The Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace: Toward a Phenomenology of Chaste Anarchism 9781501308185, 9781501308215, 9781501308208

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The Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace

The Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace Toward a Phenomenology of Chaste Anarchism Caitlin Smith Gilson

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Caitlin Smith Gilson, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0818-5 PB: 978-1-5013-3066-7 ePub: 978-1-5013-0819-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-0820-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith Gilson, Caitlin. The political dialogue of nature and grace : towards a phenomenology of chaste anarchism / Caitlin Smith Gilson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-5013-0818-5 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-5013-0819-2 (ePub) – ISBN 978-1-5013-0820-8 (ePDF) 1. Christianity and politics. 2. Phenomenology. 3. Political theology. 4. Anarchism. I. Title. BR115.P7S585 2015 261.7–dc23 2015004395 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

To my dearest Fred for everything from Brooklyn Heights to Rome to Malta and on; to Mary and Lily who are magnificently loving and kind and the very life of your Mama, and of course to Holly—Maxima semper canem!

To honor the tradition does not excuse one from the obligation of beginning everything from the beginning each time, not with Augustine or Thomas or Newman, but with Christ. And the greatest figures of Christian salvation history are honored only by the one who does today what they did then, or what they would have done if they had lived today. The cross-check is quickly done, and it shows the tremendous impoverishment, not only in spirit and life, but also quite existentially: in thoughts and points of view, themes and ideas, where people are content to understand tradition as the handing-on of readymade results. Boredom manifests itself at once, and the neatest systematics fails to convince, remains of little consequence. The little groups of those who have come to an understanding with one another and cultivate what they take to be the tradition become more and more esoteric, foreign to the world, and more and more misunderstood, although they do not condescend to take notice of their alienation. And one day the storm that blows the dried-up branch away can no longer be delayed, and this collapse will not be great, because what collapses had been a hollow shell for a very long time. —Hans Urs von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions

Contents Preface Acknowledgments A Note on Context Introduction: Stating the Problem 1

2

x xvi xvii 1

Rebellion of the Gladiators: The Disappearance of Man’s Open Nature The reef Humilitas occidit superbiam A syllabus of errors The bonfire of vanity It would take a God: Aristotle’s aporia in Nichomachean Ethics Book X A gift upon a gift versus a philosophical fiction The problem of matter and form in relation to nature and grace The Christian hermeneutic of the Quinque Viae

13

Calderon and the Chaste Anarchism Calderon’s phenomenological dialectic A story of supernatural vice and consent Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore Secondary causes and the problem of pure nature The two rocks Ex Nihilo: An analysis of the metaphysical and moral nothings The descent into hell: The anti-historical terminus of man’s created nothing The quest of the new metaphysics: Laughter in another room Justina’s chaste anarchism: Paideia and the serious play of the cross The theologos of metapolitics No untimely kindness The epoché of silence Naming the unnamed The conjuror and the denaturing descent

73

17 21 24 30 34 42 53 65

74 76 85 89 93 95 102 106 112 115 117 121 124 131

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4

Contents The A-Historical Temporality of the Chaste Anarchism The searchers The non-sequential order of historical existence A phenomenology of indications: Three ages of the non-sequential Hegel, Bonaventure, and memory Nature, grace, and the political problem of futurity Death and non-sequential temporality The polis beyond maieutics: The necessary evil Hegel’s betrayal Dispossession and prayer Waiting for whom? The devaluation of the non-sequential Man’s prepositional ambiguity Lost in translation Pennies from heaven The cities of man and God: The way of the penitent Le Dieu Révolté: The impossibility of the Christian polis The political silence of the descent into Hell Home before dark The Secular City: The dark at the top of the stairs Separate tables The man who isn’t there The political wager of the penitential gaze The progressivist as ideologue versus the wayfarer as comprehensor The tragicomedy of the Christian polis

141

The Groundwork for the Christian Polis: Noli Me Tangere Athens and Jerusalem: The case against metaphysics The uninvited: Parmenides in chains The unseen: An apotheosis of groundlessness Somewhere east of Eden: In Job’s balances The awakening: All things are possible The power of the keys: Christ and the metaphysics of freedom The unforgiven: In the bull of Phalaris

241

141 144 147 155 159 165 169 172 176 179 182 188 192 196 198 206 214 217 218 219 224 228 235 238

242 243 246 249 254 260 262

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Epilogue: The Polis and the Seven Last Words of Christ The society of the friends of God: Ever-built on Good Friday Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit It is finished I thirst My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Woman, behold your son. Behold your mother Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise Father, forgive them, they know not what they do

271

Bibliography Index

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271 276 278 279 280 281 283 284

303

Preface Let us try to put the truth in this way. In God there is no sort of wrong whatsoever; he is supremely just, and the thing most like him is the man who has become as just as it lies in human nature to be. And it is here that we see whether a man is truly able, or truly a weakling and a nonentity; for it is the realization of this that is genuine wisdom and goodness, while the failure to realize it is manifest folly and wickedness. Everything else that passes for ability and wisdom has a sort of commonness—in those who wield political power a poor cheap show, in the manual workers a matter of mechanical routine. If, therefore, one meets a man who practices injustice and is blasphemous in his talk or in his life, the best thing for him by far is that one should never grant that there is any sort of ability about his unscrupulousness; such men are ready enough to glory in the reproach, and think that it means not that they are mere rubbish, cumbering the ground to no purpose, but that they have the kind of qualities that are necessary for survival in the community. We must therefore tell them the truth—that their very ignorance of their true state fixes them the more firmly therein. For they do not know what is the penalty of injustice, which is the last thing of which a man should be ignorant. It is not what they suppose—scourging and death—things which they may entirely evade in spite of their wrongdoing. It is a penalty from which there is no escape. —Plato, Theaetetus1

The contemporary crisis of Western secular society provides more than ample necessity, relevance, and justification to revisit the lost origins of that crisis. The debate in Europe and, indeed, in Canada, Australia, and even the United States over the possibility of what Jürgen Habermas calls a “post-secular” society2 in face of the resurgence of religion both outside and even within the Western world, and the ongoing conceptual struggle between an anthropocentric understanding of nature and a religious one has challenged the secularist ownership of the societal norm.3 Less the norm than the exception, the modern secular state is no mere balancer of constituencies and interest blocks, the neutral umpire of competing interests. Rather, the ideological direction of our time is “determined by the regime itself, both by its interests in destroying the remnants of an earlier civil society

1 2 3

Theaetetus, 176c–e. Plato: Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper (IN: Hackett, 1997). Cf. J. Habermas, “Notes on a Post-Secular Society.” New Perspectives Quarterly 25, 4 (2008): 17–29. Ibid.

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resistant to its power and by an evolving project of social reconstruction.”4 And this is deeper than a debate between secularists and multiculturalists or even between liberals and conservatives, in which the rationalism of secularism is confronted by the “irrationalisms” of history, culture, faith, tradition, race, and the like. This conservatism is equally a product of modernity. A fixed, immutable, and essentially depraved human nature; eternal verities vouchsafed by religious authority; God as a theoretical postulate necessary for the orderly relations of society and as a bulwark against anarchy—this is a mere reaction to modernist progressivism. It is Hume and Burke contesting Bacon and Descartes. And there is a lot to be said for it, but not enough. Modernity is ideological precisely because it does not allow the possibility of knowing the world, but only of knowing ideas about the world. The ideas become ideals, the ideals become values, then they become feelings, temperaments, functions of the “moral imagination,”5 and then they become taste, for which there is famously no accounting. Does it make a whit of conceptual difference which values are “embraced” or “cherished,” or “returned to”? It is their very status as ideas/ideals/values which constitute them all as historical idealisms root and branch. Conservatism thus understood seeks to replace progressivism as an ideology, and it is this that renders it both modernist and useless. It exchanges one moral ipsedixitism for another. The competing political philosophies are ideas which view history as an idea. They are Hegelian through and through, as we shall also see. Not only do the historical roots go deeper, they also go to the very heart of the meaning of human existence in the dialogue between nature and grace, which is neither non- nor pre-, nor post-secular. This book intends a sustained reappraisal of that dialogue. The dialogue within its political ordination and in its metaphysical and theological underpinnings is an effort to understand the transexistential openness of nature, which the entrance of grace actively accomplishes. If grace is a mutual prepossession within man and nature, this requires a natural anthropology which is made to be open and therefore naturally in-waiting for that graceful transformation. We will thematically engage the questions of the meaning of, and relations between, faith and reason and, more intimately, between grace and nature as the precondition for the analysis of the ontological and political relations between them. The aim is to investigate whether or not the idea of “pure nature” is itself a fatal foundation for any productive metaphysics, any real relatedness between nature and grace, person and

4

5

P. E. Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Liberal State (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2001), xi. See also T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (London: Harvest Books, 1967), 12: “By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negative: the artificial, mechanized or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.” Cf. R. Kirk, “The Moral Imagination.” Literature and Belief 1 (1981), 37–49. Kirk utilizes the phrase from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 77.

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state. Absent any real understanding that grace is always indwelling in our already open nature, pure nature cannot accommodate the presence of revelation in existence and therefore furthers the present political privatization of faith, rendering the Western debate illustratively pointless—a debate in which the only participants allowed are an antinomian multiculturalism or a rabid secularism, both of which share more in origin and intent than even Habermas realizes in his efforts to split the historical differences when, conceptually speaking, there are none. The discourse between nature and grace finds its linguistic and existential podium in the human condition in its political ordination. It is in this arena that the perennial territorial struggle (polemos) of faith and reason, God and man, man and state, take place, and it is here that the understanding of the personal-as-political, as well as the political-as-personal, finds its meaning. And it is here that the divine finds or is refused a home. Any discussion of “post-secular society” has its origins in this political dialogue between nature and grace, the resolution of which might determine not only a future post-secular society but also a post-schismatic one, in which awe is re-united to affection, solidarity, and fraternity.6 Thus, the political dialogue between nature and grace is at the heart of the very possibility of a Christian society. The long-standing tension between the philosopher and the polis is dramatically heightened when between the polis and the religious figure, the saint, the martyr, leading to the very real question of the possibility of a religious society, unitary in its foundation rather than bipolar and at odds with the nature of human existence. The book intends to examine whether those who advocate a “pure” nature promote several fundamental deficiencies. Does the idea of pure nature antecedently disregard the fact that grace enters existence and that this entrance not only implies, or even demands, but also actually accomplishes a conversion in the metaphysical/existential region of human action and being? Grace gives shape and form to the prevenient openness of our nature. This conversion alters how we act as affective, moral, intellectual, social, political, and spiritual beings. More intensely, does natura pura also fail to recognize that Christ’s entrance into the onto-noetic domain must entail a dramatic intensification of human nature? And this can only be genuine if man is not a “pure” nature with a correspondent pure-asimpure end, but rather an open nature always in-making in the naturally supernatural world. If man had a pure nature with its correspondent end, wouldn’t Christ’s entrance convert by way of annihilation rather than by perfection? Would it not be gratuity but capriciousness? For if grace were not in accord with our nature, it would not be “good” for it, for the good is that which is in accord with nature as fulfilling its natural open desire for the good, which it desires and loves even as it confronts the alternative false candidates for its completion. Thus, the supernatural is in accord with the natural law of things, even as a gift. We will thematically re-engage the questions of the meaning of, and relations between, nature-related-to-reason and grace-related-to-faith as the precondition for 6

Republic 401a–d.

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the analysis of the political relations between them. Thus, the debate over “pure” nature is critical. Indeed, I hope to show that the idea of a pure nature is at the heart of global ideological secular thinking, which seeks to replace both theological and philosophical thinking about the nature of society. What philosophy and theology share, and which ideology does not, is this: an epistemological, metaphysical, moral, and political deference to the otherness of Being in the domain of philosophy and to Being-as-God in the domain of faith. This deference is the inner essence of humility not only as an intellectual but also as a political virtue. It is incompatible with any ideology based on a pure nature. Ideology subverts the deferential humility inherent in both reason and faith into a false humility of self-imposed limits-without-otherness and within which it has absolute say and sway. The specific ideologies, which are products of pure nature, interpret human finitude as in-dependence from a world we cannot know, from a God we cannot reach, and seek secular mechanisms for navigating this unknowable world. Thus, culturally and psychologically the self ’s transcendence becomes problematic, something to be achieved, a private result rather than a public starting point, what Habermas in the European debate calls an anthropocentric understanding of the disenchanted world, supportive of an inalterably and relentlessly secular society.7 The new thinking that phenomenology presaged but has yet to achieve is perhaps being accomplished within the French tournant, as the long-awaited attempt to accomplish a recognition that is more even than a description. Successfully bypassing the rationalist and empiricist alternative options of Being without a world or a world without Being, phenomenology now stands to face and articulate a presupposition that transcends the entire logic of modernity: the divine otherness. Phenomenological givenness is the experiential context revealed in the polemos, the contradictory impulse found in nature and grace, time and eternity, soul and body, faith and reason, person and state. The long-suppressed dialogue between nature and grace is the framework in which we may employ certain critical aspects of phenomenology’s theological turn. The historically protracted difficulties as to how, or even if, nature and grace relate in a substance-based metaphysics, and how they relate in an existential one, show clear implications for a phenomenology of political order, in which what has been bracketed and parenthesized turns out to be the very non-sequential essence of meaning and the very meaning of essence, as the frame of the social-moral-political poiesis. The book will then serve as the dialogic basis for a discussion of the political, societal, and even metaphysical impasses brought about by an underlying pure-nature anthropology. The effort to engage these issues will be organized within four major chapters, each of which is itself internally organized around several central components of our very large problematic. 7

Cf. J. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere.” European Journal of Philosophy 14, 1 (2006) 6: For Habermas, every religious citizen must reflexively accept the status quo of the secular society; its “profane morality” is the present and dominating condition of modern consciousness. In order to do so, he must “develop an epistemic stance toward the independence of secular from sacred knowledge” and also “develop an epistemic stance toward the priority that secular reason enjoys in the political arena.”

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Chapter 1: Rebellion of the Gladiators: The Disappearance of Man’s Open Nature: In this chapter, we examine the metaphysical nature of human existence as indicative of a nature antecedently open to—because waiting for—the entry of the divine, and how the advent of Christianity resolves, alters, and intensifies that metaphysical ordination. The denial of this alteration renders metaphysics ineffectual and irrelevant, as will be illustrated in the inability of matter and form as explanatory philosophical concepts fully to encompass, let alone acknowledge, man’s open nature, or as well the meaning and nature of evil. Chapter 2: Calderon and the Chaste Anarchism: In this this chapter, access to the heart of the matter has been attempted—because it must be so attempted—poetically, through a reading of Calderon’s The Mighty Magician. The poetic is always, as Newman said,8 the antagonist to science which always seeks mastery, where the poetic demands that we should not put ourselves above nature but at its feet. The uncertain, the irregular, the sudden are its sources: “Hence it is that a child’s mind is so full of poetry, because he knows so little; and an old man of the world so devoid of poetry, because his experience of facts is so wide. Hence it is that nature is commonly more poetical than art, in spite of Lord Byron, because it is less comprehensible and less patient of definitions; history more poetical than philosophy; the savage than the citizen; the knight-errant than the brigadier-general; the winding bridle path than the straight railroad; the sailing vessel than the steamer; the ruin than the spruce suburban box; the Turkish robe or Spanish doublet than the French dress coat.”9 An examination of Calderon will articulate that element of the dramatic in the vision of a chaste anarchism at the center of the human heart and at the heart of the impossibility and yet necessity of a religious society. Chapter 3: The A-Historical Temporality of the Chaste Anarchism: In this pivotal chapter, we will attempt a radical phenomenological reading of the temporal structure of human existence-in-waiting as non-sequential, non-linear, non-cyclical, nonchronological, and non-teleological, and therefore non-progressivist, and as at the heart of the political problematic. It is not simply that nature lacks perfection and thus we either seek it beyond the world in a notably Christian flight or immanentize it within the world, as was Hegel’s error. The reality of our non-sequential memorial existence is rather that nature magnifies human perfection in an ordination we cannot master. It is nature itself that lures us. This chapter involves a critical engagement with the way nature indicates man’s perfection non-sequentially, outside teleology, chronology, or even historical understanding. Human nature indicates yet does not contain its end. This is not to say that the world does not carry the meaning and presence of that perfection, but that it carries it out-of-sequence, in a way in which consciousness cannot reduce it to a product of itself, or measure it by means of its constructs. Man’s nature is always unified in grace as nature’s imageless ordination. As aniconic, grace is the foundation of nature. When nature supplies its images, meanings, and motifs, it never isolates itself from that imageless ordination, but rather unfailingly points 8

9

Cf. H. Cardinal Newman, “The Mission of the Benedictine Order,” in Selected Essays of John Henry Newman (London: W. Scott, 1903), 205–206. Ibid.

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toward what is irreducible to consciousness. The search begins but cannot end in nature, in the world, or in the self, because the search for meaning points always and everywhere to the other. This is not because nature is impoverished, but because nature is groaning and pregnant with pre-foundational meaning as the grace which situates all nature to be revealed precisely as natural. A phenomenology of indications will enable this effort. A serious reinterpretation of Hegel and of the relations between the Cities of God and Man will be laid out. Can there be a City of the God-Man? Is there a simultaneous impossibility and necessity of the City of God within the City of Man, a tension which cannot be imagined, let alone accommodated in pure nature theories? Chapter 4: The Groundwork for the Christian Polis: Noli Me Tangere: The antagonistic thinking of Lev Shestov has been improperly ignored as a possible propaedeutic to a new thinking in metaphysics. Shestov criticizes the partitioning off of existence as a static conception of nature which cannot accommodate the phenomenological presence of either sin or evil, or man’s transcendent open nature. Revisiting the question as to what Athens has to do with Jerusalem, Shestov’s largely lost contributions will serve as the ground for a fundamental reinterpretation of the nature of metaphysics in relation to revelation, and this will serve to refocus the vision of man and society in relation to God. Is Rome the Third Man in the dialogue between Athens and Jerusalem? Shestov’s profound contribution is to recognize the cosmogonic indifference of nature as well as its sheer incomprehensible beauty and terror at root in all action. Man’s non-emancipatory struggle with the imageless otherness of natural existence, while reflective of his fallenness, presents also the phenomenological truth that any static nature as foundation for either natural law or metaphysics issues only in a naïve and superficial rationalism unable to accommodate the human and divine tension. Epilogue: The vision and enshrining reality of the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of the Christian polis is brought into phenomenological view through the efficacious luminosity of the Seven Last Words of Christ. The mystery as to how one societal imitation of Christ remains mere imitation while another becomes instead the Christian polis—imbued with eternal transience, holy unrepeatability, and heartrending glory—is the fundamental meditation of this final section. This undying dying prayer, gifting and uniting man with the unmerited wisdom of Death forms the incarnated parenthesis, the gates, of the Christian polis, in but not of the world.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank my friends and family, particularly my Mom and Dad, for their enduring love and support. I convey my thanks, especially to my excellent, inspiring students at Newman College Ireland, and acknowledge the remarkable generosity and guidance of NCI’s founders, Mrs Kathy Sinnott and Mr Nicholas Healy, and NCI’s friends, in particular Rev. Prof. Dermot Fenlon for his kindness and magnanimous intellectual acumen. A special expression of gratitude to Dr Herbert E. Hartmann of Catholic University of America for his steadfast kindness and friendship, and a long overdue grateful acknowledgment to the philosophical formation I received from the Department of Philosophy at St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights, NY.

A Note on Context Great is the power of the craft of disputation, pursuing mere verbal contradictions and quarrels rather than conversation.1 It should be said at the outset that although this is a book about the relations of grace and nature, it is not about l’affaire de Lubac as such, and so the controversy will remain as background within the larger context of the problem of pure nature. The configurations of the de Lubac dispute are admirably delineated by John Milbank in his The Suspended Middle,2 to which I refer the interested reader. Fr. Ratzinger remarked in his Memoirs that de Lubac’s Catholicism “… gave me not only a new and deeper connection with the thought of the Fathers but also a new way of looking at theology and faith as such … . De Lubac was leading his readers out of a narrowly individualistic and moralistic mode of faith and into the freedom of an essentially social faith, conceived and lived as a we—a faith that, precisely as such and according to its nature, was also hope, affecting history as a whole.” 3 Additionally, the contentious intramural squabbles, the custody battle among the disciples of St. Thomas Aquinas, as to whether he did or did not maintain a pure nature position or a natural-desire-for-the-supernatural position is not, again, as such, the concern of this book, except in this sense. St. Thomas is a transitional thinker, as a transpositional one, indeed as a thinker in transit. It is this that makes his thought perennial rather than carved in dogmatic stone, giving employment to generations of academic heresy hunters. Pure nature can only be considered a faithful expression of St. Thomas when a narrow view of his work is defended; when an odd form of Aristotelian philosophy

1 2

3

Republic 454a. Cf. J. Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005). For another excellent accounting of the nature and grace debates with particular emphasis on de Lubac’s position, see N. Healy, “Henri de Lubac on Nature and Grace: A Note on Some Recent Contributions to the Debate.” Communio, 35.4 (2008): 535–64. “Embedded in the question of how Christ’s novelty relates to the order of creation is a set of further issues concerning the relationship between the Church and the world, the relationship between theology and philosophy, the ecclesial and cosmological significance of the Eucharist, and the meaning of the universality of Christ’s saving mission. For some, de Lubac’s account of these matters represents a recovery of the breadth and depth of the authentic Catholic tradition, a renewal of the vision of Christian humanism that unites patristic and high medieval thought and that informed the documents of the Second Vatican Council. For others [R. Cessario], de Lubac’s writings on nature and grace represent a ‘distortion of the Thomist legacy’ that has ‘influenced for the worse a large percentage of Catholic theologians and philosophers trained since the Second World War’ and ‘contributed to the destabilization of Catholic theology.’ ” J. Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977 (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1998), 98.

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of nature trumps creation ex nihilo.4 Clearly, the Church has never sanctioned any philosophy to be the “philosophy of the Church” but the debates surrounding whether or not St. Thomas did nor did not defend a pure nature theory seem to be a war of disciples rather than a confrontation for the truth. Arguing wholly from within the context of affirming whether or not St. Thomas did or did not defend such-and-such a position misses the very spirit of Thomism! St. Thomas has become an idol and such argumentation has the tendency of discipleship and idol-making. This idol-making, having its roots in the Hegelian world-spirit, appears also and oddly enough to be the next chapter in the manualist school—what a perfect companion and bedfellow to secularism! This of course is the one thing the Dumb Ox would never desire and it is destructive to the creative impulse and enduring relevance of Thomas’ wisdom. Man is not a disciple to St. Thomas; he is disciple to the Truth and the Truth is the Logos Made Flesh. Whether or not St. Thomas argued for a pure nature (which he did not) must not be the central issue. Of prime importance is whether pure nature does or does not aid in our descriptive encounter with grace. It is also problematic that the ambiguities in Thomas’ text are not treated as “essential ambiguities,” that is, trigger mechanisms for further reflection. In a letter of August 1, 1959, Etienne Gilson remarked: “Thomas has said everything, and its contrary, at least twice, but in words only—his own meaning is one, stabilisque manens. One’s reading of the Thomistic texts needs accordingly to be flexible. It becomes wooden at its own peril.”5 Those thoughtful inconsistencies on the relationship of nature and grace in Thomas’ thought should not be emptied of their mystery or disjointedness so as to neatly align the texts and fit only one particular position. Within the phenomenological core and activity of being-in-existence-and-in-grace, there can be no pure quantifying or portioning off of one aspect as nature and one aspect as grace! These ambiguities in the texts are worthy of sustained discussion. Perhaps they are directives of the commingling relationship between nature and grace, which themselves point beyond the dualities and into our untranslatable open nature, translated only by and through Christ. Therefore, and finally, this work follows upon as a natural sequel to the analysis and groundwork laid out in The Philosophical Question of Christ 6; it is a companion result of the figure or idea of Christ as the ecstasy of expectation, the ineluctable and underlying root of all historical, temporal, philosophical, theological, aesthetic, religious, existential, moral, and political meanings, beyond all those categories but not abolishing them.

4

5

6

Cf. R. Wood, “Flannery O’Connor, Benedict XVI, and the Divine Eros.” Christianity and Literature, 60, 1 (2010), 33–62: “ … the subtle and supple understanding of nature and grace advocated by St.  Thomas turned into an ossified extrinsicism, a layer-cake theology of two separable and impermeable realms.” J. Owens, “Aquinas and Philosophical Pluralism,” in Thomistic Papers II, eds. L. A. Kennedy and J. C. Marler (Houston, TX: The Center for Thomistic Studies, 1985), 133–158. C. S. Gilson, The Philosophical Question of Christ (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).

Introduction: Stating the Problem

“The wise and dread spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence, the old man goes on, the great spirit talked with Thee in the wilderness, and we are told in the books that he ‘tempted’ Thee. Is that so? And could anything truer be said than what he revealed to Thee in three questions and what Thou didst reject, and what in the books is called ‘the temptation’? And yet if there has ever been on earth a real stupendous miracle, it took place on that day, on the day of the three temptations. The statement of those three questions was itself the miracle. If it were possible to imagine simply for the sake of argument that those three questions of the dread spirit had perished utterly from the books, and that we had to restore them and to invent them anew, and to do so had gathered together all the wise men of the earth—rulers, chief priests, learned men, philosophers, poets—and had set them the task to invent three questions, such as would not only fit the occasion, but express in three words, three human phrases, the whole future history of the world and of humanity—dost Thou believe that all the wisdom of the earth united could have invented anything in depth and force equal to the three questions which were actually put to Thee then by the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness? From those questions alone, from the miracle of their statement, we can see that we have here to do not with the fleeting human intelligence, but with the absolute and eternal. For in those three questions the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature. At the time it could not be so clear, since the future was unknown; but now that fifteen hundred years have passed, we see that everything in those three questions was so justly divined and foretold, and has been so truly fulfilled, that nothing can be added to them or taken from them.” —Speech of the Grand Inquisitor1

While this work attests more directly to the living consequences of man’s phenomenological encounter with the imageless hidden within image, and grace embedded within nature—that, in other words, it appears to be a theological apologia rather than a philosophical political treatise—it is, nevertheless, the subtle, elusive, and

1

F. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. C. Garnett (New York: Dover, 2005), 210.

2

The Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace

misunderstood predicament of the Christian polis which binds this work’s conceptual motivations and intentions. The predicament is, as such, misunderstood precisely because it refuses full designation or worldly entrapment in either the political and societal region of the City of Man, or any of the other humane sciences, especially and including philosophy, or even in the theological meaning of the City of God. This predicament of the Christian polis, its simultaneously living impossibility and existential necessity, transgresses as well those conceptual borders, erodes the well-worn way meaning informs consciousness and the way consciousness informs the world, and transforms, above all else, the way man actually experiences nature outside and within himself. The political dialogue between nature and grace is at the heart of the very possibility of a Christian society. Again, the long-standing tension between the philosopher and the polis is dramatically heightened when it is between the polis and the religious figure of Christ, of the saint, of the martyr, leading to the very real question of the possibility of a Christian society. There is and will always be something of a chaste anarchism in and around the religious that is at odds with and yet essential to the formation of a genuine society: “Man was created a rebel; and how can rebels be happy?” asks the Grand Inquisitor.2 The figure of Christ heightens and vivifies man’s non-emancipatory struggle which, while consequent on a view of human fallenness, presents also the phenomenologically descriptive consequence that any static conception of pure nature, as foundation for either natural law or metaphysics, issues only in a naïve yet dangerous political rationalism. The figure of Christ places us in a position where we are unable authentically to concoct a conceptual or social foundation that can firmly withstand creation and destruction. These substitutes for reality then turn into egoistic denials and revolutions when manifested in the polis, yielding eagerly to the three temptations. And yet man’s natural inclination is to adjudicate existence into political meaning, conferring an organic and organizational identity to guide and direct human activity within a natural otherness as terminus and return. Religion cannot escape this political ordination and as such becomes either its highest or basest manifestation, or is exiled entirely from the discourse of order, and this “natural” political inclination becomes anxiously dumbfounded when politically presented with, not a species or an idea to manage, but a particularity, indeed a peculiarity—the ineluctable figure of Christ—more human than any human ever was, and never merely human but indeed all too human. The God-Man is the unrepeatable and untranslatable ever-presence of Truth which man himself cannot utter, for only the Word can utter Himself. The Word requires, indeed demands, that we communicate it politically, and places the authentic man into a divine abandonment, unsure how to communicate the Image as Word which is equally Imageless and Wordless. The “natural” inclination to manage the Word politically is in turn also an unnatural one because the Word is in but not of the world. In this prepositional ambiguity, Christ is continuously overcoming the world, even including the eidetic placement of those very prepositions, revealing daily the dis-ease 2

Ibid.

Introduction: Stating the Problem

3

of nature’s non-foundational mystery where human fallenness and open natures fight to the death for each soul.3 Christ elevates chronology into Time and Time into Being. His Event, which is not only the Event of history but also the salvific directive of the non-sequential ordination of each person, cannot be organized politically into a pattern, or reduced to a mere species of generality. Christ is the chaste anarchist, the un-patterned patterner refusing all reductive patterns, and His correspondent and dependent Christian polis itself must be a chaste anarchy. This odd polis is Christ’s presence in the world, wholly impossible and utterly necessary. How is it that the Christian polis can be the living, responding, and abiding unity, the natural turned upside down by means of the grace it already possesses, and which at the same time it utterly needs and lacks? How does it exude such a glorious and strange mystery and resist the temptation to rest? This polis must be restless and persistently an inquisitional inquiry (but not in Kant’s sense) into the natural, for the natural, because of man’s fallenness, cannot be emancipated and falls into the unnatural. The “natural” inclination to bifurcate orders, separate jurisdictions and meanings becomes an unnatural and even deadly act. There is a supposed temporal order and an even more suppositional eternal one, and somehow the idea of the Church must thoughtlessly live between the two. The Church becomes a mask. Covering what? A meaning, a truth banished, exiled from the world of Being. Behind the mask is not even a wizard, no longer even a man, certainly not a savior. The chaste anarchism means the Christian faith cannot quite be managed politically, hence the seeming impossibility of a Christian society. But man is also unfailingly an animal of otherness in need of a supreme pattern to retrieve and to re-present politically and spiritually. His anarchism finds itself continually chastened by the very presence of Christ Whose Image does not recede even though His Imageless pattern cannot be repeated. Neither can it be retreated from. The Christian society is both possible because necessary and yet impossible because unachievable, whether framed historically in terms of a state religion or of a religious state. The problem goes to the very meanings of polis, of man, of Being, of God. Let us then ask the question now. What is the relation between Being, the order of existence, essence and divinities, and the Good, the order of the polis, of worldliness, human inter-activities and relations, of Being in its most immediate and specific actuality? In the realm of the Good the concern, as Leo Strauss might have it, is men, not Man, the gods of the city, not God: being as the to-be-done, the to-be-had for oneself, one’s family, city, and state.4 These “very real realities” are presented within the polis, thus politically to men in their social natures and capacities. To ask into the relation between “philosophy” and “politics,” the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, the realm of the free and the realm of the servile, is to ask, again, into the relations between Being and the Good. The polis presents man with “the closest things” and claims thereby some sort of phenomenological priority over the objects and calling of philosophy, that form of 3 4

Lysis 217e–218a. Cf. L. Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

4

The Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace

thought which meditates the things pertaining to the gods. And this priority seems such that we might infer from it that philosophy is of its own nature a political manifestation, that is, fundamentally founded on a more universal science, politics. Thus, philosophical concepts are somehow derived or differentiated out of compact social symbols. “Philosophy was perhaps, in its origin, only a sort of vast social metaphor.”5 That the City or group is the ineluctable and immediate Otherdom6 in which the self, prior even to being a self or ego, finds itself ab origine, contrary to all state-of-nature or social contract theories, is undeniable and even fundamental, phenomenologically primordial on a certain level. The question is to know whether that level is itself the genuine form within our context. Is this priority of the things of the City a “natural” priority? If it is, we would be at the source of the ageless conflict between the Philosopher (Socrates) and the City (Alcibiades). The philosopher could then be seen as the revolutionary, challenging the presuppositioned conventions and artifices of the City, endangering in fact the very corporate life of the City, whose life is presumably entwined with the very notion of convention, that is, untruth.7 Is thus the truth of the City in essential conflict with the truth of the Philosopher? Are Being and the Good at odds, in sweet Kantian revenge? Is philosophy indifferent to the fate of the City? Is it in fact hostile? Is the philosopher a dreamer? Is the City a land of shadows? Can the two only be united on the ground of the noble lie, testifying to the falsity but necessity of the artifices and conventions, the nomoi of the City? Either the Philosopher must attack and penetrate the City’s armor of legend, myth, and presumption or he must bow to or defend them at the cost of truth. In either instance, the City is left to the realm of non-reason and untruth. Or, alternatively, perhaps there is no philosophical “truth” other than the truths of the polis. Shall we say then of the Philosopher that he is an idle but dangerous subverter? All such conceptions or possibilities share this: that they drive a wedge into the very unity of man and in some form or another opt for the Averroistic doctrine of the two truths.8 And there may indeed be a sense in which knowledge is consensus and convention, and this is so even in the Platonic and noetic polis. There is no room for the isolated individual, outside the consensus and in denial of the nomos. We not only “agree” on the meanings (nomoi), but more, we agree to abide by and conform to the nomoi. This may give the appearance of doxa, and in a higher sense it is, but doxa not as “mere opinion” (relativism) but as reasonable, contextual consensus. This is different from “true belief ” just as it is different from noesis. The physis of nomos is the presuppositional understanding that the nature of man is to create order-as-convention-as-consensus-as-reality. And this is not relativism at any level, which Hume saw but Russell did not,9 and as Burkean conservatism attempts 5 6

7

8 9

E. Brehier, The Hellenic Age, trans., J. Thomas (Chicago, IL: University Chicago Press, 1963), 4. Cf. B. de Jouvenel, The Pure Theory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). See especially Part II. Ch. 3 “Otherdom,” 55–68. Cf. S. Rosen, “Philosophy and Revolution,” in The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought, ed. S. Rosen (New York: Routledge, 1994), 27–55. Cf. E. Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribners, 1966), 70–71. Russell sought to avoid skepticism by consensus, as Hume attempted to do in the realm of morals. Cf. B. Russell, “Science and Ethics,” in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, 3rd ed., eds. P. Edwards and A. Pap (New York: Free Press, 1973), 305–310.

Introduction: Stating the Problem

5

nobly but unsuccessfully to do with the notions of custom and moral sentiment or imagination.10 It is true, as Arendt held, that what she thinks of as the metaphysical principle par excellence, the sensuous–suprasensuous distinction, has a very great deal to do with this conflict.11 It places squarely at odds and even in mortal enmity, not only philosophy and politics but also Being and the Good, nature and grace, God and man. But the postmodern death by implausibility of the distinction itself will not solve the problem or resolve the conflict unless metaphysics is itself finally dependent upon that distinction which, most assuredly, it is not. Not only is metaphysics not what Arendt thought it was but, far more importantly, metaphysics is a natural and even ineluctable affair for man: Being imposes itself, however it does so; call it if you will a burden—in any case an obligation placed before the human intellect.12 That which unites philosophy and politics not only touches but also establishes the origin, nature, and goal of all thought and action, speculative and practical: Being-Is. There is not, because there cannot be, any other starting point for the analysis and resolution of all philosophical and political matters, and it is no mere accident that this is called realism both in metaphysics and in politics and, even more than politics, is all Being local. Being-Is is in every way prior to and even within the polis. The highest thing in man, that which sets him apart not only from animals but also from his own humanity, is that intellectual and open nature which allows him to have and to be part of the polis to begin with. The City and all its worldly inter-relations are literally unthinkable and, more truly, impossible outside the order of Being, even as Being is presented to man within the City and amid the closest things! No more than the cogito or transcendental ego is the City a privileged and independently anchored irreducible domain outside of Being. Rather, the City is, in Aquinas’ language, a “special manner of being”13 and a very revealing and, in some ways, the most important one. The City is the primary mode of the presentation of Being: in no way is it something other than Being, and its prerogatives are strictly derived from and founded phenomenologically on Being. Otherdom, to use Bertrand de Jouvenel’s expression, is the social ground of the recognition and articulation of the originary meaning of all human activity, which is that Being-Is. As such, the recognition of Being is not the result of a highly nuanced metaphysical intuition at the highest degree of abstraction. It is rather first and foremost the pre-cognitive presence of the world to man. The fundamental and primordial, eidetic, and descriptive fact of noetic consciousness is that man is a being-in-the-world containing the world in which he is. This aboriginal and affinitive polarity between man and world is thus stated but in no way explained, grounded, or

10

11

12 13

Cf. R. Kirk, “Ten Conservative Principles,” in The Politics of Prudence, ed. M. C. Henrie (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 1993). Kirk’s Ten Principles display a vibrant but fatal defense of this doctrine, itself arising in reaction to the pure nature doctrine. Cf. H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind Vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978). See especially Introduction. Cf. E. Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Charles Scribners, 1937), 307. St. Thomas, De Veritate I, 1 resp. Disputed Questions on Truth, trans. R. W. Mulligan (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1952). Future citations: DV.

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The Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace

appropriated in its essential status as fact. All thinking occurs within the world, and the world is truly given in experience. Therefore, experience cannot constitute the world. Social and political experience do not constitute Being, neither the being of man nor of the world, nor the being of the polis. Man’s intentional identity with the world, as a being in the world, is the pre-cognitive presence without which no cognition of any sort is possible. Now the recognition of this pre-cognitive presential identity is already the beginning of critical reflection. Those who are both existentially and intellectually taken by the primordiality of this recognition of the encompassing presence of Being and who seek ever deeper articulation of this first truth are the philosophers who say and meditate being as Being-Is, and do so within the universal range of its truth. Being is as present and as true for and within the polis as it is for the Philosopher. But the Philosopher says it consciously and meditates it continuously. Outside the polis, the world as given socially, the Philosopher, it is true, would never even have encountered or recognized Being. The City is the necessary concomitant of all philosophy, but it is not as such its object, just as, though all thought is embedded in speech or in writing, still it is the essence of the thought and not of the vocables or written signs that is the object of genuine interpretation. The City it is that makes the meditation of Being possible. Because the Philosopher concerns himself totally, that is, existentially as well as intellectually, with the absolutely fundamental truth, it would seem, contrary to the impulse of all modern thought, that in virtue of the priority of his object, the object of his calling, the Philosopher does possess some sort of natural and absolute priority over the City and its concerns, enabling him not only to judge and understand the meanings of the City, but also to correct it if the City attempts to live its life on the enacted premise that, per impossible, Being Is-Not, that it has no order, no structure to which deference must be paid, especially politically. The Philosopher is never so divorced from the doings of the City by the presumably abstract nature of his thinking that he is not fully aware of the possibilities of corruption, existential and intellectual via the political. The truths of the City and of the Philosopher are not perhaps the same, but they originate from only one source, from Being, either in itself (ens quantum ens) or under the mode of the good. The life of a false polis is expressed and justified, that is, made to seem just, in the light of the very principle it must deny in order to be false, namely that BeingIs. Thus, even “evil” presents itself within the polis, because it must with an absolute necessity, as being “good” by nature. Now this does not, as skeptics might think, point to the vacuity and/or hypocrisy of “moral values” interpreted as conventions; rather it points to the undeniable, and indubitable (because prior even to the possibility of doubt!), characteristic of all activity; that it must be posited in being and thus as good as reflecting the Way things are: which is nothing other than to say that Being-Is. The life of a false polis always reduces itself to a certain pseudo-philosophical justification: that Being Is-Not: that, thus, all is permissible because conventional: there is no Way. Even in denying that which makes philosophy possible in the first place the false life of the false polis surreptitiously employs pure “reason” (and a “pure” nature) in sheer and violent abstraction from its own first and proper object in order to legitimize

Introduction: Stating the Problem

7

its moral-political license in claiming that the ineluctable condition of all thought and action is not in fact ineluctable: that it can be doubted (whether in fact with the ancients or methodically with the moderns): that, in a word, Being Is-Not. But the philosophical reason mediates, participates, enacts, is “faithful” to Being only because and on the condition that Being-Is. If Being Is-Not, Nothing would be. Philosophy, therefore, has the “natural” obligation from which derives the “natural” right to measure, judge, and correct the polis, because only philosophy has given itself over to Being that it may be measured, judged, and corrected by Being. Because BeingIs, the only beginning of an approach to it is the primary affirmation that it is. This affirmation cannot be made logically or existentially without thereby knowing that we are obligated by Being to affirm what we cannot deny. This is philosophy’s natural obligation and right. In saying that Being-Is, the Philosopher denies what Gorgias and Protagoras affirm, that all is or can be permissible. All is or can be permissible only if all is convention, rootless, groundless, unnatural, irrational; or if there is a presumed unknowable Way, Being as the extrinsicized Other, distinct from and alien to man.14 But in either case, Being-Is is denied as the primary datum of all thought and action, and the City is cut adrift from its open metaphysical ground. When Being is denied, Being Is-Not is affirmed and thus all is permissible. The issue here is delicate. There exists what we might call a Christian Platonism, but that is perhaps in fact a Christian Kantianism that, neither concerned with nor understanding the notion of intentionality, attempts to defend an objective realm of “transcendent truths” whose most important characteristic is their independence. Natural Law thus becomes misconceived as an eternal law above and beyond man and world, but to which man must conform himself. Justification for political order in this understanding rests on the limitation and inadequacy of reason (philosophy) rather than on the openness and allegiance of reason to Being. It is the position of Cephalus and, worse, of Euthyphro. The Modern confusion of concepts here is dramatically apparent. So many believe, as a matter of unquestionable assumption, that “truth is relative.” And so far it is, as we see in Aquinas! But from this we cannot infer either that truth is unknowable (i.e., as beyond knowledge) or that truth is whatever we wish to think. Not only this, but it is quite the contrary. Because truth is a relation, thus relative to man, it is within the range of human reason and the specifying norm of thought, or “objective” in this sense. It is thus truth’s relatedness that guarantees a non-idealistic interpretation of truth, and not, as so many antimodern antiquarians hold, the allegedly “immutable” and “independent” “objectivity” of a-cosmic and a-historical, eternal verities. Such an essentialist conception of being and truth is completely at odds with the authentic teachings of Aquinas and can only act as a cause of skeptical relativism. One must wonder whether natura pura functions only within such an essentialism.

14

While they issue in the same result, the latter form is by far the most dangerous in contemporary thought for it enables, for example, “conservatives” to defend the order of the “good” polis only religiously, or positivistically, in adhering to “transcendent truths” and “eternal verities” or the teaching of the Bible.

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The Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace

Politics is the enacted and living tension in man facing the ground from which everything emerges, the realm, the hegemonic realm of Being: the vortex that draws the polis into being with the very nature of man as the being open to Being, and draws both man and polis into itself. This is what the Philosopher meditates: the ontological structures and metaphysical implications of man and world present to each other in virtue of their pre-thematic, pre-philosophical mutual affinity. If the polis rejects the realm meditated by the Philosopher and sets itself up and the things pertaining it as Absolute Essence (pure nature), then, in effect, it is affirming that Being Is-Not. And this cannot be affirmed without contradiction, which is to say without violation and indeed violence. Thus, the polis places itself in the position of having to be judged from within a more potent light than its own, the light of reason and the light of faith, which do not themselves deal with different things but with the same things differently. When the polis does the impossible, denies the undeniable, affirms the nonaffirmable, and establishes itself as Absolute, as creator of its own reality, as arbiter of human activity now conceived as conventional, it violates not only the truth but also itself and its very essence. Philosophy, indeed faith, is obligated by its own nature to rectify the polis. Philosophy can violate the polis without thereby violating itself, the very principle and nature of which is the affirmation that there is a Way of Being that is not violation: if there is a way for things to be, then meditation on and adherence to that way cannot be violent but “natural.” Philosophy’s charter is to affirm that there is a Way: that not all is permissible, that it is not the case that Being Is-Not, that Being-Is. As long as Philosophy remains within and under the sway of this, its proper object, it can never violate itself. Rectification is a making right, and a making right can never be a violation even if violence as force and power is required for the rectification, as every doctor knows. If Being is undeniable and ineluctable, how is it that we can speak of a polis that denies Being? How is it that we are able to “say” Being Is-Not when and in spite of the truth that Being-Is and cannot be denied? So much so that even its denial, as being an act within the world, is its affirmation: we cannot deny the very precondition of any denial whatsoever. Doubt and denial can only occur within the body of Being and thus within a world. With this question, philosophy itself is reaching its limits. This paradox of human existence, this possibility of affirming the impossible, derives from human freedom, which is the only “absolute” other than Himself allowed by God in the world. As pure and absolute Being, God says only Himself even in saying the other as creation. He says only Himself as power, act, cause, and end.15 His freedom is sheer affirmation of His Being. But our freedom is also, though derivatively, choice. Thus, there is a certain freedom, ours, which is able to refuse: to refuse in fact to be free, a refusal so profound as to mock as it imitates God’s freedom. How this is possible structurally has to do with man’s embodied state, his intellect’s diminished status as an incarnate spirit, and the

15

Cf. A. C. Pegis, St. Thomas and the Greeks (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press 1939).

Introduction: Stating the Problem

9

fact that knowledge is not wholly intuitive but discursive. But this is a philosophical or structural analysis of a given fact. What is the reason for this fact? Philosophy can and does give truth, this is its nature and its purpose. But we cannot assume that it will do so consistently and continuously. Why? Because man is in fact capable of saying, per impossible, that Being Is-Not and that, thus, all is permissible.16 He is able to doubt the indubitable, to begin without that without which he cannot begin: the first principle: Being-Is: there is a Way. And because we begin with Being as the ineluctable and unavoidable, that which gives rise to wonder and thought, that about which we want to know—we not only begin with Being but, again with Aquinas, we must terminate in Being as well. Resolution in being is the mark of the truth of our thinking. It is the parity check that tells us whether our thinking is true (to Being). Philosophy’s nobility is affirmed only when it gives truth, and this only when it is affirming Being. But through doubt, through saying Being Is-Not (even if Being Is-Not doubt would not be possible) man can nihilate, literally make Being to be nothing. Virtue is not knowledge; we are not concerned here with logical error but with the existential possibility of nihilation in fact, and this is first and foremost a political matter. Because man is being-in-the-world and thus social, nihilation and its factual– historical counterpart, nihilism, have their most immediately devastating effects within and upon the body politic. We are asking into the possibility in fact of the false polis, with the philosopher as a member of that polis, and with philosophy’s capacity to remain faithful to Being and thus retain its role as arbiter of the polis. Philosophy can in fact, as can the polis, doubt Being! But faith cannot nihilate Being; it cannot constitutionally, structurally. Faith says, because it can only say, Being-Is. Faith is, unlike philosophy, super-natural. Faith cannot be nothing, which reason qua man can. The Philosopher is able to doubt, to say untruth as a philosopher because he is able to be untruth as a man. Why? Philosophy here can say nothing; it has reached its limit. It might perhaps be able to say how this is so, but why is outside its scope. Faith has an “answer.” It says that because of the Fall, reason is in a state of defection, it is defective in fact. Philosophy can say nothing on the matter.17 Philosophy lives only within the philosopher but, as human, the philosopher, and therefore philosophy, can fail or defect. But faith is not so tied to man, being super-natural, in such a way that if we fail, philosophy fails. Faith cannot defect because it is not of man,18 but emerges super-naturally as a gift of Being itself. Reason affirms Being when reason is true (to Being), but faith says Being always because it is always true (to Being). Faith, sacred doctrine, is thus superior to philosophy, and their distinction is not one of “rationality” but of fidelity. The opposite of faith is neither reason nor knowledge, but faithlessness, doubt, and denial. Knowing means knowing the way, the way things are. If there were no way for things to be, things would not be; there would be no things. For things, thinking back

16 17

18

Cf. Dostoevsky, “The Grand Inquisitor,” The Brothers Karamazov, 206–36. Heidegger, however, comes to a different and possibly even nihilistic conclusion in this regard. For him, reason defects because Being is itself defective as finite nihilation. Cf. M. D. Chenu, Is Theology a Science? (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1959), 11–12; 27.

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to Aquinas, say quiddity-essence, way-to-be. Being and essence cannot be split (Avicenna), separated (Averroes), or confused (Arendt). Essence is the patterned integrity of Being. Beings are synergies, condensations, and modifications, ways of the primal energy of Being, which Aquinas called esse. Essence as a way of being, as a way to be, is nothing but the appearance of Being, the manifestation or presentation of Being. There is no absolute essence, no pure nature, no independent polis—not all is permissible. Being-Is: this affirmation says that there is a Way, and a Way here is Essence: it is said when Being is said. Plato knew this and Aristotle knew it, and it was in fact their deepest meditation: the appearance of Being through the order of Essence. What they saw when they looked was Essence and Way, and from this emerged philosophy itself as a speculative science.19 Freedom ended in divorcing man from the world and his telos, in minimizing virtue, in depleting our very nature itself through the denial of our radical dependency upon Being and world. This matter of absolute right is what unites the current moribund leftist progressivism, as well as rightist libertarianism, survivalist capitalism, Marxism, secularism, fascism, and socialism, the entire modern ideological apparatus. For each maintains in one form or another that Being Is-Not, that there is no Way, that the realm of the absolute individual or state or market or race or masses is independent and essential. All of these ideologies share more than a modest family resemblance in that they each terminate in a moralism imposed upon thought and action in accordance with the nature of the entity endowed with absolute right, making the world to be what that entity wants and needs that world to be, rather than what the world is, which is always better than anything we could wish or want because it is true, and truth not only specifies but also satisfies. Ideology replaces the organic, bottom-up public orthodoxy with a contrived, top-down political correctness. In a word, philosophy lives in a world in which properly speaking and philosophically understood there are no absolutes, not even philosophy. This is so little a denigration of philosophy that it points to its radical efficacy: for it is philosophy itself that comes to and realizes its own limits; these limits are not imposed on philosophy by theology but by the very structure of philosophy itself. It is philosophy considered in itself that finds within itself the motivations to go beyond itself. To do this it must know where its boundaries are. Only in this sense is philosophy self-governing and thus autonomous.20 There are no absolutes, and those entities we have been endowing with absolute right for five centuries and more are disintegrating all around us. And thus the meaning of the legend of the Grand Inquisitor. The Grand Inquisitor’s Christian condemnation of Christ is neither absurd nor worthless. For the Grand Inquisitor, even and especially Christ cannot close or even cross the abyss, the chorismos between man “as-he-is” in his fallen condition and his supernatural ordination, his true nature. It is a worldly condemnation of Christ’s impossible entrance into the 19

20

There was, of course, as Heidegger has repeatedly shown, an implicit danger in the Platonic– Aristotelian emphasis on essence. Being, in its deepest mystery as presence and Act, simply got lost in essence. Speculative science consequently lost itself in abstraction and finally in idealism. See E. Gilson’s monumental Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: PIMS, 1952). Cf. J. Maritain, Introduction to Philosophy (London: Sheed & Ward, 1933), 124–32.

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world, an entrance that permeates its inhabitants with the impossible logic-as-desire of the chaste anarchist. Does not the Saint know the same truth as the Inquisitor: no one can follow, no one can imitate Christ’s aniconic chastening? Dostoevsky has sketched a wholly reasonable and worldly foe who, as it turns out, is wholly right and yet utterly contemptible! The Inquisitor wholly misses the point of man while in turn describing faithfully man’s needs in the world, the bread of the here-and-now. And yet, the Church has planted itself in the world and this is at the root of the Inquisitor’s condemnation. The Church seemingly violates the world while living within it. The ecclesiastical order is, for the worldly-Inquisitor, parasitical because it demands that man follow a pattern that cannot be given sequence. At the same time, the Church makes its demands while inhabiting a world of sequence, of teleological thrust, and it therefore utilizes that worldly sequence to manifest itself in the temporal order, utilizing a sequence that, if employed, is powerless to produce the fruit that it demands in and through the image of Christ. Can any polis withstand, let alone reject, the three temptations of Christ? The Inquisitor’s condemnation demands the Gospels be translated into the world, but how can they? Isn’t something other and else happening altogether? The alternative temptations are that with Christ, either everything is exactly the same or everything is totally different, when the paradoxical necessity is that everything remains exactly the same and yet totally different, which neither the Inquisitor nor the unchaste anarchist can comprehend. And this is why St. Paul repeatedly makes the point that to live outside the law one must be honest.21 That is the chaste anarchism. And so, Sartre was right. Somewhere between the publications of L’Être et le Néant and the Critique de la Raison Dialectique, he came to the conclusion that all writing is political.22 The personal is political as the political is personal. Even the most abstract and seemingly inconsequential distinctions concerning the relations of nature and grace possess within themselves the most dramatic, indeed the most explosive, political implicities. Such is the nature of this book.

21 22

Cf. Gal. 3; Rom. 7. Cf. J. P. Sartre, What Is Literature? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

1

Rebellion of the Gladiators: The Disappearance of Man’s Open Nature

God precedes us that we may be healed; He follows us that, even healed, we may yet be invigorated. He precedes us that we may be called; He follows us that we may be glorified. He precedes us that we may live piously; He follows us that we may live with Him forever, since without Him we can do nothing. —St. Augustine, De Natura et Gratia1

At least at one time, grace, assisting grace, and the outward circumstances shaped by God’s grace in human life were conceived extrinsically, as discrete realities that occurred now and then and which could be lacking completely in this sinner or the unbeliever. My basic theological conviction, if you will, is in opposition to this. What we call grace is obviously a reality, which is God-given, unmerited, free, dialogical—in other words—supernatural. But for me grace is at the same time a reality which is so very much a part of the innermost core of human existence in decision and freedom, always and above all given in the form of an offer that is either accepted or rejected, that the human being cannot step out of this transcendental peculiarity of his being at all. —Karl Rahner, Safe in a Wintry Season2

Not only history but also nature, especially human nature, is grace in hiding, divinity in disguise. Our nature is the created and, as created, gift in natural need of—in a waitingness for—the uncreated Grace which alone can freely, gratuitously transmit and translate the beyond-nature intensity of the logos of Being. What else is the meaning of human longing, as Wittgenstein knew but oddly enough could not articulate, except of

1

2

St. Augustine, On Nature and Grace, ch. 31. Four Anti-Pelagian Writings, trans. J. A. Mourant and W. J. Collinge (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1992). K. Rahner, Safe in a Wintry Season: Conversations and Interviews with Karl Rahner in the Last Years of His Life, eds. P. Imhof & H. Biallowons, trans. H. Egan (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 21.

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course in living it?3 God is “in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.”4 Man’s nature originates as the responsive recipient of this waiting-for-recognition, even if only vaguely intimated at first, through a glass darkly, in the universal yearnings of the human heart. The question is less whether it is possible for God to create man to be no more than a mere noetic responder, or even an ontological existential responder, but whether it would be fitting for God to do so, and, if not fitting, then not “possible,” on the principle, going back as far as Plato5 of fittingness as the epistemological criterion of theological credibility and truth. The question, especially in terms of St. Thomas, is whether it is more fitting for God to make man in such a way that by his nature he is open to faith and open to grace. The internal logic of fittingness maintains that if it is not fitting, it is not possible because God would only do what is most fitting. Does this deny God’s omnipotence or the gratuity of His action? Of course not. Grace, like faith, is not owed to man and yet it is “necessary,” as faith is “necessary,”6 for the final perfection toward which man is ordained consists in the perfect knowledge of God,7 which is beyond man’s natural ability and for which he is given principles which are not a cause of the end, but which give him the capacity to have faith. This is due to man’s nature, but their actual possession is due to the grace which the faithful receive.8 Why would we receive what we do not seek, and how should we seek what is contrary to our own nature? “Beyond nature” is not the same as “contrary to nature” and so faith is necessary to man, and because necessary, possible. How does this in any way impugn its gratuity any more than the fittingness-qua-necessity of the Incarnation9 impugns divine omnipotence? Would it, therefore, have been more fitting for God to create man with or without the natural desire for the divine gratuity? To ask the question is to answer it. Residing in the sacramental wells of gratuity, man is the prevenient respondent to God’s grace: God operates that we may will; and when we will, He co-operates that we may be perfect.10 As the naturely otherness of God, our noetic and ontological-existential acts are further prefigured by our original, prevenient openness to God, which does not originate in us, nor yet do we exist without it. It enables man-as-creature to reflect and then to recognize the uncreated first by way of the total immanence-and-transcendence of God

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Cf. L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G.H. von Wright, trans. P. Winch, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 33e: “But if I am to be really saved,—what I need is certainty—not wisdom, dreams of speculation—and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection. We might say: Redeeming love believes even in the Resurrection; holds fast even to the Resurrection. What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption.” Jn. 1:10. Republic 379a. Cf. DV XIV, 10. Ibid. resp. Ibid., ad. 1. Cf. ST III, 1, 1–2. St. Augustine, On Grace and Free Choice, 17.33. Augustine: On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, ed. P. King (Cambridge: CUP, 2010).

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and ultimately through the Triune God-Man through Whom alone man can become what he is and be himself. This prevenient otherness equips, enables, and requires man to learn the impossible—to be eternal, to reflect the un-reflected, uncreated, to heed the chastening calls. It originates in God’s uncreated and continued finite transmission of His own infinite To Be.11 God’s To Be transmits the created and the uncreated grace, nature as grace in hiding, as grace in camouflage, and as grace revealed by God whose very Essence is identical with Grace. Grace in hiding is creation to be lived through, while the uncreated Grace is the unutterable End finally to be lived in. Is the divine gratuity in any way compromised or diluted by this universal “natural” desire for the supernatural gift? How else to give due justice to the phenomenologically descriptive fact of all human existence, that it is drawn to something—it knows not what perhaps—other and perfect and beautiful and true, and yet it knows it cannot find it on its own? And it may get lost in the almost infinite number of imperfect candidates for this perfect ending, and it may knock on many a wrong door, yet it can never deny the presence of the call. If man can sense or, more often, recollect the imperfect in these worldly candidates, he has stumbled across his prepossession of the sense of the perfect. So a “natural” end framed as the imperfect is not really an end at all but a penultimate invitation into Otherness. Man’s prevenient openness, given-in-advance, aboriginal, is not itself knowledge but the prerequisite ground of knowledge; it is not even man’s being-in-act, but the beyond-being mystery of Being which pervades all knowledge and action. Prevenient openness is understood only by mediation in the search, seen most dramatically in the kenosis of the Pantokrator.12 The interiority of this Pantokrator’s rule is present in all things in a way that neither obfuscates the universal nor annihilates the intimacies of the particular, especially the particularity of the cruciform man: factus homo factor Hominis factique iudico corporeus corpora corda Deus.13 Beyond but not contrary to all philosophies, all articulations of nature, all penultimate ends, resides the kenotic ardor of the Christ Pantokrator. Christ is the imageless icon Who, as innermost in all things, gives and restores image to all.14 The unrepeatable pantocracy of Christ is the only region where the universal can translate itself into the particular without either generalizing the particular into a faceless universal or surrendering the universal to the status of mere symbol. Only in Christ’s Pantokratic rule can the impossible yet essential desire of nature for what nature does not possess be fulfilled. And if the possibility of this fulfillment falls under an arbitrary

11

12

13

14

Cf. Jn. 1:1–1:5. The Douay–Rheims New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. comp. Rev. Fr. G. Haydock (Monrovia, CA: Catholic Treasures, 1991). Cf. Confessing the One Faith, Revised Edition: An Ecumenical Explication of the Apostolic Faith as It Is Confessed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1991), 13. Cf. W. J. Hankey, Pantokrator, The Cosmic Christ: A Christian Theology of Nature (Charlottetown: St. Peter’s Press, 2004). The imageless Who gives Image is the face of Death that gives Life. Pope Benedict XVI speaks to this incomprehensible beauty impressed on the Shroud of Turin. Cf. Pope Benedict, “Veneration of the Holy Shroud,” in Meditation of His Holiness Benedict XVI (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2010).

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philosophical interdict, it will reemerge as a deformed and deforming substitute and surrogate. Only when Christ’s kenotic law has infused every facet of nature can grace be understood as already one with nature because it inflames the need for the grace-asgift that it, in a way, already possesses. Man is an expeditionary creature by nature: and every expedition needs a guide, thus uniting necessity with gratuity. As uncreated and yet begotten, a Man-God alone is capable of directing man to his creaturely origin and terminus in this prevenient openness. Christ as pantokratic mediator is the medium through Whom we gaze at the Otherness of God Who is our End. Christ is therefore the Medium Who is also the End. The mediation of our prevenient open nature does not find its origin in an epistemological conceiving, nor even in that ontological-existential engagement which has trapped so many existentialists within an immanentized and unknowable world. Rather, it resides far more interiorly in the fact that God is both methodos and end, way and terminus, medium and message.15 When Pascal spoke of knowing ourselves but vaguely if we do not know Christ,16 he spoke the a-lethiological truth of this mediation: truth is a revelatory and concealing presence, a presence possessed only in dispossession. The soul in longing knows somehow that it is missing something and, at some deep level, knows what it is missing. Truth’s revealing-and-concealing happens in a sheer simultaneity, and one who grasps for it is left in a homeless and timeless place, a place of dispossession and uncreatedness. Only a being both uncreated—the same as the groundless ground of the truth—and begotten (monogenes)—the unique presence of the uncreated—can speak the unutterable words of the uncreated-Creator in creation. “I am the way and the truth [aletheia] and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”17 Christ thus speaks the fullness of man as created to be the prevenient respondent to the uncreated by way of creation. Only the God-Man Who is uncreated and yet begotten can speak to the created about the beyond-being of the uncreated. Christ therefore unites the dual unities of time and eternity, body and soul, nature and grace, philosophy and theology, where man’s open-and-closed nature acts itself out. Man’s prevenient otherness reflects the un-created mystery and joyful unknowability at the core of each soul, for God’s To Be is most interiorly in all things.18 This primordial, natural, even cosmogonic responsiveness permits the possibility of re-creating—without first annihilating—man’s nature. St. Paul speaks of the new man, a new creation.19 Man’s rational intentionality and ontological teleology are defined only by this unspoken entelechy of human nature. If this third thing, this prevenient openness, is ignored by those who philosophically advocate a sufficient nature, the dual unities which should point to and speak of their

15

16 17 18 19

Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. ed. T. Gilby (New York: CUP, 1967), I, 8,1 resp.; ad 3. As a further expression of God as both methodos and end, medium and message, see also in St. Thomas a companion commentary on Christ as Mediator of God and Man: Summa Theologica III, 26. Future Citations: ST. Cf. B. Pascal, Pensees, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: EP Dutton, 1958), 548. Jn. 14:16. Cf. ST I, 8, 1 resp. Gal. 6:15; 2 Cor. 5:17.

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only resolution in the God-Man’s uncreated and begotten nature realign themselves into a dualism of unmixed opposition. But this primordial openness is the region of waitingness: the domain where man’s nature naturally desires the supernatural and where he waits even for the graceful possibility to respond. His unshaped call is given final shape in the God-Man’s uncreated and yet begotten presence. Christ is the medium Who allows man to respond to the call, and the call itself recasts all of man’s dualities not as dueling self-identities wrecking the unity of human nature, but as the signage of man’s being as the naturely otherness of God. And while each pole of these dualities (body and soul, time and eternity, nature and grace) may conceivably be read as containing its own teleological structural terminus when held apart, they are in their phenomenological, lived, fundamental and creational actions dual unities as mutual implications. These dualities are always expressions of something more than themselves, but none of them has the resource to articulate the shape of that more. Every time man claims a finality for each of those dualities, his finite satisfaction excludes the co-presence of the other perfections, thus reframing the dualities as dualisms. Only God can make the End-place-for-man which does not exclude the full To Be. Only God can make a place for man where he is closed in on, and inseparable from, the fully open and conversional vision of the Son. The created meets the uncreated and the open nature receives its closure-as-shape only in the full and beatific attachment to God as Love. They are held apart not to end apart, but rather to provide the uneasy tension required to anticipate and wait upon the call which is the trans-temporal act of man’s nature, the naturely otherness of God as revealed in the temporal matrix of actually lived human life pointing always beyond itself to the larger context. Each on each, these dual unities pre-thematically point toward their point of unity beyond man in Christ’s uncreated and yet begotten To Be.

The reef The preaching of Christ crucified and risen is the reef upon which the link between faith and philosophy can break up, but it is also the reef beyond which the two can set forth upon the boundless ocean of truth. Here we see not only the border between reason and faith, but also the space where the two may meet.20 Christ as the uncreated To Be of man’s prevenient otherness is the reef upon and from which man’s natural desire for the supernatural can be given its lived formation. It is also the reef, as we know historically, upon which both reason and faith can shipwreck and, if they survive the disaster at all, become cannibalistic adversaries in the jungles of the state-of-nature. The natural desire for the supernatural is always present by way of dispossession, by way of absence, by way of lack: “you shall seek me, and shall not find me: and where

20

Pope Saint John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio (Boston, MA: Pauline Books, 1998), §23.

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I am, thither you cannot come.”21 It is an aching hollow want, the “object” of which is beyond conceptual knowledge (for even doubt, opinion, and demonstration are of a lower order) but not beyond existential recognition: it cannot be deduced, but it can be described precisely by its absence. It is the fulfillment sought in and by every human life; it is the structurally constitutive dis-ease implicit in all human activity. It is present in the unformed shape of the free creature who was created to be ready and preveniently open to receive the divine Call and who is always waiting for his adoptionas-conversion from creature to son. In Christ, man receives the Word which can announce-and-shape man’s substance and End. Nature was never entrusted to finalize man’s end, but only first to reveal it by way of its absence and then to bring it closer as respondent to the call for completion. Thus, even nature groans for its completion.22 Man’s nature is not sufficient, pure, or self-enclosed but the naturely otherness of God. For nature to “complete” man would itself render man finally incomplete, a “useless passion,” fragmentary and isolated, and permanently so, as Aristotle knew, and as Pascal in his Pensees sought to articulate.23 To be the open-and-closed well of divine presence is the hallmark of a free and incarnational agonic being.24 This is what it means to have an open nature. As an onto-noetic extension of God by virtue of the active receivership of our creaturely existential dependency, we recognize the un-made in and by means of the made,25 the uncreated in the created, and our recognition becomes the revelation of our prevenient comportment as an open-and-closed nature. This naturely otherness is the mind and heart distended through and into change, and into the temporal horizon to the point of creation pausing in suspense at the un-created. What else is the deep meaning of St. Thomas’ quinque viae? Natures “in themselves” or natures “as such” have to do with their order, structure, and intelligibility. While in a sense they say nothing about origins as such (thus the prescinding language of uncaused cause, unmoved mover, unmade maker, the being that cannot not be, the unmeasured measurer, the unplanned planner)—they speak volumes in that very act of prescinding negation, saying that all nature is rooted in an origin as aniconic, as cosmogonically uncaused and supernaturam. As such, nature is not “pure,” if by “pure” we mean unoriginated

21 22 23 24

25

Jn. 7:34. Rom. 8:22. Cf. Pensees §131, 187, 188. Cf. Mark 9:24 “I believe; help my unbelief.” Unamuno considers that sentiment a prime expression of the agonic man and the doubt attached to his open-and-closed nature. See M. Unamuno, The Agony of Christianity, trans. K.F. Reinhardt (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1960), 20. Cf. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), IX, x: “If for any man the tumult of the flesh fell silent; silent, too, the images of the earth. And of the waters such silence, and silence on the air. And silent the heavens and the very soul itself; and a silence so that he should pass beyond even himself by not thinking upon himself. And silent his dreams and all imagined appearances, and every tongue, and every sign. And finally, the silence of each and every thing that comes to be through change. If all of these things could happen to a man, and he could still hear, then all these things would say to him, ‘we did not make ourselves,’ but He Who endures forever made us … . if only this could be prolonged, and other visions of a far more interior kind could be withdrawn, and this one alone ravish, and absorb, and secret away its beholder within its deepest joys.”

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but self-sufficient. And if we do not mean unoriginated, we cannot mean “pure.” And even in terms of structure, order, and intelligibility “as such,” there is a massive lacuna, the problem of incompleteness, inadequacy, and the reality of evil. Something, even in nature “itself,” does not add up: not only is it not self-originating, it is not even selfcomplete. Plato and Aristotle knew this and cannot be enlisted in the papier mâché army of “pure nature,” which itself denies the gratuity of existence and its inherent restlessness, the natural unnaturalness of existence. Of course, as intelligible-in-itself, from a certain perspective, nature can for particular purposes be viewed “in-itself.” I can, for example, consider the desk on which I presently write “in-itself ”; that is, I can exclude the desk maker from my catalogical description of the desk, its size, shape, composition, and the like. But the fact that it would not exist for such or any catalogical description without the desk maker requires a meta-catalogical, that is, metaphysical analysis. Thus, it is not “pure” in any real trans-perspectival sense. And here its existence is not a predicate but an ineluctable presupposition and, more, the table maker is the sine qua non whose action is not required (except for the desk to be, no insignificant addition) but is as such a “gift,” thus a suffused grace, a gratuity, “adding” the perfection that only existence-as-esse can add. And if, following St. Thomas, everything in the world is like that, then the world is like that, and its existence is a suffused gratuity. There are degrees and kinds of gratuity (as of love) and thus there is no impingement on infused grace when we legitimately and unavoidably discover the suffused gratuity of actual existence.26 Our otherness communicates itself in a preternatural silence, continually and manifestly internalizing the eternal while enabling us to externalize our temporal and trans-historical total neediness for the divine. This is precisely what the poets understand and what the professors never will. Man is an open nature, outside himself, because he is creationally open to the un-created. And through the recognition of that uncreatedness, which is the divine To Be most interior to all things, man is also inside himself to the point where his naturely otherness is not his to own but rather a supernatural gratuity. Man in wait is beyond himself by virtue of the dis-possession which closes and lovingly chastens him; for no creature can possess the un-created source of God’s reflection. While such creaturely externalization reflects the graceful and primordial act of the creative font of To-Be, it again closes man by way of enshrining him with the light which is the reflection of God. This lux fiat which enshrines man’s open nature, making it an open-and-closed temple of divine participation, has a fourfold expression: (1) its literal meaning, the “corporeal light” by which we see and function in a world of corporeal otherness, (2) allegorically, with “Christ … born in the Church,” (3) analogically in “the glory through Christ,” and (4) desiringly or morally, when man is to be “illumined in understanding and enkindled in the emotion”27 of Christ. Man’s open-and-closed nature is shot through with the very gratuity of God’s creation. The natural corporeal light is never separate from the graceful illumination 26 27

Cf. “Flannery O’Connor, Benedict XVI, and the Divine Eros,” 33–62. H. Cardinal de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, Vol 2: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. E. M. Macierowski (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 197.

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which Christ freely gives to that nature in order to see and then to see through the corporeal otherness.28 Nature is distinct from but never separate from Grace, and yet neither do they collapse into one another. Man’s prevenient openness to God’s call means that man as creature, son, lover, and beloved, resides on the invisible boundary line of those dualities, as the confinium itself. Man’s existence confirms the distinction between nature and grace by means of his responsive existence. It is precisely this that makes man responsible for his actions, for his life, for seeking and finding—or failing to seek and therefore to find—the meaning of life. Even nature can tell us this much, and this much is everything. As the naturely otherness of God, man embodies the distinction between the two. And because man is so wholly in the midst of waiting to be shaped by the divine call, their distinction is revealed as an alethiological calling: the distinction between the two is in fact one of concealment and un-concealment, possession and dispossession, reception and participation. Nature is grace in hiding. Man’s gift is to be the unfulfilled dynamis imitating the Uncreated creative power through which he makes himself worthy of knowing his gift and then receiving it all the more, as every child playing hide-and-seek somehow knows. To play the idle academic game of quantifying how much of existence is “pure” nature and how much is “pure” grace darkens and distorts the very nature of man as the primal respondent to the divine Call. Man is the being who surveys the boundary between nature and grace by being-the-responder-in-act. Man is not only on the confinium between nature and grace, time and eternity: he is rather that confinium itself.29 Those lines and distinctions are drawn and elongated in his act of waitingness and they constitute his temporality. Just as man is not merely either purely a chronological or purely an eternal being—no man can live in no-man’s land!—he cannot exist in either a pure nature or in a grace without nature. Examining a nature outside of grace or a grace outside the nature, which it continually infuses in varying intensities of the gift, is actually to speak of an existence that is not our existence! Such chatter is the preposterous im-possibility of creating a philosophy or a theology apart from our actual responsive existence. We know only by way of response, becoming the other as other, because consciousness is always consciousness of. And what we know through those dual unities is that our to be is the boundary line between nature and grace. Our prevenient openness is lovingly chastened by the shape of God’s call, effectively closing-quashaping our vision upon the converting power of the God-Man. Christ’s uncreated 28

29

Cf. Republic 507. There is a third thing required for the act of seeing, beyond the eye and the object; that third thing is light. The object seen in natural light is the “same” object when seen in the divine light, but seen better as what it always and already was, and even the natural light is itself, as third thing, a gratuity uncoerced but necessary and, because necessary, possible. Cf. St. Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. J. E. Anderson (South Bend, IN: UND Press, 1992). II, 69: “Dionysius says: Divine wisdom has joined the ends of the higher to the beginnings of the lower. Thus in the genus of bodies we find the human body, composed of elements equally tempered, attaining to the lowest member of the class above it, that is, to the human soul, which holds the lowest rank in the class of subsistent intelligences. Hence the human soul is said to be on the horizon and boundary line [Confinium/aeviternity] between things corporeal and incorporeal, inasmuch as it is an incorporeal substance and at the same time the form of a body.” Future Citations: SCG.

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and yet begotten nature is the life of that fourfold lux fiat which illuminates the living difference between the free creaturely essence who acts out his boundary situation, and the Creator Who made the Word and Is the Word, the Medium-qua-End by which man acts and speaks. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” God Who Is the Word resides also beneath it so as effectively to close man, to place man in the region of being the naturely other who has the essential ability to articulate and re-enact the activity of otherness. God, as the Other of man’s naturely otherness, possesses man in a twofold way: chasing-possession—“you would not seek me if you had not already found me”—and present dispossession.30 The latter emphasizes man’s naturely status as incomplete. God’s To Be chastens man to commit himself to the workings of his free creaturely essence, to experience and speak human nature by way of incompleteness and dispossession. Man is dis-possessed of the fullness of the primal Other, causing him to chase God with a trans-temporal nature elongated in its hopefulness for Grace. But man chases God because he already possesses Him by being the naturely-otherness as God’s Other. Man possesses God by the ontologically prior fact that God possesses man.

Humilitas occidit superbiam Through your creation, O Lord, goes a voice that reminds us of something that is above everything created. The things and their ordering, earth, sun and stones, seem to be pure reality, but our heart knows that they proceed from your holy freedom, and are gifts that should always be accepted afresh. And so they point away from themselves to something higher than they are; but what they might be they do not say.31 We are continually dis-possessed of God because our nature entails a learning-howto-learn to possess God wholly,32 by way of both the chasing possession and presentdispossession. These two forms of possession create the dialectic of nature and grace and emancipate man and nature from any sense of pseudo-self-sufficiency. Humilitas occidit superbiam. God is present by dispossession and is chased, while possessed, until He catches us. Man lives his natural desire for the supernatural by being the naturely otherness

30

31

32

For a companion expression of man’s present dispossession, see H. U. Cardinal von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. V: The Last Act (San Francisco, CA. Ignatius, 2003), 425: “Eternal life cannot simply consist in ‘beholding’ God. In the first place, God is not an object but a Life that is going on eternally and yet ever new. Second, the creature is meant ultimately to live, not over against God, but in Him. Finally, Scripture promises us even in this life a participation—albeit hidden under the veil of faith in the internal life of God; we are to be born in and of God, and we are to possess His Holy Spirit.” R. Guardini, “The Mystery of Grace,” in Prayers from Theology, trans. R. Newnham. (New York: Herder & Herder, 1959). DV XIV, 10 resp.

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of God. The open-becoming-closed-nature entails the recognition of man-as-sign, always pointing toward the Form. As the prevenient sign of the primal Other, man also points to his own naturely otherness, which is the limit and vital need for the Other who can make man’s otherness more than only a reflection of the font, but also somehow “identical” with the Uncreated Wisdom. A Christianity which “offers man something less than making him God is too modest … . In the struggle for man in which we are engaged, such an answer is insufficient.”33 In this struggle and agony, God is the primal Other Who internalizes the eternal and prefigures the unity by which man’s prevenient otherness can realize itself and speak its difference. Man’s nature is therefore open-and-closed, and while he is, in a way, purely different from God—a difference seeking unity—he is no “pure” nature. He is no pure nature, which would be an insult to divine providence, a discourtesy which has originated all modern atheistic humanisms, transforming providence first into a predestinational fatalism and finally into a banal determinism. St. Thomas himself speaks of two fundamental principles which outline the total trans-noetic directedness of man. These principles are simple in one sense, but have vast implications for the anthropological locus of human endeavors: (1) the conversional vision of God is the only end which will satisfy man’s nature,34 (2) this beatific vision cannot be attained by or through man’s power.35 These principles are often maintained in a hubristic self-confidence parading as modesty, an un-reflected and abstract juxtaposition which undermines the meaning and truth of their content, reducing philosophy to a conceptual self-importance and, with the perhaps well-intentioned desire to protect the gratuity of divine grace, actually exiles the divine initiative to a realm indifferent, if not contrary, to reason. Man’s end is regarded as nothing more than an otherworldly longing which does not inform man’s total here-and-now being. But the real meaning is otherwise. According to St. Thomas, it is not an intellectual grasping of God which constitutes man’s end.36 This type of end terminates in concepts or ideas which have a well-defined and self-enclosed nature only seemingly “proportionate” to man’s end as a rational, intellectual, and finite being. Rather, man’s end requires the vision itself of God’s To-Be and thus is a conversional vision, converting our naturely otherness into knowing what it cannot know as a rational 33

34

35 36

J. Cardinal Ratzinger, “Le Christianisme sans Peine,” Communio 5, 3 (1978) as quoted in H. Cardinal de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, trans. R. Arnandez (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1984), 172. The vision of God is the natural desire of man, but yes, it is too high for man. It is man’s goal and his happiness, and yet it is beyond his natural grasp. See ST I, 12, 6 resp: “the faculty of seeing God does not belong to the created intellect naturally but given to it by the light of glory which establishes the intellect in a kind of deiformitas.” Not an alien god-likeness, for grace perfects rather than destroys nature. The natural perfection of man—his proper abode—is consummated supernaturally. Man’s immanent destiny is completed in and only in his transcendent destiny. Cf. SCG III, 46. SCG III, 38: “Now such knowledge as this cannot possibly suffice for happiness. Knowledge of a thing in general, not descending into any details, is a very imperfect knowledge, as would be the knowledge of man merely as something that moves. By such knowledge a thing is known potentially only, for details are potentially contained in generalities. But happiness, being a perfect activity and the supreme good of man, must turn upon what is actual and not merely potential.”

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animal but recognizes even on this side of eternity and on this side of faith as such, but through a glass darkly, by way of our primal, obediential, in-vocational, and prevenient desire. The end which is truly proportionate to man’s nature is not the conceptual end proportionate to an un-examined noetic act, nor even (with Heidegger) the end proportionate to his finitude or limit as an ontological actor.37 His horizon and end ever remain in a free and gratuitous dis-proportion both to his reason and his being; it resides in the beyond-being unity of these two dualities, in that third thing, that prevenient openness whose source is Love. Again, what philosophy and theology, reason and faith, nature and grace share, even beyond their differences, and which any ideology does not share but denies, is this: epistemological, metaphysical, and moral deference to the otherness of Being in the domain of philosophy and to Beingas-God in the domain of faith. This deference is the inner essence of humility as a moral/intellectual virtue or disposition. It is incompatible with any ideology based on sufficient nature. Thus, the distinction between faith and reason on the one hand and ideology on the other is based on two alternative visions of human finitude, each of which claims a kind of intellectual humility for itself. Philosophy and faith, as we have said, each in its own way and domain, claim a human finitude characterized by dependence: the human actor is dependent upon the world of Being/existence, the Other, for all his knowledge and actions, and is thus umbilically tied to Being-asGod, and functions only within those limits philosophically, morally, and politically. Ideology, on the other hand, interprets finitude as in-dependence from a world we cannot know, and seeks other (political) mechanisms for navigating and negotiating this unknowable world. These two alternative disproportions/finitudes can lead to the rationalist Being-without-a-world or the empiricist world-without-Being; or to a God so transcendent as to be irrelevant, so transcendent that He might just as well not exist at all. But a proper understanding of finitude, in all its accentuated mystery, can lead to man’s active noetic and existential engagement with Being through the world. Man’s reason and being are often too easily tied into an ontical and non-descriptive expression of man’s nature, which neglects the phenomenological fact that both reason and being are themselves responses to, as reflections of, the uncreated beyond-image Creator. The gift to man as a creature in wait is to be an unfulfilled dynamis. By way of God’s ever present possession of man, man’s unfulfilled dynamism chases God through God’s self-same creational pattern of loving dispossession. Man can make himself worthy of being in the image and likeness of the Being who is beyond-being and he can participate in that gratuity because God has placed that primal yearning responsiveness in him as the open and naturely otherness of God. 37

SCG III, 48: “If then human happiness does not consist in the knowledge of God whereby He is commonly known by all or most men according to some vague estimate, nor again in the knowledge of God whereby He is known demonstratively in speculative science, nor in the knowledge of God whereby He is known by faith … if again it is impossible in this life to arrive at a higher knowledge of God so as to know Him in His essence, or to understand other pure spirits, and thereby attain to a nearer knowledge of God … and still final happiness must be placed in some knowledge of God; it follows that it is impossible for the final happiness of man to be in this life.”

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A syllabus of errors A “pure” nature promotes three fundamental deficiencies and betrays thereby its own paucity of metaphysical nuance. It repeatedly disregards the fact that Revelation enters existence and that this entrance not only implies, or even demands, but also actually accomplishes a conversion in the metaphysical/existential region of man’s action and being. Revelation brings shape and form to the prevenient shapelessness of man’s open nature. This conversion alters how man acts as an affective, moral, intellectual, and spiritual being corresponding to the fourfold nature of the lux fiat which renders him an open-and-closed nature. These three errors consist in the following: (1) Reductively viewing the Act-of-Grace only within the framework of act-andpotency. Such a reduction separates Grace from God, as if Grace is not identical with God’s pure To Be, in which there is no potentiality, but only Act. Or, rather, God Himself is already nothing more than a self-enclosed essence in some Spinozistic sense, where the infinite To Be is reduced to creation and creation to mechanization and necessity, in which divine intervention is superfluous. (2) Ignoring the implications of God’s essence as existence. Pure nature theory ignores God’s Being qua Act as the necessary source of creation. To be Creator as St. Thomas sees it—and for the world to be creational—requires that the difference between God as Pure Act/Pure Being and God as Creator be continually respected in the Creator, so much so that all of creation is therefore shot through with a continuous gratuity and that man’s nature-as-respondent to that Pure Act actually responds not only to God’s creativeness but also to His un-createdness. (3) Failing to recognize that Christ’s entrance into the onto-noetic domain must entail a dramatic alteration to the nature of man.38 More precisely, this alteration can only be genuine if man is not a “pure” nature with a correspondent purequa-impure end, but rather a nature-always-in-making-in-the-naturallysupernatural-world. If man had a sufficient nature with a correspondent end, then Christ’s entrance could only convert man by way of annihilation rather than by way of perfection. It would not be gratuity but an almost Occamite capriciousness, or a kind of gnostic magic. Would this be fitting of God? A nature closed to the natural possibility of supernatural grace would render the effects of grace impossible; a nature open to grace cannot be a closed or “pure” nature. This pure and indifferent nature would destroy the efficacy of gratuity. The open nature does not command, and thus does not destroy the gratuity but enables its free reception in freely accepting what is freely offered. Faith is not magic; neither a fortiori is grace. This is the radical difference between gratuity and capriciousness. Nature would not groan for the revelation of the sons of God were it not yearning for what it naturally desires but cannot naturally attain. Grace, like existence, is not a predicate of nature

38

Cf. F. O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 60.

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but its presupposition. There can be no phenomenology of pure nature as there can be no hermeneutic of it—precisely because it is a purely hypothetical construct and as such is never either presupposed or encountered in the world, and the world is man’s only privileged access to the meaning of reality. There is no there there, to repeat the witticism; trying to digest pure nature is rather like having dinner on the Marie Celeste. One can neither begin with it nor end with it for there is no access to it. The very notion violates man’s existential presence in and to the world. And it has more than one ulterior motivation. But its real effect is to eliminate or exile faith and grace from the realm of the human situation and discourse. Even as an hypothesis it cannot be tested, verified, or falsified within the dramatic structure of existence, and an hypothesis that cannot be tested is meaningless. It is an impure thing. These misguided efforts have reduced the To Be of God to a mechanistic Creator who imparts his creative power either arbitrarily or necessarily. As necessary output it is then conceived as the creaturely natural order or “nature” which can stand—now that God’s essence is only nominally identical with His existence—separate from grace. When grace is therefore added to this “nature,” it is an accident by way of a unique form of extrinsicism. Grace becomes those additions given by way of the reduction from potentiality to actuality—possible grace to actual grace—a reduction which is only possible if God’s essence is, again, at odds with His existence. This reduction may attempt to protect the so-called gratuity of grace, but instead it reduces that sublime gift-as-call to an inessential accident rather than being the essential, freely given, and utterly meaningful end to the preveniently open and responsive nature of man. In order to keep the region of pure nature separate, or rather isolated, from grace, the same late medieval/early modernist metaphysical mistake is made in understanding God’s Being. God’s To Be is collapsed into the creative output which must take priority over God as Act. God is no longer the beyond-being, beyond image as pure To Be. This reduction is a confusion of the super naturam with the contra naturam, and this is a grave error, doing an injustice both to nature and to grace. Grace is beyond but not contrary to nature as faith is beyond but not contrary to reason, as esse is beyond but not contrary to essentia. Whatever remains of Being becomes an object of an essentialist self-enclosed identification at the service of that generative Will. God can no longer be what is most interior to beings nor can He be everywhere as the medium by which man receives his excelling principle or his responsive nature. In this breakdown, pure nature has been set against God’s nature as the plaything of the un-relational will of God, and grace is an intrusion on that nature, either demanded-as-owed, extrinsicized as arbitrarily revealed predestination, or dismissed as unnecessary to our perfection. In one sense God is fully transcendent only on the condition that He is no longer in the world, existence having lost out to an essentialist identification. In another sense, God is fully immanentized, in Hegel’s manner, by the fact that pure Act has been subsumed by the act of necessary Creation, as if Act cannot exist without the otherness of the creational. Either way, the reality that man is made to respond to God has been lost, because grace is either an arbitrary intrusion on man’s own self-sufficiency as a pure nature, or something already owed to man, which prevents in advance a genuine participation in that gift as gift, or it becomes a merely private religious affair. The emphasis on a pure

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nature actively represents beings which exist in their own right while often maintaining the contrary. But as Anselm knew, although they can mouth the words, they cannot think the thought. As much as the advocates of a pure nature attempt to lessen39 the repercussive meaning of an extrinsicism to grace, they cannot get around the fact that if grace is viewed separately from the pure To Be of God in order to carve out this purely hypothetical bloodless pure nature, they have made God’s existence a mode of His essence.40 And this is ontologism. Once that identification is made, the distinction between essence and existence in creatures cannot be seen to be what St. Thomas held it to be, with all its powerful implications.41 They must retreat into an Aristotelian selfsufficiency so as to protect that newly formed pure nature from the grace which should pervade all dappled things. God’s essentialist identification is finally consummated when grace is extolled as being effectively identical with the cycle of potency and act in an unaltered Aristotelianism. The pure To Be, beyond being and at the heart of mystery, has vanished in this type of modernist dis-grace. This empty grace is not identical with God’s Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, or with God’s Being, but only with a voluntaristic will fundamentally un-involved in that empty pure nature it purportedly created. It is either a world without Being, or Being without a world.42 It is certainly a world without God. If man is the being of meaning, reason, call, and response, then this absolutely free gift is, in a way, absolutely necessary to his being, just as much as the Medium, Christ, is the freely given total gift which is, at the same time, utterly necessary if man is to attain the only End which will make him happy. If man is, in his origin and entelechy, a being of response, the only end commensurate with his responsive nature is one of calling, vocation, freedom, and gift, because all calls, by being calls, are free to be responded to just as much as they are free to be called forth, vocalized, or left unuttered. Man’s being begins in call, ends in call; his being begins in response and ends with the freedom to be responded to; the prevenient freedom of the creature to respond to the call ends in the freedom of God to elevate that call into the shape of the new creation.43

39

40

41 42

43

Cf. S. A. Long, Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York: Fordham, 2010), 36. Cf. R. S. Clark, “Natural Man before the Fall: Ability and Grace” pt. 2, The Heidelcast blog (2005): “Our union with Christ is both legal and vital, but never ontic. We are ‘in Christ’ by virtue of God’s decree.” Cf. Being and Some Philosophers, ch. 3. Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, The Regensburg Address: Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections (Vatican City : Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2006): “God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, ‘transcends’ knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone; nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos.” Cf. Natura Pura, 76. Long criticizes Von Balthasar’s stance on nature as a mere “vacuole for Grace” having misunderstood the open nature, not as effulgence but as blind, contentless vacuity; a generalism without positive content. On the contrary, nature, understood for Von Balthasar as “the minimum that must be present so that God can reveal himself to man,” implies a unique nature set apart from the brute animals. This “minimum” doesn’t deny that man carries a specifically endowed philosophical anthropology, it stresses instead that this anthropology is shot through with the primordial reality, that unlike any another creature, man was made to be the respondent to God. Man’s anthropology must accommodate human responsiveness, otherwise it fails to have what Long

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Calls and responses require words, and only God has the Word. Grace precedes nature and never leaves it. Grace suffuses nature to make it natural, to make of man the natural responder, the naturely otherness of God. Man’s responsiveness, prefigured on God’s graceful call, is therefore in a naturally supernatural state of in-vocation. Thus, the idea that an imperfect beatitude is fitting to man’s finitude—that “no upright rational being pines away or suffers for lack of disproportionate and naturally impossible things”—is unfitting.44 This has severely mismanaged how man ontonoetically derives the degrees of perfection. If man has knowledge of an imperfect

44

describes as “ontological density” and yet neglects to secure or acknowledge. It seems that in the natura pura position, that responsiveness cannot be an anthropologically rooted principle but is confined to an ideationally enclosed understanding of faith where faith is no longer concomitant with natural inclinations but becomes a wholly separate organism, an alien realm imposed on a natural body. Faith may incite man to response, and it may reveal to him how to respond, but responsiveness, the desire to respond, must be wholly in and of him. Man is not open to mere ideas of the infinite but to its actuality which transforms as it holds and calls him to receive its endless plentitude. That endless plenitude is at root in Balthasar’s understanding of the “minimum.” Long instead sees this “minimum” as an empty base upon which man is formed rather than a terminology struggling to articulate the oddness of the human stance, his transhumanar that must be present in the humanum constituting it as humanum. Grace precedes nature because God, the efficient cause, informs the soul so that the soul informs the body, so that the soul can know the imperfect natural end is understood only in the context of the perfect, even when the perfect end remains hidden from knowledge. Cf. L. Feingold, “Man’s Supernatural End,” Association of Hebrew Catholics, Lecture Series, 4 (2011): “Both man’s natural and supernatural end lie in the loving contemplation of God. Man can have no other end than God, because no finite goodness or truth can satisfy man’s intellect and will, which are faculties open to unlimited goodness and truth. The difference between the natural and the supernatural end lies in the way in which God is contemplated: by our natural powers in the case of our natural end, and by the light of glory in the beatific vision in the case of our supernatural end. Our connatural end has been elevated and immeasurably perfected by our supernatural end. Nevertheless, it is not idle or useless to speak about a connatural end for man in theology, for this notion of an end that corresponds to our nature as such, is absolutely necessary to distinguish the natural and the supernatural orders, and to show the gratuitousness of our supernatural end. For the vision of God is gratuitous in the full sense of the word, precisely because it immeasurably transcends our connatural end, which is the highest end that human nature could achieve through its own creaturely powers. A purely natural contemplation of God as Creator, whom we know analogically through the mirror of creation, is not such as to provide complete rest to our natural desire to know, and would not constitute perfect beatitude. It would constitute only an imperfect beatitude. This imperfect beatitude is our natural end. Since man is a finite creature infinitely below God, it is fitting and proportionate to him to know God through finite creatures. The fact that a natural beatitude would not satisfy the desire to “see God” does not mean that a natural contemplation of God would leave man frustrated and unhappy, for he would recognize that it is beyond the natural reach of all created intellects to see God face to face. No upright rational being pines away or suffers for lack of disproportionate and naturally impossible things … . Some have objected that the notion of an imperfect beatitude is absurd, and that the existence of a true natural desire to see God necessarily implies that man can only have a supernatural finality, the vision of God. Many have even maintained that this is the view of St. Thomas himself. However, if this is the case, why does St. Thomas insist on maintaining that beatitude is twofold: natural and supernatural? Is it absurd to speak of an imperfect beatitude, and to distinguish it from perfect beatitude? St. Thomas Aquinas did not think so. Beatitude refers to the full actualization of the intellectual creature, in which our faculties attain their highest object, and our aspirations come to rest. St. Thomas’ thesis is that this can happen in two ways: (a) in accordance with the proportionality of our nature (natural beatitude), and (b) transcending the proportionality of our nature (supernatural beatitude). In the first case it is relatively perfect, perfect in proportionality with our nature. In the second case it is absolutely perfect, perfect like God’s beatitude, of which it is a supernatural participation. Supernatural beatitude is immeasurably higher than natural happiness. This means that our supernatural end–heaven– transcends and immeasurably exceeds the natural longing of the human heart … A natural inclination is one that arises from nature and is proportionate to it. A supernatural inclination arises from faith and is proportionate only to grace, although not to nature.”

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beatitude, understanding it as imperfect, does this not presuppose the conception of a perfection because “any measure … that falls short in any way of that which is, is not good measure, for nothing incomplete is the measure of anything”45? The knowledge of that perfection needn’t be epistemologically enclosed and fully framed; in fact, it cannot be because it surpasses all understanding and limits; rather it lays in wait as mystery. Perfect beatitude is shrouded in nature, hiding the very grace which precedes, infuses, and perfects it.46 Isn’t this the entire logic of Plato’s Symposium? A hierarchy of perfections is employed in St. Thomas’ fourth way.47 It is not utilized to confine man to an enclosed nature, by which he should and can think merely human thoughts.48 Rather, the hierarchy reveals his transcendent transit, his longior via. While man may be more “familiar” with the imperfect, this limited knowledge already depends upon a connatural intimation of perfection. Any familiarity with an imperfect beatitude finds its primal antecedent in a perfection which man must desire if he is to see and acknowledge the subsequent order as lesser, as falling short, as im-perfect. The fourth way presupposes man’s incarnated and spiritual ordination as an open nature; it does not openly employ theological expressions which could further shape that openness through revelation, but enables nature naturally to evoke the supernatural and thus invoke a perfect end that can be desired but cannot be known in its fullness, or loved as a Person without grace. If the perfect has its onto-epistemological priority over imperfect beatitude, allowing the imperfect to be seen as imperfect, there must be an equivalent natural desire for that perfect beatitude, for all men desire perfection.49 45 46

47 48

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Republic 504c. Cf. Confessions X, vi: “But when I love you, what do I love? It is not physical beauty nor temporal glory nor the brightness of light dear to earthly eyes, nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs, nor the gentle odour of flowers and ointments and perfumes, nor manna or honey, nor limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh; it is not these I love when I love my God. Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God—a light, voice, odor, food, embrace of my inner man, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is a sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God.” ST I, 2, 3. Cf. Nichomachean Ethics VII. The Basic Works of Aristotle. ed. R. McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). Aristotle understood the nature desire for the supernatural and while grace alone can give shape to that desire, this does not mean that supernatural desire is “proportionate only to grace, although not to nature” as Feingold misapplies it. “We must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.” Future Citations: NE Cf. St. Diadochos of Photiki, The Philokalia: The Complete Text Vol. 1, trans. P. Sherrard and K. Wise (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), 288, § 89: “If the intellect does not receive the perfection of the divine likeness through such illumination, although it may have almost every other virtue, it will still have no share in perfect love. Only when it has been made like God—in so far, of course, as this is possible—does it bear the likeness of divine love as well. In portraiture, when the full range of colors is added to the outline, the painter captures the likeness of the subject, even down to the smile. Something similar happens to those who are being repainted by God’s grace in the divine likeness; when the luminosity of love is added, then it is evident that the image has been fully transformed into the beauty of the likeness. Love alone among the virtues can confer dispassion on the soul, for ‘love is the fulfilling of the law’ (Rom. 13:10) in this way our inner man is renewed day by day through the experience of love and in the perfection of love defines its own fulfillment.”

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Naturally, to desire only the imperfect and to be satisfied with that in stoic ennui would not only reduce the meaning of man’s existential comportment to a question of moral perfection but it could also reduce the role of Christ to that of a moral teacher or an artful magician.50 The God-Man’s role would be wholly marginalized: He unveils a perfect beatitude for which man in nature has no need, no desire, no hunger, but can now have by way of superfluous gift. The meaning of gift is so obscured as to become another competing “option” among many in the irrationalist drama of idiosyncratic salvation, in violation of solidarity, liberty fraternity, and equality. The political implications of such a mismanagement should be obvious. In man’s unity with God by way of creation, his responsive being is actually being the boundary line between nature and grace created by God because God created man. The God-Man as Uncreated speaks the unutterable, and as Begotten is the only Being Who can cross through to the created and thereby translate that sub-stantial as standing-underneath Word: “the sub-stance of things hoped for, the certitude of things unseen.”51 Existence therefore has fundamentally changed with the entrance of Christ, who is the To Be of existence. Advocates of a pure nature deny that this change is the active event of man and thus bypass man’s nature as made-to-be-open-to-change by being the prevenient responder to God’s call. While attentive to the real presence of Christ, they cannot permit the far-reaching implications of a Christocentric metaphysics.52 Christ did not have to enter existence, nor does He have to heighten our participation in His Existence which is identical with Grace—effectively giving us a greater share in Grace—but if Christ does so, it is accomplished because our open nature is, ab origine, the gift of the unfulfilled dynamis. And by unfulfilled we do not 50

51 52

Cf. St. Thomas on the Incarnation, ST III, 1, 5: In particular, Thomas’ response to obj. 3 opens the door to a meditation on temporality as well as on condition versus nature, which cannot be understood in a pure nature apparatus, but which requires the conatural presence of grace. Imperfection needs perfection, the latter precedes the imperfect tending toward ultimate perfection. The perfect encloses so as to elevate the imperfect at the beginning, the end and is in its very midst allowing it to be understood as imperfect. “Objection 3. Further, the work of grace is not less orderly than the work of nature. But nature takes its rise with the more perfect, as Boethius says (De Consol. iii). Therefore the work of Christ ought to have been perfect from the beginning. But in the work of Incarnation we see the perfection of grace, according to John 1:14: ‘The Word was made flesh’; and afterward it is added: ‘Full of grace and truth.’ Therefore Christ ought to have become incarnate at the beginning of the human race.” “Reply to Objection 3. Perfection is prior to imperfection, both in time and nature, in things that are different (for what brings others to perfection must itself be perfect); but in one and the same, imperfection is prior in time though posterior in nature. And thus the eternal perfection of God precedes in duration the imperfection of human nature; but the latter’s ultimate perfection in union with God follows.” Heb. 11:1. Cf. L. Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters (Washington DC: CUA Press, 2004) xxxvii. While, for example, Feingold recognizes the intrinsic unity of nature and grace, and also sees a need for an obediential potency, neither that potency nor unity appears to have any connectivity to man’s being in the world. He doesn’t allow the implications of the unity of nature and grace, and the possibility of obediential potency to take a position of prominence in man’s anthropology. His position unfortunately stymies any sort of anthropology born from a Christocentric metaphysics. This position leaves man as a closed nature who could be “opened up” by God. It undermines the perfection God freely gives man, beyond but not contrary to nature. Should man also have a natural end that satisfies him apart from that perfect beatitude, why need God?

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mean infirm but open to the reception of the kenotic power of the uncreated and yet begotten God-Man. Pure nature discards the real trans-existential change to nature, which the entrance of the cruciform Christ must accomplish if Christ is the same as To Be. Pure nature sees Christ as the historicists did—a being in time, not the Being of time—and, what is worse, they do not even recognize this reduction, which is wholly contrary to their intent but inevitable both epistemologically (the supernatural end as Christ is only conceivable by faith, not by reason—and thus purely gratuitous, as icing on the already good-enough-to-eat cake baked by Aristotle) and existentially (e.g., who is Sisyphus to pine?).

The bonfire of vanity Christ is the kenotic call to which man can both respond and call out. As fully God and fully Man, His self-emptying call has also the nature of response, responsiveness to man (for He is Man), and man is made to respond. Christ freely places Himself in the position of freely responding to His own Call. In Christ’s kenotic response-ascall, man, enclosed and attached to Christ, is now filled with Christ Himself, and man himself is also emptied in the Word’s self-emptying. This is the transformational power of Christ, the new creation that is not an annihilation of a nature but its fulfillment by way of elevation. Man-in-Christ is now able both to respond and call, and therefore his creaturely response can finally carry the weight of eternity in the shape of the Call, who is Christ, the uncreated and yet begotten. In Christ alone man’s being, which stands shapeless between the dualities, is given its shape, impetus, and End in Christ. Christ converts the shapeless supernatural into His cruciform shape. Man is the open-and-closed nature who is made to be the response to God’s uncreated call. St. Thomas’ emphasis on the identity of God’s essence and existence will not return man to the domain of the philosophers, and to an Aristotelianism where God may be the ground of ideas but not the cause of existence. The real distinction between essence and existence in the creature is derived from and contrasted to their uncreated identity. St. Thomas distinguishes God’s un-created creative dynamic infinity from any essentialist metaphysics where His existence is but a mode of essence, circumscribed and limited in reach. Man’s imago dei can thus be open to more than its creaturely due without annihilating its nature as creature. Thus, it makes room for the nature of man as an open nature, a being naturally desirous of the supernatural. When existence has a real role to play, then Christ is most interior to all beings and man can be the exterior manifestation of that interior call. Man is therefore capable not only of responding to the call but also of calling out the call, invoking the call. In the infinite exigency of Christ’s reach, humankind has the possibility of attaining Don Quixote’s slumberless dream of becoming God, of becoming identical with God’s Love, of being wholly closed in or shaped from within by Christ, of shaping his open-and-closed nature with the uncreated and yet begotten End which is beyond all shapes and Ends. Christ has chosen to beget the

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uncreated shape which names man for the first time as he is called by name in Christ. For God is everywhere primarily and absolutely.53 For God to be everywhere primarily and absolutely requires that the notion of pure nature be seen as wholly theoretical, and only as an initial and unexamined way of first imagining the gratuity of grace. Such appreciation of the gratuity of grace must of course deepen from this extrinsicized view of the mystery to its more interior understanding of the nature of man created by the Uncreated in order to be the created responder to that uncreatedness, a finitude open to being transformed by the infinite. Faith is not magic, nor is grace. Sufficient nature must give way to the prevenient open-and-closed nature in which God as the agent, and Christ as the medium, truly act on man. God is never divorced from his own pure To Be which is identical with the creative abyss of his purely actual Grace. Because God’s essence and existence are identical, St. Thomas presents the genuine connectivity between God’s creative To Be and man’s active responsiveness: God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works. For an agent must be joined to that wherein it acts immediately and touch it by its power; hence it is proved in Phys. vii that the thing moved and the mover must be joined together. Now since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be His proper effect; as to ignite is the proper effect of fire. Now God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being; as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated. Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being. But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things since it is formal in respect of everything found in a thing, as was shown above (Question 7, Article 1). Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.54

When the hypothetical construct of pure nature is presented as an existential alternative to man’s full and conversional vision of God, then knowledge of God’s nature is of a sort of non-creational essentialist Form. Knowledge of this Form would be the socalled purely natural and sufficient end of man, and if God acts at all in pure nature, He wouldn’t be within things as their sustaining efficient cause but only by way of 53

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ST I, 8, 4 resp. The pure nature position will argue that I am confusing the two orders of reason and faith by considering Thomas’ response as a metaphysical foundation only heightened by the dramatic entrance of the God-Man. They may contend that man understands the metaphysical presence of God “as everywhere primarily and absolutely” from nature, that is, philosophical, and its full realization, as Christ, is in a different vein, understood only in the faith. And thus any heightened correlation between the two is an epistemological confusion and conflation of the two orders, reason and faith, nature and grace. In response, I would argue that what can be known philosophically here is itself prepared by the faith (the God of Exodus etc.) and then mediated by reason: this is why it is a Summa “Theologica.” Once a truth of the faith is proposed/offered to reason, it not only makes supremely sense to reason, but reason has the privilege to contemplate what has been revealed in nature, which is its domain … So even this is not pure nature. The point is that the faith is itself not unnatural to man or to reason, but the very fulfillment of human nature and thus must have its preliminary and continued handiwork in nature and in reason. ST I, 8, 1 resp.

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peripheral accident, as Creation-as-Grace appears extrinsicized, indeed ostracized, and irrelevant. How can this end either be natural or satisfying or render even the philosopher “happy”? It certainly did not make either Plato or Aristotle happy. And while one must recognize that Aristotle never arrived at the idea of the un-created creator God, nor of the consequent distinction between essence and existence in creatures, nor how such a distinction serves to emphasize the un-crossable chasm between man’s finite nature and God’s infinite uncreated essence and existence, to presuppose that he had discovered a purely natural end, and a knowledge of the divine that was “proportionate” to his nature, is to ignore the collection of agonic aporiae throughout his thought,55 as well as in Plato’s.56 These aporiae serve to demonstrate, not a pure nature with an end distinct from the conversional vision of God, but the open-and-closed nature of a being in waiting, a being who is the naturely otherness of God. An aporia indicates man’s very nature to be in waiting and to be called so as to respond and act upon the event that is his nature. But without the Call in its fuller and revelatory stance as the divine Other in Christ, the philosopher could never know how to respond. Why else did Diotima reprimand Socrates but for his disregard of the confinium or in-between status of man,57 that the philosopher exists in the realm between soul and body, time and eternity, where wisdom finds inklings of love and where nature is grace but only in hiding. But man cannot even know this, precisely because what is hidden and concealed is possessed only by dispossession. Although man can only act on the call, and the degree of the divine call provides the medium by which he can correspondingly respond, this does not mean he is a pure nature. He is primordially a responsive being. If this were untrue, then Christ, Who is the same as To Be, and Who in his Godhead carries that infinitely identical essence and existence, could not be the very expression and fulfillment of man’s nature ending in God. In other words, it would not be fitting. Christ could not be the Being of time that makes time live up to eternity.58 Thomas sees how God is indeed everywhere, “first, as He is in all things giving them being, power and operation; so He is in every place as giving it existence and locative power.”59 This is not Pantheism, it is Providence. And when we apply that giving of existence and locative power to the purely active To Be of Christ, we again recognize the profound shift in existence that Christian Philosophy

55

56

57 58

59

Cf. J. Owens, “A Note on Aristotle, De Anima 3.4,429b9.” Phoenix 30, 2 (1976): 107–18; M.L. Gill, “Aristotle’s Metaphysics Reconsidered,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 43, 3 (2005): 223–41; D. S. Ross, Metaphysical Aporia and Philosophical Heresy (New York: SUNY, 1989). Cf. H. G. Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato (Yale UP, 1983); G. Matthews, Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999); M. Miller, “Aporia and Conversion: A Critical Discussion of R. E. Allen’s Plato’s Parmenides,” The Review of Metaphysics 41, 2 (1987), 355–68; P. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004). Cf. Symposium 202a–b. Cf. ST I, 8, 2 resp.: “Since place is a thing, to be in place can be understood in a twofold sense; either by way of other things–i.e. as one thing is said to be in another no matter how; and thus the accidents of a place are in place; or by a way proper to place; and thus things placed are in a place. Now in both these senses, in some way God is in every place; and this is to be everywhere.” Ibid.

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and metaphysics have recognized. “Christian Philosophy” is not a contradiction nor is it a redundancy. Philosophy, after Christ, has its being, not in a different place but on a higher plane. The commission of philosophy is the same as before: to understand what is. But now it is given more to work with; faith doesn’t give you less to think about, it gives you more to think about! This Christian Philosophy is not merely an adjectival description, nor a neat collection of the preambles to the faith, but an effort to catch a glimpse of the profound theo-drama of Christ’s kenotic act as it is happening in each man-in-Christ. This is real phenomenology, descriptive and not demonstrative; descriptive not of the necessity but of the meaning of the supernatural. By ignoring the Christian metaphysical emphasis on God’s essence and existence, pure nature theory cannot help but diminish the entrance of Christ as nothing more than an ontic or phenomenal placement, about which philosophy has precisely nothing to say!60 His entrance would remain only tangentially alongside self-sufficient existences. St. Thomas continues the genuine sense of God’s way-of-place, distinguishing it from those that exclude co-presence: Things placed are in place, inasmuch as they fill place; and God fills every place; not, indeed, like a body, for a body is said to fill place inasmuch as it excludes the co-presence of another body; whereas by God being in a place, others are not thereby excluded from it; indeed, by the very fact that He gives being to the things that fill every place, He Himself fills every place.61

Revelation does not mean a transmission of Word as mere concept or even propositional dogma, nor is it merely a peripheral contact of man with the divine. What unites a Christian man to those so-called happy philosophers with their purely natural end is the fact that they are the pre-thematic exemplar of the restless heart and their “natural” end is rather a salt that has lost its savor, or rather never had it. If Being is the ground of all knowledge, it resides in the mysterium tremendum of the un-created, in those unutterable words of which St. Paul haltingly speaks.62 Those unutterable words can be shapelessly and wordlessly groaned, for all of creation does groan, as Aristotle’s aporiae clearly groan, but they cannot be consummated as Word without Word Made Flesh. When that which stands underneath manifests itself by lovingly transgressing the uncrossable ground from the uncreated to the created, the groan finds as it receives its voice in the Word. When Christ’s uncreated and yet begotten nature accomplished the crossing of the uncrossable, this could not mean he implanted alien ontological or trans-ontological categories on man’s so called “pure” nature. This implantation of alien categories is the equivalent of grace extolled by way of a rationalist univocity.63 This is what Hegel 60

61 62 63

Why did God become man? Pure nature theorists do not see the full and necessary implications of Incarnation, which is proposed to naturally supernatural man but/and requires faith: where is the contradiction? ST I, 8, 2 resp. 2 Cor. 12:14. Cf. J. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 257–442.

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did, is it not, and his idea of history as divinity in disguise is yet worlds apart from the Christian notion of nature as grace in hiding. Accepting, in his own way, that idea of a “pure” nature, Hegel saw nevertheless its role in the ontological estrangement between man, world, and God. But instead of retreating from it he consummated it by constituting man, world, and God as finite expressions of the Weltgeist. He could not have done so without the contraption of a pure nature. Such an expression lessens the total abandonment and love of the Christocentric gift, and of the God-Man who adopts those who answer His call. Christ reads into the very heart of man because all men, especially and including pre-Christian man, even with their philosophical “ends,” are united by that timeless open-and-closed nature. What Christ does is to be the medium which directs that open nature to its end. And of course, the end is the medium, and the medium is the message. While Plato or Aristotle could not know Christ before Christ, as much as they did not know the distinction between essence and existence before Revelation, that does not mean that they were not created to long for the uncreated and to be preveniently open to the call. Just as Christ makes Himself the Medium, the thing known Who can be in the One who knows, so man can know and be in his end in Christ. For Christ to be the thing known requires that man is already by his nature open to that infinite noematic reality. His nature is therefore never divorced from the gift of grace; man’s open or prevenient nature continually testifies to this truth. The operations of the soul reflect an alethiological dispossession and possession which characterize our restless search for the end. For St. Thomas, man possesses this prerogative by grace.64

It would take a God: Aristotle’s aporia in Nichomachean Ethics Book X We need not accept the arbitrary and artificial linearization of history to a mere chronological succession of events culminating at best in a kind of union of merely relative concatenations.65 Nor, on the other hand, does history enclose upon itself becoming a self-referential absolute. History finds its beginning as history in the idea of Christ66—all the rest is the Wait; man now Waits, whether he believes in Christ or not, for the end of history. Aristotle, too, was in a kind of Wait. Like Plato’s, his philosophy is set within the genuine mytho-historical patterns of existence; his heroic search for truth was characteristically erotic. As the driving existential impetus of the

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ST I, 8, 2 resp. The distinction here is not between the cosmological/cyclical temporality of the “pre-historical” compact societies on the one hand, and the Augustinian linearly directed movement of history on the other. I would argue in fact that the ancient cyclical eternal return symbolization has far more in common with the Augustinian/Christian unrepeatability than either one has with the positivist linear successiveness or the Hegelian/historicist cyclical progressivity found in modernity. This is true of St. Augustine. See City of God, ed. V. Bourke (New York: Image Books, 1958) XVII; XIX. See also H. U. Cardinal von Balthasar, A Theology of History (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1994), 19–28; 51–80.

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Wait, this erotic nature remains inexhaustibly focused on its telos, the distantly eternal as eternally distant. Eros is thus pre-figuratively, pre-thematically, preveniently the idea of hope, incorporating the essentially historical phenomenon of expectation.67 Aristotle authentically delineates man’s highest natural hope, happiness, but nothing possibly fulfills the criteria. Aristotle, again, embodies the nature of a man in Wait, his soul hoping for happiness with an erotic desire that extends inexhaustibly but cannot find its so-desired end. This then is the pre-thematic understanding of the naturally disproportionate need for something like grace. It is at the core of Aristotle’s understanding of friendship. Truly to be waiting is to be waiting, therefore, for something or someone like Christ; this Waiting is imbedded and reflected within one’s discourse, habits, and virtues. It will be objected from what some consider to be the side of ratio that the notion of the Wait is so purely theological, indeed so soteriological, that it is the illegitimate imposition of alien religious categories upon philosophical phenomena in a sort of facile retrodiction. From the side of a particular distorted conception of fides, on the other hand, it will be objected that to consider such a notion as the Wait to be philosophical at all dilutes, even negates the unique and irreducible gratuity of freely given grace, making what cannot even be expected to be indeed predictable. Either, therefore, it is too Christian to be philosophical or too philosophical to be Christian; if it is not one or the other, it needs be neither the one nor the other. But the point is far different. The idea of the Wait as an existential-ontological component of finite existence is the unsaid but implicit category running throughout Greek tragedy and philosophy, most dramatically discoverable in Plato and Aristotle.68 It is not a case of baptizing the Greeks. Rather, is it a case of seeing what is there to be seen. And what is there to be seen is the philosophical elaboration of a philosophical problem whose only philosophical resolution philosophically requires a theological possibility. If the idea of the Wait is a critical descriptive indicator of finite human existence, it would be more strange not to find it deeply imbedded yet struggling to be articulated than to find it. And so the objections ring false and fail. This is not an attempt to rationalize religious concepts along the lines of Hegel, although it is not a denial of their ontic rootedness and rational intelligibility. Nor is it that kind of patronizing and vulgar dismissal of the Greeks as merely pre-Christian, unlucky enough to be born before the “Truth” was revealed to all with the kind of pseudocertitude that would make even a Cartesian’s jaw drop. The objection of someone like Santayana however is far more grave. In his remarkable, great work The Idea of Christ in the Gospels,69 the figure of Christ not only represents the spirit of the earth (contra Nietzsche) but also embodies and articulates to the highest degree of perfection the mytho-poetic patterns of existence. This is the kind

67 68

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Cf. J. Pieper, Hope and History (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1994), 77–79. See also Republic 490a. For a more detailed explication of the “Wait” structure see C. Smith Gilson, Metaphysical Presuppositions of Being in the World (New York: Continuum, 2010), 156–76. George Santayana, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels: Or God in Man, A Critical Essay (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946).

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of truth that neither the rationalist/historicist nor the literalist can appreciate. This is its genuine reality and religious purpose. But for Santayana, the question of its “historical” “objective” truth is irrelevant: it is poetry and as poetry it is deeply true. Only when that poetry is hypostasized does it enter the realm of fantasy and untruth. If anything, the idea of Christ is too good to be true for Santayana. Santayana would thus agree with Heidegger that mythos and logos are separated only where neither keeps to its original nature.70 In response, however, one might point out that for the idea of Christ to be given its proper ontic due, the necessary distinction between logos and mythos must indeed be maintained with as much delicacy as rigor. But the distinction underlies a fundamental interelatedness in the idea of Christ because that idea provides, fulfills, and dignifies the distinction. It is because of Christ that the mytho-poetic patterns of existence first ratified by the Greeks can come to the threshold of their own existence. One could characterize this as a legitimate hermeneutic of perfection in which it would not be possible for Christ to be on the one hand too good and on the other not true. These patterns of existence, although expressed symbolically in poetry, language, and thought, are genuine existential categories and in that sense not “mere” symbols but fully real and therefore “true.” To grasp this at all requires a conscious step out of the naive subjectivisms and objectivisms of our time, both of which are deeply nominalist in origin and intent. Suppose for the moment, or at least entertain the possibility that the idea of Christ is the perfect fulfillment of all those patterns (and whether this is the case is a philosophical question), would we not be entitled rationally to “believe” it? If the patterns are the existential ontological fabric of the metaxy in which man lives, and if Christ is their meaning, and if Christ is their meeting point, perfection and fulfillment, is not the idea of Christ to be found within, indeed as, that fabric? As the uniquely perfect image of the perfect Man-God, the idea of his existence in history as history is included, that is, the idea of his real historical truth cannot be withheld; it is precisely this inclusion of historical truth that renders the idea fulfilled and complete or, in a word, perfect. For the moment therefore, and at a minimum, we may proceed with our notion of the Wait and leave the philosophical question of the nature of belief in Christ, and return to Aristotle. For Aristotle, history is in human nature; we come to an understanding of ourselves in the shared confrontation with the other within the polis; and when history is seen as Man in Christ, our highest understanding is granted communion with the idea of the inescapable and Highest Other within His own self-referential absolute historicality. Why would God become man? To save man from that which prevented full beatitude? To give man what Aristotle saw but could not attain? To let man find and cleave to a reciprocally loving God rather than a univocally alien god and ever to find this God through the world and through others and as friends in a transcendental polis, a community of the living and the dead across time? God becoming man is the difference between an end merely to be perceived and a realm actually to be lived in, as Augustine knew.71 70

71

M. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. F. D. Wieck and J. G. Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 10. Confessions, VII, xx.

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Can the nature of Aristotle’s Wait bring something to our Wait? If the idea of Christ has re-situated the whole of existence to be brought up in Him, realized by and fulfilled through Him, then Christian philosophy precisely as Christian and precisely as philosophy cannot ignore any stage or state or condition, even and especially those pre-thematically understood. Every human life, even after Christ, begins in a noetically pre-Christian existence; this is not outside Christ but is the very nature of human becoming into Christ. Thus, the Aristotelian path to the highest beatitude, the philosophical life, is possibly true only within the idea of Christ. Aristotle had sensed something like this when, in his Nichomachean Ethics, he entered the deepest aporia as he began to describe the way to beatitude. He refined the natures of virtue, knowledge, friendship, and pleasure into a unified perfection, so much so that virtually no man on this side of eternity could achieve it, insisting and encouraging man to try to immortalize himself while admitting its impossibility for man as man to achieve. After having identified, sought, and exhausted the candidates for the good life, he has settled on the philosophic life as the paradigm of happiness. But now in that famous passage in Book X he admits, if not defeat, at least a recognition of his and our embarrassing predicament. But such a life would be too high for man; for it is not insofar as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present within him; and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exercise of the other kind of virtue. If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.72

Aristotle here lays the predicate for a natural beatitude and then confesses a solely divine element as its procurer. This paradox can be maintained only within the framework of Christianity. Without the idea of Christ, not only would Aristotle have leapt into an epistemological absurdity, but his paradox having become a contradiction would also fail to gain any historical ontic validity; so much so that the philosopher would become fully man only at the price of becoming philosophically not merely meta-physica but meta-cosmos. Plato’s non-participating spectator would not be able to step away and still be within the noetic world. A world in Wait without its telos carries no meaning: it is an empty Form. What do Christ and history have to do with Aristotelian friendship? Let us examine Aristotle’s intentions within the Nichomachean Ethics, and follow the seemingly inconsistent statements until they finally merge into a kind of genuflection toward the divine, a recognition of something Other, of something to come. Book VIII begins 72

NE X, 1177b 25–30.

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with a very anti-Kantian assessment of the benefits of friendship. Friends become “necessary for living,” they help us avoid mistakes, make up for our weaknesses, protect our wealth; friends are a useful, pleasant, and necessary commodity for a good life.73 This necessity for friendship (this reduction of friendship to the realm of necessity) doesn’t seem to reflect the realm of the free philosophic spirit; it doesn’t even therefore seem very Greek. One might claim that Aristotle goes beyond this notion of necessity and benefit, and in one way he does. He sheds the inessential layers, types of guest friendships, aquaintanceships whose likenesses are temporary and fleeting because their similitudes are etched in superficial terms: the lovers whose mutual pleasure fades with the onset of age and the loss of beauty; the relationship based on the exchange of goods dying rapidly once supply dwindles. But by striving to articulate the most excellent form of likeness as the pre-requisite for longevity in a true friendship, Aristotle in the end returns to the greatest benefits to demonstrate the nature of the truest friendship. Even therefore a greater necessity corresponds to the highest friendship than to the lesser. While difficult to reconcile to the Greek vision, it is not so to the Christian. It is precisely within Christ that the realm of necessity becomes a virtue, a vehicle toward transcendence. The benefit of necessity is the recognition of our utter unfailing dependency on the Other for our happiness. In the Christian Wait, a longing for agape, surrendering and fulfilling our erotic drive, signifies not that tragedy awaits man’s end, but that his ransomed time and redeemed soul can be raised into God’s caritas. The idea of Christ squares the circle between God and ourselves by exhausting the inexhaustible divide, the infinite chorismos: only He can give us our similitude with Him, the likeness and equality necessary to engender our highest knowledge, deepest friendship, and greatest happiness. Isn’t it precisely this likeness/ similitude that St. Anselm and St. Thomas characterize as a critical indicator for the fittingness (and therefore truth?) of the Incarnation?74 Aristotle glimpsed the core of this likeness, but with all his erotic thrust he could neither acquire it nor find it reflected in another or even in a friend. For virtue is something lasting75 but no friendship even to death can last through death. Aristotle thus understood that virtue itself had a nature beyond human capacities and that it was somehow housed in certain degrees within man. Man’s mortality was inescapable but his own excellence demanded freedom from the tragedy of death. Not even the virtues shared between friends immortalize each other’s excellences; however, if so, why does all virtue itself desire for us and in us an immortality we cannot possibly achieve? The philosopher recognizes the excellence he cannot attain; the more his habits, acts, and virtues reach their perfect pitch, the more distant the fulfillment/telos appears. The admitted need for a divine fulfillment of the human spiritual entelechy entered Aristotle prethematically and thrust him into an erotic longing for an agapetic state where he

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NE VIII, 1155a 30. St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, I, iii. Proslogium, Monologium, Cur Deus Homo, Gaunilo’s Reply In Behalf of the Fool, trans. S. N. Deane (Lasalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1962). See also SCG IV, 54. NE VIII, 1156b 13.

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recognized the desire for grace but knew not how to mouth or understand the Word, for it had not yet been said. There are thus two seemingly possible alternative outcomes to this impasse for man’s philosophic entelechy: (1) Reject the efficacy of the world, so much so that man looks for the good outside the world either by denying its intelligibility or through glorifying eternity by denigrating its moving image in either a Stoic or Gnostic deformation of the impasse. (2) Recognize the world as the intelligible grounding of all our knowledge of the Other through its formative worldhood dependency reflecting an ultimate divine dependency, and a natural desire for a naturally un-attainable, that is, supernatural fulfillment. In the latter, the nature of the world is to bring us to the door of beatitude, but it does not itself allow us to enter. But now if we understand Christ as history, history gracefully gives the philosopher his only one real philosophical option. Aristotle in his genuine thought, faithful to the truth, knew it and so did Plato: the philosopher cannot deny the intelligibility of the world; he can only wait for it to be fulfilled. The paradoxical structure of existence testifies to man’s natural sense of the divine: man desires immortality and is mortal; he must have knowledge of the eternal in order to be finite; he desires that which he himself cannot attain and must do so in order to be what he is. A paradox is based on a true presupposition, but calling a presupposition true is itself a paradox, as presuppositions are the elusive underlying context of the human intellect which must be there in order for human reason to be rational. The presupposition that man starts from the world (and need not prove it) appears inconsistent, indeed even a failure, when Aristotle admittedly cannot attain his highest beatitude on this side of eternity and within this presuppositional context; but the presupposition is paradoxically true both in pre-Christian and Christian Wait. When the idea of Christ finally and fully elevates the structure and patterns of human existence into the divine reality, the whole of our existential structure reveals itself as its own marked passage into History. In other words, we see that those patterns and structures have their cohesion and their meaning only in reference to Christ, whether beforehand or after the fact. This, not in spite of the intellect’s limitation, but because of it. The Aristotelian presuppositions condition our understanding of limit, necessity, and dependency, of, in a word, finitude. Aristotle’s paradoxical attempts to find through friends or oneself a way of immortalization/transcendence within these existential confines revealed both the reality of the desire for natural beatitude and the inability of the world in itself to satisfy that desire. Thus, it furthered him epistemologically within the Wait. He and Plato come the closest knowingly to approach the threshold of history. Aristotelian man erotically longs for an ontic completion in his very being that, epistemologically, he had come to understand as necessary, but which only through something or someone like Christ is possible. The great Parmenidean insight that the same is for thinking as for being is only fulfilled through Christ. Does not a proper

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hermeneutic of the Greeks require a proper understanding of their essential place within the Wait? 76 The same is for thinking as for being evokes the presupposition like unto like. Aristotle in Book VIII of the Nichomachean Ethics is not only outlining the nature of the greatest friendship; he is, even more so, searching for the greatest similitude. He has already grasped the nature of transcendence. Excellence and beatitude are possible only in a shared union of equals, but Aristotle has exhausted himself in his attempt to find the precise union that fully appropriates and exemplifies the other in such a union. Furthermore, he cannot find a true equality that isn’t solely contingent on an equal share of certain qualities (money, goods, pleasure etc.) for the friendship. It is not an equal share that Aristotle desires, it is a shared equal. He is looking for the simple indivisible nucleus (the Form) that constitutes equality itself. He is even stepping outside his own Greek understanding that the highest life, the philosophic life, is more or less a life alone.77 And yet, none of the friendships he has examined even meets the excellence attained in the singular philosophic life: friendships involving usefulness often obscure the line of equality when dealing with different kinds of goods in exchange; friendship among blood brothers close in age somewhat sets the parameters for equality but this kind of likeness doesn’t often translate into a mutual unhindered desire for the other to gain excellence and to benefit from it. It is the idea of family, that they are of the same root and of the same blood, that Aristotle finds himself most cleaving to in his search for likeness. But there is more. Aristotle lays the ground in Book VIII for the greatest and most delicate paradox, a palpable hint at the coming nature of the divine, even a bid to the telos that he is in Waiting. We have come with Aristotle to an understanding that the greatest friendship is in the shared communion of two souls who are of the highest merit and equal in accord with their merit, each wishing only “the greatest good for their friends e.g., being a god.”78 These two souls are both lover and beloved at the same stroke. Both are lovers of the other, each other is a beloved. Friends of the greatest virtue have equalized the relationship between lover and beloved and, as it is greater to extend one’s love than to accept, they in a way act as both because they honor and praise only each other’s excellences. But yet, it is not enough merely to equalize the lover and beloved; no, these two friends are praising each other’s virtue only insofar as their shared virtue extends into and peer toward the divine. Their virtues are virtues only therefore in reference to another greater Other. As Aristotle says, the essence of friendship is conversation about the highest things.79 A friendship based on the greatest merit has reached the door of the divine; again, it has not entered but it has entered into a relationship with it. The most mysterious paradox has caught Aristotle’s 76

77 78 79

Their place within the Wait thus constitutes both the context and subtext of their thought. It is precisely its status as context, as the element in which their thought operates but which it does not create, that prohibits the notion of the Wait from being explicit before the fact. That is, would they have even been able to think the same thoughts in the same way after Christ? NE X, 1178b 3–8. NE VIII, 7. Ibid.

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eye. At first it seemed the greatest friendship was one equal in merit, so much so that it transcended the lover–beloved relationship unable to be based on equality. The lovers in their mutual giving over are each seen as the greater. But now the relationship between father and son becomes the paradoxical paradigm. The father is inexhaustibly greater than the son, because the son owes his existence to his father and can never return the gift necessary to meet him on equal terms. Even if the son brought the father back from the brink of death, the son still could not cross the threshold of his own existential birth and meet his father eye to eye. Between father and son, the nature of beloved as lesser and lover as greater is enigmatically inverted. The son is the lesser and therefore is not and should not be the beloved, he must love the father more than the father needs to love him. In some cases it could be prudent for a father to disown a son; but never should a son disown his father, for he owes his father far too much. The greatest virtue for a man then is to meet his father on equal terms, to engage him as a friend; but not only can the son not overcome their existential divide, he has, perhaps without fault, even confused the very nature of the lover and beloved; he must be the lover of his father, but his place in existence cannot give him that kind of agapetic superiority. But not loving his father so much that he can overcome the status as the beloved and give it over, crowning his father with it, would disclose a lack that would prevent him from ever attaining his highest beatitude. The two friends who are equal in merit and seek the highest excellence have among themselves found their equality, but this similitude has only opened up within them a far greater divide. The father-toson is a natural existential divide, as the divine-to-man is a supernatural existential divide. Aristotle made the amazing pre-thematic inference that the greatest and highest equality in natural excellences peers at the vastest incomprehensible divide, as seen in the relationship of father and son—“and this is why “Homer calls Zeus Father.”80 Does Aristotle’s examination of the relationship between father and son, the unsatiated eros of the son for the father, give Christian man a better understanding of his relationship to his Heavenly Father? Does it clarify why the Father sent his only begotten Son and not Himself? Has Aristotle pre-thematically given us a distinct illumination into the nature of Christ and the Trinity? If we are to draw inferences from Aristotle’s understanding of the relationship between father and son into our understanding of God becoming man as son, perhaps we will see that as son, Christ, while still remaining infinitely Other and superior, can meet us equally as well, insofar as he has met us on human terms.81 God went the farthest existentially in his rescue mission for his pitiful creatures, for if “a creditor can remit a debt so to then can a father”:82 and so He sent His Son. The Son not only meets us on human terms, he meets us as an equal within the human world as a Son looking at the Father. When he joined us in the most excellent of friendships by looking with us to the Father, we were then, now, and ever able to overcome the existential divide between father and son, naturally and supernaturally. And because His friendship is thus of the highest and deepest 80 81 82

NE VIII 1160b 27. SCG IV, 54. NE VIII 1163b 3.

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degree, our betrayal of Him is also of the most terrible and deepest degree.83 But in the most mysterious of graces the Triune Spirit made the Father the Son for mankind. When we join His only begotten Son in the friendship He relentlessly extends to us, we have already crossed, by His Grace, the uncrossable existential divide to the Father.

A gift upon a gift versus a philosophical fiction Man’s dual unities of body and soul, nature and grace, time and eternity are the signifiers of that third thing, that prevenient, antecedent openness to the divine call, which as open is unshapen and cannot on its own respond to the Divine without God becoming the Medium which shapes and informs the creaturely call. When God acts upon man’s prevenient openness, He acts upon the region of being emphatically open to grace, open to the adoption of creature as son. These dual unities are the grace-full created expressions of the uncreated and their tensions consist in being held out from, never united to or separated from, their complementarity. St. Thomas clearly affirms this in his articles on the nature and relationship of the soul to the body.84 These mutually and umbilically related unities never reductively meet; instead, the existence of each is wholly informed, infused, and interpreted by the other, pointing to that primal creative silence, that third thing which we are to God. Man receives himself as the being born of response, as the naturely otherness of God, the reflected participant in God’s imageless Act, made both to respond and to seek the Other in himself. And as a responsive being, man cannot respond without God’s prior call to shape his response—without God’s possessed dispossession un-concealing itself and re-affirming His continued and intensified possession in man. The supernatural is thus not merely “added” but, as C.C. Martindale said, conspires with the natural into an exquisite new unity.85 And while pre-Christian man cannot call out the right word because the Word has not yet revealed the ground of his invocation, this does not negate his open nature but rather affirms it as the being-in-waiting. The happiness of the philosopher is in essence an un-satiated eros in need of the agapetic Image to soothe that shapeless need and

83

84

85

Cf. NE, 1160a 3–9: “Injustice therefore also is differently constituted in each of these relationships: wrong is increasingly serious in proportion as it is done to a nearer friend. For example, it is more shocking to defraud a comrade of money than a fellow-citizen; or to refuse aid to a brother than to do so to a stranger; or to strike one’s father than to strike anybody else. Similarly it is natural that the claims of justice also should increase with the nearness of the friendship, since friendship and justice exist between the same persons and are co-extensive in range.” ST I, 76; See also A. C. Pegis, At the Origins of the Thomistic Notion of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 38–39: “St. Thomas decided that man could be one being in nature if soul and body were related to each another as co-parts, that is, as incomplete members of a whole that alone could verify and explain their meaning even as parts. The human soul, therefore, though a spiritual substance in itself, yet had the incomplete nature of a part; it was by nature both a substance and a substantial form, and therefore somehow truly both whole and a part … It is the soul as a whole that, in explaining the meaning of soul as a part, likewise explains the meaning of man as a whole.” Cf. C.C. Martindale, “The Supernatural,” ed. F. Cuthbert, God and the Supernatural (London: Long, Green & Co. 1936), 20.

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inflame it in another way. The philosopher’s happiness is to be in waiting for the perfect proportionate end but knowing not what he waits for.86 Therefore, the wait structure— man’s antecedent openness—heralds the uniqueness and gratuity of grace while never mistaking that gratuity for a non-essential extrinsic accident, or reducing it to a natural necessity. Neither hostile to nor proportionate to the natural order, grace is no more a closed order than nature is. That was the “practical error” of both Calvinism and Jansenism and, like the Cartesian bifurcation of soul and body, the question of the relationship between these two mutually exclusive and hostile cloistered orders became and remains an insoluble enigma, wrecking the unity of man.87 Man’s nature is made to call out and to respond, and when grace speaks the Word that shapes his call, it does not annihilate his nature by replacing it with another, but truly makes him an exquisite new unity. Whether pre-Christian man or philosopher, whether sinner or saint, all are prodigal, indeed nomadic in nature: man is a creature in-transit. Man is always and already a happening toward that new creation—an open nature waiting to be wholly en-closed by or attached to the truly infinite Lover who alone gives man’s openness a definite shape. In the primal and flawless logic of the mystery, our end complements the openness and risk of our origin: born of the freedom to respond, we end with the freedom of God to call forth more than our creaturely due. Man’s so-called creaturely due is also more than man’s creaturely due, for it is natural to desire.88 All of nature is already a gift precisely because God’s nature is identical with His donative existence and with His grace. Neither God’s existence nor His grace carry limit or potentiality, nor should they be confused with the cycle of potency-to-act. Man is therefore an unfulfilled dynamis: as a being-of-response, he desires more than his creaturely due. And yet, his unfulfilled dynamis is not thereby impoverished or deficient. Such would be the practical error of the existentialists. By 86

87 88

Cf. N. J. Healy, “Henri de Lubac on Nature and Grace,” 535–64: “Our natural desire for God entails a renunciation both of self-sufficiency and of demand. To want a gratuitous friendship is also to want to be surprised, and so to refuse to know in advance the actual shape of that gratuity.” CF. C. Dawson, “The Nature and Destiny of Man,” God and the Supernatural, 80. In the plenitude of existence, man has always been given more than his “creaturely due,” this is part of the paradox and terrifying beauty of man’s open nature. Cf. J. Maritain, Approaches to God, trans. P. O’Reilly (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), 111–12: “Nothing is more human than for man to desire naturally things impossible to his nature. It is, indeed, the property of a nature which is not closed up in matter like the nature of physical things, but which is intellectual or infinitized by the spirit. It is the property of a metaphysical nature. Such desires reach for the infinite, because the intellect thirsts for Being and Being is infinite. They are natural, but one may also call them transnatural. [And this desire] … Is not a simple velleity, a superadded desire, a desire of supererogation. It is born in the very depths of the thirst of our intellect for Being; it is a nostalgia so profoundly human that all the wisdom and all the folly of man’s behavior has in it its most secret reason. And because this desire, which asks for what is impossible to nature, is a desire of nature in its profoundest depths, St. Thomas Aquinas asserts that it cannot issue in an absolute impossibility. It is in no way necessary that it be satisfied, since it asks for what is impossible for nature. But it is necessary that by some means (which is not nature) it be able to be satisfied, since it necessarily emanates from nature.” See also Pensees, 72: “For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.”

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virtue of his existential dependency on the beyond-being-and-image of God’s pure To Be, man is always in a state of having more than his creaturely due; his need is a reflection of his plenitude. He is born of and sustained in, and quite possibly finished by, the infinite freedom of God as the ever excelling complementarity to man’s ontonoetic comportment. Grace is therefore a gift upon a gift—upon the gift of creation an intensification and infusion of man’s naturely otherness, proximally resolving itself in that unshaped prevenient openness, confirming his nature in waiting and in need for God-as-End. Man’s openness continually re-emphasizes his tending toward a new creation that alone it cannot shape. Any proximal end or natural resolution only serves to elongate the dualities in a tension whose unity is discoverable and fulfilled only in Christ, as fully God and fully Man. The tension between these dual unities is not to frustrate but to reaffirm the natural freedom of our unfulfilled dynamis. Christ as Medium-qua-End can give shape to those creaturely or natural ends which are never ends or finalities in themselves, but rather ends-as-limits. This natural end is a kind of existential ananke stenai, a limit which presents the nameless Word, but only by way of dispossession. St. Thomas in the De Veritate speaks of two ultimate goods that move man, one which is described as proportionate to human nature and the other which exceeds that proportion: Man, however, has a twofold final good, which first moves the will as a final end. The first of these is proportionate to human nature since natural powers are capable of attaining it. This is the happiness about which the philosophers speak, either as contemplative, which consists in the act of wisdom, or active, which consists first of all in the act of prudence, and in the acts of the other moral virtues as they depend on prudence. The other is the good which is out of all proportion with man’s nature because his natural powers are not enough to attain to it either in thought or desire. It is promised to man only through the divine liberality: “The eye has not seen …” (1 Cor. 2:9). This is life everlasting. It is because of this good that the will is inclined to give assent to those things which it holds by faith. Thus the Gospel according to St. John (6:40) reads: “Everyone who sees the Son, and believes in him may have life everlasting.89

Before we read this as evidence of St. Thomas’ denial of a natural desire for the supernatural, we might, again, place the issue within its authentic context. The natural or proportionate end is a halting which ratifies the primordial recognition that man’s knowledge cannot ascend to what the will indistinctly craves. The intellect cannot yet name the shape which can direct the will in its craving. The shape has not been named by the Word and is therefore unshaped: this unshaped terminus is beyond the achievable natural good which envisions an end proportionate to the good of that halting. This so-called natural end is, again, the onto-noetic limit of the unfulfilled dynamis, and it is the very life of humility. It is not and never could be an end in 89

DV XIV, 2 resp.

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itself which would render the beatific end—discoverable only in the freedom of an intensified grace—superfluous and non-essential! On the contrary, it is, in its humility, that which points to another and disproportionate end, but which is the sine qua non of human happiness. This natural end or limit is called proportionate to human nature not because it is an end in itself, but because it reflects what is due to man by means of the achievable limit continually indicative of his actions. This limit re-creates a preliminary shape of man as well as a gaping shapelessness of that open and unshaped longing, that longing which is inflamed by the grace of faith. The proportionate limit and its underlying shapelessness therefore reveal man to be the more-than-man, with a natural desire for the supernatural, as we see even in Aristotle. And because this shapelessness cannot antecedently be shaped by the intellect, for the Word has not yet shaped it, this natural end as onto-noetic limit carries both anticipation and waitingness. Therefore, even man’s natural due expresses an unformed sense of gift by way of the acts of hope and bewilderment. With Aristotle, man cannot get there from here on his own, but what can be done by and through a friend can in some sense be attributed to the man.90 If the passages in the De Veritate are read without careful deference to the interior aims of contemplation, prudence, and happiness—specifically the happiness of the philosophers, which is actually a combination of eros/desire and aporia/perplexity both of which betoken the need, lack, and poverty of the attainable natural end—it might lead one to believe that these two ultimate goods actually terminate in two distinct and divergent ends for human nature. The happiness of the philosopher is proximal, and therefore, as proximal, it can never carry the finality of an End. It is an expression of that essential halting before man’s unshaped openness. The happiness of the philosopher and the Christian who also waits is not the happiness which can complete the conversion of man’s total being; it is rather the restless happiness of the journey, of the open nature, of a being-in-making. True happiness is born of freedom and ends in freedom, from the freedom of God’s gift to make man a responsive being, free to respond to God till the End when God is free to call out and complete the shape of man’s responses. True happiness occurs only when man is freely brought to rest in the true End, where the Medium beatifies the End and the End beatifies the Medium: in God’s happiness alone is man finally happy. The good that exceeds the proportionate ability of human nature is the good of eternal life. And so happiness is and always must be the trigger mechanism of human nature, and the desire for happiness is the natural and universal élan of human action and thought. “… our heart is restless until it rests in Thee …” We all seek happiness as we all seek love, for as St. Thomas says, the “desire of enjoying anything springs from the love of it.”91 Of course, the sad truth of the human condition is that we look for love in all the wrong places. “Therefore it was requisite for man … to be induced to love God …”92 Man naturally desires a happiness beyond his natural powers to achieve. It would take a god to procure it, as Aristotle knew. Thus the supernatural 90 91 92

NE VIII, 1159a5–15. SCG IV, 54. Ibid.

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yet natural fittingness of the Incarnation to achieve what we cannot; to incline the will to assent; to procure what we cannot. The alternative is at best the stoic above-it-all worldly wisdom of Polonius. The natural, proportionate good or proximal end and the end which exceeds that proportion must both pre-possess a likeness and desire for their respective ends, and the likeness is, at root, an inducement toward that end. Now nothing can be ordered to an end unless some sort of proportion to the end preexists in it, a proportion from which there arises in it a desire for the end. And this happens insofar as a sort of inception of the end comes to exist in it, since it desires nothing except to the extent that it desires some likeness of that [inception]. And so it is that in human nature itself there is a sort of inception of that good which is proportionate to [human] nature. For in human nature there naturally preexist (i) principles of demonstration, known per se, which are seeds of wisdom, and (ii) certain principles of the natural law, which are seeds of the moral virtues. Hence, in order for a human being to be ordered toward the good of eternal life, it is also necessary that a sort of inception of that good should come to exist in the one who is promised eternal life. But eternal life consists in the full cognition of God, as is evident from John 17:3: ‘This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God.’ Hence, it is necessary that some inception of this supernatural cognition should come to exist in us. And this inception comes through faith, which on the basis of an infused light holds fast to things that by nature exceed our cognition.93

Those inducements to desire the natural good are described by St. Thomas as seeds of wisdom, seeds or inklings of perfection discoverable in contemplation and in the happiness of the philosophers, in prudence and in the natural law. None of these categories, to be clear, is an end in itself but rather an end as limit or cursory shape outlining that shapelessness in waiting. Each of these categories—from prudence to the natural law—contains in its field of view an identification beyond its reach; thus they reach out as inducements-toward. When St. Thomas speaks of the precepts of prudence, wherein prudence is “foremost among all the moral virtues”94 and the very “charioteer of the virtues (auriga virtutum),”95 he argues that a precept of prudence should not be included as one of the precepts of the Decalogue precisely because the nature of prudence is not about the end, but the way or means to an end beyond itself: I answer that, as stated above (I–II, 100, 3; 5, ad 1) when we were treating of precepts, the commandments of the decalogue being given to the whole people, are a matter of common knowledge to all, as coming under the purview of natural

93 94 95

DV XIV, 2 resp. ST II-II, 56, 1, ad 1. ST II-II 47, 2; Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2011) § 1806.

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reason. Now foremost among the things dictated by natural reason are the ends of human life, which are to the practical order what naturally known principles are to the speculative order, as shown above (Question 47, Article 6). Now prudence is not about the end, but about the means, as stated above (Question 47, Article 6). Hence it was not fitting that the precepts of the decalogue should include a precept relating directly to prudence. And yet all the precepts of the decalogue are related to prudence, in so far as it directs all virtuous acts.96

While prudence is not one of the precepts of the decalogue, the decalogue as a whole expresses that open nature by the fact that all its precepts must be related to prudence which, as the central organizing virtue, directs all virtuous acts and regulates moral acts, but is not itself the end of the moral virtues. Because “the good of the human soul is to be in accord with reason … . it does not belong to prudence to appoint the end to moral virtues, but only to regulate the means.”97 Furthermore, reason appoints that end specifically through synderesis, inherent and habitual directive knowledge in-and-toward the universal, which shares a natural affinity with man’s prevenient openness by being an inherent self-presence by and through which man’s nature shares its intimate contact with angels, or, more precisely, shows itself to be of a spiritual nature. St. Thomas speaks of synderesis also as a seed or source, or germination, further attesting to the fact that the natural end could never carry a true finality: Hence it is that human nature, in so far as it comes in contact with the angelic nature, must both in speculative and practical matters know truth without investigation. And this knowledge must be the principle of all the knowledge which follows, whether speculative or practical, since principles must be more stable and certain. Therefore, this knowledge must be in man naturally, since it is a kind of seed plot containing in germ all the knowledge which follows, and since there pre-exist in all natures certain natural seeds of the activities and effects which follow. Furthermore, this knowledge must be habitual so that it will be ready for use when needed.98

As proximal, the natural good and its natural end consist in being the limit manifested by we who act out our existence as the boundary line between the dual unities. Man’s efforts to understand the source or shape of his prevenient openness—complemented by and in the inherent pre-existing synderesis—enshrine or enclose him as the naturely otherness of God. With Gregory Palamas, “God is not only beyond knowledge, but also beyond unknowing.”99 And “in reality there remains an unknowing which

96 97 98 99

ST II-II, 56, 1 resp. ST II-II 46, 6 resp. DV XVI, 1 resp. St. Gregory Palamas, The Triads, trans. N Gendle and J. Meyendorff (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982), 32.

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is beyond knowledge.”100 This is the “knowledge that is beyond wisdom” and it is what is intimated in the end-only-as-limit of synderesis, prudence, the happiness of the philosopher, and those essential and confounding aporiae which confirm man’s natural but confused-until-recognized desire for the supernatural. The recognition of these seeds waiting to be shaped by the divine is the knowledge that the irreverent discard as mere foolishness,101 but which even they cannot avoid as their sandcastles of sin crumble in the face of death. The natural-as-limit is proportionate to finite man’s utter and creational need for God. It is this end-as-limit which reveals grace’s profound involvement, as distinct from man, by virtue of man’s need for grace confirmed in that limit and in those aporiae, and also at the same time wholly suffused in and as man’s being by the fact that man recognizes this need: for one would not seek a surrogate end were he not somehow aware of the genuine end: one could not be seduced by fool’s gold if there were no real gold as the true object of the viatoric search, as Augustine and Thomas know. Re-cognition as a form of re-call is neither a priori nor innate but it is connatural and connaturally recognized when it appears, and its meaning—distinct from any question of necessity—is discerned. Why would St. Thomas go to such lengths—if it is only a matter of infused beyond-the-world magical grace—to delineate, in Summa Contra Gentiles IV, 54, the fittingness of the Incarnation in satisfying man’s natural desire for the vision of God; the re-direction of natural human dignity toward its proper though not proportionate end in the knowledge of God; the inception in the human heart of its proper though not proportionate end in loving God by the fact that God, in the Incarnation, shows His prior Love of us by means of the establishment of friendship between man and God; the inculcation of exemplary virtue and the cure of the infection of sin? It is a form of answer to the call of grace already invoked and suffused by the pure To Be of the creational act. Man may be free to re-voke that call, but neither is that proof of a pure nature, for such is the fantasy of the atheist and the materialist. Indeed, it demonstrates the ineluctable presence of the natural desire, even and especially in its denial. Only the fool can say in his heart there is no God. At this point, it is important to include the Eastern Orthodox’s unified, never extrinsicized, stance on the presence of grace in nature: “the eastern tradition knows nothing of pure nature to which grace is added as supernatural gift. For it, there is no natural or ‘normal’ state, since grace is implied in the act of creation itself … pure nature, for Eastern theology, would thus be a philosophical fiction corresponding neither to the original state of creation, nor to its present condition which is against nature, nor to the state of the deification which belongs to the age to come.”102 A philosophical fiction is a story not worth telling for it has no end. Pure-qua-impure nature has removed the efficacy of the call by ignoring the very precondition of a nature which, as responsive to God’s call, is unlike any other material nature. God’s grace cleanses man not by eradicating one nature and supplanting it with another as if the former were an 100

Ibid., 36. Cf. V. Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, trans. J. Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1976), 71–96. 102 V. Lossky, Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1998), 101. 101

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imperfect creation; nor does the notion that grace perfects nature imply a mere building upon the prior state, as if the act of grace adds another level to the Tower of Babel. Grace perfects nature because nature—specifically human nature—is naturally supernatural and naturally open to being perfected, and somehow man knows it.103 Man’s nature is open to being perfected because in its connatural and prevenient otherness with God it has always expressed the strangeness of a nature which does not have an end in the natural world like the birds, beasts, and stars, and yet “… behold the birds of the air and the lilies of the field … ” If it had an alternative locus in the natural world where it could be satisfied, then grace would not truly perfect nature but, again, offer it a non-essential alternative which would only expose the marginalization of both grace and nature; and faith would be magic, and the longer way a cul-de-sac, and hope a wish-fulfilling fantasy. Deciphering that yes to grace is entrusted to God who knows our hearts better than we do precisely because the existential font of the human heart finds its body and blood in the divine rhythmic To Be as the pulse within and beyond all things. For man to have that twofold presence of God in his being—chasing-possession and presentdispossession—requires grace as primary, distinct but never divorced from the nature it suffuses and infuses. In this world of past and future possession, God alone is the only true present, the infusion of life into our carnal being which announces our death-unto-life and which reaffirms our unity in Christ and the difference between what creatures and Creator can survive. As grace suffuses nature, it unifies man with God even as it remains a permeation, an entrance of something different, a difference continually announced in its mysterious passage. The infusion is therefore closer to ourselves than ourselves and yet wholly different. Blood pumped into the veins is not the same as the receiver’s, and because it remains a continued and ever-present infusion, man’s humility is his joy; he is made to learn, and he learns the distinction between man and God, nature and grace without ever severing the one from the other, for to separate the lesser from the greater would mean death to the lesser.104

103

Cf. C. C. Martindale, “The Supernatural,” God & the Supernatural. 6: “Precisely because she [the Church] so thoroughly understands and caters for the Natural, she is prepared to explain it to itself and guide it toward what it so much desires and so restlessly gropes after, the Supernatural.”; Ibid., 7: “Our doctrine has to do with the free gift, offered by God to man and by man freely appropriated, of a way of being—not of acting, or thinking, or feeling, save by consequence—higher than what is conatural to him … A superhuman life, therefore, is given to and can be appropriated by Humanity.”; Ibid., 9: “[The Catholic Church] dogmatically declares that there is a super-human life, and that it is God’s free will to raise thereto such members of the human race as freely co-operate with His design, so that they, remaining men, are yet ‘super-natural’ men; for this life is not one that belongs to beings of a higher order, so that men cease to be men and become that sort of being; nor yet, are men made by it into a sort of being altogether different. They remain men, but super-naturalized men.” 104 Cf. J. Debout, My Sins of Omission trans. J. F. Scanlan (London: Sands & Co., 1930), 68–69: “Habitual grace is a very different thing from a mere form of inertia; that it is not a sort of lightning conductor; that it is the most royally fruitful form of friendship, because it is the friendship of God; that it is the most magnificent nuptial garment because it is the seamless robe whitened by the blood of the Lamb—that it is, in a word, that fearful thing, the life of God in us: God Who thinks, God Who acts, God Who loves, through our minds, our wills, our hearts. It is the very goal and object of Christianity. It is the estuary in which all the sacraments, the seven streams of Paradise regained—meet and commingle. It is the culminating point of the ancient human pride exorcised and canonized: to becoming like gods—and of the eternal divine dream—to become man.”

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Man as the responsive and naturely otherness of God recognizes that grace precedes nature and that this precedential quality is never merely chronological but an eternal suffusion irreducible to creaturely progression; that it fully permeates and reshapes, not unlike the God of the quinque viae who is “first” not in time (as so often misunderstood) but in a precedence of rank, order, or foundational mystery. And grace, like God, is this presuppositional, precedential groundless ground. The story of grace is to be read backward as much as, if not more than forward. It can only happen in the future because it has already happened at the origin. Grace illuminates man’s nature in the same act as it permeates that so-called natural due with gratuity. Man can be stamped, engraved, shaped, and raised because he is the clay, the response to God’s impressions. A call prefigures a receiver and God calls man because He prefigured in His creative font the creaturely receiver who has the capacity to be open to the supernatural. God invoked a nature which can be shaped by the supernatural, as grace perfects nature, not by adding a layer of insubstantial cream on the top and leaving the two parts—nature and grace—unrelated and implying two different ends. A pure nature de-natures man because it must remove man’s natural capacity to be stamped, shaped, desirous of, to hear and heed, the call of the supernatural. In an attempt to safeguard grace, pure nature has exiled grace from nature to the point that nature can no longer even be natural. Man cannot be the naturely otherness of God, the open nature calling out for God with wordless words and shapeless deeds asking God to give him the True, Just, and Beautiful words to call out, nor can he anticipate the divine shape to imitate and act upon. The mutual exile of both genuine nature and grace has been a salt on the once fertile fields where body and soul live in a unity of tension and rigorous commitment and where grace impresses its seeds and gives shape to our already present and unfulfilled dynamis. The gift of this unfulfilled dynamis is that not everything is said and done; we are not merely a pure nature, nor is the polis the static confine of the self-sufficient status quo. Man is a participant in a futurity that is happening in him as he acts on the call, because the call is enacted in us by our very natures as open to the divine and to an end more than nature can satisfy, ab origine. If the desire for the conversional vision is not constitutive of our nature but extrinsic, then where does God place His fingers to shape us? And how will an intellect stripped of its élan vital, its interior pulse—that natural desire for the supernatural—even begin to recognize that nothing that he is or possesses can be the medium to that end, but that only God can be the medium? The unruly danger of a pure nature is that it ultimately posits an ultimate end at which man can arrive self-sufficiently and through his own powers. Thus, if man has an end he can reach, as opposed to one he cannot, the power to complete will take natural priority. In the aftermath of pure nature, the secular has taken an unnatural priority over the supernatural, so much so that nature amounts to the secular world, and faith is the fantasy supernatural realm which is not the “real world” and has no impact on it, and no place in the public square, and sheds no light in the piazza. This dismal reprioritization of existence will evacuate the faith of its centrality, and any need for grace to complete man will therefore become something secondary to our purely autonomous nature. Grace will become an obsolete category of religious irrelevance and superstitious ignorance. In other words, if grace is exiled

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and man can still persist, then who needs grace? “Get a real job!” as Callicles taunted Socrates.105 The duty of the metaphysician is to show that as much as thought is dependent on Being, so too do concepts depend on the life and reality through which the unity of man and world first conceive them. A nature apart from the creative Act of God’s To Be is no nature at all and this is precisely the danger of hypostatizing purely hypothetical terms such as “pure nature.” Pure nature in concreto is no nature at all; it is like prime matter.106 Its doing, like evil, is done by way of a privating power; it impoverishes the natural desire for the supernatural into either a rabid secular emptiness or a thoughtless secular contentment, both the hallmarks of social contract theory. Not only does pure nature extrinsicize Grace through an essentialist formulation of the nature of God, but also this essentialist reformulation makes God become suspiciously voluntaristic, arbitrary, and capricious. The project of pure nature ends in a spiritual vacuity on the one end and a mechanistic universe on the other. The self-sufficiency of this purely hypothesized and hypostatized natural end needn’t await or anticipate grace, as such an anticipation would be an overreaching of the so called “good” of this end, which is perfectly satisfied in its “natural” parameters. Think only mortal thoughts.107 This is the real difficulty and absurdity of such an impossible stance: pure nature stands free of anticipation, ready to end in its purely natural state but somehow, without a pattern or mythos of the supernatural within its natural makeup, this so-called pure nature can still find itself open to the invitation of grace and still (but how?) open for this invitation to be actually elicited out of it by God. Predestination is its only option left! Pure nature has prevented itself in advance from these anticipatory happenings and natural desires for the supernatural. Where then would this “eliciting” first find its footing or take its hold in man if he is interiorly only a pure nature? Left with no room in man’s nature to be the restless place waiting to be filled by God, what space or region is there in man where God pervades and infuses him with Grace? If man has refused to recognize or accept that prevenient openness, that region for infusion in his nature, then grace must persist by way either of addition or accident. But even accidents cannot exist without a nature open to that accident, as accidents have only a limited reach! And even though grace is gratuitous, this does not mean it is accidental as inessential. With pure nature’s vice-grip interdict on transcendence and its conjured formulation of Aristotelian self-sufficient beings brought to live

105

Gorgias 485a–486c. For St. Thomas, prime matter does not mean unformed matter. Cf. ST I, 44, 2, ad. 3 “[Primary matter] is not created without form; for though everything created is actual, still it is not pure act. Hence it is necessary that even what is potential in it should be created, if all that belongs to its being is created.” All matter is created, and thus has its own structure and conditions which follow from its form even as it is capable of receiving substantial being and in potency to substantial being. See also St. Thomas, De Malo, trans. R. Regan (New York: Oxford UP, 2001) I, 2. Prime matter is described as being only in potency, not without form. SCG IV, 81: “Clearly, the being of matter and form is one; matter has no actual being except by form.” 107 Cf. NE X, 1177b, 25–30. 106

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as strangers unchanged in an estranged Christianized world, grace’s entrance into this sort of de-natured nature would be the Christian anthropological equivalent of the noumenon! The need which exists between creature and Creator would be devotionally nominal and ontologically a non-futurity precisely because the role of grace has been re-cast as mere future potentiality, an “out-there” event which isn’t actually happening in any degree in man’s being. Grace would be that god-of-thegaps extrinsic possibility employed only to recover from the infirmity of man’s nature itself caused by grace’s exile and noumenal isolation! When the idea of pure nature is (mis)construed as something more than a heuristic hypothetical postulate, it has to exile grace in order to make room for the so-called proportionate natural end which man has devised, contradictorily, in order to protect God’s autonomy, but which renders God redundant or magical, the latter itself on the basis of the former! And what can this so-called proportioned nature be but that which isn’t God, or at least what isn’t in need of God’s creative To-Be? If this proportionate end carries the creational and graceful To Be of God, and if we accept man as an anamnetic being of recognition, how can we not see the intermingling and unity of nature and grace within each of us? What is there in creation that does not groan for God? What isn’t in need of God simply does not exist, and wouldn’t be worthy of existence even if it did. Pure nature, which was invented to emphasize the sublime gratuity of grace, confused gratuity with the extraneous and inessential. It supports the consequences of a non-creational teleology of ontological self-sufficiency and, by emphasizing the proximate end while ignoring the terminological significance of a proximal relatedness, it places man too far apart from the angels and far closer to those beings which do not participate as such in imago dei. Man is wholly animal in this deformed proximate-qua-absolute end and wholly ideational in its corresponding and partitioned thought processes. Pure nature is therefore the swinging pendulum between materialism and idealism, the former maintaining a world without Being, the latter Being without a world. Pure nature might work if man knows only abstractions and not the real thing itself, for the real thing itself would put man in contact with the gaze of the Other and with “the interconnectedness of Being,” and with the realization of God’s primal and eternal gratuity as the precondition of human acts. Either man is self-sufficient and God is not the cause of existence or, more absurdly, man has not the noetic comportment even to long for God. In both of these instances grace, if it exists at all, is something that occurs by occultist magic and leaves no evidence by which to be discovered in the nature of the converted man. The continual hypostatizing of pure nature into a pseudo-reality prevents contact with the divine, by removing the central role of man in the Gift, with devastating implications for the polis.108

108

Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, God Is Love: Deus Caritas Est (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2006), 25: “Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow (cf. Jn 7:37–38). Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God (cf. Jn 19:34).”

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The problem of matter and form in relation to nature and grace When an unaltered understanding of Aristotelian substance infiltrates the Thomistic creational identification of beings-in-act—as if the creaturely sub-stance is the same as the Aristotelian substance—contraptions such as “pure” nature can be easily fabricated and defended.109 But they are defended on a field of being that is non-creational and which perpetuates the twofold dilemma of Aristotelian substance: (1) unmasked substance devolves into an eerily familiar but less effulgent Platonic form,110 in which form is unable to have an enduringly commingled relationship with its co-partner, matter, and (2) the thisness of matter, in the aftermath of the prior point, must be a participation only in itself. Matter is segregated and terminates in itself and is never a participation beyond itself in Being. If matter could participate beyond itself in the enduring otherness of existence then either matter itself has the property of endurance or it truly informs the form. In order for the form to be in-formed would mean an individualizing (not merely individuating) or particularizing activity; it would be a true happening on the body of being which, for Aristotle, would destroy the impervious generality and eternality of the form.111 As such, we can see why Averroes thought that only the active intellect endures, and indeed is one for all men, in a genuine anticipation of the modern idealistic Transcendental Ego.112 But then why/how raise Lazarus as Lazarus from the dead? 109

Cf. Aristotle, De Anima III, 5. The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon (NY: Random House, 1941). Pure nature is in some sense the end result of Aristotle’s noncreational metaphysics. His matter, unable to in-form-the-form, is an unfaithful anticipation of the fully realized Thomistic synthesis. Grace’s entrance into existence becomes analogous to matter’s role in the four causes. Matter’s contributions are accidental: in the unity of form and matter it is matter itself which cannot give substance the endurance that formal attributes impart. Evidence of this is the absence of personal immortality in Aristotle’s separated soul. 110 Aristotle is in the same impasse, if not far more entrenched, than Plato, for again Plato had a more vital immortality. Plato’s beyondness recognized the very strangeness, the secret addition that did not add up in or to man’s nature, and how the very relationship between the soul and body pointed to a fundamental incongruity: that man is both in the world and yet this in-ness constantly shows him that he is not of the world. 111 These Aristotelian difficulties are most visible when extended to the problem of immortality. Cf. De Anima, III, 5; De Anima I, 4. 112 Averroes acknowledges some form of immortality, but has difficulty finding a source which could individuate souls after death, turning to sublunary warmth as a sort of vague surrogate. Cf. Averroes, Tahafut al-Tahafut, trans. S. Van Den Bergh (London: Luzac, 1978), 577: “He who claims the survival of a numerical plurality of souls should say they are in a subtle matter, namely the animal warmth which emanates from the heavenly bodies, and this warmth which is not fire, and in which there is not a principle of fire; in this warmth there are the souls which create the sublunary bodies and those which inhere in this bodies.” Following upon the Aristotelian principles, wherein form is so united to individual matter, that it both emphasizes the person yet defeats it by divesting it of individual immortality, Averroes clarifies the implicit yet inevitable formal ontology still working in the midst of Aristotle’s prephenomenological anthropology, see Tahafut al-Tahafut, 586: “It must be admitted that the soul is immortal, as is proved by rational and religious proofs, and it must be assumed that what arises from the dead are simulacra of those earthly bodies, not those bodes themselves, for that which has perished does not return individually.” When the 5th Lateran Council under Leo X against the Averroists defends that “the soul is immortal, and individually multipliable, and multiplied according to the multitude of the bodies into which it is infused,” it is utilizing a Thomistically “managed” Aristotelianism, which transcends, through a creational, implicitly Christocentric metaphysics, the bifurcation between substance and matter. See “Apostolici Regiminis’ ” Decrees of Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. ed. N. P. Tanner S. J. (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990). See also SCG II, 73.

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While Aristotle recognized the soul as indeed the form of the body, the reciprocity of its co-parts actually stalls when embodiment signifies its nature. For nature, apart from its tenuous and temporary particularization in becoming, terminates in matter which cannot participate beyond its own thisness, rendering it irrelevant to its own nature. The soul’s role is downsized at death to a generalist form of active intellect and its individuality perishes with it. Thus, the soul is the form of the body but the body is linked to the type of matter which cannot enduringly inform the form. The in-forming is one-way and fails to be what Aristotle looked for as analogous and reciprocal. Aristotle’s metaphysics becomes a rationalist univocity when his substance is incorporated as the prime mode of creaturely engagement in a creational metaphysics. It thus not only limits the semiotic and imagistic expressions of man-in-God, but it is also employed as a bulwark against a creative metaphysics reflecting a Christocentric vision. Aristotle’s non-creational substance is rendered the fundamental actor in a creational setting, which actually destroys his impulse toward the analogy of being among the four causes!113 This actor cannot carry the role assigned, and the audience of history is already leaving the theater as he mumbles his scripted lines. In this play, the soul’s power is its form, and the matter is isolated in a downward spiral of passive intellect and sensation which cannot endure to the final act, let alone to the curtain call! The senses lead man to the body, and the senses and body, as matter-now-isolated, are ends and participations resolved in themselves. They cannot end beyond themselves and infiltrate the hegemony of the form and of the active intellect.114 113

114

Aristotle could neither incorporate matter into the four causes nor fully dream of the neediness for the primal Other at the core of creaturely being-in-the-world, except in the remarkable passage in the Nichomachean Ethics already noted and in the subtlety of the tending of natural things toward the final cause. Cf. M. de Wulf, History of Medieval Philosophy, trans. E.C. Messenger (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1926): “Inasmuch as He gives the initial impulse to cosmic movement, the Prime Mover ought to be described as a motor cause. And indeed Aristotle would seem to place the prime mover in contact with the world (De Gen. et Corr., i., 6, 323); but contact is the necessary condition for motor causality (44, 3). Furthermore, the motion imparted by God to the world is circular motion, that is to say, perfect and eternal motion (55, 1). The point of contact is the periphery or the world’s outer sphere (Phys., viii., 10). But does not contact between the corporeal world and its mover imply that the latter is located in space? And is the reaction of the thing moved upon the mover, reconcilable with the immutability of God? To avoid these difficulties Aristotle explains the influence of God upon the world as exerted not by way of mechanical impulse but by way of the attraction exercised by a final cause. God is the final cause of the world, the good towards which all things tend; and it is this natural tendency of matter towards a higher and better state that sets up the eternal series of evolutions in earthly things. Everything moves, because everything tends towards God. But as the final cause attracts by love, the inclination originated in the creature by God in no way touches or changes God Himself. Final causality does not interfere with the Divine intangibility, whereas motor causality in the strict sense would seriously compromise it. This eternal, irresistible attraction of all things towards the perfect and immutable actual being, leads to an optimistic conception of the cosmos and excludes the idea of evolution or progress from the good to the better.” See also E. Boutroux, Études d’Histoire de Philosophie (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1908): “On this Thought which thinks itself, depends the world, as a thought which does not think itself but tends to do so … God moves the world as final cause without moving Himself … This theology is a sort of abstract monotheism. All the things and facts of nature are referred to natural causes. It is only nature taken as a whole that is made to depend on the divinity.” Perhaps all things are “accidental” at least in the sense of being gratuitous. But to transform and distinguish accidents from gratuitous acts of being requires that substance undergo an opening up of itself as the very region of participated being, where nothing exists in its own right, not even substance/ form. Substance can no longer be reducible to a duality of parts where both form and matter are

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Aristotle’s matter is therefore the descriptive efficacy of “pure” natures which terminate and participate only in themselves.115 Or they are pure essentialist forms acknowledging matter but only with a wink and a nod, for even matter here is viewed as if it were a vague component form like the so-called formless prime matter, which participates in precisely nothing.116 For the soul to be the form of the body requires that material embodiment receives its deeper in-carnation in the creational neediness achieved in the real distinction where no being exists in its own right except that Being whose essence is to exist.117 When St. Thomas affirms the identity of God’s essence and existence, he is defending something previous thinkers had merely taken for granted at best. He is not saying that existence collapses into essence and that God is an eternal essence limited to Himself; he is not saying that God is an eternally finite essence with a finite reach, such as the Prime Mover is.118 If, therefore, He is not His own existence He will be not essential, but participated being. He will not therefore be the first being–which is absurd. Therefore God is His own existence, and not merely His own essence.119

St. Thomas is emphasizing the identity of essence and existence in God in order to say something Christian about this metaphysical God; that this God has no limit and is self-enclosed, tangentially related, and which terminate in their own orders. Cf. M. Rea, “Hylomorphism Reconditioned.” Philosophical Perspectives, 25 (2012): “Treating forms as parts leaves them ill-suited to serve as principles of unity, thus stripping them of one of their traditionally most important roles. For how can a form unify (all of) the parts of a thing if it is itself one of those parts? So perhaps we should deny that forms, construed as universals or tropes, are parts of substances. If we do, and if we continue to maintain that they reside in substances as constituents, then we must take constituency or the ‘in’ relation as primitive or else identify them with other, as yet unnamed, relations.” 115 To see how an extrinsicized grace is the natural corollary to Aristotle’s notion of matter, and more interiorally, the understanding, or lack thereof, of the role of existence, see Being and Some Philosophers, 49–50. 116 Matter is a companion to the human form, a copart in the substantial form of man. The problem is—and not unlike the problem of “pure” nature and its divisively tangential relationship to grace— that Aristotle didn’t know how to relate matter and form, or existence and essence, without reducing the former, in both cases, to the latter. Without the metaphysics of Exodus, Aristotle did not have the tools to do so. One must ask, what then is the person, after all, in Aristotle’s schema? Is the world an ad infinitum amalgam of vague universal idealities, where all of the real (material) counterparts of these forms consist only of accidental variations and instantiations of substantial structures? Cf. M. Rea, Hylomorphism Reconditioned, Univ. Notre Dame, Philosophical Perspectives 25 (2012); E. Gilson, Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, trans. A. C. H. Downes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 51; See also E. Gilson, The Spirit of Thomism (New York: Harper, 1964), 73. 117 Cf. ST I, 10, 2 resp.: “He [God] is His own eternity; whereas, no other being is its own duration, as no other is its own being. Now God is His own uniform being; and hence as He is His own essence, so He is His own eternity.” 118 The Aristotelian end is recast—or finally seen for what it is—in creation as limit and it reveals the utter gratuity of grace and the wholehearted waitingness of man who lives in nature, which is the freedom of grace in hiding. Aristotle’s natural end was not the ultimate end, or even a natural end distinct from grace—although it is, of course, like all things that groan, distinct from the free effulgence of grace—but a limit-in-unshaped-longing. His inclusion of matter is a pattern of creative need (unable to be known as creaturely need without the Creator) as much as Plato’s wresting of the purely saturated Form from the unrelenting vicissitudes of nature is a pattern of the hierarchy and of eros trailing every agape. Cf. DV XIV, 10, ad 9: “For there is nothing unreasonable (inconveniens) in the fact that something imperfect, which is directed to the perfection of the end, ceases to exist when the end is reached, as motion ceases to be when rest, which is its end, is reached.” 119 ST I, 3, 4 resp.

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infinite; not only is there no potency in this God, there is an inexhaustible hierarchy in His Act. Upon the perfection of God so understood, and only so understood, St. Thomas has built his whole theory of the divine causality, the divine liberty, as well as his theory of the contingency of the universe. If God is a necessary Being, it is because He is Being itself.120

Man is utterly contingent on God—everything else outside of God is participated being. In man’s case, he is the preveniently responsive being—so much so that whatever man is, is bound up in God, who is the only Being that owns His own To Be: The nature of being is found in all things, in some more nobly in others less nobly, such that the natures of the things themselves are not the very Being which they have. Otherwise, Being would belong to the concept of the quiddity of anything, which is false, since the quiddity of anything can be understood without understanding whether the thing exists. Natures must, therefore, have Being from something else and there must be ultimately a nature which is its own being, otherwise there would be an infinite regress. And this it is which gives being to all.121

If existence is recognized in this way, where all beings participate in God’s To Be, then grace—if we mean by grace the suffusion of the divine To Be as innermost in all beings— precedes nature! And while nature is distinct from grace—as the neediness of the creature for the Creator’s To Be demonstrates—this neediness also demonstrates that there is no nature either in its beginning, happening or end that is separate from divine gratuity, so much so that grace within existence is a pointing-toward the unrepeatable distinctiveness of man’s nature. This gratuity highlights and reveals that “the good of the grace of one soul is greater than the good of the nature of the whole universe.”122 Neglecting how St. Thomas necessarily transformed Aristotle’s insights effectively removes Aristotle’s contributions to the Christian dialogue of reason and faith, nature and grace, body and soul, man and state.123 No other commentator on Aristotle arrived 120

St. Thomas and the Greeks, 51. St. Thomas, Scriptum Super Sententiis, ed. C.H. Lohr (New York: Fordham UP: 1980) II, d. 1, q.1 a. 1 resp. 122 ST I-II, 113, 9, ad. 2. 123 This transformation is not without its own difficulties, Cf. J. A. Komonchak, “Theology and Culture at Mid-Century: The Example of Henri de Lubac,” Theological Studies 51 (1990): 588: “For the Fathers there is no nous without an anticipatory participation, ever gratuitous and ever precarious, in the one pneuma. For Aristotle nature was a center of properties and a source of strictly delimited activity, shut up within its own order. Now throughout St. Thomas’ writings these two conceptions of Aristotelian nature and of the patristic image intermingle, without it being possible to say whether they truly are combined or if they clash with one another, nor which of the two will in the end succeed in subjugating the other. As vigorous as was his synthetic mind, he did not always succeed in bringing the elements received from the two different traditions into a perfect unity.” See also H. Cardinal de Lubac, Surnaturel: Etudes Historiques (Paris: Aubier, 1946), 259: “It is the whole problem of the Christianization of Aristotle that is raised here. While others went off on crusades against the Philosopher, St. Thomas undertook to baptize him. Like every baptism, the baptism of profane philosophers always leaves traces of sin. To recognize the persistence of serious difficulties, then, is not to condemn the effort nor to claim that it failed.” 121

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at the conclusions to which St. Thomas arrived. A great deal of Christian philosophy ignores that transitional,124 indeed transformational power of St. Thomas, and places the Aristotelian concepts squarely atop Thomas’ insights, therefore obfuscating their uniqueness. Such terms were liberated from their non-creational enclosure so as to express how preveniently open natures rediscover, recover, and recreate their natures in God. This non-creational philosophy of nature, where matter cannot evoke an end beyond itself, has become the “enforcer” of a realm of nature and reason which must guard against what it considers to be the unwanted intrusion of such theological categories as the natural desire for the supernatural.125 In yet another tangential touching, the realm of the supernatural and, more precisely, of faith is exiled: nature-qua-reason, and gracequa-faith, have a sort of side-by-side contact. These two realms meet each other in nothing more than a tepid version of the leap! This type of non-creational philosophy of nature—the ancestor of “pure” nature—also perpetuates a naïve view of science. Neither the realm of theological mystery nor the numinous empirical world of science can be given proper due, because their foundation in nature is severely compromised.126 The 124

For an understanding of St. Thomas as a transpositional thinker, see H. U. Cardinal von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1992); de Lubac’s Brief Catechesis on Nature & Grace. The tendency to manualize what Fathers Balthasar and De Lubac understand as the “transitional” placement of St. Thomas is disheartening. St. Thomas is a transitional qua transpositional thinker: he is neither a thinker to be passed over nor should his responses be turned into a legalistic ledger for the closet Hegelian. A transitional figure is in fact what all great thinkers and lovers try to be: as endlessly transpositional, he is endlessly relevant and never faddish. He elevates past insights while being a source for new ones. See also A. C. Pegis, St. Thomas and Philosophy (Marquette, WI: Marquette UP, 1964), 38–39: “Detached from the Summa and its specific purpose, the treatise on man is neither philosophy nor theology. It is, to apply to it the severe but appropriate expression that Maritain has used in another context, a piece of lifeless and sterile theology: une teologie degermee … I hope indeed that the fragmentation of St. Thomas has come to an end. I hope that we shall undertake to build our own Christian Philosophy, not by detaching fragments from his theology but risking our own intellectual lives in the world of today.” 125 In Aristotle’s Metaphysics, materiality is stretched conceptually in a failed effort to be more than merely “looking glass” to the Form. Materiality can shape man in this world but not beyond, for there is no immortal man beyond his material thisness. Unable to alter or affect the unchanging constant of the form, matter can only tangentially touch or surround it in the chronological present and cannot endure beyond that. Because material existence can have no perduring or contributive role to play in shaping man, the efforts to elasticize materiality into a type of quasi or prethematic existential contributor naturally fails. Aristotle is in the same impasse, if not far more entrenched, than Plato, for at least Plato had a more robust immortality, and wholly preserved the mystery of the transcendent beyond. Cf. Phaedrus 246b–d: “I will endeavour to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal creature. The soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing–when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground-there, finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be self-moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal creature. For immortal no such union can be reasonably believed to be; although fancy, not having seen nor surely known the nature of God, may imagine an immortal creature having both a body and also a soul which are united throughout all time. Let that, however, be as God wills, and be spoken of acceptably to him.” 126 Put another way: the reaction to a hyperactive rationalist essentialism becomes a constructed nominalist idealism where words are mere conventions and knowledge is reduced ultimately to selfknowledge. And the domain of faith must be exiled to a realm in order to be protected from thought. This is the famous via moderna of the fourteenth century which lays the predicate not only for the Reformation but also for the rise of Modern Philosophy. Cf. J. Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages (New York: Dover, 2013), 182–201.

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scientific worldview of the Medievals is no longer science for modernity and, if read as science, is irremediably naïve. A truth endures not by static assertion but by a rigorous and transitional unpacking of the terminological signates, of seeing how the truth lives and endures.127 The essentialist metaphysics of the later Middle Ages which brought about modernity reified Thomas’ thought into a rigidity wholly unlike the great teacher. The Angelic Doctor saw man as far closer to the angels than to the beasts128 precisely because our incarnate nature is an open one, because our essence as thinking being is thought borne on the To Be of the infinite Other by way of gift, and that gift is acted out in the happening of existence. “Pure” nature functions only, if it functions at all, because essence and existence are held at arm’s length and cannot inform each other, obviating the obvious, namely that the gifts of existence and of essence are the prime gifts of primal grace. The creature receives grace-as-existence prior to any of his actions, decisions, or merits and this gift is the fact that man is a participated being, a being preveniently open to the purely actual invocation of God in his very happening. The only way to get around the fact that there is no nature outside of grace or an end distinct from grace is to revert to that essentialist collapse which is contrary to both St. Augustine and St. Thomas. Augustine consistently maintained: For not only has God given us our ability and helps it, but He even works [brings about] willing and acting in us; not that we do not will or that we do not act, but that without His help we neither will anything good nor do it.129 It is certain that we will when we will; but He brings it about that we will good … It is certain that we act when we act, but He brings it about that we act, providing most effective powers to the will.130

Even and especially Hell, which is not the end God desires for his adopted sons and daughters, is never an end without the corresponding graceful To Be of the divine. It may be without redemption but that, paradoxically, is its mercy. Hell, that homeless place as close to non-existence as possible, is not even “pure” nature; only non-existence is. Hell contains the To Be of God’s mercy-as-justice and therefore the sustaining act of existence.131 Even the damned and the demons do not reside in a “pure” nature.

127

Cf. Gilson speaks of this great transition. Cf. E. Gilson, The Philosopher and Theology, trans. C. Gilson (New York: Random House, 1962), 219. 128 Cf. Gilson, The Spirit of Thomism, 34. 129 De Gratia Christi 25.26. St. Augustine Anti-Pelagian Writings: Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Vol. 5 (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004). 130 On Grace and Free Choice, 16.32. 131 Cf. ST IIIae, 2, ad. 1: “God in Himself is mercy without bounds, but this mercy is regulated by wisdom, which forbids mercy to demons and to demonized men. Yet even on these mercy is still exercised, not to put an end to their sufferings, but to punish them less than their merits demand.” Cf. Ia, 21, 4, ad. 1: “If mercy were not mingled with justice, the damned would suffer still more. All God’s ways are mercy and justice. Certain souls exalt God’s mercy, others manifest His justice. And justice enters in the second place, when divine mercy has been scorned. Even then it intervenes, not to remove the suffering, but to render it less heavy and painful.”

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Even though they have confirmed by their choices an end irredeemably apart from and contrary to God, it is not an end emptied of God’s To Be: In the demons there is their nature which is from God, and also the deformity of sin which is not from Him; therefore, it is not to be absolutely conceded that God is in the demons, except with the addition, “inasmuch as they are beings.” But in things not deformed in their nature, we must say absolutely that God is.132

Nature is grace in hiding insofar as man groans for a shape he cannot shape without God; he groans because God has given him that voice-as-invocation to desire the unutterable. Unhidden by God alone and in the greater fecundity of the prime existential gift, “Grace constitutes a special mode of God’s existence in things.”133 Grace is a gift freely given through the gift of existence, which itself is a grace. Through grace alone is man free and through that freedom he can participate in the gift, and desire even greater entrance into it. Man is also free to be unfree and to codify his unworthiness for grace. We can actually prefer the un-preferable and commit treason against our own souls by choosing to empty the degrees of gift into a man-made nonexistence. But even the absurdist choice does not rid him of that lovingly just and relentlessly meddlesome grace: No action of an agent, however powerful it may be, acts at a distance, except through a medium. But it belongs to the great power of God that He acts immediately in all things. Hence nothing is distant from Him, as if it could be without God in itself. But things are said to be distant from God by the unlikeness to Him in nature or grace; as also He is above all by the excellence of His own nature.134

It is only the modernist, the Reformist, and that late medieval essentialist reduction which would hold grace at odds with freedom, as it holds faith at odds with reason. Man is free because of grace; he is not only unfree but also deaf and dead in its absence.135 If we mean by pure nature a nature sufficient for action in itself, lacking nothing in itself for action—then this may very well be Aristotle, but it is not St. Thomas. Existence is the prime gift and no mere explanatory hypothesis or transient it-goeswithout-saying gift. Grace precedes nature, not in a chronological procession, but as the prime accompanying Act that makes nature efficacious in its temporal becoming. As the intensification of the prime or prevenient gift of existence, only grace actually enables man to recognize the sheer gratuity of grace. As the preveniently open and

132

ST I, 8, 1, ad. 4 ST I 8, 3, ad. 4. ST I 8, 1 ad. 3. 135 Cf. St. Augustine, Ep. 194, 5. 19. Letters 154–196: Epistulae II, trans. R. J. Teske (New York: NE City Press, 2004): “What then is the merit of man before grace by which merit he should receive grace? Since only grace makes every good merit of ours, and when God crowns our merits, He crowns nothing else but His own gifts.” 133 134

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participating being, man recognizes his total neediness for God; he has thus already approached the distinction between nature and grace! This distinction, much like the real distinction, admits no quantifiable division in the act of being. It reveals something all the more important for our spiritual and moral formation: a seamlessness shot through with eternity, so as to emphasize our dependency on God. If there were a seam, a piece to portion off, then the centrality of the salvific presence would be marginalized. There would be an alternate route or end whereby man could “complete” his open nature and in that act deny his open nature! The free possibility of grace’s alethiological unveiling and intensification of existence infuses all of man’s desires. Man, bound up in the logos, desires grace more than he desires life, precisely because grace is life itself. Grace fulfills life by transforming it, and man also somehow desires death only because he desires that transformation. We distinguish only to unite. And this is so even within the order of grace as such, actual grace, operative grace, infused grace, efficacious grace, irresistible grace: all presuppose and yet are not reducible to the prevenient, antecedent grace. Is it not similar, if not the same, with the order of love, and isn’t this the point of Lewis’ The Four Loves, not even to mention Plato’s Symposium? Our meritorious actions are urged on by God who makes them possible in the first place, because God makes it so easy for us to love Him. St. Thomas More captured this beautifully in a letter he wrote from prison to his daughter: If any man marvel that God made all His creatures such as they should always need aid of His grace, let him know that God did it out of His double goodness. First to keep them from pride by causing them to perceive their feebleness, and to call upon Him; and secondly to do His creatures honor and comfort.136

While grace certainly needs a field upon which to act, and that place is nature, it is a grave misunderstanding of the divine courtesy to come to the conclusion that nature is somehow ontologically antecedent to grace.137 A pure nature presupposes that nature has an antecedent status, confusing what St. Thomas was insistent on distinguishing: the two firsts, the first in the order of experience and the first in the order of reality, of Being. This is the epistemo-logic of the Allegory of the Cave, of the Symposium, of the quinque viae. The prisoners in the cave had their own “pure” nature in the wandering, intermediary shadows on the wall,138 as the lustful lovers in the Symposium had their

136

St. Thomas More, “Treatise on the Passion,” in The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More: Volume 13, Treatise on the Passion, Treatise on the Blessed Body, Instructions and Prayers, ed. G. E. Haupt (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1980). 137 Cf. ST I-II, 110, 1, ad. 2: “God is the life of the soul after the manner of an efficient cause; but the soul is the life of the body after the manner of a formal cause. Now there is no medium between form and matter, since the form, of itself, “informs” the matter or subject; whereas the agent “informs” the subject, not by its substance, but by the form, which it causes in the matter. ST I-II, 110, 4, ad. 1: “As from the essence of the soul flows its powers, which are the principles of deeds, so likewise the virtues, whereby the powers are moved to act, flow into the powers of the soul from grace. And thus grace is compared to the will as the mover to the moved, which is the same comparison as that of a horseman to the horse–but not as an accident to a subject.” 138 Republic 479d.

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own pure nature in individual bodies, as the objectors in the Thomistic demonstrations had it in their attempt to account for nature only by sufficient natural causes. But as the freed prisoner learned, as Diotima taught, and as St. Thomas pointed toward: while all of these are the experiential starting points on the longer way, they are not the terminus, for only in my end is my beginning and, as Chesterton, said we arrive again at home only to recognize it for the first time. Even if “pure” nature does not have independent status but is still “pure,” then either the Act of existence is nothing more than the first trigger of the falling dominos and not suffused in all subsequent acts; or, again, existence and essence only tangentially touch so as to provide nature and grace with a deadly breathing room. Because existence is innermost in all things, and unfailingly reflects God’s pure To Be, it is impossible to conceive of an end outside of God’s grace apart from that “end”—hell—which is failure to participate in the gift. Grace therefore precedes the very nature which is also the place upon which its gift works, just as God’s pure To Be precedes the creature’s to be so that man can be a participated being in God’s To Be. Grace is identical with God’s pure To Be. The relationship between nature and grace functions only on a real distinction: God’s grace is truly gratuitous and therefore grace is really distinct from nature and is its necessary precedent, and this real distinction also precludes in advance the dangerous bifurcation which results when attempting to quantify what is of “pure” nature and what is of “free” grace. There is a distinction between nature and grace and, at the same time, there is no nature without grace, just as there is a legitimate distinction between Creator and created, between, for example, the table maker and the table. After it is made, the table can be inventoried, described, categorized as “in-itself ” with no specific reference to its maker. If this is what is meant by “pure” nature, all is well and good except that, at another and deeper level, the table cannot be considered apart from its essential origin in its maker. There is indeed a real—not merely conceptual— distinction between essence and existence, but there are no essences without existence, as much as there are no existences without essence. Grace, which is the same as God’s To Be, is not bounded by potentiality, it is not essentialist in limit and therefore it does not make room for a “pure” nature. If it did, either beings would exist in their own right or, if we respect the parameters of creation, would not exist at all. We speak of the total conversion of man’s soul in Christ and forget that He is the eternally kenotic pantokrator. The refusal of a metaphysical and philosophical anthropology that complements that conversion exiles both grace and nature from man’s very raison d’etre and from a world which God now only nominally inhabits.139 That refusal abdicates the very substance of the conversion: it renders it a noumenal 139

Man flows from Christ’s side and is capable of conversion and of new creation through that river of outpouring. The language of the total conversion of our souls in God is undermined by the metaphysics at work in “pure” nature which actively denies any ontological complementarity to the phenomenon of conversion. Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, June 2005): “In biblical language, ‘heart’ indicates the centre of the person where his sentiments and intentions dwell. In the Heart of the Redeemer we adore God’s love for humanity, his will for universal salvation, his infinite mercy. Practising devotion to the Sacred Heart of Christ therefore means adoring that Heart which, after having loved us to the end, was pierced by a spear and from high on the Cross poured out blood and water, an inexhaustible source of new life.” Here is ontic density in its real sense.

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conversion, a sort of theological chatter which can have no visible re-creation in the realm of creational nature. And what dangers does this portend for the City-of-Man in its essential failure to imitate the City of God? More than that, what can be said of man’s longing—if there is any—for God in a state of pure nature? Would it be whim and idiosyncratic fancy now that it is no longer essential and thus no longer necessary? Pure nature theory communicates the exact opposite of what it attempts to defend. Strangely enough, it emphasizes the proximate end to the point of neglecting the semiotic order, onto-noetic intelligibility, and ontic density of the meaning of proximal. It has immanentized the world and displaced the centrality of the faith, all the while deforming man into an un-open self-enclosed essence. Extrinsicized as so described, grace suffers a twofold degeneration: (1) pure nature grants decreasing degrees of relevancy to the place of grace within the world and in the human heart, and (2) systematically impoverishes nature and thereby either taunting or forcing grace to act and recover man from his infirmed condition. It is not only the enemies of the Church who have created the social contract state or the carnival of ever-changing ideologies which marginalize Christ. All creativity, all beauty finds its origins in the exposition of the Cross, in the interior and the exterior, and when that is culpably, negligently lost, the City of God becomes Oz and the City of Man a fantasy or a gulag. Man’s nature is to be in response to his creation and to his beloved who has made Himself Lover. He was created to be in response to God’s creation, a response re-created in himself in an anticipatory happening each time he does respond in and to this world by way of his open nature. His response anticipates the new creation that only the unveiling and bestowal of full, actual, and operative grace can bring about. Man was created to hear the call, not only to contemplate it but to desire a re-consummation of his nature in the vision of God, and to act on it in the social realm of Otherdom. By means of God’s em-phatic and ex-nihilatory difference from all creaturely to be, God alone can become the medium through which man perceives and recognizes (i.e., knows) the end. With the emphasis on vision,140 it is clear that there is actually a need to unite man with God precisely because there is an unmistakable, inexhaustible difference between the two,141 prefigured in the re-calibration of man’s end from intellectual grasping to conversional vision.142 This difference is the communicative stance and the origin of that impossible unity of man and God. Man participates in uncovering this difference and that participation is reflected in the residual patterns of the polis. The notion of proportion as an end proportionate to man’s nature has a twofold signification, which, if left unclarified, not only promotes serious anthropological difficulties but also misreads the place of the polis as a reflection and enactment of 140

Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2000), 18. Cf. The Regensburg Address: “The faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which—as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated—unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language.” 142 Cf. H. U. Cardinal von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2009), 118. 141

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man’s prevenient openness to God. Pro-portion in the first instance implies the gift or portion positively forwarded by God to His creature. As it is positively and continuously bestowed by the one Being Who Is His own To Be, the creature, without contradiction, desires “more than his due” by desiring his adoption as son reserved for Grace. This creaturely due is man’s nature but his is an open nature, a vocational (vocare: to speak, respond, and receive the word) nature and therefore this so-called due is never “pure” or distinct from the donative power and graceful act of God’s ever continuing To-Be. In a derivative sense, proportion pertains to closed natures, things that have, not image, but only likeness. Furthermore, this base likeness is neither an obediential nor active likeness that can respond to or participate in image. It is rather likeness by trace or design, and remains unreflective unless reflected in man, angels, and in God Who alone Is the grace-filled medium-as-End. This second notion of proportion we find throughout Aristotelian teleology as the final cause of a thing, and such final causes are easily defined when speaking of beings that are either self-sufficient and exist in their own right, or are determined beings to determinedly natural ends. But even here Aristotle transcends his disciples, for the prime mover as final cause draws finite beings to itself. Man as created-to-respond to God’s call fits neither category. He is neither self-sufficient nor a determinedly natural being, and yet a pure nature cannot help but support the selfsame consequence of both of those propositions: the extrinsicism of God’s active To Be both ontologically and noetically, and the denigration of man’s nature as no longer the recipient and invocator of the vocation to the divine life. If the invocation is severed, then the polis which is subsequently formed feeds on the atrophy of the human heart re-voking the call. The polis in turn can re-voke the privilege of man to forgive, pardon, atone, and redeem because a pure nature with self-sufficient ends demands that its ends remain within the world where there is nothing to forgive, pardon, atone, or redeem except by social contract invoked out of mutual fear and mutual utility because the polis is itself the un-natural guarantor of man’s pure nature self-sufficiency. Pure nature seeks to “purify” man by extrinsicizing that call, by placing the call on hold in a univocal and oddly Kantian zone of directedness quite apart from man’s nature as the naturely otherness of God. While all things and all calls come from the donative power of God, their beauty is made manifest in how God places shape and word within man’s shapeless and imageless call. This primal shapelessness and imagelessness is, again, his waitingness as a free being. The presence of a shapelessness, of an essence which resists all ends but the shaping presence of God, is man’s nature born of response. St. Paul speaks of man’s open nature as a call, as a shaping that cannot be shaped by any other end than God: He “separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles, immediately I condescended not to flesh and blood.”143 We are presented with an allor-nothing proposition and its affirmation confirms how easy God makes it for us to love Him: either the soul is the form of the body or there is no real or worthy soul to 143

Gal. 1:15–1:16.

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mention, so much so that there is no soul at all. If man does affirm the soul in all its demands, gifts, and the inadequacy of all natural ends, then he is denying pure nature as much as he is denying prime matter. If we affirm (1) the basic Thomistic principle that the soul is the form of the body, which means that the body is raised to live at the level of the soul as God raises us to live at His level, and if (2) by recognizing these mutual elevations we have accepted that our soul needs our body—that the soul not only thinks but also acts incarnationally in its communion with God—then to defend pure nature is to advocate the irrelevance of the specifically creational and incarnational human soul. So much is this true that St. Thomas offers a rational justification for the credibility qua fittingness of the resurrection of the human body: for the soul, as complete in itself and yet incomplete without the body, is in a lesser and unnatural state or condition when separated from the body. And employing the Aristotelian principle that nothing contra-naturam can endure, St. Thomas sees resurrection as reasonable, fitting, and credible.144 Our soul acts through our body, even as it guides the body; it is the dignity of the body which confers the presence or sensation of activity on the soul’s noetic engagement. God is pure To Be and while the possibility of unity rests wholly on the gift of Grace, the clues to our unity with Him can be found in our embodiment which unceasingly drives us to act. Man acts in the image of anticipation, in the possibility of revealed and sanctifying Grace through his open-and-closed nature born of a primal grace-in-hiding. His activity lives outside abstract theories and it reflects the act of a supplicant who truly recognizes the power of the One to whom he pleads. The divine courtesy is never taken for granted even as it is always presupposed. God’s power can change man so wholly precisely because God’s grace-as-Act is no mere addition to a pre-set form but is the form of communication between man as the naturely otherness of God and God as the primal Other. If man is rational, a speaking and noetic being, and if grace is the form of communication between the uncreated and the created—and it must be because the created could never learn to speak the Act-as-Word of the uncreated—then man as thinking being is the being whose nature is made to be the response to grace. If the soul is no mere blank slate vacancy but a resin of the divine imprint shaping our end, then pure nature is the fairytale fantasy not only of the stoic but also of the atheist. Man’s nature is an open nature. If it isn’t, it is something else and less, and its change from pure nature through grace’s external and ever diminishing role is merely and tragically a non-essential addition. Why? Because the essence of the pure-matter-qua-pure-nature-man contains another end, an anti-viatoric end. Perhaps this non-essential transformation—where “non-essential” has been muddled to mean “gratuitous”—amounts to an increase or addition of love, and perhaps also the addition of other noble qualities, but none of these is sufficient, precisely because their “additional” value is in addition to a nature which has an alternative resolution from the longer way of the restless and shapelessness of the genuine heart fired by the light of God. Grace would not perfect but destroy. Man’s nature is to crave a total newness, a newness anticipated and hoped for in the depths of his open-and-closed-nature. This open-and-closed nature is the novitas 144

ST III, 1, 1 resp.

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mundi in a world of patterns and repetitions. Each soul, with the power to become the noema, is unrepeatable in its living as much as in its dying. Each soul anticipates wordless words, those unutterable utterances of Act and Beauty which it can never speak or utter or understand without God’s Grace. Man needs the gift of grace which can open him fully to the mystery and then attach or close him wholly within the active vision of the essence of God. God alone is man’s End and to see the End requires that the End become the medium to that end. Any other end, any other purely natural isolated end would, without a doubt, displace the centrality of the medium as end and motivating force.145

The Christian hermeneutic of the Quinque Viae A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their ‘belief ’ an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could ‘convince someone that God exists’ by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such a way.—Wittgenstein146 These arguments do not conclude to a God unknown before; they justify the conception when it is regarded as illusory and connect it up with other truths of our understanding.—Fr. Martin D’Arcy147 Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, ‘Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?’ The young sceptic says, ‘I have a right to think for myself.’ But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, ‘I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all’.—G. K. Chesterton148

145

Cf. R. Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ways of the Spiritual Life (Charlotte, NC: TAN, 1977), 152. “It is said in the Gospel of St. John: ‘of his fullness we have all received; and grace for grace.’ ‘By (our Lord Jesus Christ) we have received grace,’ we read in the Epistle to the Romans ‘the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost who is given to us’ and in the Epistle to the Ephesians: ‘To every one of us is given grace, according to the measure of the giving of Christ.’ If it were otherwise, God’s uncreated love for the man whom He converts would be merely an idle affection, and not an effective and operative love. But God’s uncreated love for us, as St. Thomas shows, is a love which, far from presupposing in us any lovableness, actually produces that lovableness within us. His creative love gives and preserves in us our nature and our existence; but his life-giving love gives and preserves in us the life of grace which makes us lovable in His eyes, and lovable not merely as His servants but as His sons. (I, Q. xx, art. 2).” 146 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 85. 147 M. D’Arcy, “The Idea of God.” God and the Supernatural, 34. 148 G. K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy.” The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 1: Heretics, Orthodoxy, the Blatchford Controversies (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1986), 181.

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Life precedes reflection as fides precedes ratio as grace precedes nature. Man’s participation entails his infinitely open transcendence as well as the alternative possibility of his infinitely limiting fallenness. Both transcendence and descent require that we carry a natural desire naturally unsated by nature. The transcendent form is fortitude, what Belloc called creative endurance, in the face of the restless heart; the descending freefall is lust, cowardice, ignorance, fantasy, and fear. Just as virtue is its own reward, so is vice its own penalty. This is also true of intellectual virtues and vices. This is the Socratic Wager149 that leavens Christian thought, the salt of goodness that flavors as it favors the Christian Wager. In the quinque viae, St. Thomas appears to defend his arguments with a reason and corresponding natural ground perfectly aligned with the pagan philosophers. His argumentation confidently strides from effect to cause placing him, at first glance, at a perceived distance from the Patristic position. It appears, not only at first glance but also at an extended one, that Aristotle’s notion of a prime mover is the largest stakeholder in the five ways. Perhaps, though, there is more going on. Perhaps the dialogue of nature and grace is at issue in the five ways under the mode of the dialogue of reason with faith. Not only is the narrative placement of the five ways at the beginning of the Summa Theologica indicative of its theological intent and structure, but it also embodies the onto-theological recognition of the two firsts and intentionally structures itself around “the first-in-reality.” This is why it is a theological summa through and through and not a philosophical summa as such, even as it employs philosophical reason throughout. To pick and choose between them, according to our professional inclinations, is to render the whole neither the one nor the other. It is the very structure of the Summa that renders the work inalterably theological as such. The very order of the work, starting with God (the exitus of creatures) renders it theological. Compare it for a moment to Plato. In the Laws, Plato does not get around to a demonstration of the divine until Book X and then within the context of the just polis. Plato’s remarkable demonstration (anticipating St. Thomas’s fifth way) arises as a result of the challenge by those who consider the divine illusory, but in any event it proceeds within a classically philosophic progression, from man to God. While one can bridge the philosophical to the theological methodos, one cannot confuse them. Such a bridging quality does leave open the question as to whether St. Thomas’ metaphysical ground can really be identical with the pre-Christian ground even though his demonstrations tend to imitate the Aristotelian. Perhaps, rather, Thomas’ ground in the five ways is reflecting that in-waiting/prekenotic ground and thus never decidedly either non-creational or non-hierarchical (which is where the muchoverlooked Platonic influence must come in) but invokes the prevenient openness in all men. The paradoxical structure of the demonstrations which renders them specifically Christian is twofold. First the almost humorous, almost maddening contextual principle that it is by faith that we know that we can demonstrate the existence of God

149

Theaetetus, 176c–e.

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by reason! And if we know this possibility by faith, it must be so, and therefore we know in advance that the objectors must be mistaken, and the function of reason (as handmaiden) is to show this! What else is the sed contra (“It is said in the person of God: I am Who am.” Exod. 3:14) but the roadsign, the Sherpa guide, the team coach, the loving parent who points out the wrong way in order to reach the true destination? As much as Anselm, Thomas is struggling to understand what he already believes, taking the “concept” of God from the faith. The second critical indicator of the specifically theological, indeed Christian structure of the five ways is the tantalizingly brief but volume-speaking import of the question of evil that opens the dialogue of reason and faith. If Christ is the theosis of Being, St. Thomas, as the saint who reclaimed existence, would be the last man to reduce Christ’s kenosis to a mere concept. Thus, while in some respects the five ways treat the reasoning principle and its corollary ground much the same as Aristotle viewed it when describing the prime mover, nevertheless there is a subtlety to those ways which bespeaks the fact that man cannot go back. We cannot return to a nature identical to the ground in-waiting before Christ. Additionally and more importantly for our present purposes, St. Thomas’ seeming imitation of that ground presents important restrictions on the ability actually to engage the problem of evil. Is it not of more than passing academic interest that the very first objector to the demonstrations which follow engages the problem and reality of evil. The first objection in the five ways argues the following: It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.150

St. Thomas’ rather limited, brief because anticipatory, response is telling: Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil. This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.151

Is that all there is to say on the subject? Of course not! Subsequent sections of the Summa Theologica, and the De Malo especially, carve out a startling metaphysics of evil to accentuate the purely Christian perspective. Perhaps the brevity of his response here might indicate that the problem of evil is not central to the question of the existence of God, but such a conclusion is both flimsy and unsubstantiated. Even worse as interpretation is the widely held view that, well, evil isn’t really evil for St. Thomas, that if we could only “see the larger picture,” we would realize the necessity and therefore 150 151

ST I, 2, 3, obj. 1. ST I, 2, 3, ad. 1.

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goodness of what only appears evil in its actual appearance and we would understand and accept it, not as evil but as part of God’s plan, and so St. Thomas is getting this issue out of the way early on. This is not St. Thomas, but the claptrap of a superimposed idealism and it is shocking to hear it babbled from the mouths of soi disant Thomists. Evil is an intrusion, a violation preventing contact with the divine. Many theological heresies and philosophical failures find some nobility in their efforts to protect the divine, whether in the Manichaeism of a limited but good God or a Plotinian One untouched by the world of affectivity and sensible limit. As such, the problem of evil is not peripheral to the existence of God but fundamental, not a sidebar but a threshold issue, especially if the philosophical god that one intends to “prove” must be compatible with the fully realized Christian God Who, by being the creative source of all, does not lessen the problem of evil but vivifies and intensifies it to its most extreme proportions. There is no limit, no prime matter, no alternative deity man can point to as source of disorder, abandonment, failing, and evil. It must be resolved on Christian terms or not at all. Nor is the Christian God a faceless deistic God unrelated to the world and its evils. It is not the Aristotelian God the five ways seek to point to but the Christian God. The language may be Aristotelian but the content and purpose assuredly are not. The ground of the five ways certainly gives the appearance at first glance of a nature preexisting man’s full and primal prevenient openness as existentially dependent on God as Other. It is an appearance, an imitation of a non-creational nature and, as such, is as close as possible to a pure nature. But if this were the ground on which man comes to understand evil, and the implications of human transcendence, then all Thomas could come to describe is natural vice and error, not the real fallenness of a supernatural descent. In this, man might become the better man, the man who embellishes his already-completed self-enclosed essence, but still not the new man, the man of the open nature ratified by an enmartyred and anarchistic antihistorical love. Thomists who advocate this pure nature are not only denied the exitus/reditus structure of the Summa, they have misread Thomas’ work as an operational manual of isolated troubleshooting fragments, instead of the intense Christian dialogue that it is. This reduced nature cannot reflect the utter disunity and forceful disproportion as which nature wields its indifferent and indelicate sway over man and from which man attempts to emancipate, disingenuously reorder or, more genuinely, rediscover himself within. The nature which St. Thomas utilizes in the five ways, by imitating that non-creational Aristotelian nature, cannot be the ground of natural law at root in enmartyred love. Natural law theory was made to work within Western Christendom because it was lifted into something infinitely larger than itself, the Christian vision of existence. Natural law became that part of the Divine Law which God has apportioned to men. Acquiring legitimacy and legality because it acquired personality, natural law also acquired loyalty, not precisely because it was natural but because its source was supernatural. No Christian seeking the origins of his decisions to act like a man, to act decently in a moment of crisis and when passing through the darkness of severe temptation, could do better than appeal to that Pauline text

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which states that by our sufferings we “fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ.” A philosopher’s god could not have oiled the machinery of the classical spirit: it took the Christian God on the Cross to do so.152

Natural law emerges only from and within the tidal wave of cosmogonic tension which the tragedians recognized and which the philosophers-cum-stoics denied. If Christian man transplants the stillness of the god of the philosophers onto the world, he downgrades, fabulates, and then denies the ever-present efficacy of original sin. Even Pelagius had a more noble vision of the dramatic structure of human existence than the fabulists of a pure nature corrupted only by mistakes and errors of judgment caused by a failure to remain above it all, to commit and assent to nothing. Sin finds its many reflections not only in the wishing wells of willful sin but also in the nature of the fuori le mura, outside the gates of Eden—the land beyond the garden walls in which the world of remains suspended. When man fell, indeed creation fell,153 and nature became, paradoxically enough, a reflection of our own dissimilitude. The genuine defenders of natural law never come to the absurd conclusion that nature works with or for us, that it is in service to us. Nature is not as serviceable as people think they might expect it to be. In the case of pain too there is frequently a disproportion between its function of usefulness and the intensity of suffering which it brings with it. Christianity views this outrageous absence of serviceability as an effect of original sin, i.e., the condition of alienation from God in which all mankind is born and which derives from the refusal of the first man to accept a supernatural calling and a surplus of order which implied a strengthening of the finality of things and their being at man’s disposal.154

The oddness and lack of serviceability of nature is as follows: man, both pre- and postlapsarian, is in the world but not of the world. For the former that in-but-not-of created a loving tension: the world was sign: man’s end does not terminate in the same end as the beasts over which he has dominion. After the fall, the tension bears a brutality, an unchaste anarchy, and original sin places man far too in the world, and as to how he is not of the world becomes like “looking through a glass darkly”;155 the sign becomes the riddle. This twofold tension reveals nature to be far more dramatic mythos than delineated ratio and, as such, the natural law is far more a beyond-being ontological activity than a rational appeasement of the intellectualized senses, which would be an ontotheology only in a deficient sense156 as theodicy.

152

F. Wilhelmsen, “The Natural Law, Religion, and the Crisis of the Twentieth Century,” Modern Age 10, 2 (1966): 148. 153 Rom. 8:20. 154 L. Elders, The Metaphysics of Being of St. Thomas Aquinas in a Historical Perspective (Boston, MA: Brill, 1993), 133. 155 1 Cor. 13:12. 156 Cf. Wilhelmsen, “The Natural Law, Religion, and the Crisis of the Twentieth Century,” 146. See also R. Guardini, The End of the Modern World (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2001).

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The waterless desert of a pure nature is a region in which man is acutely unaware of himself precisely because he has unrepentantly absolved himself of his utter and graceful dependency on God. The relationship between faith and reason becomes one of antagonistic intolerance leaving no stone uncoerced, every dual unity castigated into submission or repression.157 The notion of imago dei so fundamental to the existential truth that God’s To Be has lovingly inverted the ground of metaphysics, that metaphysics itself finds its saturated presence in the field of the Cross, has also to be exiled. It is not the secular humanist who completes the task but the advocates of pure nature, because the idea of a capax dei is considered to be a disadvantage to the natural law. Perhaps within the closed circles of the Catholic identity it can be “thrown in” to the discussion, but to appeal to the broader scope of academicians nature has to be emptied of its divine connectivity, and so, therefore, does man. This action reaffirms an inability to follow the startling cosmogonic and creational power of a Christ Who has changed everything because man always was an open nature. Thus, this impure nature quietly exiles God by creating another easy bifurcation for plodding philosophies by which imago dei is merely and only a “theological” concept and not at all an anthropological one.158 And what does this mean? What ontotheological truth excludes the copresence of man and thus its own anthropological implications? In such a vulgar concession, the natural law becomes legalism, a ledger of so-called divine edicts placed over and upon a nature devoid of divinity. In following this unnatural law, either man is a mere extension or attribute of a deistic romantic pantheism or, more likely, the world is a mere extension of man’s self-pantheism which fulfills itself in a will-to-power-atheism. The natural law is not edictive but the dialogically concealed Word manifested in man, struggling to appear in his imago dei. We are not going to better matters substantially by tinkering with natural law within the presuppositions of contemporary secularism: i.e., all values must somehow square themselves with symbols such as “the modern world,” “contemporary civilization” and other such beads within the gnostic rosary. We can make advances towards a restoration of natural law and the human dignity it would defend only if we are able to undergo a massive reaction within the spirit, an agony of loss and gain, which will involve, among other things, a denial of Sovereignty to both History and the Modern State, restoring that Sovereignty to God, Author and Judge of Good and Evil, of the Law. What I am calling for, in effect, is the Counter Revolution.159 157

This bifurcation undermines St. Thomas’ natural filiation of reason straining into faith. Cf. SCG I, 8: “Now, the human reason is related to the knowledge of the truth of faith (a truth which can be most evident only to those who see the divine substance) in such a way that it can gather certain likenesses of it, which are yet not sufficient so that the truth of faith may be comprehended as being understood demonstratively or through itself. Yet it is useful for the human reason to exercise itself in such arguments, however weak they may be, provided only that there be present no presumption to comprehend or to demonstrate. For to be able to see something of the loftiest realities, however thin and weak the sight may be, is, as our previous remarks indicate, a cause of the greatest joy.” 158 Cf. E. Schockenhoff, Natural Law and Human Dignity: Universal Ethics in an Historical World, trans. Brian McNeil (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2003), 20–21. 159 Wilhelmsen, “The Natural Law, Religion, and the Crisis of the Twentieth Century,” 148.

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And so our seemingly dry and abstract meditations on matter, form, and causality are leading us into their very worldy political questions, as we shall see. But first let us further refine our methodology by its transition, indeed translation, into the existential realm of Otherdom.

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Calderon and the Chaste Anarchism

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder. —St. Thomas Aquinas1

My deepest conviction is that poetic language alone restores to us that participationin or belonging-to an order of things which precedes our capacity to oppose ourselves to things taken as objects opposed to a subject. Hence the purpose of poetic discourse is to bring about this emergence of a depth-structure of belonging-to amid the ruins of descriptive discourse. —Paul Ricoeur2

There exist only three respectable beings, said Baudelaire3: the priest, the warrior, and the poet. To know, to die, and to create; the warrior makes the sacrifice, the priest consecrates it, the poet sings it: in this triune act is the futurity of joy and the always and surprising new fact that “all manner of thing shall be well.”4 “Other men are taxable and exploitable, made for the stable, that is to say, to exercise so called professions,”5 what Newman referred to as the “pantechnicon.”6 Pedro Calderon de la Barca was a priest, poet, and warrior who lived the tension of the human heart laid bare: “there are in every man, at all times, two simultaneous tendencies, one toward God, the other toward Satan. The invocation of God, or spirituality, is a desire to follow 1

2

3

4 5 6

St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics, trans. J. P. Rowen (South Bend, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1995) I, lect. 3, 55. P. Ricoeur, “Towards a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. L. Mudge (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1980), 101. Cf. C. Baudelaire, “My Heart Laid Bare,” xxviii in My Heart Laid Bare and Other Prose Writings, trans. C. Norman (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1950). St. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006), 49. “My Heart Laid Bare,” xxviii. J. H. Cardinal Newman, “The Mission of St. Benedict,” in Historical Sketches Vol. II, ed. W. J. Copeland (Longman, Green & Co., 1906), 377.

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the road upward; to invoke Satan, or animality, is taking the delight in falling down.”7 In every man is the soul of lost Arcadia, immortalized and quickened in act. Man is alone: God presents to him his aloneness as a chastening and viatoric wilderness to be the extended prerequisite of the unscripted invitation to eternal life. “The person who finds his homeland sweet is a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”8 The Platonic tension between the philosopher and the polis is both magnified and resolved, but only in a further tension, when it is seen that not only is politics a metaphysical problem (the early dialogues) but also that metaphysics is a political problem (the later dialogues). Even more so is this the case when the tension is between the martyr or saint or Church and the polis, thus questioning the very possibility of a Christian society. The incarnate Christian soul is tyrannically antihistorical in its immortal yearning for a salvation from the monotonous self-imposed individualization of the social, especially in its historicist cultural progressivism. There is only a wilderness forged within each, in which the intensification of the True could quite easily kill. Instead of secularist progression, there is a chastening into the fullness of Christ. The en-martyred man, like the monk, becomes coextensive with the antihistorical anarchist’s love; he is one with Christ Who is the Other of time and history, constituting them as time and as history within His mystical body.

Calderon’s phenomenological dialectic The Mighty Magician9 tells the story of how this anarchical love implants its pierced heart in the interiority of each soul, on the polis, and in a metaphysics which can no longer stand on or withstand its own crumbling ground. The story, much like many of Calderon’s stories, is both fictive and yet non-fiction, carving its way between the two in order to etch out the exacting meaning of Christ’s impossible essential presence and to show how man’s correspondent conversion entails a total existential change in which nothing remains untouched, neither nature nor polis. Schelling, in his Philosophy of Art, describes Calderon’s prose as the supreme interpenetration of form and content, a dialectic of the interior phenomenon of consciousness which, for our purposes, is integral to illuminating the failure of pure nature to convey the phenomenologically lived activities of conversion and human action: 7 8 9

C. Baudelaire, Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, ed. T. R. Smith (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919), 229. Hugh of St. Victor, Discadalion, trans. J. Taylor (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 101. The Mighty Magician has also been translated as The Wonder-Working Magician. The following textual commentary relies on two main translations: Calderón de la Barca, The Wonder-Working Magician, trans. D. F. MacCarthy (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1873); Calderón de la Barca, “The Mighty Magician,” in Eight Dramas of Calderón, trans. E. Fitzgerald (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago Press, 2000).

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Calderon has collected the dispersed principles of the romantic genre into a stricter unity, one approaching true beauty. Without observing the old rules, he has compressed the action. His drama is more dramatic and hence more pure. Within this form his art always constitutes pure rendering of contours side by side with the highest coloration, such that from the largest to the smallest, even unto the choice of poetic meter, form and content interpenetrate one another in the most intimate fashion.10

Nature is even more natural when it is more pure, and it is only more pure when it reflects and incarnates its origin: in the divine-ordering creativity, and this is grace and the gracefulness of nature.11 Purity is not mere self-reference but other-referential in the analogy of being, which pervades all being, all doing, all knowing, and all loving. The eros of Calderon’s prose is agapetic and yet its surrender swells erotically within every silence and dramatic pause: the play itself lingers in that lengthy longing both for the Cross and for liberation from the Cross, between the cosmogonic and the creational, between the temporal and the eternal. And it is precisely in this dialectical lingering that intimations of Hegel appear and yet refuse to be incorporated into his reductive dialectic. While Calderon’s art, for Hegel, is Romantic and therefore moving within the sphere of being a pure and “sensuous representation of the Absolute itself,”12 it never fully completes itself as a synthesis wherein the idealization of the historical trajectory of Being is inward with the pure interiority of self-reflective consciousness. For Hegel, Calderon’s art moves past the primal and ab original triadic stage of thesisas-symbolic of the other. His tragedian’s dialogue, incorporating the interplay of the cosmogonic and creational, moves beyond the symbolic and utterly outward stance of the self, existing only by being a symbolic reflection of an outer onticity. Within that vein, Calderon’s work is also more advanced than the classical art forms which resolve themselves prematurely in an antithesis–engagement with the historically unfolding geist. The antithesis so often discoverable in classical art is still an I-and-other in which the inwardness of consciousness fumbles and (still) perceives its balance to be found and resolved only in the deficiencies of the outward-as-other. Any art that completes in synthesis Hegel’s triadically directed dialectic must carry out a sublation into the Spirit which is itself non-emancipated from existence. Existence is the totality of the Spirit which first manifested itself imperfectly in the finite as symbolic and outward. The Geist, therefore, does not call forth another Other outside the finite but reveals, in the sublation of the thesis and antithesis, that the finite is the non-emancipated Absolute. There can be no contrary but the active contrariety of the Geist which has no Other because it is consciousness in the totality of itself. It is “pure” in the modern sense. 10

11

12

F. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, trans. D. W. Scott (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. Minnesota Press, 2008), 276. Nothing is outside the provenance of God, least of all nature, just as the polis is not outside the parameters of the natural and thus of the divine. Plato’s anticipation of St. Thomas’ fifth way in bk. X of the Laws provides the political context that the fifth way necessarily omits. G. W. F. Hegel, On Art, Religion, and the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 103.

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While Calderon has the intimate interiority of the synthesis, in which consciousness turns to itself in order to know itself, he does not, for Hegel, allow the repetition of that triadic flux to proceed and reveal, in its ceaseless mediations, a new synthesis of the same non-emancipated Absolute. Calderon’s work, as Hegel describes it, is “handicapped by its abstract and unyielding Catholic principle”13 which prevents him from recognizing that the real power of the Christian mythos is in being an expression of the synthesisinwardness of the Geist. Calderon’s handicap seduces him into redirecting that inwardness of consciousness onto a distracted and erotic form of the antithesis where the Absolute as truly Other is an emancipatory power bringing out a perfection in man which man himself cannot cultivate. The moment Calderon recognizes Christ to be the expression of the Absolute, distinct from any Hegelian immanentized mediation of the Absolute as historical consciousness, his project for Hegel failed. Because Calderon considers the Man-God to be the creative fountain of Otherness, incommunicability, and personhood rather than an archetype of the tragic-as-the-personal-sublation-ofthe-outward, he has failed to allow the triadic act to complete itself within the Spirit as historical-I. His work resides in the no-man’s-land beyond but not severed from the deficiencies of the antithesis. But Christ is for Calderon, as for His martyrs, “honey in the lion’s mouth, emblem mystical, divine …” because He alone is “ … how the sweet and strong combine.”14 Christ intrudes on historical thought, gets in its way, and while for Hegel He must accordingly be reduced, absorbed, ignored, or rejected,15 for Calderon everything written begins and ends with Him, but does not add up to Him.

A story of supernatural vice and consent The story of the temptation of the saintly Justina and the corruption of the teacher statesman Cipriano mirrors the lives of the early Christian martyrs Saints Justina and Cyprian, particularly in Cipriano’s repeated and failed attempts to ensnare Justina in his sorcerer’s web of demonic arts, but whose virginal purity proved to be more powerful. Her power lay in her surrender to Christ. The Church describes how the devil loathed the fact that Christ as bridegroom had secured Justina and how the evil one sought through Cyprian to ruin this nuptial bond. Cyprian, a sorcerer of some renown who had learned the arts since a child, was tasked with the ruination of Justina’s purity. He summoned various demons to frighten her, to seduce her, and to overwhelm her with a fear that would paralyze her intellect and lead her astray. Each seduction proved fruitless, the demons reporting how Justina had made a sign that frightened them and spoke words that so intensified their fear that they could not approach her.

13

14

15

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (London: Bell & Sons, 1920), 272. This comment of Hegel’s was directed in particular at P. Calderón’s play, The Physician of His Own Honor, trans. D. Fox and D. Hindley (Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 1997). P. Calderón, “The Holy Eucharist,” in Hispanic Anthology: Poems Translated from the Spanish by English and North American Poets, ed. T. Walsh (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), 337. Cf. C. S. Gilson, The Philosophical Question of Christ (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), xi–xxvi.

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Cyprian became incensed at the idea of such meekness overwhelming his magic that a mere waif had power to make the demons flee. The devil, out of options and hoping to console Cyprian, sent a demon cloaked as Justina to his student to enforce the illusion of his triumph. Cyprian embraced the lie and called out her name but the word “Justina” itself caused the demon to flee, revealing the emptiness of the specter. Cyprian now recognized his regio dissimilitudinus for what it was, the lost likeness with the God of the Cross, and in that recognition it became the ground of his surrender: “now I have understood what a non-entity you are; you are not even able to take revenge! … Depart, depart from me, lawless one, enemy of truth, adversary and hater of every good thing!”16 Christ’s entrance into worldly existence, as Pope Gregory the Great described, was a bait for the devil, tricking him into releasing his hold over sinful humanity: “The bait tempts in order that the hook may wound. Our Lord therefore, when coming for the redemption of humanity, made a kind of hook of himself for the death of the devil,”17 bringing good out of evil without reducing Evil to the Good.18 The enraged king of lies, now caught on that hook, riling at it, began to attack Cyprian, attempting to consume the new life in him. Cyprian’s new faith muted all his false magic, leaving nowhere left to turn, no alternative viatoric avenue but to enter into the image and likeness of Justina who always makes the sign of the Cross. Through the sign of the Cross, and calling out for Christ, Cyprian makes the devil pause in cautious retreat. The devil taunts with malicious impotence but can no longer approach, growing tired of his lost foothold on Cyprian; he is vanquished, exiled in his loveless failure to be. St. Cyprian’s conversion was met with mockery and suspicion, as if he had lost his mind. Cyprian and Justina lived and died carrying the words which God spoke to St. Andrew: “be a fool for My sake and you will receive much in the day of My Kingdom.”19 They were tortured in a failed effort to submit to idolatry, for Cyprian to revert to his old and worldly-wise ways. Their loving anarchism and anti-historical chastity ended in their en-martyred love, skinned and beheaded, and left unburied for six days. Where fate forbids, grace demands.20 The Mighty Magician, while following the lives of Saints Justina and Cyprian, enters also into an interior discernment of the condition which led to Cipriano’s weakness and eager willingness to sell his soul, as well as of Justina’s lovingly anarchistic and chastened steadfastness. The corruption of Cipriano’s soul by the king of lies shows Lucifer in a Faustian light. Man’s refusal of grace and his hubristic belief in his own 16

17

18 19 20

Cf. The Orthodox Word, 12, 5 (70) (1976): 135–42; 167–76. http://orthodoxinfo.com/death/cyprian_ justina.aspx Pope Gregory the Great, as cited in A. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 323. Cf. ST I, 2, 3, ad. 1; ST I 49, 1. Cf. N. Velimirovic, The Prologue from Orchid: Vol. 4 (Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1985), 15–19. Cf. Commemoration of the Holy Hieromartyr Cyprian & Martyr Justina, stitchera at vespers, ode viii: “Vanquished by the grace which dwelt within thee, the hordes of the demons were repulsed and the sufferings of the sick are banished, O divinely wise one; and we, the faithful, are filled with divine light, crying: Bless the Lord, all ye works of the Lord!” See also J. Von Gardner, Russian Church Singing, Vol. 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980).

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endurance are the underlying culprits of his fallenness. This does not downgrade the devil’s presence but rather vivifies it, for “ … thought to enter in shows that half the deed is done.”21 Lucifer is very real and Cipriano’s corruption is not a mere humanistic set of unnatural vices or defects or mistakes or imperfections but a supernatural descent encouraged by this executioner whose type of death even death cannot cure. The devil does not therefore force man’s sinfulness, as if to impose an irresistible but alien supernatural corruption. Like grace, temptation works from within. Cipriano’s absurdly deconstructing descent is his own non-natural and failed creation. Cipriano is, in a way, the deceiver: the “impression of an honest devil being defrauded of his legal right is one of the difficulties inherent in the theme of the diabolical pact,”22 just as Mephistophiles did not first appear to Faustus as a demon “who walks up and down the earth to tempt and corrupt any man encountered.”23 Lucifer appears to Cipriano cloaked as an unassuming stranger, a stranger who at the very opening of the play acknowledges his ignorance, his inability for truth and completion. He tells Cyprian that he has lost his way while traveling to Antioch, and asks for direction. Cyprian is clearly astonished at such a question, for the city’s profile is as unmistakable as is the path which will take him there.24 The Devil’s response is telling: “the old story, of losing what one should have found on earth by staring after something in the clouds—Is it not so?”25 The ignorance, the false humility the devil abides by and condemns others to abide, is no mere failure to know; it lives and reigns by denying the undeniable: that Being Is, that there is a way, and an order, and its name is To Be. Such an impossible denial presupposes knowing what you are denying and thus it is no mere lack of clarity, but rather a willed refusal to know! This is the odd and unnerving ignorance, the feigned ignorance26 at work when wholly preferring what does not perdure over real endurance under the guise of imperfect “human nature.” It is the ancient Socratic paradox: that vice is ignorance, a mystifyingly preferred ignorance that can lead the soul too far ever to return to itself alive. The devil’s ignorance consists in being the grand denier, the exemplar of refusal. This is the ignorance of mortal sin at its most abysmal; it is man’s own contract on the sanctity of his soul: “mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God’s law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate

21 22

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24

25 26

de la Barca, The Wonder-Working Magician, 104. A. A. Parker, “The Devil in the Drama of Calderón,” in Critical Essays on the Theatre of Calderón, ed. B. W. Wardropper (New York: NYU Press, 1965), 16. W. Farnham, Twentieth Century Interpretations of Doctor Faustus (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), 6. Cf. Parker, “The Devil in the Drama of Calderón,” 17. “Our first reaction is to be as surprised at the devil’s answers as Cyprian was at his question, for surely one cannot associate ignorance with the devil. But Cyprian’s surprise is more to the point. It is indeed a display of an odd kind of ignorance to have a city before your eyes and yet not know the way to it.” See also ST I, 63, 1, ad. 4: “This kind of sin does not presuppose ignorance, but only the fact that one has failed to consider what one ought to have considered. The angel sinned in this way, by using his free-will to turn towards this own good without being guided by the divine will.” de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 318. Mark 14:68.

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to be a personal choice. Feigned ignorance and hardness of heart do not diminish, but rather increase, the voluntary character of a sin.”27 This type of sin reveals the utter terror of being closer to the angels than to the beasts, the terror of man’s responsibility, the absurd fact that man can deny the undeniable, but not with impunity. The devil’s inability to see Antioch shows that he can willfully ignore the patterns of reality, the order of the Good, True, and Beautiful, so much so that the disorder becomes permanent. The demons are the first to recognize Christ, but they recognize Him only by way of the disorder of privation, they cannot see Him for what he Is. They see Him therefore with fear, jealousy, anger, envy, pride, and all the shades of ugliness and lifelessness. The demons do not see Christ at all, for they see by way of privational ignorance: a willful ignorance that has become inseparable from their insubordinate reasoning capacity.28 In The Mighty Magician, the stranger’s unveiling is measured accordingly in place with Cipriano’s own causal unveiling; as he reveals his own treachery and desire, the devil acts in kind. Together the smoke and rotted perfumes of their conjoined pride initiate and accentuate their descent. Just as Mephistophiles “appears because he senses in Faustus’ magical summons that Faustus is already corrupt, that indeed he is already in danger to be damned,”29 so too does Lucifer when he approaches Cipriano for his soul in return for the admiration and fabricated love of the chaste and saintly Justina. Calderon examines the devil in many of his plays and autos sacramentales. In one of his autos in particular, The Faithful Shepherd, the devil’s perverted honesty goes so far as to become the perverted lover of human nature. Man’s proper love is God: his nature is a naturally supernatural erotic surrender to its source in the divine. A common theme of Calderon’s plays is that of the devil capitalizing on man’s naturally supernatural inclination by attempting to insert himself as its terminus or object. The devil accomplishes this by inflaming man’s pride and attempting to rid him of his proper disposition to obedience and humility. This is the disposition man must have

27 28

29

Catechism, § 1869. The distinction between sins born of the more common ignorance of inadequate knowledge, and the sins with which man and the fallen angels impose an interdict against their own prevenient openness and its attachment to God, becomes clear: Cf. ST I, 63 2 resp.: “Mortal sin occurs in two ways in the act of free-will. First, when something evil is chosen; as man sins by choosing adultery, which is evil of itself. Such sin always comes of ignorance or error; otherwise what is evil would never be chosen as good. The adulterer errs in the particular, choosing this delight of an inordinate act as something good to be performed now, from the inclination of passion or of habit; even though he does not err in his universal judgment, but retains a right opinion in this respect. In this way there can be no sin in the angel; because there are no passions in the angels to fetter reason or intellect, as is manifest from what has been said above (Q59, a4); nor, again, could any habit inclining to sin precede their first sin. In another way sin comes of free-will by choosing something good in itself, but not according to proper measure or rule; so that the defect which induces sin is only on the part of the choice which is not properly regulated, but not on the part of the thing chosen; as if one were to pray, without heeding the order established by the Church. Such a sin does not presuppose ignorance, but merely absence of consideration of the things which ought to be considered. In this way the angel sinned, by seeking his own good, from his own free-will, insubordinately to the rule of the Divine will.” Farnham, Twentieth Century Interpretations, 6.

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when coming face to face with the uncreated creative source and end of his prevenient openness and naturally supernatural inclination. If humilitas occidit superbiam, and if the devil is the embodied fallenness of pride, then to win ownership of man’s heart and end, he must defuse humility. The Faithful Shepherd follows the allegorical richness of the temptation of Adam and Eve, where “vanity is the sign of incipient revolt, and Sin then plays her second card.”30 Pre-fall human nature in the auto is symbolized as a lowly Shepherdess with all the agon of man’s erotically inexhaustible nature “with Grace as her companion and counsellor, and with Will, Desire, Appetite and Obedience as her servants”31 and as forbearers of the restlessness of that inexhaustible nature. Within the unity and tension of these attributes, the shepherdess’ heart trembles in wild restlessness—fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te32—in its inability to be satisfied in and by nature, because made not for nature, not for the self, but for God.33 Following Calderon’s theme of a perversely honest devil, that is, a devil who recognizes that man’s ownmost prevenient openness can be the source of his fallenness, the devil must let the cards of sin deal out their hands before he steps in to secure the deal: “the devil cannot exert any direct influence on the human will: he tempts from without, but so does concupiscence from within, and the devil’s pull can have no effect unless it is combined with a push from within.”34 If God knew that free will could open the door to man’s descent into Hell, that man can fall so far that he can no longer come home, doesn’t the Pascalian Wager apply not only to man but to God?35 Hasn’t God, by creating such a beautifully absurd and absurdly beautiful world, effectively chained His infinity to the finite? 30 31 32 33

34 35

Parker, “The Devil in the Drama of Calderón,” 12. Ibid., 10. Confessions I, 1.1. Cf. Parker, “The Devil in the Drama of Calderón,” 11. The Devil and Sin itself personified as the gardener “hoes around the apple tree so that the weeds may not rob the fruit of its power to swell and ripen.” Sin is competing with Innocence and the primacy of grace for the ability to direct and harness Human Nature’s inexhaustible eros. Ibid., 20. For an exposition of this divine wager, see St. John Eudes, “The Sacred Heart of Jesus Is a Furnace Burning with Love for Us in His Sacred Passion.” St. John Eudes, The Sacred Heart of Jesus (New York: PJ Kennedy & Sons, 1946), 36–37: “The first cause of those most painful wounds in the Sacred Heart of our Redeemer is our sins. We read in the life of St. Catherine of Genoa that one day God let her see the horror of one tiny venial sin. She assures us that, although this vision lasted but a moment, she saw nevertheless an object so frightening that the blood froze in her veins and she swooned away in an agony that would have killed her if God had not preserved her to relate to others what she had seen. Wherefore she declared that if she were in the very depths of a sea of flaming fire and it were in her power to be set free, on condition that she should once more behold such a spectacle, she would choose to remain rather than to escape. If the sight of the smallest venial sin brought this saint to such a pass, what must we think of the state to which our Savior was reduced by seeing all the sins of the universe? He had them continually before His eyes, and His vision being infinitely more powerful than that of St. Catherine, He could behold infinitely more horror. He saw the immeasurable insult and dishonor caused His Father by all sins; He saw the damnation of a countless number of souls resulting from those sins. As He had infinite love for His Father and His creatures, the sight of all those sins rent His Heart with countless wounds, such that if we were able to count all the sins of men, which are more numerous than the drops of water in the sea, we would then be able to count the wounds of the loving Heart of Jesus.”

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Not everything that happens is God’s will, but God’s will is present in everything that happens. This is the paradoxical resolution of the so-called problem of evil. There is no problem of evil without God, as Fr. D’Arcy demonstrated36 so many years ago. This is not because God causes evil but because God is not merely love, but an endless and relentless Love which renders the question of the pervasive presence of evil so poignant in the face of a God Who is not only Power but Love. Man can turn away from the good, and God seeks to amend this descent with a love that does not violate free will and man’s embodied status. Les jeux sont faits. Thus, God knows the risk of giving a love that befits human nature: within the fabric of identity and difference, His Love can be misread, seen as temporary, having only a temporary effect or not even be seen at all. God is endless and relentless: the God-Man risks the incalculable, knowing again that the greater expression of His Love shows man, at the same time, the difference and distance away from Him. Hasn’t God, through His love, created and lengthened the trajectory for the possibility of man’s fallenness? Why has He done this, why has He chained his infinite freedom to finite man? Has He done this to transfigure redemptively the transcendent reality of suffering? Is the risk worth it? Calderon’s Lucifer is a worldly-wise broker, attempting to set his contract in stone by having Cipriano come to him willingly for, as St. Thomas remarked, “nothing else than his own will makes man’s mind the slave of his desire. Now man does not become a slave to his desires, except through sin. Therefore the cause of sin cannot be the devil, but man’s own will alone.”37 Lucifer therefore sees a new form of pain to inflict. The greatest punishment he can inflict upon Christ is to insert himself as the perverted lover/beloved in man’s viatoric longing for the Other that already makes him more than man. This Faustian devil attempts to enter into the very viatoric communion of caritas. While the devil can never become the source of love, he attempts to be the object of those—especially the wayfarers—who are infused by restless love. This slavish trader attempts to thwart the capacity of the rational creature to be increased by charity: “because the heart is enlarged … capable of receiving a further increase,”38 the devil acts in service to its reversal. As man is in the state of the wayfarer, the sojourner as the viatoric and naturely otherness of God, and as his prevenient openness hungers for a shape it cannot itself shape, the devil, at man’s invitation, can enter that neediness and heighten the risk of God’s primordial Wager. The lengths and depths of the descent of the Dove are found in His identical nature as Love itself: “there is not limit imposed to the increase of man’s charity” for charity itself resides within the To Be of the primal Other and all charity is therefore a “participation of the infinite charity which is the Holy Ghost.”39 Moderation in pursuit of God is not virtue. The man who signs away his openness willingly tortures God and elongates the agony of God’s ownmost Wager. By creating man in the Imago Dei and providing the

36 37 38 39

Cf. M. D’Arcy, The Problem of Evil (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1934). ST I-II 80, 1 sed contra. ST II-II, 24, 7, ad. 2. ST II-II, 24, 7, resp.

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freedom to enter into or depart from that plenitude, God has accepted His own Wager, one that allows man and angels to risk and to learn to love, for man to be wayfarer on the way to the beatific vision. “Both the nail and the wound cry out that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. The sword pierced his soul and came close to his heart, so that he might be able to feel compassion for me in my weaknesses.”40 The second cause of His wounds is the infinite love of His Sacred Heart for all of His children, and His constant vision of all the afflictions and sufferings that are to happen to them, especially all the torments that His holy martyrs are to suffer. When a mother watches her beloved child suffering, she feels the pain more keenly than the child. Our Savior’s love for us is so tremendous that if the love of all parents were centered in a single heart, it would not represent even a spark of the love for us that burns in His Heart. Our pains and sorrows, ever present to His vision and seen most clearly and distinctly, were so many wounds bleeding in His paternal Heart: Vere nostros ipse tulit, et aegrotationes nostras portavit. These wounds were so painful and deep that they would have caused His death a thousand times over, even immediately after His birth, if He had not miraculously preserved Himself, because during His whole earthly life His Sacred Heart was continually pierced by many mortal wounds of love.41

The devil may entice, offering imagined nourishment to the senses and the mind in order to inflame the appetite or to persuade the reason to be willing to believe what is unreasonable. But because “the will is not of necessity moved by any object except the last end,”42 the devil cannot be the direct cause of sin. Calderon’s Lucifer becomes for Cipriano the perverted lover of his fallen soul who has lost its obedience and humility by denying the undeniable. Cipriano has denied his nature as participant in the Primal Other, united in that Otherness for his own perfection. This is also the case in Calderon’s The Faithful Shepherd: sin deals her cards, throws the apple at the feet of the lowly Shepherdess, Human Nature itself, and says: “Come, y como Dios seras.”43 The devil has whispered in the background of man’s nature not so much what to eat, but what not to eat: do not take and eat of the Christ for it is His body and not yours, it is His blood not yours, take this apple and you shall be God, in your body you shall be God. For “the essence of evil does not consist in the mere baseness of human action but rather in the malice of rage … . Being itself is what is contested. In it is concealed the essential provenance of nihilation.”44 And it can be only pride, pride further devolving into malice and envy, said St. Augustine,45 that constitutes and “explains” Satan’s fall. 40

41 42 43 44

45

St. Bernard of Clairvaux, “Commentary on the Song of Songs,” sermon 62, in St. Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works, trans. E. Cousins (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), 246. Eudes, The Sacred Heart of Jesus, 37. ST I-II, 80, 1 resp. Parker, “The Devil in the Drama of Calderón,” 12. M. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1993), 260. St. Augustine, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: First Series, Vol. IV, St. Augustine: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises, ed. P. Schaff (New York: Eerdmans, 1984), Ch. 33.

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The devil advances in his efforts to remove God as the proper end of man’s nature by placing God not only distinct but also separate from man’s being. He plays on the obfuscations of a pure nature by making God’s presence in human nature something additional or extrinsic which can be removed or ignored but which would leave man still to be man. Nature, when by an intellectual–spiritual violence is severed from its graceful origin, meaning and direction, becomes, at best, techne or the object of techne, instead of the holy object of wonder. And techne becomes a kind of rationalist magic in the service of success-as-control. Philosophically, to accomplish this would require something like the Cartesian epistemological estrangement of res cogitans from res extensa, but this time, as Descartes never would, between nature and grace. And God is introduced as the epistemological mechanism by which to coerce a marriage of convenience and to co-sign as guarantor our ability to know. Descartes’ well-intentioned deal with the demon opened the road to hell by way of the fall into certitude. What began in wonder ends in doubt. But Calderon knows that should the shepherdess, who is herself a sheep, eat that apple—quid vobis videtur si fuerint alicui centum oves et erraverit una ex eis nonne relinquet nonaginta novem in montibus et vadit quaerere eam quae erravit 46—then she will have eaten ashes like bread and mingled her drink with weeping.47 Human nature eats and grace withdraws, for man is free to deny the undeniable and reduce human nature—as naturally supernatural—into the human condition, denying repeatedly its invocational status by preferring a fatalistic “pure” nature. … a fatalism which excluded human nature from any co-operation in the work of its renewal, and which made of nature and grace two closed orders mutually exclusive and hostile to one another. At bottom it is the old Manichean enemy in a new form. From the Catholic point of view, it is just as false to treat nature and grace as mutually exclusive things, as it is to oppose body and soul, or matter and spirit, to one another; for the union of nature and grace makes up the Christian, just as the union of body and soul makes up the natural man. The supernatural is not the contradiction of nature, but its restoration and crown, and every faculty of man, whether high or low, is destined to have its share in his new supernatural life.48

Man can remove the irremovable—grace—through the removal of humility. Because man exists, grace is always there. Not everything that happens (sin) is God’s will but God’s will (grace) is present in everything that happens. How else even to approach the “problem” of evil? Grace is still there and like man’s preveniently open waitingness, waits to remind man of his waitingness and of his true stance. This grace is therefore an existentially sustaining waiting and wanting for man to accept the origin of his invocational call and to re-take the cruciform shape which

46

47 48

Matt. 18:12: “What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off ?” Ps. 102:9. Dawson, “The Nature and Destiny of Man,” 80.

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is continually offered in the God-Man’s body and blood, to take on his true nature, to live what is natural in him. Who has not felt that the life which is most truly natural, that is to say, most in harmony with man’s true being, is not the life of the man who lives by senseinstinct, but that of the saint—of St. Francis, for instance—in whom the original innocence and harmony of man with himself and with outward things seem restored? … The ascetic life is the true “life according to nature”. It is a process of simplification by which the monk may, as it were, recover the actual rectitude and harmony of nature in which man left the hands of his Creator.49

In The Faithful Shepherd, the devil has helped the shepherdess kill her own humility, which is to kill what is most harmonious and natural in her, as an invocation of the supernatural, in order to replace it with her pride which is his pride, which calls itself “nature” but is the unnatural impure condition where limits are seen as limitations, and all ends are fulfilled by naked and blind force. Knowing what nature is is not common but rare, for to have exiled the supernatural is to have eviscerated nature, leaving the polis itself dangerously, mortally vulnerable as a result: This quality of simplicity and naturalness in the highest spiritual life has only been attained by intense effort: it is the result of a remorseless process of destruction and reconstruction. The disorder of nature is very real and very strong. It has rooted itself so deeply in humanity … . we see the reality of a naked reign of force, based on slavery, war, or economic exploitation, in which the strong prosper at the expense of the weak, and primitive peoples become the natural prey of more civilized powers. The reign of social and international justice is an ideal which can only be reached by a spiritualized humanity, a humanity set free from the domination of lust and avarice and cowardice, which drives men and nations blindly into disorder and cruelty. Hence the struggle between the spirit of Christ and that spirit of the world which is so real a force.50

As the fulfillment-as-emptiness of such an exiled nature, Lucifer has become the jealous unloved lover who extols secondary causes as if they are primary, as if they can endure on their own. He is the serpent’s kiss and together “they sharpen their tongues like a serpent; adders’ poison is under their lips.”51 He is the grand seducer and thus the father of lies. In Calderon’s works, from The Faithful Shepherd to The Mighty Magician, the devil waits for man to withdraw from that which never really withdraws—grace—and waits for man to deny what is undeniable, his very own nature. “Human Nature stoops to pick up the apple. But Sin pulls it towards herself,”52 for it is her possession, the fruit of 49 50 51 52

Ibid. Ibid., 80–81. Ps. 140:3. Parker, “The Devil in the Drama of Calderón,” 13.

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her phantasmal flesh and blood. Sin, like the devil, is perverse in its honesty: anyone who really partakes of this fruit is not deified but reified, materialized into his airless limit qua limit, for all sin is nothing but limit, shortcoming, and annihilation. Sin pulls the apple to herself when Human Nature comes for it to say that it is hers: become of Sin’s flesh and of Sin’s blood and lose your soul—lose what makes flesh and blood truly natural. Lose the ability to bet your life, to Wager your love. And when human nature follows Sin, “and picks it up and eats it, she finds herself face to face with Sin undisguised, and at the mouth of the cave where the Devil is waiting to receive her in his arms.”53 The devil has no theotic power, his impotence is that his contact with man derives solely from the divine theosis in which man is a sharer, from a perversion of the good of contingent and participated beings. The devil contrasts the divine waitingness with his own deconstructing wait. He waits for man to remove his own graceful theotic nearness which, as the devil knows, is never fully removed. If it were removed, neither the devil nor his seductions nor those whom he has seduced would even exist. When man denies the undeniable and retreats into an abyss of pseudo self-sufficiency—even and especially in the mode of a “modest” recognition of the limits of human nature, hiding an arrogance of Hegelian proportions—the devil steps in as the object of man’s prevenient openness. He does so in order to close man off, to shut man down through the inflaming of his pride-as-death, making him less than man in no-man’s-land. But man must make the first move in order for Sin to play its hand.54

Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore55 That all things terminate in a God who is Love is not only the hope of salvation but also the problem of suffering and its relationship to evil. If God is our origin and end, does this suggest not only a supremely intimate relationship with man but also a relationship that demands God not be severed from, and unrelated to, the presence of evil, but that He suffers the act of Creation in an infinitely greater magnitude than man, going so far for us as to be entrenched in, uniquely and willingly, indeed chained to non-being? Is this not the descent of the God-Man, the harrowing of hell, which is the culmination of Mary’s kenotic ardor in the Annunciation and the pinnacle of God’s theotic contact with man in the Incarnation?56 53 54

55 56

Ibid. Cf. Ibid.: “Now, and only now, can the devil come into contact with Human Nature. He has not pulled her: she has pushed herself into his arms, and the embrace of the two is the embrace of the perverted love that is love of the self, the self-sufficiency which is the delight in oneself as if one were one’s own principle, and which is the sin of pride. Pride has made Human Nature akin to the devil, but now she discovers that she has been following a vain illusion, for the World rises against her to dispel the dream of power and greatness by showing her that she is not the mistress of life but the slave to nature in pain, suffering, and mortality.” Virgil, Aeneid, trans. R. Fagles (New York: Penguin, 2008), VI, 350. Cf. P. Caraman, C.C. Martindale: A Biography (London: Longmans, Greene & Co., 1967), 70. Father C. C. Martindale thought the Annunciation an even greater Feast than Christmas; the former possessed wholly the latter while also being the viatoric and anticipatory presence of Christ in all men as it contained presence and dispossession, the pre-purgative power of Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

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The untamed wayfarer is sometimes savage in his viatoric need, but ever restless for that theotic union with the really Real. But God is infinitely more selfless and determined than man. Christ’s unswerving determination is identical with his ever donative Love which makes man’s antecedent openness to be always within Grace’s preliminary and originary shaping. The devil often preys on man’s appetites, for man is weak and God recognizes this— the sins of the flesh are not as grave as the sins against the spirit. As such, it seems the devil’s preference in coercing man willingly to abdicate his divine yearning and his invocational terminus is because the appetitive powers are easier to sway than the cognitive powers. While in some respects this is true, it seems that God has placed protective measures into the very heart of man, even and especially the appetite of the falling man. One of St. Thomas’ objectors—contemporary then, contemporary now— asserts: It would seem that God cannot be loved immediately in this life. For the “unknown cannot be loved” as Augustine says (De Trin. x, 1). Now we do not know God immediately in this life, since “we see now through a glass, in a dark manner” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Neither, therefore, do we love Him immediately.57

To which St. Thomas responds: Although the unknown cannot be loved, it does not follow that the order of knowledge is the same as the order of love, since love is the term of knowledge, and consequently, love can begin at once where knowledge ends, namely in the thing itself which is known through another thing.58

Or as Father D’Arcy remarks: God “having first loved us” even in the natural order, the soul rests dissatisfied with the best this world can offer; it will make a flight to God, as Plato said. Since in the marketplace it cannot hear the still small voice, it retires to the temple and the desert. At its best this phase of human effort will reach the Form of the Good of Plato or the One of Plotinus, and in religion the worship of Isis or Mithras. But with meaning was Tyresias depicted as blind. The highest effort of man after God is a groping, stumbling journey, “for our minds are no more fit for what by its very nature is clearest than our the eyes of bats for the light of day.” The finite cannot comprehend the Infinite. A fuller revelation than that given in the natural order had to come; truth had to manifest itself in flesh and blood; God to become man. This advent was gratuitous; the finite could not claim it, for he was raised far above himself in some mysterious mode so as to be able finally to enjoy God as He is. 57 58

ST II-II, 27, 4, obj.1. ST II-II, 27, 4, ad. 1. Cf. B. Pascal, “Discourse on the Passion of Love,” in Thoughts, Letters and Other Minor Works Vol. 28, ed. C. W. Eliot (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910), 421: “Love gives intellect and is sustained by intellect.”

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How this can be we know not, for to see God face to face requires a faculty which must be divinized. God became man that man might become as God. By God’s self-humiliation man has been exalted to the heavens.59

Fr. D’Arcy refers to Plato and to Plotinus. He might just as well have pointed to Aristotle, not the Aristotle constantly invoked by the custodians of correctness and the masters of moderation, but the Aristotle who struggled to transcend his sort of pagan selfsatisfaction, urging human nature to immortalize itself, stretching out in passionate yearning to understand.60 St. Thomas’ response reflects the interiority of man’s dual unities—body and soul, time and eternity, nature and grace—whose unitive tensions point beyond themselves. Man’s present intentio and his anamnetic correspondence, with his own being and with others, live toward futurity. These dual unities carve out all of man’s nature, leaving nothing untouched as a “pure” nature. The tension of body and soul finds within its interiority another dual unity pertaining to his powers—the cognitive and the appetitive. The longer way, the viatoric structure of man’s cognitive powers, carries a relationship to a primal immediacy within the appetite. That which is lesser cannot ascend to that which is greater without the greater—God—leaving man’s nature open to traverse, to be a sojourner on the longer way. The immediacy therefore does not prevent the viatoric agon but instead allows it to be made manifest and elongated by the infinite, enabling man’s open nature to be naturally supernatural. The viatoric journey could not begin without the ever-present immediate recognition of the radical insufficiency of the world; this is both its agony and its hope, and its natural desire. While the appetite is in many respects less noble than the intellectual or cognitive powers, it is not the cognitive powers which have the privilege of that immediacy. Such is the error of the idealists. The appetitive power has this privilege precisely because knowledge must transform into Love in order to fulfill itself as knowledge, the desire for which is appetitive at its deepest level. Plato especially understood this, as evidenced by his linguistic metaphors: the real lover of learning stretches with erotic love until he “grasps” Being with that part of his soul fitted to grasp, because of kinship, and getting near and having “intercourse” and, having begotten understanding, he knows and lives.61 This is especially true if its object is not finite and thus less than man, but infinite and not merely an idea but Act itself! It is not enough to know the good, man must be the good in order to possess the good.62 Real knowledge, especially knowledge of the Creational and Cruciform To Be, consists not in reciting ideas “on” or “about” Him but in being an invocational unity with God Who transforms man’s primal, binding, and obediential inseparability into Love. By carefully unpacking the difference in the completion of the cognitive power as distinct from the appetitive power, St. Thomas shows why the former has the viatoric structure, whereas the latter can also carry an

59 60 61 62

D’Arcy, “The Idea of God,” 51. Cf. Meta. I and NE X. Cf. Republic 490a. Cf. Republic 361b.

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immediacy, so much so that God is also pre-possessively or non-mediately loved in this life.63 This is the protection which God unfailingly offers when the devil hunts us through our weaker power, the appetite. Is it any wonder that Belloc amusingly wanted to baptize the intellectuals with a bottle of beer in the name of the five senses,64 and to swing a censer before the altar of the universe? The cognitive power is completed when the thing is known under the form of the knower. This requires the longer way through the senses, through intentional becoming and abstraction, by which the knower becomes the known as the known under the form of the knower. An act of the appetitive power, on the other hand, is “inclined towards the thing in itself ”65; therefore, “the movement of the appetitive power is towards things in respect of their own condition, whereas the act of a cognitive power follows the mode of the knower.”66 The mode of knower must proceed from what is nearest the senses before arriving at the knowledge which is most remote. This is found even and especially in the five ways. As the uncreated To Be of knowledge and Love, God is “knowable and loveable for Himself ”: God is the Truth, Beauty, and Goodness whereby things are participations of Him, the Good itself “whereby other things are known and loved.”67 Accordingly, we must assert that to love, which is an act of the appetitive power, even in this state of life, tends to God first, and flows on from Him to other things, and in this sense charity loves God immediately, and other things through God. On the other hand, with regard to knowledge, it is the reverse, since we know God through other things, either as a cause through its effects, or by way of preeminence or negation as Dionysius states.68

Man can and does love God immediately in this life and when the cognitive power plays catch-up and its knowledge is transformed into the fully vested viatoric love of the wayfarer, it becomes en-martyred love, the love which Justina possesses and which all the powers of Hell cannot shake. For the cognitive power to recollect and return to that immediacy—which the appetite held unshaped—and then to see it transformed into a reflection of the un-reflected, un-created Love—this is the very meaning of the Christian’s chaste and orderly anarchism: everything points but nothing satisfies, except the figure of Christ. And it is here that the Greek distinction between the realms of necessity and freedom does not quite cover either the existential condition or the ontological nature of man. The realm of necessity for the Greek is the realm of the for-the-sake-of, and it is something we share with our animal biological roots: all our 63

64 65 66 67 68

ST II-II, 27, 4 sed contra: “On the contrary, knowledge of God, through being mediate, is said to be ‘enigmatic,’ and ‘falls away’ in heaven, as stated in 1 Cor. 13:12. But charity ‘does not fall away’ as stated in the same passage (1 Cor. 13:12). Therefore the charity of the way adheres to God immediately.” Cf. H. Belloc, The Four Men: A Farrago (London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1912), 265. ST II-II, 27 4; Cf. ST I, 82, 1 resp. ST II-II, 27, 4. Ibid. Ibid.

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actions are directed for the sake of something else in an endless series of incremental acts and ends—going to school to get a job, getting a job to earn a living, earning a living to build the nest, building the nest to raise the children and on and on and on. The realm of free things, of transcendence, is the realm of the in-itself, of things done not as stepping stones to other incremental ends, but for themselves: no one “needs” art or poetry or philosophy or even sport, and they are sought, when they are sought, for themselves. The two realms are, however, in need of yet something more that unites as it distinguishes them. Even the realm of transcendence ends, as does the realm of necessity, in death, and thus its “end” is not a true or complete fulfillment or telos, but only an end as termination. What neither Martha nor even Mary fully sees is that the third thing that organizes their proper relation, namely, the love of God, is found, if it is found, in both. To which realm does the polis belong? To which, faith? To which, reason? A third thing is required and it will alter our understandings of each, one that will so elevate the realm of necessity that it will be possible to ask, with Saint Teresa of Avila, where God is to be found, and to answer with her: among the pots and pans! The recollection of that third thing is the un-historical union that constitutes history as history. When that immediacy is re-collected, it also reveals that the beautyand-terror of this world is the shadow land, the silhouette of the Cross. It is not the divine which is phantasmal but the world of secondary causes and incremental ends. That which is secondary becomes real to itself when it communicates its reflection of the primary, when it loves this truth. The danger of pure-as-impure nature is that it induces man to seek a substitute or surrogate end, when any end less than God is not humility but pride and opposition. This is the unreal end that the devil offers, a kind of pure nature in itself, which can only reify man’s soul into the dead wood which, in the end, still cannot escape the Cross, except at its own peril, in either the realm of necessity or of freedom.

Secondary causes and the problem of pure nature The same materialism that justifies ferocity in the jungle may thus breed impartiality and abnegation beneath the stars. But whatever may be bred in one place or justified in one person, nature remains elsewhere as free as it ever was to be original, or to prove constant: constancy, where it establishes itself, being as natural and as contingent as change. The imperative of nature is categorical enough, but it is omnimodal. So when this imperative, without ceasing to be categorical, is seen to be private, and relative to some special predicament, a sense of the endless fecundity of nature lifts somewhat the incubus of ferocious Will from the spirit and softens almost to sadness the vital necessity of being oneself.69

69

G. Santayana, Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995), 6.

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Cipriano is a man of pure nature’s art and he is looking for an alternative end, a way to conquer the heart of Justina. He seeks such a non-existent alternative because he serenely contemplates the God of the philosophers while denying the cosmogonic and creational presence of God as supreme Person. Because Cipriano possesses the very opposite of the theotic God, the nature which surrounds him and which he contemplates is as non-creational and as “pure” a nature as one can describe. But it is not even a nature being described, but a condition in free fall from God. It is also the playground for subterfuge and the temptation to sin. When Christian man schizophrenically denies that the metaphysical ground itself must now be born of the kenotic power of the Cross, he retreats into a rather odd and covert realm of temptation. This is the type of temptation which, given time, generates the attitude that there is no sin, for there is nothing, no divine entity, against whom man can trespass, except “religiously.” The god of the philosophers is either a viatoric and transitional move toward its theotic change in the Cross or it is nothing but the cul-de-sac wasteland of the human soul. And this is why the devil appears to Cipriano precisely then.70 As a man of nature’s art and sorcery, Cipriano is looking for an alternative end, a way to conquer the heart of Justina. Lucifer offers to teach Cipriano the means by which to capture Justina, the means of nature manipulation which Lucifer practices, that is, magic: Cipriano. And at what cost? Lucifer. You that have flung so many years away in learning and in love that came to nothing, think not to win the harvest in a day! The God you search for works, you know, by means that your philosophers call second cause, and we by means must underwork him.71

“At what cost?” asks Cipriano, what price must he pay for the magic which can turn Justina away from Christ and reaffirm his own pseudo-aseity? Before answering, Lucifer speaks of those secondary causes which philosophers employ to distinguish the rules of nature and the acts of will from the presence of God—or absence thereof— within nature. In thinking that secondary causes will have the power to complete, to override, or to obfuscate the primary cause, Lucifer has revealed—let slip out—his own failure. These causes as secondary are creaturely and therefore causally dependent on God for their completion. Lucifer has therefore already told Cipriano that what he will purchase is doomed to fail, thereby making Cipriano’s willing and willful participation all the more absurd. The great weakness of the devil is that his lie must be convincing, and must appear to be the truth in order for the deceived to want to live the illusion. St. Augustine described having seen plenty of men who want to deceive, but none who want to be deceived.72 The idea that none want to be deceived is not mere hyperbole. It is the unshakeable 70 71 72

Parker, “The Devil in the Drama of Calderón,” 19. de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 344. Confessions, X, xxiii. See also Republic 382b.

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ground of the devil’s weakness which is in fact the utter need for secondary causes to terminate in their primary cause. The devil, having only secondary causes to play with, knows that evil functions only on the body of Being, that it can work only on the Good it violates and more than that on the false good it pretends to impart. It speaks the language of a pure “human nature,” but depends only on the fallen human condition, oblivious to its fallenness and viewing this condition as but a nature self-enclosed, as “the way things are”; when in truth it is the way things emphatically are not. Lucifer preys on Cipriano’s own flirtation with corruption precisely because Cipriano does not see his pending descent as descent but as mere vice. Nor does Cipriano see the presence of God as creative and innermost esse. God is merely an extension of Nature which is contradictorily unrelated to its own viatoric nature. As such, the difference between primary and secondary causes is meaningless and his ignorance eases his choice to give over his soul to this stranger who is not wayfarer but roadblock. The scholastic difficulty in managing how the actions of created, secondary causes mesh with God’s own activity, all within nature, is notorious, whether it issues in occasionalism or concurrentism. An epistemology which promotes the rationalistic bifurcation of the realm of the divine from the realm of nature more often than not has a metaphysics which has actually collapsed the two into a sort of Spinozistic pantheistic naturalism. God is “there” in language but absent in “nature,” thereby retaining the nature/grace divide, with grace as junior partner. In this deontological mise en scène, however, the God of true esse and creative presence is long gone, for here God’s own action as the First Cause in nature cannot be related at all to any causal activity on the part of his creatures, whether it be in their will or nature. This is Cipriano’s God from which he will turn away, for in this God there is nothing really real; this God fails the cash value test; this God makes no difference. This God comes from a downgraded Aristotelianism, demoted to its final “pure” nature, where the difference between asserting God or not, whether that God be the God of the Cross or the God of the Philosophers, is an epistemological sentiment or nominal utterance terminating in subjectivism. The Scribes of reason and the Pharisees of faith win yet again. But what really have they won? The predatory Lucifer has preyed effectively by enticing Cipriano to subvert his own soul, for in his pantheistic naturalism where all visible effigies of the gods are nothing more than foolish child’s play,73 the primary cause carries no real, presential, or ontological difference from the secondary ones. The endgame of pantheism is identical to deism, for both submit to the reductive historical tide, draining the ontic density from the world. The anti-historical-fully-invested-in-history primary cause is irrelevant in both pantheisim and deism, for this cause does not encounter the world, it is withheld from it, suspended in order to promote a “pure” nature, or the safeguard, rather clumsily, of the gratuity of grace. In the case of pantheism, God is so immanentized that His

73

de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 317.

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personhood is emasculated into an It that can be called by its alternative nomenclature: Nature—pantheism becomes atheism. In deism, God is so benevolently isolated from the world that natural causation places man as sole existential meaning-giver insofar as God’s primary causation cannot touch the world, except as once-upon-a-time “first” to start the billiard balls of the world rolling. God is therefore emasculated in deism, becoming a fleeting name absent in the substantial causal efficacy within natural existence. Pantheism and deism end with an eviscerated and empty God who merely cosigns our desires and reputations. There is no room for any primary cause whatsoever in pantheism, while in deism secondary causes are utterly emptied of any meaningful semiotic content. Moreover, any secondary causes in pantheism—those horizontal and immediate patterns of causation within the natural world—are conflated with primary causes, in which God’s To Be is reduced to nothing other than those causes, becoming the missing God of the tsunami. Between these two divisive enterprises, there can be no intelligible and active distinction between the underlying and irreducible sub-stance and its effects. The pantheistic God, materially and formally, is the subject of all actions and events, including sin, so much so that the so-called secondary causes are nothing other than the blunt tools and passive instruments for the acts of the divine. In this view, God’s personhood is watered down into a faceless necessity effectively exiling God as having any communicative power in existence. While deism goes about it differently, it has the same effect, namely, the protracted exile of God. In deism, the secondary causes are wholly separated from the primary cause, claiming a divisive independence. The primary cause is therefore entirely restricted from the sphere of willing and doing and human action.74 Cipriano’s lack of a Christian kenotic God removes the secondary and subordinate relationship of causes to God as primary cause. The absence of the creaturely distinction between essence and existence, and its correspondent infinitized and identical nature in God, further removes the possibility of allowing those subordinate secondary causes to remain as true causes. In fact, the nature of God itself is in question: when Lucifer entices Cipriano into thinking his secondary causes can work against the primary cause, this is because the relationship between the two, as well as the essential subordination of secondary causes, has dissolved. Cipriano has paid no attention to God and, much like a good Hegelian, has nullified Being, and indeed identified it with non-being.75 Only when God is the efficient cause—the innermost Acting esse in all things, wherein all creaturely things participate in God’s To Be—does the distinction between secondary causes and God, as primary cause, remain intact without reducing it to some version of occasionalism or some other undifferentiated unity. In the Christian

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For an overview of the problem of secondary and primary causes in pantheism and deism, see H.  Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Vol. II: God and Creation, trans. J. Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2004), 613–15. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), §111: “That which begins, as yet is not, it is only on the way to being. The being contained in the beginning is, therefore, a being which removed itself from non-being or sublates it as something opposed to it. But again, that which begins already is, but equally, too, is not as yet. The opposites, being and nonbeing are therefore directly united in it, or, otherwise expressed, it is their undifferentiated unity.”

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context, man is existentially dependent on God for each moment of his existence. God is existentially near, refusing to be isolated from His creatures. Because God is the innermost esse through which man acts, man is free to uncover the plentitude of that prime existential kenosis, or to violate it, while every violation still presupposes unity and need. The creaturely or secondary causes are true causes while utterly and necessarily subordinated—in existential dependency—to the primary cause, God. Because Cipriano’s idea of God is a naturalized pantheism, the idea of God as having any theotic impression on the world is lost for him. Any notion of the possibility of a supernatural corruption, the fallenness of his soul, and the shipwreck of his mind and heart are to Cipriano alien ideas. In a world where the secondary causes are isolated from the primary or where both are conflated so as to reduce God’s meaning and presence out of existence, sin is but error and errors are mere stumbling blocks from which man can recover. Such an im-pure nature makes Cipriano an easy target for Lucifer’s seductions. Not until after his conversion will he be able to echo the words of the great and forgotten Catholic writer, Jacques Debout: I accuse myself of having deplored my impurity merely as dangerous and not as vile, my selfishness as an error in calculation and not as an infirmity, my pride as a disorder and not as a deformity.76

The two rocks What price must Cipriano pay for this doomed magic which can only reveal, in all its denials and rejections, its need for the very Being it denies? Lucifer. Cipriano. Lucifer … .

76 77

To comprehend, and, after, to constrain whose mysteries, you will not count as vain a year in this same mountain lock’d with me? Where she is? Come, take your stand upon the deck with me, till with her precious cargo safe inside, and all her forest-colours flying wide, the mighty vessel put again to sea. What, are you ready? Wondrous smack, as without a turn or tack hither come, so thither back, and let subside the ruffled deep of earth to her primaeval sleep. How steadily her course the good ship trims, while Antioch far into the distance swims, with all her follies bubbling in the wake; her scholars that more hum than honey make: muses so chaste as never of their kind would breed, and Cupid deaf as well as blind: for Cipriano, wearied with the toil of so long working on a thankless soil, at last embarking upon magic seas in a more wondrous Argo than of old, sets sails with me for such Hesperides as glow with more than dragon-guarded gold.77

Debout, My Sins of Omission, 19. de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 345.

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The devil’s suggestion is that they engage in the art of midwifery, encased in stone, where Cipriano can learn the magic of those secondary causes which can conquer Justina. Lucifer intends to undo the rock of St. Peter with another sort of rock, one from which water and life cannot spring, where the dulled heart of Cipriano will finally be muted. Lucifer preys on Cipriano because the god of the philosophers which resides in him has not been awakened from its dogmatic slumbers, and if Cipriano is further entombed, perhaps he will never crave to drink “of the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.”78 But this is not a genuine midwifery in any sense, where the truth is educed from the womb of the soul, where in “touching the beautiful and associating with it, [man] gives birth to and generates the things with which he is long pregnant, both when he is present and when he is absent.”79 Lucifer’s is not a re-collection that can shape the call, for this false maieutic denies the invocational origin of man’s need to be shaped. It is rather a degraded version, a sort of teaching under the auspices of mere supply and demand of partial information—a rote knowledge of secondary causes disconnected from and un-shaped by their origin, instruction rather than education. There is nothing Lucifer can bring to life maieutically; he can only be wisdom’s suppression, its stony entombment. What Cipriano will bear after his year encased will be stillborn, as in Deuteronomy: Their rock is not like our Rock, even our enemies themselves judge this. For their vine is from the vine of Sodom, and from the fields of Gomorrah; their grapes are grapes of poison, their clusters, bitter. Their wine is the venom of serpents, and the deadly poison of cobras.80

There will be no reprieve during this sabbatical, no possibility of rolling away the stone in the presence of gathering sheep “and after the sheep are watered, to put it on the mouth of the well again.”81 In Lucifer’s pact with Cipriano, there can be no communion through which the spirit will be made manifest. “It is man himself who by permitting disorder to arise within his own being, steps towards the realm of ignorance and deathly emptiness where the devil is waiting to receive him.”82 This rock of deathly emptiness and lost communion is an imitation of the harrowing of hell, the abyss that does not call forth the abyss,83 into a place where echo and invocation cannot be sounded or heard. When Pascal brooded over man’s nature, he concluded “a Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.”84 Lucifer intends to violate the good of ex nihilo by taking Cipriano’s burgeoning moral vice and elongating it, violating the erotically 78 79 80 81 82 83

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1 Cor. 10:4. Symposium 209b–c. Deut. 32:32. Gen. 29:3. Parker, “The Devil in the Drama of Calderón,” 23. Cf. Ps. 42:7: “Abyssus abyssum invocat: in voce cataractarum tuarum. Omnia excelsa tua, et fluctus tui: super me transierunt.” (Deeps calleth upon deeps: in the voice of thy flood-gates. All thy high things, and thy waves: have passed over me.) Pascal, Pensees, 72.

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endless participation born out of creation from nothing. Vice becomes sin when an endlessly limiting fallenness becomes host to that vice which is, in fact, a perversion of the good of the metaphysical nothing, the ex nihilo. For Calderon, metaphysical nothingness is not evil, but evil—moral and natural evil—is somehow the participation in nothing. When falling man or fallen angel has turned away from God by committing evil, they are, if God is identical with the Good, participating per impossible in non-existence. But falling man and fallen angel are not participating in a return to metaphysical nothingness prior to creatio ex nihilo—which was a good or proper homeless home prior to creation, “the night of fore-being”85; he is in fact creating a moral nothingness grounded on the recognition and yet perversion of the good of that original metaphysical nothingness. The language and reality of evil require a refusal of man’s participatory and invocational status. It is a supernatural descent into an unnatural or perverted nihilo which, while pure nature cannot envision such a descent, is in fact the perfect waiting room for the descent into hell! It is much easier to fall when nature itself denies that there can be a supernatural trajectory within itself. When Cipriano accepts the pact with Lucifer—being a man whose learning revolves around Pliny’s pure nature—he falsely conceives that learning is mere extension and not the maieutic source of conversional transformation. Vice is then merely a choice to abstain from such extension and not what it is, a type of separating death. Cipriano does not see his entombment mirroring the deep descent at root in Christ’s harrowing of hell.

Ex Nihilo: An analysis of the metaphysical and moral nothings In The Mighty Magician, Lucifer’s claim that rebellious secondary causes can overthrow the primary cause easily coerces Cipriano to remove, morally and epistemologically, his existential connection to God. But what Cipriano unknowingly condemns himself to overthrowing is his own existence! This teacher and statesman abides by a nature conditioned to dismiss the connectivity of imago dei. He therefore denies the total immanence-and-transcendence of God in causation as constituting the unique relationship of secondary causes to the primary cause. God’s causal To Be and the creaturely causal to be function on intrinsically different but dramatically related levels. Aquinas concludes that it is “apparent that the same effect is not attributed to a natural cause and to divine power in such a way that it is partly done by God, and partly by the natural agent; rather, it is wholly done by both, according to a different way, just as the same effect is wholly attributed to the instrument and also wholly to the principal agent.”86 The secondary causes, while distinct from the primary cause, receive their distinction not from rebellion against the primary cause but by being its coadjutor. As its coworker, the secondary cause becomes perfected in its divine likeness so that it can complete that likeness by being not only created 85 86

D’Arcy, “The Idea of God,” 47. SCG III, 70.

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but a creating creature. For to create is higher and contains a greater dignity than being created. The dignity of imitating creation, particularly for man, means that he is not only in the likeness but also the image of the Creator. Through his secondary causation, man confirms and acts in accord with his unity in God as primary cause. The distinction between secondary and primary causes is one of dependency—the former ever in need of the latter. But this distinction-qua-dependency reveals a further and deepening unity, as the likeness between the two is strengthened by the fact that both are creating beings: Everything is at its peak perfection when it is able to make another thing like itself; thus, a thing is a perfect source of light when it can enlighten other things. Now, everything tending to its own perfection tends toward the divine likeness. So, a thing tends to the divine likeness by tending to be the cause of other things … . So, this final perfection comes to a thing in order that it may exist as the cause of others. Therefore, since a created thing tends to the divine likeness in many ways, this one whereby it seeks the divine likeness by being the cause of others takes the ultimate place … of all things, it is more divine to become a co-worker with God; in accord with the statement of the Apostle: “we are God’s coadjutors.”87

It is therefore not the case of infirm or partial causes which contribute different aspects or elements in order to produce the desired effect. Nor does the distinction of the secondary cause from the transcendent primary cause imply any possible emancipation from God’s sustaining To Be. God’s beyond being pure To Be utterly transcends the creaturely to be in order to be the source of man’s prevenient openness and his naturely otherness. In doing so, God is the wellspring of man’s participation and his enabling origin. The repercussive reality of God’s To Be as transcending the entirety of creational time and history means that His immanent condescending, His courteous and gracious Act in time and history have unmistakable significance as unrepeatable and never merely symbolic.88 God’s wholly transcendent To Be therefore also commands the profoundest type of immanence, one which is intimately present within the creaturely order because He upholds and maintains the participatory font from which man freely chooses to act, cause, and will. Therefore, for Aquinas, “the differing metaphysical levels of primary and secondary causation require us to say that any created effect comes totally and immediately from God as the transcendent primary cause and totally and immediately from the creature as secondary cause.”89 What the five ways both presuppose and demonstrate are that we cannot account for the latter without taking account of the former. Ockham’s razor has no cutting edge here. Nature cannot account for itself, and in this sense cannot be “pure,” unless what is meant

87 88 89

SCG I, 21. Cf. T. G. Weinandy, “Does God Suffer?”. First Things 117 (2001): 35–41. B. J. Shanley, “Divine Causation and Human Freedom in Aquinas.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72, 1 (1998): 100.

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by “pure” is that it possesses “its own” order and intelligibility. But then as the fifth way of Aquinas, and Plato’s demonstration in Laws X indicate, this very order implies and requires an orderer, a transcendent intellect as its origin, so that “pure” is purely a façon de parler, a short-hand note, a limited vision from the rear-view mirror of the human mind. God as Creator always keeps the good of that creational dependency intact. The Rock of Peter is also the stone rejected by the builders,90 but it is now that “marvelous in our eyes” “chief corner”91 which “the gates of Hades shall not prevail against.”92 If God were to remove His existential connection as primary cause, neither man nor angel, nor those secondary causes, neither in their unity nor distinction, let alone their purity, would exist. Desiring evil is thus desiring what is Not-God and is actually invoking a metaphysical nothing, an emptiness or vacuity. It is Parmenides’ Being-Is-Not. The problem is that this desire for a metaphysical or existential non-existence is impossible to achieve, for the very act of desiring-as-invocation already presupposes that man has mistaken metaphysical nothingness for something else and something with a different form of existence. That morally privative desire for what is Not-God does not, nor could it, return man to the metaphysical good of the metaphysical nothing of ex nihilo prior to creation. God did not have to create: the uncreated To Be is not sublimated into a mechanistic necessity; creation is the primal freedom of God as pure Act. Thus, the state of metaphysical nothingness prior to creation ex nihilo is a good and noble “state.” It is reflective of God’s benevolence and freedom to bestow the creational gift in a continued and relentless engendering. Recognizing this metaphysical nothingness in an ordered and loving manner illumines man’s prevenient openness, precisely because his humility—his recognition of himself as a participatory being—has become enflamed. Our desire to participate in this metaphysical nothingness which we are unable, emphatically, as creatures, to participate in is the birth of the only thing we and angels can actually “create.” It is a privation, an impotency immeasurably stretching out the limited fallenness of moral vice into the abysmal chasm of moral evil as moral nothingness. This newly formed moral nothing is no mere non-creational moral vice, it is not merely accidental to the enclosed and already completed human essence. Rather, it is rooted in the ever-extending-as-ever-limiting black hole insofar as it is grounded in the perverted desire to participate in that pre-creational state. This desire unhinges and perverts the way man should look at nothingness as evidence of the creational gift. The view-toward-nothingness becomes squandered by misconceiving it as the region where secondary causes can fully rebel against the primary cause and actually live to tell of their rebellion. This is the region of the demonic and the impotent. What accentuates and further perverts the moral nothingness-becoming-nihilism is precisely that man is depriving himself of the

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Acts 4:11. Cf. The Parable of the Wicked Tenants: Matt. 21:33–45; Mark 12:1–12; Luke 20:9–19. Matt. 16:18.

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fullness of God’s primary To Be. Man therefore has, in a way, an infinite fall—an indefinite refusal of his prevenient openness to grace. Evil’s anti-invocational depths can therefore conceivably reach a point beyond remedy.93 There is an infinite distance between man and metaphysical nothingness, and creatio ex nihilo ensures this twofold infinitude. Thus, when man retreats toward metaphysical nothingness in moral evil, he continuously falls away from God. Man can never reach what is–not: the acts of approaching, desiring, and reaching infinitely separate man from metaphysical nothingness. This is not only Parmenides but also the Socratic/Platonic vice-as-ignorance. One cannot choose nothingness as such precisely because there is nothing there to choose! This again is the pathetic paradox of the human condition (not the human nature) in free fall from its own being: man can (but why?) deny the undeniable, refuse the irrefusable, and reject the only thing that can render him happy. This, for Socrates, is culpable ignorance: just as one can mistreat and abuse the body, always thinking there is more time to restore it, until it has gone too far in disorder that it cannot come back, cannot recover, so it is with the human soul: it can go too far, so that, on its own, it cannot come back. It is, as in Plato’s Gorgias,94 incurable. In the evil act, man reaches contradictorily for that nothingness which would not only undo him but, in that continual undoing, would also strip evil of its host or source of efficacy and thus ultimately undo evil. Man’s fallenness into hell is therefore the deepest spiritual death because in a way there is no end to man’s falling away from God. When theologians talk about hell as eternal, it is not the eternal ascribed to heaven but rather an anti-eternal kathodos, the falling away from God Who alone is eternal, which makes the fall an inverted-eternal trajectory. This again relates the perversion of the good of the metaphysical nothingness to the birth of the 93

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Sartre recognized this infinite fall. Cf. Sartre, What Is Literature?, 178; J. P. Sartre, “Literature in Our Time.” Partisan Review xv, 6 (1948): 635: “Chateaubriand, Oradour, the Rue des Saussaies, Tulle, Dachau, and Auschwitz have all demonstrated to us that Evil is not an appearance, that knowing its causes does not dispel it, that it is not opposed to Good as a confused idea is to a clear one, that it is not the effect of passions which might be cured, of a fear which might be overcome, of a passing aberration which might be excused, of an ignorance which might be enlightened, that it can in no way be turned, brought back, reduced, and incorporated into idealistic humanism … . We heard whole blocks screaming and we understood that Evil, fruit of a free and sovereign will, is, like Good, absolute … . In spite of ourselves, we came to this conclusion, which will seem shocking to lofty souls: Evil cannot be redeemed.” Even Bertrand Russell, startled by the atrocities of the Great War, entered into a refusing stance, renouncing the vice-grip of a pure-nature which would exonerate evil of its fallenness by renaming it under the umbrella of intellectual ignorance and lack of rational clarity or by incorporating it into a larger scheme of necessity which we are unable at present to discern but which we are assured in grand idealistic manner must exist. Cf. B. Russell “Retreat from Pythagoras,” in Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, eds. R. E. Egner and L. E. Denonn (New York: Routledge, 2009), 230: “One effect of that War was to make it impossible for me to go on living in a world of abstraction. I used to watch young men embarking in troop trains to be slaughtered on the Somme because generals were stupid. I felt an aching compassion for these young men, and found myself united to the actual world in a strange marriage of pain. All the high flown thoughts that I had about the abstract world of ideas seemed thin and rather trivial in view of the vast suffering that surrounded me. The non-human world remained as an occasional refuge, but not as a country in which to build one’s permanent habitation.” Gorgias 478d–480e.

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anti-creational moral nothing. The infinite distance between man and metaphysical nothingness provides two fundamental options: (1) If God is making and holding us out of nothingness, we are infinitely near God. Man as a being who does not exist in his own right, therefore, has the opportunity to rise up beyond his own creaturely limitation into the love of God. By accepting his unending need for God’s To Be, that need, that lack, becomes a gift. Man is no self-enclosed Aristotelian nature but an open nature, en-closed only by God Who is the very arché and telos of inexhaustibility and openness. In God, we become what we should be, the morethan-man, fulfilling our natural desire for the supernatural. (2) Alternatively, man can turn away from God in favor of what is Not-God. But man will never really approach what is Not-God because there is nothing there to approach. When we attempt to do so, we unleash a deep moral abyss of evil which burrows in the wounds of Christ. This is the “participation” in nothing, but this nothing is not God’s creation ex nihilo, it is not the good of the pre-creational night of fore-being. This new “nothing” is the extent of man and angel’s supposed creation apart from God. This is the natureless-nature of rebellious secondary causes, this is the deeper meaning of the sometimes tiresome theory of evil-as-privation, the per impossible intrusion of nothingness into being. But this intrusion still presupposes the Truth, Beauty, and Goodness of Being as the host to its parasitical attachment. This, again, is the inner force of another frustratingly true Socratic paradox: the evil man, no matter how “successful,” is wretchedly and objectively unhappy, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, because his “success” is a demonstration of his failure, for lying, cheating, envy, seducing, and corrupting are all signs of weakness, for if he had knowledge, skill, and ability, he would not need to cheat and deceive, thus deforming his soul, and a deformed soul, like a diseased body, is something no one can really want. The only cause as first cause for which man is the prime agent is evil. For St. Augustine and St. Thomas, the creature is the total initiator and the inventor of sin:  Deus nullo modo est causa peccati neque directe, neque indirecte: God is absolutely not the cause of evil, neither directly nor indirectly.95 Note “nullo modo” and the “neque directe” and “neque indirecte”: such terms evoke a painstaking divide between man and God. Man is the inventor of this disease, of this new form of nothing/nihil. Every shred of indirect causality or causal connection between man and God to implicate God as cause of evil is excluded. Good is diametrically opposed to evil: defectus gratiae prima causa est ex nobis: The first cause of the absence of grace comes from man.96 Man can make himself unwilling and then unable to receive it. On the side of God, there is no cause of the absence of grace, except as man’s refusal to partake in it. His ability to turn toward God, the meritorious action of his free will to desire the divine end, is not only made possible but is also just,97

95 96 97

ST I-II, 79, 1 resp. ST I-II, 112, 3, ad. 2. ST I-II, 112, 3, ad. 1.

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precisely because God’s active grace is already infused in that turn.98 The only thing man can “create” is nothing. But that nothing is, again, not that forebeing womb of metaphysical nothing before man existed, nor is it merely the moral failure to achieve his own perfection, as in the Greek notion of vice. Man’s nothing radicalizes the descent of moral vice; he can truly lose himself. Man’s evil is the “creation” of a new nothing, a moral nothing born of attempting to dominate what cannot be participated in, the metaphysical nothing. As an existent, man cannot participate in this metaphysical nothing, and the moral attempt to do so makes his evil the deepest anti-creational non-creation. This is the non-essence of nihilism. Fallen man and angel become nothing, but this unbecoming nothing is not a return to the metaphysical nothing of pre-creation. Nor does man become merely a lesser man, failing to live up to his perfection, for even the holy man is that and knows it better than anyone. Man can reduce himself to almost-nothing-left of the good of his own “creation,” he can choose to be truly and utterly contrary to God Who is Beingitself. This is a very active stagnant privation. This is not simply a “not there” but rather a vitiating privation. Like a virus eating out the lining of the heart, man sees but still perhaps denies the reality of the virus-as-evil by the salvaged remains of the good of his shipwrecked heart. And this is the non-essence of self-deception. As God looks at the fallen angel, He sees the creational good of that being, but that angel’s being, created in the image and likeness of God, was free to create its own nothing, which is the denial of God in the deepest way, not only in word but also in being. In falling, the angel permanently severed its understanding of its own creational Good, because goodness, truth, and beauty are participations in God who alone Is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The angel’s pride, its rebellious secondary causality, refused itself by refusing its own source image in God. Therefore, the fallen angel cannot even see itself for what it is because it has rejected God Who is Being-Is. It can only see itself for what it is-not. While the fallen angel is unredeemable, that does not mean the creational good is not present in the order of that being which God alone originates and imparts continuously to all creation. Because of the angel’s grand refusal of its participatory status, that good lies unredeemable and dormant. The good therefore is no longer there for the angel to access and thus the angel has entered a type of nothing. Because the good of its creaturely and spiritual being is no longer accessible, evil becomes very real in a vitiating and privative sense. The angel is both in and of the nothingness, the nothingness of its 98

Cf. ST I-II, 11, 4 resp; ad. 1: “Grace, as it is prior to virtue, has a subject prior to the powers of the soul, so that it is in the essence of the soul … . As from the essence of the soul flows its powers, which are the principles of deeds, so likewise the virtues, whereby the powers are moved to act, flow into the powers of the soul from grace. And thus grace is compared to the will as the mover to the moved, which is the same comparison as that of a horseman to the horse—but not as an accident to a subject.” See St. Thomas Aquinas, Quastiones Quodlibetales, ed. R. M. Spiazzi (Turin: Marietti, 1949), 4, 2 resp. Cf. Pascal on irresistible grace, especially “Provincial Letters.” The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises—Volume 33 of the Great Books of the Western World Series, trans. T.  M’Crie, W. F. Trotter and R. Scofield (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), xviii: “Such is the manner in which God regulates the free will of man without encroaching on its freedom, and in which the free will, which always may, but never will, resist His grace, turns to God with a movement as voluntary as it is irresistible, whensoever He is pleased to draw it to Himself by the sweet constraint of His efficacious inspirations.”

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own making; what else is the meaning of malice?99 Herein lies the paradox of evil: evil is not caused by God and thus it does not have being or form or intelligence of its own, and thus is diametrically opposed to the good. And yet this doesn’t mean evil is simply not there and doesn’t exist. The question remains, how is evil non-entitative—not caused by God and thus, on its own, unredeemable—and yet does exist and, while existing, can still be redeemed? How is this vitiating privation which, on its own and through its own corrupting powers, is utterly unredeemable but, at the same time through Goodness, somehow redeemable? If privation is something dramatically more daunting than mere absence or negation and “on its own” is unredeemable, how does Christianity authentically deal with that vitiating presence without absolutizing the unredeemable nature of evil? If man absolutizes the unredeemability of evil, doesn’t he prevent his encounter with God, as happened in atheistic humanism?100 Yet to downgrade the unredeemable nothingness of evil on its own, as a “creation” utterly separate from God’s causal goodness, has its own problems. How does Christianity avoid the pendulum swinging from atheistic humanism to the other end of the spectrum which reduces evil to negation or “just not there” or necessary to creation? Such a myopic stance would render Christianity naïve in encountering the problems of the world, and in organizing a polis that incorporates not a solidarity in sin but a solidarity of social forgiveness. The issue lies in the language of evil on its own. When the metaphysics of evil is finally confronted, it is understood that evil is not known by its own power, because it has no power or being; it was not created by God. After his year encased in dry stone, Cipriano knows that no water can ever flow through its own secondary powers. Water may only flow from the stone when evil’s power is seen not in virtue of itself but from the power of the goodness being violated. Man therefore recognizes evil only by the nature and goodness being violated. In that regard, and contrary to the atheistic position, it can be seen that evil on its own is unredeemable but that it cannot exist on its own, which is both its great failing and the great perfection of goodness to be able to reach even the darkest regions: The assault itself is due to the malice of the demons, who through envy endeavor to hinder man’s progress; and through pride usurp a semblance of Divine power, by deputing certain ministers to assail man, as the angels of God in their various offices minister to man’s salvation. But the ordering of the assault is from God, Who knows how to make orderly use of evil by ordering it to good.101 99

Maritain was very much involved in trying to grasp the essence of the non-essence, evil. Cf. J. Maritain, St. Thomas and the Problem of Evil (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette UP, 1942), 1: “That that which has no being in itself, nor essence nor form, nor order, nor determination, and cannot have—in other words, that evil exists, is real and efficacious—it is in this that appears to us evil’s metaphysical monstrosity. The whole spectacle of things is that of a procession of things good, of a procession of goods, wounded by non-being and producing by their activity an indefinitelyincreasing accumulation of being and of good, in which that same activity also carries the indefinitely growing wound, as long as the world exists, of non-being and of evil.” 100 H. Cardinal de Lubac, The Drama of Atheistic Humanism, trans. M. Sebanc (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1995). 101 ST I, 114, 1 resp.

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Thus, the existence of evil does not disprove a good God; it points rather, in spite of itself, to Goodness, to the goodness needed for evil to exist, for the lie to be convincing, for the secondary causes to deny rebelliously the primary cause. The very pits of evil, even if on their own unredeemable, can still be the means for a soul’s redemption. Its unredeemable nature still reveals its existential need of God in order existentially to deny God! Cipriano, growing tired of the devil’s inability to procure Justina, comes to realize just that. What he perceived to be the weaknesses of Justina—her humility, obedience, and docility—were actually her strengths, and the mere invocation of the word “Christ” was more powerful than all principalities and powers.102

The descent into hell: The anti-historical terminus of man’s created nothing Where does our unoriginal created nothing terminate? Our clues remain in the rock which encases Cipriano for a year, the rock to which Lucifer consigns him in his false midwifery of secondary causes. Lucifer’s false maieutics fail: Cipriano’s phantasmal lover and all his ideas are stillborn, seeking an impossible return to an impoverishing nothingness, a place so empty because it is the most remote from Christ. Cipriano’s present impoverishing nothingness recreates to a small degree the mystery of Christ’s Descent into Hell, which Von Balthasar explicitly calls the very center and focal point of Christology.103 Lucifer attempts to confront the Rock of St. Peter—the Rock the builders rejected—with a rock so bereft of Spirit that it entombs all hope and promise. In this entombment nothing exists because all is lost. The rock in which Lucifer encases Cipriano will not be turned “into pools of water, and the stony hill into fountains of waters.”104 Cipriano’s year of death mirrors Christ’s endless descent into an eternal Good Friday where all souls have lost noetic recognition of even the day or the hour. As

102

Cf. St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, trans. T. B. Falls (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2003), 30: “For we do continually beseech God by Jesus Christ to preserve us from the demons which are hostile to the worship of God, and whom we of old time served, in order that, after our conversion by Him to God, we may be blameless. For we call Him Helper and Redeemer, the power of whose name even the demons do fear; and at this day, when they are exorcised in the name of Jesus Christ, crucified under Pontius Pilate, governor of Judæa, they are overcome. And thus it is manifest to all, that His Father has given Him so great power, by virtue of which demons are subdued to His name, and to the dispensation of His suffering.” See also Origen, Origen: Contra Celsum, trans. H. Chadwick (Cambridge: CUP, 1980), viii, 34: “We do not, then, deny that there are many demons upon earth, but we maintain that they exist and exercise power among the wicked, as a punishment of their wickedness. But they have no power over those who have put on the whole armor of God, who have received strength to withstand the wiles of the devil, and who are ever engaged in contests with them, knowing that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” 103 Cf. H. U. Cardinal Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 7: The New Covenant (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1990), 231. 104 Ps. 114:8.

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such, there can be no anticipation of Saturday’s Vigil and Sunday’s Resurrection. This is the place where pure nature is at its “purest,” for it is as disconnected from God as the death which marks its stench over Lazarus.105 The only Being which can end an endless descent is an endlessly infinite Being, the spotless victim with the kenotic blood of the Lamb. And if an end to this death is to be, man must trust that “Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed.”106 For in this region of non-being, there is nothing else that Is. Love alone is credible: credo quia ineptum/absurdum. “The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, My God, my rock, in whom I take refuge; my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.”107 This is Holy Saturday, day of the hiddenness of God. It is the day of that frightful paradox that we recite in the Creed with the words “descended into hell, descended into the mystery of death.” On Good Friday we could at least look at the pierced one. But Holy Saturday is empty, the heavy stone of the new tomb covers the deceased, everything is over, faith seems definitely unmasked as wishful thinking. No God has saved this Jesus who called himself God’s Son. Holy Saturday, the day of the burial of God—is that not in an uncanny way our day … . a day of God’s absence?108

There is no looking backward outside the Primal Otherness of time and history by which to bypass this anti-historical stand of true existence-in-Christ. The man-inChrist is beyond returning to a foundation, of retreating to another ground, for the cruciform is beyond that noetic restraint. Unfortunately, so much of thought is essentially a looking backward to a region that no longer exists.109 If Christ’s To Be has theotically revealed the beyond-being imago dei of man’s prevenient open nature, then existence has emphatically changed; it no longer has any historical neutrality, it is no mere collection of facts. There is no humanity outside Christ, no human personality, no secularist historical consciousness, no tradition, no immemorial usages outside of Christ. What is here meant by this anti-historical

105

Cf. Jn. 11:25: “Jesus saith: Take away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith to him: Lord, by this time he stinketh, for he is now of four days.” 106 H. U. Cardinal Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2005), 101. 107 Ps. 18:2. 108 One of Cardinal Ratzinger’s meditations on Holy Week inspired by the paintings of American expatriate artist William Congdon. J. Cardinal Ratzinger and W. Congdon, The Sabbath of History (Milan: William G. Congdon FDN, 2006). 109 Cf. L. Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, trans. B. Martin (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1966), 431–2: “The head of Medusa presents no danger for the man who goes straight ahead on his way without looking backward, but it turns him who looks towards it to stone. To think without looking backward, to create the ‘logic’ of the thought which does not turn around: will philosophy and the philosophers ever understand that it is in this that man’s essential task consists, that here is the way which leads to ‘the one thing necessary?’ Will they ever understand that inertia, the law of the inertia which is at the foundation of the thought which looks backward and is always afraid of possible surprises, will never permit us to escape from the somnolent, quasi-vegetative existence to which we are condemned by the history of our intellectual development?” Future citations: A&J.

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chasteness is not a denial of history but rather an affirmation of the type of unique historical givenness that is given over within Christ’s theotic contact with man. Man is ever and inescapably in contact not with the “idea” of God, but with the Triune personhood of God Who is universal and unrepeatable in all His supremely infinite particularity. This anti-historical chastity of yearning within the soul of every enmartyred man is therefore the rejection of both the historicist progressivism and the historical conservatism that both emphasize abstraction or a finitude un-open to transcendence, both of which are in fact cloaked substitutes, separating man’s viatoric journey from Christ’s viatoric homeland. These “positions” outside the faith, from gnosticism to conservatism, dispense with the route, the longer way, either by annihilating it (leftism) or by refusing to traverse it (rightism); the leftist wants to eliminate and replace it here (through gnosis, mysticism, self-divinization, or political revolution); and because we are not (by a condition misunderstood as nature) in the Kingdom of God, the rightist plants himself down on the road and considers it hubristic to make the journey: he stops either in comfort or in despair. This is not permissible, either way, to the Christian. The leftist dilutes the mystery and the rightist reifies it. Pontiff Emeritus Benedict XVI speaks of a false form of “anti-historical reason” which should not be confused with the present use of anti-historical chasteness. In fact, his term cogently reflects the historical progressivism which has its roots in the vulgar neutrality of natura pura: The problem Europe has in finding its own identity consists, I believe, in the fact that in Europe today we see two souls: one is abstract anti-historical reason, which seeks to dominate all else because it considers itself above all cultures; it is like a reason which has finally discovered itself and intends to liberate itself from all traditions and cultural values in favor of an abstract rationality. Strasburg’s first verdict on the crucifix was an example of such abstract reason which seeks emancipation from all traditions, even from history itself. Yet we cannot live like that and, moreover, even “pure reason” is conditioned by a certain historical context, and only in that context can it exist. We could call Europe’s other soul the Christian one. It is a soul open to all that is reasonable, a soul which itself created the audaciousness of reason and the freedom of critical reasoning, but which remains anchored to the roots from which this Europe was born, the roots which created the continent’s fundamental values and great institutions, in the vision of the Christian faith … . Only when reason has a historical and moral identity can it speak to others, search for an “interculturality” in which everyone can enter and find a fundamental unity in the values that open the way to the future, to a new humanism. This must be our aim. For us this humanism arises directly from the view of man created in the image and likeness of God.110

110

Pope Benedict XVI, “The Bells of Europe: A Journey into the Faith in Europe.” Interview with the Holy Father (2012).

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The historicist is the exemplar of this abstract anti-historical reason, whose reduction of all to history and its subsequent dismissal is in fact the denial of history, at least history as meaningfully understood and experienced. The historicist looks for another but non-existent avenue outside that anti-historical chastening power that constitutes history as history, as theotically real, not abstractly derived, or independently existent. By doing so, he re-casts progressivism as a pseudo-humility in solidarity with perspectival finitude. As the historicist heralds every historical phenomenon as the ultimate step in the liberation of man,111 he completes the error of reducing good and evil to a social artifice that flowers and fades within the vacant and infertile ground of natura pura. Mistakenly believing that such a stance can give sovereignty to the mind and liberate it from conceptual dogmatisms, the historicist places—vis-à-vis the problem of evil—a romantic–pantheistic yoke of vagueness and non-commitment upon man’s neck. In such a world, man must “apprehend evil, terror, deformity as having their place in the world, containing a reality that must have its justification in the coherence of the world,”112 rather than evil being the deadly ruination of man’s anti-historicist open nature. When, for example, the idea of God for Calderon’s mighty magician is nothing more than Nature, evil becomes a problem to be solved rather than a mystery to be endured. The philosophical problem of evil lies largely in its vocabulary: if it is not finally a philosophical problem to be solved but rather a theological mystery to be endured, evil is indelibly embedded as possibility in the act of Creation just as much as fore-being (ex nihilo) lies at the heart of Being. Philosophy may assist the inquiry by separating the contradictions from the paradoxes, but it cannot “solve” the mystery of evil if it is onto-theo-logically prior to the domain of natural reason. If the problem of evil could be fully resolved philosophically within the world, it would render, inter alia, hell a moral myth rather than an existential devolution and confirm that man does not go beyond reason or the human condition. Such a stance would relegate man’s divinelikeness to a non-participatory copy-form. Moreover, it would reduce Christ to a fully

111

For an accounting of Historicism, see B. Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, trans. S. Sprigge (New York: Meridian, 1941). Croce defined Historicism as “the affirmation that life and reality are history and history alone. The negative corollary to this affirmation is the negation of the theory which holds that reality can be divided into super-history and history, into a world of ideas and values and a lower world which reflects them … and upon which they must once and for all be imposed, so that an imperfect history … may give way to a rational and perfect reality” (65); “Historicism is the true humanism, that is the truth of humanism” (315). And yet, at the same time, Croce’s sense of historicism had the subtlety to distance and separate itself from Marxist progressivism, a product of that self-same historicism: “Marxist ideology is one of the most conspicuous cases … of the particular tendency … to introduce concepts into historiography whose origin is passionate and therefore not genuine, concepts which are born of economic and political, moral and religious struggles, and which serve these, but are inept and confusing … whenever they are transported into the theoretical field” (195–96). 112 W. Dilthey as quoted in H. Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol. 2: The General Theory of the Modal Spheres, trans. D. H. Freeman and H. De Jongste (Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1955), 206. See also W. Dilthey, Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, trans. R. A. Makkreel (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2010).

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human moral teacher, at best at the level of a stoic sage, thus undermining the need for, and efficacy of, His descent into hell. If the problem of evil cannot be philosophically solved, it is because the human-and-divine tension is not something to be overcome, but the life of communion, brimming with contingency, terror, joy, and ecstasy. Every pseudo-rebel who thinks otherwise fails in his vain impotence to persist and to be anything more than a reductive part of the historical tide: The king dreams he is king, and he lives in the deceit of a king, commanding and governing; and all the praise he receives is written in wind, and leaves a little dust on the way when death ends all with a breath. Where then is the gain of the throne, that shall perish and not be known in the other dream that is death?113

It is Christ’s Love which is true soothsayer: “noble pilgrim of pilgrims, who sanctifieth all roads by the majestic gait of your heroism.”114 His is the true anarchist’s love, the quixotic intercession within the impotence of history. We can see clearly how Christ’s anti-historical, chaste, and orderly anarchism is fundamentally at odds with the reductive tide of historicism. As Unamuno saw, “we can see clearly that they sought to destroy Him because of His anti-patriotism, because his kingdom was not of this world, because he was not preoccupied with political economy, nor with democracy, nor with patriotism.”115 This is the exception that becomes the rule, creating the impossibility and yet the necessity of the Christian polis.

The quest of the new metaphysics: Laughter in another room It is Christ’s anarchic love which hums, buzzes, and pulses through Calderon’s work and which is found acutely in The Mighty Magician, which, in its mythos, attempts to communicate this fictive but non-fictional love: the per impossible reconciliation of the god of the philosophers with the God of the Cross, the god identical with Nature with the apophantic God of Grace. This reconciliation also lies at the heart of the meaning of evil. What is at stake is to show whether and how the god of nature and philosophy— placed at odds over and against the cosmogonic tyranny of the tragedian gods—can be united meaningfully to the God of the Cross. While there may be respite from the furies, there is no redemption. The furies may be muted, even silenced by the pristine god of the philosophers—by the geometry of the logicians—but they are, like the flowers of evil, never overcome. The Christian is therefore presented with an odd carnival when it comes to the ascent and descent of the soul. Born into philosophy, he heeds what the god of the philosophers says of vice: there is nothing from which man cannot recover, there is no evil, there are but failings and necessities. There is, in a word, a “pure” nature 113

P. Calderón, “Life Is a Dream,” in Hispanic Anthology: Poems Translated from the Spanish by English and North American Poets, ed. T. Walsh (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), 335–36. 114 The poet Ruben Dario as quoted in E. J. Ziolkowski, The Sanctification of Don Quixote: from Hidalgo to Priest (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1991), 183. 115 Unamuno, The Agony of Christianity, 80.

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ever-affirming its self-enclosed imperfect-as-perfect intelligibility. The god of the philosophers becomes anemic in its abstract facility and yet clings to the Cross like an appendage which, if managed with care, can function as a fundamental, preliminary, pre-ambulatory truth. This is the true meaning of philosophy as handmaiden, not whore, to theology. The god of the eternal and unchanging must somehow be universal and, more than that, relevant, for if mismanaged, we can well understand Tertullian’s damning criticism: What for Athens is wisdom is for Jerusalem foolishness: Tertullian said nothing else. One cannot even say that Tertullian had denied the possibility of a JudeoChristian philosophy. He wished only to secure freedom and independence for it, believing that it had to have its own source of truth, its own principles, its own problems—that were not those of the Greeks. According to him, if the revealed truth seeks to justify itself before our reason by means of the same procedures that the Greeks used to justify their truths, it will never succeed in arriving at this justification, or it will succeed only by denying itself, for what is foolishness for Athens is wisdom for Jerusalem and what is truth for Jerusalem is for Athens a lie.116

If this mutual tension between Athens and Jerusalem is not to turn into the vain, mocking, professorial posturing of the academic, but rather justify the genuine and loving foolishness of Don Quixote,117 then the God of the Cross must somehow preserve the significance of the god of the philosophers while revealing our historical impotence in the broken pact with God, in all our discarded truths, in every alley where evil consumes man’s possibility of redemption. The God-Man has lifted the skirt of the god of the philosophers and revealed that suppressed and uneasy realm of the furies, the skull beneath the skin. Christ, as unmade and eternally begotten, preserves the wild un-repeatable as unmanageable cyclicity of nature—for the natural law is just as much about Flux as it is about Form. As unmade, existence in Christ is un-repeatable. As eternally begotten, existence is given over as a donative cyclicity, a chastening intensification. As the only begotten, Christ alone makes history anti-historical insofar as there are no alternative avenues for man’s end, except those with the infinite viatoric structure of the Cross, through which man’s prevenient openness has become the other-as-other. Even Plotinus more than half-suspected this when he described the flight of the alone to the alone.118

116

A&J, 287. Cf. M. Unamuno, Our Lord Don Quixote: The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, with Related Essays, trans. A. Kerrigan (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 1976), 55–6: “Abstaining from action so as to avoid exposure to criticism is a form of pride, refined pride … . Don Quixote hurtled into action and exposed himself to the mockery of mankind; he was thus one of the purest examples of true humility.” “We will never recover our ancient spirit until we turn the mockery into truth and until we play the Quixote in dead earnest, not in a routine and unbelieving way” (244). 118 Plotinus, Enneads, trans. S. MacKenna (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), VI, 9, 1. 117

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In Christ, the secret philosophical identity of God burst open theotically from the top down, from grace to a nature never stripped of that grace. Man must re-discover the ground of his existence now re-viewed from the bottom up: not as a non-creational foundation, but as suffused with and pointing toward a creational Act of To Be leaving nothing untouched by its action. Man’s history has therefore become anti-historical, chastened into coexistence with an always unrepeatable and irresistible Personhood. The richness of the Summa Theologica constantly weaves across the top-down/bottom-up dialectic. It begins with God, thus revealing its inalterable theological structure; and yet within this articulation, every argument and demonstration proceeds from the bottom up, from the world in which we live. The dialogue of the two firsts, already alluded to, is the perfect exemplar of this divine–human–divine discourse. Athens and Jerusalem, yes, but there is a third man in the argument, and it is Rome, which does not attempt to split the difference in some pseudo-Aristotelian moderation, but which points to a deeper synthesis between reason and faith in the very idea of Christian Philosophy. If man is a participant in the revelatory presence of Christ, the question remains as to whether he can begin at the same metaphysical origin as the Greeks, unless that origin is itself always suffused by and pointing toward the divine. Or must he, by way of his belief in the creational To Be, recognize that super-effulgent origin within his own metaphysical origin? If Christ is Being-qua-Existence, mustn’t He already be there theotically in the ground? One could argue that such a position blurs the lines between philosophy and theology, but, on the other hand, is metaphysics never allowed to begin with the creational Cruciform To Be, as at least the non-demonstrable but necessary implication of His significatory metaphysics? Can a Christian philosophize as if he were not a Christian, and why would he want to? Can the things of the world act and move and have their being as if they were not critical indicators of the Pure Act of To Be? And can we look at them as if they were “pure”? Isn’t such a method the inversion, indeed the per-version, of the top-down/bottom-up dialectic, placing the divine kenosis at the bottom of the pure nature well, not as its source and well spring but as its noumenal, always displaced, foundation? It is difficult to tell what one sees, Peguy said, but what is even more difficult is to see what one sees. A “pure” naturebased metaphysics partitioned off from the cruciform signatories of existence exiles Christ a priori from noetic existence. Any added inclusion of His divine Otherness is therefore already a concession to the relativistic tendencies wherein Christ and Christianity are nothing more than a plurality of private symbols given public audience by preference and taste alone. Either the Incarnation does or does not open a novitas mundi. Either Christ is the alpha and omega or He is nothing. If it does, and if He is, then everything is changed even as it remains exactly the same. This is no mere conceptual chatter; Christ is “that carnal breach, that rupture of the tissues and the blood vessels, and of all the lines and ligatures of life.”119 One either dies or rises to a new life, there is no middle ground. This is the ahistorical urgency of the parables, and of the Wager. The time is always now!

119

C. Peguy, Temporal and Eternal, trans. A. Dru (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001), 152.

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If existence does change, it changes precisely because what is being changed— especially man—is always open to being changed, thus denying in advance any natura pura. Grace, like faith, is not magic. Man has a prevenient tending toward the incomprehensible divine. Revelation was not required to demonstrate this antecedent natural desire: Plato’s Symposium, if nothing else, articulates it supremely. What Revelation does is to render the desire efficacious by means of that very Revelation of the God-Man. Philosophy is fulfilled philosophically only by something other and becomes thereby more fully itself in becoming Christocentric. The human soul, having received its to be from God, does not admit a self-enclosed essence but one which finds its perfection in its inability to be enclosed and completed by its own powers. This inability to be closed is not its failing but its perfection as a thinking being. It is arrogance to have “implored grace only as a means of salvation and not so as to be beautiful with the beauty of grace through living the life of grace—of having considered grace only as a lightning conductor and not as a nuptial garment—as a guarantee and not a value.”120 Man, in order to know without puerile reduction, craves what is beyond knowledge. This is Kierkegaard’s collision of reason: it seeks its own “downfall” in being drawn to something it cannot master. Man is infinitized by this noetically limitless desire. God’s noetic life is identical with His Being, and man, desirous of utter unity with that noetic life, is therefore in the wilderness beyond noetic constraint. In that wilderness-aswait, man uncovers his ownmost prevenient openness to be as deep as ex nihilo. “The implicit knowledge of God and the implicit movement of the will towards God make human beings open to created unmerited grace.”121 Or with St. Thomas: By the name of beatitude is understood the ultimate perfection of rational or of intellectual nature; and hence it is that it is naturally desired, since everything naturally desires its ultimate perfection. Now there is a twofold ultimate perfection of rational or of intellectual nature. The first is one which it can procure of its own natural power; and this is in a measure called beatitude or happiness. Hence Aristotle (Ethic. x) says that man’s ultimate happiness consists in his most perfect contemplation, whereby in this life he can behold the best intelligible object, and that is God. Above this happiness there is still another, which we look forward to in the future, whereby “we shall see God as He is.” This is beyond the nature of every created intellect, as was shown above (Question 12, Article 4).122

If the Christian God is no mere self-enclosed Form, but the “maker and preserver of all things … since the esse of a thing is innermost in that thing,”123 as Christ is 120

Debout, My Sins of Omission, 18–19. J. M. H. Quenum, Is Divine Grace Really beyond Human Comprehension?: An Exploration of the Theology of Henri de Lubac, unpublished article (2015), http://www.academia.edu/1907057/Is _Divine_Grace_beyond_Human_Comprehension. 122 ST I, 62, 1 resp. 123 St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, trans. F. Larcher and J. A. Weisheipl (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2010), I, lect. 5, 134. 121

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both uncreated and yet the only eternally begotten one, then this “two-fold ultimate perfection of the rational or intellectual nature” cannot imply that the so-called natural end, where man contemplates the object God, could take on the character of ultimacy, let alone of primacy. If it did, then the uncreated God of primordial creational Act would be returned to the Aristotelian self-enclosed Form, and the effects of the God of Pure To Be would be in name only, mouthed but never thought or experienced. If God’s essence and existence are identical, then knowing God only as object fails to live up to the intellectual recognition of God as Act, and to know God as an idea is in fact falling short of the God whose Word is the same as the Real. Because the Incarnation has forever given a new shape to our prevenient openness, man’s metaphysical ground is in the Word and not the other way around, for what is most real is most hidden.124 The endgame and collapse of metaphysics is in its refusal to make contact with its cosmogonic groundless ground, and now that that very ground has made theotic contact with man, this metaphysical refusal is disastrous. The Greek eternality has been burst open theotically: God is kenotically infinite: His inexhaustible, immutable beyond-being presence is impressed on each soul as its charter and mission. To believe that there is even a naturally sufficient end for natural man, where God is contemplated as object, effectively undermines God’s Being as the esse which is innermost in all things. It also reduces Christ to mere symbolic moral teacher, a guide, and nothing more, rather than being the visible face of that innermost viatoric yearning. Listen to Peguy: The least of sinners, the least of sins, wounds Jesus eternally. There you have Christianity. And I, history, throughout my long history, can do nothing which does not interest Jesus, God, naturally and as though physically. I cannot commit anything temporally which is not inserted, physically as it were, into the body of God himself. There, my child, is Christianity for you. Real. The rest. … let us say the rest is good enough for comparative history of religions. It is the binding, the eternal, temporal binding, the link, the inlay of the one in the other, the incrucification as it were, which makes Christianity. The rest is good material for schoolmasters. Otherwise it would not have been worthwhile, taking so much trouble.125

The uncreated and eternally begotten incrucification of Pure theotic To Be into the temporal has finally given metaphysics its so-called object: knowing thyself without any reductive aesthetic. Only in the kenosis of the cruciform Other can man’s prevenient openness reflect upon itself and know itself without being reduced to a self-enclosed “pure” nature essence, which it never was: “God’s arms then opened up and I entered myself when I entered Christ. And having learned compassion I allowed my soul to stay.”126 124

Cf. C. C. Martindale, “The Sacramental System,” in God and the Supernatural, (London: Longmans, Greene & Co., 1936) 193–215. 125 Peguy, Temporal and Eternal, 119–20. 126 St. Thomas Aquinas, “Ask Anything,” in Love Poems from God: Twelve Voices from East to West, trans. D. Ladinsky (New York: Penguin, 2002), 131.

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An honest metaphysician, like the poet, the priest, and the warrior, knows that his standing in over nothing has been the hunting ground for that Other who can shape the hallowed ground of man’s unknowing yet unwavering grief. Metaphysics, as Plato knew, is never about objects and that is its agony and its honesty; all grief resides in the inability to know in the way of Being: “The father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.”127 No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated, especially not into a form that is unalterable—which must be the case with what is expressed in written symbols.128

The genuine thinker on Being has wanted the fulfillment of history, but nothing in and of history can claim to become fully historical, for these classes of objects find themselves reflecting the transitional–historical, that is, “perennial” truth of postmodernism: all objects become with time, memory, and recollection perspectives that reach shore and then ebb away. Christ’s incrucification is the supreme antihistorical, utterly impossible unity of form and flux, God and man, the Platonic Agathon that kenotically pours itself into the Triune Person. It is the metaphysics that finds its ground in a nature never severed from grace. This incrucification of the supremely anti-historical and unrepeatable within the historical and symbolic finds its … culminating point of the ancient human pride, exorcised and canonized: to become like gods—and of the eternal divine dream: to become man. Can any philosophy show such an apotheosis of personality? If Catholics did not admit to think about such truths, they would have too lofty a consciousness of themselves to retain any respect for what the world thinks. And they would not believe that mediocrity can be advantageously substituted for the four cardinal virtues.129

Calderon’s mighty magician Cipriano fails to conjure the unity of these things—the god of philosophy and the God of the Cruciform—for such a unity requires that man’s prevenient openness be gifted with the shape of conversion. In his essential failure, Cipriano comes face-to-face with the anti-historical martyr, Justina, who lives the unity of the god of the philosophers with the God of the Cross: “my Bridegroom is Christ; Him I serve, and for His sake I preserve my purity. He preserves both my soul and my body from every defilement.”130 Justina’s anti-historicist open-historical nature, believing that what is uncreated can also be eternally begotten, will finally chasten and convert Cipriano. The saintly Justina shows him that true knowing, as Bergson well understood, requires “some other faculty than the intellect, an intuitive dimension,

127

Timaeus 28c. Seventh Letter 342a–43a. 129 Debout, My Sins of Omission, 69. 130 Commemoration of the Holy Hieromartyr Cyprian & Martyr Justina. 128

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for a genuine apprehension of reality.”131 The very oddness of her stance, of that loving, orderly, and unassuming anarchism will convert Cipriano, for reality in all its glorious oddness and refusal to commit to the historical tide will win over illusion. Cipriano, failing to seduce her with all the magic, all the demonic powers, and phantasmal frights, falls in astonishment at the fact that existence itself has this profoundly anti-historical ground; that all begins and ends in Christ, that there is no other avenue for the life and death of the soul. Turning to Lucifer who has failed in his promise to seduce Justina, Cipriano sees the newness and inescapability of that beyond-metaphysical ground, where God makes it so easy to love him. Within that region of conversion, amid the ground of that kenotic incrucification, he responds to his tormenter and to himself: O destroyer and deceiver of all, source of every impurity and defilement! Now I have discovered your infirmity. For if you feel even the shadow of the Cross and tremble at the Name of Christ, then what will you do when Christ Himself comes to you? If you cannot conquer those who sign themselves with the sign of the Cross, then whom will you tear away from the hands of Christ?132

Justina’s chaste anarchism: Paideia and the serious play of the cross The young man seeks a bride for himself, and the maiden looks for a bridegroom. This is the earthly order of life, blessed by God. But the soul chosen of the Lord for Himself, the soul He suffers to taste of the sweetness of the love of God, does not set earthly life on a par with the love of God—she is absorbed in God alone, and attaches herself to no earthly thing. And if earthly thoughts come she takes no delight in them, for she cannot love the things of this earth—all her longing is for the things of heaven … And though all in the world be beautiful no earthly thing can occupy my thoughts: my soul desires only the Lord. There is naught on earth can satisfy the soul that has come to know God: she longs continually for the Lord, and cries: “‘My soul yearns after Thee, and I seek Thee with tears.’ The soul from love of the Lord has lost her wits: she sits in silence, with no wish to speak, and looks upon the world with amazed eyes, having no desire for it and seeing it not. And people do not know that she is contemplating her beloved Lord, that the world has been left behind and is forgotten, for there is no sweetness therein.”133 The devil’s powers are revealed for what they are—phantasmal, limited by their everlimited participation in creation. All the magic in the world can produce only a specter of Justina.134 Cipriano’s intellect, having shed the veil of that un-embraceable 131

Cf. H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1998), 362. Commemoration of the Holy Hieromartyr Cyprian & Martyr Justina. Sophrony, A. (ed.), Wisdom from Mount Athos: The Writings of Staretz Silouan 1866–1938, ed. A. Sophrony, trans. R. Edmond (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 502–03. 134 Cf. Parker, “The Devil in the Drama of Calderón,” 20. The devil “can act upon the imagination by causing images to appear, but he cannot produce new images which had not previously been received through sense impressions; he can only present to the imagination the object of man’s own experience and sense knowledge.” 132 133

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figure, must now confront and embrace the false object of his pride. He cries out in agony for having chosen “fleshless death for the warm life for which my own eternal life is sold.”135 The devil receives his power by merging into man’s ability to participate in creation. When man willfully and freely sins, his participation, like the devil’s, is also continually limited by that sin. Thus, the more the devil hungers for power by combining his treachery with man’s, the more he fails to secure that power. Rather, any combinations confirm his ever-limiting impotence. The undoing of man by his own concupiscence combined with the devil’s urging liberates neither man’s nor the devil’s power but further limits them. Together they fall downward into the limiting specter of an un-real reality which is the devil’s end. Socrates was on to something. The world’s intense reality is that it is all viatoric, all the world a stage and as such an illusion. It is not in essence a deceitful illusion but a participant in something more than itself, which it has not the power to contain. The world is to be reckoned with, not to be serenely passed over but lovingly engaged and endured. As such, this time and this place are not the end for man but the mise en scène of the human drama; there is no end in the world that can be the end of man, and this is the serious play of the Cross, for every worldly happiness must have “a natural pendent of sadness”: The more a thing is desired and loved, the greater grief and sadness does its loss bring. But if final happiness be in this world, it will certainly be lost, at least by death; and it is uncertain whether it will last till death, since to any man there may possibly happen in this life diseases totally debarring him from any virtuous activity, such as insanity. Such happiness therefore must always have a natural pendent of sadness.136

When Cipriano cries out in the face of his illusions, it is now Justina’s opportunity for true midwifery. Justina has shown Cipriano how to love the world, for she understands the chaste or “serious play”137 of homo ludens, by which man must love the world, even in and because of his denial of it.138 Even the formation of the polis, of the city of man, and

135

de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 355. SCG III, 46. 137 Cf. Laws 803b–c: “I assert that what is serious should be treated seriously, and what is not serious should not, and that by nature god is worthy of a complete blessed seriousness, but that what is human, as we said earlier, has been devised as a certain plaything of god, and that this is really the best thing about it. Every man and woman should spend life in this way, playing the most beautiful games.” 138 Cf. H. Rahner, Man at Play (New York: Herder & Herder, 1967), 40: “Surely only a man whose foundation is in the reality of God can thus call life on earth a game and a shadow-play? For only such a man as this, only to a man who truly believes that this world has proceeded out of the fullness of God’s creative being, is it given to say ‘Nay’ along with his ‘Yea’, and to say it without demur or hesitation. In other words, only such a man can accept and lovingly embrace the world—which includes himself—as God’s handiwork, and, at the same time, toss it aside as a child would toss a toy of which it had wearied, in order then to soar upward into the ‘blessed seriousness’ which is God alone. Only thus does gay melancholy become possible and justified, the mood which must always govern the Christian, the true Homo Ludens, as he follows his middle road. Love for the world and rejection of the world—both of these must draw him and he must at one and the same moment be ready to fold that world in his embrace and to turn his back upon it.” 136

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even if it is a city patterned after the God-Man, is constructed in the play (paideia) and seriousness (spoude) of the spoudiaos: the man of pause and absolute silence. The ideal city can never be one of Hegelian progressivism, let alone permanent revolution, but of the interiority and untranslatability of the orderly anarchic love. It is far more Eliot’s East Coker than Hitler’s Berlin or Stalin’s Moscow. As Plato well recognized, no polis can be taken too seriously, as if it can endure, as if it can withstand the test of time.139 Nor is it, however, merely a product only of the realm of necessity, a kind of global household order of secondary causes and incremental ends. Aristotle, following Plato here, sees it as participant in the realm of transcendence, of freedom. How else could politics be the master science of ethics?140 It must participate in the viatoric search. But how? Cipriano, the teacher statesmen, must learn to recognize that there are no master plans, venn diagrams, or equations to map out the city-state, let alone the depths of a converted human soul. And yet man must love, comically and tragically, the polis’ inability to endure, as much as he must love the impossibility of fulfilling, by his own construction, his natural desire for the supernatural. The community is therefore a caravan of solidarity in the wilderness, and if it exists at all, it exists in the inklings of virtues going beyond their limits, becoming underestimated by the world. The seriousness or making haste (spoude) within man’s play is the agonic attempt to re-create what is un-created and thus is only theotically manifested by the primal Other. Man’s seriousness must decide its domain: either it chooses to reside in an immanentized impotence, as in liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, or experience the dialogical and metaxic immanence-and-transcendence at work within his being.141 If man’s seriousness submits to the latter, it falls into the type of play which makes the idea of the Incarnation, the entrance of the God-Man, no longer far-fetched fantasy but the only reality which makes any sense! Whenever He looks at you, God sees nothing in us that He has not given. Everything is empty until He places what He wishes into it. The soul is like an uninhabited world that comes to life only when God lays His head against us. The delight a child can know tossing a ball into the air, my Lord confessed He experiences whenever He looks at you. God sees nothing in us that He has not given.142 139

Laws 816d–e: “For someone who is going to become prudent can’t learn the serious things without learning the laughable, or, for that matter, anything without its opposite … . let the play we all call ‘comedy’ be thus ordained in law and in argument.” 140 Cf. NE 1094a–b. 141 Cf. W. Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2012), xvii–xviii: “I would say that being in the between, the metaxu, does not enforce an ‘either/or’ on us between ‘being in the midst’ and being drawn ‘beyond.’ The ‘meta’ of metaphysics is double requiring both ontological exploration of the immanent between of finitude and metaphysical transcending to what cannot be determined in entirely finite terms. In the cartoon version of metaphysics no sooner is the ‘meta’ intoned and we are shooting out yonder, in revenge against time and the earth. I would rather say that in true metaphysical thinking there is more of a finessed love for the intimate strangeness of being, a love that finds itself coming to wakefulness just in encounter with, or participation in, this being’s mystery.” 142 St. Thomas Aquinas, “Whenever He Looks at You,” in Love Poems from God: Twelve Voices from East to West, trans. D. Ladinsky (New York: Penguin, 2002), 132.

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When this serious play becomes genuine paideia and paidagogia—culture and teaching—it has recognized man’s prevenient openness as craving an endurance that even the polis cannot give. The polis is therefore not built on abstract power progressivism or even protective conservatism but on the simultaneous necessity and inability to translate the untranslatable. This is the meta-political nature of the political. Man is chastened in this human–divine comedy, and he recognizes the real impossibility of society, and most particularly of the Christian society! If society is the illusion of thinking that culture and teaching are only blueprints for the progressive advancement of human nature or a bulwark against disorder—as if man can fashion another end outside the Pantokrator—then there is no such thing as a Christian society. When paidia becomes paideia and paidagogia, the tragi-comedy of the play is intact: culture and teaching are in fact the mantelpiece on which a man leans as he looks over the abyss, before he lets go of the world. But to love the world, to embrace it wholly, requires the ability of wholly letting it go by having the en-martyred love for it. The best of culture teaches man to know what he cannot learn, to fail and fail again at perdurance; whereas the worst of culture is one built on illusory force and calculation, giving man the false and idolatrous illusion that his potency is enough, that he naturally endures by absolute natural right. The polis should be the realm of serious play, not the domain of slavish correctness.143

The theologos of metapolitics [Real education] is an intimate and eternal thing and the greatest of all human works … it means causing souls to live with more life … getting into touch with and absorbing reality … how true must be one’s own interpretation of life and world and God to enable one to dare to offer it to another.144 Cipriano has lived the worst of culture and teaching, reciting the ideas of the good but never daring to be their thrownness beyond noetic retreat. He dismisses the god of the tragedians while exalting the pantheistic godless-god absent any romance. He dismisses what Peguy understands: “that the Christian is profoundly human; he is even absolutely, all that is most human. For he alone reckons humanity at the price of God. Man, the least of sinners, the most miserable of sinners, at the price of God. He has entered the very heart of humanity. He is literally at the heart and core of the tree.”145 Justina is profoundly human, living toward a happy death for a God Who is One with clay and earth, tears and toil, and is of body, blood, and of Spirit everlasting. She lives the serious play, that orderly anarchism, what Plato called the “law-abiding play” (ennomoterou paidias)146 and what Thomas More knew to be the terminus of the 143

Republic 536e–f. Caraman, C.C. Martindale: A Biography, 118–19. 145 Peguy, Temporal and Eternal, 120. 146 Republic 424d. 144

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Aristotelian mean on the eve of his death, for there is no moderation, no limit to the love of God, for moderation here is no virtue, and “extremism” is no vice. This is the chaste anarchism, the honesty outside the law, the belief that what disunites can be the only source of endurance, and this Cipriano will learn with his life. He will come to understand what Justina speaks to him as they face their death together as the source of their en-martyred love: My Cipriano! Dost thou remember, in the lighter hour—that when my heart, although you saw it not, all the while yearn’d to thee across the gulf that yet it dared not pass—my telling thee that only Death, which others disunites should ever make us one? Behold! And now the hour is come, and I redeem my vow.147

Justina is a reflection of the Theotokos and is thus the reflected glory of the reflected one. Even the enemies of the “the little band of Christ … . drunk with idol ecstasy” are drawn into her chaste and withdrawing eyes which “irradiate from a mother’s into whose the very eyes of the Redeemer look’d.”148 The chaste and loving anarchism of the Theotokos149 provides a stunning analogy to Calderon’s portrayal of St. Justina’s beauty and virtue in the face of a Cipriano who can see only that light through the worldly endurance of the regio dissimilitudinis.150 This mighty magician finds himself repeatedly fooled not by illusion but by reality. He finds himself denying the undeniable and believing that the world is enough, that the world is substance and heaven an illusion. To accept Justina and the serious play of en-martyred love is to be unintimidated by history. The French poet Francois Villon, afraid of many things, was unafraid of the historical tide: Christ “left heaven and came down as savior, on His blood death is mastered evermore, now such is our Lord that we signify inside this faith I want to live and die.”151 The chastened anarchist knows that this world’s beauty is the silhouette of the Cross, a holy shadow that the Cross itself has given, in and by which to frame our very substance. What then is life to the chaste anarchist?: “a frenzied extreme, a shadow of things that seem; and the greatest good is but small, that all life is a dream to all, and that dreams themselves are a dream.”152 God,

147

de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 371. Otoechos, or the Book of Eight Tones, trans. N. Orloff (London: J. Day & Sons, 1898), 331. Cf. St. Silouan: The Athonite, ed. A. Sophrony, trans. R. Edmond (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999), 392: “The Mother of God committed to writing neither her thoughts nor her love for God and her Son, nor her soul’s suffering at the Crucifixion, because we could not have understood, for her love for God is stronger and more ardent than the love of the Seraphim and Cherubim, and all the host of angels and archangels marvel at her.” 150 For the descent of man into the zone of dissimilarity and unlikeness, see Plato’s Statesman 296c–274d; E. Gilson, “Regio dissimilitudinis de Plato a Saint Bernard de Clairvaux.” Mediaeval Studies 9 (1947): 108–30; Confessions VII, x; Pope Benedict XVI, Meeting with Representatives from the World of Culture: Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI (Paris: Collège des Bernardins, 2008). 151 F. Villon, The Testament by Francois Villon with Notes, trans. S. Eridan, 2004. http://www.inmanartz .com/villon¬es.pdf 152 Calderón, “Life Is a Dream,” 336. 148 149

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says Unamuno, is the dream that dreams.153 This is the higher realism of theological intentionality. The religious truth of anarchism, as Berdayaev maintained, “consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power … the Kingdom of God is anarchy.”154 Such words should be taken with great caution, because any man who thinks he can easily withstand or bear the burden of being unafraid of historical progress will become a pseudo-rebel and submit to the mundane social and ideological pseudo-anarchies of the herd and its revolutions. Or with Ortega y Gassett: The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic “ideas” (the characterological lie about reality) and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. And this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.155

Even tradition is therefore not enough.

No untimely kindness The anarchy of Christ’s love finds its unexpected footing in the problem of history. Man’s unshaped prevenient openness, Christ’s Revelatory Love, and man’s inmaking shape, hiding in the wounds of Christ, are all profoundly anti-historical truths, precisely because Christ as Medium of the Message-as-End Is the pure beyond-being-and-image Being of existence. The Church therefore is itself antihistorical: “the church is not an institution devised and built by men, but a living

153

See Unamuno’s letter to Walter Starkie, October, 1921. ed. A. Guy Unamuno (Los Angeles, CA: Univ. California Press, 1967), 240: “One must leave oneself in the hands of God, that He may carry us whither He destines us. Who knows? ‘Life is a dream,’ said Calderon; ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’ said Shakespeare; ‘Dream of a shadow,’ said Pindar. And I say that we are a dream of God. God is dreaming us and woe to that day when He awakes. God is dreaming. It is better not to think of that, but continue to dream that God is dreaming.” 154 N. Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, trans. R. M. French (New York: Charles Scribners, 1944), 147. 155 J. Ortega and Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 157.

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reality.”156 And yet, man must pause to take in that unrepeatability as Christ pauses daily in all the tabernacles and on every Good Friday. Thus, history itself is shot through with that anti-historical, anti-progressivist unrepeatability of the living reality: the true historian is the absurdly loving dramatist ever approaching the truth which, as living, cannot be approached from any angle, but only encountered. Christ therefore condemns history, and all historical actors and activities, to an efficacious inability to fit in, to move with the tides of change. Christ’s unmade and eternally begotten anarchist’s love is like sap oozing from the wounds of the martyrs and it builds the impossible gossamer city-of-men-toward-Christ. It is that which pervades all history and yet is not a history of the dead but always the living; it forms a community of renounced sins, and restless lovers, and sinners singing about saints. This anti-historical living reality, is “the foundation and principle of sacred learning … from which, like honey from the honeycomb, the truth of allegory is extracted.”157 Unamuno sings of Christ’s anarchist love and its un-ending chastening of the historical progression: It is impossible to actualize in history that which is anti-historical, that which is the negation of history—whether it be the resurrection of the flesh, or the immortality of the soul, the word or the letter, the Gospel or the Bible. To live historically means to bury the dead in order to be able to live by their death. It is the dead who rule over us in history, and the God of Christ is not a God of the dead but a God of the living. Pure Christianity, evangelical Christianity, wants to seek eternal life outside history, but it encounters only that eternal silence which frightened Pascal, whose life was one Christian agony! And meanwhile history remains the thought of God upon this earth of men.158

Christ’s entrance has chastened the historical progression. History’s only progress proceeds from Christ’s anarchic love which continually represents the fact that man’s in-the-world status is not of-the-world, while at the same time that beyond-world status never stoically separates from the historical Incarnation; all progress is toward Christ, not away from Him. This is the efficacious, unable fully to-blend-in life of the Christian. Whether or not a man dies for Christ before his time, he will always die a martyr, for all true Christians chase the Love whose triune Monarchy is an orderly and ever timely anarchism against narrow common sense, un-encountered limit, and tiresome stoic abstention. St. Paul clearly set out the tension of not being in the world and yet never 156

R. Guardini as quoted in Pope Benedict XVI’s final speech to College of Cardinals (2013). Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, What It Means to Be a Christian (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2006), 40: “We shall begin to realize that the borderline between ‘before Christ’ and ‘after Christ’ does not run through historical time, in an outward sense, and cannot be drawn on any map; it runs through our own hearts. Insofar as we are living on a basis of selfishness, of egoism, then even today we are ‘before Christ.’ But in this time of Advent, let us ask the Lord to grant that we may live less and less ‘before Christ,’ and certainly not ‘after Christ,’ but truly with Christ and in Christ: with him who is indeed Christ yesterday, today, and forever (Heb 13:8). Amen.” 157 Hugh of St. Victor, Discadalion, 133. 158 Unamuno, The Agony of Christianity, 81–2.

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severed from the incarnatedness of the institutional polis. The Christian man’s thrown historicality, by virtue of its refusal to be a mere instance of the historical progression, needs the polis as the home for this loving affliction, this isolation-as-communion in the wilderness at the foot of the gift. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,159 and know that what is rendered is betting your life and yet while it is everything, it is still nothing more than a silhouette of Reality.160 St. Augustine went to endless lengths in the City of God161 to set the balance between the two cities, not by some facile separation of powers, but by the articulation of the paradoxical Pauline truth that the Christian is a better citizen of Rome precisely because of his chaste anarchism which enables him to live outside the law precisely because of his honesty: grace perfects nature. To be in the world but not of it is a dangerous but salvific tightrope walk. For Calderon, this is the truth of the temptation of St. Justina and the Repentance of St. Ciprian: if man loves Christ, if he dares to follow Him, his in-making being is radically transformed into an en-martyred one. The Christian cannot really co-exist with the historical progression or in society, and yet man is a being of time, an historical being. A finite being in need of nomos and custom, he must render what is due, give tribute when tribute is due, but owe no man anything, owe it all to Christ. The en-martyred man lives within time and yet to be of and in that Being Who ends all time—for there can be no progression or continued construction of Christ—requires the very undoing of all orders apart from God so that man can truly move inside Christ’s wounds in a soteriological openness. The en-martyred man is summoned to death within the very time he lives in, because of this anti-historical stance as a beingin and waiting-for Grace: “I prefer death in Christ Jesus to power over the farthest limits of the earth. He who died in place of us is the one object of my quest. He who rose for our sakes is my one desire.”162 History therefore cannot adjust to, incorporate, or fulfill the radical need of Christian man. His being in-making, which was once a finite instantiation of the infinite, has in Christ and by Christ’s Word, refused that finitude which terminates in finitude. 159

Mark 12:17. The serious play of the en-martyred man, the one who will not leave his prevenient openness, is clearly found in Romans. Cf. Rom. 13:1: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resists the power, resists the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he bears not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that does evil. Wherefore you all must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake. For this cause pay you all tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor. Owe no man anything, but to love one another: for he that loves another hath fulfilled the law.” Cf. J. J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. W. Kendall (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1954), 162–224. Note how Rousseau in bk. 4 almost willfully misreads Christianity’s paradoxical admonition to conform unseriously to the unserious. 161 City of God XIX. 162 St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Letter to the Romans,” in The Epistles of St. Clement of Rome and St. Ignatius of Antioch, trans. J. A. Kleist (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), 83. 160

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Thus either time must die or man must. Man within this world cannot live without the temporal passage and yet, in this world and in the next, he cannot live without Christ! In this world, Christian man dies through his very own historicality which had unveiled Christ to him, for it unveils man’s waitingness for the Primal and Grace-filled Otherness of Christ to make him more than man and therefore other than a being-intime. Pascal was right: man is infinitely more than man.163 The once open nature of the in-making man now wholly cleaves to Christ, waiting to be both a supremely closed as completed nature and yet endless in that attachment to Christ. This open nature has tasted what fulfills its shape and yet, by being-in-time, it has also tasted its own death; now it must act out its own extended martyrdom. As such, this is the impossibility of the Christian society: I know what is to my advantage. At last I am becoming his disciple. May nothing entice me till I happily make my way to Jesus Christ! Fire, cross, struggles with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs-let them come to me, provided only I make my way to Jesus Christ. I would rather die and come to Jesus Christ than be king over the entire earth. Him I seek who died for us; him I love who rose again because of us.164

St. Paul speaks to this effect when articulating the ideal celibate state of the true Christian as the only being who can embrace being-toward-death.165 Is he, as Kierkegaard was later to do, urging the end of the seed of man?166 That cessation is a commitment to separate ourselves from a knowledge which cannot complete itself. All knowledge hurls itself toward its own secret demise; it constructs the false separation between man and his inability to persist. And yet, as Unamuno indicated, all knowledge is still a chastened love begetting that chase, that penetration and union: “To know” means in effect to engender, and all vital knowledge in this sense presupposes penetration, a fusion of the innermost being of the mind who knows and of the thing known. This is especially so when the thing known is, as is often the case, another mind or spirit, and even more when the thing known is God—God in Christ, or Christ in God. This is why the mystics speak of spiritual marriage and why mysticism is a sort of meta-erotic love, above and beyond ordinary love.167 163

Pascal, Pensees, 131. St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Letter to the Romans,” 82–83. Cf. 1 Cor. 7: 32–34: “I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs. Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband.” 166 S. Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Vol. 3, trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1975), 2617; 2618; 2908. 167 Unamuno, The Agony of Christianity, 51. 164 165

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Failed knowledge redeems knowledge. The cessation of the seed only increases the desire for immortality and it haunts man into the very recesses of his en-generative power, inside the hope for the futurity of the son and daughter begotten in flesh, and in spirit. Man as anti-historical in his very soul needs the uncreated begotten life Who carries this perdurance. But as a being-in-time, his political historicality is a transgenerational failure to produce that perdurance. Each falls into progress instead of perdurance. Man’s affliction is his present homeland: his virginal ardor or virulent chastity strives to beget and then to preserve, but he will always be stillborn in the want of the truly anarchistic and creative Love.168

The epoché of silence When all around is completely quiet, the noiseless void which remains must be occupied by something, and then we hear the pounding of our own hearts, the throbbing of the blood in our temples, the flow of the air which floods into our lungs and rushes it. All this is disturbing because it has too concrete a meaning. Each heartbeat sounds as if it were to be our last. The following beat which saves us seems to come accidentally and does not guarantee the next one. That is why it is preferable to have a silence in which purely decorative unidentifiable sounds are heard.169 Cipriano, the widely respected teacher, counsel to officers, viceroy, and other elite of Antioch, has found himself at that “tougher age and stuff where relaxation is its work.”170 The great pagan teacher indeed thinks he is living the wisdom of being-toward-death, of being-beyond-the-time (like the historicist), but can only imagine what that means at the end of the tragedy. Only with Justina, who dies by his side  “looking but for him between us who is crucified,” will he live and love that strange unending logic of perfection. Cipriano only becomes Christian man, the anti-historical being-intime, the untimely fool, at his death. The citizens of the polis see in him only the disintegration of a once great man into a Quixotic figure. Modernity and the historical progressivism have “been created by laymen, not by churchmen, and to the ends of the natural cities of men, not to the end of the supernatural city of God.”171 The polis is at existential odds with the anti-historical imprint of the Christian theosis. The citizens’ pity is therefore that Cipriano has become feeble by his new faith, too wretched in his

168

Cf. St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Letters to the Romans,” 83: “The time for my birth is close at hand. Forgive me, my brothers. Do not stand in the way of my birth to real life; do not wish me stillborn. My desire is to belong to God. Do not, then, hand me back to the world. Do not try to tempt me with material things. Let me attain pure light. Only on my arrival there can I be fully a human being. Give me the privilege of imitating the passion of my God. If you have him in your heart, you will understand what I wish. You will sympathize with me because you will know what urges me on.” 169 Ortega Y Gasset speaks of the terrors of this absolute silence: Cf. J. Ortega Y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), 59–60. 170 de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 315. 171 E. Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1941), 74.

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absurdist martyrdom even to mock him: “strange that so wise a man should fall into so fond a superstition which none but ignorance has taken up.”172 Cipriano will follow in the footsteps of St. Ignatius of Antioch, craving death in such a way that any man separate from Christ would consider to be the desire of the imbecile, the fool, the failure: I am God’s wheat and shall be ground by the teeth of wild animals. I am writing to all the churches to let it be known that I will gladly die for God if only you do not stand in my way. I plead with you: show me no untimely kindness. Let me be food for the wild beasts, for they are my way to God. I am God’s wheat and shall be ground by their teeth so that I may become Christ’s pure bread. Pray to Christ for me that the animals will be the means of making me a sacrificial victim for God.173

The origins of this mighty magician’s martyrdom, whose magic failed and to whom the unseen became faith, began in Antioch. This is the town where the first unnamed disciples of the God-Man of Nazareth received their name, their communion as universal, as Katholikos, as Catholics, a name given to them by St. Ignatius of Antioch.174 But Cipriano’s Antioch believes its universals to be faceless and identical with Nature; there is no visible communion in this town, only catacombs and other pockets of hidden hope. Cipriano’s Antioch is having its raucous festival for its guardian and tutelary Zeus. The city’s population swells with throngs of visitors, merry-makers for “procession, sacrifice and song.”175 Cipriano scoffs at the hoi poloi as much as he dismisses the Katholikos, a very modern attitude. The statesman has not yet gone beyond the noetic confines of the learned; he does not wish to humble but only to teach, whereas “Jesus Christ and St Paul possess the order of charity, not of the mind, for they wished to humble, not to teach.”176 At the beginning of the play, Cipriano casts his half-formed magnanimity over his students and bids them repeated farewell, retreating from the festival, beyond the gates of the polis, beyond the sight of that “golden idol reaching overhead”177 longing for his time of drowsy contemplation with Pallas.178 He is looking for a place of absolute silence, unaware of the terrors of such a field and region, unaware that monastic silence is not stoic aloofness. The former places man inside the sheer terror of his prevenient openness; the latter is a fig leaf allowing him to be a continued function of the world even as he pretends to stand apart from it. That stoic silence of a “pure” nature therefore enables all the cogs of nature to become a covering over the very disjointedness of genuine existence in-and-toward grace. Absolute silence,

172

de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 370. St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Letter to the Romans,” 82. 174 St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Letter to the Smyrnaeans,” 90–95. 175 de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 314. 176 Pascal, Pensees, 298. 177 de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 314. 178 Ibid., 315. It is some interest that Calderón utilizes the name Pallas to the exclusion of Athena, which will be later discussed. 173

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on the other hand, is magnification and amplification of man’s absolute need. For St. Thomas, to remove the divine Word is immediately to cease, to lose the inner word in its entirety: Hence, just as we notice that as soon as our inner word vanishes, the sensible vocal sounds also cease, so, if the power of the divine Word were withdrawn from things, all of them would immediately cease to be at that very instant.179

Cipriano has no idea of that absolute silence he craves: this is the region where man must go beyond good and evil so as to be the form of the good. This is the arduous good that brings out the true anarchist, the true rebel, the true Quixote, and finally the end of all ends in that enduringly improbable necessity: the ridiculed God-Man nailed to a tree. Such silence isn’t a mere decorative embellishment, it isn’t the easy naturalist silence of a “pure” nature but the silence of invocation: fuerunt mihi lacrymae meae panis die ac nocte: dum dicitur mihi quotidie, ubi est Deus tuus?180 It is this absolute silence that in contact with God bursts forth into the choir’s voice and into true union with the world. Man’s absolute silence opens into his ownmost prevenient invocation: man is in the world but not of the world, but he needs to be lovingly in the world in order to know that he is not of the world, and that he can and must leave it behind: “sing, my tongue; sing, my hand; sing, my feet, my knee, my loins, my whole body. Indeed I am His Choir.”181 When Lucifer comes to tempt and take the soul of Cipriano, he does so through that overwhelming silence which can lead either to noisy distraction or into the interiority of waitingness. The stranger can easily lead Cipriano into distraction, for the only silence the teacher accepts is merely leisurely, decorative, and un-theotic. By the end of the play, Cipriano will find himself within the walls of absolute silence, where tears fall suspended, becoming the yeast of the soul’s un-shaped dilectum. Cipriano retreats into his decorative silence thinking that his nature, while the highest, is merely an extension of nature itself. He embodies the misleading stoic meaning of rational animal, that man is merely the highest animal because he reasons. Reason here does not indicate a primal difference revealing man to be closer to the angels than to the brutes, but a quasi-evolutionary extension of the latter, undermining oddly enough the very social “nature” of man as the political “animal,”182 and laying the

179

Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, I, lect. 5, 135. Ps. 42:2. 181 St. Thomas Aquinas, “His Choir,” in Love Poems from God: Twelve Voices from East to West, trans. D. Ladinsky (New York: Penguin, 2002), 130. 182 Cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume II, Books 6–10, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1925), VII, 86–88: “To live consistently with nature” means living in agreement with nature, as the stoics define it. It presupposes a full compatibility between man and nature, and of, in particular, a nature unassociated with a naturally supernatural directedness. The virtuous life could never possess a contra mundum sensibility, but must always be living aligned to the experience and events of nature. On a side note, even if Avicenna employed a degree of stoic logic, he differed on their rational reductionism. Cf. Avicenna as quoted in St. Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship, trans. G. B. Phelan (Toronto: PIMS, 1949), app. 1: “Man’s actions possess certain properties 180

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groundwork for state-of-nature political theories of Left and Right, all of which in one form or another deny, if not the fact, at least the implications of man’s other-directed open nature. When Socrates says that the polis comes to be “because none of us is selfsufficient,”183 this is what he means, and it is neither Hobbesian nor Hegelian, but the social intimation of our need for the Supreme Other, who is reached through but not by the polis, giving due justice to traditio without enshrining it in noumenal obscurity. Cipriano has therefore not encountered the infinite range of invocations which permeate man’s being as the responsive and naturely otherness of God’s primal Invocation-as-Word. True contemplation sings of a silence which brims with the infinitely kenotic Word of God. Absolute silence begets the contemplation of nature’s innermost voice in man as naturally supernatural: It is through contemplation that a person is made divine, not by speculative analogies on the basis of skillful reasoning and observations—perish the thought (this is something base and human)—but under the guidance of stillness. Continuing in our life’s upper room (cf. Acts 1:13–14), as it were in prayers and supplications night and day, in some way we touch that blessed nature that cannot be touched … Thus the light beyond our perception and understanding is diffused ineffably within those whose hearts have been purified by holy stillness, and they see God within themselves as in a mirror.184

Naming the unnamed By retreating from the cosmogonic silence in which a soul is finally rid of its pseudoaseity, Cipriano’s decorative silence becomes the deadening space where Lucifer’s suggestive treacheries can take hold. At the start of his silent and seductive vanities, Cipriano identifies himself with Athena’s wisdom and yet refers to her exclusively by her other name, Pallas. In the Olympian myth, Athena is the Child of Zeus and Metis, who embodied the Titanic order of wisdom, craft, and prudence-as-cunning. Concerned that his power would be compromised should Metis bear him children more powerful than himself, Zeus, like Chronos his father, swallowed Metis whole. Zeus immediately feared the consequences of laying with Metis as it had been prophesied that Metis, unlike his other wives, would beget powerful offspring, in particular a son more

which proceed from his soul and are not found in other animals. The first of these is that man’s being in which he is created, could not last if he did not live in society. Man is not like other animals, each of which is self-sufficient for living with what it has by its nature. One man, on the contrary, if he were alone and left to rely on nothing but what he has by nature, would soon die, or at least his life would be miserable and certainly worse than it was meant to be. This is because of the nobility of man’s nature and the ignobility of the nature of other beings.” 183 Republic 369b. 184 St. Gregory Palamas, Mary the Mother of God, Sermons by Saint Gregory Palamas, ed. C. Veniamin (South Canaan, PA: Mount Thabor Press, 2005), 43–44.

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resourceful than Zeus himself who would eventually overthrow him. By assimilating Metis, by taking her in, Zeus prevents not only the birth of the son but also of their daughter Athena, whose birth must now go through him, through his head, thereby altering the prophecy in his favor.185 In the myth, Zeus tricks Metis into turning into a fly and consumes her, for nothing must be begotten beyond his authority: “Zeus is aither, Zeus is earth, Zeus is heaven, Zeus, surely, is all things, and whatever is higher than these.”186 Metis, however, was already with child and during her pregnancy she weakened Zeus from the inside by hammering away, preparing Athena’s armor. Athena would then have the strength to be the child who would leap in birth out of Zeus’s head. The story bears similarities to Chronos’ act of swallowing his progeny whole to prevent their power. Athena would overpower Zeus in her birth, and this act would cast her in a different light— the light of wisdom—from all of Zeus’ siblings, Chronos’s children, who failed to release themselves by their own power. At the same time, her birth places her identity alongside her father Zeus as a leader of the divine polis. Like his daughter Athena, when Zeus came of age he also forced a birth—his immortal Olympian brothers to be released from Chronos’ insides. With an axe he forged, Hephaestus breaks open Zeus’ head and Wisdom leaps out, thereby revealing a connatural innateness, an immediacy to knowledge. Athena’s wisdom conveys an anticipatory openness and anamnetic power which is “not the unearthing of buried propositions or beliefs, but rather the awakening of a tacit desire that already has the soul in contact with the truth.”187 What is being awakened with Athena’s birth is the primordial recognition of man’s natural desire for the supernatural. Cut out by Hephaestus, the god of craft and skill,188 Athena’s revelatory birth puts her in contact with a knowledge derived from skill, but nevertheless her own knowledge lies beyond that techne as an immediate or anamnetic presence united to the god of gods, Zeus. Athena’s wisdom which is released by, but beyond, techne, and which illuminates that unshaped prevenient otherness at the heart of each man, brings to mind the debate in the Ion. Is the poetical annunciation of the divine an art-as-skill? Or is rather the inspiration itself divine, such as when muses use the human voice to invoke their truth?: For not by art do they utter these things, but by divine influence; since, if they had fully learnt by art to speak on one kind of theme, they would know how to speak on all. And for this reason God takes away the mind of these men and uses them

185

Cf. Hesiod, “Theogony,” in Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Shield, trans. A. N. Athanassakis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004), 886–900. 186 Aeschylus, Tragedies and Fragments of Aeschylus, Vols. 1–2, trans. E. H. Plumptre (Boston, MA: D.C. Heath & Co., 1909), fr. 70. 187 F. J. Gonzalez, “How Is the Truth of Beings in the Soul? Interpreting Anamnesis in Plato.” Elenchos: Rivista di Studi sul Pensiero Antico 28 (2007): 289. 188 Aeschylus, “Prometheus Bound,” in The Complete Greek Tragedies, Vol. 1: Aeschylus, eds. D. Grene and R. Lattimore (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago Press, 1992), 1–34.

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as his ministers, just as he does soothsayers and godly seers, in order that we who hear them may know that it is not they who utter these words of great price, when they are out of their wits, but that it is God himself who speaks and addresses us through them.189

If Athena’s wisdom brings to mind a knowledge beyond skill and found in inspiration, one can ask whether anamnesis has a proper role in art and knowledge. Perhaps the anamnetic waitingness is more aligned with the need for inspiration from the muses—a sort of erotic impotence where man has need to call forth a shape the dimensions of which he himself does not know. Perhaps obediential potency is potency only in terms of passive receptivity and not also power in terms of having a potent dynamos. But perhaps, on the other hand, Athena “knows divine things better than others” because she knows the very origin-as-limit of knowledge and art, that true knowledge is bound up in that graceful receptivity beyond knowledge, where man is already the naturely otherness of God. Obediential potency is a receptivity only because it is already a power, the power to receive and the power to desire to receive. If it is the power of love that “keeps the soul in contact with the truth of beings, then recollecting the truth of beings is a matter of transforming this love into explicit practice and know-how.”190 “Athena Pallas,” as Calderon called her in The Mighty Magician, also brings to mind the diverging mythos of Athena’s parentage. Pallas is a dear companion to the young Athena, a childhood friend with whom she learns the art of battle: They say that after Athene’s birth, she was reared by Triton, who had a daughter named Pallas. Both girls cultivated the military life, which once led them into contentious dispute. As Pallas was about to give Athene a whack, Zeus skittishly held out the aegis, so that she glanced up to protect herself, and thus was wounded by Athene and fell. Extremely saddened by what had happened to Pallas, Athene fashioned a wooden likeness of her, and round its breast tied the aegis which had frightened her, and set the statue beside Zeus and paid it honour.191

189

Ion 534b–d. Man has been filled with the frenzy/enthusiasm of the gods (entheos), this can be seen in several places through Greek tragedy and in Plato’s appropriation of the tragic impulse. Cf. D. Collins, Immortal Armor: The Concept of Alkē in Archaic Greek Poetry (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 22: “In poetry we find possession, for example, in Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes, 497, where the warrior Hippomedon is said to be possessed (entheos) by Ares; at Agamemnon, 1209, the chorus asks Kassandra whether she will be ‘seized by enthoi arts’; at Eumenides, 17, Zeus is said to have made Apollo’s breast entheos. In Sophocles, Antigone, 964, Dionysiac bacchants are called entheoi women. In Euripides, Hippolytus, 141, the chorus describes Phaedra’s raving state as entheos; In prose, Plato, Phaedrus, 244b, the Sibyl is said to speak by ‘mantic entheos’; in the Meno, 99c, and the Apology 22c, khresmoidoi ‘soothsayers’, and theomanteis ‘diviners’ are described as enthousiontes (from entheos); in Ion 533e, the Muse is said to make men entheoi, and epic poets are called both entheoi and katekhomenoi.” 190 Gonzales, “How Is the Truth of Beings in the Soul?,” 298. Thus, love as need (eros) in search of fulfillment (agape) is at the origin of the polis, see Republic bk. III. 191 Apollodorus, Apollodorus: The Library, Vol. 2: Book 3.10–16, trans. J. G. Frazer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1921), III, xii, 3.

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With the death of her friend, Athena takes on Pallas’ name to continue her friend’s endurance, to carry or beget that soul. She builds a wooden effigy placed near Zeus and honors her. The patron and protector of the polis, Athena has become Pallas Athena, and in that union, she is now the goddess of both wisdom and war. Her wisdom therefore enables the begetting and engendering—“that fusion of the innermost being of the mind” with the thing known: while, at same time, her nature as Pallas (to tremble, to shake)192 leaves that engendering of the intellectus open to the war-like and cosmogonic impulse which leaves all things in their failure to complete. As Athena, her wisdom shows its contact with and distinction from that techne or making: she is an articulation of the unshaped openness of a soul which cannot make itself, but needs to be made or shaped by the Other. And as Pallas, that waiting to be shaped is not waited out in a decorative or pastoral silence. The waiting-for-shape is a hiketides, a bloody battle within the very soul and in its failure to complete itself. Athena Pallas’ name expresses man’s human-anddivine metaxic trembling, which is his need for the primal Other to fulfill his natural desire for the supernatural. Plato describes the formation of Athena Pallas’ name: Socrates. There is no difficulty in explaining the other appellation of Athene. Hermogenes. What other appellation? Soc. We call her Pallas. Her. To be sure. Soc. And we cannot be wrong in supposing that this is derived from armed dances. For the elevation of oneself or anything else above the earth, or by the use of the hands, we call shaking (pallein), or dancing. Her. That is quite true. Soc. Then that is the explanation of the name Pallas? Her. Yes; but what do you say of the other name? Soc. Athene? Her. Yes. Soc. That is a graver matter, and there, my friend, the modern interpreters of Homer may, I think, assist in explaining the view of the ancients. For most of these in their explanations of the poet, assert that he meant by Athene “mind” (nous) and “intelligence” (dianoia), and the maker of names appears to have had a singular notion about her; and indeed calls her by a still higher title, “divine intelligence” (Theou noesis), as though he would say: This is she who has the mind of God (Theonoa); using “a” as a dialectical variety “e”, and taking away “I” and “s”. Perhaps, however, the name Theonoe may mean “she who knows divine things” (Theia noousa) better than others. Nor shall we be far wrong in supposing that the author of it wished to identify this Goddess with moral intelligence (en etheinoesin), and therefore gave her the name ethonoe; which, however, either he or his successors have altered into what they thought a nicer form, and called her Athene.193 192 193

Cf. Cratylus 406e. Ibid., 407a–c.

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In the Cratylus, Plato examines but leaves unresolved whether words are mere conventions or have the signatory power to point beyond themselves sacramentally to the form. At issue is whether words are arbitrarily bound in themselves as selfreferential symbols or are they natural derivatives of the super-natural? To unpack this question, Plato anticipates Nietzsche’s critique that “words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.”194 The dialogue’s humor prefigures the serious play of Christian man as homo ludens. Evidence of this humor is in the fact that the epistemological power must furnish itself with a failed etymology in the face of flux: man’s incessant desire to beget stability is always in the midst of the self-same failure to perdure. The success of the word is often considered its power to penetrate and mark Being as a this or that, but this so-called marking off of Being reveals an uneasy tension between flux and form, laughter and need, failure and completion, word and silence. The tension between the steady and stable Socratic ontology of the Forms comes face-to-facelessness with Cratylus’ flux which may very well leave man without anything to say at all. Man may end up stunned and dumbfounded inside a silence ravenous for Act, like Cratylus left with nothing to say, wagging his finger. The underlying dilemma of the Cratylus is twofold: (1) perhaps the consistency or stability of thinking-on-Being is really a convention to preserve man-in-time and (2) perhaps also the flux is the faceless cosmogonic power of Being itself which endures precisely because it cannot be broken down or marked off. The flux therefore does not evoke mere convention but Being itself, while the Form, ever un-revealed in the world, engenders the convention.195 And isn’t this Bergson’s great insight? The translator Jowett, commenting on Socrates’ etymological analysis of the term Ousia in Cratylus, illustrates this twofold dilemma of form and flux. Ousia, the beacon of constancy, as the whatness of that which stands, the substantial order itself, carries within it a lineage to Heraclitus as Nietzsche knew.196 Ousia can be derived from “pushing,” from movement, flux, or even perhaps Act. As such it is not far from the shaking or trembling of Pallas (pallein) at root in Athena’s enduring wisdom.197 Above 194

F. W. Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. M. Cowan (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1962), 83. 195 Shestov himself recognized this paradox. Cf. A&J, 433: “Protagoras affirmed that man is the measure of all things; Plato said that it is God. At first blush it seems that Protagoras’ truth is lowly while Plato’s is exalted. However, Plato himself elsewhere says that the gods do not philosophize and do not seek wisdom, being already wise. But what does it mean to philosophize and to seek truth? Is it not to “measure” things? Is not, furthermore, such an occupation more suitable to weak and ignorant mortals than to the powerful and omniscient gods?” 196 Nietzsche holds the two figures, Heraclitus and Parmenides, in wild tension, and because for him the whole of western metaphysics sides naively with latter, it has dug its own disingenuous grave. Cf. Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 69: “While each word of Heraclitus expresses the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth grasped in intuitions rather than attained by the rope ladder of logic, while in Sibylline rapture Heraclitus gazes but does not peer, knows but does not calculate, his contemporary Parmenides stands beside him as counter-image, likewise expressing a type of truth-teller but one formed of ice rather than fire, pouring cold piercing light all around.” 197 See B. Jowett’s Introduction to the Cratylus. The Dialogues of Plato: Volume II, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937), 178.

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all else, the Gospel communicates this essential failing; the Word itself stings man with his odd need to desire death if he is to possess any real hope, any real endurance. Man fails in his imitation of this truth, whether it be in the words that cannot conjure absolute reality as in the Cratylus or Calderon’s corrupted magician who, in attempting to conjure his love, the chaste and saintly Justina, has conceived a stillborn pantomime, a phantasmal imitation of life. The Justina he “creates,” the life he conjures with his rebellious and empty secondary causes, is of marrow-less bone and air, nothing more than the shadowy figure of “fleshless death” to mock him with “the phantom of a beauty whose lineaments the mere impalpable airs let in upon disfeatures.”198 Perhaps we can’t even step into the same river once! Our Lord Don Quixote knew better than most the odd need to desire death if man is to possess any real hope. Don Quixote is the very embodiment of such a man whose sorrow can be described only through laughter, and who repeatedly attempts to pattern himself after the un-patternable, Christ: The knight’s eyes represent “the nails of the Cross in the face of a buffoon”. He appears as “the Cross on horseback, divine and mocked”, the “grotesque shadow of God in man”, and is like Christ, “the man of sorrow who causes laughter”. At times he “thinks like Socrates, a Christian Socrates. For Socrates, it is sufficient for men to think what is good. For Don Quixote, it is sufficient for men to try to do what is good.”199

The Gospel enters the heart as a javelin thrust. It vacates any self-imposed notion of man’s self-perpetuation outside of the Pantokrator and completes that tragic humor, indeed Bergsonian comedy, enacted in every soul. Christ takes on our sufferings by first taking on man’s inevitable necessary failure to complete his open nature. The Pantokrator is the ruler-qua-sustainer of all because He takes on those sufferings through man’s very mockery of His sacrificial Act. This mockery is nothing but fear of the serious play and of the anti-historical chaste anarchism of the true homo ludens. Man laughs at the very Act which sustains him, and this laughter is the recognition of his unworthy neediness for the Act, as he slips on the banana peel of existence, for the last thing he wants to hear is that dust he is and to dust he shall return. Christ becomes the ridiculous for man, so that the history of man would not be ridiculous, that history would finally have a moment where it can become complete. “In laughing at Don Quixote, we crucify him. Mockery and buffets create the knight of the Sorrowful figure: our own roars of glee at his well-earned mishaps hail the ridiculous Christ.”200 Cipriano’s invocation of Pallas is a thematic constant in his desire to take-on, to transform, to become Other. He invokes Athena Pallas because she knows divine things better, but Cipriano himself is as yet unaware how she knows them better: the

198

de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 355. Cf. Ziolkowski, The Sanctification of Don Quixote, 190. 200 W. Frank, Don Quichotte, Prophete d’Israel (Paris: Laffont, 1966) as quoted in Ziolkowski, The Sanctification of Don Quixote, 193. 199

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divine ridicule, the holy laughter, the gentle mockery of the Christian order which inverts all things: die to have hope, the beloved is actually the lover, the universal has a face … In denying Lucifer’s false midwifery, he will experience the midwife’s final birth, his en-martyred freedom. Athena Pallas knows these divine things better, but not by way of a static ontology of unchanging forms—the naturalism of Pliny the Elder which Cipriano so admires and recites from memory: Why, this last Roman, Caius Plinius—who drawing nature’s growth and history down to her root and first cause—what says he?—even at the very threshold of his book a definition laying over which the clumsy mimic idols of our shrines stumble and break to pieces—oh, here it is—Quapropter effigiem Dei formamque quaereri, imbecillitatis humane reor—all visible effigies of God are but types of human imbecility.201

Athena Pallas knows divine things better because she embodies the true and paradoxical endurance in their furious flux, in their strife, and in their death which devours all. As with Heraclitus, she carries the cosmogonic as the deconstructing root of all wisdom and the very ordering principle of the polis: “war is the father of us all, king of all. Some it makes gods, some it makes men, some it makes slaves, some free.”202 But the master, teacher, and statesman—so very far from being the poet, priest, and warrior— invokes Pallas Athena in the same breath that he casually disregards any sense of the iconographic. He is unable to see past the idol into its relevance in the iconographic. Even the lowest idol reveals man’s torturous need that the God of nature have the face of Love, ecstasy and even war, the things which can give man’s prevenient openness its lasting shape. The very goddess who breaks and reconfigures the relationship between mortals and gods in the Odyssey, Athena, who doesn’t see Odysseus as the gods normally see a mortal—as disregarded servant, plaything, or object through which to fall in love and reaffirm the self; Athena whose theosis outlines the shape of a new kind of contact between man and god, one in which intellectus and cosmogonic strife must co-exist as the true wisdom, the transformative wisdom; Athena Pallas whose very “heart is torn for wise Odysseus”203 is, again, invoked by Cipriano in the same casual breath as Pliny the Elder. The world, and whatever that be which we call the heavens, by the vault of which all things are enclosed, we must conceive to be a deity to be eternal without bounds, neither created nor subject at any time to destruction. To inquire what is beyond it is no concern of man; nor can the human mind form any conjecture concerning it.204 201

de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 316–17. Heraclitus fr. 215. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (New York: Cambridge UP, 1983), 195. 203 Homer, The Odyssey: Books 1–12, trans. A. T. Murray & G. E. Dimock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995), I, 44. 204 Pliny the Elder, Pliny: Natural History, Volume I, Books 1–2, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1938), II, 1. 202

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The Athena of bloodshed and battle is reductively downgraded to be just another figure in a sampling of figures invoked within the same sampled and stale philosophy of nature, as close to “pure” nature as it is to atheism. But this Athena who merged with Pallas and confirmed her theotic presence is the forceful denial of decorative silence and its stillborn nature.205

The conjuror and the denaturing descent The type of self-enclosed, self-referential nature found in the denial of the tragedian gods cannot furnish a connection to the divine (and even Plato perhaps fell victim to this anti-tragic perspective in his quest for the formal god, the god of formalities). Rather, it consumes the divine either by reducing the categories of the deity to an extension of materiality or of convention: “it is ridiculous to suppose that the great head of things whatever it be, pays any regard to human affairs.”206 Such “pure” nature thinks it can beget the “natural law” of the polis, but it can only denature its ontological open nature into, at best, an empty ontic legalism and, at worst, a stale homogeneity. This nature hasn’t the tools to teach man the natural-within-eternal law or transcendent intelligibility. Its ground must be a void, an abysmal empty freedom from the entelechy which reveals man to be the naturely otherness of God. It has accomplished this task by stripping the genuine notion of a creational pure Act and returning it to a quasi and ersatz Aristotelian substance-essence, absent its agonic aporiae. And of this Plato is not guilty. This enclosed and essentialist Act severs the umbilical connectivity between man and God, and God becomes like nature insofar as nature acts only on the outside of things and can no longer be the Act innermost to all things. Being itself becomes a thing, an essence whose supposed limitlessness can only be understood as abstraction and extension rather than genuine Action. God is reduced to natural agency, which, as St. Thomas maintained, only operates from the outside; for, since natural agents operate only by moving and changing things, they do so by acting on others. What is lost is the God Who is immanent in things because His action is creative. To create is to give esse, and as esse pervades everything, God who gives esse is immanent in all things: God acts in all things from within, because He acts by creating. Now to create is to give existence (esse) to the thing created. So, since esse is innermost in each thing, God, who by acting gives esse, acts in things from within. Hence God was in the world as One giving esse to the world … . He is present everywhere by His essence, because His essence is innermost in all things. For every agent, as acting, has to be immediately joined to its effect, because mover and moved must be together.

205 206

Cf. Homer, The Odyssey, II, 400. Natural History II, 20.

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Now God is the maker and preserver of all things, with respect to the esse of each. Hence, since the esse of a thing is innermost in that thing, it is plain that God, by His essence, through which He creates all things, is in all things.207

It is the arrogance of a reductionist extrinsicism which leaves Cipriano susceptible to the greatest temptation and fall. This pure-qua-impure nature which he thinks is coextensive with his existence—with its merely decorative and empty silence—has already placed him in a state of denial, of disconnection from God as creational Act. And yet he invokes and dismisses the cosmogonic gods with such vehemence that the reader may rightly wonder whether he actually desires their contrary. Perhaps Cipriano desires one idol to vanquish its idolatry, for it to be real and to wrest him from the death by boredom of that “pure” nature. The stranger does answer Cipriano with plans to let him cast his body and soul into that region of vacuity that is truly as close as possible to the true “pure” nature, because it is the region of non-redemption. Having arrived as a lost traveler who has happened upon the dissatisfied ramblings of the teacher, Lucifer is not unlike Mephistopheles to Cipriano’s Faustian intelligence. Lucifer promises Cipriano the saintly Justina much as Faust makes use of Mephistopheles to seduce and rid Gretchen of her innocence. It is  this promise that will bind their bloods and enable Cipriano to be the cause of his own downfall. Calderon’s Lucifer becomes Cipriano’s unloved lover; he makes this binding promise not only for the soul of Cipriano which is already bound to the infertile soil of “pure” nature but more so for Justina’s which is not. Lucifer’s rabid lust inflames Cipriano so as to deform his unshapen openness and give power to his treacherous advances. The Stranger wants above all the soul of Justina who, in the image of Our Lady, carries the Pantokrator’s chastely ordered and enduring anarchist love: For I will lend you wings to burn yourself in the same taper they are singed with. By the quick feelers of iniquity that from hell’s mouth reach through this lower world, and tremble to the lightest touch of mischief, warned of an active spirit hereabout of the true God inquisitive, and restless under the false by which I rule the world, here am I come to test it for myself. And lo! two fools have put into my hand the snare that, wanting most, I might have missed; that shall not him alone en-mesh, but her whom I have long and vainly from the ranks striven to seduce of Him, the woman-born, who is one day to bruise the serpent’s head so is it written; but meanwhile my hour on earth is not accomplished, and I fain of this detested race would hinder all from joining in the triumph of my fall whom I may hinder; and of these, these twain; each other by each other snaring; yea, either at once the other’s snare and prey. Oh, my good doctor, you must doubt, you must, and take no more the good old gods on trust; to Antioch then away; but not so fast but I shall be before you, starting last.208 207 208

Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, I, lect. 5, 133–34. de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 330.

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If Lucifer is to bind Cipriano and purchase his soul, he must seduce him before he realizes that nature really is supernatural, so that the turning away appears only to be a minor and unworthy meditation. Then, to initiate a real depth to that fallenness, Lucifer will disabuse Cipriano of that “pure” nature. The fallenness Lucifer craves doesn’t find its downward force from turning against the exegesis of Pliny the Elder or any other stoic professor or politician hiding under “Epicurus’ skirt,”209 any more than grace merely materializes, as if by magic, in a region emptied of its erotic being-in-act! Lucifer’s response to Cipriano’s musings about nature is important in this regard. He dismisses with force this Roman naturalist and his Naturalis Historia whose idea of nature prevents contact with the nature that leaves man open to the greatest ascent or descent: Oh this same sufficient Roman, what is he but another of the many who having seen a little and heard more that others picked loosely up before constructing his little birds-nest universe of shreds and particles of false and true, cemented with some thin philosophy, all filched from others, as from him to be by the next pilfering philosopher, till blown away before the rising wind of true discovery, or dropped to nothing after succeeding seasons of neglect.210

For Cipriano, this lost traveler is a strange man of ever sharpened wit and word, to whom he feels compelled to respond, to defend the position of the Roman naturalist, the embodiment of himself, the educated statesman: “yet surely Man, after so many ages of patient observation of the world he lives in, is entitled by the wit vouchsafed him by the Maker of the world to draw into some comprehensive whole the stray particulars.”211 In response, Lucifer speaks of man’s insatiable need to make sense of nature’s strife, to soothe the world of its contradiction and inconsistency within the rationalist bed of explanation: Ay, and forsooth, not only the material world he lives in; but, having of this undigested heap composed a World, must make its Maker too, of abstract attributes, of each of which still more unsure than of the palpable, forthwith he draws to some consistent One the accumulated ignorance of each in so compact a plausibility as light to carry as it was to build.212

Lucifer’s contemptuously true dismissal of the naturalist god reveals precisely what Cipriano must come to learn: the abstract universal God is neither a wiser nor fairer alternative to the cosmogonic gods. If the God of the Cross should possess the attributes of the god of the philosophers—eternal, unchanging, perfect—those very same attributes would be worthless if they prevented the theosis of the cosmogonic 209

Ibid., 324. Ibid., 320. 211 Ibid., 321. 212 Ibid. 210

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order. As with the case of Athena, who supplicates herself on behalf of the mere mortal Odysseus, begging her father Zeus to intervene; whose heart is, again, torn for the wise and hapless warrior; who, on countless occasions intervenes on Odysseus’ behalf so much so as to hold back “dawn’s horses” so that the aged warrior could reacquaint himself with his faithful wife, Penelope—this goddess is far closer to the God of the Cross than the godless God-of-Nature. Pallas Athena is the goddess of the pre-theosis divine-to-man contact: she goes the distance for man, enhances even the appearance of Laertes,213 Odysseus’ son, so as to strengthen the fatherly bond, and cloaks herself in different forms, assuming a place by Odysseus’ side as his mentor and counsel providing peace and protection.214 Pallas Athena may not have the metaphysical credentials of the divine but her primal theosis begins to reveal the shaking ground on which metaphysics itself must rest.215 The true placement of metaphysics within the theotic power of God’s pure To Be is, of course, only given shape in Christ. The naturalist, who reduces all things bright and beautiful quite easily to their so-called natural root, disregarding the aniconic yet iconographic God with what amounts to Shelley’s cloaked atheism and naturalist pantheism,216 as well as to Hegel’s desacralization,217 is at odds with Athena’s meaning and viatoric effulgence. The fact that the teacher and statesman Cipriano does not recognize this tension means that he has yet to be humbled, yet to have his precarious prevenient openness transformed by the en-martyred love of Christ. With an abrasive overconfidence, Ciprian rejects the intelligibility of the cosmogonic gods as but reified extensions of man’s desires and various quests for power: But, since (I know not how) you hit upon the question I was trying when you came; and, in spite of your disclaiming scholarship, seem versed in that which occupies the best if Pliny blunder with his single God, as in our twilight reason well he may, confess however that a Deity plural and self-discordant, as he says, is yet more like frail man’s imagination, who, for his own necessities and lusts, splits up and mangles the Divine idea to pieces, as he wants a piece of each; not only gods for all the elements divided into land, and sea, and sky; but gods of health, wealth, love, and fortune; nay, of war and murder, rape and robbery; men of their own worse nature making gods to serve the very vices that suggest them, which yet upon their fellow-men they visit (else were an end of human polity) with chain and fine and banishment and death. So that unless man made such gods as these, then are these gods worse than the man they made. And for the attributes, which

213

Cf. Homer, The Odyssey, XXIV; Homer, The Odyssey: Books 13–24, trans. A. T. Murray & G. E. Dimock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1919). 214 Homer, The Odyssey, XIII. 215 Cf. Deus Caritas Est, 31. 216 See P. B. Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993), 67: In his raw humanism, “the strength of belief like that of every other passion is in proportion to the degrees of excitement.” There can be no creative God with a face and with body and blood; there can, of course, only be a reductive “spirit co-eternal with the universe” (31). 217 See C. Fabro, God in Exile, trans. A. Gibson (New York: Newman Press, 1964), 550–74.

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though indeed you gibe at us for canvassing, yourself must grant as whether one or manifold, Deity in its simplest definition must be at least eternal.218

Lucifer asks Cipriano to elaborate, to continue his dismissal of the order of Zeus, for in doing so Cipriano latently initiates the grand refusal of the God-Man. As imperfect as the order of Zeus and Athena may be, Lucifer recognizes what he hates in himself: they are irrepressibly iconographic even in their idolatry; even in their failure to complete, they point to the dilectum of the divine personhood. Cipriano continues on, reaffirming this abstract God which stands as well at odds with any negative theology. This abstraction, while hazy enough in itself, is not the mist of the cloud of unknowing. Cipriano’s ignorance is his preference, preferring rather to stay firmly planted in a world where essences are purely quantifiable pure natures: Cipr. Yet those who stuff Olympus are so little that, that Zeus himself, the sovereign of all, barely escaped devouring at his birth by his own father, who anticipated and found some such hard measure for himself; and as for Zeus’ own progeny some born of so much baser matter than his brain, as from his eggs, which the allmighty swan impregnated, and mortal Leda laid; and whose two chicken-deities once hatcht now live and die on each alternate day. Luc. Ay, but if much of this be allegory in which the wisdom of antiquity veils the pure Deity from eyes profane … . What if such seeming contradictions aim where human understanding cannot reach? But granting for the sake of argument, and for that only, what you now premise; what follows? Cipr. Why, that if, as Pliny writes, Deity by its very definition be one, eternal, absolute, all wise, all good, omnipotent, all ear, all eyes, incapable of disintegration if this be Deity indeed … Luc. Then what? Cipr. Simply that we in Antioch know him not.219

The god of Pliny is a god Antioch cannot know; there can be no purpose, humanization, or finality, the godhead must be vacant of will and desire which would abbreviate its extension, its shapeless bounty as the empty identity of phenomenal nature. “There is therefore in the world no finalistic why (no wherefore) but only a causal why (because).”220 The Necessity-qua-Nature of God stands at odds with the spiritual destiny of man, so much so that either man’s destiny will subordinate itself to the materialist mechanics of that Necessity or liberate itself from that causal necessity in an irreverent modernist libido, both of which drown out the divine person. The end (not as telos but as collapse) of metaphysics lies in its refusal to re-shift its boundaries, to recognize its true ordering principle in the aseitic otherness of the divine Person manifested in man, in the self-effusive love of Christ. Metaphysics will not humble itself to the fact that it is not the ground of Being, even if it is the 218 219 220

de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 325. Ibid., 325–26. Fabro, God in Exile, 186.

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ground of reason. Heidegger himself recognized this point: “metaphysics, insofar as it always represents only beings as beings, does not recall Being itself. Philosophy does not concentrate on its ground. It always leaves its ground, leaves it by means of metaphysics. And yet it never escapes its ground.”221 A pure Aristotelian metaphysics of substance will end in a tide contrary to its original flow. It will wash upon the shores of a world utterly desacralized within the Hegelian Geist precisely because this postAristotle academic Aristotelian metaphysics refuses to abdicate its ground to the God Who is truly the ground of Being and Reason.222 The God of the Cross is necessarily beyond mere generative power because He is infinite and thus, as infinite, is the only true Creative power223 Who does not reduce the world or man to a desacralized naturalism. “The essence of the true Christian God is not to create but To Be.”224 When the god of the philosophers is placed above and over the God of the Cross, what is drowned is the invocational status of man’s being-inwait. The tension resides in the fact that the kenotic power of the Cross and its religion seemingly lie far closer to mythos than to philosophy, and yet the mythos has become logos, therefore rejoining it to a philosophical comportment.225 Plato wisely kept the cosmogonic gods of the tragedians separate from the god of the philosophers without reducing one to the other. His dualism began at a far more primal level than body and soul, in the very region of the face-as-faceless of the divine. Platonic dualism is no mere metaphysical embarrassment, but the mystical body of a religious poetic, for it begins in the inability to reconcile the God of the face and of personhood with the metaphysical attributes of a Being of beings. This inability led to a wise and loving caution.226 In the dialogues, the pre-thematically iconographic gods reside within the stars and in the souls, in the soul of each man; these are the gods of faces, strife, cosmogony, and the bearers of the metaxy. They lay distinct from—even if below—the abstract prethematic mystery of the universal, unchanging Ideas. The demiurge, the creationally making god-maker of the Timaeus,227 stands separate from the far surpassing divine

221

M. Heidegger, “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics,” in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre Existence and Being, ed. W. Kaufman (New York: Penguin, 1975), 266. 222 Cf. Fabro, God in Exile, 572: “The whole Hegelian conception can thus be summed up in the concept of Spirit (Geist), which permits Hegel to execute the dual (annihilating!) movement of ‘unfolding’ God from the interior of the immanence of the human mind and exalting this same human mind to a status and position within the very manifestation of God.” Let us read one more text which seems to be among the most exhaustively univocal: “God, according to Aristotle, is Act. Pure Act is to know … but being posited as activity it must be positive in its elements or moments: to knowing belongs an Other and inasmuch as knowing knows that Other it is appropriated to it.” 223 Cf. ST I, 7, 2. 224 Gilson, God and Philosophy, 88. 225 Cf. Ibid., 22–23: “Mythology is not a first step on the path of true philosophy. In fact, it is no philosophy at all. Mythology is a first step on the path of true religion; it is religious in its own right. Greek philosophy cannot have emerged by any process of progressive rationalization, because Greek philosophy was a rational attempt to understand the world as a world of things, whereas Greek mythology expressed the firm decision of man not to be left alone, the only person in a world of deaf and dumb things. If this be true, we should not be surprised to see very great Greek philosophers at a loss how to identify their principles with their gods, or their gods with their principles.” 226 Ibid., 26–28. 227 Timaeus 29a.

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Idea, but, while lower, it still must do the action, the making, the merging, and the creational imitating, for such acts are for souls, gods, persons, and not for ideas. The order of the cosmogonic gods is there, watching and waiting. Waiting for what? Waiting, like man, for that distinct unshaped openness in the god of the philosophers—an openness which illuminates their own unshaped openness—to be shaped, pressed, formed into real life beyond the shadows of discontent: “the Greek gods are the crude but telling expression of this absolute conviction that since man is somebody, and not merely something, the ultimate explanation for what happens to him should rest with somebody, and not merely with something.”228 Aristotle, on the other hand, attempted to wrest the Prime Mover from the destructive power of the cosmogonic order. The One of the eternal ideas is no longer kept side-by-side but separate from the gods, but is now named for the first time as God, but this God is no God of groaning and dilectum. It is not the god of Prometheus’ vox clamantis.229 Aristotle united the god of the philosophers with the cosmogonic gods, but this unity within the metaphysics of essentialist-substance meant, instead, reduction. This reduction demonstrates that the historical tension of the Cross finds at first a closer kinship with the mythos than with the philosophers. But that mythos became Reality as Word, as Logos, and this entails profound metaphysical implications as yet to be recognized. This is the new task of metaphysics. The Christian should recognize that the Aristotelian merger vanquished any godly personification and exiled the theotic contact. The Prime Mover is but a god in name only and, as such, when placed on atop Christian metaphysics creates a false pure nature and a false sense of purely natural man with a purely natural end, as light to carry as it was to construct.230 Neither Plato’s nor Aristotle’s viatoric failing is to blame. It is the present, historically misconceived god of philosophers that is nothing more than the abstract idea of eternality, permanent and unchanging, without the primordial strife which illuminates those concepts in their uniqueness as veiled intimations of the infinitude of the Godhead. God can create because He is un-created and therefore his To Be is beyond the creative. The creaturely being carries the agon of the uncreated, shot through with that erotic transcendency, but that eros is muted when God’s uncreated stance is reduced to Creator-qua-nature-maker, an It rather than a Him. This primordial strife is the act of To Be in all its refusal to be reduced to essence, in its refusal to bracket man’s open nature within a self-confined pure nature: “Human reason feels at home in a world of things, whose essences and laws it can grasp and define in terms of concepts; but shy and ill at ease in a world of existences, because to exist is an act, not a thing.”231 The God of the Cross’ creation groans not only with naturely cyclicity but also with an uncreatedness and hierarchical need within all its immanent regions, revealing the entire world to be a speaking partner in man’s open nature. In 228

Gilson, God and Philosophy, 22. The groaning God in labor over and against the God of ideas genuinely illuminates the aniconic in a way distinct from the reductive abstractions of the prime mover. Cf. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 407–30. 230 Cf. Gilson, God and Philosophy, 58. 231 Ibid., 67. 229

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the devolved Thomistic-Aristotelianism, the uncreated pure To Be, which should vivify the uncreatedness of the Creator, has been reduced to an increasingly mechanized anticreative impulse. In fact, it has become the lowest order of naturely cyclicity.232 This marginalization occurred precisely because in Aristotle the tension of the dueling dual orders—the pre-thematic God of the Cross in the mythos and the god of the philosophers—was merged in a way which did violence to the uncreated incommunicable personhood of the Godhead. The irony, or tragedy, is that Christians accepted this merger as a success and roadmap to the Christian God rather than a noble viatoric failing. The end result is a God of Christianity which is nothing more than the God of nature. And while “the God of Christianity had always been the Author of Nature … he had always been infinitely more than that, whereas, after Descartes, he was destined to become nothing else than that.”233 God’s Pure To Be is the true difference which makes the things of the world and the world itself participations in Him, while at the same time illuminating a reciprocal or hierarchical analogy. Divine Otherness does not entail distance from creation.234 God as Christ alone merges the best, while shedding the worst, of the unshaped eternality of the god of the philosophers and of the shaped reification of the gods of idols. The metaphysics of the Christianized pure To Be—unmade yet begotten— emancipates the world from the rationalist univocity where either the philosopher peers at the aloof heavens or the pagan is afflicted by but unrelated to the gods. In the beyond-being metaphysics of the Cross, ever invoking man’s prevenient openness as the responsive being to God’s primal Other, the metaphysical ground is revealed to be beyond the form. It is re-discovered in the divine presence who infinitizes the selfenclosed eternal substance of nous while enabling the infinite God to have a face—an act impossible in a non-creational metaphysics of forms.235 With Bonaventure: Now our thought would not be the most elevated if we did not believe that God could communicate himself in the most complete way, and it would not be the most loving if, believing him so able, we thought him unwilling to do so. Hence, if we are to think of God most loftily and most lovingly, faith tells us that God totally communicates himself by eternally having a beloved and another who is loved by both (condilectum). In this way God is both one and three.236 232

Cf. Fabro, God in Exile, 573. “The truth of Christian theology ends up being “proven” by the Hegelian logic whose evolution expounds the self-manifestation of the Idea and of history in fieri, in process. Thus, the Hegelian logic constitutes the most radical and drastic mystification and desacralization, even profanation of the problem of God in the entire history of human thought. No wonder that all the forms of modern atheism hark back and appeal more or less directly to Hegel!” 233 Gilson, God and Philosophy, 89. 234 K. Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (New York: Routledge, 1998), 46–47. 235 Cf. ST I, 8, 4 resp.: “For whatever number of places be supposed, even if an infinite number be supposed besides what already exist, it would be necessary that God should be in all of them; for nothing can exist except by Him. Therefore to be everywhere primarily and absolutely belongs to God and is proper to Him: because whatever number of places be supposed to exist, God must be in all of them, not as to a part of Him, but as to His very self.” 236 St. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, trans. D. Monti (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 2005), I, ii, 3.

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Cipriano is a wayfarer and his merging shape is the unformed and ever-present Christian dilectum. His utter and ever famished soul desires that condilectum which only Christ can satisfy and shape. Clement of Alexandria described that pallein or dancing or trembling as the palpitating of Dionysus’ dying heart: “Athena made off with the heart of Dionysus, and received the name Pallas from its palpitating (pallein).”237 And much like Socrates in the Cratylus, Cipriano recognizes quite late his failure to transform, the failure of any concept, any humanist magic to conceive reality when it is the Real which conceives the Word and receives its own concepts by way of its own self-effusive love. And yet at this same time, Cipriano also knows that this transformation is a necessity, a necessity whose sublime gratuity cannot be conjured. In front of those leaders of the world whose esteem he no longer desires, he speaks the words which will end his life: Yes, I am Cipriano: I am he so long and strangely lost, now strangely found—the famous doctor of your schools, renowned not in Antioch only but the world about for learning’s prophet-paragon forsooth; who long pretending to provide the truth for other men in fields where never true wheat, but a crop of mimic darnel grew reaped nothing for himself but doubt, doubt, doubt. Then it was that looking with despair and remorse over the blasted harvest of my youth, I saw Justina: saw, and put aside the barren Pallas for a mortal bride even more divinely fair than she is feigned to be: but in whose deep-entempled chastity that looked down holy cold upon my fire, lived eyes that re-double vain desire. Till this new passion that more fiercely preyed upon the withered spirit of dismayed ambition, swiftly by denial blew to fury that, transcending all control, I made away the ruin of my soul to one whom no chance tempest at my feet in the mid tempest of temptation threw.238

The teacher cannot learn to unite the god of the Philosophers and the God of the Cross; no worldly idea, no philosopher’s stone can secure such a union. The union lies beyond itself in furiously loving Christ until the barren recesses of the human heart are watered with the tears of Christ. Only in Christ’s kenosis where love alone is credible can the unity of the logos and the mythos find their home in Grace. Christ is the languishing and impossible Love of God becoming Man, He is nature turned upside down to what it should be, as grace in hiding, just as Father and Son are One and Other. The genuine Thomist seeking to avoid a metaphysical naturalism might heed the influence of St. Bonaventure, much as St. Thomas himself transformed Aristotle through the hierarchical and mystical rigor of Plato and the Pseudo-Dionysus. Nor can Christian man afford to disregard the wisdom of the Eastern Orthodox tradition which avoided that caustic bifurcation of nature and grace. Evidence of that tradition

237

Clement of Alexandria, “The Exhortation to the Greeks,” in Clement of Alexandria: The Exhortation to the Greeks. The Rich Man’s Salvation. To the Newly Baptized, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1919), 39. 238 de la Barca, The Mighty Magician, 363.

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can be seen clearly in the metaphysics of St. Bonaventure, whose pure To Be is the God of the Cross.239 And so, yet again, our nomatic caravan of concepts and seemingly abstract and digressive matters comes to rest, albeit briefly, at a living oasis of thought. The questions of pure nature and grace have definitive existential implications for the nature of man, thought, metaphysics, theology, and politics. And indeed the Plinian “pure” nature both flows from and yet dictates a deception of temporality which itself dictates and deforms the human polis. One must be able to distinguish the oasis from the mirage.

239

Cf. I. Delio, “Theology, Metaphysics, and the Centrality of Christ.” Theological Studies 68 (2007): 254–55: “Bonaventure developed a theological metaphysics of Christ as the center that integrates the immanent and economic Trinity in such a way that the Incarnation discloses the essential nature of God as love. Bonaventure’s metaphysics is based on a theology of the divine Word by which the two mysteries of Trinity and Christ are intrinsically connected. Christology is a function of theology, and theology has its meaning in Christology. The self-revelation of the Trinity in history is the expression of the divine Word in whom God “speaks” Godself in all things. Creation bears a congruent relationship to the Word of God so that Christ is truly the center and goal of creation and hence its metaphysical center.”

3

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That which hath been is now, and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past. —Ecclesiastes1

There is reason to think that Bonaventure could make a significant contribution to a dialogue with Hegel and his critics. Bonaventure might lead us to re-examine Hegel’s texts to see if, in fact, Hegel held a doctrine of God mirroring Bonaventure’s own; or if not, at least he might provide an alternative to Hegel’s dynamic God which would allow critics to accept other elements of Hegel’s system.2

The searchers The journey of the soul to God mapped theo-dramatically by Bonaventure,3 and poetically by Peguy4 became, in Hegel, the successive wandering incarnations of the Weltgeist5 from naïve consciousness, through self-consciousness, to reason and finally to Geist in the four-act melodrama of Romantic idealism. At its penultimate dialectical apex, it “pauses” for Hegel in the “ … religious realm, the last realm where consciousness pauses before it becomes explicitly and reflectively philosophical.”6 The divine dynamism reveals itself as history, the history of consciousness on its way to final self-realization. If one were to examine and then compare, even if cursorily,

1 2

3

4

5 6

Eccl. 3:15. E. Cousins, Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites (Chicago, IL: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978). Cf. St. Bonaventure, “The Soul’s Journey into God,” in Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St. Francis, trans. E. Cousins (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978). Cf. C. Peguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, trans. D. L. Schindler (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996); The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems (London, Harvill, 1956). Cf. J. Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1964), 154. Ibid.

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the pattern and structure of the Seraphic Doctor’s Itinerarium and Hegel’s triadically directed caravan within the dialogic presence of the Weltgeist, would not an uncanny set of similarities appear? The divine presence as a revelatory and ever-motivating force which does not fully disengage itself from the world would naturally unify Hegel and Bonaventure in their own transhistorical dialogue. As such, the final conclusion or hierarchical terminus of their competingly descriptive divine forces, both of which manifestly exhibit an all-encompassing creativeness, would therefore have massive ramifications for the meaning and nature of the polis, man’s spiritual development and the place of the God-Man. Four interrelated points of order claim a certain priority when undertaking such a delicate comparison: 1. Conceptio: How the immanent act of consciousness responds to transcendence: how the immanent either reflects the transcendent as transcendent without conceding a total separation from, or reducing it to a mode of, self-consciousness; 2. Religio: How in Hegel grace either overwhelms or is divorced from nature: how the irreducibility of existence is managed, improperly affirming either a pure nature or an extrinsicized grace, or a nature reducible to history as consciousness; 3. Traditio: How the non-sequential essence of man as historical is bound up both in the otherness and the self-identity of the Absolute as incarnate in memory, as simultaneously boundless and bounded in the presence of personal death; 4. Anima/Patria: How the non-sequential essence of man, politically and spiritually, is conceived either to extinguish or to reflect the genuine aniconic futurity of man in the divine. Underlying is the tense dilemma of the relation between man and the divine brought into vision by the retentive framework of memory as it peers into its own aniconic status. Although man is made in the image of God, because God is aniconic so must be man as His image. This aniconic status is the place where memory and meaning emerge and end in man, in a cyclical compact which, while beyond the horizon of consciousness, reclaims for consciousness a futurity and a perfection set aside from the temporal-as-chronological, and deeper than an historical ordering which can never interpenetrate the soul, enduringly immortalizing it. Great is the power of memory, an awe-inspiring mystery my God, a power of profound and infinite multiplicity. And this is mind, this is myself. What then am I my God? What is my nature? It is characterized by diversity, by life of many forms, utterly immeasurable. See the broad plains and caves and caverns of my memory … I run through all these things, I fly here and there, and penetrate their working as far as I can. But I never reach the end. So great is the power of memory, so great is the force of life in a human being whose life is mortal. What then ought I to do, my God? You are my true life. I will transcend even this my power which is called memory. I will rise beyond it to move towards you, sweet light.7 7

Confessions X, xvii.

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Memory and meaning emerge, hide, decline but never escape the transpositional axis between the transcendent and immanent. Man rises and falls within his memory and meaning: memory supplies the ground of meaning, for it is the purposeful-inplace where meaning is re-situated into a unity. Memory then comes back to what it resituates as meaning only to reconstitute it in a different way, perhaps from a different vantage but always somehow the same. The recognition of the memorial reconstitution of meaning through time is the essence of personal, political, and spiritual history and of the hunt for immortality as the search for meaning. Man enters the most authentic level of teleological consciousness when he abides by the agony that history can never grasp, nor is permitted to capture; for history can neither immortalize nor bring into image the aniconic futurity of man’s self-presence, unless history itself incarnates a self-presence. And here at least Bonaventure and Hegel stand on common ground. Memory becomes memorial, indeed immemorial, when it resets, again and again, the boundary between the immanent and transcendent.8 Why else an elegy in a graveyard? By re-cognizing the emerging image of meaning from within the aniconic futurity of man’s own self-presence, memory lives the life of the uncreated immortal and the perfectively creative.9 Man’s immortality escapes him in the historical—the one place where it is sought! History—through its own cycle of desire and the always temporary cessation of desire—maps as it cartographically trails the rise and fall of memory and meaning. Holidays, holy days, gravestones, monuments, eternal flames and tributes, constitutions and declarations—when rooted in tradition—are, at their best, a recognition of the human polis as heartbreakingly transient and, at worst, an illusory denial of the futural death of the living. History cannot immortalize man, let alone deify him although, when at its worst as in a Marx or a Mussolini, it hubristically tries. At its best, history presents the soul with the possibility of a virility that, in the end, voluntarily renounces desire in favor of peace and, in doing so, glimpses its own transhistorical immortality.10 Historical man is defined by this relentless mapping of the rise-and-fall-andrise of meaning. And history, itself proceeding from this historical self-presence, circumnavigates memory, seeking union with its unknown essence and “logic,” unable to know its pattern and unable to escape it. And this Hegel sought to overcome. It is the aniconic non-sequential futurity of man’s self-presence, his prevenient openness, which grounds consciousness in a memory prior to pattern so that it can make techne and polis and pattern and history, and man to be the historical man. The historical struggles against the memorial-as-immortal that it cannot access, uniting in solidarity with every human soul-as-consciousness attempting to gain access into 8

9

10

Cf. Memory, History, Forgetting, 98: “It is in memory that God is first sought, the heights and the depths—these are the same things—are hollowed out within interiority.” Cf. Confessions X, xx: “Is not a happy life the thing that all desire and is there anyone who altogether desires it not? But where did they acquire the knowledge of it, that they so desire it? Where have they seen it, that they so love it? Truly we have it, but how I know not … . For did we not know it, we should not live it.” Cf. The Agony of Christianity, 66: “Virility marches forward towards its own destruction; it proceeds by way of solitude, by way of ‘eunuchism.’ This is what happens to those who voluntarily renounce desire.”

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the purposeful place of the soul to which consciousness is not as such permitted. If access were granted, man would no longer have to take his place in the historical consciousness, which is what gnostic, messianic, and political totalitarians offer: the end of history.11 Historical man craves immortality but, by being constituted within the arc of teleological consciousness, reveals that his memory cannot be the immortality born of the aniconic, only an imitation of the ageless.12 And so memory fails, and we weep at the gravestone, either authentically/reverently at the always unexpected but inevitable intrusion of death or in-authentically at the Lenin’s tomb of fallen false Messiahs. However, the figure of Christ is not the gnostic end-of-history but rather its beginning, although even here not in a teleological progressivism leading to an immanent state of perfection within a political realm of fulfillment under the guiding hand of one of history’s great leaders and secularist prophets, and by the necessary murder of God.13 Rather, the temporal-political structure of divine and human incarnation does provide history with its reality and meaning, but not, again, as we might expect, because the incommensurability of time and eternity does not exile eternity from the world or from the polis but sets the clock of history to a different beat and measure.

The non-sequential order of historical existence Who shall hold it and fix it so that it may come to rest for a little; and then, by degrees, glimpse the glory of that eternity which abides forever; and then, comparing eternity with the temporal process in which nothing abides, they may see that they are incommensurable? They would see that a long time does not become long, except from the many separate events that occur in its passage, which cannot be simultaneous. In the Eternal, on the other hand, nothing passes away, but the whole is simultaneously present. But no temporal process is wholly simultaneous. Therefore, let it see that all time past is forced to move on by the incoming future; that all the future follows from the past; and that all, past and future, is created and issues out of that which is forever present. Who will hold the heart of man that it may stand still and see how the eternity which always stands still is itself neither future nor past but expresses itself in the times that are future and past? Can my

11

12

See E. Voegelin’s understanding of the “speculative gnostics” of the nineteenth century. Science, Politics, Gnosticism (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Co., 1968) 10–34. Cf. “Where or When.” Written and composed by Rodgers & Hart. L. Hart. Babes in Arms (1937): “Some things that happen for the first time Seem to be happening again. And so it seems that we have met before And laughed before And loved before But who knows where or when.”

13

Cf. E. Voegelin, “The Murder of God,” in Science, Politics & Gnosticism (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Co., 1968), 35–50.

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hand do this, or can the hand of my mouth bring about so difficult a thing even by persuasion?14 “Non-sequential” implies the non-chronological temporal essence of man that situates him on and as the confinium between time and eternity. It is what renders chronology possible but which is not reducible to it, but which is in persistent danger of such reduction. It constitutes memory out-of-sequence, as meaning: the sequential tolling of the church bells re-minds us of the non-sequential meaning imbedded—indeed hidden—therein. The relentless ticking of the clock taunts with a rhythm far beyond “the measure of change in respect of before and after.”15 It is in this sense that we do not ask for whom the bell tolls for it always tolls for thee. And I am thee, as Hegel half-suspected. The non-sequential cannot be claimed, isolated, or managed by consciousness. It is not an epistemological order within the domain of consciousness but an odd irreducibility attached to all the immanent acts of thinking. It not only connects man to man, man to history, man to his divine likeness but it also inflames man’s sursum cordis by way of an imageless dispossession which he bears but cannot place or find on his own, nor yet can he name.16 The non-sequential bespeaks his immortality by always whispering his death, making all other ideas of immortality artificial and even tawdry. It annunciates a unique temporal structure, stretching man reflectively and futurally within and along his own change, making even the deepest attempts of historical anthropology unable fully and effectively to communicate his nature. Two preliminary implications: 1. Man’s nature itself is utterly coinhered in grace and it is because of that coinherence that we purposively require a further grace which is in aniconic hiding but never alien to us. Like the proverbial nose on the face, the non-sequential presence and possibility of grace is both unseen and phenomenologically obvious. 2. Man’s nature indicates yet does not contain man’s end. This is not to say that the world does not carry the meaning and presence of that perfection but that it carries it out of sequence, in a way in which consciousness cannot reduce it to a product of itself, or measure it by means of its constructs, or embed it politically. These ontological densities imply that man’s nature is always unified in grace as nature’s imageless ordination. As aniconic, grace is the foundation of nature. When nature supplies its images, meanings, and motifs, it never isolates itself from that imageless ordination, but rather unfailingly points toward what is irreducible to consciousness. All art, drama, film, and poetry point to this truth. Nature indicates 14 15 16

Confessions XI, xi. Physics 219b1. Cf. Confessions X, viii: “The power of memory is great, very great, my God. It is a vast and infinite profundity. Who has plumbed its bottom? This power is that of my mind and is a natural endowment, but I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am.”

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but does not contain our end. The search begins but cannot end in nature, in the world or in the self, as the search for meaning, for truth, points always and everywhere to the other. This is not because nature is impoverished, as if there is a dividing wall where reason ends and faith simply begins, nature ends and grace begins, body ends and soul begins. Again, nature is groaning and pregnant with pre-foundational meaning because of the grace which situates all nature to be revealed precisely as natural. We call a thing by its name in order to distinguish it; this is what language does. To call something natural is intended to distinguish it from the artificial or the unnatural, or the supernatural. It is the relationship of the natural to the supernatural as its foundational meaning that renders the natural to be natural. Th e Five Ways are more than sufficient to demonstrate this: change requires a changeless beginning, as activity requires an active origin, as possibility requires necessity, as relative instantiations require an absolute, as natural order requires a supernatural orderer. Nature, always unified in its foundation, especially as it is taken in by consciousness, cannot be put into a sequence where man uncovers a teleological blueprint from nature to a perfection he can craft with his own powers. This is Hegel’s error, and it is found oddly hidden beneath much of Christian metaphysics insofar as it suppresses the far-reaching implications of nature-and-grace through a naïve divorce-like separation of their two orders. But, with Augustine,17 the very “visible presence” of the natural world speaks the divine origin as grace. And is not all speech an indicative pointing to? The graceful foundation of all meaning refuses sequence as it prefigures image precisely because the marriage of nature and grace does not suppress their mutual need but magnifies it. This magnified neediness is always there because nature is seen/uncovered through its umbilical connection to what it is-not. Man’s naturally supernatural status is to some degree his desire to put into sequence what cannot be sequenced. It may be glimpsed, through a glass darkly, as the aniconic presence articulated almost exclusively in the prescinding linguistic forms of negation, as the un-caused: the un-changed changer, the un-made maker, the Being that cannot Not Be, the un-measured measurer, the un-planned planner. These linguistic limitations point to an unlimited effulgence as the origin of meaning. It is a natural desire which nature cannot satisfy. It only becomes un-natural when man thinks he can emancipate himself from nature and image the aniconic, constructing a teleological ladder of consciousness to appropriate the divine as its own; or the alternative temptation is to emancipate nature and man himself from grace and to live in the “purely natural world” of change, of chronology, the world of Ozymandias and, worse, the Marxists and National Socialists. The natural desire inflamed by grace points to grace as its foundation and well of longing. Nature is in need of the grace for the images which reveal man’s unique temporal historical sequence and which human nature carries, by being reflective, but cannot communicate. For it is that imageless differance amid and beneath nature.

17

Cf. Ibid., XI, iv.

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A phenomenology of indications: Three ages of the non-sequential Besides, it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward. But just as the first breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth—there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born—so likewise the Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms. The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.18 Time as the measure of change is phenomenologically located in the realm of necessity, and then inappropriately, indeed in-authentically, applied to the realm of transcendence, thus creating the endless aporiae in understanding time.19 But transcendence has a distinct mode of time which rises above change but not above temporality: and this is the non-sequential. The image of the imageless may be unearthed, but it cannot be dissected and as such cannot be communicated except pictographically, illustrating the stunned silence out of which our primal longing escapes, whether it be gazing at the heavens or at the funeral pyre. The non-sequential refuses all foundation in language or symbol or history, or the imaginings of flesh and blood. The aniconic has “the double role of discounting all images and subsequently restoring their kataphatic energy.”20 All newness, inventiveness, and creative fecundity are born from the dispossessive power of Being. Man’s temporally compact ordination is grounded on an aniconic futurity which permeates our self-presence and prevenient 18

19

20

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 6. Future citations: PS. For a valuable contemporary discussion of the logical conflict between these two conceptions of temporality, see R. Gale, The Language of Time (London: Routledge, 1967). However, neither McTaggart’s Hegelian paradox of the antithetical relations between a dynamic temporal A-Series and a spatially organized static B-Series nor the attempts of analytic philosophers to reduce one to the other quite touches the problem at issue here, though may be considered valuable historically. For an alternative approach, see P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, tans. K. Blamey & D. Pelleaur (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 261: “What fails is not thinking, in any acceptation of this term, but the impulse—or to put it a better way, the hubris—that impels our thinking to posit itself as the master of meaning … . Time, escaping our will to mastery, surges forth on the side of what … is the true master of meaning.” B. C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 109. See also 234: “The contradictory notion of aniconic images suggests the deconstructive role played by certain symbols that are used simultaneously to question as well as to depict what they represent. It is a visual equivalent of the effort of the poet and mystic in ‘unsaying’ through words what has already been put into language.”

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openness with a hunger for divinity that can neither be delineated nor mastered. This inability to put man’s ordination into an organizational telos-scope is precisely, as we shall see, Hegel’s downfall. Immortalizing the incommunicable yet enduring substance of existence never resolves itself in an immortality of the general, ideational, or protractedly abstract, but the immortality responsive only to Love and to its secret endurance. (Can the polis embody such a thing?) The non-sequential communicates itself experientially in a phenomenology of indications, and in that sense is discoverable in Hegel’s vast panorama of the ever-evolving varieties of historical experience, faithful to the variations within experience itself. The non-linear is embodied in myth, which itself underlies the panorama of historical varieties. It is the sanguine and hereditary incrucification of one soul discoverable in another, handed down through fathers and mothers, sons, daughters, lovers, hermits, from father to son, and father to father, from mother to daughter and mother to mother, from lover to beloved. Peguy sings of this inherited incrucification in his Portal of the Mystery of Hope: Children are never the ones who do the work. No one ever works except for children … . But would the father have the heart to work if he didn’t have his  children? … In the icy forest … . that cuts to his bones … . all of a sudden he thinks about his wife who stayed at home … . and about his children who are peaceful and safe at home. They pass before his eyes, in a flash before his mind’s eye, before his soul’s eye. They live in his memory and in his heart and in his soul and in his soul’s eye. They live in his gaze. In a flash he sees his three children playing and laughing in front of the fire … . It’s right that the father die before the children. He thinks about them, by God’s grace, and immediately the blood rushes to his heart. And warms him so.21

Hegel was not at all unsympathetic to the transcendental bond that cuts one soul into another and leaves an indelibly linked life force, beyond reason, as the ground of meaning: “the family, as the immediate substantiality of spirit, has as its determination the spirit’s feeling of its own unity, which is love.”22 And for Hegel, “Love … means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and the other with me.”23 The non-sequential is man’s self-presential memorial comportment (“self-identity”) through life and death: endurance. These immortal roles are not masks but place holders within and against a movement of incalculable loss. For nothing remains, nothing endures, and yet every role remains the same. It is impossible that personal immortality exists, and so all fathers cry sweet

21 22

23

The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, 10. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 1991) §158. Ibid.

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and shameful tears.24 And yet it is inconceivable that the immortal life does not exist, for memory itself, born of time, seems to outwit time and its generational diremption. Man indeed has one foot in each world and is at home in neither: this is the pathos of his dignity as the confinium. This compactly temporal directedness is the same story and yet different for each man who lives within its mythic night.25 In the mythic patterns of the non-sequential, everything is eternally the same for each: Hegel’s “renunciation of independent existence” claims the sweet and sorrowful joy of the father. Fatherly tears are a way of fading into the otherness of the children, it is the immortal life given over to them, always given over to the children who should not know how to weep. Renunciation claims the father and the father claims the cautious death that circles the cloistered study at night. And death claims as its own all renunciation. But renunciation is endurance given to itself by the otherness of childlike joy. This is Unamuno’s virility renouncing desire. Yet within, and perhaps because of that sameness, there resides an odd agony, an enfeebled un-transmitted terror, an isolation in the unshared experience of the Same. The mature man is, for example, the only one ready for philosophic wisdom and yet he lives in a veiled hostility toward it. His opposition is his preparedness; his disenchantment with the philosophical rests in the knowledge that wisdom-as-love may coinhere but it cannot be transmitted. It is precisely the knowledge that “to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom,”26 which condemns his youth to grieve the incommunicable which death provides through the separation from the beloved. This wisdom, which places a breath inside man’s unknowing shell, giving it mystery and substance, lives on only beyond the “low door in the wall.” It chooses when the garden should appear and when sunshine should be lost forever.27 At night, in his study the ancient man is visited by lost love’s immaterial carnality, waiting in fear and with an odd relief for his heart to fail. He is the same man looking behind himself at the distancing past, too resigned to his fate to embody terror. These are the same men and yet their unity remains untransmitted, barely communicated between them.28 Time is a “sadder mask than death may 24

25

26 27

28

Cf. The Portal of the Mystery of Hope: “It’s right that the father die before the children. He thinks about them, by God’s grace, and immediately the blood rushes to his heart. And warms him so. The bitter north wind in the forest has just now frozen two big tears that fell stupidly upon his cheeks … . There he is laughing and ashamed. Laughing to himself and ashamed both inwardly and outwardly. And even laughing out loud. Because it is sweet and it is shameful to cry.” Cf. M. Unamuno, “At Night in My Study,” in Roots and Wings: Poetry from Spain 1900–1975, trans. W. Stafford & L. J. Stafford, ed. H. St. Martin (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 15: “Here, in the night, all alone, this is my study; the books don’t speak; my oil lamp bathes these pages in a light of peace, light of a chapel. The books don’t speak; of the poets, the meditators, the learned, the spirits drowse; and it is as if around me circled cautious death.” See also Pope Benedict XVI, Saved in Hope: Spei Salvi (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2008), 101. E. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (London: D. Campbell, 1993), 28. Ibid., 174: “As I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.” For a near-perfect expression of this heartrending sentiment see S. Kierkegaard’s parable “Quiet Despair,” in The Parables of Kierkegaard, ed. T. C. Oden (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 1989).

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spread.”29 The philosopher believes everything has its place and time, its order and productive movement within the anthropological articulation of existence. But the man past the ambiguities of early existence—the one who alone can philosophize about the peculiarities of place and time—knows about the low door in the wall, and how everything but love itself is a crude imitation of the real which itself is aniconic. Philosophy itself may begin in the most loving intentions—the early intentions where ambiguity confuses itself with hopeful longevity—but it has now been shed, not for a stoic resignation over the perceived inability to achieve the transcendentals but something quite other. The disenchantment with philosophy begins in a deep and earthy hope, an into-the-ground-commitment to endure, an unworldly desire to be and to remain in love.30 To hold onto the vigil of love: … And though the after world will never hear The happy name of one so gently true, Nor chronicles write large this fatal year, Yet we who loved you, though we be but few, Keep you in whatsoe’er is good, and rear In our weak virtues monuments to you.31

The philosophical life in its telos must provide itself with a profound disinclination to continue on its own bearings; it is a recognition of itself as a forgery of the real, becoming an even cruder and emptier imitation in the face of love.32 Yet to begin in the disregard of the philosophical life cannot provide the necessary disenchantment with Being. Man is tied to the philosophical, for it brings the purgative-as-memorial, but only if we be brave enough to unchain ourselves from the philosophical stance which, at first, in our early age, had set us free, allowing us to know the difference between the living and the dead.33 The aged man can no longer be bothered with an art that becomes forgery in the face of his death and yet the drawing out and unveiling of that forgery is the grand finale of all the early loves of the poet, priest, and philosopher. All work must be love or its failure is unworthy of the risk. And the risk of failure is the heartrending inevitability of hope and of every human life that picks up its charitable incantations like a sweet intoxication against its own inevitable finality. Failure is still the great surprise for every human soul even as it is unavoidably predictable. The “surprise” and the “predictability” unite all men, for everything fails. Philosophy has already taught us this, it has left behind the breadcrumbs of its inability to succeed, its inability to be

29 30 31 32

33

G. Santayana, “For W. P.,” in Sonnets and Other Verses (New York: Duffield, 1906) Sonnet II, 31. Pascal understood this. See Pensees, 4: “To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.” “For W. P.” Sonnet II, 31. Cf. A. Sexton, “Admonitions to a Special Person,” in The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton (New York: Mariner, 1999), 607: “Watch out for intellect because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.” Cf. Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume I, Books 1–5, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1925). V, 19, Diogenes credits Aristotle with saying: “The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.”

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anything beyond another historically conditioned entrance into ourselves. Whether by storming the gates of theology or by its total retreat from any meaning beyond itself, philosophy bloats before it dies. This sweetest and most painful failure is the secret meaning for the ancient heart at night in his study. When love is involved the forgeries of the philosophical life become a crude imitation of the Same, for this man has realized that nothing is really united inside the Same. Past the receding images of the past, the untransmitted wakes from its aniconic homeland to invite man to assume his wayfaring isolation, taunting him with the brutal intangibilities of found and lost love. And so, the story of the non-sequential goes like this: the ancient man who alone is ready for philosophy is its greatest antagonist. He is the one who can save it, and recover the task of thinking. But terror, which is a form of relief, will find him before any salvation is possible. The image of philosophical purpose is uncovered in him but lays useless in the disenchantment which ends all philosophical praxis. Nature indicates yet does not contain man’s perfection. Nature and grace fully coinhere, allowing nature as reason to indicate our endurance; and, because their coinherence lives in the imageless ground of the futural, our non-sequential comportment is stretched into a neediness which nothing in reason as nature can satisfy, as every poet knows.34 The young have the vital energy for the task of philosophic thinking, but lack the death needed to become the other, which alone can make the philosophical act more than a flaccid theoria. The young cannot resist what is out-of-sequence, it is not in their nature to resist what is there in nature. What entices and yet refuses submission flaunts its differance, leaving itself vulnerable to a form of hidden slavery within the youthful vigor of the late adolescent mind. Its philosophical actions are exuberantly natural and yet unfailingly intrusive. Its curiosity is natural and yet the foundation for a willto-power persona which derides the natural, condemning the deeper and chastening hallways of sentiment to irrationalist distraction. Philosophical action is a natural and yet destructive task of the thinking being. Philosophy becomes vital man’s commerce in-and-with-the-otherness. It is his way of making sense of what is there and yet not present in the world. Lacking naturally the memorial love that strips ambiguity from early hope, he converts the non-linear nearness of Being to an architectonic of his own universally protracted self-consciousness, marked by a guiltless guile. This is Hegel’s own rationalist perversion of his own insight into the familial blood bond.35 The vital man squanders the horizon of the non-sequential in a futurity of predictable caused causes. He is vital and his energeia consumes him. This is natural, and yet if he be brave enough to let it run its own course, it will consume his vitality and disenchant him from any personal rule over his own longevity. Vital man believes 34 35

Cf. “For W. P.” Sonnet II, 29. Cf. PS, §452: “The dead individual, by having liberated his being from his ‘action’ or his negative unity, is an empty singular, merely a passive being-for-another, at the mercy of every lower irrational individuality and the forces of abstract material elements, all of which are now more powerful than himself: the former on account of the life they possess, the latter on account of their negative nature. The Family keeps away from the dead this dishonoring of him by unconscious appetites and abstract entities, and puts its own action in their place, and weds the blood-relation to the bosom of the earth, to the elemental imperishable Individuality. The Family thereby makes him a member of a community which prevails over and holds under control the forces of particular material elements

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that certainty opposes ambiguity, and through that misreading he suppresses the vicissitudes of human action, seeing any diversion from the course of reason and right as a diversion from intelligence and the good. These vicissitudes which come to claim the body of the ancient man at night in his study are, for vital man, nothing more than the accidental non-sequiturs of wills failing to be universal, of a childlike fancy of which one must be rid if he is to be a statesman of “this world.” Isn’t this Callicles’ condemnation of Socrates? The mythos of the non-sequential re-appears in vital man: he possesses the vigor, potency, and the correlative view of the futural-as-far-horizon, enabling him to build philosophical systems with all the logical, noetic, and metaphysical intricacies necessary and sufficient to be an image of the self-sustaining consciousness. His futurity-ata-distance provides the interest in philosophy, which the aged man can no longer entertain without becoming buffoonish in the face of the living and cosmogonic. At the same time, this ideational futurity causes the vital man to suppress the philosophical motivating sentiment from the start; for real philosophy, as the tragedians sensed, never lives beyond or rises above the cosmogonic. If the figure of Christ teaches the philosopher anything whatsoever, it should be this primal, binding, and intense truth: genuine philosophy must end where it begins—in the deconstructive furies!36 The dying man can and does communicate the terror of the non-linear but, as unfailingly imageless, it cannot be communicated beyond himself. The man beyond philosophy becomes the image of the non-sequential, which philosophy seeks out and yet suppresses. His is the face of the aniconic, neglected by philosophy because it cannot be disseminated. The aging philosopher disheartened by philosophy becomes for the first time a philosopher—an idling old man who, through either the neglect or the politesse of common sense wisdom, “looks back” to his youth. The aged man is dispossessed of the non-sequential for he looks back as well, just as he did, in a different way, in his vitality. The dying man cannot help but act on this out-of-sequence impulse which renders him naked and empty in contrast to health and robust vitality. He looks backward to where there is and is-not a place for meaning. This “looking back” is both natural and illusory. It is an escapism violating the mythic ordering of existence, for its turnaround to look back attempts to give the non-chronological a sequence, an arc of meaning, as well as an appropriate retreat from that meaning so that he can sustain

36

and the lower forms of life, which sought to unloose themselves against him and to destroy him.” This stands some comparison to Chesterton’s democracy of the dead and to Gray’s definitive meditation on death in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. But just as Hegel lacks the irreducibility of the soul’s journey in the Itinerarium, so he fails to respect the incommunicability of death the elegy incarnates. Instead of the soul’s journey to God, Hegel presents us with the growing pains of a hero in a romantic novel; instead of an elegy in a graveyard, he offers us a lecture in a classroom. See Whitman’s “A Song of Joys” for the end of vital man. Cf. W. Whitman, “Leaves of Grass.” Whitman: Poetry and Prose, ed. J. Kaplan (New York: Liberty of America, 1982), 330: “O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted! To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand! To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face! To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance! To be indeed a God! O to sail to sea in a ship! To leave this steady unendurable land, to leave the tiresome sameness of the streets, the sidewalks and the houses, to leave you O you solid motionless land, and entering a ship, to sail and sail and sail!”

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personal consciousness. This maintenance of historical meaning becomes, covertly, the historical progressivism of the self-of-youth, inexperienced, irreverent, and no longer innocent. But within that folly it is also anamnetic, invested in the terror of the looking forward where man inhabits the no-time ground of human existence. To rise above change is not to rise above time, and to rise above time is not to rise above change: time and change speak cessation and pause—and this is man at the brink of his own human nature. Man is somewhere out of sequence but always within time and change while never following their sequence. Man is in time and changing within that time and place, but he can never follow the fatalistic course of time and change even as he succumbs to it so wholly, so profusely, so regrettably.37 The vital man destroys philosophy because he alone is interested in extorting its secrets; the old man safeguards it by his dismissal and regret, which together collude to protect the mystery and all its dispensations. In his ancient face this man looks back, which is natural and yet destructive. His turn-around re-inaugurates that Sisyphean error of his youth attempting to give sequence to the imageless and homeless refuge walled within his memory. His attempt is natural as it indicates a futurity which is not the possession of consciousness. The half terrifying, half resigned, oddly joyful “looking-back” deepens while severing him from the possibility of fulfillment and completion. Man is buried within the non-emancipatory order, which in a way is alien to his immortal soul which must, somehow, be freed and endured. He flees naturally from this struggle, which is itself the failure to live up to what is natural, failing first to liberate his immortal soul from an order it should never be at home with, and then failing to understand the struggle itself, which deflects any attempt to make sense of it. By these failures, however, he gains access—against all odds—into a paternal, soteriological pattern of the divine. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grownup people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being

37

See the poet Rumi who perhaps had the deepest understanding of the non-linear knew that man is never reduced to the linear even as it overwhelms him. Cf. Rumi “There is a Life-Force Within Your Soul,” in Rumi, Thief of Sleep: 180 Quatrains from the Persian, trans. S. Shiva (Chino Vallez, AZ: Hohm Press, 2000): “O traveler, if you are in search of That don’t look outside, look inside yourself and seek That. I am blasphemy and religion, pure and impure; old, young, and a small child. If I die, don’t say that he died. Say he was dead, became alive, and was taken by the Beloved. In the waters of purity, I melted like salt neither blasphemy, nor faith, nor conviction, nor doubt remained.” See Also F. H. Davis, Wisdom of the East, the Persian Mystics, Jalalu’d-din Rumi (London: John Murray, 1912).

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conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.38

The child is all who remains to be spoken of, beyond beauty, in a different category beneath words and meaning.39 The child is magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life40 and yet immersed in a boundless futurity. So far beyond the rebel, the child’s real wisdom is an un(ex)communicated innocence in-crucified in every generation and yet always dispossessed by those who love it most. The endurance of the child is in having no need for the wisdom of age; its endurance folds into transience because neediness is always its calling card. The fatherhood and motherhood, within the love of their beloved, contain a love disabused and dispossessed of any philosophical having. The children pass before the father “in a flash before his mind’s eye, before his soul’s eye. They live in his memory and in his heart and in his soul and in his soul’s eye. They live in his gaze.”41 In witnessing the child’s unknowing embodiment of the nonsequential, the mother and father are knowingly out-of sequence-in-Being. They become one with a new law, where the parabolic becomes the pantokratic. Their love prevents them in advance from attempting to give nature sequence, for such an act would wound 38 39

40 41

Cf. Orthodoxy, 60. See Charles Peguy’s near perfect expression of the Child-as-the-Beautiful and the very life of the nonsequential in his Mystery of the Holy Innocents, 789: “Nothing is so beautiful as a child who falls asleep while saying its prayers, God says. I tell you there is nothing so beautiful in the world. I have never seen anything so beautiful in the world. And yet I have seen some beauty in the world. And I am a judge of it. My Creation overflows with beauty. My Creation overflows with marvels. There are so many one doesn’t know where to put them. I have seen millions and millions of stars rolling at my feet like the sands of the sea. I have seen days blazing like flames … . I have seen the dark, deep sea, and the dark, deep forest, and the dark, deep heart of man. I have seen hearts devoured by love Throughout a life-time lost in charity. Burning like flames. I have seen martyrs inspired by faith Holding firm as a rock on the torturer’s frame Between the iron teeth. (Like a soldier holding firm all alone all his life Through faith In his General [apparently] absent.) I have seen martyrs flaming like torches Earning palms forever green, And I have seen gathering beneath the iron claws Drops of blood which glittered like diamonds. And I have seen the dropping of many tears of love Which will endure longer than the stars of the sky. And I have seen faces of prayer, faces of tenderness Lost in charity, Which will shine eternally through endless nights. And I have seen whole lives from birth to death, from baptism to the Viaticum, Unroll like a fair skein of wool. Well, I tell you, God says, I know nothing so beautiful in all the world As a little child who falls asleep while saying his prayers Under the wing of his Guardian Angel And who laughs to the angels as he goes to sleep. And who is already confusing everything and understanding nothing more and who stuffs the words of the Our Father all awry, pell-mell into the words of the Hail Mary While a veil is already dropping on his eyelids the veil of night on his face and his voice. I have seen the greatest Saints, God says. Yet I say to you. I have never seen anything so funny and in consequence I know nothing so beautiful in the world as the child who falls asleep saying his prayers (As the little creature who falls asleep confidently) and who jumbles his Our Father with his Hail Mary. Nothing is so beautiful and it is even a point on which the Blessed Virgin is of my opinion about it.” F. D. Cornford, “Youth,” in Poems (Hampstead: Priory Press, 1910), 15. The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, 11.

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the innocence of the child. Mother- and Father-hood protect what is beyond wisdom with a failed wisdom, and with that philosophical impulse, they protect what they do not know how to protect. They know what they no longer know how to know. The Child-asLove does not know even how to need wisdom. For to need the untimely “timelessness” of wisdom is to have missed the non-sequential, to be a stranger outside its gates, a father crying in the icy fields, having become a gatekeeper of that love and of that wisdom. To miss that wisdom is to become a gatekeeper of it. The gatekeeper is cut by the heartbreakingly eternally lovable which cannot be protected. For being a gatekeeper signifies the loss of the soft passage and the life of power after power conquered into powerlessness. He no longer possesses the tools needed to protect what he so earnestly desires to hold out from heartache. The gatekeeper sees the incommunicable yet cannot protect it, for his seeing confirms that he is exiled from its inclusion. Fatherhood and Motherhood cloak the child in the immortality created by their own dispossession, an immortality where Don Quixote’s actions make the only sense out of the world of the non-emancipated: “But would the father have the heart to work if he didn’t have his children? … In winter when the snakes sleep in the woods because they’re frozen … . It’s right that the father die before the children. He thinks about them, by God’s grace, and immediately the blood rushes to his heart.”42 Nature indicates and yet does not contain man’s end; the life of the non-linear carries this meaning throughout all human actions, revealing nature as entrenched in grace, and grace provides the trenches for nature’s last stand. “But Jesus said, Suffer the little children, and do not hinder them from coming to me; for the kingdom of heaven is of such.”43 Verily I say to you, unless ye are converted and become as little children, ye will not at all enter into the kingdom of heaven.44

Hegel, Bonaventure, and memory Marvellous then is the blindness of the intellect which does not consider that which is its primary object and without which it can know nothing. But just as the eye intent upon the various differences of the colors does not see the light by which it sees the other things and, if it sees it, does not notice it, so the mind’s eye, intent 42 43

44

Ibid., 18. Matt. 19:14; Cf. Luke 18:16. See Also J. Betjeman, “Trebetherick,” in John Betjeman: Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006): “ … . But when a storm was at its height, and feathery slate was black in rain, and tamarisks were hung with light and golden sand was brown again, Spring tide and blizzard would unite and sea come flooding up the lane. Waves full of treasure then were roaring up the beach, ropes round our mackintoshes, waders warm and dry, we waited for the wreckage to come swirling into reach, Ralph, Vasey, Alistair, Biddy, John and I. Then roller into roller curled and thundered down the rocky bay, and we were in a water world of rain and blizzard, sea and spray, and one against the other hurled we struggled round to Greenaway. Blesséd be St. Enodoc, blesséd be the wave, blesséd be the springy turf, we pray, pray to thee, ask for our children all happy days you gave to Ralph, Vasey, Alistair, Biddy, John and me.” Matt. 18:3.

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upon particular and universal beings, does not notice Being itself, which is beyond all genera, though that comes first before the mind and through it all other things. Wherefore it seems very true that just as the bat’s eye behaves in the light, so the eye of the mind behaves before the most obvious things of nature. Because accustomed to the shadows of beings and the phantasms of the sensible world, when it looks upon the light of the highest Being, it seems to see nothing, not understanding that darkness itself is the fullest illumination of the mind [Ps., 138, 11], just as when the eye sees pure light it seems to itself to be seeing nothing.45 Take away the Nicene Creed and similar things, and you do some strange wrong to the sellers of sausages. Take away the strange beauty of the saints, and what has remained to us is the far stranger ugliness of Wandsworth. Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.46 Memory in Hegel is not merely a recollected series of fragmented images, nor even the remembrance of things past, but claims a type of futurity insofar as it is thought having returned into itself as the place where knowledge transforms itself into the consciousness-as-soul that it is.47 Memory, therefore, unlike imagination, which drafts universal archetypes from abstractions, keeps the particularity of the individual consciousness within the universality of the recollective act of thought returning to itself. Erinnerung in Hegel is also distinct from the reductionism of his Logic,48 insofar as it is not knowledge but the primordial awareness of the active presence of knowledge, of the self coming toward or encountering itself. In the Phenomenology, the Erinnerung presents itself as an odd irreducibility: it is the source of absolute knowledge and is foundational for the immanentizing of the transcendent; for a nature moving inwardly (beyond Schelling’s externalism) into the auspices of the Geist, thereby refiguring by overwhelming the nature and grace tension; for man becoming the historicality of the Geist. But the oddness of the recollective act of thought approaching itself is that such a suggestive expression of memory alludes to an aspect of existence that cannot be communicated to the absolute self of the Geist, that cannot be incorporated into the final stage of the Weltgeist precisely because it is not knowledge but the ground of the reflective, interior, subjective-as-universal act of knowledge. What in Bonaventure is a profound understanding of memory anticipates the sensuous priority of Hegel’s understanding.49 45 46 47

48

49

The Soul’s Journey into God, V, 4. See also Republic 507. G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (London: John Lane, 1905), 99. For a notable discussion on the Hegelian Erinnerung see D. F. Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1990), 205–40. Cf. E. Magri, “Self Reference and Logical Memory in Hegel’s Theory of Concept.” Revista Estudos Electronica Hegelianos 8, 15 (2011): 66–77. Cf. J. Raymond, “The Theory of Illumination in St. Bonaventure.” www.themonksofadoration.org. (2004): “The memory retains and represents to us successive, simple, and everlasting things. By the retention of the past, present, and future the memory is an image of eternity which extends itself to all times. The memory retains simple things which are the principles of continuous and discrete quantities. These principles or simple forms can only come to the memory from above. Everlasting things concern the principles and axioms of the sciences which are changeless truths. These changeless truths in the memory come from a changeless light present in itself.”

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For both Hegel and Bonaventure consciousness must approach existence, whether it be itself-in-itself or self-with-others, in a way which is not in general but in all its individual particularity, and yet without surfeiting its universal life. This particularity must entail for the journey an incommunicability incompatible with the demands of Hegel’s absolute knowledge. If we suspend temporarily that fundamental difference so as to peer into the recesses of an overlooked Hegelian synthesis regarding history and its immanent transpositional happening within each particular person, we can and should ask whether he can resolve the antitheses of unfolding consciousness into a synthesizing unity with the Absolute, or does he recoil from the implications of such a journey? For Bonaventure, this tension is present in the soul’s approach, not to faith in general, but to this faith, in all its particularity and incommunicability. While Hegel speaks from an idealistic perspective seeking to overcome that incommunicability and unknowability, he goes about it in a primordial manner, which avoids so much of the idealistic trappings and shortcomings. Does he not, to some degree, and therefore united with Bonaventure, demand a particularity within the home of consciousness, attempting to undue the generalisms, objectivisms, and so-called eternal verities that are spoken of as “ideas” only, but which are not encountered in the full act of being one with the Weltgeist?50 The tension of the universal in Hegel’s phenomenology is, in its own dyadic oppositions, the individual journey of the mind into the Absolute as Absolute; it is a journey of reason confronting, oppressing, battling, and subordinating reality until reason recognizes the need for reality by way of the distortion of subject and object, I and other. The tension thereby exposes the so-called indifference of the universal when faced with the particularity of the individual. It also expresses the dialogical movement of the individual act which reasserts itself as the expression of the universal, so that any conceiving of the universal reveals the soul’s need for itself to be its own, as well as its tacit desire for union with the Absolute: In this way self-consciousness is related to a twofold antithetic essence; it is in its own self a contradiction, and is distraught in its inmost being. The law of this particular heart is alone that in which self-consciousness recognizes itself; but the universally valid order has, through the realizing of that law, equally become for self-consciousness its own essential being and its own reality. Thus, what contradicts itself in its consciousness has for it in each case the form of essence and its own reality.51

The Hegelian dyadic tension—a perceived futurity of the Absolute-as-Other— manifests itself in the present by way of association and dissociation of the individual withinand-toward that Absolute-as-future. These associations and dissociations are coerced 50

51

Cf. PS, §372. “The individual’s act is supposed to be the act of his particular heart, not a free universal reality; and at the same time he has in fact recognised the latter, for his action has the significance of positing his essential being as a free reality, i.e. of acknowledging the real world to be his own essential being.” PS, §375.

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into the present by memory, making the memorial act both futural and recollective. This memorial act enables the individual to think within and toward the Absolute-asfuture because it overcomes the deficiencies in consciousness when quarantined to subject versus object thinking. The movement of reason into the purity of the Geist is for Hegel the pan-emergence of the pure individuality of self-consciousness.52 This is not a leaving behind of the past but a re-appropriation or internalization of what already is internal: “Spirit attains to a knowledge of itself not only as it is in itself or as possessing an absolute content, nor only as it is for itself as a form devoid of content, or as the aspect of self-consciousness, but as it is both in essence and in actuality, or in and for itself.”53 As such, the often divisive problem of objectivity, which prevents the conversion of reason into the Geist, is sublated. There is a sympathetic parallel to this so-called overcoming of objectivity in Bonaventure’s mystical hierarchy and journey of the soul to God. If, for Hegel, the birth of “objectivity” as it appears at the onset of the confrontation of the I with other can so often lead to premature terminations of the absolute individual’s movement into its ownmost appropriation of absolute knowledge of the universal, it can lead man into the neuroses of the “unhappy consciousness”54 in which the individual lives within a bifurcation where the other, unable to be assumed, is indifferent and does not return recognition, later to become Sartre’s freezing gaze of the Other. Man becomes isolated in this struggle, which the advent of “objectivity” brings to self-consciousness in its journey to absolute knowledge. Perhaps Hegel would deem the Bonaventurean hierarchy as terminating prematurely the sublation of the otherness of existence into self-consciousness when it concedes the transcendency of the divine. Nevertheless, the extent by which Bonaventure universalizes the intimacy of the “I,” especially in the Itinerarium’s starting point, reveals a journey where nothing that is or is real is left untouched by consciousness. The fundamental question is whether the consciousness which touches all isn’t itself undone and reshaped by what it touches. For Bonaventure, it is necessarily reshaped by the Other and must therefore reflect its connatural, dependent status. Consciousness is always touched, especially as it touches and takes in the world. Consciousness becomes a reflection of the non-sequential because it is, in a way, all things and because it cannot take in the other as source as the orderer of existence, and because its action is not as such chronological but foundational of all chronology. Because consciousness must be in a way all things, when it attempts to take in the cosmogonic Other, it interiorizes this beyond knowledge Other, only by being utterly subsumed by the Other, becoming per impossible but truly, the Other as Other! Thus, man is already outside himself in the futural and recollective even before he takes anything in noetically. Consciousness can be, in a way, all things: Bonaventure, St. Thomas, and Hegel would agree. But in what way? How the way and order are manifested depends upon the ordination of the Other,

52 53

54

Cf. “Religion in the Form of Art.” PS, §699–747. PS, §794. And here McTaggart’s temporal A-Series as dynamic, irreducible to motion or psychology, has its justification. PS, §197–230.

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which is the non-linear, indelibility beyond but not contrary to reason. No amount of consciousness as consciousness-of can overcome that difference, and itself ordain the order. Heidegger at least understood the wait. The memorial act seduced Hegel, as it does all men, because it shows us that the soul is, in a way, all things. But memory always re-affirms the Other, which cannot be taken in except by being taken in by It. This is precisely what Hegel could not accept and what St. Bonaventure utilizes as the very basis for the Itinerarium, and from which St. Thomas never strays in his realism. As consciousness is consciousness of, it is re-shaped continuously into an expression of Otherness and dependency. Hegel sensed this truth in the power of memory to bring forth that of, to interiorize the world of things and actions even as the mind finds itself at a distance from those actions. Memory as a recollective and futural act provides a way to go from image to concept (vorstellung to begriff), which places man in the center of the temporal order not merely as a passenger moving along or adrift within its tide. So did Augustine. But Hegel retreated from the Other as irreducible to the memorial act. Man is in movement and yet while moving he has the ability to step away from it without stepping outside of it. This is what Hegel desired but rejected in advance: the Other which provides both the movement and the recollection of it, the experience and the meaning, requiring an immediacy only recognized, if at all, after the experience and, thus, paradoxically mediated by the step back out of immediacy. This is the dance of nature and grace and together they constitute the political nature of human existence as a sort of recollective photograph, unable to reconstitute that immediacy and yet providing some way toward its truth.

Nature, grace, and the political problem of futurity Grace floods nature with its meaning and together they encompass the memorial and the futural. This coinherence requires and enables human temporality to be converted into the non-sequential ordering of human existence. This non-sequential ordering can go a long way into dialogue with a postmodernist theology which recognizes that non-sequential transience of Being but which, having side-stepped metaphysics and theology, reduces it to an endless perspectival onticity. While time as change is wholly predictable, it is within and in the midst of its very predictability that transcendent meaning is estranged. This is the motivation not only for the Marxist error but also for the entire edifice of modern atheistic humanism. The neediness for the other, for perfection, for the divine life, is not only present but also becomes the all-consuming self-presence whose perfection does not subsist in consciousness but in its groundless, imageless foundation. Consciousness, especially as it is dispossessed, is always connected to the aniconic. This phenomenological fact reveals that man needs grace in a vital way, without subjugating grace to an empty postulate estranged from nature. To rise above change is not so much to rise above temporality as it is to rise into the imageless mythos of human (and social) existence as the primal realm of Otherdom. Time is not at odds with grace: grace entrenched in nature gives time its non-sequentiality, so that man can look beyond the self-imposed telos ordained

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by consciousness, or the merely chronological ideologies of history, science, and even metaphysics, in order to find his unique anthropological status within the spiritual and the carnal, as well as within the social and political. When the need for grace is formulated by a coinherence, human futurity becomes what it could never be for Hegel: not a noetic possession, but a stretching forth of that mythic temporality whose pattern and appearance are known only to God. “That which hath been is now, and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.”55 Such a passage evokes the depth of Hegel and also his fatal misstep—reducing the futural and imageless to something not yet subjective and merely waiting to become a noetic possession. Man’s futurity is identical with the anticipatory power of the aniconic-as-Being-in-Itself. Because Being is beyond image as the foundation of image, man’s futurity indicates a stretching of his nature through and past changing time, chronology, history, and culture so as to retrieve his own memorial ordination. As the naturely otherness of God attempting to take in the underlying divinity we can neither exteriorize nor interiorize. We need consciousness to exteriorize the imageless in order to take in God-as-Man, so that we can know ourselves past time and its teleological extension. But this goal, while impossible, is nevertheless essential. It is the transnatural combativeness of the soul’s self-presence being stretched along time by its own futurity, conferring on itself its own memorial ordination. The coinherence of grace and nature alters temporality, confirming man’s non-sequential anthropology. Grace enables the universal, once set “above” time, to become personalized and intimate, without forfeiting the transsubstantial universality of Being. And this is traditio. The graceful transformation of time prevents any reduction of the mystery to a teleological extension where nature suspends grace into the unspecified end-of-history future. That kind of misplaced epoché or suspension can be found in progressivism and to some degree in Hegel. Both hold on to a futurity which does not and cannot have any place in existence precisely because everything is “already said and done” within this immanent domain, destroying all inklings of transcendence and genuine futurity. In this historical determinism, there can be no deepening, no alteration, no futural responsiveness, no otherness other than man. And because there can be no other other than man, this false futural carries no endurance. Marxism’s generalizing materialism is not unlike pure nature, for both are stripped of their existential signatories, lacking the directionality to bear divine or salvific meaning. Both therefore employ an understanding of futurity that must carry the “all” and at the same time are empty precisely because concrete nature can neither carry nor recognize its union in purgative grace. All things have been neutralized under the species of a generalizing nature; this is true of both Marxist materialism and Christianity when in denial of its Christocentric ground as To Be. The future alone is deemed “celestial” if it alone carries the full enchantment of grace or its political substitute. When the brutal vacancies of such a nature rear their heads and disenchant man of any possible salvation, those seemingly opposing worlds of materialism and of extrinsicized grace do not summon God, but an anti-Christ. If the future alone is reserved for grace, then,

55

Eccl. 3:15.

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for the time being, man needs an idol. Extrinsicized grace is at root in the rise of God usurpation, giving secularism its motivation. Hegel’s so-called immanentized futurity is nothing other than an indefinite sequence of images and perspectives which return to consciousness in the name of progressivism but can make no progress-in-time, but only confirm tediously an immovable consciousness-as-self-enclosed. It is not grounded in the aniconic which alone endures past image, providing images and ideas with movement, progression, cohesion, and poignancy. And that is why it has been aptly understood that the Second World War was largely a battle between the Right-wing Hegelians and the Left-wing Hegelians.56 Nature supplies man with Being ever out of sequence, and this might be called the parabolic efficacy of existence. Consciousness is memorial and existence is parabolic, and while time and change are wholly predictable, it is their very predictability that renders man’s re-unification of Being an un-predicated entrance that could never be either predicted or added up to. The sequence of the human soul is unrepeatable. Plato dispensed with philosophy and left it to allegory and to strangers because he sensed this. Kierkegaard spoke in parables because he understood this. The parable itself houses the terror and the hope, it points to a nature out of sequence, hiding in plain sight within the predictabilities of time and change.57 The non-sequential indicates that nature does not supply man with the in-sequence intelligibility needed in order to complete himself. It returns to the apophatic and imageless which consciousness as consciousness cannot master. When it seeks to master it, the Hegelian telos becomes the Marxist project: futurity is the “all and everything” but Hegelian pan-progressivism can have no futurity, for the futural act requires the irreducible otherness of forgiveness, fate, and the furies of the cosmogonic. Nature is received into consciousness in order to shape the receiver who evokes and assigns the name “nature.” This jostling of intentional priority finds the ontological first (nature) and the epistemological finality (consciousness) merging as one in memory. In memory, nature becomes subject and consciousness becomes object—their joint memorial a living ordination beyond but not outside themselves. Consciousness is always consciousness of—nature interiorizes the world to consciousness and consciousness exteriorizes nature and itself—and the of reveals and requires knowledge to be an immanent act, not an isolated cogitation. The of is the point de départ of memory borne on the mystery of self-presence as futural, thus raising and resolving the problem of self-identity over time. Nature can be more interior than consciousness and consciousness finds its natural abode beyond itself where it has not yet been retrieved 56

57

Cf. A. Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. H. Nichols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980). For a near-perfect expression of oddness hiding in plain sight, within and as the predictable/the everyday see Rumi, “We Are Three,” in We Are Three: New Rumi Poems, trans. C. Barks (Athens, GA: Maypop Books, 1987), 6: “I am part of the load not rightly balanced I drop off in the grass, like the old Cave-sleepers, to browse wherever I fall. For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dustgrains floating and flying in the will of the air, often forgetting ever being in that state, but in sleep I migrate back. I spring loose from the four-branched, time-and-space cross, this waiting room … . Everyone does this in different ways knowing that conscious decisions and personal memory are much too small a place to live.”

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or absorbed by itself. Before and in the midst of all divisions is an interchangeability of unity in the of-as-memorial. In this regard Hegel finds a measure of provisional unity with St. Thomas: What belongs to external nature is destroyed by contradiction … but mind has the power to preserve itself in contradiction and, therefore, in pain … Ordinary logic is, therefore, in error in supposing that mind is something that completely excludes contradiction from itself. On the contrary, all consciousness contains a unity and a separation, hence a contradiction … But contradiction is endured by mind, because mind contains no determination that it does not recognize as a determination posited by itself and consequently as a determination that it can also sublate again. This power over all the content present in it forms the basis of the freedom of mind.58

Hegel and St. Thomas depart over the issue of the divine intellect in History. When the historian attempts to lay claim to the memorial-as-immortal, he ignores the mythodramatic in favor of a self-sequentialized order dominated by the historical consciousness identical with existence. Hegel recognized the non-linear in the phenomenological varieties of historical experience and elevated history, not mere temporality, into the domain of philosophical inquiry, but in the end he could not face the implications of such a stance which would invalidate the primacy of absolute reason at the hands of the ineluctable, and it is this which renders his philosophy of history paradigmatically gnostic.59 Hegel takes futurity and makes of it a progressivism, abolishing thereby futurity—for no progressivism can exist with or accommodate real futurity—and denies the aniconic with an endless litany of perspectives no longer imagistic. What exactly this imageless futurity brackets and illuminates is the non-linear mythodrama of man’s noetic engagement with otherness-as-himself before reflection arranges and configures an order issued from consciousness. Consciousness as conscious-self cannot help but linearly to spring from and end in man’s reflective stance, inside that horizon; thereby it manifests the linear, chronological, and even the dialogic interrelationship of the temporal and eternal discoverable finally in the historical. Even in the profoundest depths of consciousness-asorderer, man is combatting his ownmost perfection in an otherness he can neither be nor attain. For the man-in-history, his claims to an enduring historicality find themselves in a struggle to attain an ever-disengaging immortality. Because history cannot consummate or acquire the immortality which in fact frames history as such, in its historical arc, this failing reveals, therefore, history to be against, or at least at odds with, the inner memory

58

59

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971), §382 appx. This overcoming of contradiction, of the exterior as interior, can be seen in St. Thomas’ understanding of the interior senses as related to the intellect: Cf. ST I, 78, 4, ad. 5: “The cogitative and memorative powers in man owe their excellence not to that which is proper to the sensitive part, but to a certain affinity and proximity to the universal reason, which, so to speak, overflows into them. Therefore they are not distinct powers, but the same, yet more perfect than in other animals.” Cf. J. Maritain, On the Philosophy of History (New York: Charles Scribners, 1957), 22.

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of man.60 Consciousness-as-self cannot separate or know itself without the horizon that its own combativeness with the general and the ideational other of extension and linear futurity procures. The cessation of such extension does not overcome the self ’s enclosure in itself-as-other but reaffirms a cyclicity of origins and termini, all of which point to the non-sequential but cannot place man in it.61 Man-resolved-in-consciousness therefore never rises above the historical, which history itself needs if, paradoxically, man is to be an historical being, a being one with the immortal and the enduring, where endurance is his own and not of a generational or historical tide. To be beyond the historical, the intimacy of each soul must involve itself in the non-sequential, which reveals not only knowledge but also Being itself to be anamnetic. If Being-as-existence is anamnetic, then noetically man cannot not involve himself; the entrance or passageway into the mystery of mythic temporality is existence itself. This, to some degree, Hegel understood and understood profoundly. Hegel attempts to overcome the easy and often unproductive bifurcation between the finite and the infinite precisely because it prevents in advance the trans-noetic journey of consciousness into its ownmost regions as otherness revealed interiorally. Philosophical structures which stop in an unreflective finite stance at the gates of the infinite have misappropriated both dialogic regions of consciousness.62 Hegel, having set up the main objection to his phenomenological interpenetration of the finite and infinite in the following passage from his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, considers such a position to be a profoundly anti-phenomenological stance: There is no passage from the finite to the infinite, no bridge between the two. We are these limited natures [Wesen]; hence we cannot with our consciousness get

60

61

62

Cf. The Agony of Christianity, 9. “Life is a struggle, and the universal will-to-live is a struggle which manifests itself in struggle … . And what unites each individual man with himself, what produces the innermost unity of our lives, is our inner discords, the internal dialectic of our discords. And, like Don Quixote, we never can make peace with ourselves except in dying. Now if such is the nature of physical or corporeal life, the life of the psyche or the spirit is in its turn a struggle against eternal oblivion. And against history. For history, which is the unfolding of the thoughts of God upon this earth lacks an ultimate human finality and is en route toward oblivion and unconsciousness. And all human effort tends toward giving to history a human finality; a supra-human finality, according to Nietzsche, who was the great dreamer of that ultimate absurdity: a social Christianity.” Whether Christian or not, all of modern existentialism springs from such an articulation of existence always exiled from academic philosophy. For this, see the still classic W. Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1962). Cf. M. Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. S. D. Madariarga (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1952), 308: “Culture is composed of ideas and only of ideas, and man is only Culture’s instrument. Man for the idea, and not the idea for man; the substance for the shadow. The end of man is to create science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be handed back to Godin order, as I wrote years ago in my novel, Amor y Pedagogia. Man, apparently, is not even an idea. And at the end of all, the human race will fall exhausted at the foot of a pile of libraries—whole woods raised to the ground to provide the paper that is stored away in them—museums, machines, factories, laboratories … in order to bequeath them—to whom? For God will surely not accept them.” Cf. M. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 1985), 323: “In every [concrete] experience there is the whole of reality. That is, experience or reality is not divisible into parts or departments; there are no distinct and separate … fields of knowledge. In every judgment whatever something is [implicitly] asserted of the whole reality.”

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across the abyss, we cannot grasp the infinite. The infinite is just infinite, and we are finite, for our knowledge, feeling, reason, and spirit are limited and persist in their limitedness. But this talk is already contradicted in what has been said. It is undoubtedly correct that we are limited; so we are not talking about the limitedness of nature but about the dependence of reason. However, it is equally correct that this finite element has no truth, and reason is precisely the insight that the finite is only a limit.63

Is Hegel on the road to an immanentization of all historical determinations wherein the ability to read and engage such immanentization requires an almost messianic stance within existence? Is he is taking on such a position in order to enable the phenomenologist step “outside” or beyond the Geist to read it as such? Continuing with the passage from the Lectures: Inasmuch as we know something as a limit, we are already beyond it. The animal or the stone knows nothing of its limit. In contrast, the I, as knowing or thinking in general, is limited but knows about the limit, and in this very knowledge the limit is only limit, only something negative outside us, and I am beyond it. We must not have such absurd respect in the presence of the infinite. The infinite is the wholly pure abstraction, the initial abstraction of being according to which limit is omitted–as being that relates itself to itself, the universal within which every boundary is ideal, is sublated. Therefore the finite does not endure, and inasmuch as it does not endure, there is also no longer a gulf present between finite and infinite, [they] are no longer two. Because the finite vanishes in a semblance or a shadow, it therefore also admits of no passage to infinite. The starting point is certainly the finite, but the spirit does not leave it subsisting. This is the more precise development of what is called knowledge of God. Knowledge of God is this very elevation.64

Consciousness as self cannot separate or know itself without the emerging image of its own combativeness with the general and the ideational other of extension that linear futurity procures. The cessation of such extension does not affirm the full interpenetration of the finite and infinite as instantiations of the enclosed-self as the fullness of the Other, but reaffirms only a cyclicity of origins and termini, both of which point to the non-sequential but cannot place man in it. This may very well be Hegel’s downfall, his refusal to see time for what it is. Nature does not supply man with the in sequence élan needed in order to complete himself. Nature supplies it out of sequence, so that nature both has and has not man’s end. Nature is neither infirm nor healthy, but of another category outside both sickness and health.

63

64

G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, & J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 172. Ibid., 173.

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Death and non-sequential temporality The eternal holiness of you, The timeless end, you never knew, The peace that lay, the light that shone. You never knew that I had gone A million miles away, and stayed A million years. The laughter played Unbroken round me; and the jest Flashed on. And we that knew the best Down wonderful hours grew happier yet. I sang at heart, and talked, and ate, And lived from laugh to laugh, I too, When you were there, and you, and you. —Rupert Brooke65

Death is, in all three ages, the primal exemplar of the non-sequential, the underlying indication by dispossession of that end-as-perfection for the human condition. As the gateway to happiness, death-as-neediness is the non-sequential futurity which must— somehow—be avoided in life and yet is the meaningful presence which life seeks out. Life (especially life in the polis) is the continual suppression of the very ordination it seeks out and yet this combativeness is necessary. Any shortcut or linear ordering of this mystery would negate the meaning of the imageless pre-possessed in man, causing its appearance to be but the overwhelming indifference of the cosmogonic. The nonchronologically compact, illuminated in both the entrance to and aversion of death, can be described by man’s existence-in-groaning, desiring emancipation from nature’s jarring twofold necessity: 1. Cosmogonic nature: the cosmogonic is the neglectful disregard for man’s presence in and to the world. The nurse of becoming is no loving mother. This disregard lives at the level of a voracious yet un-willed disinterested violence always encroaching upon the wholeness of personhood. Man attempts to dominate or submit to it, becoming either master or slave. He then either attempts to find meaning in its brutal force, causing a spiritual neurosis, or flees from any possible meaning, foreclosing the purgative way in which the divine is encountered in the aniconic. “And going a little further, he fell upon his face, praying, and saying: My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”66

65

66

R. Brooke, “Dining Room Tea,” in The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (London: John Lane, 1915), 93. Matt. 26:39.

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2. Post-fall conditioned nature: the naturalness retained in the post-fall condition is the natural order of man inhabiting the unnatural disorder by way of man’s attempts to claw himself out—per impossible—of the unnatural. The natural is therefore the total concession to man’s non-emancipation without abandoning the ascending movement and immortal yearnings of the natural, even in death. Hope is not wishful thinking but an endless re-enactment of trust—trusting our place within the stretching forth of our own temporality into the sheer imageless Other. “Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears to him that was able to save him from death, and was heard, in that he feared.”67 Together, the cosmogonic and the post-fall retentive natures continually exaggerate, highlight and yet suppress the non-sequential. Through their interruptive combativeness, human temporality emerges. Nature’s non-emancipatory struggle is reflected as the present is continuously being re-placed, only to be re-placed again by recollection. In and through man, the recollective peers into the futural which is isolative in its aniconic status. This isolation is an intimacy in hiding; it is the uniqueness of one soul’s unknowing filiation in the Other. The recollective furiously seeks to recover from the futural Other pre-possessed in all things, causing the recollective to be stretched out in temporality. What the Other has pre-possessed is the self ’s unknowing residence in the Other. This pre-possession thereby places futurity fully within the present without immanentizing it. Nature is the life, the élan vital, of the present. The recollective stance which spans the futural is the graceful ability to rise into temporality: nature is the moment and grace is the horizon where natural ends are elevated beyond ideational trajectory to a permeation of the present, without reducing itself to but always escaping that present. Nature and grace are the meaning-givers of our temporal status. Read without grace, nature is a conception of the present without the invocational stance that casts it as distinctively, distinguishably “present” in its appearance. Without grace man is without nature for he is without time. Time requires something to unify the non-sequential without reducing it to a lifeless chronology. Grace is that unifying principle, enabling nature to be open to the reception of itself without losing itself in that extension which is death itself. When man fell, nature fell, and groans in painful anticipation.68 How else is it even possible, let alone necessary, to redeem the time?69 Death as futural is beneath image and cannot give sequence to our secret ordination: nature thus again indicates and yet does not contain our end. Man re-possesses his endas-perfection by way of dispossession. Man’s stretched-along-time recollective status constantly in-forms the present. The present is marked with a terrible hesitation to reflect inwardly upon itself informed by the futural’s imageless self-presence. But man cannot not peer: the present is maintained in the step-back peering, which is the very appearance of the present. The glance itself maintains the present while disengaging 67 68 69

Heb. 5:7. Rom. 8:20–22. Cf. Eph. 5:16.

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us from it, stretching us further along the road of otherness which may receive man as consciousness but refuse to return consciousness to itself. Isn’t this the necessary but always possible meaning of the philosophical act par excellence: the step back, the participatory spectator’s larger, but not thereby abstract, field of vision, where doing less means seeing more. Isn’t this Plato’s conception of the meaning of metaphysical knowledge?70 In this non-emancipatory struggle, the post-fall temptation toward unbridled, imageless futurity, filled with active constructions of the self, can be perhaps sympathetically understood, but only as deficiency, as a “learning through experience.” From the formation of the polis to the aversion to death—an aversion natural to an immortal soul71—the natural shifts into the artificial in order to reflect itself as natural but which leaves itself culpably vulnerable to losing its own image. The socalled natural man is in a precarious position, due partly to his post-fall condition and partly to the cosmogonic magnification of the impersonal within post-fall man’s estrangement. We cannot help but live out existence amid the natural and unnatural. The flight from death is natural for an embodied soul and yet can prompt unnatural, illusory and artificial surrogates and machinations. If the post-lapsarian ego should disregard the power of the non-emancipatory struggle of its present nature, then our flight from death becomes a denial of our nature, of the supernatural and of grace. This non-emancipatory struggle has become, in a way, man’s natural order and not merely a condition to be avoided, especially as this struggle situates the possibility of and readiness for redemption. Our ability to decipher the furious oscillations of the natural and unnatural, as well as the natural struggling to separate itself from the nonemancipatory, requires that our nature be inseparable from the grace it always needs. The natural flees its own descent, for it is natural to ascend. But the natural is in a doomed-in-advance struggle with the cosmogonic as death and cannot help but descend. This deathly descent is the unveiling of the imageless as unforgivingly impersonal. And yet as impersonal, it doubles as the transnatural catalyst for penance, redemption and a renewed nature, for dust we are and dust we shall be. The impartial, indifferent, impersonal death is how man is received into the aniconic, which alone gives him his mythically real temporality. In the combativeness of the cosmogonic and the post-fall nature, man is exaggeratedly open and exaggeratedly closed. He is open to an end he cannot know or reach, and because he cannot know or know even how to desire what he naturally desires, he is frightfully closed in the metastasis of his fallenness and repulsion from the cosmogonic. The indefinite distancing of the death, which itself cannot be separated from man’s natural spiritual comportment, contradictorily promotes in him an infirmity, impeding access to his non-linear prevenient openness to grace. Societal man forages for an alternative historical immortality and then transplants it upon human acts. In all its forms, for ill or for gain, the polis is the “artificial” construct of consciousness. It is a unified historical “immortality” tracing the non-sequential only by its escapism 70 71

Theaetetus, 149b–e. Cf. SCG IV, 81; See also A. C. Pegis, “St. Thomas and the Meaning of Human Existence,” in Calgary Aquinas Studies, ed. A. Parel (Toronto: PIMS, 1978), 49–64.

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from it; the polis is a fleeing-from-death, which in turn has a degree of naturalness to it insofar as it befits the terror of a naturally needy immortal soul unable to accommodate the reality of death, which contradicts its super-natural nature. The polis therefore both protects and squanders the super-natural ordination of man precisely because it is built as a post-fall articulation of and response to this twofold dueling nature. Aristotle was right then: man is by nature a social, political animal, but this is nature in its fallen condition. And this is the virtue of conservatism, and also its failing, this recognition of the human condition in opposition to the revolutionary irreverence for tradition and the limits of the polis. What else is the origin of the dispute between the state of nature theorists and the “man is by nature a social animal” natural law theorists? Man’s reclusive super-natural nature can be described by its contradictory impulses concerning the formation of the polis. Man is a social and political being, and this is natural to him; it would be un-natural not to be in and of communal being. The polis is, therefore, the societal suspension of the relentless antagonism of the cosmogonic, enabling culture, education, and epistemological order. This artificial suspension is necessary if man is to communicate a fallenness, a struggle with nature, which he can only communicate if the appearance of a “distance-from” nature and fallenness is present, and without which reflection is impossible. And thus the natural polis is also and at the same time and for the same reason artificial, a fragile and delicate exotic human flower, giving Hobbes his due. The polis is the “natural” bonding of mankind to form the un-natural communal suspension-and-vision, which conceives—per impossible—a distance between man’s meaning and his fallen/non-emancipatory nature. Because there can be no ontological severing of man’s nature from his reception of meaning, the “distance” provided by the polis, while “necessary,” is itself never really provided. What the polis provides is a facet of that very same non-emancipatory struggle: the polis brings into vision, in culture, arts and the sciences, a greater obfuscation of our unique temporal directedness in favor of an accentuated historical immortality which cannot persist, except in the forms of “immemorial usage.”72 Culture suppresses what it seeks out: while seeking the immortality of man in his ownmost incommunicability, it begins with the contradictory epoché, the suspension of the cosmogonic ground. Therefore, only the idea (and never the immediacy) of mankind can be immortalized by the poet. The poet especially needs the suspension in order to mouth the unsaid, but the suspension itself ignores the power of the unsaid to overwhelm all things, especially and including the suspension. Can the poet survive the fact that the epoché does and does not provide distance? Even as the greatest poets and philosophers sing of this tragic wisdom, that they do not know how to distinguish fully the truthfulness of their ancient musings from those musings tinged with a distance, suspension, or perspective that, in reality, they cannot possess: Long ago I taught my thoughts to run Where all the great things live that lived of yore, And in eternal quiet float and soar; 72

Cf. “Ten Conservative Principles,” 19.

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There all my loves are gathered into one, Where change is not, nor parting any more, Nor revolution of the moon and sun.73

But the poet must sing, and hold on to this mimetic intangibility, for it is far more beautiful to sing the unsaid even were the unsaid an illusion reshaping and reclaiming man.

The polis beyond maieutics: The necessary evil Education is a form of leisure distancing us from death. Acquired knowledge enables man’s fallenness to appear as if it is outside him; as if it is outside and separate from the very same man who is unknowingly peering from the window at himself in order to record the dis-ordination of nature! In education, we are often unaware that our own dis-ordination is being disguised in the very knowledge of dis-ordination.74 The “outsideness” created by education, while itself infirmed, is “necessary” if we are to survive the competing and unified infirmity of fallenness from nature itself. We must find a stance, a foothold, a place in nature, a podium from which we can articulate Being. And yet this very survival consigns us to a lack of preparedness to encounter the aniconic implicities of human temporality. Knowledge must soon become its own disenchantment with itself. While ignorance carries with it a deathlike stance, knowledge in its manifold conceptual scaffolding has its own and even deadlier posturing. One cannot refuse to know nor can one resolve oneself to a static disenchantment without the premise of futurity. Futurity binds us to a freedom for consciousness to take in the world, and express our self-presence. Each annunciation brims with contingency, expectancy, newness, revelation, surprise, and the comedy of forward movement and failure. The place of knowledge is secured. But it is precisely that security which endangers knowledge, depriving it of its quality of

73 74

“For W. P.” Sonnet III, 30. Cf. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Harper, 2009), 71: “We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture … . The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost. From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may ‘conquer’ them. We are always conquering Nature, because ‘Nature’ is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same. This is one of the many instances where to carry a principle to what seems its logical conclusion produces absurdity.”

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being a relentlessly moving and anamnetic recitation of Being. What is the advantage of education if it empties the heart of that idiosyncratic pre-knowledge mythos, providing education with its own limits, its “reality check” into the non-sequiturs of human existence? Tradition and its daily cultural idiosyncrasies form a comedic eros that upholds, protects, and prepares us for the tragic wait-drama. The comic-joyfuleveryday-longing for immortality incarnate in old photos, in the sacrament of the dinner table, in its cracked bone china, chivalry, ancient long skirts, first communion and last rites, define and historically refine the fine lines that form the walls of thisness or mineness, or thereness critical to the polis. The comedy of right reason and opinion and authority lies before and after knowledge and enshrines the mystique of the fragile and exotic flower of the polis. Plato recognized the risk of knowledge and the necessity for a comedic order within virtue prior to Education. Traditio, imitatio, and repetitio are the gentle and humorous preconditions of thought, preparing man to bear the terror and tension of his metaxic status, the impossible and necessary “know thyself.” Hobbes, Burke, Bergson, and Santayana were the last to sense this, but even they did not have the Christocentric sensibility to understand it. The joyful exodus movement of knowledge more often than not undermines itself when it becomes fastened and secured, converting the everyday comedic into corrosive ridicule. It soon becomes ideological thinking, but not because we unnaturally seek to make the present intellectual foothold a finality. It is only natural for immortal souls to seek out endurance in the purification of the Forms of the world, yet that natural quality lives in the non-emancipatory struggle of Being. And so, even Plato had tearfully to go beyond maieutics. Is this why he is missing from Socrates’ deathbed vigil—out of shame?75 Education’s natural inclination discovers its purpose in the un-natural, which, as un-natural, aims to deceive us. Man is presented with two alternatives: either he remains inside the polis natural to his communal identity, leading his knowledge into the unnatural circumnavigation of his soul, or he leaves the polis at risk of finding only the aniconic, which may receive him but will not return him to himself. With respect to the latter position, reflection upon the natural and unnatural is suspended. The movement of the cosmogonic is too quick for annunciation and yet man must be the bearer of Being, he must take on an aesthetic perspective for foothold. How long can man really abstain from the polis? He cannot remain outside the polis but re-enters it via consciousness, whether it is the monk’s cell or the familial home, the prison, or the firing squad.76 Knowledge as knowledge knows that there must be this finality, but equally apparent is the lack of finality in the world needed for knowledge to emancipate itself and affirm its own endurance. Man’s political directedness is natural to him and yet its condition is to create an artifice polis, distracting him from contact with the non-sequential ordination toward death—which is also, in a way, natural to him. The imageless implicities 75 76

Phaedo 59b. See M. Unamuno’s exchange with the fascist general Milan Astray in H. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 487–88.

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of human temporality—discoverable in the universal as incommunicable—then re-cast our comportment as solitary, as the unrepeatable horizon of personhood interior to each as the naturely otherness of God. The wayfarer, the solitary man outside the gates of the polis, having discovered that the polis is the attempt to sequence teleologically what cannot be sequenced, has entered the passageway into death and into the meaning he seeks out only after suppressing its possibility. This is the limitation of traditionalist conservatism and, worse, the guilt of a disintegrative liberalism. Death is not natural and yet death itself is always present in our non-sequential comportment, whether it is in the prelapsarian deathless neediness for the divine or in its post-fall variation tinged now with corruption. While being free from death is not an unnatural desire, neither is that free suspension from its grip within our natural powers. The prelapsarian state also indicates yet does not contain man’s perfection; it reflects only more acutely and more perfectly man’s nature. A static natural law foundation misses this as entirely as the corrosive antinomianism of the pseudo-rebel.77 Any placid natural order has serious problems if it is to function as a foundation for a metaphysics, philosophy, theology, or a political order open to transcendence. As much as the denial of nature has it vulgar repercussions it does, malgré lui, reflect the primordial truth of the non-emancipatory struggle of man-in-and-of-nature. A static natural-law foundation, the purpose of which is to cover over the beauty and terror of existence, cannot be the authentic opposition to a condition-only surrogacy, and it may in fact be far more damaging should that static nature somehow be, supposedly, the ground or foundation for real self-present transcendent meaning. If the two alternatives are a corrosive antinomian liberalism or a placid natural law conservatism—which strangely enough both have their roots in Hume—it is no wonder the Saint ends up being dismissed as a foolish wayfarer, having no place in the world to cling to nor a described nature to affirm, and yet he may be the secret sharer of, the essence of, the social polis, whose spectorial non-participatory act grounds all participation. Nature itself may be teleologically arranged insofar as man’s placement in history is viewed symbolically or exteriorized cartographically. But that teleological map, if it is genuine, must give way to the interior movements of the soul within a non-emancipatory nature. Any exegesis of our ordination and perfection requires the rediscovery of the non-chronological mythos of time. Nature presents its intelligibility in a way in which the grace with which it coinheres is always needed in order to hold it unified and without reduction.

77

Cf. G. Santayana, Animal Faith and Spiritual Life (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967), 355: “[The living world] is fluid and contradictory, and to assume the uniformity of human nature and the adequacy of private virtue to secure public good opens the door wide to tyranny and to political apathy. The orthodox then profess to know the man better a priori than he knows himself by experience; everything that departs from their conventions is set down for a disease, a sin, or a contradiction; and this innate obliquity in man their zeal must hasten to extirpate. No attempt to do justice to life or society is possible on such a basis.”

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Hegel’s betrayal The non-sequential is man’s true comportment both in his prelapsarian state and in his post-fall condition. In the latter, this temporal mythos is both accentuated and suppressed, hidden in psychologisms, moralisms, political ideologies, and sociological surrogates. The various modes of historical experience express instances of the nonsequential, which are critical to an authentic engagement with the implications of Hegel’s dialectic. The non-sequential involves itself in so many expressions of the Hegelian project and may serve to explain why Hegel attempts to immanentize and deny what he cannot reduce—namely, the unknowability and irreducibility of the Divine other, opening the door and setting the table for the mass political and God-usurping revolutionary movements to follow: the end of history in the name of history. Man’s aniconic temporal fidelity indicates that, in a way, he implicitly possesses his end or perfection and that nature is bound up in a coinherence with the project of the unfolding human soul. The Hegelian project serves as a collection agency, a supremely responsive filter, filing these non-sequential indications of man’s own possession of his terminus. Yet there is a sort of recoil in Hegel when he encounters the fuller implications of this position. The mystery of the non-linear may indicate the saturated presence of man’s end, but the moment he attempts to master it historically, eidetically, or teleologically— to give it an order reducible to immanentized consciousness—the inner directionality of the non-sequential disappears, and all that remains is a collection of perspectivally unrelated dialectical moments. How can the phenomenologist step outside the Geist in order to know it as Geist? Does not this “stepping outside” presuppose an “other” that his system has already demanded be sublated? What Plato could do—and even Hobbes and Hume could do—Hegel cannot do, nor can Marxism and Fascism. More than that, how does the Geist itself allow this “stepping outside” when such a posture could re-posit the memory of the Other-as-irreducible? Hegel, as Voegelin described the problem,78 must exempt himself from a perspective from which a good Hegelian cannot be exempted—from the historical determination of the present epoch. The indications of the non-sequential illuminated a perfection-within-existence. This leads Hegel to trace its perspectival varieties. But the moment those indications were seen to issue from a profound Otherness irreducible to, yet coinhered with, all actions, especially and including the meaning and nature of futurity, Hegel retreats into history. His retreat is marked by an important step, a scrambling against the falling rocks. For Voegelin, Hegel in turn designates himself as a messianic figure who alone is able to read the various configurations of existence. “Hegel must … . develop an imaginative project of immanent history, with the construction of ages that will include an ultimate age to be inaugurated by himself.”79 He cannot have an Other, but there must be an other! And that other must be reducible to consciousness and yet irreducible insofar as

78 79

Cf. Voegelin “On Hegel: A Study of Sorcery.” The Collected works 213–55. E. Voegelin, “On Hegel: A Study of Sorcery,” in Published Essays, 1966–1985. Collected Works, Vol. 12, ed. E. Sandoz (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 1990), 218.

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it can name itself from the outside as nothing other than consciousness, while refusing that exteriorization as anything other than a facet of consciousness. This is a delicate game on quaking ground, and within these machinations, Hegel’s respect for and ultimate rejection of the God-Man receive their weight: The death of the Mediator as grasped by the Self is the supersession of his objective existence or his particular being-for-itself: this particular being-for-itself has become a universal self-consciousness. On the other side, the universal has become self-consciousness, just because of this, and the pure or non-actual Spirit of mere thinking has become actual. The death of the Mediator is the death not only of his natural aspect or of his particular being-for-itself, not only of the already dead hush stripped of its essential Being, but also of the abstraction of the divine Being.80

Hegel stumbles against otherness, and finds that all historical variations other than Christ can be absorbed and reduced by consciousness. Christ becomes a supreme object of fascination for Hegel, for it is this God, this divinity as Absolute consciousness, as absolute knowledge, as absolute Geist unmasked, who enters into existence, who gives credence to the Hegelian project that no stone of meaning will be left unturned.81 Christ is Other but fully immanent in the world: He is the most efficacious Other. His unity of immanence and transcendence would be the pinnacle of the Hegelian project if only that divine descent could be sublated into consciousness. Christ as the very bearer and fulfillment of the non-sequential has indicated in his life and death such a union, but in a way which cannot be organized or mastered, or possessed by consciousness.82 Hegel could neither accept nor condone the dispossession at root in every possession of Being. When consciousness became proportionally identical with Being, dispossession was rooted out and, with it, Christ: “The [absolute] essence has thereby come to be its own Self in its sensuous presence; the immediate existence of actuality has ceased to be something alien and external for the absolute essence, since that existence is superseded, is universal. This death is, therefore, its resurrection as Spirit.”83 Christ as the “All” must be emptied of His content. Two mistakes which inhere in moralism are “one, that God cannot be good or worthy of worship unless he obeys the precepts of human morality; the other, that if God is not good after our fashion, our own morality is undermined.”84 But Christ, in His radical particularity presents 80 81

82 83 84

PS, §785. Cf. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 226: “Thought implies a new relation toward faith; that is to say, the aspect of Form enters into relation with the substantial element of truth. In the Christian religion this principle is present from the beginning. Regarded in one aspect, that religion starts, it is true, from an external history which is made a matter of faith; but this history at the same time professes to be the explication of the nature of God. Christ, in accordance with the distinction which directly enters here, is not merely a man, who experienced a particular fate, but He is also the Son of God. The explication of the history of Christ, the unfolding of its meaning, is thus the deeper lying element … . With this there co-exists a demand for ‘inwardness,’ for thought. The breach between thought and faith then develops itself further.” Cf. The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, 212. PS, §779. The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, 205.

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something to consciousness which consciousness cannot reduce, and thus Hegel could only recoil from that Universal Particularity, not so much by discarding the God-Man as naïve, but by conflating His descent into death as the final sublation of objective existence into the pure Spirit of Subject as universal Self-consciousness: The death is the painful feeling of the Unhappy Consciousness that God Himself is dead. This hard saying is the expression of the innermost simple self-knowledge, the return of consciousness into the depths of the night in which “I” = “I”, a night which no longer distinguishes or knows anything outside of it. The feeling is, in fact, the loss of substance and of its appearance over against consciousness; but it is at the same time the pure subjectivity of substance, or the pure certainty of itself which it lacked when it was object, or the immediate, or pure essence. This Knowing is the inbreathing of the Spirit, whereby Substance becomes Subject, by which its abstraction and lifelessness have died, and Substance therefore has become actual and simple and universal Self-Consciousness.85

When Hegel’s final sublation is complete—the idea of which is made possible only by the vision of the God-Man’s supreme universality made actual, particular, and encompassing—he must configure a way to be the reader of history in its historical progression! His recoil from the Mediator requires still the continued influence of that Mediatory presence, now proportionally identical to Absolute consciousness: Hegel, wholly of and inside the Geist, must messianically step outside of history to read and reduce its variations, thereby taking his cue, albeit erroneously, from the God-Man’s transhistorical entrance.86 While Hegel’s disciples have dismissed Christ as one of the finite variations of historical consciousness requiring sublation in order to reach absolute knowledge, it is apparent that for Hegel, Christ is not one of many variations but the underlying variation—the difference as such. Hegel needs consciousness to accommodate and subsume that difference as such if he is to complete the task of his phenomenological conquest of history. Hegel may, in the end, dismiss Christ, but not in the usual laic manner. He dismisses Christ through a conflation of the meaning of the God-Man’s death precisely because he could not dismiss Christ as a finite manifestation of the Absolute already identical with consciousness. In fact, Hegel has to use Christ’s own constriction as death, His own entrance into non-Being as the foundation for the God-Man’s dismissal in the speculative Good Friday. And this dismissal has all the indications of a sleight of hand, a supremely enchanted hermetical “grimoire,” as Voegelin described it, “a work of magic—indeed, it is one of the great magic performances.”87 It must be magic because it cannot be the result of any adherence to the real and sensuous power of the Pantokrator eroding all metaxic law in order to illuminate it anew. Hegel’s so-called magical act is precisely the only 85 86

87

PS, §785. Cf. “On Hegel: A Study of Sorcery,” 213–55. Royce, following Hegel, demands that Christ is the finite form that must be transcended! But Hegel nevertheless authentically sees something in the ultimate memorial figure of Christ that his system cannot reduce, and he recoils where Bonaventure does not. Ibid., 222.

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response which remains up his sleeve after having recoiled from the figure he could neither reduce nor accept as irreducible to time, consciousness, and history. As the meaning of time, consciousness, and history¸ Christ’s death is the revelation that He is beyond all sequencing as the aniconic made to be the image of the imageless. Hegel’s recoil is a powerful ratification of the sheer inescapability of the God-Man. Hegel’s disciples hastily accept that dismissal, yet neglect to examine or even to encounter what prompted it. It is perhaps more unfortunate that Hegel’s messianic presence as identical with consciousness has also been deemed the inevitable result of the GodMan’s entry into existence, prompting yet another, different and deeper recoil from the ineluctable figure of Christ.88 And this is to miss the meaning of history itself, as well as the history of meaning itself. With Hegel: Death becomes transfigured from its immediate meaning, viz. the non-being of this particular individual, into the universality of the Spirit who dwells in His community, dies in it every day, and is daily resurrected.89

Contra Hegel: 1. It was while invalided in hospital during the Great War that I began to record notes and souvenirs of the times and institutions under which I had lived, realizing that I had witnessed the suicide of the civilization called Christian and the travail of a new era to which no gods have been as yet rash enough to give their name, and remembering that, with my friends and contemporaries, I shared the fortunes and misfortunes of being born at the end of a chapter in history. —Shane Leslie90 2. Now I’ve told another little story, about me, about the life that might have been mine for all the difference it would have made. Which was perhaps mine: perhaps I went through that before being deemed worthy of going through this. Who knows towards what high destiny I am heading? (Unless I am coming from it.) But once again the fable must be of another. I see him so well, coming and going among his casks, trying to stop his hand from trembling, dropping his thimble, listening to it bouncing and rolling on the floor, scraping round for it with his foot, going down on his knees, going down on his belly, crawling. It stops there. It must have been I. But I never saw myself, so it can’t have been I. I don’t know: how can I recognize myself who never made my acquaintance? —Samuel Beckett91 88

89 90 91

See my remarks on Eric Voegelin, “The Dilution of Agonic Need.” The Philosophical Question of Christ, 102–06. PS, §784. S. Leslie, The End of a Chapter (New York: Charles Scribners, 1916), preface. S. Beckett, “The Unnamable,” in Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, ed. L. Lindgren (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 390.

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3. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. —G. K. Chesterton92

Dispossession and prayer The tremulous cosmogony of the aniconic and the wild abundant Love of the Father coalesce in the figure of the God-Man. That unity is always active within nature’s nonemancipatory struggle, enervating consciousness while invigorating Otherness. The God-Man, not immune to this movement of His own self-beyond-self, knew of that enervation of consciousness as an invigoration of the Other-in-Him.93 In the sensuous representation of the imageless revealing itself as Love being devoured by its own thirst, self-consciousness is presented with a vision it cannot sustain and yet furiously attempts to prolong: how can we recognize ourselves who never made our acquaintance? If consciousness could sustain this preliminary courtship, the vision itself would confer an immortality vaster than all historical typographies. But because man is understood only through that union, the world must be all too much: his consciousness must be capsized by the Other. As philosophy must become a disenchantment with Being, so must the world become all too much: the fullness and the vast emptiness of it, the terror of it, and the beauty of it will strip ideational consciousness and its singular immortality. Stripped of the reassuring return of self-consciousness in totum, man is a stranger in the skin of a lover, a wayfayer desiring desperately what he can no longer desire, or perhaps some version of Don Quixote battling windmills while being buried up to the waist in the ground—becoming a windmill of his own. In that place, where there is place but no longer time, this man receives any image, any meaning and cannot help but magnify it. “Is it not all too much” he cries? “Here all moves, swims, flees, returns, unmakes itself. All ceases, unceasingly. One would think it was the insurrection of the molecules, the interior of a stone one-thousandth of a second before it disintegrates.”94 92 93

94

Orthodoxy, 140. St. Marguerite Marie Alacoque reportedly heard these words spoken to her by Christ. Thoughts and Sayings of St. Margaret Mary (Charlotte, NC: St. Benedict Press, 1990): “I so ardently thirst to be loved by men in the Most Blessed Sacrament that this thirst devours me.” S. Beckett, “La Peinture des van Veldes,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. R. Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 128.

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If he is brave enough to see what is there to be seen, he resigns himself to its emptying fullness. Whether it is the loss of the beloved which no historical memorial can return, or the beauty of the Cross now transplanted to a quiet passageway in an even emptier home, or St. Francis with the animals knowing in them with painful, unrelenting cosmogonic clarity the unknowing love which is also the distance between man and God.95 Every image is overwhelmed with the meaning of Him who is beyond meaning. The intelligible order man places on things may be naïve; the simple teleology from “here” to “there” may well be the denial of his end as an incrucification. Every image interpenetrates that sweet and sanguine sacrifice of a day passed in the past always and never repassed. No immortality ever communicates our immortal needs, it traces only the peripheries of man’s cruciformity and cannot yet speak their meaning or low yearnings. Somehow for the man past the conformity with himself, his immortality becomes both inconceivable and yet necessary so that endurance exist. Between two thieves, every idea of endurance is a form of monument, of stone placard, of paper and elegy, which require that things have passed, that the image, once too full, is somehow no longer full enough to remain. And yet that which has been re-passed remains present, violating finitude by exaggerating it into a pantomime that demands the image be seen only in the dark. An image too full to be spent is now no longer full enough for keeping, violating creative fecundity while remaining faithful to the passage of time. What is natural is destructive. The artificial vainly procures the resources to hold onto the natural, while condition merely keeps the time but can never view the pantomime which the man—somewhat a self but no longer fully self-consciousness—has become. The wilderness reclaims the polis as reditus reclaims exitus: When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?” … . Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions. There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. You shall not deny the Stranger.96

The linguistic embodiment of the non-sequential, even beyond the poetic, is prayerful. Its temporal mode escapes linearization by an irreducible act, not of timelessness but of 95

96

Cf. G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2002), 267–68: “St. Francis must be imagined as moving swiftly through the world with a sort of impetuous politeness; almost like the movement of a man who stumbles on one knee half in haste and half in obeisance. The eager face under the brown hood was that of a man always going somewhere, as if he followed as well as watched the flight of the birds. And this sense of motion is indeed the meaning of the whole revolution that he made; for the work that has now to be described was of the nature of an earthquake or a volcano, an explosion that drove outwards with dynamic energy the forces stored up by ten centuries in the monastic fortress or arsenal and scattered all its riches recklessly to the ends of the earth.” T. S. Eliot, “Choruses from the Rock,” in T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1991), 156–57.

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an eternal timeliness. It is a reminder and more, the anamnetic recall of self-presence only in relation to the Other which encompasses all time.97 Prayer, stranger still, speaks incessantly of how in the end God is Love. Perhaps this is because meaning in some respects has broken down with the Fall; it is there but it is more often than not the presence of dead ends always imbedded within a world of images, actions, moments so heartbreakingly prolific that only Love can be their true endurance. The man past memory-as-memorial tells us that Our Lord weeps not because the world is empty—but because it is too full. Its imagistic fullness is scattered like seed within the soil of his fallen life, leaving him unable to navigate where and how beauty and fullness will appear, or as to when it will take him in and re-warm his heart. Endurance is a form of courage and thus man is capsized into the void and into its fullness, and, if he be brave enough, into a saintly and trusting disenchantment with even his own endurance. For the little lights dappled with shadow,98 grace is not an alien category transplanted onto an isolationist nature, but the indivisible and imageless kin that lets sleep, seasons, concentration, and rhythm, meson and metron, be stilled and renewed. Their unity prompts the non-chronological memorial intimate to, and unrepeatable in, each of us. Nature, ever bonded to the imageless image of grace, elicits man’s perfective terminus with such extractive proliferation that he is both in the midst of that perfection and dispossessed of it. These simultaneous thresholds, possession and dispossession, further man’s super-sensual dis-orientation within his temporally mythic comportment. Man re-finds himself dispossessed of himself within images so full and promising and then so fleeting, all of which carry the futural which itself never gives over any image. What was he seeing? Into what recess was he peering? Man is inside an image that is equally imageless. His anthropological directedness marked by freedom and love lays the predicate for Love itself to devour the strongest hearts and strongest inclinations toward Love’s own Presence. The imageless presence strips us of the response we need to claim our freedom; its trap promotes a new freedom. 97

98

Cf. Confessions, XI, xxiv–xxv: “But now my years are spent in mourning. And thou, O Lord, art my comfort, my eternal Father. But I have been torn between the times, the order of which I do not know, and my thoughts, even the inmost and deepest places of my soul, are mangled by various commotions until I shall flow together into thee, purged and molten in the fire of thy love. And I will be immovable and fixed in thee, and thy truth will be my mold. And I shall not have to endure the questions of those men who, as if in a morbid disease, thirst for more than they can hold and say, ‘What did God make before he made heaven and earth?’ or, ‘How did it come into his mind to make something when he had never before made anything?’ Grant them, O Lord, to consider well what they are saying; and grant them to see that where there is no time they cannot say ‘never.’ When, therefore, he is said ‘never to have made’ something—what is this but to say that it was made in no time at all? Let them therefore see that there could be no time without a created world, and let them cease to speak vanity of this kind. Let them also be stretched out to those things which are before them, and understand that thou, the eternal Creator of all times, art before all times and that no times are coeternal with thee; nor is any creature, even if there is a creature above time.” Cf. “The Rock.” T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems, 1909–1962, 170–71: “In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain. We are children quickly tired: children who are up in the night and fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long for work or play. We tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad to sleep, Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons. And we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it; Forever must quench, forever relight the flame. Therefore we thank Thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow.”

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Waiting for whom? In The Unnamable, Beckett plays on man’s effulgent impotence. When faces no longer have faces, and “I”s no longer have “Not-I”s, man soon finds himself terminologically unsound and terminally in need of response: It’s a lot to expect of one creature … that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.99

Man as an emphatically memorial being is carried by the fullness of grace which enables him to look into the imageless. Turning to possess it—which in a way is natural to him—causes his memorial ordination to hide in the aniconic. He then becomes divested of that endless infinite end always ahead of him, somewhere between timelessness and placelessness. By engaging existence as memorial, man’s profound need for grace reveals itself to be his own futurity stretching him out and transforming him. He is the spectator in the darkened theater of his own life watching himself wandering comically in search of his own meaning and not recognizing it in any of the props of his life, not even quite recognizing it in his own character. And the play itself? Who wrote that? Certainly not the Weltgeist. Prayer is the indicative form of man’s stretching forth into the futural. For the dying man even “the wish to pray is a type of prayer.”100 It elicits in consciousness the necessary surrender needed to survive the transformation of the self by means of the imageless and its void. If prayer is an engagement with the memorial and if, in it, humility kills pride— or consciousness is sublated, and the “I” is refused full and reductive disclosure in the “Not-I”—it dispossesses self-consciousness of its idea-self. Prayer drags consciousness into a placelessness where it encounters its own erotic impotence in assigning an order or sequence to the images, meanings, and hopes which confront it. Consciousness is unable to take in the fullness of the world because it is all too much. Through prayer, consciousness is no longer master looking down at the typographical and slavish external world, but accepts itself as cartographically stretched beneath even the historicity of its own self with others. Consciousness is chastened: prayer provides it with an agapetic abasement, a submerging into the very event where the cosmogonic meets the carnal ardor of a human life navigating what it cannot navigate, a world which is and is not its home, through which it is only passing through. On the way to what new world? Beckett describes the stripping away of the “I” and “Not-I” to its very base which is also the purgative process of prayer. “ I’ll have said it inside me, then in the same breath outside me, perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two … on the one hand

99 100

The Unnameable, 328. G. Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. P. Morris (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002), 103: “Faith is not a thing which one ‘loses,’ we merely cease to shape our lives by it.” “I know, of course, that the wish to pray is a prayer in itself, that God can ask no more than that of us.”

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the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.”101 The question remains as to whether God can survive this ascetic leveling of consciousness as consciousness of. For Hegel, God could not survive it. But Beckett, while no theist, differed dramatically from Hegel. God’s so-called presence was the almost muted utterance of the prayer, and any comfort provided is the “god” alive in consciousness. There is no comfort beyond the utterance itself. There is no God, only the utterance of the prayer as other. As such, Beckett ends in a much more genuine position than Hegel. He does not proceed in ignoring the in-additions of human existence whereas the later Hegel must overcome them, giving all things a disingenuous teleological synthesis. The act of prayer mirrors the supreme happening of the God-Man, even when it cannot believe in anything other than the presence of itself stretched out in order to endure itself. While prayer is often isolatingly reserved as the prime act of the believer, this avoids its nature as poetic responsiveness. The loving abasement of consciousness in the facelessness of divinity does not secure the de facto reality of the irreducible Other. It shows only its total-risk reasonability. All certainty would be meaningless if it did not carry risk: thus, the act of prayer as response to this must precede all divisions of subject and object, as Beckett understood, contra Hegel.102 To the mind that has raised itself to the grace of humility founded … not on misanthropy but on hope, prayer is no more (no less) than an act of recognition. A nod, even a wink. The flag dipped in Ave, not hauled down in Miserere.103

As a memorial act, prayer precedes both the atheistic and the religious affective posture. It is the prolonged evocation of man as the naturely other in the world, which may or may not be the naturely other of the divine. Prayer realizes that man plays out combativeness with the other that he is before he is an I. It kills pride precisely because it evokes the primacy of the other that pre-situates the self and thus as aniconic can destroy its eidetic enclosures. And this is the “idea of the holy”104 that universally unites as it divides all religions, East and West. St. Thomas recognized this priority of the Other in his understanding of sacrifice: Natural reason tells man that he is subject to a higher being, on account of the defects which he perceives in himself, and in which he needs help and direction from someone above him: and whatever this superior being may be, it is known to all under the name of God. Now just as in natural things the lower are naturally subject to the higher, so too it is a dictate of natural reason in accordance with man’s natural inclination that he should tender submission and honor, according to his mode, to that which is above man.105 101

The Unnameable, 376. Cf. D. Read, “Artistic Theory in the Work of Samuel Beckett.” Journal of Beckett Studies 8 (1982): 7–22. 103 “Humanistic Quietism.” Disjecta, 68. 104 Cf. R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. J. W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1958). 105 ST II-II, 85, 1 resp. 102

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While for St. Thomas the confirmed other discoverable in sacrificial prayer is wholly irreducible to man, and is God Himself, he affirms that the inclination to that Otherness consists in an interior combativeness naturally prefiguring any religiously affirmative stance. The dispossession of consciousness—which in a way is the disenchantment with philosophical thinking—is a primordial fact of being an actor in existence. This dispossession of the self occurs when its impotence or defectiveness is revealed by way of its inability to remain central or to endure except as a thing of the past—a monument, manifesto or, at its noblest, an elegiac longing for childhood, homeland, or tradition. The words, the monument, the reenactment of being there are no longer outside the self or unrelated to it but interpenetrate the propositional self, threatening to rescind the self ’s ability to be separated from the other. Hegel sensed this encroaching interpenetration: The absolute idea may in this respect be compared to the old man who utters the same religious propositions as the child, but for whom they are pregnant with the significance of a lifetime. Even if the child understands the truths of religion which these propositions include, he cannot but imagine them to be something unconnected with, and lying outside of, the whole of life and the whole of the world.106

The memorial and futural activity of prayer turns the tables on consciousness, revealing self-consciousness as secondary and founded. Beckett understood this with an intensity and an honesty often arrogantly absent in Christian scholarship where certitude trumps risk. So too did Hegel and it is why he flees, retreats, and recoils in later works from the anthropological implications of the Phenomenology. The interpenetration of self and other seduced him and helped to constitute the dialogic combativeness in which the varieties of experience become reflections of the Absolute. But Hegel could not endure the primacy of the Other, which saturated those varieties and reflections—those defects of the self that St. Thomas recognized as indications of the Other. Hegel turns the table on the possibility of dispossessiveness by divesting the absolute of its transcendence, and thus of any genuine immanence. By affirming a teleological rigidity to man’s non-sequential directedness, God died and so with Him prayer, becoming mere psychologism and a naïve instantiation of the developing world spirit: “Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer. One orients one’s attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.”107 Beckett as postmodern, post-Idealist, postwar, did not make the move to the Other, other than the shadow which man throws and which alone responds to his prayer. The needfulness is present and we—those with weak hearts and who yet believe— must thank him, strange as it sounds, for not believing. The place of thanksgiving 106 107

G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. W. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1904), §237. G. W. F. Hegel, Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel, trans. J. B. Stewart (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2002), 247.

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has peculiar coordinates and can only be applied when faces no longer have faces to stare at. In the realm before subject and object split and conquer the world, the realm before heterodoxy and orthodoxy, there can be a sigh of relief, and an odd gratitude for Beckett’s own rebellion against the self which could not take the shortcut to affirm the divine. When he affirms that the only comfort for the self is the self, words, he knows, fail him. He speaks precariously close to Hegel and lives miles away from that carnage, that reduction of the unnamable and irreducible dance, casting shadows even where there is no light, and where there are no walls. Courage becomes living with the words that fail us. Whether man ends as an I or as Other depends upon his origin. If man is indeed the other in primacy, that otherness overwhelms the I’s noetic and ideational distance and not only anchors him but also submerges and capsizes him into a world of risk, of images becoming imageless. And for the unnamable the magnification of existence is always too much: “hearing on and off a voice of which uncertain whether addressed to him or to another sharing his situation. There being nothing to show when it describes correctly his situation that the description is not for the benefit of another in the same situation.”108

The devaluation of the non-sequential We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.109 Our nature is elongated by our own ever-present futurity, which, as hidden and imageless, moves us outside ourselves to become re-made by the Other. This futurity helps to constitute our self-presence in the world and, if heeded, evokes the chastening anarchism at root in those in-additions of human existence, those orders, and actions that are very real and yet without place or home. Nature indicates yet does not contain man’s end. “Not containing the end” does not mean that nature simply lacks it, in an existentialist emptiness denying, with Sartre, that man even possesses a “nature” in violation of and contradiction to his radical freedom. Man is human, all too human, and the appearance of the futural as the beyond-beautiful is all too much to take in. “Paradise exists not merely in man’s memories, dreams and creative imagination. It is preserved in the beauty of nature, in the sunlight, the shining stars, the blue sky, the 108

S. Beckett, “Company,” in Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho: Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 32. 109 The Glory of the Lord, Vol. I, 18. Cf. R. Guardini, Meditations Before Mass, trans. E. Castendyk Briefs (Bedford, NH: Sophia Press, 2013), 173–74.

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virgin snow of the mountain peaks … the splendor of the animal world.”110 Magnify any aspect of human existence, and existence overflows with a virility marching to an end it can neither see nor master. Man himself marches toward his own decomposition while furiously attempting to endure and outwit the very futural end which reveals the self. Nature preserves the paradisal while being that cosmogonic indifference pulling man below the waters. When nature is magnified, it denies man any possibility of fully entering it, of becoming commensurate with its creative ordination. Man stands in awe of the beautiful only to become aware of an abysmal chill at his back. He turns to face the encroaching dark and then, disoriented, returns to his previous view and previous courtship only to find it is all the same: beauty is the abyss in hiding, and it cannot be claimed, reduced, or separated from goodness and truth. Any ideological artifice which claims the True and Good but disregards the fundamental entanglement of the retreating abyss as itself the transcending Beautiful is the fall into knowledge, and the enemy of love. Beauty born among the furies will indeed avenge this injustice! The testimony of the Saint—if he does exist, if he survives and lives to speak about it—is evidence of this impossible magnification. St. Francis lived out this impossible magnification which can only be survived through a series of renunciations. The dust of the earth and the little sparrow, if given more than a passing glance become man’s elemental entanglement with the retreating source of his vision and being. Their presence presents to the mind and to the soul a heartbreaking purity, a carnal wisdom which human souls both desire and do not know how to possess. St. Francis comes perhaps the closest to understanding this entanglement and achieves therefore the supreme inversion of any Hegelian sublation. The little things—and everything is a little thing—become, one by one, all too much, all too innocent, all too unknowing in the eyes of someone like Francis. Their magnification in turn intensifies the reality of man’s incommensurability so much so that the largest of hearts can only survive the interpenetration—indeed incrucification—of Love and fate by enacting a series of impoverishing renunciations.111 The world is enthroned in grace and its heart beats with an absurd and relentless causation known only as it conquers the soul. And yet, nature also ends in lack and emptiness, and those inklings of purity are preserved by renunciation only. Man resides in no-man’s-land, between nature’s paradisal windowsill 110 111

N. Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. N. Duddington (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 284. Chesterton even before he became a Catholic (as early as 1900) sensed and admired the strange and awful beauty of the figure of St. Francis. Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi, 187: “To most people … there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of Saint Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk and not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fully here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked; we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also.”

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and its self-same creeping furies; between beauty and terror, between his nature and his condition. He must remain here, in a way in which “remaining” is not usually understood: it is not keeping to the status quo. Because of our phenomenologically descriptive fallenness, nature ceaselessly delivers us into another state, which is another variation of the prior state, and never a progression in Hegel’s sense. In this wild and hidden oscillation we must move, refusing to succumb to our fallenness. But neither can man free himself from that movement both in and exiled from nature. Hegel acknowledged this tremulous undulation in the religious personality and especially as it embodies the unhappy consciousness. But Hegelian thinking terminates by becoming a prime example of denying the undeniable. Hegel chose to “remain” and attempt to outwit nature by building an artifice of Absolute Knowledge which can reclaim existence and free man from the shaky terrain of Otherness. Whenever consciousness reaches, says Hegel, a stage of genuine reason, it becomes sure of itself and rests from the vain labors of this suspicious self-questioning. It finds indeed a new field of work, and of intense and absorbing work, but not the labor of conquering these fantastic spiritual foes. It becomes assured that the practically humane life is, in meaning, one with the whole of reality. The unhappy consciousness, however, can in and for itself never recognize this fact. It will not wake up to its own truth.112

By dismissing the unhappy consciousness of the religious figure as a passing stage where the “passing over” affirms a progression to the mind’s status, dismantling nature’s mystery, Hegel played into the hands of the non-emancipatory struggle, and completed what Shestov called the fall into knowledge.113 At the hands of the conceptual tactician, our open ordination becomes either a folly of worthless open-endedness or a rigidity attesting to an open nature that it vilifies all the while praising it ad abstractum. It becomes either a progressivist liberalism or a timid conservatism. The impossibility of and necessity for the Christian polis lives on within this magnification, and this need to endure the terra infirma without dishonor. If the Christian polis is the visible Church and thus, invisibly, the very body of Christ, one realizes, as Maritain recognized, “that the Church exists under three different states, that of Heaven, that of the earth, that of Purgatory. When one says the Church glorious, the Church in pilgrimage, the Church suffering, one does not designate three different Churches, but the same Church, the same person of the Church, under the three states in question.”114 Because the impossibility affirms the necessity, the Christian polis is discoverable in these three presences of the Church, which continually re-invoke the oddness of the Church as in but not of the world. Yet the fact that it is not of the world is revealed by what is in the world, namely, Christ. The God-Man is the invisible

112

Lectures on Modern Idealism, 184–85. Cf. L. Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, trans. E. Hewitt (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1969), 1–28. Future Citations: K&E. 114 J. Maritain, On the Church of Christ, trans. J. W. Evans (South Bend, IN: UND Press, 1973), 45. 113

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perfection made visible in man who in turn often fails to find Christ. But man’s continual failing and succeeding are resolved in the hidden perfection made manifest in the Church. The Church in glory, on pilgrimage, and in suffering reveals that it is both freed from nature’s fallenness and also in a life-and-death struggle for souls in bondage. This struggle demands the very sacrifice of the Son, and the Church itself as the body of Christ Himself constitutes that sacrifice, revealing that the Perfect mingles with the unfailingly imperfect; the Perfect forfeits any distance from the imperfect in order to make even the imperfect not of the world. The lines therefore that divide and distance the “in” from the “of ” are not surgically cut and dry, but eschatologically inversed so as to be elevated into a third thing, which only the possessor of the nonsequential can grasp, namely, a novitas mundi, which all men desire yet do not even know how to desire let alone claim—Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre charnelle mais pourvu que ce fût une juste guerre.115 The Hegelian folly can tempt the Christian. The self ’s desire to find a premature release within the world competes with an anything-goes vulgar surrender to it. When the world is the object of consciousness, both mastery of and servitude to it end in identical postures. Consciousness separates itself from the world so as to reduce the otherness of the world to a form of consciousness. This is Descartes even before it is Hegel, and it ends in Husserl, after which it collapses exhausted in one form or another of political scientism, whether capitalist or socialist. While this reduction takes the forms of servitude and mastery, these roles are but aspects of the same consciousness which tidies the irreducibility of existence into a teleological extension of absolute knowledge. Everything subsumed in this extension has now its order and place. Progression is now commanded and has commenced, for consciousness is the root of the “object” no longer irreducibly other but the other end of that consciousness.116 This linear-becoming-circular progression frees man from time and place without rising above the immanent domain of absolute knowledge, in conscious contrast to Plato’s

115

C. Peguy, “Eve,” in Oeuvres Poetiques Completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 1028. The beauty of this notion of sacrifice is that man gains all and loses nothing in Christ. See also St. Eucherius of Lyons, On Contempt for the World, trans. H. Vaughan (Potosi, WI: St. Athanasius Press, 2013), 8: “The good we do to our own souls is the most acceptable service and sacrifice that we can offer unto Him.” 116 The Hegelian progressivism is identical with knowledge—an engendering or imparting of ideas which can only turn man’s reflection toward his present situatedness, and never reach the memorial as deathless. Rumi’s “Progress of Man” is a conscious alternative, a recognition of the secret untranslatable movement of the incarnated spirit. See Rumi, “The Progress of Man,” in Persian Poems: An Anthology of Verse Translations, ed. A. J. Arberry (Tehran: Yassavoli, 2005), 127–28: “First he appeared in the realm inanimate; thence came into the world of plants and lived the plant-life many a year, nor called to mind what he had been; then took the onward way to animal existence … . Again the wise Creator whom thou knowest uplifted him from animality to Man’s estate; and so from realm to realm advancing, he became intelligent, cunning and keen of wit, as he is now. No memory of his past abides with him, and from his present soul he shall be changes. Though he is fallen asleep, God will not leave him in this forgetfulness. Awakened, he will laugh to think what troublous dreams he had. And wonder how his happy state of being he could forget, and not perceive that all those pains and sorrows were the effect of sleep and guile and vain illusion. So this world seems lasting, though ‘tis but the sleepers’ dream; who, when the appointed Day shall dawn, escapes from dark imaginings that haunted him, and turns with laughter on his phantom griefs when he beholds his everlasting home.”

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anticipatory non-participating spectator who sees the forest and not just the trees by acknowledging transcendent Otherness, by becoming the other as other. The Self has become what it is, Weltgeist. “As conscience, it is no longer this continual alternation of existence being placed in the Self, and vice versa; it knows that its existence as such is this pure certainty of itself. The objective element into which it puts itself forth, when it acts, is nothing other than the Self ’s pure knowledge of itself.”117 The only unforgiving stance within this reductive progression is the unhappy consciousness that fly in the ointment needing decisive and irrevocable extraction. This consciousness, for Hegel, lives on through a series of ascetic renunciations in the face of encountering the self in a world of other selves. The unhappy consciousness recognizes the contradictory impulse of existence, the quest for the unalterable and everlasting in a world of the relentlessly fluid cosmogonic. The unhappy consciousness seeks refuge in the divine Other by first separating itself from its own unchanging qualities and positing them in the ethereal and hidden Other. When this refuge is overturned by the caustic historical progression rendering it irrelevant, no longer a source of comfort, the unhappy consciousness turns to the historical alternative of the Man-God. The unhappy consciousness envisions its transience118 a thing to be converted into eternality by the historically distant image of the Man-God. By overcoming the transcendent and immanent barrier, Christ provides a far more compelling refuge for the unhappy consciousness. For Hegel, this type of consciousness has rightly suspected the contradictory impulses of the self as both unchanging and fluid, yet has wounded its perspectival act by displacing one pole of that impulse—the eternal and/or transhistorical—onto the idea of an irreducibly divine Other. This displacement prevents the unchangeable from the possibility of returning to the changeable self and thus obstructs the realization that these internal inconsistences are but the historical stages of the Geist. Because, for Hegel, this phantasmal divine Other has the so-called power to reconcile in the future these contradictions of time and eternity, finite and infinite, the believing unhappy consciousness leaves itself denuded and stranded amid the vast emptiness of the empire of air: The unhappy consciousness, however, finds itself merely desiring and toiling; it is not consciously and directly aware that so to find itself rests upon the inner certainty of its self, and that its feeling of real being is this self-feeling. Since it does not in its own view have that certainty, its inner life really remains still a shattered certainty of itself; that confirmation of its own existence which it would receive through work and enjoyment, is, therefore, just as tottering and insecure; in other words, it must consciously nullify this certification of its own being, so as to find

117 118

PS, §792. Cf. Meditations Before Mass, 125: “Earthly things are buried in transitoriness, and for us eternity is still only a hope. We are unable to bridge the two. God alone makes this possible through what Scripture calls ‘the new creation’: transfiguration. The temporal is not erased, but assumed into eternity, there to acquire a quality for which we now have no concept. One day, though, our whole thinking, now locked in earthly transitoriness, will receive that liberating quality, and we shall be given along with the ‘new heaven and the new earth’ the new eye, which really sees, and ‘the mind of the Lord’ (Cor 2:16).”

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therein confirmation indeed, but confirmation only of what it is for itself, viz. of its disunion.119

The self-in-contradiction cannot be reconciled for Hegel, or rather it needn’t be reconciled precisely because the process of the unfolding Geist will overcome these so-called self-contradictions revealing them to be but facets of the Absolute Self in its finite variances of that self-same Self.120 Hegel sees and yet does not see the unhappy consciousness for what it is, and conflates two different types of spiritual comportment into one dismissive caricature. The renunciation and asceticism of St. Francis, for example, are not founded on a proto-Cartesian need to secure an unchanging apparatus of absolute knowability against a world of changing things. The metaphysical and religious sentiment which provokes the desire to shed and separate the recognition of change from the unchanging can be motivated by both authentic and inauthentic desires; some involve the chaste anarchism, while others woefully ignore it. If the unchanging is placed over and against the realm of change as if one cannot belong to the other, then the divinely dreamed end is a fantasy, an alien category that cannot be understood let alone encountered. The end of this fantasy is to return to the Hegelian herd and deny the relevance of God altogether, while appropriating a deformed understanding of knowledge as identical with Being. If, on the other hand, that slow sorting out of the changeable and unchangeable ends in the primal knowledge that man is in but not of the world, that man knows but knows not how to know what he is, then the unhappy consciousness, this soul in longing, is something Hegel never allowed himself either to envision or appreciate, and Kierkegaard could not forgive Hegel or his system for this. For this type of consciousness, what man is cannot be oriented by the world even though the world does provide all the clues, all the heartbreaking potencies, to unlock his secret and effulgent futural nature. What the unhappy consciousness recognizes, what St. Augustine, Don Quixote, Dostoyevsky, and Kierkegaard especially knew, is that nature supplies man’s fullness out-of-sequence, re-affirming again and again that the world both is and is not enough. The world understood and thus encountered only sequentially can only reduce and dismiss the divine ordination to a personality 119 120

PS, §218. Cf. See J. N. Findlay’s analysis of PS, §209–13: “The Unhappy Consciousness cannot unite itself with its unchangeable essence without importing changeableness into that essence and so starting a fresh cycle of struggle and misery. In this movement various identifications and separations of unchangeable essence and variable non-essence occur, which suggest the triune Persons of Christian theology. There is a consciousness, suggestive of the infinitely transcendent Father, which rejects the variable non-essence from the unchangeable essence. There is also a consciousness, suggestive of the Son, which accepts something in the realm of unessential variability as an embodiment, an outer shape of the unchangeable essence. There is also a consciousness of the Spirit as reconciling the eternal essence with the changeable non-essence in a deeply joyful manner. These identifications and separations are for us part and parcel of the unchangeable essence itself, which is not dirempted as the Unhappy Consciousness sees it. But for the Unhappy Consciousness itself they are merely appearances which it attributes to the unchangeable consciousness, and which are all hopelessly beyond itself. For the Unhappy Consciousness, having thus turned a necessary relationship into a contingent coincidence, forgets its own relation to the Unchangeable, and only considers its relation to the remote past specification of the eternal essence. It is with this remote past specification (the historic Christ) that it must become united.”

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disorder whose only “cure” is to be found in an arrogant psychologism or an even more arrogant—to the point of being diabolical—secular political reduction of all human existence in which even the enwombed child is mere collateral damage in the war against the soul.121 But otherness is more primal than the self not because it exists before the self or even because the self needs the other in order to know itself. If this were the only reason, Hegel’s reductive sublation could overcome that priority. The other, even as it stands utterly one and identical with self, affirms its priority in the world because the self can never be enclosed, and it can never become a closed circle in the world; the neediness for what is beyond but not contrary to knowledge returns consciousness to its of. And this of is both in and not in the world. The being of the world, of the other as encountered, is fundamentally an ontological fullness, but this is contrasted as created. The doctrine of creation reveals even being to be non-absolute.122 Man’s being, even as Geist on the way to Weltgeist, shares this dual aspect, which is not a contradiction to be overcome, or a contradiction merely to be endured. Indeed, it is no contradiction at all, but the signate character of an open being.

Man’s prepositional ambiguity Whenever the relationship between nature and grace is severed (as happens … where “faith” and “knowledge” are constructed as opposites), then the whole of worldly being falls under the dominion of “knowledge,” and the springs and forces of love immanent in the world are overpowered and finally suffocated by science, technology and cybernetics. The result is a world without women, without children, without reverence for love in poverty and humiliation—a world in which power and the profit-margin are the sole criteria, where the disinterested, the useless, the purposeless is despised, persecuted and in the end exterminated—a world in which art itself is forced to wear the mask and features of technique.123 The Hegelian temptation to bypass the unhappy consciousness is also a Christian temptation. There is a tendency even in the nominally Christian polis to dichotomize nature and grace, reason and faith, temporality and eternity, the changing and the unchanging in such a way that both man and God stand as partial figures, neither being complete. And this is the world Hegel unintentionally bequeathed to us. The move from one end of the pole to the other terminates in either a disenchantment with the divine life and a hurried return to the secular assurances of the Hegelian dialectic or in an overexaggerated understanding of certainty in order to protect the Christian from the terrors of self-existence; everything must have its place, meaning, and most

121

Cf. C. S. Gilson, “The Grand Refusal: Abortion’s Pogrom Against Contingency.” Human Life Review XXXIX, 3 (2013): 48–58. 122 Cf. A. C. Pegis, “St. Thomas and the Origin of Creation,” in Philosophy and the Modern Mind, ed. F. X. Canfield (Detroit, MI: Sacred Heart Seminary, 1961), 49–65. 123 Love Alone is Credible, 114–15.

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importantly its perfectly timed, perfectly ordered explanation. This certainty cuts every conversation short, and provides walls and escape hatches at the most precise moments in order to halt that dominion of knowledge, science, and technology which suffocates faith and love. This type of certainty isn’t angelic but diabolic, becoming but another perspective in the Hegelian dominion of knowledge. Because it removes the contributive value of uncertainty as having any relevance in the question and presence of the Mystery, and the un-transferrable mystery deifying every human heart, the Mystery itself becomes nothing more than a religiously motivated idea, at best sentimental. The Mystery is no longer flesh and blood but “out-there” past the horizon of consciousness, at the end of reason, at that invisible line where grace suddenly and magically enters nature. Its unknowability is replaced with vacancy and a relationless caprice on the part of those interested enough to extol its virtues and merits. This is not even faith but “bad faith” in Sartre’s sense. While the disenchantment reaction is often seen as one that opposes the Hegelian move, it is this type of noxious certainty that meshes with Hegelianism discreetly and perniciously. Because it forfeits the Mystery’s underlying tremulous presence as To Be, beyond but not contrary to knowledge, consciousness is soon overly stabilized. It has that To Be—the unveiling of the Mystery—as an idea left for the end of the play of knowledge, a sort of deus ex machina rather than the way to knowledge. Not only is consciousness overly stabilized, but it is also centralized in a way which mirrors Hegel’s final entrance into Absolute knowledge. The idea of the Church as Rock cannot help but vanish if everything is foundational, certain, and clear; the rock becomes but another symbolic reminder of that stability rather than the presence of a unitive and needful Love in a world that offers no guarantees. Consciousness becomes the rote acquisition of a teleological certainty far removed from abiding by a genuine non-linear eschatology with all the risks attached to such a mythos-as-logos. The man of the Church, whether he be joyful or showered with the sufferings of Christ, is always the unhappy, but not disenchanted, consciousness—he will not rest until he rests in Christ, for happiness pertains to the possession of the Perfect End, and only this constitutes “beatitude.”124 His agitation and restlessness remind him of the presence of the Other, utterly one with the self and yet prior to the self. This restlessness renews also the centrality of the Rock not as guarantor of easy knowledge and its affirmations of the self; instead it guarantees the perilousness of the human condition125 in nature’s non-freeing tide, and the relevance of the wagering, faithful and creatively enduring stance. Where the weak unhappy consciousness is sublated in Hegel, it is accepted as a baseline standard in degenerative forms of even the Christian polis. As a general idea, a posture, it becomes ineffectual and cannot direct man to the oddness of his political-as-transcendental charter. Hegel at least recognized before he dismissed the power of the unhappy consciousness to 124

Cf. St. Augustine, “De Vera Religione,” in Augustine’s Earlier Writings, ed. J. H. S. Burleigh (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1953), LV, 113; ST I-II, 5, 3; SCG III, 37. 125 Cf. Pensees, 434: “Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.”

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bring forth to the Self the realm of contradiction, paradox, and mystery. It is far more worrying when the contradictory power of that consciousness is no longer rejected but forgotten or, worse, made to be a caricature, the posture of a “religious personality.” The Christian polis is the presence of the Church in act within the world, as the transtemporal manifestation of Christ’s non-linear Body personalized in a community and guaranteeing each man’s membership in the royal priesthood.126 Because the Christian polis begins in Christ, it cannot be “built,” and imitations of it even within itself have the danger of becoming idealities and arrogant protractions of selfconsciousness. The polis in the Church is therefore impossible and yet necessary: its necessity is that it be present and visible, overriding its own impossibility in act. In turn, that impossibility magnifies the Church’s presence in the world by the uneasy fact that it refuses all imitation. The Christian polis, like man, and now the ultimate man, finds itself in that odd positionless stance, where mastery and servitude are real temptations. All the more grave is the idea of a coexistence or a cohabitation of the “secular” world alongside the Church; or, that Church and world become bedfellows in a world of convenience. The Church all too quickly takes on the role of consciousness and the world becomes its object. It seeks to take in the world, making it one with its Body. But has such a position placed an undue priority on consciousness while also relativizing the world exterior to consciousness as a staid object always available for interpretation? The world as the embedded form of the Other evokes the aniconic, which Christ also is. Even Plato knew that. For the Church to take in the world, as Christ has overcome it, cannot mean that the Church configures itself as a consciousness-to-object relationship. By doing so, any service to the world may very well become mastery because it takes in what it cannot take in—namely, the imagelessness of Christ. If it attempts to do so, it overlooks the fact that much of possession is a form of dispossession, that the living Church in the fallen world lives on by way of disclosive dispossession. It also damages the visible body of Christ in the Church by making it human, all too human, a consciousness all too conscious of itself. Such an act is deformed precisely because the starting point encourages a separation of subject and object, which cannot be present in the Body of Christ, or the Church, which is that Body. Will consciousness seek to devour the Body-as-Other in the name of the Church through the kind of fall into knowledge which Hegel visibly enacted? How the Church is in but not of the world has the danger of becoming a Hegelian theo-drama, where the idea of God can only “win” if God is wholly derived in and from man. The cross-instantiations of the in and the of, if overlooked, become the formulae for Church as Consciousness and World as Object. Consciousness is in the world but not of the world, consciousness demands the world and so the world is taken in, and with it Christ. Christ is reduced to moral teacher, a humanist example of good and noble actions. The God-Man’s mystery which has permeated the World, because Christ is To Be, is reduced to a perpetuation of absolute certainties which are no longer even certainties for they do not allow the uncertainty,

126

On the Church of Christ, 74.

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the mystery, or the irreducibility of existence—the To Be—to be anything other than a horizon, an idea of faith, an idea of theology outside of, and regrettably suspended from, experience.127 Certainty works only in conjunction with mystery, and mystery, as unseemly as it is, manifests uncertainty just as much as it does trust. How does one translate the idea that the Church is in but not of the world without recognizing that what makes it not of the world comes also from that magnification in the world! This is not only a theological but also a political problem, from Plato to the present day. The impossibility and necessity of the Christian polis may be seemingly resolved on this confusing juxtaposition of the “in” and “of.” There is a further alternative temptation that the Church is a self-contained, alien entity, immune to the vicissitudes of the world. This ignores the very body of Christ-as-Church to be the supreme response to a world needing response. The Responder has also inverted the conditions of response, and is now the One waiting in the world for a response. The Responder not of the world becomes the Needful One in the world. He waits for that response by mingling His body and blood within the members of the world, making those in the world to live out the recognition of their orphaned state—that they are not of the world! If the Church is the world, then the world, inseparable from Christ, is itself not of the world. Not only is man homo viator but the world has also made him to be in transit, and it is in transit itself. Man is on the way, and in need of passage far away from the world of which he also is. If Christ is in the world as Responder-always-waitingfor Response, then the Church is inside of world-now-no-longer-of-the-world. Man is leaving the world as Christ has already and always entered it. Man’s leaving the world is made possible by Christ’s entrance and initiative in the world. Yet, for now, man cannot leave the world, for as he leaves the of, he fails and fails again and remains resolutely of the world. Perhaps he can only enter Christ. His entrance into the Body is his failure: man fails, recognizes his failure, and by that recognition is not in or of the world. His recognition is a gift found in the visible Otherness of Christ Who is awaiting response. Christ waits and man attempts to close a gap he cannot close. Christ has already closed that gap and thus man is not of the world, but man has not fully responded to Christ, he cannot imitate what has no pattern, man has not closed that gap: he is of the world, but the world is not of him. In the Church man is both at home and exiled, as Christ is living and dying. Man is of the world but Christ has conquered and replaced that of with his Body, but by offering His Body He awaits our response. We desire and yet know not how to respond, and reaffirm the human, conditional of of the world. Christ has already closed the gap and the of wherein man seeks vain comforts is stripped from him, becoming an orphan both in the world and in the Church of which he is one. Man is passing through a death he cannot imitate, or give sequence to. He tries to give 127

A consequence of this suspension is that consciousness is now free not only to regulate but to dictate experience, becoming identical with it. There is now nothing other than consciousness: experience is a progression whose root is the unfolding historical consciousness. Its progression then overthrows the static ideology of the suspended divinity, offering a dynamic secularizing god-usurpation, an idealism entrenched in the world with muddied hands … . And so the enwombed child goes from collateral damage to intended target, from enwombed to entombed, and not even that for no one buries the aborted.

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it an order, a progression, and reaffirms how wholly the man of the Christian polis is in and of the world. He is thrown back, abandoned by that in and of which no longer fit his situation. He is in another in and another of, delivered again into another in and of, where the choice to live and to fail to live must be made. To be in but not of the world has its trenches moved daily. The dialectic Hegel outlined but never penetrated is magnified in all its sheer abundance. The I is and is-not the Other, man is in and not in the world, he is of and not of the world. Christ has overcome the world; He is in and of it, He is in but not of it. This is the paradoxical structure of political existence and it cannot be leveled or sublated, and this is the crisis of European culture as it tries to avoid confronting the possibility, indeed necessity, of a post-secular society. How can the Church exist in this dance to the movement of Time? And yet it does, and it mustn’t progress for it is eternal, and it mustn’t move as it is a Rock; for all there is, is the dance. Yet all along, the Responder waits for a response, and waiting by its nature incorporates both stillness and movement, where the one cannot cancel out the other. To pass over the Church’s simultaneous impossibility and necessity is to miss the eschatological alternative to pure chronology and to pure eternality and indeed to the non-sequential presence of the Church in Christ, and of Christ in the Church, and of both to the world.

Lost in translation The Church is the Beloved of Christ, she is His plenitude. And yet this same Church is penitent. She accuses herself, often in very harsh terms, she weeps for her failures, she begs to be purified, she pleads unceasingly for forgiveness (she does so every day in the Lord’s Prayer), she sometimes cries out to God from the depths of the abyss, as from the depths of his anguish one who fears damnation … . The fact remains that the penitence of the Church shows us that if, in the image of Christ immaculate, the Church also is immaculate, she is not so however in the same manner as He is. In other words the mystical Body of Christ is not in the same relationship with its members as the physical body of Christ is with its. Whereas the holiness of Christ renders the members of His physical body holy as He is, the holiness of the Church, or of the mystical Body, does not prevent the members of the latter from being sinners.128 The sensuousness of Christ is not only dulled but also placed into a sad surrender when we are entrusted with organizing the necessary yet often deadening moral, social, even ecclesiastical orders. Man speaks casually of the necessary evils of forming internal organizations or giving a vision structure. He becomes thoughtlessly complicit in a term—“necessary evil”—that carries so much insignificance. Such an expression, while pointing toward nature’s twofold struggle and to the impossibility of the Christian polis, is, all the same, squandered as a thoughtless “as is” fact of existence, merely to be passed

128

On the Church of Christ, 41.

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over as it is conceded to. Living out a human life becomes all about these “necessary evils” to the point that compromise dictates linguistic meaning and the ordination of the good. Man’s penultimacy is dulled and through that endless propagation and profligate compromise, evil becomes paradoxically both a fact of life and a non-existent non-relation. Those who rail against the reduction—who acknowledge that they are caught within nature’s twofold non-emancipation, which in fact constitutes the true and worldly “necessity” in evil—are discarded as idealists and dreamers. Such is the fate of dreamers to become disenchanted and either to disband from such agonizing necessity and return to the fold or become Stalinist monsters of futurity. Or Saints bonded to an imageless and uncompromising image. How is it that the Christian must inhabit the ecstatic by way of his vision of the Resurrected One—of a faith given carnal meaning—and then find footing in the foundation of the Church on earth?129 St. Paul encountered and endured this dreary and even deadening “necessary evil” (though without the blathering hypocrisy we are used to in dealing with managerial double talk) when, after his vision of the Resurrected One, he had to “return” to the world and instruct the local churches on the “do’s” and “don’t’s” of ecclesiastical and doctrinal protocol.130 The dreamer is told to “wake up”; he finds that his ecstasy cannot compete with the canonical sobriety, the monotonous recitation of the rules and orders of the closed society. An anti-climax takes hold and, in a way, it needs to take hold, living through hidden forms of regret and mostly in a sense of incompletion and failure. The recognition of failure may well be the way the Church endures honestly in a world of fallenness, in a world that is never returned to the garden, where each within the living body politic of the Church must die in order to live. Is this the way the world is: one form of non-emancipation is delivered into another non-emancipation until death does them part? Does the Church live on in the rote recitation of a past ecstasy? Man must say no. And yet, at the same time, the recognition of that vast rote recitation is inescapably present and it becomes the quiet place of the dreamer’s failure. The recognition of the rote is tinged with the kind of elongated regret that can memorialize the ecstasy and in a way inflame it. Christ dies daily, He is no past event becoming non-event. The God-Man living in all the tabernacles in all the world can never recede into merely symbolic recitation. And yet, if Christ is the Church, He permits symbolism to become forgetfulness and then, for a few, a hidden form of union. Without that regret, the sense of living on, and living in failure, the failure which stokes the memorial, the tabernacle appears to be a box and the host appears

129

Cf. Pope Benedict XVI “St. Paul and the Church: God’s Assembly in the World.” National Catholic Register (2008): “We see then that ‘the Church of God’ is not merely the sum of the various local churches, but that the various local churches are the realization of the one Church of God. Taken together they are ‘the Church of God,’ which precedes the individual local churches, yet is expressed and realized in them. It is important to observe that the word ‘church’ is almost always accompanied by the qualifier ‘of God.’ It is not some human association born of common ideas or interests, but something that God has called together. He has called it together and, for this reason, it is one in all of its manifestations. The unity of God creates the unity of the Church wherever it is found.” 130 Cf. 1 Cor.

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to be bread. The Real Presnece becomes the Real Absence. The recitation slips away as well, for nothing in the non-emancipation can prevent itself from being delivered into another form of non-emancipation. Recitation cannot maintain its order and soon forgets its paltriness, becoming the incantation of a hubristic worldly order with all the rules needed to enshrine and entomb the ecstatic. The Church becomes body politic which must endure and so cannot be the ecstatic. It is a grand edifice where the more cynical can look behind the curtain and find only a magician’s parlor tricks, and the dreamer who is no idealist finds the silence of the Word. And through it, all the ecstatic need a place in the world that cannot be conquered by the world; it needs and does not need the world; it chooses to need and needs all the more fiercely the souls of the world. It has designated the world to be the place of the worldless, for the Word is spoken for the worldless of the world and not spoken to the world. The world gives the Ecstatic all the reasons to be forgotten and as it is forgotten, it endures in the regretful remembrance of things past to which the ecstatic-as-God-Man can never really be relegated. Everything after Christ is exactly the same yet totally different: the same is to be in the world, even more fully; the difference is to be no longer of the world. Why does it so often seem that the difference is devoured by the sameness? Is it inevitable that Christ be deflated into the everyday, into a merely mimetic residuum? The non-emancipatory struggle seems to affirm that degeneration; even Christ’s sadness anticipates it, and yet He takes every measure to endure a world where one servility, one non-emancipation is only received into another. Just as nature is grace in hiding, the reception promotes the regret that recovers a form of innocence and ecstasy as much as it can be the diabolical enemy of that innocence. The “nuts and bolts” are firmly affixed as the presence of the Church-in-the-world. And yet, they strip the life and wisdom of the church-in-the-world and hide it more deeply in that very same world. The presence is without rest, being and not being Christ. The Church needs to speak to the world but the Word is a silence meant only for the worldless of the world, for the world out of sequence. The Church speaks to the world becoming part of the world in a way that denies and overrides its unity in the ecstatic and non-sequential presence of the God-Man. The Church can neither inhabit the world nor can it be an “empire of air.” The body of the Church is carnal and yet worldless; its incarnational presence means that the Church already inhabits the world. But to inhabit as beingof-the-world is not to dwell in Christ, and thus the Church authentically finds itself in no man’s land, the birthplace of the God-Man. Christ’s non-sequential ordination incrucifies the world with intimacies that must be lived only within Him. The meaning of Christ therefore resides at odds with the world’s narrative and temporal sequence, even if by birth and death He too abided by its order. To “follow” the nonsequential—for which there are no roadmaps—means that what is actually shared in the brotherhood of the Church is the incommunicability of each soul in God, a silence that can and yet cannot be imparted. When the Christian polis forms and speaks to the world, it leaves itself susceptible to becoming yet another failed human institution, and yet it is in the world and must speak to the world. If it speaks of such oddities as Resurrection and all the mythic and cosmogonic patterns of existence as if those things are mere ideas rather than its body, it becomes that empire of air that needs the regret

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and failure of the honest dreamer to recover the substance it has never really lost. The brotherhood share in a regret none of the brothers can communicate: the Church, “in the fullest meaning of the word … brings beings into existence and gathers them together into one Whole. Humanity is one, organically one by its divine structure; it is the Church’s mission to reveal to men that pristine unity that they have lost, to restore and complete it.”131 It is Bergson’s open society showing the closed society its own meaning for the first time, transforming it into what it always was, and recruiting from it its own holy ones.132 Christ, as the Church in but not of the world, makes the world no-longer-inand-of-itself but His own reflective presence. Inside the Church, something strange is happening to us, turning our meanings and orders upside down, something only Christ’s sadness fully encounters and something which we learn and re-learn but never fully know.133 The only worthy meaning of the Church is to be inside the Body of Christ, and this union demands an overriding attachment to Christ. Each is carried into the Body and thus the personhood we receive within the Church as Christ is a recognition that we cannot translate the presence of Christ, that Christ translates that presence inside each body. The brothers of the Church are united by their respective entrees into the personhood of Christ which complete their own personhood. This entrance has all the risks of being lost in translation, for it is an intimate act, an act that Christ does for each. It is found in the weight of his Holy sadness and suffering. Faith is not magic; we must die to live as Christ lives to die: the formation of the Church in His overcoming of death, through each man’s dying in Him in order to live, is itself a passage that cannot be spoken but only experienced and thus in a way its transmission finds other, deeper avenues of transmission. Christ is To Be: He is the ground for the possibility of knowledge and is Himself beyond knowledge, and this is why the Word is also beyond knowledge and encountered only in the night of faith when each takes his place in Christ’s wounds. This Word beyond but not contrary to knowledge inflames our desire to transmit the Word, which as To Be is already transmitted. But man has willfully chosen to forsake its presence and to separate himself from a source he cannot live without. The post-lapsarian act of faith consists in forms of renunciation which keep a vigil for the Presence Who cannot be transmitted. Man must act in union with Christ and be transformed by the supreme image of Oneness as Threeness as Otherness. He must become an image he cannot transfer to others nor fully grasp himself. The Word is transferred into the soul of each but by way of a chastening anarchism that cannot be a mere recreation of human institutions. As everything real is inserted into the body of Christ, Christ enters man. The Church is not knowledge but the ground of the possibility of knowledge, both in terms of limit and divinity. Its odd “knowledge” cannot be disseminated, transferred, and simply passed down. The Church is in but

131

Cardinal H. De Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. L. C. Sheppard & E. Englund (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1988), 53. 132 Cf. C. Smith, Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of Europe. Modern Age 48 (2006): 28–36. 133 Cf. Catholicism, 76.

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not of the world, and thus its so-called spreading of the Word is not only a generational passing down. The Church is indeed universal because it is not merely passed along, even as it passed down through families, cultures, and centuries, enduring those centuries of erosion and change. Its reflection is passed down but its entrance is not. Its reflection has already passed while it is always already present in the imageless. The Church’s historical and generational reflection does and does not serve man’s desire for entrance into it. When the reflection confuses itself with the entranceway, it becomes a human institution extolling knowledge in a purely human manner—as if the passing on of Christ is in our hands and powers. The reflections must trigger man’s greatest strength: his failure, which is humility, is, strangely enough, his only form of hope. The man gazing into the beveled window, seeking entrance, the elegy at the churchyard, the incarnate ennui of lips on cheek—what transpires within these things is that the nonlinear, fully incarnational presence of the Church cannot be translated or transmitted in a world where man is incomplete both positively by nature and now negatively by condition. The Church as Christ, in order to complete man, is in but not of the world: it cannot abide by the world’s symbolic reductions when tasked with re-imagining the face-and-facelessness of sheerly given primordial experience. The Church cannot be reproduced or manufactured in the way in which knowledge creates human institutions; these desires can begin in noble dreams but they end in the greatest evils and arrogances, placing power, personality, and centrality where they cannot be—in the transmissions of the world—confusing universal truth with the universal lie.

Pennies from heaven The Word refuses to be transmitted except by consumption, except by becoming one with the one constant in nature, the nomadic human soul, in a world without constancy. The world’s only constancy is nature’s non-emancipatory struggle, committing us to every avenue that cannot be immortalized. The nomadic heart is our North Star and it is the place where Christ is found, intimately near and devastatingly far from home. The sadness of Christ is possibly His total and bodily recognition that the Church in a post-fall world must be His Body and, to be constant, must be one with the one constancy in a world of things and beings that cannot help but die out. Each father seeks his own immortality in his son and seeks his son’s immortality, knowing that these immortalities live on in another generation and yet live to become a heartrending symbol—and yet the caravanic heart lives on. Christ will not rest until He rests in man, man will not rest until he rests in Christ. This is the interior truth of the Church as Rock. Our Lord’s sadness lives on in this restlessness which, bit by bit, un-conceals the impossible yet necessary presence of the Church. His sorrow consists in knowing better than all the truth of the matter: the Word which so defines man’s comportment as a thinking, speaking, acting being cannot be ex-pressed by a human institution. And yet the Word must live within such an institution since its mission is our salvation. The Word cannot abide by the actions of a human organizational

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structure which survives naturally in symbols retreating from reality so as to name the Real—to be able to envision and see the Transcendent at a distance. And yet the Word is for man: the Church lives within the guise of a human institution as the creation of that institution which must be beyond, so as always to be in and with humanity. The Church’s reflection in the world cannot be its direct entrance-way into Christ, for seeing the reflection does not guarantee entrance into it. To see the reflection requires that man’s stance is already within Christ, seeing the imageless made visible to him. Because man is one with the imageless, Christ-in-man provides the visible image of the imageless: man sees in the reflection of Christ a vision containing himself, but he lacks relation to his own presence within that vision: he floats as a spirit in a void he cannot comprehend.134 He sees only Christ from afar even though Christ enables Himself to become visible by attaching His Body to man. To enter into what, in a way, man already possesses by Christ’s grace leaves man dispossessed, chasing a reflection in others, in other souls, in traditions and rituals which overflow with beauty, drawing him into his union with Christ, while perceiving ever more acutely that he is outside of the presence so desired. God is “all beautiful and more than beautiful.”135 Man becomes inebriated in the transcendental incomprehensibility of the divine, Who lives in man and is “awaked as one out of sleep, and like a warrior that hath been surfeited with wine.”136 As the divine is awakened in us, the experience of that Beauty beyond the beautiful is to surpass knowing and to be toppled over by the experiencing act. The convergence of the memorial and the futural is at hand: as Christ empties Himself, man’s union with Christ carries that mutual self-emptying. The entrance into the Church is the emptying—for this is the way one survives the Fall. The reflection which man sees cannot be entered, for man survives by the very longing for Christ made possible by Christ. Christ has taught us how to experience this eros through His supreme self-emptying which penetrates us and stretches us in and past time into a region which death cannot touch.137 If man is already dispossessed, death has already passed him over and has no interest in his emptiness. To be possessed and dispossessed at once of the fullness of Christ protects us and allows us to survive the death we already are. The intensity of the mystery constantly overthrows man, outwitting the non-freeing powers of nature. The mystery is experienced therefore as a “superaffirming negation”138; the heart of the Church is also a hyper-icon139 surrounded by the iconic which, as reflection, points toward the entranceway but cannot direct man inside its imageless face. This agitated possession/dispossession, as certainty no longer 134

Pensees, 208. Pseudo Dionysius, “The Divine Names.” Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. R. Rorem (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), IV, 7. 136 Ps. 78:65. The image of the divine being so infused with Love as to be intoxicated finds expression in the Eastern traditions. Cf. Rumi: “The Master who’s full of sweetness is so drunk with love, he’s oblivious.” 137 Cf. “Any Soul that Drank the Nectar.” Thief of Sleep: “Any soul that drank the nectar of your passion was lifted. From that water of life he is in a state of elation. Death came, smelled me, and sensed your fragrance instead. From then on, death lost all hope of me.” 138 The Divine Names, II, 4. 139 Cf. The Divine Names, IV, 6. 135

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diametrically opposed to uncertainty, is how the Church as Body of Christ provides for the reality that man is in but not of the world. The world constantly overturned by Christ is no longer of itself, and is itself in but not of the world. In this re-newed world man sees the reflection of Christ, he sees that this world is not of the world and then, perceiving his own weakness, realizes his own non-emancipated prepositional status. He looks for ways and means to enter into that reflection, which is an aspect of himself made visible in Christ, but that aspect is imageless and futural. He can and cannot yet enter. The reflected and visible body of the Church “does not lead us to the absence of images pure and simple, it leads rather above and beyond the image toward the indescribable Hyper-Icon; this is its apophatic character, that is, iconographic apophaticism. The icon is the last arrow of human eros shot at the heart of the mystery.”140 The reflected Image places man inside its aniconic beyondness. The reflection is and is not the entranceway into Christ. It is the way, for Christ is already pre-possessed in man;141 man’s peripatetic heart journeys in and to Christ. And yet Christ also deems that the visible is not the entrance-way, for that same pre-possession overwhelms man, causing him to become the other unable to return to himself. When death senses him and takes his ashes away, Christ has vouchsafed the imageless that man is, yet could not claim as his own. Death therefore could not know how to claim what man is and had become in Christ, for it lives only by feeding off every form of human self-preservation. What Christ preserves in us is an imageless pre-possession coming into image, held out from us, making us more than self. Christ preserves the point-in-time where man no longer preserves the self. He outwits death. Christ is the maker who gives the aniconic a face, and in him we wait until we have faces again. The wait is of the essence of the non-sequential, and is not a non-doing, but of the highest contemplative activities: memory and prayer.

The cities of man and God: The way of the penitent Know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man … Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite, universal, inexhaustible love. Then everyone of you will have the power to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world with your tears. Each of you keep watch over your heart and confess your sins to yourself unceasingly. Be not afraid of your sins, even when perceiving them, if only there be penitence, but make no conditions with God … Be not proud. Be proud neither to the little nor to the great. Hate not those who reject you, who insult you, who abuse and slander you. Hate not the atheists, the teachers

140

P. Evdokivmov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty, trans. S. Bigham (Oakwood: Oakwood Pub., 1989), 236. 141 ST I, 13, 2.

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of evil, the materialists—and I mean not only the good ones-for there are many good ones among them, especially in our day—hate not even the wicked ones. Remember them in your prayers.—Fr. Zossima’s Speech in The Brothers Karamazov142 Since Christendom cannot live without or outside civilization and culture, Christianity agonizes. And so does Christian civilization, which is an innate contradiction. And both—Christianity and what we call Graeco-Roman or Western civilization—live through this agony, live off this agony. If the Christian faith, agonic and despairing, dies, our civilization will die; if our civilization dies, the Christian faith will die.143 Seeking forgiveness, the penitent searches for a forgiveness he already possesses through his desire for the faith. He does not know that he is forgiven and still seeks to find it, extended to the limits of human power by seeking out entrance through the Church’s historico-traditional reflection which cannot itself give him the entranceway into the Body, but can only point to it, showing him the way. And so the priest faces the altar not the congregation, pointing beyond himself, Beatrice-like, to the object of love.144 The penitent is possessively dispossessed of the fullness of Christ for all time until death is vanquished for all. The world is and is not enough. The world impoverishes the penitent until he is divested of everything except Christ. He chases a reflection which intensifies his unknowing, yet already present, possession of his forgiveness. The fullness possessed is the invisible and aniconic aspect of the Church. The reflection chased is the visible ritual of the Church housing the invisible body of Christ which provides the substance for the reflection. The penitent chases that reflection and desires admission, but reflections do not house substance but rather are emanations of it, which indicate that a union is already present. Entrance into the Church cannot proceed directly from its visible reflection, even though the reflection must carry the weight of enticing the soul to desire what it cannot know how to desire. The reflection we encounter both is and is not the fullness of Christ. The penitent has entered that effulgence while sensing he is exiled from it. The dying God stretches His nuanced sorrow into every artifact of human memory. Man is stretched through the non-linear sadness of Christ, which is the body of the Church. The Church that man seeks does not have a home on earth even as it makes earth a home once more within His Body.145

142

Brothers Karamazov, 136. The Agony of Christianity, 61. 144 Cf. D. Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (The Inferno, The Purgatorio, The Paradiso), trans. J. Ciardi (New  York: NAL Trade, 2003), Paradiso, I; La Vita Nuova, trans. D. Slavitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010), II. 145 Cf. What it Means to be a Christian, 25–26: “I believe the real temptation for someone who is a Christian, as we experience it today, does not just consist in the theoretical question of whether God exists; or even the question of whether he is three or one; or even the question of whether Christ is God and man in one person. What really torments us today, what bothers us much more is the inefficacy of Christianity: after two thousand years of Christian history, we can see nothing that might be a new reality in the world; rather, we find it sunk in the same old horrors, the same despair, and the same hopes as ever.” 143

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The Word cannot be reduced into even the most humane transmission. Because of our grand refusal, the perfect way in which Christ seeks to save neither violates the consequences of that refusal nor the road to penance. The oddness of the Christian polis, its impossibility and its necessity, reflects the ever-lengthening path Christ freely accepted in order to save man. The Word cannot be reduced to a human institution even as it lives within a human institution. The question remains: how does Christ express this strange yet essential fact to the members of his Body while that body lives within and mirrors such an institution? Is it merely a question of dividing divine and temporal affairs, or is that not replete with the same problems as the nature and grace bifurcation? If the Church is cut midway down the line where one half is the divine perfection and the rest the chaff—the temporal imperfections—then one may rightly ask: why dress the former in the latter if such an act only obscures the intentions toward perfection! Being within the Body of Christ as homeless-home promotes an absurdly unworldly purgative pain. The Body is not a place of alienation even though it disabuses man of all his worldly certitudes. Man is only at home in Christ’s body when he begins to become unfamiliar to himself. The odd distinction between Christ as perfect and the body-politic as imperfect must eat away at him. This struggle between the perfect and imperfect refines and illuminates the purgative good, helping prevent the reduction of Church to a human institution and quickly forgiving its iniquities as stemming from “the human side” and increasingly isolating the divine from that human side. The struggle of this tension is phenomenologically expressed in man’s dis-ease with his own responsiveness to evil. He must continually be asking himself in the face of ecclesiastical or worldly injustice: (a) Can he accept the wrong as part of the purgative good? (b) Are some wrongs unworthy of purgative good or can only elicit the purgative good when trying to combat them? (c) If combat is needed, when does it complete the presence of the purgative good, and when is it all too much and fold into the wrong? (d) Is loving renunciation, agapetic acceptance the way to combat the injustice? In this tension, man is within Christ overcoming the world. When dismissing it, he misses the whole of the Christian polis as both impossible and necessary. Hegel appropriated certain aspects of St. Augustine’s City of God to frame his own philosophy of history. While claiming to be a rational account of the orders of experience, political and moral, Hegel’s is far more an expression of theological hierarchies weighted down by an immanentism, securing man as solo ratio meaninggiver. The split between the two cities is rightly understood as a catalytic in Hegel’s dialectic. In one sense, Hegel knew that any facile split between the two orders, the human and the divine, was alienating and inauthentic, serving not only to weaken reason’s natural directedness but also to distort the purgative orders of custom and sentiment. This important advance in Hegel is often overshadowed by his more disastrous final movement into an atheistic gnosticism. He considered the divide between the two cities as nothing more than a stage of consciousness that, as it unfolds historically, will be sublated into a peaceful resolution, revealing all “determinations

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of the human being as implicitly spirit.”146 The intensifying historical dialectic in all its forms contains the political-as-spiritual bisection between what must be rendered unto God and what unto Caesar. Hegel sees in Christian teaching the genesis of an alienated consciousness which must lead a double life: one geared toward Caesar and the other toward Christ. In the impossible weight of this psycho-spiritual burden, the unhappy consciousness chooses either to flee the world by displacing his own perfected eternality in a divine and unattainable other, or he rises above the limitations of the historical stage of religious alienation in the reconciliation of the spirit as supreme self within the world. Christ’s kingdom, not of this world,147 is conceived in the Hegelian logic as a City of faith beyond and diametrically at odds with the action of the earthly city.148 Even before Hegel, the opposing cities graft an inward warring mentality within consciousness, preventing it from reconciling the self with absolute knowledge. Santayana sensed this lamentable dualism: All history was henceforth essentially nothing but the conflict between these two cities; two moralities, one natural, the other supernatural; two philosophies, one rational, the other revealed; two beauties, one corporeal, the other spiritual; two glories, one temporal, the other eternal; two institutions, one the world, the other the Church. These, whatever their momentary alliances or compromises, were radically opposed and fundamentally alien to one another. Their conflict was to fill the ages until, when wheat and tares had long flourished together and exhausted between them the earth for whose substance they struggled, the harvest should come.149

The alienated and unhappy consciousness recognizes that the earthly city, the City of Man, carries and generates human action while left dumbfounded as to the type of action and meaning which remains to the City of God. To overcome this barrier, the religious figure conceives of the divine city as a form of cessation or peace whose activity, while indescribable, is synonymous with man’s unchanging essence. “Whereas that city is an actuality that lacks thought, the City of God contains the thought-out essence of man. But that essence is cut off from real presence and lacks actuality.”150 The language game of the two cities deeply influenced Hegelian thought, revealing that man’s nature is held out and protracted through history. Hegel’s thinking incorporated this extension, involving a form of “providential presence of God in history.”151 But this providential formula does not end in the same impasse as the unhappy consciousness. It is so arranged as to allow the unfolding Geist to be identical with history. When ultimately unveiled, the fully realized historical Geist overthrows the division between

146

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 76. Jn. 18:36. 148 Cf. J. Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. S. Cherniak (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1979), 381–83. 149 G. Santayana, Little Essays Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana, ed. L. P. Smith (Edinburgh: R & R Clark, 1920), 71. 150 Ibid. 151 Cf. W. Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (New York: Ashgate, 2003), 157. 147

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time and eternity, and is none other than the Self who has finally surpassed, outlasted, and reconciled its contradictions in itself. Hegel’s dialectic must therefore part ways with Augustine’s two cities, whose protodialectic requires that the self and other are not only held out through all time but are also resolved in a non-linear idea of eternity elevating time beyond history, paralleling and fulfilling Augustine’s meditation on memory and time in the Confessions. This move, for Hegel, is an empty and non-contributive gesture representative of the final form of religious consciousness. The search for a source deeper than and constitutive of the historical act prevents man’s incorporation of divine meaning as a reflection of the self ’s extension. It makes history subservient to the eternal and universal, rather than seeing that the universal can only be understood by history as its product.152 The Hegelian temptation, while at odds with historical Christianity, finds its force within certain Christian shortcomings, especially the aversion to dwell on the impossibility-necessity-prepositional paradox of the Christian polis. Christ is in but not of the world: what a strange and magnificently rich paradox. While it invites by its aphoristic encapsulation of the impossible, freely given and necessary mystery, it can be too frightful to contemplate. Its almost mystical meaning is passed over, as foundations are quickly ignored in favor of the increasing heights of the architectonic. Hegel misread the un-examined relationship of the “in” and “not-of ” to be the ultimate expression of the religious attitude. The Church as Body cannot be reduced to a human institution even as it lives within a human institution. Christ expresses this unnerving truth, of being wholly in but not of the world, through His two natures, which “exist without confusion, without change, without division,” and where distinction is not annulled in union and where the coming together preserves the distinction, not as separate parts but always as one. The temporal lives distinct from the eternal so as to announce their unity; this truth is only magnified in the body of the Man-God. The Christian polis must have its temporal and eternal orders but order itself cannot be divided in such a way that there is a human institution surrounding a divine idea which cannot impress itself upon that humanity. The divine must be able constantly to overthrow these orders making what is of the world no longer of the world. It then makes itself of the world because the world it has re-possessed is itself no longer of the world but has become in and of the Body. When it comes to the God-Man’s salvific beauty and terror, there can be no limits: the Body does not confine itself to one quadrant of the world or to a postulate within the consciousness of the world. The Body seeks to overcome the world by overcoming consciousness, by turning what is inside out in order to save as many as it can. The Body will not stop until the world itself

152

Ibid.: “[Hegel] undercuts the distinction Augustine makes between the City of God and the City of Man: undercuts, just by claiming to sublate it speculatively … . Augustine’s sense of Providence by no means entails that world history is the ultimate tribunal. Die Weltgeschichte is not das Weltgericht. Providence in history is not denied but the Cities of God and Man intermingle without becoming identical, and in a manner we can never entirely comprehend, for the last secret of this intermingling or intermediation will not surrender to the importunate knocking of speculative logic. There is a temporal intermingling of the Cities of God and Man, and this is an historical en-doubling, but in history itself this en-doubling will never be reduced to the final sway of a singular realm.”

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is no longer of the world in free fall from God. And no mere concordat can achieve this, nor can the burlesque of secular values, nor the artifice of state religion, let alone the trial separation of Church and State—a divorce by another name which leaves man orphaned in the workhouse of secularism. The sadness of Christ lives on in the need for man to need Christ. All the while man continues to dull this saving need by conceiving first a pure nature, and then by re-casting the Church’s “in” but not “of ” the world along that nature and grace divide. But man is naturally supernatural, and cannot suppress his chaste anarchism; it will re-assert itself and more often than not in a deformed state: how distant is Savanarola’s bonfire of the vanities from Hitler’s burning of the books? Different by intention but not by effect. What Hegel recognized as the religiously unhappy consciousness’ fatal suspension of the self in an empty idea of outward otherness is but a product of natura pura’s prior neglect of the twofold in but not of, in which both nature and grace are dramatically in but not of the world. Hegel’s understanding of the unhappy consciousness powerfully presents the fleeing religious consciousness, searching for meaning in a world where nature has been stripped of its connatural partner, grace. These problematic avenues prevented Hegel from recognizing that there is a genuine truthfulness to the search. When the unhappy consciousness seeks out meaning in a world segregated from grace, it begins to place Otherness farther and farther away from itself in that “empire of air” untouched by suffering and change. It seeks a type of abstract otherness which only pure nature can manufacture. Thus its search is doomed to failure, and not the purgative and productive failing which exists in a world imbued with grace, but the type of failure which leads to an increasing disillusionment, degenerating either into fideism or atheism, or revolutionary praxis. The deformed religious consciousness refuses to realize that this disillusionment is the natural consequence of separating what cannot be separated. While Hegel recognizes that the “in” and “of ” cannot be separated, he reductively conflates them within the immanent domain of historical consciousness. For him, the world is more than enough. Only for the unhappy consciousness, deformed by a pure nature foundation, is the world simply not enough. And how could it be? This understanding impoverishes the uniqueness of the Christian polis as an extension of the Body of the plenitude of Being itself. In such a rendering, the iconic is displaced by the symbolic. The icon is no longer a window into the imageless image153 but merely an aesthetic of images and ornamental perfections un-substantiated by Being, and fit only for the tourists of history. But when the Church is in but not of the world, because nature is grace in hiding, the world both is and is not enough! Nature needs grace even while utterly unified to it. The unity promotes the need because their imageless unity promotes the desire for the imageless to be revealed. When the Body overcomes the world, and makes what is of the world no longer of itself, the world carries the fullness

153

Cf. P. Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. D. Sheehan & O. Andrejev (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 65: “An icon is therefore always either more than itself in becoming for us an image of a heavenly vision or less than itself in failing to open our consciousness to the world beyond our senses—then it is merely a board with some paint on it.”

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of existence by way of a non-sequential directedness to the Other. The world, which is and is not enough, can break open a soul to its own fullness and only then reveal its transience. It thereby incorporates the partial truths of the Hegelian and pure nature positions without committing their conjoined errors. Pure nature’s unhappy consciousness has placed so much weight on the “not-of ” that it mutes the “in,” deforming its presence into an idea, an ethereal thought, an instantiation of eternity which is somehow inside the world but so inside as to “appear” wholly absent; in other words, to “dis-appear.” The “in” of Christ as Church is reduced to a part of the “not-of ” and together they mirror non-existence itself. Is this not the Kantian noumenon, that non-contributive non-entity, that late medieval hangover which Hegel will overcome in his final sublation? The relationship of the “in” and “notof ” implies both a unity and a separation which neither pure nature nor the Hegelian conflation could appreciate, let alone accommodate. When the sense of difference or separation can no longer elicit any notion of unity—except one which exists outside the world of meaning and experience—the Church in but not of the world becomes a lost foundational principle, one which is vulnerable to the kind of reduction Hegel accomplishes with the two cities. Distinction is not annulled in union because union is re-affirmed in that distinction: two orders, nature and grace, are reflected in the Church of temporal and eternal orders. But orders in the Body as Word must come “together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ.”154 The Hegelian temptation to claim the City of God as a product of consciousness, though regrettable, is understandable when viewed from within the pure nature auto da fe. The City of Man, the city of action, is revealed to Hegel to be what exists behind every curtain of every variety of historical experience. It is the City of Man which must be the secret constitution of meaning and idea, and not the City of God, which exists only as the futural alter-ego of the earthly city. The religious consciousness elongates the self in its search for the essence, which constitutes the good of the City of Man while itself not being of it, but being of divine things. “They desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them.”155 But because pure nature has vacated that “in” of any entrenchment in nature, it becomes ideational and inaccessible, another vanity for the bonfire. From that serious misstep, the Hegelian sublation of the City of God into consciousness as City of Man receives all the power it needs. St. Augustine’s endoubling and intermingling of the earthly and heavenly cities is something very different and is “never reduced to the final sway of a singular realm.” Faith is the adventure in sanctification and involves the total risk of conversion: man must be converted into the deiformity prepossessed in him. As such, the two cities for St. Augustine must

154

Chalcedon Creed, A.D. 451. Documents of the Christian Church, eds. H. Bettenson & C. Maunder (New York: Oxford UP, 1947), 73. 155 Heb. 11:16

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intermingle without becoming identical; it is their intermingling which prevents them from becoming identical. Augustine goes to some length in the City of God to refute the Roman accusations against Christians that they are bad citizens. Augustine maintains that Christians make the best citizens,156 for to live outside the law one must be honest, echoing St. Paul. Thus the place of the City of God within the City of Man is as necessary for the City of Man as it is for the City of God. They are bonded in the way that seeing does not constitute belief but is derived from it: “Of all visible things, the world is the greatest; of all invisible, the greatest is God. But, that the world is, we see; that God is, we believe.”157 The City of Man cannot exist, cannot be seen in its fullness without the unseen City of God. Thus for St. Augustine, keeping them separate and isolated does not preserve their orders but, contra-intuitively, causes them, as Hegel has shown us, to be submerged into one unearthly City, neither of Heaven nor of earth. The excesses which occur when man tries to commandeer God (Hegel) or refuse God’s co-presence in man (pure nature) become the two tributaries that water this unearthly city. When they finally merge, they constitute the type of thinking which made state of nature theory, the foremost adversary to any type of divine presence within the polis, except as an extension of the popular will (Rousseau), bulwark against political anarchy (Hobbes) or a sentiment of moral imagination expressed in the immemorial usage of custom (Hume and Burke).158 The formation of various social contact theories has its origins in a pure nature which provides the perfect foundation for bracketing man off from his natural affinity to the supernatural. Saving neither grace nor nature, natura pura is no opposite to sola fides. Just as two vices never really oppose each other, a grace without nature on one hand, and a pure nature touting an exiled grace on the other, terminate in the same failure of virtue. The former has no place-qua-nature on which the excelling principle (grace) can act; and the latter has rendered the place-qua-pure-nature as self-sufficient in its own impure end and without the need for grace as the excelling principle to complete itself; it has removed the creational gift of man as the responsive or unfulfilled dynamis. What can be left of civic/political virtue in such a scheme? Man’s nature as the naturely otherness of God means that his end is not “proportionate” with the so-called pure nature which seeks to eliminate the transcendental evocation of man’s freedom. Pure nature, uneasy with the terminological usage of the supernatural, confiscates from nature those companion terms—freedom, transcendence, forgiveness, atonement, redemption, and so on—that organize the polis as the residual reflection of the natural otherness of man in God. If the polis is a secondary reflection of the divine order re-created by our responsiveness to the Call, then what type of society can exist, or for that matter be called Christian, if the natural ground by which we act out our

156

Cf. City of God XI; XV; XVIII–XX. Ibid., IV. 158 Cf. M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962); I. Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1930); R. Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 2001). 157

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existence has been evacuated of the natural desire which nature cannot satisfy? Pure nature neglects the tension of a truly embodied, incarnational and spiritual nature which is simultaneously an unfulfilled dynamis held out in the entirety of existence as arduous Hope is held out between Faith and Love.159 Man is beyond nature—beyond the natural end—and this is his dignity. This dignity is the self-same recognition of his unfulfilled nature or dynamis; humility is man’s power. He is unlike anything on earth and yet in many ways the creatures of the earth are more complete than he is. The tension of this spiritual nature, both more and less complete than the animals, is the life of the comingling of nature and grace within each man, in his body and blood and found acted out in political order. St. Augustine was pre-occupied with the City of Man and its connection to the City of God, for their confrontation, tension, union, and leave-taking reflect the comingling of nature and grace discoverable in our prevenient openness. The relationship of these two Cities has itself two fundamental presences: (1) the imitatio-traditio that comes from man and is found in his formation of polis in the authentic sense of the closed society160 and (2) freedom, fecundity, and creativity—the original sources of that imitatio and traditio as found in the self-emptying of Christ, Who is the life of the tension between nature and grace, and the earthly and heavenly cities.161 Christ alone unites the dual unities: His two-person-one-unity is the prime instantiation of nature and grace finally finding their home. Just as much as man’s prevenient openness receives its shape only in the Medium-as-End, so too does society receive its shape by the man who recognizes that he is a being-in-making needing that Medium-as-End. Man is not a new creation by his own powers, nor is his polis formed outside that new creation, that open society. Man happens toward and in need of Otherness and the residual light of that happening carves the fragile boundaries of the polis. The acts of the polis are themselves the re-action to man’s acting-toward or other-directed nature. The polis is the residuum (not the resting place) of the restless heart and is therefore a closed imitation of man’s preveniently open imitatio. No man or polis can ever sustain itself or arrive at perfection, for such is the ideological error and its hell on earth.

Le Dieu Révolté: The impossibility of the Christian polis If, finally, the conquerors succeed in molding the world according to their laws, it will not prove that quantity is king, but that this world is hell. In this hell, the place of art will coincide with that of vanquished rebellion, a blind and empty hope in the pit of despair. Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary mentions a German lieutenant—for

159

For an implicit description of how the purely hypostatized notion of pure nature (vis-à-vis nonsubjective and non-objective categories) comes to dominate thinking, see P. Tillich, The Protestant Era, trans. J. L. Adams (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago Press, 1948), 102. 160 Cf. H. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. A. Audra & C. Brereton (South Bend, IN: UND Press, 1991). 161 Cf. Temporal and Eternal, 95; 152–53.

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years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost unbearable—who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery, perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone. And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.162 That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already, but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents forever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point—and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in the terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.163 The estrangement so central to the human condition resonates not only in metaphysics and in the polis but, and because, also in Christ Himself. Christ’s lama sabactani is the culmination of man’s post-fall penultimacy; it calls forth the extent and depth of His anguish as the ultimacy within the impossibility of metaphysics and of the Christian polis. Not only must there be a sense of the disparate and the forsaken within the political community of the Christian, but the philosopher must also experience the irrelevancy of his work, its inability to proceed, advance, or resolve. The man living

162 163

A. Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. A. Bower (New York: Vintage, 1991), 276. Orthodoxy, 87.

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in and toward the Uncreated, whether politically or metaphysically, lives as a captive at odds with a world addicted to the pseudo-exigencies of a progress without change: “between the Church and the World there is no permanent modus-vivendi possible.”164 If the captive’s political or philosophical economy is to have any meaning, it must begin in the psalmist’s agony: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest … . Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast … . I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death. Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet. All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.165

The psalmist’s agony culminates in the supreme contradictory impulse of the Christ forsaken in and by His own Act-in-death. He must be Being-in-Act losing Act, the uncreated decreating Himself. Christ’s Act stands beyond moral communication as the iconic rebellion against reason in order to save the place of reason within the existential efficacy of each man’s incommunicability. Christ as Rebel means He is the enduring image of the disparate, the forsaken, the contradictory polemos in existence Who refuses man the merely possible and incites him to the impossible, all the while confirming through His very death that nature will not furnish the skills or the tools to accomplish the ends of man’s essential contradictory impulse. Christ must subdue reason so that reason in man can have its own rational motivations to faith. The forsaken becomes in Him the domain of hope, not manufactured wishfulfilling hope, but hope for conversion and transformation which require that end deeper than death itself. In Christ, faith is neither rational nor irrational, it is reason at the point of its necessary terminus and origin in Love. Only if the audacity of an uncreated Being can be felled by death is the impossible made possible. Then Love, as Christ Himself, is the Rebel as the contradictory spirit in its dynamic longing. Man’s existential contradictory impulse is the specific difference between himself and the animals. It is not reason as such, but rather that impulse which is our core entelechy. That contradictory impulse to recollect the act while attempting—per impossible—to continue activity, the step back and the moving on in simultaneity, unravels rational ends, rendering both the rational and the irrational to be effects of man’s primordial waitingness. Only this whole act is alive166 and thus, any reflective, 164

Christianity and Culture, 72. Ps. 22:1–18. 166 M. Bakhtin speaks of this noetic difficulty of man’s waitingness which permeates his acts, see Towards a Philosophy of the Act, trans. V. Laipunov (Austin, TX: Univ. Texas Press, 1993), 2: “[All of man’s] activities establish a fundamental split between the content or sense of a given act/activity and the historical actuality of its being, the actual and once-occurrent experiencing of it. And it is 165

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contemplative process—even as a participant in the act—places the act in a sort of deathlike stasis. The ongoing event of Being illuminates the struggle between naturein-and-beyond-man, and man’s existence as a contradictory impulse rising against the ends of nature. Man’s inability to conceptualize or transmit or teach the Word demonstrates the simultaneous necessity of that transmission: this inability to achieve the movement, teaching, or transmission lies in man’s nature-as-ever-only-on-theeve-of-truth, while the necessity for that transmission resides in man’s existence as penultimate. His inability to transmit is evidence of man’s finitude as a non-finality on which he cannot fully act. Because he does not possess the fullness of his own finality, he fights against that penultimacy, demanding the clarity that nature is unable to give. Man knows that nature cannot supply him with the succor to satisfy his penultimacy and yet, in a way, he knows nature must therefore be an open nature, an equally penultimate band of brothers, pilgrims in a pilgrim world. A grace-infused nature does not abolish penultimate man’s sense of limit but illuminates the contradictory impulse of our own incommunicability. Christ’s death— the death of the un-created made created and then re-created in the Resurrection— opens this truth. His is the image of contradiction-as-perfection, beyond idea incorporating all ideas. This image acts itself out within a time now irreducible to change and therefore discoverable only in the interplay of the rational and irrational. Man knows only through his penultimacy, which, as the moment and movement always preceding the ultimate, is the place where knowledge is truly authentic but never fully disclosive, for his knowledge is received only under the form of the knower.167 Christ knows this and His lama sabactani calls out not to tidy up man’s “eve of truth” penultimate status but to be it so fully. When man takes on the image of Christ, he knows the restlessness, the polemos, the contradictory spirit of a penultimacy that cannot rest. Even and especially nature tells him not to rest.168 Man enters into the very grace he already is. But this grace is infinite. Only Christ enables re-entry, to re-encounter it from the inside and thus enter it for the first time as a penultimacy carrying ultimacy, not symbolically, but incarnationally. When man echoes Christ’s lama sabactani, Christ’s grace illuminates our need, invocation, responsiveness, otherness, and thus our limit. It is only an extrinsicized grace which abolishes the intensifying sense of limit in man which promotes unity with God. When the world is viewed as a bifurcated ontical contraption, where body ends and soul begins, time ends and eternity begins, where nature ends and grace begins, the sociological ignorance of divine meaning actually perpetuates the transgression of limit. A world where man is wholly contained in the lower order, the natural, bodily

in consequence of this that the given act loses its valuableness and the unity of its actual becoming and self-determination. This act is truly real (it participates in once-occurrent Being-as-event) only in its entirety. Only this whole act is alive, exists fully and inescapably—comes to be accomplished. It is an actual living participant in the ongoing event of Being: it is in communion with the unique unity of ongoing Being.” 167 Cf. ST I, 84; 85. 168 Cf. M. D’Arcy, Humanism and Christianity (London: Constable, 1969), 44: “I would rather walk ten miles than stand for one mile.”

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and temporal, can only breed the denial of the legitimacy of limit. Man may conceive of the other half, the supernatural, the soul, the eternal but these are just so many ideas, and in a realm of ideas as abstractions, ideas are given primacy but lack reality. The idea of the supernatural is therefore no more meaningful than the idea of a unicorn, but even a unicorn sculpture might find a place in the public square! By creating a tackedon, “stacked on top of ” perspective to existence, man becomes self-enclosed in a selfsufficient pan-naturalist world which turns a blind eye to the Heraclitean movement of nature. Death becomes the elephant in the room which God may not even enter. This movement is only magnified in the post-fall state, and yet somehow post-fall man has completed his descent by denying it all together! The natural is within the unnatural as a nature driving fiercely against it, and yet needing its context. When grace is not extrinsicized from nature, the beauty and terror of existence is made manifest: the natural pulls away from the unnatural but is never stripped of it. Natural need knows no end and in that endlessness its limits are magnified: the natural needs the fulfillment of the supernatural in which it is invested but does not know even how to need it. But the merely tangential touching of two unrelated realms—the socalled natural and supernatural—chokes the contradictory impulse and destroys the sense of limit that grace provides when it is integral to the natural and not exiled from it. When exiled, the world of this scientized nature coerces man into assimilation. He ignores the impossible in favor of the “possible” whose ends speak nothing of man’s true anthropology. When the supernatural is “added” to that omni-naturalism, then the political, anthropological, economic, and even metaphysical explorations of man are, and in fact must be, engaged without any directedness to God’s grace. A sign of “intelligence” or “scholarship” is in fact found in the refusal to reference grace—as if “grace” weakens arguments. The realm of the “possible” becomes self-sufficient ideality, for it can give answers. Thus metaphysics must be a science, it must give answers. Thomistic thought is often praised on the basis of this misunderstanding. St. Thomas may very well advocate the centrality of reason but he does not sever reason from faith and from reason’s own motivations to transcend itself. When St. Thomas is viewed as this type of two-tiered professional thinker, where, for example, his demonstrations are a testament to reason’s ability to avoid reference to and need of grace, then Thomas is nothing more than a proto-Hegelian. But while Thomas may speak in dual unities, he does not speak in dualisms. When the dual unities become dogmatic props, the desire for the divine is privatized politically and metaphysics becomes an empty language game seeking to revive a dead rhetoric. And what it revives is the enemy of the Christian polis by making its realization nothing more than the sociological or political allegiance to the “party of Christ” rather than it being possible only on the condition of its utter impossibility. If “human nature in actuality is fully definable in merely natural terms, this means that there can be an entirely natural and adequate ethics, politics, and philosophy and so forth. Man might even offend the moral law, and yet not be directly guilty of sin.”169 And so the politician caught in scandal admits

169

The Suspended Middle, 17.

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only to having made a “mistake”, an error in judgment—as if he had only gotten his multiplication table wrong. Man’s inability to transmit or teach the Word demonstrates the necessity of that transmission. That inability and necessity are discoverable only in a nature resolved to finding its naturalness maieutically within the supernatural. It is this resolution that protects nature from the demonic suppression of man’s limit in an ideological progressivism. While, for example, an orthodox Hegelian like Feurbach could recognize the contradictory spirit of Christ,170 the contradictions were only examined under the conception that reason itself was the core and constitutive meaning of man’s nature, rather than being an effect of the contradictory charter of man’s prevenient openness. As such, contradiction must be overcome and explained away as a facet to be clarified and ordered by reason or psychology. When reason is reduced to causal orderer, the rational and irrational are held to be irreconcilably opposed, thereby removing the ground where reason finds a meaning beyond knowledge, where the capstone of the reasoning act includes a distancing from reason: The error of false philosophies is precisely that of making God an object, of claiming to possess him through the intellect. But that which the intellect possesses could not be God. On the contrary, it must be said that the encounter with God drives the intellect to a fundamental conversion, to a decentralization from the self; and this conversion is the knowledge of God himself. For God can be broached only as an existent and as a personal existent. On this level, my act of intellect seems itself to be an existential act, the act of an existent; and thus far it depends on God. To know God is not, then, to hold him in my intellect, but on the contrary to rediscover myself as measured by him. So we see at the same time how the knowledge of God is a work of reason and a challenge to reason. It is in this sense that nothing is more reasonable than the disavowal of reason.171

When the rational is seen as diametrically opposed to the irrational, the genuine metaphysical-as-contradictory impulse vanishes. The next chapter of a metaphysics of pan-naturalist cause-and-effect—where reason is the king of nature and the supernatural is sequestered to an invisible and intangible realm of faith—is discoverable in the Hegelian dialectic. This dialectic exaggerates the contradictory dialectic in order to overcome it by way of a rational harmony. All ideas, things, and terminological differences must be reconciled under reason as cause and king. When the dichotomy between soul and body, eternity and time, grace and nature became most pronounced, they were emptied of their experiential effulgence. In such a “harmony,” reason must suppress by reducing what lies outside of reason. Thus, with regard to the soul, it became personality as object of a psychology ultimately reducible to the materialism

170 171

Cf. L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. G. Eliot (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 2011), 332–36. J. Card. Daniélou, God and the Ways of Knowing, trans. R. Walter (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2003). See also Cardinal Daniélou’s description of state of theology in the aftermath of WWII, “Les Orientations Presentes de la Pensee Religieuse.”Etudes 79 (1946): 6.

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of the body. The contradictory life is muted at all costs. The price of harmony is total revolution against man’s open nature and his limit. As such, when reason becomes the cause and chief constitutive element of man’s nature and not an effect of his prevenient openness, then reason must absorb any extraneous acts or meanings that appear outside or beyond its noetic reach to be within its sphere as an effect of reason. Christ’s dramatic lama sabactani, which asks man to desire the impossible, even and especially as he is surrounded only by the achievable-possible, cannot be understood by reason. If reason is to maintain itself as causal king, it must do away with limits and engulf and absorb that impossibility inside a progressivist futurity which can accomplish all. The difference between man and God is also therefore absorbed. God “has been conceived by philosophy and theology, as nothing but a psychological projection of the infinitized human consciousness or mind.”172 The political articulation of this is the omnivorous secular society which sanctimoniously extols its own “limits” and “humility” by ignoring the divine as “beyond its pay grade” or “too personal to discuss publicly” while extending secular control to every corner of intimate life, replacing God, in effect, as the cause and guarantor of human existence. This is the attempt to have things both ways so characteristic of modern liberal thought: arrogance parading as modesty. But man’s inability to achieve the movement, teaching, or transmission lies in man’s nature-ever-on-the-eve-of-truth and thus the contradiction cannot be overcome. To exaggerate the contradiction in such a way as to make it the opponent of progress— this also obscures man’s existence as penultimate, and this is the temptation of conservatism. Nature’s inability to furnish man with his ownmost end and the necessity of human existence to struggle against nature cannot be forsaken. That “inability” and that “necessity” always merge in human action and enact man’s seamless contradictory impulse. In man’s acts, he is living and dead, empty and real. “The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.”173 None of man’s communicative acts can fully cover over either his incommunicability or his inability to transmit the ongoing event of the Word, either into himself or into others. This virtue cannot be taught, except maieutically. It is love which brings ruin to every wishing well, for love bespeaks a moving or transmitting of the Word. But this movement resides in the impossible difference of God from man. While we can transmit the possible, we cannot transmit the impossible, but even the transmission of the possible only displays our penultimacy and incompleteness. The contradictory spirit continues to intensify: if the difference between man and beast is only constituted by reason, man could not be like God. Man requires the failure in order to be like God—his failure to transmit the Word—in order to enter into image with God! To be in the image of God is to attempt to be like that Being Who, as uncreated, is beyond image. If man is to hold onto this aniconic imago, the image in him must show that while the similarity between the Creator and the

172 173

God in Exile, 664. G. Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (Ann Arbor MI: Univ. Michigan, 1967), 66.

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creature is immense, the difference will always remain greater, and any genuine analogy reflects the aniconic, the difference and mystery.174 No image which reason naturally supplies can be fully natural to man, nor therefore his natural end. Admission into the anguish of being in the image of God can only occur through that contradictory impulse. It is therefore quite natural to see the non-rational within the heart of reason: reason supplies so many ends by which man can re-constitute his nature or personality but which all fail to persist.175 No end which reason supplies can complete man; none of them is the “natural” end for man. Reason is both natural and unnatural, and thus the non-rational is, again, no longer diametrically opposed to the rational but a reflection of penultimate man’s contradictory impulse. The recognition of this oddness, this preveniently open polemos, reveals that Heraclitean motivation of nature: nature opens to a power beyond itself by a power it needs in order to be natural: nature is therefore naturally supernatural. But reason read under absolutist motivations would constitute reason as the difference between man and beasts. It would render man one step higher than the animals on that quasi-material, quasi-spiritual ladder. Man would therefore have no real difference as such from the beasts. In this reduction God, the so-called orderer of reason, would be one or perhaps two steps higher on that ladder. Neither would man be different from the beasts—hence the latent yet low hanging materialism inherent in Hegel—nor would God be qualitatively different from man—hence the atheism which grew out of the kind of spiritualism borne of dialectical materialism. And hence the infinitely dreary and irremediably unnatural-as-inhuman humanism. It is often considered the greatest leap, a suspension of reasonableness, to believe in the God-Man. It seems rather that humanism, not only the mere idea but also its identifiably personal commerce—a humanist brotherhood bonded to one another with nothing other than their secular pact and values—is far more farfetched and in fact the major stakeholder of that curious concoction of unsubstantiated, infirmed and fleeting possibilities used to deride faith. It is this “reality” that is flimsy and insubstantial, precisely because this world is both naturally and unnaturally less real, less genuine than God. “The God whom atheists abandon is of mean conception and easily destroyed because He is in their own image.”176 If philosophy is primarily interested in the un-hiddenness and retreat of truth within existence, if it is concerned with man’s sojourn into his own elusive end, then reason isn’t its primary tool. Reason was an effect of what philosophy must study, which is that contradictory impulse, that prevenient openness that cannot be reconciled with the world or with man’s limited status. This is why God demands of man the impossible and this is why the Christian polis and its metaphysical and graceful underpinnings are necessary only on the condition of their impossibility. God, says Shestov, “always demands of us the impossible … . It is only when man wishes the impossible that he 174

Cf. E. Pryzwara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics, Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. J. R. Betz & D. B. Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 507. 175 Cf. L. Shestov, In Job’s Balances: On the Sources of the Eternal Truth, trans. C. A. Macartney (London, J.M. Dent & Sons, 1932), 221: In all his writing Shestov sought to defend and exculpate that “irrational residue of Being.” 176 Humanism and Christianity, 143.

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remembers God. To obtain that which is possible he turns to those like himself.”177 The wisdom of the psalmist’s lamentation, the vox clamantis of Christ, His forsakenness at demanding the impossible, is therefore the origin and start of all real philosophical inquiry.

The political silence of the descent into Hell God, I love ever and always the human voice, The voice of leave-taking and the voice of sorrow, The voice whose prayer has often seemed vain, But which still goes forward down the painful road.178

Christ resurrects in Himself the full terror of that call, that forsakenness, through His own self-emptying. He abandons Himself of Himself in a supreme hesychasmos, a withdrawing silence. The passion itself bespeaks a supreme kenosis in which His divinity does not suppress His humanity but accentuates that inquiry into forsaken souls. Christ as Father abandons Himself as Son so that as Son He calls forth His own self-emptying to its completed last drop. For Christ, this “affliction makes God appear … more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. A kind of horror submerges the whole soul.”179 There is nothing left to say or to hear in the realm of this silence. The Father does not abandon the Son—for if He did, the Son could not call out—but the Son must see in the Father’s silence His own silence to come in the descent into Hell. The Son as Father abandons Himself as Son to resume the agonizing finality of souls who have refused their nature. Christ abandons Himself as Son, becoming thereby the full and terrifying visage of the mortal son within the climax of His ownmost mortality. In order to see in that silence its emptiness and abandonment, the Son becomes the silence of the Father under the form of the unanswered respondent. Christ therefore makes the silence of the Father not only an answer of “No,” of leave-taking on the part of the Father, but also of an already happened abandonment. For the Son, the silence is of such a sort that the Father is quite simply already gone; His silence is no longer part of a dialogue. Among the dead “it is not the dead who praise the Lord, nor any of those descending into the silence of death.”180 Christ lets His own silence as Father become the silence of a hearer who discovers that the dialogue is now a monologue. But as man is an intentional being, knowing himself only in the face of others, in Christ’s abandonment of Himself the Other has left and as such this is no mere noetic abandonment, but a lostness deeper than death. This is the full force of that kenotic call: the call of the Son

177

A&J, 435. C. Péguy, The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, trans. J. Wainwright (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986). 179 S. Weil, Waiting for God, trans. E. Craufurd (New York: Harper, 2009), 70. 180 Ps. 115:37. 178

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calls out to God Who has the privilege of remaining silent, for man had already freely chosen to abandon God. This withdrawing and ultimate hermitic silence that Christ endures is the pre-creational existential emptiness no one can survive, for it would quite simply deconstruct us. Christ-in-descent is ever chastening his divine anarchism in this silence. Christ is man, more man than any man. The silence of the Father is therefore graver and far more deafening, it is the silence of pure To Be refusing Itself its ownmost creational Otherness. It is achieving what man, driven by evil, desired but could not desire: to un-create himself. The Son takes in the silence which can only empty Him of all relation to Himself as Father: His descent into Hell has already begun even before His last breath. This is the heartrending purity at which the Christian man of penitential gaze must stare, must adore when drinking in his own penance.181 Christ responds to His own lama sabactani with the post-fall Silence which underlies and outlasts man’s deconstruction of his own prevenient openness. The strangeness of man’s “natural” condition is magnified, revealing the impossibility of natura pura. The nature of post-fall man consists in the Heraclitean movement of clawing out of an abysmal and unnatural end from which it cannot free itself. Nature seeks emancipation from that which cannot emancipate itself, and thus Christ, to save man, must be the core of that contradictory spirit as both master and slave to nature. What then is nature? The reasoning capacity of post-fall man does not occur on a static template of easy eternal ideas, of an easy nature bound by a neutral, purely natural cyclicity. Man is reasoning about nature while his nature, and nature itself, are movements which cannot complete themselves. Christ is the only rebel Who can survive this chastening lawlessness, Who can, in Being, refuse that deconstructing assimilated and, on the other hand, accept it by way of a descent no other could survive. Reason’s inability to find a foothold, fully to climb out of death, to need God’s supreme grace more than ever, is our new nature. And yet, this new conditioned nature cannot lose sight that something is indeed wrong in this nature—something is rotting in the state of nature. For if man does lose sight of the unnatural, if his new nature-losingnature makes the unnatural just one of many ideas, then man’s nature will begin and continue its own assimilation descent into the unnatural. Man can bear so little reality;

181

Cf. The Sacred Heart of Jesus 38–39: “We read in the life of St. Catherine of Genoa that one day God let her see the horror of one tiny venial sin. She assures us that, although this vision lasted but a moment, she saw nevertheless an object so frightening that the blood froze in her veins and she swooned away in an agony that would have killed her if God had not preserved her to relate to others what she had seen. Wherefore she declared that if she were in the very depths of a sea of flaming fire and it were in her power to be set free, on condition that she should once more behold such a spectacle, she would choose to remain rather than to escape. If the sight of the smallest venial sin brought this saint to such a pass, what must we think of the state to which our Savior was reduced by seeing all the sins of the universe? He had them continually before His eyes, and His vision being infinitely more powerful than that of St. Catherine, He could behold infinitely more horror … . Our pains and sorrows, ever present to His vision and seen most clearly and distinctly, were so many wounds bleeding in His paternal Heart: Vere nostros ipse tulit, et aegrotationes nostras portavit. These wounds were so painful and deep that they would have caused His death a thousand times over, even immediately after His birth, if He had not miraculously preserved Himself, because during His whole earthly life His Sacred Heart was continually pierced by many mortal wounds of love.”

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the refusal of his prevenient openness has made the really real, the really natural an act in hiding. And yet he tries to bear what a nature fleeing from the unnatural does not have the tools to bear. He must keep the unnatural near to know the natural which flees his conceptions; to know it by way of the difference from himself. But how much can he keep that unnatural tide near without failing in his chaste anarchism and assimilating? How can man distinguish fallen knees and closed eyes from fallenness and distraction, how can he bear the silence? Man knows this existential mess all the while not knowing how to excise himself from it, or to clean it up. “My God my God why have you not forsaken me” becomes the indignant call of the man who desires to forget, to take the shortcut in Christlikeness. Every gain is loss and every loss is gain: Christ inverts every order and is forsaken so that man is not forsaken and in doing so man must bear a little more of the nature so ill-equipped at fulfilling him. The reasoning capacity has both a recollective capacity and a restorative need. Reason re-collects its ground in order to know, and this re-collection is at the same time a re-discovery of our active desire to recover what we have lost. All knowledge recollected is truly both a new creation and a continual need for creation. The act of knowledge in the post-fall world is still in the image and likeness of God and this constitutes its anguish: my God, my God why have you not forsaken me. Knowledge is no mere recitation of the properties of God but an active imitation of creation and yet it too can only bear so much reality. Knowledge retreats to recitation in order to preserve itself, to extend its meaning which is already dead the moment it is voiced. This disenchantment with Being—knowledge as forever a dying intentio—becomes a hidden knowledge at the gates of silence. Accepting it is to face the silence—that non-responsiveness man invoked when he fell from Being and into mere knowledge. Only Christ as un-created rebel can endure that silence and refuse to assimilate it into the distraction within the possible. In Christ, “my God, my God, why have you not forsaken me,” is the call of the man who cannot bear the violence of nature against his existence, and yet is transformed into an invocation where Word is moved by being the one with Christ. Man speaks what Christ did not speak: “my God, my God why have you not forsaken me?” Christ did not speak it, rather He returned to man the ability to encounter his prevenient openness which cannot help but be attached to the uncreated source of that openness. The desire to forget and to assimilate, the desire to be forsaken and forgotten within the possible, is now transformed into the Chaste Rebellion Who is Love. Christ speaks the strange, the uncanny. He speaks the silence residing amid and beneath man’s postfall descent into knowledge, distraction, and the merely possible. Christ therefore recollects and restores for man the impossible, which is the true eschatological cosignator of man’s penultimacy. In this new penultimacy, in the rediscovery of man’s prevenient openness, humility kills pride and re-collects the true sense of limit and finitude that only a grace never banished from nature supplies. Knowledge, with this grace, is sometimes granted permission to remain unified in the act it invokes. When it remains in act, it not only recollects our contradictory impulse but also becomes one with the act itself. God forsakes Himself so that our prevenient openness, as the shrine of our penultimate nature, is re-collected in the

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fullness of Being. When post-fall man fell into knowledge, the ultimacy of God was reduced to a non-viatoric ideational distance. This fall from Being into knowledge simultaneously made man an “ultimate” within the realm of the possible while prompting him to be neglectful of his penultimacy within the region of the impossible. God’s graceless non-inclusion in existence—because grace was interrogated and then dismissed from nature—reduced the impossible to a mere extension of the possible which man can, through the progressivist fallacy, accomplish in the future. Christ did not speak: “my God, my God why have you not forsaken me.” Through His hesychasmos-as-forsakenness, Christ withheld that invocation so that man could speak it and recollect his limit and penultimate status; so that man could strip himself of his comical yet diabolical quest for advancement and progress, and begin to re-see what is to be seen.

Home before dark Achievement is the “diabolical” element in human life; and the symbol of our vulgarization of human life is our near exclusive concern with achievement … whereas the only human value lies in the adventure and the excitement of discovery. Not standing on the top of Everest, but getting there. Not the “conquests” but the battles; not the “victory” but the “play.” It is our non-recognition of this, our rejection of it, which makes our civilization a non-religious civilization. At least, non-Christian: Christianity is the religion of non-achievement.182 Through that recollection, the region of the impossible, itself possible and necessary only on the condition of its impossibility, becomes the basis of culture, polis, tradition, and metaphysics. The impossibility of the Christian polis is now understood as the order which cannot live in the possible and yet must somehow endure while refusing to assimilate. Man’s post-fall polis needs to survive the unnatural death in order to retain its naturalness. And yet it can only do so by accepting death and by neither forgetting nor ignoring the proximity of the anti-natural, the unnatural, and the lawless. The proximity of the unnatural encroaches and the polis can be easily overcome by it. To survive, the Christian must not be overcome. Yet he cannot deny that the unnatural and lawless must continually encroach, for this encroachment is the recognition of the impossible he is always on the eve of possessing, but can never possess, for to do so would be to convert political meaning into ideology. Isn’t this Hobbes’ deeper meaning? Hobbes’ state of nature is the jungle law of “eat or be eaten.” This state of “nature” is really the post-fall condition and Hobbes sought to insulate man from it. In

182

Unpublished letter of M. Oakeshott, Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life ed. T. Fuller (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2011), 31. See also E. C. Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics (Columbia, MI: Univ. Missouri Press, 2006), 71.

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this sense, man is not by condition a social, political animal, though he is an animal. Hobbes’ virtue is to see the fragility, the rarity, the artificial delicacy of the polis, a fragility that requires peace, which requires order, which requires protection, which requires power in the hands of society’s protectors. Of the state-of-nature theorists, Hobbes is no romantic like Rousseau, no liberal like Locke. His materialism against risk is such that a parent might propose—not for himself, ready for death—but for his children and their safety and security. Consciousness doth make cowards of us all. And religion can only be tolerated as an anesthetic or a bulwark against disorder. The temptation here, and it is the one to which Hobbes succumbs, marking his failure, is to see the polis as entirely artificial, bypassing the real polemos of the natural within the unnatural. The artificial itself becomes the shortcut to the unreal under the guise of the “reality” of man’s unnatural political reality. Just as man “by nature,” but not by fallen condition, desires to understand, so man by nature, but not by fallen condition, is a political being, to give Hobbes, as well as Plato, his due.

The Secular City: The dark at the top of the stairs Man must recognize that the “natural” condition transformed in the otherness of Christ and His death is an imitation of creation so wholly real that this imitation has not merely ideas at stake but man’s very life and redemption. The difference between the polis, which communicates the terror of this imitation and its contradictory impulse, and the one which does not, is no mere trivial posture or attitude or disposition; it is the difference between the living and the dead. The man who recognizes the terror of this imitation finds himself stranded in a political communion that can only persist if man can teach or impose the Word. But this is impossible: he cannot either transmit or teach the Being of the Word precisely because man lives within the fall into knowledge. He has therefore two alternatives: (1) the society of the possible where everything as pure nature is communicated but nothing is real or (2) the society of the impossible that cannot even form itself. Even if he chooses the latter, he must fight against his desire for knowledge (as control), which, in a way, is “natural” to him. He must fight against knowledge in order to stay in the vision of the impossible which he cannot approach; no knowledge or nature can furnish him any nearness to it. Man’s existence and nature are at odds with each other so much so that he must be cautious even of the desire to form a polis that can communicate the Word! Within every act of knowledge remains the desire for a shortcut, a mini-fall into knowledge and the possible. Knowledge will continually confuse, it will always be a “fall into knowledge,” and a going beyond maieutics. Knowledge becomes recitation of empirical facts precisely because meaning in the post-fall world must be a reflection of the place from which its knowledge is derived: in that unnatural agony where man refused creation and the creative impulse, and where participation is deformed into recitation, and where identity is consumed by difference, and difference itself is reduced to the ideal consciousness of science, refusing

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God Himself Who alone as uncreated is beyond Creation. As man can bear only so much reality, he creates a distance from Being-in-Truth by the recitation of ideas about Truth. Plato speaks of Being, we speak of Plato; Aristotle speaks of substance, we speak of Aristotle; Husserl speaks of the phenomenon, we speak of Husserl; and on and on in that pedagogical pantomime we call and “teach” as the “history of philosophy.” Man allows knowledge to be distinct from knowing the terror of that imitation, so that he can bear the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty which surpass him and do not bring him along, for he has refused the journey. Man does not, will not, and cannot live up to the truth, so truths become so many ideas in a world of ideas. The Truth is therefore both near to and far from him, as the nearness and the darkness are the effects of the very act of reasoning. Hegel wanted the distance to be overcome by way of progression, failing to recognize that every spiritual variety of nearness carries its own distance, and that the incommensurable will neither be bribed nor intimidated into epistemological or existential submission. Ideas have a necessary inauthenticity to them while also being both a recollection and an attempt at a restoration of man’s natural state through the polis. Even tradition, recollection, and restoration do not wholly distinguish themselves from the veil of inauthenticity, often enough acted out by way of forgetfulness masking itself as remembrance. There may be fear, but at least not arrogance in this conservatism. But the polis of the progressivist possible deadens the contradictory impulse by distraction and divertissement, particularly the ultimate diversion from the reality of death. These diversions make us believe that we can communicate anything; speech and word become the political rhetoric of the solipsistic state where each belongs to the other as a shared property of ideas, economies, and labor, and where what de Jouvenel called the “ubiquity of the Minotaur”183 replaces even the Leviathan’s omnivorous appetite for power.

Separate tables In the simultaneity of impossibility and necessity, the human body of the Church must somehow be elevated into Christ’s unrepeatable, uncreated Word. If Christ is identical with the Church, then the Church must be the seeking of the impossible, it must be the image of the chaste anarchist. We must distinguish, with Maritain, the Person from the personnel of the Church,184 but with that distinction we cannot live out our days in a dualism in which the personnel are the possible while the Person is the impossible. The Christian and polis, if these two things are at all possible, cannot refuse their quixotic 183

B. de Jouvenel, Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1962), 9–16. Additionally, (pg. 55): “Hobbes seems to me to have given Leviathan only a shadowy existence, which was but the reflex of the only real life—that of the men composing him. What is certain, however, is that metaphor is always a dangerous servant; on its first appearance it aims but to give a modest illustration to an argument, but in the end it is the master and dominates it.” 184 Cf. “The Person of the Church is Indefectibly Holy Her Personnel Is Not.” On the Church of Christ, ch. XI.

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limit and contradictory impulse by extrinsicizing the Person, the Impossible and, therefore, grace itself from the daily and temporal affairs of the personnel. Once the personnel content themselves with the possible and the natural—as if nature is static and “pure”—Christ is reduced to a noumenological end beyond the relationality of the personnel. And beyond the issue of the nature of the Church is the matter of the nature of society, whether it is “by nature” secular, and its relation to the impossible. While there is a difference between man and God, and this difference is in fact greater than the likeness between man and God, Christ urges us to live by his contradictory impulse, to chase those impossible windmills even at death. Christ’s lama sabactani is the heart of that contradictory impulse. As the master of nature Who dies by nature, Christ’s imago shows us that while knees must fall to the dramatic difference between God and ourselves, we cannot live by that difference, for to live by it is to cease to live toward the divine. To affirm the difference, as if it were a category to rein man in and segregate God, would obviate man’s dying intentio and prevenient openness. If we ascend from bended knees only dogmatically to reaffirm a world of nature untouched by the supernatural realm, then we deny in advance the impossible summit to which we must first ascend before any knee can fall. Every prayer is an invocation of the impossible and thus a metaphysical trespassing of nature’s end. Every politique invokes the mystique. This trespass is necessary in order to rediscover the eternal presence of grace as genuine limit, which strips us of every order of the realm of the possible. Man lives by a for-as-against anguish, and his prayers ask not for the ideas of the Good but the Bread of the Good itself. When the realm of the faceless personnel not only contents itself with the difference between man and God, the natural and supernatural, but also enforces it as the definitive meaning of man’s anthropology and nature, it has enclosed man in a dead limit which he will soon trespass in another and deviant way, by infinitizing his infantilized ego against God. When the polis has Christ and World divided by their differences, where Person and Personnel can dine only at separate tables, Christ is reduced to the personnel and to the possible, becoming an un-Eventful sociological symbol cast aside for the endless litany of finite events which have denied their penultimacy. The one who passes over his penultimacy does so by keeping those divisions intact, becoming immanentized in his own consciousness, which, practically speaking, is a form of bureaucratic bloat and blasphemy against Christ’s contradictory impulse.185 The polis is itself the social organization of patterns. Because it is fragile, though not unnatural, made-to-be but not artificial, only certain patterns are compatible with its health and its good. With Plato all must be patterned on the gods and the gods themselves are patterned on the Good and its criterion of fittingness. Of course, the Good itself, the Agathon, is itself as incommensurate beyond pattern, itself neither imitation nor narrative pattern—unless of course it takes upon itself a pattern. The

185

Cf. St. Justin Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, trans. A. Gerostergios (Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies, 1994), 23.

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theological patterns themselves can only be based on the fittingness established by the Good. The need implicit in the polis is the need, at least in large part, to manage xaos and this is the need for patterned order, and so even theology as the pattern for the polis must, for Plato and for Aristotle, attempt to exile the cosmogonic from divine action— or to elevate it to the creational and to account for it by a Fall.186 This is not rationalism but realism, and the origin of order as traditio, as education-in-grace where only the most beautiful is the most lovable as retained in a corporate remembering. By contrast, the modern state and its contemporary political philosophy are the principal heirs of almost the entire body of post-Renaissance thought. They are rationalist, with Bacon and Descartes as forbearers. And they are ideological, placing the template of pre-meditated abstractions over those messy particularities of history and world, making them both the product and the patient of our formulaic deductions. They are global and in an odd relativistic way absolutist. This global secular ideology is also oddly compatible with its ostensible competitor, global turbo-capitalism. Both process the world into a formula, invade the intimate and trample tradition. And both are inalterably secular. Once we believe that communication is a commercial exchange, the essence of communication loses its value. Once it is assumed that everything can be spoken, the only things mouthed—but never understood—are purely hypostatized constructs. The state of nature and natura pura became in this respect frightfully similar, as the static ground, the construct where all can be communicated and understood within the parameters of our own prescriptive say-so. Within their sway a form of false transcendence, or the false rejection of that false transcendence, are in battle. In this polis of the possible, man ignores the battle of the natural/unnatural in favor of the artificial, but still cannot escape the battle even if it be one of falsities and pseudorealities within a false habitation.187 Christ’s lament illuminates so as to re-invite man into his penultimacy. It is an invitation into the communication of that which cannot be communicated, namely, our pre-suppositional origin: “the existential is supernatural not only because it directs man towards the supernatural grace, but also because it is un-owed. It is existential because it does not (as does the existentielle) stem from the free act of the person, but rather is its pre-supposition.”188 The rediscovery of our patterned penultimacy is necessary in order for us to see our own origin as beyond but not contrary to reason, just as the phenomena of the truly comic and the truly tragic are “beyond” but of the very essence of the human situation as situated on-and-as the confinium of time and eternity, nature and grace, faith and reason, death and immortality, constituting the cyclical dance of the cosmogonic and the creational acted out in the polis, indeed as the polis. Bergson thus properly saw the comic as a social utility, but perhaps missed the cosmogonic nature of the comic in its sudden eruptions as a reminder of the limits

186

Cf. Republic 269b, 376b, 379a, 398a–e, 413a–e, 462a–b, 509a–e. G. Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, trans. G. S. Fraser (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1952), 172–73. 188 K. Rahner, “Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace.” Theological Investigations Vol. I: God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. C. Ernst (Baltimore, MD: Helicon, 1961), 297. 187

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of a social self-sufficiency forgetting its origins in rational neediness. When grace is rediscovered as hierarchically existential—that it is imbedded in all acts of existence, pervading, indeed constituting them wholly while going beyond them—then man’s pre-suppositional ground as prevenient openness is rediscovered as the pre-creational Wager of the Uncreated God. The ground of man’s wager is infinitized in God’s Wager. In a certain sense, every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history with its empires, its wars and revolutions, its blossoming and fading civilizations. And because of this, the break with history is inevitable, a judgment upon history must be passed.189

In God’s Wager man has more meaning than the whole of history not only because man is the invocator of the Other-as-History but also, and more dramatically so, because Christ, by becoming the form of History itself, transformed History into his Body and Blood which is now one with man, reconciling the cosmogonic with the creational in the tragicomic beauty of traditio, imitatio, and repetitio. Within the responsive status of his prevenient openness, man rediscovers the genuine limits that only a truly suffused grace can provide. Man sees that prior to his own acts of freedom and choice, God makes a Wager in order to ensure the possibility of our freedom. The only way that our finite freedom can act in and toward the infinite, in which the finite attempts to communicate what is beyond communication, is that God’s Wager consists in giving us an existence so wholly enjoined to grace that all of nature, when united to man’s imitation of the divine, groans for an end beyond itself. Christ’s via dolorosa embodies, in its unity of image as reality, our inability to transmit the Word precisely because the recognition of this “inability” is essential to seeing the existential as the supernatural. Man’s finitude, his limitation, is not the cul de sac of immanence, but the gate of the divine. Christ cries out in His total forsakenness, for He saves men not by magic but by Love. And while Love knows no limits, it is truly donative precisely because it does not invent ways and means which violate the agony of man’s open but fallen nature. Christ cries out, beyond any knowledge, the depth of His sadness: He saves man who, when saved, cannot move the Word—for faith and salvation are not magic. Thus, we are living and dying at the same time as the contradictory impulse is elevated in Christ’s salvation. Because we cannot move the Word, Christ must always die and always live within us, and without division: “we always carry the death of Jesus in our body, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.”190 In the simultaneity of man’s death and life, it is clear that the Christian society, the Christian metaphysics, are possible only on the condition of their necessity, as the death of God was both impossible and yet fitting and thus necessary, and thus possible!

189

N. Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World, trans. D. A. Lowrie (Ann Arbor MI: Univ. Michigan, 1961), 12. 190 2 Cor. 4:10.

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If the polis of the Word and its metaphysical anguish and ecstasy do appear, they do so because man, who cannot transmit the Word, can be the abode, indeed temple of the Word, and can thus become the individual chaste anarchy patterned in each unrepeatable human soul.191 This is the genuine essence of true tradition, and it is here that conservatism is truer even than it conceives itself to be, going beyond the noble anti-rationalist efforts of Hume and Burke, and even beyond Eliot and Oakeshott, to something more real because less rational. Man cannot communicate what is beyond communication but he can be of the body of that uncreated Love: “For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.”192 When the annihilatory lust of progressivism is repelled and man rediscovers his prevenient openness, he becomes what he always was, the responsive otherness of God, as God is his Other in which one’s self is known. And it is only in the temporal structure of a genuine tradition that this is safeguarded, without being guaranteed, as a real and necessary possibility. Only within that responsiveness is the recognition of the impossibility of the transmission of the Word taken up into being and then, only then, are “the things that are impossible with men, possible with God.”193 Christ’s body and blood is the Wager prefiguring all human wagers. The God-Man saves men who, when themselves saved, cannot transmit the Word for, with Plato, virtue cannot be taught, and this is the delicate tension of tradition, which in a sense betrays (traditore!) as it attempts to hand over that which cannot be transferred, but which somehow must be.194 Traditio is not itself maieutic, but it is the gestational womb and frame of maieusis. Irreverence toward tradition is irreverence toward our finitude. To see this is the virtue of conservatism.

191

Cf. A. Vasileios, Hymn of Entry, trans. E. Briere (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 34–35: “The living patristic word is not conveyed mechanically, nor preserved archaeologically, nor approached through excursions into history. It is conveyed whole, full of life, as it passes from generation to generation through living organisms, altering them, creating ‘fathers’ who make it their personal word, a new possession, a miracle, a wealth which increases as it is given away. This is the unchanging change wrought by the power that changes corruption into incorruption. It is the motionless perpetual motion of the word of God, and its ever-living immutability. Every day the word seems different and new, and is the same. This is the mystery of life which has entered deep into our dead nature and raises it up from within, breaking the bars of Hell … . This change of the word within man, and the change in himself resulting from it, preserve unchanged the mystery of personal and unrepeatable life which is ‘patristically’ taught and given. It is like the food a mother eats: it nourishes her and keeps her alive, and at the same time becomes within her mother’s milk, the drink of life for the stomach of her baby.” 192 2 Cor. 4:11. 193 Luke 18:27. 194 Cf. Hymn of Entry, 36: “Scholastic theology and intellectual constructions do not resemble the Body of the Lord, the true food, nor His Blood, the true drink; rather they are like a stone one finds in one’s food. This is how indigestible and inhumanly hard the mass of scholasticism seems to the taste and the mouth of one accustomed to the liturgy of the Church, and it is rejected as something foreign and unacceptable. Our words are often flabby and weak. For the word to be passed on and to give life, it has to be made flesh. When, along with your word, you give your flesh and blood to others, only then do your words mean something. Words without flesh, which do not spring from life and do not share out our flesh which is broken and our blood which is shed, mean nothing. This is why, at the Last Supper, the Lord summarized the mystery of His preaching by saying: Take, eat My Body, Drink My Blood.”

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The man who isn’t there This contradictory impulse—especially in an anthropology focused exclusively on speculative reason to the reductive detriment of Being—appears under the guise of the absurd or the irrational. This absurd, even as it is dismissed as the irrational and irrelevant periphery of the rational animal, cannot help but reflect its source in grace.195 What reason as causal king cannot recognize is that prolonged engagement with the absurd only elicits humility as meaning if one is brave enough not to look away.196 And this world full of new meaning which can only be accessed through endurance, consists in a humility at the feet of the absurd. This humility is powerful enough to reposition speculative reason in a way neither above nor below the passions, but in a different order altogether.197 A speculative reason no longer in competition with the absurd can aid the soul in its rediscovered desire to recollect the impossible. The absurd can augur the sort of finite limit exegetically reflective of grace as beyond noetic limit. Thus, even the existentialist’s notion of the absurd—which in so many ways is the human condition failing to find or reconcile itself with the divine—has its source in the sublime gratuity of God who gave man reason so that he could desire something more than the ends of reason. “My God, My God why have you forsaken Me?”—Is that not the ultimate invocation of the absurd trembling at the very limits of grace? In every act of postfall, man contradiction is lodged. Our nature is not only hidden in a condition with its conventions and behaviorisms, nor does it merely meld with some aspects of the human condition while attempting to shirk others as impediments to progress. In all these descriptions of the relationship between nature and condition, what is actually being proposed is a soft determinism, one that is horizontal in that it immanentizes man in his finitude conceived as limit while also voraciously vertical in its temptation to a humanism as God usurpation. Human nature held out and alongside such a condition diminishes the for-as-against struggle of the unnatural and natural. Man’s nature has now lodged itself in the natureless existentially devolving act of choosing

195

Shestov describes how the absurd evokes grace through Kierkegaard’s own anguish for reasons beyond reason: Cf. K&E, 112: “Kierkegaard went to Job, went to Abraham, invoked the Absurd and craved Faith, only because he hoped in this way to blow up the impregnable fortress behind whose walls speculative thought was hiding all-destroying Nothingness. And at the very moment when the Paradox and the Absurd were presented with the chance to realize their sovereign rights and enter upon a great and final struggle with the self-evident, they fell exhausted, robbed of their strength by some mysterious and enigmatic power.” 196 Cf. R. D. Srigley, Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity (Columbia, MI: Univ. Missouri Press, 2011), 27. 197 The Poet Kabir recognized this odd humility to be at the very core of divine meaning; see “How Humble Is God?” Love Poems from God, 226: “God is the tree in the forests that allows itself to die and will not defend itself in front of those with the ax, not wanting to cause them shame. And God is the earth that will allow itself to be deformed by man’s tools, but He cries; yes, God cries, but only in front of His closest ones. And a beautiful animal is being beaten to death, but nothing can make God break His silence to the masses and say, ‘Stop, please stop, why are you doing this to Me?’ How humble is God? Kabir wept when I knew.”

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what is not natural, so that his nature is to be unnatural. But to accept the unnatural would be to surrender our nature, and thus we strain against the unnatural with a nature which has plummeted its ownmost being into the unnatural. So nature moves with us and yet in a way against us. Authentic existence refuses progressivism and returns us to the beyond-noetic freedom as the naturely otherness of God. It places man within the recognition of his natural desire for the supernatural, which nature does not have the power either to complete or to escape. This notion of freedom as both the distinctiveness and failure of man is critical to the formation of the polis and thus to the impossibility of the Christian society. The Christian polis cannot long endure if it exists only to cultivate the moral “improvement” of man, community, and society.198 Its focus should instead be about holding onto, against all reductive odds, the seeds of human-in-divine freedom through “the recognition of the uniqueness and distinctiveness of each person. Attempts to produce more just societies or more virtuous citizens fail to take account of the fullness of personal distinctiveness and human failure.”199 Man’s reasoning is evidence of this strain between his uniqueness which desires endurance and his failure to achieve the impossible. This strain promotes in him the temptation of becoming an individual within the realm of the possible—rendering society first reactionary and then revolutionary—rather than desiring personhood within the infinite. This strain does not so much obscure the truth beyond recognition as it exaggerates it. Man all too clearly knows he is in contradiction, and in a way he knows the truth; it is rather a question of how he knows it. Il faut supposer Sisyphe heureux.200 Contradiction beyond paradox is lodged in man’s Sisyphean heart, for if it were paradox, it could be resolved and he could recover himself through his recollection of the truth. Man’s post-fall knowledge is not as such damaged—for man does know with a type of theoretical clarity that he cannot recover, on his own, from this descent. And he knows with a practical clarity—repetition in the virtues—that he must try to recover while knowing that recovery will be always incomplete. Thus, the polis must re-collect and re-store this type of movement which can neither complete itself nor descend away from the desire to be completed. If the polis forgets that it is incomplete, it becomes unnatural. If it invokes a completion within the realm of the so-called purely natural-qua-possible, then it has become the artificial. There can be no City of Man apart from the City of God, where the former is the possible-as-pure nature

198

Cf. Humanism and Christianity, in particular Fr.Darcy’s deep critique of H. Cox’s The Secular City, 85–105. 199 D. Payne, “The ‘Relational Ontology’ of Christos Yannaras: The Hesychast Influence on the Understanding of the Person in the Thought of Christos Yannaras,” unpublished article (2015), 16. 200 Cf. A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. J. O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), 591: “If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious … . The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.”

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and the latter the extrinsicized supernatural order. When these two cities coexist in only a tangential touching, the City of Man becomes an infinity of secularized egos which extend themselves and remove the crown of the divine by humanizing its alter-categories—soul, eternity, grace, and so on, as the property of the end-ofhistory future. By invoking a “pure nature,” a purely natural-as-artificial state, the polis actually violates the natural and vitiates genuine transcendent movement which unveils both the need and the inability to move/teach the Word. When the polis is seen as situated and concretized in the possible, this becomes a dismissal of the for-asagainst struggle of nature and existence, which is the interior and non-emancipatory struggle of the natural and unnatural. The conservative becomes the revolutionary precisely because his bifurcated tendencies immanentize nature inside consciousness: the polis of progress and the possible makes body, time, and causality the self-enclosed properties of the natural, distinct and severed from supernatural grace. The saturated phenomenological experience of soul and eternity is reduced to death at a distance, just so many ideas that have been stripped of their intentional primacy and rendered mere pronouncements of the vacuity of the past, present, and future in a carnival of progress without change and/or change without progress. The polis may be the brief epoché, the place of rest through tradition, but it cannot ease our contradictory impulse either by promoting the continued failure-asforgetfulness of our distinctiveness and unrepeatability or by extolling our success as dismissal of our failure. The impossibility of the Christian polis consists in the task of being the place for the unrepeatable and unique conversion of each man, for community cannot become a masked mass homogeneity promoting only generic ideals. The difficulty remains as to how the polis can become the place where man must, in all his actions, lay himself open to the possibility of conversion, and must establish, foster, and protect the agora of that possibility, uniting authority with maieusis in a genuine tradition, as Plato attempted in the Sophist, Statesman, and Laws. Our knowledge of the human situation is connected to Being in a condition of infirmity, indeed by that condition posing as nature. Knowledge reflects our ever-dying intentio. Reason’s connection to Being is damaged by the clear fact that it is terrifyingly easy for us to forget and to deceive ourselves, mouthing Christian pieties and denying Christ in the same breath. Contradiction becomes hypocrisy, which in turn becomes indifference and this indifference is the cornerstone of our “homicidal civilization.”201 The breeding ground of this indifference resides in the tension of dual unities—body and soul, nature and grace—being downgraded into dogmatically divisive realms. When metaphysics and the polis become fully assimilated ideals, the causal reversal is complete and nature is an “eternal law.” Man walks into a Church, falls down on his knees in love and repentance, and walks out to repeat his same errors. The desire for immortality and the temptation of the possible coexist in Him and make abstractions

201

J. Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), 21. After having described its illusory liberty, Maritain showed this homicidal society to possess an equally “homicidal adoration of man” (61).

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and phantoms out of the connatural contact with the supernatural. Man sees death as an idea at a distance while at the same time he knows, with a certain and yet vague resolution, that he needs to know death only as an idea and at a distance! For if it were otherwise, indifference would lose its foothold and contradiction would re-assert itself as the non-emancipatory cycle of the natural and the unnatural, which could truly strip him of everything, which “everything” is in fact nothing. The impossible Christian polis is made possible only when the unnatural is understood as fundamentally intertwined in man’s recognition of the natural as unnaturally non-emancipated. This absurdity, this impotency presents man’s un-fitting status in existence—his nature does not fit into nature. There exists in-and-alongside him something supremely gratuitous devouring all retreats into the possible and this is the terrifying vision of an as yet unnamed conversion. The polis is sometimes seen as the artificial precisely because of its oddness; it sticks out from the tides of nature. But it cannot be seen in its oddness only if it is defined as artificial. But if that oddness is left to its own eschaton—even and especially if that entelechy is eternally cyclical— it becomes the kind of recognition of gratuity which serves as handmaiden to grace. The polis is naturally artificial. Why else a gravestone? Man’s nature refuses to be pinned down; it is evaded as it is encountered in the tragic and comical acts which attempt to usurp but verify the laws of nature. In the incongruities of existence ever usurped by surprise and chance and especially political formation, nature, for better and for worse, becomes blurred. While the lack of clarity to nature may also be a consequence of original sin, it is more that man’s nature has always been a Heraclitean movement, an impossibility that cannot be pinned down in the merely possible. In the post-fall state that restlessness, the transcendental characteristic, gets painfully seen as the absurd in opposition to or rejection of grace. But that restlessness should not have a negative value only. Man’s “dwelling will be away from the earth’s richness, away from the dew of heaven above. You will live by the sword and you will serve your brother. But when you grow restless, you will throw his yoke from off your neck.”202 Even the garden’s peace was not a place of stasis, precisely because transcendence is itself a form of restlessness. Restlessness, because of original sin, may manifest itself in the agonizing life of the sinful and the irrational, but restlessness was still present in the garden, not as distraction but as focus, commitment, peace, clarity, desire for perfection. While the post-lapsarian mostly understands restlessness as negative, as anxiety, sleeplessness, or dread, he is never disconnected from the without-rest transcendental property of love and the desire for love. Truly free, the real heart of free will consists in the restlessness of man’s nature as a being in and toward love.203 The death of the polis may very well consist in implementing an order that mutes that restlessness and the chaste anarchism at root in the for-as-against struggle of the 202 203

Gen. 27:39–40. Cf. Rumi, Whispers of the Beloved, trans. M. Mafi (London: Thorson, 1999). “I cannot sleep in your presence. In your absence, tears prevent me. You watch me my Beloved on each sleepless night and only You see the difference. Looking at my life I see that only Love has been my soul’s companion from deep inside my soul cries out: do not wait, surrender for the sake of Love.”

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natural and unnatural. It is in that struggle alone that we face the beyond-image of the divine and can come to form a self-understanding that is free from pseudo-aseity. In that non-emancipatory tension we are truly free, unique, and unrepeatable precisely because we find ourselves in the rediscovery of the impossible.204

The political wager of the penitential gaze Instead of turning for help to the world renowned philosopher or to the professor publicus ordinaries [i.e., Hegel], my friend seeks refuge with a private thinker who knew all that is best in the world, yet afterward withdrew from life: with Job who tosses off fluent observations and hints as he sits in the ashes and scrapes the sores on his body with potsherds. Truth is here expressed more convincingly than in the Greek Symposium. Kierkegaard205

Christ’s lama sabactani is the Wager banking on man’s primal restlessness. Christ cries out as He saves man who, when saved, cannot “teach” the Word—for faith and salvation are, yet again, not magic. If the Word is to be transmitted in and to the polis, this possibility exists only on the condition and recognition of its impossibility. Christ’s agony is the image of our restlessness in its purest form; we cannot move the Word, but we can, through Christ, embody the individual chaste anarchism in each unrepeatable human soul. The risks involved in this rescue mission—of translating the untranslatable innocence into a world-refusing innocence—must extend even further. Christ’s entrance into un-creating silence illustrates that He is faithful to the consequences of original sin—His own Godforsakenness: with a supremely “foolish” love of mankind, God desires to experience the whole absence of God,206 in the eternal kenosis of Good Friday, which lives within Easter Sunday.207 204

Cf. C. Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality, trans. E. Briere (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1984), 269–70. 205 S. Kierkegaard, “Repetition,” in Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, trans. M. G. Piety (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 50. See Also K&E, 29; 32. 206 Cf. H. U. Cardinal von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, trans. A. Nichols (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2000), 22: “The son of God took human nature in its fallen condition, and with it, therefore, the worm in its entrails—mortality, fallenness, self-estrangement, death—which sin introduced to the world.” 207 Cf. K&E, 187–188: “The life of Christ is one uninterrupted failure of love … . Quiet despair had also made its home in Christ, the only begotten Son of God, and over him there hung the same curse that hangs over man: he was powerless; he wanted to, but could not, stretch forth his hand to the tree of life; instead he plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge and all reality turned into a shadow that continually slipped from his grasp. There is no other way out than to accept man’s powerlessness and the powerlessness of God, and to regard this as bliss. One must not become embittered by the horrors of life, but seek them out just as God, Who became incarnate in human form for that very purpose, sought them.”

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Christ desires man in order for man to recover what he has forgotten even to desire. In order to accomplish this task, all must be lost on Good Friday and continually lost on all the Good Fridays. If original sin is a deathly falling into knowledge—where we can pompously subsist within divisions and categories, and where grace can be excised from nature—then, when Christ became Man, He took on that fallen-into-theoria knowledge as one with Him. While Christ came without sin, He became one with us and therefore bore the consequences of that sin. He lived as one with that fallen and non-emancipatory knowledge where no amount of holy anarchism can chasten the fall and prevent His death. This fall into knowledge, where the natural strains against the unnatural, needing the unnatural in order to know itself, is a servile struggle which Christ fulfills in the descent into Hell. In Him the completion that all is lost and all is overcome is encountered in its totality: Christ becomes both slave and master to nature as Good Friday and Easter Sunday live within each other. The sacrifice of Christ’s Being has self-translated man’s forgotten desire by leaving him open to the possibility of refusing to take on that penitential gaze. Christ works from within the consequences of original sin, thus He does not give clear and decisive edicts which must be obeyed, nor does He return man to the garden of simple clarities. Rather than clear and decisive law or an un-chaste anarchism, there is instead the resumption of the dialogue, with all the stallings and risks a dialogue holds. It is in this dialogue, and not standing apart from it, that we discover the genuine meaning of natural law and order and virtue, the true value of tradition and social politesse. The for-as-against structure of the natural and unnatural, which is a non-emancipatory cycle in which man must continually drive toward freedom as the impossible, while refusing progressivism as the possible, is the internal essence and dialogue of the natural law. The natural law is the nakedness of man’s dialogue with otherness—the otherness of nature, man, God—as an erotic brutality toward an infinite end. This law is one of affirmed incompleteness and thus the law itself places everything which man possesses, especially and including reason, on the eve of truth. All of nature is therefore open to, and needful of, the supernatural from which it is inseparable. The man who recognizes that for-as-against structure to be his being on the eve of truth has discovered that it is the need for grace, not speculative reason, that makes nature intelligible. Because man is ever only on the eve of truth, he recognizes that his intelligible principle is not found in reason, for reason finds and announces itself as reason only when the truth is presented. The natural law is the active manifestation of the eternal law as eternally non-apparent but oddly present.208 Man’s manifestation is made possible by the grace of his antecedent openness, which is also, by way of man’s contradictory impulse, a need for grace. The natural law is thus the recognition that nature is wholly unified in grace without

208

Cf. Confessions XI, iv: “If to any man the tumult of the flesh were silenced; and the phantoms of earth and waters and air were silenced; and the poles were silent as well; indeed, if the very soul grew silent to herself, and went beyond herself by not thinking of herself; if fancies and imaginary revelations were silenced; if every tongue and every sign and every transient thing—for actually if any man could hear them, all these would say, We did not create ourselves, but were created by Him who abides forever.” Cf. Confessions VIII, xx–xxi, XI, v, xxv; On Grace and Free Choice, 31.

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violating the fact that nature consists as the need for grace. This lack within a world impregnated by grace—as man is both lost and saved—spurs reason on and motivates the heart to go beyond reason. Reason becomes an effect of that for-as-against structure intelligibilized by grace. When the natural law is recognized as the dialogue with the impossible, then its meaning is recovered from the dry mechanical Scholasticism which would place the rational in an unproductive opposition to those truths beyond reason. The natural law ceases to be natural when it crowns reason as the intelligible principle and orderer of nature and its law, replacing the for-as-against structure with an arid and socially corrosive unscientific scientism. This is Kant’s Grand Inquisitor of nature, soon to become the executioner of virtue, tradition, and social politesse. History lives by, it abides by, the savagery of innocence unmaintained.209 If the Christian polis is the community of sinners living in the translation of the un-translated, what political manifestation of the Word, what unity of nature and grace, what translation actually befits the condition of the fallen who freely chose to fall and who must freely choose to love again?210 Innocence is merged into the silence of a non-descript manger, but together their language game is one of life and death. The silence of and around Christ was always a preliminary courtship with forsakenness. The man inseparable from Christ sees that Christ’s own transmission of the Word carried the silence of the untranslatable. The sadness in the garden when the cup cannot be passed means that, when saved, man is saved in such a way that he must recognize the dialogic terror of his salvation. Man must speak the Word he himself cannot communicate, and what he must communicate is that he cannot reduce so as to move the Word: he communicates the grace which alone

209

Cf. R. Lowell, “History,” in Selected Poems: Expanded Edition (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), 199: History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had— it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes. Abel was finished; death is not remote, a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic, his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire, his baby crying all night like a new machine. As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory, the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter’s moon ascends— a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes, my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull’s no-nose— O there’s a terrifying innocence in my face drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.

210

The Christian polis, like the Church is, as de Lubac described it, a “complexion oppositorum.” Cf. H. Cardinal de Lubac, The Church: From Paradox to Mystery, trans. J. R. Dunne (New York: Alba House, 1969), 2: “The Church … I begin my personal search, but where shall I find her? What are the features of her countenance? With all these disparate elements, can she in fact be said to have a countenance? I believe so; she is complexio oppositorum. But even so, at first sight I must surely admit that the resounding clash of the opposite hides the unity of the complexio. Or is this merely the inevitable result of regarding her successively from different points of view? Or is the truth of the matter that she embraces each of the incompatibles?”

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provides limits and finitude. All prayers live by contradiction; Godforsakeness speaks more to hope than hope itself: [The Son] endures desolation for us as our head and in our place. He enters into solidarity with all who feel abandoned and forgotten by God. In what the Greek fathers boldly call his “foolish” love of mankind God wants to experience the absence of God. He suffers abandonment infinitely more wounding than that of sinners, one that somehow embraces them, bringing light into the midnight of their anguish, placing pierced hands of love beneath their fall. There are no uncharted territories. Even in the most hellish desert of this life, no man need despair. Godforsakeness, too, can be a holy place, for it has been hallowed and made hopeful by the person and presence of God incarnate himself.211

If this un-translated innocence can be translated into the penitential gaze, then the world of nature will never be the same. If the impossible is made possible only on the condition of its fitting necessity, then it will be a world where god-forsakenness can bring about more hope than hope itself, fulfilling as it overturns the existentialist’s non-assent. And Christian man must always be “magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life”; and that lack of preparation is itself the true education to life itself. Can the polis possibly accept, encourage, and indeed organize itself around this naturally supernatural truth of existence? It cannot but it must and because it must it can, else there would not then be a place to which we might return when we have wandered away.212 If translation serves to unify the community, the unity itself is wrought with an ever deepening contradictory stance. Christ’s translation actually reveals the isolation in the heart of each man whose very recognition of evil and whose penitential gaze sets him apart from the unity of the community. “Thou hast made us to be a contradiction to our neighbours: and our enemies have scoffed at us.”213 A Christian community would require that each Christian within the polis lay restless in the countenance of his decomposition and preliminary penance, leaving him severed from others and dumbfounded as to how to translate what cannot be translated. He is gazing within his own soul, which does not build him up but strips him down, for he must experience everything lost and everything gained, where neither experience excludes the efficacy of the other. His soul draws him in with its supernatural abundance and terrifies him with its trivialities and self-imposed decomposition. Magnificently unprepared indeed! The soul, which defines the human species and should be the birthplace of the polis, refuses him the peace or even the cessation needed to define man as fully “this” or “that.”

211

J. Saward, The Mysteries of March: Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Incarnation and Easter (London: Collins, 1990), 47–48. 212 Confessions XI, viii. 213 Ps. 80:6.

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The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but nonChristian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.214

It is often argued, and admirably so, that only the power of the Christian traditio can combat the horizontal immanentisms of an atheistic humanism and restore the transcendence into Otherness and personhood. Christianity within the polis elevates the political order from the purely natural and rationally artificial, allowing political communion as an exercise in the distinctiveness of man. The polis therefore becomes the expressed identity of the precarious and essential union of nature and grace. A Christian culture is said to be a blockade against the annihilatory suicide of the West. The desire to avoid replacing the City of God with the godless City of Man is very much the point here. And in a certain phenomenological givenness, man can recognize an intelligibility, an anarchical wisdom inside the Christian polis which appears at certain times within history and which raises man into the image of the divine and anoints the community with the transmission by tradition of that image. Yet these efforts to re-create, to copy, to find the blueprint or key, or map to that polis, the wisdom beyond knowledge but not beyond recognition, always fail. The subsequent organization becomes one only of words and not of Word. Repetition rapidly degrades into a bureaucratic posturing of dogmatic props which place the open society at odds with the closed society. A vacuous mysticism, where one is “spiritual” but not organizationally religious, is neither the answer to the re-creation of that Image nor to the recreation of the open society, but merely an effect of that failed bureaucratic copy. The impasse still affects the discourse: it is not a question of avoiding these inauthentic copies or of bypassing the most noble of closed societies. Even the inauthentic copies must be generated precisely because the unnatural is more important to man’s understanding of the natural than is the natural. Man is always within that for-as-against struggle. As the naturely otherness of God, he needs the Word to be transmitted in order to complete himself, to bring the evening to a close for the man ever on the eve-of-truth. Because no transmission is a success nor yet can he rest in his failure, it is quite easy to see why staring into one’s own soul can be a source of decomposition even as it brings joy. The soul, as the place of unity necessary for the Christian polis, is a place of decomposition. How is the Christian society even possible in the first place, when Christ’s polemos only heightens the decomposition of our soul’s countenance? The countenance that remains in that for-as-against struggle puts forward instead the ground of the isolation of each man in his ownmost guilt. That chastened stance places us in the desert of dissimilarity where our prevenient openness is yet and again untranslatable. Solidarity in guilt

214

T. S. Eliot, Thoughts After Lambeth (London: Faber & Faber, 1931), 32.

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is wholly insufficient, a shortcut where there are no shortcuts. As such, solidarity hands over to man a humanism of forgiveness, an apologetic to forgive what man cannot absolve. This solidarity therefore trumps the isolation of the penitential gaze, which is the aboriginal stance of the Christian man. All joys, all love, all intoxications of the true, good and beautiful must reside in the penitential gaze which sets each in the desert of his hope within the unending intimacy of his own lost innocence. The solidarity may be real insofar as each can depend upon a shared experience, but the experience itself is overwhelmingly of each man alone, in God or not in God. This is indeed what Camus recognized to be the lama sabactani of all men, found most profoundly in Christ because He is even more profoundly inside man’s inability to resolve himself in community or solidarity than any other man—Good Friday more than attests to this, as does every gravestone in every country churchyard. The recognition of these questions in Augustine’s City of God reveals, in fact, the primordial yet impossible necessity of the Christian society. If the penitential gaze is phenomenologically characteristic of the Christian man, if it is wholly the man, and not a social façade or posture or personality or attitude, or ascetic piety, but the primal and binding intensity of his open-to-be-closed nature, the possibility of the Christian polis is precariously vulnerable. The community cannot be the ground of the penitential gaze but its consequence, because to be Christian means that the gaze is the primal intensity which makes man seek out the Christian community. If there is a community, a Christian polis, then somehow, per impossible, it is the penitential gaze itself which must provide the formative unity of the society. But the gaze when revealed in its intensity outstrips this unity and places man in the untranslatability of his own lost intimacy. If that untranslatability is to remain fertile, it can never be resolved in the brutal generalisms of a Marxist or Hegelian collective, for there can be no economy in guilt. The community, if it is to be Christian, cannot lessen the intensity of man’s joyous penitential gaze. Neither solidarity in guilt nor in good works, to give Luther his due, is sufficient to be the formative substance of the Christian polis. It cannot transfer the guilt, penance, or needfulness to a solidarity which takes the thisness of man’s incommunicable penitential need and replaces it with an abstract universality. The temptation of the community is to promote a Hegelian ego, a universalism of Jacobean ideals, a solidarity of empty Christian virtues: solidarity in guilt becomes the solidarity of the guilty absolved by abstraction. Abstraction increases the scandal of the lie and midwifes the atheistic posture. The noblest secular community carries within it the urge to pollinate, indeed to colonize, to disseminate, or transfer its goods, ideals, and humanisms. If the polis is to be Christian, if each is to remain unendingly open in the form of the penitential—in the chaste anarchism of his open waiting to be closed nature—how do we constitute a community where the polis must avoid the temptation of living and thriving under the species? How do the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, when transformed in and by Christ, refuse to be resituated as ideals in the species? How do they remain untranslatable in each man and yet universal, implying a unity, a communion of

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Otherness? This was also Bergson’s question of the relations of the closed and open societies.215 If we can find the image of a communion that is built neither on solipsistic relativisms nor on universal generalisms, then we would be inside the image of the impossible Christian polis! It thereby appears that if the impossibility of the Christian polis is translated, it is, in fact, the image and Act of each man’s un-translated personhood. The Act of the Christian polis is a universal one that never degenerates into its own absolutism nor does its unrepeatability sequester itself into rank sentiment or relativist pseudo-commitment.216 To revisit and restate: Isn’t this the meaning of the legend of the Grand Inquisitor? Dostoyevsky’s Christian Grand Inquisitor condemns Christ and this is neither absurd nor worthless, nor without value. It is a worldly condemnation of Christ’s impossible entrance into the world, an entrance which permeates its inhabitants with the impossible logic as desire of the chaste anarchist. Does not the Saint know the same truth as the Inquisitor: no one can follow, no one can imitate Christ’s aniconic chastening. Dostoyevsky has sketched a wholly reasonable and worldly foe who, as it turns out, is wholly right and yet utterly contemptible! The inquisitor wholly misses the point of man while in turn describing faithfully man’s needs in the world, the bread of the here-and-now. And yet, the Church has planted itself in the world and this, is it not, is the root of the Inquisitor’s condemnation, the Church as seeming to violate the world while living within it? The ecclesiastical order is for the worldly inquisitor parasitical because it demands that man follow a pattern that cannot be given sequence. At the same time, the Church makes its demands while inhabited in a world of sequence, of teleological thrust; and it therefore utilizes that worldly sequence to manifest its Church in the temporal order; it utilizes a sequence which, if employed, is powerless to produce the fruit that it demands in and through the image of Christ. The Inquisitor’s criticisms demand the Gospels be translated into the world, but how can they? Isn’t something other and else happening altogether? The alternative temptation is that either everything is exactly the same or everything is totally different, when the paradoxical necessity is that everything is exactly the same and yet totally different, and this neither the Inquisitor nor the unchaste anarchist can comprehend. And this is the point St. Paul repeatedly makes—that to live outside the law we must be honest. That is the chaste anarchism which does not, because it cannot succumb to the three temptations.

215 216

Cf. “Final Remarks: Mechanics and Mysticism.” The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 229–74. Shestov asks a similar question and it is one we must apply to the impossibility of the Christian polis: Cf. A&J, 431–32: “But why attribute to God, the God whom neither time nor space limits, the same respect and love for order? Why forever speak of ‘total unity’? If God loves men, what need has He to subordinate men to His divine will and to deprive them of their own will, the most precious of the things He has bestowed upon them? There is no need at all. Consequently the idea of total unity is an absolutely false idea … . It is not forbidden for reason to speak of unity and even of unities, but it must renounce total unity—and other things besides. And what a sigh of relief men will breathe when they suddenly discover that the living God, the true God, in no way resembles Him whom reason has shown them until now!”

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The progressivist as ideologue versus the wayfarer as comprehensor Objection 1: It would seem that Christ was not at once a wayfarer and a comprehensor. For it belongs to a wayfarer to be moving toward the end of beatitude, and to a comprehensor it belongs to be resting in the end. Now to be moving towards the end and to be resting in the end cannot belong to the same. Therefore Christ could not be at once wayfarer and comprehensor. I answer that: A man is called a wayfarer from tending to beatitude, and a comprehensor from having already obtained beatitude … . Hence He was at once comprehensor, inasmuch as He had the beatitude proper to the soul, and at the same time wayfarer, inasmuch as He was tending to beatitude, as regards what was wanting to His beatitude. Reply to Objection 1: It is impossible to be moving towards the end and resting in the end, in the same respect; but there is nothing against this under a different respect— as when a man is at once acquainted with what he already knows, and yet is a learner with regard to what he does not know.217 It isn’t the community that in-forms the penitential gaze, for the gaze is the primal instantiation of man’s open-nature in the post-fall world. If there is to be a Christian society, then it is an effect of man’s untranslatable but universal penitential gaze. In order for this gaze to be fruitful—to remain as a gaze refusing both alleviation and distraction—it must not seek out community, solidarity, or species as forms of temptation to distraction, nor however must it reject them. To further that contradictory impulse which is now a discourse with God, man is an intentional being: he is a being who knows himself only in the face of others. And now what he knows he cannot translate. As in the midst of his own dying-intentio, he is the protracted death ever on the eve of life, but neither death nor life truly commands him. In this contradictory impulse where man lives beyond reason but not beyond recognition, four key phenomenological efficacies appear: (1) Man cannot found a “new” morality; there is no escape from the world or from the conditions of his penitential open nature; we are all very much in the same boat, and even if it is not the Titanic, it is very much a Ship of Fools. (2) Virtue cannot ultimately be taught; we cannot translate or transfer the untranslatable universal to others. (3) Man is an intentional being; his desire to communicate the transcendentals socially cannot be muted or stripped. His need to transfer them to others presupposes and prefigures his need to receive them. His ability to possess 217

ST III, 15, 10.

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the transcendentals is made possible only by responding to or taking-in their habitation in the Other in a public orthodoxy. (4) Possession and dispossession live within man. He is full of grace and deprived of it at the same time; he is forsaken and saved. He is in the image of Christ as both Wayfarer and Comprehensor. The result of these four intensities is that the Christian polis is both impossible and yet essential. Man’s nature as an intentional being and his penitential gaze as a manifestation of nature-inseparable-from-grace are both at odds with each other and in need of each other, so much so that “the instinct of destruction is as natural to the human soul as that of creation” and apart from “these two instincts all our faculties appear to be minor psychological properties, required only under given, and accidental, conditions.”218 This tension between creation and destruction, intentionality and the penitential gaze, thereby reveals the deeper meaning of the relationship between nature and grace and provides the onto-theological underpinnings of the polis. The natural inclination of man is to manage existence politically. He makes an organizational structure for all human acts precisely because he is a being-in-otherness with a political intentionality. Even religion itself becomes the highest order of political act, as Plato more than sensed in the Laws. But this “natural” inclination becomes one of temptation when presented with, not religion in general, but with this religion, this faith, whose figure, Christ, is the unrepeatable, untranslatable wayfarer-ascomprehensor, the chaste anarchist who reveals that the “natural” within this natural inclination is both invested with the fallenness of condition and a preveniently open invocation of grace. Christ’s unrepeatable eternal presence within time, elevating Time into Being, means that His Event cannot be organized politically into a pattern, or reduced to a mere species of generality. As the anarchism in which the natural is turned upside down by means of the grace it already possesses (Christ and Christian as comprehensor) and at the same time needs and lacks (Christ and Christian as wayfarer), Christ and, therefore, Christian man refuse all patterns. As with St. Paul, to live outside the law requires a different unrepeatable pattern, but one no less strict, no less chaste, but even more so, thus creating the tension, indeed conflict, between the Christian and society. Christ as beyond Being is beyond pattern and, as such, the Christian faith cannot quite be managed politically, hence the seeming impossibility of a Christian society. Yet man as an animal of otherness needs this society, which itself cannot be repeated or patterned. In a very real sense, a Christian society is both possible because necessary and yet impossible because unachievable. With all its tension, is the religious sensibility still the ground of political society? The discourse between nature and grace finds its linguistic and existential podium in

218

L. Shestov, Penultimate Words and Other Essays, trans. N. I. Kontsy (Boston, MA: John W. Luce, 1916), 138.

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the natural/unnatural condition of man in his political ordination. It is in this arena that the perennial territorial polemos of faith and reason, man and state take place, and it is here that the place of Christ finds or is refused a home, and it is here that the understanding of the personal as political as well as the political as the personal finds its meaning or meaninglessness. The idea of a pure nature resides at the heart of all social contract theories, whether Left or Right. The ideological consequences of natura pura polarize human finitude causing it to be at odds with the incommensurability and mystery of God, no longer a partaker in the divine effulgence. The seeming modesty/humility of ideology translates itself into the absolute right and autonomy of the ideologue, independent of all real limits. It is not humility but pride and it denies what Aquinas called the longior via: the leftist at first abbreviates and then annihilates the wayfarer, whereas the rightist at first mummifies and then entombs the comprehensor. They are, again, both a false humility masking their pride. The impossibility of the Christian polis is made possible by the union of the wayfarer and the comprehensor. This polis, if it is made possible, will never reside in an empty secularist progressivism but will carry within it the status of both the wayfarer and the comprehensor. The polis is both an eros and a saturated presence at the same time. Christ’s To Be, which is most interior in all things, has made the impossible possible without violating its impossibility. Man-in-Christ is both wholly wayfarer and comprehensor. The Christian polis is therefore the continued translation of the Cross’s affirmation that nature is inseparable from grace; it is the place wherein man tends to the beatitude which, in a way, he already possesses. He possesses grace by way of dispossession: the dispossession reveals his wayfarer status, which in its authentic eros sheds the fanaticism of an aesthetically immoral and spiritually aloof progressivism. Man’s dispossession also reveals that he is the preveniently open comprehensor of the beatitude of Christ’s Word ever infused in nature. The Christian Society is no progressivism, for it carries the fullness of the Word. The Christian Society is never Ideal, for its fullness rests on man’s open nature desire to close-in-on Christ’s supremely open nature. The Christian society refuses both static ideals and empty futurity. Its futurity is carried in the present, which unleashes an intensified anticipation within that fullness. The wayfarer without the comprehensor is the basis of empty revolutions. The comprehensor without the wayfarer is the end of the death march and the birth of fanatical idealisms and the theological autocracies of the Grand Inquisitor. Any notion of Christian society built on an extrinsicized grace is a static and endless concatenation of distracted movements. It is static because it has rendered its truths to be eternal verities untouched, where all meaning is suspended in the future. It is ceaselessly moving because it denies its foundation in grace and thus denies man’s open nature. As a result, the man who has an unfailingly open nature must act out that openness in an annihilatory way. It is this form of degenerate polis which promotes the impotence of a satanic dynamism. History’s meaning becomes a mindless re-historizing of goods, meanings, and values in an empty creative fatalism. The Christian who segregates grace is the atheist without even an object to refuse.

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The tragicomedy of the Christian polis Man is naturally supernatural. As such his polis must be a timely companion. While the polis may create a “pause” in the natural tide, this does not mean that societal order is against nature. Perhaps, instead, it is attempting to grasp the type of place which befits open natures. The Greeks realized that the polis must prepare man to accept his supernatural status. Its order was not supplanted in nature to exonerate man from the tragicomedy of existence219 but to provide a context needed to approach the tragic. The polis must enshrine the divine mystery, which is, from certain vantages of spiritual awakening, comedic and from others tragic. Man is an open and un-fixed essence where the acquisition of truth resides in a spiritual appetite requiring the painful awareness of time. The comedy of traditional nomos and custom provides those gentle in-additions inviting the soul into further speculation. The closed society in Bergson’s sense opens the door to the Cross and to its tragic brotherhood; its invitation is an entrance with no exit, and it is measured by a hollowing intensification. The comedic found in ritual and the retelling of ancient myths is the gestational stage of the Via Crucis. The child fumbling the sign of the Cross marks off time in ancient signs of sacred deference. Through the non-sequential’s secret ordination, an unknowing, slow, and loving fatalism binds that free soul as much to the nativity as to the nightfall on the Cross. And the only freedom that means anything at all is the one discovered at the foot of the Cross. Man’s waitingness lives between comedy and tragedy. Every attempt to define this wait, from Christian ritual to Heideggerian resolve, is but a comic shot across the bow in search of location, place, or any stance where the self may remain. The tragic needs the comedic precisely because it isn’t so much a product of fatalism but of that immense and imageless freedom; that unbounded possibility and joyful yearning needed to be like God.220 The truly tragic is the Saints’ joy. Man-in-Christ has the freedom to place himself in a self-imposed fate, a freedom to do the impossible and tear himself down beyond recognition. If tragedy were merely irrational despair, it would fail to carry any meaningful ties to Christianity. If it is the relentless élan vital, those fumbling, almost comic re-enactments of the eternal terror, then tragedy is Christian. Man experiences the homiletic and cyclical conversion from tragedy to comedy and back by becoming something new in the Body and Blood of the God-Man. If the impossibility of the Christian polis reveals its necessity, it carries with it the highest form of the comedic, Christ. Christ persists within all entanglements of the beautiful and the absurd, as He is the greatest of fools, surrendering Himself to man. 219 220

Cf. K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2013), 179. Cf. H. U. Cardinal von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1989), 102–03: “In tragedy, man acts against the background of the god and man reveals himself, emerging into the light of his own truth, because of the appearance of the god, even in wrath and concealment. There is no trace of an aesthetic effect on this stage, it is concerned solely with bloody truth and justice … and which is revealed simultaneously in the god and in man, in that communion which they enjoy and yet divides them.”

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St. Louis de Montfort was once astonished221 to find that when looking at a Cross, great joy and laughter was not only possible but profuse. He wondered how joy could compete with an image of supreme agony. How is it possible to desire even now the Cross when desiring the rack, the noose, the gulag’s execution is impossible? The impossibility of the polis is its necessity; the necessity appears in that joyful desire for the Cross. Christ’s actions bridge the ethical with the religious, making Christian ethics an exercise in the impossible, with all the quixotic joy needed before real surrender. Lose such a bridge and Christian ethics becomes legalistic. The religious life then becomes the satisfaction of ethical demands that appear as distant and unreachable eternals. These dry forms of ethics and religion cannibalize themselves from within, failing to offer the living Word. They overflow with boredom until revolted against. In their aftermath, psychologically reduced views of tragedy are positioned against the certitudes of Christianity stripped of their comedic and tragic presence. Man finds himself disconnected from Christ, seeing only wish-fulfilling hope. Living out the tragicomedy of his situation, man cannot reconcile it with a decrepit Christianity opposed to it. Its impossibility is that the Cross is a pattern always present but never repeated in anything else. Christ must be in the polis and at the same time cannot be. He is present as fugitive and absent as honored guest. He plays the comedic fool and the tragic hero. The joy and laughter inside the Cross is denied to the guillotine. The Cross implies an eternally new man living in all men and therefore invading political ordination. Christ is the underlying metaxic force forever uniting tragedy and comedy into the new man. He is the tragic hero, the relentless fool, the Beautiful Love, freely making the impossible possible only because it is necessary. Prometheus falls into the abyss, soldiers to their knees, consciousness is lost again and again for every soul, the smile of the genuflecting child, bread, and wine: Christ is the turnkey to all these things, uniting beauty and terror, the everything and nothing. Christ elevates the closed society into the open, the politique into the mystique,222 He is the polemos, the real rebel, the essential confrontation beyond the polis Who forms its gates. In the dying God, the way up becomes the way down and the lesser becomes the vehicle of transcendence. If Christ is separated from the activities of the polis, what is lost is the primal ground beyond good and evil where custom, nomos, tradition, and ritual are fed and in turn give limit and perspective to knowledge, education, will, and intellect. When the polis forgets that it is a supernatural possibility, the open society is in-authentically rendered in opposition to the closed society. The mystique of the polis lies within but beyond the mean, metron or meson; it is the living law making the word flesh. When this mystique is ignored, the deadening standards of apathetic moderation and

221

Cf. Jesus Living in Mary: Handbook of the Spirituality of St. Louis de Montfort, eds. S. De Fiores, A. Bosard & P. Gaffney (Litchfield, CT: Montfort Publications, 1994), 274. 222 As the supreme chaste anarchist, Christ works with and against the polis. The God-Man both returns man to the mystique as his naturally supernatural ordination and condemns and destroys the politique in order to re-constitute it. Peguy recognized this tension between the mystique as parent and the politique as needy usurper. Cf. Temporal and Eternal, 31. “Everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politique … . The mystique should not be devoured by the politique to which it gave birth.”

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cowardly tolerance systematically deride the tragicomedy of traditio, imitatio, and repetitio, which has its place prior to and beyond reason. What remains is an empty “tradition” of perspectivisms where virtue training is suffocated by the fraudulence and sophistry of either the conservative fear monger or the liberal pseudo-rebel. The artifice of the city-state becomes unnatural, mechanistic, and totalitarian, a stream of unconscionable allegiances to the various fads and humanisms of mediocrity. The new man is drowned out in favor of the less-than-man, who cannot embody any tragic wisdom, but only uses it as a badge in order to shirk the weight of responsibility and the tasks of humility. The futural becomes the past: comedy is extinguished, and tragedy can no longer bring about the dis-ease of the restless soul. Tragedy becomes “the same” and comedy becomes ridicule. The brotherhood of the polis is replaced by the brother-less comrades of the red guards. (Only) innocence individuates; (only) ignorance multiplies; (only) one embodies regret, but which one?

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The night on Golgotha is so important in the history of man only because, in its shadow, the divinity abandoned its traditional privileges and drank to the last drop, despair included, the agony of death. This is the explanation of the lama sabactani and the heartrending doubt of Christ in agony. The agony would have been mild if it had been alleviated by hopes of eternity. For God to be a man, he must despair.1 The power of the biblical revelation—what there is in it of the incomparably miraculous and, at the same time, of the absurdly paradoxical, or, to put it better, its monstrous absurdity—carries us beyond the limits of all human comprehension and of the possibilities which that comprehension admits. For God, however, the impossible does not exist. God—to speak the language of Kierkegaard, which is that of the Bible—God: this means that there is nothing that is impossible. And despite the Spinozist interdictions, fallen man aspires, in the final analysis, only to the promised “nothing will be impossible for you”; only for this does he implore the Creator. It is here that religious philosophy takes its rise. Religious philosophy is not a search for the eternal structure and order of immutable being; it is not reflection (Besinnung); it is not an understanding of the difference between good 1

The Rebel, 32. Cf. N. Berdyaev, “The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge,” trans. S. Janos. Put 18 (1929): 106: “The essence of Christianity consists in this, that the transcendent has become immanent, that there is a commensurability between God and man, there is a likeness and kinship, that the Divine truth is rendered human, whilst also non-human. The theme, which all his life torments L. Shestov, finds its resolution only in Christianity. Over and beyond an immanent god, of abstract Reason and the Good, the God of the philosophers, and a God absolutely transcendent, a God capricious, unjust, merciless and cruel, there is a third, the Christian aspect of God— God as Love, God as Sacrifice, the God emptying Himself and issuing forth blood, God, having become Man. And it is only this aspect of God that can be acceptable. Theodicy is not at all a justification of God in the face of human judgment, theodicy is a defending of God against a false human understanding of God, against the slanders leveled against God. The sole possible theodicy is Golgotha, the redemptive sacrifice of God, reconciling God and man. Here is why between our sinful, legalistic, this-side life and the life beyond, of paradise, the Kingdom of God, there lies sacrifice, effort, humility, the path, along which God Himself went, the son of God, Who humbled Himself and took on the form of a lowly servant.”

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and evil, an understanding that falsely promises peace to exhausted humanity … . the philosophy that does not dare to rise above autonomous knowledge and autonomous ethics, the philosophy that bows down will-lessly and helplessly before the material and ideal “data” discovered by reason and that permits them to pillage and plunder the “one thing necessary”—this philosophy does not lead man towards truth but forever turns him away from it.2

Athens and Jerusalem: The case against metaphysics Not entirely unlike Bergson, Shestov (1866–1938) never formally became a Christian, although he ever seemed close to becoming one, at least in his writings. But what he consistently, if ambiguously, struggled to articulate is to be found—and I believe he knew it—most dramatically in the figure of Christ. “Shestov’s God is Jewish but He is at the same time the God who became flesh, who died and rose again according to the Christian faith.”3 Shestov relentlessly reproaches the metaphysician for his betrayals, for his reductive refusal to encounter or even to approach a mystery like the beyond-being God of the Cross Who has overwhelmed the metaxy and radicalized man’s encounter with God. Christ goes beyond all experienced categories of perfection, beyond all relatedness and balance, beyond the metaxy, though not abolishing them. He is, for Shestov, the All-orNothing, the impossible lover trading the distant absolute of philosophy and theology for the kathodos of eternal surrender. As the embodied act of To Be, Christ leaps with a wagering sacrifice into the finite, going beyond—but not abolishing—good and evil. Christ elevates man’s perfection far beyond the moralism of a social teacher and into an impossible yet essential naturally supernatural end with all the particularity, incommunicability, universality of His own To Be. As the Being of time, Christ is beneath and beyond the categories of right and wrong, true and false, real and unreal, as the loving and relentless God: the polemos uniting eros and agape, time and eternity, Being and Becoming, universal and particular. As the ground of all categories, ideas, and meaning, Christ is eternally overcoming the world. Shestov indeed recognizes what Nietzsche missed—the radical power of Christ, in Whom the impossible is made possible and the senseless is made sensible.4

2 3

4

A&J, 70–71. Noted Shestov scholar R. Fotiade as quoted in D. Sugarman, “A Philosopher of Small Things.” Tablet Magazine (June 2012). Cf. A&J, 221: “Instead of engaging in supreme combat with Necessity, Nietzsche, velut paralyticus, manibus et pedibus omissis (like a cripple, with slack arms and legs), abandons himself to his adversary and hands over his soul to it; he promises not only to obey and venerate but to love it. And he does not make this promise only in his own name; all must submit to Necessity, venerate and love it, or else they will be excommunicated. Excommunicated by whom? Amor fati, says Nietzsche, is the formula for greatness, and he who refuses to accept everything that fatum imposes upon him will be deprived of the praise, the encouragement, the approbation that the idea of ‘greatness’ contains in itself.”

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God’s relatability and ineffability are both dramatically re-appropriated in the GodMan, vivifying the Mystery of Being in a way previously unknown to the philosopher. God’s ineffability is no longer the abstraction of the Greeks but rather—and quite the contrary— the visceral nearness of Golgotha where Christ is more human than any other human ever was or will be. God’s ineffability, therefore, works hand-in-hand with his supreme relatability: Christ, more human than any human, is, simultaneously, the most relatable Being and yet beyond all knowledge. His relationship with man can never be severed or abstracted from the encounter, making Christ beyond reason but not beyond recognition in lived-experience; with, therefore, significant implications for the new thinking presaged but never accomplished by Phenomenology.5 There can be little doubt that Shestov has cast off metaphysics—down and off to the wayside fall the loosened chains of a Greek slave. “The pretensions of reason to all-inclusiveness take their rise in our taste for the limited, which encloses itself in artificial bonds and feels such extreme fear before all that is unknown.”6 Having deemed metaphysics a failure in its exaltation of reason over-and-against Being in its genuine ineffability realized in Christ, Shestov has left metaphysics behind and not only will not look back with a view to his old habitation, but refuses to do so out of a furious joy motivated by the fear of being frozen in what he considers fallen and idle knowledge. The ineffable is ineffable because and inasmuch as it is opposed by its very nature not to realization in general, as people are inclined to believe, but to definitive and final realization. It does realize itself but it cannot and does not wish to be transformed into knowledge. For knowledge is constraint, and constraint is submission, loss, and privation, which finally hides in its depths the terrible threat of “contentment with oneself.” Man ceases to be man and becomes a stone endowed with consciousness. The Parmenides, “who is constrained by the truth itself,” the Parmenides who turns around to look at the truth, is no longer the Parmenides who, as Plato later did, dares to penetrate into the land which is known by no one but only promised to men, to seek there the golden fleece or some other treasure that in no way resembles those that men know. He is no longer the living, restless, insubmissive, tortured and—by that very fact—great Parmenides. The Medusa’s head, which he saw in turning backward, brought him a deep and final repose.7

The uninvited: Parmenides in chains It is precisely the oddness of this stance which sets Shestov apart as a metaphysician of the mystery. If we propose that Shestov’s reprimand and rejection of metaphysics is based on what he considers a feeble and fallacious natural foundation for 5

6 7

Cf. L. Shestov, “In Memory of a Great Philosopher: Edmund Husserl,” in Speculation and Revelation, trans. B. Martin (Athens, OH, Ohio UP, 1982), 267–87. L. Shestov, Potestas Clavium, trans. B. Martin (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1968), xv. A&J, 116.

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knowledge, meaning, and recognition, we come to the very heart of his contribution. For Shestov, the language of the total conversion of our souls in God is undermined by the metaphysics at work in any presupposed idea of a “pure” nature which actively denies any ontological complementarity to the phenomenon of conversion. In Shestov’s view—and not incompatible with Heidegger’s—the notion of truth devolved after the Pre-Socratics, losing its alethiological character, becoming nothing other than universal and necessary “truths.” Man, standing apart from the truth, is no longer in a position to be transformed by it. The truth therefore becomes a roadblock, a stopping point failing to become the critical engagement or passageway into the Otherness of Being. When man, for Shestov, stops at this deformed view of truth as Necessity, it puts an end to any inquisitiveness and to the recognition that the impossible end is the only genuine end for man. When man arrives at the so-called necessary relations between phenomena, the ultimate and highest task of metaphysics has been accomplished, thereby undermining any real rapprochement with metaphysical Otherness.8 Man, for Shestov, is the being who reenacts the horizon between nature and grace by being the responder-in-act. His responsiveness indicates that he is not only on, but rather that his non-sequential being is identical with the confinium between nature and grace, time and eternity.9 He is neither purely a chronological nor purely an eternal being, his existence is neither a pure nature nor a grace emptied of yearning nature. Man knows of his unified nature through a gift far nobler than the machinations of reason, which leave man a surveyor, a thinker but not a knower. This gift of man as the otherness of Being is yet still the ground of metaphysics. Man knows only by way of response—becoming the other as other, because consciousness is always consciousness of. For Shestov, there is no dilemma in rejecting metaphysics if its architectonic rises from the vacant and infertile ground of a natura pura which not only

8 9

Cf. G. Gruca, “Lev Shestov’s Philosophy of Crisis.” Analecta Husserliana CIII (2009), 209. Cf. SCG II, 68; SCG II, 80; SCG III, 61. Man, by virtue of his intellectual soul stands on the borderline, “the horizon or confinium between eternity and time.” St. Thomas stresses this point throughout his works emphasizing that the soul is shown to hold the last place among intellectual things (Cf. DV X, 8 resp.). Man is an in-carnated soul; the neediness of the soul for the body, reflecting the very dignity of the soul, is no mere footnote or theatrical aside embellishing the already completed project. The fact that man’s soul holds the lowest place among spiritual beings reaffirms its proper location as a lived and embodied experience. The soul’s movement as animating principle of the body means that it does not abstract from matter by apprehending the immaterial insight and quickly shedding the material baggage of unsought particularity, as if by doing so the soul has affirmed its unmixed and separate spiritual nature. This view improperly projects the soul as first among spiritual substances, which is a type of angelism and not the soul’s proper identification as active and receptive, completed and incomplete. The soul is on the horizon between time and eternity, holding the highest spot in embodiment and lowest in the spiritual life. With this in mind, Shestov’s criticism that metaphysics creates a bifurcated view of the world must be taken seriously. When nature can only tangentially relate to grace, and where the eternal, universal, and absolute are therefore abstract and cut off from the world, this metaphysical compartmentalization will indeed have devastating consequences for Christology and especially for understanding Christ as Being. And here we find an affinity with St. Thomas that Shestov did not recognize.

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fails to illuminate the supernatural naturalness of Christ but in fact exiles any Christological meaning from nature. In order to accommodate what it has denied in advance, pure nature must bind the freedom of the divine to the necessity of earthly order. Instead of the world being a straining reflection of God, God must reflect the world as its projection and thereby be constrained to its necessity.10 Pure nature’s more prime deficiencies involve a denial of the presence of Revelation within existence. This presence isn’t “there” merely to indicate the possibility of an empty futural conversion for man. Rather it is accomplishing a conversion in man’s existential comportment so as to give him a real and incarnate futurity. Christ shapes man’s open nature because He neither elicits a form of magical ideology, such as the vacant futurity of Marxism, nor does His presence deny that human nature is in a perilous non-freeing struggle. When natural law is built on such a denial, it fails to be natural—that is, open to revelation—becoming also the ground for a non-entitative futurity. In such a reduction, Christ is no longer the metaxic reality always overcoming the metaxy, but rather one of the many historicist symbols of a descriptively distant metaxic tension that does not confirm anything more than that man is “open” to the possibility of a vague transcendence—and isn’t this the cloaked cowardice of the agnostic who, like the Stoic, thinks he is above it all and so withholds assent? This kind of “Christ” has no place in the metaxy except to be one of its manifestations that, again, can be picked up or discarded by the “pure” and self-enclosed self as it forms itself and forgets more than all else how secondary it is in the world of Otherness. Christ, in this fall into reductive knowledge, becomes a framework of symbols, projections, or aspirations, an end at best to be perceived, rather than a realm to be lived in. Christ as teleological end of symbolic patterns soon becomes a naïve or unnecessary and unhelpful limitation to the presumed unencumbered possibilities of the self ’s own powers and natural self-enclosed projections. With Shestov: … we must see here a trick of reason which wishes at all costs to preserve its sovereignty. For reason the potentia ordinate (ordered power) of God is much more comprehensible and much more acceptable than his potentia absoluta (absolute power), which it fears at bottom more than everything in the world. Reason seeks and finds everywhere a well-defined order, an arrangement established once for all. It even goes so far as to oppose potentia absoluta to potentia ordinata as a supernatural to a natural order, thus brushing aside in advance every threat against the integrity of its sovereign rights.11

10

11

Cf. A&J, 352: “Medieval philosophy at times made extreme and desperate efforts to preserve the truth of revelation, while accepting the Greek wisdom. But all its efforts remained fruitless: the truth of revelation ended by completely resembling the natural truth. And this resemblance is expressed, above everything, in that it refuses to recognize its dependence on the Creator but wishes that the Creator obey it.” A&J, 347.

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The unseen: An apotheosis of groundlessness Man’s being is constantly re-cast in Being, for he is the being of meaning, call, and response. If his arché and telos are situated in responsiveness, the only end commensurate with his nature is the in-commensurate gift of an open, and endlessly conversional end.12 This contradictory impulse resides in the fact that as a being-ofresponse, man’s end takes on the risk of responsiveness; it is an open end, a naturally supernatural end, an end looking for an end which precludes in advance the selfenclosed finite end of nature, which is an unnatural end for man. That is why only Christ can leave man satisfied. And here grace and faith are in the same situation: both are unmerited but necessary, and necessary because divinely fitting, indeed the perfect fit for man, fitting for God to provide as belonging to the essence of goodness, which is to communicate itself to others. “Hence it is manifest that it was fitting that God should become incarnate.”13 Does this, again, in any way deny either the divine gratuity or the divine omnipotence? The natura pura ideologies cannot have it both ways, implying that it does and then attempting to manage St. Thomas’ clear assertion to the contrary. There is an ontological inner tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, towards the divine. From its origin, man’s being resonates with some things and clashes with others. This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the god-like constitution of our Being, is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is, so to speak, an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. He sees: That’s It! This is what my nature points to and seeks. The possibility for and right to mission rest on this anamnesis of the Creator, which is identical to the ground of our existence … nothing belongs less to me than I myself. My own “I” is the site of the profoundest surpassing of self and contact with Him from whom I came and toward whom I am going … . It is the longing for a truth that does not just make demands of us but also transforms us through expiation and pardon. Through these, as Aeschylus puts it, “guilt is washed away,” and our own being is transformed from within, beyond our capability. This is the real innovation of Christianity: The Logos, the truth in person, is also the atonement, the transforming forgiveness that is above and beyond our capability and incapability. Therein lies the real novelty on which larger Christian memory is founded, and which indeed, at the same time, constitutes the deeper answer to what the anamnesis of the Creator expects of us.14

12

13 14

On the relationship of the commensurate and incommensurate, see A&J, 185: “Like everything that bears the mark of mystery, freedom harbors an inner contradiction. Every attempt to rid oneself of it always leads to the same result: one rids oneself not of the contradiction but of the problem.” See also D. Patterson, Exile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters (Lexington, KY: UP Kentucky, 1994), 107. ST III, 1, 1 resp. J. Cardinal Ratzinger, On Conscience (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2007), 40.

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God is “everywhere primarily and absolutely,”15 deepening our created responsiveness to the uncreated and infinitely open source which we both can and cannot take-in. Our finitude is being transformed by the infinite: God is everywhere primarily and absolutely because He is “in all things … and innermostly.”16 Man cannot and yet must take-in the call: he cannot take it in because it is reason’s primal antecedent. He must somehow possess it because his perfection and happiness reside in responsively knowing and loving the Caller Who is in every place giving man his respective operation as a responder as well as his “existence and locative power.”17 Christ’s union with man means so much more than a side-by-side touching of selfsufficient existences: by “the very fact that He gives being to the things that fill every place, He Himself fills every place.”18 Christ freely binds Himself as Medium; the thing known Who can be in the one who knows. In this supreme bondage, man is freed to know, love, and to enjoin in the only satisfying end, Christ. If Christ is known and taken-in, this is because man is already by his nature open to that infinite noematic reality. His nature is therefore never divorced from the gift of grace; man’s open prevenient nature continually testifies to this truth.19 The dramatic reality of Christ is often sidestepped in metaphysical expression when it should be given centrality as Christ is, according to the faith, Being itself, the conversional ground for man’s knowledge: Metaphysical systems must be constructed in such a way that they do not irrupt into life and do not shake the established order of existence, or, better yet, in a way such that they bless and sanctify the established order … . Metaphysics must be useful to society, just like science and art and religion … . Even the religion of the crucified God tries to imitate metaphysical systems, and Christians almost always forget, even though they wear a cross on their breasts, that the Saviour of the world cried out from the height of the cross, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” They believe that the Saviour must know this terrible despair, but that men may escape it. Men need a metaphysics which consoles and orders existence, and a religion which also consoles and orders existence. But no one cares for a truth of which he does not know beforehand what it will bring, nor for a religion which leads us into unknown territory.20

15 16 17 18 19

20

Cf. ST I, 8, 4 resp. ST I, 8, 1 resp. Ibid. ST I, 8, 2 resp. Cf. D. Cardinal Mercier, A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy Vol. II (London: Kegan Paul, 1922), 222: “Our destiny is in point of fact a supernatural one; such a destiny is intrinsically possible, since we know [through revelation] that is actually a reality. May we, then, still speak of a happiness that is purely natural? To be happy is to be in possession of a good which gives full satisfaction to the desires of the will, and if it’s admitted that human nature is capable, by supernatural aid, of knowing God intuitively, it would seem that a discursive knowledge of God cannot suffice for man’s happiness.” A&J, 408–09.

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Man for Shestov, as for Unamuno, has an unfixed or open essence, a capax dei, enabling him to participate even in Christ’s radical freedom. Only with a being so far beyond, not abolishing but rather constituting the irreducible and transcendental nature of the categories of making, doing, acting, persisting, and enduring, can man unmake himself in the existential chase and re-collect what is not himself so as to become deiform. The risk of his existence is deeper than survival against death; it is the risk of having or possessing life. Man’s risk is not merely to maintain life, which would be another manifestation of the struggle against death. His risk is to make himself actual and fulfill the Delphic injunction on its deepest level. The act of creation gave us creational status, not merely the ability to persist in the life we already have, but to participate in its formation. Our existential status is in-making, constantly coming out of the backdrop of Being through the power that brings forth both the happening and the futurity of existence. This is the underlying rigor of deiformitas: man must come out of nothing again and again and he must extend himself in an almost infinite number of ways to the point where he is his own other and is ontologically abandoned to himself as a radically open possibility. To be man as more-than-man, man must be at the point that lies beyond his own capability and incapability and this requires that he already be other than himself. This being-beyond-our-capability-and-incapability is the impossible yet essential stance of man that Shestov knew and which prompted his critique of metaphysics—that the metaphysician could not encounter that impossibility but sought to reduce its difficulty to an easy, worldly harmony.21 The war against what one knows only too well—which is the necessity to go beyond our own capability and incapability—is the inner dynamite of the Christian tradition and its irreducible historicality. It is predicated on the depths of an anamnetic and creational power that only a God-Man could re-collect, recover, endure, and complete, but in which man must participate in order to be himself. The operations of the soul therefore reflect an alethiological dispossession-and-possession which characterizes our restless search for the end. In the impossible logic of the Cruciform, man the untranslatable is translated: the tragic flirts with and becomes the transcendent so that the life of the God-Man becomes God-ever-in-man, and through Christ man’s very life translates into endurance—the shedding of blood is both death and life simultaneously. This simultaneity of life and death entails a fundamental shift not only in philosophical perspective but also to the ground of the possibility of philosophy, Christian or otherwise. Shestov’s so-called rejection of metaphysics and the fact that he has been so easily forgotten—having neither disciples nor schools in his honor—makes him perhaps one of the greatest metaphysicians.22 Perhaps Shestov’s critique of metaphysical thinking 21 22

B. Fondane, Rencontres avec Léon Chestov (Paris: Plasma, 1982), 60. In “Shestov or the Purity of Despair,” Milosz spoke of another forgotten writer, Sorana Guran, who, in speaking of life as she dies, re-arranges her loves to the most precious and few, telling Milosz to read Shestov: “Read Shestov, Milosz, read Shestov.” With Gurana and Shestov, Milosz had more than half suspected there to be a primal link between a certain type of greatness and the inability to transmit that power: Cf. C. Milosz, “Shestov or the Purity of Despair,” in Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Thinking (Berkeley, CA: Univ. California Press, 1977), 102.

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is in metaphysics’ own refusal to recognize that it cannot transmit its own meaning; that its greatness lies in being un-transmittable—as a veiled expression of the very contradictory heart of man who seeks out and yet flees communion, and does so without cessation. Shestov recognized the for-as-against beyond-noetic-engagement of man to be at the root of the metaphysical act. Man’s discourse on thinking is not borne of a pan-naturalism, nor even of a paradoxical effulgence of seemingly contradictory terms to be reconciled. Shestov saw that the idea-based divisions which metaphysics sets up in order to encounter the world, while natural and which often in their originality convey a responsiveness to the world, strangely enough plummet man into the artificial, denying thereby both the natural and the un-natural. The shift from the genuine to the inauthentic in metaphysics is as a blink of an eye. Metaphysics, seeking to express the experiential and phenomenological presence of man to, in, of, while yet severed from the world, recoils from this dark passage under the seductive promise of “assimilation” with things that can be “taught”—science, psychology, sociology, and so on. Metaphysics, for Shestov, recoils from the metaphysically visceral in its effort to tame the absolute and to ape science. It then proffers its catalogues of concepts and categories in which man must live by distinctions, quartering himself in a nature exiled from grace. Man becomes the concubine of the general and the absolute and the universal, for he thinks these things can be transmitted and thus that metaphysics can claim a semblance of eternity in its “eternal verities” and even immortality in its sheer Aristotelian impersonality.

Somewhere east of Eden: In Job’s balances To pass from empirical philosophy to metaphysics one must be prepared to renounce the principles of identity and contradiction. And this is very understandable: metaphysics, with its immense tasks, does not admit the limitations which the empirical sciences accept and even cultivate. Hence it is a useless enterprise to exhibit the contradictions of metaphysical constructions. The validity of a metaphysical system does not by any means consist in the harmony and concordance of its theses, but in something quite different.23

Shestov never forgot that human discourse is dead when spoken, that any speaking about Being can never catch-up to Being-beyond-being. A genuine metaphysics lies in enmity against the orders of metaphysics. Beyond knowledge but not beyond recognition, the metaphysician is the visible presence of the unseemly, unforgettable, and unrepeatable. Metaphysics is the transience of Being, it is a necessary disenchantment with essences, even and especially as it is confined necessarily to such language and expression. “The father and creator of the theory of ideas was not afraid

23

Shestov, Potestas Clavium, 113.

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of metaphysics. Even more: for Plato the theory of ideas had meaning only because it opened to him the way to metaphysical revelations and, conversely, it appeared to him true and eternal insofar as it expressed certain metaphysical visions.”24 The beauty of Christianity, its philosophical and theological speaking, if it is to rise above chatter and discourse, is in the elongation of contradiction itself, the seeds of which reside in the very heart of man. After reading Dostoyevsky’s Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Shestov sensed a wisdom beyond knowledge, but not beyond recognition, and connected that wisdom with an intense “metaphysical state of man before the Fall, not just to visualize a happy Rousseauistic society.”25 Metaphysics for Shestov was both lost after the Fall as non-conceptual intentional identity and, at the same time, only encountered for the first time after the Fall as abstract science based on the principle of non-contradiction. If metaphysics is the expression of the primordial connaturality of man and nature, where both constituents call forth their supernatural grounding, then prelapsarian man would be beyond mere idea and situated within the phenemonological givenness of metaphysical meaning. As such, in the garden metaphysical knowledge would be fully encountered but therefore “unknown” except connaturally, for man is beyond ideational chasing, and even anamnetic resolve.26 Metaphysics becomes a form either of penance or neurosis in the post-fall state, for it is an attempt to reconstruct a state it cannot even speak about, let alone teach. And yet, the primordial mythos of the Genesis story pervading all epistemological acts as the hidden fall into knowledge cannot be ignored: “if we wish to participate in the biblical epistemology or, to speak more exactly, in the metaphysics of knowledge, we must above all else realize as precisely as possible the meaning of this story.”27 Just as grace per-fects, so sin de-fects and man cannot think as if it has not in-fected reason by means of reason, for the Fall is not so much from knowledge as into knowledge.28 In that sense its nature is its condition as defecting from the pre-fall condition as naturally innocent, as loyal without reason. Can metaphysics see and incorporate the defection of reason or must it pretend it isn’t there by nature? If that latter pretense becomes the noetic foundation for metaphysics, then Shestov’s rejection is timely and, in fact, a metaphysical rejection of a degenerate metaphysics. Post-lapsarian nature exists in a cosmogonic Heraclitean flux bordering on the tragic, becoming a non-emancipatory circularity. Post-fall condition is a nature in needful movement: the perpetual fall

24 25 26

27 28

Ibid., 313. Milosz, “Shestov or the Purity of Despair,” 106. Cf. Shestov, Speculation and Revelation, 161. Cf. F. Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Other Stories, trans. C. Garnett (West Valley City, UT: Waking Valley Press, 2006), 13. “Their knowledge was higher and deeper than the knowledge we derive from our science; for our science seeks to explain what life is and strives to understand it in order to teach others how to live, while they knew how to live without science. I understood that, but I couldn’t understand their knowledge. They pointed out the trees to me, and I could not understand the intense love with which they looked on them; it was as though they were talking with beings like themselves. And, you know, I don’t think I am exaggerating in saying that they talked with them!” A&J, 277. Cf. K&E, 1–28.

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away from innocent nature, and the restless need to recover, co-exist within a nonemancipatory for-as-against natural and unnatural struggle; this is man’s new nature. It is true that the eternal presents many very seductive external advantages over the temporal, such that one can admit that weak human nature has manifested itself in the philosophers in this case also: the eternal and the immutable has seduced them not only because it is superior by its “nature” to the transitory and the changeable, but also, among other things, because it lets itself more easily be fixed and therefore studied … . General ideas appear to the philosophers, so to speak, like a rainbow above a waterfall: the rainbow remains immobile and immutable, while the water gushes, crashes, and evaporates into a cloud. Where then must the essence of things be sought—in these splashes and these drops that are born and disappear, or in the rainbow? To what must our thought be applied? So men put the question, losing sight of the fact that the rainbow also passes, that it ceases to exist when the sun sets.29

Any metaphysics that attempts overly to Hellenize nature—ignoring the tragedian’s wisdom—perverts the real ground of metaphysics and reduces nature to a static and ideational tabula rasa. This is not only an unworthy but also a diremptive metaphysics precisely because it has bracketed the encounter with fallenness as a merely theological truth held suspended from an anthropological givenness. Such bracketing is the handiwork of pure nature, and has shown itself to be far more compatible with the modern and post-modern segregation and privatization of theological truths which render the faith irrelevant as a purely idiosyncratic encounter. Shestov more than recognized how all of human existence groans to be emancipated from nature’s twofold necessity: (1) the cosmogonic nature which ignores us with such violence that we either find penance or dominance, and in the end any dominance fails to find independence, becoming its own form of penance, and (2) the post-fall condition, which is the reality of the natural inhabiting the unnatural by way of attempting to claw itself out—per impossible—of the unnatural. The natural-fleeing-from-descent-whiledescending finds itself needing the contrast of the un-natural to lay claim to what is natural, all the while calling out to the supernatural in a sort of fallenness and stasis of the soul’s journey to God. In the merging of the cosmogonic and the post-fall nature, man is exaggeratedly open and closed. He is open to an end he cannot know or reach— man is naturally supernatural—and because he cannot know what or how to desire what he desires, he is frightfully closed in the stasis of his fallenness and repulsion from the cosmogonic. In this non-emancipatory struggle where he must come to terms with his penultimate nature—that no natural end can satisfy him, that all such ends carry within them what Aquinas called a “natural pendent of sadness”30—even the terrors and the furies of the cosmogonic are more comforting than to recognize

29 30

Shestov, Potestas Clavium, 241. SCG III, 46.

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his own impotence in sin. Existence groans to be released from this twofold nature, all the while needing the shifting plains of this post-fall nature. This is the season of lamentation and all men are amateurs at it. Our existence cannot persist without either the cosmogonic, which never stops even as death divides man from man, or the longing for that post-fall flavored innocence that tinges the fields and the fruit with waning light and melancholic expediency. Man needs to love both avenues of this twofold nature in and beyond him as much as he must hate it with all his hope. He must love and hate it in rapt simultaneity in order to fulfill in himself the immutable contradictions of being the speaking being: Nature often deprives man of ready material, while at the same time she demands imperatively that he should create. Does this mean that nature contradicts herself, or that she perverts her creatures? Is it not more correct to admit that the conception of perversion is of purely human origin? Perhaps nature is much more economical and wise than our wisdom … ?31

Man’s non-emancipatory struggle is not only reflected in his post-fall nature but also in the charter of his very being as reason attempts to live up to the Being beyond image. Man, for St. Thomas, desires the impossible to be made possible, but if it is a genuine desire, a desire born in nature, it cannot be impossible precisely because it is natural.32 It may be supernatural and more than nature can give but grace perfects nature and does not destroy it.33 Neither the cosmogonic nor the fallen nature is equivalent to natura pura, for they can be described, engaged, and phenomenologically encountered, whereas natura pura is a purely hypostatized construct beyond any experience precisely because no one has experienced it and never will. It fails to live up to the level of intelligible meaning and engagement by being a rejection of the apotheotic ground for engagement. After metaphysics banishes the non-emancipatory cyclicity of nature to a realm of theological truths, its defect is usurpatory and the God it asserts is in its own defective service, and this is rationalism; or it is exiled, and this is empiricist skepticism: both employ reason-as-defective. Can reason intuit its own defection and seek as reason to transcend it? For Shestov, no; for St. Thomas, yes. Recognition of the defect as defect requires “grace” as the step back, as for instance Plato’s prisoner is compelled to ascend in accordance with his hidden desire but against his better judgment.34 And this is not (yet) knowledge, but the restlessness of the heart. Plato understood this nonemancipatory struggle, even having it as the cornerstone of the meaning of philosophy, but its meaning is clear only to those initiated to that struggle-as-a-gradual-dying.35

31 32 33 34

35

Shestov, Penultimate Words, 20. Cf. ST I, 89, 1. Cf. Maritain, Approaches to God, 111–12. Cf. Republic, 515e–16b. And here the paradox is intense: How does one reconcile the Allegory of the Cave with the famous opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics? Only by recognizing the distinction between nature and condition: all men by nature desire to know but not by condition. The prisoner does not escape, he is compelled to turn around (periagoge as conversion) and painfully ascend. Shestov, Potestas Clavium, 40; Phaedo, 64a.

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To ignore the defect in, and non-emancipatory struggle of, post-fall nature and then to construct the metaphysical architecture of categories atop a vacant and static nature is bound to breed men who infinitize ideational and egoistic thinking while fantasizing and infantilizing the terminus of their own creational otherness and imago dei. Any post-fall speaking about the intensity of human existence is a discourse in a dying intentio: it is the failure of man to transmit meaning, both of himself to himself and to others, and most especially it is the failure to move the Word. Every man is penultimate man; every man is ever on the eve of truth. Man’s crepuscular meaning languishes in what he does not possess; each man’s hunt for the truth is a confirmation of his infirmity in death and his dispossessed state. If man is penultimate man, then Shestov’s ruthless love for Christ does not consist in a justification of the merely immanent God merely managed with the transcendent. It is not the God of the Philosophers, of Athens, managed with the God of Jerusalem; it is not the management of the God of universal principles in harmony with an Aristotelian nature, nor is it even the God of the sublime apophansis. None of these “gods” of paradox and a coerced managed harmony can exonerate the penultimate man of his crushing finality and the polemos of his will in the eve of the face of the divine. None of these “gods” is the God of the Cross, Who is truly the metaphysical ground because He is beyond reason but not beyond recognition. Aquinas, acknowledging the commensurate correspondence and, at the same time, the incommensurate disparity between reason and recognition, knows that All these things are almost too much to be believed. This truth that Christ died for us is so hard a truth that scarcely can our intelligence take hold of it. Nay it is a truth that our intelligence could in no way discover … . So great is God’s love for us and His grace towards us, that He does more for us than we can believe or understand.36

And yet the longing for understanding is the essence of both the human drama and the divine commedia. Shestov leaves the heart bare and this is his metaphysical genius. He shows that any “management” of that irreconcilable intentio—between the incommensurate and commensurate of existence—dilutes the centrality of our penultimate status. If man’s penultimacy does not surround and permeate every aspect and arena of meaning and nature, then we are truly lost, a being of mere odds and ends, logic, calculation, cold-blooded theoria, and pure nature. Man, as ever on the eve of truth, does not possess the truth but this does not deny the efficacy and importance of philosophical thinking nor sink man into a vicious relativism.37

36 37

St. Thomas Aquinas, Meditations for Lent, trans. P. Hughes (London: Sheed & Ward, 1937), 67–68. Cf. R. Clark, “Lev Shestov and the Crisis of Modernity,” Archævs XI–XII (2007–2008): 242. Shestov does quite the opposite: “Shestov reacted violently against Berdiaev’s suggestion that he was therefore a skeptic, because, he says, skeptics are those who are persuaded that there is nothing to be searched for given that nothing will ever be found … . I am not favourable to skepticism but to a flexible adogmatic dogmatism.”

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Philosophy, stripped of its presumptuousness, shows man that it does not have the answers, but this does not mean we should look to inner worldly things which claim the answers in science, psychology, politics, and sociology. All these are historicist fables. All such philosophy, and much of what passes for religion, is either a refuge from time or a dismal confidence in it. Philosophy, when it actually admits that it does not have the answers, reveals itself to be the saturated presence of man’s penultimate status and the keeper of preliminary contradiction—only in Christ can such a sign of contradiction achieve its ultimacy. Freed from naturalism, scientism, and from the folly that questions should always have answers, metaphysics can truly speak the meaning of man and the divine. This Shestov knew and he would not let the foolishness of language games and a naturalist metaphysics delude or deceive him. To be on the eve of truth is to be in the “evening” where dispossession is more important than possession: “the darker the night—the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief—the closer is god.”38

The awakening: All things are possible Shestov’s critique of metaphysics and of the medieval tradition can lead naturally to the conclusion that he aligns himself with either (or both) a radical fideism or an uninformative existentialism in which the world cannot communicate the meaning of the divine. Shestov’s critique is fundamentally philosophical and based on the rejection of the idea of pure nature as a fatal foundation for any productive metaphysics or any real relatedness between reason and faith. While Shestov’s epistemological and metaphysical insights are often opaque, when discovered, they not only contribute to a deepening of Thomistic teaching but also find a significant complementarity with St. Thomas’ thought. While there is little doubt that Shestov considers his dissent the means to a proper and faithful assent, what is often overlooked is his own role as a metaphysician. The genuine metaphysician can only exist by bringing close to hand the very first principle of thought—the irreducible, hegemonic reality of Being itself. Being resides beneath and in the midst of man-and-things-in-the-world as the coinhering force of all the principles of philosophy. Being is the landscape of thought, the topographic curve and texture of specifically human activity. Being itself is that which man desires to know in order to be himself. Thought is never something merely deposited inside our minds: it is rather an action that entrenches and shapes, and goes on—can only go on—in the lived-world of Being. Being is what makes things truth-full: man understands the truth of a thing when he attributes to it the being that it possesses. The descriptions of a thing are terms which reveal the temporal signate of its enduring Being: the when, where, and how that entity has its being, or more precisely, how and in which way Being carries that entity into meaning. Being is inseparable from the content of truth; it is the truthfull-ness of a thing. Thinking the truth is, therefore, thinking the truth of Being-itself

38

F. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. R. Pevear (New York: Vintage, 1993).

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as well as thinking the truth of a particular being’s way of being. To think truly is truly to think. It is in this regard that thinking is itself, in a way, the truth of Being, as the home or presence where and in which Being enters into and gives itself over as truth. Thinking is the presence of Being insofar as Being first gives it that presence. Thinking annunciates that presence so that the activity of thought can go on—can only go on—in the lived world of Being. Can we separate thinking in its proper identification or essence from the primal truths of Being? We cannot and must not. Nor can man isolate thinking from knowledge, as modern philosophy from Kant to Arendt would characterize it. Knowledge is the very relatedness of truth itself as Being-thought, as Being given-over to thought. Thinking Being, as distinct from thinking “about” or “on,” or “around” Being, always involves thinking the truths of Being, and this thinking the truths of Being is knowledge itself. Thinking must not be seen as ontologically separate from its fundamental ground. Is this not the fundamental truth of St. Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of knowledge and truth39 and does not Shestov, in his own way, agree?: Metaphysics evidently was not only unable to find a form of expression for her truths which would free her from the obligation of proof; she did not even want to. She considered herself the science par excellence, and therefore supposed that she had more largely and more strictly to prove the judgments which she took under her wing. She thought that if she were to neglect the duty of demonstration she would lose all her rights. And that, I imagine, was her fatal mistake. The correspondence of rights and duties is perhaps a cardinal truth (or a cardinal fiction) of the doctrine of law, but it has been introduced into the sphere of philosophy by a misunderstanding. Here, rather, the contrary principle is enthroned: rights are in inverse proportion to duties. And only there where all duties have ceased is the greatest and most sovereign right acquired—the right of communion with ultimate truths. Here we must not for one moment forget that ultimate truths have nothing in common with middle truths, the logical construction of which we have so diligently studied for the last two thousand years. The fundamental difference is that the ultimate truths are absolutely unintelligible. Unintelligible, I repeat, but not inaccessible. It is true that middle truths also are, strictly speaking, unintelligible. Who will assert that he understands light, heat, pain, pride, joy, degradation?40

It is not so easy a case of pitting St. Thomas against Shestov, the intellectual against the existential. Aquinas acknowledged the commensurate correspondence and, at the same time, the incommensurate disparity between knowing and Being in both metaphysical thinking and Christology. Metaphysics, for Shestov, ignores this metaphysical ineluctability, either by its neglect to engage it or by the temptation to confuse it with abstraction, or to exile it to a realm beyond its categorical competence,

39 40

Cf. DV I, 1. Shestov, Penultimate Words, 162–63.

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rendering it philosophically irrelevant. “Without a metaphysics of knowledge or, more precisely, so long as, instead of striving for a metaphysics of knowledge, we shall be content with a ‘theory of knowledge’ which checks and tests the data of experience, the book of being will remain for us a book with seven seals.”41 This remaining-true-to-Being-Itself is everything to Shestov, for Being has transformationally burst through the eschaton as Christ. The metaphysician has “grown quiet and no longer ventures to recall the uncreated dark freedom … that broke through to us in the natural world from another, unnatural, spiritual world.”42 That night on Golgotha—anticipated in that first night in the manger—has therefore transformed the world; it cannot contain itself as a pale reflection of the god of the philosophers but finds itself Homerically and ecstatically bound up as a living image of the God of the Cross. The goal and mission, therefore, of the metaphysician, particularly of the Christian philosopher, should never be to produce a contented speaking and laic procuring of the ideas adopted “on” and “around” Being, for the most profound problem in philosophy is the transition from the formal absolute to the real and living absolute, from the idea of God to God Himself.43 And here philosophy has its limited but critical role to play.44 The journey, therefore, is of such a sort that at a certain point the metaphysician becomes a disciple to the ineluctable in-commensurability between thinking and Being fulfilled at the foot of the Cross.45 And with all disciples who are also lovers, he knows that he cannot return home, for home needed to vanish out of reality as it vanishes out of sight in order to feed the length of the journey. “The eternal truths have a beginning and perhaps have no end. What is the way that leads to them? If you follow Don Quixote, St. Theresa, or even Orpheus, you will never arrive anywhere; or if you do arrive somewhere, it will not be where your guides are found. When you lose the road, when the road loses you, then … .”46 There must be an end beyond philosophical necessity and constraint and earthly order, and that end is found beyond knowledge but not beyond recognition, in freedom, grace, and love, and thus is Christ the analogia

41 42 43

44

45

46

Shestov, Speculation and Revelation, 129. Ibid., 239. Cf. J. Lachelier, The Philosophy of Jules Lachelier: Du Fondement de L’Induction, Psychologie et Metaphysique, Notes sur le Pari de Pascal (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960). See also E. Gilson, introduction, J. H. Cardinal Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 20–21: “We all know from bitter experience what difference there is between presenting a perfectly valid demonstration of the existence of God and eliciting assent to it from a mind willing to concede its validity. The fact, a hundred times stressed by Newman, that real assent does not automatically follow from valid notional inference, opens a wide and fruitful field to phenomenological investigation.” Cf. SCG I, 8. Cf. St. Hilary, “De Trinitate,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Second Series, Vol. IX, Hilary of Poitiers, John of Damascus, ed. P. Schaff (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), II, 10, ii. Even noted atheist George Santayana understood the priority and centrality of the Cross; see Santayana, Soliloquies in England, 98–99: “The foot of the cross—I dare not say the cross itself—is a good station from which to survey existence. In the greatest griefs there is a tragic calm; the fury of the will is exhausted, and our thoughts rise to another level; as the shrill delights and the black sorrows of childhood are impossible in old age … . In the skirts of Mount Calvary lies the garden of the resurrection.” Shestov, Potestas Clavium, 162.

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entis.47 As Being, God is that which stands underneath, not only surpassing man’s noetic recognition but also shrouding it and throwing man back upon himself into the certitude of his finite and temporal status against the backdrop of infinite Being. While the metaphysics of categories is a clear confirmation of the emphatic distance between man and God, both in man’s being and in his knowledge, the entrance of Christ into existence cannot be ignored let alone sidestepped, if Christ is Being itself. Christ dramatically alters existence, and metaphysics will therefore cease to be metaphysical if it is unwilling even to approach that novitas mundi. In the idea of Christ, God makes Himself flesh and blood, and thus an “object” of knowledge man can finally take in and even become. Shestov held unwaveringly to what Anselm and Pascal anticipated, that in Christ alone man is startled into a new vision of Being with a newer, more intensified certitude, the kind of certitude only the fool can deny.48 This certitude comes from Being itself revealed in Christ, who speaks the certitude of Being in a way in which man can be in that certitude and also know it. In Christ, the presence of God becomes a revelation of history in which the telos is not merely an end to be perceived, nor a “falling away” into primordial difference, but a realm to be lived in.49 Christ becomes the metaxic mediatory presence from and through which all ends, all beginnings, all meanings, all hopes, all redemptions, all loves, and all deaths are encountered and fulfilled. Faith may not be knowledge but it is recognition. The very recognition of Christ-as-perfect triggers and vivifies man’s certitude, rendering him incapable of wanting any other end than Christ and knowing that no end is real without Him. Christ alone confirms the certitude of Being in such a way that man is not thrown back upon himself but is made to be man for the first time. Man is no longer on the outside looking toward Being but fully being-in the metaxic or mediatory presence of Christ as Way, because in Christ’s Act man’s knowledge resides at the level of Being. The presence of God is thus historical, and must be so if man is to be man. Christ fulfills the intimations of an eternity not severed from time but in-time, elevating time without shedding the particular.50 47

48

49 50

Cf. von Balthasar, A Theology of History, 69–70: “Christ can be called the ‘concrete analogy of Being’, analogia entis, since he constitutes himself, in the unity of his divine and human natures, the proportion of every interval between God and man. And this unity is his person in both natures. The philosophical formulation of the analogy of Being is related to the measure of Christ precisely as is world history to his history—as promise to fulfillment, the preliminary to the definitive. He is so very much what is most concrete and most central that in the last analysis we can only think by starting with him; every question as to what might be if he did not exist, or he had not become man, or if the world had to be considered without him, is now superfluous and unnecessary. Philosophy has its negations and warning signs, which are needed on the level of philosophical thinking and may not be toned down. Thus it is a part of the notion of God that he be free to create a world or not to create it, and likewise that when he creates man, he is not thereby obliged to let him share his own inner life. But when God reveals his inner intention—that he willed creation from all eternity; that now, bound up with the world in the indissoluble bond of the hypostatic union, he will never again be without the world; that he designed and predestined man as the brother of his eternal Son become man—then it becomes clear how, without losing its validity, the plane of philosophy is transcended.” Cf. R. Guardini, Pascal for Our Time, trans. B. Thompson (New York: Herder & Herder, 1966), 120–1. Cf. Confessions VII, xx. Guardini, Pascal for Our Time, 571; Pascal, Pensees, 548.

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The idea of the historical Christ is an historical idea, and it is an idea about history, but its meaning and truth are not historically determined, for all historicoevidential determinations are merely approximations, as Kierkegaard maintained, and would fall into the category of doubt, not belief as the realm beyond but not contrary to reason.51 Another startling paradox: it is precisely the inclusion in the picture of Christ of its historical manifestation, of Incarnation, that renders the picture-as-idea perfect for Anselm, Pascal, and Shestov; and, linking them to Tertullian, it is the very “impossibility” qua non-necessary non sequitur of the Incarnation that is the essence of the perfection of the idea! “To be taken up in thought with the transcendental essence of existence itself is a new occupation for thinking; it is so occupied through that essence whose appearance is the essence of history.”52 It is either too good to be believed or too good not to be believed. And again, it is the idea of history as included, indeed dominating, the idea of Christ that renders the picture perfect as irreducible to all prior mytho-poetic articulations. And the idea of history is the idea of novelty, as Whitehead said: “history exceeds all limitations of common sense.”53 The criterion of its epistemological validity, its credibility, resides in its fittingness, beauty, and perfection, and its perfection resides in it as non-sequitur, as necessary historical unpredictability. For Shestov, as with Dostoevsky, it is an idea too good not to be true even if it were untrue! What more could the postmodernist ask for?54 Put another way, “Shestov heralded the need for what he termed a ‘biblical philosophy’ that would renounce the philosophical quest to explain the necessary reason for things and point instead to a human freedom that derives from God’s unlimited freedom.”55 If the metaphysician is to have a heart that misses what the eye does not see, then he must elicit the beyond-speech-and-pattern ground as Being, a ground always beyond knowledge but not incompatible with lived faith and the living Christ.56 When man, for Shestov, transforms “a truth given by faith into a self-evident truth or understand it as such, it is a sign that we have lost this truth of faith.”57 Is he not right?—is that “transformation” instead a reduction of the lived experience of the mystery?; is it a decision to make Christ conform to the ideas “on” or “around” an ignored ground

51

52 53

54

55 56

57

Cf. S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. A. Hannay (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 21–22. See also DV XIV, 1. D. G. Leahy, Novitas Mundi (New York: NYU, 1980), 2. A. N. Whitehead, The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. L. Price (Boston, MA: Little Brown & Co., 2011), 3. Cf. Gilson, The Philosophical Question of Christ, 51–128. The second chapter contains a detailed discussion of and response to the conceptual difficulties and objections regarding the possibility of philosophical thinking about the Christ Event and its meaning for human existence. R. Staal, “The Forgotten Story of Postmodernity.” First Things 188 (2008): 36. Cf. A&J, 433–34: “The philosophers seek to ‘explain’ the world in such a way that everything becomes clear and transparent and that life no longer has in itself anything, or the least possible amount, of the problematic and mysterious. Should they not, rather, concern themselves with showing that precisely what appears to men clear and comprehensible is strangely enigmatic and mysterious? Should they not try to deliver themselves and others from the power of concepts whose definiteness destroys mystery? The sources, the roots, of being lie, in fact, in that which is hidden and not in that which is revealed.” Catechism, § 39–43. A&J, 317.

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of existence rather than existence ridding itself of its distractions so as to imitate that incarnational presence? Shestov’s radical interpretive violence toward the metaphysician, long idle in scholastic acrobatics, may very well provide a reclamation of metaphysics and re-appropriation of the onto-theological ground of Christian philosophy. Shestov’s thinking demands a vital connectivity to the faith, a carnal faith because it is about incarnational meaning. While such a stance as his is often associated with fideism, there is on the contrary a hidden metaphysical and theological premise. Shestov’s critique of reason illustrates that the visceral particularity of concrete faith helps reason to overcome its tendency to proffer catalogues of categories-as-concepts wherein man must live by distinctions, quartering himself in a nature/reason exiled from grace/faith. Faith therefore furthers reason’s natural aptitude for intelligibility without encroaching on its autonomy or forfeiting its own gratuity. Additionally, when an empty faith-in-general is offered as an alternative to a sustained encounter with the thisness of faith, such an alternative promotes an ideological thinking in the arenas of both faith and reason, theology and metaphysics: There are three things we cannot do: we cannot carry on with natural metaphysics, natural ethics, natural jurisprudence, natural study of history, acting as though Christ were not the norm of everything. Nor can we lay down an unrelated “double truth,” with the secular scholar and scientist on the one hand and the theologian on the other studying the same object without any encounter of intersection between their two methods. Nor, finally, can we allow the secular disciplines to be absorbed by theology as though it alone were competent in all cases because Christ alone is the norm. Precisely because Christ is the absolute he remains incommensurate with the norms of the world; and no final accord between theology and the other disciplines is possible within the limits of this world. The refusal of any such agreed demarcation on the part of theology, though it may look like and be called arrogance, is really no more than respect for the methodological demands of its subject.58

Concerning the meaning and nature of metaphysics, Shestov both misses the mark and hits it straight on. His merit is strangely enough his defect, and yet any prolonged focus on one pole without reference to the other amounts to missing his contribution as a metaphysician. While it is certainly true that Shestov contrasts “the temple of self-sufficient reason with the city of righteousness and locks horns with every philosopher from Heraclitus to Husserl,”59 is it a correct assessment that he was “willfully blind to the possible synthesis of reason and revelation?”60 Was his rejection of this synthesis motivated by blindness, or was it rather a-seeing-of-whatwas-to-be-seen? The beyond-reason transformational power of revelation could only find hearth and home in a metaphysics when it did not suppress the ineluctable, 58 59 60

von Balthasar, A Theology of History, 13–14. Staal, “The Forgotten Story of Postmodernity,” 36. Ibid.

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indeed unseemly mystery of Being by a calculated mimicry of the empirical sciences which even Husserl rejected.61

The power of the keys: Christ and the metaphysics of freedom Shestov never averted his eyes from the contradictions of human and divine existence, and for him any metaphysical “management” of that contradictory impulse, whether through causality, time, nature, or teleology, had worthless consequences for the understanding of man and Christianity. Such a metaphysics consisted in creating a pseudo-science from and upon the intellectual carnage of a purely hypostatized nature ready-made for clear and distinct ideas, where harmony oozes from every orifice. Shestov rejects a metaphysics which had become the ultimate solipsistic system, built entirely of its own ideas and principles, enclosed in and by them. He is the last metaphysician condemning a metaphysics whose only connection to reality resides in how it flees reality, while also sidestepping the purgative need for man to experience the necessary disenchantment with all things, especially and including metaphysical Being. The figure of Christ in such a metaphysics would be an empty apotheosis, an exaltation of Hegelian symmetry over and against Christ’s actual peace-as-polemos. When reconciliation mutes contradiction and man’s penultimacy is ignored, Christ as moral teacher is the innocuous and effete counterpart to a metaphysics of pure nature. Such a Christ does not invade existence, or burst forth through the contradictions as their vital heart, but sits idly by waiting for man to give Him time, arrogantly to apply various principles to Him or to leave Him outside entirely, simplifying the metaphysical endeavor! In a metaphysics dominated by a teleological directedness leaving no room for the beyond-speaking contra-dicit of existence means that Christ saves by way of logic, and that His Gospel, more hideously still, must be read as a logical tractatus with clues and edictive keys to being rescued from this contradictory impulse! Or subordinating Him to a higher standard of human fancy, especially political fantasy. In such a rendering, it is no wonder that for Nietzsche the Christianity which trails the death of Christ is never good enough to be true. It isn’t even a fairytale but the gulag’s nightmare presided over by the new Grand Inquisitor of worldly calculation and power.

61

Cf. Shestov, Speculation and Revelation, 275: “Who is willing to speak seriously of such a thing as absolute truth? Husserl, of course, knows very well that contemporary thought is afraid of approaching within cannon range of such a judgment. All epistemologists speak of self-evident truths, but for them self-evidence, our certainty of the existence of universal and necessary judgments is only, in Sigwart’s expression, ‘a postulate beyond which we cannot go,’ a certainty which is maintained only by subjective consciousness, ‘the feeling of certainty which accompanies a certain portion of our thought.’ … These thinkers seemed to want to assume that the feeling of self-evidence was a ‘sufficient reason’ which would justify our confidence in the results of scientific investigation. But Husserl saw in such frivolous assumptions, whether conscious or unconscious, a fatal danger to philosophy.”

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The kenotic ardor of the Filioque has torn apart the veil of any serenely stoic harmonic alignment in the world of things. One of the contradictions of the Christian establishment of the new order and the new man is that it also confirms that this novus ordo was always there, preveniently restless in the house of contradiction. The novus ordo also confirms what never was: existence never lived toward nature, nature as the living that happens against man’s existence. Man’s existence lives against nature; it is born of nature as the knife pares the skin from the fruit; it lives in nature while simultaneously dying in that living. Berdyaev illuminates Shestov’s condemnation: it is not so much of philosophy, but of that dizzying and vertiginous labyrinth of laws headed toward the accentuation of the minutiae at every turn. Law upon law built by philosophy from ideas about nature; never speaking in, of, or as nature, these laws serve only to drown the philosophic impulse, which was once genuinely reflective of man’s penultimacy and contradiction.62 Christ breaks as he fulfills all laws in His chaste anarchism. His translation of the un-translated is the mystery of the faith. The new man is grounded on the apophantic unrepeatability of Christ’s ever-intensifying presence: the crucified One is indeed an “apotheosis of groundlessness.” He is the arché of the pattern from which no pattern can be made, as the martyrs and saints know best. Christ is therefore the very heart and essence of man’s long-dormant but still beating contradictory impulse. The GodMan is the unending ultimacy man chases with every breath of his hollowed out penultimacy. In Christ, this penultimacy is shrouded by both limit-in-finitude and by a grace which violates that limit, making it in a way even more limited—more strikingly a cessation in the nature that breeds more nature when confronted with the antagonizing posture of human existence. True grace makes man’s limit even more limited until it reaches the productive agon of necessity, until it can do nothing but call out to an open nature it knows only by way of dispossession, by way of the evening of truth, by way of contradiction. Man is free precisely because of the chains, because of the suffering, because fallen nature is opposed to existence. Grace makes man’s limit a form of love and penance. Grace in a world of forgotten contradiction does not make man forget contradiction but recollect it in his entire being. He becomes the new man and the new order that always were there. This is why eyes close and knees bend at the reception of the Host. The priest who offers the Pantokrator’s Cross places a new kind of law which lasts and yet cannot be repeated. It is one with man. The Pantokrator’s law is dissolved on the tongue as both the weight of sin and the unbearable lightness

62

Cf. Berdyaev, “The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge,” 88–106: “The position of L. Shestov would have played out clearly, if he were to have acknowledged, that his chief enemy is not philosophy, not Aristotle and Husserl, the significance of which, sad to say, he very much exaggerates, it is not reason and the good, but rather law, laws logical and laws ethical, the laws of nature and laws social, all of which are uncreated by philosophers. I am prepared in much here to be in sympathy with L. Shestov. The world has need of law and forms and strengthens it in response to its sin, but it also groans beneath its death-bearing and crippled life under the grip of law. The grip of law tyrannises both the world and man. It has distorted the very most Christian revelation, and adapted it to the conditions of our world. The mystery itself of the Fall through sin has been interpreted legalistically. The law condemns sin, but it also is begotten of sin.”

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of Being, affirming with urgency and an eerie calm the contradictory Love at root in man’s penultimate and unfinished open nature. If there is an absolute, it is not found in ideas straining to curl in on themselves so as to present the idea of an integral and untouchable everlasting quality; if at all discoverable, it is found at night behind our backs, in the holy sanctum where chance meets love, agony, and patience, as in the manger at Bethlehem. The appearance of the eternally non-apparent—that unrepeatable imageless vision of eternity—which man cannot move, has its happening outside all man’s acts while being the most interior to them. The first rule of nature is that it is never what it claims to be—this Shestov knew. Within the groundlessness of man’s creative fidelity the Word is moved, wholly beyond man, beyond being and, yet again, more interior to him than all ideas. D. H. Lawrence, in his forward to Shestov’s All Things Are Possible, speaks of the burden of the soul which must do away with ideals, and also with the absolute, which in fact prevents contact with the absolute: The human soul itself is the source and well-head of creative activity. In the unconscious human soul the creative prompting issues first into the universe. Open the consciousness to this prompting, away with all your old sluicegates, locks, dams, channels. No ideal on earth is anything more than an obstruction, in the end, to the creative issue of the spontaneous soul. Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the forever-incalculable prompting of the creative well-head within him. There is no universal law. Each being is, at his purest, a law unto himself, single, unique, a Godhead, a fountain from the unknown.63

This is not a recipe for anarchy, for it requires the chastity of grace to render it real and not mere self-indulgent pantomime.

The unforgiven: In the bull of Phalaris Shestov recognized the deceit at root in the historically conditioned but antihistorical metaphysical hunt for the universal. The metaphysical disposition replaces the apotheotic veil of the eternal with a neatly partitioned line where nature stands obedient and unmoved, un-blushed even as it is carrion for ideational thinking on or around or about, or absent the absolute. The mythos of the eternal veil standing ready to illuminate and shroud the kenotic presence of the God-Man is denied its essential movement, advance and presence within a metaphysics of categories. The ideas of body and soul, time and eternity, finite and infinite, which once strained to convey the beyond-knowledge unity-as-distinction between man and God—the very

63

D. H. Lawrence, introduction, L. Shestov, All Things Are Possible (Apotheosis of Groundlessness), trans. S. S. Kotelianksy (New York: Robert McBride & Co., 1920), 10.

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recognition of which was the sustained undoing of man’s end and the heralding of his penultimacy—have become the ideational battlements obstinately enforcing where knowledge as nature ends and grace begins, where reason ends and faith begins. Man becomes a being who must choose either side of the fence as his pseudo-ultimacy, for there is no in-between left, no eros to infinitize his surrender. The body ends and the soul begins so that the pseudo-objectivity of a decrepit metaphysics can say it speaks a truth little deeper than the empirical sciences, but really no different.64 Shestov greatly respected Tolstoy’s refusal to separate the soul’s failure, drive, impotence, and repentance from the metaphysical and moral, and employs Tolstoy to express the phenomenological reality that existence is not demarcated. There are no lines where the body ends and the soul begins, where life ends and death begins. It is the absence of these lines in reality and their necessary but difficult presence in man’s conceptio which repeatedly reinstates man’s contradictory spirit. “Fear, anguish— we think of death as terrible, but when we look back upon life, it is the agony of life which overwhelms us! Death and life seemed in some way to be confounded with one another. Something tore my existence to rags, and yet could not succeed in tearing it completely.”65 Metaphysics exiles the untransmittable, incommunicable and therefore contradictory spirit of existence; it abolishes the polemic ground in order for its own seemless meaning to appear. In its rabid thirst for “objectivity,” metaphysics denies its own subject matter.66 The soul confronting death is the ground—not the denial—of intersubjectivity, as the intentional other that is in every case “mine” but to which all are related. The polis either validates this in traditio or denies it in a secular futurity, which itself denies not only the past death but also the very presence of death.67 Metaphysics

64

65

66

67

Cf. Shestov, Speculations and Revelation, 21: “Once religion must justify itself, once a judge turns out to be over it, its case is in a bad way. The same thing may and must happen with it that happened with metaphysics. So long as it did not occur to metaphysics to seek legitimate justification for existence, it lived—whether badly or well. However, hardly had Kant persuaded it to appear willingly before the tribunal of reason when it immediately was deprived of all rights to existence. Mathematics, the tribunal decided, has rights, mathematical natural science likewise has all rights, even empirical science was permitted to continue its existence, but metaphysics was condemned once and for all and—irrevocably … . The fate of metaphysics is, indeed, far more closely connected with the fate of religion than people commonly think.” Excerpt from Tolstoy’s brief and unfinished story The Diary of a Madman quoted in Shestov, In Job’s Balances, 84. See also L. Tolstoy, Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, trans. M. R. Katz (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). Cf. Shestov, In Job’s Balances, 190: “Only the Living struggles. The Living needs something, something which can also not be, that can be taken away, and for which one must struggle if one wishes to keep it. This ‘need’, this possibility of ‘losing’ and ‘keeping’ and the consequent necessity of struggle—is a mysterious, supernatural element that has intruded, God knows whence, into the indifferent milieu of the indifferent, natural being. At this ‘need’, at the riddle of this ‘need’, philosophy has to begin with its questioning and examination. For before life appears with its ‘need’ there are and can be no questions.” Cf. Sophocles, Sophocles Selected Poems, Odes & Fragments, trans. R. Gibbons (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2008), fr. 941: “She’s death—and the realm thereof, she’s undestroyable life, she’s madness raving loose, she’s undiluted hot desire, she is wailing with pain, with sorrow, with rage, with fear. All real, excellent energy’s in Her, and all restedness too. And all that leads us into violence. She pours in, she saturates thought and what’s inside the breast of all that has the breast of life.”

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has subjugated God to a finite causality or a useless datum. These distinctions became deformed within a modernist understanding of the principle of causality where Godqua-Absolute is nothing more than a Spinozistic self-caused cause “which” could not live up to being a “Who.” This personless God crowned a vacuous order of non-entities persisting in their divisiveness—where reason contains itself and faith contains itself outside the relational, and man contains himself in nature apart from God-as-grace. These metaphysical distinctions affirmed a non-relationality of human ideals and God’s absolutism but neither man nor God was ever truly discussed. For Shestov, the choice between a metaphysically empty and uninformative monotheism and the effulgent Triune God of the Cross carries no quandary. The metaphysics of a hyperbolized causality and ideational categories could not possibly supply any vital longing for the Cross but rather suppressed it at every turn. The causal pattern which should be an indication of man’s dramatic difference from the world has perpetuated, through its naïve objectivity, a naturalist indifferentism. In the absurd effort to make metaphysics a fact-based science, metaphysics makes nature the principle of causality and man to be an effect of that causality. Shestov doesn’t so much reject metaphysics as he does the type of causality that ignores man as the causal wellspring. Nature is an effect of the being who knows différance. While nature indeed affects man, it is not the causal origin of its own causality. Rather does it originate in its difference in man, and more interiorally in God’s Personhood as the free sustenance of man’s personhood: If the snow turns into water, gets into the river, and the river floods or destroys a village, man is disquieted, he begins to ask, and then for the first time the apparently “objective” question of causality arises. But there is nothing objective in it. The world “as a whole” has remained as it was. It is man for whom, through the enigmatic decision of a mysterious and incomprehensible fate, it is no longer indifferent where and in what state—solid, fluid, or gaseous—the water is; man who divided the world into parts and gave to each part a name, he it is who first conceived questions, or rather, he did not even conceive them himself but some being inspired him with them, a being after whose image he was created, that is, a being which is essentially not “indifferent” but “passionate”, can rejoice and be sorry, wish, fear, triumph, love, hate, etc … . As long as indifference reigned, if it reigned and was the principle of the universe, there could be no question of causal connections. At the best there would be “something”, and that would be all—but most probably there would be nothing at all. If, therefore, we reflect on causal connections we must direct our attention first and foremost to the most inexplicable form of these connections: on the connection of the outer world with the inner world of humanity.68

This is not subjectivism: it is the “objective” mutual pre-possession of man and Being as pure To Be. His rejection of this suspect metaphysical causality rescued metaphysics

68

Ibid., 191.

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from its continuous shipwreck. If man is metaphysical, and patterns all longing, intelligence and wisdom toward the death he cannot survive and yet needs to survive, then Shestov made the choice of a true metaphysician. He denied the metaphysics which denied the descent of the soul into its ownmost nature and grace, into the betweenness and apotheosis of its groundlessness, his prevenient nakedness in the hunt for God’s kenosis. He rejected the causality that failed to represent man and world’s contradictory spirit, that refused to convey or even to consider the un-transmitted within “the connection of the outer world with the inner world of humanity.” Causality for Shestov is the grand assumption which extinguishes the contradictory agon of man’s penultimate status and makes him the dictator, the Grand Inquisitor of a nature which must be raised to the level of another eternal law, an hypostatized non-entity: “Thanks to the grand hypothesis, man is forewarned and forearmed. Thanks to this master key, the future is at his mercy. He knows, in order that he may foreknow: savoir pour prevoir. Here is man, by virtue of one supreme assumption, dictator henceforward of all nature. The philosophers have ever bowed the knee to success. So down they went before the newly-invented law of natural sequence; they hailed it with the title of eternal truth.”69 And in doing so they banished the true non-sequential essence of man and time. It is not the causal effulgence that Shestov rejects but the causality of scientism which the philosopher-turned-academic so wholly embraces in order to make his inquiries into existence seemingly scientific, sober, and factual. Somewhere along the line order and intelligence demanded conceptual concrete—a highway of untarnished ideas to God. But Shestov knew such a route was one only of God-usurpation, for Being beyond being can never be reined in as an idea, with other ideas, among more ideas. This stance of refusal is the stance of divine Love and it is the birth of the contradictory impulse in man. Metaphysics lost its substance when it paved over that contradictory impulse, the loving penultimacy at the heart of each man. The once merely cursory terminology of body and soul, time and eternity, which ever pointed beyond themselves, became ends in themselves and death to the metaphysician. Man’s penultimacy was picked up, or rather picked over, by the existentialists but without the divine. The superabundance of grace devoid of its ecstasy and ultimacy became absurdity, and man’s prevenient openness fell into graceless ruin. But if the choice is between natura pura and atheistic existentialism, one must see that the latter is far closer to God than the former, for the existentialist never sheds personhood within the very minutiae of existence, within the dust and salt and grains of nature. Pure nature’s arrogance was to deny the graceful personhood present in nature. The man of nature, now divided from his openness to grace, must necessarily be a self-contained personhood so as to protect that vicious division between nature and grace, which must terminate only in a natural end for man. Man became self-enclosed in a world of mute material. And how is this not the birth of the usurper? In this unforgiving

69

Shestov, All Things Are Possible, 16.

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realm of disintegrating and self-contained personalities, it is even more “impossible to conceive of a personal God in an abstract monotheistic way.”70 Open man needs closure in the infinite, in a way that respects and befits the visceral incommunicability of each soul: no suffocating species, generalism, or absolutism can give him the end befitting his natural desire for the supernatural. Metaphysics built on purely hypothesized and hypostatized categories such as natura pura destroys creative fidelity and places man severely apart from God and the divine kenosis in Him, and replaces it with the ruthless egoistic creativity-by-distraction inherent in revolutions. Such a metaphysics makes man forget his primal incommunicability and offers him the temptation of transmission: that he can make communion and unity possible and that progress of the human soul is just around the corner with some future insight. The generalist and absolutist speak neither of man nor of God but of ideals; he renders his carnal spirituality vacant. He turns man into an ideal and then himself into an idea, for ideals and ideas alone, divorced from reality, can scale the orders of perfection and with every day of every century claim an ever approaching nearness to an illusory truth without Truth. Shestov rejects that rampant Hegelian revolutionary rationalism, which “accepts from the Bible only what can be ‘justified’ before rational consciousness,”71 for … “it never for a moment entered into Hegel’s mind that in this lies the terrible, fatal Fall, that ‘knowledge’ does not make a man equal to God, but tears him away from God, putting him in the clutches of a dead and deadening ‘truth’.”72 Hegel’s revolutionary spirit is not that of the true rebel but of assimilation, of believing that man can assimilate into nature, that he can move the Word. Man, as Shestov knew, can only transmit the individual chaste anarchism in each unrepeatable human soul. This is the truth of genuine metaphysical thinking when stripped of the scientism which coerces the dialectic of body and soul, nature and grace to conform to dogmatic divisions imposed upon experience. One could say that it is the uneasy and always unproductive bifurcations in faith and reason, grace and nature, which were the terrible propaedeutic to revolt and revolutionary thinking, whether it be gnostic-spiritualist or materialistic. All of man’s experiential content is seen only by way of dispossession. The fall into

70

71 72

Cf. Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, 57: “A self-contained personality becomes disintegrated. Personality is not the absolute, and God as the Absolute is not a Person. God as a Person presupposes His other, another Person, and is love and sacrifice. The person of the Father presupposes the Persons of the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Trinity is a Trinity of Persons just because they presuppose one another and imply mutual love and inter-communion. On another plane the personality of God and of man presuppose each other. Personality exists in the relation of love and sacrifice. It is impossible to conceive of a personal God in an abstract monotheistic way.” Cf. Gruca, “Lev Shestov’s Philosophy of Crisis,” 209–10. “[The discursive mind often] evades or simply is not able to deal with the issue of accidental occurrences. The accidental character of existence … . is in Shestov’s opinion a characteristic example of reasoning’s failure. For thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition, tradition admiring reason, accidents either prove the general rule or are thrown away outside of the scope of their interests. But exactly there, outside of reason, the true face of reality can be found. Shestov’s ideas go in that direction, where he wants to discover the mystery of not only the knowledge but mainly the mystery of being itself.” K&E, 5. K&E, 6.

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knowledge is what is meant by the “seeing,” the theoria, the bifurcation of metaphysics for the first time. Seeing metaphysics is itself emblematic evidence of the fact that man neither possesses the metaphysical life nor transmits, nor moves the Word. That is, again, why knees are bent and eyes are closed at the reception of the Body and Blood. And that is why the real presence Is all and present and no mere symbol, and yet in all the tabernacles from the Church to the tongue, it resides in hiding as much as in Revelation or, rather, that the hiddenness is the Revelation! If man chooses to obtain only what is possible, let him be a scientist or a politician, or a metaphysician-qua-academic. If he chooses to remember himself, and therefore remember God, let him desire what is beyond image and recollection, let him desire what he knows not how to desire, let him open his mouth in his prevenient openness waiting for Christ to move the Word. He opens his mouth with a grace never ostracized from nature, and accepts the impossible, for this is the life of the holy and the brutal. Christ cries out because He knows that for man to follow Him, he must flee from the possible and its ability to make him assimilate, to become bureaucratic in its pseudo-ability to teach the Word. Conformity or assimilation, said Camus, is “one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity.”73 Man must flee the possible on the condition that the possible makes it impossible to desire the impossible! Is this not the plight of Don Quixote and the laughter at Christ’s humiliation? Christ dies knowing faith is not magic. He dies for the man who will survive but who cannot move, let alone encompass, the Word. That is why Christ is for the young Camus “the fool that I love.” For man to believe he can move the uncreated is to lose it all and to forget what is possible only on the condition of its impossibility and untranslatability. Christ cries out for the impossibility He must vivify and the contradictory impulse He must attempt to etch into the burial rock. The vision of an immutable God bleeding, where thorns actually pierce the form and shape of the crown—this is why eyes close and knees bend at the reception of the Host. “The hearer belongs to the other and obeys him.”74 The hearer must be prepared to live on the side of defencelessness, the side where resources for reaching the impossible are nil. Man closes his eyes in faith not to undermine reason but to return it to its

73 74

The Rebel, 87. Cf. H. U. Cardinal von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, Vol. 2: Spouse of the Word, trans. J.  Saward (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1991), 477–78: “The eye is the organ with which the world is possessed and dominated … Through the eye the world is our world, in which we are not lost. Rather, it is subordinate to us as an immeasurable dwelling space with which we are familiar. The other side of this material function denotes distance, separateness … Hearing is a wholly different, almost opposite mode of the revelation of reality … It is not objects we hear—in the dark, when it is not possible to see—but their utterances and communications. Therefore it is not we ourselves who determine on our part what is heard and place it before us as an object in order to turn our attention to when it pleases us. That which is heard comes upon us without our being informed in advance of its coming. It lays hold of us without being asked … The basic relationship between the one who hears and that which is heard is thus one of defencelessness on the one side and of communication on the other … The hearer belongs to the other and obeys him.”

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status as the effect, not the cause, of man’s contradictory prevenient openness. In man’s penultimacy, nothing must add up or be finished, or completed. This unfinished state, this penultimacy is fundamental to understanding Christ’s agony and it must be fundamental to the Christian polis. If that unevenness, that unfinished meaning, is set aside in the polis, man has been assimilated into an existence of the possible and turned away from the conversional power of the Pantokrator’s law. It is not reason but the contradictory impulse, this refusal to accept the possible, which is the core human entelechy. The recognition of this primal and intensifying truth renders faith supremely intelligible and beyond reason precisely because it resituates the irrational within the rational. Every gain of the possible is a loss of the impossible, every assimilation is a descent into the unnatural by forgetting the unnatural. The impossibility of the Christian society is built on this oddness of loss and gain.75 All is really lost on Good Friday. Christ’s death and Resurrection must be the paradigmatic exemplar of the contradictory impulse and we must avert our eyes and obey Him. The closing of the eyes allows reason to be what it is, the effect of man’s contradictory spirit and prevenient openness and not the orderer of his nature. With eyes closed, Christ can be understood as both master and slave of nature. He is the master, for it is He who commands Lazarus to wake, and because existence will always rile against nature when full of the need for grace, Christ-as-man is also the embattled slave to nature: death must terrify Him as it terrifies all men. Death brings Christ into its non-entitative yet fully reified absence. Christ’s salvation is rational and irrational: it is failure and success, it is emptiness to its last drop and effulgence; Christ cries out for He must save in a way that does not abolish the condition of impossibility, that man could lose it all. Christ’s lifeless body must itself bespeak the simultaneous nature of failure and success which eyes often dominated by reason cannot always see. Pascal wagered on a total risk and a sure thing. In Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Roghozin’s picture of the dead Christ is beyond the aesthetic-self of ideality and preservation. Looking at the God-Man’s lifeless face is to be in the midst of that contradictory impulse where man must be completely saved at the same moment that the gamble with salvation fails. Christ calls out at His death, His status as both master and slave to nature, as the Being who communicates through His own incommunicability.76 Man must always be simultaneously in-saving-by-and-in-Christ and also wagering his life for he could, all could, be lost. The psalmist’s lamentation is radicalized by Christ’s passion becoming the very essence of the Pantokrator’s law. 75 76

Phil. 3:7–12. F. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. E. M. Martin (New York: Digireads, 2008), 254: “The picture was one of pure nature, for the face was not beautified by the artist, but was left as it would naturally be, whosoever the sufferer, after such anguish. I know that the earliest Christian faith taught that the Saviour suffered actually and not figuratively, and that nature was allowed her own way even while His body was on the cross. It is strange to look on this dreadful picture of the mangled corpse of the Saviour, and to put this question to oneself: ‘Supposing that the disciples, the future apostles, the women who had followed Him and stood by the cross, all of whom believed in and worshipped Him—supposing that they saw this tortured body, this face so mangled and bleeding and bruised (and they must have so seen it)—how could they have gazed upon the dreadful sight and yet have believed that He would rise again?’ ”

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Christ’s lama sabactani leaves no avenue of existence untouched, especially regarding the man of the polis. As both master and self-descending slave to nature, Christ rises above the natural vicissitudes while being swallowed whole by them. Christ is life and death simultaneously, He is law beyond law. He is for and against the world and this is possible on the condition of its impossibility. The immutable God risen with scars is the image of the law of the polis so much so that the Christian polis is a community of the impossible. St. Paul spoke of the oddness of the Pantokrator’s law in man: “through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”77 The bloodied body of an infinite God means infinite wounds and infinite perfections, and through this impossibility the transgression of the law is transformed into law.78 The messy business of salvation is not at odds with, but at the heart of the contradictory impulse, and thus at the root of the polis. Within the God-Man, the irrational is not diametrically opposed to the rational but is its succor, for man experiences in the dead Christ God’s own Wager and gamble. If man is free at all to place his bet, it is only made possible on the condition of its impossibility. Man’s ability to risk his life is possible only because of Christ’s kenotic power while its impossibility stems from the fact that no God has risk or death or disfigurement, or wounds. But this Christ does; His death is impossible and necessary; the Law is free and in chains. This God, this Christ is beyond reason but not beyond recognition, and what we recognize is nearer to ourselves than ourselves. This God is not the God of reason but Love and, as Pascal saw, the heart has its reason, which reason knows nothing of.79 The man of faith closes his eyes to release himself from the logic which would have him bypass his limits and his penultimacy, thereby separating the inseparable grace from nature. It is easier to endure suffering when one hopes that the end result is a defined mission that will be fulfilled, a good

77 78

79

Gal. 2:19–21. Cf. Shestov, In Job’s Balances, 55: “Christ’s face was hideously disfigured by the blows He had received; it was swollen and had horrible, bleeding wounds on it; the eyes were wide open, they squinted and shone with the vitreous gleam of death. And strange to say, when one looks at the dead body of this man who has suffered so much, one curious, particular question arises in one’s mind: if the body was like this (and so doubtless it was) which the disciples looked upon and the apostles, and the women who had followed Him and waited at the foot of the cross; if all those who believed in Him and loved Him saw Him like this, how could they believe that this martyr could ever rise again? And then another thought presents itself: if death is so frightful, if the laws of nature are so powerful, how can anyone triumph over them? How could we overcome them when even He could not overcome them who forced nature to obey Him when He was alive, to whom it submitted itself; when He cried ‘Talifa cumi’ the virgin arose, when He called to Lazarus to come forth from the grave, Lazarus heard Him and obeyed? When one looks at this picture, nature seems to become an enormous, pitiless, silent beast, or rather, more accurately (although strangely), nature becomes more like one of these modern machines which has blindly seized, swallowed, torn to pieces and engulfed that infinitely beloved and admirable Being who alone was worth more than all nature and its laws which, indeed, were perhaps only created to produce that Being.” Pascal, Pensees, §277.

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that can be done and that will prevail. But Christ’s lama sabactani comes from the man, that “fool that I love.” Christ is loved for He does not take a shortcut into an inauthentic progressivism nor into an intransigent conservatism. He does not reduce salvation to the domain of the possible and thus what is clear from every aspect of His act is the impossibility of this Event—the impossibility of it being repeated, spoken, communicated, re-enacted; and the simultaneous necessity for all those things to be done. Christ’s kenosis is the supreme contradictory polemos, which, when it touches man, leaves him restless and in his own undoing—every one of his gains is a loss. The greatest Love that Christ offers is the greatest risk of all; the difference between meaningless and redemptive suffering does not result in the mission accomplished but in the very ground of the soul. The definitions of the mission and the end are not defined. Man does not suffer for a defined end or a defined mission, but for the prevenient openness of his soul. There is no branch within man’s own agony or ecstasy to guide and give focus to his suffering. Such a conception displaces the agonic change in man, making it secondary to the end when all along what must be clarified and illuminated is man’s penultimacy—this, in a way, Nietzsche half-suspected. The loves that were once common in childhood become rare until recognized only in Christ. This recognition in the abstract-now-becoming-concrete-reality is the risk; it is the mission and charter of the soul! Man can and will be stripped of everything; the mission or goal, or plan as it was understood or planned may not—and it is better if it does not—survive. Only the lost cause prevails. It may very well be a delicate dance of freedom and grace, where its partners are related but always seen in tension. But the tension becomes a living union, for what is unnatural cannot endure. It is strangely sweet and painful that man’s prayers are never answered in missions or in ends, or in the teleological chatter of the polis, even the most honest of them. The mission, end, and telos, like reason, are but effects of that prevenient openness, which is itself what Christ came for. Every gain is a loss; every loss is a gain. And the rational and irrational are no longer at war even and especially as they pull man apart and strip him down. Every prayer, every mission, every end, every invocation is answered in a way more true to its interior desire, where grace itself gives us freedom by relieving us of false endurance and false freedoms and most painfully relieves us of those false hopes— hopes that distract from the total salvation of hearts and minds. Christ does not hide our penultimacy but radicalizes it by being both the master and slave to nature—“my God, my God why have you forsaken me” is answered precisely because every gain is a loss and thus every loss is a gain. More than the eternal law, this is the divine law crowned by faith.80

80

Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship, I, 16; R. Brague, The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007), 227–28.

Epilogue: The Polis and the Seven Last Words of Christ

Every wound of Christ strikes through his mystical body: is a means whereby that body is united to the Tree of Life. In so far as we are remade in his image, these wounds must strike through us too. They are the instruments of our glory, our union with him. The friends of God are wounded in the hands that work for him, in the feet that journey to him, in the heart that asks only strength to love him: as he too is wounded in his ceaseless working for us, his tireless coming to us, his ineffable desire towards us. We share the marks of his passion, and he ours. So, too, is all his creation grieved most in those very members which express the energy, the liberty, the Godward instincts of its life. In its perpetual striving towards him, the whole living cosmos risks and receives the sacred wounds which transfix the feet, the hands, the heart of God. It is hurt in and by its restlessness, its creative industry, its desires. The law of love seizes upon these agents of freedom. Charity pierces them, transmutes them to the service of the All: nails Life—free, urgent Life—to the Eternal Cross. Those disharmonies which are the opportunity at once of strife and of perfection strike through its members, and imprint upon the universe the stigmata of Christ. Eternal Wisdom maimed himself, marred his beauty, that thereby he might be united more closely with his world. He became man in our interest: he was scourged in and for our transgressions: his heart was pierced that we might enter in. There is no other door to the secret of being than this strait gate in the ramparts of our only home. “Intra tua vulnera absconde me!” [Within thy wounds hide me.] No idle metaphor, no poetic image: but the grandest petition of the awakened Spirit of Life, pressing at all costs towards its home in the heart of God, the one reality. —Evelyn Underhill1

The society of the friends of God: Ever-built on Good Friday Death nurtures the oddity of the human and divine substances. It is the fatherhood of extraction and removal, the great polarity to fecundity, and yet it imparts its own generational begottenness. Down the line, down in and through and past time, death

1

Cf. E. Underhill, “Eleventh Station: Jesus Christ Is Nailed to the Cross,” in The Path of Eternal Wisdom, ed. J. Cordelier (London: J. M. Watkins, 1911).

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presses itself against our agony, becoming one with our faces. And so we understand that “Christ is in agony until the end of the world,”2 until we have faces again. Death is ultimately neither “it” nor “other,” instead presenting itself as commerce itself; becoming the phenomenologically lived presence of both parties in the dialogue. Stripped of sentimental longitude and disbelief, death is the soul’s entanglement with endurance and legacy and the odd hope that the non-chronological carries and overrides the chronological. When death becomes self, the swollen heart barters its own intangibilities for something Other which it cannot lay its hands on and yet, for the dying man, is more visceral, more real, more elusive, more menacing, more inviting than love lost, love gained, love overcome, or even love fulfilled. The deadly pause, this peri-mortem is how God is, beyond but not contrary to the things that speak and can be spoken of. This parenthesis at the so-called end of life makes death all the odder, for death toys and plays with the language and meaning of finality. The moratorium or terminus or cessation or passageway or condemnation or judgment or transition lingers around the parenthesis but does not carry its richness, for death is the apex of all meaning held, in some respects, as the first meaning and Truth. If allowed, from this estuary of truth held out from its tributaries, springs through them new life and truth. In forgiveness, salvation, relationship, the invocation of abandonment and distress, as well as in triumph and reunion, what was once considered suspended becomes nothing less than what is. And yet he who is, who has allowed this release with-and-against his will, is himself no longer, for death, which is always an is-not, has removed its searing immediacy. Its generational begotteness carries tones of irony beneath the collective façade of relief. Once suspended, death becomes in the dying the true identification of reality, casting every form of realism in the light of the lesser; the things known for their independence reveal their startling dependency; the images forgotten as inconsequential reign without light; all meanings become redrawn in the ebbing human drama of appearance and disappearance. And yet these meanings cannot be imparted by man for when he dies death snatches the other end of his personal parenthesis. Any living emergence from the parenthesis is impossible; the living, the half-living as we are, those who peer and glimpse backward, must retreat and return from where we came. Are we presented with death’s ultimate nurtured oddity in the figure of Christ? Christ overcomes death not by abolishing it, by simply making it vanish, but by making it the revelatory in-former of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful in all their enduring and cyclical transience. For each of us, the same things are always different and always the same forever and ever in the divinely human repetition of life and death which, for each, is an un-rehearsed play with oft-cited lines. The other end of the parenthesis is perhaps the thicket of non-being, the purgative wait, Love, love beyond love fulfilled as an ecstasy itself ecstatic by its own surpassing good. The truth is, man must be a fool to plunge headlong into the parenthesis, and yet this foolishness must be timely and demands the wisdom of finitude even and especially as death not only 2

Pascal, Pensees, §533. Pascal then says “we must not sleep during that time.” But we cannot not sleep, and so our agony is His agony, our failure unto death, becomes His dying for our lives.

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confirms but overrides all our limited ends and their natural reciprocity. But the other more neglected truth is that man has no idea what it is to be a fool. He is foolish to the point of a deadening maturation, but that is quite a different thing from being a genuinely holy fool. Because of sin, and the pride of independence and self-sufficiency, man has a hard time figuring out how to be a fool even though the inclination is always intact, entrenched in his spiritual organs. He runs toward the tabernacle or the monk’s cell, or to the arms of another, or he wakes up as night blooms its fingered shadows and holds his young child. Even the cynic carries a tattered vestige of some untranslated sentiment that can ignite flaming tears which everyone and yet no one can understand. But true to form we always retreat into the sinful mimicry of miserly existence. But in Christ, our foolishness is saved—felix culpa—by death. Death has neither the time nor the setting to do anything else but to listen to the holy fool, to make room for what doesn’t add up. The parenthesis has no patience for protracted, historical man because this man refuses contradictions even as he becomes one. The true fool speaks in the non-linear, which is the only language death understands. Death is always that which does not follow suit, that which does not live by this world’s reason and immortality. If allowed, death can bring about its own speaking partner by making man a fool again, making him something naked, something pure because craving purity, somewhere between the garden and the shroud. It nurtures us propadeutically into the parenthesis from which some things retreat and others do not emerge. Christ did not retreat, and yet He emerged from death. As the supremely Holy Fool who was spat upon and mocked and beaten and thrown to the ground, with the gravel encased in his palms and knees, His last Words make it through the parenthesis as the bridge between the human and divine Cities. Through blood-confused sweat, becoming sweat-confused tears, and tears confused even more profusely with the blood of our Father now the blood of our children, death’s generational begottenness has become something other, tangible, and has a name. It is precisely because no man has emerged from the parenthesis that makes the Christian polis impossible. And yet, because Christ has descended into hell, endured, carried, ascended, and conferred that consummated parenthetical finxit on man, this impossibility is also a necessity, as the real, the abiding and the sensuously manifest in the world. What are the phenomenological manifestations of this impossible and yet necessary society, and how do these indications in existence existentially reflect the simultaneous impossibility and living reality of that society? The impossibility of it does not cease to exist because the society continues to manifest itself by way of the enduringly eternal death and resurrection of the God-Man. Its emergence does not remove the wild impossibility of this polis, for it cannot be re-created, even as it appears again and again at different times. Its image when imitated, even where imitation is a possible avenue for human purgation and transcendence, is not an effect of the primal cause. The aniconicas-image reflects itself in all but cannot be captured, let alone reimagined. Man seeks to recreate it, which is both futile and natural, uniting nature in the cosmogonic tension of finitude in the face of the infinite. Our seeking to implant the image can become also unnatural, creating the Hell on earth of progressivism and suspended futurities, what Voegelin famously and justly referred to as the immanentization of the Christian

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eschaton.3 The truth of Marxism was also its lie: its suspension of the ideal polis as perfectly crystallized equality showed its impossibility, but as the impossible it was accentuated only to be betrayed by an incessantly furious progressivism. Marxism devalued the mystery of man into a chronographic pseudo-exegesis of mastery issued in time, beyond history. When Christianity is reductively viewed in this manner— as if our aniconic and prevenient openness is meted out in a chronological exegesis held suspended in an empty futurity—the meaning and visible presence of its polis are lost before any noetic responsiveness can take hold. This so-called Christian futural is emptied of all content precisely because the intermingling of human into divine futurity is confused with an extrinsicism and a bifurcation, and a fear that any truly divine immanent presence would undercut the transcendent flight of the soul. But immanence as saturated presence, even and especially as it appears as an impoverishing immanence, is the only ignition for genuine transcendence. God is in the world, or He is nowhere. The metaxic balance of the commensurate–incommensurate must be maintained, but not at the expense of the exile of God from the world. And this is often enough the conservative’s temptation. If we take seriously the enduring impossibility of the Christian polis, even in the midst of its apparent presence, do we simply allow the tides of change to proceed, to march on wielding other orders and contradictory intelligences? Must a type of ascetic fatalism trump reckless activism: should the Christian learn to co-exist with the processes of societal interaction and commerce which exhibit themselves for, but more often against, the Christian polis, thereby acknowledging his inability to create or form or sustain on his own that polis? Or must he fight within the certitude of that brutal intangibility, must he fight to uphold something which he cannot uphold, cannot repeat, cannot communicate? Must man defend what he cannot generationally reflect: this Christian polis outside visible society and yet inside it, hidden from view, disappearing from view, transfiguring and transfixing man’s hidden sight, making him a holy fool at the risk of becoming a fool, fighting windmills because for him there are no alternatives, when the world clearly and visibly has a multitude of others? What are the guidelines, the sacred pact, of this Christian polis and how do we know its presence when we can neither re-imagine it nor hold it suspended in a futurity emptied of all substance? The future won from such an emptiness is not the divine plenitude achieved by man struggling to navigate an all too magnified world, all too full of the divine invitation, but rather the result of that vast abyss of historical finitudes enforcing his self-mastery on the world, and failing even to achieve self-knowledge. The Christian polis, when its impossibility insinuates its beauty in the midst of the anomalies of the human agon, those oddities which actually characterize the redemptive soul of mankind, accosts the senses with spirit, making breath and Word one. It is neither mirage, for water reaches lips, nor is it a carnival come and gone,

3

E. Voegelin, New Science of Politics (Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago Press, 1987), 117–32; 162–80. See also K. Keulman, The Balance of Consciousness: Eric Voegelin’s Political Theory (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1990).

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even if it is the festival of Being. Nor, on the other hand, is it the durable Rock of St. Peter, the sturdy sobriety of the civic building. Rather, it is a rare and exotic flower almost artificial, too beautiful to be natural, like a perfect movie set capturing what even nature indicates but cannot capture. And in this sense the state of nature theorists are right: there is something unnatural about the polis. It blooms at night, behind our backs, cohering the restless caravanic will to its siren’s lure. Its endurance transfixes the human soul leaving it with the knowledge of transience as much as of eternity; an eternal transience ebbing its way into personal memory and living on in the Christian by recollection. He relives a past he cannot recollect, for it is not yet past him, nor is it his past, and yet his past is defined by it; he is a being becoming re-defined by an imageless present living within him, illuminating images as indications and presences too real for this world. At the same time and forever, man gains access into the Christian polis when the world is not enough and man’s soul is too much, and the world is too much and man’s soul is not enough to navigate it: this is the contradictory impulse fulfilled in the chaste anarchism of man imitating Christ Who has no pattern but only an unrepeatable eternal presence. The odd appearance of the Christian polis cannot be so much dissected but described only as it in-vokes its own description, only as it casts itself in undiluted contrast to its substitutes and surrogates, and thus it needs no justificatory manifesto or blueprint, and is able to accommodate a variety of political norms, from monarchy to democracy with all their attendant rules and regulations.4 It lives on through a quiet antagonism that is as much merciful as it is of power and dominion, overcoming failed egoisms and confiscating the boundaries where the myth of self-sufficiency is considered the separator and adjudicator of the City of Man from the City of God. It is a place of dreams but is earthy and weighted with the stuff of life and death. The Christian polis is thus mortal in its heart, handing over its own immortality to mortal dreamers who can dream of immortality only insofar as the immortal sustenance lives on within them, imageless as it may be, becoming image in their recollections that are not merely of the past, for the present as Christ has not passed them by and never will. Christ’s fulfilled parenthesis is greater than all imitations, constructions, and conjured futurities or allegiances to the past, it is traditio invoked with the unique, un-patterned anarchy that belongs to sheer selfless, bodily donation of the Spirit. This peri-mortem parenthesis which crystalizes the hearth of the Christian polis is fully futural without diluting the present. It contains the maxim of perfection beyond anticipation and accountability, without allowing the present, even as an impoverishing purgation, to be systematically emptied of its locus and identity within and in the midst of the world. For Christ is in but not of the world, overcoming the in and making the world no longer of itself. The God-Man places the image of his aniconic epoché within man. He expands our open natures to accommodate what is impossible and yet necessary to take-in: the wisdom of death’s own word recovered into life. His Seven Last Words are the invocation of this parenthetical pause within each of us, which can unite us to others

4

Brague, The Law of God, 227–28.

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in a social compact beyond the inevitable waning of custom, nomos, popular will, or even historical tradition. For man must make the final journey to God alone, and that finality is not suspended but a daily affair: the meaning of life is carried only within the non-sequential parenthesis. Too pitiful we are even to pity our own infirmity. Too full of pride to pray for contradiction, or at least that which does not add up. And in the absence of penitence and thanksgiving, man denies himself the wilderness, becoming too lost even to pray, unless some god come to his rescue.5

Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit6 We can wrestle with death only insofar as death allows it. Time, ever mindful of death, refuses to allow us the completion of our own parenthesis, nor does it give over its secret knowledge. Before man can ask for that wisdom to be handed over, so that he may pass it down in a non-betraying traditore as genuine traditio, death puts him to sleep, off to bed straightened out on stone or pine amid sawdust first fresh and then faded with the timeless timeliness of the sun which shines on man as if his moment is already a recollection, a dream shot through the earth. Man soon becomes one with death, beyond knowledge but not recognition. And thus the story continues, but no one knows for sure its language. If it is a song, its movements and melodic repetition remain hauntingly at a standstill, chastened into silence by the chastener of the human and divine commingling. God speaks Words full of Being-beyond-being and man becomes an is, but cannot understand what he is. This contusive union, this blushing and bruising is re-made continuously below the surface: the Word which makes life folds into every life and is left unattended, taken for granted, examined only with smudged blinders, and thus unloved; a mystery bypassed by generational sin, even as it is presupposed in the graveyard by the old vicarage. Christ commits Himself to reunification with the Father and, in doing so, puts Himself within death, inside its commandeered sleep. He becomes of the pine floor, and of the stone and of the sawdust. He becomes the human condition’s intermediary between God and man. Christ commends the breath that unites him to carnality, not with a serene release but with the whole trembling Word which waits at the depths of creation and permeates His very flesh and blood. The living Word was put to death. The Christ child was born to die and Our Lady’s heart was raised to break open and overflow with unbroken sorrow and joy. She knows the aniconic and the meaning of time-without-time. She can see the whole beauty and eternal transience of the moment which is all too much for us to navigate or understand. Her child’s heart is sheer love, it is everything, the immense and the little, yes, the little and the light’s own peculiar weight untouched by man. In Him, she sees the very birth-pangs of divinity and feels it throbbing in her heart. 5 6

Republic, 492, 497c, 499. Lk. 23:46.

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The very cornerstone of the Christian polis has thus been set, unseen and lighter than air, innocence falling unremarked as swords find home in the Sacred Heart. God in Christ commits his Spirit also to the polis, creating its distinctive intangibility and yet enduring inescapability. This release into the Father’s hands holds open death’s unending parenthesis and also finishes and completes it in a simultaneous tension. Christ is the Triune Act, He is the beginning, the end, and the Word in the midst of the parenthesis, inverting condition and death into plenitude and life. By committing His spirit and becoming the life of the Christian polis, the God-Man is the living Word living inside man and uniting what is untranslatable into the only true Here in the midst of all the substitute “heres” and “nows.” This Here, while beyond knowledge is the place where fools become saints, and where faith, while always an exercise in futility, receives its highest expression as wisdom incarnate. And it is here that the Burkean principles of political order and social harmony transcend mere piety and platitude: that there is an enduring moral order incarnated in custom, public orthodoxy, convention, and continuity; the prescriptive and prudential character of immemorial usage as criterion for action; the limiting imperfectibility of the human condition; land and property as the guarantors of liberty; and hierarchy as the standard of variety,7 for the patterns of the polis are themselves patterned after the divine,8 and here even Rousseau would agree that the greatest political evil is that which tears the polis apart and makes it many instead of one, while the greatest good is that which makes it one.9 We have travelled such distant roads We have no further taste for foreign lands. Queen of the confessors, of the virgins and of the angels Here we are come back to our first villages. So much has been said, O Queen of the Apostles, We have lost the taste for discourse We have no more altars but yours We know nothing but a simple prayer. All that everywhere else demands an examination Here is but the effect of a defenceless youthfulness. All that everywhere else requires postponement Here is but a present fragility. All that everywhere else demands certification Here is but the fruit of a poor tenderness. All that everywhere else requires a touch of skill Here is but the fruit of a humble ineptitude. 7 8 9

Cf. Kirk, “Ten Conservative Principles,” 15–29. Cf. Republic, 397. Ibid., 462a–b.

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All that everywhere else is imbalance Here is but measure and grading, All that everywhere else is a hut Here is but a solid and lasting dwelling-place.10

It is finished11 The God-Man’s existence entails an overlapping mediatorship. Not only does He connect the divine to the endless mortal heart, fulfilling the purgative good of man’s desire for God as well as God’s infinitely immense desire for man, but Christ becomes death itself. As the intermediary between that which endures and that which cannot, death is the lost connection born of refusal, alienation, and separation. Only man abides by ignorance, only he lives suspended from the very hyphen itself which connects God to Man. Because fully God, fully Man, and fully intermediary, for a time being Christ is fully Death, for He takes on all mediation in his endless desire to save. What connects man to God by nature is life, but by condition it is death: Christ becomes life and death in one Body becoming the fulfillment of the contradictory impulse. Et lavit nos a peccatis nostris in sanguine: Christ commits His spirit and induces in Himself the impossible and necessary wait structure which gives man the horizon and finishing of death’s parenthesis. When it is finished, the triumph has been announced as Word. The parenthesis from which man retreats will be ended through the supreme life born to die and through that death born to life. Christ consummates and thus closes the parenthesis that constitutes the Christian polis, that polis in but not of the world. It is in the world, for Christ is innermost as Being itself, but not of the world for it is impossible that the wisdom of the parenthesis be given over to man because it is man who must be given over to it, who must submit his life for its formation. This polis is necessary on the condition of its impossibility. It is impossible that God is finished, it is impossible that man should go on, and yet these two impossibilities are constituted in Christ’s twofold mediatorship which inverts the tragedy of condition as the entrance into a new nature, a new polis: All that everywhere else is constriction by the rule Here is but an impetus and abandonment; All that everywhere else is a harsh penalty Here is but a weakness that is relieved. ... All that everywhere else would be a great effort Here is but simplicity and quiet; All that everywhere else is the wrinkled rind Here is but the lymph and the tears of the vine. ... 10 11

C. Peguy, La Tapisserie de Notre-Dame (Amsterdam: A. A. Balkema, 1946). Jn. 19:13.

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All that everywhere else is a degradable good Here is but quiet and rapid disengagement; All that everywhere else is a rigidity Here is but a rose and a footprint in the sand. ... All that everywhere else is questioned and taken up Here is but a clear river near the source; O Queen, it is here that every soul comes Like a young warrior fallen by the wayside. All that everywhere else is a steep road, O Queen reigning in your royal court, Star of the morning, Queen of the last day, All that everywhere else is the table laid, All that everywhere else is the sense of the road travelled Here is but a serene and firm detachment, And in a temple of calm, far from the flat anxiety The expectation of a death more alive than life.12

I thirst13 Christ’s parenthesis is thus a prayer, an appeal of seven last words which have built a polis, a polis which is a prayer for lost souls to become wayfarers again. The Christian polis is thus restless, thirsting, and nomadic in its origins and in its terminus, appearing and disappearing, unable to be captured. This polis is running for its life and in distress, transfiguring death to preserve life, a nomad whose permanent habitation exists only in the City of God.14 With heavy and earthy back, Christ is the defining vision of the Christian polis carrying the whole of the cosmogonic and the creational on His back. The polis is the weight of the Cross, weighted down so as to bring about the final Seven Words that constitute the “program” and pattern of that polis: to make man as the polis is: as homeless and timeless as the Beautiful itself.15 The polis is the Beautiful as much as it

12 13 14

15

Peguy, La Tapisserie de Notre-Dame. Jn. 19:28. Cf. C. Peguy, “The Portal of the Mystery of the Second Virtue,” in Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes, ed. M. Péguy (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 587: “Jesus, my child,—it is the Church speaking to her children—did not come to speak to us of frivolities, He did not make the trip to descend to the earth, to come to tell us riddles and jokes. There is no time for entertaining ourselves. He did not give his life, to come to tell us fables.” Cf. von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, 18: “Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, leaving it to its avarice and sadness.”

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is the transfigured weight of the Cross, and while intangible it is consumed and felt to be more real than earth and clay. It is a rock of considerable fixity and yet nomadic, thirsting, and erotic, an appeal for succor as much as it is an invocation to bring man to the table; it is prayer exorcised of any empty space, of any promise unfulfilled, for it is the body of the supreme Mediator. Because it is all these things, the polis is man’s open nature set before him in a living parenthesis, inescapable and yet unable to be captured. Christ so ardently thirsts to be loved by men that this thirst devours Him: before He commits his spirit, and before it is finished, He reveals the eros of the mission through His thirst. Christ is the mission of the Christian polis as much as He is on that mission with man. Christ has chosen to lack out of abundance and to be thirsty with us at the entrance of that same parenthesis that He has finished as Father and is living within as Spirit, Word, and Life. He holds it open for man to drink of its new life, its impossible love, its death stripped of the imageless and given image in His selfless thirst: He who loves puts himself in the power of him who is loved. It is the habit, it is the common law. It is fatal. He who loves falls into servitude, puts himself under the yoke of servitude. He depends on him whom he loves. And yet it is in this very position that God has put Himself by loving us. God did not wish to escape the common law, and by His love he fell into servitude to the sinner. The Creator now depends on His creature. He who is everything has put Himself, has allowed Himself, to be put on this level. He who can do everything depends on, waits for, hopes from him who can do nothing. Everything has been confided into sinful hands. In confidence. In hope. Man’s own salvation, the Body of Christ, hope in God—all has been committed to man. Terrifying privilege. Terrifying responsibility. The lowest of sinners can crown or uncrown a hope of God. Terrifying love. Terrifying charity. The Creator has need for his creature, has put Himself in the position of needing His creature. God has need of us. God needs His creature. We might be wanting to Him. Not reply to His call. Not respond to His hope. Fail to appear. Be missing. Not be there. Terrifying power.16

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?17 Christ’s overcoming and fulfillment of death’s parenthesis is the substance of the polis, a risible heaviness-as-inescapability, revealing reality as the lesser and only divinity as the real, and thus the unspoken ground of social humor, vindicating as it elevates Bergson’s thesis.18 Christ is forsaken by His Father, by Himself and most of all by man,

16

17 18

C. Peguy, “Charles Peguy,” in ed. E. M. Walker The Month, Vol. 126, No. 613 (London: Longmans, Greene & Co., 1915). Matt. 27:46. See H. Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. C. Brereton (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004); Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion.

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all so that man is not forsaken. And we have not yet learned how to cry out “My God, My God, why have You not forsaken me?” His weight is our own but man cannot bear it, so Christ transfigures it into the very origin and end of time. The waning world of lost images now houses the “Here,” this parenthesis in but not of the world, enclosed and enshrining man in the fact that he is not forsaken, so much so that the forsaken one, Christ, thirsts for us, thirsts for us to save Him, to give Him His Word, to take Him inside the polis, to experience the weight of the Cross which has been transformed into joyful anticipation. Christ, as the lost one, invites us into the region of Being once irremediably lost, holding it open. He lives inside what was once lost as the discovery of the imageless-image of the Beautiful, and then is the End of that deadly parenthesis as perfector of all wayfarers, including Himself who needs no perfecting. Christ gives Himself over as abandoned, as wounded, as wayfarer for man to hide in his wounds and to be perfected. He becomes a wayfarer because no earthly wayfarer, as lost, as turned upside down, can find his way home. The wayfarer lacks everything and has no home. Christ becomes the stone, the pine, the sawdust; He becomes so abandoned in the weight of lost perfections, taking on the terrifying darkness of the wayfarer, so that man’s wayfaring can have an end, a happy endless homecoming Love. Christ thirsts, for in his supreme forsakenness—which will not end until man no longer sleeps, until we have faces—He takes on the countless broken cisterns.19 Christ gives the Christian polis His body and blood, which as infinite holds all love, all life and all impossible Goods made possible. His tabernacle is the unbroken cistern, the water of Life. And only in this sense is the polis to guarantee the “pursuit of happiness.”

Woman, behold your son. Behold your mother20 Would that Christianity had a Virgil to describe the old monks at their rural labours, as it has had a Sacchi or a Domenichino to paint them! How would he have been able to set forth the adventures and the hardships of the missionary husbandmen, who sang of the Scythian winter, and the murrain of the cattle, the stag of Sylvia, and the forest home of Evander! How could he have portrayed St. Paulinus or St. Serenus in his garden, who could draw so beautiful a picture of the old Corycian, raising amid the thicket his scanty potherbs upon the nook of land, which was not good for tillage, nor for pasture, nor for vines! How could he have brought out the poetry of those simple labourers, who has told us of that old man’s flowers and fruits, and of the satisfaction, as a king’s, which he felt in those innocent riches! He who had so huge a dislike of cities, and great houses,

19

20

Cf. Jer. 2:13: “They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and have digged to themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” Cf. Gorgias, 493b: The life of pleasure is like filling one perforated cistern from another perforated cistern—an end-less-ness without completion, as the ultimate recipe for frustration. Jn. 19:26–27.

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and high society, and sumptuous banquets, and the canvass for office, and the hard law, and the noisy lawyer, and the statesman’s harangue, he who thought the country proprietor as even too blessed, did he but know his blessedness, and who loved the valley, winding stream, and wood, and the hidden life which they offer, and the deep lessons which they whisper, how could he have illustrated that wonderful union of prayer, penance, toil, and literary work, the true otium cum dignitate, a fruitful leisure and a meek-hearted dignity, which is exemplified in the Benedictine! That ethereal fire which enabled the prince of Latin poets to take up the Sibyl’s strain, and to adumbrate the glories of a supernatural future, that serene philosophy, which has strewn his poems with sentiments which come home to the heart, that intimate sympathy with the sorrows of human kind and with the action and passion of human nature ... .21

The weight of the Cross-as-polis reveals itself in man’s futural anticipation carried fully and aniconically in the present by Christ’s eternally begotten presence. The God-man elevates and illuminates the past as much as He elevates and illuminates the future. Christ is the eternal present itself generationally incrucifying man—mother and sons, father and daughters—with the futurity discoverable in death’s hallowed crown, now an enclosed, finished parenthesis as the very gate of the Christian polis. As the present is always ahead of man, Christ makes man a responder to His call. And man’s responsiveness—having been liberated from the abyss by the Christ who snatched and ransomed man’s forsakenness for His own—becomes a beholding, a vision and image of Christ’s call to be generationally repeated and resituated. Through the Christian polis, which exists in an eternally offered transubstantiation, man translates the untranslatable without it ever leaving Christ, for man is in Christ as Christ is in man. Imitatio becomes repetitio which becomes traditio which becomes liturgia, which becomes, again, imitatio—all in the grand epoché of meaning and culture. The non-linear presence of the Cross means that no meaning or truth or beauty or goodness is emptied even as it is hidden within generations which reclaim forgetfulness and even imitate forsakenness. Even as the non-sequential cruciformity of the polis is revealed, there is more to behold, more to pass down, more for Christ to thirst, more of Christ to be given. The Christian polis has its enshrining parenthesis and, because of it, it has no end, only transformations bearing the archetypal aniconic image of man’s open nature. Christ hides in order to be revelatory, the polis as nomad hides and through it man takes on the sufferings of Christ and the splendor of reunification and solidarity, affection, liberty, fraternity, equality—all united in and to awe. The God-Man is the generational incrucification of all time, all meaning, and all history revealing the Christian polis to be far more real than any other society, compact or allegiance. And yet the tradition is not some ready-made handing down of past facts become stultifying irrelevancies. Not only is it the living Word constantly new, an astonishing constant even as it hides in the mediocre, but because this polis possesses

21

Cardinal Newman, “The Mission of St. Benedict,” 407–08.

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the fullness of the consequences of post-fall reality, its very directive to man is itself a festive polemos. It cannot be captured or re-created, as nomadic and thirsting. The Christian polis eternally refuses to become the kind of vague universalism or generalism in which ideals are mindlessly grafted upon the mind in the name of “education”. This parenthesis, which won out over death so much that it lovingly utilizes death’s elusiveness and mastery over man, can never become a place made in our own image. It is intransigently maieutic. Without God’s archetypal imageless-image, traditions handed down over generations devolve into a political brothel, a pecking order of secular concession, compromise, and convenience. The Christian polis is the true generational begottenness because it cannot be repeated and yet cannot be escaped.

Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise22 The peculiarity of the Christian polis is that it must accost the senses by its repetitive newness to the point that it is naturally fused to man’s vital pulse, becoming the gluttonous and glorious spring bud,23 taking its nourishment from the tree, even as it is also the life-giving root of the tree of the polis. The Christian polis must appear to be taking something away from society, producing even a non-utility. Because the font of paradise lives hidden in its midst and is always thirsty, this polis produces a beauty that cannot be used, a gorgeous uselessness that goes deeper into sanctifying souls because this “uselessness” alone understands the incommunicability and untranslatable life that individuates each human soul as the “one thing needful.” The true spectacle of the Christian polis—its impractical iconographic presence adorning street corners, archways, and found fumbled by ancient hands from the bricklayer to the knitting old spinster—can unite man more supremely, more authentically, because it is the image of those impassioned and compassionate intangibilities: the interior and internal pauses between all events that constitute a human life. The weight of the Cross-as-polis translates and transfers to man, by imaged brevity and eternal transience, the shared incommunicability truly binding men as wayfarers living out their collective neediness for God within the cities of their souls.

22 23

Lk. 23:43. Cf. The Mystery of the Holy Innocents, 71–72: “When you see so much strength and so much roughness the little tender bud looks like nothing at all. Then it seems like a parasite on the tree, to eat at the tree’s table. Like mistletoe, like a fungus. Then it seems to feed on the tree (and the peasants call them gluttons), then it seems to lean on the tree, to issue from the tree, unable to be anything, unable to exist without the tree. And in fact, to-day it comes out of the tree, at the axil of the branches, at the axil of the leaves and it cannot exist at all without the tree. It seems to come from the tree, to steal the nourishment of the tree. And yet, from it everything comes. Without a bud which had once come forth, the tree would not exist. Without these thousands of buds which come forth only once, at the very beginning of April and perhaps in the last days of March nothing would last, the tree would not last, would not hold its place as a tree (and that place must be held), without that sap which rises and oozes in the month of May, without those thousands of buds which pierce tenderly at the axil of the hard branches. Every place must be held. Every life springs from tenderness.”

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The City of Man becomes finally a City in Christ, for He immortalizes the flesh and bones of the city of each untransmitted soul. Each soul of every man constitutes the polis and lets the polis be the innocently greedy bud on his soul. Christ became Man so that man can dream of Christ and re-create Him and be re-created in man. In us, Christ has made man anew. That is politics in the true sense. Paradise is not an empty progressivist promise, but a living present promise which, in Christ’s cruciformity, is already fulfilled in the blood ties of a living futurity.

Father, forgive them, they know not what they do24 Courtesy First snow falls in kind agreement to timeless ways. Gratia plena. Our Lady of Care is a kindly countenance sad as autumn frost. Faithful tears reclaim gardens brought to graceless ruin By wishing wells of sin.25

In this City of real universals, the universal is concretized in flesh and blood. This universal is weighty, and yet ambulating with dreams, mysteries, hopes, and the terror of love’s reflected countenance drifting in its fallen condition and even agitated by the facelessness of death. How different, how strange this City of Souls appears, this Christian polis which lives and abides by what the world cannot survive—the everfinishing parenthesis. The Christian condemns himself by attempting to recreate it, and this re-creational activity is either salvific or monstrous, for creativeness has consequences. Perhaps Camus understood this, perhaps Sisyphus reconciled himself to impossibility and futility as much as he understood the relationship of necessity to freedom. Perhaps, also, he lost his life in such a reconciliation, in such a concession, noble as it was, to the world where everything adds up and forms another kind of absurdity, that of fallenness confused by its own trajectory to view itself as natural. Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Father, forgive us, we know not what we do. We know not what we do, competing for “intelligences-as-allegiances” even as true understanding passes us by. Why is it that one imitation fails while the other, still as imitation, ceases somehow to remain one? How is it that one imitation becomes instead united with breath and Word, becoming the Christian polis? Man, it seems, knows the answer and yet must fail again and fail better, for when he catches a glimpse, even a backward half-turned glimpse of the City of incrucified souls, he is both a part of it and a stranger outside its gates. How can he live outside its law and survive? Man

24 25

Luke 23:34. F. Gilson, “Courtesy.” First Things 19 (1992): 44.

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is not honest enough, nor can he separate in himself the holy fool who fails (and thus wins without witnesses) from the miserly fool who wins for all to see and yet has failed himself and his God.26 Father, forgive us for we know not what we do, living as if we know the extent our own weaknesses. This new City, because it is from man’s soul and planted from Christ’s sacred and thirsting Heart, is nomadic and restless. Citizenship is thus twofold, conferring admission only by exodus.27 Man is inside and outside the gates, and this is the deadly serious admission fee for the greatest joy and beatitude: he is always a citizen only if always a stranger. This twofold citizenship makes its paradoxical confession in the fact that the sacrament is always valid: we know this, man acknowledges this, sometimes with a sigh, and other times with hope, fidelity, and fear. Once again as in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed to do more than entertain it as an agreeable possibility, once again we have sent Him away, begging though to remain His disobedient servant, the promising child who cannot keep His word for long. The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory, and already the mind begins to be vaguely aware of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are, back in the moderate Aristotelian city of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry and Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience, and the kitchen table exists because I scrub it. It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten the office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen the Child, however dimly, however incredulously, the Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all. For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment we can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious; remembering the stable where for once in our lives everything became a You and nothing was an It.28

Back to the moderate Aristotelian city of the darning and the Eight Fifteen, where fools have no place on narrowed streets and guilt must not remain conscious, but where the sacrament is always valid. We acknowledge this truth with birds’ hearts beating furiously and clutching breadcrumbs at the altar, now with a little less consolation and a bit more risk. The secular society of tangible ends and equally ephemeral ideals works against this cruciformity, and so it becomes a struggle, a show, a pantomime play, a theatrical spectacle. Mass comes and then it goes, and for many it fails to consummate in a visible union. The love of the priest cannot crush our spiritual impotence, for he possesses this infirmity as well, even as he possesses the shining armor of Truth.

26 27 28

Republic 362a–b. Cf. Cardinal Newman, “The Mission of St. Benedict.” W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio,” in W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, ed. E. Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 399.

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The once garden walls beyond the Church live on but without their holy ivy; nor are they littered with icons in various stages of weathering, nor are there candles that intoxicate us with a secret message like flowered scents so abundant as to be unsure of their primal source. And still, in this polis perpetually hidden and yet eternally revealed, the sacrament is valid: for the sacrament becomes the polis, as saving grace for the nomads we all are who have no home. The sacrament is the heart of the Christian polis and remains its heart, when nothing is left: Cor Pauli, Cor Christi erat. When nothing is left but the sacrament, all is still present as the polis moving with the wayfarer, eternal and transient, finite and infinite, unassumingly thin, quiet and still abrasively white like the bricklayers’ stone, calling man to its gates. He gave to Misery all he had, a tear, He gained from Heaven (‘twas all he wished) a friend.29

That life is very strange indeed is a commonplace truism apparent to all in some superficial way, but it only strikes the heart in the more often than not rare nonsequential moment when the parenthesis surrounds and encloses and we stop in mid-step and sense the intensity of the strangeness. And it is to be found even and especially in the holy wildness of the agora and the wild holiness of the monastery, both only revealed in the holy face of death.

29

T. Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1938).

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Index Aeschylus 125–6, 137, 246 agape 38, 41–2, 55, 75, 126, 179, 200, 242 aletheia (a-lethiological) 16, 20, 34, 244 analogy of being (analogia entis) 54, 62, 75, 138, 213, 256–7 anamnesis 52, 87, 125, 126, 153, 163, 170, 178, 246, 248, 250 ananke 44 aniconic xiv, 11, 18, 134, 136, 142–7, 150–2, 159–62, 165–7, 169–70, 172, 175–6, 179–80, 190, 198–9, 212–13, 234, 273–6, 282 St. Anselm 26, 38, 67, 257, 258 apotheosis (Apotheotic) 111, 246, 252, 260–2, 265 Arendt, H. 5, 10, 255 Aristotle xvii, 10, 18–19, 26, 28, 30, 32–41, 45, 51, 53–7, 59, 63–4, 66–8, 87, 91, 99, 108–10, 114, 116, 131, 136–9, 150, 168, 219, 221, 249, 252–3, 261, 266, 285 Auden, W. H. 285 St. Augustine vi, 13–14, 28, 34, 36, 48, 58–9, 82, 86, 90, 99, 119, 146, 159, 187, 188, 200, 202, 204–6, 233 Averroes 4, 10, 53 Bacon, F. xi, 221 Barth, K. 57 Beckett, S. 175–6, 179–82 Belloc, H. 66, 88 Benedict XVI xviii, 15, 19, 26, 52, 61–2, 104, 116, 118, 149, 193 Berdyaev, N. 117, 183, 222, 241, 261, 266 Bergson, H. 111, 128–9, 170, 195, 206, 221, 234, 238, 242, 280 Bernanos, G. 179 St. Bernard of Clairvaux 82, 116 Betjeman, J. 155 St. Bonaventure 138–43, 155–9

Brehier, E. 4 Brooke, R. 165 Burke, E. xi, 4, 170, 205, 223, 277 Calderón de la Barca, P. xiv, 73–140 Camus, A. 207, 224–5, 233, 267, 284 capax dei 70, 248 St. Catherine of Genoa 80, 215 Chesterton, G. K. 61, 65, 152, 156, 176–7, 183 Christian Philosophy 32–3, 37, 57, 107–8, 259 Clement of Alexandria 139 confinium 20, 32, 145, 149, 221, 244 connatural (connaurality) 27–8, 48–9, 125, 158, 227, 250 Cornford, F. D. 154 cosmogonic xv, 16, 18, 69–70, 75, 90, 106, 110, 124, 127–8, 130, 132–4, 136–7, 152, 158, 165–8, 170, 177, 179, 183, 186, 194, 221–2, 251–2, 273, 279 Cousins, E. 141 creatio ex nihilo xviii, 94–101, 105 D’Arcy, M. 65, 81, 86–7, 95, 209 Debout, J. 49, 93, 109, 111 deiformitas (god-likeness) 22, 204, 248 De Jouvenel, B. 4–5, 219 De Lubac xvii, 19, 22, 43, 56–7, 101, 109, 195, 230 Descartes, R./Cartesian xi, 35, 43, 83, 138, 185, 187, 221, 226 Desmond, W. 114, 201 St. Diadochos of Photiki 28 dilectum 123, 135, 137–9 Diogenes Laertius 123, 150 Don Quixote 30, 106–7, 129, 155, 163, 176, 187, 256, 267 Dostoyevsky, F. 1, 9, 11, 136, 187, 234, 250, 254, 258, 268

304

Index

Elders, L. 69 Eliot, T. S. xi, 114, 177, 178, 223, 232 epoché 121–4, 160, 168, 226, 275, 282 eros 35, 41–2, 45, 55, 75, 80, 126, 137, 170, 197–8, 237, 242, 263, 280 Euripides 126 Fabro, C. 134–6, 138 Feingold, L. 27–9 fittingness 14, 24, 27, 32, 38, 46–8, 64, 220–2, 227, 231, 246, 258 Florensky, P. 203 forgiveness 101, 161, 192, 199, 205, 233, 246, 272 St. Francis of Assisi 84, 177, 183, 187 Garrigou-LaGrange, R. 65 Geist 34, 76–7, 136, 141–2, 156–8, 164, 172–4, 179, 186–8, 201 Gilson, C. S. xviii, 35, 76, 188, 258 Gilson, E. xviii, 4–5, 10, 55, 58, 116, 121, 136, 137–8, 256 Gilson, F. 284 gnostic 24, 39, 70, 104, 144, 162, 200, 266 grace (Prevenient, Antecedent) xii, xiv, 14, 15–18, 20, 22, 24–6, 28–9, 31, 34–5, 42–5, 47, 49, 51, 53–64, 66, 68, 79– 81, 83, 85–6, 96–8, 103, 107, 109–11, 115, 117, 119, 122–3, 125, 130, 134, 138, 143, 147, 167, 206, 211–13, 215–16, 220, 222–3, 229, 232, 236–7, 247, 261, 265, 267–8, 270, 274 Gray, T. 152, 286 St. Gregory Palamas 47, 124 Guardini, R. 21, 69, 118, 182, 257 Habermas x, xii, xiii Healy, N. xvii, 43 Hegel, G. W. F. (Hegelian) xi, xv, xviii, 25, 33–5, 57, 75–6, 85, 92, 114, 124, 134, 136, 138, 141–3, 145–9, 151–2, 155–9, 160–4, 172–6, 180–90, 192, 200–5, 210–11, 213, 219, 228, 233, 260, 266 Heidegger, M. 9–10, 23, 36, 82, 136, 159, 238, 244, 291 Heraclitus 128, 130, 210, 213, 215, 227, 250, 259

Hesiod 125 St. Hilary of Poitiers 256 historicism 30, 34, 36, 74, 104–6, 111, 121, 245, 254 Hobbes, T. 124, 168, 170, 172, 205, 217–19 Homer 41, 127, 130–1, 134, 256 Hugh of St. Victor 74, 118 Husserl, E. 185, 195, 219, 243, 259–61 Hylomorphism 55 St. Ignatius of Antioch 119–22 imago dei 30, 52, 70, 81, 95, 103, 212, 220, 253 immemorial 103, 143, 168, 205, 277 incarnation (incarnational presence) xv, 8, 14, 18, 28, 29, 33, 38, 46, 48, 58, 64, 74–5, 85, 108, 110, 114, 118–19, 140–4, 152, 185, 194, 196, 206, 209, 228, 231, 245–6, 258–9, 277 incommensurate 144, 183, 219–20, 237, 246, 253, 255, 259, 274 intentionality (intentional being) 6–7, 16, 66, 87–8, 117, 161, 214, 216, 220, 226, 235–6, 250, 253, 263 St. John Eudes 80, 82 Jowett, B. 128 St. Justin Martyr 102 St. Justin Popović 220 Kant (Kantian) 3–4, 7, 38, 63, 204, 230, 255, 263 kathodos 98, 242 kenosis (kenotic) 15–16, 30, 33, 61, 66–7, 85, 90, 92–3, 103, 108, 110–12, 124, 136, 139, 214, 228, 261–2, 265–6, 269–70 Kierkegaard, S. 109, 120, 149, 161, 184, 187, 224, 228, 241, 258 Kirk, R. xi, 5, 130, 205, 277 Kojeve, A. 161 Lachelier, J. 256 Lawrence, D. H. 262 Leahy, D. G. 258 Lewis, C. S. 60, 169 Long, S. A. 26–7

Index longior via (longer way) 49, 61, 64, 87–8, 104 Lossky, V. 48 maieutics 94–5, 102, 169–72, 211–12, 218, 223, 226, 283 Marcel, G. 221 St. Marguerite Marie Alacoque 176 Martindale, C. C. 42, 49, 85, 110, 115 Marx, K. (Marxism/Marxist) 10, 105, 143, 146, 159–61, 172, 233, 245, 274 matter and form xiv, 51, 53–65 McTaggart, J. M. E. 147, 158 metapolitics 115–17 metaxy (metaxic) 36, 114, 127, 136, 170, 174, 239, 242, 245, 257, 274 Milbank, J. xvii, 33 Milosz, C. 248, 250 mystique and politique 170, 220, 239 Newman, J. H. vi, xiv, xvi, 73, 256, 282, 285 Nietzsche, F. 35, 128, 163, 242, 260, 270 non-emancipatory xv, 2–3, 21, 68, 75–6, 96, 104, 138, 146, 153, 155, 165–8, 170–1, 176, 184, 193–4, 196, 198, 215, 226–9, 250–3 non-sequential xiii, xiv, 3, 142–9, 151–2, 155, 158–61, 163–73, 177, 181–2, 192, 194, 198, 204, 238, 244, 258, 265, 276, 282 Oakeshott, M. 163, 205, 217, 233 obediential potency 23, 29, 63, 87, 126 O’Connor, F. xviii, 19, 24 open/closed nature xii, xiv, xv, xviii, 3, 5, 13, 16–19, 24, 26, 28–30, 34, 42–3, 45, 47, 50, 57, 60, 62–4, 68, 70, 87, 99, 103, 105, 120, 124, 129, 131, 137, 184, 209, 212, 235, 237–8, 245, 261–2, 275, 280, 282 Origen 102 Ortega y Gassett, M. 117, 121 Ousia 128 Owens, J. xviii, 32 Pantokrator 15–16, 61, 115, 129, 132, 154, 174, 261, 268–9 Parmenides 39, 97–8, 128, 243

305

Pascal, B. 16, 18, 80, 86, 94, 100, 118, 121–2, 150, 256–8, 268–9, 272 St. Paul 11, 16, 26, 33, 63, 68, 118–20, 122, 193, 205, 234, 236, 269, 286 Pegis, A. C. 8, 42, 57, 188 Peguy, C. 108, 110, 115, 141, 148, 154, 185, 214, 239, 278–80 phenomenology xiii, xiv, xv, xviii, 1–5, 15, 17, 23, 25, 33, 35, 53, 74–6, 135, 145, 147–57, 159, 162–4, 172, 174, 181, 184, 200, 219, 221, 226, 232–3, 235, 243–4, 249, 252, 256, 263, 272–3 Plato x, 4, 7, 10, 14, 19, 28, 32, 34–5, 37, 39, 53, 55, 57, 60, 66, 74–5, 86–7, 97–8, 109, 111, 114–15, 125–8, 131, 136–7, 139, 161, 167, 170, 172, 185, 190–1, 218–21, 223, 226, 236, 243, 250, 252 Plotinus 86–7, 107 polemos xii, xiii, 208–9, 213, 218, 232, 237, 239, 242, 253, 260, 263, 270, 283 polis 169–71, 206–14, 238–86 postmodernism 5, 111, 159, 181, 258–9 Prometheus 125, 137, 239 Pryzwara, E. 213 Pseudo-Dionysius 20, 88, 139, 197 pure nature (natura pura) xi–xv, xvii–xviii, 2, 5–6, 8, 10, 19–20, 22, 24–6, 29–34, 48, 50–3, 55, 57–64, 68–70, 74, 83, 87, 89–93, 95, 98, 103, 106, 108, 110, 122–3, 131–3, 135, 137, 140, 142, 160, 203–6, 218, 225–7, 244–5, 251, 253–4, 260, 265, 268 Rahner, H. 113 Rahner, K. 13, 221 Ratzinger, J. see Pope Benedict XVI Ricoeur, P. 32, 73, 147 Rousseau, J. 119, 205, 218, 250, 270 Royce, J. 141, 174 Rumi 153, 161, 185, 197, 227 Santayana, G. 35–6, 89, 150, 170–1, 201, 212, 256 Sartre, J. P. 11, 98, 136, 158, 182, 189 self-presence 47, 143, 148, 159, 160–1, 166, 169, 171, 178, 182 Sexton, A. 150

306

Index

Shelley, P. B. 134 Shestov, L. xv, 103, 128, 184, 213, 224, 234, 236, 241–70 St. Silouan 112, 116 Socrates 4, 32, 51, 66, 78, 98–9, 113, 124, 127–9, 139, 152, 170 Sophocles 126, 263 Spinoza, B. 24, 91, 241, 264 spoudiaos 114 Stoic (Stoicism) 29, 39, 46, 64, 69, 106, 118, 122–3, 133, 150, 245, 261 techne 83, 125, 127, 143 Tertullian 107, 258 theosis (theotic) 67, 85–6, 90, 93, 103–5, 108, 110, 114, 123, 130–1, 133–4, 137 St. Thomas Aquinas vi, xvii, xviii, 5, 14, 16, 18–20, 22, 24, 26–34, 38, 42–8, 51, 55–61, 64–8, 70, 73, 75, 81, 86–7, 99–100, 109–10, 114, 123, 131, 139, 158–9, 162, 180–1, 210, 244, 246, 252–5, 270 St. Thomas More 60, 115–16 Thomism (Thomistic) xvii, xviii, 53, 61, 64, 68, 138–9, 210, 254 tragic (tragedy) 35, 38, 64, 69, 75–6, 106, 114–15, 117, 121, 126, 129, 131, 136, 138, 152, 154, 168, 170, 221–2, 225, 227, 238–40, 248, 250–1, 256, 278

transcendentals 150, 235–6 transhumanar 27 Unamuno, M. 18, 106–7, 117–18, 120, 149, 163, 248 Villon, F. 116 Voegelin, E. 144, 172, 174–5, 273–4 Von Balthasar, H. U. vi, 21, 26–7, 34, 57, 62, 102–3, 228, 231, 238, 257, 259, 267, 279 Wager 66, 80–2, 85, 108, 189, 222–3, 228–34, 242, 268–9 wait (waitingness) xi, xiv, 13–14, 17–20, 23, 28, 32, 34–40, 42–6, 48, 55, 63, 66–7, 83, 85, 109, 119–20, 123, 126–7, 136–7, 159, 170, 191–2, 198, 208, 233, 238, 267, 272, 278 Waugh, E. 149 Weltgeist see Geist Whitehead, A. N. 258 Whitman, W. 152 Wilhelmsen, F. 69–70 Wittgenstein, L. 13–14, 65 Yannaris, C. 225, 228