute truth… truth abides in God, so that true being is another name for God.” It is a transition, yet every trace of transition is absorbed where the world is explained not as means to God but as nullity, the ladder kicked away in Wittgenstein’s image. The whole point just is to nullify the world11 and Hegel will have nothing to do with any ens commune taken as reality, our reality. In language we name all things and it is thus that they come to be. Thus the limits of my world are the limits of my language (to reverse Wittgenstein’s dictum in the Tractatus) or, which is the same, the one is as unlimited as the other. Language, says Heidegger, is the house of being. Logic’s transcending linguistic usage, therefore, is a case of the latter’s, and man’s, perpetual self-transcendence, as also charted in the dialectic. What then remains? We might say that the Heideggerian tag is a case of having the cake and eating it, of not going far enough. Language, along with the dialectic it incarnates, absorbs being as a moment in, a mode of, its grammar. But if essence is grammar this is because grammar, speech, remains always at the level of “the doctrine of essence”, i.e. midway 10 11

Hegel, Ibid. 19. Ibid. 50.

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between being and “the notion” or spirit in Hegel’s conception. Hence, in speaking of “that whereof we cannot speak”, at the close of his Tractatus, Wittgenstein shows awareness, with Hegel, of a third mode, transcending being and essence. Yet what transcends also perfects as, for Aquinas, grace perfects nature. We deal with the same reality, whatever our categories. This mode, the doctrine of the notion, is for Hegel, therefore, no other than (we should not say “no more than”) the third of three “subdivisions of logic”, making up “the Theory of Thought”.12 We should keep silence, says Wittgenstein, but there he would condemn not only Hegel, as some have wished, but the whole of theology, concerning which Wittgenstein or, rather, his school vacillate, as it were dialectically, between receptive humility and amused scorn. Well, don’t we all? Thus he formalises what is after all a “funking” of the larger question. Hegel though, neither coward nor foolhardy, presses serenely on: The position taken up by the notion is that of absolute idealism. Philosophy is a knowledge through notions because it sees that what on other grades of consciousness is taken to have Being, and to be naturally or immediately independent, is but a constituent stage in the idea… The notion, in short, is what contains all the earlier categories of thought merged in it. It certainly is a form, but an infinite and creative form, which includes, but at the same time releases from itself, the fullness of all content… the notion is a true concrete; for the reason that it involves Being and Essence, and the total wealth of these two spheres with them, merged in the unity of thought.13

His “at the same time” suggests necessity of a kind, but this is the necessity of freedom itself, since “the Notion is the principle of freedom”, of, that is, an unbound subjectivity which therefore is a “releasing from itself”, even within itself. Infinity, that is, must transcend, overcome, the divide between self and other, as subject is identical with all predicates. “This also is thou; neither is this thou.” It is, rather, what is best called love that can say this, says it in us, if indeed we have grace as “preventing” us in all our doings14, so that we are not and never were just we. We are prevented indeed, even ontologically, being rather images or shadows mis-taken for the reality, mere faces in the fire. “Our God is a consuming fire.” Thus viewed we will never have faces15, being rather unique aspects of one great laughing face flickering with unceasing 12

Ibid. 83. Ibid. 160. 14 “Prevent us in all our doings…”, an old Anglican “collect”. 15 Cf. C.S. Lewis’s novel, Till we Have Faces. “How can the gods see us face to face till we have faces?” 13

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merriment. “The notion is pure play.” We borrow a Buddhistic image as completing or more fully explicating the “face to face” imagery, which cannot be taken literally without degrading God. Thus even or especially the Johannine Christ said, self-effacingly, “He that has seen me has seen the Father” and, in total annihilation of separateness, “I and the Father are one”. It might seem a “Satanic” humility then to want to remain apart. “Except you eat of me” and so on, leading to the ideal of becoming what, we now see, we are, “members one of another” namely, a totally paradoxical image if ever there was one, though by no means contradictory.16 But no wonder Wittgenstein baulked. There, however, he merely acquiesced in the picture of philosophy as handmaid of theology, rather than that into which theology must issue and historically has issued, viz. a philosophy of religion, a religious philosophy even. Thus it is that the Idea “does not merely pass over into life”, as if it were something incomplete, requiring of necessity an object, but will freely “go forth as Nature”. Rather, it does not “go” anywhere but, as Hegel makes precise, though with conscious anthropomorphism no doubt, it, “enjoying… an absolute liberty… resolves”, but “in its own absolute truth”, “to let… the immediate idea, as its (the Idea’s17) reflected image, go forth as Nature.” Nature, that is, is intrinsically, though not immediately or materialiter spectata (Kant), a product of thought. “What is the world without the Reason?” (Frege). Leibniz meant no more than this in claiming that creation had to be “the best of all possible worlds”. We began with Being, abstract Being: where we now are we also have the Idea as Being: but this Idea which has Being is Nature. (EL244 add.)

In saying that language depends upon, “names”, abstracted concepts, we might seem to return to “the jargon of abstraction” of which, claimed Peter Geach in an Appendix to his Mental Acts, Aquinas kept clear in his thinking as a whole, teaching rather that the mind “makes” concepts. Hegel, more explicitly, claims that it makes them out of nothing:

16

Yet one may recall Hegel’s perhaps tongue in cheek endorsement of Leibniz’s philosophy, which “represents contradiction in its complete development”. This, however, is what forces the notion on to a synthesis of Subjective Notion and Object in the Idea. One cannot rest in contradiction, though one may need first to “develop” it. Encycl. 194. 17 My gloss.

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We add a remark upon the account of the origin and formation of notions which is usually given in the Logic of Understanding (Hegel compares Understanding unfavourably to Reason, as ratio to intuitus in some ways). It is not we who frame the notions. The notion is not something which is originated at all. No doubt the notion is not mere Being, or the immediate: it involves mediation, but the mediation lies in itself. In other words, the notion is what is mediated through itself and with itself. It is a mistake to imagine that the objects which form the content of our mental ideas come first and that our subjective agency then supervenes, and by the… operation of abstraction,… frames notions of them. Rather the notion is the genuine first; and things are what they are through the action of the notion, immanent in them, and revealing itself in them. In religious language we express this by saying that God created the world out of nothing…18

Matter, on this view, again, just is the possibility of such creation, not “a matter that exists outside of it”. It is impossible not to see continuity here with the Platonic comparison of knowledge with (unconscious) reminiscentia. The “vulgar” Aristotelianism taken up by Locke, where the mind is first tabula rasa, only carries one so far. Indeed, Aristotle’s example at the end of the Posterior Analytics has been too hastily taken as basis for unqualified empiricism. The soldiers, he says, regroup after a rout to form a line of battle, corresponding to the universal’s “coming to rest in the soul”. What though, we forget to ask, is this regrouping, what the rout? It is a strange, a subtle and complex comparison, as so often in Aristotle. The line formed is an attempted approximation, with difficulty, to what the soldiers made up naturally to begin with, to what, that is, they always have been, since they are a battle-line, as the football team is a team, even should they get drunk between fixtures. Aristotle will have had Plato in mind here as always. He shows, more nuancedly than the slave-boy in Meno, how the proto-remembering takes place, how the soul’s rest which is thinking, self in other, in all other, is established, made contact with. “Know thyself.” It all fits. “The soul has learned everything.” The abstraction of language, its untruth, its “bewitchment of our intelligence” (which only style can redeem), derives from the finitude of concepts, notions. Hence Hegel speaks of the notion, in which “each of its functions can be immediately apprehended only from and with the rest.”19 Style, of course, is a self-referential concept, since style in writing, its truth, is an ability or willingness to catch the style of one’s thinking without that such thinking, again, would be a separate activity. It is, that is, a being willing, a need, to write in just that way in which one is 18 19

Encycl. 163. Ibid. 164.

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thinking (or vice versa, rather) and not to dissemble, as we so often feel forced to do in speech. Texts can be stored away. Still, a minimum ability for honesty, with and in oneself, is required and this is to have style. It also discloses the hidden reality of the speculative, as Hegel defines it, as at Enc.82, as reason as such, the “reason-world”. It is not only Americans who, as Sartre judged, “do not like to think.” Many would misuse religious faith as alibi against this unloved task. “We do not have to think,” declared the Victorian Anglo-Catholic, Brother Ignatius, “it is all decided for us.”20 Such “faith” does not seem to be fides quaerens intellectum. In a similar way what I have called here vulgar Aristotelianism functions as a shield against any pure or philosophical wonder. Thus religion becomes infected by ideology, which is philosophy’s corruption and death. This is why one can call neo-scholasticism a political movement (K. Rahner). Sponsored by high authority, after 1879 especially, it put paid to the “ontologism” of Rosmini, Gioberti, Brownson and others which had been the main Roman Catholic version of Hegelianism, though looking back to “the noble Malebranche” (Hegel’s phrase). Yet there are traces of it still in Newman. Even in our time a Pope, Paul VI, prefaced his “Credo of the People of God” with an attempt, not without pathos, to outlaw any kind of existential commitment to philosophical questioning. It is, however, impossible to accept that Christian faith entails this kind of naivete, miscalled realism. There are, rather, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any one person’s philosophy, not less. Hamlet, or his creator, was “spot on”.21 20

Quoted in P.F. Anson, The Call of the Cloister. For scholastic realists this has all been shunted into angelology, treated effectively as philosophy by Thomas Aquinas, who offers probabilistic arguments for angels’ existence (“pure” spirits), as a “multitude” in that case. Lawrence Dewan O.P. points out that the Thomist universe is overwhelmingly spiritual (“immaterial”), time and matter being but the trailing limit of creation’s garment, of “the things that are not seen”. “Turn but a stone and you touch a wing.” Yet by only a slight adjustment of thinking such stones can be seen as the “matter”, currency, of the discourse of those spirits merely, just as we ourselves, our true unknown selves (cf. the doctrine of guardian angels who “behold the face of my father in heaven”), are spirits, these spirits (the last man or second Adam “became a living spirit”). Thus of us too “there can never be enough” and more are now revealed on earth, and therefore in heaven, than our forefathers could dream or reckon up. Yet each is a whole universe, the notion. Again, there is no question of stones “becoming” conscious, as evolutionary realists would have it, and in saying they would “cry out” the Gospel implies, rather, the interiorly dreamlike or subjective character of inanimate matter or stuff. Nothing and no one can become

21

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What, though, do Hegel and the others mean? We might feel let down, in the passage just cited, by his flat comparison of our subjectivity with God the creator. Is he merely inviting us to take the place of God (Hegel’s “mad dream” according to an early paper by Karl Rahner)? Well, did even Feuerbach do this? Such evaluations depend upon seeing the finite self in absolute terms, actually a contradiction (the same contradiction as “founds” Molinism). For Hegel is not merely drawing an analogy either. He says, if we attend, that we express this by our talk of God, this being “the notion” as genuine first. There is, rather, a closeness between each of us and God more intimate than our relation to ourselves. The self, that is, is a somewhat provisional concept, being rather quodammodo omnia, as Aristotle had it. In realist circles this modus of being all things is taken as derivative or subsidiary, but the quoddammodo can just as well signify the most absolute manner (of being) conceivable. “The soul has learned everything” can be understood in terms of that constitutive knowledge we have been discussing. This is what the theologian Henri de Lubac was groping after in his De la Connaissance de Dieu22 in terms of “the idea of a concept - of God or of anything else - prior to the network of concepts we inherit as we are initiated into language…”23 In the end, we might say, speaking generally and not of Trinitarian theology specifically, ipsae personae sunt relationes, reinforcing the Thomistic (and Augustinian) identification “reciprocally”. Behind “It is he that has made us and not we ourselves” we find the deeper truth that we (and “he” therefore) are not ourselves merely. Sensus est quaedam ratio. Aquinas is often taken to mean by this something merely common-sensical, such as that the senses “deliver” to us reliable information concerning some “thing in itself”. Probably St. Thomas might tolerate such a reading as first penetration into his meaning, so to say. Neo-scholastics like Henry Veatch spoke of the senses delivering to reason more than the senses understand. What this means, if it can mean anything, is that it is not the senses than sense, but the human person. In tasting cheese, this piece, I savour the world under this appearance, this view of it, even should the cheese be mouldy or accidentally unsuitable for “literal” savouring. Accidents, we remember conscious from a previous state, an insight preserved in the myth of the soul’s “infusion”. We, rather, are known and hence know from the foundation of the world. When we love, too, we know this (Francis’ “in loving we are loved” is not otherwise understandable). 22 Eng. The Discovery of God, London 1960, discussed in Fergus Kerr O.P., Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007. 23 Kerr, Ibid. p.79.

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(to change tack slightly), are not parts of substance, cheese not part of the world, world seen in a grain of sand (piece of cheese).24 The chair, again, is “composed” (well, is it?) of wood and colouring material or paint. But the chair as a whole is coloured, is, say, identically a blue chair in just the same way that it is a chair simply, since a change to green is no different (at the level of logic and predication, the “metaphysical” level) from a change to a table, a weapon or firewood.25 Whether we sample cheese, chairs, concertos or this text consciousness, which is cognition, is continuous and thus one, the notion. It is this that acts, so that “a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees.” Experience “has no intrinsic value of its own… A great mind is great in its experience.”26 We make our world and have been doing so from the beginning. A beginning, though, it is clear, since it is the beginning of time or of a time (aevum) cannot itself be in time and so has no beginning (or end therefore), is always with us. Thus Augustine refers the angelic or timeless creation before all that is visible to the “In the beginning” of Genesis 1,i. Again, “It is he that has made us and not we ourselves”, ipse fecit nos. He? Well, whom do we all pray to in our extremities, whether theists or atheists? We appeal to one closer to us than ourselves, our true self therefore or atman. I came out from my Father, yet he and I “are one”, at the beginning and end, alpha et omega, whatever goes on in the middle. The coming out and the being one were historically made into two Trinities, the “economic” and the “theological”, missions, sendings, being distinguished from proceedings (processiones). They are the same, however, as necessities of love taken as actuality. And so we seek to return, in sentence after sentence, hour after hour, gathering up, bringing “the sheaves”, rolling up time’s scroll, to what we never left, the “heavenly places”, being “changed from glory into glory”, a trans-figuration of self, as self is itself a figure. Only thus are we commanded, as mere common-sense, again, the only true “commonsense” as eluding the critique of “essence”, to love God more than ourselves (Aquinas), i.e. to love ourselves and all else (yet there is no “else”, the mind is “at home” everywhere, is “its own place” and not “in” it merely) in that way. Speech, sermo, is the ladder we wish to kick away. “Round and round the garden…” 24

Without a general and even spontaneous recognition of the authority of poets no interpretation of “canonical” sacred texts is possible either. They are “inspired”, many of them at least, because of their stylistic qualities, by which alone the community might recognise the divine, the daimon, in them. 25 Compare Wittgenstein, op. cit., on broomhead and broomstick. 26 Hegel, Ibid. 24.

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* The attempt to splice together evolutionary naturalism and anthropocentric theism, of which Christianity is the apogee, dies hard. It is, after all, the time-honoured project of Catholic “realism” referred to above, of which Teilhard de Chardin might seem to be the most illustrious contemporary representative, though one can wonder if this is the right way to read him. With the Lord a thousand years is as a day, says the scripture, and we do not notice that to accept this “as” is to give up the thousand years. Instead we start talking about “ontological discontinuity”, just as we go on talking about a “first” cause. Lewis and Towers, in their excellent critique of the views of Morris, Ardrey, Lorenz, Popper et al.,27 do not stop thus to wonder and the oddity of such transcendental realism, as it might be called, glares out all the more. A new variant of absolute dualism, as between biology and rationality, nature and man, results. The Judaeo-Christian doctrine of creation 28 in this philosophically unmediated form lies behind this regression from the Cartesian thematisation of the transcendental or intrinsic subjectivity of knowledge and consciousness. This is not to deny that the regression is found also in the development of Descartes’ own thinking. Thus he invokes the benevolent spirit who would not let him be “deceived”, as if philosophy were not as such a transcending of “the natural attitude” more deeply natural. This exactly corresponds to virtuous effort in the moral life or, for that matter, faith in religion, which should rather stimulate the transition (to absolute idealism). “When I was a child I spoke as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.” This text, as inspired, has limitless depths. Becoming a man entails putting away even the supposed temporal ascent from childhood as (childishly) 27

Bernard Towers &John Lewis, Naked Ape or Homo Sapiens, 1970. Philosophy requires a commitment seldom dreamt of by orthodox theologians claiming to “perfect” it. The curriculum of seminary studies has obscured this. There is no point in man, imprisoned in his cave, merely taking “a look” at the lady philosophy as she passes by with indeed more than consolation. Thus when Bernard Lonergan somewhat patronisingly declares that philosophers “are apt to go into a deep huddle with themselves, to overlook the number of years they spent learning to speak” etc. (quoted Kerr op. cit. pp. 113f.), one rather loses interest. The Kantian project of questioning time, fulfilled in McTaggart’s thinking, for example, has simply not been taken seriously, since Lonergan surely knows that childhood memories are not “overlooked”. At stake, rather, is the status of such a memory under an idealist view of time, where “a thousand years is as a day” (in Platonism, Christian or not, memory, memoria, transcends time). Is this a case of “practical atheism”?

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illusory. Knowing in part is not knowing at all, inasmuch as “absolute knowledge” is not a mere species of the latter. Now is not now. Now is then, projected as future. Thus, “I live not yet I…”, “Turn but a stone…”, “If it be now…”. Plato cannot be charged with dualism in the same sense, since he rather transcended it, affirming the falsity of material appearances, which “both are and are not”. The same affirmation palpably (note again the role of style) underlies St. Paul’s comparison of the seen (temporal) and the unseen (eternal). For Teilhard de Chardin, however, matter is alive, and this is a way of affirming the Aristotelian priority of form29 rather than positing “extension” as matter’s quasi-essence, matter’s own form as it would then be, absurdly if we wish to ignore the equivocation on “matter”. Thus Chardin too can be seen as Platonically eliminating matter. It is rather as when we reverse the Thomistic identity of divine essence and existence, as we can, since identity is after all a reciprocal relation (a fact rendering wholesale reductions forever impossible). We then go beyond existence (being) as a divine attribute to a more genuinely Platonic ideality.30 For Lewis and Towers man appears not of course as First Cause but as Last Effect, in time, of evolution. With man, they actually say, biological evolution stops. The creature goes over from slow biological adaptation to rapid conscious control of the environment. This is a version of Teilhard’s postulating an ascent from the biosphere to the “noosphere”. No reason is 29 Cf. Metaphysics VII. In Book VIII Aristotle is prepared to consider that even ideas (ideai) might be substances, ousiai, along with species, genus, fire, essence, subject (hypokeimenon), cf. Met. 1042a 15f. The significance of saying that metaphysics studies being qua being is that here we finally say how things really are, prescinding from the “many ways” of predicating. All predications, all judgements, are false, says Hegel, not of course unaware of the liar paradox. This is why the doctrines of physics (Aristotle’s included) cannot be carried over unchanged into metaphysics or into a view (always “mystical”) of how things really are. This is nothing other than the stock religious view of things also and one cannot have things both ways (“ontological discontinuity”), not in philosophy. It is in this way that the first lovers of Christian wisdom inserted Christian revelation into the tradition of wisdom, never surely the Pauline “wisdom of this world” but a wisdom able to specify and recognise “the appointed time”, as we find in Hegel or Origen and the Alexandrian Fathers and as implicit in Plato and Aristotle or the ancient Indian or Buddhist traditions, say. 30 Hegel points out that we cannot flatly assume that existence is a predicate worthy of divinity. Cf. Enc. Logic 28 (subtext) on finite thinking “regulated by categories… not subject to any further negation… existence is by no means a merely positive term” (see further 122, 123).

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given, however, why evolution, the warp and woof even of cosmogenesis, should thus stop. They quote Dobzhansky’s claim31 that a majority of ethnologists, psychologists and sociologists as well as “various” biologists think that with the attainment of the (not “a”) “genetic basis for culture” biological development is over and done with. In support of this one appeals to the supposed fact that man’s intellectual powers have not noticeably increased in the last hundred years “or even the last fifty thousand years”. Two totally incommensurate time-scales are brought together here. As Lewis and Towers themselves observe, it took the horse a million years simply to lengthen its teeth a little. They quote Julian Huxley as saying that man’s development is not biological but sociological. Yet this is no reason, within evolutionary theory, to deny that man as object of our knowledge will not evolve into something else after many millions of years, though this may indeed pose a difficulty for the theory, epistemologically, but that they do not consider. Such a new creature may move to extra-terrestrial habitats, just as his non-human prototypes (not ancestors) descended from the trees. Forty years after Lewis and Towers our human intelligence still sees human nature as genetically based, along with instinctive behaviour generally, and thus subject to specifically genetic development also. This gives rise to increasingly successful genetic manipulation. Medical science is thus compelled to view human beings, the species, as in continuous interplay with microbes and viruses which do indeed undergo evolutionary change at a rate comparable with our human and “cultural” time-scale. Even we, for that matter, go through at least some observable biological change, due to diet and similar things. People get noticeably taller (witness medieval furniture), life-expectancy changes and so on. In short, this paradigm, product of finite understanding (Verstand), cannot without further reflection be combined with the metaphysical insight of reason (Vernünft). This applies though equally to the metaphysical “proofs” of God a posteriori. They do not leave the world of experience from which they reason unchanged, as second thoughts change first thoughts. Thus the appearance of reason in nature is, necessarily, dialectical and not historical. That is, it relativises history as a category. Hans Küng’s notion, in his book on Hegel and the incarnation (1970), that just historicity should be made one of the transcendental predicates was therefore monstrous, as of course was the Marxist interpretation of Hegel on this point. 31

Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving, New York 1962.

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So where we have adopted the paradigm of evolution there is no reason, within biology, not to view man as conditioned by it now as much as in his origins, no reason for positing some directive deus ex machina bringing nature to a halt, which is what Teilhardism viewed through a realist glass would amount to. What might be revealed, rather, by “the phenomenon of man”, is the illusory character of nature as a whole or, rather, its being a “petrified” (representation of) intelligence (Schelling) and nothing more or other (matter as possibility merely). Just as a first all-causing cause must supersede empirical or finite causality as such (appeal to analogy is of no use here) so a last, effect-stopping effect (biologically viewed) supersedes the event-chain of which one initially viewed it as a last member merely. Man, thus viewed, has no origin since it is man who searched after such an origin of himself. The ability to do this or to conceive of such an origin, with native oxymoron, comes only with himself and thus human contingency is as strictly unthinkable as there being nothing. Nothing cannot be; that is what it “is”, i.e. as a predicate. Thus in religion God has a human face, to be manifested “in the fullness of time”. What is manifested rather is the whole time-series itself as symbolic representation of “the Idea”, i.e. as a unity simply. With evolution, therefore, biology transcends itself within itself, showing that all science is ultimately as perfectly a contradiction as the philosophy of Leibniz, as we found Hegel saying earlier. Oxymoron rules and reason (Vernünft), like the peace of God, passes all understanding (Verstand). Philosophy, though, as without limit, is obliged, within itself, pace Wittgenstein, to explore such perspectives, without therefore becoming “theology”, sacred or otherwise. Unlike biology it does not thereby transcend itself but all else rather. Empiricists insist that “dogma” or the a priori must not distort “facts”, not seeing that it is the nature of fact that is at issue. The idea of a fact characteristically blurs the distinction between language and reality, as if predication were the same as function in relation to substance, supposing we saw reality as substance, ousia. The philosophical question though is in what sense anything is a fact, is “the case”, that the earth goes round the sun, say, and to this extent the movement in philosophy has been right which identifies language and world, though this rather pulls the rug from under the picture of a nature consisting of empirical facts “out there”. Here though the antithesis that was Moore’s and the late Russell’s empiricism (if it was that) in relation to idealism is reintegrated with the latter in a richer or more specific mixture. The Idea as we know it is discourse, text, “logic” in Hegel’s sense of this term as ultimately spirit, thinking, the absolute idea (which is the same as the “divine ideas” of old, each of which is one with the divine essence).

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Since man transcends nature “man” cannot be in nature. Nature rather is subsumed into himself. To make that move, however, is to see that nature is not an absolute or independent reality. Here too the outside is the inside (and vice versa). Although nature seemed to be the starting-point the journey (and hence it is no mere literal journey) is one of coming to see that we were never there. It is more like the effort of waking from a dream than it is a journey or voyage and we may even find, who knows, that we shall eventually leave our fancied egos behind too, passing from a false to a true self, from old to new man in Christian terms. So did we evolve, not just from apes, but from the first atoms, molecules, unicellular organisms or whatever may be eventually proposed as antedating these? Big Bangs may come to be seen as infinite in number, as an eternally recurring cycle of expansion and contraction; explosion, implosion and implosion again. Eternity, however, and recurrence are incompatible, however Nietzsche thought of it, and so what is repeated are the events themselves, i.e. they are timeless, they themselves return and not, mythically, their simulacra. Repetition within history is oxymoron again, like a beginning of time within time, and thus, as a proposal, calling for self-transcendence (Aufhebung). Events, like persons, are eternal, i.e. there are no events as we usually or empirically think them. For Christians all event or act lies in the utterance of the one Word. So this question too (Did we evolve?) returns, as we return always to common sense, the “light of common day”.32 But it is a question wholly, not to be completed by an answer but rather transcended in dialectic. With the paradigm of evolution the searchlight of natural science was turned back upon the subject “doing” science, man, hitherto reserved to philosophy or ambiguous sciences like psychology33 or sociology. How can man study himself? How can he postulate a natural process issuing in an ability, as term or, rather, stage on the way of that process, to know the truth about that very process and, indeed, about anything whatever? Will not any finite consciousness, like any sense, fall short of that apprehension, which, as knowledge, must be “objective” in the sense of not mirroring the subject or, indeed, subjectivity? Yet how can natural process, evolution, issue in the requisite infinity of consciousness? For this reason McTaggart interprets or develops Hegelianism into the view that what exists is a unity (not a mere community) of infinite or 32

Common sense, McTaggart points out (Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic), belongs, in Hegel, to “the doctrine of essence”, which the doctrine of the notion supersedes once and for all. 33 Not without ambiguity even in its classical form as “rational psychology”, since “being is said in many ways”.

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absolute persons. This might also be viewed as a development of Aquinas’s view at Summa theol. Ia 85, 2 (knowledge is of the res) or of Aristotle’s teaching in De anima concerning the inevitable paremphainomenon (literally, that which would appear beside) hindering any finite or “material” apprehension from being knowledge, into the view that the mind, which is thus Mind, has to be omnia, all things, everything whatever. We did not then evolve, absolutely speaking (and here we indeed invoke a claim to speak absolutely, on occasion). Evolution, along with the fossils, or the rising sun, is maya, illusion, symbolic representation rather, part of a language or “way of life”, of what we do. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” It is misunderstanding to see this Eckhartian view as downgrading beauty. It upgrades the beholder rather and doctrines of creation can quite well be interpreted in its light.34 In the older philosophy the result was arrived at that the divine knowledge was causal, caused what it knew. It had to be, since God, infinity, is potential to nothing and yet, as God, must possess knowledge or something transcending yet subsuming it. Such a view, however, simply wiped out human freedom as hitherto unreflectively understood, or at least called for a re-evaluation of it. The call, naturally enough, once pressed, was then refused, even at the highest level (Congregatio de auxiliis, 15971609), and this brought on the cultural drift towards a hostile atheism. There seemed to be a choice between God and man. So man, having previously been assured of his freedom by Christianity, chose man, naturally enough and the Jesuits, always practical (and just then hard at work earning Paul V’s gratitude holding off Protestantism in Venice), didn’t bat a collective eyelid. This, however, was just the beginning of insight. For if God’s knowledge is causal then knowledge as such is anywhere constitutive of its object. We make our world and, yet more wonderfully, one another.35 Just as before, and as always, philosophy, love of wisdom, compels us to abandon our unreflective prejudices and assumptions, since it leaves us no 34

Cf. Kerr, op. cit., 160-161, reporting Rahner (Theological Investigations XIV): “The dogma makes no sense in isolation… If there were a new definition, it could not be false, since the legitimate range of interpretation would be so wide that no room for error remains… this does not make it devoid of content… no process of interpretation is ever concluded.” Kerr is commenting (p.158) on “The ferocity of the debate set off by Küng’s book”, Infallibility? He adds: “there is surely room for further philosophical discussion of the concepts of a proposition, truth and interpretation before debate on papal infallibility is resumed.” 35 Cf. our “Begotten not Made”, The Downside Review, January 2006, pp. 1-21.

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alternative, annihilating any possible way of return. If we look back to the old way we lose everything, lose the beloved. Restorations smell of decay. We should not quarrel with the new insight because we cannot transform it too into “common sense”, “second nature”. There is only one nature and Hegel and tradition concur in teaching that spiritual life is a matter of breaking with nature, requiring a primal in principle benign “catastrophe”. The moment, though, of eating of the Tree of Knowledge, like every other moment, recurs eternally. We cannot sit back, in a false rest, arrest rather. Peace lies in having done with time altogether. The Ite missa est is, qua dismissal even, a call to come back the next day, not to repeat or re-enact merely but to intensify further, keep it going, as the love-affair, series of meetings or course of pill-taking is one treatment, one healing to new life. We need the animals and plants to think and talk about ourselves. We do not need them, they could not be, partners in a “divine milieu”, where all beauty will not only be in our eyes but will shine out from within us, “all glorious within”. There is no “without”, while if we have ever loved a dog then he or she will be revealed, constituted indeed, by just that very love as something infinite, someone. Again, it is often remarked that more people are alive now than have evr lived before and that will become more and more the norm, since “there can never be enough”. This was the perspective of St. Paul when writing to the Thessalonians of old. Those that had “fallen asleep” before “omega point” were regrettable exceptions. “Them also I must bring,” records the Gospel of “other sheep” and so w will find a way of “bringing” the great spirits of the past. Or is it that they, as also or even especially making up “the communion of saints” in “life everlasting”, as the Apostles’ Creed has it in one version, have already “brought” and are bringing us, eternally? “Art thou Elijah?” The answer given was negative, adding though that Elijah had come (again) all the same. Implicitly our usual notion of ourselves as substances is replaced, superseded by one of infinite relation, shared action, each in all and all in each, “members one of another”. We do not really need any doctrine of reincarnation. What is incarnate is the whole of reality, every time, in every infant’s cry. Like Donne’s bell, he or she cries for, in place of, thee. Dying with the dying, you are born with those being born. Thus you are not born and do not die. Nor does anyone, unless daily.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN OXYMORON

“And this we call God.” Thus St. Thomas Aquinas effectively concludes, or passes beyond, each of his five a posteriori “ways” to certainty about what is called, again, God. The sit of Utrum Deus sit is too restrictively, hence unworthily, translated as “exists”. “Whether God is a reality” might be better, though the question as to what exactly one is trying to prove remains open, at least philosophically speaking. “God”, thus spoken about, cannot simply mean the God we are now going to talk about in the rest of our theology. Perhaps for Thomas the theologian it did, thus far, mean just that. Anselm, earlier on, began, in a sense, where Thomas ended, asking himself precisely what might be called God. Only, he claims, that than which nothing “greater” can be thought, that of which, in effect, we must form an absolute, indeed a self-realising idea, an “idea which thinks itself” we may say, looking back to Aristotle and forward to Hegel. For Hegel the question is not “Does God exist?” but “What is God?” St. Thomas’s text shows that this, recorded as his own question when a student merely, is really his procedure too, as thinker if not as teacher. The question is, also, “What might God be?” What would God have to be? The possibility of absolute actuality is examined, in Hegel. We cannot just presume that this will fall under our category of existence, since we are considering just what, in its very idea, falls under nothing, is uniquely first. The dilemma between theism and atheism might appear simply vulgar, therefore. Where is thy God, the most sophisticated theists of that time were mockingly asked, exactly as the “first man in space” would later declare that he found no God there. The Christians, in their turn, appeared upon the scene, it seemed to many, as atheists. Hence within this Christian movement there has ever been the conflict or at least the suspicion that those seeking further clarity were pushing on into atheism, which indeed is one of the variants of the Absolute within Christian culture, which is bigger or wider than “religion”, historically considered.

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“And this we call God.” “I am that,” says the Hindu. For McTaggart, Hegel was wrong to identify the absolute with God. But the pagans had judged the same concerning Yahweh of old, i.e. that he was not truly a god. St. Thomas, within a sacral culture, had to identify his five firsts or ultimates with God. That is what one called them. Hegel, McTaggart and Aristotle were, relatively, without this constraint. What is distinctive about religious or God-talk is lordship, subjection, slavery, which it is the essence of Christianity, pace Feuerbach, to overcome. Thus we have the paradox, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father… We are one”, converted within a generation or two, however, into a positive Trinitarian theology. This theology though, in accordance with the enhancement of personality generally within Christianity, proved to be a first step towards opening up the individual to universality, to the whole, as presaged in the original conception of unity, the one infinite God. The personal is the universal, Hegel taught. Persons are relations, relations persons, so Augustine and Aquinas. Thus the Son is his own begetting (passive) by the Father, as the Father is this begetting, this “speaking” of the one Word, self-manifestation, “glory”, and as the Son is also the “spirating” of the Spirit, who is his own giving (donum). Each is the other, though distinct. So being begotten even, as subsistent relation, i.e. not abstracted, must be, subsistently, “spirating”, though if they are relations we should not thus substantivise or “gerundise” them. Similarly, if not likewise, we are all members one of another and live “in” (are even begotten by1) one another. So the “high-priestly” prayer for unity of John 17 is effective declaration. Things are so because they are known so. But if God self-dissolves within Christianity it is not by any real emptying or kenosis of what he was “before”, as some theologians whimsically pretend. Reality, the whole, here manifests itself. We cannot say it finally manifests itself, not because we want to deny that Christianity can be “the absolute religion” (Hegel) but because it manifests itself as manifestation, called glory in religion, to which there can be no end. Revelation, that is, is not only God’s manifestation of himself, his epiphany, but it is epiphany itself or glory. The glory of the Lord is glory simpliciter, passing from glory into glory (St. Paul). So revelation is not just of this or that but, just as revelation, is the unveiled face we call reality. As such it can never be static. This lies behind Rahner’s view of inspiration (of scripture) as simply “acceptance by the Church”. To object that this claim is circular, as if the Church views these texts as inspired wholly inasmuch as or because it has 1

Cf. our “Begotten not made”, The Downside Review, January 2006.

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accepted them as such, is to fail to see the claim. The claim is that there is no inspiration, no content, apart from the Inspirer himself, offering just his self as donum. This is why God is love and not this or that. As for the unveiled face, revelatum, this cannot be, ultimately, the face of another, of any other. That would be alienation, which is finite. To see the face of God incarnate (and if not incarnate there is no face) I have to see my own face, be deeply “at home”, maybe for the first time. At eternity, omega point, truth and love must “fuse”.2 In this sense one looks forward to meeting one’s own image, that of which oneself is an image, “walking in the garden”. Then indeed one will have all the dignity of an authentic “magus”, to recall Shelley’s mysterious lines. Hegel, of course, was accused by Eric Voegelin of being a magus in the line of the Gnostics. Here, anyhow, one should recall that his, in religion, dialectically final Kingdom of the Spirit is identified with “subjectivity as such”. * What is God? The beyond, ultimate mystery, Herbert McCabe tells us; the forever implicit (never explicit), says Eugene Gendlin; the selfexplanatory, say Abbot Butler, John Finnis and others. What is selfexplanatory would end all discourse. So it is placed beyond this life, ever beyond. It seems to many a point of orthodoxy that God is essentially beyond experience. Uncreated grace becomes “created”, definitionally, just inasmuch as we experience its effects, in a classical “language-game”. It was laid down, after all, which “idioms” were acceptable, what one might say, or not. In this way theology unintentionally prepared a way for the deformation of philosophy in “dogmatic” ideology, as Christ prepares Antichrist. Why is beyondness important to orthodoxy? Do we lose God if we let go of it? The whole effort of mysticism, of spirituality, is to know God, not just to know things about him. Not only so, but how can I know anything genuine about anyone that I am precluded from ever knowing, e.g. that he loves me? One runs the risk of settling for a singularly empty ideology, where all of substance that remains are the “witnesses” and their later associates, to whom the world should listen, as if they alone knew what it is impossible to know. No one has seen God. The first, onlybegotten witness (but what did he then witness, before he witnessed to it?) has declared or shown, him. Those who come after those who “touched 2

Cf. Dom Illtyd Trethowan, “Grace as Union with God: Edward Yarnold’s ‘Enormous Paradox’“, The Downside Review, July 1991, p.163, “the supreme value of charity and the supreme value of truth fuse at infinity.”

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and ate with” him are ordained to the same task primarily by shared belief in this first witness and not by dogma or sacrament merely. What is denied is not just that complete knowledge we do not have of anyone else anywhere, but any immediate contact at all. “What the spiritual man seeks is contact,” wrote an anonymous Carthusian, by contrast. “I am that”, says the Hindu. “There is one closer to me than I am to myself” (Augustine), but not closer than contact surely. This would make of faith a rejection, a preliminary to atheism, as if it did not itself depend upon a first grace and the life that is “the light of men”, “I in them and they in me” indeed. Dom Trethowan3 refers to a “regular” interpretation restricting this to intimate union rather than “sheer identity”, which he seems to think entails participation as in parts of a cake. Perfect unity, however, transcends such composition, of parts or selves, eliciting the oxymoronic concept of identity in difference, a having of the cake and eating it indeed. Thus there will be no “conversion of the godhead” into something less but a “taking… into” it of the creature (Athanasian Creed), though dialectically rather than historically, we claim. For Christians, one generally understands, there is just one who is “our only mediator and advocate”. All knowledge of or contact with God would thus come through this long deceased human being, who yet lives eternally “to make intercession for us” and who is, ultimately, one with the omnipotent judge and dispenser of all grace(s), as reason too judges universally. Yet the powerful movement in the Catholic Church to make out yet another as such a mediator (of all graces) suggests that this general understanding is something of a preliminary sketch of a richer view. “I have many (more) things to tell you but you cannot bear them now.” Thus, by intercession, the communion of saints, we have and want to have many others who in turn mediate with such a mediatrix, being finally “members one of another” though in Christo as unique “head”. “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Offshoots can often surpass the parent plant. “Greater things than I have done shall you do,” though it is hard to think what. As Newman points out so eloquently, no one else, no other name, has elicited such enduring love down through all the ages. Yet in fairness one must concede that this is typical of religious founders more generally, as even Buddha claimed (the sermon at Mount Vulture) to be with us until the end of the world. Thus in absolute idealism, to go further, this becomes reciprocally generalised, as when Hegel writes of the error of the Crusaders in seeking Christ at an empty tomb in a dusty Middle Eastern city. “He is not here,” 3

Ibid. p.160.

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he quotes. Jesus, in effect, revealed man to himself. Thus the Fourth Gospel begins by saying that “in the divine Word was life and that the life that was in him was also the light of man.” This connects with the text of the Davidic psalm, “In thy light shall we see light”, fundamental for Augustinian epistemology, where it is taken as it were scientifically (as “creationists” take the creation account). Even so the Johannine text just cited “primordially gives us the truth about how human beings are intellectually constituted.”4 Dom Trethowan quotes this assessment while placing it, with Dubarle, within a realist philosophy of the world and creation. Yet divine life as being our light is even prima facie much more than an intellectual or any other constitution, making us more like images or reflections of the divine than things made to that image, as if by some artifex needing to give body to his (finite) thoughts. Such realism looks especially improbable if we grant to Dom Illtyd that “the nature of the human animal is differentiated from that of a mere animal” by “just the original gift of some simple contact”, not in itself of course explicitly identified as “religious”, as “the reality of God”. It would be a contact with ultimate reality just as such, rather. If it is not so, he quotes Dubarle as saying, then “faith would rest upon nothing… reduced to a verbose ignorance.” Indeed, “the gradual disappearance of a Christian culture from much of Western Europe originated in the adoption by thirteenth-century thinkers of a philosophy which kept God at a distance.” Dom Trethowan speaks of “that horror of intuiting God which resulted from the Modernist crisis” and which is “still around”. Surely though this horror goes back at least to the days of the movement known as Ontologism, against which, as against Hegelianism generally, the guardians of orthodoxy reacted by resuscitating Thomism just as it had been five or six centuries before. The “crisis” of Modernism showed that their war on intuition, despite this clever move, was not going to be all that easy, and as the draconian measures followed one another the whole world got a better chance to see how great their horror was. One must though go still further back, though I would want to claim that the whole development should be seen not merely negatively but dialectically, not as a falling away from primitive or Augustinian illumination simply. It is now time to restore, in a more integrated way, that which provoked, through awareness of its own limitations, the temporary supersession of such “illuminism”. Thus Rudolph Steiner, a predecessor of Dom Illtyd, somewhat laments the ninth-century papal move, under Nicholas the First or “Great”, to crush mystical experiential 4

Dominique Dubarle O.P., Le Modernisme (Beauchesne, Paris 1980, pp.252-255).

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religion.5 For this reduced faith, it can seem, to an obedient repetition of formulas leading on to later neurotic inquisitions into whether anyone “really believed” what he was thus forced to utter, as they were forced to participate in totally unfelt “contacts” with God put across as “sacraments”. The campaign was pursued simultaneously, in the Libri Carolingi, against the iconological aesthetic of the Byzantines, though they could never get the papacy to sanction their iconoclasm. Here, under pressure from a bunch of illiterate, recently converted tribesmen, divine transcendence was to be reduced to a mere positivist legislation as recorded in the Bible, quasi-magical to them as were all books. None of this though has anything to do with knowing God or “Jesus Christ whom he has sent”, as the first Protestants later protested. Yet also the Protestant view of the Mediator, of mediation, reeked of positivist legalism. All the same it was a step on the way, by a zigzag motion, to the reinstatement of philosophia, salvation by knowledge or contemplation (faith alone). Philosophy, indeed, embodied the Christian movement as theologia (not at first usurpatorially “sacred”), under the guise of which philosophy became more truly universal than in the days when it had been in fact the preserve of gentlemen. Thus Porphyry had rightly singled out the Jews as a nation of philosophers. Democracy was born or, rather, conceived blindly in embryo, to develop through the disedifying rampages of Christian and other mobs. Yet in substance this “rebellion of the masses” is a legitimate and even glorious elevation of man as such, where the last are first and so on. At infinity again, knowledge and love, theory and praxis, fuse. Contemplation, Aristotle had already declared, is the highest praxis, while the seed falling on the ground and dying was after all an answer to the Greeks, a participation in their dialogue, their philosophising. So Justin Martyr saw it, for example, as the same had been said of the fate of Jonah. It was a sign, a vox, like, maybe, writing in the ephemeral sand. This is the truth behind “gnosticism”, that there is even a “science of the Cross”, as Edith Stein, Carmelite philosopher and witness in extremis, wished to stress. How are we then to know God? Are we to do so? Must there be a forever implicit? Is this implicit itself implicit in the very form of reasoning and intellectual consciousness? Yes, and not only so. For, just in itself rather, only the Absolute absolutely comprehends itself. Becoming one with the Absolute occurred under realism through the lumen gloriae, 5

Cf. Rudolf Steiner, “Drei spirituelle Strömungen im 9 Jahrhundert und ihre Umformung” (1922), reprinted in Geschichtserkenntnis (ed. C. Lindenberg), Verlag Freies Geistes Leben, Stuttgart, 1982.

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itself surely a “created” grace. Since then even there the need for absolute knowledge was recognised and “catered for”, so under absolute idealism we must allow for absolute knowledge of the Absolute. This can only occur through identity, however, and so we are returned to “subjectivity as such” as being the final “Kingdom of the Spirit” where, in MerleauPonty’s words, “I am the absolute source.” I am that. The kingdom of heaven, it was said, is within you, disputed translation or not. Again, “you know not of what spirit you are.” Otherness, Trinitarian theology teaches, is in God and is reconciled there. Why then can it not be so with us? What else was ever meant by the life of the Trinity within the soul? Any other account of it is either a materialist imagining or a reductionist ethical interpretation merely, camouflaged perhaps through an appeal to “friendship”. Identity with “the ground” must be closer than that, must be the necessity and eternity, rather, of each and every one of us, distributed or not, continuous or discrete. McTaggart represents this openness as abandonment of confidence in “personal” immortality. It may just as well be taken, however, as a corrective to our present immediate self-perception as a separate individual, which does indeed seem to fall short of Hegelian self-consciousness in “absolute knowledge”. The “hope”, that is, must of itself become more radical, accepting first a death to our immediate representations even of our empirical selves. The narrative prototype for this paradigm might at least as well as any other be Christ himself, who “became a living spirit” (St. Paul), in the unimaginable tradition of Elijah. Again, as God is known only to himself, so none knows a man save the spirit which is in him. It is the same and has to be so, as infinity, Hegel shows, is necessarily differentiated. This then is what is implicit in the very form of intellect. Denial of it, as in certain versions of human “contingency”, is “practical atheism”, like making an absolute of Sunday church-going. So one knows the road is right though one does not know where it will lead us. That one “will no sooner know than enjoy”. So don’t look back and lose the vision. The nineteenth-century ontologists argued for an immediate knowledge of God, basing themselves more or less upon Hegel and upon “the noble Malebranche”6 and his reading of St. Augustine, in which Dom Illtyd, quoting Eugene TeSelle, seems to concur at the relevant points7, as 6

Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy; cf. our article “Ontologism” in Dictionary of Metaphysics and Ontology (ed. H. Burkhart & B. Smith), Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1990. 7 Trethowan, Ibid. p.164. Te Selle, Augustine the Theologian, London 1970, p.113-14: “We must agree, I think, with those who assert that Augustine really meant to claim an immediate vision of God…” This, he goes on, comes not by an

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against, say, F.C. Copleston or D.J.B. Hawkins. Hawkins was “convinced that it (sc. the mind) cannot have direct or indirect contact with God; this was part of the Church’s teaching, he maintained… irreversible.”8 But what, again, is God? That was the question here. With “subjectivity as such” the subject can surely have contact. If, though, ninth- or thirteenth-century distancings of God from “any possible experience” should be viewed as dialectical and not just negative then this can only be as part of a process of transcending transcendence itself, so to say. God as “out there” (J.A.T. Robinson) is to be aufgehoben. Hence Dom Illtyd’s distinguishing of experience of the ultimate from the specifically religious “form”, lordship etc., which it may on occasion take, is a valuable caveat. It is against the spirit exclusively that we are not to blaspheme, an exclusion permitting development of doctrine to the point of developing the doctrine of development. As for ontologism, and the nineteenth century in general, it had two faces. With Gioberti it was close to Feuerbach, with Rosmini, Brownson or indeed Newman it looked back to Augustine. Augustine, however, along with Malebranche and anything Christian looks both forwards, as breaking with the old, and backwards as fulfilling it. Similarly, Hegel both inspired dialectical materialism and gave new impulses to both philosophy of religion and theology. The heirs of the great, one finds, fight among themselves. * Again, why God? This is to discuss a name. Again, the relation of “subjectivity as such” to our everyday subjectivity could be the same as that of Augustine’s “one closer to self” to the everyday self. I am that. The divine names, either infinite in number or less than one, are problematic. Eternal oxymoron draws us. God, like woman for man or man for woman, is part revealed as whole. That is love, being “in love”. Oxymoron, that is, is thought reaching beyond language within language, i.e. oxymoron can only be explained oxymoronically. So it cannot be explained, since it itself embodies the passage from Verstand to Vernünft, from either/or to both/and. We pass beyond notions as they seem to us, as we regulate them, to notions in themselves, to being qua being. So the religious devotee takes God for his portion. But he does so as seeing that God, just one of the many names we employ, is yet all. So Francis’s Deus meus et omnia, exceptional (sc. supernatural) gift but by an exceptional effort of “natural capabilities”. Grace thereto is not of course here denied. 8 Trethowan, Ibid. p.170.

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as prayed by the devout, progresses in their prayer from “My God and my all”, in devoted or vowed fidelity, to “My God and all things” (the literal translation, one would think), in contemplative wonder. The part, as it was thought, is grasped as whole. Love is born, as, for that matter, we might love a pepperpot9, or Van Gogh a common chair. Art, after all, is love manifested. So “I live yet not I”. So one loves oneself, model for all other love. “The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me.” So figures of speech, as transcending speech within speech, there have to be, such as we learned them in the English class at school, not in philosophy lectures at the university. The romance of God… One would, maybe, give all the poetry in the world for the Psalter, progressing through to the final paean where, again, music stands for “everything that has breath” or is alive and personal, and all breathe in each, as all of the Psalms are in each. Inspiration, indeed is finally reception by the community, Rahner taught. Inspiration, therefore, as a notion, transcends itself. The moment of authority, canonicity, is but a moment. In a sermon, “The Weight of Glory”, C.S. Lewis suggested that the neophyte humbly devote himself to texts he finds alien in the hope of making them gradually his own. This does not strike me as a good or honest programme at all. But nor are the Psalter or Gospels or the Apocalypse or Book of Revelations (to which Lewis refers) so alien as to require such disingenuous play-acting. This would not be the story of anyone’s heart. An approach like that of Richard Jefferies or Emily Bronte in her poems has much more to commend it. We all know that things forced down people’s throats produce life-long revulsion, and where I myself have done the forcing (upon myself, that is) my disgust is all the greater. One seeks far away for what lies buried in one’s own backgarden, “hidden in a field”. I am that. This is expressed, to a degree, by the roundness of the world. An idealist might say we make it round for that reason, going out but to come in. This, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythology, is even part and sign of our condemnation and exile from original blessedness, that we can no longer travel away from “here” and get to “the blessed realm”, as was done in an earlier aevum. Steiner, mutatis 9

One would thereby personalise it or, as it were, beget it for the first time. In love we beget one another. So no one is without love, in some measure. It follows that we have loved ourselves into being, closer to ourselves than we are to ourselves. Self itself is here aufgehoben, and this is the deeper meaning of Hegel’s remark about death being the victory of “kind” over individual. On this, cf. Enc.222, 381: “nicht als ein naturliches Hervorgehen (des Geistes), sondern als eine Entwicklung des Begriffs…” I am you, in the sense that each is all, all each.

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mutandis, expresses similar ideas, seeking to replace the original but lost clairvoyance with philosophy. Here though, more optimistically, one would rather see such circularity as a figure of our own centredness, misread by “unhappy consciousness” (not equivalent to Christianity as such, whatever be the case with anthroposophy) as exile or imprisonment. One has indeed to travel away from the restrictedly natural, the “unspiritual” (Hegel). But such self-transcendence is itself natural too, as Henri de Lubac (Surnaturel) and others have wished to make clear even within a realist scheme. Not merely do we “fall but to rise” but the Fall is, represents, this movement of self-transcendence (rising). This though makes the realist scheme that much more improbable, since part of this self-transcendence should be the overcoming of it too, as prison of an earlier self. In our consciousness, “subjectivity as such”, we are quodammodo omnia. All things are yours, say both St. Paul and St. John of the Cross, or “mystics” generally. Ama et fac quod vis. To which Augustine adds, similarly ecstatic, that all the things of nature cry out Ipse fecit nos. Nature “freely goes forth”. Here though the main question is, who is this Ipse? If, with the philosophers, we speak of mind, nous, the absolute idea, then we, the consciousness of each of us, are also that, nous, of which nothing can be merely part, since it is not composite, being infinite. It is not simple either, but necessarily differentiated, i.e. the simplicity is not abstract merely. As ultimately real and hence as the very opposite of abstraction mind is thus necessarily differentiated and, as infinite, infinitely so. That is, it is differentiated but not into parts. The postulation, the discovery, rather, of a Trinity as ultimate manifestation (revelation) unlocked this secret, near to hand maybe as it always had been. Encapsulated within it though is a more just account, a deep modification, of our quasi-animal idea of selfhood. The persons are the relations as the relations are the persons. The persons are relatings to other persons who are relatings to them, to speak, again, oxymoronically. “As you, Father, are in me and I in you, so may they be one in us,” prays the deiform prophet, preparing to bring about eternal truth. “The truth shall make you (your minds) free.” Hegel cites this Gospel text, adding the converse, that freedom makes the mind, spirit, true. For die Substanz des Geistes ist die Freiheit.10 The being one in “us” and thereby “members one of another” is, intuitively, not compatible with some finite number of (finite) selves ending, if written out, in one of the ten Arabic digits. Yet one cannot, it is 10

Ibid. § 382.

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generally thought, have an actually infinite but discrete quantity, this and this and this… The consequence, the overcoming of what now is not oxymoron merely but real contradiction in the mind itself, is that the self, any self, is itself infinite qua self, containing and contained by all others. This identity of the active and the passive, in oxymoron again, signifies transcendence of this metaphor of containment. Dialectically, first and second person are differentiated preparatory to being reintegrated. Three in one and one in three, as schoolchildren sometimes thoughtlessly sing. “Yet they are not three Gods but one.” The realist thinker finds no difficulty in distinguishing the absolute spirit, for whom all things are known, from the finite (created) spirit, for whom all things are knowable. Some created spirits, in the tradition, however, are actually created knowing all things innately. That Aquinas and others were driven to postulate this curious, not to say fishy notion speaks for the view rather that all spirit, spirit as such, is infinite as free and “ab-solute”: Das Endliche hat also im Geiste nur die Bedeutung eines Aufgehobenen, nicht die eines Seyenden. Die eigentliche Qualität des Geistes ist daher vielmehr die wahrhafte Unendlichkeit, das heisst, diejenige Unendlichkeit, welche dem Endlichen nicht einseitig gegenübersteht, sondern in sich selber das Endliche als ein Moment enthält. Es ist deshalb ein leerer Ausdruck, wenn man sagt: Es gibt endliche Geister. Der Geist als Geist ist nicht endlich, er hat die Endlichkeit in sich.11

The insisting on a realist view of creation in much official Catholicism, in despite of the development of philosophy (and misusing Aristotle for this purpose), is strictly on a par with the frequent Evangelical insistence on a universally direct creationism taking no account of the evolutionary record. Neither of these stances is required by Judaeo-Christian revelation. So, if we return to the question of the number of spirits, of persons, we might say that there is absolute multiplication (infinite differentiation of the infinite), face upon face, a multitude indeed “without number”, if we would but attend to this word instead of asking “And how many is that?” Numerologically this is signified in Scripture, in the Apocalypse, by the super-number, as it then seemed, of one hundred and forty four thousand. 11 Ibid. 386. “Finitude has for mind only the meaning of something superseded, not that of (a) being. The real quality of mind is much more therefore true infinity, that does not stand onesidedly over against the finite but contains it in itself as a moment. For this reason “There are finite minds” is an empty expression. Mind as mind is not finite, but has infinity within it.”

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Who or what this ipse is, our main question we said, turns, though only from our point of view, upon this intrinsic absoluteness, which is also an indeterminacy, of self. The notion of indeterminacy expresses freedom as negation. Yet it is in negating this negation that freedom is finally appreciated, as a reciprocal all in all, as the most perfectly possible unity, as, again, “subjectivity as such” and, as such, the “Kingdom of the Spirit”. Indeterminacy, all the same, reflects back upon one way, the arithmetical way, of understanding number. For Aquinas too the oneness or unity of God is not to be understood in this abstract arithmetical way. Therefore the development of interpretation sketched here is, qua development, by no means ruled out. It would stand, anyhow, upon its own feet, by whatever route is has been or has indeed needed to be attained, religion and indeed faith eliciting philosophy. Philosophy develops historically like a train stopping at different stations along a series, the earlier stops being moments in the destination defining the train’s journey from its start. Yet each has at least in part an aspect of the destination, as witness the passengers who get off at these places, and thus no past position is simply to be rejected or scorned. As moments in the (dialectical) development these intermediate positions bring about the illusion of time, which a matured subjectivity overcomes as being a finite notion merely. Thus nothing is to be rejected but, with equal justice, nothing is to be finally accepted. Held together these two principles redeem one another, as the cataphatic yields to the apophatic and vice versa. “This also is thou, neither is this thou.” Everything is to be seen through and philosophy itself provides for this. So does dogma, as a matter of fact, as when it defines God as always more unlike than like his analogues. That, however, must also apply to the de-fining as such, when applied to the in-finite, and so ad infinitum. Oxymoron again. God speaks only one Word and so our plurality must err except where we dare to negate our judgements and negate this negation again. For silence, exterior and still less interior, is not an option, as the fact of liturgy demonstrates. So being is non-being, nothing, and their resolution, synthesis, Aufhebung, is not “becoming” in the common or everyday sense merely (the mistaken intepretation of both process theology and Marxism). Hegel takes everyday names for categories not always ever before taken as he understands them. “Becoming” in the Logic refers rather to the manyfacetedness, the necessary differentiation, whereby each thing is not itself but another thing, and thus in this way is itself (members one of another). Even if Hegel had not meant this we could make him mean it, since our concern should be with the dialectic he uncovered and not with him as person. As McTaggart remarked, if the validity of the dialectical ascent to

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the Absolute Idea had depended upon the infallibility of each and every one of just Hegel’s steps thereto then the whole project was vain from the start. One shows, rather, and it is not clear how far Hegel himself understood this, that thought itself, in any “culture” whatever, ascends of itself in zigzag fashion, from shadows to reality, as negation is piled upon negation under the sign of oxymoron. For us this appears to take time, but time, as conditioned phenomenon merely, is not of the essence of the process, or of any series whatever. In speaking, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, of three kingdoms, of the Father, of the Son and of the Spirit, Hegel is elaborating a philosophy of the Trinity. As Georges van Riet emphasises, although Hegel knows that “the notion of a Trinitarian God is born of the experience of Christianity”12 there is nothing contingent about this. Everything comes in its time and the representation of something external is itself internal, the work of reason, of Spirit. “He is not here, he is risen.” So the Trinitarian affirmation is not, at bottom, “theological”, as in the dualist world of St. Thomas and his time. It is not even just “Christian philosophy” as a kind of handmaid of faith merely. Rather, it is the affirmation that otherness is in God (Son) and negated there again (Spirit), to give one version of it, as “reconciliation itself”. So it is properly philosophical, philosophy’s essence even, though declared, revealed, manifested, late in its history, “the absolute truth in itself and for itself”. “The task of showing its truth belongs to philosophy.”13 All the same, as McTaggart, keen to distance Hegel from Christianity, points out, these three kingdoms, in accordance with Hegel’s overall system, are presented, they too, as a dialectical triad. So the third, the Kingdom of the Spirit, fulfils, subsumes, transcends and in a sense takes away the other two. It is almost as if they were first stabs at or sketches merely of the final reality. As logic or pure thought gets realised as external in nature only so as to return to itself in final reality as Absolute Spirit (the triad of triads) so the so-called Kingdom of the Father, which is “abstract” Trinitarian theology, is phenomenally (economically?) represented in the Kingdom of the Son, i.e. incarnation, death and resurrection of the God-man, only to be forever realised as “subjectivity as such”, the Church or human (ideally Christian) community. Yet what else is the coming of the Spirit in the New Testament as “strengthener”, leading into all truth and clarifying all that has been said 12

Cf. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, tr. Speirs & Burton Sanderson, London 1895, vol. III, p.99. 13 Georges van Riet, “The Problem of God in Hegel”, Philosophy Today, Summer 1967, pp. 75-106, p. 81.

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before? Thus, pace McTaggart, this account is not equivalent to a transcending of Christian religion,14 itself in essence self-transcendent. It recalls rather the Jerusalem come down from heaven of the Bible (Apocalypse), where the prophet “saw no temple” and where God himself replaced the sun. All was inward, that is to say, “subjectivity as such” as we might hazard, every tear’s being wiped away corresponding to Hegel’s view of matured thinking or consciousness, as “at home with itself” always and everywhere. Only this, contemplation, is “desirable for itself” (Augustine). Such philosophy, the Trinity, is indeed “reconciliation”, Hegel’s ideal even though, as in the Gospel, his vision takes in the sword and so on. The prospect of “religionless Christianity” is, all the same, opened up but precisely through deep penetration of its most mystical elements and not as a mere reduction to the ethical, popular in some quarters today. If Christianity is “surpassed” in philosophy (not merely the left or right wing or some supposed bird) this only means that the latter “accomplishes” it, i.e. “reflection on this lived experience is possible and necessary”. Given that, it must not be half-hearted or merely trail along in the wake of those remaining at the level of parable only. This, again, implies that the religious mode of apprehension is imperfect in its form, and there is nothing impious in admitting that. This imperfect form “has true reality as its content” and so is “rooted in the speculative sphere”, “infinitely close to philosophy”. Faith is not suppressed. Philosophy, then, “completes Christianity by showing its truth” and to do this honestly, from the centre, one must forget about apologetics, for the (eternal) moment at least. Oxymoron rules. Again, religion has a certain content, the form of its affirmation can be varied and there is, possibly, a perfect form of affirmation, more “necessary” than contingent narrative, misread as freedom’s equivalent. People ask, all the same, is the Trinitarian dogma here dissolved or not? Is it not rather solved, so to say, illuminated? Van Riet remains somewhat ambiguous here. Revelation “does not concern Jesus alone, but in him and by him all of humanity.” Yet, finally, van Riet writes, “Man is God’s image, God’s son, reconciliation.” The latter is McTaggart’s standingground and he, McTaggart, adduces texts of Hegel implying that Jesus is as it were the necessary particular needed to show man’s universal absoluteness, more formal than efficient cause one might say. For Hegel this is not a reduction, but the necessary form of any possible revelation. Still, having come thus far, one cannot but ask why one might not say, 14

Ibid. p.85.

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conversely, that God is man’s image, man who is himself, when fully developed, no doubt through the “history of salvation”, reconciliation of contradictories through endless negation, “identity with oneself in difference”, which is, again, Spirit, “the eternal history of the Trinitarian God” (van Riet). As we noted earlier, we discuss a name. Hegel sees the religion of the Cross, this “royal road” (Thomas à Kempis), as a call to or even a revelation (wisdom from above) of philosophy, death to the finite. Thus, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus…” (Philippians, my stress) or, again, in Colossians, “Mortify your members which are upon earth, for you are dead and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” This hidden life is precisely what idealist philosophy would disclose, with its methodic transcendence of common sense (the “things which are”), stuck fast, for Hegel, in the transitional “doctrine of essence”. It is, as hidden, the Holy Saturday, when churches are stripped bare, following upon God’s own Good Friday. But “there is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed.” Nor is this stance historically divorcible, as Cartesian “methodic doubt”, from the scientific method from which modern culture, after all hailed prophetically as, in some ways, the age of the Spirit foreseen by Joachim of Flora might have seemed to be born. That the latterday flirtation of “science” with commonsense realism has been a mere dialectical moment contemporary physics, say, now strongly suggests, while evolutionary theory in its very idea, as reflecting back on those reflecting rationally upon their rationality, cannot but break the bounds of the realist scheme. The corresponding ethical stance to these insights, actually not a finally separate domain at all, is here included, as theoria is itself but the highest praxis, once again. This wisdom from above manifests itself necessarily, not contingently, in what for our consciousness is set in historical mode. It is not less free gift for that, this being of the essence of wisdom, as in the rational and therefore free judgement, unrestricted by “nature”. It is therefore logic. Logic, the absolute idea (nous) thinking itself, unfolds reality, even as going forth from and returning to itself, “all in all”, not just the ultimate truth or some other partial view of all but all in all. The doctrine of the analogy of being is a disguised, even an inverted, “acosmism”, but only if one insists on viewing the cosmos through a realist lens. The doctrine of creation, faith in it, does not require this, as the so-called mystics of just our tradition have ever witnessed. The phrase “ontological discontinuity”, by contrast, I would dare to suggest, unless very carefully qualified, verges on the superheretical, the two-winged bird swallowing a camel there. Regarding McTaggart’s objection (to seeing Hegelianism as Christian) one might as well ask, to repeat, if the dogma of the three persons is

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dissolved when the persons are identified (oxymoronically) with the relations between them, as in at least Western classical theology. For clearly that position is a step on the road to further clarification, i.e. it clarifies things to draw attention reflexively to the dialectical character of clarification, as our notion of development entails its own development also and even principally. If persons are relations between persons then personhood is a selftranscending notion. Even, it is transcended as a notion. That is, the tension or paradox between Trinity and absolute divine simplicity might be self-resolving and Aquinas had already looked for pointers in this regard, so as to show at least that there was no contradiction in this, again, oxymoronic notion. The dictionary defines oxymoron as apparent contradiction in the sense of sharp (oxus) folly. Sharp is metaphor for “pointed” (itself a “dead” metaphor). It is a pointed foolishness, i.e. it is in the service of meaningful utterance, a figure induced indeed by Hegel’s own notion of the cunning of reason, of the reason ordering the world, do what we will or may. Language, of course, has been described as consisting entirely of dead metaphor (though one then presumably began with live ones; i.e. all were then poets) and one might try to think of all contradictions as dead or non-viable paradoxes, as oxymoron overreaching itself. Yet for Hegel contradiction was always the motor compelling dialectic to go further, since contradiction simply shows that truth and reality have not been reached. Thus, finally, “everything finite is false.” Contradictions, for that matter, were always in our categories, not in society or anywhere in nature, except inasmuch as nature is viewed, non-”realistically”, as a categorial construction anyway. Thus the MarxistLeninist interpretation of the dialectic is indeed contradictory at its root. This, though, might itself be benignly seen as a step in some dialectic of dialectic or meta-dialectic, whereby we might return, by synthesis, to a Hegelianism of, say, J.N. Findlay’s type.15 So one can concur with McTaggart in understanding Hegel’s three kingdoms as a progressive dialectical triad, the third movement of which, “subjectivity as such”, supersedes the first two, as both spirit and Spirit. Hegel himself might seem to deny the simplicity in claiming and quite well demonstrating that infinity is necessarily differentiated. Yet this may quite well be seen as developing simplicitas as a notion, progressing from an abstract idea of it to how it must be in reality. Thus simplicity in Aquinas is precisely a transcending of the mutual dependence of whole and part as notions, compositio being taken from the material world or 15

J.N. Findlay, Hegel: a Reexamination, Collier, New York, 1966.

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shape of our experience from which our thought is first built up. Ultimately, the same result is found in acknowledging that most perfect unity where the whole, now become Absolute and not whole (a comparatively relative notion), is intimately and even constitutively present in each “part”, now become person or relation, while each person, as relation to all, is present and even constituently present to all that is otherwise other to it, as “containing” it. All are, and each is, in all. Everything ethical, again, is here included too. Thus “we are all responsible for all” (Dostoyevsky). Such has been the trajectory of philosophy, of which revelation is both essence and moment. It would follow that we are in the Trinity and the Trinity is in us. So inasmuch as this is not daily or immediate experience a true self or atman is disclosed in dialectical opposition to the empirical, more self than self. Here again a finite notion, self, transcends itself (or its self!). Since it does this one cannot accuse this self, with the youthful Rahner writing against Hegel, as in one and the same move identifying itself with a thereby reduced divinity, as if the original self remained unaltered after transcending itself. This is simple contradiction showing failure to understand. The ground for such self-transcendence (of self itself here), self’s “going out” from self, “going through” that which it is not, thereby “bringing to nought” the “things which are” (though “are” here is rethought as what had seemed to be merely), is prepared under the imperfect knowledge-form (knowing “in part”) of religion with its appropriate rites and sacraments. For here we experience ourselves not as ourselves, but as “members one of another”, fruits of an original seed. Finally, we should note that we have journeyed in a circle, that what was farthest away was nearest to hand, as infinite transcendence entailed the most perfect and hitherto unguessed immanence, or as other discloses self in knowledge and love. For it discloses that what had been called exterior, like the Other of the Father on earth, is yet most deeply interior, to the point that the latter is the very begetting of his Other in an equally immediate, which is he also, reconciliation with it, him or her. As absolute subjectivity, “subjectivity as such”, I am that, the other I, that “lives”, being “not I”, as St. Paul has declared. As Hegel summarises, life itself is a finite and therefore false category. This, too, is the ultimate resolution of the dispute concerning human and artificial intelligence, discussed exhaustively in Hofstadter’s entertaining pages.16 Here too, I am that. All is in consequence of the dissolution, under its “internal contradictions”, of 16 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Basic Books, Inc., New York 1979.

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the concept of the self, actually the self-transcendence of self by self, the only thinkable worship. There is no absolute problem or opposition, as between self and God. Self and “life in this world” are not equivalent. “The outside is the inside”, exitus is reditus, an “eternal return” indeed, though transcending any mythical or Sisyphean repetitiveness. The forever implicit, beyond all experience as being its guarantor (McCabe, Gendlin), remains, the “cloud of unknowing” we beat upon, which is its beating upon us. The foolishness is pointed (oxus), though the pointing be foolishness, the end the beginning.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN LOGIC AND THE WORLD

In previous work we suggested that argument forms were arguments, of the most generalised kind simply.1 But we neglected to enquire if, in that case, judgement forms and even the form of the judgement as such (like “two things identical with a third thing are identical with each other” in the case of arguments) should not itself be a general judgement. If it should, then by parity the concept formally considered “as such” is itself a concept and perhaps the all-inclusive concept, as “S is P”, and its extension into argumentative reasoning by triple identity, would include the programme for all discursive thinking. For finally judgement and “syllogism”, thus taken, would rejoin the formal concept or notion. The aim here was to unify one’s view of logic and the world, to allow for logic and thinking generally as an activity, and even as such an entity, within “what there is”. A main insight here was that one could not reason by external specification, by rules supplied from without, since one had to believe, to know, to understand that, for example, two things identical with a third thing are identical with each other. Logic had to be something one saw, in seeing the world, in apprehending reality inclusive of the possibility of thought. This appeared to make logic into a potentially empirical reality, its principles, at the same time as one thus, necessarily, implied a necessity in the form of reality perceived. A second if related principle was that language as such refers or “stands for” (supponit), relates itself to an extra-linguistic reality. This explains why, after all, we felt the need for it to refer to itself too, as that by which all else is known. It was a system of signs, and this included the “internal words” of thought, whereby, typically in the judgement, one united or identified that which our faculty of abstraction or of particularising attention was forever taking apart or “analysing”.

1 See Stephen Theron, “Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy”, Acta Philosophica, fasc. II, volume 6, Rome 1997, pp.303-310.

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Here one attempted to define “the domain of logic” while thus charting the contours and being of human reason itself. To what extent this should be called a “critique” is a separate question, even if one lying close to hand. Hegel, for instance, rejects the very idea of a critique of knowledge or reason, relying rather upon his distinction between understanding and (speculative) reason. Logic, anyhow, is by no means a restriction, impossibly, upon reason. It is how reason goes to work, its instrument(s), viz. concept-formation (apprehensio), judgement, syllogism or argument. This is in fact language (logos) itself, since this is made up of judgements or statement, of predications, whereby one says something about something else. The exterior word or phrase corresponds to or flows from the interior word or verbum cordis, brought forth in the very act of thinking. So close are language and reason. Reason makes language as it makes concepts or ideas, in the very act, again, of primal thinking. If Wittgenstein’s denial of private language were the whole truth then why is there a plurality of languages? In fact I understand all other languages, the languages of others, if I do, upon the touchstone of my own. That is, I translate, whether a wholly other language, which however will always have certain deep structures identifiable with my own, or a dialect partly dissimilar or just the other person’s stylistically diverse usage. In the end, furthermore, I understand my own language as expressing my own thinking, giving it body or incarnating it. This thinking is none other though than the unity in harmony of being itself and there the subject, of predication, can only be the conscious self, subjectivity, identifying with or making its own all that can be said of anything and, not less, anything of which anything can be said. The two classes interchange, as Hegel shows well in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit. In the scholastic logica docens such thinking issues in logic, in speech, quite naturally. Yet “it is evident, that it is this man who thinks” (Aquinas). This man is the subject, is subjectivity, absolute. This subject has no fixed standpoint but different ones at different times. The subject, of his sentences, is as variable as the predicate and either one may determine the other, as when the predicate defines the subject or, conversely, the subject determines the predicate’s reference. They pass into one another, as Hegel will say. This is in fact the function of the judgement, to unite what abstractive concept-formation has first sundered, while keeping the newly minted concepts. By judgement language takes us away from itself and, ultimately, therefore, we make no judgements. The whole skein of language is illusory, a system of signs, which, however, are purely relational and so without being, relating ourselves to ourselves. The

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world itself is the creation of language, which just therefore sets its limits. Only thus can thinking, as distinct from a mere talking to oneself, be accounted for. Language, that is, judgement, is as a ladder one kicks away as the timeseries passes into, comes to be understood as, what as series is no longer thereby temporal. Taken absolutely temporality is impossible. All judgement becomes the judgement that is being, the uniquely one Word that God has spoken. This expression from theology means that there is no particular or finite standpoint from which a particular judgement can or should be made. This would deny the infinitude of any possible subjectivity, which is always subjectivity as such and indivisible, such that all is in each and each is in all, the Idea thinking itself, which is therefore the indivisible being celebrated (in poetry, let us not forget) by Parmenides. Here the most perfect unity possible is conceived as achieving the final simplicity of infinity, final as result, of the dialectical process. Just so is time revealed as illusion while we pass, again dialectically and not in time, into maturity. Thinking annihilates time, not merely “subjectively”, because there is no object except in the fragmentary thought of finite, not yet accomplished subjectivity. The judgement of being is at the same time, more properly or absolutely, the concept or notion, the Idea that thinks itself. It is thus thinking, act. For the judgement that is being is ipso facto the identity of all identities, which thus fall into one, a simplicitas no longer (it never was) merely abstract and unsatisfactory therefore. The notion, as act, is “pure play” (Hegel) or wisdom “playing before the throne of God” (Proverbs of Solomon) without need or desire for rest or change. This play, therefore, is neither motus nor immobility, but the hypnotic, self-focussing quietude of unceasing dance, where every step, every encounter, embodies the whole, embodies, that is to say, all other steps, all other encounters. There is no time in which to get bored since, ultimately, there is no time at all. All is act, uttering the one Word, begetting as one is begotten. The limits once thought constitutive of the self are superseded in quasisubstantive interchange or act that is act of no actor or “substance”, that is no longer predicate or predicated, that is Idea, notion, being, in utter simplicity and fullness. The coincidence of philosophic realism and absolute idealism is striking. It depends upon the identity of mind and known reality in scholastic epistemology. There is no unknown reality. Reality is generated in knowing. To this corresponds the Thomistic praemotio physica of the finite will. Once conscious subjectivity is discovered as infinite in itself the identity is complete. The cogito is no longer seen as an argument, not

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even an imperfect one, but a description. The felt nexus of thought is self as generated. The field is now clear for viewing the dialectical treatment of logic as completing, or at least supplementary to, the earlier logica docens, at the time of Hegel the only logic in the field. Nor is the question of the relation of Hegelian thought to the movement initiated by Frege as simple as is often believed, as if, namely, there were no relation at all, historically speaking, nor any call to relate them otherwise. * We have sketched here a notion of actuality that transcends movement or change. Creation, it has been taught, entails no change in God. Yet creation is all the same generally viewed as a putting forth of power, to which the attribute of omnipotence corresponds. God produces something exterior to his own being, in “ontological discontinuity” it is even claimed, somewhat self-defeatingly. Yet Aquinas and others insist that God can have no real relation to what is thus outside, but only to its “corresponding” divine idea. To this paradox corresponds Hegel’s discussion of the concept of force in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, from paragraph 136 onwards, leading, via an identificatory destruction of our contrast of outward and inward, to the category of actuality, as he calls what he has in mind. Even this will not of course be the absolute, which is the Idea alone, or thought thinking itself. Here Aristotle finds partial vindication in Hegel’s thought. Causality, indeed, was one of the concepts or categories that the medieval thinkers hardly dreamed of ever subjecting to philosophical critique. Hegel’s reproach stands concerning metaphysicians who simply imported into otherwise sophisticated systems unexamined concepts from the normal life of “common sense”. Common sense in fact, McTaggart will point out, belongs in Hegel’s “doctrine of essence”. It has no place in the final vision of “the notion”, of spiritual reality. Hegel also brackets it with the “faith or immediate knowledge” idolisation of which he criticised in his contemporaries such as Jacobi or Schleiermacher.2Here, in his discussion of force, Hegel begins to show that notions of causality are as unworthy of infinite being as he had earlier tried to show was the case with existence. We should not ask if God exists, but rather try to discover what God is. What we call creation is, rather, “the thoughts of one mind”, in each of which the whole is refracted or differentiated, forming a perfect unity in simplicity of all in one. The particular face of one’s child, the Thomist 2

Cf. Enc. 63.

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Joseph Pieper once remarked3, says everything, gives full knowledge that all is well with the universe, with the whole or all. Aquinas and other earlier thinkers really say or mean to say the same thing. Aquinas shows that the power of God is exercised, achieves its end (though God is his own end, again), by intellect and will, not by the putting forth of physical strengths, earthquakes and so on. It did not occur to him to see this as actually a setting aside of causality in favour of something more worthy. Thinking causing events, evolutions and so on puts one most in mind of the man who could bend spoons on television by concentrating his thought upon them. That is not our God, surely. The approach though is an old, indeed, a constant one. Thus we may consider the prophet Elijah, in the three thousand year old Book of the Kings of Israel. Elijah seeks wearily for the unseen God of his people, of tradition, whom he has served as has none other. He looks for him in storms, winds and earthquakes before finally finding him in “a still small voice”, an idea, that is, of something quite beyond any suggestion of power or force. For Nicholas of Cusa, too, God will as well be the smallest of things as the greatest. * What we are seeing is that cogito ergo sum is not a mere confirmation from the empirical act of my thinking, such that I objectify and describe it. It is rather the claim that thought, the Idea, is prior to or independent of existence, which, as a finite notion, depends upon it. Also the first person, referring to the subject, is used. This has nothing to do with psychology but is, rather, absolute, subjectivity as such, where all coincide as “members one of another”. Logic was bound to catch hold of, to absorb and fascinate the mind of philosophical man. In so far as it does so logic becomes ontology, metaphysics. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Physics takes as its task more and more not that of thinking how the world is but of thinking how it can think the world, such thinking actually starting from this very thinking of the world in the sense of making it actual. Of course this conception includes an uncovering of the world’s existence and reality but only as long as we rest content with the finitude of these terms, these notions. It certainly would not prescind from them in what would be self-impoverishment, but goes rather beyond them.

3

J. Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation.

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Now we have said4 that a valid argument form is itself an argument, and hence valid. In practical things, similarly, there is just one law (not though a “meta-law”) that all law is to be obeyed. Syllogistic, for that matter, is based upon the claim that there is just one final argument form (that of triple identity), in virtue of which all validity of argument takes its rise. This must be so, moreover, if argument is a univocal and scientific notion. This argument-form, as we choose to call it, is yet an argument and not some “meta-argument”. What could that be? Similarly the form of judgement is itself true and even truth. Judgements are not valid or invalid, but true or false. The form of judgement is the identity of subject and predicate, i.e. the identity of or in their difference. That is to say, that S is P is based upon the prime condition for thought that S is S. This condition is unique, not shared with some requirement that P be P, since as predicate the predicate is always predicated. The subject, by contrast, is what is first conceived, (logically) prior to predication. It is in fact the concept, engendered in apprehensio simplex, at least as the scholastics apprehended it. As final apprehension of all things in unity, nonetheless, the grasp of the concept, the notion, is the reverse of simple. Simplicity, alternatively, is something to be won at the end of the day. Just as there is one form of judgement, so there is one concept, notion, Begriff. There is no form for the concept, as there is a form of judgement and of argument. We may call it the Idea, which just means the Idea of the Idea or conscious subjectivity. For thought to think itself thus is not a matter of rejoicing in supposed powers or faculties. We have seen that force is a finite and so untrue notion. Thought leaves everything as it is, for the simple reason that everything just is thought, its refracted light, this refraction being only subjective in the negative sense, as proportioned to our manner of apprehension, a manner which philosophy can show, has shown, to be defective. Thus to rise to the concept is not to rise to a new manner of existence but to transcend existence. The real and the existent do not coincide. To posit judgement, therefore, is to envisage the drawing of all that appears to be multitudinous and abstractly different into the unity of the concept, the idea, which though transcending form is yet one and in that sense “simple”. Similarly, and as we all know, argument seeks to bring all that is obscure under definite judgement. Indeed this judges it, preparatory to possession of that one reality, the “notion”. Here judgement not merely ceases but is discovered never to have been. We have to kick away our 4

Cf. Note 1, above.

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starting-point, not proceed “as if we were only reasoning from one thing which is and continues to be, to another thing which in like manner is.”5 The common-sense world is like nothing so much as a counter-factual assumption made at the beginning of a process of reasoning for the sake of concluding to the truth. Thus it is a species of reductio ad absurdum and so the “existentialists” were thus far correct, they too. The concept was anciently put as head and source of the three “instruments of reason”, as they were misleadingly characterised. These were concept, judgement and syllogism. Similarly Hegel sets forth, in his account of logic, the (doctrine of the) concept as synthesis of the doctrines of being and that of essence. To this end, however, he places it last or “at the end”. The notion, as truth, is finally the Idea, which “is not to be taken as an idea of something or other, any more than the notion is to be taken as merely a specific notion.” The Idea, “as absolute unity of the notion and objectivity”, is no mere logical form or abstraction. In the idea we have nothing to do with the individual, nor with figurate conceptions, nor with external things. And yet, again, everything actual, in so far as it is true, is the Idea, and has its truth by and in virtue of the Idea alone. Every individual being is some one aspect of the Idea… It is only in them altogether and in their relation that the notion is realised.6

One might say that this vision of things is encapsulated in the “ontological argument” for God’s existence. Ultimate truth is a conceptual fusion of being and essence, the concept which is “objective”, which cannot not be, which, rather, is its being, in identity. Thus as infinity it is being, to which nothing can be added. Hence it is not the mere abstraction, falsehood therefore, of esse commune. St. Thomas is right that existence cannot be derived from thought, as he takes Anselm to have intended, but what is shown rather is that existence is transcended at the level of the concept, in the Idea. It is not univocal as between Kant’s hundred thalers and the Absolute. Such a view must be abandoned to those theories, which ascribe so-called reality and genuine actuality to the existent thing and all the other categories which have not yet penetrated as far as the Idea. It is no less false to imagine the Idea to be mere abstraction. It is abstract certainly, in so far as everything untrue is consumed in it: but in its own self it is essentially concrete… 5 6

Hegel, Enc. 50. Ibid. 213.

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Here philosophy is shown as aspiration to the divine or absolute point of view. It realises indeed that a viewpoint as absolute is no longer such, but simple disclosure. “I am he who is; you are she who is not.” The Absolute is “closer to me than I am to myself” (Augustine) and this is what Hegel calls “the ruin of the individual” as we routinely and abstractly conceive it. Ultimately life itself “runs away” as being a defective category rather than “genuine actuality”. Those things that are purely alive but that do not think, are not subjects, such as plants and animals, do not form part of the resurrection, St. Thomas himself teaches, which yet, in its definition, includes “all in all”. As absolute, eternal, the Idea, “the bodies of the redeemed”, include as transcended, aufgehoben, all lower notions and categories. Existence as such never “corresponds to” its notion since as such it is conceived as its antithesis. The identification of these two contraries, essence and existence, on the other hand, is final truth. For it is the divine intellect, if conceived of at all, which is the place of reality, where all is as it is. It can never be some special exceptional case. Thus to consider it we must consent to go up into it, to be “consumed”, not stay with some “two truths” theory. Plato wanted that philosophers be kings. The truth is that anyone, as subject, is king and more than king. Humanity, under the influence, it can well be claimed, of Christianity and associated movements, has attained to this freedom, already assumed in the preaching praxis of Eckhart, say. The doctrine of faith, of what faith is, cannot but develop in the light of this development. This will entail, in turn, development of this very doctrine of development, once developed by Newman out of earlier notions. Insofar, then, as the tradition-bound peasant, subject to the Obrigkeit as much as to God and even confusing the one with the other, fades into the past with the development of society, he cannot longer be taken as the type and ideal of the person of faith. This was indeed always a mistake and misrepresentation, one which as a means of domination has wasted a lot of people’s time, as if …man is not intended to seek knowledge and ought to remain in the state of innocence… and harmony. Now all this is to a certain extent correct. The disunion that appears throughout humanity is not a condition to rest in. But it is a mistake to regard the natural and immediate harmony as the right state… Childlike innocence no doubt has in it something fascinating and attractive: but only because it reminds us of what the spirit must win for itself. The harmoniousness of childhood is a gift from the hand of nature: the second harmony must spring from the labour and culture of the spirit.

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And so the words of Christ, “Except ye become as little children,” &c., are very far from telling us that we must always remain children.7

* Whereas in Scholastic thought the concept, along with judgement and syllogism, was usually seen as an instrument, organon, of reason in Hegel it is reason, “effective of itself”, not so much causa sui as effective “no longer as the cause is”.8 It does not bring about something else, namely, but its own individuality, the “I”, subjectivity, upon which all individuality is based. This individuality is not the unmediated or natural individual distinguished, but only as prelude to reintegration, in judgement. It is the same rather as actuality, as the unity presupposed to consciousness. As such it is, also, the universal of universals, at the opposite pole from the “abstract generality” with which analytical Verstand normally and quite properly and necessarily deals. The concept, as identified with Reason (Vernünft), is self-particularising or differentiating, active. In this sense it is “not we who frame the notions”. The concept is “not originated at all”, though it be in its own nature self-differentiating, “through itself and with itself”, not as something added on or to it. Thus, for Christians, God is necessarily a Trinity. In this sense the notion, thought, “is the genuine first”, not a posteriori abstraction and concept-formation, making things to be what they are “out of nothing”. Thought is “the infinite form”, free and creative as “not needing a matter that exists outside of it”. This primacy given to thought may seem foreign to a science based upon observation. Thus even the earliest evolutionary forms, also those prior to life, are products of thought, of the self-active “concept” which is one with absolute subjectivity, individual and actual. Yet the consistency and freedom from contradiction of such science itself depends upon an account such as this. Evolution itself is lost if thought is no longer conceived as self-actualising (and therefore universally actualising) but as itself evolving to the point of conceiving the evolution of itself. Such a view can in fact be called materialistic idealism, as compared with absolute idealism, based upon spirit and truth as self-validating posits. The former is converted into realism by supposing the process to be transcendently directed by a transcendent God, thought of as creating matter as a positive reality at the opposite pole to himself. This though is product of the self-contradictory fantasy of theological or fideistic voluntarism, whether of the late-medieval or earlier kind. To see the 7 8

Ibid. 24. Ibid. 163.

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contradictions, however, requires analysis of the categories of power or force or causality such as to show their contradictions beyond a certain point, i.e. their finitude, their inapplicability to what is infinite, the Absolute. As for straight materialism, it is in the end simply a name for the refusal of thought, of philosophy, historically masked by an appeal to Aristotelean empiricism, to nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu. But “in God we live and move and have our being”9. The Apostle declared this to a gathering of Athenians, as a philosophical statement, which he backed up by appeal to one of their poets. In Hegel’s analysis the category of revelation, which St. Paul went on to propose to the Athenians, takes its place in the dialectic of philosophy’s history. So does the attempt by the theologians to separate it off from philosophy (“sacred” theology), with which however it will be reintegrated in the category of philosophy of religion, part of a final absolute knowledge beyond metaphysics. With great boldness a later thinker, McTaggart, will argue, from a broadly atheistic perspective, that even this category, knowledge, is finite or limited. “Whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away” was indeed an ancient insight. Knowledge will be superseded by something more absolutely reciprocal, which McTaggart suggests is best called love, in apparently total coincidence with the Christian claim and hope. The proposal of truths as extrinsically revealed, as we find in a Tertullian or a Gazali (“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”), is in absolute terms a first sketch of the transcendence, the absolute freedom, of reason itself. Having thematised the notion of the development of doctrine (in and before Newman) Christian thought is able to interpret the notion of revelation in this more integrated way. In philosophy it accomplishes religious views of such revelation. This was Hegel’s path, presaging yesterday’s “modernism”, now no longer a crisis, since it was come “not to destroy but to fulfil”. This insight into development was again anciently presaged in the image of the mustard seed, smallest of all, growing into a tree where birds might find resting place, or in the idea of being led by Spirit “into all truth”. Evolution then, first appearing as antithesis of all that has gone before, compels a revolution of thought of which Hegel and “romanticism” generally were harbingers. Intending to oppose the telos, teleology, it lifts it higher, to where it includes the subject’s own theorising, thus rejoining and filling out Aristotle’s insight into reason as thought thinking itself. For 9

Acts of the Apostles, 17:28, lit. “in whom we live and we move and we are” (Greek: esmen).

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only thus can evolution itself be thought, natural history too coming to be seen as dialectical, as in the “phenomenology of mind” when dealing with human and political history. For Marx too man is totally “autonomous” and reshapes the world, Erdbildung, and hence nature. “It is somewhat astonishing to see how flippantly he identifies cosmic evolution with ontological self-sufficiency,” comments a conservative or “realist” theologian10, somewhat crossly. In fact no disrespect need be intended, but imagination rather, whatever was the case with Marx, young or old. Man is God; God is man. “I have said ye are gods”, runs one Davidic “psalm”: tou gar kai genos esmen.11 In general the realist always refuses to take the idealist argument seriously. He thinks the idealist does not mean what he says, points out that he basks in the physical sunshine like the rest of us, and so on. But when spirit has taken the leap it does not look back and what looks like a mere argument is really a journey, a way or via. “Only connect”, The argument of C.S. Lewis12, much obscured by G.E.M. Anscombe’s irritations, was that reason must come from outside nature, guiding it, if nature itself is a closed and blind system. This insight, true as far as it goes, was needlessly dualist in form. Nature itself is, rather, “the thoughts of one mind” (Wordsworth). As such it is knowable by us, in our perception. This is not a “veil of perception”. Rather, we are what we perceive. Anima est omnia. As McTaggart will say, there are only persons, though he may have absolutised that particular differentiation, into persons, more than was warranted. Religion will teach that we are “all one person in Jesus Christ”, or “members one of another”, i.e. we are not we, in the immediate sense. “I live yet not I” and so on. In general, the object is but a mode of the subject and not its antithesis. But one should rather say this of the predicate, which as said of the subject refers to or stands for the same thing, though differently, as several medieval logicians taught. In fact subjectivity and objectivity are “wholly dialectical.”13 What we perceive we create, conceive or beget, as we are ourselves begotten, in a world where individual and universal are one. Humanus sum et nihil humanum me alienum puto.

10

Leo Elders, The Philosophical Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, Brill, Leyden, 1990, p.284. He refers to Marx-Engels, Kleine ökonomische Schriften, Berlin 1955. 11 See Acts of the Apostles, 17, 28. 12 C.S. Lewis, Miracles, London 1947, ch. 5. 13 Hegel, Ibid.. 194, Add.

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Note the equivalence. But Hegel uses here a concessionary way of speaking. If this is knowledge, once achieved, then there never was a strange world and we are “in no strange land” as the poet says, asking “Does the fish soar to find the ocean…?”15 In fact the concept of matter is wholly vacuous, so much so that it might not seem to matter much, rightly taken, if we call ourselves spiritualists or materialists. When the medievals identified matter as the principle of individuation they might therefore just as well have meant, and perhaps they did, that matter is our name for there being individuals, outside one another as the material attribute of quantity was said to consist of “parts outside parts”. Here though thought will dialectically disclose that the inside is the outside and vice versa. Man is nothing without the air he breathes, the colours he sees and so on. Thought, knowledge, indeed divests matter, shows it up rather as a fugitive concept, like the harpies, said McTaggart. It “traces it back to our innermost selves”. The Augustinian argument from truth in the mind to mind’s absoluteness and hence infinity cannot be discounted. For a “naturalist”, in Lewis’s sense, knowledge, which cannot be thought without the positing of truth, can only be justified in evolutionary terms, which yields absurd results. Thus we might say a belief, in transubstantiation, say, succeeded for a time as for that time furthering survival for humanity or that portion of it holding the belief. It disappeared, died out or atrophied, when it no longer served that purpose. But then, just as the belief, since the passage of time and environmental change disqualify it just as they give rise to it, has no call to be called true, so this general account, or any other, has no call to be called true either. The same applies to “materialism” and evolutionary theory as a whole, thus taken.16 So if we are convinced of the latter it has to be taken some other way, dialectically namely. We have no other way to think nature at present. It is how nature presents itself to us, but it has to be seen as partial truth only, like any pure object. More than any previous view indeed, evolution obliges us to build into the theory that 14

Hegel, eodem loco. Francis Thompson, “The Kingdom of God”. 16 Cf. J.B.S. Haldane, “Some Reflections on Materialism”, The Rationalist Annual, 1930, pp.33-34, cited in my Morals as Founded on Natural Law, Lang, Frankfurt, 1988 (1987), p.155. I owe the reference to Professor P.T. Geach. 15

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it is we ourselves who conceive it .We conceive it in the act of what we are so inclined to reduce to a mere discovering, as we first dis-cover the fossils in the ground or the multiplicity of actual related species, or so it seems. These are not indeed merely “put there” as part of a real material world statically conceived. They were, rather, necessarily to be found one day as witnessing to a natural history. Such history as a whole, however, is read by us according to an a priori form of sensibility, which is thus not to be passively assumed into thought just as it is. Thought, the concept, again, is indeed “the absolute first”, creating the world free of temporal constraint and “out of nothing”. The necessity, that is, that Nature reflects, is dialectical rather than, as on a realist scheme, itself natural. Findlay17 claims that this view of Hegel’s, leading him to deny the “reality” of evolution at the very moment when the evidence for it was being discovered, is at variance with his general affirmation of the historical as itself a real rather than a dialectical progress. But Findlay is surely wrong here as to the latter. The verdict of the Logic is that the End is “realised” (EL212, add., on “the illusion under which we live”). Hegel’s realism is the realism of the End, as alone true, as the finite is not. So what he says of the history of philosophy, in effect transcending history as immediately imagined (Enc. 86, add.), must also apply to history generally, in his philosophy.18 This will include “natural history”. Its realism is contained in the larger scheme, for which “a thousand years is as a day”. It is in this ultimate sense alone that Hegel “sees in the notion of evolution merely a convenient conceptual schema”, a Kuhnian paradigmatic moment almost, that one can supplement by that of emanation, say, reading from higher to lower, though in any case many evolutionists would protest against interpreting the process as progress. Nothing finite or partial is absolutely true and life itself “runs away” as being a finite category. We have to do, therefore, with “models” (of explanation), as science indeed generally recognises. Nor is the solidity of scientific knowledge hereby challenged. The change, one of thought, is pro parte objecti. Whatever is “in” time, “in” space, even “in” space-time, 17

J.N. Findlay, op. cit. pp. 274-5. Confirmation of this view is found in the long section on “Universai History” at Enc. 548 –552. See also the “General Introduction” to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History. This is an original manuscript of Hegel’s of around 180 pages, dating from 1830, not included in Karl Hegel’s 1840 edition, which opens with a so-called “Special Introduction”, thus bypassing the logico-metaphysical question here. This was later included in Lasson’s edition (c.1928), along with student-notes distinguished by square brackets in some versions. The rest of the Lectures we have indeed consist only of such notes. 18

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is inconsistent, finite, and contained within the unity of the perceiving subject. Even our saying “in” here is as though attempting to confer an absoluteness that is not there, as also Newton felt obliged to do. Space or time are not absolute, are never unrelated to the finite objects, i.e. they are their relations. Again, our subject-predicate structure is not absolute and not in the end suited to the notion or concept, where identity is fully realised. McTaggart’s D-series goes some way towards meeting the difficulty19. Thus even the roundness of the world will not last forever, while evolution is but the latest name for the flux as we perceive it, either reaching an omega-point or returning cyclically. This though is little more than an image of the eternity of the notion, ever realised, ever unfolding before us dialectically. Some years ago, in his “On Understanding a Primitive Society”20, Peter Winch was able to show how for the members of that society everything would confirm their fundamental beliefs and nothing could clash with them, just as nothing can clash with our belief in, indeed knowledge of, the world’s roundness. It is, as Quine said, “on a par with the Homeric gods.” Yet confronted with another, stronger society, as when the Spaniards appeared in America, the “primitive” society dies, or adapts, just as in evolution. The only way out of the relativism that threatens here is Hegel’s principle that, as taken on its own or abstractly, “everything finite is false”. No finite category is ultimately compatible with the Idea, the actual. This is the principle behind the dialectic. Nothing escapes this sharp sword, not even the concepts we use to express this insight itself. One such concept is revelation, which we touched on above. * There comes a time when time-honoured symbolic forms, representations, rituals, once in exteriorised harmony with the reflective self, come to lose that harmony, when the god, as we say, has flown. Central here is the notion of spirit, as in the Gospel notion of worshipping in spirit and in truth, not, let us say, in rites and ceremonies exclusively. Central to spirit is inwardness. This is the paradox of the Holy Spirit, if holiness denotes otherness, since it is precisely this spirit which shall be in us and by which we shall live, not so much just “led by the spirit” as possessed and taken over by it. It is both self-consciousness and universal being, since the self 19

Cp. P.T. Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality, p.156f. See P. Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society”, in Ethics and Action, London 1972.

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is at home with itself in its opposite. This was Hegel’s analysis of and further contribution to the account of knowing bequeathed by the Scholastics, that it is self, the knower, having the other as other. Only in this having of the other thus is self, the soul, known at all, concluded Thomas Aquinas. It is known as that which becomes all things and is them. This “all” implies divinity, and this is not so much pantheism as the rejection of any world outside of God, identical with each of his ideas, with which alone he is related thus or knows. It is thus obfuscating when C.S. Lewis speaks, in The Abolition of Man, of humanity’s natural inclination to a pantheism which only a notion of a divine revelation in power can overcome, as if God had not spoken to Moses from a burning bush, or to Elijah in a “still small voice”, or as if God is not first properly known when “made” man. Re-velation consists in God’s being known, i.e. as what he is. He is known as spirit, as “the process of retaining identity with itself in its otherness,” as knowledge, in short.21 “In this form of religion the Divine Being is, on that account, revealed.” The reference here is to incarnation, “of the Divine Being, its having essentially and directly the shape of self-consciousness.” This is “the simple content of Absolute Religion”. Speaking generally, There is something in its object concealed from consciousness if the object is for consciousness an “other”, or something alien, and if consciousness does not know the object as itself. This concealment, this secrecy, ceases when the Absolute Being qua spirit is object of consciousness. For here in its relation to consciousness the object is in the form of self; i.e. consciousness immediately knows itself there, or is manifest, revealed to itself in the object… It is the pure notion… the truly and solely revealed.22

This is not pantheism but the total return of creation and self to God, as Absolute Mind, their identification with the Concept, with God as Absolute Idea (which is the same as the Absolute simply, Hegel states), whom they never left and never could leave, God being infinite and not simply supreme among a class of objects. We may employ analogy but philosophy has to be conscious that it is analogy and get behind it while explaining and elucidating the need for it in the first place. We cannot simply rest there, philosophically, with the well-known religious forms. Even theology admits as much and to that extent goes over to philosophy 21

Cf. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, New York 1966, Harper Torchbooks, page 758. 22 Ibid. p.759. Cp. Augustine, “Et ecce intus eras et ego foris… Mecum eras et tecum non eram”. Confessions, X 27, 38. Cf. Hegel, Enc. 140 (esp. subtext).

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of religion. Today theology is in crisis and one has to ask if its very being, as sacred theology, does not depend upon a dualistically extrinsic notion of revelation overcome in a proper analysis of just this concept, revelation. Assimilating this to pantheism is just a propagandist’s wilful disregard, while, regarding dualism, we have to learn to distinguish better the form from the content of our faith-affirmations. The form of a sacred history, for example, might colour an essentially dialectical content with contingency, contingent indeed to the form itself.23 * Theologians such as Thomas Aquinas typically proceed in their Summae from a treatise De Deo Uno to a treatise De Deo Trino and then straight on to De Deo Creatore. Those dealing in “philosophical theology” today, even or especially those styling themselves followers of St. Thomas, may be found as it were religiously following, retailing and interpreting the medieval thinker’s first treatise before simply hopping over the quaestiones on the Trinity to consider what might be said about creation “philosophically”, i.e. without a supposedly impure admixture of “revelation”. The works of Etienne Gilson or Leo Elders are typical here. Thus Elders compares the “philosophical” insights of, say, the Summa theologiae to physiological chemical processes, which though occurring in the body (which is theology) nonetheless can be studied, as to their truth, outside of that body.24 A form of barbarism is at work here, a lack of the requisite openness.25 The requirement to “think the Trinity” entails a requirement to bring it under the rubric of our religious philosophy. Otherwise we are no true philosophers. Revelation, that is to say, has to coincide or be brought to coincide with our own true vision, a task to be begun here and now wherever or whenever it is to be accomplished. This we have been saying above. The barbarism mentioned, incidentally, is one of which St. Thomas is innocent, however he stands with respect to the alternative charge of dualism. Thus he passes serenely on and without a break, after considering what divine “attributes” there might be, to asking the question as to 23

Cf. G. Van Riet, “The Problem of God in Hegel”, Parts II-III, Philosophy Today, Summer 1967, pp.75-105, esp. p.102. 24 Cf. Elders, op. cit. p. viii, note 3. 25 Cf. John Macquarrie, Twentieth Century Religious Thought, London 1971, SCM, ch.18, section 89, cited in Theron, “Faith as Thinking with Assent”, New Blackfriars, January 2005, p.101.

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whether there are processes or processiones in God. The thrust of his reasoning here continues to be philosophical as before just as, also before, his mind shows itself as inherently synthesised with a tradition not in itself to be questioned but which he nonetheless develops and elucidates almost wherever he touches on it. That is, it was not barbaric to take a pure-hearted philosophical decision to submit all one’s future thinking to a transcendent revelation coming from outside in a quite new sense.26 This process is described in St. Augustine’s Confessions and it is an example of a metaphysician’s taking a category from public life at face value, which was the criticism of the modern metaphysicians before Kant. This is a weakness, not a barbarism. No one was wilfully dualist. There just seemed no other way to see things. It does dishonour, all the same, to Christian dogma not to be able to imagine that, once implanted in the mind, it might not be found to guide and fulfil all one’s philosophical or sapiential striving hitherto. A principle of sacredness is employed in justification of not doing this, which was, after all, the principle of the Pharisees as portrayed in the Gospels. This attitude is portrayed in Dostoyevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov. It is implicitly criticised, from an ethical and political point of view, in Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy, where he pleads for genuine application of the Christian principle of universal love and brotherhood, as opposed to mere civic friendship. We would regress to the latter, he claims, as against, say, Edmund Burke or Paul Ricoeur, to the scandal and disappointment of humanity. In fact we should expect to find a relation between the identification of essence and existence in God, which though Thomist is ultimately Anselmian and indeed Augustinian (non aliquo modo est sed est, est…), and the doctrine of the three persons, which is a doctrine as to the presence of otherness in God. God, as pure form, is nonetheless, by an internal necessity, emptied into the otherness of existence, which is (are) yet himself. It is the same necessity as that for persons or relations in God. There cannot be two necessities. It does not help much to call these relations real, since it is just this category, reality, which we transcend here, in the sense that the real is usually distinguished from what we otherwise call the merely conceived. Spirit, we might say, is the thinking, the living, the consciousness of this, or simply Love. Of course revelation comes to people immediately as “figurative thinking”, in Hegel’s phrase. It is the philosopher’s task to get behind this, 26 Aristotle had said, in De partibus animalium, that reason itself “comes from outside”.

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to bring, rather, such thinking closer to inward consciousness, and inventing names such as sacred or mystical theology does not alter this or destroy its unity. The religious mode is a type of thinking which humanity passes through. Nor do we leave it behind, remembering it always as the ladder whereby we ascended to our present insights, being led “into all truth” as promised. This ladder, however, passes away. It gets transcended or “kicked away” as we step upon it, like the sacrament as it is consumed. The case is similar with the ways, viae, of thought’s ascent to God. They change, or rather reveal, the world in our minds, not leaving it as it had seemed before. Note that this applies to revelation as a species of thinking itself, as self-developing. It can be, has to be, applied equally to the thought of of those we see as the prime “revealers”, such as Moses or Jesus, as God himself is identifiable with Mind or nous, spirit, Geist, setting all in order as it freely orders itself. To posit a contrast between freedom and reason, which alone is ad opposita, was always contradictory. The necessary identity of thought and being is consequent upon the actually infinite which alone is non-composite and true. Infinity, however, is necessarily, qua infinite, differentiated and differentiated infinitely. Infinite differentiation, however, transcends composition as a limiting principle. The differentiations, that is, are identical, not abstractly merely, but in the sense that each differentiation contains or coincides with each and all of the others. This is the principle of spiritual or perfect community, which, as the activity of love, again coincides with the procession of Spirit. As infinity, the Idea, is necessarily manifested as existent, so that absolute being, Mind or consciousness, is necessarily infinitely diversified in a subjectivity without limit. There is no self without infinity of selves, passing in and out of one another. Incarnation, therefore, as manifestation or self-emptying, is necessarily limitless, each moment however identifiable as moment of the Idea, the Concept, the ultimate I. To understand this, though, and for it to take root in the mind and culture of humanity it has first to be known as occurring in one as it were chosen individual, since only the individual is real or concrete, the true universal. Similarly the eternal and infinite life or actuality of spirit (actually beyond Life as the immediate Idea only) thus represented has to be understood or “defined”, in that sense in which one might define the infinite) in contrast to a universal death. “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive”. Men and women thus participate in the life of this individual as a setting forth of or as identical with their participation in one another. This, which in religion is understood as an efficient causality, though such causality is a finite logical category only, is nonetheless a

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formal principle. It is thus that matters must be thought, the truth being that we beget one another. This can be called a universal coinherence and it is attained in the simple notion of bearing one another’s burdens, thus after all fulfilling “the law of Christ”. The concept of this New Law, all the same, is figurative as signifying in the religious mode of consciousness. Begetting one another is synonymous with thinking one another. Religion, however, is not rejected since religion of itself passes and did pass into philosophy. Those who interpret the martyr Boethius’s search for philosophical consolation in the death-cell (like Socrates before him) as a turning from religion, in the sense of a turning back to aristocratic models superseded by the new universal movement of salvation, miss the point altogether. Boethius, locally (around Mantua), in all probability still venerated as the martyr San Severino, here fulfils the destiny of religion taken absolutely, being neither the first nor the last to do this. Each such an uplifted one “draws all men” and women unto him as standing in their place, in the place of each. This transfiguration of the everyday, again, leaves the person unchanged, showing him or her as they really, that is eternally, are, since he or she carries all within him or her to a necessarily infinite and therefore unquantifiable degree. That this is broken down for us in what we call history, physical reality, creation, is necessary condition for our perception of its perfect unity in simplicity. Nor is this pantheism, being rather a refutation or overcoming of the world of multiplicity, an “acosmism” of “all in all”. But who is not uplifted, finally? This universality, its mystery, the mystery of good and evil, is what Sartre focussed upon in his study, Saint Genet. It was no more than focussed or “touched upon”, however. Gollum becomes the hero, in reverse view, of Tolkien’s drama as Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost and we might know that we are “of the Devil’s party” without thereby despairing. Jeder muss sein Schicksal tragen. Evil, that is, is dialectically necessary for creating the contours of good, of final everlasting reality. But it has no being, is rather as the scales that must fall from our eyes when coming to see. The saints saw themselves as guilty of the sins of the whole world, as “made sin”, whether or not in their phenomenal lives they passed through a period of committing such sins. Here too the felix culpa, like the death of God, finds application, for Spirit, as embodied, incarnated, in either history or nature, does nothing in vain. The passage from Being to Spirit, indeed, in our thinking and representation, is a leap from the first to the last page of Hegel’s logic. Spirit is the name for process. As realised in dialectic it is the ceaseless motion or “becoming” of Mind as such, of itself, that is. But if this is

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“process theology” then it is it with a difference. For as naming process Spirit absolutises it as Act, the speaking of the Word, ever new and beyond all change from old to new, therefore. Spirit is passage between opposites, from self to other, reconciliation, love, final “objectivity” when the centre is everywhere, superseding “points of view”.

CHAPTER NINETEEN LOVE, IDEA, BEING, CATEGORIES

In the thought of Thomas Aquinas, as in the whole tradition in which he stands, being is taken as the master category, so to say, under which the Absolute or Infinite, God, is considered.1 God is the necessary being and even ipsum esse subsistens. The system of Hegel, by contrast, which is a dialectic of concepts functioning as categories, starts with being as the poorest or simplest category, coming to rest at that of the Absolute Idea, the idea as idea, or thought thinking itself. As a later variant on this McTaggart argues that this category, the third of the categories of “cognition” (after cognition proper and will), is not yet perfect or ultimate since not truly reciprocal, as the final category, or rather the reality, would have to be.2 One is reminded of Berdyaev’s talk of the tragedy of 1

Thomists claim it is not a category, but rather an immediate intuition (of the first act of any “substance”, and even of the “form” of that substance, which then subsequently gives it its esse. Maybe so, but nonetheless, as an object of philosophic discussion and even of contemplation it is “thematised” and so not immediate. It is, as ens, what “falls into the mind”, with the mind therefore taken as prior, and just thereby, separated or abstracted from its individual occurrence, it becomes a category, even if a unique one. This is proved by the possibility of a science of entities, sistology, which considers entities, objects, irrespective of whether they have being or are merely considered as if they had being (entia rationis). But they are all then considered as “entities” or objects, irrespective of what kind of being (or none) they may have. 2 Cf. J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, Cambridge University Press, 1896, e.g. §206: “… in order to render the highest form of Absolute Spirit capable, as it must be on Hegel’s theory, of transcending and summing up all other aspects of reality, we shall have to recast the last steps… Philosophy, together with Revealed Religion, will be the antithesis to Art. And a place will be left open for a new synthesis… we can, within very wide and general limits, say what the nature of such an expression (sc. for the absolute reality) must be. It must be some state of conscious spirit in which the opposition of cognition and volition is overcome--in which we… are aware that inner and outer are in such close and necessary harmony… it must have overcome the rift in discursive knowledge and the

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knowledge as bound to “objectivisation”.3 McTaggart suggests love as a suitable name for this putative, more reciprocal ultimate category, which as ultimate will be reality now beyond any finite categories at all. There is a coincidence, Feuerbachian perhaps, with the Johannine dictum, “God is love”. Of course John also says God is light, but love seems to be the basis for this. The Hegelian development might lead one to take this Scriptural speech more seriously than is usual among theologians. One might come to think that it is wrong to base love on being. One might rather think that love elicits being, even in God himself. This is by no means a new thought. It is suggested in much of Christian Platonism. Jakob Boehme, independently, feels that God is only being when considered in relation to creation, to nature, and this would seem also to be Eckhart’s standpoint when he says that “If God were not, I should not be, and if I were not, He too would not be.”4 It is not until Question Twenty of the First Part of the Summa theologica that Thomas Aquinas, for his part, is ready to ask if there is love in God. First he had to consider if God had will (19,1), of which, he says, love is the first motion. Will, in turn, depended on divine intellect (14,1), of which it is the inclination. God has intellect, again, as being free from matter (3,1) in the highest degree and hence unlimited (7,1) by any one form. Knowledge, after all, means one’s having the form of the other as other. The divine immateriality and limitlessness is thus the basis for the divine love. Is it at all possible to reverse this way of thinking? Linking divine infinity to negative freedom from matter strongly suggests accommodation to our human situation as the norm. Yet, as Lawrence Dewan points out, in the Thomist universe the norm is, rather, to be spiritual and non-material, following the example of God himself.5 Further, The principal created beings (rational creatures) are absolutely necessary beings, not contingent beings (even though they are entirely dependent on the Creator).6 immediate must be for it no longer the alien. It must be as direct as art, as certain and universal as philosophy.” In a later work McTaggart suggests “love” as a suitable name for this final synthesis and “adequate expression” of reality. 3 N. Berdyaev, Spirit and Reality. 4 Quoted in Hegel, Philosophy of Religion, Vol. I, p.228. 5 Cf. Lawrence of Religion Dewan O.P., “St. Thomas Aquinas against Metaphysical Materialism”, Atti del VIII Congresso Tomistico Internazionale, Libreria Editrice Vaticano, 1982. 6 Lawrence Dewan O.P., “Death in the Setting of Divine Wisdom”, Angelicum, LXV (1988), pp.117-129, p.127. Dewan refers us here to St. Thomas, SCG 2.30

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This is of course turned inside out, so to say, where matter is just equated with potentiality and we get discussions about the matter or, as a variant, spiritual matter of angels. But then the human soul would have matter too and we could hardly avoid considering astral or other theosophic hierarchies of bodies. Well, let us not dismiss that out of hand. Here, anyhow, the clinging dualism is lifted from matter versus spirit to created versus uncreated. There are, to start with, other ways of thinking of love. If we think of universal love, without limit, we naturally think of unshakeable harmony, something indestructible, a kind of still centre of radiant energy. Good will, which the Thomist analysis of love, or our own far poorer notions, might suggest, does not capture universal love. It suggests rather a universal inoffensiveness, though it need not. One might think of the suggestion of Jesus that we should do, energetically it seems, whatever we would like to have done for us, without limit. This is more, much more, than just abstaining from what we would not like to have done to us. But now we seem to have blundered into the restricted field of ethics, simply, and out of that of metaphysics. Love, we said, suggests harmony, yet it is surely more like fire, the ultimate energy in other words, something never still and yet remaining the same or, as we say of fire, not going out.7 Again, can one be love without having anything to love, except and De pot. 5.3. When he goes on though to speak of “a universe of both natural and voluntary things” and of “the unity of the human being, body and soul… a suitable, natural, substantial union” it seems to me he blurs his own insight concerning “the principal created beings”, cited in our text. For this suggests two levels of discourse, principal and less than that, and not two parts on the same level. The natural or material things are contained within the reach of or structured by the rational beings, essentially, and will indeed eventually be seen through or transcended by rational vision. Man cannot be a “composite” being. There is no proportion, and a substantia incompleta is a contradiction in terms. We must rather look at the ultimate difference and at the unicitas formae substantialis, as St. Thomas’s own principles must have urged upon him (according to Inciarte’s “Die Einheit der Aristotelischen Metaphysik”, cited below, Thomas “systematically misses” die Zuspitzung auf die Wesensform bei Aristoteles). What is left under that form is pure matter without form, i.e. not a component in any physical sense at all. It is this unique form, however first individualised, that is the bearer of the destiny of each of us and which, as act, makes us wholly present in every moment. It is thus not itself in time and, since it is the whole substance, there is in fact no time. Time, as we said above, is rather constructed by what principally exists. 7 This indeed rather recalls Hegel’s third category, which he somewhat inadvisedly called Becoming, a term usually suggesting temporality, which would be contrary to Hegel’s intention. He took the names for his categories from ordinary speech,

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that love which one is, as our predication system compels us to say? If God though is love and not being, as Berdyaev says he is freedom and not being, then he is a not-being, an other than being, me on in Greek and not simply ouk on or nothing, and that is clearly to stretch the “is” too far. Perhaps love, as we said, at once elicits being or beings. Love, that is, generates a lover. But God is not that lover. God is love. Or is love itself a lover? We have the philosophy of act, of “pure” act, beyond substance. Love, then, would generate even act, in the sense of being its meaning, the love that does not just “leap for joy” (Imitatio Christi) but is that leaping or joying. It would be prior in reality and not just the highest example of a more general reality such as act or energy, actus actuum indeed. Nonetheless, since in our thinking we see that love has to be act (if it is prior it generates the very possibility of act, yet generation is an act too, if we are not merely conceptually analysing) we can see, almost, how love, just qua love, generates or differentiates. Love is not one and not many (these notions have in no way arisen as yet), like fire it will be here there and everywhere in all its fieriness. Centrality, by contrast, is a spatial concept. We overcome it, its finitude, by saying the centre is everywhere, anything is the centre. So, in this differentiation love is fully present as a passing over and between any number up to an infinity of subjects all having the totality of love, and hence of its differentiations, within them. If, to change tack slightly, one considers what Hegel writes about life in his logical works one finds that he seems to assert that we are not alive, since life is less than the reality, limited. When he writes “Life runs away” he means it never is. It is an imperfect because finite and therefore, after a certain point, self-contradictory notion. That is why “all that lives must die.” Eternal life is an analogy only. What abides is not life but consciousness, or rather thought, which is in nature “subjective”, absolute subjectivity, of a subject, which each subject partakes of in absolute and hence infinite plenitude. The reality, Anaxagoras saw long ago, is nous. To be real one must be nous. And thus the principle of personality is universality, Hegel says, not in the sense of abstracting universals but as having the all within itself and thus being it, in some way (quodammodo, as Aristotle said). “I in them and they in me.” And here it is love that is though supplying his own, different specifications of them (thus Mechanism and Chemism stand for different views of unity, Life stands for a kind of organic unity, Cognition includes will, etc. etc.). It was and is naturally difficult always to keep this difference in mind. I follow McTaggart’s practice of capitalising for a category-name. For Hegel, however, writing in German,m this form of typographical distinction was not an option, since substantives are all as such capitalised.

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envisaged. Love is what nous ultimately is or, rather, tries to be. Ut omnes unum sint. Love one another, to the uttermost, as I have loved you. Be love. Love love. Our difficulty with predication, the copula, itself seems to thrust us back into ethics. It reveals love, though, as trans-ethical. Ethics, rather, transcends itself in the manner of the “transcendental” predicate, the Good, an ens rationis according to Aquinas (De pot. 7). How shall we take this?8 There is a clue in St. Paul’s saying that knowledge, but not love, shall vanish away. As McTaggart seems to suggest, again, knowledge is itself an imperfect and therefore non-actual echo of love, as we found life is of knowledge or consciousness. We must not be bound to our predication system merely, marked as it is by our finitude. We know that other languages predicate differently, or not at all. We think, for example, of colour as among the first abstractions a child makes, in the category of colour. Is it not rather that first he knows colour, as a prime reality, and is then taught linguistically to see it as an abstraction from substance in the category of quality? Might he not just as well, in another community, say and think white now snows here, or black now cars or nights? In fact white is not separable from snow or other whites. There is no snow without its colour. The blue of the chair, Wittgenstein pointed out, is not the blue paint applied to the chair. But we might say the same of the blue of the paint. So there might be no knowledge without love, as ultimate specific difference within cognition. Thus, for Thomas, intellect gives all of its being to that “body” which has it as form, down to my five toes, as love, again, gives all of virtue to whatever is virtuous, as virtue’s form, all coming down from the highest perfection without which the reality is not attained. This is how things are really or physikoos, i.e. one is not merely seeing them logikoos9. But here we are at one with the dialectic (as a “series” common to both logic and spirit), for which also the last perfect concept alone is trans-categorial, giving us the real and infinite. Thus Hegel is perfectly Thomist and Aristotelian on this point of unicitas formae substantialis or the unicity, rather, of the last and most specific form generally, as opposed to any “bundle” theory. Yet, for Hegel, “everything finite is false”. This is the point also of the distinction between

8

On all this, cf. our Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt, 2002, p. 203 f. 9 I double the letter “o” to signify Aristotle’s Greek omega (and not omicron) in this adverbial form, “physically”, “logically”.

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speaking cum or sine praecisione,10 making being either the poorest of predicates or perfectio perfectionum. The most perfect thing of all is to exist, for everything else is potential compared to existence… the act of existing is therefore the ultimate actuality of everything, and even of every form. So it is that things acquire existence and not existence things.11

What though is meant by speaking of things as acquiring existence? We say, indeed, that they come to be, but this is idiom, metaphor, if not sheer distortion. Before they are they are not, so they cannot come to be! Talk of potential being obscures this. Things do not acquire existence. Existence, Thomas might rather say, as ipsum esse subsistens, creates things, ex nihilo or non ex aliquo. But is existence after all the worthiest name for the ultimate, highest principle? Must it not rather choose to be? It cannot lie under some necessity of existing. Its choice, however, as infinitely free, might coincide with all that we mean by necessity, even as its ultimate cause. Thus it is that in Hegel’s dialectic the two, freedom and necessity, become identified. “This truth of necessity, therefore, is Freedom…”12 In this way indeed the laws of logic, including the primary one, as in Descartes’ intuition, their very necessity, result from the divine freedom. Again, we found Boehme and Eckhart saying or implying that being comes in or belongs with creation, without their thereby identifying God and creation. The divine freedom, which was called a pure will but which, we are saying, we should rather identify as love, the ultimate or specific difference from which all will in reality arises, as being also pure act (and no static object), freely, that is necessarily, differentiates itself. We may call this creation and yet maintain here too an identity in difference, as does Augustine, after all, when he speaks of the one closer to me (or him) than myself. I have suggested elsewhere that a consequent result of this consideration is to find that we beget one another.13 10

Cf. Aquinas, De ente et essentia. Aquinas,, Summa theol. Ia, 4, 1 ad 3. 12 G.W.F. Hegel, Encycl. Logic §158. 13 Cf. our “Begotten not Made”, The Downside Review, January 2006 (Chapter One above). And if we beget one another then a fortiori each one chooses, consensually, his own birth and its time as well, so what we said above about free choice of when to leave the temporal or die is merely of a piece with that. As for time, it is not so much a unique, with space, innate form for experience as itself one with the phenomena, itself phenomenal too, and gradually being grown out of and cast off. It is a finite and thus far untrue conception from which we slowly emancipate ourselves through life as we progressively identify, perhaps via notions 11

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Of course a certain consequence, that there is no God, might boldly be drawn if one says that God is beyond being, or “both is and is not” (Nicholas of Cusa). Atheism and theism might here coincide, the great dispute be sidelined. This may even be the main significance of Christianity, as Muslims tend to fear. We might still have a universe of pure spirits, ourselves, as absolute differentiations, each having in himself the whole, the unity, so that (as McTaggart did not quite see) the distinction between part and whole is transcended, superseded, as indeed it is in the Hegelian logic. We speak of parts of the mind, says Hegel, only by analogy with organic life.14 “I in them they in me”, “members one of another”, the sense of the religious tradition, its harmony with the historical philosophical tendency, is very clear to view. But we ourselves would then not exist independently either, so would not have the advantage over God as in the more aggressive atheism. We would rather be ideae divinae ourselves, and just as such one with the divine essence, as Aquinas saw.15 It might seem easier to relapse into the realist position. We have a world so suited to man, and so God puts man into it, as into a garden (at least part of it can be made into a garden). But then what is man before he is so put? Is not the world, the environment, the four elements, are they not part of him, his inside which is outside, his outside inside? Evolution and ecology teach as much. But with evolution comes the big circle, that its truth is judged of by a mind developed under its auspices, for which indeed it shall be the total explanation.16 “Intelligent design” is now supposed in some quarters to overcome this. The question then becomes, of the aevum (see below), with our true selves in present eternity. This is why, incidentally, we have an identity of the ousia or person, fully itself at any instant whatever, through time. Substance, as act, is not process (Cf. Aristotle, Met. VII, 1039b). The end of time is not (obviously) a temporal ending. 14 Hegel, Ibid. 135. 15 Aquinas, Ibid. Ia 15, 1 ad 3. “idea in Deo nihil est aliud quam Dei essentia”. Cf. our “Divine Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas”, The Downside Review, October 2004. 16 Cf. Axel Randrup, “Cognition and Biological Evolution: An Idealist Approach Resolves a Fundamental Paradox”, International center for Interdisciplinary Psychiatric Research, CIRIP, 2004, Internet http://cogprints.org/3373/01/evolutioncognition.html. The contradiction, under materialist realism, is that “all the thoughts and cognitions of our everyday life as well as of science and philosophy depend on the human cognitive apparatus in its present stage of evolution.”(p.1). Idealism is thus only avoided by a decidedly archaic Cartesian or Augustinian supernaturalist realism (we are apes with an infused ready-made intelligence) at odds with all science.

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and there are really a host of them, why do we need such a world at all? Why not just start and end with man? No doubt it is all intelligently designed. The question then becomes, who is the designer, the thinker? And what, again, will be the meaning of this world’s being “outside” such a thinker? None at all, be the thinker God or man. Freedom is the mark of intellect. The perceptions of animals are determined by limitations of environment and faculties. But reason and judgement are ad opposita. The field is open for us to “make up our mind”, as we say. We want of course to be determined by “the facts”, as animals cannot be. It has been contended here, however, that reason does not stop there. Reason is, and wants to be, creative. This is often called voluntarism in the (theological) sense of preferring will above reason. The authentic and, incidentally, Thomistic view, however, is that will is itself reason’s own inclination to being perceived as good. Reason determines the facts. Commonly, this is put down to the divine reason, exclusively, by which human reason is measured. But we are now finding that these two are not really so separate. Spirit is spirit, the one spirit, wherever it is found, and nature is spirit’s self-alienation, though only in abstraction from its reintegration, negating the negation. So reason is ultimately will. They are one. The non-rational will, therefore, is a chimera, while if computers are rational (most likely they are not) we had better keep a watch on them! It is then the community of spirits that posits nature. So nature has no existence apart from them. Nature is their means of perceiving one another exclusively. Only thus do we evade the circle posed by evolutionary theory. Mind does not come from non-mind. Thought is all, and therefore necessarily beyond being, as is freedom. Being is chosen by spirit in the very act of differentiation defining active love. There is no moment of rest or preparation before that, since that, the differentiation, is what it is. At least, that is what we must say so long as we are certain that we exist, that existence is a reality and not just a mediating idea. We too might rather “be” subjects, thoughts, perceptions, not as a more rarefied type of being but as quite other, more than alive, for example (viventibus esse est vivere). Being comes in with creation but being too, like creation, might be idea, thought, the idea of that special sheen we call being, that which horrifies us at the sight of some extra-large animal, its being, or a mountain or rough sea. Mind, however, is subject. There are no “other minds”, since mind itself is essentially having the other as other. This is the coincidence, the coinherence, of all in all. Where this is not realised mind is not yet operant. So the Socratic equation of human evil with ignorance is not to be denied.

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In that sense it is always true that “they know not what they do” and so will be forgiven, drawn on to new development, inclusive of penitence. Thinkers such as Peter Geach or Lukasiewicz recoil from the idea that logic and its laws are freely willed by divine love. Geach attributes this strange view, while recognising it in Descartes, to some of his young “fundamentalist” evangelical students typically, while Lukasiewicz equates discovering a new logical law with finding out something about God. Thus he identifies the excitement.17 Similarly they will stress that even God cannot change the past (restore Miss C’s virginity, is Geach’s example). Here they seem to have Peter Damian against them, or the prophecy that “I will remember their sins no more”. This can be taken to mean that the time of our sinning is as incompletely real and misperceived as any finite concept up to the term of the dialectic. It is however at least as strange as this to think of God as constrained by logic, of these laws as alongside God eternally. Perhaps some variant of tense-logic, corresponding to the divine freedom of “I will be what I will be”, might serve insofar as this immutable freedom, one with necessity, is reflected merely in time and tense. Of course this is not to say that philosophies such as those of Leibniz or Nicholas of Cusa, the union of opposites and even of contradictories in the defined sense, are not elaborated in accordance with the human laws of logic. They are human philosophies. It is in fact just this adherence to the principle of noncontradiction that pushes the dialectic on. Contradiction and antinomy are exposed in one concept after another till only the thinking self is found able to bear identity in difference or having the other as other. It is what it is not and is not what it is, a paradox not resolved simply by saying that different senses (e.g. real as against intentional) are used in the subject and the apparently or prima facie contradictory predicate. Here we might recall McTaggart’s conclusion that in eternity, i.e. in reality, judgements are not made and the subject-predicate form, along with language itself, is superseded. It belongs with shadows and misperception, the armies on the “darkling plain” where really, did we but see, “the angels keep their ancient places… Turn but a stone and you touch a wing.” The consensus, poetic or philosophical or “mystical”, is impressive, and, respectfully leaving the schools and their logic just as they are. The insistence that God could not create the laws of logic, whatever other good arguments there may be for this, expresses awareness that we then as it were lose our handle upon God himself, our ability to argue with 17 This is cited by Geach in Coope, Geach, Potts, White, A Wittgenstein Workbook, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1971.

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confidence towards him, from known to unknown. Instead we would just take “God” as naming the ultimate, whatever it may be. This is, actually the procedure, mutatis mutandis, of the ontological argument and the hidden reason why this has been preferred to “the five ways” in modern religious philosophy. In what we call revealed religion we are accustomed to God taking the initiative, saying we could know nothing about him of this kind but what he chose to reveal. It is a simple matter to extend this principle, however. In fact it follows from the divine infinity that he remain hidden unless he choose to reveal himself. Hence any logical laws leading to his disclosure, as First Cause or whatever, must be by his free dispensation. He cannot be subject to them, as if he must let himself be proved. This choice, this revelation, we must also note, must be one with God himself. He must be his revelation, whatever it is, as the necessity within himself of his freedom. This gives us further reason to treat the so-called natural truths about God as on a par with those more usually called revealed. Everything is revealed, is divine choice. Therefore it is the philosopher’s duty to think whatever has come down to us, till it comes clear, Trinity, incarnation and so on, and this is Hegel’s position too. We may if we wish retain the primacy of the category of being, as at least in accordance with our system of predication, even under idealism. We may not though, in that case, accord automatic primacy to extramental being (but rather the reverse). The study of entities in this open way, as a replacement for ontology, has been pioneered under the name of “sistology”, of which Alexius Meinong might be regarded as the remote founder. Its roots go back to ancient Platonism and beyond, as always in philosophy of which, as Hegel says, the entire field “really forms a single science”, resembling “a circle of circles” without a privileged point of entry or wholly present in each part.18 * These entities not found in reality, or as existing, were called historically entia rationis. “Being is twofold, of reason and of nature.”19 Here again we have a dualism, within which one then finds the concrete dualism within nature of informed matter and form that can be without matter. So

18

Hegel, Enc. 15, 16. Aquinas, In IV Met. Aristotelis, 4, 574. Cf. Stephen Theron, “Ens Rationis I: Medieval Theories”, Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology (ed. H. Burkhardt & B. Smith), Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1990, pp.245-246.

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Aquinas will say, “Whatever is understood must actually be”20, even if as “being of reason”. Examples are negations, relations of reason, dreams, the future, the three transcendentals other than being (viz. unity, truth, goodness)21, the whole being of which in each case consists in its being understood. This explains why, just for example, there is no autonomous realm of value for Aquinas and the metaphysical tradition in which he stands. Goodness, namely, is nothing other than being itself as presented to the will. It is constituted by a universal relation (of being to the will) which, as itself an ens rationis or way of understanding things, adds nothing to being so as to make it more than being over again. The coincidence with Hegel is complete. One might ask, is an idea qua idea real or a being of reason, as it is as “intending” what it is an idea of (subjective versus objective concept in later scholasticism)? As intentional it is (though it sometimes fails to be) a real relation of consciousness to what it is conscious of, we might think. This relation is the signum formale as taught by John of St. Thomas, in André de Muralt’s interpretation at least.22 But in Hegel all real relation is identity, or just what for scholastic realists was the purest example of a relation of reason only. Yet such intentional knowledge, or knowledge in general, does not affect what is known. Here the scholastics had to blur over the distinctness of their category of entia rationis, some of which had and some of which did not have a foundation, be it proximate or remote, in reality (fundamentum in re). On a realist scheme this was inevitable. It is a difficulty consequent upon treating extra-mental reality, which is a finite category, as absolute. Our minds, in short, form at least a great part of reality, while the divine nous must be all of it if it is anything. A divine idea Aquinas finds to be one with the divine essence. Certainly any idea of ours, as a present consciousness (it is Aquinas too who argues that we can only have one thought at a time), is, as being thought, wholly one with the subject then thinking or conscious. In that way self is in other, other in self. Aquinas again it is who teaches that we can only know the soul in its act of knowing other things. In philosophy nothing is really or absolutely new. Thus it is striking that Aquinas finds even unity to be an ens rationis, as deriving from negation (of division into parts). Mind, he is saying, brings 20

In IX Met., 10, 1894. Yet Aquinas might seem to modify this in saying that negation, say, is considered as if it were a being, ad modum entis (In IX Met. 889). Rather, ens rationis is ens, non-being is being, precisely Hegel’s position. 21 Cf. Aquinas, QD de pot., 9, 7 ad 6. 22 Cf. A. de Muralt, L’enjeu de la philosophie mediévale, Brill, Leyden 1991, p.83ff.

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to being what is not really there but must be treated as if it were there, viz. unity, of this or that, why not say substance. This then must also be applied to being qua being, as to ipsum esse subsistens. Parmenides indeed said that being has no parts, that all of it is present wherever any of it is, i.e. there can be no “any” of it. But here we find Aquinas saying that such unity, as negation (of division), is, as we conceive it, a mere ens rationis or fictive being. It is really beyond such unity, as indeed for Plotinus it, i.e. the ultimate Absolute, is beyond being itself. His expression, “the One”, is a mere approximation.23 That is, in other terms, God only becomes being in so far as he creates what we cannot but regard as existent. He is then in relation to it or, rather, this and these are in relation to God, who, as infinite, has no real relation to anything outside of himself and those real relations he substantively is, as Trinitarianism has brought to light. In itself and apart from our way of consideration, though not from our subjectivity as such, the Absolute is other than being, is in fact pure thought and Idea or Spirit. We must tread carefully here, where it might seem we might say anything with equal ineptitude, and therefore equally aptly! One is proposing a suspension of predication, a thus far and no further, based as this predication is upon the ontic copula. In the later Fregean analysis this is not so; we have rather act as final category so that such a logic indeed “cannot say what anything is”.24 Perhaps this is a virtue, however, if things are not themselves, if the dominant note of reality is indeed “identity in difference”, as, above all, the paradoxical notion of the self, of consciousness, urges. James E. Heanue speaks of “a thin version of being in which objective significance appears as the analogue and competitor of reality”25: Any ens rationis is a fiction in the general sense of a mental construct. It enables our knowledge to circumvent its natural orientation to being and to have an object where none is provided by nature.

23

Cf. A.H. Armstrong, “Plotinus”, in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, CUP 1967, esp. P.237: “…his use of the name ‘One’… He regards it as inadequate” etc. 24 Henry Veatch’s perspicacious objection to it, e.g. in “On Trying to Say and Know What’s What”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, September 1963. 25 James E. Heanue, “Ens Rationis II: From the Medievals to Brentano”, Burkhardt & Smith, Handbook of Ontology and Metaphysics (note 17 above), pp.246-248.

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Now for McTaggart, by contrast, existence is, or is to be viewed as, a species of the genus reality. Existence, that is to say or intimate, is not the ultimate reality. Thus, neo-Platonists, Nicholas of Cusa and others find that God both is and is not, as Plato said, contrariwise, of the visible things of just nature herself. Such thinking wants to go beyond any “natural orientation” of “our knowledge”, as it is, paradoxically, natural for our knowledge to do, as the history of philosophy demonstrates. In other terms, it wants to progress from the manifest image to the real image of man.26 This in fact is the function of the ens rationis as enabling circumvention of this constraint. This though, in reality freedom and escape from “the natural attitude” or, in Hegelian terms, from essence and “common-sense” to the notion, is represented in realism in terms of fictions and constructs. There are of course abstractions, but these are at the opposite pole to the notion or “concrete universal”. The Idea, it is claimed, is rather the prime reality, as is at least suggested by the doctrine (of Aquinas and Augustine) that a divine idea, any such, is identical with the divine essence. Existence, as correlate of ideas, comes in with creation, or even with just our own “natural orientation”. Thus we should also try to think creation, the doctrine, more objectively and as free from our own involvement as thinkers in its finitude, but free, too, from a gratuitous philosophical realism or absolutisation of “the natural attitude”. Orthodoxy is only incidentally identified with this as a matter of contingent history, like the Creed being in Greek. Such an attempt, mutatis mutandis, is the Aristotelian project attempted in Metaphysics VII to IX. * In McTaggart’s philosophy it never gets explained, as it seems to me, how our life or lives, misperceived as temporal, finally stand back to reveal that eternal and unchanging existence, those relations of love, which are our real existence and indeed the only real existence of anything at all. Commentators rather weakly suggest that this perfect happiness comes after a very long time, as if McTaggart had not based the whole thing upon the denial of time’s reality. One thinks, it may be, of St. Paul’s assertion that we, or some, “sit with Christ in the heavenly places”, now, apparently. One thinks, if one is in that tradition, of the liturgical making present, daily, the eternal divine “throne”. One thinks of the presentation of the

26

Cf. Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality, RKP, London 1963.

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sacrifice or offering of all existence as it were all at once, each of us seen by the man on the cross as, in McTaggart, all see all.27 McTaggart’s philosophy could be usefully completed by fusion with Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Return, properly interpreted. By this doctrine, taken literally, we have lived and will live our life (we can extend it to take in possible reincarnations) an infinite number of times. Yet to say that our lives, our births, come back infinitely, and have already done so, cannot or should not be meant in the sense of an infinite repetition, or we would never have got to where we are now. The doctrine is rather about the quality of this life that we are now living, namely, that it is eternal, truly eternal. It is not even a matter of an aevum only, but real eternity.28 To say that it comes back is only a way, a mythical way, of 27 Geach, in his Truth, Love and Immortality, denies that McTaggart is committed to this, that all see all. Textually he may be right, but I consider McTaggart should maintain this, as it is also true of the Christian vision where we see all that God sees. He should maintain it also because it follows from what he says about the perfect whole or system, in his Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, Chapter Two, for example. 28 At Summa theol. 10, 5&6, St. Thomas introduces the idea of the aevum (Gk. aeon), q.v. It is spoken of as, with time and eternity, one of three “measures” (in Timothy McDermott’s free translation, Blackfriars edn.). One sees in these articles how this concept is demanded in consequence of the realist understanding of time, while Herman Dooyeweerd saw it as an essential safeguard against pantheism (Cf. J. Glenn Friesen, “Studies relating to Herman Dooyeweerd”, Internet, http://members.shaw.ca/jgfriesen/Definitions/Aevum.html . One may note, aevumtheory apart, that St.Thomas’s remark at 10.5 ad 4 agrees exactly with Hegel’s concept of infinity. His treatment of the aevum itself, moreover, prepares the way for the dialectical conception of time as not so much a finite reality to be overcome, though it is this inasmuch as “everything finite is false”, in Hegel’s words, as a limited and therefore incoherent concept to be aufgehoben. This is what happens to time, as Kurt Gödel saw it, in the special relativity theory of Einstein (Cf. P. Yourgrau, The Disappearance of Time, Cambridge 1992). Thus the idea of the aevum enables Aquinas more easily to present time as an imperfect imitation of eternity, in line with general creation doctrine, rather than its antithesis. So he says it “lies somewhere between (quod est medium) eternity and time” and as such “measures” both angels and the quintessential corpora caelestia. These things, “groaning and travailing” (the whole creation, says Paul) are to be “gathered up”, and when that which is perfect is come, i.e. is seen to be eternally there, that which is imperfect falls away. This in fact is in line with the argument of the Gospel’s main personage for resurrection, viz. the God of Abraham is the God of the living. Abraham and Isaac are no more dead than was the daughter of Jairus, though she certainly was dead as men speak, since that was the point of the miracle. Thus, as the aevum offers real transition to eternity in a hierarchically

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saying that it never goes away. What “comes back” is the actual present, now, and not a mere pointless simulacrum of it. Time itself is circular, and not a mere succession of times or lives. That is to say, there is no time. It is in this sense that one can think of a person’s whole life being present to him or her at the time of dying. There would not be time to run through the events conceived successively, after all. There is a psychological state, understood as a brain disorder29, in which the subject cannot distinguish memories and first impressions. He has the sense, falsely it is said, of having experienced everything before, the events of the latest morning, the television programme, everything, even if he should admit that this can not be true. Now if the Nietzschean McTaggartian philosophy is true then he is maybe seeing deeper, not misperceiving. For then nothing is new, everything is eternal (or “ever new”). On such a supposition also one would have to suppose, since there is in reality no brain or matter of any kind, that this true reflexive perception represents itself in our forms of understanding in terms of the physiology of the brain and associated phenomena as we now understand them. In a sense, a transcendental sense, we find the explanations we expect to find, rather as Socrates claimed that all knowledge is remembering, a characteristic that can well survive the associated demythologising. * One implication of Hegel’s dialectic is that life is not absolutely a reality. This finding coincides with much of the Eastern doctrine of maya, while not contradicting Christian views. Life, dialectical treatment uncovers, is a category insufficient, as finite, to coincide with the real and actual. This belongs rather to cognition or, finally the Idea as idea, Aristotle’s “thought arranged universe, so death, just like life, “runs away” also in the sense of a further purification of our conceptions. Rather, it belongs, mirage-like, with this running away. This, of course, did not, by contrast, prevent St. Peter from contrasting David’s undoubted deadness (“his tomb is with us till this day”) with the eternal and risen life of Christ. But this was rhetoric, not metaphysics. “For God all men are alive.” Yet the true spiritual reality of the rational creature supersedes even (organic) life, since soul or substantial form is act, as genus and difference are in the real being identical with one another, and not a part at all. Victory over the flesh, its glorification even, involves also a new conception of it, eternal things being “not seen”. 29 E.g. by C. Moulin, psychologist, of Leeds University. Cf. Der Spiegel, Nr.48/27.11.06, pp.208-212.

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thinking itself”, absolute knowledge. For McTaggart indeed, we saw, interpreting and correcting Hegel, even knowledge (as we know it!) is finite illusion before the final and more fully reciprocal reality, beyond subject and object, best called love. “Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away”, atheist and Apostle coincide in saying. McTaggart simply makes more precise that what will vanish was never more than appearance. Nor can it have been for St. Paul, if we “sit with Christ in the heavenly places” eternally, among those whom God foreknew. One speaks too of sons or daughters of light (or darkness), a timeless relation possibly. This indeed, the finiteness of organic life, is why we die, necessarily. Of course, but here what is drawn attention to is the finiteness, and therefore falsity, of the concept as concept. What is finite finishes (no mere equivocation) and so has merely a relative or “subjective” stability in being. Death then is not merely (and mythically) due to some contingent “Fall”. The fall would be into this kind of thinking, except that Dialectic, like salvation history, as such proceeds from the less to the more perfect, from finite category to open reality. It cannot begin at the end. This though is not a historical process, taken absolutely, but, precisely, dialectical. We have an analogy, maybe, in the stages of the inner life of prayer, which are not conceived as bound to any specified times, even though what is more perfect must come after. And such prayer too characteristically discovers an unreality in time as clinging to “things which are seen” as opposed to things not seen.30 It is of the highest importance to understand rightly the nature of the Dialectic. Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life,… there Dialectic is at work… we find that the limitations of the finite do not merely come from without;… by its own act it passes into its counterpart. We say, for instance, that man is mortal, and seem to think that the ground of his death is in external circumstances only; so that… man would have two special properties, vitality and - also - mortality. But the true view of the matter is that life, as life, involves the germ of death, and that the finite, being radically self-contradictory, involves its own self-suppression.31

Hegel, again, is no mere Marxist before his time, working within historical categories simply. Time is here deconstructed as he goes beyond and 30

Since this is, like ecumenical Catholicism (Cf. H. de Lubac, Catholicism, 1939), a doctrine of reconciliation one ought perhaps to enquire whether Marxism, lately so widespread as a social doctrine, cannot be re-presented with its original perversion of dialectic now aufgehoben. Of course it might then collapse into a version of what we are presenting here or even of prophetic “Christianism”. 31 G.W.F. Hegel, Enc. 81, subtext.

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behind it as finding the finite “radically self-contradictory”, so as to be not merely destroyed but suppressed. This takes place within a logic that discovers (it does not though “delimit”) the possibility of what is “spiritually” realised (thought thinking itself) in actu, in Wirklichkeit. This indeed is the programme of Aristotle’s metaphysics in their unity.32 Hegel can of course admit transferred uses of the term “life”, its analogies. “Life is a Becoming; but that is not enough to exhaust the notion of life. A still higher form is found in Mind. Here too is Becoming, but richer and more intensive than mere logical becoming.”33 Here, however, in the passage quoted above, he is concerned with organic life, and he claims not merely that it ends but that it is illusory in itself. The Christian mystics say as much, whatever commitments there may be or may be thought to be to “realism”:34 …the defect of life. Its notion and reality do not thoroughly correspond to each other. The notion of life is the soul…35

Here Hegel adds that the soul is as it were infused, adding though that it is only “when the living being is dead, that these two sides of the idea (sc. of life) are different ingredients.” Soul indeed is “the notion” of life and not, as in much Thomism, merely the formal “part”. Indeed he agrees with St. Thomas, implicitly at least, that the (intellectual) soul, as final form or specific difference, takes away or supersedes all other forms and should therefore take away also any forma corporeitatis. Mere matter is nothing other than possibility and, as the dialectic too makes plain, perishability. Such perishability though, in Hegel, is no more than part of a larger instability in being attaching to all finite categories (and not merely to “matter”). Here he might seem to rejoin the two great Greeks, leaving aside the later dualistic speculations on the inherent imperfections of matter as extended stuff. Life, anyhow, “runs away” and “the living being dies, because it is a contradiction”36, i.e. it was never alive. The Dialectic emphatically does not admit real or existent contradictions. 32

Cf. F. Inciarte, “Die Einheit der Aristotelischen Metaphysik”, Philosophisches Jahrbuch , 101 Jahrgang, 1994, pp. 1-21. 33 Ibid. 88 (subtext). 34 Thought to be, rather. For whether we take all flesh as grass, as dust and ashes or as “nothing and less than nothing” the salient point of “incarnation” is that a nature like ours, whatever it is, was assumed. This is denied by theological Docetism but not by the philosophical doctrine of absolute idealism, say. 35 Ibid. 216 (subtext) 36 Hegel, Ibid 221 (subtext).

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Substance had been dismissed even earlier in the Dialectic as a candidate for the real. The love, which is what remains, accepting now McTaggart’s critique of cognition, is a relation at one with the persons, human, divine or both, of whom we would wish to predicate it, as in Trinitarianism. A developed Trinitarianism, this would mean, would include the view that God is a necessary being because of the loverelations, and not the other way round. This would reduce role of the Five Ways, for example, to mere description of our mental processes. This means, again, that differentiation is prior to simplicity or, otherwise expressed, simplicity can only be embodied, and not remain merely abstract, as differentiation. This is precisely why it is necessary to postulate identity in difference as Hegel does. This is a matter, again, as regards analysis, of finding many prima facie contradictions not to be contradictions at all. This after all is equally the basis for Scholastic distinctions: we don’t need to make distinctions until such an apparent contradiction arises, leading us to ask how both elements can be true, as we need to say. The Trinitarian relations then, once again, are not merely compatible with simplicity but they are prior to as founding it. Beginning with divine simplicity is a concession to the abstractive procedure of our finite thinking. The Absolute in itself, however, is, rather, these relations, this life, and due to their infinity, their perfection, they coincide with and in a perfect simplicity (this is also Aquinas’s reply to the obvious objection37). Equally, however, it follows that this could or would be true of any perfect and hence infinite community of relation in love (“God is love”), however conceived. That is, the absolute reified simplicity of Allah (as often conceived) has, with Trinitarianism, already been rejected. We might, with no more improbability thus far, have the community of spirits, ourselves, each one having the whole unity within self. Perfect simplicity, that is to say, is describable as “all in all”, and, like that state, belongs to final vision. It is not grasped in advance, any more than eternity, with which it coincides. That this is thinkable as finally, even if beyond our comprehension, compatible and even identifiable with the Trinity of orthodoxy cannot be denied by anyone who admits the Augustinian insight of “one closer to me than I am to myself”. For this means that self is not to be conceived as analogical with substance. For substances “each thing is itself and not another thing”. Again, it is not necessary to do more than show that no contradiction has been proved here (as applies equally to divine 37

See Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 27, 1 ad 2; 30, 1 ad 4.

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immutability vis à vis incarnation). But nor should we deny that Trinitarian doctrine can itself develop to a point beyond our present powers of recognition, as some of the Biblical authors might well not have been able initially to recognise their faith in the later formulation. Precisely this is why they would need faith, this virtue. Theologians, anyhow, who have propounded notions of “the whole Christ” might have been launching, like St. Paul himself in his day, more than they have personally envisaged. Well that is what we are all trying to do, whether in prayer, meditation or in speech and writing, “or what’s a heaven for?” What is true of God, this simplicity, must be true, we seem to be saying, of final, “absolute” reality. This, surely, is why Paul speaks of God finally becoming “all in all”. He could not see how that, now, could be compatible with creation, but yet he knew that it must ultimately be so. He would not have been content to rest with the Scholastic paradox, plura entia, sed non plus entis, as if all were on one level or as if infinity were in its very limitlessness limited by creation, for there we have a true contradiction indeed until, again, distinctions are introduced. Why must reality be simple, we might find ourselves wanting to ask? Here again the arguments of Aquinas on the matter serve fairly well. Those beings added, as we imagine, in a creation, are not beings as is the Absolute, even if we want still, with Aquinas, to give esse pride of place as God’s most worthy or proportionate product, so to say. Hence, again, he has to say, too, that any divine idea is identical with the divine essence and that this idea, not some other thing, is what that essence so to say “knows” or has relation to, though this “relation”, as identity, is not a real relation as of persons. As identity though it may be inverted. Indeed there is no “imitable” perfection of God which is not, it too, this very idea, the divine essence. It is in this sense that the unity would be for the differentiations and not vice versa. They are what realise it, as it were rescuing it from the abstractness of idea as in our conception merely. In any event we do not seem to need to make the duplication retained even by Eriugena of ideas and, at a separate level, created things. It is an error in perspective to think that creation doctrine requires this, one resting ultimately upon one’s not having shaken off the primitive equation of spirit with ghost, the ghostly or “insubstantial”. Matter then, as we experience it, “stuff” indeed, just is what is not spiritual. How then would God have created it? “He likes it”, says C.S. Lewis, as Teilhard de Chardin liked it, perhaps. But Chardin is practically Hegelian much of the time and Lewis shows, e.g. in The Great Divorce, that matter for him is a very flexible reality indeed. Matter, as in the ancient philosophy, is no more than (a principle of) limitation, finitude, upon spirit, upon essence, and

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indeed has no place in that transcendence of essence which is Hegel’s “notion”. Aquinas’s anima mea non est ego, from his commentary to I Corinthians 15, is given final say by many Thomists today. They fail to see that without qualification this amounts to a slavish attitude in the face of death, for it depends upon the common-sense realist epistemology. Aquinas’s final doctrine is of the unicitas formae, entailing the sovereign determining function of the ultimate difference, here the individual soulform, as act, such as we find in Aristotle’s Metaphysics VII.38 Nor is this to deny flesh or the taking of flesh in the incarnation. It simply pinpoints better what flesh is, grass, dust, ultimately a principle of limitation and not “stuff” at all. We seem to see a reality which has partes extra partes merely because we do not see that this is just our immediate attitude, prior, that is to the mediation of which we are all capable. Similarly we can work out that the moon is larger than the saucer it might seem to be. We can work out, that is, that matter is not stuff, as physics has been doing for quite some time. It is the spirit that works its final transcending of the body (“I go to the Father”) when its time comes. The ageing process begins this work if we will tarry so long. Thus to say “no man takes my life from me” is to acknowledge this and not to deny that one may be murdered, even as a child. Again, it would be wrong to refer these sayings to the divinity of Christ’s person exclusively, as if we (or Socrates) could not say we go to the Father when we are about to die. Again, for the “spirit” to “return to God who gave it” cannot mean loss, e.g. of self or egohood, since one was never separated from God merely by virtue of being “enfleshed”, but rather Felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness.

That eternally we are not simply or finitely alive but participate in a love transcending life is shown forth in many ways. “Thy love is better than life.” Traditionally, love is divided up into eros and agape. While some theologians assert their total difference (A. Nygren) and hence reject the Catholic mystical tradition others (H. Küng) stress a mutual dependence of the two forms of love, though they seldom attempt to analyse this relation. Nor, disappointingly, does C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. They remain four, disparate. “My eros is crucified”, said the subapostolic Ignatius, as if in sober ecstasy. Christ on the cross at one stroke acts out agape and is the supreme erotic symbol, arms outstretched in a sacrificial death itself declarative of ecstatic love for all men, women and 38

Cf. F.Inciarte, op. cit.

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children, a love not compatible with continued life. Quia amore langueo, as the middle-English lyric presents him as singing. The seed must die or “abide by itself alone”. Love, that is, is a mortal wound, “as strong as death”, and the thing is quite obvious. For lovers as lovers life cannot continue and society foists marriage on them to make them put a stop to it, to save them for life, not always unwillingly of course. Marriage is surely fine, yet not for this purpose precisely.39 Still, it is a most natural feeling that to lose one’s wife or husband for all eternity might be to be lost indeed, if one has ever begun to love? The same though can apply to other loves, earlier or later, and not only to love between the sexes. Yet, and against all the claims of society, “Oh life that is no life at all”, St. Teresa and others witness, for “One day in thy courts”, the courts of love, “is better than a thousand.”40 They think it is better to burn than to marry as, clearly, did Paul, though he on occasion asserted the contrary.41 39 C.S. Lewis tried to show, in his The Allegory of Love, how Christian culture, as reflected in certain poets, progressed from regarding marriage as remedium concupiscentiae and hence hostile to eros, to an interpretation of this phrase which could see marriage as the consummation of an experience of eros, thus reclaiming it for society. Marital consummation tends to remain of a more prosaic kind, however, kept separate in people’s minds from “spiritual marriage”. But this is very likely regrettable and to be fought against, in the way Chesterton so often claimed. One should periodically elope with one’s wife, act out the Isoldean “dark night” drama. But is not to act out the same as to de-dramatise and is that desirable? Christian marriage has rather been viewed sacramentally, as figuring something else, viz. “the union of Christ and his church”. In itself or phenomenally it is limited by “Till death do us part”, prolonging fidelity but finitely. The shared death of lovers is rather intended to transcend death’s parting function, if it should have it. 40 Thomas Aquinas claims in the Contra Gentes that society requires for its wellbeing that some transcend it or busy themselves with something higher or better. He thinks primarily of “the religious state” as corresponding to the Gospel leaving all things. The well-being though is achieved by the witness to a selftranscendence in man beyond the materially institutional, which in our cultural development we have in fact increasingly integrated, not least by virtue of our own technology, into everyman’s perspective, the totalitarian or “total work” perversion (of religion’s total service) notwithstanding. Democracy is here to stay and the accursed people who know not the law, viz. the followers of Jesus as seen by the Pharisees, have won or are winning the day as we move into the “noosphere” and yet “further in and higher up”. 41 The question here of course is in what sense one ever burns exclusively for some one finite object. “In as much as you did it to one of these you did it to me” might often apply here too, when the bush starts to burn, each symphony the whole world as the man said. Sumit unus sumit mille..

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It is all in Phaedrus, and attempts to vacuum-seal supernatural as against “natural” mysticism are not to the purpose, we surely have at last understood. Tristan and Isolde can but sing and die, like Thérèse of Lisieux there, and who can contradict? In erotic love at its most intense the sexual motive can well be sidelined, orgasm avoided but not merely through a refined sensuality. The grace of the unicorn, white, virginal, is a (male) symbol of this. Specific sexual love is indeed a form, maybe foundational, of eros, but this does not justify reduction of Wordsworth’s nature poetry or Dante’s Beatrician transports to precisely what the vision transcends. Agape, then, is eros transcending itself, as it does and should, like man who is its incarnation. Eros introduces Dante to the new life of good will as the god’s own prolongation. Here too life is transcended and, as it seems, generally shortened or cut off, thrown away as they say. Pages of Augustine (Enarrationes In Psalmos) corroborate this, in clear continuity with his earlier loves, while the Oratorian, Fr. Louis Bouyer, sees in this eros the very meaning of monasticism.42 Any biography can represent a slow (for some very slow indeed) coming to terms with this initially astounding reality. It is love, the love that is no one’s property, that has thrust us into life and will take us out of it, as out of a dream since, we have seen, we were never really in it, this “place appointed for my second race”. In love we see the particular truly as the universal, which is otherwise mere abstraction. The Samaritan alone serves love, in the concrete individual. All is in each, as each in all. The “selfish love” advanced in objection is found to be defect of love, since lovers as such must know to avoid what would destroy not them but their very love. The religious cloaking of this in various symbols is not to be rejected. A rationalist theology obscures the orientation of study towards a contemplation which includes and fulfils it, a little of which is worth all the rest (Aristotle) and which alone is desirable for itself (Augustine). For such contemplation, as made clear within the religious tradition, is fulfilled in what they call, on occasion at least, “nuptials”, as of course is erotic love (despite our earlier remark about marriage viewed socially). This recognition is only ignorantly equated with “giving the game away”. For whether Bernini’s Teresa is in orgasm or in a state superseding it is strictly immaterial. Love, as we have said, is the one reality, the corporeal ecstasy a legitimate shadow of the reality, no more. Love, as final, must include all that might be meant by creation, incarnation or anything else. 42

Louis Bouyer, The Meaning of Monasticism.

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Love hath pitched his tent In the place of excrement43,

or near enough. The centre, we noted, is everywhere, and highest does not stand without lowest. Love indeed is one love everywhere and for deep truly to call upon deep you must go deep, ad intima, even, perhaps, “through that which thou art not”. It is not John that loves Mary but love, the concrete universal, that holds them both. In this sense each has all others, typically just in having one, “fair creature of an hour” or not or, as it might be, a poem or a burning bush, again, which, in either case, is eternity within the lover. “I saw eternity the other night”. The “many-splendoured thing” is, and is essentially, close to hand. It is in this sense that Aquinas’s denial that friends are needed for beatitude might be understood, that the beloved is, again, closer to me even than self. Yet such love, we find, is act more than substance, as the “I” in itself is a relation, and to all. This relation is even what the all is, secret of high mountains and roaring seas, of science and philosophy. Here, where the dialectic terminates, it holds all the rest, since this is itself the meaning of its terminating. It has, however, to terminate, to fulfil, as perfecting a beginning, as “salvation is of the Jews”. It starts there, in one version at least. As touching that, however, shifts in the dialectic are always possible. What is essential is that there shall be some dialectic or other, some procession of conceptions. McTaggart, for example, shows that this principle, that Hegel discovered, Hegel did not so himself well understand if he really thought that just the dialectical terms he proposed were the only right ones. In that case nothing would have been achieved once the slightest link in the dialectical chain were found to be invalid, as McTaggart shows that very many of them are.44 The dialectic of religious conceptions, as developed in what is called salvation history, was often difficult to grasp as a unified series or process. Christians could not always easily see how what their leaders were now calling the Old Testament could possibly be witnessing to the same one and true God who gave the New, in Jesus Christ. Some even called the older “revelation” the work of devils (Marcionism). The orthodox Church, by contrast, offered, as it were side by side, an elaborate mystical interpretation of the “old covenant” and the demand that it be believed that God had done these wonderful works, in particular brought the Israelites 43

W.B. Yeats. McTaggart, A Commentary on Hegel’s Logic, Cambridge University Press, 1910. 44

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out of Egypt amid miraculous actions, his mighty arm outstretched. This, indeed, is what is rehearsed at great length and with great solemnity at the Easter Vigil, as prefiguring the Easter miracle as the victory, not now over the Egyptians but over death. It now however becomes increasingly clear that the events of the Book of Exodus admit, indeed elicit, an entirely non-miraculous or natural explanation, in terms of the contemporaneous seismic activity (Santorini). Already Immanuel Velikovsky, taking the Biblical history seriously, had looked for this type of explanation, which has now been found. Indeed, once this is even suggested one sees that so it must have been. Now apologists respond by saying that this is an accidental difference. The great miraculum is the providence of God towards Israel. The point is though that this is now no different from the providence operative everywhere, if reality is rational, and simply serves to confirm, or rather affirm, the status of the victorious Judaeo-Christian religious trend to what Hegel calls the absolute religion of Christianity. This religion he sets out to “think”, so as to express it for himself and others in a more perfect or rational form than that of religious symbolism and narrative. He does not, though, wish to annihilate the latter, but rather to bring out its meaning, the perennial task of theology or of religious philosophy. McTaggart may be seen as completing his task when he argues that this perfect knowledge is yet still, just as knowledge, imperfect or finite, as is the religious representation it would elucidate. The final reality is a state, rather, of universal mutual love, reached now by the analysis of a professed atheist, but coinciding almost one to one, names apart, with the vision of St. Paul. There is here an appeal to the Christian community to consider a more farreaching aggiornamento than achieved, attempted or perhaps dreamed of hitherto, the appeal, in fact, that was so hysterically rejected at the time of the Modernist crisis. As we have suggested already, this is the point where doctrinal development, as itself a doctrinal principle, is seen as itself admitting development, a development of its own frame of operation, we might say, like those computers which are programmed to re-programme themselves. The point intended here is that the discovery of the natural or rational character of the Old Testament theophany is itself a further entering into the more integrated grasp of the Christian vision and teaching which theologians up to and after Hegel have continued to urge. In doing this they have not “debased the Christian coinage”, this phrase being an attempt to canonise a mere brute fundamentalism, as it is called, of the “The Bible says…” variety. The opposite is the ongoing effort to interpret “spiritual things spiritually”, always a work of grace as there is no reason

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to doubt. Thus, in further illustration, in not always rising to understanding the resurrection spiritually Christians have filled the world with rotting cemeteries, “decaying never to be decayed”, which “the faithful” visit in alienated horror, as on that first Easter morning. But “why seek the living among the dead”. “God is not the God of the dead but of the living”, while life as such, a finite category, beckons to self-transcendence in the spirit. This is speculative Mind, the “dry bones” phenomenal merely. * The categories may be viewed in two aspects. On the one hand it is by their instrumentality that the mere perception of sense rises to objectivity and experience. On the other hand these notions are unities in our consciousness merely: they are consequently conditioned by the material given to them, and having nothing of their own they can be applied to use only within the range of experience.45

Hegel develops his idea here together with the idea of content as being necessarily ideal. We should not call a novel full of content, or say it had “much in it”, merely because “it included a great number of single incidents, situations, and the like.” What makes a work “pregnant with matter” is thus “thoughts, or in the first instance the categories”, as we see here that even the “popular” notion of content implies. What then of these categories? Aristotle too prefaces his logical work with a laying down of categories, as we find in Kant. But for Hegel they must be deduced, in an ascending dialectic or discussion among themselves, so to say, from which but one should emerge as answering to reality, whether by identity or some other connection. Just why and how this is so we have still to see. One might think of Kant as just naming or enumerating those natural operations of the mind, seen as application of these categories, which his critique blames the “dogmatic” metaphysicians of earlier modernity for uncritically applying or just assuming to “fit” reality. This is in essence a mere rehearsal, thus far, of Hume’s criticism, of the categories of substance and causality (or “causal necessity”) in particular. Hegel nonetheless brackets Kant with the Empiricists46 who first reacted against the a priori rationalism of Descartes. Hegel himself finds something to respect even in these rationalists, however, especially

45 46

Hegel, Enc. Logic 43. Ibid., 37-60, “Second Attitude of Thought to Objectivity”.

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Malebranche47, Spinoza (who spoke of “the stupid Cartesians”) or Leibniz (whom Hegel praises as a thinker who “represents contradiction in its complete development”48). Hegel identifies the Empirical philosophy as the one “which abandons the search for truth in thought itself, and goes to fetch it from Experience, the outward and the inward present…”, adding that “this source from which Empiricism draws is common to it with metaphysics.” Metaphysics finds guarantees in “materialised conceptions” as immediate (inward?) experience. Hegel’s idea is that thought, as philosophical, should take nothing from outside in this uncritical manner. Insofar as it finds itself bound by categories it is led to search for patterns intrinsic to thinking which declare themselves within it, and this search is a progressive transcendence of such finite or limit-placing categories towards the transcategorical. This is why Hegel focuses upon logic, as did the metaphysicians of the more remote past, under the rubric of logica docens (as against logica utens), for example. Similarly, contemporary logicians have come to see their art, or science, as ontology. Hegel praises Fichte, who “called attention to the need of exhibiting the necessity of these categories and giving a genuine deduction of them.” Laws of thought, “or the classification of notions, judgements, and syllogisms” should “be no longer taken merely from observation and so only empirically treated, but be deduced from thought itself.”49 If I don’t myself see the truth of the logical rules then I cannot meaningfully apply them, and this speaks for the soundness of Hegel’s approach. This seeing, after all, is a “subjective” intuition. Yet it is no more subjective than the so-called success verbs, as when I say I see you before me. It “is not the mere act of our personal self-consciousness… Rather, this identity is itself the absolute.” This is what the making intelligible of the world of sense is, and Hegel equates “man’s endeavours to understand the world” with one “to appropriate and subdue it to himself” and this again with his “idealising” (crushing and pounding) it. In this sense “The ‘I’ is the primary identity.” The “I” is not defined with reference to the other. I am I not because I am not you, as now is now because it is not before or after or red is red because it is not yellow or blue (Hegel’s examples). The being of “I”, my being, is not outside itself, as with the sensible. This is the great truth of subjectivity, before going 47

See Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Enc. 194. 49 Ibid. 42. 48

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into such questions as whose child I am, in what order of birth, of what sex and so on. That the categories are strictly properties of thought does not make them subjective merely. They have content, and they “necessarily lead onwards in due progress to the real departments of Nature and Mind” (Hegel’s triad). Hegel insists that this content is not, cannot be originally foreign to “the logical idea”. For this “by its own native action is specialised and developed to Nature and Mind,” which are thus affected by “thought or the Ego” (i.e. they are the same) and “transformed into it.”50 Self creates everything and insofar as matter (and form) is a category transcended and thus discarded there is no original matter as it were prior to this transformation. The Ego has but to learn and understand, in this apparent temporal condition, where in reality it forever sits. “Knowledge by means of the categories”51 Hegel calls Understanding, Verstand, which he contrasts with philosophical Reason, Vernünft. If we have not abandoned the search for truth in thought itself (as he reproaches the Empiricists with doing), if content is not foreign to the logical and inward idea, then even bodily and inward movements seeming to distract from study, for example, have the aspect of insight, though missed in the specialisation (or “thoughtlessness”) of the moment. They may push to further wholeness and harmony. The I, the ego, is everything, not defined, again, with reference to the other, in contrast to “now” or “red”, which a later philosophy will evaluate as “part of our language”. It is this problem of solipsism with which Wittgenstein struggled, resolved here by affirmation of identity in difference, which is no more than the ancient paradigm of knowledge, identification of sense and sensible, intellect and intelligible. Anima est… omnia. Here one accounts, too, for the insight that I cannot have been picked to be one of the mundane crowd. It is this insight. It is impossible, since I am I. I rather contain the crowd, as does each “I”. Thus, and only thus, ethically, one corrects the utilitarian formula “Each to count for one and none for more than one” to “Each to count for all and none for less than all”, an equality still, but of infinities. I cannot be born into a world where there could be another in my stead. So I create the past, the memories. In constructing God, indeed validly, I delineate myself. That is, I open or erase the merely apparent delineations of a closed consciousness. All the great deeds, all the sins, are mine. The one who was “made sin for us”, and his great interpreter, discovered that. 50

Cf. Meister Eckhart: “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him.” 51 Enc. 44.

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Buddha too claimed similar things (the sermon at Mount Vulture52). Let there be credit where credit is due. “As a mother comforts her child so will I comfort you”, wrote Isaiah, by sympathy in propria persona, and this is the mystery hidden within the formula “Thus saith the Lord”, viz. “Verily I say unto you”. What can we not find, furthermore, in the teachings and visions of aboriginal peoples on this matter? We carry one another absolutely, so that none is superfluous. Ethics, metaphysics and logic coalesce or reflect back on one another, the basic negative truth of “natural law”, though it might as well be made a negative truth of metaphysics (or logic), grounding all, as we must, since this is what thought is, in subjectivity, “all in all”. If Christianity “fulfils” Judaism then, by the same token, Judaism interprets Christianity. In this relation, first here made explicit, is contained the principle of universality which is personality. Thus too all the prophets and the Wisdom literature interpreted Moses while they fulfilled his teaching and example, the deed that was word and the word that was deed, like writing in sand or dying on a cross. “Only in Christianity is man respected as man, in his infinitude and universality.” This is “why slavery has vanished from modern Europe” and there is no “special circumstance” otherwise explaining it.53 This universality, which the principle of ecumenism makes ethically explicit, is in fact philosophy or the final unconcealed wisdom which philo-sophia, properly speaking, loves. Nothing prevents this, either, from being finally disclosed as what we might call love in the sense of a trans-objectivist relation of perfect reciprocity, philosophy’s deepest secret and wisdom “from above” or even “divine madness”, to use the phraseology of Phaedros. There the lover is praised, within philosophy, above the non-lover, who is in fact put to shame. Why now does the tradition speak both of the saving wounds of Christ and of the wounds of original sin? How can wounds save, or what have wounds to do with being sinful? There is mystery here, and the first step towards appreciating it, and even clearing it up, is to see that they are the 52

“You may think that my enlightenment took place so many years ago under the Bodhi tree… and that I will pass away into Nirvana after so many years from now. But this way of thinking is at fault, for my enlightenment took place countless aeons ago; indeed even before the creation of the world. As to my entering into Nirvana, there will be no such thing, for I shall continue giving sermons to you which will be heard by all sentient beings all over the world until the end of time” (Lotus Sutra, quoted in D.T. Suzuki’s The Field of Zen, New York 1970, p.64, my italics). 53 Hegel, Enc. 163, Add.

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same wounds and ultimately one wound. This wound is openness, the being opened, where, in the Gospel, blood and water flow. The Lord has opened me, or has opened my mouth, we read, and the firstborn is blest as opening the fruitful womb where all gestates. To be wounded or opened, this is a way of saying that one is not whole and complete in oneself but is ad alterum, or, rather, that this is what self is. It is a relation, namely, to be understood wholly only within the whole, as having the whole unity within self, finite within infinite and vice versa. Ultimately, self is other, other is self, and so “the man who looks at himself does not shine.” This is why, in Hegel’s thought, every judgement, as finite, is false. Word, as word, must be one and total. Hence, equally, every judgement or syllogism collapses into or gives way to not just a but the notion, in which all is “gathered up”, final yet ever-present stasis where wounds are glorified or known for what they are, unhindered communication in “pure play”. Hegel concludes to “the self-knowing actual idea, raised to the concept of the living Spirit which in necessary wise draws distinctions in itself, and returns to unity with itself out of its distinctions.”54 These distinctions are ourselves, the return all our forms of communication, all ultimately reducing to communication itself, thus far the medium which is the message and so no longer medium. “This only is desirable for itself.” “I have not called you servants but friends,” a text stressed by Eckhart in relation to the friend’s knowing what his or her friend is about and so to their being in unity together, as identical rather. Hence the living Spirit draws distinctions, is differentiated within or differentiates itself, that is. It is not though distinguished from something else, such as servants. Boehme did not dare to follow Eckhart here, yet Eckhart is actually more deeply orthodox, more Augustinian, more Pauline. When the servant knows all that his master knows he is free. But this is the disclosure of eternity, where there only ever is or was freedom, the relations and “processions” in themselves, behind all the play of history, or of nature still more. Logic, which first discloses this, disappears completely like the pain of witness, the ladder one kicks away (or draws up after one and transmutes into fire). Logic gave only the possibility of what is actual, not the reality. Logicus non considerat existentiam rei. It is in this way that the external and alien is reduced or “pounded” to inwardness, to Spirit, as man represents himself as emerging from nature, its groaning and travailing. That it should be just logic which discloses this, that it has to be so and not otherwise, if indeed “it” shall “be” at all,

54

Hegel, Philosophy of Mind. See Enc. 377-577.

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if, that is, the Idea shall “go forth freely as nature”, in Hegel’s words55, only seems to impose an alien necessity. The “percipient (anschauende) Idea is Nature.” It simply is that, as the Idea itself, even as “independent or for itself”, is “Perception or Intuition”. In this necessity it enjoys “an absolute liberty” and this initiative (“resolve”) is “within its own absolute truth”. Beginning, in logic, with abstract Being, logic ends with the idea as being, viz. Nature, all of which is contained within Spirit or Mind. It is in fact Love, in the sense here given, which transcends the opposition we first posit between freedom and necessity, as mere conceptual analysis can first show in the abstract56. In so far though as we pass from Being as possibility, not forgetting that possibility is a later but still finite category, to real Being, to the Idea as Being, there is openness to process in the Idea. Thought thinks, it is this thinking (as the Father is his begetting; it is not something he does on the side), act is prior to substance as merely assumed in our predication. God, that is, exists because of the processions. They do not in any way result from necessary Being. This necessity is itself secondary as chosen. The necessity is the choice. “I will be what I will be” and nothing else could be God or actuality, certainly not a helplessly uncaused Parmenidean sphere. That, indeed, would not be “simple” enough. So it is only in this secondary sense, too, that the laws of logic are necessary. Yet they are prior, necessarily, to Nature as giving its possibility, that of “experience”. One might take Aristotle, at the end of Posterior Analytics (II, 17), as maintaining the contrary, as if all were abstracted or “inducted” (epagoge) from “sense-experience”. The question is, what does one then abstract? One sees, rather, what we have expounded here, that Nature, experience, cannot be without prior consistency (noncontradiction), giving consistency of being. If logic were derived from Nature then logic could not judge it. Science would be impossible. Only because Nature is idea, the Idea which has gone forth as Nature, thus remaining id quod, that which is perceived, inwardly, in self-reflection, not, as first appears in unreflected sense-experience, that by which (id quo)

55

Enc.244. Cf. G. Van Riet, “The Problem of God in Hegel (Parts II-III)”, Philosophy Today, Vol. XI, Number 2/4, Summer 1967, pp.75-106 (French source, Revue philosophique de Louvain 63, August 1965, pp. 353-418): “As soon as you are in the world of love or goodness, there is hardly any sense in opposing freedom and necessity. Furthermore, the human notion of freedom cannot be transposed in God without correcting it…”

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something else is perceived57, is there any knowledge, any self, at all. It is this very knowledge that is the pounding to inwardness. All this is the result of the content of the (dialectical) categories, that as categories of logic they are not just empty or tautological forms. There has to be a so-called “synthetic a priori”, though this was misunderstood as applied to a type of statement merely. What is philosophical is to push from appearance to reality, in Bradley’s phrase. Thus it was not really open to Brentano to equate existence with being the object of a justified judgement.58 It is rather judgement that is founded in existence or in thinking, which is beyond both existence and language, since all judgement, in a world of relations, is one-sided and so finite and therefore false. Nor can reality be “what science says it is” (A. Flew), simply because science, as empirical, has no opening to saying what it is, i.e. to pronouncing upon the reality within which it operates. Mind in itself, however, the self, is, though differentiated, identical with this reality. For reality is just this differentiation. These positions are not merely Hegelian but are what mind repeatedly arrives at, as he no doubt saw in a unique or fresh way as standing at the birth of our historicist age.

57 58

Cp. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 85, 2. Cf. Heanue, op. cit.

CHAPTER TWENTY ON THE QUANTITATIVE INDETERMINACY OF SELF

“For Hegel there is no time.” “Hegel is always right” (an absurdity of Derrida’s). There is no time. “We (you) sit with Christ in the heavenly places” (St. Paul). The worshipping community at Mass is and believes itself in heaven as Christ on the cross, on the altar, sees and loves each one of them totally. Each has the whole, the unity, within himself, McTaggart urges, who never “went to Mass”. I am that. As he saw you he also saw them, writes the diabolical Screwtape to his apprentice, describing the final escape from the two of them of a “Christian soul”. The same C.S. Lewis has the heroine of his novel cry out, “How can the gods see us face to face until we have faces?” But who are these gods? A popular theorist (Walford, following Z. Sitchin) argues that gods, superior beings from elsewhere, spawned the human race on earth, not, this time, by mating with the sons or rather daughters of men, as did the angels in Genesis, but by advanced technology. Such gods were clearly finite, since infinite transcendence requires total immanence, the outside being inside and vice versa. So any viable creationist theory must be compatible with this. Reincarnation, anyhow, is the belief of a large portion of the human race while even the Christians believe in incarnation without the “re”. Incarnation in itself, I would suggest, insinuates the first heresy concerning it, viz. docetism, that Christ only “appeared” as a man. Don’t we all, if all flesh, flesh universally, is as such mere appearance? This is the conclusion of Absolute Idealism. Aristotle, speaking for the ancient world in which Christianity arose, has a curious halfway position on this in his On the Soul, see especially 423a 1ff. So the true incarnation of the incarnate “one” would not be denied in stating this later conclusion. To become incarnate, in that case, just is no more than to take on an untransfigured appearance. The perspectives transcend reincarnation however. We are “members one of another” as God is “all in all”, “I in them and they in me… that they all may be one in us.” One may assume that the prayer of the one chosen is

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granted, which means that he states what is eternally and necessarily so. It has been rationally demonstrated in the more perfect form of philosophy. “I will see you again.” “You will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory.” There was no need to take this as a fallacious prophecy concerning the later experiences of those present, i.e. in their life-times. The reference, should these texts be venerated as normative, would rather be, still, to the End, but an End that all will see, if we do not behold it eternally indeed, ourselves constituting it. Spirit is neither born nor dies and as necessary we more than exist. Existence abstracts, as a category, from immanent otherness. Thus the end of “time”, created by backward causality of the last member of the series, is not a temporal end but an end to temporality, where we see ourselves in our last or final and only real incarnation, which is spirit and so no incarnation at all. Ten thousand times ten thousand or, more truly, a multitude “without number” (what kind of multitude is that?), infinitely differentiated, each is necessary to the whole. The “angels” of the smallest children “behold the face of our (my) father in heaven”. The doctrine of the guardian angels, that is, is one of identity with Spirit beyond empirical consciousness, as “I and my father are one”. Twins can experience a most perfect identity, uncanny to others. We all, though, are not merely begotten of one mother-father, but are begotten perpetually, at every actual moment, in one another. For being in the other is constitutive of its other, viz. of self. I “know as I am known” and am thus necessary to the whole as having it within myself. The divine simplicity, the perfect whole which infinity has to be, can be and has been thought in terms of the Trinitarian relationships, without contradiction. So it can just as well be thought in terms of this relation here (of infinite differentiation in identity), which actually annihilates relation (a finite category after all, along with substance and all possible accidents), of all with all. Rather, it is a relation of the whole with itself in an infinite transparency of self-conscious, self-constituting perception. In this way man, spirit, is revealed “in glory” or as absolute behind the veils of time and space, of transitional “nature”. The Trinity is not here denied, since it is constitutive of all consciousness within itself, having the other as other and yet having it, as it were intensively, all multitude being finally denied or superseded (aufgehoben). Self just is its other, known and so realised as and in its other. The final return of other to self, to other of its other, is selfconstitutive. It constitutes self in the final bond of love. Thus reality is spirit, blowing where it will so that you cannot tell where it comes from. This is the significance of the original insistence on the Trinitarian notion

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as a mystery or as “above” reason. The meaning is that reason is, in its inmost self, creative or revelatory, “at play”. Hegel’s notion of the “notion as pure play” coincides with that in the Proverbs of Solomon. Reason is not enslaved by self-manifestation. It is therefore itself manifestation simply, the manifest, the re-vealed. We may say it transcends itself ceaselessly, since this is what it is, viz. reconciliation, not merely of self and other, but of self into other. Self, that is, is paradoxical in its notion, as personality for Hegel, its principle, is universality. Thus the outside is the inside and in looking out, upon nature, upon brothers and sisters, man apprehends him/herself, “all glorious within”. He sees the “thoughts of one mind”, which is his own. Thomas Aquinas, in arguing from a premise that “It is evident that it is this man who thinks” (On a Common Intellect), begs all the philosophical questions. Man, neither one nor many, is “at home with himself”, “the great Apocalypse”. I am that. Finally the only subjectivity is absolute subjectivity. In seeing that we leave ourselves behind, kick the ladder away, as Hegel found and reported in his day (see his critique of the a posteriori proofs of God in the “Little Logic”, 50, 511).

1

See the later Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE BEYOND MAN

One needs to focus upon the transcendence of the biological in man. One may treat man biologically, as is done in Aristotle’s On the Soul or Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape. Seeing oneself, or ourselves collectively, however, as one of nature’s species is not “the natural attitude” we easily slip into pretending it to be. Aristotle’s definition of man as a or the rational or talking animal is reached by an effort of abstractive thinking. This effort knocks out, for him, other definitional candidates, such as featherless biped, in his search for the essential feature. He speaks of feature and not features since his account of definition is ordered. There has to be one ultimate difference which limits (defines) the broader category first begun with. This category is itself not given merely, and animal, as a genus, is nonetheless a species of a broader category, living being (zoon), and so on. Although one might think that we talk of man as we talk of the elephant or the daffodil we only do this by a definite, somewhat hard-nosed decision. It is mediated, as Hegel would say. Many cultures preserve more consistently a strong awareness of the gulf between “us” and nature or the animals, whether or not this leads to a lack of respect for “life”. In compensation, maybe, we have a strong awareness of the individual, of subjectivity, as other or prior. Morris concedes that he makes his examination of the naked, if rational, ape qua zoologist, i.e. not as Desmond Morris the man in his entirety.1 So also Aristotle arrives at a more final estimate of man (and of much else) in his Metaphysics, when endeavouring to think reality as a whole without 1

This, by the way, is a good illustration of Aristotle’s thesis that it is the essential form that defines the substance and not some ordered grouping of forms, soul, body etc. “Desmond Morris the man in his entirety” actually refers here, if counter-intuitively, to the “Morrisian” intellect (to say “Morris’s intellect” would perpetuate the error), his unitive consciousness. On this view, if I say “I have hurt my finger” I refer to myself as subject, as intellect, as I do not if I say, as I might, “My finger is hurt”.

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discriminative attention, to think being as being, in his words.2 Noting that such biological definitions are pre-patterned to give one a composite he concludes that this composite is determined by some one element or “part”, since any being is one, which will therefore be more essentially the being, viz. its “form”, than is the composite of everyday. This part is more the whole than the whole composed of parts! In other words the schema part-whole is here superseded as inapplicable and Aristotle has in fact passed to the less abstract but more metaphysical schema of act and potency. The form (“soul”) is the act, the actuality, of a man or woman. The organised body, made up of matter, is potential to this act, which makes it entirely what it is, such that its final organisation is one with the form, but as viewed potentially. This is only understandable, in my view, under the format of idealism, taken absolutely. Substance as subject (hypokeimenon) of properties or accidents, including an organised body (having life potentially), becomes, as nous, absolute or self-bearing subject and ipso facto activity, ultimately one with the first substance of all, as is the case, regarding this point at least, in the later Augustinian noetic. Of course there is question still as to what this finally means. But since this form in man is in fact intellect it is arbitrary to continue to posit man as living being in only a biological sense. Biology is not the final science, does not give the final knowledge, especially not of man. This would give the basis of subjectivity referred to above. In Aristotle this takes the form of a lack of clear distinction between nous, intellect, as creator and thinker of all the world (as in Anaxagoras) and nous as the intellect and form of any man which, he says, perhaps misleadingly, “comes from outside”. He could as well have said it comes from inside. The world, abstractions apart, is, in every case where it is spoken of, the world as known by the speaker. In an immediate sense the world as including one subject as projecting it is not identical with the world as including another subject projecting it. It can only be this if every subject, or these two at least, is or are identical with one another. But nor is this impossible or unthinkable. It forms the basis of both the classical account of knowledge and the religiomystical conception of the community of love, “members one of another”.

2 This formula excludes any view of being as equivocal, e.g. as between predicative, existential, “is” of identity. Rather, these senses are all subsumed under the last-named, a relationship of identity in act, be it in logic or reality (cf. Note 3). Even veritas propositionis is to be thought metaphysically as act, something Aquinas too brings out in his commentary on Peri hermeneias, explaining predication as identity. The whole endeavour is the very opposite of basing metaphysics upon forms of predication merely.

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This move of Aristotle’s is in fact connected with the justification of logic (logica docens) and of the principle of contradiction (Metaphysics IV), of being able to talk about anything. That is why it is still a schema and so one might adopt a Humean attitude in virtue of which the final reality could remain implicit only and self, whether as composite or form, still merely a construct. This would at least reconcile us with all the paradoxes the notion of self gives rise to, leading eventually perhaps to a Buddhistic or “oriental” position. However, if we return to our previous paragraph, it also leads to a conception of each subject as absolutely other, not essentially one individual member of a common biological species. One might want to ask here why this does not apply, or how it applies, to the true reality of, say, rabbits, answering in terms of intellect as subject, final subject. This, further, is the basis for the insight into human equality as based upon fraternal love in freedom. Not “each to count for one and none for more than one”, an ancient principle of civic justice and not revolutionary at all, but each to count for all and none for less than all. Each, that is, is end, not means, subject not needing further subject (hypokeimenon), in the sense in which “I am the captain of my soul”. This means that I, any I, is not to be restricted or imprisoned within the category of a common humanity. He can say “I am from above, you are from below”, where the “you” refers precisely to our “objective” view of “the others”. Thus “Christology” yields a possible philosophical concept deriving from historical religious thought yet able to situate our anthropology metaphysically. At the same time we vindicate or “accomplish” Christology. Our attention is invariably selective from actual experience, itself without limit or universal whether or not involving actualised awareness of this or that individual, as we do not remember every detail of our past life or lives. Yet every real moment and all that went into that moment’s consciousness contributes to how we are now. In that sense each one is a whole world and so quite other than anyone else, with each of whom nonetheless, and just therefore, he is identical. It is the subjectivity that is condition for the universality. The world is nothing other than the minds containing it, nothing other than each of those minds. This, too, is why God is personal. Intellect is differentiated actuality, which is infinity, quite obviously, since only something over again actual could limit it. But it is an unlimitedness of reflection, of which our multiplication is the shadow, unity heaped upon unity in unity. Aristotle argues for the impossibility of a world without substance, and even without several substances. This is not to say that he claims to have identified substances wherever they may be found. He can allow a stone to

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be considered a substance, or even a metal, say gold, individualised so to say at second level, and so one speaks of primary or secondary substances, this gold or gold (this metal), this piece of rock or rock. At the same time the argument of the Metaphysics progresses towards the identification of a unique because infinite Pure Act as the first or most real substance, the most real Being or Being as such. A coincidence with Spinozism seems preparing. Accidents do not exist. There is not properly accidental being (as in the doctrine of being’s univocity). In so far as accidents have being it is identical with that of the substance concerned, as the form of predication indeed expresses. Socrates is white (but not what white is). That Aristotle links his metaphysical argument to defence of the principle of non-contradiction is proof that the rationalist metaphysicians such as those of the early modern period were after all in a certain continuity with him. He treats together the principles of argumentation, of logic, and those of substance (Bk. III) and this all-inclusive science of principles is resolved in what he calls God or substance as act.3 He is not following but resisting forms of speech here, as Hegel will later say that predication is unsuited for knowledge of truth, that “all judgements are false”. In seeming contradiction with this one substance is his claim that there must be several substances for speech to be possible at all. The seeds of the later solution lie in Aristotle’s own philosophy however. The form or essential act of the substance most known to us, that of man, is a form possessing all other forms, the place of forms, forma formarum, to which the material body is merely passive, mutable and therefore not actually anything. Thus it is in its final development identical with that act which is intellect, i.e. it is nothing else or, as we have suggested, it is its cipher. It is never clear in Aristotle when this nous is the nous of the universe and when it is that of an individual as it were created person. The unclarity, however, reflects real identity of what we have still to discern. Not precisely the Anaxagorean all in all that he would avoid but an all in each and an each in all, nevertheless, is the conclusion to which later philosophy, along with theology and mysticism, will arrive. Substance is not thing as we materialistically imagine, but that act at which thinking arrives. Acts can be mutual and yet one, as in the union of love or an act of murder or of tango, which therefore “takes two”, or of an army. Nor, finally, is such act of anything. All participate, not as material parts in a composite whole but as endless facets of one unitary jewel or star. Each 3

995b 5-10. Cf. our “First Principles” in New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics (ed. Campbell Campbell-Jack, Gavin J. McGrath), Inter-Varsity Press, Leicester, UK & Downers Grove, Illinois, USA, 2006, pp.268-271.

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“view” of such a thing is a view of the whole. So there is both one substance and many. The unity is closer than organic, thus the many are not parts of some corpus mysticum. Just as mystical it is no longer corpus, though we may say so, the whole being everywhere, as the universal community is at local level, the “two or three gathered together”. So the idea that by this account God must be reduced to the impersonality of “the systems view” as encompassing a collective reality misses the perfection of the unity in identity to which reason leads in whatever material version of the dialectic is followed to its summit. Thus Hegel would have been mistaken if he thought that his own version of dialectic had to be free from error at every step to lead to the conclusion. What he discovered, rather, and more modestly, was the principle of dialectic itself, whereby every solution short of the perfect one negates itself in a higher synthesis or reconciliation. Eckhart saw this steadily, saying that the eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him. “Myself and God”, said Newman. These are the only two realities. Stopping at this dualism, however, illustrates the intermediate and temporary or finite character of his system (ever a via media!) as, mutatis mutandis, of that of Thomas Aquinas. This estimate seems confirmed by Newman’s appearing to stop at the concept of “the development of Christian doctrine”, failing to allow explicitly that this notion entails development of such development. Yet today a more perfect form of the content of faith is called for, such as Hegel and Newman had both, if differently, attempted to supply. Hegel’s thesis was that philosophy supplied the properly perfect form for the insight offered to faith but which faith and religion had historically offered to philosophy, which therefore, in receiving the divine message and thinking it through, “accomplishes” it. This is not theology, in the sense of “sacred theology”, a mystifying term in today’s context, mainly used to exclude the work of those not in “holy orders” or professionally identified with the religion. It is, rather, philosophy of religion. Such theology proposes a dual source of truth, viz. nature and grace, only partially overcome by Aquinas’s thesis that grace perfects nature. For it perfects it in the sense that nature is only first revealed as anything at all, as form and system, under the action of grace or of absolute Spirit. All is grace, grace is everywhere, and in this way the stock theological term (as we find it in Karl Rahner, say) should finally supersede itself, theology giving up its claim to treat philosophy and reason itself as faith’s handmaid. Faith and reason are “two wings” indeed and there is no subordinative hierarchy of wings or, in so far as there is, then it is the other way round. The “vain philosophy” of the Pauline

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writings is thus invited to give way to a more serious philosophy or wisdom, one that is “from above” or “from outside” (Aristotle’s phrase) indeed. Faith, therefore, is not idle complacency but that urgent beating upon the “cloud of unknowing” which Augustine or Hegel (or Nietzsche or Wittgenstein4) exemplify, seeking and even finding understanding, intellectum, in a measure. Theology is in a sense the creation of the thirteenth century, a reaction to the rediscovery of philosophy within an essentially sacral civilisation. In the early Patristic period Christian thinkers referred to their faith as a higher wisdom, one which existing philosophy therefore should naturally incorporate into itself or, rather, incorporate itself into this wisdom. So we find it in Justin or the Cappadocians, or even St. Paul when he set out to explain this new wisdom. The Christ-event was not essentially event in the finite sense but the appearing of something not seen, not realised, before. The Christians were those who realised it. What caused scandal was their opening their ranks on equal footing, something implicitly denied by the later clericalism, to the uneducated and illiterate. Yet such had been implicit in philosophy as practised by Socrates, for example, who, incidentally, and contrary to the accusation brought against him, had every respect for religion and its traditions. Agnosce o christiane dignitatem tuam, cries Augustine therefore, and it is by the most natural transition that incarnation is seen, comes to be seen, as the revelation of the absoluteness of divinity and of spirit in man. Later philosophy will rediscover Aristotle’s insight that it is not man the composite but this unitary intellectual form and “form of forms” which is the immediate reality of which we are conscious, which we bear. It is in this light that the dogmatic formulations can best be interpreted, rather than in the uncritical categories of an ad hoc philosophy, of a “naive realism” indeed, since some philosophy, some cultural ambience, was always and always will be 4

These last tend to find themselves ranked by the faithful on the side of the deniers. Yet one might assert that there is no other way of understanding the statement that blasphemy against the Son of Man (but not against the Spirit) will be forgiven than the reconciliatory one exemplified here. After all, the great text does not say I should be your way, truth and life but I am (anyone’s who seeks) way, truth and life. Pace Newman again one can be “all in one way” also in this positive sense. This very textual greatness, however, contributes to our grasp of Christianity as “the perfect religion” (Hegel), imperfect, all the same, precisely as religion itself is, beside philosophy, imperfect in form. However, cf. H. de Lubac saying “Catholicism is not a religion”, to which he adds “it is religion itself”, which may be taken as a way, if oblique, of superseding (aufheben) whatever was once meant or striven after by “religion”.

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present, the treasure in earthen vessels. Philosophy, therefore, has no quarrel with the authority of, say, Scripture. It is precisely such Scripture that it will want to think and follow through to its hidden meaning, though not necessarily with the presuppositions of an Origen or a Philo. This was the method of Augustine, of fides quaerens intellectum, not stopping there as if faith were of another order entirely, relegating philosophy forever to the status of some pagan survival of which one had to take note merely. The approach of the new movement to the particular Jewish culture in which it arose, that of fulfilling a promise, extends, mutatis mutandis, to all philosophy everywhere since, it has ultimately to be acknowledged, all religions are true. This follows, in fact, from any claim that the principles of ecumenism, e.g. as elaborated, in maybe preliminary fashion, in a recent “conciliar” decree, are true. Thus the philosophical claim reinforces the religious devotional claim and vice versa. Long ago Porphyry referred to the Jews as a nation of philosophers, and this was indeed a distinction. What tends to be overlooked is that this evaluation is strictly and literally true. The Jewish “law” stands or falls by the same criteria as any earlier philosophical system. Thus it was subverted, and simultaneously fulfilled, from within as are all finite philosophies and as, for example, Hegel, contrary to prevalent impression, expected also of his own system as he himself had materially elaborated it. It is of course true that Christianity sharply distinguishes deeds from words, theory from praxis, but this is a bringing to the light of a characteristic of theoria itself, which Aristotle accordingly called “the highest praxis”. Ascetic practices, monasticism, “social” programmes or almsgiving, even an explicit element of “theurgia”, are not definitionally excluded from philosophy just as, contrariwise, salvation by an act of belief, on the other hand, will always have in it a “gnostic” element. Thus martyrdom, the highest Christian act when informed by charity, is essentially witnessing and holding fast to truth under stress, the very essence also of philosophy, of “getting it right” in general.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO LOVE, REASON, PERCEPTION

One of the most fascinating suggestions of Hegel’s dialectic is that life is not a reality. It coincides uncannily with, as explaining, the Eastern doctrine of maya, while also not contradicting Christian views. Life, dialectical treatment uncovers, is a category insufficient, as finite, to coincide with the real and actual. This belongs rather to cognition or, finally the Idea as idea, Aristotle’s “thought thinking itself”, absolute knowledge. For McTaggart indeed, interpreting and correcting Hegel, knowledge (as we know it!) too is finite illusion before the final and more fully reciprocal reality, beyond subject and object, best called love. “Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away”, atheist and Apostle coincide in saying. McTaggart simply makes more precise that it was never more than appearance, as indeed it must have been for Paul too if we truly “sit with Christ in the heavenly places” eternally, among those whom God foreknew as, time-bound still, he puts it. One can speak of sons or daughters of light (or perdition), a truly timeless relation. This indeed, the finiteness of organic life, is why we die, necessarily. Of course, but here what is drawn attention to is the finiteness, and therefore falsity, of the concept as concept. What is finite finishes (no mere equivocation) and so has merely a relative or “subjective” stability in being. Death then is not merely (and mythically) due to some contingent “Fall”. The fall would be into this kind of thinking, except that Dialectic, like salvation history, as such proceeds from the less to the more perfect, from finite category to open reality. This though is not a historical process, taken absolutely but, precisely, dialectical. We have an analogy, maybe, in the stages of the inner life of prayer, which are not conceived as bound to any specified times, even though what is more perfect must come after. And such prayer too characteristically discovers an unreality in time, clinging to “things which are seen” as opposed to things not seen.1 1

Since this is, like ecumenical Catholicism (Cf. H. de Lubac, Catholicism, 1939), a doctrine of reconciliation one ought perhaps to enquire whether Marxism, lately

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It is of the highest importance to understand rightly the nature of the Dialectic. Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life,… there Dialectic is at work… we find that the limitations of the finite do not merely come from without;… by its own act it passes into its counterpart. We say, for instance, that man is mortal, and seem to think that the ground of his death is in external circumstances only; so that… man would have two special properties, vitality and - also - mortality. But the true view of the matter is that life, as life, involves the germ of death, and that the finite, being radically self-contradictory, involves its own self-suppression.2

Hegel, again, is no mere Marxist before his time, working within historical categories simply. Time, and therefore history, is here deconstructed as he goes beyond and behind it as finding the finite “radically selfcontradictory”, so as to be not merely destroyed but suppressed. This takes place within a logic that discovers (it does not though “delimit”) the possibility of what is “spiritually” realised (thought thinking itself) in actu, in Wirklichkeit. This indeed is the programme of Aristotle’s metaphysics in their unity.3 Hegel can of course admit transferred uses of the term “life”, its analogies. “Life is a Becoming; but that is not enough to exhaust the notion of life. A still higher form is found in Mind. Here too is Becoming, but richer and more intensive than mere logical becoming.”4 Here, however, in the passage quoted above, he is concerned with organic life, and he claims not merely that it ends but that it is illusory in itself. The Christian mystics say as much, whatever commitments there may be or may be thought to be to “realism”.5 So we have …the defect of life. Its notion and reality do not thoroughly correspond to each other. The notion of life is the soul…6

so widespread as a social doctrine, cannot be re-presented with its original perversion of dialectic now aufgehoben. Of course it might then collapse into a version of what we are presenting here or even of prophetic Christianism. 2 G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §81 (subtext). 3 Cf. F. Inciarte, “Die Einheit der Aristotelischen Metaphysik”, Philosophisches Jahrbuch , 101 Jahrgang, 1994, pp. 1-21. 4 Ibid. 88 add. 5 Thought to be, rather. For whether we take all flesh as grass, as dust and ashes or as “nothing and less than nothing” the salient point of “incarnation” is that a nature like ours, whatever it is, was assumed, as is denied by theological Docetism but not by the philosophical doctrine of absolute idealism, say. 6 Ibid. 216 add.

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Here Hegel adds that the soul is as it were infused, adding though that it is only “when the living being is dead, that these two sides of the idea (sc. of life) are different ingredients.” Soul indeed is “the notion” of life and not, as in much Thomism, merely the formal “part”. Indeed he agrees with St. Thomas, implicitly at least, that the (intellectual) soul, as final form or specific difference, takes away or supersedes all other forms and should therefore take away also any forma corporeitatis. Mere matter is nothing other than possibility and, as the dialectic too makes plain, perishability. Such perishability though, in Hegel, is no more than part of a larger instability in being attaching to all finite categories (and not merely to “matter”), and here he might seem to rejoin the two great Greeks, leaving aside the later dualistic speculations on the inherent imperfections of matter or extended stuff. Life, anyhow, “runs away” and “the living being dies, because it is a contradiction”7, i.e. it was never alive. The Dialectic emphatically does not admit real or existent contradictions. Substance had been dismissed even earlier in the Dialectic as candidate for the real. The love, which is what remains, accepting now McTaggart’s critique of cognition, is a relation at one with the persons, human, divine or both, of whom we would wish to predicate it, as in Trinitarianism. A developed Trinitarianism, this would mean, would include the view that God is a necessary being because of the love-relations, and not the other way round, thus reducing the Five Ways to a descriptive role of our mental processes merely. This means, again, that differentiation is prior to simplicity or, otherwise expressed, simplicity can only be embodied, and not remain merely abstract, as differentiation. This is precisely why it is necessary to postulate identity in difference as Hegel does. This is a matter, again, as regards analysis, of finding many prima facie contradictions not to be contradictions at all (this after all is equally the basis for Scholastic distinctions: we don’t need to make distinctions until such an apparent contradiction arises, leading us to ask how both elements can be true, as we need to say). The Trinitarian relations then, once again, are not merely compatible with simplicity but they are prior to as founding it. Beginning with divine simplicity is a concession to the abstractive procedure of our finite thinking. God in himself, the Absolute in itself, however, is, rather, concrete simplicity in these relations as deriving from them, this life. Due to their infinity, their perfection, they coincide with and in a perfect simplicity (this is also Aquinas’s reply to the obvious objection). Equally, however, it follows that this could or would be true of any perfect and 7

Ibid 221 add.

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hence infinite community of relation in love (“God is love”), however conceived. We might have the community of spirits, which is ourselves, each one having the whole unity within himself. Perfect simplicity, that is to say, is describable as “all in all”, and, like that state, belongs to final vision. It is not grasped in advance, any more than eternity, with which it coincides. In Idealism precisely the logical “relation of reason”, identity, is the real relation, as founding in an identity relation’s own characteristic compositeness, the mark of its finitude as proceeding in abstractive alienation. Relation is self-in-other misperceived in immediacy. That this is thinkable as finally, even if beyond our comprehension, compatible and even identifiable with the Trinity of orthodoxy cannot be denied by anyone who admits the Augustinian insight of “one closer to me than I am to myself”. This, in fact, means that the self, in so far as one retains this notion, is not to be conceived on the analogy of a substance, where “each thing is itself and not another thing”. Again, it is not necessary to do more than show that no contradiction has been proved here (as applies equally to divine immutability vis à vis incarnation). But nor should we deny that Trinitarian doctrine can itself develop to a point beyond our present powers of recognition, as some of the Biblical authors might well not have been able initially to recognise their faith in the later formulation. Precisely therefore is why they would need faith, this virtue. Theologians, anyhow, who have propounded notions of “the whole Christ” might have been launching, like St. Paul himself in his day, more than they have personally envisaged. Well that is what we are all trying to do, whether in prayer, meditation or in speech and writing, “or what’s a heaven for?” What is true of God, simplicity, amounts, we seem to be saying, to final, “absolute” reality. This, surely, is why Paul speaks of God finally becoming “all in all”. He could not see how that, now, could be compatible with creation, but yet he knew that it must ultimately be so. He would not have been content to rest with the Scholastic paradox, plura entia, sed non plus entis, as if all were on one level or as if infinity were in its very limitlessness limited by creation, for there we have a true contradiction indeed until, again, distinctions are introduced. Why must reality be simple, we might find ourselves wanting to ask. Here again the arguments of Aquinas on the matter serve fairly well, and those beings added, as we imagine, in a creation, are not beings as is the Absolute, even if we want still, with Aquinas, to give esse pride of place as God’s most worthy or proportionate product, so to say. This is why, again, he has to say, too, that any divine idea is identical with the divine essence and that this idea, not some other thing, is what that essence so to

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say “knows” or has relation to, though this “relation”, as identity, is not a real relation as of persons. As identity, though, it may be inverted, as there is no “imitable” perfection of God which is not, it too, this very Idea. It is in this sense that the unity would be for the differentiations and not vice versa. They are what realises it, as it were rescuing it from the abstractness of idea as in our conception merely.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE MAN THE SACRAMENT OF UNITY: IS MAN A SPECIES?

Theologians have written of Christ the sacrament, or of the Church as the sacrament of perfect unity, a perfect humanity. But for an idealist philosophy all that is visible is a sign of something “inward and spiritual”, which will be absolute. This ultimate assumption of the philosophical to “the place where it was before”, that of highest wisdom, must result from the implicit supersession of the profane as a category implicit already in the signifying of the absolute in just one man. Apartness and alienation are there declared untrue in our very thought. There is no behind appearance, and so a sacrament is indeed what it signifies without any prior transsubstantiation being needed. But man signifies the absolute, as Aristotle noted in saying that the soul is quodammodo omnia. This quodammodo refers not so much, or not exclusively, to that intentional identity which constitutes the soul’s intellection. Aristotle himself states that the soul “comes from outside”. It refers rather to the plain fact that there are many souls. Each must therefore be all in a way that is qualified by this circumstance. Not only so but this coming from outside, as if less than absolute, is deeply modified by the realisation of the sacramentality, the character of sign, as of something, misperception even, to be seen through, attaching to all that is material and visible, so that in reality the inside is the outside and vice versa. Aristotle’s own theory of the soul, rightly understood, will show that it should not be thought apart from the whole man, the “body”, of which it is the unity and life. This soul then is the man or, which is the same, the man is the sacrament, the “appearance”, of his soul, which is thus the reality, the self, as we might say. As everywhere in Aristotle, the ultimate difference specifies and determines the whole. This principle, however, ultimately negates or transcends his whole biology, since it is only here, ultimately, that one emerges from dialectic into what is true and real and as reconciling all else in a higher unity. In a related way the evolution of man within biology today is represented, though this is

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contradiction, as overcoming and transcending biology. A creature emerges who can, it is supposed, judge and understand how he and this power of judgement itself have emerged while he simultaneous continues emerging into something else again. This “first actuality”, as understood here, is just actuality, what is real and true, which the rest symbolizes in, we are saying, “sacramental” form in accordance with our fragmentary manner of perception as represented by the all-pervasive spatio-temporal format. For Aristotle all living things have this actuality. Animals and plants exhibit self-movement and not only so but they have a “natural functional organization” (Gendlin). However, they exercise this within a closed environment, whereas man takes the all as his province which is thus no mere province. This difference is far greater than the resemblance. Animals and plants are remote imitations of man, as we would expect if man is to see himself as within an extended environment in any way. Either this, i.e. they are man’s creation, or they are spirits in disguise, as it were. The various interactions of this extended world, which Aristotle makes in some way basic, eating, self-nourishment, metabolism, harmonize with the unity of spirits in which each has the unity of all within himself or herself or perhaps himherself, as is reflected in the “exchange of ideas”, or just in language, at once wholly physical and wholly spiritual. “Words are not thoughts dressed” (Wordsworth). Our very words for this are taken first from the biological processes. We conceive ideas, like “offspring”, we mix metaphors, like foods, etc. etc. These processes are our primary way of projecting spirit. We tell ourselves stories. But it is intellection itself, the perfect way in which one reality can be in and one with another in its very otherness, which shows the untruth, the provisional nature, of what we begin with, like babyhood. “When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away with” and not re-membered. We ascended to “the perfect” because it was already there to ascend to. The past is a dream, a ladder we have kicked away. This is why it was said even of God, “I will not remember their sins any more”, which is impossible if the past remains as present, i.e. is real.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR WHAT WAS AT STAKE IN MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY? A HISTORICAL VIEW1

I begin with some considerations concerning natural science and evolutionary theory in particular, situating both in relation to philosophical speculation. The aim or, rather, expectation, is to see how absolute idealism emerges both as pointed to by such science and as implied by a deeper penetration, in the light of later developments, of the medieval endeavour to provide a philosophy of the transcendent. In relation to this latter a main claim here is that the Christian differentiation of the transcendent into persons and relationships, actually identified with one another, spells the end, the supersession or Aufhebung, not of transcendence but of a separated or, as it will now be seen to be, abstract transcendence. Self-transcendence is rather to be seen as immanent in any consciousness or subject. If differentiation is at all possible it will, as pertaining to the Absolute, be necessary, though not thereby unfree.2 However, there is no certain way of determining which thinkable differentiation is the one that is necessary. We do not even know, if we go so far, whether there might not be a whole set of overlapping differentiations all equally actual, since we deal with infinity. At any rate, once, as in idealism, the importance of the conscious subject is conceded, then nothing stands in the way of the simpler model whereby those subjects or spirits known to us, and not an abstracted fusion of essence, existence, omnipotence and so on, form the differentiations of the absolute, which then actualises its properties in each one severally, as is also the case with the three divine persons of theology. 1

This title would recall André de Muralt’s L’enjeu de la philosophie mediévale, Brill: Leyden 1991. 2 This Hegelian commonplace can be verified, or called in question, by perusal of Hegel’s text.

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The arguments for this Trinity are put forward post factum revelatum and depend upon the drawing of analogies with differentiations made within spirits as known to us, principally knowledge and will, which analogies are then “personified” or absolutised. What is not considered is that the admission of differentiation opens the way for the simpler immanentist solution for which, as McTaggart points out, one may or may not retain the traditional religious names, God and so on. One can put this by saying that the theological example Aquinas offers of his philosophical thesis of necessary divine simplicity stretches its interpretability to such a great degree that the thesis, and consequently our view of the relation of terms with which it is defined, viz. essence and existence, is rendered so open as to be equally applicable to other schemes besides the Trinitarian. Simplicity, essence and existence thus understood can all be accommodated to McTaggart’s atheistic understanding, for example. On the other hand it is quite clear that Thomistic simplicity is a forerunner of the richer notion of identity in difference. This notion allows all persons to be identified in the one spiritual unity. This, rather than an abstract simplicity, is ultimate. Such a simple unity would in fact be less perfect, as less real, an abstract conception merely, the pure concept cum praecisione. In reality nothing is thus separated or abstract and so one prescinds from nothing. Every appearance, rather, is appearance of the actual and, hence, notning apart from it from which one might prescind. This is the reality of both creation and incarnation, from which indeed Spirit proceeds, as being “revelation itself”, this very proceeding. So there is no pure being, except in idea. Making God to be being alone depends upon separating it from essence in the first place. But, equally, essence is never separable from being, in reality, quite obviously since reality is being. Such a separation belongs to thought alone. Being is a concept of an essence that is not an essence, since its essence is act. If we think act, in second intention, it becomes in turn an essence. So act is not on a par with essence; it is more concrete and specific from the point of view of thought. Act as thought is essence. That is why God is not to be thought, not even as existence (this is the meaning of saying that his essence, his idea, is existence: it transcends thought). So he is not being, unless we would go back on the very prohibition we have just stated. He is freedom in the sense of (being) free of being anything. He is perhaps “what he makes himself and nothing else” (Sartre’s characterisation of man!). He makes himself a unity of persons, be they three or innumerable.

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McTaggart wished to deny that the Absolute, the whole, is conscious, as are, for him, the differentiated spirits. There cannot be a solitary consciousness, he argued. In Trinitarian theology, however, the three persons, when considered apart from their non-symmetrical relations, act always together, constitutionally and not merely habitually. They are one God. “He that has seen me has seen the Father”, i.e. has seen the whole, has seen God. In seeing the Son we see the Father, in the Spirit no doubt. Just so may it be that apart from our (human) relations, when we remain alone in our thought, our sensation, even our sleep, then the whole as more than a sum totality, as the unitary necessity rather without which I am not myself (as that is not itself without me, or you), is consciously and actively operative and hence present. Just so acts God in Trinity, according to orthodox theology, when impinging upon creation. The two situations, our contemplation, divine providence, seem opposite but both are at one in distance from internal relations of either the deity or the human community. Thus the dreaming poet, the sleeping child, two lovers still more, are each in their time and place the centre (not a centre; that is contradictory) of absolute reality and being. Which is the same as to say that time and space, like birth and death, play no role at all. To have been born negates birth and beginning, since one is. This is the ultimate truth of the scholastic subsistentia, as applied to being a person, touched on in the Gospel in reference to talk of “the God of Abraham and Isaac”, who are therefore living, i.e. this is what talk of having a God means, since this alone is why God can only be “God of the living”. * Idealism, indeed, makes common cause with “absolute religion” as we know it today and yesterday, in that both put man, subjective spirit, at the centre. Hence for Aquinas animals are more deeply playful imitations of “everlasting man”, kept hidden in the heavens, than they are his causal forerunners. Indeed it is not possible just to accept evolution and then speak of an “ontological discontinuity” between animals and men, as today’s Church leadership is fond of doing. The same phrase is applied to God in relation to creation, between which, if we would call them two beings, there is an analogy only. The plain implication of such a phrase, its only legitimacy, could be within an idealist outlook, where only spirit is real and where nature as a whole is an imperfect conception or, as fragmentary, misperception. In religious terms, animals and plants would not have part of the resurrection, of eternity, which is indeed what we find

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Aquinas saying. He speaks instead of the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed as compensating for any supposed loss. In philosophical terms though reference to such a glorified body is the same as reference to spirit, of which the human body as we know it is cipher, as part of that system of imperfect perception we call Nature. “When that which is perfect is come then that which is imperfect is done away with.” And if it is forever done away with then it is not now or ever actual, let the dinosaurs roar how they will. It is all construction, since, to view it from another angle, we cannot on common-sense or “physicalist” premises have a mere part of this evolutionary process understanding this process as anything more than its own organic cognitive function (i.e. as construction, though here too contradiction lurks) while, we have seen, dualist presupposition of intellect as coming from outside equally must reduce nature to a construction, to the outside becoming the inside and vice versa. * We may, anyhow, understand the interpretation of the world offered by natural science as a kind of preliminary abstraction. This it is whether or not we accept the traditional theory of it as the first of three grades of abstraction, of which metaphysics is the last and, strangely, mathematics the intermediary one. So science begins with simple observation, although the observer brings to this task a philosophy (third grade) which will include rationale at least of what he now undertakes. He collates the results, thereby determining which supplementary types of observation, including experiments, will supply more results, in the form of an understanding permitting consistent explanation and accurate identification of remaining areas of ignorance. Now the idea that the philosopher, by contrast, situates himself at some further distance from the phenomena before commencing his own attempt to reason and understand seems unwarranted. The one activity leads easily into the other, as the case of Aristotle illustrates. Like everyone else one awakes to experience, inclusive of information supplied by others, the tradition and human milieu, and strives to understand and explain it more fully. One’s time and other investments one may parcel out as one will and whether or not one becomes classed as a specialist in some limited field is not categorially decisive. What counts is the work, works, one produces. These will be texts, either inclusive of or accompanied by demonstrations, which the texts assume only so as to interpret them. Behind the texts, however, as what they signify, is the thinking spirit, and that is what we all

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are and were irrespective of all signification. Rather, consciousness itself is the prime signification. Such a refusal of abstract stratification of types of enquiry, however, as if reducing metaphysics to meta-specialisation, does not permit the assertion that the world is “as science says it is”. Science has not thus spoken. There is no such person to speak. Physicists have to philosophise like everyone else, and they do, increasingly. The level is rising, for here too there is “globalisation”. Nature as a whole has to be set in the cognitive context of a further whole or “absolute”, loosed, that is, from falsifying finitude or specialisation. Specialised studies, rather, in their essence, lead to the further questions of what knowledge is, what thinking, of how one can think the world. Evolution is sometimes interpreted, in view of its result, as the world become conscious of itself, in that lately evolved species which now thinks evolution. There is a circle here, be it benign or vicious. There would also and equally be a circle, however, where one interpreted the theory as the latest ploy merely in the struggle for survival, a circle, and also a regress. Is interpreting theory as a ploy itself a ploy? Must it not then be so? Is not interpretation then impossible? But that is itself an interpretation. And so on, on, on… The circle in the first case is in fact the same circle, in that a theory of evolving itself evolves and so has to include itself. That is, cognition evolves, its act as its being. But cognition, as then finally opening the whole event to view, the event which has caused such cognition, as that real recapitulation we alone can call knowledge, is itself prior, at least as form of the whole, at most as in itself totally a thinking of itself. The Darwinian insight, all the same, was closer to Hegel’s thought than is generally acknowledged. Thus far the attempt to see man as the crown of a biological development fails for the reasons supplied. The discovery that man is or must be seen as such a development, nonetheless, abolishes any possibility of biology as an absolute mode of perception. There can be no such bios to be perceived. The category of life, in dialectical terms, is imperfect, finite and, just as such, false. We cannot have an apparently contingent process magically culminating in man the perfect knower, Hegel’s talk of reason’s cunning notwithstanding. Man, spirit, has to have been there all the time, time now needing to be seen as a dialectical series, negating realist biology. The theory of evolution as found within a realist pursuit of science is thus strictly a halfway house, transitional to idealism or hyperidealism, to stay with the traditional division for the moment. To this extent evolution is self-dissolving, even apart from the incidental perplexities as to how it is possible in a world of chance, on such a time-

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scale, and so on. Hypotheses of extra-planetary causality of life can never overcome these contradictions, simply removing them to another part of the system as extensionally conceived. Yet evolution reflects perfectly the natural system. This system itself, therefore, the world of daily prephilosophic perception, now dissolves in the minds of men, though this is nothing new, merely its wider incidence, loosely called democracy. Religion and philosophy here attain a new degree of vindication. This is what ascent to the “noosphere” should mean and not an impossible development within nature itself, since nature is not an absolute. This knowledge was always available all the same. Aristotle had it. “The soul is in a way all things.” This is not a claim of special human privilege merely, or at all, but a flat statement of the primacy of thinking, ultimately of thought thinking only itself, as “all”. This soul, as spirit and nous, is human as sublating the (phenomenally) human. Anima mea non est ego, wrote Aquinas, while Aristotle ascribed to soul “the sovereignly determinative role of the ultimate specific difference”.3 This determination means for McTaggart that we are spirits and nothing else. There is nothing else. Spirit contains all, nor is this alien to the minds of Plato or Aristotle. In saying therefore that “the intellect comes from outside”4 Aristotle had something different in mind from Aquinas’s miraculous creationism within the natural system, something more Spinozistic, we might say. He would have meant, at least, that intellect forms no part of nature, of the material physis our senses encounter. Aquinas, equating nature with creation more readily than with ens mobile, could think of something transcendent and yet within the existent, observable system. The view however is in some way magical, as of a God who intervenes. Spinoza, it has been suggested, was in some respects the founder of our view of the world, of nature, as entirely amenable to scientific research and explanation. Nature is one divine attribute, for him, infinite and under that aspect entirely exhaustive of God’s nature. Mind, of the researcher or of God, is the other of these two attributes, all that are known to us of what must be an infinite number, Spinoza argues from the original (originating) infinity. Peter Geach’s account of thinking veers, if under Frege’s influence, towards the Spinozistic, though presented as an interpretation of Thomism (one might say the same of Spinoza himself, of course). Thus he stresses that “there is no empirical nature of the thought process”, just as there is no organ, nothing we “think with”, since “it is the whole man that 3

See our Natural Law Reconsidered, Frankfurt (Peter Lang), 2002, p.203f., for background to this; also F. Inciarte, “Die Einheit der Aristotelischen Metaphysik”, Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 1994, pp.1-22. 4 Aristotle, in On the Parts of Animals.

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thinks”. He does not think with his “soul”, in other words, i.e. “we cannot infer that he does think with an immaterial part of himself.” All we can mean positively by soul-talk is that “thinking is a vital activity”, an activity, however, that might “occur independently”,5 but which clearly has no necessary connection with, i.e. forms no part of, the natural world. In so far as Geach hints here at some kind of textual origination (his example is a roulette wheel) he approaches the Popperian doctrine of three worlds, material things, the subjective realm of minds, objective structures produced by mind (not, as objectified, fully separable from the first world, however). This might without too much violence be seen as a new Spinozism supplying now three attributes of the divine or of the world of worlds, reality, though Popper himself, unlike Spinoza, might see this as an exhaustive account of such “attributes”. It rather confirms though that Popper’s own theory of evolution is one with his theory of knowledge, one, again, with an activity of “problemsolving” in turn one with the constant, i.e. defining struggle for survival of “all organisms”. For this is thinking, a thinking that is thinking itself, since these organisms do not think. They play the part of the roulette-wheel rather, a hypokeimenon indeed. We construct the past from the present, according to the more consistent versions of idealism.6 Can we seriously take the step of accepting this? Awareness of the contradiction posed by naturalism, evolutionary or otherwise, is not new. It certainly seems to vindicate C.S. Lewis as against G.E.M. Anscombe, on the main point at least of their 1947 debate. It is however what led to the various historic forms of dualism, of intellect and understanding generally, “truth” for Augustine, “soul” for others, spirit both human and divine as removed from the sphere of nature, ad extra. There were however always systems placing understanding (Popper’s “problem-solving”) within nature, as being down to atoms, monads, relationships. With Plato nature, ens mobile, began to be seen (in contrast to the “physicists”, but in line with many yet older philosophies, in Asia for example) as illusory, merely phenomenal as Kant was later to put it. Putnam’s pragmatic or “internal” realism is in fact idealism, as if Dummett’s “anti-realism” and the consequent jettisoning of bivalence is in functional relation to the universal reconciliation claiming to be mirrored in Hegelian-type philosophy or “phenomenology of mind”. It is indeed an instance of it, the notion that such development was thought of as stopping 5

P.T. Geach, God and the Soul, p.38. E.g. A. Randrup, “Cognition and Biological Evolution”, cirip.mobilixnet.dk/evolutioncognition.html

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with Hegel himself (Kojève’s interpretation, apparently) being simply myth and error. But now, should we go along with Putnam’s notion that things can only be said to exist within a conceptual scheme? He will then have to grant that, for example, the palaeontologists are making their discoveries (of existing fossils) within a conceptual scheme. This will be absolute idealism, which conceives of itself as “absolved” from any such scheme! Thomas Aquinas, on Aristotelian principles, arrived at the position that the intellectual soul and that alone is forma corporis, i.e. that which makes the body what it is. Now Aquinas was careful to distinguish the faculty of intellect from the soul as (incomplete) substance, according to him. The expression “incomplete substance” indicates an overstress, if not actually a breakdown, of the inherited or adopted hylomorphic language. An impression is conveyed of the intellect as a substance informing (in fact forming) the body, while in thinking, its attribute (cf. Descartes talk of res cogitans), it acts on its own. Aquinas, that is, did not take the step of saying that the intellect, the spirit, thinks the body. Yet what else, having gone so far, could be the relationship? The intellect, in the same philosophy, is an act, actus; it is never at rest. The talk of the passive intellect is simply adversion to its finitude and is heavily if abstractly metaphorical. Aquinas cannot say, however, that the intellect thinks the body since on his account human intellect needs the body to understand. All its activity begins by abstraction from sense-experience, even its understanding, and ipso facto forming, of the principle of non-contradiction.7 But this is very odd if the intellect is also the form of the body, i.e. that by which the body is what it is and indeed anything at all. As a subsistent entity it cannot need the body to make it itself to be a body. The relation, incidentally, to the forms of animals or organic substances is merely analogical since those are not subsistent but principia merely. They do not exist in any priority to the body, nor in any way whatever. The intellect is called subsistent, prior to death, in that it has no separate esse from the so-called composite which is the human being. This identity of esse is of course usually put the other way round. As a contrast and thereby an incidental help to our understanding, Aquinas presents his account of angels as pure spirits, pure forms. These subsistent intellects are created with the species of all things present in them a priori. Each one therefore duplicates God in his omniscience virtually, differing from him as receiving being from him, i.e. their (finite) 7

Cf. Aristotle, Post. An. II, final chapter.

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esse and (finite) essence are not identical. Insofar however as there must be a logical order and building up of the species or concepts within the angelic intellect there would be an analogy with the ordered developing of the human mind in individual growth and in history. Given absolute idealism these two orders must be the same. We misperceive (in McTaggart’s strong phrase) a quasi-logical series as a temporal series. As part of the same misperception we see ourselves as bodies, subject to change and decay, from which however, particularly the face, we read off as well as we can the quality of the immortal spirit, from the “human form divine”. In this way the intellect forms the body indeed, as might any angel, there being in fact no difference. Ultimately, or, rather, in the final analysis, in the trans-futurity of “heaven”, each spirit will “have the species of”, will perceive each other one, since that is entirely what there is. The unity of the whole system will find itself within the particular personality, all persons thus forming the most perfect unity or whole. Thus in Aquinas one angel perceives, has the “impressed species”, of all the others.8 Aquinas has difficulty here in explaining how they remain separate beings and one thinks again of the scriptural “I in them and they in me” or, yet more forcefully, “you are all members one of another”, from another hand there. For Hegel spirit just is self in other. In many cultures, e.g. the Japanese, the individual self is not seen and is often positively argued not to be totally distinct from the collective self.9 From this point of view it is an error to diagnose the sense of alienation, as experienced typically in the young person exposed to irregularities in upbringing or environment, as imperfect socialisation merely. This term can imply a Procrustean denial of delicate feelings of individual selfhood, which will be totally erroneous if the self in its own deepest being just is this relatedness, as the self knows itself in loving or in falling in love with another. It has only to learn that this experience, so-called bonding, is in principle extensible to all others, to the other, otherness, as such, which is not to deny that he or she can only proceed by the one-by-one principle, normally starting, no doubt, with the mother (a fact which may help to 8

Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 56, 2. “Japanese people commonly think that the self exists only in relationships with others… our mind is thought to exist in a field of relationships. The self cannot be considered separate from the relationship field nor having as clear a boundary, as Western people imagine… one of the conditions to be an adult is the ability to feel somebody else’s or the group’s feelings.” Makiko Okuyama, “The Sense of Self among the Japanese”, in George E. Lasker (ed.), Advances in Systems Studies, Windsor, Canada, 1993, p.29 (cited in A. Randrup, “Idealist Philosophy: What is Real?”, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001216/01/reality.html.).

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explain why women are more commonly “bi-sexual” in feeling than are men). Aquinas, as a pre-evolutionary philosopher, would have seen the animals more as perhaps playful imitations of aspects of man, or of the incarnate Word, than as causal fore-runners10 and this is paradoxically nearer to the truth, or more deeply true, than the naturalist-realist evolutionary account. Evolution is the “latest” construction of a past that we have produced, moving downwards through the edifice of our own being. It completes the unique construction that we have always been making, the spirit “going forth as nature”. That fossils should also be posited is mere consistency. This startling position, we should recall, has been arrived at by elimination, and it is fully consistent with Putnamian internal realism, for example. Whereas nineteenth century churchmen were prepared to say that God created fossils to mislead the over-curious and that really the world was created in 4004 B.C. (there were and are of course less extreme instances of people baulking at “the descent of man”), we are now prepared to say that the fossil scenario was constructed indeed not by God but by man. They exist indeed as true and dateable fossils but this existence, like any other, is only real within a conceptual scheme, and this scheme is our construction. We ourselves, however, are real simply as the conceivers, not though as atomistic individuals but as mutually begotten in the perceptions (the ultimate truth of what we fragmentarily perceive as “conceptual schemes”, judgements etc.) of one another. The fossils are “as real as tomorrow’s breakfast” (McTaggart), no more and no less. Evolution, then, is rejected equally by “fundamentalists” and by absolute idealists, if for reasons identical in difference. Contradiction is only avoided by excepting the human mind or soul (“infused”) from the reach of evolution. Not only, however, does the evidence within the paradigm or conceptual scheme, which is that within which we live as taking ourselves as sentient and embodied, make it more and more improbable that there can be such an infused soul breaking in upon hominid evolutionary continuity, but, from the other end, where biology reaches up to our mental life as devising biology as a science then biology itself is destroyed and with it so is man as a biological composite destroyed. So this third position too must be rejected by evolutionary theory itself, which however has no other to adopt. Hence we arrive at absolute idealism by elinination. This position however does not allow us 10

Cf. Theron, “Intentionality, Immateriality and Understanding in Aquinas”, The Heythrop Journal XXX (1989), pp.151-159.

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to go on speaking of evolution in the way desired by such as Teilhard de Chardin. In so far as physics might seem to be adjusting itself to an idealist position, it would be incumbent upon us to recast biology more wholeheartedly in this perspective, supporting bio-chemistry with biophysics. Science and philosophy will now be at one in presenting the “real image” of man, which is idealist, like Plato’s unseen soul, and not physicalist, as was but recently thought. Both versions though differ equally extremely from the common-sense view or “manifest image”. What is needed is a theory of fields, of some new kind of form, of nature as precisely objectified spirit, once again. Hegel’s own natural philosophy may not have much to offer here, which is not to say that his endeavour was itself vitiated. What is needed now is a study, which might be called “Evolution Understood Dialectically”, where one understands that any comprehended dialectic will be, as self-conscious, of the mind, not material except as this notion be contained within mind. The development of spirit itself within or from nature, gone forth from the “absolute idea”, is to be viewed dialectically just in that and because it cannot be viewed as a material and/or biological development. This is the crisis provoked just by the principle of evolution. * The category of life, we said, is imperfect. Biological evolution must then be seen dialectically, if we are to avoid contradiction or the associated “twin earth” difficulty. In general there is no proportion between truth and favourability to survival. A merely evolved evolutionary theory would not be truly theoretical. It would be, at best, a model for “getting on”, which one would be at liberty to deny. It is a feature of the Hegelian dialectic that it is not temporal. Rather, each earlier step is subsumed into the later. If it ends in absolute spirit, the Absolute Idea, then this is reality. All is found in the end to be spirit. In the Kingdom of the Spirit this is so. Nature, materiality, is thus subsumed. That is what the contradictions of evolution, of nature becoming conscious of itself, are forcing us to attend to. The plants, the animals, the prehistoric ages, time itself, and so space, are imperfect categories, primary building blocks in a dialectic taking its character through and through (unlike a temporal series) from its ultimate state, thus parallelling the Aristotelian specific difference in the hierarchy of forms which, however, disappear as each, except the last, is assumed into a higher form. It is true, as McTaggart points out, that we do not know if some of these things, e.g. animals, are not eternal spirits like ourselves, if we are indeed

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such, but misperceived. The rest, however, is only explicable thus, as an ordered non-temporal series. Can we really be the necessary, though in some sense finite differentiations of the whole or Absolute? “Each differentiation, not being the whole, will be finite.”11 Yet McTaggart says, in his commentary on Hegel’s Logic, that “that is truly infinite whose boundaries are determined by the fact that it is itself, and not by mere limitation from outside.” In so far as he speaks in his own person he seems, if he refers here to a differentiated spirit, to contradict himself. Or he means, like Hegel, that the finite is in the infinite and the infinite in the finite. For Aquinas too the infinite is necessarily differentiated, e.g. as a Trinity of persons or relations indifferently, but each divine person is equally infinite. Again, there are divine ideas of everything, but each idea is identical with the (infinite) divine essence. This led historically (i.e. in the dialectic) to philosophies of all in each, “the world in a grain of sand”. For McTaggart it gives us the differentiated spirits and the unity of the whole as fully present in and “for” each one of them. Other ideas are all our misperceptions, it would seem. If, as in McTaggart, the Absolute has no consciousness duplicating that of the community of spirits the problem will wear a different face, though each is conscious of the whole. McTaggart here is the successor of Henry of Ghent, who maintained against the Thomist, Thomas Sutton, that necessary existence need not be exclusive to an infinite being or essence. However, we noted that, at least ,in a sense, each being is infinite. What, after all, does Thomas Aquinas show in making the Absolute an infinite necessary being? Might it not as well be all of us as the Trinity, differentiated even if Thomas thinks he can reconcile it with the divine simplicity. The McTaggartian community of persons might equally have an identity of essence and existence, since Thomas is explicit that we do not know what either of these things are in God, only that they must coincide. It follows that our God could be of the McTaggartian, superficially atheistic form, under which it includes each one of ourselves, no longer separate, however, or in its self. Each one has the whole unity. Each one is free. In this community we must then find the unity, truth, goodness and beauty of real being, the transcendentals after all only taking their colour from our human spiritual faculties of intellect and will. Truth and goodness differ from being, whatever is, in no other respect for Aquinas.12 The beauty of this eternal community is apparent, its praise breathed forth throughout the New Testament. 11 12

McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology 8. Cf. Aquinas, QD de potentia 7.

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For Aquinas God is, has to be, wholly simple.13 Nonetheless there is the real distinction of persons, plus the distinctio rationis cum fundamento in re between the attributes and the essence, as indeed between the attributes themselves. Regarding the ideas, they belong to the understanding of God’s essence as infinitely imitable, so it is not against his intellective simplicity that he “understands many things”, as it would be if he had a separate representation (species) for each thing.14 Regarding the persons, “by how much more perfectly something proceeds (ad intra), by that much is it one with that from which it comes”.15 The Father’s mind is one with his Word. Number, too, is taken only abstractly in God, not as counting anything, so that the Father is as great in quantity as the whole Trinity.16 Still, one might feel there is not much left here of the ideal of absolute simplicity. In any case the whole argument can be replicated on McTaggart’s scheme, where each person possesses the whole unity and is, we saw, in some sense infinite. Each contains and mirrors all and neither the whole nor the persons have any reality except in constituting the other, since love defines each (a perfect reciprocity beyond that of knowledge), though the whole is for the persons and not vice versa. The consideration from a Japanese source mentioned above about a collective personality (not to be confused with the atman) brings persons nearer to the Trinitarian persons of Christian tradition and also strengthens the simplicity of the system as in some way absolute. How else explain that each person is essential, i.e. necessary, since the unity is in each of the united individuals and would be destroyed if just one were lost? The unity, complete in each, is the bond uniting all. This unity, indeed, is the whole nature of any individual. An undifferentiated individual would not exist. The whole meaning of the unity is to be differentiated into just that particular plurality. Hence no one is contingent; all are necessary. It is difficult not to feel that McTaggart meets all of Aquinas’s requirements for ultimate reality, apart from the smaller number of persons. That God is no longer distinct from ourselves is another consideration altogether, though we might indeed still say with Augustine “closer to me than I am to myself”, since it is now patent that I am not myself, even “analogously”, in abstraction from the whole. Nor was I ever that. The doctrine of the true self or atman permits us to worship a God that is not an other. In going to meet him I find myself, most intimately 13

Cf. Summa theol. Ia 3, 7. Aquinas, Ibid.Ia 15, 2. 15 Ia 27, 1 ad 2. 16 Ia 30, 1 ad 4. 14

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(intimior me mihi). As for the transient surd of moral evil, McTaggart points out that it presents a difficulty on any showing, e.g. in Thomism where God “pre-moves” any behaviour whatever, and he gives this question his attention in his Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, since for him, in a totally personal cosmos, axiological and physical questions coalesce, as they anyhow do for all who characterise God as love. Although we paired him above with Henry of Ghent McTaggart’s link with Sutton and the Thomists, as with Hegel, Leibniz, Nicholas of Cusa or Eckhart is more intimate, we claim. For Henry of Ghent any essence carries with it a proportionate finite existence, with which it might even be identical. For Thomas Sutton esse, being, is infinite, containing all perfections (perfectio perfectionum), only restricted, but never limited in itself, by the finitude of a particular essence, as this is not naturally receptive of more. Hence an infinite essence alone could have esse infinitely, in its plenitude namely. Being, such a philosopher would argue, is itself infinite since only being over again could, impossibly, limit it: There could be nothing outside the essence of being which could constitute a particular species of being by adding to being; for what is outside of being is nothing and cannot be a difference.17

This consideration is the basis for the doctrine of the analogy of being, whereby all usual predication is construable as the predication “specifically” of being but secundum quid, not simpliciter, since the essence (i.e. whatever “else” is predicated) adds “some diminishing qualification”.18 But since in reality, i.e. apart from our language and limited perception, the unqualified notion of being is applicable to God alone Sutton can say that “with regard to God everything else is rather non-being than being” and this is the position that Hegel and his successors have undertaken to make functionally explicit in their account of reality. Sutton of course knew that this had been the view of Augustine19, who, however, only says “perhaps”. Sutton concludes: “Only

17

Aquinas, In metaphysicam Aristotelis, 5, 9, n.5. We may recall that for McTaggart being, as existence, is itself a species of “reality”, as might seem to be the case with Meinong and the proponents of “sistology”. 18 Cf. G. Klima, “Thomas Sutton and Henry of Ghent on the Analogy of Being”, Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics, Vol. 2, 2002, pp. 34-45. See p.42 of this. 19 Augustine, VII DeTrinitate 32.

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God should be said to be an essence. For only He exists truly, since He is unchangeable”.20 This is exactly Hegel’s position. Henry of Ghent, it is clear, works, like Scotus, with a more “logical” or conceptual notion of being, whereas Aquinas never forgets, in discussing such absolute matters, the real metaphysical situation. In this light, however, the analogy of being doctrine becomes a kind of attempted amelioration of the untruth of the finite as we perceive it.21 Our efforts should be directed rather to rising above such an “analogy” by means of an ascent through the dialectical categories to the discovery of the “absolute idea”, prefigured in the category, beyond that of essence, of cognition (not necessarily our human process only from which the name is taken) whereby self, as becoming all other, is infinite and hence true. Thus only an infinite essence could be identical with its being and, therefore, necessary, though the being would, equally, then be the essence. This, the converse, prevents us from identifying this actus essendi with an abstractly infinite existence. Thus for Aquinas, as for Hegel, infinity, to be such, is necessarily differentiated, e.g. as a Trinity of real relations. This Thomistic doctrine, again, of being as a quasi-magical infinity which we enjoy according to the degree of our capacity, although in itself it is the same infinity for all, is one, not parcelled out, links Aquinas with the later philosophies of the whole, the unity, as reflected and totally present and possessed in each part, the centre being everywhere in what in the end has to be a universal cognition or something yet more reciprocal (love, claims McTaggart, in philosophical vindication of I Corinthians 13). Conversely, though, each thing is in a way infinite. Things do not exist as isolated but only as they are unified in the Absolute… the “unity of persons need not itself be personal”… and McTaggart adds that “by Hegel’s usage a finite person who was not the whole reality but… harmonious with himself is as infinite as the Absolute”, which “cannot exclude its differentiations from itself.”22 So here we, or the spirits constituting reality, are all necessary beings. Thus can they be identical

20

Thomas of Sutton, Quaestiones ordinariae, München 1977, q.32, quoted in Klima, op. cit. 21 It is noteworthy that in the tradition this analogy (of being) is scarcely ever mentioned when considering the entia rationis, although these “beings” are nonetheless so prominent there. It is as if it was already in germ understood that Spirit or final Being is the synthesis of the Absolute Idea and its antithesis or “selfdiremption” in Nature, i.e. these are by no means analogies of Spirit, which rather completes them. 22 McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology 8.

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with their existence severally and yet all together, each having the unity of all as intrinsic to the self. If, finally, we take account of the agnostic note in Aquinas whereby we know neither infinite (divine) essence nor infinite (divine) being, then the Absolute might as well, ceteris paribus, take the form envisaged by McTaggart as take the form of Trinity. Incarnation can, even on Aquinas’s principles and in his expressis verbis, in the pars tertia of the main Summa, be extended to all, thus becoming, however, a figure for cognition as described above, all in each and each in all. In each system, furthermore, the same degree of simplicity, which necessarily falls short of an abstract simplicity merely, is preserved, of all in each and each in all again, plurality being fully plurality whether of three or of three hundred billion, say. But plurality is not composition. Plurality, as exemplified in these two systems, transcends composition and thus, as incomposition, instances simplicity. Later, and separately, one might enquire whether McTaggart’s vision can be prised away from his denial of “higher” persons, so that all might be in verbo, so to say, the parts being “for” the whole after all as well as the whole for the parts. This though, it might seem, would negate the historic Kantian intuition of the “kingdom” of persons as a “kingdom of ends”, use of the scriptural term deliberately evoking, in Kant or McTaggart, the Kingdom of Heaven, subject of so many parables. It might seem that here the paradoxes of the idea of a Christian philosophy, whether, namely, there can be such a thing, are laid to rest. It is indeed strange, ecumenically offensive one might say, that this question has been discussed for decades by a certain group almost as if Hegel had never lived and written, to say nothing of those who learned from him.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE REFLECTIONS ON THE TEACHING OF PHILOSOPHY IN CLERICAL SEMINARIES

I begin with a personal anecdote. Some years ago I had to teach a course on the history of philosophy to a group of five students who made up the Catholic seminary of one of the Scandinavian dioceses. I had prepared the lectures carefully, so as to give the students a just picture of the development of philosophical thought down the ages, its interaction with religious traditions and so on. At some point halfway through the first year, we would have just about reached Anselm, I was interrupted by probably the brightest of the students, a Pole. He told me that I failed to understand that I was supposed merely to inform them about philosophy, not try to get them to philosophise. As future priests they did not have time for that. Those were his words, more or less. When I replied that there was no possibility of just being informed here, that they must try to understand and therefore interact with the philosophers concerned, he replied, in the language of the country where we found ourselves, two exiles, that “must” belonged in Russia, i.e. and not elsewhere. I laughingly agreed but continued to maintain my view of the students’ duty. This young man could well be a bishop by now. He had a lot of “go”. Securus iudicat orbis terrarum. I wonder. There is certainly a long tradition of seminary education as we have it. Every candidate for orders has to go through a course of philosophical studies, although there is no reason to expect that even a majority of aspirants have natural aptitude or attraction for such study. One knows what torture it was for the saintly Curé of Ars, the official patron of parish priests, while the hero of Bernanos’ novel, Diary of a Country Priest, is clearly of just that ilk. Even if we consider, with Hegel perhaps, that mysticism represents a kind of final distillation of philosophy, as in Augustine, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Eriugena, Plato or Hegel himself, we have still to recognise that some mystics have jumped right in at the end of this road. They have even at times dispensed with a need to be able to read and write, though they may still, like St. Catherine, be declared “doctors of the Church”.

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One is reminded here of the claims some people make for “African philosophy”. This, in some versions, turns out to be a kind of folk-wisdom of illiterate peoples, as if a proverb such as “There are no crossroads in the ear” can be put on a par and studied together with, say, Aristotle’s analysis of contradiction in Book Four of his Metaphysics.1 Africans who do philosophy are not obliged to defend or take on board this kind of “African philosophy”, however. The question would be then, is there some kind of “seminary philosophy”, some attitude seminarians should be encouraged to have which might be regarded as philosophical, but which differs from the attitude of Kant or Aristotle or even, dare I say, of Thomas Aquinas? We had better stick with the last-named for the moment. It is quite clear that Aquinas had a dualistic attitude as between philosophy and theology. We will be suggesting that such an attitude can no longer be maintained, whatever havoc this change of view may wreak in seminary education. All the same, Aquinas engaged in dialogue with philosophers, of his own and past times, with respect and diligence, based upon preliminary effort to understand what was being said. But St. Thomas does not appear ever critically to have questioned the “popular” notion of revelation, as an extrinsic divine breaking into history. This is what Hegel does. He shows how revelation must be philosophically understood as an immanent process within the thinking person, which is at the same time transcendently absolute. This discovery entirely bridges the previous chasm between “natural” philosophy and “supernatural” revelation, enabling seminarians and others at last to take philosophy seriously and not as if it could not possibly affect or matter to them. There is something in its object concealed from consciousness if the object is for consciousness an “other”, or something alien, and if consciousness does not know the object as its self. This concealment, this secrecy, ceases when the Absolute Being qua spirit is object of consciousness. For here in its relation to consciousness the object is in the form of self; i.e. consciousness immediately knows itself there, or is manifest, revealed to itself in the object… It is the pure notion… It is thus the truly and solely revealed… To be in its notion that which reveals and is revealed - this is, then, the true shape of spirit… its notion… alone its very essence and its substance. Spirit… is this self-consciousness itself. The divine nature is the same as the human…2 1

Cf. Stephen Theron, Africa, Philosophy and the Western Tradition, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1995. 2 C.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1966, pp. 759-760.

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This is in full continuity with the history of philosophy, going back to Eckhart (“The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me”) and Augustine (“There is one closer to me than I am to myself”). Hegel particularly enables us to see how it goes back to Aristotle, to the pure nous, which at one and the same time is the nous of the concrete person and reason as filling and shaping the universe. This is the soul as “all things”, as much or more than a particular piece of bread is in Catholic belief the “body of Christ”. After this it follows quite naturally that The absolute Being existing as a concrete actual self-consciousness, seems to have descended from its eternal pure simplicity: but in fact it has, in so doing, attained for the first time to its highest nature… The lowest is thus at the same time the highest: the revealed which has come forth entirely to the surface is just therein the deepest reality. That the Supreme Being is seen, heard, etc., as an existent self-consciousness, - this is, in very truth, the culmination and consummation of its notion.

This, he means, is when and how God first exists, is reality or full notion, as that most perfect being that, just thereby, cannot but exist, as Anselm saw. Of course one means “first” only in that we would thus first attain to God’s, and our own, supra-temporal reality. Time is where what is beyond time is manifest, “in the fullness of time”, namely the truth. The “pure singleness of self” is an abstraction making possible sense-experience, which Hegel treats as one with this concrete appearance, highest and lowest, of “deepest reality”. Actually we “are all members one of another”. Aristotle’s presentation of nous as it were evoked incarnation, the universal in the particular. Since this is itself a universal truth Aquinas easily concludes that, conveniens or not, incarnation can take place in a plurality of individual natures, of course human natures, since “the rational creature” is a name for what is capax Dei. What is in religion and “positive” theology presented as contingent potentiality, however, is in reality necessity and identity, of “all in all”, actually the final vista of religion also. The “Arians of the fourth century” (Newman’s title) were, therefore, both right and wrong. The fuller interpretation of Catholic Trinitarianism lay in the future, while Jesus as prototype for creatures, they thought, had himself to be a creature, first-begotten indeed. The truth is that we are none of us creatures, just because selfhood is not membership of a “society of animals” but each in all and all in each, identity in difference. If one is revealed as divine then all are divine, absolute. This Aquinas found to be possible but unfitting, a direct result of his epistemologically realist

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assumptions. Yet creation is in fact a “figurative” notion, since God knows nothing outside of himself. This is why for Aquinas too it does not finally stand, but only “the bodies of the redeemed”, this being the meaning of the resurrection. It is in our own consciousness, finally, that the Trinitarian relations are realised since apart from us the Absolute has no consciousness. Not only so but the “us” is finally one, each one, the “body of Christ”, members one of another, all in each and each in all, bearing one another’s burdens, co-inherent. The Trinitarian mystery, all the same, remains subject to further interpretation still while, as the fourth evangelist states, there are yet other traditions, other sheep, not of this fold, and them also our thought must “bring”. As for the Trinity itself, it is not really a matter of number. Number is “not posited in divine things” and the indeterminacy with respect to a separate unity which we find in the notion of self, of itself connoting an infinity, is naturally magnified when we aspire to consider any yet more absolute relation. What is true is that consciousness is or ought to be at home in otherness, so that, again, other is self. This, indeed, is the only way to think infinite love. What then of faith? It seeks understanding, such as we here give it. Even in the pages of Scripture explanations are given of what was at first presented as arbitrary or, to our thinking, contingent manifestations of divine or absolute freedom. Although these explanations themselves get canonised as scriptural what is thus recorded as normative is seen to be the natural human process of understanding and interpretation, such as we offer here. It is, that is to say, canonised as a principle of procedure, or confirmed rather, since it anyhow stands as its own justification. The truth of reasoning is one of the truths concerning which reason more or less effectively reasons. Here we have to distinguish between the form and the content of revelation. The figurative form, in which the content is first presented, corresponding to narrative intuition, changes with the development of philosophy. Philosophy thus “accomplishes” religion, the content, which remains ever the same. Thus all philosophies coincide, although insight into this truth, itself present from the beginning, the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters, represents a further step in categorial dialectic. To this view of things, philosophical or rational, corresponds the enthronement of democracy in the popular consciousness and the minds of its political spokesmen. This too was prefigured in Christianity, as absolute religion, where man, any man or woman or trans-sexual3 person, 3

This term is to be preferred to “bisexual”, which refers rather to the consequent behaviour and inclination of the trans-sexual person or even to an arbitrary attitude available to anyone.

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received an infinite value, as “end”, precisely and universally as man and as “son (daughter) of man (woman)”. Universal suffrage with its corollary, universal education, is the fruit of this. “Go and teach all nations”, the apostles were told, commissioned, but this process, we have seen, cannot stop short of those thus taught returning (exitus and reditus) to further teach the teachers. Here too the exchanges of love are for ever mutually enriching. It is impossible to tell just where the irony of the apostle over the opinionatedness of his charges, in 2 Corinthians, passes over into admiration and readiness to learn from them. In the Gospel too there is talk of disciples doing “greater things than I have done”, of course in consequence of those coming first, of him who “will be in you” as all will be “in one another”, members even of one another. The religious and authoritative promise, in other words, embodies at one and the same time an insight into the infinite nature of self, its constitutive identity with what is other. As for democracy, it means that the authoritative, as deserving respect, is no longer to be contradictorily confused with a constraint that ends, has ended, in undermining all respect. That the last is first and the first last means that all such hierarchy is in its absoluteness abolished, that a cat may not merely look at a king but jump upon his lap and even at times reverse the relation. “I am that”. As regards philosophy accomplishing religion, clerical thinkers or those in close association with what they are pleased to call the magisterium often like to stress what they see as the provisional character of philosophical conclusions, this being what makes, say, the liberal arts liberal. This notion is not unattractive, but it attracts as does, say, the “discarded image” of the Ptolemaic or medieval universe. We have, since Copernicus, and of course at other times too, achieved knowledge such that we know that we know. We know, for example, that the earth is round, of such and such a size, just as we know the relative distances of planets or stars from one another, how and why they move and so on. There is, however, no call to quarantine this knowledge, this attitude to knowledge, to a closed off area called, in English-speaking countries, “science”. It is self-defeating to attribute to science, i.e. “natural” or “empirical” science, a certainty superior to that attained in other fields. Thus mathematics or logic are not empirical, except on certain questionable accounts of them. What, say, the Copernican revolution represented was a clear revolution in regard to the human confidence in reason, implying an implicit dethronement of theology in certain areas. This controversy is quite simply being repeated in our day in regard to evolution and “creationism”, as clearly stands out. For a long time

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religious authorities tried to represent evolution as hypothesis merely, and the same misrepresentation was accorded Copernicus, e.g. in the Lutheran Osiander’s Preface to the first edition of his work. It was left to Galileo a lifetime or more later to insist that there was no point in insisting on a naked would-be-Emperor’s clothes in this way. The earth moves, in simple fact, and our ideas of Joshua or other ancient authorities must adapt accordingly. The religious (sic) or obscurantist attitude is dangerous and should be fought. Thus, for example, Copernicus’s knowledge, what he knew and knew that he knew, might have gone the way of similar knowledge attained by Aristarchus almost two millennia previously.4 At the time of Copernicus, all the same, the type of study upon which he was engaged was not distinguished from other “arts” as able in principle to yield greater certainty. The attitude today, therefore, that certainty is the prerogative of “science” is a prejudice of scientists. Thus, for example, reasons for rejecting evolution, that cornerstone of modernity, as a final hypothesis even in biology seem to be mounting up. Nor though does this herald a regress to “creationism”. It calls, rather, for a new approach altogether5, one paying as much attention to the role of “the observer” as physics has been obliged to do. So philosophers wishing to protect religious loyalties do not help themselves, in the long run, by adopting an analogous theological positivism. We see this in the case of political theory, perhaps for that reason rechristened recently, and barbarously, as political science. To suggest that democracy with its attendant rights is a hypothesis open to future revision is just to reveal oneself as really an opportunistic fascist. I say this without thereby excluding further analysis of the very notion of a “natural” or similar right. Democracy, the equal and indeed infinite dignity of each, of man as man, stands independently, just as it was thematised by Kant (the “kingdom of ends”) two centuries ago, and without any need for a “dogmatic definition”. It is at least as certain a truth as the earth’s roundness and possibly more so, if we allow for the idealist stream in philosophical reflection. The same applies to the doctrine of virtue though

4

I prescind here from the Hegelian objection to absolutising evolution, viz. that it, as “natural” history, is a representation of dialectical as temporal process, as indeed is the whole of history. The end, finis ultimus, not only is forever achieved but “founds” the beginning. 5 Thus that Hegel rejected evolution of species as final word (see previous note) is not explained simply by his having lived before Darwin, who, incidentally, was himself doubtful, admitting the lack of evidence, as is or was Professor Watson, discoverer of DNA, finding the period of time allotted impossibly short.

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not, again, to all “legal” applications of it, to derivations, that is, of what is wrong or illicit. It is in this light too that we should view the Vatican conciliar declaration of 1870 concerning the truth of God as knowable to human reason. It refers to the knowableness of the reasonableness of reality as absolute, of God however we are to conceive him. Thus it makes no mention, lays no stress, upon the difference between God and man, upon the subjection or slavery of man, as if he might not be one with God respecting his reason. God might indeed be beyond or above mere existence, and modern atheism might be a twisted acknowledgement of this. The declaration, this is the point, invokes a certainty every bit as robust as that of the natural sciences. Thus it is that we can think of philosophy as “accomplishing” the content of religion, inherently deficient as to its form. In this way we have to move on from medieval views that saw the figurative element in religion not as defect but as an advantage in dealing with realities intrinsically unintelligible to us. Confidence in reason, its divinity, aided by a lumen gloriae (connatural to it) or not, means that nothing actual is unintelligible. As the medievals themselves liked to say, omne ens est verum. Enthroning the goddess Reason on the main altar in Paris in 1789 or thereabouts meant nothing more than that and was quintessentially Christian as deriving from “the absolute religion”. “Liberty, equality, fraternity”, similarly sums up the Good News of the Gospels as presented anew to our modern age, though we have still to practice it fully. Thus Aristotle’s statement concerning education in regard to ethical truths, that different degrees of certainty are appropriate to different materials studied, to different types of study, need not be denied. What we are saying, rather, is that nothing forbids us discovering or seeking to discover certainty there where we once despaired of it or never even dreamed of finding it by our own efforts, about the movements of the planets, for example, or the appearance of man on earth. This remains true in principle even where we might allow sceptical objections to evolution, say, that the time-period is too short for the actual development we must postulate, that therefore we should rather think of a development promoted by an ingredient from outer space, say (see note 350). In accordance with this confidence in reason philosophy has developed in modern times a system in which the history of philosophy, inclusive of its oppositions and contradictions, not after all absent from the natural sciences either, is a manifestation in time of absolute spirit, of reason. Every human philosophy is a “moment” of this, to be understood in relation to the whole and not to be ignored or rejected. Dogmatism is here

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transcended, though it may recur in too definite interpretations of dialectic itself, such as in “dialectical materialism”, a materialist dialectic, rather, the qualification destroying the transcendence. That thought is inherently dialectical is simply the principle of discourse and conversation and not a dogma at all. We have perhaps said enough to show that the received notion of seminarians taking a look at or getting informed about philosophy as something of no real existential concern to them, thus enabling them to appear before their flock or the world at large as “cultured” or “informed”, is not coherent. This suggests that the gradual positing of theology, starting from an earlier notion of the regula fidei, as an absolute or divine science to which philosophy is the “handmaid”, represented from the beginning an ad hoc expedient in support of the project of transforming a whole European population, learned and unlearned, into the populus christianus. Here, though, we should not ignore the way theology first grew up, as it were naturally, as continual commentary upon scripture. Thus it is scripture itself that gets explained as having symbolic and narrative forms suitable for communication with learned and unlearned alike. Yet we cannot remain with such a crippling dualism, nor do those still calling themselves theologians by and large do so. They claim rather the right and duty to correct or amplify the notions, as expressed, of the sacred writers themselves and today’s unlearned would rightly resent being kept in the dark about that. Even small children, however, as yet untouched by the Zeitgeist, can resent being fobbed off with the Adam and Eve story as literal. Theologia is an ancient Greek name for metaphysics, as such open to all. It was into this arena among the learned that Christianity was introduced, as witness Justin or the Alexandrines. That it offered also, or even principally, salvation or happiness to the unlearned does not mark it off from this ancient human endeavour, the love of wisdom, whether practised in Greece or India. This was actually not different in type from the Platonic principle of dialogue, if we but abstract from Socratic irony. The apostle Paul had a lot of irony of his own, anyhow. This negative moment of dualism collapses once we see that concepts of revelation and religious authority themselves not merely call for but elicit philosophical analysis. Similarly, introducing development of Christian doctrine as itself a doctrine elicits development of this doctrine of development, as we develop it here. The stream of Christian thought, seen thus, is part of the patrimony of philosophy and there is no sense in continuing to refuse this dignity to it, an attitude typically manifesting itself in the closing of academies. At that point, in sixth century Byzantium

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or nineteenth century Rome, where the option of Ontologism and a fortiori Hegelianism was suppressed, faith gets fatally pushed over into ideology, a system of ideas devised by some human beings for the domination, desperate as it may be, of other human beings. In Rome in 1879 Leo XIII published his encyclical restoring the teaching of Thomism, more and more as the authoritative teaching, in ecclesial places of learning. This seemingly innocent and creative attempt to restore order, on an imaginary medieval model, to modern thinking is perhaps more justly viewed as deeply subversive, whatever its incidental benefits, of which there have been many. One after another the new philosophies were condemned by the clerical order, typically as “not safe”. Ontologism had been developed out of Hegelianism, in Italy chiefly. Some propositions of Rosmini, at least close to the ontologist movement at that time, have lately, as he has come up for canonisation, been freed from their earlier condemnation. The then Cardinal Ratzinger, justifying this turnabout, explicitly stated that what is condemned at one time may be reinstated at another, depending on context. Not even Hegel achieves such a degree of relativism, or nihilistic cynicism, as one might see it, though it is no secret after all, regarding people’s thoughts and insights. Such a person, such an attitude, viewed in abstracto rather than as proper to the Cardinal, has renounced all insight or striving after it, as being “the mystical” merely. Zeal for the law, guarantee, as it happens, of one’s own employment as front-line soldier, absorbs everything. The variety of philosophical approaches among Catholics, in itself a sign of vitality, was seen by the clergy as rather a kind of undesirable eclecticism, a kind of spiritual libertinage recalling the ancient gnosticism. This though is a two-edged criticism. Thus when Karl Rahner is found a century later criticising Augustine’s Trinitarian thought, the analogy he draws with human thought processes, as verging upon gnosticism then one naturally wonders if gnosticism is always such a bad or unorthodox thing after all.6 The same applies to Voegelin’s description of just Lutheranism as gnosticism. In the mid-nineteenth century the clerics, that is, the theologians, principally Joseph Kleutgen S.J., began to urge that Thomism was the 351. It is also quite striking that in an article on the Trinity in Sacramentum Mundi Rahner disdains even to mention Hegel’s Trinitarian thought, even though he complains that the doctrine has not developed since the fourteenth century Greek Orthodox speculations. Unlike God, Rahner is clearly a “respecter of persons” here. He might at least have chided Augustine with anticipating the unnamed inheritor rather than recalling the Gnostics. Orthodoxy anyhow has always “verged upon” heresy, though knowing how to “keep off the grass”.

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ideal philosophy for backing up Catholic dogma and that no other was needed. Whatever is the case with the sacred texts of religion it is astounding that anyone thought that philosophical texts of the thirteenth century could render all later thought otiose. What blinded the orthodox to the absurdity of this project was fear plain and simple. With Hegelianism they could not deal, while the later “modernist” crisis was a further step into an all-encompassing hysteria, as we now see all too clearly. The very name “modernist”, as ipso facto pejorative, betrays the total loss of confidence, the burying of a talent. What was at stake was, principally, the preservation of the clerical order. For this a dualist system of thought is required, faith and reason, nature and the supernatural, philosophy and theology, such as one finds in Thomas Aquinas but not in Aristotle or Hegel, his modern interpreter. Attempts to enlist Plato’s attitude to myth as vindicating the Thomist downgrading of philosophy to theology’s “handmaid”, are just not germane. Plato tried to show these myths as arising out of the soil of reason, just as we find in Hegel that philosophy “accomplishes” Christianity. For Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, the philosophers were in general an extinct class or, we might say again, order. He lived, quite simply, in a sacral civilisation, established since at least five centuries before him, the faith-principle having been taken over by the civil authorities as an ideological instrument. The clergy by and large abetted this loss of the spiritual, promoted it even, believing indiscriminately, or anyhow claiming, that what they bound on earth would be bound in heaven. Thomas Aquinas did his best to find rationale for the situation, as when he says simply, after quoting all the texts speaking against a military defence of “the faith”, against military religious orders even, that the Church has, at present, or for the present, chosen that form of witness. He in fact presents an extreme form of papalism, the “power of the keys”, which clearly helped commend him to the devisers of Aeterni patris. “The letter kills, the spirit gives life,” this was a text best left to the Protestants, who had after all ridden it to death, or maybe to those few faithful still to be found skulking around in monasteries. These were not going to rock the boat. We are not concerned here with some dialectic maybe necessitating these sins, errors and limitations as part of some grand design in which the proclamation of this or that truth was found inopportune or “not safe”. We are concerned with truth, such as everyone has to be who claims to teach or understand philosophy or to have any kind of contemplative wisdom at all. Here my young Polish friend was so far right that what goes on in seminaries when they “toe the line” just is not philosophy. Seminarians are

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not in any way initiated into a culture, as are the monks when they chant the psalms. Rather, they are trained and prepared as ideological troops, or pastors, to vary the metaphor. This noble function though cannot but be sullied when what the sheep are force-fed with is ideology. Here again though one suspects that, taken literally, as this metaphor of sheep has been, this “pastoral” function was bound thus to degenerate. As purely Johannine, though also, previously, Pauline, it is corrected within scripture by the injunction to “call no man father”. Here Hegel’s explication of the injunction to receive “the kingdom” as a little child is pertinent.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX A NOTE ON MARXISM

Hegel speaks of philosophy as putting the content of religion in perfect, non-figurative form. By religion he mainly means Christianity, which he calls the absolute religion and characterises as the bringer of freedom, responsible for the disappearance of outright slavery in Europe. As to that, one can find it confirmed by historical studies, e.g. of the evolution into and from serfdom, such as R.W. Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages. As to Europe and a supposed Eurocentrism, it is quite obvious that Europe is not a geographical continent but an Asian peninsula. What united it as an association of peoples was the preaching, in a measure the enforcement, of Christianity (see Christopher Dawson’s The Making of Europe). As absolute religion, anyhow, Christianity has absolute content in nonabsolute, imperfect form. Therefore, in accordance with the scheme of The Phenomenology of Mind, i.e. with the temporal illusion we call history, religion has to be “accomplished” by philosophy or absolute knowledge. Maintaining this, by the way, one might still accept Thomas Aquinas’s defence of Scriptural figurativeness and crudity. He argues, namely, that there is thus less danger of confusing our forms of expression with the strictly unknowable God, even should we call the latter Absolute Idea and, with Anaxagoras and Hegel (and also Aquinas), Mind, Geist, Spirit. Thus even or especially Hegel will stress that all judgements, as essentially finite, are false. Here lies coiled an early philosophy of language in sophisticated form, as Derrida (“Hegel is always right”) brings out in his article “Speech and writing according to Hegel”.1 Christianity, that is, its appearance and reality, elicits the later philosophy as its so to say benign nemesis. This does not mean that Hegel 352. In G.W.F. Hegel, Critical Assessments, edited by Robert Stern, Routledge 1993. One might note the common term “making” in both the books cited above. It recalls Vergil’s line, where he says it was such a great effort, tantae molis erat, to create (Roman) civilisation, a line that Hegel somewhere applies to the creation of German idealism and, implicitly, his own system.

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denied all dignity and/or useful function either to the religious impulse or to religion in society. Nor did he look down upon a philosopher’s possible participation in religious organisations, as he himself, we learn, attended the Lutheran services regularly, not merely, surely, and in view of his generally forthright character, out of an unworthy prudential deference. Even a philosopher as such ought not to do other than thus participate, he seems to imply, inasmuch as he is a human being among human beings. One might be able to substantiate this as Hegel’s considered view, as falling under Sittlichkeit at least, rather than religion as such. Today, therefore, he might well not be among the churchgoers. Nonetheless, much of Hegel’s philosophy is offered as Biblical interpretation, of the Fall of Man (Enc. 24), of Christ, of creation out of nothing, and so on. In question here is the philosophy of Liturgy in particular. One can argue that this essentially Enlightenment move towards a general liberation of all people from superstition, ignorance or poverty, enthroning Reason as God or calling for erasure of an infamously perpetual holding of the so-called masses in tutelage, is reflected and is getting fulfilled in the society we know. In this society people in general can read, discuss and form opinions unhindered. We call it democracy, to the extent that they can also, by their voices or votes, form governments. Although an academic snobbery still exists or, rather, we have always to have an intellectual elite, this is an open elite, since anyone may strive to join it. Implied here is a certain relativity of forms. Thus a novelist may be found to be the bearer of philosophical truth, as was Dostoyevsky. The novel in turn, again, as suggested in one of Virginia Woolf’s critical essays, may moves more and more in the direction of poetry as the stricter forms of poetry itself disappear from the general consciousness. Examples here are Woolf’s own novels or those of D.H. Lawrence, the only English existentialist according to the late Herbert McCabe. We even have a further example of mutual relativisation of forms in the service of the highest of them in Hegel’s contemporary Beethoven’s remark that “music is a greater revelation than the whole of philosophy and religion”. Music there is surely viewed as that revelation itself that hegel identifies as the Absolute, as God, whereby it is just itself in and as identical with the Concept, like each of the latter’s “constituent functions” (Enc. Logic 160). Philosophy, that is, as “accomplishing” religion, has to move into its place in evolving human society. Otherwise there is no accomplishment. This is the meaning of the stress upon praxis in some forms of early Hegelianism, such as Marxism. In this respect the theologians have dragged their feet, not having been willing to admit such a transformation or possible evolution. The appearance of “liberation theology” is an

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attempt to reverse this particular infamy, infamy I mean as an intellectual or spiritual failure. Hegel’s own solution was to replace theology, product of a dualist outlook of nature and grace, soul and body, reason and revelation etc. etc., with philosophy of religion. Most contemporary theologians do this on the quiet anyway. The danger here is of popularising the unpopularisable (the same problem as we encounter in democratic art, as in music, from Beethoven to Shostakovitch). Philosophy is aristocratic to the core. Democracy itself is at the core a call to each and every human being to separate himself or herself from the unthinking mass. This lies behind superficially repellent Christian teachings as to a chosen few, a narrow way as opposed to the broad road of destruction, finding expression also in Goethe’s statement, attributed to angels in Faust, that “we are allowed to save whoever strives.” Striving is the mark of nobility. Yet there is ever the danger, in the general eagerness to replace religious forms of dominance, of philosophy’s yielding place to ideology in the negative sense of a tool in the hands of dictators for enslaving human intelligence, something fully explored in Hannah Arendt’s study of totalitarianism. It is in this sense that Marx’s interpretation of Hegel was a consciously forced interpretation (“What matters is not to understand the world but to change it”). The fact remains that an invitation to such forcing can be argued to be found in the work of Hegel himself, where will, for example, is treated as a form of cognition. It can, though, be educed from any theory of or encouragement to a will to believe, such as Christians and especially Lutherans have promoted. So this too is part of, a moment in, “the development” of which the Absolute Idea is, eternally, the “result”. Here we have the, for many, scandal of Hegel’s “fatalism”, which he himself will attribute, following Biblical tradition (in the Proverbs of Solomon), to the eternal playing with itself of the divine or absolute wisdom. He will also, though, refer to the “cunning” of reason, as if, per impossibile, God pursued ends not yet fulfilled. Marxists too can recognise the end-state or result as eternally present. It is this sense that they can (or could) assert “the future lies with us”. Futurity, that is, is a false because finite category, as they show they understand by saying it “lies” now. No other sense can be given to their notion of infallibly realisable “laws” of matter. Thus the dilemma of “matter or spirit” is not the main issue of Hegelian interpretation. Similarly, Freud when young offered us his “theory of the mind” or Scientific Project (1896). The fact that this theory works with materialist premises, rather than being ideologically or metaphysically based upon

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them, means that they do not affect the substance and value of Freud’s speculation. The same might be said of Melanie Klein’s theory of nascent mentality. Hegel anticipated much of these unconscious discoveries and discoveries of the unconscious. The central dilemma in Hegelian interpretation, or in the theory of the concept generally, is not therefore the choice between a materialist or “spiritualist” set of ideas, where the latter term denotes notions of a soulthing or quasi-thing and suchlike. Rather, the concepts can be followed through without taking much notice of, say, Lenin’s almost puerile explanations of how concept-formation takes place. Marxism, maybe like Hegelianism on some interpretations, is, just as a piece of economic theory, a theory of happiness. Thus Hegelianism can be viewed, again, as an anticipation of Freud and depth psychology, delving deeply into the unconscious. It is a theory of the subject, of Absolute Subjectivity, and not of man as substance. Substance, as belonging to “the doctrine of essence”, is a mere finite category of the moment and, as such, purely phenomenal and evanescent. We may be materialists, up to a point, but still must acknowledge finally the absolute falsehood and illusion of the whole material world. Again, this is not because of some soul-thing or spirit-thing. Consciousness, consisting of perceptions, this and these are what is real, along with the discourse representing them. Questions of matter or spirit, in that sense, just do not arise. Similarly death, as end of an unreal and phenomenal life, is not a point for philosophical discussion, as are self and ego, the I, I myself. Death, I mean, wears in philosophy a face opposite to itself as found in immediate representation. “Oh death I will be your death”, Marxism wanted to take the place of religion as regulator and leader of society. Yet Hegel rather claimed to think religion, not think it away. Religion itself elicited his philosophy as more perfect form of the same content. This is what is happening or should be happening in modern theology, no longer a theologia sacra but philosophy of religion. So far, however, none of the theologians have shown themselves to be of Hegel’s competence in this matter. His line, after Thomas Aquinas, is Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Fichte. He gives credit to them all. The perfect communist society is Marx’s version of the Absolute Idea. It is of course an inconsistent or self-contradictory version. If we remove the contradictions we arrive at something indistinguishable from the Hegelian view proper. Nor does the materialism prevent this. That is the point. What counts for Hegel is not matter versus soul-thing but subject versus objectivisation or abstraction. Since there is no substance all or any

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subject is absolute subject or subjectivity (just as, in divinis, God is his godhead). Returning to praxis, we must say that Hegel, in acknowledging the practical effect of “World-historical Individuals” or great souls has to allow for the demonic or the creative and practical more generally too. In this sense the idea of changing the world is not some kind of dull reduction of truth to pragmatism. Nor is it as such the degradation of philosophy to ideology. Truth, reason, is operative. Theory itself though is the highest praxis, as Aristotle says in the Nichomachean Ethics. We can see this in writing. The man who lifts his pen to write feels himself possessed. Without inspiration one should not write. Scripture is sacred, is demonic. I refer not to shopping-lists and so on, but to the truly magical incarnation of thinking, as to something “called up”. This is the sense of the action Marx called for, that philosophy should speak in actions, like the divine Word itself. He did not see that this is exactly what Hegel did. Thus Hegel understands a proof of God’s existence in this sense, as a changing of the world. “Unless the being of the world is nullified, the point d’appui for the exaltation is lost” (Enc. Logic 50). In so far as philosophy “accomplishes” Christianity, absolute content, it participates in and steers the latter’s mission to cast fire upon the earth and take the kingdom of heaven by what is in truth violence, the violence of dialectic, of casting down and building up. Within the illusion of time philosophers, who reject it, cannot be kings. When time reaches its supratemporal end or omega point there will be time enough for that!

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN ON NOT SHRINKING THE WORLD

Nobody wants to shrink the world. It is, rather totally denied in the supersession of substance by subject. The status of the subject, as enabling this, is identified with infinity. This is pictured in religion as its supernatural elevation. The dignity however can only be eternally possessed. “You know not of what spirit you are.” This becomes evident in mind’s apprehension of itself, in philosophy, as the Concept, the Idea Absolute which is the Absolute simply. Hence the first or governing precept, the meta-precept grounding ethics in “first philosophy”, is to “Become what you are”. This is explicatively identical with the immediate precept of total love of God, the totality freeing love, as hyper-cognition in self-knowledge by knowledge, from the finite tie, the limitation to any object other than itself. This, however, can also be viewed as reduction to nothing. Individual mind, in adhering to its nothingness, whether in philosophical discipline, religion or the absolute canon of art, realises its achieved unity with the All, which is, in the Concept, unity with all things and all others (EL159, 160). Thus the monastery, or some equivalent dedication organised towards “mystical” or speculative contemplation (EL82) and harmonious living (they may be the same) might seem to have the edge over the secularised university, organised around researchers paid to come up with communicable results. That monasteries in our Christian West have been by and large set aside is due to their commitment to the silver of credal formulation rather than to the gold of lived insight, as well as to their principle of lifelong celibacy. Yet neither of these is essential to a view of absolute knowledge as intrinsically destined to give way to the Absolute (which is itself) beyond our finite category of knowledge. As the Absolute is the Absolute Idea, so is the Absolute Idea the Absolute, “its own object” (EL 236 add., Hegel’s stress), “the objective world is in itself and for itself the Idea” (EL235). “If there be knowledge it shall vanish away”, insist both the apostle Paul and the atheist professor McTaggart. “The definition which declares the Absolute to be the Idea, is itself absolute” (EL 213).

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A form of life somehow midway between the monastery and the university seems to be called for. Really this is the life we anyhow live world-wide, from within which we view our television screens, listen to music, read the occasional book, practise love, think, write, draw, manufacture, care for one another or whatever we do. It is here that the constant philosophical (and still more poetic) tradition of seeing the whole in the part finds its application. “Turn but a stone and you touch a wing.” Aristotle hit out against our fatal tendency to compartmentalise when he remarked that contemplation is itself the highest praxis, thus annihilating in advance the whole polarisation of the speculative and the practical intellect he himself had initiated. As practical thinking is still thinking, so even thinking is praxis and the same logic governs both. What then of the subject? Absolute idealism, if that is indeed our own position and not just one of many historical fore-runners of it, results from rejecting a centuries-long endorsement, under the sway of literalist religion, of the contingency of the subject, as indeed of the contingent human being realistically viewed. Religion teaches that the world is created out of nothing, i.e. is nothing, not merely in comparison with the Infinite but as, just therefore, impossibly standing outside of it. The only true “ontological discontinuity”, namely, is that brtween being and nothing, which, even they, are yet the same, since “the Absolute is the Nought” (EL87) as, we have seen, Idea, the final outcome of Being as Beginning (see the beginning of The Science of Logic).The Idea is not Being but Freedom in the Spirit, the eternal because speculative triumph of “the things that are not” over “the things that are”, in St. Paul’s phrases. Really, “things that are not” are not things at all. So, if human beings are part of this world then they too are thus created, are contingent. Yet anyone we encounter, including our self, bears “the face of Christ”, image of the image in infinitely reflexive perception, though we may seem to emerge arbitrarily, however great be the fittingness in each case, from an abyss of freedom, so as to stand forever before the other, the not-we, who called us forth. “It is he that hath made us and not we ourselves”. Yet such freedom annihilates the arbitrary and the not-I is I. “I live but not I”. The one great exception, but proving the rule, as we say, in our tradition, is God himself as made man, Jesus of Nazareth. It is proclaimed that through him, as non-contingent subject, since personally identical with the divine, we can then overcome this

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natural alienation of our contingency. This alienation is recognised as prior to and independent of the estrangement called sin. Yet sin figures so prominently in Christianity that on some interpretations it uniquely provoked the hypostatic union of God and man, thus becoming the felix culpa. Yet the fault thus viewed can only lead to its eventual understanding as inherent in our finitude. It, along with such finitude, is what God “will not remember”, since it only appears in a certain representation one cannot even call our own, if we, really I, am not-I. I defend here the view that the ontological status of the individual self, its limits or essence in relation to others, is intrinsically indeterminate. At the same time I contend that however consciousness (of subjectivity) be viewed, of one or of several together, it cannot be contingent. That which thinks, knows and feels is necessary and, ipso facto, eternal. As necessary to the whole it cannot be created by the whole out of a metaphysically prior free choice, as are the angels of Aquinas. In religious terms we are essentially “in Christ”, the Word. It is as that Word that I have the necessity I have or am at all. Yet that necessity, that Word, is absolute freedom, necessarily, and so there is no constriction (coarctatio) in this necessity, one with absolute possibility. Freedom, as founding all necessities, is not itself precepted. In this sense, therefore, we are set by thinking to “become what we are”. In meeting a new person one encounters a new perception of the whole, transcending any “thinking at the edge of one’s own”. One goes “over” the edge. In perceiving that perception, however indistinctly, my mind, mind itself, becomes it, it exists in me. To that extent my past is overturned. In the extreme case this is falling in love, as we say, so this is not generically different from our normal responsiveness, to a new (or old) acquaintance, to a sexual being, to a teller of tales, to a creative artist or performer or to an expounder of science or philosophy. This perception and the perception which is self pass into one another (where there are no hindrances) and the world is seen anew. Should this happen when I meet a dog, or a cow, then the dog or cow is a spirit, a person, is spirit or personal (we are defending an indeterminacy here), as there might be spirit, a spirit, dwelling, as we say, in a picture we look at. In fact the picture is nothing before or without this that dwells, of which it is the cipher. This is the truth of “animism”, not to be discarded as we advance to “higher” notions. If the picture affects me then spirit is there, as what “affection” means. Therefore, again, the question of one or several spirits, self or other, is intrinsically indeterminable. For the self is itself indeterminate as becoming first this, then that or, rather, as being all

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these things eternally viewed. On the Aristotelian analysis knower and known are one. All that is said here can be shown to follow from that. That the perception is oneself is not a matter of reducing reality to a perception but of enhancing the role of perception in the explication of reality. This entails both the passing over to perception in an active mode, in our understanding of it, and a consequent freedom to create what and as we perceive. As we experience life in time it is essential passively to know a thing before we creatively comment upon it. Here though, without loss of reality, we stand, it may be by choice, here too, at the final moment of the series, not determined but determining. This mode is not strange to us, since we are accustomed to attribute it to the divinity, to the absolute and infinite to whose agency we attribute all things. In this spirit a person can make up her mind henceforth to “be happy”, for example, to be in this way mistress of her circumstances. We speak, by syntactic rule, of a subject of perception. How then can we ever perceive the subject? We do not, could not, since subject is nonobject.. Subject is itself perception as including all other perceptions. Thus it was said that God’s knowledge of himself is himself. “In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was God.” In the theology of mission the messenger becomes the message. Reason, we are claiming, arrives at a generically similar point of view. The constricting categories of every day belong to the finite viewpoint we are called upon to grow out of, as we once grew out of our childhood’s clothes, one set of them after another. This mode of being, of dialectical process, should not just stop. It changes rather its mode, since we cannot just go on getting physically bigger and bigger, monstrously. So the term of physical growth is more or less the moment for mental expansion, on the basis of materials acquired through long physical maturation. The term “physical”, however, does not belong in Logic. The tendency here is to speak of two sources for future development, as we might say impressions and ideas. This arises from our simplistic empiricism. But we have already urged that perception is as such controlled from within, from that perception which is our self. More precisely, we might say with Hegel that the outside is the inside and contrariwise. This in and out, that is, is a materialist imagining. Air, trees, water are essential to the self, i.e. they are within him in the sense of included in the notion of what he is, his essence. Yet essence, in becoming “notion” or “idea”, is active perceiving. In thus perceiving the same things, within the same inter-translatable language, we are one another, many and one.

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If now we move to the second point, I mean the self’s necessity, we find we cannot treat of it in isolation from our presentation of this first. Intrinsic indetermination and necessity are in relation, are ultimately identical. Indeterminateness we have found to proceed from, as condition for, perceiving. It is the utmost determinacy as “all things”, since “every being is true”, is knowable. If, now, we consider this perceiving, we find that the reason we are applying this, as it may seem, one-sided epithet to what is more usually called experience of the world is that there is always, first, the self perceiving as, equivalently, self’s self-perceiving. Thus even Aquinas remarks of being itself that it is the first notion to “fall into the mind” (cadit in animam). The mind, which is consciousness, is prior. The world, that is, is always, world-known-by-me. There is no other experienced reality, only an abstraction. My perception of what is seen through the microscope is mine and mine alone. One cannot appeal to a common discourse to overcome this basic datum. Nor can it itself be a trick of language merely. That is the point about consciousness, represented by its discoverer Descartes as the constant ability to be deceived. We might with as much reason, once given the premise, say that we are never deceived. The task rather is to elucidate just how the whole is found within the part, the part within the whole. * The viewpoint here is not compatible with the doctrine of a contingent creation as normally presented. One may though view it as a development of that doctrine, the time being thought ripe for bringing into the open the shifts which have taken place within the original inspiration, within the human spirit indeed. It requires similar development, acknowledgement of development, in our notion of God. We may find that the phenomenon of modern atheism, its positive kernel, is part of that development. The beginning of all development lies in selfhood. The opening words of an old catechism can serve to fix this in the young mind. What is your name? Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? God made me to love him and serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in heaven. No one asks who made God. Should they then ask who made me? The individual, after all, is not identifiable by any quality or characteristic, since any of these can be shared by another, in such a way that even if they happen not to be yet the individual participates in such qualities as he may have so as not to be identical with them. One reaction to this has been to assert that the individual is unintelligible, or that “matter” is its principle. If, anyhow, I am not thus identifiable then in

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what sense could God have made me? I am not anything. And who, for that matter again, is God? As not self he is nothing, or at least of no interest. He would have to be my deepest self, and thus far a dispensable manner of speaking. I, then, am the source, if there is any source at all. I, again, is or am the most entire universal, just because of this situation. We coalesce in a universal solipsism, to which love is merely obedient. Love knows without or beyond seeing, beyond all illusion of time or space. If I am made to be forever happy in heaven with God then now is not outside of forever and I am and always have been thus blessed and, in distinction from the catechism, we are mutually originative. If I have been always “with” God I must be necessary to God. The contingent at some time is not; where there is no time there is no contingency. Such a necessity, as full positivity, would not be restricted to unfreedom. Certainly I am with all the others, with whom I am ultimately one (their otherness is in me, as mine in them), since all are equally placed in this matter of individuality. I do not even know how absolute is the otherness of others. The boundaries of self, I argued above, are intrinsically indeterminate, which means one should not try to determine them. Love extends subjectivity indefinitely, I in others, others in me, each one appropriating the Johannine vision. And in so far as in each one sees “the Father”, the whole, in “the part”, the individual, then Father, God, both is and is not, is a full coincidence of opposites. We cannot therefore, it might seem, exist for him, as the Catechism envisages, though he may be said to be for us. We are then uncreated, as the angels were not. We will not though have assumed a human nature in the realist sense of hypostatic union, since there can be no such nature to assume. If men are eternal then their natures are not generated. That is appearance merely, while if we are not men but spirits of some other kind then from where could such a nature be assumed? It could only belong to a fragmentary dreamworld, which analysis would show is full of self-contradiction. This dreamworld in fact is opposite pole to our consciousness. In consciousness everything means something else and nothing is itself. “This also is thou; neither is this thou.” So in seeking God I seek my closer than close self. There is nothing new here, except in the obvious sense that this whole text, like any other, is new. Creation doctrine as usually presented is blind to these perspectives. People can only go along with it only so long as they see no difference between the self that one is and a particular describable personal history, as if that too might not have been different while the self remained. This then is a development of creation doctrine, even though it interpret our

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contingency as what might seem to be its opposite and negation. For, similarly, the principle of development of doctrine entails merely logically the development of this principle itself, since it too is a doctrine pure and simple.1 One shall not call it a meta-doctrine. Thus, as we know that we know whenever we know, so it is reasonable to follow reason. Anyhow, the doctrine of mono-linear development itself develops into a doctrine, an understanding rather, that there are various styles of thinking. Now style, while remaining itself, can be blended with another. It has to prove its worth by capturing in its own way and better explicating what the older style groped after. If, as is merely rational, we posit an implicit beyond and always beyond what anybody says, since it cannot, as infinite, be finally conceptualised, then the new style brings out something the old style left implicit while still finding an infinitely implicit before it. This situation, which is indeed the essence of situatedness, founds what have been identified as paradigm shifts. Style, of course, is the realisation of content, as is patent in music and more or less so in all non-technical writing. Now philosophy, as committed to the whole, i.e. to truth, can never be technical, can never therefore be univocal or without the implicit.2 Philosophy, in other words, is beyond method or skill as needed for this or that practical purpose. Thus the crisis in physics arises from the wish to integrate physics into philosophy, to measure its own measure. We spoke above of “the individual”. Normally this last term is adjectival, not a noun. To use it as a noun, or simpliciter, is therefore to imply that there only are individuals, pure individuals. This in turn implies that the world of species and genera, of kinds, belongs to fragmentary or illusory perception. This is why the individual is what is most universal, the “I”. We have to do with a society of persons, since persons alone can sustain the necessary differentiation of the Absolute and infinite through which it ever actualises itself. Personality is act, the key to the actually real, understood and known in our immediate self-experience. The question therefore of our human nature, as being a species, remains at the least in doubt, as it was for Descartes, who deduced it from consciousness plus an undeceiving God, or for Newman, who was more certain of God, of spirit, than of his own hands or feet. The body, though, remains our perfect and natural cipher, in particular the human face, for all that is spiritual. As Thomas Aquinas taught, the absolute is never seen 1 Cf. J.M. Cameron, Introduction to J.H: Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Pelican Books (Penguin), Harmondsworth & Baltimore, 1974, pp. 45-50, on how what seem to be changes, e.g. “religious liberty” (Vatican II Declaration) are really developments. 2 Cf. Eugene Gendlin, A Process Model and other writings.

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without mediation. “We know not what we shall be”, one reads in Scripture, only that when He shall appear we shall be like him. He, of course, is spirit absolutely, and we too are likened to an absolute. This taking of a certain distance from the body is not a dualism since it gives no independence to the body but rather removes from it its customary reality. As Aquinas taught, the body is for the soul. What we do rather is to distance our being from the category of life. We do not die and we are not born. In deepest consciousness everyone knows this, i.e. when he or she thinks, beholds, listens, forgetting himself in uniting with the whole, present in all times and places, all particulars. Life depends upon thought, upon the idea as higher category. So I think and only therefore I am, yes, but more truly, I think, therefore I am not, I am not simply as a living body or substance. I “am” much more, as I am also my other, my others, and the others are I, I in them and they in me, members one of another. There is nothing new here, and philosophy surely owes many of its inspirations and discoveries to religion. This is the office of religion, of faith, to overcome the world. Thus substance, on which our idea of person is first modelled, is thought up or come upon within the system of this encoded material world. The I, as universal simply, or as individual absolutely, is not literally substance. Persons, rather, are entirely relational. Yet in such a relational world one cannot rightly speak of subsistent relations. The relations are the persons and the persons are not otherwise subsistent. That is, I am my other, or what I am not. Nor is this an exercise in the destruction of logic, but an enquiry into reality, of which love is the basis as holding it together and thereby founding it. We are necessary to one another and each is necessary to the whole, which is non-reciprocally for each one. The system is perfect, as reason requires, and so each has that amount of goodness which it is good and best for him to have, that degree of enlightenment he can best bear, with its proportion of grief and joy. All such grief, however, belongs to the temporal illusion in which we are more or less sunk, though as knowing, if we do, that this being sunk is in itself illusory. Thus, in the imperfect because figurative apprehensions of religion, even of the absolute religion, the faithful are told that they “sit with Christ in the heavenly places” and Jesus returns to the side of his Father, which he never left. Just so, again, those who see him see the Father and so may anyone speak. The centre is everywhere, should space be abolished or seen through. “I am that.” In taking distance from the model of material substantiality as applied to persons we do not deny their determinate reality. At the same time it is at the least intuitively implausible that there should be a determinate

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number of such persons as constituting the Absolute and infinite. This was always the weakness of Trinitarian doctrine, at least as calling for an overcoming of the appearance of granting a mystic absoluteness to the numeral three. Only one might be seen as thus absolute but then, Aquinas spells out, only as and if one be not considered as the first of a number series merely; …termini numerales non ponunt aliquid in divinis, sed removent tantum, he quotes his authority Peter Lombard as saying.3 Each person, rather, is an infinite capacity for relation, as viewed from the time-series. Each person indeed is an infinite relation and thus each mirrors the others in a consequent identity best called love or harmony. These relations are neither attributes of substance nor themselves subsistent as if in place of substance on the material model. We have a different way of being or rather acting or energising, the spiritual, where each counts for and indeed is all and none is less than all. Thus there is no “each” that ever is found or exists apart or unconnected. “I in them and they in me”, we might recall, or “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Now a branch is not a substance and the vine is the system as a whole for which a vegetable substance has been taken as a figure merely. So infinity in differentiating itself naturally differentiates itself into infinities ad infinitum. A person is infinite. It is only in such differentiation that the Absolute becomes personal, since it itself is clearly not relational. Yet if it did not differentiate itself it could not be at all, but would remain abstract. For the Absolute to be personal means for it to be thus differentiated without limit, in a system where each counts for or indeed is all and none counts for or is less than all. Each is thus necessary and immortal and all and each beget or generate one another, since an abstract Absolute could not do this, as if at some time willing to branch out in this way. This system of love, of harmony, is what reality is. Not a relation, then, but infinite relatedness is what each of us is, each over the same field from the differing vantage points, as well say consciousnesses, which constitute our ontological determinateness. At the same time it belongs to our conscious freedom in love to combine and identify at will, as “members one of another”, since thus it is that each is all, each part containing and indeed realising the whole. We may be what we will be; indeed, all will to be all. One may indeed stress with McTaggart the role of special loves while yet preferring to see them as pre-indications of a universal attitude, like him who would “draw all… unto him”. We have had this universal ideal, this enlarged consciousness, proposed to us and cannot then so easily forget it. 3

Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 30, 3.

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Regarding differentiation, the persons themselves are differentiated into “mental states”, we find McTaggart saying. This is what a person is and this is what we have identified as states, to an infinite number and degree indifferently, of relatedness. This person, however, in every case, as Mind conscious, not of self and other but of self as other and other as self, is the Absolute, closer than self to self. This is the state, of perfect Cognition, as Absolute Idea, that McTaggart calls Love. As Absolute Idea it is the Method of Logic and, as such, the form of the world, being itself reality. All consciousness, sensing, life, is therefore included in it as absorbed and superseded in that unity of subjectivity which is “absolute knowledge” of just this ideating act itself. This is the solution to the riddle of personal existence, not able to be satisfied with the thoughtless presumption of contingency. In conclusion I cite again Erwin Schrödinger’s verdict quoted above: It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense – that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What. Objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you – and all other conscious beings as such – are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.4

4

Cited in Daniel Kolak, I am You, Pomona, New York, 2002, p. xv.

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